S3 E6: How to Stop Fighting Food
It can seem impossible to break out of the cycle of dieting and binging, but health coach Isabel Foxen Duke found the key at the end of what she calls her “final binge.” And the answer isn’t more dieting! Virgie and Isabel talk about “radical hopelessness,” why Nutella is the ultimate anti-diet food, and why dieting - not binging - is the real coping mechanism.
Journal with us! In this episode, Isabel taught us that we have the power to transform how we interact with food. Write your very own Stop Fighting Food manifesto, detailing your vision for a life where no one is afraid of food.
Isabel Foxen Duke: I'm a big fan of just nut butters of all kinds. But Nutella is obviously like the holy grail of nut butters, you know, it's the best one.
Virgie Tovar: I've always felt like the word, the phrase “nut butter” just sounds so a little bit illicit. And I love that.
Isabel Foxen Duke: Yeah. Nuts, you know, nuts are a little sexual. Yeah.
Virgie Tovar:From Transmitter Media, this is Rebel Eaters Club! I’m your host Virgie Tovar. Today we’ll be eating Nutella with a really good friend of mine, Isabel Foxen Duke.
I’ve known Isabel for almost a decade. We’re neighbors now, and on a nice San Francisco day you can find us walking around in the park discussing Pema Chodron. We both talk with our hands and are known to fling a crumb or two while eating treats and talking loudly about how much we hate diet culture.
Beyond being my friend, Isabel is kind of a big deal. She’s a health coach who helps her clients break out of cycles of bingeing and restricting so they can finally make peace with food.
I am so thrilled to talk with her today!
Now - let’s get back to the Nutella!
Virgie Tovar: I went to the, I walked down to the, like the little co-op down the street and they had like, they had just gotten the bread delivery. So I got this like sweet, warm baby loaf of, it's called like, Duka, it's like a Duka bread. And it's got seeds all over it. And it’s like, so dense and delicious. Like I got that. I cut it up into, I really love cutting my own bread into like really fat slices.
Isabel Foxen Duke: Oh, that sounds amazing. Yeah, is it like the spongy, warm, fluffy kind of bread? Yeah. That's what's up.
Virgie Tovar: Yeah it’s like spongy and dense and I love that. And then it's got like a nice crunch, which I'm going to crunch it in a minute, but also, yeah, I just slathered Nutella on it and then cut up some banana, put that on top and it was just, oh, so
Virgie Tovar: Should we share a bite together? Normally I do a countdown.
Isabel Foxen Duke: Let's do it. Okay. Let's do it. Let's do it.
Virgie Tovar: Okay. Here we go. Three, two, one.
Isabel Foxen Duke: Okay. Here we go.
Virgie Tovar: That’s good.
Isabel Foxen Duke: Okay, I have to get the full…
Virgie Tovar: Mmmmm I like it.
Isabel Foxen Duke: Right. Very good.
Virgie Tovar: So, tell us about why we're eating nutella.
Isabel Foxen Duke: I always just thought that Nutella was like the ultimate symbol of like bad foods that people like avoid in diet culture, you know, it was like the holy grail of that. It was the ultimate creamy, fatty sugar, you know, everything that was villainized in diet culture, like felt to be embodied by Nutella. So yeah, so it's the best, obviously.
Virgie Tovar: Yes. Yes. So like the first time you encounter Nutella, I want to go back to that moment or the first time you remember...
