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Journalist and author Kate Leaver joins us to discuss her experience with long Covid, all the weird wellness-y stuff she tried out of desperation, and why it’s so hard to think critically about interventions that promise healing when you’re so sick you barely have the energy to read an email, let alone do a deep dive into the science. She also shares how working with a naturopath as a kid sparked her eating disorder, how she found her way to recovery, and lots more.
Kate Leaver is an author, journalist, and former professional fairy. She’s worked for a glossy magazine, a leading Australian women’s website, an evening radio show, and the digital offshoot of a major literary franchise. She covers topics like love, science, celebrity, pop culture, and why dogs are so great. She’s currently writing her debut novel and she publishes the newsletter ENTHUSIASM.
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Support the podcast by becoming a paid subscriber, and unlock great perks like extended interviews, subscriber-only Q&As, full access to our archives, commenting privileges and subscriber threads where you can connect with other listeners, and more. Learn more and sign up at rethinkingwellness.substack.com.
Christy's second book, The Wellness Trap, is available wherever books are sold! Order it here, or ask for it in your favorite local bookstore.
If you're looking to make peace with food and break free from diet and wellness culture, come check out Christy's Intuitive Eating Fundamentals online course.
Resources and References
Subscribe on Substack for extended interviews and more
Kate’s newsletter, ENTHUSIASM
Christy’s second book, The Wellness Trap: Break Free from Diet Culture, Disinformation, and Dubious Diagnoses and Find Your True Well-Being
Christy’s online course, Intuitive Eating Fundamentals
Transcript
Disclaimer: The below transcription is primarily rendered by AI, so errors may have occurred. The original audio file is available above.
Christy Harrison: Welcome to Rethinking Wellness, a podcast that offers critical thinking and compassionate skepticism about wellness and diet culture, and reflections on how to find true well-being. I'm your host, Christy Harrison, and I'm a registered dietitian, certified intuitive eating counselor, journalist, and author of three books, including Anti-Diet, which was published in 2019, The Emotional Eating, Chronic Dieting, Binge Eating & Body Image Workbook, which came out on February 20th, and The Wellness Trap, which was published in 2023 and is the inspiration for this podcast. You can learn more and get them all at christyharrison.com/books.
Hey there, welcome to this episode of Rethinking Wellness. I'm Christy and my guest today is journalist and author Kate Leaver, who joins me to discuss her experience with long COVID, all the weird wellnessy stuff she tried out of desperation and why it's so hard to think critically about interventions that promise healing when you're so sick you barely have the energy to read an email, let alone do a deep dive into the science. She also shares how working with a naturopath as a kid sparked her eating disorder, how she found her way to recovery, and lots more.
Just a heads up that at one point she discusses and critiques a specific alternative medicine protocol by name. And it's not a household name, so I might normally edit it out to avoid giving it more airtime, but I think in this case it makes sense to leave it in for reasons that you'll hear Kate explain. And I think her perspective on this and all the other wild wellness treatments she's tried is super valuable for anyone who's struggling with any sort of chronic condition or who knows anyone who does.
Paid subscribers get to hear the full episode, which includes almost another hour of this great conversation. It was truly epic and I would love for you to listen. To do that, you can upgrade to paid at rethinkingwellness.substack.com. If you do, you'll not only get to hear extended interviews like this one, but you'll also get subscriber only Q and A's full access to our archives, including a bunch of bonus episodes we've done with other guests, commenting privileges and subscriber threads where you can connect with other listeners and lots more. Plus, you'll get my undying gratitude for helping support the show. I really, truly appreciate everyone who has become a paid subscriber and helped me continue doing this work. You can go to rethinkingwellness.substack.com to sign up now or click the link in the show notes with that. Here is my conversation with Kate Leaver.
Kate, welcome to Rethinking Wellness. I'm really excited to chat with you because I want to talk about your experience with long COVID and all the ways that made you susceptible to dubious wellness claims, as is unfortunately, the case for so many people with chronic illnesses and especially poorly understood, poorly treated chronic illnesses the way long COVID is and many others. So I'm excited to get into all that. But before we do, I'd love to start off by having you tell us about your history with wellness and diet culture.
