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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 335 of the Find Your Food Voice Podcast. I am Julie Duffy Dillon, registered dietician and your host as you are navigating diet culture. Maybe you’re trying to recover from your eating disorder or you are just done with dieting in general. I hope I can help you move from a complicated relationship with food to enjoying eating. 

Julie: Again, I have a letter from a listener that is exploring how freaking noisy diets are and this person was a child of the eighties and nineties and some really way back references to certain foods that were especially, um, important to diet culture back in the eighties and nineties that I think you’ll find, um, in a way kind of funny, but also not, at the same time because I know that these are the ways that so many of us were brought up to learn how to hate our body and how to not trust our own food voice. 

Julie: So this episode goes through this letter and I take you through something that I don’t think I have before on this podcast. So many people ask me, what exactly is your food voice? And it’s a really challenging thing for me to define because it’s yours. I have mine but you have yours. And the only way to connect with it is without the noise. But we are like breathing in diet culture. It’s like so close to us all the time that we can’t see it. It’s just so pervasive. So I have a guided meditation that I’m gonna take you through after we hear this episode’s letter. And I hope it helps you to get a little bit closer to help you nurture your own food voice. 

Julie: So next up, we are going to have a quick sponsor break and then you’re gonna hear this episode’s letter. Mark your calendars for January 2025 because that’s when The Find Your Food Voice book is slated to be published. If you haven’t heard the book that I’ve been wanting to write since I think I was in sixth grade has finally happened. It’s finally happening. And I am so grateful that you have been a listener for as long as you have, maybe this is your first episode or maybe you’ve been listening since way back in 2016. But I am just so grateful that you have been supporting the Find Your Food Voice podcast. And now we can make it into a book. So if you would like to be a part of this book, you can be. You can actually be a part of the words that will be on the page. And the way you could be a part of it is by submitting your own Dear Food letter. So just like this podcast, every chapter in the book is gonna include a letter from a listener that is just like you. And um that book will start every single chapter as we go through different parts of finding your food voice. And we also are looking for more letters for season nine of the podcast. So I have a link in the show notes, if you want to submit your letter there, we would be so, so grateful. And besides submitting a letter, you can also support me by doing something really simple whenever there’s an ad on this podcast, if you actually like let it play, I don’t care if you listen or not, but if you can just let it play, then that ad revenue will come to me and my team so we can continue to make the podcast episodes while I am writing this book. And we do appreciate that. If you want to take it even a step further and you want to join me while I’m writing this book, I am doing coworking sessions over in the Find Your Food Voice book community. That’s where you and I can do some co-working sessions that will be kind of muted for like 45 minutes. But at our 15 minute break time, um I tend to work in three hour shifts. Um We will have a 15 minute break time every hour and chat or just do whatever you want. And during these co-working times, you can maybe do some work if you want, but you can also do something called nesting time. And nesting time is this experience where you do whatever you need to do to help reconnect to your own food voice. It may be journaling, meditation, making a grocery list, eating a meal or a snack. Um It can be crafting, it can be anything under the sun, honestly. Whatever it whatever helps you to feel it more at home in your body, that’s what nesting time is. And so I have been doing this um with other people in the book community already and some people do just bring their work from the regular work day and other people have been doing some activities that they know that helps them feed their food voice so you can check out all the details. It’s just $5 a month to join us and support me and my team as this book is being written and you can get to all the details at julieduffydillon.com/book. Again. It’s julieduffydillon.com/book. All right, we have one more quick message and then we’ll be getting to this episode’s later. 

