Rethinking Wellness

Rethinking Wellness offers critical thinking and compassionate skepticism about wellness and diet culture, and reflections on how to find true well-being. We explore the science (or lack thereof) behind popular wellness diets, the role of influencers and social-media algorithms in spreading wellness misinformation, problematic practices in the alternative- and integrative-medicine space, how wellness culture often drives disordered eating, the truth about trending topics like gut health, how to avoid getting taken advantage of when you’re desperate for help and healing, and how to care for yourself in a deeply flawed healthcare system without falling into wellness traps.

Subscribe to get a new interview, essay, or Q&A every Monday.

Who/What/Why

I’m Christy Harrison, the producer/writer/host of this operation. I’m a longtime health and science journalist, a registered dietitian specializing in intuitive eating and disordered-eating recovery, and a nuanced critic of diet and wellness culture. I’ve written two Amazon-bestselling books, The Wellness Trap (published in April 2023) and Anti-Diet (2019). My first podcast, Food Psych, helped hundreds of thousands of listeners heal their relationships with food and think critically about diet culture.

In my decade of producing that show, I came to understand that in some ways wellness culture can be even more insidious than diet culture—pulling people back into disordered eating after they’ve sworn off dieting for good, and leading them down perilous paths of mis- and disinformation. I wrote The Wellness Trap to explore those issues in depth, and I launched Rethinking Wellness to continue the conversation.

Here we delve into the connections between diet culture and wellness culture, and examine how the wellness space became rife with scams, misinformation, and conspiracy theories.

We investigate how social media and other algorithm-driven technologies are helping spread wellness misinformation and detracting from individual and collective well-being.

We explore how integrative and functional medicine can inadvertently lead people down a path of disordered eating and other harmful behaviors, and how the shortcomings of the conventional healthcare system make so many of us vulnerable to false promises.

And we discuss how to break free from these traps and find your own true well-being.

You’ll hear from people who’ve learned to navigate this tricky landscape, including scholars of wellness culture, experts on health misinformation and media literacy, professionals in the field of disordered-eating recovery, critics of social media and the attention economy, and everyday people who’ve fallen into the wellness trap and found their way out—including me, someone who lives with multiple chronic conditions that often get blamed on food and lifestyle choices, but whose efforts to heal myself “naturally” ultimately caused far more problems than they solved.

If any of that interests you, I hope you’ll subscribe!

We publish new podcast episodes weekly, alternating between interview episodes and solo Q&As/essays, and most content is available in both audio and written form. Paid subscribers also get lots of additional content that you can learn more about below!

Paid Subscriptions

Paid subscribers get a wealth of special benefits, including:

Exclusive breakdowns of the science behind diet trends and wellness fads, through the unique lens of a seasoned eating-disorder dietitian and science journalist who also lives with multiple chronic health conditions
The chance to connect with me in monthly office hours and ask your burning questions
Extended interviews with our guests, including all the juicy bits
Commenting privileges, where you can join the conversation with other readers
Ad-free podcast episodes
Priority answers to your questions
News roundups and my take on trending topics
And more!