The first part of this episode is available to all listeners. To hear the whole thing, become a paid subscriber here.
Anti-diet personal stylist Dacy Gillespie joins us to discuss diet and wellness culture, her bad experience with functional medicine (and what attracted her to it in the first place), how she’s dealing with her chronic symptoms now, and why she doesn’t think clothes should be “flattering.” Behind the paywall, we get into how to shop for clothes after your body changes, how to start discovering your authentic personal style beyond diet culture’s ideals, the advice that revolutionized Christy’s approach to fashion, and more.
As a weight-inclusive, anti-diet personal stylist, Dacy Gillespie helps her clients reject fashion rules and ideal standards of beauty imposed by the patriarchy, white supremacism, and capitalism so that they can uncover their authentic style. Through their work building a functional wardrobe, Dacy’s clients make a mindset shift from thinking they need to wear what’s flattering to unapologetically taking up space in the world.
After a lifetime of jobs in high-stress careers that didn’t suit her highly sensitive, introverted personality, Dacy started mindful closet in 2013 in an attempt to create a more emotionally sustainable lifestyle. Her work has been featured in Forbes, Real Simple, New York Magazine’s The Strategist, and Lifehacker, and she is a frequent podcast guest. Dacy lives with her husband and two children in St. Louis, Missouri. Learn more about her work at mindfulcloset.com.
Resources and References
Christy’s second book, The Wellness Trap: Break Free from Diet Culture, Disinformation, and Dubious Diagnoses and Find Your True Well-Being
Subscribe on Substack for extended interviews and more
Dacy’s website
Dacy’s Substack
Christy’s online course, Intuitive Eating Fundamentals
Transcript
Disclaimer: The below transcription is primarily rendered by AI, so errors may have occurred. The original audio file is available above.
Christy Harrison: Dacy, welcome to the show. I'm so excited to talk with you.
Dacy Gillespie: I am so happy to be here. Thanks for having me.
Christy Harrison: You are an anti-diet personal stylist and you help people feel more at home in their clothes and their bodies, which I really am excited to talk about. I know that many folks listening are probably going through something with that, and I know I myself have definitely had those struggles and continue to as a relatively new mom with a different body who just has not been able to shop in years. So I'm excited to talk with you about that and your expertise in this area. But first I'd love to hear about your history, especially your personal history with food and diet culture and wellness culture.
Dacy Gillespie: Yeah, I will start off by saying that I have always had a lot of thin privilege and so I don't need to take time away from other more important topics. Because I've been lucky enough to kind of escape much of that because of the size of my body. So I luckily grew up with parents who didn't comment on it, didn't have any opinions about bodies in general, really. Now that I think about it, it's pretty remarkable. And so it wasn't something that I got at home. Of course, you just can't exist, particularly as a female in this world, without being affected by it. And certainly diet culture was something that I participated in with friends. An activity was knowing the calories that were in different items and kind of comparing meals and things like that. But I was very lucky.
Christy Harrison: Yeah. That's interesting. So it didn't really catch you. It sounds like even though that diet culture was in the air and in the community you were in.
Dacy Gillespie: Yeah.
Christy Harrison: What about the wellness piece? Because you mentioned to me off mic that you had seen a functional medicine doctor and had a bad experience there. Can you tell me a little bit about that?
Dacy Gillespie: Yeah. I don't know if it's officially called this, but I say I grew up in a brown rice household. Everything was kind of like natural. And my father grew up in poverty and this was more from a frugal aspect rather than a current kind of wellness, organic everything approach. But we didn't have sugar cereals, didn't have soda. And so really on that extreme, to the point where I was always much more interested in the foods that were not allowed at home. But health wasn't a huge thing that we talked about either.
And then throughout my adulthood, I had periods of trying different health related diets, cutting out sugar, keto, different things like that, and never felt like they made much of a difference to me, to be honest. I was able to try them and let them go. But in the last 10 years or so, I have had pretty severe fatigue issues. And so when you're unable to kind of solve that with going to your doctor or with medication or with conventional advice, naturally you're going to start to look for other approaches that might help. And so definitely it's been very hard to walk that line of what is actually helpful and what is veering into dangerous territory where you might start to restrict or kind of demonize some foods.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, that's really interesting. I think the experience of being someone who grew up without diet culture really touching you and without getting disordered about food or obsessive about food, but then having health issues crop up in adulthood where you're attracted to wellness culture, you're a target listener of this podcast or something, right?
