Find Your Food Voice

Ring in the new year a NEW way: without body hate and painful diets. This bonus episode is a part of my #FoodPeace series supporting your way of life promoting health without diets.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Have you hit diet rock bottom? Do you feel ready for self-love and food peace, but still feel like food is your number one enemy? Are you just plain scared of food, and terrified to abandon the diet mentality and finally embrace health at every size? Listen now for some tips on how to move forward. Subscribe and leave a review here in just seconds. Key Points: Reflections on National Dieting Month (January), my hashtag project, #foodpeace, and my weekly Food Peace Newsletter! Diet rock bottom: the understanding that diets don't work! ... but it can be a tough and lonely place. The New Year shenanigans: dieting and "self-improvement" can run rampant during this time of the year, and it can easily suck you back into the diet mentality. Dieting is seductive because it shows the world that you "have your shit together," especially if you "succeed" in losing the weight. It makes you feel in control of your life... but this is a sham! It's a fantasy. Dieting is not sustainable, and weight loss is not sustainable. How do you define "healthy" for you? Does it include yo-yo dieting, food and weight obsession, or social isolation? These habits do not promote lifelong health, happiness, or wellbeing. We need to redefine what healthy living means, and that definition may be very different from the definition we've been fed our whole lives. My definition of healthy living: Living a life that's connecting to others, to experiences, to challenges, and to joy; engaging in kind, intuitive choices; choosing self-compassion. "There's no way a long-term solution to health includes ignoring or punishing your hunger." - Julie Self-compassion is key when reflecting back on any of our food choices. When healing from diet culture, we're going to make mistakes... LOTS of them. We must approach these with compassion and understand that it's a part of the process. Our world is one that promotes dieting as normal eating. Recovery from dieting is going to take about a year or more, and the involvement of any kind of eating disorder will lengthen this process considerably, so give yourself the time to heal! Choosing not to diet is NEVER the same as letting yourself go!!! It is letting yourself BE. It is giving yourself the opportunity to experience joy, compassion, and wellbeing. Food is not the enemy. Instead, it should promote nourishment, health, connection, and peace. Show Notes: Link to subscribe to the weekly FREE Food Peace Newsletter. It is sent out every Tuesday morning and no spam EVER. By signing up, I will also send you Love Food's Season 1's Food Peace Syllabus. Eating Disorder Dietitians Julie Dillon RD blog Do you have a complicated relationship with food? I want to help! Send your Dear Food letter to LoveFoodPodcast@gmail.com.  Click here to leave me a review in iTunes and subscribe. This type of kindness helps the show continue! Thank you for listening to the Love, Food series. Give me feedback via Twitter @EatingPermitRD. This episode is sponsored by my friends at Green Mountain at Fox Run. A special promotion for Love Food listeners: Join Green Mountain at Fox Run for their Binge & Emotional Eating Weekend Intensive (January 20-22, 2017). Participants will explore personal barriers and how to counter them with evidence-based strategies to prevent eating in response to stress and emotions. For more information or to register, please visit https://www.fitwoman.com/therapy-services-eating-disorder/offerings/binge-eating-intensive-weekend/. TAKE TIME TO INVEST IN YOU. It’s time to shine the light on yourself and make YOURSELF the priority. Here at Green Mountain at Fox Run, we’re all about embracing and supporting yourself through self-care. Through powerful tools such as mindfulness techniques, stress management skills, and movement that is customized to your body and fitness level, you’ll learn to practice self-care in your daily life. Visit https://www.fitwoman.com/ for more information.    Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Can you not remember the last time you ate without being on some kind of diet? Do you feel anxious and preoccupied about your food choices? Do you feel like you use food to escape your life, and avoid intense emotions? Are you consumed by feelings of loneliness, and find yourself trying to use food to fill that hole? Listen now to get some insight on these issues. Subscribe and leave a review here in just seconds. Key Points: Dieting harms us and disconnects us from our own innate wisdom about our health. We associate the word "skinny" with positive attributes, and the word "fat" with negative attributes, but these are FALSE TRUTHS fed to us via toxic diet culture. Erica Leon joins to talk about our cultural ideas around "skinny" and "fat," and diet culture overall. We often diet to feel in control, but inevitably it does the opposite and makes us feel out of control instead! This pain is so VALID, and our pain surrounding food and our bodies is so, so common. Perfection is not reality!! Using food to cope is an understandable reaction to trauma... but this means that we must tackle the emotional underbelly of our relationship with food. We must let go of dieting, begin to trust our inner wisdom, and understand that all foods fit! This process can cause a lot of uncomfortable emotions to arise, and so having additional mental health support is very important during this process. Dieting, disordered eating, and eating disorders have a function! They allow us to get through trauma, and we cannot discount how important these behaviors are in the context of our journeys. Therapy is such an important adjunctive piece of healing a client's relationship with food and their bodies, especially when working with a nutrition therapist who may not be able to support clients in that mental health capacity. Our relationship with food is about so much MORE than the food! Discomfort means you're GROWING!! Keep going... The first step of intuitive eating is to let go of the diet mentality. This can trigger the feeling of being out of control, and having the support of a dietitian in this phase can be super important! This is when we start to tune into our hunger and fullness, explore food in a new way, and observe everything with non-judgmental awareness. Feeling out of control with diets might be the first step away from diets... but this feeling does NOT last forever! Part of this process is rediscovering foods you may have not liked in the past, things you thought you loved that you don't like anymore, and just feeling it all out by asking yourself questions and reconnecting to your wisdom. You are not alone!!! Show Notes: Link to subscribe to the weekly FREE Food Peace Newsletter. It is sent out every Tuesday morning and no spam EVER. By signing up, I will also send you Love Food's Season 1's Food Peace Syllabus. Intuitive Eating, 3rd ed. by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch Eat What You Love, Love What You Eat by Michelle May --> This week's Food Peace Syllabus addition #1 The Diet Survivor's Handbook by Ellen Frankel and Judith Matz --> This week's Food Peace Syllabus addition #2 Erica's website, intuitive eating workshops, Facebook page, and FREE webinar! Eating Disorder Dietitians Julie Dillon RD blog Do you have a complicated relationship with food? I want to help! Send your Dear Food letter to LoveFoodPodcast@gmail.com.  Click here to leave me a review in iTunes and subscribe. This type of kindness helps the show continue! Thank you for listening to the Love, Food series. Give me feedback via Twitter @EatingPermitRD. This episode is sponsored by my friends at Green Mountain at Fox Run. A special promotion for Love Food listeners: Join Green Mountain at Fox Run for their Binge & Emotional Eating Weekend Intensive (January 20-22, 2017). Participants will explore personal barriers and how to counter them with evidence-based strategies to prevent eating in response to stress and emotions. For more information or to register, please visit https://www.fitwoman.com/therapy-services-eating-disorder/offerings/binge-eating-intensive-weekend/. Immerse yourself in a practice of mindfulness. Join Green Mountain at Fox Run for "Mindfulness for Women Who Struggle With Food and Body - A Meditative Retreat", designed to help you reduce stress, eat well, move joyfully, and guide the way toward ending eating and food struggles. For dates and registration information, please visit www.fitwoman.com/weight-loss-program-reinvented/2017-mindfulness-weekend/. The Women’s Center for Binge and Emotional Eating at Green Mountain at Fox Run is the only clinical program in the nation solely for women suffering with binge & emotional eating. Their insurance-eligible program is backed by over 40 years of experience and is staffed by licensed clinicians. Their program has created life-altering changes by helping women to manage emotional overeating through the practice of mindfulness. For more information, visit www.fitwoman.com/binge.