How does your story with food from childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood impact your current relationship with food? Opal Co-Founder, Julie Church, RDN interviews Jessica Setnick, RDN the creator of the “Healing Your Inner Eater” workshop and workbook which invites individuals to look back in order to move forward in one’s relationship with food. Listen in to Jessica’s passionate story telling to learn about the three parts of your inner eater and how learning about your eating legacy could help heal your current eating concerns. This episode is like a buffet– there is something in it for everyone!
Connect with Jessica:
Healing the Inner Eater Workbook – coupon code “podcast”
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Thank you to our team…
Editing by David Bazzi
Music by Aaron Davidson: https://soundcloud.com/diet75/
Sound engineering by Ayesha Ubayatilaka at Jack Straw Studios
Transcription by Rev.com
Julie Church (00:04):
Welcome to the Appetite, a podcast brought to you by Opal Food and Body Wisdom, an eating disorder treatment clinic in Seattle, Washington. On this podcast, we talk about all things food, body movement, and mental health. I’m Julie Church dietician, nutrition director and co-founder of Opal, and I’ll be your host for today’s show and I get to introduce you to our special guest, Jessica Snick, who is here. Welcome.
Jessica Setnick (00:29):
Hello. So happy to be here.
Julie Church (00:30):
Yay. So I could do all sorts of ways of introducing Jessica. I think we’ve been fairly in the field for about the same-ish time, but I think Jessica did predate me some because I got first introduced to her by one of her first things that she did to really benefit the eating disorder field was that eating disorder bootcamp. And Jessica as a registered dietician has been somebody who has been a pioneer in a lot of professional education as well as the clinical interface like having her own clients and caseload for many years. But she is retired from that now and is really just focusing her attention on how she can help individuals in kind of, I think I want to hear more, but really a focus almost outside of the nutrition field to maybe enhance the other folks out there to know more about eating disorders and hopefully maybe prevent or assess better. Yeah. So I want to hear more
Jessica Setnick (01:29):
That, okay, eating disorder treatment is so crucially important, but there’s just a big but to that, right? Which is that only a very small portion of people with eating difficulties ever make it to specialty care. And most people aren’t even diagnosed with an eating disorder and still may have difficulties with their eating. So my goal was to sort of take the words eating disorder out of the same methods that we might use to help someone with an eating disorder, but just remove those words so that people who would never in their wildest dreams identify with I have an eating disorder, could still learn some of the skills that we use to help people with eating disorders
Julie Church (02:12):
That
Jessica Setnick (02:12):
Really can help anyone.
Julie Church (02:14):
And
Jessica Setnick (02:14):
That’s the goal of healing your inner eater is just different wording, but some of the same techniques that we might use on a, I’ll say, I don’t know if a lighter scale is the right word, but more of a in-home living kind of scale where someone can do it, A DIY, let’s
Julie Church (02:30):
Say,
Jessica Setnick (02:31):
Versus necessarily needing to as if they don’t even identify as someone who might need to meet with a dietician or a therapist. They can still do some of these things on their own to really look back. And then of course the last page of the workbook says something like, once you’ve done these things, you may want to talk with someone about them.
Julie Church (02:49):
Okay, wonderful. Yeah. So we are going to get to hear a lot more about this inner eating workbook and some of that. Can you speak to, I think the reach beyond the dieticians also, and you were also speaking some on your website about just health educators, school counselors, maybe first responders, primary care, athletic staff, college health. What are you doing in that world to bring your knowledge?
Jessica Setnick (03:17):
So people tend to think that educating kids about nutrition means educating kids about nutrition. It’s not right. It’s like we think of nutrition from an adult point of view, nutrients, macronutrients, micronutrients, carbs, proteins, fats, vitamins, minerals, even supplements. We think of all this adult conception of language, healthy foods, not healthy foods. Sometimes foods, moderation, fun foods, all these things might mean something to us, but to kids it’s totally different. Nutrition education isn’t actually talking about nutrition, it’s talking about the very, very, very basics. Why do you need food? Food makes your body grow, food makes you have energy, food makes you feel good. That’s the kind of stuff that we have to talk to kids about. Role modeling, appropriate eating, role modeling, not judging other people’s foods. So in other words, my stance is trying to say that not talking about nutrition facts and details is not the lack of education about nutrition.
(04:28):
Those things, kids are so concrete. The example I always give is red and green. We teach kids, you go on green stop on red, that’s it, right? Because kids don’t have discernment. As adults, we know sometimes you stop on green and sometimes you go on red, right? But you can’t teach kids that because they don’t have that discernment. So when you tell kids something like, oh, I’ll just make something up, pizza is bad for you. Then in a child’s mind they take away, if I see my mom eating pizza, something bad might happen to her, right? It’s very concrete. They don’t have the discernment to say either that was your point of view or eating pizza all the time might not be the healthiest choice. They just don’t have that discernment. So in other words, we need to stop giving kids discerning nuanced nutrition information that we understand and start putting it into very kid appropriate concrete thinking.
