I want to help people not have to suffer in the way I did: A Dietitian's Journey from Restrictive Dieting to Intuitive Eating

As we learn and grow, we also begin to recognize the inadequacies of what we once believed. For healthcare professionals, this realization comes with the added weight of knowing that our past lack of knowledge may have hurt the people we worked with and cared for.

In the eating disorder recovery field, there is an increasing movement away from restrictive dieting as research emerges showing that restrictive diets are unsustainable and often damaging. For a dietitian, the challenge of making this shift is often twofold: both personal and professional. How does a person navigate a shift that involves not only their relationship with their own body but also their professional identity?

In this episode, Jenna Talleda shares her story of being shamed for her weight, engaging in restrictive dieting and weight loss, training as a dietitian in a weight-centric health model, ultimately discovering intuitive eating, and beginning to share it with her clients. Jenna reflects on her feelings about the work she did before discovering intuitive eating and gives us insight into the challenge of shifting one’s professional approach while also coming to terms with the past.

This is a real, raw, and honest conversation—one that does not whitewash the difficulty of change but instead embraces it as part of what it means to be an evolving, growing person and professional.

Jenna is an anti-diet dietitian and Certified Intuitive Eating Counselor with nearly 20 years of experience in the field. She works with women, female-identifying, and nonbinary people who struggle with feeling comfortable in their bodies, emotional eating, and the fear of body shaming in medical or family settings. A strong LGBTQ+ ally and weight-inclusive provider, Jenna encourages people to take up space and reject the idea that weight defines worth or health.

Jenna also leads a group called Permission to Exist, which helps people in larger bodies navigate living in a fatphobic world.

Work with Jenna

https://your-nutrition-ally.com/

Learn more about her group:

https://permission-to-exist-prof.my.canva.site/permission-to-exist