[00:00:26] Kc Rossi: My guest today is Stephanie Dodie, heir. She is a clinical nutritionist, intuitive eating expert and host of the beyond the food show whose integrative and comprehensive approach helps women make peace with their bodies and quit diet culture.
[00:00:50] For good. We really talk about what it means. To be in diet culture, how we can increase self-trust and intuition, not only with our eating, but in our life and how much power we are able to reclaim. When we start to shift our negative thoughts and beliefs about ourself. I hope you enjoy this episode as always.
[00:01:14] We continue the conversation in the women developing brilliance, Facebook group. So you can head on over there and share your thoughts. Hey, Stephanie, welcome to the show. It's great to have you as a guest.
[00:01:16] Stephanie Dodie: Thank you for inviting me and hello, everyone listening. Yeah. Awesome.
[00:01:20] Kc Rossi: So I want to dive right in and hear from you what it means to break free from diet culture.
[00:01:38] Stephanie Dodie: By I have this term called diet your life, which is really about learning how to claim your power back. On yourself, learning to trust yourself in every area where diet culture has stripped it away from you. And just for the listener, if you're new to this world, I'm going to define a little bit with diet culture is because it's a new term that maybe some women listening I've never heard about, or maybe you think it's about being on the diet, but that culture is an entire.
[00:02:13] It's a system of belief that is constructed to put the image of a thin body for women as the ideal and the place where women can feel valued into this world. So if you don't belong into this class of thin women, then by definition and by diet culture, you are not worthy and you need to work. To get to that thin body.
[00:02:41] And who's with me, we spent decades dieting. I know for me twenty-five years. How about you Kc?
[00:02:47] Kc Rossi: I've been dieting since I was 10, so I'm going to be 50 next year. So that's literally 40 years. I mean, I used to bum a ride with my neighbor's mom when I was 13 to literally go into diet workshop meetings.
[00:03:02] And I really wasn't even that overweight, but in my mind I felt that I really. Because you're right. It didn't match those ideals of the models we saw in the magazines and the actresses that we looked up to. Yeah.
[00:03:02] Stephanie Dodie: So you started at 10. I started at 12. Most women. Our age started anywhere between. 15 and 25 years old, that's when the first diet came into our life.
[00:03:28] And it was pretty much about us feeling valuable because we were going to be able to meet that, meet that 10 idea, but there's consequences to that. We literally lost the ability to be connected to our innate wisdom, our intuition. I think you call in your world with regards to food, with regards to the choice we should make about our body.
[00:03:52] Undieting your life is about claiming back that path. Yeah, it's about stopping dieting, but it's also about learning to trust ourselves, learning to appreciate who we are outside of those norms. That diet culture is trying to impose to us.
[00:04:02] Kc Rossi: Yeah, absolutely. And you know, going back to the word, you talked about worthiness because when we are so hooked into diet culture and what we feel, we need to look like.
[00:04:25] In order to be accepted. I want to dig deeper into that because this is something that is so very layered. And it's one of the things I see a lot of people held back, especially if they're entrepreneurs, solo producer women, when there's just these layers of unworthiness and maybe emotional eating just happens to be like a consequence or symptom of that.
[00:04:45] Can you talk to the point of, you know, how do we gently one recognize. That the root is unworthiness. And to take those steps because it feels like a large way away from being able to claim power when you're in the.
[00:05:00] Stephanie Dodie: Absolutely. So let's not make it about us having something wrong with us, right? This feeling of not being worthy or not being valuable or commonly known as not being good enough.
[00:05:16] Let me just say this. There's nothing wrong with any one of us here. We did not create that. The system, the society model that we live in. Created a structure around us, AKA diet culture that made us feel this way. So claiming back our power is almost tapping into something that's already within us. This power to be magnificent, to be brilliant, to be successful is within us.
[00:05:46] But because we live in this context in this society, We think it's not there. So when we Undiet our life and we change the way we engage with food and with our body image, this connection to RNA power is rapidly growing and that's when we become kick ass at what we do analyze.
