Your Body Is Not the Problem: Reclaiming Health Beyond Diet Culture

What diet culture won’t tell you about health, food, and the real reasons we’re made to feel broken.

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If you’ve ever felt like you were the problem because the diet that supposedly works for everyone didn’t work for you, know that you’re not alone. This week’s Substack is extra special because I have the opportunity to interview Julie Duffy Dillon, a registered dietitian and author of 

Find Your Food Voice

. In this interview, Julie talks transparently about the shame so many of us carry around food, the deep roots of diet culture, and how we can begin to unlearn harmful health narratives.

There is a lot I want you to take away from this interview, but one of the primary things is that Julie doesn’t just challenge the myths that fuel disordered eating but invites us to reconnect with the wisdom we’ve had all along. As a woman with a long history of disordered eating, this conversation hits home during Women’s Health Month!

Whether you realize it or not, it’s not always easy to listen to our bodies in a world where diet culture has hijacked our sense of self. Even though this particular interview isn’t exclusive to the experience of Black women, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that weight-centric healthcare keeps so many people, especially Black women, from accessing the care they deserve.

Whether you're a healthcare provider, a health coach, or someone on your own food healing journey, this interview will meet you where you are. I hope it leaves you with hope, clarity, and a renewed trust in yourself. Now onto the interview!

Find Your Food Voice, Julie Duffy Dillon

1. Your book, Find Your Food Voice, speaks to something deeply personal for many of us, rediscovering our own voice around food. Can you share what that phrase means to you and why it's so crucial for anyone ready to step away from the grip of diet culture?

I wrote Find Your Food Voice after 25 years as a dietitian helping people make behavior changes. While everyone has their own relationship with food, most of us carry the same shame for diets not working. We feel like a failure in isolation yet this part of our story is not unique. I wish everyone knew diets don’t work long term for most people, and I wish we didn’t blame ourselves when diets fail. You aren’t broken, and we need to fix the notion that diets will make us healthier. We don’t need to diet but most people I meet only know how to eat when dieting. When not dieting, people tell me they binge, experience food noise, and feel awful. In my book, I share the story of 5 people all with a complicated history with food trying to find a way to enjoy eating and promote health. Every chapter starts with a letter written to food, sharing the twists and turns of their relationship. I share what pushes us to diet, what keeps us stuck there, and guide you to build new sustainable habits to help you not diet and promote health.

Each of us has a food voice: an internal system we are born with to communicate when to eat, how much, and what choices to consume based on what is available.

We get communication through body awareness like hunger, fullness, fatigue, mood, and satisfaction. Communication also comes through thoughts, feelings or guided by structured self-care techniques. It is unique to the individual yet always flexible, kind, and nurturing. The diet industry, with its roots in racism and misogyny, tells us to eat less. This blocks us from our food voice with its primary function to eat enough. Your food voice is a knowing with an unconditional permission for food, yet compassionate when outside circumstances (availability, time restraints, oppressive systems like racism or weight bias) block access.

2. In Find Your Food Voice, you highlight the harmful myths that diet culture spreads. From your perspective, what are some of the biggest lies we’ve been told about food, bodies, and health? And how can we begin to break free from them?

I wish everyone knew diets are not about health. In the book, Fearing The Black Body by Dr. Sabrina Strings, we learn how food rules began with the transatlantic slave trade as a way to distinguish between races and invent superiority. The thin ideal was created from racist beliefs, not as a way to promote health. Today, long-term weight science research shows us chronic dieting causes the very conditions we are told we need to diet for: diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart disease. I specialize in helping people with insulin resistance, PCOS, and diabetes. While most diets appear to improve these conditions in the short term, research shows us that diets will not improve them long term. An important question to ask: do I want to be healthier tomorrow? Or years from now? If you are invested in long-term health, diets will always overpromise and underdeliver.

The diet industry convinces us we need to eat less sugar or carbohydrates but long term research informs us that won’t work long term.

Instead of removing a food or group, consider what can I add? Can you add more vegetables? Can you add more meditation? Can you add more water? We can begin to break free from the lies of the diet industry by moving toward a belief of adding to my life instead of taking away.

3. You’ve worked extensively with people struggling with disordered eating. In your view, what’s the link between diet culture and disordered eating, and how does it normalize unhealthy behaviors under the guise of "wellness"?

Wellness doctrine seduces us to believe health behaviors will keep us alive longer. The diet industry, and the culture it created, promises to permanently fix our health if we follow specific rules. We see BMI posters, the diet printout instructions from our doctor, and health claims on food containers. Here’s what we don’t see: a smaller stomach and defined muscles code how we are allowed to move through life. A thinner person can access more with ease and safety.

We don’t talk enough about how thin bodies gain privilege.

This advantage pushes us from wellness to disordered eating. For example, someone may start with “I want to eat more fiber” to “I am bad if I eat this processed food.” We are told if we care about our health and are disciplined enough, then we will be well. Rigid food behaviors, or disordered eating, begin to equate to someone who has everything put together. Beliefs move toward the flip side of this diet culture myth: someone who is not well or in a higher weight body must be lazy, selfish, or just not love themselves.

Are we bad for eating processed food? Are higher weight people lazy? If you are curious as to whether you are experiencing disordered eating versus true wellness, your food choices and body size will not have morality connected to it. If you feel guilty for eating a food, that’s not wellness, that is disordered eating. If a person feels good or bad based on their body size, that is not wellness either.

