Katie Dalebout guest-hosts the show to interview Christy about her new book, The Wellness Trap! Christy shares why she wanted to write a book about wellness, the potential harms of integrative and functional medicine (and why we’re understandably attracted to these approaches), the connections between wellness culture and diet culture, the legacy of the “hysteria” diagnosis and why women are still having to push back against the idea that symptoms are all in our heads, the role of social media in spreading wellness mis- and disinformation, and more.
Christy Harrison, MPH, RD, is a registered dietitian nutritionist, certified intuitive eating counselor, and journalist who has been covering food, nutrition, and health for more than 20 years. She is the author of two books, The Wellness Trap and Anti-Diet, and the producer and host of the podcasts Rethinking Wellness and Food Psych, which have helped tens of thousands of people around the world think critically about diet and wellness culture and develop more peaceful relationships with food. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, SELF, BuzzFeed, Refinery29, Gourmet, Slate, the Food Network, and many other publications, and her work is regularly featured in national print and broadcast media. Learn more about Christy and her work at christyharrison.com.
Katie Dalebout is a writer who produces and hosts podcasts. Her weekly interview show, Let It Out, began in 2013 and now has over 400 episodes. In 2019 she started producing Spiraling, a mental health show she co-hosts with Serena Wolf. In 2016, she published her book Let It Out, an interactive book about using writing for emotional wellness. She now teaches writing workshops, consults with individuals and brands on creative strategy, and writes a weekly newsletter. She lives in Los Angeles where she walks everywhere like she still lives in New York.
Resources and References
Christy’s new book, The Wellness Trap, which comes out this week!
Katie’s podcasts, Let It Out and Spiraling
Christy’s online course, Intuitive Eating Fundamentals
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.
Hey there. Welcome back to Rethinking Wellness. I’m Christy and my guest today is actually a guest host. My friend Katie Dalebout is here to interview me about my new book, The Wellness Trap, which is out this week if you’re listening to this the week it airs. I’m so excited for the book launch and I was really psyched to have Katie guest host the episode because first and foremost, she’s a great interviewer. She’s done more than 400 interviews on her own podcast, and I also knew we’d have a lot to talk about since she knows my work so well. She’s been both a friend of mine and a friend of the pod and a fan of both pods actually for over 10 years now. And she had her own journey of falling into the traps of wellness culture and finding her way out. And she’s also been helping me set up book events and a book tour, a podcast book tour, so she knows the book inside and out.
She’s read it really carefully, and I knew she would have great questions to ask me, and I think she really did. It’s a really great conversation and I can’t wait to share it with you. In it, we talk about why I wanted to write a book about wellness, the potential harms of integrative and functional medicine approaches and why we’re understandably really attracted to these approaches, especially those of us with chronic conditions who feel unheard or dismissed by the conventional healthcare system, the connections between wellness culture and diet-culture, the legacy of the hysteria diagnosis and why women are still having to push back against that idea that symptoms are all in our heads, the role of social media in spreading wellness mis and disinformation and lots more. I can’t wait to share our conversation with you in just a moment. And of course, I would love if you would buy the book, which you can now pre-order for one more day if you’re listening to this the day it comes out.
Otherwise, you can just order it, regular order, just go into your local bookstore and buy it off the shelf, which is so exciting. The book is called The Wellness Trap: Break Free from Diet Culture Disinformation and Dubious Diagnoses and Find True Wellbeing, and it explores the connections between diet-culture and wellness culture, how the wellness space became overrun with 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 get the book either pre-order or regular order. And if you pre-order it before tomorrow, if you’re listening to this the day it comes out, so before April 25th, you can get a special bonus webinar and Q & A with me 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 it, which helps it grow and helps it get in front of more listeners, you can do that wherever you’re listening to this.
And you can also get the podcast 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, and if you upgrade to a paid subscription, you get occasional bonus content plus early access to episodes. Just go to rethinkingwellness.substack.com to learn more and subscribe.
Now, without any further ado, let’s go to my conversation with Katie Dalebout.
Katie Dalebout: I’m so happy to be here. Christy, congrats on the new book and the new podcast. I have been a fan of you for years, decades, a decade at least, and this podcast and this book especially are no exceptions. I’ve gotten to read the book already and we were talking a little bit before we started recording how much of it I want to talk about and pull out of it, and it was really hard to narrow down what we’re going to talk about today and we’ll just kind of see where it goes, but I’m really happy to be here and congrats.
