I have featured many books focused on diet here at World Wise Beauty and most of them have been focused on nutrition. With a mantra calling for all of us to be ‘comfortable in our own skin’, I have never shared books about diets promising to get you at your ideal weight and body type. Health and wellness has always been the focus and remains my commitment. This does not mean I don’t understand wanting to look attractive in our clothes or wanting to feel good about what I see in the mirror when I look at myself. How many conversations have you had with women friends focused on body parts? Admiring their skinny legs or wishing we had a smaller or bigger butt!
This is just touching the surface of this conversation. The things women have done over the history of time to look like whatever the zeitgeist has deemed beautiful, desirable, or acceptable is just sad. One of my first posts at World Wise Beauty was an overview of just how crazy it is to aspire to any body type other than your own. Why is it crazy? Because ideal beauty and body types change with the wind and the culture every 5-10 years! You know what I am talking about!
The industry that has profited from this over the last fifty years has been the ‘DIET’ industry and we can’t ignore that the fashion and beauty industry has conspired. We have to aspire to some ‘ideal’ other than our self for them to thrive and profit. It’s a tangled web and we are all steeped in the culture we are living in. I do think in the last 10 years, younger generations have pulled the wizard’s curtain back and are embracing real beauty and health far better than previous generations. But we are still struggling with body ideals and angst all the time.
The WWB Spring Book Wise selection ‘Find Your Food Voice’ is one of the most insightful books I have read on the ‘diet culture’ and is written by a dietician, nutritionist and eating disorder specialist. Julie Duffy Dillon gives us an eye opening view of the diet industry and then gets down to what we can do to overcome what we have been brainwashed to believe. The diet industry has confused us into conflating health with weight. It has sold us countless diets and told us countless rules that have thoroughly mixed up our relationship with food, with our bodies, and with health. Time to reclaim YOUR body!
If you have been yo-yo dieting for years and seem to never reach your goal, this book is for you. It’s also for anyone struggling with a eating disorder of any kind. It’s also for all of us who just want to be healthy and comfortable in our own skin. I am honored to do this Q&A with Julie Duffy Dillon and thrilled to feature her newly released book ‘Find Your Food Voice’, as the Spring Book Wise pick. Maybe this Spring you won’t be thinking about how to ‘fix’ your body for beaches or weddings and more about how to love and honor your body everyday for the rest of your life. Now that sounds like beautiful flourishing! Read on to learn more…
Laura Connolly, CHC, Founder of World Wise Beauty
Coach Lauroly Q- Welcome Julie! I have to begin by saying, there seems to be a lot of educated health and medical professionals coming out to say (in so many words) “My education has not been enough or sufficient to treat and help my clients.” Even more alarming is they don’t seem to agree with a lot of what they have been trained to practice. This worries me as we live in a dis-information age. We don’t want to throw out the baby with the bath water! Education and a foundational understanding of any discipline is important. For example, today I rely on my gynecologist for blood tests, scans and exams, but I don’t expect a traditional gynecologist to understand how nutrition and lifestyle can affect my female hormonal health. Can you share briefly what your experience and journey has been and what led you to write ‘Find Your Food Voice‘?
I remember getting in trouble during my dietitian training years because I was spending too much time sitting and talking with patients. It makes sense now why I am podcaster and speak for a living! I loved listening to a patient’s rich lived experience and about three years into my career as a dietitian, I started to specialize in helping people with eating disorders. It’s something that I found fascinating and which I really enjoyed learning more about. During those early years I also specialized in working with higher-weight kids and their families. While working with kids and their families, I noticed they were not getting compassionate, comprehensive care. I noticed, too, that thin people who had anorexia and bulimia got a lot of sympathy from the medical community while higher-weight clients did not. When reporting on the types of bullying they’d been subjected to, higher-weight kids said they were encouraged to diet, lose weight, and exercise more to prevent the harassment. I witnessed higher-weight people treated like dirt everywhere even in the healthcare setting.
As I listened to the diverse lived experiences coming from higher- weight kids, I picked up on a theme. They were all working so hard! They worked hard to cut out fat or carbs or sugar or calories and they were exercising more. Most were not losing weight or enough weight or they weren’t coming back to see me. I constantly heard: “Julie, you don’t understand.” And I didn’t because I was not living the same life.