Kate Leaver: Yeah. Oh, gosh, it's a big question, isn't it? Well, I'm mid-thirties, so an elder millennial who grew up in the early two thousands or came of age at that time when I think tabloid media was particularly cruel to women. So I think that is one part of my context in terms of diet culture, because I do feel like Kate Moss was saying nothing tastes better than being thin, and Jessica Simpson was being called all sorts of hideous adjectives for looking absolutely stunning on stage. And so I think I grew up in that kind of very strange era of diet culture. And I'm aware, obviously from reading your work, that diet culture has been in the works for many, many, many years. But that's my little era of diet culture.
And you mentioned that I have long COVID. I've had a post-viral infection before. When I was nine or ten, I got Glandular fever. So did my sister and my mom. And then they recovered and got on with their lives and I basically never did. And it developed into what I've always called as chronic fatigue syndrome, but I believe it's also called ME and has various similarities with long COVID. And my parents, bless them, sort of carted me off to every type of medical and alternative health expert that we could think to do in Australia. And one of those people, a naturopath, put me on an elimination diet, which was the beginning of sort of snowballing into anorexia, which kind of defined, in many ways, my teenage years.
And as I said, I think it's worth mentioning there are so many factors to these things, but I think it's worth mentioning that context that I grew up in where it was like, thin, thin, thin. If you're a woman, being thin is the only thing you have to offer. And I really took those messages and internalized them. And while I understand that an eating disorder is obviously a medical condition and was tied in with all sorts of things like depression and anxiety for me as well, and some grief and sad things. I think it's always worth, you know, looking at all the different things that come into our experience of illness and our experience of diet and wellness culture.
But then I think all of those things kind of combined forces to make diet and wellness culture, well, it's just such a pervasive part of our society and particularly part of growing up as a woman, isn't it? So I think all those to kick us off a little cheery summary of my sort of medical history, but also kind of running along alongside all those messages that made their way into my personal life, sort of just by osmosis and then into my heart and my head. And I think that's why diet and wellness culture is so pernicious and so dangerous. And my heart hurts for the young version of myself and also for any person growing up now, because just like ballet flats and low rise jeans are back in fashion, it seems like some harmful messages around body image rearing their heads again. And I'm very sad to see it.
Christy Harrison: It is really sad. You know, they call eating disorders a biopsychosocial illness. And I think about that a lot, right? It's like all of those things are playing a role. And I know in my own history, that was very much the case, too. There were, like, biological factors, psychological factors, social factors in the context of how I grew up in the eighties and nineties and the messages that were there as well, and all of that. But it seems like oftentimes for people I've spoken with, and it sounds like in your case, this was true, that there's all this tinder, I think of it. It's all this kindling built up to be there when someone lights a match. And whatever that match is maybe is different for everybody, but it's right there to catch on fire whenever that match is lit. And maybe for you, the match was the elimination diet from the naturopath. But it could have been many other things, perhaps at different points in your life.
Kate Leaver: Absolutely. You know, I try not to spend too much time imagining alternate realities in which things happen differently from me. But when I do that, I do think about what would have happened if I hadn't got sick, if I hadn't stayed sick, if I hadn't gone to see a naturopath and gone on that elimination diet. And was it inevitable, basically, would I have still ended up having disordered eating or an eating disorder because of all the other factors in my life? Or would they have been, as you say, a different thing to light that fire for me.
And, yeah, I don't like to dwell on it, but it is an interesting thought experiment because it does sort of feel like there was just all these different elements that came together, as you say. And it does make me wonder what my life would have been like if I didn't have that particular set of tinder. Would I have found a different one? You know, or when I'm being particularly torturous to myself, would my life have been problem free and carefree and delightful? And I would have achieved all the things I didn't get to achieve because I was unwell, which is unlikely, but you can't help but think of that.
Christy Harrison: Right. Totally. I mean, especially becoming unwell so young, I feel like that must have had an emotional impact.
Kate Leaver: Oh, yeah. I've dealt with mental health issues most of my life. I think I joked recently in something I wrote that around the age of eleven I realized that everyone dies. And that kept me up for the last couple of decades. I think a doctor at some point when I was about twelve told me to stop watching the news. And I do take that advice to this day. I think I'm a self described marshmallow of a person in some ways. I'm very tender and soft and I like those things about myself, but it's been crushing in a lot of ways and I think growing up ill. I'm a writer by profession and editor and it's almost a cliche. A lot of writers talk about being sick when they were young and reading all the classics and that was their education. For me, it was more watching daytime soap operas, but it was an education of its own.
