Ep 29 Is diet culture showing up in your marketing?
Diet culture is sneaky in many ways....especially in how it markets. The bad news is that traditional marketing and diet culture marketing are generally the same thing.
The good news is that there is another way.
Today I want to offer up an opportunity to bring your values based filter to your marketing and messaging to check for any diet culture tactics that might be sneaking in and support you to show up with your values intact.
Let's dive in.
Links, resources & mentions
Episode Transcript
Laura Jean 0:04
Hello and welcome to this week's episode of The dietitian values Podcast. Today I want to talk to you about ditching diet culture tactics in your marketing. And I want to talk about a few ways where this can show up. Before I jump in, though, I want to talk to you with full transparency about a workshop that I've got coming up about marketing as well. So we're gonna dive into a little bit about marketing today. And if you want to know more, or if you just have been following along here, you like what I share and you want to learn a different way to show up in your marketing. Then I'm running a two hour workshop around values aligned marketing, authentic marketing, or what I also call human centred marketing. It's going to be a two hour workshop on December the seventh at 10am. Australian Daylight Saving Time, which is a Tuesday. And for folks in the US that will be December the sixth which is a Monday and if my conversions are correct, please check me, 6pm Eastern and 3pm Pacific, so that's December the seventh 10am to 12pm here in Australia and then the day before in the US at 6pm Eastern and 3pm Pacific and so this workshop will be around basically how to create your own values aligned marketing plan and marketing framework so it's not like a one size fits all it's not like 'do this to be values aligned, do this to be human centred'. but it's how can you bring your values and your way of practising into your marketing so that when you're marketing to the humans you want to work with you're showing up in the same values you practice by. you're showing up in a way that centres your relationship with the human you want to work with. that centres you your humanity and their humanity. And so that everyone walks away with their humanity intact from that kind of marketing experience. So I'm going to talk a little bit about why traditional marketing doesn't feel so great. I'm going to talk a little bit about that today as well. And also just give you ways to move forward that are based in your values. So if that sounds like something you'd be interested in, I'm going to pop the link to get all the details you know the little blurb and to sign up in the show notes and I will also pop it over on - it'll be it's on Instagram at dietitian values. over on Instagram and dietitianvalues.com in the show notes or just on the website itself in my events and web, things like events and workshops tab you can check out. it is 50 Australian dollars, so that is a little bit different when you convert, you'll get a discount if you're in the US, not an actual discount but just you get a bonus I suppose for having a stronger currency on the global market. So it is a paid workshop and there will be a replay available so if you can't make those dates and times you can purchase the workshop and catch the replay afterwards or you can show up live and then also you have access to a replay so that you can go back and watch, rewatch at any time to support you as you put your plan and things in place. So if you have any questions about that then please feel free to reach out I just wanted to give you a heads up so that's the values aligned authentic human centred marketing.
Okay, let's jump into the episode. So today I want to talk about diet culture tactics showing up in our marketing. And as I said, I want to give a few examples or ways where that can happen. So the first thing I want to talk about or the first thing I want to link in is one tactic that diet culture or that you know diets as their marketing themselves use in marketing is there being like, the one way, the only way, and a lot of the times marketing is around 'this is the answer. this is the thing you've been looking for, this is the diet to end all diets' kind of situation and I want to encourage you to be really mindful of where this can sneak in, in the non diet, anti diet, Intuitive Eating space when we have been trained in the traditional kind of weight centric paradigm, and then when you find this other way and when you peel back the layers and challenge your own bias and do all the work because it is a lot of work to get there and see this and just kind of be like yes, this is it. This is what people need. It can be really easy to extrapolate that out to this is the way this is the one way. and to market, your non diet anti diet, IE kind of approach as the alternative 'the way', 'the answer' if you struggled with diets all your life, this is the answer. And so what I would just encourage there is to just be really mindful of how sometimes that wording can show up in your marketing and how we can we can adjust it and I know myself I can actually remember using the words in a programme that I launched, I launched my first non diet online programme in like 2012. which full disclosure to like a total of two participants. But it was great. It was a really good way but I know that in that marketing. When I look back on it, I know that I used this kind of thing like this is the answer you've been looking for. And it's so easy to kind of fall into that rhetoric and that kind of way of speaking because if you've done traditional marketing kind of programmes, that's often the way you're encouraged to pitch services, to pitch your programme to be the answer that somebody is looking for, to be the solution to their problem. And I think this can be problematic because it does replicate that same situation that diets and diet culture do that that they're the answer the other thing. we can't know that intuitive eating, non diet, anti diet approach is the answer is the solution for everybody. We can know as practitioners, if we've had experience how helpful it is we can know that operating through that values have weighed inclusivity basically of centering people's humanity is is the only way we want to practice. However, I think it's this is just an opportunity to get, just to be really mindful of how sometimes that same kind of language or same kind of positioning can show up even with the best intentions. So that's something I would just like to highlight so that's number one like using that kind of right, way only way the answer approach in marketing.
