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!

Wanna Take a Walk with Me?

Have you taken a walk with me yet? Maybe you listen to this podcast on a walk but how about listening to a guided audio all about shifting your motivation from external diet mentality to internal empowered changes and respecting your body. Download my free 10 minute audio, pop your ear buds in, and take a walk with yours truly today!

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 yourse...