HYBRID EVENT: You can participate in person at Baltimore, Maryland, USA or Virtually from your home or work.
Michelle Petties, Speaker at Obesity Conference
Brand New Now Press, United States

Abstract:

I am not a doctor, scientist, researcher, therapist, or nutritionist. I am a woman who lived with and fought food addiction and obesity for over 40 years. I have absolute clarity and no fear of ever gaining the weight back again. I discovered a truth that a 70-billion-dollar weight loss industry obscures. In my talk, I unpack that truth. During my lifetime, I have gained and lost over 700 pounds. Not that long ago, I was obese, morbidly so, once tipping the scale at 260 plus pounds.  For 42 years, I was in a fight for my emotional, physical, and spiritual life – unconsciously, eating for all the wrong reasons, battling subconscious Food Stories, and looking to food for joy, entertainment, companionship, pleasure, comfort, and status, using food to mask stress and daily discomforts that I never allowed myself to feel. In my presentation, I will take the audience on a journey that chronicles a lifetime of food addiction, experiential eating, and emotional overeating. The decades-long journey began in the kitchens and backyards of a small town in the segregated south and continued throughout countless conference rooms and restaurants in Washington, DC.  As a result of uncovering and understanding my Food Stories, I untangled long-held and mistaken beliefs about food and hunger. I learned to make peace with my mind, body, and eating. As a former advertising insider, I excelled in an industry where image is everything, working for some of the most recognizable organizations in the media, including Disney/ABC and Radio One, negotiating client campaigns for iconic brands like McDonald's, T-Mobile, and Coca-Cola.  I was an abject failure when it came to managing my weight. In the words of my former boss, media mogul, and Radio One founder, Cathy Hughes, “Information is power.” But what if the information you believe about food and eating is false? What if food is not family? Not culture? Not love? Or joy? What if cravings are a good thing? And “relationship with food” is a myth? What if “comfort food” is also a myth? What if the stuff we call food is really not food? What if our yet-to-be-unpacked Food Stories are silently standing between us and authenticity? It is the one thing found at the intersection of race, culture, gender, identity, status, education, and economics—food.  The truth is: It’s never about the food. It’s always about the story behind the food. Presenting the truth in my Food Stories is my gift to the four out of five African American women who are obese or overweight and the rest of the population that is not far behind. These numbers break my heart and boil my blood. My presentation holds the secret to leaving those statistics in the dust and illustrates how everyday events, experiences, and memories inform our beliefs, attitudes, and habits around food, eating, and hunger, revealing that the answers to why we eat, and what we eat rest in our Food Stories.

Biography:

Michelle Petties is an author, speaker, and food addict in recovery. Her memoir, Leaving Large – The Stories of a Food Addict, a category winner in The 2022 Memoir Prize for Books, features the award-winning essay, The Cake is in the Mail. After gaining and losing over 700 pounds, Michelle developed a process for making peace with her mind, body, and food. Her memoir illustrates how events, experiences, and memories inform our beliefs, attitudes, and habits around food, eating, and hunger. Michelle now teaches others how to find, face, rewrite, and replace their food stories during healing-through-writing-and-storytelling workshops and retreats.

Watsapp