This will be cross posted on Food Psych as well, but with Food Psych, it's more for people who are specifically struggling with disordered eating, who kind of know that about themselves or are curious and have gone through it with Diet Culture. But I think there is this whole swath of people who are not in that boat, who don't think of themselves as disordered eaters, who never really had an issue with food from a kind of conventional diety perspective, but then get snared in what I call the wellness trap in another way, where they're coming to it from, like what you said, not getting served in the conventional healthcare system, looking for answers, looking for a diagnosis and treatment that are going to help with whatever condition they're dealing with, or just wanting to improve overall health and wellbeing.
And I think that also is a really slippery slope. And like you said, there's so many dangerous and unsubstantiated and unevidenced claims that are out there that can really mess with people's relationships with food, not to mention deprive them financially and cause a lot of problems and issues that weren't there before, perhaps, and take them away from getting the care that really is evidence based or the diagnosis that they really need.
Dacy Gillespie: Yeah, it's been an interesting experience really,because I've been kind of immersed in this intuitive eating and health-at-every-size world for probably five or six years. And to have that kind of mindset and worldview, then to be looking for solutions to what could potentially be an autoimmune disorder or something that, again, there's not conventional treatment for, there are just red flags everywhere. And I find myself very susceptible to them, to be honest. It's been really interesting to kind of observe from a distance.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, well, having that sort of critical perspective on diet culture probably makes you a little bit more able to think critically about wellness culture. But I imagine, personally, I have so many chronic health conditions that I've gone through the wringer with of trying to get diagnosed, trying to get treated, and multiple autoimmune conditions that really aren't curable. They're just something I'm having to manage and live with and be on medication for and stuff. And I definitely feel at various times I've been susceptible as well, even being a pretty critical thinker myself. So you mentioned that you had a bad experience with this functional medicine provider. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Dacy Gillespie: Yeah, it's such an interesting thing just to talk about and I've heard you speak to other people who've kind of gone through this experience as well. But there is so much shame just around having the experience and not being able to recognize it immediately. And I did kind of figure it out pretty quickly. But, yeah, essentially I've just been exhausted for a long time. I know a lot of people can relate to that. It was getting to the point where, I have two young children, they had both made comments at various points, basically kind of showing me that they thought of me as a tired person, as it being part of my identity to them. Mom's always in bed. Mom's always tired.
That was the breaking point of not wanting that to be the way they thought of me. And so I started really trying to explore everything. Of course, I had done as many things as I could. I've tried every sleep modification and every. I've done everything for my sleep environment and tried as much kind of small things as I could. And so one of the things I did was that I went and got a sleep study done, and I was really hoping, honestly, that I had sleep apnea and that that would be the solve. And I was on the border of basically having mild sleep apnea, which really, if you know anything about those numbers, it's really not a big deal. I did try a CPAP machine. That didn't really help me at all.
I have a child who has ADHD, and I have suspected that I might have adhd. So I went and got evaluated for that because I know the different ways that brains work can run really cause a lot of exhaustion and brain fog and memory issues, which are all things I was dealing with. I was not diagnosed with ADHD. Again, as I said, my kind of general practitioner doctor wasn't very helpful.
And so this was the point at which I was looking to see what other options might be out there. And of course was reading about functional medicine. Everything I try and do in my life, my work and kind of my family and everything, I want to approach from a holistic approach. And so I really love that idea of functional medicine being something that takes your whole life into account. It's not just like maybe physical markers or what can be seen in an exam room, but really digging deeper and getting to know the person as a whole to see if there's more of a story there. And so I was very attracted to that.
But I also believe in science and I'm pretty data driven. And I have a sister who's a physician. And so I really wanted to see a practitioner who also had an MD. And for me that was kind of the safety, I guess, was to say I know there's some criticism of this field, but I'm going to speak to someone who has been trained in a traditional way and also has kind of come to this approach. So I did find someone in my area. And so the appointment was basically a two hour appointment. And if you've kind of dealt with any of these kind of people, you know that there are long appointments and they're very, very expensive. Of course insurance doesn't cover it. I had talked to my husband about it. We agreed of that this was something that was important, that we would make it happen financially because it was so important.
And the first hour of the appointment was great. It was really great. I felt heard and of course that's something that many people don't feel when they're speaking to a traditional medical practitioner. I felt like there were things that she would say that really resonated with me. I felt like she was picking up on certain aspects of my personality, that sensitivity and kind of the introversion. And then, things got weird. Basically after she took this history, she said, "Let's examine you and see. I have this software that is going to tell me what's going on with you, and so I can help treat you." And she had a device on her desk that was a hand cradle, and it had kind of metal plates on it. And she was like, "Place your hand here, rest your hand in this cradle. And it's hooked up to my computer, and I'm going to see what the software tells me." It was really a lot about software.
