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Julie Duffy Dillon (00:00)

Hi, and welcome to episode 413 of the Find Your Food Voice podcast. I am Julie Duffy Dillon, registered dietitian and your host. Welcome to the show where we are going to be unpacking if your relationship with food is still haunting you. Now we are using the word “still” for a reason, because there are many people, and I wonder if you are someone that can identify with this, that have struggled with their eating disorder or their relationship with food for many years, and it impacted their relationships, maybe their physical health. And now you have really pushed to recover and reclaim your life. And it may seem from the outside looking in that everything is fine, but is it really fine? There are many times where I would be sitting with folks in sessions and they would talk about how stressed or anxious or sad or uncomfortable they are around certain foods or certain situations with food, but no one knew it. Everyone thought that they were really doing okay. So if you are someone who is suffering in silence, we made this episode for you. And by we, I mean my guest today, Jamie Magdic, who is a registered dietitian specializing in eating disorders reached out to me because she wanted to chat about pseudo recovery. That’s the term that she uses for this experience where you’ve come a far way, you’ve come a long, yet you may still feel really uncomfortable in certain situations or around certain foods. And she wants you to know that there’s more, there’s more that you can do to help your relationship with food.

And what we’re gonna talk about are some of her experiences in pseudo recovery as she was in her first few years as a registered dietitian. And as we unpack this, I hope that it’s going to be something that gets you going to make those next steps because you can continue on and where you are and be fine. And what if, what if there was more? So we hope that this gives you some first few steps into this next stage of your recovery. I want to give you a few announcements just to make sure you and I are totally caught up. I have been getting into Substack more and more. Are you over there too? I’ve always enjoyed writing and of course writing the Find Your Food Voice book, it helped me to really appreciate that I enjoy writing. So as I was writing the book, I did start reading people’s Substacks and I decided I wanted to move a lot of my email communication with you over on Substack and I’ve been publishing essays about every week. My last one was all about how I’ve created an anti-diet home culture. I’ve officially been a parent for 17 years now, totally bananas. But you know, after 17 years, not that I’m doing it perfectly or in this exact right way, but I wanted to share with you A lot of the answers that I tell people when they ask me like, what can I do with food, with helping my kids to help them to respect all bodies and body size and to have a healthy body image. So I wanted to just catalog it all for you. And as I was writing notes and beginning the essay, I realized that this is gonna be one hell of an essay. So I had to split it up into parts. So part one is everything that I can think of, like all the scripts all of the teaching points, every intervention, when I speak up, how I do it, I just put it all in there in part one. And it goes into how I basically do the food part of this anti-diet home culture that I’ve been trying to build at my house with my two kids. And I hope it’s helpful for you, if you’re, maybe you don’t have anybody else living at home with you, but you see that in your future or maybe you have a young kid at home and you’re wondering what are you gonna do when they go to school and everyone else’s food beliefs just start flooding in. I know it can be really overwhelming, so I hope it helps you just to calm the nervous system a little bit and help you to have a plan.

Another essay I just published was all about the behind the scenes of Find Your Food Voice books first month. Yes, it’s been over a month now and it’s been a really fun ride for you to share with me how you’ve been reading this book and what it has brought to your life so far. And I want to keep the conversation going. That’s also another part of why I wanted to do a sub stack.

is to continue to write the book. There’s so much more to say. So if you want to know about the behind the scenes of the Find Your Food Voice book, if you want to get to this anti-diet home culture essay that I have started this part one, join me on Substack. It’s an easy name. It’s just Find Your Food Voice. So findyourfoodvoice.substack.com, you’ll get to it. So do me a favor, push subscribe, and you won’t miss an episode of this podcast, and then go over to Substack and push subscribe there. Doing that helps me and my team to be able to continue to provide this resource for you before we get to this conversation with Jamie, I want to let you know one more just scheduling tidbit. This is going to be ⁓ May 2025 is a part of the busy season for me as a parent, May and June are just, they’re just a lot. So I am giving Future Julie a gift and I’m going to just turn down the dial a little bit on content. So I will be having episodes every other week of this podcast in May and June. And then I also will have essays every other week in May and June and just see how that goes. And I will be doing that at least for May and June. I’m not really sure from there what I’m gonna do I wanna be transparent with you. I’m just experimenting and we’ll see what happens. So if you push subscribe here and also on Substack that way you know you will not miss a thing no matter what. But ⁓ that is all the housekeeping I have for you. So we are gonna get to my episode with Jamie after a very quick sponsor break.

