193. Undiet Your Life: Food Freedom, Body Neutrality & Intuitive Eating With Stephanie Dodier
193. Undiet Your Life: Food Freedom, Body Neutrality & Intuitive Eating With Stephanie Dodier
For so many women, the struggle with food and body image begins early. Stephanie Dodier’s story started at just 12 years old, when she was sent to Weight Watchers and told she was a “bad girl” because of her body. That moment launched decades of dieting, weight cycling, and burnout in her corporate career—until she discovered a radically different approach.
On this episode of the Embodied Writing Warrior Podcast, Kayla and Stephanie dive into what it truly means to undiet your life, and why it’s never just about food.
Stephanie explains how social conditioning and harmful stories about women’s bodies keep us trapped in cycles of restriction, bingeing, and self-criticism. She unpacks the difference between body positivity, body love, and body neutrality—and why neutrality creates the most sustainable shift.
You’ll learn how intuitive eating helps reconnect you to your body’s natural hunger, fullness, and satisfaction cues, and why pleasure (yes, even with food and movement) is essential to building lasting self-trust.
Most importantly, Stephanie challenges us to rewrite the stories we’ve been told about food, health, and worth. Instead of living by someone else’s checklist, she invites women to discover their own desired life—and align their choices with it.
Listen in to discover:
The three most damaging cultural stories women are told about their bodies
How to find pleasure in food and movement without guilt
Why changing behaviors for weight loss will always backfire
The mindset shift that leads to true freedom and embodiment
If you’ve ever felt stuck in diet culture or disconnected from your body, this episode is your permission slip to step off the hamster wheel and finally come home to yourself.
Resources & Links:
Connect With Stephanie:
Embodied Activation: Powerful Thinking with Stephanie Dodier
This week’s embodied activation comes straight from our guest, Stephanie Dodier, and it’s a beautiful practice in powerful thinking—a technique drawn from her Cognitive Behavior Coaching framework.
Rather than correcting your thoughts, this modality invites you to consciously shape the story you’re living through intentional, empowering questions.
Your Activation Prompt:
“In what ways is my body a tool to help me live the life I want?”
Grab a journal and write out 10 ways your body supports the life you're creating.
Think beyond appearance.
Think function.
Think freedom.
Think possibility.
Whether it’s walking your dog, dancing in the kitchen, hugging your child, lifting heavy things, climbing stairs, or simply breathing through a challenging moment—your body is a tool for experiencing and expanding your life.
This is more than mindset work.
This is embodiment through narrative.
This is undieting your thoughts—one powerful question at a time.
Transcript
Kayla: Stephanie, welcome to the Embodied Writing Warrior Podcast.
Stephanie: I'm very excited to be here because this is one podcast niche I have never done an interview in. I'm excited about this.
Kayla: I am excited to have you because as I mentioned in an email, you were someone who actually changed the trajectory of my own career, which is very exciting.
Like this podcast would still be slay and thrive. If I hadn't had that conversation with you, and now you get to experiment with a new niche, so, so Stephanie, can you tell us a little bit about who you are and the work you do in the world?
Stephanie: Yeah, so I'll dial you back to the very beginning of this journey for me, which is at 12 years old, so I'm calculating quickly in my head, that's almost like 30 years ago.
I, as a 12-year-old little girl was told that I needed to go to Weight Watcher and 12 years old Weight Watcher was new. I had no idea. I'm like, okay, let's go to Weight Watcher. And I ended up in the basement of a church and I was put on a scale to be weighed, and I still remember the vivid image of.
I used to call this old lady, which probably she was my age now, wavering her finger at me saying, you're a bad girl, you're too fat. And that changed the trajectory of my life because in that moment I learned that I was not a good person because my body wasn't good. And until my body was gonna be good, then I was not going to be a good girl.
And my whole mission in life was to be a good girl. 12-year-old. 12 years old girl. So, and that sent me down the path of dieting for the following 25 years. So if I'm not that moment forward to the age of 38, I. Dieted in an attempt to control my body. And I lost and gained and lost and gained. And with every diet, I was just reflecting on that a couple days ago.
