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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 and welcome to episode 336 of the Find Your Food Voice Podcast. I am Julie Duffy Dillon, registered dietician and your partner on your food peace journey. I am so glad you’re here. Thank you for joining me today. And I have a very special episode that includes a listener question. If you’re new to the podcast, we often read a letter that is addressed to food and a person goes through their complicated relationship and then I sift through it and at the end, food writes back. But today it’s a little different. I actually have a question that a listener submitted and I’m gonna go ahead and just answer that question. So, um it’s a little different but also a lot of the same. Um And this is a question that if you are someone who has had a complicated relationship with food for quite a while, I have a feeling there’s been times you’ve looked back as you’re trying to like, look forward and mend your relationship with food, you may have moments where you kind of just like looked over your shoulder, looked behind you and wondered what if I had just continued to diet? Would things be easier? Would things be better? Would I be healthier? Those are really common questions in this experience of finding your food voice and trying to recover from diet culture. There’s a lot of times where you may have doubts and this listener has that kind of doubt. And I’m really explore, uh really looking forward to exploring that with you. 

Julie: But before we get to that, I wanna give you a quick book update. The Find Your Food Voice book is slated to come out in January of 2025. And I am officially, let’s see, 11,197 words in exactly. I do keep track of it because I have like kind of a goal of um, a certain number of words each time I have like a writing time and I was sharing with a friend that I really want to enjoy this, like process of writing. And for lots of people that I’ve known who’ve written books, they have shared with me how it just got so chaotic and um having to kind of get up early or stay up late. And I mean, if you’ve listened to the podcast for at least a minute, you know, like my sleep is like, so important and I can’t imagine getting up at like four in the morning to write. I would just, nothing would come out, like I need rest. And so that’s why I intentionally looked at my calendar from when school started till May 1st, when I wanna turn this manuscript in and looked at how many days I could write. And I am trying to like each time I write to, it’s like a little under 1000 words. And so far it’s been like a really fun process. I do have times where I’m like, am I actually gonna be able to like write this part I’m gonna be writing today? But then the words come out. So, um I’m grateful for that. I hope it continues that way and having that kind of word count, I don’t know, it just is like a fun way for me to see it like happening and to enjoy each kind of movement forward, um and be in the present and really grateful for it because, you know, I have really wanted this for a long time, so I’m grateful that I’m able to do this. And something that’s been so amazing as I’m writing this is that um a number of you have joined me as I’m writing. So I am doing this thing where as I’m writing, I’m going live in the, um Find Your Food Voice book community. And for 45 minutes, we kind of co-work where we’re just muted and some people are working from home and they’re just doing some other work and some folks are doing things that help with the relationship with food. It may be meditation or journaling or making grocery list, eating something that is nourishing or maybe challenging, um doing something that is just gonna help to continue to work um without relying on dieting to help your food choices. So I have called this Nesting Time because that is a part of the Find Your Food Voice book is Nesting Time. And actually, as I say this, I’m like, I need to make an episode about what nesting actually is. Um But anyway, a number of you who have joined the community have been joining me live and it’s really cool because we do this kind of um co-working for 45 minutes and then we have 15 minutes where we chat and I get to, you know, just hear about how things are going, chit chat or, you know, whatever people have on their mind. And I love that. I hope, you know, that that is giving me so much energy um to continue to do this and I’m so grateful for it. Um You can join that community by going to julieduffydillon.com/book and it’s just $5 a month. Um It kind of helps me to um to support me as I’m writing this. Um You can also be a part of the co-working sessions on TikTok for free. Um it’s just during that 15 minute time that I go into the community and um chat there instead of on TikTok. But you can join me for the co-working sessions and nest all you want over on TikTok too. And my handle there is FoodVoiceRD. All right. So we are going to take a quick break and when we come back, you will hear the listener question. So hold tight. We’ll be right back. 

Julie: I’ve lived with PCOS for over a decade. And while I was deep in my orthorexia/disordered eating, my symptoms were pretty under control. I quit dieting six years ago and started incorporating anti diet approaches for managing my PCOS symptoms – adding supplements, pairing carbs and proteins and fiber, et cetera. I feel frustrated because none of these things that I’ve heard firsthand working for other people seem to be working for me. My PCOS symptoms feel like they are at an all time high and my blood panels are getting worse and I feel those tricky dieting thoughts start to creep back in. Was I better off in diet culture? 

Julie: All right. Let’s get to answering this listener question and thank you for submitting this question. I really appreciate this. This is a question that I am really excited to just sift through because I think it is one that is not linear, it’s super messy and also pretty darn typical. I have loved the experiences I’ve had working one on one with people over the years and something that is really um unique to working as an a dietician who works with people who are trying to recover from diet culture or recover from an eating disorder or both is that we often get to work with people for years and working with people for years, you get to see the arc of how diets affect a person’s life. There’s a lot we can glean from research and to actually apply it is super messy, but also can really click in with what you’re asking um in this question. 