Isabel Foxen Duke: I remember really discovering, I went to France one summer. I did like a teen tour in France when I was 13. And I remember going to France and it being everywhere and me thinking like, this is the best food that ever existed. And it was definitely attached to this really happy memory of just being like a free kid running around, like being almost spoiled. Right. I mean, really I'm like in France, I'm 13 years old and I'm eating Nutella crepes. I mean, you know, it was like really the ultimate decadent experience. That food represents that whole trip, that whole experience of my life. And I had loves in France, I had my 13 year old love in France. I think I had my first kiss in France that summer, maybe, my first, like real, like make-out, you know, French- Frenched. And so there was just like a lot of really positive, you know, feelings about that trip. I do remember coming back though and freaking out that I had gained weight. I remember thinking, well it's because of all the Nutella that I ate, right. The villainization of Nutella was like very quickly attached to the joy of Nutella, right. I don't, I don't really remember ever thinking the Nutella was really okay because by that age, by the age where I really discovered Nutella, I was already pretty entrenched in diet culture. I was probably already, I think I had like a full blown eating disorder at that point already. So there was no time where I really felt Nutella was a safe food, but I remember always thinking it was the fucking best food, you know.
Virgie Tovar: My first encounter with Nutella was also abroad. I was 16 years old. I was visiting extended family. My grandmother had been waiting until I was 16 to sort of take me on an identity pilgrimage to Mexico so that I could meet our extended family. So I was in the town where my grandfather grew up, which is called San Luis Potosi in Mexico. And my, like, I dunno if he was my uncle or what, he was like some kind of relation and he brought home a jar of Nutella as sort of just a hospitality gesture. And I remember, you know, I was like, what is this? Right. And then I put a spoon in it and it was like, fireworks are going off. It's like the scene in a movie where you're like, you see your first love. And you're like, oh my God, it's happening in my mouth. And I ate the whole jar that day. Like they were like, you know, where did the Nutella go? And I'm like, whoops!
Isabel Foxen Duke: Whoops! [laughter]
Virgie Tovar: So I hadn't, I mean, I think that also, what's interesting when you're talking about going to France, like my next, my next chapter of Nutella history, you know, novel or whatever is, I'm studying abroad in Italy. And I have decided to turn this short-term study abroad into a diet, right.
Isabel Foxen Duke: Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense.
Virgie Tovar: The idea that you could go overseas and then after like a few weeks or a few months, come back and be completely transformed, you know, like to the point that no one could even recognize you, like your friends and your family are like, who's that? And you're like, it's me!
Isabel Foxen Duke: Did you not do this every summer? Like every summer break, every, it was always that fantasy every single time you were going to be like away and then you'd come back a new person.
Virgie Tovar: And it never happened. As we know, as diet culture always, always be disappointing us. Right.
Isabel Foxen Duke: Totally.
Virgie Tovar: But I'm like in Italy literally basically starving myself. Some friends are like, I don't know if this is a good idea. And I'm like, you're just jealous. I’m incapable of like completely, completely in, like, I don't know, I've been like the sunken place with my fatphobia. Right. And I cannot understand these people's gestures of care as anything but jealousy, but then, you know, we're in Italy, people like the other people in the house I'm sharing with, you know, 18 years old, we're sharing a house like eight people or something. And someone always had Nutella in the, you know, in like the kitchen. And of course in my moments where I would like, you know, could not starve myself endlessly, I would just find the jar of nutella. I would like sniff it out like a truffle pig. And like, I would just eat. I would just eat as much as I can, sometimes the whole jar. And then somebody being like, did someone eat my Nutella? And everyone knowing that it was me cause I was like doing all this wild, insane food restrictions.
Isabel Foxen Duke: Yeah.
Virgie Tovar: And then pretending that it wasn't me. And then finally caving out of shame and being like, “I did eat it. I'm sorry. I'll replace your Nutella.” And then it all started over again, Isabel, it was like a horrible, it was like that horrible cycle. And I think right like and this kind of is starting to pivot into what you do, right? Like, of course we have this sense that we're monsters, that were terrible. But then, you know, we realize that this kind of behavior is actually completely in line with what dieting and food restriction does to a person.
Isabel Foxen Duke: Yeah, completely.
Virgie Tovar: I want to get to that more in a second. We've known each other for a long time, but we've actually, you've never told me, we never had that moment where you tell me what your relationship to diet culture was like, how you ended up the path to becoming a health coach who works with people who are recovering from chronic restriction or disordered eating.