I was trying to come up with a number of how many pounds I lost in my life. And the last calculation was over 400 pounds of losing, gaining, like I lost 20 pounds at 14. And then. Gain somehow. And then by the time I was 16, I had 30 pounds to lose. And it just lose gain, lose gain. To the point where my last big hoopla, dieting in my late thirties, I lost a hundred pounds.
That was like the. The biggest, John and I gain it all back, obviously. So that's what my life was about. From the age of 25 to the age of 40, I went to work and began a corporate career, but from the place of not being good enough because that was my storyline, right? I'm not good enough because I'm not able to.
Maintain the weight loss, so I'm not able to lose the weight. Like it was never enough. Even when I was lost the weight, then it was my skin was too loose and like, you know, it was some, always something. So I, I was extremely successful in the corporate world while trying to lose and maintain weight and all that storyline.
Because I was on the chase of proving my word, which in the corporate environment like these are the best functional, functioning employees, is people who believe they're not good enough because they're gonna work their ass off trying to prove to the CEO that they're good enough. And then after 25 years of dieting, 15 years of burning myself to work, I crashed.
And I had a life changing moment where it was either, I continued and by the time that was at 39, so if I continued in that trajectory, I was probably going to crash and die by my early fifties because I was exhausted physically, emotionally, mentally. And I, changed direction, went back to school, finished a health science degree that I had started in my early.
Twenties never finished. And I, launched a business helping people with food, which, was one of my biggest learning lesson is as I started to see patients in my office, I realized that all the women had the same problem as me. And it was another come to moment where I realized I'm not alone because this whole 25 years I thought I was alone.
I was the only one with that kind of problem, and I realized that there was many, many women like me. And then I did another switch. I closed that business, opened a new one, and that became beyond the food, which I am here for today. It's now been nine years that I run a company called Beyond the Food, and we help women undyed their life.
And now I train professional in that same beyond the food methodology. So, long story short, that's my story.
Kayla: Thank you so much for sharing, and there's a few things there I wanted to highlight. One is that whatever core wound we have, I've once heard from a coach is those are the women or the people that we're most poised to help.
And I love that you're doing that work now. And I would also like to hear more about what it looks like to undiet your life in purpose.
Stephanie: So. We can think of our relationship to food, be it about just the food, but it's about our relationship to what we are thought about food. And
when we struggle with food, we struggle with people. Most people think it's because you don't know enough, like you're not, you don't have the latest study or the latest intellectual information, and that's why you struggle.
And I'm like, I'm gonna know everything there is to know, and you still come out of this and you're still struggling. You're like, okay. It's not about the food and the amount of information, it's who I am in front of the food. And then you start unpacking that. You're like, well, I am who I am in front of food because of the way that I was taught right When to weight watcher, how my mom taught me how to make decision about food, how in school I was weighed.
Taught about caloric intake and eating too much means like all the layers of how we are taught about food. And then you're like, well, really, it's not about food. It's about how I use food to manipulate my body. Like the core issue is not food. It's actually how I use food to manipulate my body. So it's about what I've been taught to think about my body.
So undying your life is unlearning all these layers that contribute to what most people will describe as emotional eating, binge eating, like they wanna solve the emotional eating and the binge eating because they think it's a food issue. But when you peel the layer in, unpack it, it's about who you are as a woman.
Why you have a body and how you've used food to manipulate your body so you can feel good enough as a woman. So in dieting, your life is that process of unlearning what we call social conditioning.
Kayla: Mm-hmm. That is why you are the perfect guest for this show, because what I'm hearing there is you're changing all of the stories, all of the narratives about food, about body image, and then you're just creating one plot twist at a time.
Stephanie: That's like social conditioning. So social conditioning, in another way of looking at it is stories. Stories you were told, stories that you owned and stories that you keep telling yourself.
Over and over again. So changing the story means unlearning what you were told, unlearning how you owned it, and then what you tell yourself ongoing.
Kayla: I would love to hear what are about three of the top, most harmful stories that come up for the women you work with over and over again about body image, about food, whatever it might be.
Stephanie: So if we go to the root of it, all right, the most impactful stories women are told is that their value in as a woman in today's world is how their body shows up into the world. And there's a very specific way. In order for you to be valuable, to be good enough, you have to show up in a thin, fragile, weak, blonde, blue eyes, quiet type of body.