But, yeah, I mean, it definitely shaped the person I am and some of my coping mechanisms and the way I approach all sorts of things in my life, not least because I spent so much time off school. I just barely went to school for some of the years and that's a great loneliness that comes back to me now and that I think I carry with me. But it also taught me all sorts of, I guess, resilience gave me a lot of time to think and become who I am.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, there's post traumatic growth there too, right? I'm sure. I'm sure there's ways that it shaped you in positive ways. I'm curious how it unfolded for you. Did that chronic illness ebb and flow? Did you kind of have that the whole time until you got long COVID. Or how did that play out?
Kate Leaver: Definitely, like, I think a lot of chronic illnesses do. It definitely did the ebb and flow thing. So I've always. I mean, I sometimes describe myself as having the constitution of a sickly Victorian child because I'm one of those people that sort of, you know, if a group of people were taken down with a flu or a cold or something, everyone around me would get up and get on with their lives, and I would sort of still be recovering weeks later. I'm one of those people who's always kind of, I think probably because of that early on, infection just taken a hit every time I get unwell. And I've had patches of great energy.
In my university years, I kind of came out of school feeling better than I had and was in a huge rush to prove myself and do every possible extracurricular activity and go to parties and all that sort of thing. And then I would crash. And that cycle kind of continued through my twenties because I was just sort of– I wish I could go back to that version of me and say, like, slow down, because I was also just absolutely so keen and ambitious and wanting to make up for lost time for all those years that I'd spent lying in bed.
So, yeah, I mean, over the last couple of decades, it's been highs and lows, energy wise, mood wise. It's sort of like the specter of chronic fatigue syndrome has stayed with me. It's lurked. It's like, even in my high energy, really, like, functioning successful times in my life, it's still been there. Like, "Don't overdo it, because we'll send you to bed for weeks or months."
But I moved to London from Sydney maybe nine years ago. And for the first few years of being here, like, pre me getting COVID and pre pandemic, I was pretty good. Like, I was on a pretty stable. I look back, I was going through some things and picked up an old diary from 2016. Not like a confessional diary, just literally what I was doing on each day. It was so full of activities. It was like, work thing, social thing, work thing. It was just insane. So I definitely have had periods of great functioning, and I was doing pretty well, to be honest, before I got COVID for the one and only time, and I'm yet to recover.
Christy Harrison: Oh, my God. I want to hear all about that. I'm curious, too, how your anorexia played a role in this and your recovery as well.
Kate Leaver: Yeah, so I'm 36. I would say that the worst part of anorexia was when I was probably 14/15/16. It took me a really long time to get rid of it. I think that I physically recovered, got on with my life, that sort of thing. But I think anytime there was any, any moment of increased vulnerability or I felt threatened or worried, some of those cruel thoughts from anorexia would return over the years. And I think it was probably the beginning of my thirties that I really was able to say to myself I'm able to have a really healthy relationship with food. And that took a lot of internal work.
And I only realize now, really with great sadness, but also joy, that it's changed what an unkind and unpleasant place it was inside my head for so long. You know, how cruel I was to myself because of the illness and also because of just the monologue that was in my head was not gentle. And I've learned to make it gentle. I mean, I've always been exceedingly gentle to other people. It's one of my sort of defining things, but I wasn't to myself and I've learned to be, and that's made a huge difference. So, yeah, I mean, what I'm trying to say is that it took me many, many years to fully throw off the anorexic tendencies. And I really am confident that I have now.
I really am very deeply proud of it because I know what it took. You know, it's odd. And I recognised this at the time, even when I was unwell, because I was in an eating disorders clinic and they asked me to write a love letter and a hate letter to my eating disorder. And because I'm a writer, I lapped that up. I loved it as an exercise. And of course, the love letter makes you realize how sort of addicted, in a really dangerous, empty way you are to the behaviors that you've developed. And the hate letter was really galvanizing for me because it made me realize how angry I was that this illness was taking various opportunities and parts of myself from me. It made me tap into or made me discover an inner strength that I am able to revisit now.
I think if I'm to come to terms with any of the kind of various illnesses that I've lived with, it is really worth looking at, I think you called it the trauma growth, post traumatic growth. It is really worth recognizing and celebrating and looking very directly at the things that you have learnt and the parts of yourself that have shown up and so I now can't remember what your original question was, but I'm deep in appreciating my own inner strength.
Christy Harrison: May all my questions lead to that for people. No, I love that. I mean, I was interested in how you found that healing as well. It sounds like it wasn't one thing, but just a process over the years.
Kate Leaver: Do you know what a lot of it is tied up with anger. The lovely kind of white hot anger that cleanses you, where you realize, well, actually, where you look diet culture in the face and you think, look what you've done and look what you continue to do to people and look what you've done to me, in part. And I think especially when you realize that diet culture is internalised by so many women. And so many of the people that I've loved in my life have had their, you can barely talk to a woman, particularly our age, who hasn't been affected by it. I mean, I think everyone has. And that really pisses me off. And there's something about anger that is wonderful for healing, because I think I've repressed it for a very long time and that's done me no favors.
So it was finding that that really helped in the healing, for sure. It was also, do you know what? I'm in a relationship with a wonderful man. We've been together about seven or eight years and we started living together. And this was the sort of end of my twenties, started my thirties, and he had the least problematic relationship with food. And because I was sort of for the first time, really, when we started living together, noticing his eating patterns and his attitude towards food and exercise in his body, and it was just a dream. He would just eat and then get on with his life, do you know what I mean? There was no guilt lingering around after any meal.
This is a man who used to have pudding after every meal. And he was just so sort of excited about what his body could do and saw exercise as just something wonderful, you know, there was no hint of punishment and self flagellation like there was for me. And he would just eat what he wanted, have a lovely time eating, and then do the next thing in his life. And I could tell that his, you know, mental real estate was made up of all sorts of lovely, interesting things, rather than mine, which at the time, even then, after so many years of healing, was still like, "Okay, but what if I do this much activity and this much food" and just parts of my brain were taken up by things that didn't affect him.
And I was like, I want that. I want that. I want my boyfriend's sort of freedom around food and movement. And I think he really helped me by setting an example like that that I was able to emulate, but also just by not, he gave me this sort of great and simple gift that, unfortunately, a lot of people don't get in that he just sort of gently challenged me. If ever I were to vocalize something unkind about myself or dysfunctional with regards to food, when we were out on a date or when we were at home or when we were shopping or planning, and it wasn't like he was on some great campaign to fix me. He was just saying things that he thought and his thoughts were functional and healthy. So that really, really, really, really, really, really helped.
Christy Harrison: Getting those functional, helpful messages is something that so many of us don't get. So to have the opportunity to encounter somebody like that and how cool that he also felt free with you. And I'm sure that's a testament to your relationship and how you made him feel safe and not judged and stuff. To be able to voice that to you and say, actually, this is how I think of it, because I think not everybody has that either. That's very special. I'm glad that you have someone like that in your life.
Kate Leaver: Yeah, me too. Me too. Side note, he's also, during the pandemic, opened up a bakery in our kitchen, a vegan bakery where he cycles bread and pastries and things round to people on his bike. And the house often smells like bread. And if he is to make me a cookie or a cinnamon roll, there is nothing but joy when he brings it to me on a plate. And that, for me, is just a huge deal and so lovely.
Christy Harrison: It's amazing to be able to have that relationship with food. I love that. So let's talk about the pandemic and the long COVID and sort of how that's all unfolded. When did you get sick, and when did you start to suspect you had long COVID? What were the symptoms that stuck around for you?
Kate Leaver: So I think because of the history that I've just told you about, I was a mess during the pandemic. I mean, this is true of so many of us, but there was just a constant level of fear. And I was really concerned about getting COVID because I thought it's gonna happen again. History is gonna repeat, and I'm gonna maybe have trouble recovering. And that was the case. And I don't think it was a self fulfilling prophecy.
So I was very safe. I was very risk averse during the pandemic. We were very compliant about lockdowns and rules and being very sensible. At some point in my risk fatigue journey, I made the decision to go and see Harry Styles live in London at the Wimbledon Stadium. It was the 20th of June 2022, and it was by far the biggest risk I had taken throughout the whole pandemic. So we'd made it through until that point two and a half years, roughly, since the beginning of the pandemic without being infected.
