#230: You Understand Diet Culture, So Why Do You Still Hate Your Body? with Stephanie Dodier
Many of us can relate to getting to a particularly frustrating place in this work where we know so much about diet culture…
We understand that bodies are diverse and why dieting doesn’t work the way we’ve been promised it will. We can see the ways thinness, beauty, health, gender, and worth have been tangled together. We might even be very good at extending all of that compassion and nuance to other people.
And then we look at our own body and think: Okay, but why do I still feel like shit about mine?
Today I’m speaking with Stephanie Dodier, a non-diet nutritionist, certified Intuitive Eating counselor, and cognitive behavior coach. Our conversation covers a lot of ground, but constantly circles this question:
What happens when you understand all of this diet culture stuff intellectually…but it still doesn’t quite feel true for you and your body?
Stephanie and I talk about why food can sometimes feel like the easier part of recovery while body image remains incredibly sticky; how years of cultural conditioning around gender, bodies, beauty, and worth become part of how we understand ourselves; and why learning more and more about diet culture isn’t necessarily what gets us across that gap.
Stephanie also shares her own experience of dieting for 25 years, the feminist lens that changed the way she understood her body, and something I especially loved talking with her about: what it actually looks like to take the things we believe intellectually and begin living them.
In this episode, we talk about:
Why Intuitive Eating can sometimes feel like it “isn’t sticking”
The connection between food, body control, self-worth, and belonging
Why satisfaction and pleasure are such important parts of our relationship with food—and how gender and body size can shape who feels entitled to that pleasure
The role of patriarchy in how we learn to understand and relate to our bodies
Why understanding diet culture intellectually is different from actually embodying new beliefs
Why body image can feel harder to untangle than food
What practicing a new belief about your body can actually look like in everyday life
A practical exercise from Stephanie for beginning to separate facts about your body from the thoughts you’ve learned to treat as facts
I also really loved where we landed on the role of community in all of this. One of my favorite analogies (and I mention it in this episode) is comparing leaving diet culture to uprooting a tree: it’s one thing to pull your roots out of the old soil. But you also have to plant them somewhere new, and give them a chance to grow.
Because eventually another diet will come along. Another doctor will say something shitty, another body change will happen, another Ozempic-like craze will blow through.
Knowing diet culture is bullshit matters, but we also need somewhere else to put our roots.
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