If you don't show up in that kind of body into the world, then you're not good enough as a woman. So picture me five 11. By the time I'm 14 years old, athlete wide, shoulder wide, hip, like height, width, musculature. Very sharp with my tongue. I was everything that didn't fit this storyline. So that would be one of the things.
So think about who you are right now against that model that you are told to be so that women are valuable as much as their body shows up to the expectation. The second thing is that you are not born worthy. You have to prove your worth into the world. So this, I'm spiritual more than a religious attachment to one doctrine.
I believe that all human beings are born worthy today. I believe that. But I was raised in the world in an environment which said, no, no, no, no, no. You have to prove to the world that you are worthy and good enough, and. One way to do that is your body. The other way to do that is your grade In school. It's your ability to don't ruffle the water, not get into a fight with people, do what other people told you.
So as a woman, you're not worthy and you have to gain your word by playing the role that society tells you you need to play either what your body or your grades or your ability to born children, whatever the story might be. Third story is that the food you eat has one but function, which is to control your body.
The reason why you eat is to control your body and to control your health. There's no other reason of function for food to control your body and your health, and that if you actually take anything else in a relationship to food like pleasure, it's actually shameful. So you should not have any pleasure with food.
It is a mathematical formula for your body and for your health, and that's the purpose of food in your life. These would be the top three.
Kayla: And I think if you could help women heal those three alone, they would be set in this realm of the yes of their lives. So I'd love to talk a little bit more about the body itself, because one thing I love about your work is you don't believe in body love.
You believe in body neutrality, which I love the distinction. I'd love for you to just talk about how you help people shift their beliefs in that area.
Stephanie: Yeah. So let's talk about what is body neutrality versus body love. Many women will hear the word body love. They're like, what do you mean? But if I say the word body positivity, they're like, oh yeah, like I heard about that.
Like that's what having a good body image is. It's like being positive about your body. So we wanna understand that body positivity, number one, is not a therapeutic framework in order to have a confident, comfortable, healthy relationship to your body. It's a, social structure that we use to bring justice to all the different kind of bodies.
So it's a social justice element. It's actually not a therapeutic relationship to your body. So let's put that aside. When we think about where do we want to go instead of body love, I'm in the world of body neutrality because of the stories we just talked about. When we understand how body image of the relationship to our body is formed in our brain, we realize that it has a lot to do with our intersection in the world.
Gender, race. Abilities, right? We are being told very specific stories about what our body should be based on the ways we show up into the world, gender being the primary factor that I refer to all the time. As a woman, we have very specific belief about what a body should look like versus a man. So body neutrality for me is this place where we go to the root and change the belief system.
So for me, body neutrality is about shifting the narrative of the story we tell ourselves about our body to be one of function of care and of respect. How do I need to interact with my body nutritionally?
Health promoting behavior in order for me to take care of this machine, this like bones and skin structure, so that it can help me live the life that I want to live. So what do I need to do? Okay, I need to feed it certain molecule and certain type of quantity and certain type. I need to move it. I need to take care of its mental health and its emotional wellbeing.
Its spiritual wellbeing. What do I need to do to have and support this machine so we can together live our best life? So to me that's body neutrality versus I need to love the way my body shows up into the world.
Kayla: Hmm. I have a very similar perspective. I tend to call it body cooperation, but what I'm hearing is a very similar Yes.
Framework. And I would love to hear once women do find this body neutrality, how does that change how they're eating, how they're moving, and just how they relate to their health in general. Hmm.
Stephanie: I don't think that, the way I wanna reframe that, I don't think that the way. We relate to our body automatically, for an example, changes the way we relate to health and food.
I think we need to separate those three entity and investigate each one of them. So we just investigated bodies based on our gender in the story we're told. We also need to do that with health. What was I taught since? I can be taught something about health, right? What was I told? Were healthy people, unhealthy people.
How do people achieve health? How do people become sick? And when you start digging into the stories you were told and the stories you keep telling yourself about health, you will find weight. Weight is everywhere, right? People that are unhealthy are overweight. Your weight determines your health. And you go everywhere and it's not only a story, you go to the doctor up to about five years ago.