I learned we can’t assume scientific knowledge and understanding is the only necessary piece for behavior change. I also learned there are many different paths to health and I don’t get to even define what health is—that decision belongs to the individual. Find Your Food Voice compiles the stories and paths I have witnessed as a seasoned dietitian helping people with a complicated relationship with food. Healthy eating and weight has become perfectionistic and rigid blocking us from an innate knowing how to take care of ourselves. This book promises to help you move away the big boulders blocking access to this wisdom to help you not need to rely on dieting to manage eating anymore.
Coach Lauroly- With so many people failing at diets it makes sense to move away from them and focus on bio-individuality. But imagine there was a book title that read “Eat What You Love, Your Health Will Follow”. Would this be true? To a certain degree we all are conditioned to food based on our upbringing and the culture we are steeped in. One person’s comfort food may be another’s poison! What I love about your book is you take a broad view at our relationship with food and then guide the reader back to the most important aspect of health—tuning in and listening to our body. Can you speak to this practice when it comes to eating. Is this what is called ‘intuitive eating’?
Would they be obsessed with oxygen? Addicted to it? Of course not. This is a natural, normal, and expected response to not getting adequate air to breathe.
So why do not offer the same understanding when we eat past fullness? Why do we think we have character flaws when we eat something “bad” that we think we need to abstain from? Just like needing the air we breathe, we need food to survive. If our brain has reason to believe we will not get enough to eat—even if we do—it will crave food and think about it often. Just letting yourself gasp for air and take time to recover, we need to do the same with food. Just like a person gasping for air eventually develops a more rhythmic breathing pattern, we will too with food if we give ourselves a chance.
Unfortunately, our diet obsessed culture constantly pulls us back to holding our figurative breath, so binge eating and emotional eating will continue to occur. This doesn’t mean we are broken rather it means our world needs to be fixed. We need to continue to honor our food voice—our knowing how to take care of our eating decisions—with compassion appreciating the world has a broken view of food. The more exposure and trust in our food voice brings us closer to the nuance of what each individual needs in fruit and vegetable intake, sleep, movement, and other behaviors to promote health. Holding all of this together will help us promote health for ourselves and others in the community.
Coach Lauroly: I am reassured about your anti-diet mantra because you still believe our Labs are very important to assessing our own health profile. We can listen to our bodies and we can review our labs to illuminate what is going on with our chemistry and organs. Our Labs are very important, but I also found that what is considered ‘normal isn’t what my personal normal should be. There is always personal context. Can you explain how medical science herds us all into a ‘norm’?
Using the above example, many people with insulin resistance and PCOS have normal blood sugar values yet astronomically high insulin levels. A fasting insulin is not yet reliable to give a picture of what is going on, yet self-report is: carb cravings, sluggishness, and fatigue all let us know that the body is having trouble metabolizing carbohydrate for energy and releasing insulin that is not able to do its job. Focusing on weight loss or cutting out food groups will just keep someone from their body’s wisdom and blame the individual. Certainly, healthcare providers blame body size on disease and put the onus on the individual’s diet willpower to fix health. There are other options. Listening to the body while doing nutrition experiments helps an individual to appreciate what they need to promote energy levels, decrease stress, and improve health. These nutrition experiments I refer to as Curious Nutrition. Curious Nutrition experiments with adding foods while aiming to eat enough. It lets the body communicate what is helping and what is not as another piece of information just like lab values. Medical data can guide us yet relying on it only gets in the way to sustainable health options.
Coach Lauroly Close: There is so much more you explore in your book, and particularly about body types and the social shaming that feeds the diet culture and destroys our spirits as woman. We are just scratching the surface here and I encourage everyone who has ever struggled with weight, body image, or medical conditions related to diet to read this book. It will take you on a true wellness journey versus an bottomless loop of discomfort in your mind, body and spirit. At World Wise Beauty we are FOR nurturing your nature and above all being ‘comfortable in your own skin”. Thank you, Julie, for bringing attention to the manipulative diet industry, and helping us learn how we can discern for ourselves what foods are right for us and find OUR OWN food voice. Bravo!
Julie Duffy Dillon Closing: Thank you Coach Lauroly for inviting me to share my book’s message. I hope anyone with a complicated history with food can use it to help them let go of the burden of food decisions. I hope it helps the reader enjoy eating again while having permission to explore different avenues toward health—on their terms! I hope every reader remembers: you are not a failure at eating rather functioning as designed by the oppressive systems pushing the real villain—the diet and weight loss industry.