Isabel Foxen Duke: So I, you know, had been a sort of classic diet-binge cycler. I was put on my first diet by my pediatrician when I was three. And I remember, my mom lovingly refers to this diet as the broccoli and skim milk diet. I was like high on the baby BMI scale. I was like, you know, whatever. And the pediatrician said, oh, you gotta watch her weight. You gotta be careful and so I don't have a memory of not being on a diet. So as far back as I have consciousness, I always just had this experience of myself as somebody who wanted more than I was supposed to have. And I loved food too much. And my desires around food were not good. And I had to actively sit on my hands and try not to eat. Because, you know, if I ate what I really wanted, I would be fat, and we all got this message. You didn't have to have a fatphobic pediatrician to get the message that this was bad. It wasn't just about health. Come on. I mean, it was a lovability issue. It was a social issue. I remember I did have this feeling of like, if I was thinner, I'd be more popular, more people would love me. I'd get the boys to like me and I had crushes going back to like the age of five, and I thought that thinness was the thing that was missing in my life. As sort of like this like white upper-middle-class girl, that seemed like the only thing that maybe was the problem, or like, it's like, well, yeah, if I'm thin, I'm just going to have everything, life would be perfect when I was thin. Right. I would get everything. I'd have all the attention, I'd have everything that I wanted and that, that fundamentally, my body and my appetite was my biggest problem. And so I spent my entire childhood into my adolescence trying to control my appetite, but not being able to, then hating myself for not being able to, then trying harder the next day and then falling again, even more intensely. The more I would restrict, the more I would binge, the more I would hate myself, the more I would try to restrict, until eventually, you do get into like real clinical eating disorder behaviors. I mean, I remember being so desperate, right? I mean, I was, I think I was throwing up my food by age 10 or 11. And so this went on throughout my whole childhood into adolescence, through high school and college. And then I remember, at some point I discovered stimulants, right? Appetite, suppressants, cocaine, Adderall. And that really was the only time I was ever able to actually lose a significant amount of weight and quote, unquote stick to my diet was when I was using drugs. And that very quickly landed me into rehab. So I was 19 when I went to rehab for an eating disorder – an eating disorder/cocaine, whatever. It was really just basically an eating disorder. And I was like, this is so great. I'm going to go to treatment and they're going to teach me how to not binge without drugs. I remember being in the intake and I said, “if you can teach me how to control my weight without coke, I'll quit tomorrow.” I will give up drugs tomorrow if you can teach me how to control my weight without it. And they said, yup, we can do that. And when I was in treatment – and this was like a fancy rich girl rehab, right? I mean, this was like the highest level, luxury health care you could be getting. I think my parents, my mother spent a hundred thousand dollars on treatments for me that year and what I got was, I mean, I got clean, right? I mean, I was in an environment where I couldn't do drugs, so I did get clean, but you know, functionally, what they were doing with food is they just put me on a meal plan that was less food than my body actually needed because the meal plan was designed to keep me in the BMI range.
Virgie Tovar: Right, right. Not to heal you, but to keep you in the range.
Isabel Foxen Duke: To keep me in the BMI range. Right? There was no real rehab. There was no, like, you know, we had group therapy where we would talk about our feelings, but then we'd have to go eat our meal plan, calorie allotment. And that was the treatment. And I remember, you know, kind of coming out of rehab and I was like, what's, you know, what's the aftercare plan. And they would say, go to OA, go to Overeaters Anonymous and stick to your meal plan and, you know, work with a nutritionist or whatever, you know, like have a nutritionist watch over your meal plan essentially. Right? Like, so I came back and I was working with the nutritionist and, and when I worked with the nutritionist it was the same thing. It was all about, she would weigh me every week and we'd talk about what I was eating. And we would adjust the food to keep me in the weight range. It was all about keeping me in the weight range. So, I again, very quickly after getting out of rehab could not stick to any kind of meal plan. I had the same problem, nothing changed. I wasn't doing drugs, which was good. But I could not stick to my meal plan. And I realized, I think, like I remember being in an Overeaters Anonymous meeting and I met someone who was like to this day, one of my best friends in the entire world. And she somehow came across a Geneen Roth book. I don't know if you're, are you familiar with Geneen Roth.