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Are you trying to reconnect to your own innate wisdom with your body and food? Do you feel obsessed with food, especially during the holiday season? Has "clean-eating" become the focal point of your life, and does the idea of eating non "clean" foods make you anxious? Listen now for some ways to combat the holiday diet stress, and to free yourself from the guilt around food. Subscribe and leave a review here in just seconds. Key Points: Food is something that connects us to our family and our culture, but diet culture makes food WAY too important and obsessive, and that preoccupation removes the connecting and pleasurable components of food. Use the hashtag #foodpeace to join in my discussion about alternatives to diets throughout the next few weeks, which are bound to be full of diet talk (January is national dieting month!). Finding pleasure in food contributes to your overall quality of life and health!! Food provides a connection to people around us, and when we get in the way of that, EVERYTHING suffers. Orthorexia: a condition in which a person relates to food in a moralized way (think "good" and "bad" foods) that becomes overwhelming and creates a negative relationship to food. Jennifer McGurk joins for some more insight on food peace! Our culture places so much emphasis on health, and conflates weight loss and clean eating with being healthy. WE GIVE FOOD WAY TOO MUCH POWER!!! How do we change our relationship with food and find food peace? How do we take back our power and control in our lives without trying to exercise power and control over our food? The ways in which we relate to food can be a metaphor for other things that we are struggling with in our lives! Orthorexia may not be a full-blown eating disorder, but it IS a form of disordered eating... we don't know enough about it yet to really have a full grasp of its impact on mental health. First step to healing: make a list of pros and cons of eating in this "clean," controlled way. Pros: control Cons: guilt, disconnection from family and friends around food because you can't join them in certain meals, thoughts and emotions are obsessive about food and make you feel out of control, sacrificing parts of your life! So do the cons outweigh the pros?? Recovery from orthorexia takes time! Working with an eating disorder dietitian can help, as well as proper nutrition education (we need "healthy" foods just as much as we need "unhealthy" foods!). Increased moodiness and decreased sleep is a big sign of disordered eating. Carbohydrates are IMPORTANT!!! Taking the focus off the food and focusing more on individual positive health may be a helpful mindset shift. Let's label food not as "healthy" or "unhealthy," but just as what it is. An apple is an apple, plain and simple. Bring food back to the present, rather than interacting with food in an anxiety-driven, future focused, "Is this food going to kill me????" kind of way. ALL FOODS FIT! "Clean eating is washing your food and making sure that it's cooked to the right temperature. There is no such thing as dirty eating unless your food literally comes from the ground and has dirt on it." - Jennifer Orthorexia carries implications for those around us... if some of us are eating "clean," then are the rest of us eating dirty??? NO! Eating "well" doesn't have to be black and white... we can eat our ice pops and also go to the farmers market. "Our relationships are more important than our food choices." - Julie Nutritional health has a lot more to do with our mental health and our emotional health than we've ever realized before... let's cross our fingers for some more research!! Let's give ourselves permission to have fun with food and our family... Just remember, how would it feel to be at peace with food? The importance of mental health as it impacts our physical health cannot be ignored." - Julie Having such rigid rules around food may actually result in negative consequences to our health. Food is just not as black and white as we want it to be... apples won't cure all ills and cheeseburgers won't kill us! You don't need forgiveness for the food choices you make!! Show Notes: Link to subscribe to the weekly FREE Food Peace Newsletter. It is sent out every Tuesday morning and no spam EVER. By signing up, I will also send you Love Food's Season 1's Food Peace Syllabus. Dr. Steven Bratman's Essay on Orthorexia "How to Take Back Your Power From Food this Holiday Season" by Julie Duffy Dillon Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) Pamela Kelle, RD "No food is healthy. Not even kale." by Michael Ruhlman The Rules of "Normal" Eating by Karen Koenig --> This week's Food Peace Syllabus addition Jennifer's book on private practice, Pursuing Private Practice Jennifer's Nutrition Counseling and Consulting, Eat With Knowledge  Eating Disorder Dietitians Julie Dillon RD blog Do you have a complicated relationship with food? I want to help! Send your Dear Food letter to LoveFoodPodcast@gmail.com.  