Julie: Dear food. What I thought of you for as long as I can remember has been accompanied by noise, namely everyone else’s opinions and their rules that changed often. I first heard the noise through one, the women in my family and two, TV and magazines because it was the eighties and nineties. I knew about which foods we had to eat guiltily, as soon as I was introduced to them. I ate air popped popcorn with zero flavor. I knew about sweet and low and Snackwells. I am a Diet Coke baby. That’s my generational marker. We grew up in the eighties and nineties and our moms, for stretches of time, would consume only rice cakes and cottage cheese and Diet Coke. Food was always guilt with the capital G. I never got to see the real you because my picture of you was filtered through lots and lots of noise and aspartame. I feel like you didn’t even have a chance. I didn’t even know your side of the story. There was always someone saying something about you that went beyond the logistics of buying groceries and eating meals and snacks. So much noise from TV. Lean cuisine. Slim Fast, Richard Simmons. Stop the insanity. Oprah’s wagon of fat and from family, my mom or my aunt or grandma would always have something to say about what I was eating. The instant I was old enough to speak to say I’m hungry. I was bombarded with the message that there was no way I could ever know for myself when I was hungry and what I should eat. Sometimes a woman in my family would name a weight and say, well, you don’t want to be blank pounds and then fill in the number. And then I would spend a lot of time thinking about who weighed what and how and thinking I was good because I wasn’t that weight yet. One time I knew sweet tea would give me a headache. So I opted for something else and an aunt whispered to my mom, does she have diabetes? Because sweet tea was the God ordained norm. There must be a reason. Let’s find out the reason. It couldn’t possibly be me making my own food choices. Why do we even have to talk about this? I remember thinking because I learned food must come with noise, enough noise to drown out your own thoughts and instincts. I have worked with young children and their families in childcare and there is noise there too. Whether a child has to save dessert for the end of the meal, whether to allow bread with preservatives, whether to withhold a popsicle as a punishment, lying about allergies occurred at a weirdly alarming rate. Sometimes there was concern about on demand feeding for infants. It’s all evidence that we have all been traumatized by food. By whatever has happened around food during and before our generation. There is an urge to control it because how could anyone know what to eat and when unless they’re told by someone else that has already been traumatized? You cannot blame individual parents or teachers for these misunderstandings and mistakes. It is generational trauma that is so complicated to address and to change. And as an adult, of course, I have started unpacking all of this. Thinking about my experience as generational trauma helps me see what a crock of shit we all have been fed and helps me forgive those who have handed me my trauma. I had resisted thinking that my mom did something wrong with raising me in regards to food and thought and said that I was fat because of my own faults and mistakes. And because I learned that being fat was certainly a fault. I pretty much knew someone had done something wrong, at some point. I did not want to blame my mom. When I understood that she was a victim too, that she was influenced by another set of ridiculous rules and noise from just 30 years earlier, I can admit she did some wrong things and then quickly and easily forgive her, and that is such a relief. It is uncomfortable to need to forgive someone you can’t even blame yet. I’m not telling you that the noise is gone. I still hear it and even at this exact moment I am eating a cookie, I don’t want my husband to know about, and I don’t know exactly why. That’s just the way it is. I’m working on it. I’m aware that the noise is a problem, but that doesn’t mean I can avoid all of its influence. This is not to say there are not good food memories. My best food memories are clear of noise and other people’s opinions. A tomato sandwich on the beach, a frosted butter pecan cupcake, I ate out of my hand without a napkin. Risotto in Italy. Trying pho for the first time on a cold rainy afternoon. I just wish the enjoyment of food had come before the noise. Pure enjoyment, not guilty pleasure enjoyment. So food, what I want to say to you is, I’m sorry that we got off on the wrong foot. I’m beginning to understand you, without the noise. Be patient with me. Here’s to more noise free food in the future. Sincerely, a Diet Coke baby. 

Transition music: Taking the good with the ups and downs, I want to see how the world turns round…home is with you wherever that may be.

Julie: Hey there diet Coke baby, it is so nice to hear from you. Thank you so much for writing and sharing your experience. It was a trip down memory lane. All those references to different foods and diet culture tools from the eighties and nineties. Wow, it was a time to be alive for sure. And I love how you use the word noise to talk about the distractions from your own like innate wisdom. And that word noise, I’ve also used in the past to um describe diet culture. And it’s one that as I’ve been writing the Find Your Food Voice book, in chapter three, I introduce like what a food voice is and I talk about noise as well. So as I was reading your letter, I was like, oh my gosh, I should introduce an exercise that I’m doing in the book because, like you mentioned in your note, you’ve done so much now to connect the dots, to forgive, to understand and there’s still noise. And it’s not just a simple process of choosing once to not diet. It’s like this constant decision to always have to make and that I think it’s important to have as much connection to that innate part of you, that knowing, that has your interest um in mind and heart and a way to move forward in the way you wanna go. But with all the noise, depending on how much noise you experience, which of course for you listener that’s gonna depend on like what kind of identities you have, how much access to food you have, just what season of life you may be in. So you may have more noise than I have or other people have. That’s why I think that your food voice is yours alone. And I haven’t talked about this. I don’t think I’ve ever talked about on the podcast and I haven’t talked to many people about it. But this is why I change kind of my way of describing the process of healing a relationship with food. Why I change it to food voice instead of food peace is uh someone who has my identities, they may be able to experience food peace. You know, if, if you’ve never seen what I look like, um I can buy my clothes at any department store. Uh I don’t need to go to special places to get clothes. Um I am white and cis and you know, the world sees me. Um And yes, I’m almost 50 but you know, the world is accessible to me in just about every way. So with that being said, you know, I may be able to experience food, peace. But if you have a different identity for me, maybe you’re recovering into a higher weight body, maybe you are black or maybe you experience a disability. You know, it just depends on what type of experience you’re gonna have in life, what identities you hold in those experiences, your food voice is gonna be different and it may not include peace. So I felt like it was just time to move on away from that because I just couldn’t hold that anymore as a way for, I don’t know, for me to talk about this, this whole topic of your relationship with food. 

