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Julie Duffy Dillon (00:00)

Welcome to episode 398 of the Find Your Food Voice podcast. We are going to be talking today all about 2025’s diet red flags. Let’s get to it.

Julie Duffy Dillon (01:45)

Hey there, welcome to episode 398 of the Find Your Food Voice podcast. I am Julie Duffy Dillon, and I am so glad you are here. Welcome to 2025, happy new year. If you’re listening to this episode, I’m assuming that you wanna make 2025 the year that you don’t get stuck back in the diet trap. And I wanna help you. Certainly, diet culture is going through another rebrand, but it-

Fortunately for us, it’s using some old types of nostalgic diet culture connections that we can use to help us navigate this hellscape. And again, it’s really reminiscent of 1990s dieting, maybe even early 2000s, but they’re using new words like food noise and how we are supposed to be super scared right now of certain foods.

I also think the election in 2024 in the United States has also been part of this type of push to diet in a new but really old way. So Make America Healthy Again is really kind of connecting to a time before body liberation, even body positivity was a part of conversations. It’s trying to help us.

Go back, go back to a time where dieting was kind of this new sexy thing, although it hasn’t really been new since like the 18, what? I think it was 1830s, yeah, 1836 or something like that. But still, it’s trying to do this rebrand. And this rebrand may be sneaky. And I have connected with three different red flags.

that I wanna share with you to help you make 2025, I don’t know, a little safer, more compassionate, more pleasurable, and continuing to help you heal your relationship with food. No matter how complicated it is, no matter what type of chronic diseases you have, you still deserve to have a relationship with food that is connected to pleasure and connection. So let’s get to it. But I do have a few announcements.

One in particular I am super excited about and that is the Find Your Food Voice book is finally available for pre-order. Yay! And this book will be coming out in March, but is available for pre-order right now. And if you’re wondering what this book is going to be about, well, this book is a way for you to have practical steps away from the diet trap.

And these are practical steps that allows you also to prioritize healing. You may have read books like Intuitive Eating or another kind of anti-diet or non-diet book, and you may want more. And that’s what this book is for. It’s for that person who needs more. So maybe you have insulin resistance or diabetes or you’re scared of those conditions. Maybe you are someone who has been dieting your whole life or you’re recovering from an eating disorder. So you need more tools.

This book is written for you, if you’re that person. So I’m so excited. This is something I’ve been working on for almost two years now. And honestly, I think I’ve been working on it for like 25 years. And so I’m so excited to be finally giving it to you now. You can pre-order it at julieduffydillon.com slash book. But when you pre-order there, and I’m really excited because I do have a way for you to pre-order.

in any of the different places, know, Amazon, Target, whatever. But I also have a way for you to order from my own local bookstore in case you want to support a local business. There’s a Greensboro, North Carolina bookstore that I love so much. So you can order straight from them and they’ll ship it to you no matter where you are. And yet when you do pre-order, make sure you come back to that website because there’s a way for you to enter your email and mailing address because I want to send you a free gift. You know, thank you for supporting me and the Find Your Food Voice team.

so we can continue to deliver more ways to help you stay out of the diet trap. And with that being said, I have one more thing I wanna communicate to you and that is the Find Your Food Voice listener survey is now live. I wanna help you like have what you need out of a podcast, out of my emails that I send to you and any other kind of services that I may provide for you. I want them to help you with what you need right now.

So if you fill out the survey, it’s gonna help me make those things for you, but also it gives you a chance to be entered in a drawing for a door dash gift card, which I love getting those. So I would love for you to be the one that wins. So go to julieduffydillon.com slash survey and you will get to that survey. And my team and I thank you so much in advance for doing that, because it’s gonna help us a ton as we are deciding what to do this year. All right.

We’re gonna get to those three dieting red flags after a very quick sponsor break.

Julie Duffy Dillon (06:55)

Welcome back and let’s get started on the red flags to watch out for in 2025. I want you to succeed on your anti-diet practice, your recovery, your mending your relationship with food. I know you are just so sick of dieting. You don’t want to do it anymore, but find yourself continuously back in the trap. So let’s keep you many, many steps away from

the craving to diet, the trap to diet. And what I want you to focus on are three different feelings. So you may want to call them experiences or messages, but there are three specific times that I see many people getting into the diet trap and feeling really stuck. And these are feelings that may surprise you.

that are connected to really this kind of stuck place where diets end up harming you instead of helping like they’re promising.

