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Intro music: Bags are packed, are you ready to go?…This time tomorrow we’ll be on the road…riding with you into sunnier days…I wouldn’t want it any other way. 

Julie: It’s time to name the neglect from typical food advice. Welcome to the Find Your Food Voice podcast, hosted by me, Julie Duffy Dillon. I’m a registered dietitian with 20 years of experience partnering with folks just like you on their food peace journey. What have we learned? Well, cookie cutter approaches exclude too many people, and you don’t need to be fixed. It’s not you. It’s not me. It’s all of us. Only together we can start a movement and fix diet culture. And we will. Let’s begin with now.

Transition music: I want to see how the world turns round…Let’s go adventure in the deep blue sea…home is with you wherever that may be…home is with you wherever that may be.

Julie: Hey there, welcome to episode 333 of the Find Your Food Voice podcast. I am Julie Duffy Dillon, dietician and host and I am here today to talk to those of you who have been trying, oh my gosh, just trying with all your might to reject diets. Maybe you’re recovering from an eating disorder or you’re recovering from diet culture. Yet then you go to the doctor and they give you some news that has really jolted you into questioning this decision. And this is a really common experience. And for clinicians like myself, this is something we hear very, very frequently as the biggest stumbling block to stopping intuitive eating or recovering from your eating disorder or diet culture, getting diagnosed with something like insulin resistance or diabetes or just having a health care provider, say you must diet for some reason. So I hope this episode helps. 

Julie: We are including a letter from someone who is experiencing this. And when I read the letter, I’ve actually been holding on to it for a long time. I had intended to read a different letter today, but I was like going through all my unread ones and I was like, wait, I haven’t answered this one yet. Like this is, this one needs to be answered because this is a very, very common experience. So I do hope it helps you. And before we get to the episode, I do wanna give you some content warning on the letter because this is someone who um is relating their lived experience of going to the doctor and using clinical words that can be stigmatizing to many people like the O word. I just read the letter as it appeared. So you will hear those words. Um So I just want to give you that content um heads up so you can take care of yourself however you need to. All right. So we are going to get to this episodes letter after a very quick update for you and a word from our sponsor. 

Julie: Hey, can you believe it, the Find Your Food Voice book is being created as you are listening to this, I am probably typing away at my keyboard and working hard on making the Find Your Food Voice book a reality. This is something I’ll be working on over the next year. And so my team and I have really like turned down the dial on everything else so I can just focus on writing a book. You probably know that writing a book in itself is a full-time job. And I want you to help me to be a part of this. There are many different ways that you can be a part of it, including one, just like listening to the ads on this podcast. I know it’s very silly and, and it’s so easy just to push that 30 second button to go ahead. But for independent podcasters like me, that is the only way that we get paid. Um we have ads on the podcast to help pay for the production of the podcast. So by you listening to them and actually you don’t even have to really listen, just letting them play, it does help to support me and the team and the production for this podcast, so I can get my butt in the chair and keep writing. And if you would like to go behind the scenes a little bit more with me as I’m writing this book, I will be on Tik Tok live as I’m writing. So you can do some coworking sessions with me. And if you want to even go further into helping your own relationship with food while I’m writing this book, I am uh carving out something called nesting time. So of course, the book is not done yet, but I do have a chapter all on this concept of nesting, which includes building up an arsenal of what you need to kind of keep closer at hand what connects you to your own food voice. This can be journaling, this can be crafts, this can be making a grocery list. This can be getting your butt in the chair and eating your meal. So while I am writing, I invite you to have your own nesting time and do this while I’m writing, we can like put forth energy together to have a healing space. And what you basically experience is 25 minutes of me writing. So I’m not saying anything and it helps me to be basically accountable to my writing time because I am extroverted as fuck. And like this is gonna be hard for me to shut my mouth and just write. So you will help me be accountable to my writing time, will take a five minute break where we can chat and then go back to another 25 minutes of writing. And I have basically set up about four hours a day when my kids are at school to be writing and having this 25 minute on five minute off kind of thing. And during that five minute downtime, we can chat and you can share with me what you’re doing or you can just stay muted and just like sit in a space that is carved out to be basically what I think of as like a nest, something that’s protecting you and helping you to rest and find respite from all of the bullshit of that culture. So if you want to join me, it’s just $5 a month. Like buy me a coffee basically at hand. Um help me uh as I am writing this book and we can have time together so you can get to all the details at julieduffydillon.com/book and it’ll get you to all the information. It’s a community that I’m hosting on Circle and there is a way to do lives there and you can just join me live. So again, it’s julieduffydillon.com/book. All right, let’s get to some advertisers that are helping to support the show. And then we’ll hear this episode’s letter to food. 

