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Julie: Hey there, welcome to episode 383 of the Find Your Food Voice podcast. I am Julie Duffy Dillon, registered dietician, and I am so glad you are here. If you’re new to the podcast, welcome. Here we discuss all options to help you to move away from dieting or restricting your food intake. I hope this episode is one that helps you to have some new ideas, new tools to just educate you on your own journey to repairing your own complicated history with food. This episode is a letter episode. What does that mean? Well, I welcome you listener, you dear voice finder to write your own letter to food. And I’m going to be reading a letter from a listener just like you in a few minutes. And that is how we’re going to kind of structure the episode is I’m going read this letter, they asked me some questions. And then I’m going to give you some tidbits and education that I would typically offer clients if they were meeting with me. And again, I hope it adds into your voice finder toolbox to help you to be able to reject diets or any kind of conditions on your relationship with food. And if you have a letter in you, I would love, love to read it and you can send your letter over to info at juliedillonrd.com. You can also submit it on my website at julieduffydillon.com. There’s a place for you to submit a letter there as well. So I would just love to read your letter. And if you are willing, I will read it on a podcast and answer the letter too. But before we get to this episode’s letter, I want to let you know that we are nearing the end of I am running a special on my PCOS and doctor visit toolkit. So September is PCOS awareness month. And I always like to celebrate by having some cool deal on something that I’ve made before. And the doctor visit toolkit is just $27 during the month of September. And this includes all the labs that I encourage people to ask their doctor for and advocacy tools that you can use to help just ask the doctor to not be weighed and how to navigate the shit show that is PCOS Healthcare. So you can get to all the details in the show notes or at julieduffydillon.com/toolkit. Another announcement is I just turned in the last edits for the Find Your Food Voice book a week ago and it’s slated to be released on March 25th. I have mentioned before that I have been developing some fun swag. I love merch so I can’t wait to share it with you. And this merch is stuff that we will be giving as a part of a bonus for pre -sales. So stay tuned, more details will be coming. And then lastly, I’ve noticed more reviews for the Find Your Food Voice podcast. I so appreciate that. I was just checking on Spotify. I have some more reviews there and that made me so, happy. So however you listen to the podcast, especially Apple podcasts and any other really, any of them, but Apple podcasts in particular seems to have the most kind of listenership for this podcast right now. If you can leave a rating or review, I would be so grateful. But also if you have feedback, if there’s things that you want us to do a little differently, you know, some constructive feedback, we really like take those to be really important for us as we are navigating our production calendar for this podcast. So thank you in advance for any feedback and support and just know whenever you do things like that for my podcast or any other independent podcast you listen to, you are helping us a lot because we are not celebrities. We don’t have as unlimited budgets and making a podcast is not free. So doing this helps more people find us and helps us to be able to sell more ad spots and be able to keep the show running. All right, so speaking of an ad spot, we are gonna get to one here in just a second, but I wanna say thank you so much for listening and we will be right.

Julie: Dear food, you have always been a creative outlet for me. And for that, I am grateful. I always wanted to learn how to cook myself. I even tried microwaving pancake batter because I wasn’t allowed to use the stove, but I could use the microwave. It didn’t work. I remember working at Panera Bread and loving my discount and the foods they had to offer. That is also when I started gaining weight. I transitioned to college and worked out a lot. I had rules for you food such as only one serving of sweets per day. Once married, I really gained weight after cooking many luxurious fatty foods such as fettuccine, Alfredo, frequently. I decided to count and measure you by calorie, restrict and control. I lost X amount of pounds. I felt great. I then learned about eating organic. I tried being a vegetarian after watching documentaries about inhumane animal treatment. I yo -yo dieted and fluctuated in my weight. I ate only quote real foods and cut out fast food and processed food. I tried paleo. I tried veganism. I got pregnant. I carried so much pressure on myself that the way I eat now impacts how another human being will choose to eat. My midwife ordered me to eat leafy greens every day. She applauded me because my placenta looked very healthy, proof of my hard work. Nursing sucked my baby fat right off of me. It was easy. I was actually less weight than my pre -pregnancy weight. I had another baby and had a similar experience.I cut out dairy with both boys while nursing due to acid reflux, and then I have a mental health breakdown. I eat cafeteria food I would normally completely turn my nose up at, and yet I am grateful for the week in the hospital I can eat without caring for my two young children. Food, I think about you all the time. What I should and shouldn’t eat. What am I doing right or wrong? How can I maintain health and yet eat more normally? How do I listen to my body’s cues and trust my instincts rather than binging, eating so fast and restricting? I’m tired of the mental chatter in my head always judging me. I long for freedom, yet I am so afraid of becoming too fat and losing control. Is food freedom and a healthy weight possible? Sincerely, weighed down food enthusiast.

