Listener Q&A Vol.4
In this episode, I answer two questions:
- How to navigate diet culture with my family – my mom is a chronic dieter…
- Does undieting my life and quitting dieting mean I’ll never lose weight again?
What you’ll learn listening to this episode on Listener Q&A Vol. 4:
- How to overcome being triggered by other people dieting
- The long term solution to be able to be with family that have different choices then you
- Why being in rebellion against diet culture isn’t the most effective way to heal
- Why compassion is key to move to changing how your experience life without diet culture
Mentioned in the show:
Undiet Your Life Coaching Program
Episode Transcript:
Going Beyond The Food Show Episode 351
This is episode 351 of the Beyond the Food Show and today we're back with another amazing question, actually actually two question from our listener. And the first one we're gonna tackle together is how to navigate diet culture with family member, particularly those that are still dieting.And the second question is about losing weight. Does un dieting my life, stopping dietingmean I'll never lose weight again.You ready? Let's answer those questions. Stay tuned.
Welcome back to the podcast. Today we're gonna answer two question. The question you guys are submitting are amazing and I'm encouraging you to submit more. You can send your question with a little bit of [email protected] and I'm gonna try to squeeze it in the upcoming listener q and a.
The first question we're gonna talk about today is navigating diet culture with family member, particularly those that are still dieting. And it's very interesting that this question is a wonderful reflection of one of the topic we coach the most often inside of Diet Your life, which is, our student women un dieting their life and having difficulty at first with their own mothers.
And there's a very good reason why that is. And I'm gonna explain it in answering the question. And I wanted to put this question in early on in the listener q and a series, because if it's such an important struggle point with my student inside of Onai your life, it is the same percentage of you out there who are not privileged to be coached by us inside of Onai at your life, you're struggling with that too.
So let's give you some tool to navigate that. I'm gonna read the question first, and then we're gonna go into the answer.
I need help with my mom, exclamation mark. She's a chronic dieter. I attended your training, rebellious eating training, and I realized that I learned dieting from my mom. Since my early twenties up to last year, we actually dieted. I love my mom dearly, but now she's triggering me badly. I wanna spend time with her, but it's so hard for me to hear her talk about diets all the time. What can I do?
The first thing I wanna do for you submitted this question is to say congratulations and good work. One of the most empowering action you can do to transform anything in your life, including your relationship to food and body and health, is to ask yourself reflective question. And that was part of the rebellious eating training, I gave you some reflective question and you clearly did the work, and you're coming here with question about the work you did, which is amazing.
For those of you perhaps listening to this podcast who haven't attended the Rebellious Eating training, know that it's now available for you to listen with the recording. So you can go to our website, stephanie do.com, and right there on the homepage, you will have an option to get the recording of that training.
So you clearly are reflecting and asking yourself some very good question and you have added the dots. You have learned how the struggle you're currently experimenting with came to you. And the other thing I really like aboutthe way you formulated your question is you're not blaming anyone. You're not blaming your mom. It looks like you are taking self responsibility, which, by the way, is the only way to create sustainable, permanent change in our life, is when we take responsibility for what we create in our own life. No transformation to at least permanent transformation will come to you when you look at other people being the cause of your problem.
So you're doing that, you're taking responsibility, you are acknowledging how it happened to you without blaming, which is amazing. But you're being triggered by your mom. Although you learned dieting from your mom, she taught you dieting. She invited you to join her in dieting because she was herself at that point socialize the diet culture. She had thoughts and belief that dieting was going to change her life.
What we have to remember here is that diet culture happens in our mind. DI culture is a system of beliefs that leads us to think thoughts on the daily about dieting, about our body, about body size. So when we're looking at navigating in your question, di culture, we have to look within our mind to find a solution to this. And the first thing we need to acknowledge is all the other people in our life have the same thoughts we used to have about dieting. They're not thinking about dieting and diet culture, and they're not talking about it because they wanna arm hus or they want to create a reaction in. They are themselves indoctrinated under the charm of the DI culture. They're saying these words that trigger us because that's their reality right now. And it sound like or looks like that your mom hasn't done the work that you've done. She hasn't yet come to choose a different way to think about bodies, about food, about diet culture.
So the first step I would coach you on is to have compassion for your mom. Is to have compassion for her because she's in pain, in the same pain and the same probably anxiety that you were on before you came to choose another way to think about bodies and foods and DI culture. She's feeling exactly what you were feeling back then. She just hasn't chose yet another way. She perhaps doesn't even know it's optional for her to choose another way. Perhaps she's deadly afraid to choose another way.
