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Julie: Hey there, voice finder. There are times when everyone is dieting. Have I caught you in one of those moments? Maybe there’s a family reunion coming up or some kind of get together over a holiday. Someone’s wedding or maybe even your own. It’s January, International Dieting Month. Always a shit show. Or maybe people are talking about being beach ready. Or is it just Monday where you work?

Welcome to episode 381 of the Find Your Food Voice podcast. And this is a mini session episode. I love mini sessions. They give you a new tool to try out. And these are tools that I have used over the last 20 years working one -on -one with clients. Unlike my client sessions though, this is for educational purposes only. And I encourage you if it sparks something by going through this episode to bring it to your in -person provider and they can help you make it individualized just for you and your lived experience. This episode is for you if you know diets don’t work for you, but you doubt this knowing because everyone around you is dieting. It will feel wrong to not diet when everyone is around you. It’ll feel like you are breaking some moral code. It’s scary. And what about health? What are you doing to yourself? I appreciate that some of the ways that people talk about food will just feel so, it may make you feel so small and at the same time, like you’re taking up so much space with your burden. And maybe you tried to break up with diets before, maybe you tried intuitive eating, but you just felt like a failure. It felt chaotic and frustrating and just so fucking scary. Maybe you’re just not sure if you can do it. So this is a very common experience as a person is repairing their complicated history of food. So common, in fact, every single person that I ever worked with, whether they were recovering from an eating disorder, or if they were just trying not to diet, and I don’t mean just to minimize, but if they were not recovering from eating disorder, but rather really needing to break away from dieting as this kind of chronic experience. This is something that everyone experienced. So if you find yourself there. This isn’t your fault. You’re not doing it wrong. You are living in a world that is wrong, that needs to be fixed. And I have four tools or four ways to navigate this spot. So I encourage you to save this episode for when it happens again, maybe just keep it on repeat as you’re navigating this moment. And it’ll help you to remind yourself of that knowing, that knowing that diets don’t work.

Julie: And that knowing is your food voice. Before we get to those four steps, I have a couple quick announcements. I’m recording this in the middle of September and I’m running a sale on my PCOS Doctor of Visit toolkit. This is a toolkit that my team and I made because we kept getting the same questions over and over again on what, like to ask your doctor for if you have PCOS, like what labs to run, which studies, and then how to navigate the shit show that is fat phobic PCOS healthcare. So if you are looking for more tools, more support, this PCOS doctor visit toolkit is just $27 through the month of September. And you can get all the information on it and order it at julieduffydillon.com/toolkit. And another announcement, as I just turned in the very last edits, finally, of the Find Your Food Voice book, you know, I started writing it and August of 2023. So this was a long time, but I honestly I enjoyed this process way more. And between you and me, I am really hoping I get to write another book because I really loved this experience. But as I’m kind of waiting, just know by waiting, mean waiting for you all to be able to read it because it’s going to be released in March of 2025. But as we are waiting, I will be kind of putting together some cool swag to give away for those of you who are able to pre -order. And I’ll give you all the details as it comes up, but I just wanted to keep you in the loop. And then lastly, I appreciate all of your recent podcast reviews. Do you know that I read every single one and they are so helpful, especially for me and my team, this like independent podcast. We don’t have these big like engines behind us and funding to help make the show. It really is this like passion that we want you to be able to connect with your own food voice. And so it’s hard for people to find us, even though we may have exactly what they are looking for. It’s hard for people to find us now because there’s just so much noise. And when you leave a review, that is a way that especially an Apple podcast that more people can find us. It just like helps bump us up. So thank you in advance if you’ve done that. If you haven’t, I would love to get feedback from you in a review, but also just know it really helps us. And besides leaving a review, if you follow the show or subscribe, however it works on whatever you’re listening or watching on right now, that’s another way to help people just find the show and it helps us grow. So we thank you in advance for supporting independent podcasts. We’re gonna pause here for a quick sponsor break, but we’ll be right.

