What if your food noise is painful insight into diet trauma?
Gain the steps to repair your food noise and replace with your food voice
Sponsored by Find Your Food Voice.
Hey there Voice Finder,
How is today? If you are open to it, consider placing one hand on your heart and one on your belly. Let your gaze soften and take a slow breathe in and out. Notice your heart beating. Your breathe coming in and out. Just like your heart will beat and your breathe will come, your food voice is speaking. It won’t always be clear but your food voice is there.
Finding your food voice in 2025 has proven to be tough work. I am so proud of you.
If you are a new Voice Finder—welcome! I am currently sending out weekly emails based on individual chapters of Find Your Food Voice—my book published this past March.
Even if you haven’t read the book, these questions are written to help you along your non-diet process and recovery.
Want to catch up? Here are the book discussion entries so far:
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Let’s get to Chapter 8: Mend.
To move these feelings through you (and this chapter will bring them up to the surface), begin by listening to Chapter 8’s first song included in the Voice Finder Playlist.
I have a secret: this chapter was hard to write. I told you chapter 2—outlining oppressive systems—brought out my perfectionism more than any other. Chapter 8 with its focus on your diet trauma felt different and heavy. This type of trauma is rarely discussed yet when clients discover the trauma as a block to recovery, they find firmer footing with their food voice.
Although tough write I was determined to include it in Find Your Food Voice.
Psychologically, there’s relief in naming an experience as a trauma. But 2 years ago (yup that’s how long ago I wrote this chapter) everyone was talking about food noise.
Food noise refers to constant food thoughts with the compulsion to eat. With the popularity of GLP-1s like Ozempic, the phrase gained hashtag fame on TikTok. Just like food addiction, food noise appears to capture the persistent and exhausting experiences many of us have with food.
Just like putting your finger on a complicated emotion, the collective bond over food noise helps move folks from isolation to community. When we feel less alone, we can heal. I love this part of the food noise conversation.
Unfortunately, current food noise connotation blocks access to healing our relationship with food with or without GLP-1s.
Where are we getting it wrong? Food noise seeks to explain this noisy eating dynamic as a defect or deficiency.
But what if that’s wrong? What if silencing food noise keeps us from really what is going on? Food noise alerts us to diet trauma.
Sponsored by Find Your Food Voice.
A review from Intuitive Eating co-author Elyse Resch:
“With an engaging and readable manner, Find Your Food Voice will guide you back to your eating wisdom that has been confiscated by diet culture. Written with deep honesty and compassion, this book will challenge you to confront the lies that you’ve been fed by the diet and wellness industries. With renewed trust in your inner voice, you will build a joyful relationship with food, that embraces you with the safety and freedom that you’ve been missing.”
Can dieting actually be traumatic?
With so many people dieting, how can a diet be that bad?
Withholding food from your body traumatizes you. I am not being dramatic. We need five basic needs to maintain life as evolved humans. They include:
Oxygen
Hydration
Sleep
Shelter (Warmth)
Food
Imagine walking up to a lake after a dramatic rescue. Someone drowning in the dark waters was pulled to safety. You see the near drowning victim gasping for air in shock. A few minutes later, you see her weeping as what almost happened overwhelms her. Shaking with tears streaming down her face it takes her hours to recover. During this time, the ambulance comes and administers first aid. She’s given supplemental oxygen and warm blankets. You are not surprised to hear months later, she is too frightened to go near large bodies of water, has anxious thoughts about drowning, and nightmares about not being saved.
This was traumatic. We need to breathe to stay alive. Her body, while recovering, took time to breathe normally again. The trauma replayed in her mind to keep her safer in the future. This type of event has lasting effects and we can easily name its trauma.
If we need oxygen to survive and when it is withheld we experience trauma, wouldn’t it be the same for sleep? Lack of hydration? Being unhoused?
And that is why dieting is traumatic too.
You may activate your diet trauma creating food noise when:
eating a food or doing an exercise that you frequently relied on while dieting
seeing someone who has clearly lost weight whether they dieted or not
experiencing panic hunger
eating past fullness
thinking about starting a new diet
🗣 Discussion time: Do you believe you have been traumatized by the push to eat less, exercise more, and lose weight? What is it like to name it a trauma?
Diet trauma will make finding your food voice more complicated because triggers will activate body cues for an emergency. Every cell in your body remembers how you survived going without enough food. Your body will do whatever it takes to keep you alive even if the threat doesn’t feel real to you.
Keep this in mind: your diet trauma recollection is a strength not a weakness. This is your evolved mind, body, and soul on your side rooting for you to continue to reject your I-Should-Eat scripts (another term for diets or eating disorder behaviors in Find Your Food Voice).
What do you do with activated diet trauma?
In the Find Your Food Voice free workbook (click here to get to it!) you’ll find a diet trauma worksheet helping you through the process. On page 167 in the Find Your Food Voice book, I provide the steps to take including:
Name it.
Accept what is.
Ask yourself a question: What is this fear waking up?
Give permission.
Try to be patient.
Discussion time: Let’s get a plan together for your future self. Next time you experience activated diet trauma, what do you hope you provide future you? What would feel supportive?
To move these feelings through you, conclude the discussion questions with Chapter 8’s next song included in the Voice Finder Playlist.
I am sending you a big consensual hug if you want one. Discovering and tending to your diet trauma is hard work. And it’s good work. I am so proud of you.
What’s next?
Chapter 9’s book discussion questions arrive in your inbox Friday July 18th. Also look for the next Find Your Food Voice podcast episode on Tuesday July 15th.
Until then, take care.
Warmly,
Julie
p.s. Don’t forget the Find Your Food Voice book bonuses—it’s a free workbook to help you keep track of your gathered insight. Get to it here.
p.p.s. Can I invite myself to your Find Your Food Voice bookclub? If your bookclub chooses Find Your Food Voice I will gladly meet up with you in person in central NC or via Zoom free of charge. Just email me julie@juliedillonrd.com. I would be honored to be a part of the discussion.
So loving this. Excellent points.