Can you grow from the trauma of diet culture?

Yes. Post-traumatic growth is a psychological concept describing why some people don’t just recover from trauma but actually expand because of it. In the context of diet culture, this means moving beyond survival mode into a richer quality of life — in relationships, career, resilience, and worldview. It’s not guaranteed for everyone, but it becomes more possible with the right framework, cognitive tools, and support.

Transcript 

[00:00:01] Stephanie: Welcome back, my sister. You are listening to, it’s Beyond The Food Podcast, and I’m your host, Stephanie Dossier. And today we’re gonna talk about a concept called the Post- Traumatic Growth. And I want you to stay with me until the end with this one, because I think this concept as the potential to reframe how you think about your relationship with diet culture and what is actually possible for you on the.

[00:00:29] Other side of it. This episode is for the women on their personal journey through releasing diet culture and also for the health professional who lead other people into this work. Both of you need to hear this now first. Before we go into posttraumatic growth, I wanna quickly tell you about where I am in this physical world.

[00:00:54] I’m home, so if you’re listening on YouTube, you perhaps see the yellow [00:01:00] curtain and the green stack of cushion on the floor. I’m back home. It’s been a week now that I have been back in Quebec, Canada after two months of living in Mexico. And I have to tell you this. This is the smoothest reentry I’ve ever had in my quote being home life.

[00:01:20] I have arrived after three days of delay of airplanes and cancellation, and that was a story in itself. I arrived back home on Sunday. Morning, and by Monday morning, I was back at my desk luggage, unpack laundry, done fridge stock and food prep for the week and ready to go. I think I finally cracked the code on how to reenter life.

[00:01:47] And I have to say the magic trick behind all of this is. The note app on my phone. I think I’ve achieved the next level up of using notes on, I use a [00:02:00] iPhone on a I call, I think they’re called iNotes on your iPhone, and I kept building this list of. What to prep when I come back home, what to do when I leave home.

[00:02:12] And it’s been like four cycle of leaving to go live my digital nomad life and then come back home. And I’ve been perfecting this list and I think I nailed it. And so that all the things that I needed to do were done very easily because I’d done some specific thing before I left anyway. I’m very proud of myself.

[00:02:36] I think I’ve hit it in a way where the level of stress of leaving and coming back home and living the digital nomad and living a home-based life is easy. It’s easy for me. I think I should co, I think if I ever wanna build another business, I should teach a course on living a nomadic [00:03:00] life as a second life.

[00:03:03] Now I also wanna tell you about what I’m doing right now as we speak today, as I’m recording the podcast. When I finish recording, I’m gonna work on my Q2 goal for my business. So for April, may, and June, and although we’re April the eighth and the Q two’s already started, it doesn’t phase me. I’m going to try some different marketing strategy based on the change that I’m seeing in our industry, in the online coaching world, and I think I’m gonna share that with you in an upcoming podcast of how I’m gonna implement those changes.

[00:03:39] What is my marketing gonna look like, uh, going forward? So if you’re into the online coaching world, business world, uh, stay tuned for a podcast on that in the coming weeks.

[00:03:51] So the title of today’s episode is about post-traumatic growth, [00:04:00] and I wanted to share with you where the title that this episode came in and why? I wanted to share it with you because I think it’s gonna contextualize even more the concept of post-traumatic growth. I was reviewing, actually testimonial for to put on the sales page of a program I’m selling right now, the groundwork, and I was.

[00:04:21] Looking at a file that we have of the testimonial of our last graduate of the Non-Diet coaching certification. And in reading that, it really struck me of how much the going to be on the food method has the power to facilitate. For some people post-traumatic growth in this particular health professional came into the non diet coaching certification, wanting to upskill her practice.

[00:04:58] She wanted to be better [00:05:00] at working with women and she walked out with. Something completely different. She’s like, yeah, check mark. I’ve upskilled myself, but I have a much more richer life, specifically in my relationship, have did not expect that, but I have a much higher level of confidence in my personal life and professional life, and I have fundamentally different relationship with.

