#223: Diet Culture Recovery, OCD, and Size Inclusive Fashion: Viva Voce Founder Kate Zigrang on What Healing Actually Requires (Part Two)
This is part two of my conversation with Kate Zigrang, founder of Viva Voce — and this is where everything shifts.
We left off last week with Kate at a turning point: an OCD diagnosis, a doctor who finally told her the truth about her health, and something beginning to loosen. This episode is about what came next — the harder, slower, more relational work of actually stepping out of diet culture after a lifetime inside it.
We cover:
* Going no contact with her parents — the decision, the grief, and what space it created
* The complicated dynamic with her mom: over-apologizing, enmeshment, and why leaving felt both impossible and necessary
* The slow, specific work of separating her own body from her mother's — learning to look at herself without dread
* Religious deconstruction happening simultaneously with the body acceptance work and the mental health work — all three threads unraveling at once
* The Manhattan pants incident — eighteen months of traveling the world, unable to find a single pair of pants in her size anywhere in New York City, and the rage that became a turning point
* What Viva Voce actually is — a marketplace vetting brands for ethics, sustainability, and genuine size inclusivity
* Why she insists on carrying straight and plus sizes in the same space
* The pop-up strategy — and why she's bringing it to smaller cities on purpose
* A data project collecting real body measurements to understand how clothes could actually be made better
* Why belonging is at the center of every decision she makes — and what that looks like in practice
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Find Kate and Viva Voce at vivavoce.live and on Instagram @vivavoce.live
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