“I’m totally OK if people know that about me,” she says.
“And I am an Indigenous person with a history of pretty violent colonialism over my traditional foods.
So there will always be shades of that in my answers when it comes to food and eating.”
Photo: Schmieding: Kevin Winter/Getty Images. Collage: Cassie Basford.
EatingWell: What do you typically eat in a day?
Schmieding: What I eat varies so much, every day is different.
Ease and taste is top of my list right now.
I’m not a huge breakfast girl.
When I’m at home, my first meal is usually around lunchtime.
But I really like coffee to help me focus.
I buy a lot of pre-made salads and proteins from Trader Joe’s.
EatingWell: What usually comes to mind when you hear the word “diet”?
And how does that word make you feel?
Schmieding: We have such a range of opinions in our culture about this term.
But I personally really do not like the word “diet.”
I feel triggered by it.
That was before my adolescence.
I didn’t see women who were fator any kind of body diversity.
Dieting is one way that predominant culture has perpetuated fat phobia in our world.
So yeah, that’s the very loaded answer to the question.
EatingWell: What food could you not live without because it makes you feel so good?
Oh, I am obsessed with curries of all kinds.
They have all of the features of food that I adore.
They can be meat- or vegetable-based.
And they’re super savory.
I’m a savory girl!
Yeah, there’s something about curry that makes me feel alive.
I feel like the spices awaken the senses, like they clear my sinuses.
There are real physiological effects of eating curry that I find beneficial.
I feel full after I eat it, also, which is really important to me.
When I eat, I like the feeling of satiation, physically but also metaphorically.
Like there is this genuine hunger that I have grown to know about myself.
Like I’m hungry for all things.
And so the feeling of being satiated is really important to me.
Curry is like a love potion.
If I think about it, I have to get it, I have to eat it.
EatingWell: What do you wish you could tell your younger self about body image?
As a girl, I really took that responsibility on, and it’s a huge concept.
I wasn’t acceptable, and I wasn’t deserving.
And I still struggle with it.
You know, even to this day.
It’s that insidious.
All bodies are beautiful.
But that would be gaslighting her.
That’s what culture did to me and does to this day.
I genuinely think the problem of the body-positivity movement is that the dominant culture doesn’t believe in it.
It’s embarrassing to eat in public because I’m fat.
I was being told that I was gonna die if I got COVID-19!
So there’s this genuine gaslighting that happens to fat people.
I know that what you’re experiencing is horrible and hard.
And you have no control over it.
It’s not your fault.
EatingWell: Are there things you think that the entertainment industry should be doing to help change it?
Schmieding: I don’t know.
The industry isn’t a person.
And the entertainment industry is sort of in collaboration with advertising as the main distributors of harmful body standards.
It’s been a heavy lift from a lot of people.
And the lift comes from victims, which is not how justice works.
I feel like my position in the industry is to be comfortable kicking down doors.
I see that as my personal work that is within my locus of control.
That is something that I think about all the time.
But I am only one person.
EatingWell: You used to have a podcast called Women of Size.
Have any of those interviews in particular stuck with you?
Schmieding: So many of those interviews have stuck with me.
And also so many of those friendships have stuck with me.
That podcast really opened the space for me.
I didn’t really expect that.
It felt more like a bit of a research project for me [at first].
Eryn is an organizer who belongs to the Jicarilla Apache Nation and Pueblo of Laguna.
Eryn’s interview really alludes to a lot of that.
Like, how do I employ love?
How do I stay in a place of peace and hope when everything around me is so harsh?
And even in the entertainment industrymy entrance into this industry has been so fun.
And exciting and huge, it’s been a major event in my own life.
But it’s a world with sharp edges; it’s pretty cutthroat out there.
So it’s just that same wisdom of staying soft, staying true, putting trust in hope.
EatingWell: What’s the one thing that you want our audience to take away from this interview?
So much of our unwellness or our sickness, if you will, is founded in racism.
Are we going to shame them for being unhealthy?
How are we treating our food sources, including our animals?
We need to look at our medical system.
I’m thinking about it all the time.
How do I stay soft?
That is the work that I want to be focusing on.
How do I stay safe?
Like how do I protect my insides?
How do I protect my mind and my heart, you know?
One of those ways is eating the f–k out of curry.
