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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.

Julie: Hey there and welcome to episode 352 of a Find Your Food Voice. I am Julie Duffy Dillon, your host and welcome to another mini. So and as I call it a mini, so it really isn’t going to be that many as you can probably tell by the duration, but it still is going to be one of those episodes. That’s a little bit less glamorous. I don’t know if my podcast is ever glamorous but it’s not edited. So I am sitting on my bed and still enjoying wintering and I have no clue what day it is. All I know is this episode is going to be dropping January 2nd. So I need to get myself to recording because I wanted to hang out with you. And so if you are listening to this episode, the day of or a few days after it dropped, Happy 2024! I hope your New Year is going well and going in the direction that you want it to go. It’s a very complicated time, especially for those of us who are trying to reject dieting and all things non diet living. So this episode’s intention is to give you space to sit with the complicated feelings and thoughts that come with January as we like to call it here International Dieting Month. So I’m going to do this guided meditation. And after the guided meditation, I have an exercise that I want you to do if you are interested to help you. Um and a few different ways. One is to use your own diet history as a foundation for rejecting diets. So you may be someone who has dieted your whole life and just can’t imagine going on another diet. But also like, what the hell do you do instead? Or you may be someone who is trying so hard to recover from an eating disorder. But so many of the thoughts, so many of the feelings and the polls are just keeping you stuck in eating disorder patterns. And I know you don’t want to do it anymore, but kind of in a similar way to someone who’s trying to move away from dieting. It may just be impossible to imagine a life without following some of the eating disorder behaviors. No matter how you relate to food and your body and to dieting, we all have something in common. We are all going against the cultural norm with food. So this guided meditation and activity after that, it is something again that I hope helps you to have a foundation for now during international dieting month. But also any other time you feel that seduction from diet culture and last week’s episode really dove deep into that seductive side of dieting. And so if you haven’t listened to it, go back, it’s a quick mini episode and come back and listen to this one. All right, before we get to the guided meditation, we’re going to take a quick sponsor break and we’ll be right back. 

Julie: Welcome back. This is going to be a guided meditation where you can do it however you want, if you’re someone that needs to ground first, definitely pause, take a few deep breaths and come back. And you also may be someone who really wants to kind of multitask or maybe you’re on a walk. I basically want you to know that there’s no wrong way to do this guided meditation and do it whatever works for you. So let’s go ahead and get started. 

Julie: I greet you at my office door and show you into my therapy room. You sit on the green couch and that’s when I notice your very heavy suitcase. You keep it hidden at first yet as you sit down, the suitcase lands on the floor with a thud. I see you try to not make a big deal about how heavy it is and hear you apologize for dropping it. The suitcase barely stays shut. It strains full of a mismatch of tough to contain memories covered in doctor office BMI printouts, Weight Watcher point trackers, and empty trendy diet drinks. I see the shattered hope trying to hold it all together.

Julie: As we chat about the weather, you try to minimize how much space you and the suitcase take up. You apologize for its beat up appearance and lie about where it has been. You make excuses for the suitcase like you caused all its clutter and deserve to add more burden to it. You want me to believe the suitcase has nothing to do with why we meet. Rather you sing the suitcase’s praises as if reading memorized lines from a script thrown at you so long ago. The suitcase is how you will find health some day, you acknowledge, and you hope I will add another token. I see another string of hope ready to tie things together.

Julie: I wonder if you want to unpack what is in the suitcase. I want to help you sort through everything and make sense of it. I won’t rush, I promise. I won’t preach either. You bawk at my attention to the suitcase’s power over you. I am not supposed to see all of it together, rather just the last bits and your effort to keep meeting a goal. You show me how well you are following the directions. You wonder if I can just keep it light; you want me to not pry into the depth of the suitcase. Instead, you want me to stay on the surface and give you another directive script. It is easy for me to see all the scripts already there. How can I add anything different?