Virgie Tovar: Yes. Yes.
Isabel Foxen Duke: Yeah. So she came across a Geneen Roth book, and this was my first introduction to the concept of intuitive eating. This was my first introduction to the concept that you have hunger signals, that you have a body that gives you information about what it needs. I didn't know that, I thought that what your body needs is whatever it needs to stay in the weight range. The idea that I was supposed to listen to my hunger and fullness and that that was like important, was pretty new. The idea was if you're listening to your hunger signals correctly, if you're really waiting until you're hungry and really stopping when you're full, you will be thin. That was the message. So this is what I call the intuitive eating diet or the hunger and fullness diet. And I became totally like, you know, pretty obsessed with the hunger and fullness diet, but I would fall off of it. I couldn't stick to the hunger and fullness diet either. You know, I would eat way past the point of full, in quotes. And I would eat when I quote unquote wasn't hungry, whatever that means. All the time. Right? So I couldn't stick to the hunger and fullness diet. And then, I mean, I went through many different iterations of the hunger and fullness diet. At one point I was involved with the Weigh Down diet, really super, very intense Christian group, this church that basically, it's a lot of like pray to God to not eat when you're not hungry, because when you eat when you're not hungry, that's like a spiritual malady. Right. And so I was even –
Virgie Tovar: A weight loss church?
Isabel Foxen Duke: A weight loss church, yeah. It's a weight loss church. Yeah. Yeah. There's a documentary about this. It's actually quite disturbing. It's a pretty much, it's a cult. I didn't realize how culty it was when I was doing it because I wasn't actively in the church. I was just, you know, buying all the programs and reading all the books. Yeah. And I remember, you're supposed to wait until you have a growl in your stomach to eat. And if you eat before you have a growl in your stomach, that's a sin.
Virgie Tovar: Wow. Wow.
Isabel Foxen Duke: Very intense. I mean, I was starving myself. It's a starvation program. And I remember having a huge binge eating episode, I was like, couldn't hang on any longer, binged my face off. It was like four days in the fetal position, could barely, very physically uncomfortable, like low bottom binge-eating where I like had to call in sick from work because I was so full and stuffed that I just could not really breathe or move. I'm sitting there, like sweating, so full, so uncomfortable, I felt like I was in the depths of hell. I call it like my final, my final binge. I'm just not in control of my food. I can't do it. I can't get up and try again tomorrow. I can't. It was like a surrender moment of like, perhaps I'm just a person who's going to have a jar of Nutella. And I can't do anything about it because every time I try, I end up here and I can't be here anymore. I cannot be like face down in my bed, hating myself because I fell off the wagon. I don't have the energy to keep trying to control my food. And so I just gave up, I gave up, I was like, screw it. If I gained weight, I gained weight. If I eat whatever, I eat whatever. I can't think about this anymore. I can't have my life revolve around this anymore. I'm just going to let myself just eat and whatever my weight will be will be. And the magical thing that happened was I ate, I gained weight, but I never had a four day bender where I just wanted to die ever again, after that, you know, like it was like, the really intense binge eating episodes that the hardcore diet-binge cyclers have experienced – and if you've been there, you know what I'm talking about – that never happened to me again. Did I have days where I had a jar of Nutella? Absolutely. I could still have that today. Stabilized, normalized food doesn't look like what diet culture tells you it's going to look like.
Virgie Tovar: Right, right, and I feel like you and I have talked about this. I dunno if you've quite called it radical hopelessness, but I think there is a –
Isabel Foxen Duke: The gift of hopelessness, the gift of hopelessness. Giving up was the best thing that ever happened to me. That was the healing: giving up the hope of dieting will ever work for me.