Christy Harrison: Thank you so much, Katie. It’s so good to talk with you always, and I’m so glad you’re interviewing me for this on my own podcast to talk about the book. I couldn’t think of anyone better, anyone I would more want to do that. And I feel like we’re just, your story and your experience with wellness culture was so inspiring to me and thinking about wellness culture and this book, and it’s been an interesting journey for both of us, I think, out of the difficult, problematic forms of wellness culture that we both fell into. So I just think we have a lot to talk about and a lot of commonalities in that way too.
Katie Dalebout: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, as I was reading it, I just, so many, many of the stories that I read and all the people that you interviewed and all the research that you did, I had so many eye-opening moments and then also so many moments of like, huh, could have been me, could have been me, and just relating so much to so many people that you interviewed. So when did this idea first form for you and what was some of that early research and what drew you to want to unpack this topic more?
Christy Harrison: Yeah, I mean, it’s been such an interesting 10 plus years of being sort of an observer of wellness culture, and I was actually making, I made a little page on my website that sort of catalogs all the writing and speaking I did about wellness culture leading up to the book. Probably not all of it because I think I missed some, but I was tagging things and putting them in a little summary block and stuff. And one of the first things that was there was your episode from 2014 of Food Psych where we talked about orthorexia. We talked about the healthy behaviors that you were doing and your pursuit of wellness spiraling into something really disordered. And I was working with people with orthorexia at the time as a dietician and sort of steeped in how wellness culture was harming people without naming it as that and without knowing everything that I do now of in the past 10 years of spending time observing this and researching, but I think your story was part of the genesis of this book. So I think that was really special and I appreciate that.
Katie Dalebout: Wow, I remember that day. Well, it was when I first met you,
Christy Harrison: The first time we met in person was when you showed up at my door because yeah, that’s who we both were at the time. We were just weird boundary-less people that would do something like that.
Katie Dalebout: Yeah, it worked out well in this friendship.
Christy Harrison: It really did, I’m so glad. It could have gone many ways, but it’s really lucky.
Katie Dalebout: I know. I know. Wow. Wow. It seems like lifetimes ago and also not that long ago somehow in my brain.
Christy Harrison: I know I feel like a completely different person and also it feels very close at the same time. Soon after that, I think I wrote a piece about clean eating for Refinery 29. Clean Eating was very much in the discourse and showing up for me in my work with clients with disordered eating, and that was one of the first manifestations of this social media version of Wellness culture I would call it, I guess, that I really observed close up. But I was very much a part of Wellness culture before that too. I was so caught up in the proto clean eating, I guess you could call it the Farm to table movement and Michael Pollan and Marion Nestle and thinking about food politics in this way that was very ostensibly out and to some extent is about food systems, but also is very demonizing of particular foods and the food industry and has a lot of fat phobia baked in, a lot of weight stigma and anti-fat rhetoric.
That was for me, my orthorexia, my orthorexic thinking about food kind of stemmed from that approach or that philosophy. And so coming out of that and starting to work with eating disorders, I saw clean eating as a new manifestation of the sort of crunchy farm to table stuff that I had taken part of. And then from there, I think it’s just morphed, and shape shifted in so many different ways and wellness culture as we talked about in what we’re going to post as a bonus episode to this one, we talked about the history of wellness culture and how it intertwines with diet-culture.
And so I think it diet culture really is sort of baked in from very early on in the 1970s genesis of wellness culture as it sort of exists now. And I think there’s been a lot of interesting unfolding, particularly with the pandemic that led me to want to think about wellness culture and keep unpacking and exploring it because in my first book, Anti-Diet, I covered wellness in the second chapter and it was really tough to reign myself in.
I definitely felt like I could write a whole book just about that and put it on my list of potential next book ideas because it just felt like there was so much more there. I didn’t turn that into a real book proposal or even know for sure I wanted to do that as my next book until 2020 when the pandemic happened.
And there was such a proliferation of wellness misinformation online, people talking about supposed cures for COVID and that their essential oils or their whatever protocol, whatever sort of wellness culturey thing that they were already selling was now supposed to cure COVID and all these recommendations for cutting out foods and then also all the demonization of higher weight bodies that came about with COVID and then the sort of emergence of more and more conspiracy theory type rhetoric and conspiracist beliefs about the vaccine and about masking and all of that stuff.