Click here to leave me a review in iTunes and subscribe. This type of kindness helps the show continue! Thank you for listening to the Love, Food series. Give me feedback via Twitter @EatingPermitRD. This episode is sponsored by my friends at Green Mountain at Fox Run. A special promotion for Love Food listeners: Join Green Mountain at Fox Run for their Binge & Emotional Eating Weekend Intensive (January 20-22, 2017). Participants will explore personal barriers and how to counter them with evidence-based strategies to prevent eating in response to stress and emotions. For more information or to register, please visit https://www.fitwoman.com/therapy-services-eating-disorder/offerings/binge-eating-intensive-weekend/. Immerse yourself in a practice of mindfulness. Join Green Mountain at Fox Run for "Mindfulness for Women Who Struggle With Food and Body - A Meditative Retreat", designed to help you reduce stress, eat well, move joyfully, and guide the way toward ending eating and food struggles. For dates and registration information, please visit www.fitwoman.com/weight-loss-program-reinvented/2017-mindfulness-weekend/. The Women’s Center for Binge and Emotional Eating at Green Mountain at Fox Run is the only clinical program in the nation solely for women suffering with binge & emotional eating. Their insurance-eligible program is backed by over 40 years of experience and is staffed by licensed clinicians. Their program has created life-altering changes by helping women to manage emotional overeating through the practice of mindfulness. For more information, visit www.fitwoman.com/binge.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Do you feel like your preoccupation and shame around food and your body end up making you miss out on parts of your life? Do you feel embarrassed and judged by your size, and often find other peoples' comments about your weight triggering? Are you a person of size trying to navigate the professional world of health and nutrition while still feeling comfortable in your own skin? Listen now for some solutions on overcoming the shame and judgment around your body size. Subscribe and leave a review here in just seconds. Key Points: The importance of size diversity in the nutrition and dietetics profession. Diets and kids: So often, kids are put on diets at a young age because they are considered "overweight." This often does more harm than good, and ends up creating a breeding ground for a disordered relationships with food to grow. Lauren Anton joins to answer the writer's letter! The unfair expectations placed on people in the health and wellness professions to look and act a certain way. Surround yourself with like-minded folks who subscribe to an all-foods-fit, HAES mentality rather than people who are obsessed with food, calories, over-exercising, and dieting in order to avoid being around people who might be entrenched in weight stigma. Some schools are adding advocacy and size diversity to their nutrition curriculum! Weight loss is not the goal!!! Let's be advocates of size diversity, rather than forcing everyone into one specific body type. Would you say an English bulldog should look like a pit bull???? AKA, our bodies are the size and shape they are meant to be, and we should never try to force them to be something different. "The body's gonna do what it will." - Lauren How we relate to food mirrors how we relate to others and ourselves. If we let judgment control our food choices, it only leads to weight cycling and a tumultuous relationship with food. We must learn to love, respect, and accept ourselves! Being in a larger body is not the bad thing. The way we treat and perceive the larger body is the bad thing. Mindful eating and hunger/fullness techniques are not another diet! Part of engaging with food is allowing joy. You are worthy of nourishment no matter your size!!! Show Notes: Link to subscribe to the weekly FREE Food Peace Newsletter. It is sent out every Tuesday morning and no spam EVER. By signing up, I will also send you Love Food's Season 1's Food Peace Syllabus. I am a Fat Nutrition Student...Can I still be a dietitian? HELL YES! Link here to Ep 6 where discussed with Glenys Oyston RD Poodle Science HAES video Health at Every Size by Linda Bacon Lindabacon.org Mindful Eating by Jan Chozen Bays Our fab guest Lauren Anton RD's contact info: Arrive Nutrition, @laurenantonrd, @lganutrition Eating Disorder Dietitians Julie Dillon RD blog Do you have a complicated relationship with food? I want to help! Send your Dear Food letter to LoveFoodPodcast@gmail.com.  Click here to leave me a review in iTunes and subscribe. This type of kindness helps the show continue! Thank you for listening to the Love, Food series. Give me feedback via Twitter @EatingPermitRD. This episode is sponsored by my friends at Green Mountain at Fox Run. A special promotion for Love Food listeners: Immerse yourself in a practice of mindfulness. Join Green Mountain at Fox Run for "Mindfulness for Women Who Struggle With Food and Body - A Meditative Retreat", designed to help you reduce stress, eat well, move joyfully, and guide the way toward ending eating and food struggles. For dates and registration information, please visit www.fitwoman.com/weight-loss-program-reinvented/2017-mindfulness-weekend/. The Women’s Center for Binge and Emotional Eating at Green Mountain at Fox Run is the only clinical program in the nation solely for women suffering with binge & emotional eating. Their insurance-eligible program is backed by over 40 years of experience and is staffed by licensed clinicians. Their program has created life-altering changes by helping women to manage emotional overeating through the practice of mindfulness. For more information, visit www.fitwoman.com/binge.