Virgie Tovar: I kind of want to talk a little bit about some of the points on the journey. Like one of them being, I mean, right, you can be eating in a way that, where you do not feel controlled by food, and that could look a lot of different ways. Some days it can look like the jar of Nutella, some days it looks like whatever. Some days it can look a lot different ways. The other thing is at the end of, you know, creating a relationship with food that is peaceful and not adversarial or that like is as joyful and peaceful as possible, like in, in the context of such an anxiety ridden food phobic culture. At the end of that, there is no guarantee of what kind of body you're going to have at the end of that. You can be complete, you can have this beautiful, wonderful – I would use the word “healthy” – relationship to food, and you could be a thin person. You could be a fat person. There's no guarantees on this. And I think that that's really scary for a lot of people. And I think for a lot of people, it can be really liberating and normal. I think for me, I felt really liberated like, oh, this is the body I'm supposed to have.
Isabel Foxen Duke: Yeah. Yeah.
Virgie Tovar: Going back to sort of a radical hopelessness can look like that moment, you know, where you're in the fetal position and you have to call out of work. It can also be the moment where you sort of have to come to terms with the fact that you ultimately can't control the size of your body pretty much, unless you want to, unless you want this to run your entire life. And I'm curious about like, you know, as a coach, I know you have brought people to the gift of hopelessness or helped them, ushered them there. And I'm curious, like, what is that like for people? Is that something, I mean, talk about the gift of hopelessness.
Isabel Foxen Duke: I mean, the gift of hopelessness is the most, it's, it is the core of my teaching. If your like number one goal is, I just don't wanna have an eating disorder anymore, like, I don't want to have this like, crazy relationship with food anymore, once you really get to the point where like, “I just can't diet, I am hopeless on dieting, I am hopeless on trying to control my food, trying to control my body,” that's when the real healing comes with food, right? Like that's when you're like, okay, food's just going to be food. It's going to be what it's going to be. This is what we call acceptance, body acceptance. I can still struggle with my body image. I can still struggle with fatphobia on any number of levels, but fundamentally, if you are hopeless on dieting saving you from that pain, then your food is just going to be your food. Here's the problem, I think, with hopelessness, is that hope grows back. If I'm really struggling with my body image, if I'm having pain around my body-related trauma, in some way, all of a sudden, dieting seems, maybe it's a good idea. Maybe it wasn't that bad. Maybe if I just do this, well, I'm not going to go back to that crazy dieting. I'm just going to be like a little dieting or I'm just going to be like, you know, like, that's fine. Right? Dieting is the real coping mechanism. Right. People talk a big game about emotional eating or whatever. Like you want to know what's really hard? Giving up dieting when you're in pain about your body when you're having emotional pain about your body related trauma.
Virgie Tovar: This is the thing, and this is what I've been trying to, you know, more and more tell people I'm like, you know, Isabel, like you're using the word, hope I might use the word you're triggered. Right. We think of dieting as like helpful behavior. We think of that moment when we want to get thin as optimization. I'm like, no, it's all just you being triggered. When you restrict it's a reaction. That's what you've been taught to do to cope. When you are triggered to your point around the pain that you have been taught, that something's wrong with your body, something's wrong with how you eat. So, I mean–
Isabel Foxen Duke: Right, and there's a reason for that. There's a biological reason for that, actually. So when we are in fight or flight, when we were an anxious, when we were in trauma response, we literally, our brains start to look for, how do I get out of this pain? Right? What can I get control of? Biologically, part of what that is, is you start to develop something called threat bias, which means you're looking for problems to solve. What can I control? What can I, you know, do to make myself safer? And so dieting is like, in the absence of an obvious solution to my problem, dieting is just this like always there in this corner of like, oh, this is something you could control. Just lose a little weight. You know, where your body, your body is always something you can try to control. Right. It's kind of like I'm having difficult feelings and I'm just in them and there's really nothing to be done about it other than just be with my feelings if I'm trying to escape those difficult feelings, but I don't really have a real solution to that problem. All of a sudden, like any control mechanism out there will start to look, feel like a good idea, right? And sometimes this could, this could be, you know, the pain might come from like actual fatphobia in the world, but, you know, even if you're just an anxious person, right. It's this projection of like all of my anxiety onto my body, as the thing to control, to take me out of this pain that I'm in. Does that kinda make sense?
