Who's version of a dietitian are you conforming to?

What kind of dietitian do you actually want to be?

Is there a disconnect?

In today's episode I'm talking about the idea of the 'good' dietitian, suggesting some opportunities to challenge the status quo and ultimately, an invitation to be your kind of dietitian. I'm also sharing a little about how I came to be a dietitian (spoiler I didn't really know what I was signing on for!).

Links, mentions & resources

• Kelly Diels - feminist marketing extraordinaire

Episode Transcript

Hello, and welcome to this week's podcast. How're you doing? Today I want to talk about what kind of dietitian do you want to be when you grow up? And the reason I want to talk about this is because I see so much of a story around the quote unquote good dietitian, right dietitian, like there's only one way to be a dietitian or one version of what a dietitian is. And I want to open up a conversation about this. And I have been doing that over on Instagram @dietitianvalues, but I want to talk a little bit more in depth, and get you thinking about who you want to show up as as a dietitian, and who frames that for you. Is it you, your own values? What you see is important? Or are you being influenced by your social programming, by our professional stories around what a dietitian is or isn't? So here's a few questions for you. And as we go through, I'll talk a little bit about my own experience. And then I would love to hear from you about what kind of dietitian you want to be when you grow up.

So, the first part is to think about how you fell into dietetics. Or your chosen profession, if you're listening to this, and you're not a dietitian, because many other health professionals have these whole kind of stories around the 'good', 'right' Social Worker, physio, psychologist, all of those things. enter any profession really.

So for me, I fell into dietetics kind of accidentally, I wanted to be a chef from when I was about eight till I was in year 11. which, in Australia is the sort of second last year of school, it's kind of when things get serious. And I always wanted to be chef, but I did a placement and I realized actually chefs have a pretty shitty lifestyle, you know, they're always working when everyone else is enjoying themselves or home in bed. And as much as I love cooking, I have real passion for cooking and connection to food. I was just like, this is not for me. And for some reason I had enough insight at the ripe old age of 15 to kind of project into my future, not that I over analyze a project into my future very often, to see that it wasn't going to work for me. So then I kind of floundered around, I went to see the worst careers advisor in the world, which we had at my high school, where I told her about my interests. And she suggested that I do microbiology. When I talked about I love food, I was kind of good at science at school. And then I was like, I like helping people. You know, I was talking about teaching, etc. When I look back on when I stumbled across dietetics. I'm like, Oh my gosh, that's like the perfect career for me from what I was talking about. So anyway, let's not get this into a conversation about my terrible careers advisor. So basically, I kind of had on my preferences, dietetics, not teaching, I even had law on there, I kind of was all over the shop, I got into dietetics. And to be honest, I loved it. And it was really the right fit for me as much as I didn't really know what I was signing up for.

How about you? Did you know what you're signing up for when you signed up to be a dietitian, I think a lot of us kind of have a bit of an idea. But we really don't know what our profession does, unless you've had your own experience. And I know that's another reason a lot of dietitians might sign up to be a dietitian is if you've had any experience with a dietitian through childhood or teenagers or seen a loved one have an experience. And I know a lot of dietitians come to dietetics through that. And then there's kind of a little bit of a dark side of how people come into dietitian dietetics. And that can be through their own relationship with food, through struggling with their own relationship with food. So coming to dietetics through that angle as well. And so how did you fall into dietetics? You know, what kind of dietitian did you come to the profession to be? Were you an accidental dietitian, like me who dreamed of creating a cooking school and cooking classes? Or were you very much, you know, considered in what you knew you wanted to be?

For most of us, we started out with a real big desire to help, you know, our training our conditioning, kind of, you know, the personality types that often come to be dieticians while we are very varied, we often have this underlying desire to help, unfortunately, through our training and conditioning, and also social programming and the fact that we live in a supremacy based culture, that helping ends up looking like paternalism, where we think we know better than the people that we work with. So this is one part of the story that I see starting to shape and what kind of dieticians we start to become, you know, we start thinking that our role is that we have to fix people that we have to have all the answers that we have to be right and it breeds a real kind of culture of perfectionism in dieticians, which often leads to dietitians never feeling good enough. Never thinking that you know, always thinking like they need one more course or one more qualification to be good enough as a dietitian, more experience, you know, I've got to have this job and that job, I've got to do everything before I can call myself a true dietitian. Unfortunately, our profession is steeped in supremacy culture, and its fucking bullshit. And I would like to see us change that, I would like to see us slowly as individuals and also as a profession really start challenging some of those ideas of what a dietitian should be.