Julie: You decide it is ok to take out all the previously held scripts in your suitcase. Some are marked with points or macros or calories or exercise directions. Each journey began with hope for something better. At first you connect with the longing for better health and energy. Then, as we lay out all the open scripts, side by side, you notice something you have never seen before. Each script disguised as a map says the final destination provides permanent acceptance, peace, and light. We study each one and name how they are all full of overpromises that under deliver. Each and every map had one final destination: isolated shame. This realization brings tears to your eyes. Each script symbolizes your unmet needs and more pain. Each script brought more shoulds. Seeing them all laid out you can’t believe you’ve been carrying it all along by yourself for so long. 

Julie: I wish you knew that suitcase full of diet history is not your individual burden. I see your shame trying to cover its tracks yet still hoping it will provide. How many more maps to the same destination do you need? I want you to know you have tried enough times. I will you to know this too. You have been tricked to believe you need a Should Eat Script. You don’t. You just need your breath noticing it rhythmically grounding you to meet your needs. We fill the therapy room with all of your suitcase contents. You feel overwhelmed seeing it all now wondering if it can still be packed up. It all feels too much. We can go through this anyway you want. We can leave it out and take our time looking at each piece with a magnifying glass. We can light a match and burn it all. We can group like with like and name each era for what it means now.

Julie: Keep this in mind: you are in charge and there are no wrong ways moving forward. It is ok if it feels scary, sad, exhilarating, terrifying, or puzzling. It is ok to take breaks. You may feel alone but you never are. It’s not just me here. Look around at all of us sorting through our baggage not knowing how we got here and unsure about what is next. Except now we are on our own terms.

Julie: All right. I am going to conclude the guided meditation. And before we go on to the next section, we’re going to take a quick sponsor break. But at this point, we are going to break down some kind of concrete things that you may have concluded from this guided meditation. All right, we’ll be right back. 

Julie: Welcome back. First thing I want to say is great job. You did some really hard work listening to that guided meditation and noticing what has come up for you doing this work to move away from dieting is heavy and full of so many surprises and unknowns. So again, great job, I’m really proud of you. So like I mentioned before the break this section of the mini. So I want to give you some kind of concrete steps. Now, after doing that guided meditation and I hope you find it helpful to start, I want to first define in case there is kind of any question about the phrase the should eat script. So for many of us, the word diet um is what we use to describe changing how we eat in order to change our body. And I appreciate not everyone uses that word, but yet when a person was going through different types of ways of manipulating their body size, through food and movement, there were just so many common themes of shame and blame and being really stuck in a trap and so should eat script is the phrase I use that for many people, they would say diet. But for others, especially if you are recovering from an eating disorder, you may say restriction or eating disorder behavior or if you are changing your eating in order to be safer um or to gain access to certain spaces or acceptance. And it also could be a food rule that was passed down um in your family, some kind of food or body rule that every generation has just passed down. And you’re noticing that you don’t want to do that anymore. 

Julie: So when I say these scripts and, and that meditation, that’s what I’m talking about. And what I want you to do with this should eat script is think about the last five times. You have tried to change your eating again, this could be a diet. This could be a relapse with your eating disorder or it could be some kind of suggestion from your family. And if the last five, I, I wanted to give you another option, you may also want to do the top five, you know, the, the, the top five meaning the most impactful cause the most change the most chaos. You know, you could do something like that too. Um For people that I’ve worked with individually, we would often um like at this person in the guided meditation, we would go through all of them, like all of the different scripts that a person has been given to change their body and of course, that can take a long time. So I thought I picked five just because it was a nice round number and um to kind of just get you started but feel free if this opens some floodgates to do as many as you want. 