(05:30):
And we don’t want kids to think concretely about food in goods or bads, so therefore we have to stop talking to them about it in terms of goods and bads. I love that. Instead talk about colors in foods and wait a minute, you ran so fast you must have eaten something this morning. You had tons of energy and really simple kind of connections. So the same way we talk to kids about their bodies and feeling good about their bodies, we’re really not getting into the minutia that’s in our heads. But somehow we think if we, that if we deliver that to kids younger, we’re going to prevent eating problems. And it’s actually the reverse.
Julie Church (06:08):
So you’re as a dietician trying to get to the school counselor or the athletic trainer or the coach and helping them broaden their perspective on what nutrition education is and
Jessica Setnick (06:19):
Ideally all of them, because the more people in an environment, whether it’s a college or whether it’s an elementary school or whether it’s a hospital, the more people that have that information, the more consistent message is coming through. So this summer I’m speaking to the National Association of Health Unit coordinators, which I guess is what we used to call sort of a unit secretary. It has a different name now it’s a unit coordinator. So that’s someone who doesn’t necessarily have a health professional type of education, but they’re interacting with patients all the time. And so it’s wonderful that people who aren’t even necessarily involved in that kind of direct patient care but are in a hospital setting want to learn about eating disorders. And so I’m doing healing your inner eater with them. So that’s the idea is that all of us really need to change if we want to prevent eating disorders, and we cannot prevent all of them, but we all could benefit from changing the way we talk about food and eating to our kids and also ourself because we have an inner eater, which is pretty childlike a lot of the time.
Julie Church (07:23):
Okay. Yeah. So what you’re saying too, yeah, you’re trying to address, well, yeah, there’s this mainstream messaging that diet culture gives us about nutrition and you’re trying to get in there to help some of the educators and the influencers that are with others to have awareness around that and maybe give some different messages. So I love that. So this is sort of a deeper dive into even intro of you, but is there, I think the other bigger, I guess organization, I think of you being a part of that you founded was ied, which is the International Federation
Jessica Setnick (07:55):
Of Eating Eating Disorder, dieticians,
Julie Church (07:56):
Right? Of eating disorder dieticians. Is that still up and running? Is that still an organization? Oh my gosh,
Jessica Setnick (08:00):
Yes.
(08:01):
So IED has just been something that grew bigger than maybe my wildest dreams because I am not equipped to be running a nonprofit organization of 900 members. But it’s also been wonderful because it gives dieticians who work in the eating disorder field of voice and dieticians who didn’t know they were going to be working in the eating disorder field, a community. So a lot of the people that join our more sort of eating disorder interested, I would say, and I think of IED as my Girl Scout best. I don’t know if anyone listening has ever been a Girl Scout or had a Girl Scout, but my step baby, Peyton, who’s grown up now, when she was six or seven, I used to walk the neighborhood with her selling Girl Scout cookies. I know they do it differently now, but at that time you would just walk up to a stranger’s door and knock on their door and offer to sell them cookies.
(08:48):
Well, this is a child who couldn’t order for herself in a restaurant. She’d whisper to me what she wanted and then I would tell the server, and yet when she put on that Girl scout vest, she would march right up to a stranger’s door and knock on that door and sell that person, girl Scout cookies. And so I think of IED as my Girl scout vest, for example. I’m talking to government officials. I wrote a letter to the secretary of the va. I don’t do those things, but IED gives me the Girl Scout vest, right? And I just march right up to the secretary of the va. I mean, I’m writing a letter to the Honorable Bull, Doug Collins, a cabinet member and saying, this is what’s important to the eating disorder, dieticians and the veterans they serve. And so I feel like that’s what IED is really doing behind the scenes. A lot of people think of IED as just sort of a membership organization, but we’re doing a ton of advocacy work. The goal all along has been to help people get access to care. And I feel like in the past two years we’ve really made advances and leaps and bounds toward that.
Julie Church (09:49):
That’s awesome. Wonderful to hear about that. I think I didn’t even know maybe that that was it, but I did notice when, I can’t remember exactly the troubling news or stance that was brought out by some national organization if Fed did jump in and wrote an article or got some of us all to sign off on something. So I guess I have seen you do that. So thank you for that and behalf of many of us dieticians, and I would love, I think as listeners already can tell Jessica’s passionate and energetic. So I am excited that our paths recross to say, yes, of course you should be on the appetite. And today we are going to focus on something she’s already been referencing in terms of talking about healing your inner eater and that workbook and workshop that she has been creating and doing more in her current state. So healing your inner eater. Jessica, can you tell us what is this and how did it start and what is this is a workbook, is it workshop? Is it something anybody can do? Is it dietician focused? I don’t tell me.