[00:05:50] Kc Rossi: Yeah. Talk to me more about the positive triple- down effect.
[00:06:14] When you start on dieting your life, when you start tasting, you know, joy and fulfillment outside of food.
[00:06:20] Stephanie Dodie: and we just say confidence. Yeah. Can like it. People listening that you, you have a business, you're an entrepreneur, you run your own source of income. What if tomorrow or a week from now two weeks from now, as you do the work, you start feeling more confident, more confident into the action.
[00:06:42] You're going to take into your business. And with a, when you start accepting yourself, when you start claiming back your body image, as it is today, Can you show up more on camera? Can you voice your opinion more because you're no longer entangle and having to look a certain way to be able to voice your opinion and market your business.
[00:07:06] So confidence for me would be the number one thing, and then two learning to reprogram that self critical voice in your mind. Yes, because they're re like we have to be honest with ourselves and say we still live in a free society. We live in north America or any. First world country. We have the ability to say no to dive culture, but we fought up to today.
[00:07:37] Be telling you this, we didn't have a choice, but to go on the diet you 40 years, me twenty-five years. I didn't think I had a choice until somebody came into my life. And so you actually can say no, and I have to wake up one morning in the SU. The responsibility of saying no. And when I did that, that's when the power came back into my life and into my business.
[00:08:01] So. Stopping that self-critical voice that constantly. Can we just like, I don't know about you, but for me it's constantly in the past judging everything that I did. Yeah. So if we can tune down that self-critical voice and we can start believing in our aspiration, into our dreaming, what's possible for us, what can we create?
[00:08:26] Kc Rossi: Yeah, I love that. And I, I truly think that when we can, um, again, I love the aspect of claiming back power and really looking at that and how it parallels with confidence. Because when you are trying to grow your business scale, your business so much is using your voice, being confident, having a high vibration.
[00:08:46] So people are like, who is that check? Like, I really like what she has to say. I want to know more. And in order to do that, you really need to amp up your visibility. And so we are the face of our business. And so I think that there is so much value in, like you said, dampering down the negative voices in our head, absolutely pumping up the competence and then really looking at.
[00:09:13] Those pieces of negative image and negative body talk negative. Self-image. I mean, if you're feeling that you can't fake, fake it through well,
[00:09:25] Stephanie Dodie: here's where it gets interesting. You're successful, I'm successful and there's hundreds and thousands of women listening that are successful to a certain degree.
[00:09:32] While constantly having the self critical thought, not fully showing up in their full body, not taking the brand picture they have to take. And yet you've achieved that level of success. What could you achieve if all that garbage was out and you were like 10 X, what you are right now? Yeah, that's so exciting.
[00:09:56] Kc Rossi: I mean, to me, I mean, that is a key piece of the work that I do too, is self-actualization. And so really taking off all of those layers and masks and discovering your brilliance and not being afraid. So you've been in the world of sub development for awhile, just like we're caught in the same class. I hear what you're saying.
[00:10:19] Stephanie Dodie: And you know, I've attended, I've been in the business world for 25 plus years and I've attended all kinds of seminars and classes and workshops specially for women. But what I didn't realize until I understood the concept of diet culture is that. It was baked in to the teaching culture. It was baked him that as a woman, you needed to look a certain way.
[00:10:47] You knew that to look professional, you needed to wear makeup. You needed to wear heels. What if none of that was there. If you could show up exactly the way you are and fully feel confident. Yeah.
[00:11:12] Kc Rossi: Oh, a hundred percent. I mean, people are craving that. I think that, especially with. COVID and all of that, you know, situation that we've dealt with that authentic piece where it's like, we don't want perfection anymore.
[00:11:21] We really just want a human being that has a big heart. That's going to truly listen to us and be compassionate. That is what we're craving. Yeah. And here's the thing. We can create that for ourselves, because I know for me when I was stuck dieting, so I stopped dieting 10 years ago. And what's very interesting is that my business, as my body grew back, the weight that I was trying to control in the back.