Julie: So there are, let me count how many I have on here? 12345678, 8 questions to cover as you are. Oops. And I just bumped the mic. I hope you didn’t hear that. Um But there are eight different um things that I want you to list with each of these scripts and the first would be the name of it. So it could be keto, it could be relapse in 2007. You know, it could be healthy eating or um whole 30. It could be a New Year diet from 2017, you know, just give it a name and I also would encourage you to put the year and or a life event that was happening at the same time. For many people. They’ll experience kind of a pull,  a seduction to change their eating because of something that is happening around them. Um New Year’s very, very timely for us as I’m recording this. It could also be um a wedding, it could be your own wedding. And um I know weddings were when I was seeing clients individually affected by eating disorders. Someone’s wedding was one of the most common experiences that led to a pretty severe relapse. Um It also could be after giving birth. That was the other one that I saw to be the most prominent relapse time so much. So as if I was working with someone who was preparing to get married or preparing to start a family or pregnant that we would um I would preemptively want to like start planning um how to avoid and also how to like increase support during those times. So much to say, you know, make sure you include any kind of like life event that may be going on for many people. It also could be a transition time of like leaving home, leaving school, starting a new job. Those are important. And the reason why they’re so important is going through these scripts. One by one, you’ll start to notice the themes just like I talked about in the meditation. There are certain poles that will be tells for you like this feeling or this type of life event is usually something that leads me back to a script um not wanting to rely on my body anymore. 

Julie: OK. So the next thing I want you to do after you’ve named the diet or the the the script, the year, the life event that could be also could have also been happening at the same time is to name the spark. Try to get yourself back to your past self when you are thinking about doing this change to your eating. What was the spark that led to it happening to like all the like the everything just lining to make it set up. There is usually a spark of some kind of really positive thing that comes in. And for many people, they talk about the spark of hope. I’ve had lots of clients talk about it as a silver bullet. This is going to be the thing. There’s also a longing people will talk about or acceptance. And also for many of you, it may have been safety. Maybe you were needing to access gender affirming care or fertility treatment. And so you had to show that you could make yourself smaller. Maybe it was just to access certain spaces because you experience different types of marginalization, which we’ll talk about in a second. So name the spark, name the the thing that lit the match. Um in the guided imagery, I talked about the string kind of holding the the very loaded suitcase together and that’s what kind of just kept it even more tightly wound and securely in that um very over full kind of suitcase. 

Julie: Ok. So after you name the spark, I also want you to keep going and name the promise. What did this script? What did it promise you? So for many people, it’s this promise of this is going to be the one, this is the silver bullet. This is going to be the permanent change. I’m finally going to get my shit together. I’m finally going to control my blood sugar. I’m finally going to be able to get a job. You know, there may be some kind of promise that this diet or script was offering you. 

Julie: And along those same lines, I would also ask what were the short term outcomes of following that script? So maybe you tried Atkins 10 years ago and you lost a certain amount of weight that everybody noticed in six months, everybody was giving you pats on the back and out of girls and just was so proud of you. And you may have noticed people treating you differently. You may have been able to access fertility treatment for the first time. You know, they, they what were these short term outcomes? These are all very important because something that I know to be true is every diet has positive short term outcomes. That is why diets and eating sort of behaviors and passed down kind of family rules are so hard to move away from is that every single script will have the ability to have some positive short term outcomes and they like to take credit for them. But like I mentioned in the guided meditation diets, they overpromise and under deliver every single time. There’s yet to be one that doesn’t overpromise and under deliver in the long term. But we’ll get to the long term in a second after you go through short term outcomes for these scripts. 

Julie: The next thing I want you to name and name as many as you need, which systems of oppression contributed to this should eat script. So I talk a lot about systems of oppression on Find Your food Voice. And if you’re new to the podcast, you may be like, what are you talking about? Um And I encourage you to explore what that means. And as someone who is not experiencing many systems of oppression, I’m not going to be the best person to learn about them from. But certainly there are many, many folks that have lived experience and expertise on systems of oppression. And what I also say is the last podcast episode. I talked more about this and we included some references and I’ll put the references again in the show notes for this episode too. But just know if you experience racism, homophobia, transphobia, healthim, ageism, anti bias, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You know, there’s many different ones that also are a part of your scripts that you’ve been given because part of diet culture, part of its nasty like depths of evil with it is they are actually a tool to manipulate us into thinking that there’s something wrong with us when it’s not us that needs to be fixed. So as uncomfortable as it is naming the systems of oppression that are connected to each time you start to explore a new change to your eating. It is one of the foundations of finding your food voice because it’ll help you to move away from shaming yourself, blaming yourself and turning it outward and releasing it into where it really needs to go to really what needs to be fixed because it’s not you and it’s not me. The world needs to be fixed, right? It’s even in the beginning of the podcast every single week. So lets out. Yeah. Which systems of oppression brought you to that spot. 