Jessica Setnick (10:53):
So healing your inner eater started as a five day workshop at sort of a high end, let’s call it a rehab center. And it costs thousands of dollars to go, which I did not get, but it was a five day workshop for people who had already been through treatment for traumatic events and really wanted to look at how those events might be affecting their eating. And so I came up with a curriculum for it, and what was amazing to me, again, I didn’t want it to have the word eating disorders in it, so it was called Making Food Your Friend again, which is sort of a troubling concept in some ways. And so I’m glad I’ve changed the name, but that’s what it was called at the time. And the people who came were amazing, I would say potentially could have all been diagnosed with eating disorders, but also had amazing stories to tell.
(11:44):
And in this confidential environment, we made timelines of your life experiences with food. And just to give you an example, one of the individuals, and none of this will be identifying information recalled as a child, his first eating experience was that he remembered being on the ground on all fours, eating grass. And of course we had to hear how did that come about? He was something like, and I won’t have the exact numbers, but let’s say he was the 10th of 10 children and his mother unfortunately died during the childbirth process. So there was only one girl in this family and she was 12 or 13 years old. And so for whatever reason, the girl was given this baby, a girl’s going to know how to take care of a baby. Well, she certainly didn’t know how to take care of the baby. And so he remembers being on the ground on the farm with the sheep eating grass because he did not even know he was a human baby and remembers throwing up. And so you’re talking about starting out life with some very traumatic experiences related to food. And what I found, of course, we handled that and discussed it person to person in the group. But from a bigger picture point of view, what alerted me and alarmed me is we’re talking about people who have already been in treatment for traumatic events in their life and the unhealthy behaviors that arose from them, like drinking or drug use. And no one had ever talked with this man about this.
(13:18):
This is the first time he had shared this with anyone. And so that’s what alerted me that so much is going on and going into people’s eating that no one is thinking to ask about and talk about. And so over time, obviously a five day workshop that costs thousands of dollars is not very accessible. And so I shrunk the whole thing into a workbook, change the name to healing your inner eater, and now it’s something that people can, yes, there are people who come to a workshop when their workplace hires me and what they’re hiring me to do in theory is two things, or in reality is two things. One is to teach them some of these skills to help the people that they serve, but to do that we’re also delivering the content to the people who are attending to look within on their own.
(14:05):
And so that’s how healing your inner eater became what it is. I wanted it to be something accessible where people can say, something’s going on with my eating. I may not be able to put my finger on it. It may not rise to the level of what I think I need to see a professional about, but here’s some ideas of what you could start to look at on your own as a friend with your dietician and start to see how those early childhood experiences, and not only that, but the people who raised us, what are the messages that we’re still carrying? And I know I’ve thrown a lot of words at you, but I’ll sort of close my mouth after I say that. When things happen to us when we’re kids, it’s so tempting as adults for people, I’ve heard it a million times, well, that’s an exaggeration.
(14:49):
I’ve heard it a lot of times where say, well, that happened so long ago, it’s not affecting me anymore. And I think the opposite, the younger you were when it happened, the fewer resources and discernment you had to understand it. The longer you’ve been living that storyline, whatever it was that you learned, and the more of your life that has been affected by it. And so that is why we really look back to move forward because these early experiences are not sometimes things that are really discussed or thought about, we think it’s so far in our path.
Julie Church (15:22):
Yeah, that’s wonderful. I think that is so true, and just to have our listeners hear that and go, okay, yeah, it is okay to be pondering or even exploring those things in our past to then hopefully move forward in a healthier, more life-giving relationship with food. When we started the appetite, it was really to target the same thing you’re saying, which is that there’s so many people that will never do treatment at Opal, and we wanted there to be something that somebody could tap into, listen to get some resources from and do their own healing in the ways that could be accessible. So in the same way your workbook and other ways even talking about this on this podcast, we’ll be doing that at the same time with appetite, which I love that. Why
Jessica Setnick (16:05):
Am I not surprised?
Julie Church (16:08):
Well, I would love for you to then, I think you’re kind of already defined, but your term of inner eater, can you just give me a little bit more of an expansive definition of what you mean by that?