[00:11:51] So that is the growth of my business because the more I became. Me, but I didn't create that because something externally came into my world or the magic formula came in. I created that because I took how were back into my mind, what I thought, what I thought of myself, myself. Semaj right. Your self-concept.
[00:12:16] And I literally out of that shade out, like true out the door. Anything that, that culture had been telling me my whole life and what I found. With my power. And you're saying that that had a direct correlation to your business acceleration? Absolutely. Yeah. Direct correlation. Like, I mean, I'm looking at my result from the last quarter and like I'm up 30 points.
[00:12:41] Kc Rossi: That's amazing. That's amazing. Speaking of COVID did you see emotional eating increase? And if so, why do you think that is?
[00:13:00] Stephanie Dodie: See, I have a perspective that's probably going to shock many of your listener. Emotional eating is normal. It's part of. So, what I seen is people not being able to cope with their difficult emotions and as a result of that, people were using what's around them, which is food, but the emotional eating is not the problem.
[00:13:15] It's the root, which is us not being able to cope with our emotions to skillsets. That we were never thought, like there's not a course, a class in any of our educational system that says, Hey, let us show you how to cope with your emotion. And your emotion is just a wave of energy going through your body.
[00:13:37] And then we become adult and we don't know how to deal with stressful situation. Like COVID what do we do when we feel the stress? We go to anything that's around us. That's a normal human pattern. So. I really don't like the narrative around emotional eating, especially around COVID because again, it shames food as being the issue and food is never the issue.
[00:14:01] Kc Rossi: Yes. And I think also to your point, it makes you feel, again, like something's wrong with you? Like you have to overcome something, you've got to squash something. It's a very kind of masculine, linear way of just like, you know, pushing it down versus that intuitive, feminine flow. You know, that could be that piece.
[00:14:20] I'm curious if a woman is listening to this, but as waiting for permission to ditch diet culture, what do you say to her?
[00:14:45] Stephanie Dodie: The concept that we teach called south authorization. Right? So here's the thing in order for us to be out of our culture to be saved from diet culture to no longer have to diet the only person, the only group that will be able to free us up is ourselves and other women.
[00:14:55] We have to come together as a group. This is a grass roots movement to literally. Dismantle by a culture that this mental via culture first in your own life, you have to authorize. So just standing on the sideline, waiting for the sign, waiting for the headline in media that says it's okay for you to not.
[00:15:20] That can happen. There's a $168 billion industry and newly that counts on you wanting to die and console you hating yourself. So it's not going to come. The only way for you to do that will be to authorize yourself and to join a group of women. That empowers each other into doing that, creating that grassroots movement that would time will this lodge diet culture.
[00:15:51] And here's the thing. If you have a daughter, a granddaughter around you right now, she's learning.
[00:16:00] Kc Rossi: You're modeling it, whether you're conscious of it or not. And I love the point that you talked about the collective consciousness, you know because there is power when, when, especially in something that's new, especially in a grass movement.
[00:16:10] And when you have all the media marketing against you because they're making money, you know, you need that, that powerful group of like-minded. People to support you and to create your own safe space, really around that. So you could start to redefine what normal. Yes.
[00:16:40] Stephanie Dodie: So let's go back to this whole modeling it for your daughter because I really want to emphasize this. I know I've learned from my mother. Did you learn from your mom?
[00:17:28] Kc course. I learned to diet. I learned to pick up my body and I learned to question myself. I learned to work hard to offset, not being good enough and not being strong enough for back in my mother's age, in the seventies and eighties, being a woman in the workforce, right? You have to work harder. So the best influence we can give that next generation of women is us healing ourselves from culture, claiming back our power and demonstrating this image to the next generation of what can be done.
[00:18:06] Yes, and together we can do that supporting each other. Definitely.
[00:18:16] Kc Rossi: I know you've worked with so many women and help them make this transformation. And I'm wondering if you could share maybe a case study of how this process unfolds. I know everybody's unique, but I also know that there is this maybe false sense of, I want that.
[00:18:27] Immediately, you know, we want to be out of pain as soon as possible. So how does it generally unfold? And then also I would love to hear some of the positive trickle down effects that you've seen, like with a particular woman in jail.
[00:18:58] Stephanie Dodie: So I'm going to tell you the story of Jessica, but just for the one listening and wondering, because this is such a new way.
[00:18:51] There are tons of videos on our website of women's there are podcasts interview on my podcast. So you have plenty of other examples, but I'll, we'll talk about Jessica for a minute. Jessica had been bingeing and dieting for close to 30 years. She had two young children and a husband like a classical family unit.
[00:19:10] And. The result of her undying her life on dieting her mind from all these thoughts on dieting, her relationship to food, becoming an intuitive eater and becoming a body neutral person is a better relationship with our family. Taking trips, going to the beach with the kids, and polling in the water with the kids, not standing.
[00:19:38] On the beach with a t-shirt on and shorts on because she was too afraid of going and playing. So creating memory as a mom with a young family. That's beautiful. Changing her practice. She was a psychologist. Now she helps other women do the same thing. I've had clients who wrote books. Like it's literally, you know, it's, there's this, I don't want to claim it that it's life changing, but literally is life changing because yeah, it starts with food and body image.
[00:20:10] But once you've got that new way of thinking of yourself, you start generating outside of you everywhere you touch. And your business and your profession and your relationship and people are going to start to notice and they're going to be like, what are you doing?
[00:20:37] Kc Rossi: And that's the thing, you know, like you said, it's really not about the food.
[00:20:28] It, it start as bad, you know, like we think that that's the thing, but when you're helping somebody trust them, Lean into their own intuition and heart wisdom. I mean, this is a skill that they can take. That's going to improve every area of their life. Every relationship something, once they learn, no one can take it away from them.
[00:20:49] Stephanie Dodie: Yeah. And it's so we have the, we have a concept and other, like, we teach different coaching concept, but one of them being diet brain and that, so I'll give you the example of the four components of diet brain women coming to work with us are typical. Perfectionists people-pleasing black and white or all, or nothing.
[00:21:08] Thinker and mental filtering, mental filtering. I'll explain this one shortly because it's not evident, but literally, you see your day and your life through your body. So bad body image day, you have a bad day or people you think people are commenting about your body. You feel terrible. So you're filtering lives through your body.
[00:21:29] So when you change the way you're thinking you claim back your ability to trust yourself and you become neutral with your body. You no longer need perfectionism. Can we say time-saving. And energy savings. I mean, what a drain, like all of those negative thoughts that are on repeat and all of, like, you're talking about the filtering that is leaking precious energy and keeping you from being your best brilliant self and giving the gifts that you truly have to the world.
[00:21:59] So, I mean, I feel like I can just visualize people almost meeting themselves for the first time. Yes. Like their true south, not the south, that's trying to make up for not having the right body, but the true self, their creative self especially for the creatives out there, like that need to tap into that, like in a.
[00:22:23] Vibration of wisdom. Like you got shedding, it's probably the best expression of indicting your life. You shed those layer that prevents you from tapping to that innate wisdom. You drop the perfectionism, you claim back your time, you claim back the power of standing in your creativity, whatever it is.
[00:22:42] Yeah. How much time do we give to others for people pleasing? Because we're afraid of rejection. Imagine if you can be in your power and not give a hoot. Being rejected or not. Yes. Oh, totally freeing. I mean, totally free.
[00:23:00] Kc Rossi: I know you're passionate about helping a million or more women break free from diet culture and get their life back. Talk to me a little bit more about that.
[00:23:35] Stephanie Dodie: I want to help the next generation of women. So I have got two young nieces. I don't have children myself, but I have two young nieces and about. Four years ago, I went to dinner and the boat declare that they were on the diet and I'm like, I know what's in front of them because I've been there.
[00:23:27] My first I had was at 12. I know what's in front of them and I have to stop the cycle. I have to stop the enter generational trauma of diving from woman to woman. That's where this goal was born from. And I know. If I impact a thousand women at the top, they each going to impact 10, 12 women. And I trained professional as well.
[00:23:53] They're going to like together, we can easily reach that million women. So the next generation of women are not impacted like you and I, they don't start dieting at 12 years old. Yeah.
[00:23:53] Kc Rossi: That’s a beautiful mission. And I feel it. I feel your energy. It feels so possible, which is really, really exciting. I love that.
[00:24:14] Um, that's amazing. What do you have exciting coming up?
[00:24:20] Stephanie Dodie: Um, either to close out this year 20, 21 or launching in 2022. So we have our podcasts. First of all, we're going to be on the food show, going beyond the food, get the tagline here. So we're going to celebrate our 300 episodes. Congratulations. That's amazing.
[00:24:37] And that is no small feat, six years of podcasting my from yes. You know, and that really goes to the dedication, dedication that you have just being, you know, very patient and persistent, which are skills to have a winning life in business. So really hats off to you. That's amazing. And then on Diageo life.
[00:24:58] So I've taken all my program and I've merged it all into one before I used to help people with food and separately from the body. And I finally through my own inner work, have the confidence to say no, Like you need all of this. You need to work on your body image. You need to work on food and you need to work on that self-critical thinking.
[00:25:20] So we've merged it together. So now we have only one point of contact it's called Undiet show life, the course where we give you all the tools and support you all on.
[00:26:00] Kc Rossi: That's awesome. What's been one of the pivoting pieces in your life through your inner work. If you were to just, you know, kind of go, you know what it was, this, this was the choice point.
[00:25:42] Stephanie Dodie: It was. So I was a practice. So I'm a clinical nutritionist. I was in a traditional practice for the first two years of my career. So I w I had a clinic. I worked in Toronto, Canada, and I used to see patients one after the other. And this one client gave me a book. Call health at every size. She gave me this.
[00:26:04] She said, oh, that changed my life. I looked at it. I read the first few pages. I'm like, hell no. Like this person is not teaching to restrict food. She's not teaching like wellness. Threw the book out another client a month later. Brought me the same book. Wow. This is not finished a third client. A couple of months later.
[00:26:24] Brought me the same book. By the third client, I've got to read this thing. Like this thing keeps showing up in my life. You know what that means spiritual, right? Yeah. And that book, I was angry the whole time I was reading, reading it because it was like if I had known all of this 20 years ago, three quarters of the pain or the suffering that I had would have not had to be.
[00:26:51] I closed that book and I decided to change my entire business. Wow. So, and two years after that book was closed, I closed my clinic, sold the building and took the leap of faith of starting a brand new business online called beyond the food. So that book changing point in my life, edible story. Thank you so much for sharing.
[00:27:15] Kc Rossi: You know, I'm curious. Because to make that decision and to kind of jump ship and have a different fork in the road, not knowing. And it took a tremendous amount of courage and bravery. What tool do you think you used to cultivate that Moxie to do that?
[00:27:37] Stephanie Dodie: So what had made me my whole life since the age of 12, up to that point.
[00:27:41] 39 years old. What made me feel ashamed my whole life, which was food and AKA the weight because of the food and not being able to control where the food, my. Road back to my power with what was my source of shame, my whole life. So the intuitive eating for those who don't know is a process of recovering in normal relationship to food.
[00:28:07] Like what we call normal eater, like people who've never dieted. And that process taught me that I could trust myself. Taught me that I have, I had everything inside of me to be successful in my relationship to food. So learning to trust myself, claiming back power over the thing that had made near shame.
[00:28:31] My whole life is my Moxie is what propelled me to be here today with you. I love that. How do you use intuition to work your business for me? It's a sensation in my body. So interoception awareness is this capacity to feel in your body. So when I have to make this decision in my body, we use something called a body compass.
