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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: Hi there and welcome to episode 339 of the Find Your Food Voice podcast. I am Julie Duffy Dillon, registered dietitian and host. I am so glad you’re here. I wanted to share a recent conversation that I was having with one of my kids. He is starting fifth grade this year. And as he was getting ready to start this year, he said he wishes he was still in kindergarten because when he was in kindergarten things were so easy. They just had centers and a lot of recess and lots and lots of fun. There was no homework and there were no tests and it just felt like a good old time. I think we can all relate, right? And I have a letter from someone today that I’m going to be sharing with you who talks about that when it comes to food.Remembering a time where things were just so delicious and loving everything, fear was not a part of the way this person connected to food. And because we are all living in diet culture all of the time, this person eventually got to a point where food just became real complicated and a tool for something else. I have a feeling you’re going to relate a lot to this episode’s letter, so I’m excited to get to it and share my thoughts with you. I hope it’s helpful. 

Julie: And before we get to this letter for this episode I want to share an update with you. I am still plugging along on the Find Your Food Voice book. I don’t exactly know how many words that I have done. I’m just about done with chapter two and I would say about two-thirds of the way done to chapter three. But unfortunately, there was a hurricane that came through a couple weeks ago and it ended up causing a little mini flood in my office. So, in case you’ve never seen anything online that I’ve been doing, usually I’m recording these podcasts in my office and it’s in this detached garage, but it’s a garage so it’s not sealed as well. And it has a cement floor and I guess just if we get a lot of rain, which we do when you live on the East Coast where there’s hurricane sitting, it can flood. So when it flooded this time, it actually ended up frying out a couple cords, including the cords for my computer. So I’m in the process of replacing everything. And today, as I’m recording this episode, and I believe the last one, and maybe even the one before that, I have recorded in my bed. So I hope this sound is okay but it’ll just have to do because I couldn’t wait. And it’s kind of nice. It’s a nice different way to do this. I’ve never recorded in my bed before. It is real nice but I kind of want to take a nap. So I’m going to finish this episode and maybe I’ll have time for that. But anyway, I did want to give you that update. So I don’t know how many words I’ve written, but I have been writing and plugging along.

Julie: And I’m really excited about it. I’m still really excited about this book. And if you want to be a part of writing it with me, there are a few ways you can do that. One way is we are including letters just like the letter from today. And actually, as I was reading through today’s letter, I was like, this would be a really good letter for one of the chapters that I haven’t written yet but that I think would match up really well. But if you would like to be a part of the book, you can actually submit a letter that can be included. The way that we can include it is up to you. You can make it anonymous like our letter writer today, or you can give like your first name. You can give a little bit if you want to, or you cannot. But I want to include letters from people with different lived experiences, different identities, because we know that we all have a different food voice and we all are going to relate to food differently, be it we all are experiencing diet culture but just in our own unique ways. So I do want to include different types of letters. So I would love your letter. We’re going to put a link in the show notes for you to click if you are ready to submit a letter. And we also need letters for the season, season nine of Find Your Food Voice. So submit away. We would love them if you wrote one in the beginning of this podcast back in 2016. Submit another one. We would love it. And yeah, just let it flow. We do have also a guide for you in the show notes here. If you’re like what exactly do I include? If you are newer to the podcast and you have never heard a food letter before, well, listen to the one we have next. But you can also on my website, julieduffydillon.com, you can click a link that you can find on the bottom of the navigation just for all the letters. And you can just read them all and get a little taste of what they all look like. And there’s so much and just reading through them to help ease your journey. So I invite you to do that. But again, submit a letter for the podcast, submit a letter for the book. I would love to include your voice in the Find Your Food Voice book. 

Julie: But if you want to be a part of it, like in real time, while I’m writing the book, I am actually hosting co-working sessions that we are calling Nesting Time. And I have a whole chapter devoted to nesting. And it’s a part of making space for you to have diet-free just living whether it’s journaling or meditating, being in community with others, eating a really good, but I say good, I mean, tasty snack, doing all those kinds of things. And when I’m writing, I invite folks to either co -work with me or do some of that nesting time, do some of the things that you need to do to help just feel more at home in your body and have more ammo for diet culture. So if you would like to do that, I am often doing these live on TikTok, so you can find me there for free. Or for $5 a month, you can join me and it’s in a community that I host on Circle and it’s like a sort of Zoom room. And so we just stay muted for 45 minutes. And you could do that part on TikTok for free, but if you wanna have time just to chat with me and other folks who are also in community together while I’m writing then you can join me and details are at julieduffydillon.com/book. All right, so we are gonna take a very quick sponsor break. And then when we come back we will hear this episode’s letter.