The second step is for you to continue the work of dismantling all your thoughts and beliefs that you've learned from di culture in your own brain. The long-term solution for you not to feel trigger in the presence of your mom or how to be able to be with your mom without wanting her to change and not feel triggered, the solution to that is in your own mind.
I wanna talk about being triggered for just a moment here because there's a lot misunderstanding about being triggered, that it is with DI culture or with literally anything. You have to remember that when I coach, when I talk about mindset, I talk about it in the context of food and bodies and di culture, but these principle, these coaching principle applies to everything in your life. Funny enough that we have a training program for professional, and we use the same coaching principle, we use the same coaching at the mindset level for them to build and grow their business as we use inside of AK life with food and body image.
So let's talk about being triggered. Being triggered is often an analogy to being have our button pushed. But truly it's not buttons, it's our wounds. Our wounds from the past are being activated. That's what trigger is. And it's an opportunity for you to heal and grow. Every time you are triggered, every time you feel triggered, it's an opportunity for you to stop and reflect, what is being activated in me right now? When we react to other people's thoughts, feeling, needs, problem, and opinion in a way that makes us feel triggered, it's a gift. It's a gift for us to look within and figure out why we are being triggered. These triggers are from our past, as I mentioned earlier. And the more reactive you are, the more triggered you are, say on a scale of one to 10, for an example, the more traumatic your past in this particular circumstance has been.
So we'll take the question around dieting and mom dieting. Being shamed for your body size or shaming yourself for your body size and restricting food is a trauma. So when you see your mom dieting and you're being triggered, what really is happening in your brain is you are activating, you are reliving a past experience that was really damaging, traumatic to you, which is dieting and probably body shaming and hating your body and hating yourself, these are traumatic experience. We don't hear dieting being talked about from a trauma perspective simply because we live in a fat phobic society. We live in a society that is entrenched, that is built upon diet culture.
But I guarantee you that 50 years from now, a hundred years from now, when we look back at dieting and diet culture and body shaming, we will acknowledge that these event were trauma. We're just not ready yet for that globally in the population. In my world, in the world of people who help other people heal that, we know these are traumatic events. We just don't have the agreement of the majority because the majority is entrenched in fat phobia and DI culture.
So I'm gonna come back to the question when you are being triggered, it's a sign. It's a sign for you that you have wounds, that you have trauma, that you need to heal for yourself. You need to bring these thoughts back to the surface, and you need to have compassion for yourself. It's not your fault. You were born in a society that believed in DI culture, that believed in shaming people for their body. You didn't consciously choose to do that. You just were socialized to do that. So have compassion for yourself and then change your beliefs and your thoughts about bodies, about food, about health, about you as a person, and only you can do this work because that is internal work. We teach a framework to help women change their thoughts and their beliefs that will lead them to no longer be triggered when they come to circumstance of being with other people, the diet. But the best free tool that I can give you right now is the tool of reframing your thinking about dieting and your past experience in food and social. What may need to happen for you is to set boundaries with your mom. For a time while you do your internal work of changing your belief system and changing your thoughts.
The very first live q and a that we did, episode 3 47, I did a answer question specifically on boundaries. So I'm gonna let you go to that podcast to get tools and resources on boundaries. And then I'm gonna close this question here. And I wanna add one more thing. So you're doing the work and changing your thoughts and your belief so you can feel differently. You have boundaries with your moms while you're doing your personal work. One of the thing to heal the trauma of years of dieting and body shaming is to learn to be with your emotion. Be with your emotion of shame, be with your emotion of anger. We call that riding the wave, learning to feel your emotion, process your emotion, and then release them.
So you may want to Google that, how to process and release emotions safely. So every time you feel trigger, every time you feel the anxiety and the anger, don't avoid it, but be with it. So these would be my three steps or my three advice for you to help you navigate diet culture with your mom.
I'm gonna move on to the second question. I'm gonna read it first.
I've quit dieting just a little over a year from now. At first, I did it as an act of rebellion. An act of rebellion when I first realized that DI culture was a thing. Amazing that after 25 years of being a feminist, I didn't even know DI culture existed, exclamation mark, exclamation mark. Anyway, I have since gained weight, which I'm okay with, but does this mean I'll never lose weight again if I don't diet?
This is an excellent question and at first I want to say this, many of us, me, including gave a big FU to die culture when it came to our awareness. Like when somebody sat me down and explained to me what DIA culture was and how he was playing with patriarchy and how it was a tool to oppress women in compliance, I just went through a massive stage of anger, massive change. And I know many of you. And most women enter undying their life from that place. It's part of the journey, but it's not the whole journey. Dismantling di culture within ourselves cannot be done from a place of anger. It has to be done from a place of compassion.