Julie: So your food voice, you may be confused by that phrase. Um You know, I, nobody uses it. That’s that, it’s one that I’ve trademarked now. So it’s a phrase that I use and I hope it’s something that you can use as a tool to hope to access how you want to eat and your relationship with food, without the noise. And whenever you’re in a place where there’s noise, which could be all the time, I still want you to have a way to access your food voice. And I’m gonna take you through some guided imagery on how to do that. But before we get to this exercise, let’s take a quick break and we’ll be right back. 

Julie: Welcome back. Like I mentioned before the break, this is going to be a meditation about your food voice. And I have tried so many times to think of a concise definition for what I’m thinking about and what I mean by the phrase food voice, but it just seems to always fall flat and I think that’s because your food voice is this very basic but yet complex thing at the same time, like there’s no words and thousands of words. It’s just this really amazing thing that is your own. And what makes it even more challenging is that my food voice is not the same as yours. So I hope this meditation helps you to connect with yours, maybe even for the first time. And that makes me really excited to think about. The more you can connect with it, the more you can get to know it. And even when life is has life has its noise, like our letter writer for this episode, described, connecting with your food voice is something that can help you to know what step you want to take next. So this is where we need to go into a place where you can have some imagination. 

Julie: Imagine in this moment seeing a magic wand at your feet. With one glance it is special. You notice its intricate carvings from top to bottom. Someone spent hours making this just for you. Picking it up, you feel how it holds a new energy. It is cool to the touch in a refreshing way. It has a heaviness that is not a burden, rather powerful. When you see your magic wand and you hold it, what do you notice? Try to capture these details, maybe in a notebook or just picture it in your mind’s eye for as long as you can, hold on to those details. As you are describing what the carvings look like, the material that’s used to make it, as you describe as many details as possible, you’re gonna use that when things get noisy. So it’s not gonna make sense yet. And that’s OK. So as you give yourself time to really picture your magic wand, you then do what one does with magic wands, you wave it and instantly there is a difference. You know this wand has been waiting for you to wave it like you did to show its magic. By waving the wand, you see all the sparkles and glitter float around you like I picture magic wands doing even more. It washes around every human on this planet all at once. You know, everything has changed yet nothing appears different. This magic wand has erased the belief that certain bodies are better than others. The white cis, thin able body is no longer that ideal, rather, it’s just alongside all the rest of the world’s bodies. While this may sound bananas, real bizarre, just try to stay with me. Hold this new belief. You and the rest of the planet no longer value thinness and any of their other iterations, muscular, healthy looking, fit, petite, slim, et cetera. Any word that you would have used in the past to describe a smaller body, it’s no longer valuable, all forms of biodiversity, age race, ethnicity, height, weight ability and everything not named, exist equally without different privileges. After waving the magic wand, you take in all this new knowing. While your body doesn’t change the way you relate to it in an instant. Look at your hands while you’re holding on to this wand and notice every textured inch of skin, hair, veins, moles, maybe signs of aging. You notice these things instead of the usual judgmental messages because your brain is reacting differently. How does it react? Well, now that you and no one else on the planet knows how to negatively judge your body or anyone else’s. What do you think about your hands? How do you feel about them? Let yourself look at your hands with this new knowing. Wiggle them around, if you can let your thoughts and feelings flow, give yourself a minute or two and connect with the messages. If words float into your brain with this new connection, jot them down in your notebook, try to capture all that you can. After spending as much time as you need and can with your hands, move those hands to your heart, find where you can feel it beating. Notice the rhythm it makes and where you can feel it. How long has your heart been doing this? Moving with this rhythm and awareness helps you to feel the rhythm and all the other body processes happening without your control. The glittery poof has barely settled from you waving that powerful stick as you connect with a new gratitude. You feel your heart beat and you get some new messages about your body. What do you feel? What is your brain thinking about your body? Give yourself a minute or two and connect with the messages. If words float into your brain with this new connection, jot them down here in a notebook. The magic wand has brought another new revelation worldwide. I’m so excited that you wave this magic wand because now eating is a tool for living and connecting. Food brings us fuel as well as complexity to each moment. How that complexity is defined is individual, based on your heritage, culture, preferences, access, and with the magic wands powers, food no longer is a tool for body manipulation or power. It just doesn’t work that way. Now bodies change with aging yet food no longer has the power to change your body size or anyone else’s. No matter how much or how little you eat, your body will do what it is genetically programmed to do. Just with the rhythm of your heart, your body