[00:05:33] My partner, I and, and she used the word richer, which for me is, it is the way that I personally describe my own journey through post-traumatic growth, and I recognize what she was describing and, and it inspired me. I put on my list again, back to my eye note app on my phone. I have. I have a note that is ideas [00:06:00] for upcoming podcast episode and I put the term post-traumatic growth and I noted something in there that I wanted to talk to you about and share with you.

[00:06:09] So this where, this is where it comes from, and this is the context around me talking to you about post-traumatic growth today.

[00:06:18] Because here’s what I see often happen when people talk about a anti-D diet approach, a non-diet approach, or broadly leaving diet culture behind. And often have these women coming into my program because they hit the anger stage of the culture. Unlearning because anger stage is part of the healing framework around diet, culture or any grieving process.

[00:06:51] Uh, they’ve hit that part and the. Are stuck there, right? People realize that diet culture caused them harm emotionally, physically, [00:07:00] spiritually, mentally. And they have, in some cases the perspective that they’ve lost decades, years to attempting to shrink their body. And we, most of us hit that stage of being angry at the system.

[00:07:17] And that anger makes complete sense. It’s validated through grief stages from the psychological approach to healing from a trauma. Like it’s, it all makes sense, but unfortunately for some people, we get stuck there. And I use the word we because I was stuck there for a few years where. I wasn’t in a stage of growth and, and back then, I if you were, this was about nine or 10 years ago, and if you were to scroll back.

[00:07:50] On my Instagram account back in those, you can sense it through the post. And I’m talking about this because again, a few months ago I [00:08:00] don’t know why I was working on a social media post and I wanted to have some snapshot of my growth and I went back on my Facebook page to post from 2016 Outta shock.

[00:08:14] I, I was shocked at reading the way I was writing and the anger I felt reading those posts that I was clearly living through at that stage because I think I was stuck in the anger stage instead of a, what I now recognize as a growth.

[00:08:31] So let’s explore the concept of post-traumatic growth specifically in the context of, we’ll call it diet trauma. And if you are new to my world, you can scroll back on my podcast feed and there’s a couple of episodes called the Trauma of Dieting, uh, diet Trauma. So you can understand my lands on what I call diet trauma, but I wanna focus now on the concept of [00:09:00] post-traumatic growth, which is not unique to the trauma of dieting.

[00:09:04] Post-traumatic growth is a psychological theory that was developed by two PhD psychologists in the mid 1990s, and their research explored why some survivor of trauma and crisis. Uh, do not just recover and learn to live with the side effect of the crisis and the trauma, but actually experience growth and expansion.

[00:09:34] They want it to understand it better, and that’s where the theory of post-traumatic growth. Come from, and I’ve taken this theory and brought it into my world and embedded very specifically in the, beyond the food method specifically for women in the context of diet, culture, trauma. You can see how niche this thing is and ask myself, [00:10:00] how can we apply this theory?

[00:10:03] Within recovery from the trauma of diet culture, what does it take to create the condition where post-traumatic growth becomes possible for some of the people that we work with? Because what is clear in the the theory of post-traumatic growth is that. For some reason, we’ll get into that a little bit later.

[00:10:28] It’s not accessible to everyone, meaning it’s not guaranteed that everyone who recover from a traumatic experience will experience growth and transformation. Now, there’s some assumption as to why that happened for some people and not others. Again, that will be a little bit later in the podcast.

[00:10:51] Now there’s different stages that we need to move through when we’re trying to recover [00:11:00] from the trauma of diet culture or any trauma in general. And the. Like the survival mode, moving ourselves out of survival mode is a stage and it’s the foundation. And that’s what very often is expressed for us in our world through the journey of intuitive eating.

[00:11:20] I did a podcast recently on what is the difference between intuitive eater and a normal eater, and I think that expressed. Very well that post-traumatic growth, intuitive eating is where we get ourselves out of the

[00:11:38] survival mode around food. It’s where we shift, we do the hard work of shifting the belief system and doing the titration work around food. Like that’s not where the growth the post-traumatic growth happened. That’s just where we get ourselves. Out of survival. We get ourself into recovery mode. But to move from being an [00:12:00] intuitive eater into normal eat normal eater, that’s the post-traumatic growth.