Julie: Before I go into this uh question and kind of sift through it, I just want to mention if, if you have a question for me that doesn’t really fit well into a letter, I would love to answer it. Um You can submit it by shooting us an email, just let us know your question. Um And if it’s one that fits well with the show, then we would love to answer it. So just want to put it out there. I love this option to answer questions for an episode because again, the questions that we often get are ones that I know many people are struggling with or having trouble to, uh, applying, helping people to not diet anymore. 

Julie: It’s the thing, the reason why it takes so long, I cannot get my words to work today. The reason why it takes so long, the reason why I worked with people for years is deciding to not diet anymore, is not a one and done decision. It’s something that you need to decide actively every single day and many times throughout the day. And then if you add a chronic condition like Polycystic Ovary Syndrome, well, then it’s gonna be even more cumbersome to reject diets. So you remember the, the listener said that they were experiencing PCOS for over 10 years and then six years ago, um quit dieting and started incorporated anti diet types of strategies. And so this has been six years of working towards recovery from disordered eating and orthorexia, which is amazing, so hard in itself to continue to do that work. And for many people that would be sitting on my green couch, the couch I always had in my room working as an individual dietician. So much of the work was shame of having to diet in the first place and then it not working. And then as a person started to really acknowledge all the systems of oppression of dieting, having this place of like, oh, I can’t believe I dieted that long. And I hope for you who wrote the question and anyone listening that you can have compassion for all of that, something that I get from this question and from other people too is diets work for as long as they can. And for you, um, who wrote this question,  you know, the diets worked for as long as they could. It sounds like they worked for about four years, maybe a little bit longer. And depending on how on how old you are, that’s what I basically saw, like, especially when people were younger. So probably under the age of 30. So if you’re in your teen years and your twenties, diets may work for a pretty long time, relatively, you know, it may be years of using a diet to kind of control symptoms or to suppress your weight and then they eventually stop working or they eventually get to a place where they’re really impacting your life in other ways. 

Julie: But before I get into those other ways, something I wanna mention is that researchers have been able to show us over and over again is diets do work in the short term. Most nutrition research is short term, 12 weeks, a year, two years, like those are really common. Um, not the two year one, the 12 weeks to a year are the most common length for nutrition research. There are some that do go two years out. I love the ones that go to five years out because that’s really what I can use more in my work with clients because you’re not just existing in this 12 week or one year time period with food in this way, it really is this like lifetime thing. And again, looking at research and in particular PCOS research in the short term diets do seem to lower inflammation, lower insulin levels, lower blood sugar, improve um ovulation cycle length, improve egg quality. Like those things all happen in the short term. But in the long term, well, in PCOS, there’s none that exist that are, are long enough to be considered long term, you know, more than two years long. But when we look at the general research, our research on the general population rather, we see that diets don’t work long term, whether you continue them or not, it doesn’t matter. So even for this person who wrote this question, if they hadn’t quit dieting six years ago, something that may be hard to like put your feet into it like as the parallel person from six years ago, what if you had continued to diet? What we don’t know for sure is would you have still maintained that better um symptom management from dieting? Because research would point to that it probably wouldn’t, whether you continue the diet or not. Researchers have found that insulin and inflammation, two of the things that are probably the most important with PCOS and so many other conditions, that those actually get worse by diets in the long term. So even if you had continued, which is hard to like, put yourself in those shoes of like, imagine you’re the person who didn’t quit dieting six years ago. What if instead you did just continue on? My guess according to research is for most people, your PCOS would be in the same place it is now. So, I hope that makes sense. Like even in the short term, it worked until it didn’t work anymore. And that’s consistent with research and whether you continued using, um, disordered eating to manage the condition or you were recovering from diet culture, it probably wasn’t gonna matter that the PCOS symptoms would be how they are today. So, what I find to be so tricky and I get a little like, huh? What’s the word? I get a little pissy about this, um, diets get to claim so many wins because of their short term successes. And when it doesn’t work long term, they often blame the dieter, not the diet again, whether the person has continued on the diet or not. And for most people, they can’t, they can’t keep dieting for decades. It’s just, there’s too, there’s too many things in your body that are gonna prevent you from doing that. But what I know is that diets in general get this big win because of the symptom management in the short term. And then they get to a point, well, because you’re using intuitive eating or, or you are rejecting diets now, that’s why your, your symptoms are worse. When what researchers haven’t even been able, even been able to say is dieting in itself can be a part of why PCOS is worse now. Like if you hadn’t dieted to begin with 10 years ago, if you didn’t experience orthorexia or disordered eating 10 years ago, what, what your symptoms look like now? My question is, what if they actually weren’t uh is in a bad place as they are now? Bad is such a word I, I don’t like using that word because it just feels so black and white. But diets don’t get to, to say that they are the winner here because researchers have been able to show us in long term research that, that actually makes chronic conditions that involve insulin and inflammation worse over time, not better. So instead of, oh, when I quit dieting and my PCOS symptoms are now worse and that’s because I quit dieting. What if your PCOS symptoms are worse because you dieted? That’s, that’s the big question I have. And for some people as they do sit with that as an option, that’s where for some people they can feel some of that shame of like, well, fuck, I wish I’d never dieted to begin with. And I wish you never dieted to begin with too. And that’s why anybody who has someone in their life that they think may have PCOS someday, one of the best things you can teach them is how to not diet. And I would say that also goes if you have children in your life who could get diabetes or high insulin levels or any chronic condition that is so interwoven with being skinny to treat it, to eat less of food to treat it, teach them how to not diet. And my prediction is that then their chronic condition will be easier to manage the older they get compared to folks who were just told to diet from the get go. 