You were weighed all the time, right? It was brought back constantly that your health equal your weight and the BMI and all those matrix. So you need to unpack health and say, what do I believe about health? What is factual information versus what is it that I believe? Then you take the same thing with food and you unpack food.
And what you will find is that go through, align through all of it, but you need to see it separately and then you can bring it back together and say, what stories do I want to have for myself when it comes to health food in my body?
Kayla: And what are some of your favorite, most empowering news stories you've hope clients create?
Stephanie: For me, it's so we'll start with food. For me, food is pleasure. Like that would be my number one. Like once I've unpacked it all and I actually started to look at food and say what makes me feel satisfied. Like the word satisfaction for me was bundled in shame because satisfaction meant gaining weight.
So I had to untangle this story and say, actually what makes me feel satisfied, and I'll take the case story of sugar because everybody freaks out on sugar all the time, right? As soon as we say there's no rule around sugar, people think you're going to eat sugar all day long, and I. Taught so too, and I did the experiments and I like to tell this story, part of my intuitive eating journey, my coach was the person who wrote the intuitive eating.
Like I hired her way back when Evelyn Oli. And as I was telling her how afraid I was, I was going to eat sugar all the time, she's like, okay, go buy the birthday cake. The cheap birthday cake at the grocery store. Put them on your counter and make yourself a mission of eating sugar all day long and see how long it lasts.
Like from breakfast, like I we're giving, I'm giving you permission to eat sugar as much as you want, and let's see how long it lasts. And we'll check in by a text at the end of every day. It did not even last a whole day. Because I felt literally sick to my stomach of how much sugar there was. Like I had cake for breakfast.
I had some homemade chocolate chip cookie for lunch. By the time I hit two or three in the afternoon, I felt no energy wanted, literally to vomit because I had so much sugar in my body and I realized it's not even pleasurable. Now that I've removed the permission gate and I can have it, and I'm taking the time to actually ask myself how does that make me feel?
Do I enjoy it? I realize that when I eat sugar in large quantity at once, it makes my mouth feel like numb. It gives me like high and lows of energy. It makes me want to be sick. That's not pleasurable. And then my hunger goes through the ups and down, like I eat the sugar and then two hours later I'm starving again.
Like, there's no pleasure here. I'm like, okay, you can have sugar, but is that what you want? Is that what's gonna make you feel satisfied? So I opened the floodgate by removing all the barriers to actually asking myself what makes me feel satisfied. And that changed my relationship to food because I realized I'm a meat eater.
I love protein. I just love it. I like bread, but like once a day the rest of the time. Like I love protein, I love gravy, I love potatoes. Like that's the stuff that gives me pleasure. And when I started to follow my pleasure, my true pleasure. Guideposts, I started to come very, very close to the recommended guideline of dietetic without making it a rule, without aiming to eat that,
I just ate a lot of fruits and vegetables, lot of meat. Lot of rice, lot of like whole grain and without making it a rule. So pleasure for me was a big thing. And when it comes to exercise, I'll talk about more like self-care and health again was pleasure. 'cause for many people that are listening to this and many people like me, exercise was a tool to shrink my body.
It was never for pleasure. It was always about burning as many calories as possible, and then two, sweating a lot because a workout without sweating was like a waste of my time, and it was about being painful. If I did not have soreness the next day, I wasted my time the day before.
And that led me to exercising, because it was so much pain and it took so long, didn't have the time, right? So how can I be guided in moving my body from a place of pleasure? That's when I found yoga. That's when I found functional training. That's when I found moving my body so it can do what I want it to do so I can, for me, I travel a lot, so I can walk long distance when I want do museum, like when I want to visit town, I want to be able to, I have a sc, I want to be able to bend.
I want to be able to use my body as long as possible. It was about not suffering. What a concept. What a concept to think of exercise and not see its value based on the amount of suffering it caused you, but actually how good you feel the next day. That was like mind blowing to me.
I actually, I can move my body and actually feel good the next day, and that's good. So that changed my relationship to movement and my relationship to food. And that opened up the space to all the other things I do with my life now, because I don't have to manage the suffering, the pain, the rules. I can get that outta my way and actually focus on what I want my life to be.
Kayla: Thank you so much for sharing that. And I do think pleasure is one of those things that. Build a consistency and a follow through in a not rule-based way that just feels really good and really sustainable. And I wanted to touch on a couple things there. One was that sugar story was powerful because like you said, it's actually not pleasurable to nothing but taking Doritos all day, if we actually stop making something forbidden and then stay embodied when we're eating the thing.
We'll start to, like you said, naturally gravitate towards those healthier choices and then movement as well. I loved the way that you changed all of those stories because I know there's some people that are like, not anymore. I used to work at a door building place and they're like, you get up at one hour to work out beforehand.
Why? And I'm like, 'cause it's the best part of my day and I'm in a much better mood if I do that before I come here. So it's not like a punishment or a chore, it's when you have this place of already enough. You can start to make decisions around food, around movement that actually make you feel better.
So thank you so much for sharing all of that.
Stephanie: You're welcome.
Kayla: So intuitive eating is something you touched on and you have been trained by the master of it. I know of a lot of people who struggle with this concept and struggle with doing it, and I don't wanna say doing it correctly because it's intuitive, so there's no real correct way.
So what is some of the real reasons why a person might struggle with intuitive eating?
Stephanie: Well, so first of all, what is intuitive eating? How about that? Right? Intuitive eating is about following. What we do know are eating cues built in within each human hunger, fullness, and satisfaction, and those eating cues are part of your.
DNA of your makeup as a human, you are born with it. And my favorite way for you guys to think about that is a newborn. A newborn is purely driven by those three eating cues. They will cry to let the environment know they're hungry. You put them on the bottle, on the breast, they will stop crying. They will feed, feed, feed until they feel full.
Then don't bother me. Then maybe we're gonna like tap them a little bit to like start the digestion process. And what do they do after they fall asleep? 'cause now they're fully satisfied, right? They're just happy human being. And again, if you've breastfed and then went to the bottle, you know that it's hard to move a child from breastfeeding milk to bottle because it doesn't taste as good.
So the child will always want to latch on a breast. They will see a woman in their breast and they'll go like, want to latch on because it tastes much better not to say that it's better or bad to breastfeed. The image here is for you to understand what intuitive eating is. That's how children are born until they're exposed to diet culture, until we screw it up for them and start telling them, you gotta eat everything on your plate.
Make sure to eat your broccoli. Little children are guided by their hunger fullness and their satisfaction cue. Diet culture screws that up. So intuitive eating was created and continue to be used as a recovery mechanism. It's a healing process. 10 specific healing steps in order to recover your natural state of relationship to food hunger, full satisfaction.
So it is a healing. Methods process to recover natural eating direction within your choice of food. So it's not this foreign thing that we try to get you to become that is unnatural. Like, I don't know, keto an example or low carb. Like we're trying through this process of healing, we're trying to get you back to your original manufacturer setting.
Like we're trying to hit the reset button to go back to how you were meant to be when it comes to food. So that's what intuitive eating is. With that in mind, when I teach intuitive eating, one of the most challenging part is not intuitive eating is listening to your body. The three eating cues that I'm referring to are in your inner world.
They're not like, they're not something that's gonna come into your for to say, now you're hungry. You have to feel it in your body. So the reason people struggle with intuitive eating is not because. It's not natural. It's because they're disconnected from feeling their inner world. In a science world, we call that interoception awareness.
The ability to sense your inner world, and that's the most challenging part, is the first few weeks, few months, not the intuitive eating work, but the work of feeling your inner world. Once you've got that back on, like on online, the rest follows naturally.
Kayla: Thank you so much for that distinction, because I have also heard that intuitive eating is just eating whatever you want, but what I'm hearing it is more about re-accessing that body wisdom that when you're on diets for years or even decades, you absolutely lose touch with that.
Level of embodiment and body awareness, so thank you for that.
Stephanie: Well, it's actually, it's the only way that dieting or restrictive eating of any kind can be done is by disconnecting from hunger and fullness. Because if you continue to sense your hunger and your satisfaction cue, you will not be able to sustain restrictive eating behavior.