Virgie Tovar: Of course. Yeah, absolutely. It's like, you know, it feels unsafe to be in my body. What can I do to escape from this, get a sense of control over this feeling, which feels very overwhelming. Absolutely. and I think, again, there's this idea of. You talk about this a lot. The idea of, a lot of people think of an eating disorder as something that is sort of, self-contained, like there is something wrong with me. There is something wrong with my relationship to food or my relationship to my body, without understanding this is happening in an ecosystem where all of these things end up becoming inevitable for a certain percentage of the population.
Isabel Foxen Duke: I mean, I would say that every diet, 95% of dieters by definition are dealing with this up and down. This is most people's experience in some way or another. Right? I think so. More severe ups and downs. And they usually just match the degree to which we're restricting or making ourselves wrong or being perfectionistic with food or whatever. I call it diet-binge cycling physics, right. The farther I pull the bow back on the bow and arrow, the farther it's going to fly in the other direction the second I let it go. And then I was like, oh shit, it flew in the other direction. Let me pull, pull, pull, pull, pull, pull, pull, pull myself back. Right. And then it just keeps happening. And this is, this is diet- binge cycling, classically defined. And most people are experiencing this, the small group of people who are not experiencing this, who are successfully sitting on their hands and really kinda holding it down for years on end, that's when you start to really see symptoms of clinically restrictive eating disorders like anorexia. So you know, I always am like, I do not feel jealous anymore. I did. I used to. I used to feel jealous of people that could restrict, that had the capacity restrict. I'd be like, what's wrong with me. I never, I never thought I had an eating disorder because I wasn't capable of maintaining restriction and I would be jealous. And now I realize actually the folks who are really capable of long-term restriction are often in more pain than anyone else, because that, I mean, there's no relief. It's constant self denial and self harm with zero release. Binges are fundamentally relieving. They are medicinal. They're actually a healthy response to deprivation. I thank God for my binges because they kept me alive. They kept me out of the hospital.
Virgie Tovar: I mean, I can feel that in my whole body, what you're talking about is bingeing as healthy responses, normal responses, self care in some way, you know, I think it's so difficult in this moment to understand like quote unquote bingeing, which is so deeply shamed and pathologized in our culture, to actually sort of see it as an act of self care, as your body sort of coming in and taking over and helping you survive. And I don't think we have the space right now to even think of how amazing that is.
Isabel Foxen Duke: I mean, yeah, I have an enormous amount of gratitude now for that. And, you know, really, it's a massive shift of consciousness to think that my desires for food are good, that my desires for food are healthy and keep me alive, that my desires for food are fundamentally safety mechanisms.
Virgie Tovar: Yes. Yes, yes, yes. Yes. I mean, I've just been thinking, I mean, for me, you know, I'm always, like, I don't like the quote unquote healthy, quote-unquote unhealthy eating binary. I'm like anything fundamentally, when we're talking about the bare minimum, anything that is there to help you survive, that's going to keep you alive, I would say, is in the healthy camp. Right? Like if you're absolutely not eating, right? And so I think, yeah, I always have trouble with those kinds of binaries, but you know, let's talk a little bit about fatphobia and what that looks like. You know, when you're working with a client who maybe is a thin bodied person versus a larger bodied person, you know, like a thin person can have an extremely high level of body dysmorphia, which is very unpleasant, but may not be dealing with, you know, likely is not dealing with structural, cultural fatphobia. I'm just thinking about like, when you're working with a thin client versus a fat client who might be facing fatphobia, I mean, what's the difference in those two trajectories?