Similar to this is the one size fits all. Now we know dieting and diet culture and diets are really great at this, you know, they're sort of like the whole pretending that things are you know, medically adjusted or you know, they used to be a diet called like the blood type diet that was basically like, you know, we've adjusted and adapted and developed this diet for your blood type and I think like the only thing different was like some people could eat carrots and some people couldn't or you know, people talking about how they develop these individualised plans, but everyone puts in their details, different details and spits out the same you know, kind of number of calories that people should be eating so they're not really that one size fits all. So we know that how that shows up in diets and diet culture. How does it show up in intuitive eating or a non diet anti diet? Again, it's a bit sneaky. It's not always obvious. And so some questions you can ask yourself when you're like looking over your own marketing, and I should actually caveat this and I'm going to talk about this more in the workshop. But when I mean marketing, I don't just mean posts and things that you put out when you're promoting a product or programme or service. Any thing that you share interacting except if you're already working with that client but anything else and like that human so that humans already gone to, come into the relationship where you're actually working with them, for anyone else, any communication that you are putting out into the world is marketing. So all of the posts that you put up or any blog posts or if you have a podcast like I do, anything you put out into the world that communicates information about you your way of working your belief system around your way of working your the way you do things, anything that puts out information that sort of is positioning you in a way to support humans to get to know you. I mean, these are good things. I'm just letting you know that marketing isn't just I just really want to emphasise that marketing isn't just the posts you put up when you're telling somebody about something you've got to share with them like like a product or service. and so I'd like to give you a couple of questions to think about. And these are things that you can overlay any kind of communication you put out to humans that you are wanting to work with. Or anytime you put out communications to humans when you're talking about how you practice or your way of working. So a couple of things I would encourage to ask is when you are sort of talking about things, whether it's a social media post or a blog post or you know developing like a pamphlet information type thing. Are you leaving space for nuance and the ability for things to be adapted to different humans. Sometimes it's particularly on spaces like social media where there's not much space, it can be easy to leave the nuance behind and sometimes we can promote, you know, sound bites or like little you know, like try to condense all of your knowledge and all of your experience and all of the collective experience of the humans you've potentially worked with into like one tiny post, we can often sometimes lose nuance and we can lose that opportunity for advice to be picked up individually. And sometimes it can become quite prescriptive, or it can become quite, 'this is the thing' you know, like, you don't need to do X Y Zed and what it can be useful to do is just to look is are you still creating space while still Yes, sharing your beliefs and sharing how you practice. You creating space for humans to adjust and adapt and taking things in a way where they can feel that they can take what resonates and leave what doesn't even asking for you know creating space of consent where where information, not necessarily in a social media space because people can scroll past and stuff like that sometimes in a way where you are creating consent for people to actually opt in and out of receiving that information. Are you giving people options of ways to work. With you. So the one size fits all thing. And again, I know that I did this in my business at times where I would do like maybe only have one kind of way of working like one programme I was running at a time. I've always found packages have been a really useful way to work with, to you know, to provide services to humans because we know that when we work with people particularly around this area that it takes a bit of time. However, what I've always been mindful of is having an alternative where people could just work with me one on one so there's options for the way people can work with you. So it's not one size or it's not just like this is the only thing I do I only provide three month packages. And that's the only way of working with you. Now, that doesn't mean I'm not saying that you have to provide a whole suite of things I suppose what I'm asking you to consider and question is, is there any of that one size fits all kind of thinking or way of working coming up there? Maybe the way you've thought about how you offer your services is to do with yourself and your own boundaries and all these kinds of things. And the way that works for you