And so in that moment, I said, "Can you explain to me again how this works?" And she had a lot of answers that she clearly had said multiple times to other people. And many of the answers were about how she's not a software programmer and can't explain how the mechanism works, but she just knows that it gives results that are helpful. So we proceeded to sit there for, I don't know, at least 45 minutes to an hour of this machine reading electrical signals that it was sending into my skin and somehow getting responses back that were telling me things like my liver was not functioning correctly. It was pretty unreal.
And the really tricky part and the really insidious part is that I felt like she had spent that entire first hour really building my trust in her to the point where I was certainly a little thrown off guard by this device. And it's part of my nature not to question things. It helps me to kind of name where these things come from so that I know that there's not something wrong with me. But one aspect of being an introvert is that your processing time is longer. And so in the moment when things are happening, I'm not always going to be able to catch that they maybe don't make sense.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, you just go with it. I relate to that a lot. Especially if someone has gained your trust and been empathetic and you're sort of like, "Okay, well, this seems a little weird, but I'm just going to go with it because they know what they're doing, and this is a doctor, and maybe there's something to be gained from it" or whatever. I also, in that situation, probably wouldn't stop her and be like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa." It's easy for me to sit here and be like, "Oh, boy," but it's a whole other thing to be in that situation, actually.
Dacy Gillespie: Yeah. And there's a level of the expert authority that is built in that situation in which you, like you said, "This person knows what they're doing or that's why I've come to them." After many, many, many minutes of this, when the machine started to tell her what my affirmations should be, that's when I got really weirded out. And I started to actually kind of remove myself from the room mentally and just say, "I just have to get through the rest of this and then, I really need to process this. I don't know what's going on, but this is weird."
And then, of course, after this evaluation was over, I was literally handed probably eight bottles of supplements and told to buy them. And, of course, this is all what the software had told the practitioner. And this was before I'd had any blood work done. I mean, this was based on nothing other than taking my medical history and this device. And I felt very helpless in that moment. The supplements totaled $350, and the appointment had been $600. And it's a very vulnerable place that you're in, when you're in that position of being someone who's looking for help, someone who is asking for help.
So I got home and immediately googled this device and found out that it is, of course, not at all based in science. The FDA has actually issued warnings to the company telling them that they are advertising benefits that they have not proven with studies. And even then, I still didn't want to let it go. "Maybe I'll still give this stuff a try. Maybe I'll still give the supplements a try." But it was a wild, wild experience.
Christy Harrison: How did you eventually decide to stop working with the person or doing the supplements?
Dacy Gillespie: Honestly, that night. It didn't take me long. Once I looked up this device and realized that this is what this person was basing everything on, when the device itself is absolutely, completely made up and does nothing that it purports to do. At that point, I was like, "Well, how can I trust anything that this person said?"
And of course, I know about the supplement industry, and how can I trust that any of these supplements are what they say they are on the label? And so, pretty immediately, once I was able to remove myself from the situation, and so I even called the office the next day, I started the process to try and get my money back and formally make a complaint about this business, about what they're doing.
And it's heartbreaking because I was able to return the supplements. So I had to go back into this office and return them and as I was waiting for someone to help me, there was a family in front of me who was buying hundreds of dollars of supplements to help their child. And of course, I don't know anyone's situation, but it made me feel very sad that there are people who are potentially spending a lot of their money on things that we really don't know anything about.
Christy Harrison: Yeah. And that don't have any sort of good basis for being recommended in the first place. If it's this bogus device being used to make the recommendations and also having probably lower trust or engagement or just sort of not feeling so empathized with in the conventional healthcare system and then going to this place that you felt like would offer that empathy and that support and maybe get to the bottom of what was going on and then to have that hope dashed, I can imagine would leave you feeling even more bereft or hopeless.
Dacy Gillespie: It's what you just said. You have hope going into the situation and then to realize that not only is it not helpful, but it's actually really damaging and realizing how harmful this is being for many, many people. I feel very lucky that I was able to catch enough of these big red flags soon enough that I didn't get very deep into the situation. But lots of people do. It makes me really angry to think about kind of the harm that's being done.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, same. I think about myself at different points in my life before I knew to question some of these things. And I probably would have gone further down that path. I did go further down that path with some providers. It takes a while, I think, to start to become skeptical or to start questioning those things. Some people that I've interviewed, and I think in my own experience as well, I think that sometimes you have to go down the road pretty far ain order to really show yourself that this is not the path to salvation or whatever. This is not the path to health or healing and well being and stuff like that.