So perhaps for you that's the next stage, is learning to have compassion for yourself and for even diet, culture, and why it existed in order for you to create the space, the mental space, and the emotional space within you to be able to dismantle the belief system within you. Rebelling in outwards in hope of changing the system is amazing, but that's not how we do the work within ourselves. These are kind of two separate sector of work. This is what we call activism. When people dedicate time and resources to dismantling DI culture at a systemic level, but then the work still need to be done within us, and that work cannot be done from a place of anger.
So that's the place where you are in and meeting yourself with compassion and one of the belief system that di culture uphold is that our body, us, cannot be trusted. Cannot be trusted with food, cannot be trusted with decision around health, we always need an authority outside of us to make decision for us. And that's part of, it's one of the belief system we need to change that we can trust us, ourselves, we can trust our mind, we can trust our emotion, and we can trust our physical body. We can trust the wisdom of our body.
So you've gained weight. You stop restricting food. I don't know if you were over exercising. You stop those behavior and you experience what we call diet backlash, right? The pendulum swung the other way and that happens to many of us. Now, what will your body decide to do with that? Is that your weight that you should be at for the rest of your life? I don't know that. You intellectually do not know that, but your wisdom inside of your body knows, and that's the work. The work is to lean in to your body wisdom, lean in and build your capacity to trust your body, therefore, yourself.
We can't control our body. We have the illusion that we can, that's what DIA culture sells us, but it's not true. Our body are a unit on its own. It's a being on its own that knows what it needs to do. Now, this is also where the world of body acceptance comes in, right? So I don't know how you came to the world of culture. Is it true food? Is it true body? But the work of body image is also part of dismantling the belief system of that culture, that all bodies are good bodies, including your now body, which is heavier than the thinner body you had before. It's still a good body. So that's another belief you need to build within you.
At the end of the day, your job is to build trust and respect for your body, accepting the fact that you can't control your body weight. It was just an illusion sold to you by DI culture. And that's the work. And that's the work that needs to be done from a place of compassion. As a feminist, you can continue to do the outward work if that's your area of work, of dismantling systemically and influencing the world. But don't forget that the work has to be done within you as well in order for you to change how you experience life, but also to be able to sustain the work in activism for the rest of your life. Because many activists get burned out because they do the work of changing systemic oppression from a place of anger, and that is not sustainable long term. So that was my thought for you.
I love you, my sister, and I'll see you on the next episode.
351-Listener Q&A Vol.4: Navigating Diet Culture with Family & Does Undieting Mean I’ll Never Lose Weight
This is episode 351 of the Beyond the Food Show and today we’re back with another amazing question, actually two questions from our listener. And the first one we’re gonna tackle together is how to navigate diet culture with family member, particularly those that are still dieting.And the second question is about losing weight. Does un dieting my life, stopping dietingmean I’ll never lose weight again.You ready? Let’s answer those questions. Stay tuned.
Welcome back to the podcast. Today we’re gonna answer two question. The question you guys are submitting are amazing and I’m encouraging you to submit more. You can send your question with a little bit of [email protected] and I’m gonna try to squeeze it in the upcoming listener q and a.
The first question we’re gonna talk about today is navigating diet culture with family member, particularly those that are still dieting. And it’s very interesting that this question is a wonderful reflection of one of the topic we coach the most often inside of Diet Your life, which is, our student women un dieting their life and having difficulty at first with their own mothers.
And there’s a very good reason why that is. And I’m gonna explain it in answering the question. And I wanted to put this question in early on in the listener q and a series, because if it’s such an important struggle point with my student inside of Onai your life, it is the same percentage of you out there who are not privileged to be coached by us inside of Onai at your life, you’re struggling with that too.
So let’s give you some tool to navigate that. I’m gonna read the question first, and then we’re gonna go into the answer.
I need help with my mom, exclamation mark. She’s a chronic dieter. I attended your training, rebellious eating training, and I realized that I learned dieting from my mom. Since my early twenties up to last year, we actually dieted. I love my mom dearly, but now she’s triggering me badly. I wanna spend time with her, but it’s so hard for me to hear her talk about diets all the time. What can I do?
The first thing I wanna do for you submitted this question is to say congratulations and good work. One of the most empowering action you can do to transform anything in your life, including your relationship to food and body and health, is to ask yourself reflective question. And that was part of the rebellious eating training, I gave you some reflective question and you clearly did the work, and you’re coming here with question about the work you did, which is amazing.
For those of you perhaps listening to this podcast who haven’t attended the Rebellious Eating training, know that it’s now available for you to listen with the recording. So you can go to our website, stephanie do.com, and right there on the homepage, you will have an option to get the recording of that training.
