Do you deal with binge eating? Did you experience bullying, specifically within your own family, that relates to your body shape or size? Have you experienced sexual abuse, and feel that it has impacted your relationship with food and your body? Are you trying to set a healthy example for your own children after having a difficult relationship with food in your past? Listen now for some expert advice on how to cope with these body trust struggles.

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Check out this summer's special blog post series: Empowering Your PCOS Journey. It aims to help you understand PCOS, improve your relationship with food, and advocate for better care. You will be hearing from nutrition grad student Kimberly Singh and her experiences with PCOS as well as evidenced based info to help arm yourself with the most up-to-date research. Find it here now: JulieDillonRD.com/PCOSseries

Episode's Key Points:

• Sometimes our family environments can be just as toxic as this culture that we live in... remember, we ALL live in diet culture!! But that doesn't make our family's actions okay.
• Abuse, physical or mental, can have a profound impact on our relationship with food and our body.
• Lindsay Stenovec of The Nurtured Mama joins to talk about the complex interactions of motherhood and our relationship with food!
• Processing this kind of trauma is essential... find a therapist to work through these difficult emotions and to help you cope with your past!
• Sometimes we use food to cope with our emotions... this is totally understandable, but we can take steps to help heal this part of our relationship with food if we find it interfering with us living our lives.
• We are all doing the very best that we can under our own circumstances! This doesn't make us a failure or a fraud.
• How do we feed others when we've had such a fraught relationship with food and body ourselves?
• As parents, we do our best to shield our children from pain, especially from pain that we have experienced ourselves. Many mamas are trying to shield their children from the pain that they themselves experienced in relation to food and body... but sometimes this backfires when parents do so by trying to get their children to lose weight or to eat in a "perfect" way.
• Feeling acceptable is SO important to finding body peace and body trust! Instead of repeating the same cycle of trying to control your own child's food intake or body shape, focus on the unconditional acceptance you have for your child and help them to foster this body acceptance in themselves, no matter the outside influences.
• We should ALWAYS feel safe at home, even if we live in diet-culture world!
• We're all just doing the best that we can!!
• What does it mean to eat in a "healthy" way? How do we make peace with food and our bodies?
• Ellyn Satter's definition of normal eating is a helpful resource!!
• Healthy eating is more about being connected to life, not about what we put in our bodies.
• Our relationship with food and our bodies is about very complicated, difficult, and personal truths. It has to do with the food, but it also doesn't! Our past has a HUGE impact on all of this, and it's SO important to find support around figuring all of this stuff out. Find a trauma, Health at Every Size, and eating-disorder-trained therapist or dietitian to help you along this journey!!
• Raising children brings up the difficult parts in ourselves that still need more work.
• Going to therapy is a BRAVE choice! It is hard, but it gives us the tools to move forward in our lives and find healing.
• Stress, discomfort, and feeling like a fraud are messages from our body! These emotions mean there is something that needs to be addressed within.
• Secretive eating, shame, and hiding of food is an understandable reaction to growing up in an environment that body and food shamed you! The important question is not, "How do I stop," but, "What do these actions tell me about my needs?"
• Sometimes we don't learn sustainable coping skills as a child... therapy can help us bolster our toolbox of coping mechanisms as adults!
• Normal eating is FLEXIBLE!!! Normal eating is trusting our body to make up for our "mistakes" in our eating, and being compassionate about our choices.
• In the end, it is JUST food.
• When you trust your body to take care of yourself, it'll do the best that it can.

Show Notes:

• Link to subscribe to the weekly FREE Food Peace Newsletter. It is sent out every Tuesday morning and no spam EVER. By signing up, I will also send you Love Food's Season 1's Food Peace Syllabus.
• Check out the Empowering Your PCOS Journey Series.
• Lindsay Stenovec's first episode on the Love, Food Podcast
• Ellyn Satter's definition of "normal eating"
• Secrets to Feeding a Healthy Family by Ellyn Satter ---> This week's Food Syllabus addition #1
• The Nurtured Mama Program & Community with Lindsay Stenovec ---> This week's Food Syllabus addition #2
• Eating Disorder Dietitian
• Julie Dillon RD blog

Do you have a complicated relationship with food? I want to help! Send your Dear Food letter to LoveFoodPodcast@gmail.com. 

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