Alan Levinovitz, religious-studies scholar and author of Natural and The Gluten Lie, joins us to discuss the problems with framing eating and wellness practices as “natural,” the weird parallels between gun culture and wellness culture, the tricky balance between empathizing with why people are driven to harmful wellness practices and being clear in calling out misinformation, the need for nuance when discussing the connection between physical and psychological issues, and more.
Alan Levinovitz is associate professor of philosophy and religion at James Madison University, and the author, most recently, of Natural: How Faith In Nature's Goodness Leads to Harmful Fads, Unjust Laws, and Flawed Science.
Resources and References
Alan’s books, Natural: How Faith In Nature's Goodness Leads to Harmful Fads, Unjust Laws, and Flawed Science and The Gluten Lie and Other Myths about What You Eat
My upcoming book, The Wellness Trap: Break Free from Diet Culture, Disinformation, and Dubious Diagnoses and Find Your True Well-Being
Alan’s piece “In Praise of Bewilderment”
Alan’s piece about long Covid
Transcript
Disclaimer: While every effort has been made to provide a faithful rendering of this episode, some transcription errors may have occurred. The original audio file is available above.
Christy Harrison: Welcome to Rethinking Wellness, a podcast exploring the diet culture, disinformation, dubious diagnoses, and disordered eating that are so pervasive in contemporary wellness culture--and how to avoid falling into these traps so that you can find your own true well-being.
I’m your host Christy Harrison and I’m a registered dietitian, certified intuitive eating counselor, journalist and author of the books Anti-Diet, which is available now, and The Wellness Trap, which comes out on April 25th. You can learn more and pre-order the book at christyharrison.com/thewellnesstrap. That’s christyharrison.com/thewellnesstrap.
Christy Harrison: Welcome back to Rethinking Wellness. I'm Christy, and my guest today is Alan Levinovitz, a religious studies scholar and author of the book, Natural: How Faith in Nature's Goodness leads to harmful fads, unjust Laws, and flawed Science. We discuss the problems with framing, eating, and Wellness practices as natural, the weird parallels between gun culture and Wellness culture, the tricky balance between empathizing with why people are driven to harmful Wellness practices and being clear and calling out misinformation, the need for nuance when discussing the connection between physical and psychological issues and more. It's a great conversation. I can't wait to share it with you in just a moment. Before I do a few quick announcements, this podcast is brought to you by my upcoming book, The Wellness Trap, break free from Diet Culture Disinformation and Dubious Diagnoses and find your true wellbeing, which is available for pre-order now. The book explores the connections between diet-culture and Wellness culture, how the Wellness space became a hotbed of scams, misinformation and conspiracy theories, why many popular alternative medicine diagnoses are misleading and harmful, and what we can do instead, to create a society that promotes true wellbeing, just go to ChristyHarrison.com/thewellnesstrap to learn more and pre-order the book for its April 25th release. That's ChristyHarrison.com/thewellnesstrap, and once you've pre-ordered, you can get a special bonus Q and A with me about the book by uploading your proof of purchase at christyharrison.com/bookbonus. If you like this show and want to help support it, I'd be so grateful if you'd subscribe, rate and review, you can do that wherever you're listening to this. And you can also get it as a newsletter in your inbox every other week where you can either listen to the audio or read a full transcript or both.
Subscribe to that at rethinkingwellness.substack.com. That's rethinkingwellness.substack.com. Now, without any further ado, let's go to my conversation with Alan Levinovitz. So Alan, welcome to the show. I'm so excited to chat with you again, this is for a new podcast series that has launched since you were on my old podcast, Food Psych a million years ago, but that episode was a fan favorite and I still get a lot of great feedback about that today, and so I'm excited to talk with you again about your latest book and all your other work that's come out since then.
Alan Levinovitz: Thanks for having me. I'm really looking forward to chatting.
Christy Harrison: So I'd love to start by just having you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you came to do the work you do.
Alan Levinovitz: Yeah, so I'm a bit unusual in the wellness and food and fitness space. I'm a religion professor, and a long time ago I started noticing some pretty interesting similarities between how people choose their foods religiously, so taboos and ideas of purity and impurity and how people were choosing their foods in a supposedly secular way. So I saw restrictive dieting that had a veneer of science as a kind of parallel practice to the religious diets that promised salvation and also threatened damnation if you ate the wrong things. And that led me down a long path of thinking about how my discipline, religious studies (I do classical China), how my discipline in general and ideas of ritual and impurity and impurity or sin and guilt and holiness could help me understand what looks secular, the wellness world or the fitness world or the food world, but actually I think is really helpfully understood through the lens of religion.
Christy Harrison: And we talked in our first interview about your first book, The Gluten Lie, and how the discourse about gluten that was happening at the time and that is still happening today, had these sort of religious undertones and now with your book Natural, I think there's a lot more contemporary stuff to unpack there too.
Alan Levinovitz: Absolutely. With gluten, what I saw was people were treating gluten-free diets, but also as I talk about in the book, other sort of bad substances, whether it's fat or carbs or sugar or whatever it is, they were treating them the way you might treat something that was deeply impure, that was banned by God, you couldn't even touch it or it would completely defile you. And in the course of researching that book, one of the reasons people gave me for why they wanted to avoid these substances was that they weren't natural. And I began thinking more about the power of that word. And as soon as you start seeing it, I mean anyone who's listening to this, as soon as you start seeing how natural is used to justify things or to argue against things, bad things are unnatural, good things are natural. You will never be able to unsee it everywhere. And it's the sort of decisive argument that I came to realize. Nature was just the secular analog for God and natural was a secular analog for holy. And so the idea was you do what nature wants you to do in the same way that you do what God wants you to do. It's what nature intended, it's what nature wants us to eat or how nature wants us to parent. And in fact, anything ever goes wrong or anything is ever making you sick, it must be because it's unnatural. And so that was a really big sort of a ha moment for me, and I spent as a lot of the book just unpacking what that means in various facets of our life.