Julie Duffy Dillon (06:29)

The Find Your Food Voice book offers a supportive path away from dieting. The Seattle Times says that this Find Your Food Voice book is warm and nurturing, but doesn’t shy away from the hard things. If you’ve read Intuitive Eating or you’ve struggled for years to recover from an eating disorder and you need a resource that’s actually gonna help you get through the muck, I wrote this book for you. Find Your Food Voice is available anywhere books are sold.

Julie Duffy Dillon (06:56)

Hey, Jamie, how are you doing?

Jamie (06:58)

Hey Julie, I’m doing awesome. Thank you so much for having me.

Julie Duffy Dillon (07:01)

I am so glad to finally have a chance to talk to you about the topic we have at hand today. So thanks for coming on and also agreeing to be vulnerable to unpack this topic. This is something that a lot of my clients we would have to warm up to and then eventually we would start to get there and it would be really important to unpack, but hard. This is a really hard thing. And what I’m talking about is almost recovering, pseudo recovery, Why is this so important to you?

Jamie (07:31)

Yeah, absolutely. It’s one of my favorite topics. And of course, I can only speak to my experiences, but it’s one of my favorite topics. And I love chatting with clients about it, people about it. Because I think it’s, I’m super passionate about this specifically, as registered dietitian working in eating disorder recovery. Because I think a lot of people, recovery is defined differently for everyone. But I’ve found a lot for not only myself and my experience, but for a lot of my clients that people can get stuck in what I call like the pseudo recovery place where, you know, they’re feeling better. Behaviors are, have been changing, you know, they’re decreasing, maybe a little bit better relationship with food and body, but they’re still struggling or they feel like they’ve reached a place and this is just as far as they can go. So I’ve experienced that a lot with clients. I’ve experienced it with myself and I’m really passionate about, you know, consistently pushing for more, asking themselves, where else can I go? What other resources can I get? Is this good enough for me? I also think that a lot of people, everyone’s journey is different. I really wanted to have a disclaimer that for that, everyone’s is different. But I think that people are also get the message that they may be struggling with X forever, or it’s unmovable And not just in some places they may get that and when I hear that it breaks my heart and I felt that way too in when I was in pseudo recovery and got similar messages. And so I like to challenge that and see where else we can go so that people can be freer and reach maybe more goals they didn’t think were possible.

Julie Duffy Dillon (09:17)

Mm-hmm. Yeah, are there certain areas that you see that come up a lot for people that’s like, this is a common pseudo recovery block?

Jamie (09:26)

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I a few pieces, I think, I mean, in areas of food and body image and maybe some of the deeper therapy work. And that would be I see often, and I can speak to myself and to others. With others, I see that they get to a place where they’re, you know, maybe eating all foods and having a more of a variety and they’re their behaviors are decreased, maybe they’re even, some behaviors are gone, but they’re still very anxious around food or they still feel like they need to control it or the thoughts just consume them. The behaviors might be better, but the thoughts are still very much there. Those shaming thoughts, those distrusting thoughts. So even though they’re moving forward with having all foods in place and they’re not using behaviors, it’s still like haunts them in that way and they feel like they can’t let that go. Fear of, you yeah, that. I would say body image where they may have feel better about the food and have maybe a trusting relationship with food, but they haven’t explored body image to its capacity and in all the ways they can help further their relationship with body, where they feel more accepting, confident, understand it more, less alone, more of a friend with their body. And then those two pieces impact each other. you know, where it’s stuck because of maybe not exploring food all the way or not exploring body image more than they can. And so they keep the other parts stuck. I really think they work in tangent and they, as what I’ve seen with my clients and for myself.

Julie Duffy Dillon (11:01)

Okay.

