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Julie: Hey there, welcome to episode 372 of the Find Your Food Voice podcast. And I have titled this podcast episode, Finding Food Freedom. If you found this episode because you put food freedom in the search bar, pushed play, and you’re now listening, welcome. This episode will give you basic first steps and help you also dive deeper, especially if you and I are aligned on what that deeper kind of wanting is. And since this is the first time we are getting acquainted, well, hey, my name is Julie Duffy Dillon.

Julie: I’m a registered dietitian and I have been one for close to 25 years now. I have been helping people most of that time with a complicated history with food to let go of the burden of food decisions to finally enjoy eating again. I think everyone deserves to have a relationship with food that is actually satisfying and pleasurable. And if they’re also wanting to, ways to promote health. If you are struggling with feelings of failure, I want you to know that you’re not failing in your relationship with food, rather functioning as designed by all the diets and all the systems that have pushed it. Those diets and those systems, they are the real villain, and I call them the should -eat script. know, whenever you start a new diet, it’s a bunch of, I should eat this, I should eat that. And that’s why I call them the I should eat scripts. What I think is the opposite of that, we could use the phrase food freedom. If we wanted to define food freedom, certainly there’s lots of practitioners and people on the internet who talk about food freedom. But when I think about it, I consider it to be a way of connecting to food that has no rules and rejecting that. And it’s also not tied to weight loss. So is food freedom possible? Well, I think on the surface, yes, for many people.

Julie: I think it’s also really, really complicated because food freedom, if we consider it to be eating without guilt and also not tying it to weight loss, it ignores certain connections that over the last 25 years, I’ve come to appreciate to be vital as a collective community of folks who are trying to reject diets and to like rebuild a way of relating to food that’s normal the way it’s was supposed to be normal, like not relying on diets, but rather relying on ourselves and what we have access to and what actually we enjoy. So again, if you Google food freedom, you’ll find many people teaching it, but you’ll also find people teaching it who are promoting diets and weight loss with GLP -1, WW, Whole30. Those are all folks that I have seen promoting this concept of food freedom. And why this happens when food freedom is supposed to be a way of moving away from using the scale of a measure of progress is those are folks who are not really looking at the collective, the community, like every human being and how every human being should have access to feeling at home in their body, feeling safe in their body, and also a relationship with food that is filled with dignity, I guess you could say, and pleasurable. I think food freedom is kind of like an onboarding to a non -diet world. So again, if you’re new to me, this is maybe how you found me, is like just putting food freedom in that search bar and like, okay, maybe this is a quick podcast episode to help me have the tools. And I hope it helps you start the work.

Julie: And I think food freedom is more of the first exit ramp off that dieting superhighway to a more nuanced roadmap to rejecting diet culture. So basically I don’t want you to stop at food freedom for you yourself. I hope it’s like the first kind of layer that you work through. And food freedom, really, I’m hoping it helps you again to kind of get off that exit ramp. While you’re maybe still seeing that superhighway, but starting to also see other options that includes like eating food without guilt, eating foods that maybe you were told you can never have again, and doing the work to reclaim like, permission for all of that. And you might find yourself wanting some kind of structure or concrete ways of helping you make those steps. For many people since the 90s, they did this through intuitive eating. That’s how I found non -diet ways of practicing as a dietitian because I just, after three years of helping people to diet, I just couldn’t do it anymore because I saw it not working and being harmful and I wanted to figure out another way or I wasn’t gonna be a dietitian anymore.

Julie: Thankfully, I read Intuitive Eating. It saved me from quitting my job. And also, it helped me to build a foundation of the work that I do that really has permission as a foundation with your relationship with food. And again, over the last 25 years, I’ve added more nuance to it as I’ve learned more. And what I have learned is this is not an individual experience. When you’re rejecting diets, you’re not only helping yourself in your complicated relationship with food, you’re helping someone else in your community to feel more at home in their body. And this kind of brings back to, for me and my brain, like why I didn’t call my book that I just finished writing, Find Food Freedom, it’s called Finding Your Food Voice. I don’t call it food freedom for a reason because I think about, yes, there’s this individual experience for many people, but those many people who can experience food freedom in the way it’s described and they can just kind of stop with the individual is because they don’t experience food insecurity or poverty. They maybe don’t live in a body that experiences a lot of hardship. Maybe they don’t experience racism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia.

Julie: Maybe they have a body size that is accepted in their community, but what about people who will never be thin or white or able -bodied? Or what about people who are living in poverty or constantly neglected by their caregivers? Or what about people who are experiencing starvation because of genocide? There are a number of genocides happening all over the world right now. Like, what about food freedom for that person? Don’t they deserve access to food freedom? Of course they do. And I know you agree with me. Healing your complicated relationship with food while you have safe, reliable food is important because as you do that work, you can then help those without the access.

Julie: Naomi Wolf is a writer from many, many years ago. You know, she was one of the first authors that I read when I was starting to explore breaking up with like dieting and moving away from that as a dietitian. And a lot of her work talks about how a dieting person is easier to control because we’re so focused on how our food is supposed to be. And we’re also probably not getting enough. So our brain is just not functioning at all. It’s like default settings and levels.

Julie: So as you start to feed yourself, you may notice you literally start to wake up. And at first, you may focus on helping yourself, which is really important. We gotta put the gas mask on ourself, right, before we help those around us. So helping yourself to experience food freedom, or whatever we wanna call it, is really important work. And what I hope, and this is the big message of finding your food voice is I hope it doesn’t stop there because as you start to wake up, you will start to see how this is different from other people around you who have different lives, different access. And you may be able to easily connect with people in your community who have different lives. But what about people who are half a world away experiencing genocide and violence and all that? What about people who are living like that? And that’s gonna take a lot of brain power to help to fix to help the world be a better, safer place for everyone. So if you’re someone who is kind of like, well, I think I just want to work on myself. maybe Julie, what you’re talking about is just not something that is going to be important for me. That is fine. Be well. I hope you experience a relationship with food that feels like permission and helps you to recover. You deserve that.

Julie: And continue to Google search food freedom or on TikTok, you’ll probably get some excellent next steps, many different podcasts. But I do think of that as just a bandaid on a bullet wound because people experiencing food insecurity, people experiencing racism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, or people experiencing genocide, like those are folks who are the canaries in the coal mine kind of metaphor.

Julie: Those are people who are experiencing the opposite of food freedom before people of privilege experience the opposite of food freedom. So you may be able to help yourself now, but there’s probably gonna come a time in the future where it’s gonna be even harder for folks with privilege to also experience food freedom. So I hope as you do your own work, you continue to dig deeper and move toward helping your community, helping your country you live in, helping the world so every person can experience food freedom. And I’ve never used food freedom to describe kind of my process of helping people recover their complicated relationship with food. What I have used for many years is a phrase called food peace.

Julie: And I’ve actually moved away from that. That’s why I didn’t call my book, Find Your Food Peace There’s a reason. And I’m going to explore that in my next episode. So catch that if you’re interested to know a little bit more, to dive a little deeper and stay in touch, join my email list. You can join 8 ,000 fellow voice finders and I’ll leave a link to do that below in the show notes. And I also want to offer you an opportunity to support this independent podcast and YouTube channel. I have a link below as well if you are able to help us to pay for an editing and a team to produce this podcast. And if you cannot financially help us, sharing the episode, leaving a five -star review, joining our email list, pre -ordering the Find Your Food Voice book, doing any of those things really helps the show grow and it helps us to continue. And so we appreciate you. Thank you so much. And I’ll see you in the next episode. Until then, bye for now.