Christy Harrison: And it's not just about food. I thought that was so fascinating that you got into so many other realms that it sort of started with food, right? Because I think you said you were inspired by the research you had done for the gluten lie, but then it goes into all these other avenues too.
Alan Levinovitz: That's right. You see it everywhere. I mean, as I talk about in the book, there's a natural birth section, but as a parent, natural parenting is something that you hear about all the time you're supposed to. Why do you breastfeed? Because it's natural. Why do you sleep with your child? Because it's natural. And there's often these sort of romanticization of a kind of garden of Eden where you've got this exoticized hunter gatherer that lives perfectly and is happy and is always healthy and their kids are never throwing temper tantrums. And then you have unnatural western children who are all corrupted by our horrible, unnatural parenting. So it's like there, it's in sexuality, it was even an economic system. So I really thought this was an important way to look at how when we're confused, because life is complicated and we're looking for explanations and heuristics to guide the choices we make, we want something simple and decisive and naturalness in a world where the authority of religion has receded from areas like parenting or diet, we substitute the idea of naturalness. And I think it's a big mistake because you can love nature without worshiping it and understand that just because something is natural as you say in your book, doesn't mean that it's good.
Christy Harrison: Right. Well, yeah. And you argue that the binary of natural versus unnatural has some really harmful consequences. It's unhelpful for understanding the nuances that really exist in the world. What are some of the consequences of categorizing things in that way?
Alan Levinovitz: It's funny, some people want to go the complete other direction, which is the idea that everything is natural. We're all stardust at the end of the day, so there's no difference between New York City and Yellowstone Park, which I don't think is true. I think that if you understand naturalness as a spectrum and the most natural things are things that human will had no involvement in, so anything that existed before humans is completely 100% natural, dinosaurs – 100% natural. And unnatural is stuff that we've willed that wouldn't exist without our active willing, like New York City. I think those are useful distinctions, and we can talk about natural and unnatural in a lot of interesting and helpful ways. The problem happens when we map that natural unnatural binary onto good and evil. So when we start to think that natural is a synonym for good and unnatural is a synonym for bad as it has been in our language since before Shakespeare, unnatural death's, a bad death, that sort of thing, a death, it's immoral or out of the order of things that are morally good, that's the problem.
And so what I really want people to do is realize that when they make that move, shifting from natural/unnatural to good/bad, are going to end up making a lot of mistakes, because what's natural is not always good. What's unnatural is not always bad. And those, that idea has been used to justify all sorts of things that otherwise would be very difficult to justify, whether it's opposition to interracial marriage, it's unnatural to reproduce with people who are not your same race, which is what is both untrue, but also it wouldn't matter if it were unnatural, what matters is whether it's harmful or not. And that's a really, really important thing. I think we can be captivated by the magic of the natural argument.
Christy Harrison: I mean, I think I see it a lot with food, this idea that natural is always better and with, I talk a little bit about the anti-vax movement in my book or have a whole chapter devoted to it actually, and this idea that vaccines are unnatural, that it's aligning or it's leaving out this question of whether or not something is harmful. The harms to public health of avoiding vaccines are pretty incontrovertible, but this idea that vaccines are supposedly not natural, that it's putting these artificial toxins into your body clouds that argument about harm.
Alan Levinovitz: That's exactly right. And that argument has been around an anti-vaccine circles for a very, very, very long time. The idea that vaccines are unnatural and therefore they're bad, and we should prefer natural immunity, for example, over the unnatural immunity of vaccines. And it is like any simplistic binary that's not accurate, if you push on it, it starts to collapse almost immediately. You can point out all kinds of things like infant mortality rates that are extremely high in the natural world, or you can point out the fact that humans are living longer than they ever have before, thanks to unnatural innovations like food plentifulness and the ability to treat illness. But I think in a way, what I've realized is that trying to make those sorts of rational arguments is a mistake, because what natural means to people is not, it's not something they've thought through and come to a kind of rational conclusion that they want to pursue natural things. Rather, it's that there's something deeply mysterious and beautiful about the idea that there are forces beyond and before human beings that have created the order in the world that we see today, everything from butterflies to trees to our own bodies. And that really is true, and it is cool, and it is important whether or not you're religious, that's just incredible. And so when people are confused in suffering and searching for some way to make decisions and searching for some explanation for why there are bad things happening in the world, the idea of naturalness is helpful. It's helpful not because it's accurate, but because it's satisfying. It's a satisfying, simple explanation. And so that's something I think is really important to understand that the reason this argument is so appealing and nature looks so good to so many people is not because they've thought it through, but because they need it to look good and they need it to be satisfying,
Christy Harrison: Right? Because what's the alternative? If not, it's like this world of mystery and perhaps anxiety and fear that we don't have explanations for all these things that are happening and some really terrible things like pandemics or infant mortality or things like that.
Alan Levinovitz: Yeah, I saw that with the pandemic. People were saying, oh, this is nature taking revenge, right? This, it's like, oh, we've been out, we were outside of the natural order, so this has come to get us. I mean, you see this argument and it's a bipartisan illusion. So you see this in very conservative circles, and you see it in very liberal circles as well, sort of horseshoe theory of politics, those ends of the horseshoe and are right there with natural. This is why, for example, people have talked about this, but why you saw Q-ANON intersecting with yoga influencers. People were like, I don't understand this. These are two worlds that we thought were so far apart, but really they're united by, and again, this is not yoga and wellness are not, I hate to generalize about these communities, but there are parts of those communities where people are searching for binary explanations to suffering and naturalness is the answer and Q-ANON and other sort of cultish movements, do that as well. And there's this kind of nature core conservative movement that also appeals to naturalness in the sense that they see progress or change as unnatural, and they want to return to what they see as “natural” social roles, for example, for women and men or natural sexuality that is married couples and not homosexuality. So that argument can be used powerfully to justify virtually any ideology.