Jessica Setnick (16:20):
Yes. There are three parts to your inner eater. All of us, we all have an inner eater. There is the inner child, which I’m going to call the inner rebel, which is the one that wants what it wants when it wants it, right in the middle of the night. I want three nutty bars from little Debbie in my pantry and I want to eat them. Then there is the critical society, the internalized voice of critical society or diet culture that says, that is ridiculous. That is an insane amount of calories. You shouldn’t be eating in the middle of the night. You should be asleep and X, Y, Z will happen if you eat those things. And then the third part of your inner eater, which for many of us is a very, very tiny little voice, very quiet, is the competent adult or the competent eater.
(17:10):
And the competent eater is the one that sort of navigates between those other two parts and says, thank you inner Re for being excited about little Debbie snack cakes and thank you critical society who’s trying to keep me safe, but I’m going to make a competent decision about this right now. And that decision might be I woke up in the middle of the night because I’m hungry, so I’m going to have a nutty bar. And it might be I woke up in the middle of the night hungry, so I’m going to have a Turkey sandwich. In other words, the competent adult takes the information from the other two and figures out what is the best course of action. It doesn’t just knee jerk react between one and two. But one of the things that you sent me as far as questions you thought you might ask, I hope I ask it myself. I hope it’s okay. What is the impact of when your competent adult isn’t? Well, it’s because it’s that you’re bouncing back and forth between that inner rebel and that critical society voice without a lot of input from the competent adult. And that’s when you see overeating undereating and a lot of regret and guilt about
Julie Church (18:15):
Both. That’s such an impact.
Jessica Setnick (18:18):
And never feeling like you’re doing it right or eating, and I’m using finger quotes for the people who can’t see my hands right now.
Julie Church (18:26):
I can’t see your hands, but yes, that is good to say. That is good to say. So then, if one is wanting to do that journey of inner eater and build becoming a competent eater and have awareness around the rebel awareness of the critical society, diet culture, what are some of the ways to do that? Or what’s the journey?
Jessica Setnick (18:48):
So the goal, and sometimes we have to build up to a goal, but the ultimate goal is to be able to hear the competent eater voice either as loudly as the other two or almost sometimes in place of the other two, that it’s instead of having angel and devil on your shoulders and feeling like you have to have this other voice come in and navigate between them or negotiate between them, the competent eater voice becomes more of our inner north star, our compass. Of course, in times of stress, the inner rebel and the critical society may become louder, but the goal is to really give that competent eater a voice, that competent adult voice. And the way to do that at first is to start listening for all three voices. So for example, when someone is feeling conflicted about what to do next to think, okay, what’s my inner rebel saying?
(19:44):
What’s my inner critical society voice saying? And then what are the other options? And the best way to spot when you are battling between inner rebel and critical society is if you can only see two options. So let’s say you and I, Julie are sitting at lunch and in your mind you’re battling back and forth, I could eat a dry salad or I could have a cheeseburger, fries and a milkshake, and the menu might have, oh my gosh, let’s say we’re at the Cheesecake Factory. There’s like 40,000 things on that menu, but all you can see is there’s a right choice and a wrong choice. That’s what tells you that you are in black and white thinking. You are just battling between these two voices. And so you have to sort of identify that. And you might say, Jessica, all I can see right now is I could have a dry salad and be good, or I could have a cheeseburger milkshake and fries and be satisfied.
(20:36):
Can you help? And I might say, well, I think you could have both of those things or either of those things, but tell me you’re thinking about it. What else? What are the options? How would you guide me if I said those things? And so it’s sort of a conversation you can, I’m just depicting it as a conversation with another person, but it can even be a conversation with yourself. Because the truth is you could have a salad and a milkshake. You could have a cheeseburger and a fruit plate when you could only see two options. That means your competent adult is hiding over in a corner. And so we got to bring the competent adult out and say things like, what sounds good to me? How hungry am I? What will be my next eating opportunity? How much money is in my pocket? Et cetera, et cetera. And the competent adult uses all kinds of determining factors on why to make choices about food. Whereas the inner rebel and critical society only use this false dichotomy of what’s good for me and what’s bad for
Julie Church (21:36):
Me. That’s awesome. Yeah, I love that. Just it’s the awareness, increasing of awareness and allowing for the conversations that happen in our own mind and heart about food to matter. It’s like just make that matter.
Jessica Setnick (21:51):
That’s a mic drop moment. Yes. The conversations that happen in our food and mind make them matter. I love that.
Julie Church (21:58):
Yes. Yeah, because I think so many times, especially when somebody’s maybe on a diet or struggling with eating disorder, it’s like this thing, I just got to push it away. I got to just push it away. I got to push it away. But I do think, no, this slows everybody down maybe to say, Hey, to have my own awareness about this and listen actually could help me in this moment and then allow for me to make the decision I want to with my food.