Jamie (11:18)

And I know for me, I was stuck in those areas for sure. Once behaviors were gone after that, I was stuck probably for a good, you five, five to seven years, not using eating disorder behaviors, kind of feeling like I passed that part of my recovery and wasn’t really thinking about that part, but I was still very much distraught with trying to find the perfect way of eating or dieting, your dieting, really feeling like I’m managing my body and trying to be quote unquote healthy. So just in that disordered eating pseudo recovery where I felt better, but it still took up so much mental space and so much of my life. And that’s what I call like, you know, kind of stuck in pseudo, pseudo recovery, not knowing there was more.

Julie Duffy Dillon (11:46)

Yeah, I could appreciate how this would be something that’s often invisible because if someone’s in a place where maybe they were struggling and it was really impacting their life that other people noticed and then they were able to add foods back in, eat consistently, maybe it felt like emotionally just felt more like themselves. No one was aware of any eating issues.

Julie Duffy Dillon (12:42)

But yet inside, mean, way you said haunts, was like, ooh, that’s the word. That’s the word that so many people have shared with me when they’re suffering and like secretly, and people just think that they’re fine. And maybe they’re quote fine, but they’re not fine. It’s like still so much of an emotional burden. And something that I hear, like as you’re talking about your experience and other people you know, like it seems like it kind of loops it back into this like isolating, shameful kind of space and like I just have to just hold this all together and move forward because this is the only way. What would you like, what do wish people knew about like this pseudo recovery experience? Like what do you wish people knew about like how, I know I’m thinking about selfishly like how can people get out of it? But just like, what do wish people knew?

Jamie (13:12)

Yeah, absolutely. I think this is why I like talking about it so much because what I want them to know is that they don’t have to stay there. You know, there is more to do. You still deserve support. You know, don’t stop moving forward just because it doesn’t feel maybe as bad as it used to like that. You can go much further is what I would want to say. I think when people get to that place, you know, a pseudo recovery place, they feel like, well, now maybe How do I describe this? Maybe they’re not sick enough. I know that’s something that people struggle with all the time, but they think, I think because of the way also society normalizes the management and manipulation of your body and the hypervigilance around food that you almost feel like, well, now I’m not sick. Now this is my responsibility. So they don’t continue to keep going to build like. full trust with food and full trust with their body. They just think, well, this is good as it gets. And now this manipulation of food and body is my responsibility. So I would say like, if it still doesn’t feel good, that’s something to question. And there’s more you can explore.

Julie Duffy Dillon (14:50)

Mm-hmm.

Jamie (14:56)

So I think I would want people to take that away and know that you can get to a place where it doesn’t just feel okay, but it feels really good. And you have this really deep trust with food and body because you’ve done the complete exploration of it and kept going. Yeah, those are probably the things I would highlight to people.

Julie Duffy Dillon (15:11)

Yeah, I’m thinking about someone who can relate to this experience. And I would imagine many people as they’re recovering from their eating disorder or trying to like just move away from dieting in general, how a lot of times those actions are they happen because you’re doing it for someone else, you know, like, okay, I’m going to recover. So my family doesn’t have to worry about me anymore. Or I’m going to recover so I can have, I don’t know, my relationships stay where I want them to be. And I would imagine that this is the step where you may just find that, again, like you can kind of manage it, but this is gonna come down to more of like an internal experience instead of what externally is happening. So if someone, like how does someone make that like jump? How do you go to start to really unpack the pseudo recovery and.

Jamie (15:51)

Right. Right, right. Yeah. Yeah, I think that’s a great question. I think it really depends on, you know, the situation that you’re describing here. I mean, so individualized, it’d be different for everyone. I guess for this individual, it would really be assessing, you know, their motivation and their desire for it. You know, why they, if and why they want

Julie Duffy Dillon (16:13)

Yeah, naming what’s going on.