Julie: Welcome back. Hey there, Letter Writer. Thank you so much for this note. and I hear your million dollar question. Can I give up dieting and maintain a healthy weight? Seriously, it’s a million dollar question. I think it’s the most talked about part of helping to recover from chronic dieting, from an eating disorder. And, you know, reading through your note, What you describe is such a common part of this, for lack of a better word, journey. This experience of mending all of these complicated bits to your history with food and your body. And something else about your descriptions, the word that pops in the mind for me is the word dichotomy. Now, if that’s a new word to you, just know it’s a very popular like therapy word. It’s one of those types of trends and patterns that as therapists often they will notice in sessions with clients. And yeah, the way you’re describing food is this like extreme and all or nothing. Like I gathered that food was something you’re really curious about. And I loved how you described trying to make pancakes for yourself. And actually makes me think about something else. Like food was probably also a way that you were maybe experimenting with independence and wanting to be creative. So it was, there was this curious and creative side, a creative outlet, yet rules were put in place and you described food after getting married. And I would gather maybe you were celebrating or connecting with this newly formed family, then there was punishment then your ability to control. It was like the way that you were saying, I need to be fixed. I hear you, you’ve tried every diet out there. Like you seriously named almost every single one. And I really appreciate that you named so many that people oftentimes will deny even being connected to diets, know, vegetarian or veganism. And as I say that If someone is vegetarian or vegan, doesn’t automatically mean that they have some problematic relationship with food. And it’s also a gateway for many people to feel a sense of control with their food. It’s really important data, basically. There’s also the organic eating that you describe and all the different types of diets. It doesn’t really matter what it’s called. It’s really how many times have you tried to change your eating in order to chill out that food noise. Some people call that dieting, but it may not always fit. And that’s why I was so appreciative reading that in your letter. You also are describing another part for people who listen to this podcast. This is a part of their history too. So yeah, what I hear as your biggest complaints, the constant food noise and yearning. my gosh, so much yearning to eat without stressing. Like you literally are exhausted. Like literally you’re having to seek out a higher level of medical care because of the level of exhaustion. And I have a few kind of points of direction for you just to like let yourself percolate. And if you’re listening and you’re not the letter writer, thanks for joining the conversation. And I would encourage you to do the same. Just take some of this in as education information and Yeah, let yourself discern if these are some things that you want to explore in your own life. So something that you said, letter writer, that I found to be really important is that you say that listening to your cues isn’t working like doing the non -diet work isn’t working as evidenced by, that’s a very like dietician kind of sentence structure there, but your evidence was because of the binging and eating so fast and the restricting. And when you said that, I was like, that’s where I would wanna begin. That’s where I would wanna start the mending process is where your brain starts to give you that message that you can’t trust yourself as evidenced by these behaviors. I know you long for freedom, yet you’re afraid of two things, weight gain and the second one is losing control. So let’s first talk about losing control because that goes towards what I was just mentioning about this evidence that it’s not working. You’re losing control, so that’s the evidence that intuitive eating or non -diet stuff, like that’s how you know it’s not working.

Julie: I gently but firmly disagree with you. There’s this thing that I like to talk about called the pendulum. Now, pendulums are great. They’re a great way to loop in some metaphor, especially as it relates to our relationship with food and meeting our needs with food when it comes to like biological and emotional needs. The pendulum is something that I encourage you to go back to. especially when you notice those behaviors that feel so chaotic, like binging and restricting, again, the dichotomy, the black and white. When you feel that chaos of the dichotomy, I hope you can picture the pendulum from now on. Like moving forward, think of a pendulum. What I know to be true is that we have evolved into these creatures that by getting enough food, our body will just predictably think about food in a kind of calm way. When we’re hungry, when maybe we’re planning our meals, when we’re at the grocery store, and then when food is around and maybe smells good or something and you were hanging out with people. But when we have consistent access to enough food, way we think and the drive for food doesn’t have a lot of momentum. It’ll have some movement. The pendulum will swing a little bit, but it’s not as chaotic, there are some kind of exceptions with that that I’ll mention in a second. But when a person is experiencing that dichotomy, the extreme of the pullback of I need to eat less, my eating is out of control, like the rigid messages, whether it’s a certain diet or just conditions around your eating, the pendulum gets pulled back maybe to the right really far.

Julie: And what happens when you let go of a pendulum after it’s pulled back really far is it swings in the opposite direction. And so anyone who’s binging, seriously every single person that I have ever met who is experiencing binge eating disorder or experiences what they would name as a binge is also restricting. Sometimes the restriction is literal like the way we would train to think about restriction like not of calories or certain nutrients. And sometimes the restriction is from kind of a mental restriction, like not enough actual permission to eat, which is still very powerful and can drive that pendulum. But as we go through these experiences of the dichotomy with food and it’s pulled back and there’s some rigidity and I can’t eat this. And then eventually the pendulum swings in the other direction because this is where evolution comes in.

Julie: We have evolved as a species to eat more when we haven’t had enough and eat it while we can. That is why for many folks, they may think they’re eating enough. They may be, if on paper, if we calculate, I don’t know, nutrition needs and all the different ones, maybe they’re meeting the needs that we would estimate, but they’re still experiencing these chaotic experiences where it feels like a binge. And that happens because again, the body may still fear it’s not gonna get enough. And it’s this very protective, very savvy trait that we’ve all evolved to have. And it’s not making you less of a human. It’s not making you out of control. It is to be very meta.

Julie: To me, this is the exact opposite. Like this is my own dichotomy, but I’m gonna stand with it. I’m gonna die in the cell. That is your body’s way of controlling. By you’re not losing control, your body’s in control. It’s maintaining life. It is not you being a failure. It’s you being a successful human. I seriously, binging and out of control eating happens in response to restriction. And by you having those experiences, I know you don’t like them. I know we’ve been told that they’re horrible, but what I have noticed over last 25 years is they happen in response to not having enough. And it’s the way that you’re being a successful human. If you don’t like them anymore, if you don’t want to binge anymore, if the food noise is just deafening too loud, you can’t get any other shit done and you’re just exhausted. There are some steps that you can take moving forward. And part of that is recognizing when you’re on the pendulum and again, we’re always on the pendulum. Like nobody’s eating an exact amount where they’re always eating that exact amount. Like there’s not like, we’re not robots. And so the pendulum will always kind of swing. It’s the response to the swing that I’ve noticed that really makes the big impact. For example, just to help clarify this, there’s going to be times where eating enough is just not an option. You may be stuck on an airplane and a traffic jam. You may have experienced grief or you have the flu or something like that. And so there’s these times where you’re not eating enough and there’s this natural kind of swing to eating more. And when you notice yourself eating more, it’s a really, it can be really pivotal to be able to step back and say, this is the pendulum.

Julie: This is my mind and body protecting me and showing me that I’m an involved human being and that I’m a successful human. Whenever my kids get sick and they are not able to eat that much, as they’re starting to recover and I can tell their appetite’s picking up, I like them just to have a heads up. Yeah, you may notice that your body’s recovering and so you’re just extra hungry. Let me know if I’m packing enough in your lunch. Let me know if you need more or if you need certain things to feel more satisfied as your body’s recovering from not getting enough. And if no one’s ever told you that information before, you can tell that to yourself because what I’m gathering from you, letter writer, and for anyone else who relates to that letter, you have experienced diet trauma. And not enough people have named this as a trauma. This is a very big T trauma, another therapy term, there’s little T trauma and there’s big T trauma. Diet trauma is a big T trauma for a reason. We need food to survive as a human being. Having it withheld, whether it’s for a diet to lose weight or starvation because of poverty, neglect, genocide, I know that all those have different other traumas attached to it. And we don’t necessarily need to say which one’s worse, having your food restricted for whatever reason, whether it was something that you did because you wanted to lose weight for to fit in a dress or something. Or if you were trying to help your body to access some types of health care. That is a trauma. That is a big trauma to be told you need to withhold your food.