So, it is lucky that you were able to avoid that longer path, which I can imagine maybe at other points in your life you might have gone further. Where are you now with your fatigue and your journey to get diagnosed or whatever, and also your relationship with the conventional healthcare system?
Dacy Gillespie: Honestly, I'm still kind of recovering from that situation. I think what's so hard about this whole situation, which I know your book is amazing at kind of laying all this out, but there really is so much out there that you could really find someone to support any particular path you might want to go down without the scientific knowledge or the background or the perhaps the research ability. It's almost impossible to kind of decide what would be an appropriate path to try out.
And so I've just tried to go back to absolute and complete and total basics. And so for me, that's been really starting with sleep again, trying some new things that I hadn't tried before, specifically CBTI which is cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia and things like trying to get sunlight every day, trying to move my body in a really gentle way. Stress has honestly, I think been the cause of most of my issues and so really trying to be very aware of when that's rising and make sure to give myself the time and the rest that I need.
Christy Harrison: Which is so hard in our system. I feel like being a parent and living under capitalism in a system that does not offer a robust social safety net is exhausting. I find it exhausting anyway, and I think many people do, too. Not to say that that's all of what you're dealing with because there may be other things going on too, but I can imagine that is not helping.
Dacy Gillespie: Yeah, no, it is tough. And I think the news of the outside world and just kind of the place that we're in in this current age of information overload, I think that we've kind of mentioned in passing being a highly sensitive person. I think it's too much for any human to take in right now, but there's just a lot of stress that maybe someone 100 years ago would not have been subject to. And the other thing I'll say is that I'm in perimenopause. And so the other thing I've done is to find an OB GYN who's a specialist in menopause and go to them and see if there's stuff that we can work on from that regard.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, that has a huge impact, I'm sure, in fatigue and brain fog and all that stuff. Well, let's talk about your work a little bit. I am so curious how you got into personal styling and your background. I think you were initially a classical musician, so curious to hear how that transition happened.
Dacy Gillespie: I think if I hadn't grown up in the household that I grew up in, I would have probably gone into fashion without having this first career. But things like aesthetic pursuits or things that weren't concretely helping another human were pretty looked down on. My parents are very idealistic and were activists when I was growing up, and so that was kind of the mold that we were poured into, if you will. So I always felt a little bit of shame about caring about things like clothes or just things that maybe didn't make such a concrete impression on the world.
So I did go into music, and I performed and took auditions and taught and freelanced and played gigs and worked in arts administration for a long time, most of my adult life, until I was in my mid-30s. And really, I burnt out for probably the third time in that career when I was in my mid-30s and just really was at the end of my rope and knew I had to do something different. And so I really, no joke, read What Color is Your Parachute? Really went back to trying to figure out what I want to do with my time and to earn money.
And luckily, I had a great therapist at the time who asked me, "What do people ask you for help with and what do you love to do?" And I really had felt like I could never be someone who worked in any facet of the fashion industry. I just didn't feel cool enough, to be perfectly honest. But her asking what people asked for my help with allowed me to kind of see that other people can see me this way, maybe I can believe in myself in this way as well.
I was really lucky that I had financial support from my husband. I will never not acknowledge that, because I couldn't have done this otherwise. I had about a year to try and start a business and see how it went. And that was 11 years ago.
Christy Harrison: Wow. Yeah. That's amazing. And what has your own relationship with style and fashion been throughout that?
Dacy Gillespie: I've never been asked that. I've always, always loved clothes. I was always so aware of what people were wearing around me. My family didn't have a lot of money when I was growing up, so I really felt outside of the crowd and not able to participate in fashion in the ways that maybe some of the other kids could. It was always something I really aspired to and just really loved and loved playing around with. And it was just kind of an extracurricular interest for most of my life, but it was definitely something people knew about me. It was something that again, people would kind of come to me for help with and I've just always loved it.
I love clothes, I love getting dressed, I love shopping. I've gone through many iterations of my own style and my own style evolution and my own learnings about consumerism and overconsumption and all of those kind of things and I bring all that into when I work with clients.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, let's talk a little bit about this aspect of anti-diet personal styling and the perspective that you bring to that. It's such a huge thing for so many of us to find clothes that fit, to find clothes that match our personal style, that work for our bodies, that are comfortable. Especially I think, for people who are letting go of dieting and disordered eating and recovering from wellness and diet culture. It's just a lot. It's a whole thing. Why is it so hard, first of all? And what's the alternative in terms of buying clothes that actually fit your body and also your personhood, your personality?