Isabel Foxen Duke: I mean, obviously the challenges that a fat person is facing in terms of externalized or institutional or interpersonal fatphobia are just going to be structurally and fundamentally different. They're just dealing with, you know, so you think about, like fatphobia can be broken down into institutional, interpersonal and intra personal, right. A thin person is not dealing with institutional fatphobia. They just do not. They're completely, they have the privilege of just never having to deal with that particular set of challenges. The interpersonal fatphobia that they're dealing with is also probably quite reduced. That being said. I think what’s complicated for thin people is that even thin people are not necessarily immune from having had fatphobic experiences in childhood and also witnessing fatphobia, and seeing how people get treated differently on the basis of body size, like thin people still like see that. And they like kind of internalize the fear of fat, even if they're not experiencing the fatphobia. So It is undoubtedly clear that larger people are dealing with way more shit than thin people in terms of the challenges that they need to overcome, because they're also potentially also dealing with the anxiety. That’s the other thing about living in a fat body, you're dealing with all of the institutional fatphobia, all of the interpersonal phobia, all of the stuff, and you may also have trauma and anxiety and things that predispose you to disordered eating, even if you weren't in a fat body. Right. So it's like a triple action threat potentially happening. But yeah, it just gets like really murky, like where the line is, I guess, between, “am I totally projecting something irrational onto my body?” Is this like, oh, you have an eating disorder because it's really about something else. It's not really about fatphobia, it's just, you know, you're projecting, you know, your anxiety and your trauma onto your body. Or does having had experience of fatphobia in childhood or having a mother who was a dieter who was constantly, you know, putting herself down or having a mother who constantly put you down, even if you were in a, you know, thin body. I mean, it's just, the line starts to get really weird in terms of what's caused by quote unquote active, external fatphobia, and what's an anxious or trauma response projection, and like making a distinction between those two is really hard to do because no matter what body you live in, you still live in a fatphobic culture. Does that kind of make sense?
Virgie Tovar: Absolutely. I mean, that's the thing, right. I often use the metaphor of like breaking up and diet culture is your ex. And I'm like, I think what's hard about diet culture, unlike a lot of other types of trauma is that, you know, some trauma is safely in your rear view mirror. You can deal with it and you can kind of tell yourself, I'm never going to be like, if it happened as a kid, I'm never going to be five years old that, you know, I'm never going to be dependent on my parents that exact same way. But with fatphobia and working through food issues and body anxiety, it's like running into your ex every damn day. Like everywhere you go, your ex is like there. And so you're trying to heal while also actively running into them when you're grocery shopping, when you're going to get coffee or when you're going to get your Nutella, when you're trying to go on a date with someone else, right.
Isabel Foxen Duke: Right,
Virgie Tovar: That's one of the biggest challenges, I think, about the recovery, is that the trauma, it's like, my friend once told me, you can forgive someone who has slapped you in the past, but you cannot forgive someone who is still slapping you. And I think that is what's so hard, is like we're still getting slapped. It's really hard to forgive ourselves, let alone anything, when we're still actively in this place where we're getting lambasted all the time.