So I was starting to see that unfold and just sort of horrified by all of it. And I think that was a major piece. And I actually ended up getting my book deal on January 5th, 2021, the day before the fateful January 6th. So wild, such weird timing. And so I was already starting to think about the conspiracist and the role of social media in fomenting more and more extreme wellness content and leading people down rabbit holes towards anti-vax and swearing off all kinds of conventional medicine and going completely into the supposedly natural space where a lot of things are really unproven and potentially harmful. And then January 6th, I think just helped clarify for me the role that social media algorithms are playing in driving people towards those extremes. And some of the research that was coming out on how social media amplifies division and hate and drives people toward those extremes really resonated with what I was seeing already in wellness culture and had seen so many people individually falling down rabbit holes with clean eating and that sort of anti-food bias and demonization of certain foods and elevation of others. So I’ve seen that a lot in my clients who are recovering from disordered eating kind of over the years.
But something else I saw starting to really pop up more and more, it seemed like around 2020 was clients and readers or listeners coming to me with questions like my functional medicine doctor diagnosed me with leaky gut syndrome, or my naturopath told me I have adrenal fatigue or this questionnaire online or this wellness influencer told me that I have chronic candida or whatever, and I’m being told to cut out all these foods and take all these supplements, but it’s really affecting my relationship with food. It’s making me feel really disordered with food or it’s setting me back in my eating disorder. Maybe the person was recovered or recovering, and now it’s threatening their recovery. People come to me being like, what should I do? How can I do this medically necessary diet while also not destroying my relationship with food?
And whenever I get those kinds of questions, my typical response, and I mean same when I get these recommendations for myself too, as someone with multiple chronic illnesses, if a doctor kind of offhandedly says, oh, you might try cutting out blah, blah, blah or whatever, I’ll go to the research and see what the science actually says and look at whether this actually has a strong evidence-base or not, because I think that’s really helpful in deciding is this something that is truly medically necessary and could be helpful and I can frame it as self-care, or is this something that is not helpful, potentially harmful or just not, in which case I don’t want to put myself at risk or put my recovery at risk or have other people put their recovery at risk. And so when I started really looking into those kinds of questions and have been doing this for years, but it started to become really a pattern to me, I think when I was thinking about wellness culture in this way, I would notice that there really wasn’t a lot of good evidence behind these things. And in some cases, the diagnoses themselves, the supposed diagnoses that people are coming in with aren’t evidence based either. Those things I mentioned, adrenal fatigue, chronic candida, leaky gut syndrome, they all have some grain of truth to them, but they’re the supposed diagnoses themselves are really full of misinformation and dubious diagnoses, as I call them.
So that was really a driving force I think behind this book too, of wanting to unpack all of this misinformation and grains of truth that get blown up into, popped out into popcorn of misinformation that I think is affecting more and more people. And I’m seeing books and podcasts and things that are in this functional and integrative and alternative medicine space, become increasingly popular and taking a lot of people in ways that I don’t think are justified given the lack of really strong evidence behind them. And for me personally, as someone with those multiple chronic health conditions, many of which are often prescribed diets and sort of functional and integrative interventions like, oh, you have autoimmune conditions, cut out gluten cutout, dairy, cut out this cut out that you have IBS, you need to cut out all these foods, you need to take these supplements, all of these different things that are so common.
So many people do have chronic conditions, 60% of Americans live with some chronic health condition, 40% have two or more. So I’m very much not alone in that experience, but I think it’s because it is so increasingly common. I think people are searching for answers for those things. And unfortunately the conventional healthcare system isn’t really well set up to deal with chronic conditions and especially diagnosing chronic conditions that may have lots of nebulous symptoms. The picture can be very unclear at first, and it can take a long time to get diagnosed. And that was certainly my experience and has been the experience of many people I know and have interviewed and worked with. So there’s this long phase for a lot of people I think, where they’re just like, I don’t know what’s going on. My doctor’s dismissing me or not giving me a lot of help, or I’m being very underserved by the conventional system even if I am being served somewhat. And so it I think creates this void that wellness culture easily steps into fill with potentially really dangerous consequences for a lot of people.
Katie Dalebout: Yeah, I think many things I appreciate about this book, but something in particular is the empathy that you give to those of us who have fallen into wellness traps. And you talk about, like you said, your own chronic illnesses and how the pitfalls of the modern healthcare system can make us feel dismissed or abandoned. And it’s easy to find solace in alternative medicine because there are a few things that the alternative system can do with something called the care effect, which you go into in the book, which is apply, well, I’ll let you explain, but it’s something that the healthcare system really lacks and can lead people in further because we all want to feel heard and cared for and not dismissed. So can you talk about that, because that was one of the many eye-opening parts about, especially in the functional medicine section of this book.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, thank you. So I think the care effect is really very real and definitely lacking, I think in a lot of corners of conventional medicine. Not that it’s entirely lacking. So I think we can definitely find caring providers who give us that sense of being held and being cared for, but what the care effect is, is this part of a family of placebo effects that is related to the mind body connection and sort of placebo effect means that you believe that something is helping or that you have a certain expectation that something’s going to help. And so it, it actually creates real physical effects in the body in part by working on pain receptors like pain, pain reduction pathways. The endogenous opioid system can be activated by expectations that something is going to help. And one thing that we can expect is going to help us is when a provider really seems to care for us and take an interest in our situation and spends lots of time with us and gives us empathy.
And this sense of being cared for really can raise the expectation that you’re getting help and you’re getting care and therefore can help reduce symptoms. And so this is definitely something that happens more for things that have a component of pain involved. So it’s not necessarily applicable to things like cancer because your expectations about getting care or your expectations about whether a particular medication is going to work or something can’t actually fight cancer cells in your body, but it can help reduce the pain and the symptoms that might be associated with the cancer. So even in situations like that where it’s the placebo effect isn’t having a real measurable impact on your condition, it still might have an impact on the symptoms that you’re feeling and experiencing with the condition. So the care effect I think is really powerful. And it’s something that again and again, I hear people say, and I have had this in my own experience too, that when you’re working with someone who is outside of the conventional healthcare system who’s more of an integrative or functional provider or who’s even further outside a complimentary or alternative medicine provider that oftentimes in those spaces you get more time, you get more empathy, you get people who are asking questions and really assuring you that they’re going to get to the bottom of things.
And unfortunately, we don’t always get that in the conventional healthcare system where appointments can be five to 15 minutes, 15 minutes is kind of a long appointment in my experience. And providers can be somewhat brusque and rushed even if they are really trying to take the time to work with you. They may not be able to do a lot of deep empathizing. They may not have a lot of solutions for you. They might give you one option and say, try this, see if it works, come back if not. And I think that can leave people really vulnerable to alternative treatments that give them more hope, that give them more options, that make them feel more heard and understood. Because if you’re suffering from something and you don’t want to, you’re hesitant about taking medication or you don’t want to take pharmaceuticals because you feel like they’re harsh or you’d rather do something with fewer side effects that you think has fewer side effects to start, but the provider in question, the conventional medicine provider doesn’t offer you that or doesn’t sort of explain and walk through the steps or doesn’t take the time to meet you in your hesitancy about taking a particular medication and explain the side effects and also the risks of not taking it or the alternatives and what the risks of those might be, then you’re sort of left to your own devices.
And I think a lot of us, when left to our own devices in that way will turn to Dr. Google or turn increasingly to Dr. Social media and find these spaces where we can connect with other people who have chronic conditions, trade ideas. But then unfortunately, what often happens is we kind of get targeted as people who are looking for health information. There’s now ads being served to us based on what we’ve searched for, and things start to follow us around the internet. We start to get pulled down this algorithmic rabbit hole of information that can often be miss and even disinformation. So misinformation being incorrect information and disinformation being incorrect information with intent to deceive. And so social media kind of radicalizes people in that way, which we can talk a little more about, but it puts people really at risk when they don’t feel like they’re getting the care that they need.
And conversely, when people are having that care effect in alternative medicine and wellness culture spaces, it can go a long way to helping them feel better, to the point where I think it can start to be very confusing sometimes because people feel like they’re getting cared for and heard and understood, and then they’re given these treatments or protocols that don’t necessarily work and may actually have pretty severe side effects or other unintended consequences and start to feel worse because of that. But then they were feeling better because of the care effect. And so it’s kind of like instead of thinking, okay, this provider is not giving me something that works or this treatment wasn’t effective, the blame can often sort of shift to the individual or can start to feel, it can start to feel like, okay, well, we tried this one thing, it didn’t work.
So we have to do a harsher version of this thing. We have to do a stricter diet, we have to eliminate more foods, we have to add more supplements, we have to add more experimental sort of treatments and protocols. And so you can get down this path of adding on and on and on, more and more stuff that is actually not helpful, but because of the placebo effects that exist from the care effect to just the expectation that something’s going to help and the expectation that natural is always better and something that is natural is going to be helpful, I think you can get sort of led pretty far down that path before realizing, oh, this isn’t actually helpful.
Katie Dalebout: Yeah, I, I’m laughing because it’s so one could, it’s like, oh, I did, I sure did. I relate hard, hard, relate. A lot of hard relates in this book for me.
Christy Harrison: I know this is you interviewing me, but I’m curious to hear a few of your experiences in this too. I mean, I know a lot of them offline, but just for the folks listening to hear some of what you went through.
Katie Dalebout: Well, it’s interesting because, well, maybe we can just let everyone in on a little secret. There’s a lost basement tapes version of this conversation that we had some early recording interviews, but half of it was great. And the half that was great was about the history of all of this. And I told you this before, but in your first book, Anti-Diet, you go into the history of diet-culture and how it began and got to where it is today. And similarly in this book, you do that with wellness culture, and I loved that part. That was really eye-opening to me. And so we talked about that. And then I was thinking about my own history with this part, especially in terms of functional medicine, because I think before I read this book, which seems so odd to even say that this hadn’t clicked with me before, but I hadn’t really even fully made the connection between my orthorexia and anorexia and wellness culture.
I knew that, I knew that Orthorexia is this obsession with going down a wormhole, but I hadn’t thought about functional medicine as being related to that. And then when we were recording in the lost basement tapes, the first part, I think I mentioned that as you were talking about some of this, I was like, oh, when I was really, really young and a family, I came back from study abroad and I had what, a family friend who was maybe in school for functional medicine. I’m not even sure. She was one of my cousin’s friends, and I thought she was really cool. I really liked her. I was just off to the races. She told me I had a parasite, she told me to do this and this and this and this and this. And then I have a very addictive personality and where she would’ve stopped even, I then kept going and it snowballed and snowballed and snowballed.
And I think in a way where a lot of this is just how it panned out for me, but it was so alternative from all the medicine that I had up, all the food that I had growing up. We grew up in very different places you on the West coast, and I grew up in the Midwest and my family owns fast food restaurants. So then it became this identity and this rebellion, and then it was happened to coincide with a time where all of this was starting to, this is about 2012, starting to blow up on social media really, really slowly, or social media was starting to exist, I guess. And I found community and I found an identity as someone would in the nineties getting into grunge music or something. It was this alternative way of being and at a time where I was malleable at a time where my career was malleable.
And I think an interesting thing that you and I have discussed quite a bit is that when your career is in a malleable place during the time where you get into wellness or you have an eating disorder or a little bit of both, in my case, it can really shift the course of your career and your life. And I think I’m only now 10 years later starting to fully see the impacts of that. And reading your book was, some of it felt so bleak in the sense of, oh my gosh, everybody seems so bought in. I live in Los Angeles now, and I just feel like there’s just so much talk of wellness culture. So in the media and then social media, it’s just amplified.
And so it felt really comforting to see the research behind it. And then while you tell the truth and show it so comprehensively, you also, as people will see when they get to spend time with the book, and even on episodes of this podcast always, and again, something I appreciate about you is like, okay, but do about this, how can we move forward?
It does feel really good in that way and comforting in that way. And that’s what I found after reading it, is I felt better after reading it. I was happy to know the information, and there was a little bit of like, oh man, I wish I would’ve known that then, but I know it now and here’s what we can do about it. And that felt really good. But going back briefly to the functional medicine bit, I think like you were saying, when someone comes in and applies care and empathy, we all want to be heard and understood. I think feeling misunderstood or feeling dismissed, especially for all people, but especially for women. And I think especially when we’re trying to figure out what’s going on with us, having someone apply care, even for me with a friend or with anyone, it kind of reminded me of the dating term that I, I’m not even sure I fully understand what it means, but have you heard about love bombing?