Jessica Setnick (22:23):
And because that’s the goal. And I said, sometimes we have to take steps to get toward the goal. Sometimes it can go either way. Either we can hear those inner voices and think, oh my gosh, where did I get this idea that these are my only options and trace it back? Or sometimes you have to go the other way and look at the formative years of your life to be able to hear those specific voices. And that’s where a timeline comes in. And looking at the people who raised you. Yeah,
Julie Church (22:52):
And that’s one of the things about the workbook, I was excited to get into this and hear how you’re navigating this, but the workbook description does talk about the importance of looking back to move forward. And part of that is exploring one’s caregivers and their own experiences with their food relationship and perhaps maybe the feeding relationship between that caregiver and yourself. So tell me more how you do that and
Jessica Setnick (23:15):
Sure. So I am going to use the term eating legacy to describe everything that came before us that we inherited. And so we are the product of the people who survive. So in other words, we are the product of our caregivers. They are the product of their caregivers. And I always say caregivers because not everyone was raised by a family member or by a parent or parent. So anyone that impacted you. And in the workbook there’s a circle for you. And then there are many circles around because we were impacted by many people other than our primary caregivers. So the idea is to identify the people that were involved in your early childhood life and ideally, hopefully those people all had your best interests at heart, even if it didn’t seem like it, there may be some people in there who didn’t, and that can be traumatic on its own.
(24:08):
But one of the key things that we try to talk about in the workshop is just because the people who were raising you were trying their best. We don’t have to blame them for causing problems. That doesn’t mean that they saw you for who you were and exactly what you needed. So we have to look at not just the people who raised us, but what was their eating experience when they were kids and the people who raised them. And so we have to keep going back because the truth is we are a product of people who lived thousands of years ago. And I love to say that people pleasing is a survival skill. We learned a long time ago in our genes that if you don’t stay with the group, then you can’t survive. And so we are descended from the people who were able to conform to survive in the short term that plays out as if I play peekaboo with these weirdos, then they will feed me and change my diaper when I need it. And so we learned to go along to get along. Another example is let’s say thousands of years ago, who’s going to survive when there’s not enough food? The person who says, oh, well I guess there’s not enough food. Or the person who gets hangry and says, out of my way people, I got to go find some food.
(25:23):
So we are descended from the people that got hangry when they didn’t get enough to eat. So these are the kind of things that we have to recognize that we think our individual eating behavior is our conscious choice and we make our own destiny. And the message of diet culture definitely tells us if something’s going wrong with your eating, just change your mind. Do it differently when really we are reacting to generations and generations of eating experiences. Some of them far back, but also some of them very recent. And I’m thinking of the stories that people tell at the workshop, and some of them will make you cry. I mean, I’m thinking of someone who said that her grandmother always cried at big family meals, and she would ask Grandpa, why is grandma sad? And he would say, no, grandma’s crying because she’s happy. And she didn’t understand until she was an adult that her grandma grew up in a dust bowl situation either in Kansas or Oklahoma, somewhere during the depression where there wasn’t enough food.
(26:23):
And apparently the minister would come over to her family’s house every Sunday after church, and the children were not allowed to eat until the grownups were done, that the parents didn’t want to tell the minister that they were struggling. So they’d put out as much of a spread as they could, and the kids would basically watch the minister eating seconds and thirds knowing that that meant they weren’t going to have anything to eat. And so for this grandma now to be an adult and to see her whole family with grandkids and everyone sitting around the table with enough to eat really moved her to tears every single time. And so that’s just an example of the way that our patterns are transmitted through generations. And if we don’t have an explanation, which a lot of times we don’t have the luxury of an explanation, we have made up our own story about those things and it may be affecting our eating still till now.
Julie Church (27:13):
How do you guide folks if they don’t know that story? Are there ways that you help them put some of the pieces together?
Jessica Setnick (27:22):
That’s an interesting question, and I am not sure I’ve ever thought of it quite that way, but I am good at reading between the lines, and probably you are too. And we’ve both seen a lot of individuals and heard a lot of their eating stories. And so to be able to give someone ideas, possibilities. So some of the possibilities include the fact that none of us, I may not know your heritage, but there is no one alive today who isn’t somewhere descended in the past few generations from someone who went through a refugee situation, a food insecurity situation, the Great Depression, the Holocaust. There’s all kinds of different ways that people have been traumatized with regard to food. And so even if you don’t know exactly what your caregivers went through, that there was some of that in there somewhere. That’s why we all, not we, but many of us have grown up with, you have to eat everything on your plate.
(28:16):
There’s children starving in blank. And so there are themes that we can predict probably happened to someone based on their eating behavior. Someone who, for example, hides food. We can say, do you think that there was a situation in your past where someone didn’t have enough to eat and so you learned to store food somewhere or someone who had an unsafe situation where food was stolen from them, and so they learned to hide food in a certain way. We can sort of conjecture, even if we don’t know for sure, we can look at the outcome behaviors and suggest possibilities of how that might have transpired. And sometimes we kind of sound like mind readers when we say something like that. And then a patient once told me that he was adopted and his adopted parents, so it became his parents. His parents had a biological son almost the same age, and that son had a totally different body type. And so the biological son was allowed to eat whatever he wanted, and the adopted son being larger was only allowed to have one portion. And this developed into an adult situation where he can eat whatever he wants and his inner child is still telling him to binge eat
(29:27):
Because now he can have whatever he wants. So he’s rebelling against those childhood experiences. So we’ve heard enough of those stories that we can sometimes kind of say, I wonder if there was ever a time blah, blah, blah. And then someone’s like, oh my gosh, how did you know? And it’s because we can sort of read the tea leaves of their current eating behaviors and imagine what their past eating trauma might have been.
Julie Church (29:49):
Totally. I love all that. Yes, there is so much richness in that and hope the listeners are encouraged to kind of think back and explore that. I also am aware of some research that talks about the importance and the value of exploring one’s ethnic identity and having a connection to their roots. And I think about identity when we think about culture and religion and ethnicity is food. There’s so much around food that comes out, and I’m so aware that the influence of racism and there still is systemic oppression that keeps some from feeling like they can fully eat the foods that are connected to their family, connected to their heritage, their religion and culture, and do that in a public place or do that in the ways that they may want to. I do wonder, when you talk about that healing, there’s this awareness of like, okay, this is my lineage. What did you say? My eating legacy? Yeah. So what do I know about that? And then now in my current context, how do I then proceed to do this in a safe way, in a way that I feel like I can be what honored, respected?
(31:03):
What about that?
Jessica Setnick (31:04):
There’s two parts of that. One is that just because your eating legacy, the heritage of your ancestors may have been erased by more recent generations who were trying to go along to get along and trying to fit into the culture because that’s what meant safety and survival. That is okay for you to bring back some of those things, even if let’s say your grandma didn’t make those things, there is someone out there that knows how to make those things and you can experiment with ’em and you may not even eating all of them, but that’s what you can. And that’s the beauty of the internet and social media and some of the things that bring so much crap into our lives also sometimes brings some beauty into our lives because we can find people who have preserved some of those food ways and be able to bring those back into our lineage and our legacy for the future, even if they weren’t directly transmitted to us.
(31:58):
And I hear you on all of that social justice aspect and the systemic determinants of health, social determinants of health, and there’s so many buzzwords around it, but the idea basically being that certain parts of our heritage were erased because they were considered not okay. And unfortunately, I think there’s some heritage of dietician work doing that too. I mean if you look at any of the pictures of the dietician conferences of the early 19th, or sorry, early 20th century, you look at all of these stern looking crabby white women, there were black dieticians and there were people working in other areas, but they weren’t given a voice. And so the voice of dieticians tends to be sort of one of erasure unfortunately. And so it’s important that all of us bring interesting food ways and sort of heritage, legacy food ways into our lives and for our kids, even if they weren’t our heritage.
(32:53):
And that’s a beautiful thing too, but all the factors that are in our society, all of our ancestors had the factors in their societies. And so that’s why it’s so hard to be the change maker because you’re the person working to change generations of behaviors and generations of society. So I almost think of it as, and let’s just call it a slow moving train because I don’t love the idea of someone trying to push a train back, but I do, I think of it as a train of many cars and you’re trying to push it back so that it doesn’t keep going to your children, and it’s a huge job for the person who’s in the middle, not just because of let’s say, finding these legacy food ways that have sort of been erased, not just because of trying to undo things that you were taught and trying to change our thinking, which are very hard things, but also because some of those people are still alive and they may get hurt feelings.
Julie Church (33:48):
Yes.
Jessica Setnick (33:49):
When you say, in our family we do X, Y, z, and your parents or your grandparents are looking at you or shaking their head or giving you the look or I can’t believe you let your kids eat like that. It can be very hard on the change maker because you’re trying to convey, I don’t judge what you did, but we are doing things differently in our family and for some reason we are better at doing that in other areas. Let’s just say you got sent to summer camp every summer and you’ve decided that you want your kid to have a free range summer and just play in the backyard. It’s somehow easier to say that than to say, you know what? I really don’t like gefilte fish, so we’re not going to have gefilte fish at Rosh Hashanah or something like that. And being Jewish, I can really equate this food is heritage type of idea.
(34:40):
It becomes really hard, and I was trying to explain it. I was asked to speak about it to a group of people who are not Jewish, and I was trying to explain that when someone with an eating disorder, and it could include people with food preferences, but this was specifically eating disorder professionals. When someone with an eating disorder, let’s just say I don’t want to eat lakas at Hanukkah, those don’t feel like they’re supportive to my recovery maybe another year, but this year is not that year that sometimes people, family members can hear like You’re rejecting Judaism. Our great grandparents went through the Holocaust and they came to America with one pair of shoes and a nickel. And it’s like, oh my gosh, all you said was, I don’t really like a filter fish or I don’t feel safe around. And someone heard that as you’re rejecting your entire culture. So that can be a really fraught area and we have to be able to navigate it and somehow it feels so much harder when you’re talking about food and eating because it’s so ingrained in culture than it does when you’re talking about something much more simple. Yeah, I know you like rose’s mom, but I really like daisies. Somehow food and eating is just so much
Julie Church (35:54):
More. Totally. Which is what makes it so amazing. I mean, it is so much more, and we can take the time and have those,
Jessica Setnick (36:03):
It also explains why it’s hard.
Julie Church (36:04):
It does. It does. And I think what you’re saying too is those conversations might just need some tending to and some care and be mindful that, okay, I don’t want to just drop this and move on, but maybe bring it with some care if you are going to be asking other older family members to maybe do something different or you’re just sharing your experience of what’s going to work for you in this season to just,
Jessica Setnick (36:28):
Or the love of all humanity, do not have these conversations at a time
Julie Church (36:33):
Meal. That’s totally, it’s easier if food’s not around and we’re not talking about it in real time, but we’re more allowing for somebody to take in. Oh, okay. So this summer party is going to be different than last year. Okay, I got it. I got it. Yeah, so true. So true. Okay, so what else? I guess we’re talking about maybe specific, and I feel like you’re tapping into this, but I do think that some parents, especially if you’re bringing anything that’s related to eating disorder, so if somebody says, wow, how you, I’m learning about my child and rebel. I’m learning about my critical society voice and I’m hearing some things that happened in our household and that stuff I’m needing to filter through and that can make a caregiver maybe be defensive or feel really guilty. And so any, I guess for both people listening, right, like the caregivers listening as well as maybe the folks that are wanting to talk to their caregivers either direction, but how do you deal with that potential shame blame piece
Jessica Setnick (37:39):
With that? Yes. Well, in the same way that we would tell an individual, you are a product of your society, your time that you are alive and the people who lived before you, I would say the same thing to a caregiver, you are a product of your society, and so let’s just take it off of food for a minute. You thought that the best thing was to send your child to summer camp. They decided to not do that, right? That doesn’t mean your choice was wrong and it may have affected your child in a certain way, but they’re trying to do things differently in their family and it doesn’t mean that you were wrong. That’s such a hard thing because I think even in jobs, it feels like if we do it a different way, we’re somehow saying the other way was wrong, instead of just adapting and saying, this is a different time, this is a different child, this is a different family, and I think we have to really make room for that feeling of, but I feel like I disappointed you. I didn’t that asking you to eat all your peas was going to make you feel guilty. I didn’t realize that. I thought that’s what we were supposed to do.
(38:44):
And to say, absolutely, I understand that I’m not blaming you. I’m simply saying let’s change our eating legacy together for the next generation. So really bringing that caregiver into the new plan instead of saying, I’m not doing it your way, so you therefore can’t be involved. And to even say something like, I know it’s going to be a big shift, and so if I hear you saying to my child, you need to finish that, I’m just going to say, oh, you know what? Everyone in our home just eats what they’re hungry for. I love you mom, and I’m going to give you a hug. In other words, wrap the message in kindness so that we can attend to those feelings of those ancestors almost as if you, the same as you would if you were able to communicate with someone from 300 years ago and you would say, wow, you went through some tough stuff, but I don’t want to live without air conditioning just because you did. It’s that kind of thing. Just because somebody had a different food experience doesn’t mean you have to continue living the legacy of it. It’s not insulting to them, but it’s harder when it’s a living person because that person has feelings and it’s appropriate to attend to those and maybe have a counselor in the room if need be when that happens, if you’re concerned.
Julie Church (40:04):
Yeah, I was thinking that of course, because at Opal it’s a treatment setting where we have family relationship therapists and this is some of the content that certainly happens in that formal way. And I do think, yeah, if somebody is really wrestling and struggling in the midst of an eating disorder, having professional help to have some of these conversations is so normal, and that is such something we recommend could be a therapist, could be a dietician that could help facilitate some of that and the others that are out there that are wanting to have those conversations. I think it is also something that can be done, like you said, maybe in the backyard in the afternoon or being brought, oh, I want to talk through the fact that, yeah, I’m going to have you watch the kids a few days this summer, and I’m really trying to reset this for myself and the family.
(40:51):
I would love for you to do it this way too. I know when I was raising my kids and had nannies, I had some stuff related to food relationship in the contract that I had with them just to have it written, because for me, it felt important to be able to have language, common language and have them see how serious and important it was to me. So maybe I’m more formal in that way, but I think in the family relationships when you’re not writing a contract for the aunt to come over once a month, it might be different, but I do feel like it’s still very much just having things in
Jessica Setnick (41:24):
Writing is not a bad idea. I might recommend a different form, like a book. I read this book and it gave me some great ideas. I wonder if you’d be willing to read this book. We had a book like that in my family that I think five copies were bought and everyone got their own copy, and it was sort of read this and let’s discuss if we want to move forward with these ideas.
Julie Church (41:42):
So cool. I love that. Okay, so this workbook is obviously something we can have access to from your website. You also seem to be somebody that would do it for your workplace or do it at your place of worship or do it in your community mom’s group or whatever. People could bring you in to do something it sounds like, which is so cool.
Jessica Setnick (42:03):
Exactly.
Julie Church (42:04):
Is there anything else you’d want our listeners to know about the healing of your inner eater and what you’re offering?
Jessica Setnick (42:12):
Well, I think it’s a big job. I will say healing your inner eater is the workshop and workbook is a start. You can go to healing your inner eater.com and I’ll make a code podcast. If someone wants to use the code podcast, it’ll bring the price down of the workbook, and then I’m thinking about having maybe an online group. I’m not exactly sure what form that will take, but I’ll keep you
Julie Church (42:33):
Posted. Okay, wonderful. So Jessica, when I think about bringing these concepts into formally into somebody’s recovery from an eating disorder, how would you say that that could be done, or what are some of your recommendations there?
Jessica Setnick (42:47):
Well, it sounds like you’re already doing a lot of this at Opal, which is amazing. And as I said before, I feel like some of this is actually, we’re taking it from eating disorder recovery and pulling it out to the community, but I think it is important for anyone who is in a situation where they are helping individuals with eating disorders to really be thinking along the lines of, this didn’t start with this person. Yes, they may have had these genes. Yes, they may have had this incident that sparked their eating disorder, but we need to take it off of the idea of this is this person’s individual responsibility because that’s what always feels so blaming. And instead add in the idea of those social determinants of health, of family influences, caregiver influences beyond the family, and then ancestral influences and things that were done to harm members of our ancestor community. I think that those are important things to bring into eating disorder treatment if it’s not already there. Okay,
Julie Church (43:46):
Wonderful. Yeah, I think those are great things to be considering. Anything else that you want to make sure that we get in here?
Jessica Setnick (43:52):
You know what, I will add one more thing, which is simply that it can be hard. I don’t want to make it sound like, oh, you just do a chart or worksheet and then it’s all solved. I’m thinking of even the simple question. It sounds simple. What were family meals like when you were a kid? Or how did you get food in between meals when you were a kid? What happened if you were still hungry after you had finished the food on your plate? What happened next? Those sound like really simple questions, but each of those could be a whole session with a dietician or a therapist. And so I’ll just add, be kind to yourself that Rome wasn’t built in day and your eating habits have built over a lifetime. It doesn’t mean you can’t change them, but awareness and insight are awesome. They don’t always change behavior overnight just because you’re aware of something, just keep reminding yourself like I am work in progress, and I think any step in the right direction is still a step, even if there’s a couple steps back that come after it, there’s nothing to be ashamed of when it comes to your eating.
(44:56):
I think shame is the last thing we need to add on.
Julie Church (45:00):
Thank you. Thank you, Jessica. I’m so glad we have had this conversation and that our listeners can get, I love this structure and some different ways of thinking about our relationship with food is always helpful, and maybe this will be really a little inspo for somebody to really do this hard work of healing their inner eaters. So thanks Jessica for being here.
Jessica Setnick (45:26):
It was great.
Julie Church (45:26):
Yes, yes. So listeners, if you want to learn more about Jessica, I will have links to her various websites and workbooks and workshops in the show notes. So please check that out. And I want to thank Jack Straw Cultural Center for Sound Engineering, thanks to Erin Davidson for the Appetite’s original music, and to David Bazzi for editing. If you want to learn more about Opal and our programming and eating disorder treatment clinic, please visit us at opalfoodandbody.com or follow us on Instagram. Until next time.