So you clearly are reflecting and asking yourself some very good question and you have added the dots. You have learned how the struggle you’re currently experimenting with came to you. And the other thing I really like aboutthe way you formulated your question is you’re not blaming anyone. You’re not blaming your mom. It looks like you are taking self responsibility, which, by the way, is the only way to create sustainable, permanent change in our life, is when we take responsibility for what we create in our own life. No transformation to at least permanent transformation will come to you when you look at other people being the cause of your problem.
So you’re doing that, you’re taking responsibility, you are acknowledging how it happened to you without blaming, which is amazing. But you’re being triggered by your mom. Although you learned dieting from your mom, she taught you dieting. She invited you to join her in dieting because she was herself at that point socialize the diet culture. She had thoughts and belief that dieting was going to change her life.
What we have to remember here is that diet culture happens in our mind. DI culture is a system of beliefs that leads us to think thoughts on the daily about dieting, about our body, about body size. So when we’re looking at navigating in your question, di culture, we have to look within our mind to find a solution to this. And the first thing we need to acknowledge is all the other people in our life have the same thoughts we used to have about dieting. They’re not thinking about dieting and diet culture, and they’re not talking about it because they wanna arm hus or they want to create a reaction in. They are themselves indoctrinated under the charm of the DI culture. They’re saying these words that trigger us because that’s their reality right now. And it sound like or looks like that your mom hasn’t done the work that you’ve done. She hasn’t yet come to choose a different way to think about bodies, about food, about diet culture.
So the first step I would coach you on is to have compassion for your mom. Is to have compassion for her because she’s in pain, in the same pain and the same probably anxiety that you were on before you came to choose another way to think about bodies and foods and DI culture. She’s feeling exactly what you were feeling back then. She just hasn’t chose yet another way. She perhaps doesn’t even know it’s optional for her to choose another way. Perhaps she’s deadly afraid to choose another way.
The second step is for you to continue the work of dismantling all your thoughts and beliefs that you’ve learned from di culture in your own brain. The long-term solution for you not to feel trigger in the presence of your mom or how to be able to be with your mom without wanting her to change and not feel triggered, the solution to that is in your own mind.
I wanna talk about being triggered for just a moment here because there’s a lot misunderstanding about being triggered, that it is with DI culture or with literally anything. You have to remember that when I coach, when I talk about mindset, I talk about it in the context of food and bodies and di culture, but these principle, these coaching principle applies to everything in your life. Funny enough that we have a training program for professional, and we use the same coaching principle, we use the same coaching at the mindset level for them to build and grow their business as we use inside of AK life with food and body image.
So let’s talk about being triggered. Being triggered is often an analogy to being have our button pushed. But truly it’s not buttons, it’s our wounds. Our wounds from the past are being activated. That’s what trigger is. And it’s an opportunity for you to heal and grow. Every time you are triggered, every time you feel triggered, it’s an opportunity for you to stop and reflect, what is being activated in me right now? When we react to other people’s thoughts, feeling, needs, problem, and opinion in a way that makes us feel triggered, it’s a gift. It’s a gift for us to look within and figure out why we are being triggered. These triggers are from our past, as I mentioned earlier. And the more reactive you are, the more triggered you are, say on a scale of one to 10, for an example, the more traumatic your past in this particular circumstance has been.
So we’ll take the question around dieting and mom dieting. Being shamed for your body size or shaming yourself for your body size and restricting food is a trauma. So when you see your mom dieting and you’re being triggered, what really is happening in your brain is you are activating, you are reliving a past experience that was really damaging, traumatic to you, which is dieting and probably body shaming and hating your body and hating yourself, these are traumatic experience. We don’t hear dieting being talked about from a trauma perspective simply because we live in a fat phobic society. We live in a society that is entrenched, that is built upon diet culture.
But I guarantee you that 50 years from now, a hundred years from now, when we look back at dieting and diet culture and body shaming, we will acknowledge that these event were trauma. We’re just not ready yet for that globally in the population. In my world, in the world of people who help other people heal that, we know these are traumatic events. We just don’t have the agreement of the majority because the majority is entrenched in fat phobia and DI culture.