Dacy Gillespie: Well, I think it's so hard because clothes are so intricately tied up in our body and how we feel about our bodies. And we can't exist in this society without clothes, so we have to deal with them in one way or another. And I think so many of the messages that we get through diet culture really affect how we feel and how we approach clothes.
For one thing, we're kind of in indoctrinated into this idea that bodies shouldn't change, that bodies should land in one, ideally thin, place and that if we deviate from that, our whole lives should be about getting back to that. Our whole life should be a project of kind of holding onto or getting back to a body that we had in the past. And if you think about how that applies to clothes, that means that we are going to be holding onto clothes that don't fit because again, we're taught that we should get back into them. We can't let them go because that means we've given up.
Similarly, we can't buy clothes that fit because that means that we're acknowledging that we won't change our body back into something that it used to be and so they're all kind of these outward manifestations of how we feel about our bodies and what we've been taught to feel about them.
Christy Harrison: Yeah. Relatedly, you have a Substack called Unflattering, and you don't subscribe to the concept of flattering when it comes to clothes. Why is that? What is problematic about the concept of flattering?
Dacy Gillespie: I always get pushback about this so I'll just preempt all of that by saying, of course, there are different usages of the word flattering. Of course, flattering can mean something that suits you or it lights you up or something that is just lovely about you. But if we're being honest, the typical usage of the word flattering is to wear something that makes you look smaller than you are or to attempt to make you look smaller, to create some sort of optical illusion.
Christy Harrison: Define a waist or whatever.
Dacy Gillespie: Yeah, exactly. And so to me, that puts the priority on our clothes, again, to try and achieve this body ideal. That is the highest priority. I want to flip that and say the highest priority in our clothes should be how we feel in them and whether you like them or not, to be perfectly honest. And whether they feel good on your body, whether they fit you. Because when we are striving for flattering, all other things are of less importance, including our physical comfort, including how we want to show up in the world, including the fabrics that we like or the styles that we like.
Everything else is subject to this idea of flattering being the priority and so that means that we really aren't showing up as perhaps our most authentic self because we're striving for this other goal that really means nothing. What does that mean about us if our body appears thinner?
Christy Harrison: I think about the times in my life when I was the most into fashion. I used to work at Gourmet, which was a Conde Nast magazine, and worked in the Conde Nast building. And prior to that, I had been at environmental magazines and freelance and was just schlubbing around in Brooklyn and my secondhand clothes. And I really liked fashion, but I was not very versed in it. I just kind of bought things that I thought I liked and sort of mashed them up together. Didn't have a very defined personal style, really, but I made an effort when I started working at Conde Nast.
I literally rode the elevator with Anna Wintour and her assistants multiple times. "I'm gonna be around these fashiony people. I need to step it up a little bit." And so I started shopping at this very cute, very cool boutique in my neighborhood that the proprietor was always pulling pieces for me and stuff like that. So I got very into it and I loved some of the things I bought, but I also bought things that I loved in the store but then I was just so uncomfortable walking around in and I was like getting looks and catcalls and things. This was also in my 20s and shrinking my body and stuff too.
So I was participating in diet culture and the thin ideal very much. And I was just very uncomfortable with the kind of attention I was getting, the way the fabrics fit and felt. There was a lot of stuff that just didn't feel good to me and I had to wear particular garments to fit into or all of this stuff. It never really occurred to me that I could be comfortable and that I didn't have to suffer for fashion. Certainly later on it occurred to me. But I think in that moment of my life when I was the most "fashionable" I've ever been, perhaps by a certain standard, it was synonymous with suffering, really.
Dacy Gillespie: I always like to remind people that women have been conditioned to be uncomfortable for the sake of being pleasing to others' eyes. We're not doing it for ourselves necessarily. Or maybe we're doing it to get a certain reaction, but it really is to conform to what we've been told is ideal.
Christy Harrison: Yeah. And to fit in in certain spaces. And I guess that's the thing that's a little tricky about fashion. Is that there is an aspect of it that's sort of, this is your uniform for this job, or this is what you need to wear to be taken seriously in a certain space or in a certain way. But there is access that can come with that stuff. I do think it probably helped my career to some extent that I was invested in fashion and I mean, I think I probably could have found things that were more comfortable and still fashionable at the time. And we'll talk a little bit about that, I think too, like how we can marry those things or bridge that gap, I guess. I'm curious about your thoughts on this idea of fashion as access and the uniform to be taken seriously in certain environments.
