Ep. #133 | Achieving Empowerment by Unsubscribing From Diet Culture with Stephanie Dodier
I had so many “aha” moments during this conversation. You could say that Stephanie Dodier helps women break away from diet culture. But that doesn’t do her work justice. She promotes counterculture principles that permanently change how women relate to their bodies, including how to de-link self-love from body love and how to disrupt harmful generational knowledge transfer. She is empowering women to change the world from the inside out.
Stephanie is a Clinical Nutritionist who created the Going Beyond the Food Method, a cornerstone of her Conquer and Thrive program. She uses her own experience with food and her body to sustain her investment in sharing how she approaches personal health.
Here are the main topics of this amazing conversation:
- Why the podcast has a new name
- Introducing Stephanie Dodier and how she inspires
- What “being healthy” has come to mean
- 14:00 Why Stephanie cares so much about the culture associated with being healthy
- 15:00 Stephanie’s experience accepting and loving her body is … other people
- Many sectors profit off of women feeling like they aren’t good enough
- Stephanie’s journey with food and her body
- Women who ask for help with weight gain are ostracized by society because they don’t fit the typical need profile
- About diet culture and societally imposed body ideals for women
- There is diversity in women’s body size going back millennia- as far as we can trace back
- How and why the medical industry participates in diet culture
- Self-love versus body neutrality
- The effect of living in a patriarchal society on “programming” girls’ relationships with their body
- Generational norms contribute to the persistence of diet culture
- Jenn’s early experiences with diet culture
- How to begin pushing back against diet culture
- 43:00 intuition
- 43:20 how to deal with sabotage- how to re-think sabotage
- Redefining health to be more than just a physical body
- Linking “optimum health” to social justice
- Moving away from the idea that everyone is meant to prioritize being perfectly healthy
- Diet culture affects girls’ behavior as early as elementary school
- How the pandemic is affecting body relationships
- We should be teaching in schools how to process emotion, which would affect our relationship with food
- How Jenn and others feel when processing all of the topics covered in this episode
- The Conquer and Thrive program and Stephanie’s podcast
Hoping this episode supports you on the path of knowing, accepting, and loving who you truly are. Wishing more simplicity and ease in all that you do!
You can connect to this episode on iTunes, Spotify, or Stitcher by searching The Simplicity Sessions, or visiting www.jennpike.com/podcast.
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Learn more about Stephanie Dodier:
Listen to Stephanie Dodier’s Podcast
Start with Stephanie’s Freedom From Dieting Roadmap
Learn more about Stephanie’s Conquer and Thrive program
Online working with Jenn:
To register for my signature program The Hormone Project and work with me 1:1 to support your health, hormones, and more, please join the waitlist at www.jennpike.com/thehormoneproject.
You can now start this program at any time, take it at your own pace, and have a live group, weekly coaching classes, with me and my team as well. You will get lifetime access to the program, starting with a 1:1 session with me, testing, classes, core modules, my recipes, exercise calendar, and masterclass series. We are waiting for you to join the Hormone Project!
The Synced Program is now available for registration, learn how to tune your body to the lunar cycle, and acquire a multidisciplinary approach to balance your body in less than 30 minutes a day! This is a membership site where you will get lifetime access to more than 60 classes according to each phase, plus the masterclasses I give every month.
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I ended this episode thinking about my daughter, so I want to share with you some products that I think will help us reinforce our beliefs with our actions and teach our daughters to take care of themselves outside of the diet culture we discuss in this episode. I’ve tried these as a mom- I hope they work for you!
- We love smoothies because they’re quick and easy. I started adding in Sunwarrior’s Beauty Greens Collagen Booster in pina colada flavor. She likes that it tastes healthy, I like that it’s got probiotics and is plant-based with greens in it.
- I am encouraging my daughter to think about her skin as a whole. Skin Essence is Canadian-founded, organic, non-GMO, not animal-tested- this company is one that we love and have around the house, which is why my daughter’s been giving them a try (and my husband and son too!). You can even talk to the company to get advice on which products may be right to try first.