Julie: And then lastly, what were the long term outcomes by long term? It may mean six months. It may mean five years after. But somewhere in between there, whether you continued with that should eat script or not, there were some long term outcomes and for most of us, those are not positive. Yes, there’s going to be 3% of folks who kept the weight off or never had a high blood sugar reading again. But for the majority of folks, the long term outcomes were weight regain higher than it was before or higher blood pressure, higher blood sugar, higher insulin levels, irregular cycles, more depression eating disorder behaviors that were strengthened and relapse loss of relationships, disconnection, lack of sleep. Um More chronic illness, those all can be like all can come from and caused by a new script. Uh You know, if we specifically look at diet research, the long term outcomes of every diet so far are all these things that I just listed. They literally have been able to find in research that dieting causes higher blood pressure, dieting causes higher blood sugar. Again, these are all long term, not short term because short term, it does the opposite but long term, it causes more cardiovascular events, it causes higher insulin levels. Those are for all my folks listening with PCOS and insulin resistance of some sort. The very thing that you’re told you have to do in order to manage your insulin levels is the very thing that causes it to be worse in the long term. 

Julie: Again, doing this work is very, very hard work and it is really good work for you to do because once you have done at least five of these, again, this could maybe be the last five should eat scripts or this could be the big five that you’ve experienced in your lifetime so far. But having this data, this is better data than any research out there because it’s your data, it’s your lived experience and your lived experience trumps any research. And as you look at all five of these should eat scripts in the meditation, I called them in the maps. Where did they all take you? They probably all took you to the same long term outcomes. And when you want to try a new way to eat, get these out, get these out every time because I want you to have informed consent. Would this new one this new diet or this new kind of behavior that your eating disorder is promoting you to do. Can it really bring you anything different? And if you argue, maybe you’re like, maybe it could. Well, you know, it’s, it’s up to you to decide what you’re going to do. I want you to have informed consent. Maybe you need to change your eating in order to access certain places or to be safe or to get certain um services, heartbreaking and infuriating for me to like think about that. You have to make this kind of choice but that’s not your fault. That’s the systems of oppression contributing to that. And I think it’s also when a person does choose to follow another script, be able to be safer to access certain things that they should get just because they’re human. Um I want you also to remember those long term outcomes because when they happen, it’s not your fault. You are living, you are trying to survive. And again, I want you to remove the shame. I often call it like a shame cloak. I want you to remove that shame cloak. It does not belong to you. 

Julie: All right. I can keep talking for hours on this and I need to end because this is supposed to be a mini. So but alas you know, I like to talk. So we are going to be having a new episode next week. That is back to our regular editing and it’s a chat with the Find Your Food voice team. Um And so I look forward to connecting with you. Then if you, if anything came up for you as you were listening to this episode, um my email inbox is always open. You can get to my email at Julie at Julie Dillon, rd.com. And if you did like this guide imitation and some of the activities, um this is a part of the Find Your Food voice book that is coming out in 2025. So just know there’s more to come. And at some point I’ll have a preorder link. It’s not ready yet. Of course, because I’m in the middle of writing it. But um, any support that you can provide along the lines of pre ordering a book in the future, I would be so, so grateful for because I do believe that the more of us that find our own food voice, it helps others do the same. So, all right. That is all for now. I look forward to connecting with you again next week and until next time, take care.