🔥 Food and body shame grow in isolation so let’s burn it down. Here's your match.
Let's unpack how healthcare diet recommendations altered your food and body relationship with this Chapter 1 Find Your Food Voice book discussion.
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Hey there Voice Finder,
Have you met Matilda? She is the first person I introduced in the Find Your Food Voice book. She was also the very first client with PCOS I worked with after I swore off diets forever.
At our initial meeting she asked me (page 10):
“Do you believe me? I have tried all the diets and none has worked.
I promise I was not doing anything wrong.”It was easy for me to believe Matilda. She wasn’t the first person in a higher-weight body diet their life away with no outcomes to speak of except a complicated relationship with food and body shame. I paused before answering. Instead of enthusiastically yelling yes! I wanted to know more.
“What makes you ask, Matilda?”
What Matilda said next has been repeated now at least a thousand times on that same green couch. Healthcare providers told her there was no way she was actually eating that little or exercising that much— if she were doing all those things, she would’ve lost weight by now and her cycles would’ve normalized. Sometimes they didn’t even ask Matilda what diet she had been following and merely recommended higher calorie amounts or carb restrictions significantly looser than those Matilda was already torturing herself with.
Healthcare providers always assumed she was eating too much or spending her time too sedentarily. I have a feeling the word “noncompliance” was written in her chart notes because her weight loss wasn’t going as the provider planned.
I told Matilda what I want to tell you: I believe you and I am sorry others haven’t.
I shared Matilda’s doctor story because clients taught me how common this experience is yet it creates pulls toward isolation.
Shame grows in isolation so let’s burn it down.
🔥 Let’s start the discussion. Share in the comment box below if you feel ok giving others a peek into your lived experiences. I have a feeling together we can extinguish parts of healthcare harm.
Have you experienced similar things as Matilda while accessing healthcare? What have you experienced at the doctor? Did you feel listened to? Seen? Treated with dignity?
How did these healthcare experiences impact your relationship with food and your body? With accessing future healthcare?
Thank you for thinking through these tough questions. You are doing great work!
I wrote Find Your Food Voice because I noticed common Intuitive Eating blocks. They include:
Too much reliance on the hunger/fullness scale.
De-valuing unconditional permission to eat.
All-or-nothing food thoughts so ingrained from the diet industry.
Focusing more on physical health instead of holistically. We are more than just our physical health—we also have emotional and spiritual health.
De-valuing oppressive systems like poverty, racism, weight bias, and misogyny.
Believing health outcomes mostly rely on individual behavior change.
If you have read Intuitive Eating and felt like it didn’t work for you, I encourage you to give Find Your Food Voice a try. I introduce the concept of a Food Voice within this first chapter. Here’s what a Food Voice is:
Your Food Voice is an internal system you were 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. This communication may also be through thoughts and feelings or guided by structured self-care techniques. Your Food Voice will be unique to the individual yet always flexible, kind, and nurturing. Its primary function is to help the person prioritize eating enough. It is a knowing with an unconditional permission for food yet compassionate when outside circumstances block access.
This book is written to be a guide on your food voice journey. Consider what you want to be different with food moving forward. Also consider what you want to remain the same.
📣 Let’s get back to some questions. Share in the comment box below as a way to grab your figurative megaphone so the diet industry hears:
Which food and body wishes do you want to put on pause (Dorinda-style IYKYK)?
Which food and body wishes do you no longer want to pursue?
Which food and body wishes do you want to pull even closer? What makes you want to start with these? (Remember–no right or wrong answers.)
Recovering from dieting and/or an eating disorder is messy and non-linear. You may feel alone yet please remind yourself often that me and thousands of fellow Voice Finders are slogging forward too. Ann White, one of my clinical supervisors while I worked as a therapist at a children’s hospice, often would say to me “It’s hard work and it’s good work.” I say the same to you as you make your first (or thousandth) step away from dieting.
Next week (Friday May 23) I will drop Chapter 2’s discussion questions. If you got something out of this discussion so far, liking and especially re-stacking (a Substack thing in case you are reading this email) helps more people find my work—so TIA!!
Warmly,
Julie