and you as a resource and so it's coming from that that angle, but sometimes particularly in marketing, kind of like the way marketing can be taught. Often there's encouragement to structure offers to kind of funnel or push people into choosing one kind of thing. And I suppose that's what I would just encourage you to be mindful of. Are you giving people options or creating space where they can be options, you know, making sure there's a bit of consent around how information is shared rather than everybody should just have the same information, adjusting to different needs and requirements. And also is it easy for humans to modify what you're sharing for their own their own values and their own way of living. So, again, it's not always the case in a social media post. Although I think the more nuance we can add to them, the better but sometimes this might be in the way we're providing, you know, information in other sort of like like a little bit more extensive information. So maybe like in a blog post where you might go into giving somebody a little bit more, more information that borders towards advice, you know, are we making sure that there is that nuance and there is that conversation of adjustment versus the one size fits all? So it's just one to keep an eye out for because, as I said, it's super obvious when we look at it in dieting and in diet culture, and sometimes it can sneak into how we operate and share information. It's just good to have that one in there. Like it's almost like a filter system. So knowing these things and these questions is just a way to filter what you're doing through it. Versus make you feel stuck that you can't make any you know, choices. It's just really being aware of it so you can filter what you do do through these thoughts. And just be mindful of those things coming up.
The next one I wanted to talk about was scarcity. So in traditional marketing there's so much about faking scarcity. Well, you know, it's all about creating scarcity. So basically just leveraging that internal, very natural and normal human instinct to act on scarcity, embedding that in marketing and it's one that is yeah, its everywher, and what I've or the conclusion I've come to and I offer it here as an invitation to consider to run it through your values based filter and to see if this is something that resonates for you and something that you want to be aware of, is what I find is that it doesn't feel congruent for me in the values I practice by and also in the values that I live by to market my services in one way and then turn around and provide services that actually go against the very tactics or those very strategies. So thinking of scarcity, you know, if I was to use scarcity as a, you know, and this is manufactured scarcity, like if me as a resource, I only have capacity to see, you know, five, take on five new clients and I say that I've got five spots left because I've got five that's the capacity I have that's a very different thing than manufactured scarcity. Like where there's an online programme, where there's no actual live component for you and no actual need to limit numbers and it's marketed as 'there's only 10 spots' but really, it doesn't matter how many spots there are. or a thing where it's like doors close on this date, and maybe the doors closed on that day because the programme starts and you need to get ready, but maybe the doors are closing as a way to kind of you know, give people a deadline to sign up by and traditional marketing encourages us to fake scarcity in our marketing to make people act and to make people act from that kind of internal drive. What we know in the non diet space is that scarcity and restriction around food - we see the same thing happening. And so a lot of the work you will do with clients is to actually undo a lot of that. not take away the scarcity, internal scarcity trigger, because humans are hardwired to react to scarcity. It's when it gets leveraged as a tool. And I know for me in a lot of my work that I've done over the years with women around their relationship with food is to get them to see that process and undo it and to support them to move away from scarcity and restriction approach to food. And so to market in that way feels very incongruent to me. So that's one I think, is good to look out for and like I said, sometimes there'll be like deadlines or limited numbers because of many, many reasons. What I'm talking about here is the manufacture or the fake scarcity to get people to act to get people to act on that kind of drive. Like 'this programme will never be run again', you know, to get people to kind of sign up or it's going away forever, you know, which is that whole scarcity mindset. which is the same thing that dieting and diet culture, tactics use for humans to trigger those scarcity things or maybe not even on purpose but a lot of the techniques and tactics that humans are exposed to through dieting and diet culture triggers, again, it triggers unconsciously triggers that scarcity and then pushes them into interacting with food in a way that doesn't feel nurturing and nourishing for them. So watching out for those incongruent kind of tactics such as scarcity.