[00:12:06] So when it’s, when we ask ourselves what is possible beyond just intuitive eating, what can I build from being an intuitive eater? Where else can I go with this?

[00:12:21] So I wanted to, I gave you the, the example of intuitive eating here, but I wanna give you more example of different area of our industry where post-traumatic growth can show up. ’cause I want you to be able to recognize it perhaps as a possibility in your own life, but also where you actually have experience.

[00:12:46] Post-traumatic growth, and perhaps you did not have a name for it. The most immediate area is obviously our relationship to food and our relationship to our body. Post-traumatic [00:13:00] growth here is look like this level of ease and wellbeing that is better after the recovery from thy culture than it’s ever was before.

[00:13:14] You eat the satiety. You follow your hunger, you move your body in a way that create joy, and the result is a quality of life that is far greater after recovering from diet culture. Than you ever was before because you went through the process of understanding your relationship to food, to body, to fitness, and you moved yourself into a way where you not only experience the positive side effect into your health, but joy, and you have a broader understanding that health is way more than just physical.

[00:13:52] It’s your overall wellbeing. Um, the example into our relationship, the, the story, the testimonial [00:14:00] that the professional gave me about richer relationship. And that often happens because through exploring our relationship to food and body. And becoming more self-aware. We also learn to example, regulate our own emotion better.

[00:14:19] So we no longer need to lean into our life partner to regulate our own emotion. We become, we, we know we. Evolve from codependency with our partner where we learn to fulfill ourself and regulate our own world so that the experience and the shared partnership with our life partner is no longer just about regulating our own world, but it’s about.

[00:14:48] Developing, creating something together that has nothing to do with just regulating my thought, my feeling and leaning on this partner to make my life easier. Like we have [00:15:00] learned the skills to do that on our own so that we can create something better or something that we want outside of this.

[00:15:07] I wanna talk about the world of career because I’m a living example of this one. I spent 15 years in the retail industry, and through the process of indicting my life and separating my work from how my body looked, how much money I had, I decided to go back to school and change my career and build the business that I’m running today.

[00:15:30] And here’s, what I wanna be clear about, I did not look back. I do not look back anymore at these 15 years in the career business world today as an error or waste of time. But instead, I’m looking back at those 15 years as. A gift because every operational skills, every business skills that [00:16:00] I develop in that career is now part of why my business is successful today instead of rejecting that I build on it.

[00:16:12] And I have the business that I have today because of it. Another area is personal resiliency and personal strength. And this is a significant one when you learn the skillset to be able to go in. Look at your thoughts. Look at your belief system. You develop the skills of changing your perspective because changing your perspective on your traumatic experience of dieting in our case requires that you are able to look at it and move intentionally to change your thought.

[00:16:56] And your belief system surrounding that [00:17:00] traumatic experience. You learn the skillset to be able to do that, and you learn the skillset to be. More capable to regulate your own nervous system, your own self, and through the experience, the cumulative experience of regulating your nervous system, of changing your thought to think intentionally, you become stronger, you become more resilience.

[00:17:28] So when things happen in your life, in the today’s world, like post diet, culture, trauma, you’ve built the skillset to be more resilient. You cope with life better. Another example, and I’m gonna use my own self again. There is the worldview and faith. For some people the process, the post-traumatic growth process deepens their spiritual life and fundamentally change their value and [00:18:00] priority.

[00:18:00] And for me. My fate in the universe, I don’t believe in a particular organized religion or particular God. I have a faith built around the universe has, is fundamentally. Different than what it was before. My post-traumatic growth. I have a much more deeper fate and relationship to higher power that at any other point of my life, I, although I was born.

[00:18:34] And raised in a Catholic faith religion that I left consciously at the age of 17 and never stepped back into a church until the age of 39 years old. My relationship to faith and higher power is much more stronger than it’s ever was way back when I believed in Jesus and the Catholic [00:19:00] religion. My.

[00:19:01] Experience of faith today is totally different, and it helps me, guides me into how I view the world today with food, with my body, but well beyond that.

[00:19:14] Another area, and some of you may be experiencing that a much greater level of appreciation of life and the possibility of life when your mental and emotional energy is no longer. Consumed by anger and resentment, by replaying what could have been what was done to you. Something shifts because you have the space, the energy available to notice and savor.

[00:19:50] The small things in life, and that’s when priorities change and new possibility come into view that were [00:20:00] not even possible before.

[00:20:05] Now the question is, why does it happen? Why does some women get stuck at the anger stage and not move into growth? And as I mentioned earlier, we have to be clear here, and I wanna be honest with you. There’s no single one answer why? For some it’s possible. Why It’s not, it’s not one thing. It has to do with past experience.

[00:20:32] It has to do with, social determinants of health. It has to do with value system. And it has to do with what you even see as possible as the work of unlearning diet culture. It has to do with the framework. You use the books that you read, the podcast you listen to, if you are a professional, the type of coaching methodology you [00:21:00] use, to provide coaching and perhaps even the type of methodology you’ve received the coaching with that are available and all of that together shape if you are going to experience growth post on learning diet culture.

[00:21:19] Or not,

[00:21:20] and this is why training Health Professional to use an approach I can actually foster post-traumatic growth is my life’s work because I have seen it for myself, I have experienced it for myself.

[00:21:40] And I have seen it in a great proportion of the people that I work with. The testimonial I read to you earlier, I know that the potential is there for some people, but the condition have to be created and that’s what the [00:22:00] really, the beyond the food method creates, it creates those condition. That’s why for me, just talking about food is by far.

[00:22:11] Too simple and not enough. It needs to embed the cognitive work, the emotional regulation tool,

[00:22:18] the nervous system awareness tool. This combination is not an accident. It’s very much. Intentional. I wanted to build the infrastructure that made post-traumatic growth possible for some individual. Not a guarantee, but possible.

[00:22:39] This is very also intentional because of. The niche, the ideal client that I have, which is working with people who identify, have been socialized and raised as women. When women move into a post-traumatic growth [00:23:00] phase their experience with diet culture. Blossom. They become a different kind of people in the world.

[00:23:08] They become the one who can see power system clearly, and who can challenge not only the health system, the nutrition industry, but how we interact with women and how we. Lead women, they become people in the post-traumatic growth stage, become critical thinker and critical thinker leading other people to drive structural change.

[00:23:37] When women access this level of growth, they access a different level of personal power. They not only change their individual patterns, but the impact broader system of pattern like intergenerational trauma. Their career, how [00:24:00] people play within different professional lineage. I remember working with many lawyers who have mentored and trained other young women lawyers and wanted to help them avoid the typical patriarchal.

[00:24:20] Ways that lawyers show up in life because of the personal growth that they had experienced healing their own trauma of diet culture.

[00:24:31] So how do we facilitate an environment where. Post-traumatic growth is possible in a world where we work with diet, culture, trauma. So I wanna kind of talk about it into two areas, if you are a health professional, the first place we need to stop is understand post-traumatic growth as a psychological [00:25:00] concept, not just as a.

[00:25:01] Vague positive outcome that happened to some people, but understand the structure that needs to be included in your work with your client to make it possible for some people.

[00:25:15] Again, I’ve said it earlier in the podcast, I have seen unfortunately, programs around, anti-D diet. In the early years of the anti-D diet growth, we had perhaps around 2021 around like the pandemic world where, leaders and professionals were moving people into the stage of anger and thinking that was the end product.

[00:25:43] That in order to make quote the right change, you needed to stay in that anger and direct that anger outwardly into the world and be angry at the world. And, and this is where the whole like. We’re still living through that today, where people were posting [00:26:00] picture of themselves eating all the donuts in the world.

[00:26:03] You know, the whole analogy of not anti-D diet means eating donut all day long. That’s where this came from. This came from the belief that the end product of, working through on dieting your life, the post diet trauma was. Ending at eating donuts all day long, right? That was the end product, and we unfortunately had professional who were leading other people into that direction.