So I’m gonna come back to the question when you are being triggered, it’s a sign. It’s a sign for you that you have wounds, that you have trauma, that you need to heal for yourself. You need to bring these thoughts back to the surface, and you need to have compassion for yourself. It’s not your fault. You were born in a society that believed in DI culture, that believed in shaming people for their body. You didn’t consciously choose to do that. You just were socialized to do that. So have compassion for yourself and then change your beliefs and your thoughts about bodies, about food, about health, about you as a person, and only you can do this work because that is internal work. We teach a framework to help women change their thoughts and their beliefs that will lead them to no longer be triggered when they come to circumstance of being with other people, the diet. But the best free tool that I can give you right now is the tool of reframing your thinking about dieting and your past experience in food and social. What may need to happen for you is to set boundaries with your mom. For a time while you do your internal work of changing your belief system and changing your thoughts.
The very first live q and a that we did, episode 3 47, I did a answer question specifically on boundaries. So I’m gonna let you go to that podcast to get tools and resources on boundaries. And then I’m gonna close this question here. And I wanna add one more thing. So you’re doing the work and changing your thoughts and your belief so you can feel differently. You have boundaries with your moms while you’re doing your personal work. One of the thing to heal the trauma of years of dieting and body shaming is to learn to be with your emotion. Be with your emotion of shame, be with your emotion of anger. We call that riding the wave, learning to feel your emotion, process your emotion, and then release them.
So you may want to Google that, how to process and release emotions safely. So every time you feel trigger, every time you feel the anxiety and the anger, don’t avoid it, but be with it. So these would be my three steps or my three advice for you to help you navigate diet culture with your mom.
I’m gonna move on to the second question. I’m gonna read it first.
I’ve quit dieting just a little over a year from now. At first, I did it as an act of rebellion. An act of rebellion when I first realized that DI culture was a thing. Amazing that after 25 years of being a feminist, I didn’t even know DI culture existed, exclamation mark, exclamation mark. Anyway, I have since gained weight, which I’m okay with, but does this mean I’ll never lose weight again if I don’t diet?
This is an excellent question and at first I want to say this, many of us, me, including gave a big FU to die culture when it came to our awareness. Like when somebody sat me down and explained to me what DIA culture was and how he was playing with patriarchy and how it was a tool to oppress women in compliance, I just went through a massive stage of anger, massive change. And I know many of you. And most women enter undying their life from that place. It’s part of the journey, but it’s not the whole journey. Dismantling di culture within ourselves cannot be done from a place of anger. It has to be done from a place of compassion.
So perhaps for you that’s the next stage, is learning to have compassion for yourself and for even diet, culture, and why it existed in order for you to create the space, the mental space, and the emotional space within you to be able to dismantle the belief system within you. Rebelling in outwards in hope of changing the system is amazing, but that’s not how we do the work within ourselves. These are kind of two separate sector of work. This is what we call activism. When people dedicate time and resources to dismantling DI culture at a systemic level, but then the work still need to be done within us, and that work cannot be done from a place of anger.
So that’s the place where you are in and meeting yourself with compassion and one of the belief system that di culture uphold is that our body, us, cannot be trusted. Cannot be trusted with food, cannot be trusted with decision around health, we always need an authority outside of us to make decision for us. And that’s part of, it’s one of the belief system we need to change that we can trust us, ourselves, we can trust our mind, we can trust our emotion, and we can trust our physical body. We can trust the wisdom of our body.
So you’ve gained weight. You stop restricting food. I don’t know if you were over exercising. You stop those behavior and you experience what we call diet backlash, right? The pendulum swung the other way and that happens to many of us. Now, what will your body decide to do with that? Is that your weight that you should be at for the rest of your life? I don’t know that. You intellectually do not know that, but your wisdom inside of your body knows, and that’s the work. The work is to lean in to your body wisdom, lean in and build your capacity to trust your body, therefore, yourself.
We can’t control our body. We have the illusion that we can, that’s what DIA culture sells us, but it’s not true. Our body are a unit on its own. It’s a being on its own that knows what it needs to do. Now, this is also where the world of body acceptance comes in, right? So I don’t know how you came to the world of culture. Is it true food? Is it true body? But the work of body image is also part of dismantling the belief system of that culture, that all bodies are good bodies, including your now body, which is heavier than the thinner body you had before. It’s still a good body. So that’s another belief you need to build within you.
At the end of the day, your job is to build trust and respect for your body, accepting the fact that you can’t control your body weight. It was just an illusion sold to you by DI culture. And that’s the work. And that’s the work that needs to be done from a place of compassion. As a feminist, you can continue to do the outward work if that’s your area of work, of dismantling systemically and influencing the world. But don’t forget that the work has to be done within you as well in order for you to change how you experience life, but also to be able to sustain the work in activism for the rest of your life. Because many activists get burned out because they do the work of changing systemic oppression from a place of anger, and that is not sustainable long term. So that was my thought for you.
I love you, my sister, and I’ll see you on the next episode.
