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Episode 21. This week I talk to Marie-Pier Pitre-D’Iorio, RD, B.SC. Marie-Pier is an anti-diet Registered Dietitian with a B.Sc. in Psychology and the founder of The Balanced Dietitian. She is passionate about helping folx discover how to nourish their bodies without guilt, shame or restrictions. She strives to provide evidence-based nutrition interventions to all her clients and support them in their recovery journeys. She is the host of The Balanced Dietitian Podcast where she provides listeners a different approach to nutrition. She also has an amazing group program that can be found here!
Marie’s Journey
Marie-Pier talks about her experience with developing an eating disorder and process of her recovery. She talks about her experience with more standard eating disorder treatment, and how there was little connection or discussion around how her thoughts and beliefs about food and her body impacted her emotions, self-worth and overall feelings about herself.
This prompted her to pursue a career in dietetics where she eventually learned about anti-diet approaches, diet culture and started to apply that to the work she did with clients as well as her own personal journey and experience of herself.
She’s got some great takeaways so make sure you stay to the end to hear those!
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Nutrition Training Within Diet Culture
Marie talks about her experience going through nutrition education within diet culture and our more standard weight centric model. She talks about how she had the thoughts “I can’t be a fat dietitian” and the fact that restoring her weight to a “healthy weight” was good, but how feelings of control creeped in in thinking, “I can’t gain too much weight.”
She graduated from school and still wasn’t fully on board with the anti-diet movement and looking back, she believes at times she was causing more harm that good in helping people move towards weight loss.
She reflects on the incoherence between the messages of what we tell people in larger bodies (you should lose weight) versus those in smaller bodies (you must gain weight) and how she also started to realize that if she holds these standards for others that your body must fit into a certain mold of what is “good” then she will never be set free.
Becoming a Bright Light
Marie stated that the way she shows up in the world today is as such a bright light, and reflecting back on how different that is from the way she used to be. I didn’t know her then, but I completely agree her energy comes through the screen in talking to her. She is so passionate about what she does and that is why I highly recommend you all follow her on Instagram to see for yourself.
Building Internal Cues with Helpful Boundaries
Marie discusses a period of time when she was in recovery from her eating disorder where she would go to family parties and have her husband put his hand on her arm to remind her to tune in to her body. We talked about the difference between autonomy of behavior, versus being controlled and how only the person truly knows.
We talked about the fact that you don’t go from a lifetime of dieting to the next day tuning in to your intuition, and how it’s okay and normal to stumble, but how it’s also ok and normal to notice and ask for boundaries and supports along the way.
This might mean asking a support person to help you tune in to your body when you are out of sync, or to keep certain foods out of the home for a particularly period of time. This is going to be incredibly individual for different people and it’s hard because it requires continued trust in yourself, working on things, learning what works and what doesn’t, and making adjustments.
Marie says, “There’s no wrong way to tune in to your intuition.”
Reflecting on the Healing Process
Marie shares the timeline for her healing and how it was a gradual process that too time and work. She shares that “the healing process is not an easy process. BUT, it’s very worth it.”
She talks about how many people go about life living with a dim light, and how different the way she shows up now is from her former self.
Helpful Tips & Takeaways
Marie talked about some of the things that were most helpful to her in her recovery journey. These included:
- No longer weighing herself. Marie shares that she does not weigh herself at all and has not done so in 4 years, and low and behold, she’s doing just fine and happier than ever!
- Stop calorie counting. She had to be honest with herself that she wasn’t just curious about calories and delete the calorie apps from her phone.
- Doing her own emotional work. As she learned to no longer hyper focus on her body and avoid the other emotions in her life, she had to face what the true concerns were for her in her life. She talked about the experience of viewing her eating disorder as a symptom, not the cause and how this freed her up to make the necessary shifts in how she relates to her emotions, and to herself.
- Unpacking diet culture. She talked about how over time, truly understanding what diet culture is, how it is impacting her and the women in her life was really powerful. She stated that she realized over time and learning that she can choose to drop out and no longer believe the things she used to believe, and that this was empowering.
- All bodies are good. Another theme that came out in our discussion is the idea that she believes that all people and bodies are good and therefore, this should apply to hers too. This brings up an interesting a relevant point that is crucial to examine. Body shame and weight bias and diet culture and narrow views of what “healthy” means negatively impacts all of us, even if we fall into the image of what health is “supposed to be.” As Marie said above, if she holds these standards for others, she will never be truly set free.
Connect with Marie-Pier
I hope you enjoyed this conversation as much as I did! I truly appreciate Marie’s contributions to the world and I’m so glad she’s showing up as the bright light that she is.
Marie has an excellent podcast called The Balanced Dietitian Podcast and is super fun to follow on Instagram. Connect with her today and let her know you appreciated this conversation!
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Disclaimer: This blog and podcast is for informational and educational purposes only. It is not a substitute for individual professional advice or treatment, including medical or mental health advice. It does not constitute a provider patient relationship.