Food Psych #95: How to Share Your Anti-Diet Journey with Katie Dalebout

Fellow body-positive podcaster and coach Katie Dalebout joins me to celebrate Food Psych's 4-year anniversary! We discuss how Katie's first appearance in episode 34 changed the direction of the podcast, how her recovery from orthorexia led her toward Health at Every Size and away from her original wellness-focused business, how she discovered her interests and passions beyond food and health, why it's so important to consider potential triggers when telling your recovery story, how to share responsibly on social media, and lots more!

Through her blog, podcasts, videos, and courses, Katie Dalebout curates inspired wisdom that guides people to go deep and sift through the thoughts clouding their minds. She’s a contributor to Hello Giggles, Refinery29, and MindBodyGreen, and in 2013 launched the weekly podcast Let It Out (formerly The Wellness Wonderland), which attracted wellness and lifestyle celebrities such as Gabrielle Bernstein, Tara Stiles, and Joe Cross in its first few episodes. She’s the author of the Amazon best-selling book Let It Out: A Journey Through Journaling (Hay House, 2016). She helps people develop a positive body image by embracing their creativity and personality outside of their physicality, and she’s on a mission to share journaling tools that invoke deeper authenticity and self-awareness. Find her online at KatieDalebout.com.

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We Discuss:

The four-year anniversary of Food Psych, including its evolution into a 100% body-positive philosophy, and Katie’s role in defining some of Food Psych’s themes
How Katie and Christy became friends through podcasting, as well as the early days of Food Psych
Katie’s “coming out” process with her eating disorder
Christy’s first exploration of Health at Every Size, including how the eating disorder recovery world and collaborating with Isabel Foxen Duke really brought her into the fold both in her practice and her podcast
Katie’s experience listening to Isabel Foxen Duke’s episode of Food Psych, including the vulnerability that the episode brought out in Isabel’s story
The importance of exploring our relationships with food growing up, and how this question helps us establish that we are not alone in these food and body struggles
The problem with eating disorder memoirs, including balancing storytelling with potentially triggering information
The normalization of diet culture
How our stages of recovery, understanding of disordered eating, and awareness of triggers evolves over time
Katie’s podcast, Let it Out, and the transformation it has undergone with Katie’s own journey through eating disorder recovery
Seeking out hobbies apart from food, the body, and wellness
How disordered eating can shape our lives and career trajectories
Responsibly sharing on social media, including representing a balanced life rather than just the highlights or the “healthy” parts
The issue with social media “branding,” including getting stuck in certain food and lifestyle labels
How eating styles can become a part of our identity
The potentially damaging influence of people we admire in the social media realm
The peace that comes from living your life in an intuitive way rather than a diet-mentality way
How the diet industry is beginning to co-opt not just wellness and nutrition, but intuitive eating and body positivity
Creating boundaries and taking a stand against diet culture
The importance of tapping into anger and humor in this social justice movement
How the body-positive movement and anti-diet movement fit in the larger socio-cultural context of our current political situation
Striking the balance between curating a compassionate social media feed and ensuring that we don’t forget that the HAES, body-positive bubble in which we reside isn't how the rest of the world functions