Julie: So with that all being said, when you notice the binging, when you notice the restricting, if there’s a way for you in the moment to eventually be able to name the pendulum, I’m experiencing that pendulum right now, it’s gonna bring you back to the present and it’s gonna help you to not get as swept up into what is really provoking all this chaos. Because that’s what I hear, you wanna get the fuck away from this chaos. You’ve had enough chaos, You want to be able to enjoy your life. And I actually just need to make sure my podcast mic was plugged in. Okay.

Julie: All right, so I’m gonna move on to another point, but if you want more information on this, you need more support in this area. I love Jes Baker’s book called Land Whale. Chapter four goes into this in such a beautiful way. She names the pendulum as diet land versus donut land. And she describes this yearning like you do letter writer to just feel like you’re eating normally. And we have so few people in our lives that are eating without diets. So reading through this chapter, you may find some more sources of help. Okay, so that’s the losing control piece.

Julie: Something I wanna kind of have as an addendum to the losing control is remember that relying on your food voice is not just eating when you’re hungry and stopping when you’re full. It’s also believing. And if you don’t believe it 100%, it’s okay. But like working on believing that you deserve unconditional permission to eat and exist and anybody and everyone deserves this no matter your size, no matter what you deserve unconditional permission to access enough food. And that permission is not just like literally you’re eating enough, but also the way your brain thinks about it. That’s why it really comes down to do you believe you deserve to enough? And that’s why this next point is really important, because you said that you are longing for food freedom, but afraid of weight gain. So let’s talk about that healthy weight. Is your lower weight, letter writer? Is your lower weight actually a healthy weight? Because what you’re describing to get to that point took so much, so many unhealthy behaviors basically. You needed to impact relationships. You needed to be really rigid. Your brain needed to be fixated and obsessed with food and it impacted your self -concept, your self -worth. Is that healthy? You know, our body size has been so pushed into this box that your body size tells you how much you are allowed to eat. And again, that’s where diet trauma comes back up. Because if you believe that you have to be a certain body size in order to experience the perks of health, and we can go for a long discussion on what that even means, but we’ll save that for another podcast. But if you think you only can have that at a certain size, well then, okay, I lost my train of thought. Let’s see.

Julie: Okay, so what I want to turn to now is talking about healthy weight. You mentioned this long for freedom, yet you are so afraid of your weight changing. This is where it’s really important for us to really consider body size and health. Is the information really telling us that we have to be a certain size to be healthy? Now we have over 100 years of dieting data and we certainly know without a doubt, haven’t we studied it enough folks, that short term diets do things to improve health? And many, many people can do that. And people on the statistical extremes of BMI, those are the folks where causation has been found with body size. But for the rest of us, we don’t have that. We just have a correlation, meaning there’s just a relationship there. Now for folks who are at a very high weight in statistical extreme, know, meeting the criteria for a body size that research has shown a causation with health issues, we still don’t have an intervention that doesn’t add more risk factors because what we know about dieting is it just adds more harm in the long term. Every single diet, yeah, short term, it does stuff. We have over 100 years of data, 100 years of data to show us that just about every diet works, quote, in case you’re not watching on YouTube works to improve health. Doesn’t matter which one. But the long -term data, yeah, no, it’s shit. It’s a shitty tool. For most people, diets are going to make your insulin levels higher, your blood sugar higher, your blood pressure higher, your cholesterol higher. It’s going to impact negatively your mood and your body image. It is not a health promoting behavior.