Individual food choices are only a fraction of the health determination and wellness pie chart.

Our health comes more from safety, access, and wealth. Why do we think our health comes from only individual choices? Oppressive systems love an unspoken disguise and that’s how we have muddled disordered eating as wellness. Wellness culture pretends it has universal answers for individual problems. If we eat a certain way, then we will gain power or maintain it. Even more, focusing on rigid disordered eating keeps us from breaking down the oppressive systems making us sick.

4. Your journey plays a significant role in shaping the message of Find Your Food Voice. How has your experience influenced how you approach these sensitive and often complex topics, both personally and as a healthcare provider?

I often think about my career in two pieces cut down the middle by a big sob. Before the cry, I thought folks would experience health behavior change by me communicating healthy eating and exercise tools. Knowledge is power, right? I also thought individual health could be mostly controlled by these individual behaviors.

In my first 5 years as a registered dietitian, I helped people after heart attacks and those newly diagnosed with diabetes. I started to niche into helping kids and families adopt healthier behaviors to promote balanced blood sugar and lower cholesterol. Very quickly I noticed most clients did not lose weight and many didn’t come back to see me after the first few appointments. My colleagues taught me concepts like “noncompliance” yet that didn’t fit for me. How can 30, 40, 50 or more patients all be noncompliant?

Quoting Taylor Swift, “It’s me, Hi, I am the problem. It’s me.”

Around this time I completed a masters degree in mental health counseling that helped me appreciate my own lived experiences and privileges. I started to understand how social determinants of health create the biggest part of the health outcome pie–not individual behavior.

Holding all these new-to-me truths, I was speechless. Unfortunately, I was in the middle of teaching a group nutrition class when I lost my words and got in trouble with my boss. That is why I was in her office, sobbing. I told her I couldn’t teach diets and push weight loss anymore because I didn’t believe in it. I knew then diets harmed and social determinants made the biggest impact.

That was the last day I taught people how to diet and pushed weight loss. Now, I only teach from a trauma-informed non-diet perspective. My clients and I strategize how to add new behaviors while each individual navigates how they will fight against the diet industry.

5. One of the central takeaways for me from your book is that weight loss doesn’t equal health. How can healthcare providers begin to shift the conversation from weight-centric care to one that prioritizes overall health and patient-centered approaches?

Most dietitians, therapists, and coaches quickly see how diets don’t work. We spend so much time going through individual behaviors and hearing how hard folks are trying. We quickly see how harmful and futile diet attempts are for individuals. Researchers, doctors, and other healthcare providers don’t spend as much time in the eating behavior nuance. These providers take much longer yet control more of the healthcare direction. This is so frustrating yet we still have options!

We can consider the bigger picture: what can we control?

We can’t promise weight loss yet we can demonstrate compassion as a client describes their experiences navigating weight discrimination. We can help clients brainstorm which new behaviors they want to add–for example, add more fiber by increasing fruit and vegetable intake or add more protein at breakfast. We can help clients not get stuck in the weeds of perfection by giving clients permission to use canned, frozen, or pre-packaged produce.

While helping clients add new behaviors, we can also advocate for better care. This may mean communicating with their medical provider to not push diet restrictions or weight checks. I spend a lot of time helping providers understand why pushing weight loss gets in the way of clients accessing health care–traumatizes them even. We need to help our weight centric colleagues understand their role in blocking healthcare access.

6. Healthcare providers have the power to challenge harmful health narratives. From your perspective, what role should those in nutrition and dietetics play in breaking down these myths and promoting a more compassionate, inclusive approach to health?

We healthcare providers and coaches have a responsibility to help without harm. We see how people keep trying diets, yet see how they are not working. Instead of blaming the client for lack of willpower or drive, I think it is important to consider that we–the healthcare helpers–are the broken link to promote health. We can see the big picture; health is so much more than the food consumed. Poverty, racism, safety, and healthcare access impact more than what a person chooses off a menu. We have the power to impact these systems by naming them in the moment instead of blaming a patient’s food intake.

We also need to listen and believe our clients.

People are trying, yet shamed when weight isn’t lost. Instead of pushing harder, we need to help clients make health accessible. This won’t happen if we keep blaming food intake.

7. Looking ahead, what are some areas you’re excited to explore as you continue your work in challenging diet culture and encouraging body liberation?

I have a special interest in helping people with PCOS be able to access healthcare while lessening the PCOS symptoms. This looks like adding tools to lower insulin and balance blood sugar without focusing on weight loss and dieting. Navigating PCOS healthcare has a host of problems especially for higher weight Black women. I want to build more ways to keep people with PCOS safe while advocating for better health outcomes.

As you’ve read, Julie’s work reminds us that healing our relationship with food isn’t just about what’s on the plate, but about reclaiming our right to care for ourselves without shame or restriction. Find Your Food Voice is more than a book, but a call to action for all of us to unlearn what diet culture has taught us and embrace a gentler, more inclusive path to health.

If there’s one thing I hope you take from this conversation, it’s this: You are not the problem. The system is. And there is a better way forward that centers compassion, connection, and care.

You can learn more about Julie and her book at Julieduffydillon.com/book, and I encourage you to reflect on the question: What would it look like to trust your food voice today?

Until next time,
Tomesha