the next one I wanted to talk to you about, this is number four on my list if anyone's counting along at home, is around outsourcing. Encouraging the humans you want to work with to outsource their own expertise. So diet culture tactics, we know that is all about encouraging humans to outsource expertise. It erodes trust with their bodies. It erodes trust in themselves, so that they are reliant on the strategies and the tools that diet culture so readily offers up for a fine fee. So what I would encourage you again, here's a couple of questions to think about, to filter posts, messaging or marketing through. So, this includes things like sales pages and stuff like that, but also, anything like I said, marketing is bigger than that. So, a couple of questions. So one would be are you telling people answers or encouraging curiosity and asking questions,.so I get it sometimes on social media, it's feels easier to ditch the nuance, and to give things in more concrete ways. What we know in the non diet space, and just in the actual embodiment of our humanity, is that it's full of nuance, and it's full of grey. So are we telling answers or asking questions? Are you replicating the expert role so that the expert lives outside the human that you're wanting to work with and support. and is there opportunities there to redirect to that or to to centre them as the expert and to shift your role as the clinician to the person with expertise or the support person or the however you want to word it to create that space of you being the person who has expertise? Absolutely. Who can support, who has solutions, Who has potential solutions? We don't know if they're going to be solutions, for this person. We hope they will. We know they've worked in other situations. We know they're felt supportive for other people, but we can never know what another person needs or wants or what works for them and to assume we do is us slipping into that ' we're the expert' role. Versus we have expertise and we have all of this to offer and we've got lots of invitations for you and we've got opportunities. And so that's my next question is Where can you switch how you're talking? How you're presenting information to invite to open up possibilities. to give people opportunities, versus telling them these are the things. closing it down, you know, removing the nuance, removing the grey. and so they would be some things I would encourage you to think about as you are doing marketing, doing posts and communications to humans is where are you slipping into maybe some of that positioning what you have to offer as something that would potentially override their own expertise in themselves. And some of this stuff happens really subversively, like I'm not suggesting that you're going out trying to set up a post that tells humans that they just need to work with you because you've got all the answers. In fact, I know by the very fact that you are listening along here and you're a non diet dietitian, someone who works in that space, that you're very likely not trying to do that. But it doesn't mean it's not happening just because of the way we're taught to market the way that we see other people talking about messages and the way that a lot of traditional business marketing coaching encourages this, you know, being the authority being the expert being the person with the solutions and the answers to their problem. They're, their, they being humans. So where can we shift that? Where can we reposition them as the experts in their own situation, their own lived experience, their own body and relationship with food. And what role do you actually want to play in your relationship with that human? and position yourself in that role, versus feeling pressure to position yourself as the quote unquote expert and which goes against which is not congruent again, with the way that you practice. If it is congruent with the way you practice, you practice as the expert the way as dietitians we've been traditionally taught to practice - if someone comes to you and you give them all the answers, then rock on with your bad self. But if that's not the way you practice, then you want to get that congruency between how you practice and how you market. so that the experience for you and the experience for the human you want to work with is congruent from their first interaction with you right through and that's what builds trust. That's what builds that know like trust factor that is often talked about in the marketing space, not pretending not, you know, not manufacturing it. And like I said, I don't think that you are trying to do that, but these are just some of the ways where it can sneak in.
Number five, the old bait and switch. so diet culture pretends to be looking out for the best interests of humans, customers. And often, you know, it advertises about things being like personalised or medically developed, but gives people the same plan anyway. So there's that bait and switch thing happening there. It pretends to be a lifestyle, change, a lifestyle habit, wellness, and then switches into a diet in wolves clothing. So the bait and switch and so what I would just encourage you to look out for that in your ownmarketing. So are there places where you are marketing in one way and then switching it up into another way, even if it's switching it towards a more positive way? So maybe you're marketing using traditional methods and then switching to your values based way of practice? And sure it's better than the diet culture way of practising, but it's incongruent for you and that human and it's confusing and it is why for a lot of dietitians, they can feel really and maybe this has been your experience, really unaligned with marketing really like that it's icky. And it can make you feel stuck. It can make you not be able to actually move forward in marketing. It makes marketing hard. Versus when you can approach marketing through the same values you practice by through the same values you live by, with you and the human you are interacting with centred in there and the relationship that you want to build with them centred. When you can do it that way there is ease, it's not easy, like nothing's usually easy. That's kind of worthwhile doing half the time. But there's