Julie: Another part of this question that makes it so tricky is that PCOS like diabetes, um some cardiovascular conditions, basically any kind of condition that has a metabolic kind of component, the way that we as a people have been trained to look at it is that an individual can cure it by eating differently. And there may be people that, you know, certainly I know people who got pretty rigid with their food intake and their numbers like maybe their blood sugar or something like that were looking so much better in the short term, but long term, they just couldn’t do it that long. So again, dieting was only the short term thing. But what I’m trying to get at here. Instead of just that is that these conditions are not necessarily something that could be cured by the individual’s behavior. These are chronic conditions. If there’s one thing on TikTok that I say that pisses people off the most and people wish um negative things on me is when I say that there’s no cure for PCOS, there’s no cure for diabetes, there’s no cure for high circulating insulin levels. 

Julie: There’s ways you can intervene with behaviors to maybe help manage the symptoms. There’s ways to maybe slow down the progression, but there’s no cure for these things yet because these are chronic conditions. There aren’t things like the flu where you can be acutely ill and then get better and it goes away. PCOS is not like that. It, it’s a chronic condition and how we define chronic conditions in the medical community is that it’s a condition that over time, that gets worse, the longer you live with it, the worse it will be. I don’t mean this to be like a buzz kill. I think you can handle the trust, you know, these are things that do get worse over time. And so that’s another layer to this whole question, even if there was no dieting, uh there wasn’t any management of symptoms in the beginning and then things got worse. Just having PCOS in general, you could also have this kind of trajectory where symptoms are managed and then they stop being managed. Um Adding the variable of dieting has made it more complicated and it also could still go in this direction as you’re describing. 

Julie: So one last thing I wanna mention, because at the end you mentioned was I better off in diet culture? What diet culture does to us is it is a very sneaky seductive machine that without our consent leads us to believe that we as individuals can fix things that are going on in our body. And that we will have this long term solution that will allow us to be happier. Diet culture also prioritizes physical health as the means to improving mental health, our relationships, our spiritual health, like it centers physical health and it says that’s the gateway to all the other things. And I hope you can appreciate that, that’s not the case. Diet culture is super seductive and it’s always around us like we’re breathing it all the time. So there’s maybe just this part of your brain that is always kind of wondering was I better off in diet culture? I hope some of the things that I named today kind of put a wrench in it. So you can at least look in the other direction a little bit. And when a person is in a place of really gung ho and into disordered eating behaviors or an or or or orthorexia, there’s definitely a prioritization of physical health. And I would take a guess that you quit dieting six years ago because it was compromising other parts of your life. I’m not sure what those were, but for many people I talked to, it’s like it really was getting in the way of their mental health. They couldn’t maintain relationships in the same way because their eating got so rigid. Um, it impacted being able to just do fun things because all the time spent thinking about food. So as you are living with this chronic condition, it’s ok to prioritize other parts of your life besides physical health. And I, you know, one of my big values is that I really prioritize healing over everything else, but that’s just mine. So I am rooting for you to continue to disengage with diet culture as much as a human can, you know, because we are breathing it all the time, but working towards anti diet living as much as you can. I appreciate how that can help your health in other ways, again, like your mental health, your relationships and some researchers would also say it does help your physical health over time. Not experiencing the up and down with weight that a lot of people experience also known as weight cycling is something um that we know can also improve your physical health. So with all that being said, I hope that provides some clarity on the mess that is just living with a complicated relationship with food. And I appreciate your question so much because I know there’s a lot of people who are listening, who are like, holy shit, that is exactly what I am debating and while I am not you, like I am not in your shoes, living your life with your identities, so I cannot know for sure if you’re better off in diet culture, but I, I do know is that I want you to have informed consent. And in the short term dieting may still provide some temporary relief, so some PCOS symptoms. But as for the research, long term, it’s suggesting it’ll make it worse. So I’m rooting for you to continue to reject diets. So there you have it. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Find Your Food Voice. Thank you to the listener for submitting that question. We really appreciate it. And again, if you have a question that doesn’t fit all neat and tidy into a dear food letter, let us have it. Uh email us your question and we would love to include it into an upcoming episode. And before I sign off for the week, we are going to be coming back next week with a new episode. It is a diet culture IRL with Coleen Bremner. So I am looking forward to sharing that with you. And if you have any interest in following along with me as I’m writing the Fine Your Food Voice book, I welcome you to join me on TikTok and also in the book community. You can go to julieduffydillon.com/book to get all the updates and more information about joining me there. All right, I look forward to seeing you next week. Bye for now. 

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 Yel 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.