What does being a dietitian look like without supremacy culture like what could that look like if we weren't so focused on being right? being perfect as this whole 'We are the experts' paternalistic approach, holding our clients in contempt like we know better. And this stuff I want to be really clear isn't necessarily a conscious choice. It's all unconscious ways that we are trained to act as dietitians that carry out the work of the supremacy culture that we've been trained in. our profession carries it out beautifully, you know, we have a hierarchy of dietitians being so called quote unquote, better than nutritionists better than x y, z. We have a bit of an inferiority complex when it comes to doctors, we feel like we're not getting you know, sometimes enough recognition as dietitians. And all this is to do with how supremacy culture kind of pits us against other professions and dehumanizes people who we consider quote unquote, below us on the ladder, and helps, and gets us aspiring to being you know, higher up on the ladder. So, supremacy culture is really insidious. And so when I talk about the ways that we show up as dietitians, and how it's rooted in supremacy culture, I'm not saying that you are making a choice as a dietitian to oppress people. It's the way we've been trained. And unfortunately, unless we start to become aware, unless we start having these conversations, it's just going to continue.

So what I've started to dream about or started envisaging is what does being a dietitian look like without supremacy culture, and we can see some of these coming through I feel in the non diet dietitian space, and the Health at Every Size, trauma informed dietitians are really starting to create beyond that lip speak of the dietitian being the center of care, but actually creating care and creating spaces and services, which really does value and center lived experience. Now, I'm not saying the non diet approach area is, is perfect (Because there's no such thing as perfectionism outside of supremacy culture), that we don't have a lot of work to do in there. Because often what can happen is people can bring that whole supremacy mindset and whole traditional 'we are the experts' approach into intuitive eating into non diet and we start getting that whole black and white thinking reducing everything to little soundbites, really quick, easy things. And we lose the nuance and we lose the gray. So I think our profession without supremacy culture starts embracing a lot more nuance starts embracing a lot more gray and starts sitting in the discomfort of the fact that there is no such thing as being right, there's no such thing as right or wrong, good or bad, healthy or unhealthy. There's no such thing as the right dietitian, good dietitian, perfect dietitian. And we start challenging those ideas and start embracing the gray and embracing the nuance and start making space for both/and so that we can be dietitians, who are working towards, you know, decolonizing, our practice, and we can still be, you know, struggling with that we can still feel challenged by that, we can be acknowledging the supremacy base of our profession. And we can be working actively to dismantle that it's not either or.

So what does it look like when we unlearn like all the fuckery of the isms and the oppressive bullshit that clouds our profession? What do you dream of? what kind of dietitian do you want to grow to be? What dietitian do you want our profession to grow to be and grow to produce? For me, I really see my role as an unlearned, um unlearning dietitian or, you know, unlearning a lot of the traditional aspects and trimmings and trappings of being a dietitian. to be about liberation, and not liberating others, because that's not my role. But to create a space where liberation can happen if individuals so choose to take that up. And it's also recognizing that for some people liberation or moving away from things like diet-culture may not feel safe, there may be reasons why people engage in that beyond what I consider, quote, unquote, to be the right way, because of course, there isn't any right way. But it really is holding space or creating space that honors the sovereignty and autonomy of each individual. And also of myself. So whether that's in the clinic room holding space for a woman who's battled the oppression of diet culture bullshit all her life, or maybe it's coaching a dietitian that wants to run a business that challenges the status quo, without the oppressive trauma informed tactics of how how businesses are, you know, kind of traditionally shown to run so it might be working with a dietitian to look at Okay, well, what kind of marketing tactics are you using? Are they using supremacy, kind of oppressive kind of trauma triggering tactics, so things that trigger scarcity things that trigger which, you know, if you've done any business development or business kind of training, you know, scarcity is something that's always talked about. being something to use to utilize pain points, you know, really pushing into those pain points.