Christy Harrison: I mean, I think about it in my field, the intuitive eating field and how explanations of the nature of our relationship with food, some of the explanations that I've used to explain intuitive eating and where it comes from unwittingly sort of rely on that distinction between natural and unnatural. It's just so insidious.
Alan Levinovitz: Absolutely. Well, it's because it's so appealing. So in Chinese, the typical translation, ancient Chinese text were natural is zoran, which literally means self so or so of itself. So it means spontaneous. It's not ordered by humans then. So it's ordered by of itself. And I think there's something really romantic about the idea that if we just cut away the clutter, all the pollution that's been forced upon us by culture, our parents or whatever, and we just allow ourselves to be spontaneous, that will miraculously result in everything being harmonious. And there is something, I see that a lot in intuitive eating circles where there's this idea that's like, well, the problem is you've been told all this stuff, it's unnatural and it's destroyed your natural relationship to food, which would otherwise be harmonious. So we'll cut all of that other stuff away. Then what you'll be left with is the right way to eat the spontaneous theron way to eat, the self so way to eat, the organic is another word that taps into that idea or it's of itself, it's grassroots rather than top down. And that's just not true. Sometimes things that are so of themselves suck and our impulses suck, and we need to control them with rituals and culture and taboos. And there's nothing wrong with acknowledging that our spontaneous impulses need a little help sometimes, I think, and it can be hard to admit that in part, maybe this is hopefully something we can talk about more is related to wellness because it is precisely when we seek these sorts of explanations that we tend to be at our most disempowered. So we're looking for things like, well, how do I decide what I want for my kid? Or how do I decide what to eat or how to, we're asking those questions when we're vulnerable, when we're suffering, when we need an answer.
And so, we then search for an answer. This explains anti-vaccine stuff as well. We want an answer that empowers us. Well, I don't need the government, I don't need doctors. I don't need people telling me what to do. I don't need people telling me how to eat. It's their fault and they have control over me. And if I get rid of them and I take control, and the answers come from within me, that's really helpful because it empowers you. And if nothing else, empowerment is a good way to stave off suffering. So in that sense, it's a complicated relationship between the appeal to nature and the kinds of things people need when they are in a situation where the appeal to nature is compelling, if that makes sense.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, so much to unpack there for sure. I'm thinking first about the intuitive eating stuff, and I would say not necessarily that people's impulses suck, but that it's hard to untangle what actually is the natural impulse or whatever, or the impulse from the self from what has been socialized by the culture. And I think I've seen that with a lot of people recovering and healing from disordered eating. Sometimes it goes back so far, some people will put on their first diet before they even remember age three, age four, whatever. And how do you get back to something that's natural when you can't even remember what that was like or never even knew what that looked like. That might be someone who needs a little bit more structure or support in their relationship with food, not going to be this sort of freewheeling thing that might be for someone who at least has a memory of that more relaxed intruded upon relationship with food.
Alan Levinovitz: Yeah. Well, and this is a good example too of a lighting natural good, unnatural bad. The problem with disordered eating is not that they were told to diet and therefore there was this outside thing imposed on them that is intrinsically bad. The problem is that the outside thing that they were told to do is bad. Humans are just intrinsically social. We live in communities, we eat with others. We eat foods that have meaning that extends in webs beyond us and between us. And so the idea that we could sort of develop eating patterns that just bubble up from within us, unpolluted by outside forces, I think is wrong. What we can hope for is eating patterns that are relatively effortless. And that's just another way of talking about habituated that aren't pathological, that don't hurt us. And that could mean tying yourself to someone else's eating habits. So just as an example for me, my spontaneous impulses during the pandemic were drink more. I just started drinking more alcohol. I think many people did the same thing, than one thing that's helped me is to tie my drinking habits to my wife's, which much myself. So I'm just like, okay, I'm just going to drink what my wife drinks and that's it. So it's very unintuitive. It's very sort of forced upon me, but it's good because it's getting me away from a pathology. But again, I mean to go back to the example you gave, part of the problem is that people who have been told to diet or have been shamed for their body, often what they're also suffering from which is separate from the pathological eating is disempowerment feeling like their self worth is bound up with either parents who are always telling them to diet or what society has told them to look like or how to eat.
And so then there's two different problems. One is feeling empowered when for so much of your life you've been disempowered. And two, figuring out how to eat in a way that doesn't harm you. And those are actually separate things I think. And the desire to bring them together can yield the illusion that what you need is to just strip everything away until it's just you controlling yourself spontaneously. That's the, that's sort of appeal to natural thing. Again, in the same way that if your health would come back, if only you just ignored all the mean doctors and all the people telling you what to do, and you just did whatever you wanted, right in accordance with nature, that's helpful for empowerment, but not for your health.
Christy Harrison: I mean, you've written in other places about this idea of wellness culture as a form of what you call empowerment epistemology. I found that really helpful and intriguing. Can you explain a little bit more what you mean by that?