more ease there. You're less likely to get stuck because what you're actually doing is building a relationship and you know how to do that as a dietitian, who supports people, you know how to build relationships. and what I suppose I was hoping that this episode would show you or to highlight is that is to be mindful of the ways perhaps that some of that diet culture stuff or some of where, because you may feel not as confident or not as sure around the marketing piece where perhaps you have been outsourcing those expertise to somebody else and using like, you know, overlaying your work with other people's approaches to marketing because they've said they're the expert, they've got the solution for you, and trying that and it doesn't feel it doesn't align basically, it's values misalignment, and then you end up feeling stuck, you end up feeling like you're no good at marketing that you just can't do this. There's something wrong with you or you're putting stuff out into the world that doesn't align with how you practice. So the humans that want to work with you are confused and so they're not necessarily seeing your values come through in that so they're kind of like well, is this the dietitian for me or not really sure what's going on. so there is ease when you can come at it from your values, where there isn't this bait and switch stuff going on? A lot of it, you know, is work, you know, and some of it comes down to if we're thinking about the bait and switch thing you know, looking at your own bias, looking at limitations, looking at how you incorporate lived experience and that whole experience so that that experience for the human you want to work with is the same it's congruent from when they first interact with you to when they go through to work with you. That doesn't mean you can't change and grow and learn and unlearn as a human. I'm not saying that you stay the same and so I'm not saying that the experience is the same. I'm saying it's congruent, in that your values are the same whether they're reading your social media posts, whether they're reading a blog post, whether they're receiving an email for you, whether they're listening to you on a podcast, whether they're signing up and it's always congruent.
And I had a moment myself personally, I'll share this experience with you around this kind of congruency and how when you show up in your values it just is. So I was doing a recording last week for a podcast doesn't air to like February with somebody. Anyway, we jumped onto the call and we're chatting away. And then she started launching into the questions and there was no kind of pause like I'm going to start recording now and I realised that everything we've been talking about was being recorded from the start. And there was initial feel of like, what did I say? Because I hadn't been thinking it was being recorded and then I just sat back and was like, Well, I just said things that are me. like I was showing up in my values. But I did have that initial thought of like, Did I say something I shouldn't and it's like, well, no, I didn't because I was showing up in my values. And so that's really an example of where when you do show up in your values actually, it doesn't matter. Like it doesn't matter what people hear, whether people hear you're talking in a personal conversation or business conversation or like that example in the podcast in the pre recorded bit and all that, you know, there's no difference to who I am or to how I was showing up. I mean, yeah, like I said, I had that moment. But what we create is we create congruency for us, where the same human showing up but also for the humans we want to work with.
So that is what I wanted to talk to you about today about diet culture showing up in your marketing. So I've talked about one right way, only way answer kind of approach, the one size fits all approach, using scarcity as a tactic, outsourcing encouraging humans to outsource their own expertise in themselves their own, you know, to devalue in their lived experience and the old bait and switch say one thing - there was actually a term that used to be bandied about - 'sell them what they want and give them what they need'. So that was talked about in marketing like where it was basically like sell them what they want. So talk about what they want in the marketing, but then, even if it's a bit different, give them what you need. So for example, in the nondiet space it might be marketing in a way that uses kind of shady language around weight or things like that, but then giving them what they quote unquote need, which, you know, there's problematic aspects of assuming what someone needs anyway, but then then sort of coming through with the old non diet approach. like a Trojan horse and I remember somebody that I learned from many years ago talking about marketing being a Trojan horse. And so just to think back on it, I'm just thinking now, that real bait and switch is just, it's so problematic, but it is so rife. And so if you have learned some of these tactics, you don't have to throw out all of the marketing strategies and tactics that you've ever learned. What you can do is overlay it with your own values based filter with the way you practice and make sure there's congruence in how you're showing up, that your integrity remains intact and that it is congruent with who you are and how you want to show up.
So that's what I want to talk about today. Like I said, I am doing an upcoming workshop where I'm going to dig a little bit deeper, not in this topic specifically but around marketing, and particularly around building your own values based filter and your own marketing plan around that. That sounds like something that you'd be interested in, feel free to sign up. Okay, I'm just looking at the time, and well, we're just about at the 30 minute mark, which is longer than our normal episodes. Clearly I have got a lot to say about this topic. I hope that this has been useful if you've got any questions, comments, concerns, as always reach out either via DM, email or head over and pop a comment on the post the podcast posts at dietitian values over on Instagram, and I'll talk to you again soon. Until then. Bye for now.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