Dacy Gillespie: Yeah, well, I mean, this is the perfect place to just acknowledge that not everyone can wear what they want to wear. Not everyone can wear what's comfortable, the more marginalized you are, the more harmed you might be by not showing up in a way that's expected. And if you will lose work or you will not be promoted or in some other way lose access to something, then it's not possible for you to necessarily exercise all that freedom. So I do want to acknowledge that.
I always feel like it's, it's on those of us who do have more privilege to start to push those boundaries, to try and make space for other people to have the freedom to spread out a little bit. But certainly there are spaces and places where you have to do what's safe over perhaps even expressing maybe some artistic freedom. And unfortunately that is just, that's the world that we live in.
And I also feel like sometimes that safety is important to acknowledge, as you said, you were kind of wearing things that made you feel unsafe. And so maybe if you had worn something that was less fashionable, but you felt safe, to me, that's a higher priority. And so it's important and especially for people who are in changing bodies or bodies that are recovering, whatever it takes for you to wear for you to feel safe in your body, that's the priority.
We've gotten so many messages about larger bodies should not wear oversized clothing because then you look bigger, or bodies shouldn't wear fitted clothing because then we can see the size of your body and it's like you can't do anything right basically. What I feel like my work is, and similar to the field of intuitive eating, is trying to tap into your own inner desires and needs and seeing what that really is again, to kind of create that safety for yourself.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, I'm so curious to hear more about how to do that. I've been saying for almost the past three years that I need to get a stylist to help me learn how to dress my body now because I'm now a mom. My mom body is a different size and shape than my pre-pregnancy body. And also I'm in my 40s and I want to start dressing in a way that maybe reflects that better, who I am as a person. I'm older, I'm wiser, I give fewer fucks in a lot of ways. I also prioritize comfort more. But I want to look sophisticated or have outfits that are appropriate to certain situations and look like I'm aware that I'm in my 40s without being "frumpy" or whatever, but not looking like I'm trying to dress like a much younger person, which I think I may err on the side of because I just don't know where to shop or what to buy at this point that is going to reflect me and also this stage in.
Dacy Gillespie: I even feel like that's worth interrogating a little bit. What is it that we've been taught is wearing something that makes you look younger? Or what have we been taught is something that makes you look serious or your age? To me, it just comes down to patriarchal standards of how women are allowed to show up. Women of a certain age are not allowed to do things that someone younger would be allowed to do or people of a certain body size or shape are not allowed to participate in certain things based on the size of their body. So that's where I always want to start is, what is that idea? And where does it come from? And is that important to you? And if not, can we create your own idea of what it is that Christy, as a person in her 40s, wants to wear?
Christy Harrison: Yeah. I appreciate that framing. Thank you. That's helpful, because I think that idea of I don't want to look like I'm trying to look younger is definitely coming from outside myself and some societal ideal I have of how people are judging me. And it's all very convoluted. It's this inner critic in my head has taken up something that I got from the culture.
Dacy Gillespie: Yeah, absolutely. It's always, for me, about whether something comes from an internal desire or from an external expectation.
Christy Harrison: Yeah. And it's so tricky with clothes, because we're so conditioned from such a young age to like certain things, certain colors, certain fits and types of pieces. I mean, my daughter is not even three yet, and she already has absorbed her favorite colors are light pink, light purple, and light blue. Where does that come from?
Dacy Gillespie: Yeah, I mean, it is interesting to think about, and often I will with clients, we always talk about their relationship to clothes over the course of their life and I always want to hear about what they were attracted to as children, because often, just like bodies, there becomes a point at which you're aware of what I'm choosing to wear is maybe not acceptable or my mom is telling me I can't wear that and it Is interesting to see what you might have been drawn to before that point.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, totally. What is maybe the most authentic or less socially conditioned sort of desire that you can remember?
Dacy Gillespie: Yeah.
Christy Harrison: How can people start the process of shopping for clothes, for a body that has changed or maybe a new moment in life or stage in life, that if they're thinking about it from a perspective of a new job or something like that, not necessarily doing what I just did, of being self critical and being like, "Well, I need to look like I'm in my 40s" or whatever.
Dacy Gillespie: Yeah. I think the first place to start is to