Christy Harrison: Which is amazing. I mean, yeah.
Kate Leaver: And that includes a bit of travel, because we were in Australia at the beginning of the pandemic. Awfully, we'd gone there to spend some time with my family, and when we arrived, there were horrific bushfires. And then as soon as that was over, the pandemic started, and we had to be inside and not see anyone. Fast forward to June 2022. And I had just the time of my life. I really love Harry Styles. I was a One Direction gal back in the day. I went to their concerts three times. It was a real thing of joy for me. And I was going with two incredible friends, and for a full hour just danced and jumped up and down.
And I don't have the heart to even regret it now because I had such a great night, and I don't think I got COVID at the concert. I think because it was outdoors. And as we know, the particles from the virus, they sort of spread, it's better when you're outdoors, is what I'm trying to say. But afterwards, I think 90,000 people tried to get the tube, which is the underground or the subway version in London, and they sort of funneled us with gates in this huge stampede of people to the station.
And it was probably, like 100 meters, 150 meters. And I think we were there for three hours, so much, much longer than the actual concert. And, like, sardines, like, the closest you can be to strangers. And I just know that someone breathed on me then because it was. Didn't matter that we were outside then. We were, like, body contact on all sides. And I'm not good in crowds usually, and I didn't know to anticipate that, because I'd never been to a concert at that venue. And we still we had a lovely time. The crowd was singing songs at the top of their voice to keep their moods up. But, yeah, I feel like that's when I contracted it.
I went home. I quarantined in our spare room to try and not give it to my boyfriend, which was unsuccessful because I think we'd had a little kiss before I realized that I was unwell. So he got it. I think we were both sick for about ten days in an acute kind of way. It truly was not that bad. I had been vaccinated a number of times by then. My boyfriend had too, but not as many times as me because of some mental health issues that I have on my medical records over here in London, they were very keen to vaccinate me, so I was quite mild, which I mention because you do not have to have a really awful time of COVID in the initial infection period in order to get long COVID.
And I think it's worth saying that because I think people maybe don't know that. And the other thing is, I'll just take a moment for a bit of advice for anyone who gets COVID, which I know people still do, like, just stop doing everything for way longer than you think you need to. Because I wasn't that sick. I was, like, answering emails about work from bed and had my family come to stay and was trying to be the fun Auntie Katie and sort of thought maybe I'll just get back into dancing around the house and going for a walk and resuming normal things.
And even though I was kind of still in that initial period straight after the infection, like, sometimes passing out for three or four hours in the afternoon, I was, like I'm over it. It's fine. No, don't. I think that is the crucial point where you. And it's not guaranteed it, but where you push up the risk of long COVID if you're trying to get back to your normal life too soon. So I'm not blaming myself for it. But I definitely didn't realize because we didn't know, you know, we were learning things on the fly with this illness. I didn't realize how long I should have and how seriously and how deeply I should have rested and waited.
Christy Harrison: I personally blame capitalism.
Kate Leaver: Oh, yeah. Oh, my God. I'm happy to blame capitalism, too.
Christy Harrison: Right? Like, if we didn't have this constant pressure to produce and be productive and do all the things. And if your family could easily reschedule and it wasn't a big deal to them financially, all of that, I feel like it all kind of comes back to money and pressure from capitalism to keep going at this pace that is just unsustainable.
Kate Leaver: Oh, absolutely. And our various governments are certainly spokespeople for productivity, guilt and capitalism in that way, because with one hand they were vaccinating us and the other saying, get to the office. So, yeah, it's almost impossible to extricate yourself from that and properly, properly rest. And, you know, that is a lesson. It's a very worthwhile lesson. I wish, again, I wish there were easier, an easier way for me to have learned it, but I do now feel that I have learned it.
Christy Harrison: If you're enjoying this interview, I think you might love my second book, which is called The Wellness Trap. There's one chapter in particular that really feels like a continuation of this conversation, which is about how chronic and poorly understood illnesses can make us vulnerable to the false promises of wellness culture, because so many wellness influencers and providers can seem so certain that they have the answer, often despite not having any sort of real scientific basis for their interventions.