Julie: Dear Food, You and I have had a love/hate relationship for as long as I can remember, although not quite my entire life. I am 34 years old, 5’3’’ and XYZ or so lbs and I have an eating disorder (I restrict). I actually found your podcast via my eating disorder dietitian, and all I can is WOW! If I go all the way back Food, I loved you. I was a happy chubby baby, along with my identical twin sister. My late maternal grandmother would often remind me that when I was a little girl (maybe 2 or 3) I would say and I quote “I tries everything I sees and I likes everything I tries.” Let’s just say that I was a good eater. Fast forward a few years and I believe that I still was a good eater. As an elementary age child, I remember loving meal time, especially when my mom would make my favorite – spaghetti and meat sauce. I actually think I enjoyed you so much Food that I would actually make myself sick – too much of a good thing? As a kid while I was never “fat,” I was the “fat” twin because I was always 5 or 10 lbs. heavier than my twin sister and my twin sister was none too shy to let me know it.

Julie: Now, let’s fast forward a few more years into adolescence and the beginning of high school. When I was 14 during the beginning of my freshman year of high school, I found out that I was a Type 2 diabetic (twin sister as well). I really think that is when you Food became my enemy. I was dragged to a dietitian (it took me 20 years to learn that all dietitians aren’t bad after that experience) to learn what I could eat and what I couldn’t eat. I was never officially put on a diet (except Sugar Buster’s reared its ugly head and other low carbs like that). And what happens when you tell anyone “no, you can’t have that” (much less a hormonal teenager) – obviously I was going to find a way to eat what I wanted. I wasn’t mature enough yet…I wish I would have exercised more and would have eaten less junk but I was a kid. Fast forwarding a few more years and boom it’s off to college time. Well Food…a college freshman can get into all kinds of trouble when you are basically limitless. Thank goodness for the gym around the corner. I think just the thought of knowing that I would have to go my internist every 4 months and get on the scale was enough for some self-control but that scale, it sure made me feel like shit for years. And then came law school. I don’t remember much Food but again you were there for comfort when all I felt like I was doing was reading and studying.

Julie: I was a full time working adult before I really started restricting. I had always used you Food as a tool in some form or another. I guess I restricted before that because I would refuse to eat for as long as I can remember when I was an angry. It was my “*#$% you” to whomever it was that pissed me off. Well as an adult in my late 20s/early 30s, I “perfected the art” of restricting. My husband hates when I say that. But I feel like I have. I have gone through phases where Food there were only a few safe ones of you and that routine was super important. I seemingly forget Food that you provide energy and sustenance. All I could see you as was the bastard causing the scale to go up and I was addicted to the scale. I even used pregnancy as a reason to stop restricting. It didn’t work. I think the day after my daughter was born (born 10 weeks early via an emergency c-section) I was restricting again. I wanted “my body” back. Oh wait, I now had a huge vertical incision down my tummy that would take some time to heal. But more than anything, my mind and soul needed to heal. At this point, at 32 years old, I had been practicing my art pretty full time for close to 3 years. I wasn’t sure how to go back.

Julie: I hit rock bottom when my husband was in a full time treatment center for binge eating disorder. I starved myself for 3 weeks straight to cope. I had to get help. I have now been seeing my dietician for almost 2 months and while I know Rome wasn’t built in a day, there has been tons of progress. My dietitian often says that I “get off” on restricting. While that hasn’t changed the behavior is getting better. Can I tell you Food, I never in a million years thought I would listen to a podcast about love and food much less write you a letter? Silly right? And maybe the silliest part is that I shared you with my husband last night. The bottom line for me Food is that I have a beautiful and impressionable 20 month old daughter who LOVES you‼! I made meatballs this past weekend and last night as she was eating dinner, she was Yum Yum Yum Yum. I want that back Food! I will never be the food happy toddler again but I want some middle ground and I want to be a good role model for my baby girl. Thanks for listening! Anonymous in Texas

Julie: Hey there letter writer. Thank you so much for this note and sharing with me all the ups and downs and some really silly things that like your grandmother told you about how you spoke about food and how your daughter speaks about food now. I don’t know if you could hear it when I was reading it, but it really made me smile. I actually had to reread your letter a few, not reread, but I actually had to rerecord your letter a few times because I kept chuckling. Anyway, I do appreciate that. And I also appreciate the update from working with your dietician. I know when you wrote this, this was a really new thing for you. That is such a hard step. I hope you are really proud of that step because it was a really big one as you’re moving forward. I hope what I have to say over the next few minutes adds to that that maybe you and your dietician can sift through it, see if any of it is helpful, discard what isn’t, shelf what is just not for right now. But I do appreciate your note because while your experiences are unique, your feelings about food are gonna resonate with a lot of people, especially having kind of this up and down experience with food.