Alan Levinovitz: Absolutely. So I originally thought of this when I was thinking about gun culture, which again seems like a weird intersection with wellness, although now people are, now that we're seeing that more, it's not so crazy. But when I first started writing about that, I realized that gun have a relationship with their guns. It's a lot like sort of new age person's relationship with a crystal, which is to say they found a community of people that listens to them. They feel like the authorities, in one case, the medical authorities, if you're a sort of alternative healing or alternative wellness kind of, if you're attracted to that medical authorities on the one hand or government authorities on the other, which is guns, you don't trust them. So you don't trust the police to protect you or you don't trust doctors to heal you or keep you safe. And so you turn to an authority that says, Hey, we've got something for you. It's going to give you control over your life, the gun. You get to protect yourself or this crystal, you get to come up with your own healing plan. We're going to personalize it for you. And all of a sudden you are like, oh, I, I'm in control. I don't have to seed control of my health or my safety to somebody else. And that's very empowering. So then what you have to do is you have to figure out, this is the epistemology part of the theory of knowledge part. You begin to know things in a way that is not oriented towards truth. You begin to know things in a way that's oriented towards feeling like you have agency, feeling like you have power. And that's not necessarily a bad thing, I don't think. It's just that the problem is sometimes it means that you believe things that aren't true.
Having a gun in your house just doesn't make you safer. And having a crystal just isn't going to prevent cancer. But that's not the goal of those objects at the end of the day. And then on top of that, the other thing about an empowering epistemology I think is really important is that it's a way of dealing with something that historians of technology refer to as epistemic opacity, which fancy, fancy academic talk for not being able to understand how things work. And so whether it's our technology or our legal system or whatever it is, we're increasingly surrounded by things, whether it's medicine or our phones, that we just don't understand. We don't understand how they work, we don't understand the machinery behind them. They are not transparent, they are opaque, and that's very disempowering. And so again, the crystals or the gun make it very simple. What keeps you safe? Having a gun to defend yourself. What keeps you safe? Eating naturally. And that's what an empowering epistemology is. And it's if we want to fight back as you do, and I do against toxic forms of wellness, one thing we really have to do is realize that the market for them exists because people are being disempowered by a whole host of broader forces in ways that I really think are not their fault.
Christy Harrison: I agree. I mean, as someone who I talk about in the book, I have multiple chronic conditions and many things that took years to get diagnosed and resulted in a lot of dismissal and feeling unheard by the healthcare system and feeling like I had to take matters into my own hands if I wanted to heal myself. I very much understand why people seek out these alternative sources in those moments because they feel so let down by the healthcare system, by science, by conventional medicine. And I think that makes people so vulnerable to exploitation and being preyed upon by these unscrupulous actors. And sometimes well-meaning, but just misled themselves, providers, and sometimes bad actors with a clear agenda to mislead.
Alan Levinovitz: That's exactly right. And so I used to be, especially even when I wrote The Gluten Lie, I used to just kind of rail against these ideas. It's like, well, they're not true. I was, it's like kind of a new atheist for food or something like that. It's like, well, look at your ritual. It doesn't make any sense. What if this is just a nocebo effect or a placebo effect? But what I realized is was there's a lot of people who are like, you should go like IBS or you got Crohn's or you've got some kind of undiagnosed autoimmune condition. Just feeling empowered might be the best thing you've got. And feeling empowered, I mean, psychology, as you know, and I'm sure your listeners know, psychology does affect physiology. There isn't a clear divide between those things. And so if you are feeling less anxious or you're feeling like you have more power or you're feeling more confident because of a ritual that you're doing, I think I need to, I can only speak for myself.
I think people in general maybe need to be a little bit more careful before they waltz into the church and start trashing all the icons of the stories and stuff. It's like, well, these are important things for people. That gun is doing something for that person, that crystal or that diet or that juice smoothie or the carnivore diet or whatever it is, they're doing, it’s doing something for them. And it's not kind to do what I've often done in the past and regret, which is to just try to take those things away or sneer at them rather than trying to understand why they exist and maybe even make room for them in a way that isn't pathological in a way that's healthy. There is room for ritual and there is room for the sorts of things that, there's room for empowerment. You just have to figure out how to get it without vaccine denial or something like that. And I think that a lot of people in this space, and I know you, you've seen that, I'm not going to name any names, but a lot of the people who are otherwise admirably pro-vaccine and fighting the good fight, I think there's a kind of edge to them that's deeply off-putting to the people who are seeking out anti-vaccine rhetoric as a form of empowerment to disempowered people. They feel authoritative and scary and it doesn't reach people where they need to be reached.
Christy Harrison: Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, I've had a conversation with someone else on this podcast about the authoritative nature of the delivery of information in the traditional healthcare system and how when you're someone who's already feeling dismissed and disempowered and doubtful about the information that you're getting and whether it's really helpful or whatever, hearing something delivered in that tone can feel extremely off-putting and can feel like, okay, well now I know for sure that they don't have my best interest at heart. It can sort of feed into some of the rhetoric in those spaces and the nexus of wellness and conspiracy theories that says that big pharma or big medicine is out to get people
Alan Levinovitz: Precisely. And I don't know. I don't exactly how to, I haven't figured out yet how to walk that line in part because, and this is something else we may end up talking about, in part because when you get too generous to the sorts of rituals and beliefs that people have come to embrace out of a need for empowerment, sometimes you risk not being clear enough about what's true. It's very, very difficult, in my opinion, to be sensitive in the ways that you need to, the things that people need or the things that people believe while also not compromising on the truth of particular positions. That's just hard. And sometimes I think it's especially hard when you don't know a person when we're doing this podcast, we don't know who's on the other end of this listening. Maybe it's someone who's in a perfect position to hear the things we're saying and they're going to feel great about it. Maybe it's someone who's going to be hurt by those things. And when you have a personal relationships with someone, it's much different than when you're writing a book or doing a podcast because you can't meet them where they are and show them that you care about their humanity.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, I've struggled with that so much myself, and I really appreciate hearing you be open about your evolution with that because that's been something that I've had to deal with a lot in writing this new book and trying to walk a line of having empathy for people and compassion for why people choose the things they do and not going in there and just stripping away the things that are meaningful to people while also holding a line on what is true and what is backed by solid evidence and what evidence is more shaky. And I think in my first book and the earlier part of my career, I was very much coming down on the side of clarity and wanting to be super clear that certain things are harmful and here's the evidence and the science to back that up. And I've always tried to be compassionate, but I think sometimes I've missed the mark certainly with that. And also I think part of that was where I was in my own evolution too. I had disordered eating and an undiagnosed eating disorder and struggled for many years. And then came to find my own recovery through intuitive eating and therapy and support, and started to do this work. And I think that there was a little bit of a proselytizing energy to it. There's a sense of this is a chapter in my own healing to spread the message that was so helpful to me and a zealotry to that.