In the book, I interview many people whove fallen into wellness traps in this way and explore the harms they experienced, like disordered eating and worsening symptoms and even potentially life threatening misdiagnosis. I also offer lots of ideas for protecting yourself from all the misinformation, scams and conspiracy theories that are popular in the wellness space and ways to move out of the traps of wellness culture and find true well being. If any of that sounds interesting, you can check out the book at christyharrison.com/thewellnesstraptrap or get it wherever books are sold.
Kate Leaver: So I had that initial infection and basically long COVID, or what technically is called post COVID syndrome, I believe, is when you have symptoms that continue twelve weeks or three months after your initial infection. And I knew that at the time. So I was, and I had heard in that way that you sort of pick up stories like urban myths about how this person has recovered at this time and this person did this. And then they got, you know, I'd heard that some people get to that three month period and it kind of just gets better.
So I was kind of, I literally had a date in my head and I was just sort of thinking, do you know what? Maybe I'm just going to have this little three month blip, and then now I'll return to the self I was before. And obviously that date came and went. So if I contracted COVID in June, I think it was about October, that I went to my GP. I think I may have been before then, but I went to present him with the idea of, "Hey, I think this is no longer normal that I'm still feeling this way."
The other thing is that I think is really interesting, and I'm so pleased that you're asking me these specific questions because I think people like, when I talk about long COVID now, some people don't know what I'm talking about, which is really shocking to me. And obviously I'm right in the middle of it. And, you know, my Google history is like, long COVID symptom, long COVID cure, so I intimately know what it is. But I'm shocked that people will sometimes back away from me like, I'm contagious. And it's like, "Babe, I haven't been contagious since June 2022. You're okay."
So I'm grateful to be able to sort of explain because so I was infected in June. And as I say, there's that three month period left. And it wasn't sort of like I reached a point of non recovery and stayed there. It was like after that three month period, the long COVID experience expanded to include more symptoms and symptoms that weren't related to the ones I had when I actually had COVID. So they said it was quite mild. When I had COVID, I was deathly tired and achy in that way that you are when you're sort of flu-y, cough, sneezing, all that sort of thing. Body pains.
But once my body was in the long COVID period, I would just pick up different symptoms to have a go. And, I think you sort of start off thinking like, come on, body, what are you doing? Why are you putting me through all these symptoms? And then you go through a period where you go down many rabbit holes and you try and understand as best you can, even though you were never good at science at school, how the body works, had the immune system response.
And I have become very, very fond and proud of my body throughout this because I realize now that when it was throwing different symptoms at me, that was its way of trying to deal with the infection and the lingering. Whether there are still traces of the original infection in my body, we don't actually know. There are all sorts of different theories about how long COVID works, which is another layer of stuff to deal with as you're trying to understand your own illness. It's very baffling and frightening and confusing to realize that other people don't have the answers.
Christy Harrison: Even scientists and doctors.
Kate Leaver: Exactly, exactly. So, yeah, I mean, as I say, I think you go through phases when you have a chronic illness. It's been 22 months for me now. And I think you go through like a profound panic stage, especially when you realize that no matter what different combination of words you put into Google, you cannot find a cure. And no matter which specialists you go to or which referrals you get, which sort of brain fog, study groups you're signed up to, or data collection apps you download for the health services over here, you still can't find an answer.
And it's just such a futile mission because you're sort of digging around for an answer and part of you knows it's not there, but you can't, you can't not do anything. So you're just continuing to look for this cure, this magical thing that you could do to make you feel even a small amount better, but preferably, could I please take some sort of tablet that just disappears all of my symptoms? But then there's another, obviously more rational part of your brain that's like, okay, the best scientists in the world don't know what's happening with this illness, why would you?
So, yeah, there's a deep research period where you're sort of refreshing the new section of Google on the term long COVID, and then you realize that sort of the mainstream news publications don't always have the best take on it. So you start going to Google Scholar and trying to decipher medical journal articles. And of course, through all of that, you're also trying to filter out any misinformation or disinformation, as well as listen or not listen to people on social media as appropriate. I mean, perhaps this is a good time to talk about that.
Christy Harrison: No, I was just going to say, I'm curious how you're sort of heuristic for filtering through all that noise when, too, you were vulnerable, right? You were searching for answers and perhaps desperate for whatever relief you could find. And so that can alter the calculus when we're feeling desperate.
