The Diet Is Not the Problem. Your Relationship With Food Is. Living Well with Dr. Jessica

The Diet Is Not the Problem. Your Relationship With Food Is.

Registered dietician Caitlin Kiarie joins Living Well with Dr. Jessica Turner for a conversation about food, guilt, and what it actually means to nourish yourself.

If you work in veterinary medicine, you already know that taking care of yourself is the thing that always comes last. You take care of the animals. You take care of the clients. You take care of your team. And somewhere between the end of a long shift and whatever you grabbed on the way home, you also tried to take care of yourself — which, if we are being honest, often looked like eating whatever was available and feeling some level of guilt about it afterward.

That guilt is the problem. Not the food.

That is the core of what registered dietician Caitlin Kiarie brings to this episode of Living Well with Dr. Jessica Turner — and it is a conversation the veterinary profession has needed for a long time.

What a Healthy Relationship With Food Actually Looks Like

Caitlin Kiarie works with people who have been through the cycle. The diet that worked until it did not. The meal plan that made sense on paper and fell apart by Wednesday. The pattern of eating well during the week and then completely abandoning it on the weekend and starting over on Monday. She has heard every version of this story, and her response is consistent: the plan is not the issue. The relationship is.

A healthy relationship with food, she explains, is not about eating perfectly. It is about eating in a way that feels sustainable, that does not carry a constant emotional weight, and that actually supports the life you are trying to live. It means being able to sit down to a meal without calculating whether you deserve it. It means making choices based on what your body needs rather than what some external rule says you are allowed to have.

"Most people are not struggling with food because they lack information," she says. "They are struggling because somewhere along the way they absorbed a set of beliefs about food that are working against them."

For veterinary professionals, those beliefs often look a certain way. High achievers who are very good at following rules tend to apply the same relentlessness to eating that they apply to everything else — and when the plan does not hold, the self-judgment can be severe.

Why High Achievers Struggle With This More Than They Admit

There is something particular about the personality type that gets drawn to veterinary medicine. Detail-oriented, high-standard, used to measuring success against clear benchmarks. That same precision that makes someone an exceptional clinician can make their relationship with food quietly miserable.

Caitlin has seen this pattern up close. The person who is organized and controlled in every other area of their life but feels completely out of control around food. The person who eats very little all day because they are too busy and then feels out of control at night. The person who has followed so many food rules for so long that they have completely lost touch with what they actually want to eat or what their body is telling them.

"When you have been ignoring your hunger for long enough," she says, "you stop trusting it. And when you stop trusting your body, the relationship breaks down."

Dr. Jessica Turner, who has spoken openly about her own history with disordered eating, knows this territory well. The conversation between them is not theoretical. It is two people who have both done real work in this area talking honestly about what that work actually looks like.

The Conversation the Profession Has Been Avoiding

Mental health in veterinary medicine gets more airtime now than it used to. Burnout, compassion fatigue, anxiety, depression — these conversations are happening, and that matters enormously. But the connection between mental health and our relationship with food is one that does not get discussed nearly enough.

The two are deeply intertwined. How we eat affects how we feel. How we feel affects how we eat. And in a profession where stress is constant and self-care is often the first thing sacrificed, that cycle can do real damage over time.

Caitlin and Jessica do not wrap this up with a neat solution. What they offer instead is something more useful: honesty about how hard this actually is, and genuine guidance for people who are ready to approach it differently.

"This is not about being healthy in some abstract future version of your life," Caitlin says. "This is about feeling better in the life you are living right now."

Listen to this episode of Living Well with Dr. Jessica Turner on Vet Candy Radio. Find it at myvetcandy.com and wherever you listen to podcasts.

Living Well with Dr. Jessica Turner is a Vet Candy original podcast. New episodes available on Vet Candy Radio and at myvetcandy.com.