systems decide how to use each bite. In this new system, that knowing is not good or bad. It just is. Holding these new truth, maybe with those hands, how do you decide when to eat? This is where you may want to have a notebook handy. How do you decide when to stop eating? How do you decide what food to bring into your home? How do you decide how much food to put on your plate? How do you decide to order food at a restaurant, knowing that everyone has also been affected the same way by that magic wand? How do you decide what to put in your grocery cart? What to order at the movies? Spend some time holding all these new truth. There are many new strands of knowing that don’t feel familiar yet. They have always been there. These are the particulars of your very own food voice. Notice the complexity and function of every single part. Like one with braid hair, imagine weaving every different aspect of your food voice. So you can see it all together up and down, over and over. You notice foods satisfaction, fuel pleasure, connection, intergenerational loops to ancestors, passing along knowledge of recipes and so much more. What messages do you get about food with this new braid? How do you think about food now? How do you feel about food? Now that a part of you has experienced a few moments with your food voice? Let’s figure out how you want to integrate it with your reality even though this exercise does not meet our collective reality, how I so wish it did, connecting to the knowledge gained will be powerful for you. It will impact your relationship with food moving forward and through every season of life. I encourage you to gather all the data that you just collected about your particular food voice. It probably has feelings, thoughts, experiences, pictures, messages, or combination of all these. This is very valuable. We can’t get this information from a diet sheet, from visiting a dietician’s office, from a podcast. This is all within you. While a part of you has experienced your food voice with this magic wand’s powers, there lives a part of you that still has not. And this is where you can gain so much moving forward. Let’s consider this part of you that did not experience your food voice yet as your parallel self and your parallel self did not see the wand and its intricate carvings, didn’t feel its magic. It remains fully stuck in diet culture and all of its systems of oppression. I have a question for you. What is the first thing you want this parallel part of you to know about your food voice? What did you discover that you are so excited for this part of you to understand as well? I encourage you to spend some time describing to your parallel self what he, she, or they need to know. These are the parts that are going to be really important for you. Moving forward to hold on to whenever you have noise. At the beginning of this guided meditation, I encouraged you to write down as many details as possible about your magic wand. If you kind of, you know, kind of skipped that part, maybe you need to go back or the magic wand changed over time. That’s OK. You can fill in as many intricate details about it whenever you want. And I would encourage you to think about that magic wand often and here’s why. Our brain is amazing. How it can use a picture to help us connect to memories and experiences. The more you picture that wand and the more that your brain learns that is how you have connected to your food voice. When you are around that noise and that noise can be someone making a comment about their body, someone talking about their diet, someone teasing you about your body, a doctor saying you cannot get a procedure because you weigh too much. It could be any different ways that you are impacted by diet culture and all the other systems of oppression that are lifting it up. The more you can connect with that magic wand and the practice of doing that, the more you will connect to your food voice. And again, all of the intricate details that is just your food voice. And how if you were never, if you never experienced those systems of oppression, how you would decide to feed your body, how you would decide how much to eat that all is in you and only you. And again, the more you can pin picture that magic wand and practice that that’s the connection. That’s like the fast track to connecting to your food voice. The more in the moment you can stay connected. 

Julie: All right. So I see food has written back. Before we get to food’s letter. This episode of the Find Your Food Voice Podcast is brought to you by the Find Your Food Voice book. If you would like to join me through this really bananas ride of writing a book, then you can join me over in the community that I’ve built. Just for that, you can get to all the details at julieduffydillon.com/book. Thank you for listening to this week’s episode and I will be back next week with another episode. But until then take care.

Julie: Dear Diet Coke Baby, we see your exhaustion and how far you’ve come. Where did you find the truth about food and bodies when all you’ve been shown is how to diet and hate? You living your life in this in this way, is helping to spread body liberation to more people, especially the young people in your life. Naming diet trauma is calling it out for its controlling bullshit. We see the noise volume remaining loud and encourage you to continue to practice connecting to your own food voice. It’s always been there too, yet needing time to be nurtured and discovered.  The more you connect to it, the more it can contend with the noise, it may not quiet the noise by itself yet, your food voice will get stronger as more folks connect with their food voice, we can together quiet the noise. 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 Dillon and my team of kick ass folks. I couldn’t make the show without Yeli 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.