Jamie (16:37)

full recovery for themselves, what they do want to change, what they do want to heal right now and why and understanding that from themselves and really working with those parts of themselves, the parts that are resistant. And I would say that’s a lot of like that internal conversation to decide even where they want to go, right? There’s a lot of places they can go with a recovery and, and do more healing, build more trust, but you know, learning about and asking themselves why what the motivation is for that. I know I can speak to it took me I think when I was going through my recovery and I was in pseudo recovery, there were parts where I was like, well, I’m going to do it for this reason and this reason but it wasn’t until some of those internal motivating factors for me like I don’t want my daughter to you know have a bad relationship with food and body or while I’m hitting this rock bottom where this really doesn’t feel good and I really am like

sick and tired of this now I’m willing to see what else I can do and maybe face some of my fears. So I think some are like an awareness that someone has timing the desire to explore that a bit. And I would say for other people wanting to you know, dive into pseudo recovery. And I forgot your original question here. But what sparked into my mind was, was thinking about people who may want to explore it, but just are stuck because they don’t know how to, or they don’t know what’s possible. So in that case, I would ask those individuals, you know, comparing where you’re at now and what your ideal is, where ideally do you want to go? What does recovery in its ideal form and its best form for you where you can live the most free life, have the best relationship with food and body possible? Like if you can paint that picture, what would it be? to then start breakaging the gap and seeing if, know, what you need to do to get there. And that’s where to support from, where I like to support, where other dieticians like to support with full recovery. And what I’m really trying to name here today is that it is possible. There are a lot of things you can do and keep working on when it comes to building trust in your understanding and relationship with food and body that can get you to those more ideal places where the food noise is a lot less behaviors are disappearing. You’re more grounded in, you understand it more at a deeper level where you can let go more and more and more. So yeah, I know that was a little bit all over the place, but I hope that made sense. Yeah, yeah.

Julie Duffy Dillon (19:21)

No, I totally followed for sure. And you know what I’m thinking

 about? I don’t know if you have worked with other dietitians that were like clients of yours. And that’s where I, first of all, I have to say like the dietitians that were my clients over the years, what a privilege to have the, to like be able to work with folks who are colleagues of mine and helping them with recovery. And those were, many of those folks who also were in a lot of these pseudo recovery experiences. And I think like being a dietitian in itself is just a challenging job for so many reasons. Like we have to like feed ourselves and our family and you know, make grocery lists and then we have to go to work and talk about it too. It’s just like a lot of food talk. Did you find like the experience and I don’t know like when you became a dietitian and when pseudo recovery experience was for you and if they are overlapped, like how has your job as a dietitian impacted this pseudo recovery experience for you?

Jamie (20:24)

Yeah. yeah, absolutely. That’s a good question. I started struggling with my eating disorder when I was, you know, I’m 36 when I was maybe 11 or 12. And it would pop up stronger at different points. But when I would say I was out of eating disorder, not pseudo disorder, pseudo or disordered eating, but maybe out of eating disorder behaviors, they’re so blended, but was maybe around, you know, college age. And my first degree was as a teacher. When I went back to school to become a dietitian, I would say I was in disordered eating, trying to find like the healthiest way to eat, but you know, not doing certain behaviors. Really didn’t even look at the… I didn’t seek treatment. I didn’t know there was treatment. I didn’t get help for my eating disorder. But through like doing some healing, getting older, things shifting in life, not being in certain places with like, you know, a trauma that impacted me. I started to, you I went into more disordered eating. And then when I was going back to school to become a dietitian, that same like first year of the, four year program, I found health at every size, intuitive eating, more holistic health. And that’s when I took those in body image resources. And that’s when I started questioning like I’m gonna be helping people as a dietitian and I don’t I’m confused at how to Completely like help them because I’m trying to find this prescriptive way of doing things in this healthiest You know in the quote-unquote healthiest way But it doesn’t it doesn’t feel right. I don’t feel like I feel like there’s anxiety around my relationship with it I know I wasn’t where I was But here doesn’t feel good either. So those resources really opened up my mind and got me to a place where I’m like, wow, this is full recovery. This is where I don’t think about food and body image. And was able to turn that corner and, you know, just feel very free of it where I’m not thinking of food and body image. I’m just doing things out of respect and care for my body and have a trust with food and have a trust with my body. Just new education, new insight, new experiences, a lot of getting uncomfortable and to take those last steps to be like, to have the experiences of, I can trust my body. I can trust food, which are scary things to do. So that’s a little bit of, you know, in a nutshell, how that looked. But being a dietitian was a, I wasn’t originally thinking I was going to work with eating disorders going back to school. It’s actually, I said, I’m not going to work with eating disorders. And now, yes, which is so funny. And I think that’s you know, a lot of people’s experiences, but now I’ve been working. I only worked with eating disorders as a dietitian. I’ve been working with them for seven years now going on eight. So yeah.