Christy Harrison: Oh yeah, absolutely.
Katie Dalebout: It kind of feels like what can happen in this, at the beginning of finding a practitioner who is listening and has more time and spends more time with you, it feels like, oh my God, okay, You’re like, you go from black and white to color and also in diet-culture, how that feeling that we’ve talked about before too of diet starts tomorrow. I’m going to be a new person once. And then of course it’s bleak and it’s their ups and downs with everything, but it sort of reminds me of that. And going off of that, two of the most chilling parts, I think in the section about functional medicine specifically, one of them really made my stomach drop on a rollercoaster was when you spoke about how people who, like myself, have a history of disordered eating say that to a new practitioner as I have done, whether it’s been with a functional medicine doctor or in my case mostly with just having moved a lot of times and going to different doctors in the healthcare system, something you taught me to do was to say that out of the gate and to say, I don’t actually want to be weighed.
I’d like do a turn around and I know you’ve had this experience too, and same and with having a baby, and sometimes it’s really hard for doctors and just people in general to remember everything and take all this into account. But I know we’ve both had experiences where I remember once in New York, I got a piece of paper and even though they were like, yeah, yeah, no problem about the weight, and then there’s my weight and there’s my, or it’s just like they said it after whatever it is, these things, it takes a lot sometimes for me to take care of myself in that way and to actually be honest and say that and then have it disregarded or just, and not even, of course it’s not purposeful, but I think something that in the functional medicine space with these diets in particular with elimination diets and cutting out all these things, they probably just don’t know how intense that is for someone who has a history with disordered eating. And the chilling part was when you said, this is something that I have a history with. The doctor still will say, go on to this diet and cut this out and do all of those things. So can you talk a little bit about that?
Christy Harrison: Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, I will say to anyone listening who’s a fan of functional medicine or practitioners, I’m not trying to paint with a broad brush and say the whole field or everyone in it is leading people into disordered eating. But I do think that the tenets of functional medicine and also of a related field lifestyle medicine are largely based on cutting out food, right, on food as medicine, the idea of food as medicine. And I think when you get into thinking about food as medicine, that’s a really slippery slope when you’re living in diet and wellness culture. When we’re in a culture where people are already demonizing certain foods and elevating others, and there’s so much moralization about food in the ether, just we’ve all absorbed our whole lives telling people like, oh, even if it’s the gentlest possible approach, you may want to avoid this, or you might consider eating this before this or whatever. It’s really hard to, well, there’s not always great science or evidence really behind that, right?
Sometimes it’s really extrapolating from very early stage research, but even when there is good evidence behind those sorts of recommendations, I think it’s really hard for people to hear them in a way that is not black and white or that doesn’t risk slipping easily into black and white thinking, because most people in our society I think are on that sort of seesaw of, okay, we can do a flexible dietary control thing, but it tips really easily into rigid dietary control. There’s been research on this that flexible and rigid dietary control are part of the same spectrum, part of the same sort of plane as it were. And Intuitive Eating is on a totally different plane or spectrum, and it’s not related to that sort of dietary control idea, but I think people who are living in this culture and who’ve been socialized and into thinking about food in certain ways and body size in certain ways and exercise in certain ways, it’s really hard to have any sort of prescription related to food and exercise that doesn’t risk turning very disordered to the point where when you think about diabetes, which is a condition that unfortunately people have to think about, especially type one diabetes, but in some cases type two as well where you’re having to count carbohydrates for insulin dosing.
That is something that can make people so obsessive about food to the point where people with diabetes are at many times higher risk. I think I saw one statistic that it was 20 times higher risk than the general population for eating disorders. And women, young women with type one diabetes are 30 or 40% of them meet criteria for eating disorders. And of course there’s potentially other things that can account for that too. There might be hormonal things contributing to people’s disordered eating that are specific to diabetes. But I think, and the research in this area suggests that it’s largely to do with the hyper focus on what you’re eating and the need to limit or restrict certain foods that’s causing people to have such a higher risk of disordered eating. And so I think that’s something that is just not really talked about in the mainstream healthcare system or the mainstream wellness culture.