Julie: I, again, wanna just communicate how much I loved reading about your early food experiences as told to you by your grandmother. Not only were they very sweet and gave me the biggest smile but for you, it gave you a snapshot of your food voice before most of diet culture wedged in there. Everyone has a different food voice. That’s why I can’t give someone an exact prescription of what a food voice is, because that would just be my description. But from reading your letter what I gathered is that your food voice loved the pleasure from food, and probably still does in the present tense. But I have a feeling your food voice not only loved the pleasure but also probably the connection that came from eating with other people, again, probably your grandmother, that that was just a joyful experience.

Julie: And you are joyful and proud. There’s something really interesting about a relationship with food. I have found that it is something that has a mirror image on how we relate to other things in life including relationships. So I’m wondering if we had some more history about your life as a toddler, maybe through elementary school is that how you experience people too? Were you someone who was like, I’m ready to play, and you laughed, and you enjoyed that connection with people when you were laughing? I would just guess that was how you were. Maybe you weren’t extroverted, but when you connected with someone and you felt safe with them, that that was how you were. That’s how you rolled, or maybe you were extroverted, and you just wanted to bring that laughter and joy through connection anywhere you went. And I’m also glad in your letter you wrote about perfecting the art, and for the listener who’s not the letter writer, the art of restricting was in quotes. I didn’t want to say that while I was reading it but I believe the writer was trying to communicate kind of the irony of it and how it was a problem.

Julie: It wasn’t something necessarily that was helpful, like we would often think about for art. But I know when you were talking about your art of restricting starting in your late 20s early 30s, but then noting, I probably started it a lot earlier. I’m so glad that you’ve increased your awareness from that it wasn’t just something that started later in life that you have an awareness that this history goes deep and it’s complicated and it’s a history. It’s something that is connected to feelings that probably didn’t have a voice and you named anger. 

Julie:  Now, I don’t know about you, but the way I was socialized as a girl and a woman was not to be real comfortable with anger. It was considered to be too much and maybe even using diagnostic language like histrionic, right, that it’s a problem. And connecting your restriction as a way to communicate anger, which is sidebar, so common. I’ve heard from so many people who have a complicated relationship with food. The history is very deep. And not being able to communicate anger, there was this really simple kind of rudimentary connection that was made. Well, I’m so effing mad right now. I’m gonna show them by not eating. That is a script that so many people can relate to, some way or another. And for many people, they will do that. And then it also leads to other behaviors, especially because when we are not eating enough our body naturally will need to eat more later on, but it doesn’t do that for everybody. And it may not start out that way, but may evolve to that. So anyway, I digress.

Julie: Connecting to the anger. I am wondering how anger and how little it’s had a chance to kind of like escape from your expression. I’m picturing if you were almost like a volcano that hadn’t erupted in a long time. If someone had put a little vents in to let the energy out and let the vent the anger there would be no need for an eruption. But what I’m hearing about your restriction now, letter writer, is more like an eruption. It’s really invading your life and getting in the way.

 So I’m wondering, as you went through college, as you went through law school, as you went through your late 20s and early 30s, as we mature, as we connect dots sometimes connecting all of these dots can really put a fence up around areas of our life that we think we need to just close off. And so I am wondering if that’s where the anger may have also become other things. So I’m not in your brain with you. I’m not even going to pretend that I’m in there with you. But I wonder if the anger could also be connected to other feelings. I think about resentment. That’s a big one connected to it for a lot of people. It could be even things like self-hatred. Those are often kind of the, if we kind of put a word map on a page with anger in a circle those are two things that I often would hear from clients that they connected to the anger. 

