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Julie: Hey there, welcome to episode 374 of Find Your Food Voice. And this episode is all about what the hell is a food voice and what is it instead of food freedom or food peace? Like, why am I making this distinction? This episode is gonna help you understand all of that. I hope it helps you to clarify what you’re looking for as you are basically beating off diets with a stick, trying to just navigate this world and help heal your complicated relationship with food. this is kind of, this is an episode that I hope helps you understand where I’m coming from, but then also, and most importantly, helps you to clarify what you need as you are recovering from all this dieting bullshit. So if you’re new to me, if you’ve never listened to this, podcast or YouTube channel before. 

Julie: Welcome. My name is Julie Duffy Dillon and I’m a seasoned dietician. I’ve been a dietician since 1999. And yes, so that means I lived through Y2K and all of the like heroin chic, skinny crap that comes from it. And I was learning to become a dietician and all of that. And a few years into learning how to become a dietician as I was like a new dietician. just three years into being a dietitian, I realized how harmful diets were and actually how they didn’t help or work, whatever that means, for most people. And I actually almost quit. I got things prepared to get a master’s degree in mental health counseling and I got into a really great program that happened to be just 10 minutes from my house was super excited and I told the dietitian who I was training to take over my position as I was leaving this job. I was like, hey, just want to let you know a secret. I’m never going to be a dietitian again. You just witnessed my last diet instruction. And she said, no, Julie, why don’t you want to be a dietitian anymore? And I explained to her what I just told you. You know, I didn’t think diets work. I thought they were harmful. And she said, well, I get that. I’m with you and all that.

Julie: And have you read Intuitive Eating? I did not read it. As I started my master’s program in counseling, again, still gung ho that I was going to be leaving dietetics. I think I was about a year into the program when I finally read Intuitive Eating, probably on a summer break because it was the only time I had anything true, any time to read anything. And that’s when I realized that I was not the only dietician rejecting diets. And hey, I don’t need to leave diets. But now I have this degree in counseling that I was working for and I eventually finished that helped me to just be better at helping and better at helping you feel the things that come from rejecting diets. And I’m so glad that I connected with that book. And for many of you, you may have read Intuitive Eating or if you are new to things like food freedom or food peace and you haven’t read Intuitive Eating.

Julie: If you’re listening to this before March of 2025, read Intuitive Eating. If you’re listening to this after, I still recommend it. It’s a very good book, especially the latest edition. But just know I’m also in the process of editing my book, Find Your Food Voice. And I hope it helps you to build the arsenal of like tools that you need, like a food voice toolkit to help you find your food voice.

Julie: Anyone who’s doing that work, I call you a voice finder. And there’s a reason why I do that because how you define this recovery is going to be on your terms based on your identity, your lived experience and your goals. And every voice finder has their own way of connecting to that. And I think that’s so beautiful. And that will help more people access these same tools. So.

Julie: Before we go any further, I’m really proud of the definition of food voice that I wrote as I was writing the Find Your Food Voice book. And to give you a little backstory, I don’t know if you enjoy behind the curtain kind of things like around 2020, I mentioned in the last episode, I realized that food piece rather was not a phrase that connected anymore with what I was hoping to do as people are rejecting diets.

Julie: I just couldn’t, I didn’t feel like it, it didn’t feel at home in my brain anymore as I was starting to witness the racism and other oppressive systems as more people were helping me to appreciate them. Peace with food, while it’s still something I want everyone to have, it just didn’t seem accessible to everyone. And I didn’t want to limit who I was helping to just one group of people, people with the most privilege. I want everyone to experience a peaceful relationship with food, including someone who is experiencing food insecurity because of poverty or someone who is experiencing starvation because of genocide. Like everyone gets to like, I want everyone to be able to experience food peace. And the way that we can do that is through coming together. So to define it took me many years. And in 2022, I wanted to redo my website. I knew that I did not want to work one on one with people anymore, because like many of my colleagues, I had burned out doing the work one on one work of helping people recover is something that not enough people appreciate the experience of holding trauma and how draining it is for the nervous system. And for me as an Enneagram four, I call myself an empath. I’m definitely a highly sensitive person. I like when I experienced feelings, they’re very heavy for me. And I didn’t do enough on my self care over 20 plus years.

Julie: And so I did burnout. And so I knew I wanted a new website where I could basically share my podcasts and anything I wrote and instead of working one on one with people, because I just knew that my own nervous system couldn’t do that work anymore. Like that was not my work to do anymore. We have many colleagues who are able to do a much better job than I can in that area. And so as I was trying to redo my website, the folks who were helping me to do that. I mentioned to them that I didn’t really feel connected anymore to the term food piece, even though I had trademarked it, even though I called myself a food piece promoter on my podcast, like that was part of my introduction every single time. And they helped me brainstorm. Like we did this mega brainstorming session and someone threw out the word or the phrase rather food voice. And that came from kind of this compilation of, wanted someone to be able to describe their relationship with food that not only helped themselves, but helped them to fuel their voice to help make the world better, to fix oppressive systems and to help people who don’t have as much access to tools to recover their relationship with food. So then it can be more accessible.

Julie: So when food voice got thrown out there, I was like, that’s it. So here’s the official definition that I came up with. Again, it took me two years from 2022 to 2024 to come up with this definition. And it was when I was about two thirds of the way done writing, find your food voice. I finally came up with this definition. So I hope my publisher doesn’t mind, but I’m sharing this before it’s released. So if you’re listening, just know you’re getting an extra special bonus because this is in my book. So food voice is a noun and it’s an internal system each human was born with to communicate when to eat, how much, and what choices to consume based on what is available. This communication may be through body awareness like hunger, fullness, fatigue, mood, or satisfaction.