Dr. Jennifer Webb has been immersed in the study of psychology since her undergraduate days at Harvard in the 1990s. She got her Doctorate in Philosophy and Clinical Psychology from USC, and then she went on to Duke Integrative Medicine Center for her post-doc work. This is where she started intersecting professionally with yoga practice. At Duke, she learned how mindfulness is what she described as "the center of the wheel" for the work she was doing, which was to perform research and teach on weight loss and strategies for positive body image. This turned into a profound shift that she made—which she has been exploring for 17 years at UNC Charlotte where she is now an Associate Professor—around body positivity and loving and celebrating being the body you're in, versus trying to fix it and make it different.
I first met Dr. Webb through a research presentation she gave with Sat Bir Khalsa and me on media misperceptions of yoga. Seeing the numbers from Dr. Webb on how media has portrayed yoga as being either for loin-clothed men with long beards, or for thin, able-bodied white women in skin-tight athleisure wear is real. It's also encouraging to know that someone as smart as she is is contributing to so much change in the perception of yoga.
Dr. Webb has been diving ever deeper into the study of yoga and what component parts of it have efficacy for the populations she has been studying, so much so that she became a yoga teacher in 2021 through the first ever BIPOC-centered training through Integral Yoga. In this conversation, we talked about her past research studies, the most significant of which was with Curvyyoga.com. We also talked about how scientific literacy is one of the important aspects of society in today’s age of misinformation. Enjoy!
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Terms:
1. Randomized Control Trial: a study designed to measure the effectiveness of a new intervention or treatment by randomly assigning participants into an experimental group or a control group
2. Dialectical Behavior Therapy: a structured program of psychotherapy with a strong educational component designed to provide skills for managing intense emotions and negotiating social relationships
3. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: an action-oriented approach to psychotherapy in which clients learn to stop avoiding, denying, and struggling with their inner emotions and, instead, accept that these deeper feelings are appropriate responses to certain situations that should not prevent them from moving forward in their lives
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References:
2. Dr. Jennifer Webb article: Realizing Yoga's all-access pass
3. Dr. Jennifer Webb article: Yoga at Every Size
4. Sat Bir Singh Khalsa on The Weeks Well podcast
6. Integral Yoga’s BIPOC Teacher Training Program
7. USC Department of Graduate Clinical Psychology
10. NCCIH
13. Melanie Klein
14. Eddie Stern episode on The Weeks Well podcast
15. James Fox episode on The Weeks Well podcast
16. Jessamyn Stanley
17. Dana Smith
18. Kim and Sat Bir Singh Khalsa video on yoga and pregnancy
19. Study on pregnant women's salivary cortisol levels going down
20. Chelsea Roff episode on The Weeks Well podcast
21. Dr. Catherine Cook-Cottone
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Episode credits:
Original music by Kim's band Governess.
Produced by Alyssa Yeroshefsky and Kim Weeks.
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