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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. Welcome to episode 361 of the Find Your Food Voice podcast. Thank you for joining me. I am Julie Duffy Dillon and you have reached a rant in the form of a mini episode.  This is actually part two of the minisodes that are focusing on ‘are anti-diet  dietitians killing us softly?’ It’s in response to a recent Washington Post article. We have it linked in the show notes for you in case you’ve missed it. I would say go back and listen to part one if you haven’t listened to it, but fuck the rules. You can do whatever you want. Maybe you wanna start with this one because of the title, that we’re going through this one is this is one of the big points that the Washington Post article makes about the reason why anti-diet dietitians are really harming us. They basically say that weight gain means that rejecting diets is obviously wrong. I have a lot of issues with this assumption and I am going to explore how they’re saying it because they don’t come out and just say that directly. And why I have issue with this. There’s lots of nuance if you are considering moving away from diets,  if you are trying to recover from your eating disorder and don’t want to rely on a diet anymore. I encourage you to explore the nuance with this topic and this Washington Post article really unfortunately does not explore the nuance that I think it should have when it comes to this conversation. So I’m gonna get to that in just a moment and before we get to a sponsor break I want to let you know that the Find Your Food Voice book pre-order link will be ready very very soon. That’s what I’ve been working on this last year so of course I had some things to say about this Washington Post article. I’ve been knee-deep in this conversation. Me and my laptop on my bed, we’ve been doing a lot of research and typing on this conversation. So the pre-order link will be ready for you very soon. I cannot wait to share it with you. Like I said, I have been doing so much in this area and what I’m working on right now are the edits. I have just a few more weeks before I need to send it over to my publisher who will probably request some more edits, but that’s just the way that these things roll but I am so excited again to bring this to you. It is almost almost here. All right we are going to take a quick sponsor break like I said and thank you to the sponsors. You know these are usually just dynamic ads that we place in the podcast. If you’re wondering why we do this I know it’s annoying. I think it’s annoying when I’m listening to podcasts too but for me and the Find Your Food Voice team it is literally the way we’re able to bring you these episodes and keep this podcast independent is by having these dynamic ads placed in there. So, if you want to support the show for free, if you just listen to them, that’s the way we can actually still bring in some ad revenue. So thank you in advance for supporting the show and we’ll be right back.

Julie: Welcome back. Let’s answer this question. Does weight gain mean that rejecting diets is obviously wrong? That is a big theme that I got from reading this Washington Post article that they used over and over again and by they, I mean the authors of course, they kept bringing up that weight gain kept happening and that’s why anti-diet  dietitians are harming us, that their message is harming us. Of course, it also goes into some other key areas including Big Food, which will be the subject of the next mini-sode, but right now we are just looking at the weight gain portion.  And what I gathered is that they were trying to make the case for the anti-diet moving movement pendulum just swinging too far. like now it’s too radical and the weight gain is the proof. So something I did agree with is the article talks about how the anti-diet movement has gained popularity with millennials and Gen Z as they have watched their almond moms struggle to keep themselves small. Now do you have an almond mom? Do you know what that means? I mean it’s basically a parent who was like encouraged to diet, to keep themselves relevant, but then also teach their kids to diet. Certainly, I’m a product of that generation. And because of this like very kind of rigid way of eating and how it has damaged our relationships, many millennials and Gen Z and it could be maybe you a listener identify with this, how you noticed how harmful that was, how that kept you from experiencing some things that you could have experienced. Some joys with being brought up and just yeah like experiencing your life because your mom was so or another parent was just so knee deep in following some kind of rigid diet and so with with this trend, with this like gaining popularity, it became a trend. And you know, something I remember having a conversation about many, many years ago, gosh, this was before I had kids. So my oldest just turned 16. So this had to be about 20 years ago. I remember going to my hairstylist’s, his name was Steven. I went to him for many, many years. And see Steven was someone who before before becoming a hairstylist, was also in the modeling and fashion industry, worked in makeup and styling. And so I got to ask him some questions about the sociology of fashion and how trends work. And so I was like, “How do you know what’s going to be trendy?” And he’s like, “Oh, that’s easy. It’s just the opposite of what is trendy right now.” And so I think about the anti-diet movement, how it became this trend in response to so much rigidity. The late ’90s and early 2000s, what I remember, and that’s when I was in my 20s, in the ’90s I was in high school and college, but then in the early 2000s I was in my 20s, I can remember the very stick thin with really big boobs being basically the trendy body type. And when folks a little bit younger than me started to notice how dreadfully sad, constantly dieting and starving yourself and trying to attain this thin thin thin body, which for most people just wasn’t going to happen even if they were practicing an eating disorder. Of course the trend is going to be the opposite, just like Steven predicted, right?