Julie: And what you’re experiencing, letter writer, is such a great example of why diets don’t work. And that’s why, like, when you are talking about your body size at this lower weight, is it really healthy for you? Yeah, I just don’t think it is. focusing on weight loss, what I also know about it is that it impacts that pendulum that we talked about earlier. So focusing on being a certain body size is gonna impact how much your pendulum swings in each direction and how you react to it. So it’s a big boulder in the process, but here’s the kicker. I don’t know what your body size is in real life. Like I read your letter, but I also can’t really appreciate what your experience is in the world. Certainly folks who are in higher weight bodies are going to experience life where they don’t have as much access at the body size that their body will just settle at. And so just giving up on dieting, it’s not as clear cut and I can’t decide for you what to do next, certainly based on that information. I wish that you were aligned with the belief that you don’t have to do this, that you don’t need to be fixed, that the world needs to be fixed. And I know that doesn’t fix the world. And no matter what you choose, whether you choose to diet or not, I hope you can remind yourself that you are not the one that needs to be fixed. You may be surviving by dieting to get access, but you are not the thing that needs to be fixed. You’re not a thing either, but you’re not the one to be fixed. Our world needs to be fixed. So is food freedom possible? If you listen to podcasts by me before, you’ve heard me say the phrase food freedom just does not, it doesn’t sit well with me. It never has. It’s a word that I think is, easy to Google. It’s why I’m going to name this podcast Food Freedom. I mean, you mentioned it in the letter, but also because I want to be able to talk to you about this. But food freedom doesn’t fit because of that last point and many other areas, too. because you’re you deserve freedom with your food, you deserve to feel at home in your body and eat however you want to eat.

Julie: And I know the world is not gonna react the same to every single person doing that. And that’s not freedom then. There’s only gonna be food freedom if there’s no diet industry and diet culture or racism or homophobia or any other way we have historically harmed people by different oppressive systems. So until then, I can’t say I connect with the word food freedom. I used to use word food piece and I explored this past summer and some episodes on why I moved away from that. I really connect with the phrase food voice because I want to incorporate all the things that you’re experiencing living your life and your own intuition, your own wisdom. It may be based on hunger and fullness and satisfaction. It also may be based on what you have access to and what you’re trying to deal with. It’s also fitting the experience of that pendulum and deciding moment by moment what you’re gonna do and having unconditional permission to do what you need to do. So before I go, and before we hear food’s letter, because food has written back, I encourage you to let yourself fantasize, like really fantasize. How would you eat if no one ever was judged for their body, including yourself? Like no one was ever judged on their body size or appearance. How would you eat? How would you know when to eat? How would you know when to stop eating? How would you set your table? Would you put like a nice tablecloth down and have some flowers, maybe light some candles? How would you feel when you were eating? How would you feel after eating enough and maybe even eating something pleasurable? How would you experience that? What would your thoughts be, the messages? What would that look like?

Julie: Like try to picture yourself in that fantasy. Picture that visual. I want you to do that because I know if we start to write that story, we can collectively as a group start to make that happen for more of us. And the more of us that are able to reject diets and connect with our food voice, the more we can work to fix the world. That’s always what I’m shooting for. It’s like if we can all reject diets, then we can all help those who don’t have access for whatever reason. All right, so like I said, food has written back. So let’s get to that, but until next time, take care.

Julie: Dear weighed down food enthusiast, we are thrilled to be working on rekindling our relationship. We think it is possible for us to connect with joy, pleasure and function. Yet diet culture is making this tough. Consider whether holding onto this notion of a healthy weight is actually a value you want to continue to hold. We think it is getting in the way of healing and your true self healing will take time.

It’s hard work and it’s good work. Be patient as you uncover the cuts and bruises and burns from your diet trauma. Be tender with yourself as you make missteps and keep in mind the person who is setting the table with special plates and linens, joyfully preparing and enjoying a meal. That person is you. Love food.

Thank you for listening. I have another bonus episode coming up on Thursday. Thank you for listening. I have another bonus episode coming up on Thursday. Hit subscribe or follow to not miss it and know by doing that one simple thing, you are helping us and you are supporting our podcast. So until next time, take care.