[00:26:32] So as a group of leader, as a group of professional, we first need to understand where the endpoint is and how, and which structure, which tools we need to bring in to facilitate posts traumatic growth. Here’s a couple of tools. I’m gonna give you very specific things. What does this tool can look like for me?

[00:26:54] First is the unintentional intentional thinking model from [00:27:00] the cognitive behavior world where first you help your client to see how their current thinking about diet culture lead them to experience life as they do today. Right. We help them see their thoughts. We help them outline. When I think this way, I feel this way and I behave this way, and this is how I experience life.

[00:27:25] No morality. No judgment. No, this is good. This is bad. No black and white thinking. Just this is what’s happening with the current way I’m thinking about diet culture.

[00:27:39] And because we need to be clear, we’re not attaching morality around this. It can stay this way. You don’t have to change, right? This is where the self-determination theory comes in, right? You do not have to change. You can continue to spend the rest of your [00:28:00] life. Thinking about diet culture, thinking about your experience of diet culture, your years of dieting in the way you’re currently thinking about it.

[00:28:09] And that’s totally okay. You can go on about your life thinking this way, and there’s also an option to change the way you think about your experience of diet culture. And if you were to change it, if you chose. If you consent to change it, you can then feel this way, behave this way, and create a new experience of life.

[00:28:39] What do you want to do? That’s how we call consensual coaching, collaborative framework of coaching that you as a leader, don’t decide. Don’t tell people what to think, what to do. You outline for them what is possible and they decide what they want to do. So that’s the [00:29:00] second tool, a consensual relationship to change.

[00:29:04] Where we move from, quote, I have to to, I choose to. And this is what makes ethical coaching stand strong when we think about intentional thinking is the layer of self consent. Now, if you are a woman on her personal journey and you’re listening to my podcast because you’re like. This girl knows what she’s talking about, right?

[00:29:30] I’m listening to her and applying what she’s teaching. I wanna give you this one question to sit with, and I want you to resist the urge of answering quickly. Here’s a question. How can I use what I have learned from my experience with diet culture to lead myself? Towards the life I actually want. [00:30:00] Now there’s a sub-question to that.

[00:30:02] What is the life I actually want? What does a life that I actually want to live looks like? Now, if you listen to my last podcast episode, I clearly outlined that this level of coaching hinge more on the life coaching world. Than it is on nutritional health coaching. But that’s, these level of coaching questions are what allows us to create permanent sustainable result for our client.

[00:30:36] I’ll repeat the two questions so you can write them down. How can I use what I have learned from my experience with D Culture to lean myself towards the life I actually want to live? What is the life I actually want to live?

[00:30:54] Notice that these two questions are not asking you. [00:31:00] How you were wrong and how you need to be right, but it’s neutrally allowing you to explore something that would lead you to live your desired life at this stage of your life. ‘ We have to understand that I am teaching this at 50 years old, so I’ve got a fair bit of life experience, and I totally see that what you want at 20 years old is vastly different than what you want at 50 years old and allowing yourself to say, well, I no longer want.

[00:31:40] What I wanted at 30, because now I’m 50 and I want something totally different in my life. Now, what did I learn from diet culture that will help me create the life that I want at this stage of my life?

[00:31:54] So these are the two angle that I want you to think about. Now, if you’re a health professional [00:32:00] and what you heard today, the tools that I talked about made you realize that the framework you use with your client. Needs to change, needs to sharpen. This is where you want to come into the non diet coaching certification because this is where this work will happen.

[00:32:17] And if you are someone on a personal journey that you are a professional or not, and the question that I gave you to reflect on, brought up some things in you, and you want to do the groundwork, the work of the model behind the model. To gain those skillset, you may want to come and join us inside of groundwork.

[00:32:38] Both linked to those program are in the show notes. Thank you for being here with me, my sister. I love you and I’ll see you on the next podcast episode.

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[00:32:51] Stephanie: If this resonates with you, the next step is the groundwork, my Beyond the Food Foundational Program for Health Professional, [00:33:00] ready to go beyond the food and rethink how they approach nutrition eating and health behavior starting with themselves. You can go to www.stephaniedodier.com/groundwork and join us now.

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