[00:28:58] I don't know if you're familiar with that and not now, I haven't heard that body compass is this, this space where you get quiet, close your eyes, and then you go with them and then you visualize the choice you have to make, and you feel the sensation into your body and how your body feels with them. Um, to make a decision, right?
[00:29:18] So does it feel good? You go through a process of identifying if it's a good or not a good choice for you. And then you go within, when you have a, make a decision, then you go to see how your body feel within the sensation within your body. So for me, it's using that company. To make the decision. So I go with them, feel the sensation, and then I'm guided to make a decision.
[00:29:41] Kc Rossi: Yeah. I love that. And I mean, it, it actually points to your success, your numbers being on the rise, despite. The global economy and everything else. And I think that it's, it's a really good compass for all of the listeners to understand that they have everything within them to make their own decisions and leading into that.
[00:30:01] Self-trust, what's one thing they can do. Um, aside from the body compass exercise to take a step towards intuitive eating or intuitive level.
[00:30:30]Stephanie Dodie: Let's talk about body image because we didn't talk about it a lot. I'm going to give you one piece of wisdom as a woman. The reason why you have a human body is not to look pretty.
[00:30:27] You were given a human body to experience life point. Like just reflect on this four minutes. What if we reframe the reason why you have a body and it was never meant to be about beauty and it was about function. How can that shift your relationship to your. So we teach body neutrality, which is about literally taking the value off your physical layer and engaging with your body.
[00:31:01] From a place of function. I have a body, I have five senses. My body is meant to hear things, to feel sensation, to experience life. And with that, I need to respect my body and I need to create a relationship of respect, which by the way, Does not have to be centered around weight-loss even for health reasons, there's not one single health condition known to men today that is exclusive to people that have a weight surplus.
[00:31:36] So with that in mind, can you then have a more respectful, caring relationship with your body that is not centered around weight loss? Yeah. That's my piece of wisdom. I love that wisdom and that self love and acceptance is. It really is gold. Then you can take all the energy about like, you're worried about your weight and trying to control your weight and food, and then apply it to where ever you want your business, your relationship, your enjoyment of life, like take all of that and refocus it where you're going to benefit from it.
[00:32:15] It's exciting. You're literally taking voltage that was just leaking and having nothing and bringing it all into one. Central, you know, strong powerhouse. So I'm loving that message. Thank you so, so much, Stephanie, I just, I feel like you're doing tremendous work in the world. You are, and you're changing lives.
[00:32:35] And I feel like that when you were kind of doing this with your hands, with the pyramid, like if, yeah, if you feel like you're reaching a thousand and then they're helping 10 more and then, you know, we're really committing to changing generations. You know that his power is such a spiritual mission. I love it.
[00:32:54] Kc Rossi: And, um, one, where can people learn more about you and your work? Yep.
[00:33:05] Stephanie Dodie: So you're listening to the podcast, go to my podcasts, going beyond the food, on all the platform, and then go to my website: www.stephaniedodier.com And from there, you'll enter my world. That's fantastic. You've given us so much wisdom, but if you were going to leave us with a bright light nugget, what would it be?
[00:33:22] Stephanie Dodie: You're perfect as you are.
[00:33:25] Kc Rossi: And I reflect that right back to you. My friend, you are perfect as you are. It's been such a pleasure to connect with you and until we meet again, breathe joy. Thank you. Thank you.
[00:33:37] I hope you enjoy today's episode with Stephanie. If so, head on over to love the podcast.com/brilliance. One listener says five stars, very inspiring. It's so great that Casey brings in such powerful women who really are doing great work in the world. It's always wonderful hearing stories of success and success tips.
[00:33:59] I am so glad it's resonating with you. Thank you for taking the time to leave your feedback. And if you're enjoying this podcast, you can head on over to love the podcast.com/brilliance until next week. Breathe joy.
