Fellow body-positive RDs Rebecca Scritchfield and Julie Duffy Dillon return for a special episode in honor of NEDA Week and National Nutrition Month! We discuss our new joint campaign #ChangeTheGame, why the nutrition field often plays right into diet culture, why we need to stop prescribing one thing to people with diagnosed eating disorders and another thing to the rest of the population, how dieting messes with your mind, and lots more!

Julie Duffy Dillon is a food behavior expert who helps people enjoy eating again. Award winning with her progressive approach, Julie was featured in TLC’s documentary My Big Fat Fabulous Life. Julie has an active blog on JulieDillonRD.com and a weekly Food Peace Newsletter. Listen to her weekly body positive, diet free, and health promoting podcast Love, Food where she answers listener letters about their complicated relationship with food. Julie received her BS in Nutrition from Ohio University and MS in Mental Health Counseling from The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. As a registered and licensed dietitian in North Carolina, she founded BirdHouse Nutrition Therapy a group practice passionate about helping individuals and families recover from eating disorders and PCOS. As a Certified Eating Disorder Specialist (CEDRD), she also supervises dietitians to be eating disorder specialists. Don't miss Julie's previous appearance on Food Psych!  

Rebecca Scritchfield is a well-being coach, registered dietitian nutritionist, certified health and fitness specialist and author of the book, Body Kindness, which Publisher’s Weekly calls “a rousing guide to better health.” Through her weight-neutral mindfulness-based counseling practice, she helps people create a better life with workable goals that fit individual interests. She is the co-founder of Dietitians for Body Confidence, a website and free bi-monthly e-mail dedicated to shared learning among dietitians and future RDNs to improve body image in people they serve. Rebecca has influenced millions through her writing, Body Kindness Podcast, and appearances in over 100 media outlets including NBC Nightly News, CNN, the Today show, the Washington Post, O Magazine, Health, Shape, and many others. She lives in Washington, D.C., where she was recently recognized as one of ten “Supermom” entrepreneurs in the Nation’s Capital. Find her online at RebeccaScritchfield.com, and don't miss her previous episode of Food Psych!

How are you changing the game on diet culture? Share your anti-diet victories with us using the hashtag #ChangeTheGame on your favorite social media platform!  

Join the new Food Psych Facebook group to connect with fellow listeners around the world!

We Discuss:

• How Rebecca came up with #ChangetheGame, including the realization that dieting is a game, and that we can change the game by refusing to play

• The resources that are “game changers,” such as Health at Every Size by Linda Bacon or Intuitive Eating by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch

• How diet culture permeates our lives, and the ways in which diets can directly lead to eating disorder development

• The biological and psychological impacts of dieting and restriction

• The seduction of diets, including the fantasy of the life weight loss will bring you

• How diets set us up to “fail,” and are made to keep us trapped in never-ending weight cycling

• The consumer culture of dieting, including the way marketing and advertisements target insecurity to sell products

• Fear mongering around food

• The role nutritionists and dietitians have in healing the world’s relationship with food

• Pleasure and food, including the need for pleasure in nutrition and the inevitable result of balance and variety when we approach food with pleasure and compassion

• National Nutrition Month, including the subtle diet message embedded within this year’s campaign

• How the diet industry no longer wants to be associated with restriction but rather with health, and how the nutrition industry is implicitly associated with diets

• How to change a dietitian’s approach to getting people to eat a more balanced diet

• The importance of interpreting health data in the context of food insecurity, economic inequality, diet history, and social stigma

• The all-or-nothing, orthorexic-type nutrition information currently being touted by nutritionists and the media alike, and how to combat it with a more flexible approach

• The need for an intuitive eating, HAES, size-inclusive shift in the dietetics profession, and for the disordered eating within the profession to be addressed

• The issue of sizeism in the nutrition world, specifically in dietetics education, and the need for more size diversity

• Weight concerns and the need to shift away from weight-focused wellness to a self-care driven model

• Letting go of trying to control our bodies, and letting go of diet culture altogether in order to find true happiness

• Action items for #ChangeTheGame and dismantling diet culture

Resources Mentioned:

• Health at Every Size by Linda Bacon

• Intuitive Eating by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch

• NHANES

• Is intuitive eating the same as flexible dietary control? Their links to each other and well-being could provide an answer. study by TL Tylka, RM Calogero, and S Danielsdottir

• Jessamyn Stanley

• Jes Baker

• Southern Smash

• Julie Duffy Dillon, the Love, Food Podcast, and Julie’s Food Psych Podcast episode

• Rebecca Scritchfield’s Body Kindness and Rebecca’s Food Psych Podcast episode