Diets consistently over promise and under deliver. And they start this off by three specific feelings that they provoke within us to get us into their kind of web of lies. So number one, the number one feeling to watch out for in 2025 is the feeling of fear. Diets are really, really skilled.

at jumping in whenever things are scary. And there’s a lot that is scary going on right now. There’s something about a diet that can help us feel all cozy and warm, which is so bizarre, but really that’s what I’ve noticed over the years that diets end up doing when we’re feeling scared. And often that fear may be because of some things that are really scary, you know?

things that may be going on in your life that you’re really afraid of. And it could be whether or not you have enough money to pay your rent next month or whether or not you are going to get diagnosed with diabetes. It can come across in many different ways. And how diets will seep into this when you’re feeling this fear is it’ll often will get channeled then into, need to fix myself. I need to be

aware and fearful that each bite will kill me or cure me. That’s a quote from Evelyn Tribble, one of the co-authors of Intuitive Eating. That’s something that I learned from her, that diet culture and the diet industry basically has trained us to believe that each bite of food is either going to kill us or cure us. And if you’ve listened to anything from the Find Your Food Voice podcast, you got to remember that

Nutrition science is just not that sexy. It’s not that black and white. It doesn’t have that much power. And the way I’m hearing it right now is, my gosh, every like news station is really sending these fearful messages about ultra processed foods. I think all the foods that we have available have a place and ultra processed foods are included in that list.

It’s another hill I will die on. They’re important. And yeah, like we’re not going to be wanting to eat the same exact food every single day. And for some people, ultra processed foods is the only way they have enough food at home and eating enough is always priority. So if you notice that fear when you’re hearing the messages about ultra processed foods, like, shit, I’m eating all of these box foods. This is going to kill me. I hope.

You can remember this, that that’s the fear. That’s the diet culture fear that is trying to allow you to open the door for just swoop in and try to pretend like it’s all gonna be okay. All right, so number two, the second feeling that is a huge diet culture red flag is the feeling of urgency. I appreciate we’re in International Dining Month.

And January is full of these like sweeping changes that we just always have as a part of January. And I have noticed since probably around summer of 2024, and then it got even progressively worse as it got into fall and early winter, this kind of pull for urgent, quick, drastic changes.

It reminds me so much of 1990s, early 2000s diet culture. So, you know, it’s ringing some bells that I’ve heard before, you know, cutting out whole food groups, this kind of, need to do more, we’re too lazy, we gotta get into it and make these drastic changes. I picture a sweaty gym coach who’s like blowing a whistle in your face and wagging a finger telling you,

that you’re doing it wrong. It’s instilling so much urgency. And urgency is something that diet culture uses because of its connection with perfectionism and things like white supremacy. Those are systems of oppression where urgency has found its place to be very useful. Again, nutrition science is not that sexy.

It just isn’t. And if you’re feeling this urgency that you have to do it now, well, there’s not any one food, one meal, one day of eating, one week of eating really that is going to change your blood sugar to go from not having diabetes to diabetes. It’s like a slow progression. And again, most of it is still genetic. I use that as an example, because I think that’s probably the most common one I hear from listeners.

If you feel that sense of urgency, I hope you can push some kind of pause button or imagine a speed bump to help you just slow it down. Because when I notice folks who change behavior, usually fear and urgency are the two that practitioners will use to push behavior change. But I noticed that didn’t work when I used to use those methods.

And researchers have known that that doesn’t work either. That’s been shown in research over and over again. So if you’re wanting to improve your life, improve your health, if you’re wanting to, I don’t know, consider January 2025 as I’m going to have this type of future where, I don’t know, fill in the blank. I encourage you to not use urgency. It’s probably why I…

sort of roll my eyes when I think about New Year’s resolutions. It’s sort of a cliche and it makes it have this urgency that I know is out really just to make us do quick kind of changes, drastic changes that in the end do more harm than good.

All right, let’s get to our last one. And this last one, I have a feeling it’s gonna shock you. It’s not something that I think most of you are gonna assume is connected to diet culture’s like bag of weapons here. Fear and urgency, know, those have those negative connotations. But hopefulness, hopefulness does not. Hopefulness feels good. It is very warm and fuzzy and exciting and…

Hopefulness, I know when I feel that, I feel a sense of relief and calm. Every diet starts with a spark of hopefulness. Again, when we’re afraid, diets will swoop in to help us not feel afraid. It basically hands us a game plan and is like, here’s our plan. Don’t worry, just follow these steps. I will take care of you. And when we feel the

fear moving away, we let hopefulness in. And I call these the sparks that get us trapped, that get us stuck in the diet trap. Sparks like this was the last diet I’ll ever need. This is the diet that will help me not ever have diabetes. This is the diet that will help me lose weight for good. And it doesn’t matter how many times one has tried a diet, when these sparks are felt and

they move into a hopeful kind of space. It doesn’t matter if you have found yourself at the back end of a diet and feeling like a failure, that hopefulness will just get anyone back on the, goodness, I hate the phrase, like back on the horse, but like just get back to it and trying again. It’s part of the diet industry’s like master plan that gets us really hooked. And,

I hate saying it, but if you start to feel these sparks of hopefulness about your new way of eating, you’re already in the diet trap, but you can get out. You have to name what is happening. You have to name this really slick and conniving hopefulness that is really just, again, over-promising and under-delivering.