Kate Leaver: Yes. Yes. And I think it's good. I know I've used this word and I'm glad you have too. But the word desperate really gets at the heart of it, because I think when you are so desperate to access any kind of help, any kind of treatment, any kind of understanding of what you're going through, it makes you so vulnerable. And on top of that, you have to understand. I mean, there are 200 recorded symptoms for long COVID. We each get our own special combination of them.
And, as I say, changes over time. Sometimes you wake up and there's a new one to surprise you or joyfully, one sort of disappears for whatever reason. I think the most common symptom is fatigue, chronic fatigue. And may I say that fatigue and chronic fatigue is not the same as being tired. And it's not helpful to have a hierarchy of exhaustion. Everyone's tired. But chronic fatigue is not the same as being tired. It's like having bricks for limbs. It's like a full body experience that is like having the flu, like running into a wall, like being bulldozed. It's like you have nothing left. It's not, "I need a nap." It's like, "I wonder if you could die from being this exhausted." So we sort of almost need stronger language for it. But that's the most common.
The second most common is brain fog. And there's all sorts of research going on about the cognitive consequences of having COVID at all. For people who don't even have long COVID, there are suggestions that there are long term effects that we may not know about in our brains. But for long COVID, the brain fog has possibly been my most annoying symptom, because I feel like throughout my life, I've been able to deal with physical illness and mental illness. And I realize I've just divided those into two categories, but they're so completely inextricable that I should have just said health in brackets, physical and mental.
But I feel like my go to coping mechanisms, I've always felt that I will be okay so long as I can read or watch television, so long as I can write, so long as I can imagine things in my head that allow me to escape the things that I'm feeling. And so to have brain fog so badly that I could not do those things, I couldn't concentrate on a television show. I could not read more than a couple of sentences before basically like a drawbridge from a castle would close my brain. Brain fog is such a gentle term for it. I believe I once described it to a GP as wearing an astronaut's helmet full of butter.
Christy Harrison: That's good. I like that.
Kate Leaver: Thank you. Thank you. I'm not sure that the doctor really did know what to do with that, I think they suggested I have a glass of water and a lie down because it's not exactly helpful, sort of clear medical terminology, but it's an awful feeling. And that, for me, was really alarming because I couldn't do my normal things. I couldn't read a book, I couldn't have ideas and think about things. I couldn't watch television.
There was a time when I couldn't have a two or three minute call with my mom or my dad. And they both live on the other side of the world. I call them pretty much every day. I'm a very dutiful daughter, and I think you've got to make up for long distance by amping up the frequency of communication. For a time, as I say, if I had a two, three minute conversation with my mum, that was me done for the day. That was my whole activity, which is a long winded way, and I'll bring it back to the point that I was trying to make, is that if you're dealing with that kind of brain fog, you're dreaming if you think you can employ critical thinking about things like social media, wellness trends, or the promise online or in person, for that matter, of some kind of cure if you just pay this exorbitant amount of money over this period of time and will make you better kind of thing.
We contain multitudes. One of my multitudes is being quite impressionable to marketing, which is a very human thing in the society that we live in. But if something says this will make you beautiful, this will make you happy, this will make you full of vitality and energy, I'm like, sign me up. Give me one. Where do I get it? Which is just what capitalism has taught me, as you said earlier.
So there's already that part of my personality that's quite excitable about trying a thing, and then add to that brain fog, where, because brain fog can hit various parts of your brain and therefore various ways of thinking. One day my executive dysfunction, which I think at some point, it was a popular therapy term on TikTok, so people may or may not know what it is, but it's sort of the part of your brain that you use for decision making, but also sort of like the memory of process. So how to do things. So a lot of administrative tasks, a lot of just for example, like, to this day, I can't follow a recipe to make dinner. It's very, very difficult for me to tap into that part of my brain that is told what to do and does it.
I get all scrambly in my brain, but at some point I was having a shower, and I forgot how to turn the shower off, and I wanted to make a cup of tea and my brain, I was sort of stuck like a record. I was like, "Make water hot. I want to make the water hot." And it took me, like, five minutes to remember to put water into a kettle and boil it. So that's the kind of level of brain fog that I'm dealing with, and it's much better now. Here I am having a long conversation with you, where I hope I'm being coherent. And this is like a huge landmark for me. I will get off this phone call and be extremely happy that I've been able to speak, because that's the other thing, speaking and listening. Huge drainers of cognitive energy. Huge. And that's very hard to explain to someone.