Julie: And the anti -diet kind of way of connecting to food became popular. So in this Washington Post article, the authors’ cite an interview with someone who experimented with intuitive eating and anti-diet tools and this person explored how that experience was for them and one of the things that they experienced was weight gain. So, let’s unpack weight gain as it relates to moving away from dieting. If you can recall what I was just talking about with trends and a pendulum swinging, it’s a really good metaphor for also mending your food voice. If you’re someone who has been dieting or in the throes of an eating disorder for a very long time, moving away from them will feel exhilarating, exciting, and scary as fuck. It’ll feel probably pretty violent, even just like this like very energetic kind of swing in the other direction and for many people a part of that repair work also includes weight gain. There is absolutely no way to predict if you will gain weight as a part of your healing process. Anyone who says that they can help you not gain weight is full of shit I’ve been doing this for over 20 years now, there’s no way to predict it. For many people their weight stays the same, others it goes down, and for others it goes up. There’s no way to really predict it. But what if you do gain weight in a response to moving away from dieting? It’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s just a thing. It just happens and it’s common for folks for two different reasons. One, if you have been dieting or restricting because of an eating disorder, for whatever reason you weren’t eating enough, doing that is something that slows down a person’s metabolism. This is something that research has been able to show is that like not eating enough calories or whatever you’re counting, but basically it comes down to not eating enough, ends up making your metabolism slow down because it gets used to it. It just gets used to running on less. And so then when you go back and add in an amount of food that is more humane, weight gain happens for many, many people, especially if you have been dieting for a very long time. It is a very common experience. Then also this happens, weight gain happens for folks, because weight gain is a sign of repair. So if someone is in a lower weight body, in the throes of eating disorder, you’ll often hear people talk about their weight range they need to get to, they need to gain weight in order to recover. There’s phrases like weight restoration. And of course, that is something that is focusing just on people who are smaller to begin with in the recovery process. The majority of people who experience anorexia, whether you’ve been diagnosed or not, the majority of people with anorexia are not in thin bodies. They’re actually in higher weight bodies. Unfortunately, that’s considered to be atypical anorexia, which is total bullshit because it is the most typical, but whatever. So for many folks who did not start at a lower weight body but still in just as deadly of a place as someone who was in a lower weight body, both will gain weight. It’s just a part of the recovery and repair process. Weight gain is a sign of healing and I know not everyone likes to hear that but again after 20 years that’s what I’ve noticed.

Julie: For folks who’ve experienced food insecurity, starvation, famine, or been living in diet culture, whatever the reason a person is not eating enough, when they finally start to get enough, weight gain happens. And that’s a sign of healing and repair. The authors of this article consider weight gain as only a bad thing. And it’s proof to them that the anti-diet movement is not working. All it is proof of is their own anti-fat bias. I hope you heard me. Weight gain is not proof that anti-diet tools don’t work. Anti-diet tools are helping so many people and some of those people are gaining weight and that doesn’t mean it’s not working. All it’s doing is highlighting where anti-fat bias still lies. So the person interviewed in this Washington Post article talks about their experiences with the weight gain. And they went back to dieting because they experienced not being fit in places. They felt like they were experiencing more rejection. It hurt their confidence. So of course, like we all want to belong. We all want to be safe, and we all want to experience life and living in a higher weight body for many people will keep that from happening in our current environment. Does that mean the anti diet movement is wrong? No, it means that the diet industry is wrong for continually to continuing to perpetuate thinness as a healthy thing and the only way to promote health. And that higher weight is bad. These are things that we can correct as a society. But for the person who was interviewed in the article, if this person had just experienced acceptance and a world that welcomed her and made room for her and said your body is acceptable, just as it is today, would she have gone back to dieting? The person also describes feeling out of breath going upstairs, and that was another reason why this person went back to dieting and like, “Man, what if that person had gone to their doctor and experienced weight-inclusive care and the doctor had gone to the doctor?” “Oh, do you want me to help you with endurance? We can get you into physical therapy to help to make going upstairs and going on longer walks and hikes more accessible to you by building up your strength and your cardiovascular output.” It’s something that a trainer could help with. But no, they were just told, “It’s your weight to blame. Go fix it.” And unfortunately, this person got sucked right back into the diet trap, I’m sure, and told it’s their fault moving forward if they start to experience those symptoms again or when inevitably weight gain happens again.

Julie: Oh So I hope that, I need to stop because this is supposed to be a minisode, But I hope I impact at this point enough to bring some clarity to you. Part 3 of the series is all about Big Food. So Big Food and anti-diet dietitians, we’re in bed together and you know, we anti-diet dietitians, we are very spicy. So this is going to be a shit show, I’m sure. But I’m going to explore what has been brought up for me in this article as it relates to Big Food. So I look forward to being in your podcast feed then. Hit subscribe so you you don’t miss it. It should be out in a few days, but I’m not exactly sure because again, I am supposed to be editing my book, not doing these podcast episodes, but I gotta, I just have to get it out. Anyway, I look forward to connecting with you soon. Bye for now.