Alan Levinovitz: This actually brings us back to the intuitive or brings me back at least to the intuitive eating and thinking about that and why I was trying to figure out the problems. Like the problem I had with this idea that you strip everything away or something like that, which is again, this, that naturalness appeal is, it's a kind of universal thing. It's like, well, here's how everyone should be eating. It's like you just eat naturally. You strip everything else out and allow yourself to return to your sort of organic, pure, holy self. But actually, I think that it's more harmonious eating. There are going to be lots of people in lots of different situations where it will require different things to harmonize with that situation. Sometimes it will require eating at times that you're not hungry. If I'm in China and I'm visiting a family and they bring out this dinner to honor me, and I just ate sadly, I was going to eat, I better eat and I’m not hungry and they're forcing me to. But that's how I harmonize with that situation. And I think it will be helpful to be in a place with my diet where that doesn't feel like a violation of the way I need to eat, because that's going to cause that's going to be pathological. It's going to cause me to conflict with that situation. And so sometimes it's going to be forced and sometimes it's not, it's going to merge out of community and sometimes it doesn't. And also to what you said, it's going to be different for everybody, not because everyone's pure self is different, but because some people don't need to eat according to their pure self. Some people don't need that. Some people need to eat in ways that harmonizes with their rhythms of their community or whatever or whatever it happens to be. So yeah, I think that's a big part of it.
Christy Harrison: I mean, I will say with intuitive eating, there's such black and white interpretations of it that say you can only eat when you're hungry and you have to stop when you're full, and it's turning it into another diet. But actually intuitive eating as a model is definitely open to eating when you're not hungry and eating when you're full because of all these other cultural and logistical reasons. But it's, I think, again, the sort of way that things get stripped down to very black and white forms online and disseminated in ways that are not so helpful. The nuance is totally lacking.
Alan Levinovitz: Yes, absolutely. And another place, I don't know, it's three extremely touchy subjects that I'm sort of throwing around in my head, but I think another place where this kind of black and white thinking is unproductive. So okay, I'll take one I'm really familiar with, which is a chronic illness. A lot of people as personally and professionally in the chronic illness community have been dismissed by the medical establishment. They often go through nine years of being diagnosed with a modern equivalent of high hysteria before, you know, find out you have endometriosis or Crohn's disease or whatever it happens to be. And the response to that deep historical injustice is something like, in my experience, chronic illness must be always understood in terms of how the sufferer experiences it. Not to put too fine a point on it, I'm sort of generalizing here, but it'll be helpful for the point I'm trying to make.
And the result of that unfortunately, is not unlike the result of what happens with people who go on diets and experience good things, which is that you end up being put in a position where sometimes in some cases we know, again, psychology is an important thing, that chronic illness can be in part a function of anxiety. We just know that that's just a thing that we know. But saying that feels like a betrayal, it feels like a sort of justification of all of the times in which people have been dismissed by the medical establishment. So then you're stuck in this horrible position where either you have to never allow in that explanation, ever. Long COVID is never, ever, ever, and I've written defending long and saying that we need to be really, really attentive to it. But if part of that position is never, ever is long COVID a function of psychogenic problems, which is itself stigmatized, we're in a bad situation in the same way that we are in a bad situation where you're diet, the efficacy of it could never be psychogenic, not a good place to be. And so that's another thing I really struggle with, which is how do we acknowledge the suffering experience by communities due to snap misdiagnoses, while also allowing that those snap misdiagnoses aren't in every and all cases wrong? Does that make sense? I'm just curious to hear what you think because it's something I struggle with all the time and I don't know what to do with it.
Christy Harrison: Same. I mean, I wrote and rewrote sections in my book so many times because of that very conundrum. And I personally have had experiences on both sides of that coin. My disordered eating was at the root of or contributed to many symptoms. I ended up getting diagnosed with a couple of autoimmune conditions and taking years to get those diagnoses. But in the process, I mean, it was my disordered eating that started the symptoms. I think I didn't have any symptoms. Then I started dieting, trying to lose weight and going further and further into this wellness culture space because I started developing symptoms from the dieting, from the disordered eating and then trying to cure those “naturally” and developed more symptoms and saw a doctor after doctor and finally was diagnosed with autoimmune conditions. But that didn't explain every symptom. Those didn't explain why I was missing my period. Those didn't fully explain why I was so fatigued or whatever, brain fog and things like that. And ultimately, when I was able to start true healing and recovery from the disordered eating, a lot of those lingering, pretty much all those lingering symptoms went away when I was eating enough. And I now realize not eating enough can cause hypothalamic amenorrhea, missing periods. It can cause fatigue and brain fog and make people feel generally really unwell disordered eating while it has all these physical manifestations technically, I mean, an eating disorder specifically is a mental health diagnosis. If someone were to say, I mean at the time, if someone had said to me, I think you might have an eating disorder, I think that could explain what's going on with your symptoms. And a couple people close to me tried to bring that up. I was not willing to hear that that was not on my radar. And that felt very dismissing and that felt very much like people were saying, it's all in your head or you're doing this to yourself. And these symptoms don't have any sort of real biological cause. It's just all because you have this psychological issue with food. And now I can see in retrospect with a lot more healing and education in this area that to some degree that was true, that it was this psychological diagnosis, which I really think of as it touches all aspects of a person's life. It's not necessarily just a mental health issue, but my psychological issues with food definitely contributed to those symptoms. And then more recently I had an experience on the opposite side where I had a real condition that I didn't know about for years that was psychologized and explained in psychological terms. And I totally believed it because there's a lot of reason to believe it.
I have what's called a binocular vision disorder, a binocular vision dysfunction that my eyes don't create one clear picture of my environment. They're seeing two different things and I'm seeing double a little bit. My brain doesn't bring them together. Actually, I've been through a lot of vision therapy now where I think it is finally doing that, which is great. But for years, I was like, it started in 2017 when I was driving on the highway, there are these weird funky lines on the highway that kind of scrambled my brain and I had a panic attack, pulled over, and my husband drove the rest of the way. And the way that I framed it to myself was, it was the week after Trump's inauguration that really stressed me out. We were actually going up to visit some family members who had voted for Trump and were big Trump supporters, and that was going to be stressful. And so this overwhelming amount of anxiety resulted in this panic attack. And that was an explanation that was cosigned by my therapist at the time, by another therapist I saw, a couple other therapists I saw later, one, to help specifically address the highway driving that resulted from this, because I had numerous other panic attacks driving on the highway after that. And I was always like, well, it happened when I saw a bridge and bridges represent whatever it was, this sort of effort to explain it in psychological terms. I mean, I also have a PTSD diagnosis. I also have generalized anxiety. I've had many mental health challenges over the years. So it kind of made sense to me that this would be explained in psychological terms. But it wasn't until I was pages deep in Google looking for self-help on highway driving phobia, which had come back, and the psych therapy that I had done before wasn't going to be accessible anymore. And I was like, how can I address this? Cause I don't want to be stuck and not be able to drive on the highway. I found some mention of it somewhere, went to a special optometrist who specialized in this and got a diagnosis. And it's changed my life. It's radically, radically helped. It's helped me so dramatically. So having those two experiences of an physical issue that I was looking for a physical cause of that ended up being largely psychological in nature or partly at least, I mean the autoimmune conditions certainly played a role, but there was this eating disorder piece that was really driving a lot of the symptoms. And then this situation where it was like psychological explanations masking a true physical cause. I really personally am grappling with how to talk about those things and how to make sense of them for myself and potentially talking about them publicly because it is so fraught, right?
Because people have such terrible experiences trying to get diagnoses, trying to get help for conditions like this and can feel so dismissed when a psychological explanation is brought up. Even if, I think in that article you were talking about how people can sometimes misattribute or remember things in a way where it's like, oh yeah, that doctor was so mean, that doctor dismissed me. And maybe that's not exactly how it happened. I think about some of my past experiences where I would've said in the past that this doctor totally dismissed me and told me it was all in my head. And I think about it now and I'm like, did they actually say that though? I really don't think they did. I think it was maybe suggested to me that stress and anxiety were playing a role. And I took that and ran with it because I was sort of primed to have that reaction.
Alan Levinovitz: And there's the desire. I mean, the whole time I was so struck that you were talking by the word explanation, just whether it's psychological or physiological. That's something we want. How many students have come to my office and be like, well, I was trying to figure out why I didn't. I was nervous in tests and then I realized I have anxiety or I didn't understand why I couldn't concentrate in class, I had adhd. And again, this is another different touchy subject and I want to open this can of worms, but I do think that something also, and maybe this is the science, broadly speaking, again, kind of the monopoly it has on truth that that's gone too far. Some of these things don't have explanations or sometimes it's just how it is. To take an example trauma; cause you mentioned PTSD, so early addition of the DSM, the diagnostic manual for people who are listening, and dunno what that is, I don't know what your listener base is, I don't want to patronize anybody, but the manual of official psychological disorders, trauma originally was very, very narrow category. So they excluded, for example, bereavement was one of the things they excluded. It's like, my God, bereavement, you could be depressed for years if you lose a child or a spouse or something. And they're like, no, no, no, that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about really crazy things. Your family's murdered in front of you. You're in war or something like that. And I think that our desire for explanation combined with the increasing totalitarianism of scientific explanation has led to a situation in which all suffering must necessarily be explained with a kind of scientific ideology. I don't know how I feel about that. I think it might be good in some cases. Sometimes people go way too long, I mean often people go way too long, undiagnosed, and they can't get the help they need. But also maybe if we tattoo these labels on ourselves, it becomes difficult to remove them later. And that's something I also see in wellness communities. What those communities do is they tell you who you are, to explain why you've suffered. And sometimes doctors can't do that, right? Doctors are like I don't know why you got cancer. I remember the study came out where they were, a third of cancers are just random. And people were really mad. They were like, you can't say that. It has to be an explanation. And so the wellness, you turn to the wellness community and you know, go to your alternative. No alternative medicine practitioners, we don't have an explanation for this. I'll guarantee you that Chinese medicine practitioner, the aggravated therapy person, they will always have an explanation. That's one of the things that they offer, which paradoxically I think is a function of the scientific community being like, well, everything's got an explanation, a scientific explanation of a weird version of science. And so that's something also I, I'm going to think harder about in the future, just how to deal with it. Because again, it's really touchy, but I think that's important and I have a lot of mixed feelings about how to approach that moving forward.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, I agree. I feel like the idea of always needing an explanation, I mean, I understand when you're suffering, you want to know why and you want to know what to do about it if there is something to do about it. And I think in some ways, I don't know, for me, the western medical practitioners, conventional doctors that I've seen, some of them were pretty good at saying, we don't know and et's try to figure this out. But also here are some approaches that could help whether or not we figure it out or we don't know, let's get you some more tests or whatever. Versus going to a naturopath who's like, your problem is you're intolerant to gluten and you need to take these 50 supplements and cut out all these other foods because they're somehow related to gluten or they're inflammatory or whatever. And then suddenly you're neck deep in this very disordered eating regimen that's potentially just going to exacerbate symptoms.
Alan Levinovitz: Yes, that's theological. Again, this is where the natural thing comes in, is when there's always an explanation for suffering. It means you're doing theology. Because it means that you violated some kind of universal law and that if you didn't violate it, you wouldn't suffer. Whereas I mean, in a non-theological world, you just suffer sometimes. That's it. We don't know why we do our best and muddle along. And that's, that's not a satisfying explanation, but it's the truth. And you can try to alleviate that suffering, but you may never know what the reason with the capital R, was for it.
Christy Harrison: And I think when people are looking for a reason, sometimes it's to say, how did I cause this? Right? How did I…
Alan Levinovitz: Yes, yes.
Christy Harrison: Bring this on myself because we're so conditioned to think, I think in wellness culture especially, it's like everything is down to the individual and choices you've made and foods you've eaten or chemicals you are exposed to or whatever it is, and that you somehow have agency in No. If you can know that and you can know that you are definitely responsible, then you can make changes to alleviate your suffering.
Alan Levinovitz: Yes, absolutely. And that's deeply problematic. I mean, I remember I watched this video with one of my classes, intro class on religion and spirituality, and it's these two people who are like, we've come up with a way to meditate without meditating some kind of like brain zapping device. I not into science, this doesn't matter. But basically one of them gets on, he is very serious, and he goes, this could be a huge thing because we would've figured out how to make everyone happy. And then he brings on this woman who's used the brain zapping device, and she's like, well, I was abused as a kid, and obviously she's listing all these horrible things that have made her unhappy. And I'm sitting here and I'm like, what a horrible world in which the solution to the suffering that results from being abused or not having enough to eat or all of the things that cause us to suffer would be some individual brain zapping response. It's so individualistic with the wellness that that's such a weird place of privilege, which is that no, most of the suffering in the world are just caused by these horrible things that are beyond our control. And the way to address them is by making sure those things don't happen, not zapping the brains of individuals who are suffering, because it must be their fault that they're suffering and up to them to relieve it. But it is empowering, right? If you're being abused and you can't control it, it's nice to think that you could zap your brain into happiness that's just not, and maybe, and right, so this gets back now I'm being insensitive. Maybe that's what you need. And maybe when you're suffering, you have no control over it. Maybe all you can have in that context is a diet or a guru you go to who you feel like who gives you things that make you feel like you're doing something and have some control.
Christy Harrison: And I guess the question is when those things are potentially harmful to me, that's the problem. That's the line that's like, okay, let's try to help people not fall into that trap and try to help people not get exploited by people preying on their vulnerabilities. But when it's something that's more benign, if you can have a relationship with a guru who is a kind, helpful, compassionate person who's a good listener and that's what they give you and they're not doing anything weird and manipulating you into some high demand group or something, then maybe that is what you need. Maybe that's okay. Or maybe if there's a diet where you're eating more of a certain kind of food or less of a certain kind of food and it's not harming you, it's not creating obsession and compulsion around food or disorder in your relationship with food and it's more low key and benign and you're able to do it without having it be any big thing, maybe that's not an issue. And I think there are people out there, I know people like that. They're relatively few and far between, I think, in my experience. But there are definitely people who can do those sorts of things and not have it turned into this whole rigamarole. But I think the problem is when the supposed cure does more harm than good, right?
Alan Levinovitz: Yes. Although suggest something even more outlandish, which is that, so what you just said, it does more harm than good. I think that's really important because maybe that the cure does do some harm. In other words, maybe the diet that makes you feel really happy or maybe the diet that makes you feel like you have control is just kind of bad for you, bad for you according to a certain set of metrics, but good for you according to others. I mean, what's chemotherapy? But that, right? Like well, here, you know, can do this chemotherapy, it's going to extend your life by an average of people in your situation according to this computer program, about six to 12 months. But you're going to feel like shit. And then you just make a choice. You're like, there's this thing, there are these competing values. So I can imagine, again, rituals or communities where what if you just need to feel in control so badly? Maybe you have to choose an intervention that has bad side effects. I don't know, I mean this is again, I'm not saying you should, but I've realized it's not so easy. And the fact that we take certain kinds of side effects, the quantifiable ones, the observable ones to be the decisively bad ones and other side effects like disempowerment to be not as decisive, I think is a problem. There are a lot of costs and benefits in the world to the actions that we take and the rituals that we engage in and the practices that we engage in. And sometimes they are going to hurt you in one area, but they're going to help you in another. And that's something, again, with vaccines, it becomes incredibly complicated because there's this community problem as well. It's just like that doing this, you're not just harming yourself. But I'm not convinced, for example, in the way that I was in the beginning of the pandemic, that someone for whom if you're an elderly conservative Catholic, for whom taking communion is just the center of your identity in spiritual life in person. I don't know whether it's the right thing to do to stay home from church to avoid the risks of getting COVID. I just don't know that that's true. It's like quitting chemotherapy so that you can live out the last three months of your life happily rather than six months of misery. I think those kinds of trade-offs are real and important, and at the very least, we shouldn't dismiss them. And that in fact, dismissing them counter productively, drives more people into the arms of the manipulative wellness charlatans that you and I are both, have been through most of our engagement, this stuff deeply concerned about.
Christy Harrison: That's such a good point. The trade-offs for any individual are going to be unique and people might make different decisions based on what values they hold most dear in any situation. And with a Catholic example, it's like for that individual taking that risk of getting COVID potentially, maybe that is something that person would want to take on. I think the community aspect there is more fraught versus with an individual diet or something. But even with the diet, I think we also have to think about the side effects of what happens if I become super obsessive and disordered about this thing. What happens to my family or my loved ones or the people who rely on me has these ripple effects.
Alan Levinovitz: And unless listeners think that religious studies professors are religious professors, I'm not Catholic, I'm not religious, I just give this an example, but it might as well be a secular grandparent, right? It's just like, screw it, I'm going to visit my grandkids kinds of things. And again, COVID really was, it was bad for what was already a bad situation, which is that people needed explanations and they needed heuristics for making decisions and they were scared of this crazy disease. And so it made us really hate people who had different heuristics and made us deeply incapable of understanding trade offs and nuance and complexity in part because we had no cognitive bandwidth left for that. We were spending it all on being scared and traumatized by the pandemic. So there's just no time to be like, well, there are a lot of ways to think of value. Those that we just needed our simple heuristics just to get through the day. And many things that we needed during COVID, but no longer need but may still get delivered food to our homes or staying away from people. Perhaps it would be best to reexamine the kinds of simple heuristics that we adopted to get through this traumatic period and start to dial them back a little bit as we have a little bit more energy and power to devote to thinking things through.
Christy Harrison: That's well said. How do you suggest people go about that as individuals and a society?
Alan Levinovitz: Well, and in this, I guess, yeah, I am a religious studies professor, so I think rituals that cultivate a healthy relationship to ambiguity are really helpful, at least for me. So that can be anything from allowing chance to have a greater role in your life. So you can do things like instead of making a decision about where you're going to eat by looking at all the reviews online, which is again, you need a heuristic, you're sticking to it, you flip a coin and it's a small thing. But if you allow chance into your life in ritualized tiny ways, it helps you realize that you can be comfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty. That not everything has to have a reason and that not everything, you know what I mean? So I mean, guess that's as a very concrete thing that people can do to become more comfortable with ambiguity, is you can introduce it ritually into your own life by using chance to make decisions, for example. That's something I do. I find it really helpful because it feels like you're like, oh God, I'm just going to leave this up to a coin. Turns out it's fine. Actually, coins can decide stuff almost as well as we do in a lot of context, which restaurant we're going to go to. So that's one thing I would say. And then also reading or interacting with religious slash spiritual material that cultivates ambiguity. So almost every religious tradition has its mystics. There are Christian mystics, there are Sufi mystics in Islam, there are mystic texts in the context of Daoism in China seeking out mystics, and they can be secular mystics or religious mystics. It's helpful as well, because these are people who are good at expressing the beauty and comfort and truth of ambiguity, which is a nice sort of antidote to a world in which we are constantly trying to establish certainty. So those are the two things I would suggest off the top of my head for helping us be more comfortable with complexity and uncertainty.
Christy Harrison: I love it. I'm definitely going to try at least the coin flipping in my life and maybe seek out some mystics when I have.
Alan Levinovitz: Yeah, if you do, let me know how it goes. Let me know how it goes.
Christy Harrison: I will. Yeah. That sounds really fun. Alan, thank you so much. This has been such a great conversation. I feel like I could talk to you for another hour and a half about all this stuff, but want to be mindful of your time. So tell us where people can find you and learn more about your work
Alan Levinovitz: Until recently on Twitter. But now I'm, I've become somewhat disgusted with being a mega mini ex play thing, so I've been off Twitter. Maybe I'll be back after the holidays, but if you just search my name, Alan Levinovitz online, there's all sorts of stuff that I've written about all of these issues. So if there's something, whether it's wellness or naturalness, find things I've written, just by searching in my name. There was something recently actually to end with on ambiguity. I called it bewilderment. So it's an essay I wrote called Praise Bewilderment for the Hedgehog Review, in which I just talk about how having a little bewilderment in your life is like having a little bit of spandex in your jeans. It means that when things change, you can adjust rather than ripping and makes you more resilient. So that's a good place to start.
Christy Harrison: I love that. We'll link to that in the show notes for this and some other stuff you've written too.
Alan Levinovitz: Thanks. I appreciate that.
Christy Harrison: Thank you so much.
Alan Levinovitz: Yeah, thank you. It's been so fun.
Christy Harrison: So that's our show. Thanks again so much to Alan Levinovitz for being here, and thanks to you for listening.
If you like this conversation, I'd be so grateful if you take a moment to subscribe, rate and review the show, just search for Rethinking Wellness with Christy Harrison wherever you listen to podcasts, or go to rethinkingwellness.substack.com to get new episodes delivered to your inbox every other week. If you have any questions for me about wellness and diet-culture, you can send them in at christyharrison.com/questions for a chance to have them answered in my newsletter or possibly even on this podcast in the future. If you're looking for help healing your own relationship with food, grab my free audio guides Seven Simple Strategies for Finding Peace and Freedom with Food at christyharrison.com/strategies. Rethinking Wellness is executive produced and hosted by me, Christy Harrison. Mike Lalonde is our audio editor and sound engineer, and administrative support is provided by Julianne Wotasik and her team at A-Team Virtual, album art by Tara Jacoby and theme song, written and performed by Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs. Thanks again for listening. We're just going with that for the sign off. Keeping it simple. Take care.