Systems like alternative medicine, integrative and functional medicine, I think don’t really take disordered eating into account either. Just the conventional system people aren’t, that’s not really on people’s minds. I think people think of eating disorders as this small silo that’s very separate from healthcare and medicine and the sort of conventional wisdom and diet and wellness culture is like everybody could stand to eat better, everybody could stand to lose weight. We don’t eat enough vegetables, we eat too many processed food, blah, blah, blah. This sort of vision of the standard American diet that is supposedly out of control and leading people down a bad path. And so that’s where healthcare providers of all stripes I think, feel the need to focus their energy. And I think the conventional healthcare system, there are certainly doctors within the conventional system who might take a slightly more integrative or functional approach, but not be sort of fully immersed in that approach, who might be leading people onto diets and stuff too.
But I think, one thing I do appreciate about some of my conventional healthcare providers is how not at all concerned they are about diets, how they sort of look at other factors related to health that have nothing to do with what I’m eating or what I weigh or anything like that. And of course, as a smaller bodied person, I have the privilege that doctors will overlook that for me when they might not for a larger bodied person, but I think there even are healthcare providers out there who will not bring weight into the conversation for larger bodied folks as well, although that’s harder to find. But I think that when you get into integrative and functional and alternative spaces, food is such an integral part of the conversation. Food is the number one thing; the food is medicine belief is really front and center there.
And I think that’s where it becomes really risky. I think that’s where it becomes a slippery slope into disordered eating for many, many people. And you don’t necessarily know ahead of time who is at risk or who is going to fall into that disordered eating place because yes, people who have a history of it are definitely vulnerable and at risk. And I would definitely not recommend to someone who comes in and says, I have a history of disordered eating. I would not recommend that they go on a diet or elimination diet or protocol or plan eliminating foods or restricting foods or whatever it might be unless they have diabetes where they might need to count carbohydrates or something. But even then, there’s ways of doing it that are not demonizing of carbs and don’t require people to cut out carbs entirely and stuff.
But I think when you look at just someone who doesn’t have a history or doesn’t know they have a history necessarily or think of themselves as having a history of disordered eating or maybe has a really positive relationship with food in their body when they come in, folks like that are still vulnerable.
And I know people who came in never having dieted, never having worried about the size and shape of their body and were recommended to cut out foods and do elimination diets because of a certain health condition working with an integrative or functional provider or even sometimes with a conventional provider and then really tumbled into disordered eating and perhaps even full-blown eating disorders in some cases. And their relationship with food and their bodies was very damaged. And in part that was because they were getting so much positive reinforcement for the weight they lost or for having cut out these foods and being so good and healthy and in the eyes of people around them. And that’s where the cultural element comes into play too, because it’s not just the provider’s fault, it’s like, and not to blame the provider entirely either, but I think the culture sets us all up for this kind of thing and reinforces the idea that the person was doing good by cutting out foods and by losing weight, et cetera.
So it’s just really, really tricky. And I think understandably, a lot of people are attracted to providers who have a more holistic or integrative or functional sort of view of things because we think that that’s going to help us. We think that that’s going to be the key to unlocking whatever is going on for us that conventional healthcare hasn’t been able to address effectively. And I get that why there’s that belief because in some cases we do feel much more cared for in those alternative systems in wellness sort of oriented spaces. And yet I think it’s really important to look at the risks and the unintended consequences of that approach. And to say that it’s not without risk. And I think sometimes people when they’re desperate, and I’ve felt this way too, what do I have to lose? What do I have to lose by trying this? I might as well try, even if it’s not effective, what harm could it do? And in some cases, it could actually do a significant amount of harm. And so I think seeing it as something with potential serious side effects rather than saying, oh, this is the natural approach, so therefore it’s good and I don’t need to be skeptical, or worry is important.
Katie Dalebout: Yeah, it’s interesting because like you said, so many people don’t know that they might be susceptible to having a disordered relationship with food until they start to have one. In my case, when I first encountered a functional medicine doctor, I was mostly okay with food or in my body, so I thought, but I was also really young. I was like 19. And so I think, I don’t even know how my twenties and early thirties would have gone without having this as part of it was so in my brain, even in college, in my college environmental journalism class, we were taught Michael Pollan. We were taught about standard. That was when I first remember hearing about standard American diet. I remember it being on a test and it’s very cultural. Even I grew up with a lot of family members in larger bodies and all of them actually.