Isabel Foxen Duke: Right. So this is where, I mean a good portion of my work, and this is, you know, with people of all body sizes, a good portion of my work is when it comes to just dealing with the culture, right. It’s, “where can I realistically protect myself? Are there boundaries that I can realistically input to keep, to protect myself from the culture?” Right. Like maybe I don't talk to my fatphobic mother. Maybe I don't, you know, follow the Kardashians on Instagram. Right? Like there are, what can I actively do, what is a realistic thing that I can do to divorce myself and take myself out of that kind of violent environment. But then realistically, you're going to come up short there, right? So then what's the game plan then? And I mean, I would argue probably, you know, a big part of it is like repair, right? Like being able to like, self soothe and like, you know, how can I self care after I'm harmed, when harm is not avoidable. You know, I have a lot of clients whose spouses are really fatphobic spouses who are, you know, basically threatening them with, “I need you to be losing weight.” I mean, that's a really different – when you have children, you have a family, I mean, that is a heartbreaking situation. It's like, you're damned if you do, damned if you don't. Right. So, you know, working with people around, you know, what are the boundaries that you personally feel comfortable setting? Like what are your lines in the sand where you can remove yourself from toxicity and where, you know, for whatever reason you may be deciding to stay in an environment that may be fatphobic because of these other things. It just gets really, it's a lot, but yeah, what can I do to change my environment? Where can I set boundaries and invite my environment and where do I need to, how can I take care of myself when I am exposed to fatphobia in a way that harms me?
Virgie Tovar: Yeah, a hundred percent. So, okay. I think, I actually have just have one last question for you. Isabel. Are you ready?
Isabel Foxen Duke: Yes, let's do it.
Virgie Tovar: I want you to pretend that you're traveling, you're in the future. Like you're, you're I dunno how long in the future, but it's a time when you can look back at what we're all living through around diet culture and food and bodies.
Isabel Foxen Duke: Okay.
Virgie Tovar: You're safe, that’s safely in the past, we're no longer doing that. What is your future self saying about this very moment? Like 2022 that we're living in now, when it comes to like how we deal with food and body and diet culture
Isabel Foxen Duke: You know, I think that honestly, I just have so much compassion. Like when I think about that, when I think about like, looking back on history and thinking about all the pain that so many, especially women, but like all people are in and we're in, if we're looking at it retrospectively, just thinking about how hard that must have been. Right. I'm literally in the future, thinking about, that must have been so hard and so painful and it makes me so sad and I just, it's like my heart breaks, but there's like a real, it's just compassion. Like I just feel so much compassion and like that's like one of the most important tools you could have, I think, in this process, on this journey, is just really, looking at your diet recovery journey through the lens of compassion, you know, looking at your body image challenges through the lens of compassion of like, none of this is your fault. Like this is all like diet culture wounding that like, you know, none of us asked for. And it's so painful and it's so hard. And like, how can you just really like, love yourself and be compassionate towards yourself through this like, violence that we're experiencing as a collective.
Virgie Tovar: Yes. I mean, I obviously love that. I absolutely agree. Isabel, thank you for being on Rebel Eaters Club.
Isabel Foxen Duke: Thank you for having me. This is so special. I'm like, I feel like such a special kinship with you and it's like, it's just a treat. It's really a treat.
Virgie Tovar: Same, same. And thank you for sharing some Nutella banana business with me.
Isabel Foxen Duke: Anytime you want to share a nutella banana!
NARRATION: Wow! Ok, let’s take a moment to contemplate radical hopelessness. Yes! That moment when you understand that dieting just doesn’t work - that it will never work… that it’s not your fault and your body will just be the weight that it wants to be… THAT is a moment of power.
As Isabel says, “dieting is the real coping mechanism.” Most of us need help coping. How can we trade out dieting for something that doesn’t eat our souls, though? I personally recommend thrifting, water colors, and perfecting your heckling skills.
If you have thoughts on the conversation you just heard or even if you just want to say HI, REACH OUT! DM me @virgietovar. DM the show’s producers @TransmitterPods Or Shoot us a message at rebeleatersclub@gmail.com!
CREDITS:
Rebel Eaters Club is brought to you by Transmitter Media.
This episode was produced by Shoshi Shmuluvitz <SHMOO-luh-vitz>
Sara Nics is Transmitter’s Executive Editor
Wilson Sayre is our Managing Producer
and Gretta Cohn is our Executive Producer
And I’m your host Virgie Tovar!
Rick Kwan is our mix engineer.
And thanks to Taka Yasuzawa, who wrote some of the music we use in the show.
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