Christy Harrison: Yeah. When your energy levels are high and continuous, it's like you don't notice how much of a drain that is.
Kate Leaver: Oh, my God. Exactly. I mean, my poor, darling boyfriend. The number of times I've had to tell him over the past couple of years when he's in the middle of a sentence, I've had to just put my hand up and be like, I can't. You're going to have to stop talking to me because I can't process the words anymore. And it's making me feel like I've got the astronaut helmet of butter on. I've explained all of this to make the point that that is the state that I'm in when I'm picking up my phone and look at Instagram, or I deleted TikTok.
And it's not even just social media, because I've also had a really positive experience on social media in the sense that I've found a number of people who also have long COVID who have chosen to spend their day recovery time chronicling their experience and sharing the things that help. And that has been extremely good for me, because you come to a point where you're like, is this just me? Have I imagined it? Am I in a fugue state? Is this a dream? A nightmare? Like, is there something wrong with me personally that I still feel this way?
And so it's extremely powerful if you can curate your social media experience to have positive influences in it. And there are a number of people who live in London, some women who are, well, I was gonna say my age, but I think they're actually a bit younger than me, but who do beautiful things on social media. And that has been, like, deeply moving and very helpful for me. But there's also obviously a lot of other harmful stuff. And also, like, to be fair to social media as a big thing, I also went looking for it. Like, when you're, as I say, on this ridiculous search to find an answer that doesn't exist, you will find no end of people who are promise you that it exists, and it just so happens that they have found it and you can have the privilege of paying them money to give it to you.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, capitalism again, right? There's this incentive to create that kind of content. And then social media, it's the human input of you're looking for that. And maybe you would have gone down intense rabbit holes anyway looking for that kind of information. But then also the algorithms are radicalizing you and pushing you further and further into weird corners of the Internet and of long COVID communities and stuff like that.
Kate Leaver: Yeah. And do you know what? My algorithm is usually quite kind to me because it knows that I just want Taylor Swift Internet and dog videos and like, the occasional sort of, you know, when a duck becomes best friends with a pig or something like that. So I generally have quite a wholesome Instagram portal into the Internet. But that has changed, I guess, because I've been feeding my algorithm different search terms. And for me, that has been going on a hunt for things that will make me well. And I think it's that age old story that, of course, you've told many times in your work and on this podcast, that when mainstream medicine doesn't show up for us, whether through lack of resources or lack of understanding, especially of women's pain and mental health and anguish and chronic illness, or whether it's intentional or whether it's through no fault of medicine's own, because medicine is just doctors, and doctors are just people, and people are fallible.
But when we cannot get the answers or the cures or the treatment or the empathy from our usual doctors, it's so natural and unfortunately, quite risky, but so tempting, almost irresistible, to start looking at more alternative things. And some of those alternative things, it's difficult. Isn't it always so difficult because everyone has their own line, because wellness, at its heart, as a word, is just about health. And there are some lovely things that are not taking pharmaceutical drugs. I have many. But there are some lovely things, and there's such power in things like breath work and stretching and yoga and meditation. And I truly believe that Yoga Nidra, is magical, and I love it very much.
There are all those things that make me feel more well that I would not classify in a nefarious way as wellness things. But then in your search for those things that do help, you sort of accidentally stumble across things that are adjacent to those lovely things. And then the further you go along, at some point you're following the path that's like, you know, what? If you breathe deeply and use your nose to breathe, and then at some point you stumble across and you take a different path, and all of a sudden you're in neurolinguistic programming, and if only you could think these very special thoughts, you would be better. And because you haven't thought those thoughts and manifested your own destiny of being healthy, and by the way, you probably have high cortisol, you continue to be sick through your own fault, you know?
Christy Harrison: Right. So blaming.
Kate Leaver: Yeah. And I, before this episode, sent you a little list of the things that I have tried.
Christy Harrison: I'm curious to hear about those and what your experience has been of those, too.
Kate Leaver: So there's something called the Lightning Process. I don't know if you've heard of it.