Julie Duffy Dillon (23:18)

Yeah. That’s so funny. Yeah, me too. was like, no, I’m never going to work in the field of eating disorders. And then, wait, what was I fighting? Yeah, there’s something really, it sounds so cheesy, but like the gift of like working in eating disorders is, and also like getting exposed to body liberation and fat politics and intuitive eating, just like different tools that come up and different ideologies and philosophies.

Jamie (23:27)

Yeah. Right. huh.

Julie Duffy Dillon (23:55)

it’s something like in a session with a client as things are coming up and they’re noticing their stuff, I’m also noticing my stuff. And you can’t not. And it is the thing that it gives back that it helped me. I’m not someone who has an eating disorder history, but I’m living in this world that’s so fucked up and disordered. So I feel like that’s the part I can identify with.

Jamie (24:03)

Mm-hmm. Isn’t that interesting? I know, I know. Yeah, absolutely. Yep, yep, yep.

Julie Duffy Dillon (24:23)

I’m so glad to have these tools right here in front of me. But yeah, it can be scary to uncover some stuff and to face them. I’m wondering if someone is like, Just wanting some ideas. do you have any, either from yourself or for someone else, maybe, someone that you maybe are thinking about that you worked with at some point, just like a first step that kind of just nudge the pseudo recovery a little bit to like shake it up and be like a first step. if you’re like, I don’t know, I’m thinking about someone maybe with, just feels so much shame with maybe eating a certain food or I don’t know. You know what I’m saying?

Jamie (24:54)

Oh, goodness. I would love to like know their whole journey and be like, okay, here’s the first step, but I know we can’t do that. So I’m gonna give it general. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Julie Duffy Dillon (25:13)

No, no, but just like, no, just like, yeah, like an example, like even doesn’t have to be just like a random one. So if people can kind of get the gist of like, ⁓ it doesn’t need, do you have to like be perfect? You don’t have to do all or nothing with it. But like, what’s one gentle first step for that’s like a random example.

Jamie (25:24)

Mm hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Well, I would first ask if you’re in this place and you feel like you’re in pseudo recovery, I would I would want someone to really sit in that feeling of pseudo recovery and open up the possibility of more. So just like raise awareness to even ask like, where else do I want to go? Is that possible for me? And because I think that’s pretty powerful in and of itself, because I would say when I was in pseudo recovery, high functioning, it didn’t, you know, it felt like it didn’t impact me much because it didn’t impact me as much as it did before. But still my confidence in around my body and my relationships and intimacy and going out and it just taking up space and grocery shopping and meal prepping and just how much energy it took. I know I didn’t like that. And so I would, and I know ideally I just didn’t want it on my mind. I wanted time and space for everything else. So creating a little bit of that gap for yourself, I think is an important first step because that’s going to help you to decide, you know, to know and decide for yourself. Wow, there’s so much more energy in life I can experience if I didn’t have this piece taking up maybe 50 % of my day in all these little ways to be able to ground themselves in where they are and where they want to go. But I think that’s really powerful because you may not know. raising awareness around that. And then I would say maybe building, getting a little bit more uncomfortable. So first step with your window of tolerance and your ability right now and your desire right now.

What is one thing where you are sitting right now in your shooter recovery that does really impact you so you can build confidence with that? So if it is, I’m so glad all those behaviors are gone, but I really do feel like I’m always obsessing still over if the scale moves. You know, that is the number one thing that bothers you. The fact that you have to hop on the scale. might be to learn a little bit more about that positivity, health at every size, weight science. So to just open a book there or to get uncomfortable and say, okay, well, I weigh myself every day. I’m going to weigh myself every other day and kind of let go of that control. So baby steps. But I think that the biggest thing impacting someone right now that really doesn’t feel good would be a good place to start. So you can start to get some like freedom and from that struggle that really doesn’t feel good. And I would say that’s the second step, but the first step would to be maybe raise a little more awareness so you can have motivation to say, yeah, that would bring me a lot more lightness, less anxiety, more life, you know, so I think I would like to experiment with that scary thing. It’s hard to dive into something scary if you don’t, you’re not grounded in what it could bring.

Julie Duffy Dillon (28:25)

Mm-hmm. I find it so helpful to name it as an experiment too, because it’s just like, let’s just see what happens. You could always go back. I don’t want you to, but you can always go back. Yeah.

Jamie (28:44)

Okay, okay. You can always, you can. That was, tell my clients that all the time. You can go back, let’s experiment. No, no, uh-huh, exactly, yeah. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Julie Duffy Dillon (28:54)

Yes. Yes, it’s not forever. Let’s just see what happens. Yeah. Yeah, I’m always rooting that you don’t, but like, it’s okay. And so much of eating disorders and like their roots and like white supremacy, it’s like super rigid, all or nothing perfectionistic, like, no, we don’t want to go in that space. That’s not, that’s not what we’re looking for. It’s just like, I, yeah, I love how you gave some examples of just like,

Jamie (29:11)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yep. Yep. Right. Uh-huh.

Julie Duffy Dillon (29:24)

these are like baby steps, like you said, to start to like, just shake it up a little bit. And yeah, I think there’s so much that comes from like the first big steps away from eating disorders, but then getting to the place where you can really sit with that awareness that you’re describing of what else you also could do to help be more grounded, to be more affirmed in your own recovery, to like move also through the pseudo recovery into even more like of a, don’t know, like once pseudo recovery is gone, what does that mean? Like, I don’t know, do you have a name for the space after pseudo recovery? You do? What is it?

Jamie (29:53)

Yeah, yes, yes. I mean, for me, I would say, and this is, again, I don’t wanna say anything that’s gonna maybe invalidate someone’s experience, but what I would probably call it is, know, full recovery. I think that it was somewhat beneficial for me that I didn’t, I didn’t know there was help. I didn’t know I had a problem, right, with my eating disorder when I was younger, so I never was diagnosed. But I think that was helpful and like, am struggling with an eating disorder, right? I’m struggling with my relationship with food and body. And now I’m not. And so I feel like the diagnosis that I was never given was never stuck with me. So where I would say now is that, I don’t know, I’m fully recovered or I that was a part of my life. Now I’m in a different part of my life. It just doesn’t feel like part of my life anymore. yeah, maybe. Yeah, it does. I don’t think about it. You know, I’m not worried about falling back into it. So maybe, maybe full recovery, I would say.

Julie Duffy Dillon (30:59)

Yeah. That’s great. That feels so light, doesn’t it? That’s, Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I don’t invite any listener to like, you decide, but what would you call it when these next bits are taken care of and you feel like the eating disorder has no more of a grip on you. And yeah, we’re rooting for you. Like you deserve this. So Jamie, tell me where can people find you if they wanna connect with you, maybe work with you in some of your programs that you have?

Jamie (31:19)

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Best way to so jamie the dietician dot com, but to have conversations on Instagram at Jamie RD underscore, I’m always on there interacting with people and sharing resources. Yeah, so that would that would probably be the best way to connect and start up conversation and share how I can help. Awesome.

Julie Duffy Dillon (31:43)

Okay. Awesome. Thank you so much. We’ll put all those in the show notes, of course. Thank you so much for just letting us have this conversation about your own lived experience. And I hope it helps someone to be able to take these next steps. So thank you so much, Jamie.

Jamie (32:05)

yeah, absolutely. Thank you for having me, Julie.

Julie Duffy Dillon (32:33)

So there you have it. I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Jamie all about pseudo recovery. And we hope it helps you with your next steps to reclaim your food voice because you know what? You deserve to have a relationship with food that brings you joy and satisfaction and more ease. Remember, next week I will be publishing an essay, so subscribe to my sub stack. And then the next week, I will be back with another episode of Find Your Food Voice. That episode is going to be a group chat with Rachel and Colleen, and we are unpacking GLP-1’s in-body liberation. I cannot wait.

And until then, take care.