Julie: And you know, letter writer, you have been through a lot. You’ve been through a lot of complicated experiences with your food and your body you know, getting compared to your sister. And I know you said your sister would kind of have some put downs about your body size but the two of you learned that somehow, that that was something to compare. I’m not a twin, but the twins I know in my life have shared with me how complicated that can be just being compared all the time. But then you and your sister were also diagnosed with diabetes as a 14 year old. So getting diagnosed with anything at 14 is hard, but then to get diagnosed with something like diabetes that has such a like polarizing effect on people that is a really tough one. There’s a lots of judgment with diabetes that a person caused it, which you didn’t, which is really interesting that you and your sister both got diagnosed with it. It just kind of further enhances the notion that most of diabetes is inherited, it’s genetic. So anyway, but getting diagnosed with diabetes anytime is hard. But then as a 14 year old, when you barely are starting to understand some kind of abstract concepts, it’s a really tough one to hold on to. But then not only getting this big heavy diagnosis, but also told that you have this chronic illness. You probably were told that you can cure it by cutting out certain foods, i .e. that horrible experience you had with a dietician. And you can’t, diabetes is a chronic condition. Sometimes people can minimize symptoms, but it’s not something that’s cured at this point.

 Julie: And then another thing that I think about that can contribute to that anger and resentment and just distraction from joy, that was such a big foundation for you as a young person is this tightrope you talked about with quarterly visits to your doctor to check on your blood sugar to check those numbers, to check the weight on the scale. And how that just really got hammered in there, again, I think about resentment. And I don’t know if I’m just putting my own feelings on top of yours, but I’m thinking about that for you. So as we talk about diabetes and eating disorders they are commonly found together. So I know a lot of people who listen to this podcast have diabetes and have an eating disorder, but may not feel like that’s a normal thing but it is a very common experience together because of how diabetes is so interwoven with food as the cure. If you’re looking for more insight I highly recommend two dieticians. One is Chelsea Levy and the other is Jen Jackson. They are two people who are very well-versed on diabetes and eating disorder recovery and giving you permission to heal your relationship with food.

Julie: So before we wrap up, there is a big question that you gave me, you said that you wanna get back to, “I tries everything I sees and I likes everything I tries”. I had to rewrite it, because it’s just so fun. You wanna get back to that person or at least the yum, yum, yum as your daughter is talking about. And you are holding this very heavy burden. I do wonder if it’s connected to anger. If you told people in your life about this complicated anger, my question for you letter writer and anyone who can relate to this, what are you afraid that will happen? What is the fear? What are you afraid of what will happen? Uncovering that, that’s gonna be what starts to get the ball rolling. I also see a way to kind of I’m picturing almost like sewing you know? And you don’t thread the different parts that have been torn apart by this anger that hasn’t had a voice, starting to give it a voice. That is challenging.Again, socialize as a girl and a woman. It’s a challenging thing that takes time and it’s really worth its time. And something you can start to do is connect to that child that was so happy in the pleasure with food.

Julie: And if it’s too scary to have pleasure with food, are there other areas in your life that you can experience pleasure again? Because my guess is that there needs to be more pleasure in your life. Are there other areas that you can have more pleasure? And I recommend it like that because when food is scary and it does take time and you’re doing that with your dietitian, finding other areas where you can safely experience pleasure and remind yourself that you have that capacity and that you deserve it and how satisfying that is and how much it actually helps you live your life it’s gonna help fill in the spots that have been not filled in for a long time as it relates to food and pleasure. Because remember, how we relate to food mirrors other things in life but other things in life also mirror how we relate to food. So it’s kind of like the loophole that my clients and I have found when you’re doing the hard work of trying to recover from diet culture in a world that hasn’t recovered yet you can also go in this like back avenue kind of approach. So I hope this helps. So I see that food has written back but before we get to food’s letter, this episode of the Find Your Food Voice podcast was brought to you by the Find Your Food Voice book. It will be out in January 2025. I am writing it right now. If you would like to stay connected along the way, go to JulieDuffyDillon.com/book. All right, I’m enough about all of that.

Julie: Let’s get to food’s letter. And I look forward to chatting with you next week. Take care. Dear Anonymous in Texas, Eating is supposed to feel good, energizing, satisfying, and pleasurable.Expressing that joy–not so typical these days especially as adults especially in this dieting world. Restricting pleasure to express anger will only work until it doesn’t anymore. Cutting off that pleasure point will show up in other areas too. As you crave those younger days remember what brings you fun. Let yourself PLAY! As you unravel the anger that has been allowed to speak, turn up that volume on what makes you laugh. You are allowed to enjoy eating again and reconnecting will be the greatest teacher to the next generation. 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. The 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 Yeli Cruz, assistant producer and resident book lover 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.