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Have you worked really hard to stop hating your body but feel like your family keeps holding you back? Do you find yourself dealing with the food police within your own family, even after you've begun to make peace with food yourself? Do you have family that encourages fat shaming and diet culture, even when you feel like you're doing your best to rid yourself of the mindset?? Listen now as Julie tackles this family-oriented topic and introduces some solutions. Subscribe and leave a review here in just seconds. Key Points: What is the experience of finding peace with food while family members surrounding us stay stuck in the diet mentality? Fat shaming can come from people we care about! Setting our own boundaries is SUPER important in trying to protect your own recovery. The world that we live in isn't one of body-positivity, HAES, and size acceptance. This means that when we pursue recovery, we are going against the vast majority of society, and sometimes that means our families. This makes the work harder to do, but it is that much more important! Going against family dynamics is super hard, and when we actively follow our own path, it is common to feel pressure to go with the flow and back off of our own personal work in order to appease the family. When we RECOGNIZE any emotion we are having, it automatically diffuses it and breaks its power. How to beat body comparison: recognize the emotion, remove its power, and counteract with readily available responses of self-compassion. How do we connect with our self-compassion?? We must actively find ways to support self-compassion for the moments in which we feel vulnerable. Remember, our feelings and experiences are not going to last forever!! Have some ready-made comebacks to assert your recovery, either by facing it head on or by changing the subject. Surviving the Holidays and National Diet Month : #SoAnyway How do we empower ourselves to connect to peace and health and feeling comfortable in our own skin? When we provide new visuals for ourselves that are more size-diverse, it provides another option for our brains to think that OTHER kinds of bodies are beautiful too! IT'S NOT OUR JOB TO FIX OUR FAMILY! We should spend our energy on keeping ourselves safe, setting our own boundaries, and focusing on ensuring that we are providing the best modeling for our own family in terms of having a healthy relationship with food. Embrace self-compassion, boundaries, and self-care. Show Notes: Link to subscribe to the weekly FREE Food Peace Newsletter. It is sent out every Tuesday morning and no spam EVER. By signing up, I will also send you Love Food's Season 1's Food Peace Syllabus. Dear Virgie: How Do I Deal With My Mom's Fatphobia and Concern Trolling?, Wear Your Voice Embrace, the documentary Secrets of Feeding a Healthy Family by Ellyn Satter Eating Disorder Dietitians Julie Dillon RD blog Do you have a complicated relationship with food? I want to help! Send your Dear Food letter to LoveFoodPodcast@gmail.com.  Click here to leave me a review in iTunes and subscribe. This type of kindness helps the show continue! Thank you for listening to the Love, Food series. Give me feedback via Twitter @EatingPermitRD. This episode is sponsored by my friends at Green Mountain at Fox Run. A special promotion for Love Food listeners: Immerse yourself in a practice of mindfulness. Join Green Mountain at Fox Run for "Mindfulness for Women Who Struggle With Food and Body - A Meditative Retreat", designed to help you reduce stress, eat well, move joyfully, and guide the way toward ending eating and food struggles. For dates and registration information, please visit www.fitwoman.com/weight-loss-program-reinvented/2017-mindfulness-weekend/. The Women’s Center for Binge and Emotional Eating at Green Mountain at Fox Run is the only clinical program in the nation solely for women suffering with binge & emotional eating. Their insurance-eligible program is backed by over 40 years of experience and is staffed by licensed clinicians. Their program has created life-altering changes by helping women to manage emotional overeating through the practice of mindfulness. For more information, visit www.fitwoman.com/binge.