So the only way you can be successful. With restriction is by tuning out the inner world. And so if you're, if you're tune out the inner world, then you will lean on to the rules and the restriction until it doesn't work.
Kayla: Yes, because I think it was, Janine Roth talks about for every restriction there is an equal and opposite bit because your body's just gonna keep rubber banding.
That's why diets are so problematic and they do not work in the long run.
Stephanie: Yes. And so there's this new world, I'm, witnessing on social media where now there's still a segment of health people who are prescribing weight loss and diets, but it's becoming less what people are saying is that diets don't work. Eight out of 10 people will regain the weight. So now the new hip thing is let me help you change your behavior so you don't regain the weight. Now I want to caution anybody listening to that, changing a behavior, a health behavior, eating behavior, exercise behavior anchored in weight loss.
Is still proven to be highly unsuccessful because the motivator of this new health behavior, or this modified health behavior is still external to you. You're still leaning in to your body, shrinking in order for you to be motivated to sustain that behavior. Changing any one of your health.
Promoting behavior with the outcome of weight loss is a direction or almost a successful failure. We have to get body shrinking completely off the storyline and change the behavior for you to have. The life that you want, a better relationship with yourself, more mobility, whatever the situation may be, but not about shrinking the body.
Kayla: Absolutely. I think that's a beautiful thing to touch on is that idea of being internally. Motivated versus externally motivated. And obviously there's so many beautiful ways to validate from within. I think like energy, creativity. I know, you know, mood is a big one. Your sense of like self-trust, self-confidence.
What are some other intrinsic motivators you love to help clients work with on this journey?
Stephanie: For women, I would say one of the most motivating. Element is living a desired life. So let me talk about this a little bit more. Helping women access the way they want to live, not the way they've been told they have to live, not the checklist of things they must achieve, like children house and corporate careers and all this stuff.
But what is the life you wanna live? That first question often gives you, when you ask that to your client, a blank look and like, I don't know, like getting married, having kids, making money. Like, what else? Like we've never asked ourself what is the life I want to live? So we gotta find that first and then second, aligning our choices in life to create that life.
Right. So, and it's mundane decision, like what kind of budget you're gonna have for your finance so that you can do the things you wanna do. What are you gonna say no to? Because you wanna do this, your relationship, your friends, your family, what kind of relationship you're gonna have in order for you to do this, what kind of business you're gonna build so that you can have this.
So when you align your choices. Both in your health, your finances, your career to the life you want to live, that's when I think you win.
Kayla: Absolutely. It moves us out of the problem solving mode of diet culture and into like that creative narrative power, but with your entire life. So that was the best explanation of that.
Yes.
Stephanie: Creating the life that we want instead of complying in the life that other people wants us to live.
Kayla: Exactly. Yes. So, two more things as we wrap up. I have loved chatting with you. I'd like to give my listeners an embodied challenge or an embodied activation at the end of each, interview.
So it can be a journal prompt. It can be a movement practice you like, thing you wanna challenge the listeners to do at the end.
Stephanie: Well, let's do powerful thinking. So the framework that I teach is called Cognitive Behavior Coaching. And in cognitive behavior coaching, we kind of have two submodality or two ways of coaching.
One is called a corrective thinking. When we look at our thoughts and we correct them towards what we want, but there's also something called powerful thinking where we use a question. For an example, find 10 ways that my body is a tool for me to live my life. And then you sit down with a pen and the paper and you go through your life and you go through how you want to live your life and you find 10 ways that you can express that your body is a tool to create the life that you want.
So powerful thinking is about imagining the thing that we want being. Present in our life right now. Find 10 ways right now that your body is a tool for you to experience your life.
Kayla: Perfect. Thank you so much for that. And if listeners wanna learn more about you, connect with you.
What are the best ways for them to do so?
Stephanie: So since we're listening on a podcast, I would say head over to my podcast. It's beyond the food it's been running for, it's gonna be nine years in a month from now. So we have 450 episodes of the podcast for you to, listen to, or my website, stephanie do.com.
Kayla: Thank you so much, and I'll include all of that in the episode description as well.
Stephanie: Thank you, Kayla.
