‘Find Your Food Voice’ offers a supportive path away from dieting

On Nutrition

There’s no shortage of external rules floating around — some evidence-based, some not — about what, when and how to eat. But rather than making life simpler, over time, these rules often make for a complicated relationship with food. With her new book, “Find Your Food Voice: Defy Diet Culture, Declare Body Liberation, and Reclaim Your Peace” (out March 25 from Sheldon Press), North Carolina-based registered dietitian nutritionist Julie Duffy Dillon aims to help you clean house on the rules in your head and, well, find your food voice.

What’s a “food voice”? Dillon defines it as “an internal system you were born with to communicate when to eat, how much, and what choices to consume based on what is available.” When you find and claim your food voice, you forge a healthier relationship with food. Now, the idea of having a relationship with food — a largely inanimate object — may sound odd, but through the “Dear Food” letters throughout the book, representing the struggles of Dillon’s own clients over 20-plus years, it makes sense:

“Dear Food. We have had a long twisted road together, and I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t stressing myself out about how much to eat. Even as a kid, food was a fight. Will I ever enjoy eating? Yours truly, Rae.”

Dillon said she doesn’t think we would need to discuss our relationships with food if the diet industry didn’t exist. “But the diet industry tells us that we’re doing it wrong and if we think about food too much, then we’re the problem. That’s why we need to talk about our relationship with food, because we have this big oppressive system poking its head in.”

Dillon’s approach in the book, as in life, is warm and nurturing, but she doesn’t shy away from the hard things. In one chapter she writes, “You may picture other anti-diet folks doing a diet-to-food freedom 180-degree turnaround. It’s as though they have just jumped off the tightrope and are flying away without a care in the world.” Then she adds, “No one moves away from their complicated food history this way.”

She said no book (even hers) and no tool for rejecting diets and healing relationships with food and body is going to work for everyone. “I think whenever someone finds themselves seeing other people succeed at anti-diet work, but they’re struggling, they’re blaming themselves when really it’s just that the right tool just hasn’t been built for them yet.”

Another problem, Dillon said, is that many people think they can simply reframe how they connect with food and change their relationship to it — then everything will be better. But they don’t realize that, even after doing this personal work, they’ll still be navigating a space that has diet culture as an oppressive system. “It’s not one and done. It’s constantly having to make the decision to not go get in line with the diet industry.”

The idea that it is effortless to make that pivot from dieting to intuitive eating and body positivity — and that life will be happy all the time once you do — is gaslighting. “Diets are really seductive in how they help us feel this nice, warm, fuzzy hopefulness. So taking that away can feel really awful. I see myself as almost a historian who holds people’s stories and then show folks who are newer to this process so they can have as much insight as possible into what comes next and hold onto, ‘There’s nothing wrong with me, no matter how hard it gets.’”

Those stories are one big reason that Dillon decided to write this book. “Everyone has their own experiences with food and their own story, yet there’s this unifying experience of feeling so ashamed and isolated. When I was working with clients, I would say, ‘I wish you could be a fly on the wall and just hang out with me all day, because you would hear how everyone else feels alone, too.’”

She said that was one of the driving factors that led her to start her podcast, “Find Your Food Voice,” now in its 10th year (for the first five years it was called “Love, Food”). She noted that while the nondiet space is flourishing on social media and in podcasting, that’s less true in publishing. “There’s not a lot of written material and books, so I wanted to contribute in that way to help people feel less isolated and alone.”

Helping people feel less isolated isn’t just out of kindness and compassion (although there is that). There’s a more pragmatic reason for putting her ideas out in book form. “There’s an individual experience where we need to repair our complicated history with food, but it’s not going to get fixed without all of us doing it,” Dillon said. “We all need to band together to fix what needs to be fixed, and we can’t do that on our own.”

Dillon helps the reader understand why the diet industry and other oppressive systems are so seductive with their “I-should-eat” scripts. Then she offers tangible tools for discovering their food voice and therapeutic strategies to navigate to a nondiet way of eating while feeling supported. She doesn’t promise to have all the answers or to deliver super concrete outcomes.

“As much as I want to have it all wrapped in a nice tidy gift box with a bow, I don’t think that’s real. I want people to get to their real self and tend to that relationship they have with their body and with food and whatever needs to be mended. This is hard, I would expect it to be messy. And if it’s not messy, I would question it.”

The work, however hard, is worth it, she said.

“The way I take the reader through is what I would do with clients over a couple of years. This is the direction we would go. So, yeah, let’s get messy.”