And my mom would always say when someone asked her about her weight, which is just wild that that’s a thing that people even do, but it would happen quite a lot when I was with her just as a kid. And someone would mention, are you losing weight? Have you lost weight? Something like that. And she would always say the same thing, which was always trying, always trying just as you say, how are you? Nice to meet you always. I just kind of was like, all right, well, when I get older, I’ll say, always trying when someone asks that quickly gets just so pervasive in our culture. And until I met you and so many others that have been on your podcast and have really informed my thoughts on weight stigma and all of these issues that we’re talking about, it just makes it so complex.
And I think that anytime you’re focusing on food or talking about it with a practitioner having to track anything at all, for me, that’s a real slippery slope. And I wouldn’t have known that starting out. And a lot of people probably don’t know that until it’s kind of too late and you need to do something about that. And I think that the care effect can put blinders on to some of that or just keep you more stuck in it. And then social media can add another layer to that. And of course, this is so on our culture, and I want to get to talking about social media a little bit, but before we shift out of functional medicine, I said earlier two things really were chilling for me. And the other one other than the part about a history of disordered eating is a fascinating section of your book where you talk about the word hysteria and how the hysteria diagnosis. Well, I’ll just let you talk about what happened with the hysteria diagnosis because I think it’s an anecdote that speaks to this in a way that was really a watershed moment for me.
Christy Harrison: So I think with hysteria, there’s a really interesting history there that kind of connects it to what we’ve been talking about with the care effect and why people feel dismissed in the conventional healthcare system because I think there’s a piece of it where there’s this long history of dismissing women’s pain and dismissing women’s symptoms. And this goes back to Greek antiquity where the womb was considered to be the source of all illnesses for women or many, many illnesses that women could experience. The idea that there was such a thing as a wandering womb that your womb could just wander around into different parts of your body and cause problems was part of ancient Greek medicine. And then the word for uterus in Greek is hyster, or in ancient Greek, I guess is hysteria. So that’s where the name hysteria apparently came from. There is some dispute over whether Hippocrates invented the idea of hysteria or whether it was other doctors in Greek antiquity, but the notion of a wandering womb certainly was there and was being blamed for all kinds of women’s ailments. And from there, the notion of hysteria had a long history. It kind of continued to exist in various forms through decades in millennia or decades and centuries. And once mental health started to be a little more understood and the brain started to be seen as the site of potentially many ailments, hysteria was labeled as a mental health diagnosis, and it was put into the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental illnesses. And it actually stayed there until 1980. It was not taken out until almost the whole way through the 20th century. And so that notion of hysteria as a mental health condition was a way to blame any sort of unexplained symptoms that a woman might be experiencing.
And at that point, it was men could be labeled with it too, but I think it was still very much conceived of as a female issue, the idea that your mental health or a mental problem, this supposed problem of hysteria was at the root of all kinds of unexplained physical symptoms, I think is still something that shows up in conventional healthcare in various ways. And it’s really tricky to talk about because there is a connection between the mind and the body and mental health conditions can have physical impacts and physical health conditions can also cause mental health impacts. There’s very much a feedback loop there that happens. But for me, as someone with PTSD and anxiety, I definitely have come to understand the impact of those mental health conditions and just chronic stress in general on my physical body and physical symptoms.
And that is true. We see that in the research that chronic stress has all these negative health effects for people, especially long term. And we can’t just go blaming any unexplained symptoms someone has on mental health issues. And I think there needs to be a lot of nuance to the conversation about the impacts that mental health can have on our physical wellbeing, not just sort of saying, well, I can’t explain it in this five minute visit or in a series of five to 15 minute visits and a few imaging studies we’ve done, or whatever, therefore it must be stress or it must be anxiety or depression, or you need to just go on an antidepressant or something. I think that’s unfortunately what some conventional healthcare providers will end up conveying to patients, even if it’s not directly saying it’s all in your head or you’re just a woman who’s hysterical or whatever.
The sort of overt misogyny I think has gone down over the years, although there, it certainly exists I know in pockets, but I think for the most part, doctors won’t come out and say it’s all in your head, but they might say, some of this could be related to stress. Have you tried meditation? Have you tried an anti-depressant? Have you tried an anti-anxiety? