Delina Soto calls herself an anti-diet dietician.

Her approach, eating without guilt, and embracing our culture, which she shares online

as your Latina nutritionist, has earned her a

massive social following. Here's the thing that I love about Delina. Rather than just talk

about diet and wellness culture, she's actually built a framework for reckoning with it. So in this

episode, I'm going to have her walk us through her Chula method, her guide to food freedom.

Dahlina, thank you for doing this.

Oh, thank you for having me.

Okay, so you go to Penn State thinking that you're going to be pre-med. You take a nutrition 101 class and it really turns you around. What is it that

happens in that class? In my mind, I always just like, I'm going to be a doctor. Nobody's going to stop

me. But I think when I went into that nutrition class, it was very eye-opening to me,

just seeing like a different side of health. I never thought about. I didn't come from a family

that dieted a lot. I didn't come from a family that viewed food more than just what it was.

You know, like I wasn't raised in that way. And then like,

I just learned how food plays such a major part in our health. And it just kind of like clicked

all the things of like, okay, so not only do I want to help people, because I've always been like a

helper, but more importantly, like, I want to make sure people don't get sick. Like, that was my

train of thought then, very wellness culture, very diet culturally in a sense, because it didn't

know better. You use terms we hear thrown around a lot, diet culture, wellness culture, and you do such a

great job on your Instagram of talking about how both of those cultures are built around ideas

of control of moral superiority. As you said, you sort of went into this practice indoctrinated

in that baseline culture. Is there a moment where you say, wait a minute, something's not right here?

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