Julie: All right, welcome back. Let’s start this mini session. All right, so everyone around you is dieting. They’re all talking about this bullshit. You’ve heard a song and dance before, but you probably are catching the spark. There’s like this hopeful kind of gust of maybe this’ll be the time where the diet will work, even if this is not your first rodeo you may feel that sense of urgency. So my number one request in this moment for you, VoiceFinder, is to take your time. There is no rush in this decision. Even though it’ll feel like it’s very urgent, that is a very specific product of the diet industry is to make it seem like you’re losing time. So try to push all the pause buttons that you can and remind yourself, there is no rush. Take your time. Think about any big decision that you make and look back on those decisions. The ones you made kind of quickly, I know for me scrolling TikTok and buying something on TikTok shop, has it ever helped? Has it ever really been that great? No, no it hasn’t. And if you’re on TikTok too, I know you feel the same way. But if we pause, consider the different options.

And name the different systems that are trying to influence us in the moment. I know for me, it helps me to stay grounded in who I am and my values. And so I encourage you to do the same. Take your time. And as you slow things down, you may notice something that is very predictable. And that is anxiety. You may feel really anxious about the possibility of not dieting in this moment or next week or ever again. And if so, if you’re noticing some kind of anxiety, you may feel like the physical signs of anxiety, like the heart racing, your breath kind of rapidly increasing. You may also just notice your brain is so activated and there’s like this spiral of thoughts and feelings that feel so overwhelming. I know that spot very well.

Julie: And anxiety is very predictable in the diet space, especially when you’re trying to reject diets in a world that is just so consumed and drinking their sugar -free Kool -Aid, right? So I encourage you to reach for any tool that has ever helped you to ground, to help you just again, pause the anxiety button. If you need more tools, some of my favorite things to do when I’m feeling anxiety, Some of the things I teach my kids to do and teach my clients to do in these mini sessions is to think about the senses. So when we’re anxious, our brain is just overwhelmed and flooded with thoughts and feelings. And that will totally take us to this place where we’re like a floating head and it’s not gentle. It’ll feel really, really urgent and uncomfortable. So again, thinking of the senses, touch, taste, sound. You know, I think sometimes people can do things with touch that can be really accessible. And it’s kind of depends where you are. But feeling something like I’m feeling my desk and it’s a wood desk that has a little bit of texture to it. I have done that many times when I’ve been anxious in this spot before. You can also feel the texture of your clothing. So if you’re watching me on YouTube, you can see like just feeling your the textile that you’re wearing right now.

Julie: And you can even be thinking of your future self and having textures that feel grounding to you nearby. That’s how some people have like a worry rock. I remember having a worry rock when I was in middle school. And I think that really became a tool for me for my whole life to use texture as a grounding mechanism. So much so when I’m like on a walk with Doug, my dog, if I walk past like a stone wall, I always like to touch it because it does, it helps ground me. Feeling my feet on the ground made me feeling a soft blanket. This is where weighted things can be really helpful too. A weighted blanket. I have bookmarked weighted hoodies because I think some people in my life have been getting those for holiday presents. But yeah, any kind of textile, like the feeling. Another one, if those are just not your jam, another one is even just grabbing ice cubes and putting those in your hands, especially if you’re in a really big panic attack where it just feels like an urgent, urgent spiral or some of those warm packs that people sometimes use in the wintertime, having just a temperature in your hands that can help your brain snap in a different direction for a second and kind of get unhooked or pivot a little bit away from that urgent spiral. The other thing is having sense. So having a candle or a diffuser, even just like right now it’s raining where I am like smelling the rain. God, I love that smell so much. And then as I’m thinking about outside, it may even be that to feeling the outside air opening a window or going outside and putting your feet in the grass and feeling the coolness or if you’re in a different season, maybe feeling the warm sun, doing something where you can activate your senses in a different way. This is also where taste can come in. You know, it may be a sweet taste, a salty taste. It may be a sour taste, just something that helps your brain again to experience something else with your senses and notice how it grounds you.