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Are you someone who identifies with the emotional eating experience? Have you tried everything to work through emotional eating and bingeing, but still lean on food when things feel intolerable? Do the tools that everyone suggests to you to overcome these problems always seem to fall short? Listen now to get a new perspective and begin to find some relief from emotional eating. Subscribe and leave a review here in just seconds. Key Points: Sometimes we get convinced that nothing will work as good as food in allowing us to cope with our emotional issues. How do we incorporate tools that just don't work with our lifestyle? Eating for emotional comfort just doesn't make us happy in the long run! Ellen Shuman, a therapist who does work specifically with people who struggle with emotional eating, joins us to help answer today's letter! She tells us about her journey to becoming involved in the eating disorder and emotional eating worlds. "The Oprah Effect" Ellen's "Emotional Handrails:" something to attach our mind to in order to tolerate the emotions long enough to figure out what is driving us to emotional eating. It's not about food behavior, it's about being able to internally emotionally regulate! "I've learned how to neutralize the things I'm saying to myself that really are distortions, and not really the truth." - Ellen The whole point of eating emotionally is to be mindLESS, which is why mindFULL eating is such a hard goal for people who deal with emotional eating. "First we learn how to tolerate our thoughts and feelings and to feel more empowered to manage those so [that] we're not so scared they're gonna overwhelm us." - Ellen There are so many tools out there that work better!! It's about intervening BEFORE the food thought hits. Conscious positive behavior replaces conscious negative behavior. Ellen's "To Hell With it Switch:" that moment in which we abandon our promises to "do better" and instead engage in emotional eating to numb out. What's the brain chemistry going on here?? What are the patterns of thinking that trigger our emotional eating? Top brain (pre-frontal cortex) vs. bottom brain (primitive brain). Use self-compassion and self-care to quiet your negative thoughts (middle-brain self-critical statements) that lead to emotional overeating! "I am not my thoughts! Just 'cause I have a food thought doesn't mean I have to act on it." - Ellen "Don't believe everything you think." - Dr. Wayne W Dyer Ellen chats about her program, A Weigh Out which focuses on an end to emotional eating and weight obsession, her free phone seminar session, and the Weigh Out free 3-week membership. If we work on the underlying issues and learn new tools to support our emotional management, then the food issues begin to resolve themselves. Happiness and freedom from food obsession comes from being who we truly are, and working on our emotional coping tools. You are WORTH putting in the effort and figuring this out. Stop blaming yourself... you haven't found the tools yet that work for you! RECOVERY IS POSSIBLE!! Show Notes: Link to subscribe to the weekly FREE Food Peace Newsletter. It is sent out every Tuesday morning and no spam EVER. By signing up, I will also send you Love Food's Season 1's Food Peace Syllabus. Marsha Lineham and DBT Excuses Begone! by Dr. Wayne W Dyer Free Phone Coach Seminar with Ellen A Weigh Out Ellen's free 3-week membership Ellen's contact information: ellen@aweighout.com, (513) 321-4242 Eating Disorder Dietitians Julie Dillon RD blog Do you have a complicated relationship with food? I want to help! Send your Dear Food letter to LoveFoodPodcast@gmail.com.  Click here to leave me a review in iTunes and subscribe. This type of kindness helps the show continue! Thank you for listening to the Love, Food series. Give me feedback via Twitter @EatingPermitRD. This episode is sponsored by my friends at Green Mountain at Fox Run. A special promotion for Love Food listeners: Immerse yourself in a practice of mindfulness. Join Green Mountain at Fox Run for "Mindfulness for Women Who Struggle With Food and Body - A Meditative Retreat", designed to help you reduce stress, eat well, move joyfully, and guide the way toward ending eating and food struggles. For dates and registration information, please visit www.fitwoman.com/weight-loss-program-reinvented/2017-mindfulness-weekend/.  The Women’s Center for Binge and Emotional Eating at Green Mountain at Fox Run is the only clinical program in the nation solely for women suffering with binge & emotional eating. Their insurance-eligible program is backed by over 40 years of experience and is staffed by licensed clinicians. Their program has created life-altering changes by helping women to manage emotional overeating through the practice of mindfulness. For more information, visit www.fitwoman.com/binge.  Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Do you have a health situation that makes intuitive eating difficult? Do you have doctors telling you that weight loss and cutting out certain food groups is required for your wellbeing? Do you just feel lost and want to help guide yourself toward food peace?? Listen now for some first steps on how to tackle it all. Subscribe and leave a review here in just seconds. Key Points: Reflections on the 2016 Election, the President-elect Donald Trump, and the fat phobia that has come along with his campaign. The difficulty in choosing not to diet, and dealing with the pressures from outside sources to continue down that path. Using food as a coping mechanism and a numbing agent for uncomfortable feelings. The vulnerability and fear of being thin. Coping with health issues, such as PCOS, while also dealing with a disordered relationship with food and your body. PCOS: weight gain, hormone destabilization, fatigue... what do we do?? Does intuitive eating really work for PCOS?? Or does "healing" PCOS require weight loss, as so many doctors suggest? The million dollar question: can someone work on intuitive eating (rather than dieting) AND manage their health with PCOS? HELL YES! Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome: a genetic and environmental syndrome that affects someone's hormones, which leads to high insulin levels and insulin resistance. These high insulin levels lead to a high drive to eat, especially carbohydrates, which can lead to weight gain. Weight loss is often the primary treatment from most practitioners. This can make delving into intuitive eating difficult! Other sympotoms can include hair growth and male pattern baldness. These symptoms can have a huge negative impact on the body image of someone dealing with PCOS. Self-care needs to be a priority for people with PCOS, especially getting enough sleep. Those affected with PCOS can actually use the delicate balance of their bodies to delve deeply into intuitive eating! Take notice of energy levels and mood, rather than weight and even hunger cues (hunger cues can be super difficult to interpret with PCOS!). Those with PCOS will probably need more protein than those without, especially at breakfast and before bed, to help with fatigue and appetite (but don't cut out carboydrates or fats!). Focus on healing your body and your soul... Sometimes, it's not about the food!! Sit with your vulnerability. (This is where therapy can come in handy! Therapists allow us the space to sit in that feeling.) Put weight loss on the back burner and check in with your body... how does it feel today? What self-care did I do that worked for me today? This will help lead you to food peace and body peace. Show Notes: Link to subscribe to the weekly FREE Food Peace Newsletter. It is sent out every Tuesday morning and no spam EVER. By signing up, I will also send you Love Food's Season 1's Food Peace Syllabus. PCOS and Food Peace tools Eating Disorder Dietitians Julie Dillon RD blog Do you have a complicated relationship with food? I want to help! Send your Dear Food letter to LoveFoodPodcast@gmail.com.  Click here to leave me a review in iTunes and subscribe. This type of kindness helps the show continue! Thank you for listening to the Love, Food series. Give me feedback via Twitter @EatingPermitRD. This episode was sponsored by my friends at Green Mountain at Fox Run. A special promotion for Love Food listeners: VIP Upgrades at Green Mountain at Fox Run On stays November 6 - December 17, 2016 Green Mountain at Fox Run is offering special upgrades for one+ week reservations through the end of the year. Receive a free room upgrade and $250 credit towards amenities and professional services. See DetailsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Do you have a hard time eating without worrying about "good" and "bad" food labels? Do you feel like food is your enemy? Do you feel overwhelmed by all the nutrition info out there? Join Julie and fellow dietitian Fiona Southerland to start unpacking this issue! Subscribe and leave a review here in just seconds! Key Points: Our bodies have lots of different methods, including our brains and our intuition, to help them figure out what they needs in terms of food in order to feel satisfied and full. Healthy eating includes PLEASURE! Fiona Southerland joins to help answer this week’s letter! Self-compassion and kindness is super important when we confront our beliefs related to food rules. We are not alone… so many of us feel this way. It’s impossible to follow every single food rule! The more we try to follow rules and live in our heads (intellectualizing!), the less we listen to our body and intuition (innate wisdom!). There are so many crazy things going on in the world… why are we focused on whether or not something has gluten in it?! Even the professionals don’t know everything about nutrition… it’s confusing! When we try to control things that weren’t supposed to be controlled (like our food intake) we go haywire. Our culture is confusing health with our appearance (like our body shape). Our expectations about the female body inform our opinions of health. Fiona’s "Build up and let go model:" build up our skills of inner awareness, which will allow us to let go of rigidity. We need skills related to our intuition in order to drop the food rules and stick to it! How do we find a stable place outside of food when we feel out of control with our body? The wise parts of us are not perfect! Intuitive eating can become another set of diet rules… don’t let it! The foundation of intuitive eating is unconditional permission to eat. We must help people build long-term resilience against the cultural crap! Self-care and personal connection are super helpful for our wellbeing, and we have to return to our well of wisdom and call upon a stable place of self-compassion to take care or ourselves and move past cultural expectations. Intuitive eating is s different way of BEING with food. It’s peace. But it’s scary, and that’s okay! Perfectionism and the all-or-nothing approach can get in the way of healing around food. Fiona says, “Reassurance without assurance”… we will support you through the confusion! HEALING YOUR RELATIONSHIP TO FOOD IS MESSY!! (Cultivate the mess!) Although knowledge is important, it can take us away from living. It’s time to slow down and hone in on our intuition. Show Notes: Link to subscribe to the weekly FREE Food Peace Newsletter. It is sent out every Tuesday morning and no spam EVER. By signing up, I will also send you Love Food's Season 1's Food Peace Syllabus. Work by Ellyn Satter Intuitive Eating by Evelyn Trioble and Elyse Resch Embody by Connie Sobczak The Diet Survivor's Handbook by Judith Matz and Ellen Frankel Find Fiona Southerland at Body Positive Australia! Find her professional development, resources, and workshops about mindfulness and intuitive eating for dietitians at The Mindful Dietitian Eating Disorder Dietitians Julie Dillon RD blog Do you have a complicated relationship with food? I want to help! Send your Dear Food letter to LoveFoodPodcast@gmail.com.  Click here to leave me a review in iTunes and subscribe. This type of kindness helps the show continue! Thank you for listening to the Love, Food series. Give me feedback via Twitter @EatingPermitRD. This episode was sponsored by my friends at Green Mountain at Fox Run. A special promotion for Love Food listeners: VIP Upgrades at Green Mountain at Fox Run On stays November 6 - December 17, 2016 Green Mountain at Fox Run is offering special upgrades for one+ week reservations through the end of the year. Receive a free room upgrade and $250 credit towards amenities and professional services. See DetailsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Are you ready to heal your relationship with food yet stuck?? How do you make amends with food and your body when disordered eating is all you've known? Are you ready to make a change yet unsure of the steps? Listen now for a new set of directions. Subscribe and leave a review here in just seconds. Key Points: Julie needs your letters! Send your letter detailing your complicated relationship with Food to LoveFoodPodcast@Gmail.com. You've been fighting for many years and I appreciate that is exhausting! The doctor's comment did not cause this struggle yet totally F-ed it up! Doctors pointing out fat bodies as wrong happens too often and leads to distrusting the body and feeling unacceptable. I wish health providers knew their power to prevent eating disorders especially when a mom brings her child in concerned about disordered eating. To health providers: don't say they should lose weight or exercise more!! Shame in the food choices: food dichotomy doesn't promote health. Food isn't supposed to have this much power and pride. Food gets too much power. It doesn't deserve it! Bulimia's behaviors promote fluid shifts, puffiness, and body shame. Relationships heal this. They are much more important and valuable than this eating disorder. Next steps are painful BUT all worth it because recovery will allow these relationships to continue to blossom and fulfill your life. You need to choose from a "healthy" weight loss journey OR eating disorder recovery? Can't have both. We can't make peace with food AND pursue weight loss. Pursuing weight loss will only enhance eating disorder behavior and negative body image. Healthy relationships are not compatible with the eating disorder. Unconditional acceptance and respect is what is missing. Take it slow. Day by day. Surround yourself with helpers. Be mindful to pick a helper that is body positive. Show Notes: Link to subscribe to the weekly FREE Food Peace Newsletter. It is sent out every Tuesday morning and no spam EVER. By signing up, I will also send you Love Food's Season 1's Food Peace Syllabus. Eating Disorder Dietitians Julie Dillon RD blog Do you have a complicated relationship with food? I want to help! Send your Dear Food letter to LoveFoodPodcast@gmail.com.  Click here to leave me a review in iTunes and subscribe. This type of kindness helps the show continue! Thank you for listening to the Love, Food series. Give me feedback via Twitter @EatingPermitRD. This episode was sponsored by my friends at Green Mountain at Fox Run. A special promotion for Love Food listeners: VIP Upgrades at Green Mountain at Fox Run On stays November 6 - December 17, 2016 Green Mountain at Fox Run is offering special upgrades for one+ week reservations through the end of the year. Receive a free room upgrade and $250 credit towards amenities and professional services. See DetailsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy