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 new interviews every Monday and bonus episodes every other Wednesday, plus transcripts and newsletters. Paid subscribers get full-length interviews, subscriber-only Q&As and essays, commenting privileges, access to the archives, and more!
Who/What/Why
I’m Christy Harrison, the producer/writer/host of this operation. I’m a journalist and registered dietitian specializing in intuitive eating and disordered-eating recovery. I’ve written two Amazon-bestselling books, The Wellness Trap (published in April 2023) and Anti-Diet (2019). My first podcast, Food Psych, has helped tens 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 how wellness culture can be even more insidious in some ways—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, 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 every other week I do a little link roundup with some quick takes and occasional deeper dives on items in the news. Most content is available in both audio and written form. Paid subscribers also get lots of bonus content that you can learn more about below!
Paid Subscriptions
Rethinking Wellness is a reader/listener-supported publication. Many podcast episodes and Q&As are free (or include generous free previews), and paid subscribers get bonus episodes and Q&As, commenting privileges, access to our full archives, and more. Paid subscriptions also help me support my family and continue to produce the best free content I possibly can. I’m so grateful to all my paid subscribers and hope you’ll consider becoming one!
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