Julie: Notice how it allows you just have a little speed bump in that spiral of anxiety, panicking about what should you do about this diet. All right, as you’re starting to ground and you are practicing reminding yourself that there’s no rush in this decision, as you feel things start to slow down, the question that I wanna ask you is how many diets have you been on? Like really, how many? And when I say diets, I don’t necessarily just mean like you signed up for Weight Watchers or something like that, or you read a diet book or you watch some YouTube person talking about a diet and practice that. It may even be something like I just wanted to do some healthy eating. I want organic or I’m more plant -based or I was a vegan or a vegetarian, or it may be actually like a relapse in your eating disorder or a kind of a little slip into the eating disorder, how many times have you attempted to change your eating? And you may be surprised by the number if you’ve never done this before. Most people I worked with, it was 30 plus easily that they’ve tried and this was in their 30s or 40s. So with that being said, you may need to kind of draw a timeline of your life and some important events like when you started school, when you started puberty, when you were dating, when you identified your sexuality, when you had your first partner, when you moved away from home. These are all really common kind of experiences people go through, And diets often like to nestle all cozy inside those experiences.

Julie: So you may need to do something like that. There may be a little bit of extra work to help figure out actually how many diets have you been on? And then when you get to your number, like your number, that number is really important because what I want you to ask yourself next in this third part is, is that enough? Is this enough times? And only you can answer that. Like I don’t have the answer to that question. I’m really hoping it’s enough because for most people it’s not gonna work. But like for you and your brain, is that enough? And let yourself really answer that. And maybe you need to experience a diet again to really know if it has been enough. And I am rooting for you that if you do that, that it’s your last one, that you don’t ever have to do another one again and it does what you’re hoping. Or that you say, no, it’s been enough. I know they don’t work. All right, this last one, number four, maybe a little bit controversial but I think it’s the most powerful of all, something about giving up on dieting. There’s something about the finality of that that really increases the anxiety, the urgency, and the hopeful spark of a diet you can always go back on a diet. You don’t have to say goodbye to diets forever, especially in these moments where you are fucking like triggered and really, really, really feel pulled to diet again. What if you just said, I’m not gonna diet today or I’m not gonna restrict today, tomorrow I can do that. Do you know how many people are recovering from their diets or their eating disorder by doing this practice? So many, at least hundreds, maybe even thousands of people that I’ve connected with have done that. And that’s what keeps them recovering. It kind of is along the same lines for a lot of people who have a substance use disorder. It may be along those same lines, but there’s something about saying never again for many people that is just too anxiety producing and promotes that risk to go back to dieting. It just makes that spark, that hopeful spark, even more of a lure. So keep in mind, you’re just deciding for this moment, for the next five minutes, the next hour, or maybe just today. What if today you didn’t diet? And what’s really cool about how our brain is wired is as you replicate this as you give yourself another five minutes, another 10 minutes without dieting, another day without dieting. It eventually changes your neurochemistry to have these really dense myelin sheaths. Now, if you’ve never heard of myelin sheaths, they’re super cool because back in the 90s and early 2000s when fat was this like horrible thing to eat, I hope you saw my eye roll Myelin sheaths were like the thing that I thought about initially about like if we’re not eating fat and food, our nerves are not going to have that special coating over them that helps thoughts move through it. Thoughts and also like helps our body just do what it needs to do to be a human. As we don’t eat enough fat, that breaks down and it gets shredded. If we’re eating enough food and we’re eating enough fat and we are practicing this, hey, just one more hour without dieting, just one more day without dieting. As you’re doing that, the myelin sheaths get stronger and denser. And so then it becomes eventually the default setting. Not dieting can be eventually your default setting, but it doesn’t start with, for most people, it doesn’t start with, I’m never dieting again. For some reason, that is just something that triggers the diet culture foundations that we all have. So give yourself the opportunity to experiment with just for not this moment. I’m not gonna diet in this moment. deep breath. It’s such a hard work. This is such hard work and it’s very good work. And if you’re wondering the how, well, of course I dive deep into all this in the Find Your Food Voice book, but I will be sharing more of the how in another mini session.

Julie: So thank you for listening to this mini session episode. I would love it if you hit subscribe before we go. And I will be back with a book review episode in just a few days. And until then, I help you, voice finder, take care.