I have a vision of a dietitian that I want to be, that I'm working towards, where that is challenged, where just because it works, yes. It's not how we have to do business, that we don't have to push on people's pain points, perhaps what I envisage, and I have to hat tip to Kelly Diels here. And if you don't follow her, please go. She's amazing for talking about a way of working with clients and using marketing where we can create a dream, a shared dream of values, values that we share, and how we can bring that into reality. And using that to bring people along with me in their journey, or bring people along with me in that, that sort of stepping towards a new vision versus pushing on pain points to make them make a decision to work with me. I like the idea of, I always found scarcity really didn't work for me when I would do it. And I in marketing, you know, when I first was a baby, baby online entrepreneur, and absolutely just followed the kind of, you know, the step the steps the status quo. And it was like, you know, using things like scarcity didn't sit with me, and when I actually stepped back and kind of zoomed out and saw that, how I practice as a dietitian, is to help clients move away from scarcity around food, to feel comfortable with food, to trust themselves around food, and to not use, you know, to not believe that scarcity tactic that diet culture uses. And then the reason it felt so uncomfortable for me to then use it in marketing, because I was actually trying to, like, you know, quote, unquote, lure people into my programs by using the very tactics that then I was turning around to try and help them unravel. And it was a real, you know, I never knew why I didn't like using scarcity tactics, you know, always sort of thought maybe I'm just really terrible at sales, or, you know, I've just got to get more confident this or maybe it's another course, you know, can you relate, but what I actually realized was, it's a values disconnect, I can't market my business, using those kind of triggers of scarcity of pushing people's pain point. All the things that we try and work as non diet dietitians to help our clients unlearn and move away from, I can't use that in my marketing, and then bring people in and authentically, and to me it with integrity, actually then teach them okay, well, that's okay for me, because I'm marketing my business. But hey, when diet culture tries to sell stuff through using those tactics, then just don't believe them. Like, it just wasn't based in integrity. And I know that sometimes dietitians get to that point and think, well, this isn't for me, I can't sell I've just got to go back to a job.

But there is another way there's a way we can envisage a world of diet world of dietetics, if dietetic entrepreneurs, that is beyond the dietitian sitting in the practice private practice, but it's also not the dietitian, then, you know, perpetuating all of the oppressive tactics and structures of the current kind of marketing system, you know. So I think that there's space for us to create different ways of marketing to be trauma informed to be, you know, using the tools that we use when we're unlearning diet culture in our profession to unlearn the same tactics because diet culture is simply a tool of white supremacy of supremacy culture, a tool of oppression. And same goes for a lot of the systems that we learn under. So we can apply that same critical analysis, that same kind of liberatory kind of framework around you know, being aware, analyzing and looking for ways to do it differently and taking action in a different way. So that we can show up in our values in our business that we can be the dietitians that we want to be that we can truly create a space where clients and humans we work with and the communities that we want to serve feel supported, as opposed to just the lip speak of that.

So what are your thoughts? What kind of dietitian Do you want to be when you grow up? And how does this information land for you? Perhaps it's the first time you've thought about oppression, oppressive kind of stories that that overarch our profession, perhaps you've been mulling over it yourself, and this has kind of brought a few of those little noodles and brain noodles as I call them together in your mind. Or perhaps you are like fist bumping, you know, really excited and this is putting into words all you've been thinking about and the things that you've been trying to say.

So I'd love to hear from you. Head over to @dietitianvalues and comment under the episode post. If this resonates with you. If you really loved it, then absolutely share, subscribe and join in the conversation. So I look forward to talking to you next time. And look forward to bringing more conversation to the dietitian values podcast where as dietitians we can challenge that status quo where we can have these conversations, and we can start creating a new version of what a dietitian can be and it can be your version. What version of a dietitian do you want to be? What version of the dietitian profession do you want to see? The change is in us and we are the profession. And while it's slow, and while Yes, we are traditionally a very risk averse profession, and things move really slowly, we can start it. You know, if you think about the non diet approach 5, 10, 15 years ago, you know, reflect back and I'm showing my age because I've been a dietitian for nearly 20 years, that when I graduated, oh gosh, it was not even on the radar. And now it's in some courses at unis, which I think is absolutely amazing. And some dietitians get to do their internships and placements with non diet based dietitians, like, you know, it slow, but it takes it does change, and we can make the change, we don't have to sit here and wait for the profession to change around us. And the more we do that, the more we're built, we're kind of like, you know, buying into that whole supremacy culture where we're not in control where we are looking for somebody else to save us. And that is all linked into the, you know, supremacy, culture ideals and the way we've been socially programmed to look for somebody else to kind of come along and be the difference that we can actually be. to create the space for us to stand into the, sorry, not stand into because that's ablest language, to create the space where we can be the dietitians we want to be. we can create those spaces. And I'm hoping that this creates a space where we can start those conversations.

So again, I'd love to hear your thoughts over @dietitianvalues, and I'll chat to you next time. Bye for now.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai