In this episode of the Untidy Faith Podcast, I sit down with Anna Rollins, author of Famished: On Food, Sex, and Growing Up as a “Good Girl,” for a conversation about the shared script underneath purity culture and diet culture—and why knowing the promise is false doesn’t make it stop working on us.

Topics Covered

* The pattern Anna kept finding in her own private writing before she had a name for it, and what scarcity, smallness, and shrinking appetite had to do with each other

* Why “control your appetite and you’ll be safe” persists even for women who see through it, and the very real thing it’s rooted in

* What internalized fundamentalism looks like once the original system is gone, including inside body positivity

* How to tell rigidity from conviction, and where each one shows up in the body

* What “reclaiming appetite” actually looks like on a normal Tuesday, and why it’s rarely about food

Timestamps:01:00 Noticing the Pattern in Her Own Writing03:00 Why the Promise Is Durable Even When You Know Better06:00 Fundamentalism That Follows You Into New Systems11:00 Wellness Language as Code and the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders13:00 Telling Rigidity from Conviction18:00 Shame, Guilt, and Where the Hope Lives20:00 Why Healing Body Shame Shifts Your Relationship With God24:00 Reclaiming Appetite on a Normal Tuesday31:00 For Anyone Still in the Middle of It35:00 Finding the Book and Anna’s Work