Julie (reading listener letter): Dear food. I’ve struggled with you all of my life since age four. And I learned that chocolate tastes way too good and makes me feel like I can go faster. I used to steal greedy handfuls of you and hide you in my clothes so I could eat all in one go in private until I felt sick. You were the comfort I needed when I felt unsure or lonely and growing up, that was all the time. Then when I got older, I learned that I was supposed to be afraid of you, that I should control you and you became the source of all my misdirected loathing. What I did to my body in my pursuit of you. I felt ugly and undesirable at a time when my burgeoning sexuality was a strong tidal wave taking over everything else in my life. Maybe I don’t give you enough credit for those times. Maybe it was better to look the way I did because otherwise I would have gotten pregnant or seriously hurt beyond the rejection from my early crushes. Bad as my life is now, it could have been entirely more difficult. Now, after just getting to an ambivalent, positive relationship with you, the news comes, I’m insulin resistant. I haven’t had a regular period in nearly two years. I’m obese and bordering on diabetic. I’ve been told I have to control you again, but not for the aesthetic reasons this time. This time, it’s for my health, but here’s the thing. Food. I loved my ambivalent positive relationship with you. It felt like we were both on the same page. We were going steady eating well, and enjoying each other’s company and I don’t feel sick. Most of my family is diabetic and I’ve never been very good at diets. I don’t think trying to control you is going to work this time. Especially knowing it’s never ever worked before. I don’t think it’s going to get me anywhere. I think this is just one of those things that’s going to happen. You’ve always done this to my body. Maybe it’s only now that everything is starting to make sense and the diagnosis can be finally realized. Maybe it’s for the best to just accept you for what you do to me and take care of myself the way I am, as I am. Maybe you and I should just bury the hatchet and we can keep building on this new loving but not all encompassing relationship. After all, how can I give up on you when I need you? Love, longing for the ambivalence. 

Transition music: I want to see how the world turns round…Let’s go adventure in the deep blue sea…home is with you wherever that may be…home is with you wherever that may be.

Hey there, longing for ambivalence. Thank you so much for your note. I read this note and the first thought I had is holy crap. So many people are in this exact same spot with you. So many people are feeling so much less alone just by hearing your note. So I thank you so much for putting this all down on paper so you can just validate other people’s experience. And I appreciate how exhausting and painful this kind of fork in the road can be. And I hope the next few minutes I can go through some points to help you hold on and help you to decide what your next steps are gonna be. Like what’s gonna be best for you. And for most people I have spoken to, they have taken the tremendous leap of faith towards uh intuitive eating, rejecting diets, anything in that kind of realm. You know, that leap of faith toward intuitive eating because of an eating disorder recovery or because they are tired of the cluster fuck that is continuously going on and off a diet. And this is already hard enough for people who have not worked on rejecting dieting and diet culture. Again, whether they’re in recovery or trying to recover or because they are noticing like the systems of oppression and how dieting, being complicit with dieting, how harmful it is for our world. Like it doesn’t matter all adding anything else to it. You don’t even have to add anything else to it because that already is hard enough and moving forward with your life without dieting is so exhausting already again, without anything complicating it. 

Julie: And to get to the point where like you letter writer where you’re experiencing this ambivalence like that torn feeling of maybe I should diet or maybe dieting is not helping me like holding both of those together at the same time. Again, pure painful exhaustion and that exhaustion, what I’ve noticed over the last bazillion years that I’ve been helping people with this is it’s so painful because that’s where the healing is happening. Um And I’m not saying that to minimize it, but more to like, highlight it, to lift it up and to honor that this is where the hard work is happening and like the, the literal like bumps and bruises that require all these like band aids, they require more tending to and when you’re experiencing that ambivalence and you’re trying to hold together, should I go back to diet or dieting or should I not? Holding those together and noticing and feeling that pain? I do think that’s where the healing happens and finding a way to resolve that ambivalence because, it can be resolved. I’m not saying that like it makes it so you never get affected by dieting again. No, but like resolving that ambivalence and saying no, I’m going to reject diets forever. And um feeling that resolve that happens with resolving that ambivalence like healing that, that spot. So when you’re holding on to that ambivalence and you’re healing and getting diagnosed with anything that has a connection to food, whether it’s insulin resistance, like you letter writer, or diabetes or PCOS or fatty liver disease or high cholesterol that is like punching a gaping wound. You know, that is such an insult to a spot that already is so tender and you’re already tending to it. And I can just imagine the scramble and hanging out with people in that space of like that scramble of, “I just got diagnosed with something. Um that is so um connected to food and food is pushed as the way to heal”, like going through all of that. Oh my gosh. It’s so such a it’s such a moment that my brain even just like scattered. I’m like it is. It’s just a lot for you to stay in that moment and you shouldn’t have to do that because this is what I think about dieting with these medical conditions. Is I appreciate, it can feel like it, it pushes you back to the beginning, the beginning of rejecting diets or recovering from your eating disorder. It can feel like oh shit. Now I have to start all over again but it hasn’t like it doesn’t take the the healing that you’ve already experienced away. It may have punched that wound again, but it doesn’t take away the healing you’ve already done. It just means you need to tend to it again. 

Julie: So there are four bullet points I have here, for what I want you to know for you, letter writer and anyone who can relate to this. So again, if you have been working on rejecting diets because of your recovery or because of wanting to no longer comply with diet culture or you are a diet rock bottom. There’s four things that I would encourage you to keep in mind. You can write them down, hold on to them for a rainy day or a day that just feels like a rainy day. And number one is we know especially those of us who’ve done intuitive eating work. We know diets don’t work for most people. We know that already. And we know diets don’t work for most people, including those with insulin resistance, with diabetes, with PCOS, with fatty liver disease, or with high cholesterol. Like we’ve studied, we, I’ve read the studies, uh, researchers, scientists have studied people with different health conditions and there has yet to be a diet that has been found to help long term to help most people without adding more risk factors. So when we say diets don’t work for most people, that includes those of you with insulin resistance. And even more, this is kind of like a bullet point with an extra bullet point. The long term data, we don’t have a lot of long term data because as much as the diet industry doesn’t like you to know this. Most of the research is just 12 weeks or a year long. It’s not long enough to really study the long term effects of diets. But when we have um studies that look two years or more out, what we notice is whether a person stays on a diet or is going on and off a diet doesn’t matter that that has been shown to cause higher blood sugar, higher insulin levels, higher cholesterol levels, higher blood pressure. The very things that you are told you need to diet for, those very things actually have been shown in long term research to get worse by this tool that you’ve been told you have to do. So there’s that, so diets don’t work for most people, including those with these conditions. 

Julie: Ok. And the second point I want to say to you, letter writer and anyone who can relate to this letter writer, is think about your own personal history with diets. When you get this news, think about the history you already have with dieting. And for most people, I talk to when they’re in that space of doing non diet work, they’ve come to the point to realize that diets haven’t worked for them personally. And they may have tried a diet for years, decades even. And so they got to that kind of line in the sand and were like, ok, “I’ve tried diets enough to know that they don’t work for me”. So getting a diagnosis doesn’t take away that history for you. It just doesn’t like it. It didn’t work for you for the first 40 years of your life. So why would it work? Now? There isn’t a new tool. There’s not a new diet that has been shown to magically cause this improved health. Long term. I’ll let you know if I find one, but there just hasn’t been one yet. 

Julie: Ok. So this is probably the most important of the bullet points that I had written down intuitive eating and non diet work to mean to me. So rejecting diet culture to mean, oh my gosh. I can’t say this word, rejecting diet culture to me means prioritizing healing. It’s really complicated, right? Like deciding what to eat. It’s not a decision that you just make once, it’s a decision that you make over 200 times a day, like you have to make this decision constantly and making this decision constantly to reject diet culture means that you are prioritizing healing. Again, this is my own personal way of interpreting it because I kind of came to this conclusion because of sitting with so many folks who were in this messy middle where they have been wounded by that culture and they’re tending to that wound and then they get punched again in that same spot because they get diagnosed with insulin resistance or something along those lines. And there’s so many decisions. Now there’s so much more pain in the decision. There’s so much more riding on the decision. And as we’re like holding it all, I, I almost can picture myself like digging through. Um I just made a ton of friendship bracelets because I went to Taylor Swift this summer. And you know, like you, you’re going through the beads, those of you who made friendship bracelets too. And you know, when you’re like scooping the beads to move them aside, to look for a certain letter because, you know, we all ran out of the letter E and you’re digging and digging and digging and the beach just kind of pile back on top. And so you, you can’t ever really get to the bottom. But if you know, if you, if you do that and you kind of like have someone help you and then pull back when I would do that with folks, what we come to appreciate at the foundation level of all this is healing and doing this work and healing this ambivalence. Healing, that wound that is valid enough, that is valid enough to continue. Even when you’ve been diagnosed with insulin resistance, even when you’ve been diagnosed with PCOS, even when you’ve been diagnosed with diabetes, even when you’ve been diagnosed with fatty liver disease, no matter what your size is. Prioritizing your recovery, prioritizing healing is valid enough to continue with it. And it is also promoting health. They, I don’t, you don’t have to be um working towards health. And I also think prioritizing your healing, your recovery, it is promoting health including physical health, emotional health is including like your whole self. It’s promoting your whole self and its health. But remember like doing this work, rejecting diets, that is a valid enough reason. Your, your, your healing is valid enough. You don’t need another reason. I appreciate that’s not the response that you’ll get from a lot of the medical teams um from people who haven’t named diet culture as an oppressive system. But know, there are many of us who are aligned with you, letter writer, who wanna sit with you as you’re sitting with this ambivalence, help you pull back some of the, the goop to help you get to the foundation, which is your healing. You deserve healing, you deserve recovery. 

Julie: You know, in other episodes, which is, this is kind of the concluding bullet point, but I’m not gonna go too deep into it and other Find Your Food Voice podcast episodes. I talk about getting diagnosed with some kind of chronic condition and how you can add tools to it. Um I’m not gonna go into that because um I have explored it before and you know, I’ll talk about it again. But for you, letter writer, I strongly believe that you prioritizing your healing and you prioritizing a positive relationship with food is valid enough. 

Julie: All right. So I see Food has written back. Before we get to Food’s letter. I want to remind you that the Find Your Food Voice book is in progress officially as you are listening to this podcast episode and I am so excited if you would like to stay connected as I’m writing this book and be a part of it. Remember, I am looking for letters to be submitted to include in the book. You can get to all the details at julieduffydillon.com/book. Again, it’s julieduffydillon.com/book. 

Julie: All right. So we are gonna get to Food’s letter and until next time, take care. Longing for Ambivalence, We see your fatigue and it is ok to stop and rest. You have been working to heal for so long and have come so far. We see the work you’ve done to tend to your eating recovery. When you got punched in that same spot with your diagnosis, we see how it took the wind out of you, but no, it did not push you off course. They focus on what you know, to be true. Diets don’t work for most people and your diet history is enough proof that they don’t for you. Here’s what is most important of all. Tending to healing is valid and enough. You don’t have to end your pursuit of finding your food voice because of a condition. And if anything, maintaining your connection is even more important. Love, food. 

Julie: Thank you for listening. I am Julie Duffy Dylan and this is the Find Your Food Voice podcast. Ready to join the Anti Diet Movement and take the Food Voice pledge? Go to julieduffydillon.com and sign your name to the growing list of people saying no to diets and yes to their own food voice. To Find Your Food Voice podcast is produced by me, Julie Duffy Dylan and my team of kick ass folks. I couldn’t make the show without Yel Cruz, assistant producer and resident book and Coleen Bremner, customer service coordinator and professional hype master. Audio editing is from Toby Lyles at 24 sound music is fly free by Hartley. Are you looking for episode transcripts? Get them at julieduffydillon.com where you can also submit letters for the podcast, give us feedback and sign the food voice pledge. We need your voice to end diet culture. We literally can’t do this without you. Subscribe to the Find Your Food Voice podcast to get weekly inspiration and education on how we can defeat diet culture and reclaim our own food voice. I look forward to seeing you here next week for another episode of the Find Your Food Voice podcast. Take care.