If you find yourself while you’re listening to this podcast maybe or in the near future, feeling that hopefulness, you notice the sparks, you notice this kind of calm coming around you because you’re feeling like you have a plan that maybe this will be the time. I hope you can be really gentle with yourself. I hope you can give yourself a lot of compassion. It’s hard to really block that urgency and that fear that diet culture.

really is waiting for you to feel. It is something that is really slick and successful. And that’s why so many of us are having to work every single day to not diet. But when you feel the spark, name it. And as you notice the sparks, one of the best things you can do is write down what got you there. Like keep track of it on your notes app or in some kind of journal. What gets you feeling those sparks?

and it may be some triggers that you can name. So then when you have the triggers again, you can really be aware that these sparks are coming. And that’s one of my like favorite tools to stay out of the diet trap is just to be aware of when hopefulness sneaks in there and delivers these sparks. So you can stay away. And there are some things that I think are red flags for

A diet is right around the corner, but there are some green flags and I wanna share them with you right now. Part of the green flags are these three key areas of your food voice that I encourage you to use as kind of a way to check in as you’re maybe making some new health goals or you are strategizing some changes you wanna make in your life.

before I give you these three green flags, they’re a part of the definition of a food voice. And you may be wondering what a food voice is anyway. So I’m gonna share that with you. like I said, it’ll help you understand these three green flags to start to practice as you are moving away from dieting. So here’s what I want you to know about your food voice.

The diet culture that we live in, it implies that you and I are just too stupid to know what to eat, yet you have been successfully managing your food intake since your very first breath. You were born with this knowing how and what and when to eat. So much of this eating wisdom came with you on your very first birthday and the diet industry has built up boulders blocking you from that innate knowing. This knowing is your food voice.

And we all have one. Our food voice is an internal system that we’re born with to communicate when to eat, how much, and what choices to eat based on what is available. This communication may be through body awareness like hunger, fullness, fatigue, mood, or satisfaction. It could also be through thoughts and feelings or guided by structured self-care techniques. Your food voice will be unique to you, yet it always will have.

three parts to it. It’ll always be flexible, kind, and nurturing. Always, its primary function is to help you prioritize eating enough. It is a knowing with an unconditional permission for food, yet compassionate to you when outside circumstances block access. So keeping that definition in mind, your food voice will always have three criteria.

that will basically help you to navigate those three red flags of fear, urgency, and hopefulness. Your food voice will always be flexible, kind, and nurturing. So how I see using this is when you feel that hopefulness, the fear, or the urgency, I encourage you to filter it through three different items, and that’s

flexibility is the first one. Remember, nutrition science is very rarely black and white. It’s almost always very gray, and it’s going to be flexible, even if you have a chronic illness. So instead of really focusing in on this kind of very extreme, drastic, urgent change, I invite you to allow compassion into your 2025 eating goals.

The other one is kindness. Your food voice is always gonna be kind. If you’re hearing messages to promote any kind of health change, that includes that you’re just too stupid or lazy, I hope you can check it because deciding how to eat has kindness attached to it, always. You are living in a world with oppressive systems that are hard as fuck.

navigating all of it is so draining. You are not stupid. You are not lazy. You are surviving. You are coping. And you deserve kindness with every food choice every single time. And the last one is your food voice will always have a nurturing side to it. Because remember, eating enough is always number one. I don’t care who you are. You have to have enough. And I don’t care what food choices you have. Eating enough is always

priority number one. And along those same lines, eating is supposed to be satisfying and pleasurable. Eating is also supposed to be a connector. When you remove these parts, this nurturing side of eating, it will block you from this knowing. It’ll block you from your own food voice. And why I want you to align with your food voice, I don’t want you to rely on diets.

and you may have been dieting for decades at this point, and I still think you can move away from them, we need to one at a time remove these blocks from your food voice. And remembering that your food choices always need to be filtered through kindness, flexibility, and be nurturing is a way to get there.

Julie Duffy Dillon (22:35)

So there you have it. I hope you enjoyed this mini session. I hope it helps you to make 2025 a year without dieting and also include a lot of compassion as you are trying to make that work. Before we go, just a quick reminder that the Find Your Food Voice listener survey is now live and I would love for you to fill it out. And we’re gonna have a lucky winner who gets a DoorDash gift card. So,

someone has to win, it might as well be you, right? So if you could go to juliduffydillon.com slash survey and you can get right to it. It’s really quick and it’ll help me to be able to build this podcast this year into what you want. And also anything else that you would like to get from my team and I, we thank you in advance. And lastly, remember the Find Your Food Voice book is now available to pre-order. I am so excited.

to give you more tools to help you connect with that knowing that you are born with because relying on diets is so not sustainable for you. It is so 1980s, we are ready to move on. And the Find Your Food Boys book pre-order, you can get to it at my website, julieduffydillon.com slash book. All right, I look forward to you being in your ears next week with another episode and until then, take care.