- I’ve mentioned before a plant-based iron organic herb tonic that my daughter has been using. It’s been helping her feel a lot better, especially around her periods- it’s common for young girls first getting their period to be anemic. Garden of Life’s mykind Organics liquid iron supplement is junk-free and helps her body uptake and absorb iron. This could help you moms too! And the flavor is fantastic- her favorite is cranberry lime.
- Another thing that I want to help my daughter with is reducing the problems that can be associated with having her period. Really Neutral Tonics from Saint Francis Herb Farm can help. I most love their menstrual tonic and a PMS support, which you don’t have to use together.
I hope some of these tips can help all your mamas out there, and if you don’t have a daughter, then I hope some of these tips and tricks can help you.
Create a more simple life with Saint Francis Herb Farm products. You can purchase Saint Francis Herb Farm’s products online using the code Jennpike15 and save 15% off all of your purchases or directly in your closest Health Food Store.
Use the code jennpike10 and get 10% off your purchases.
Learn more about Jenn’s work:
Ignite your Life with Jenn Pike
The Hormone Project
The Simplicity Project Shop for books, DVDs, programs, and much more!
Quotes:
JP: “I want to help to be part of stoking you”
SD: “What is currently perceived as health, as a normal body, what is perceived as beauty, even, is not for the best intention of women, and the only people that can change that is us women”
JP: “If you empower a woman to love her for who she is and to fully embody that- you can’t profit off of her”
JP: “Hell hath no fury like a woman in her power”
SD: “Nothing was working to maintain the body that society expected me to have”
JP: “Everything that they are being taught is being geared toward weight loss”
SD: “We are telling women that their body should be a certain look or should be a certain weight”
SD: “We’re classifying the value and the worth of women based on the size of their body and on their health status”
SD: “BMI was never created for health reasons”
SD: “As of 2019, there is not one single study that indicates that weight causes a health issue”
SD: “In my world and the way that I teach, self-love is B.S.”
SD: “We can love ourselves not because of our body but because of who we are”
SD: “We raise women to be good girls”
JP: “I see what she’s exposed to and I am also seeing what my son is exposed to”
SD: “The first line I want to say to women is: it’s not your fault”
SD: “If you can learn that, unpack that for yourself, if you change the narrative at home- that’s how we change that for the next generation of women”
SD: “The very first place we start is self-compassion”
SD: “Intuitive eating is the reparation mechanism to our relationship with food”
SD: “Wow I can regulate myself. What else can I do?”
JP: “We’ve been taught to focus on the wrong change, the outer change”
SD: “Learning how to manage our brain, learning to manage our mind, so we no longer are the pendant of other people’s words and other people’s opinions of us, we build our own- that’s the greatest source of power for women”
SD: “That’s the goal of this work is liberating women and then us going out and changing the world”
SD: “We need to redefine what health is”
SD: “Most of us are not meant to be ‘100% healthy’ in all factors”
SD: “What if we move the goalposts from outside to inside, by being self-aware, by being present just within your own body”
SD: “The body becomes the punching bag”
SD: “Emotional eating is a gift”
SD: “That is the most detrimental to your health- not the layer of fat on your body, but the stress load on your body”
SD: “If you need a motivator, do it for your daughter and then it will become your work afterward”
Additional Information About Jenn:
Jenn studied and graduated with honors in Human Anatomy and Physiology with such a passion that it propelled her to continue her education over many years. Jenn is a Registered Holistic Nutritionist, Medical Exercise Specialist, Registered Yoga Instructor and Faculty of the Toronto Yoga Conference, Pre & Post Natal Yoga Expert, STOTT Pilates trained instructor, Twist Sport Conditioning Coach, Spin Instructor Crossfit Level 1 Coaching, among other certifications she got along the way. She is also a guest Holistic Expert for Breakfast Television, Global, CHCH, Rogers Tv and writes columns for STRONG Fitness Magazine, iRun magazine, Savvy Mom and contributes to Inside Fitness Magazine, The Toronto Star and Sun. She is also a proud educator and ambassador to Genuine Health, Nature’s Emporium, and Juice Plus.
Jenn is a proud mama to two beautiful souls and her best teachers of life. She resides on Lake Simcoe in Keswick with her husband and two children.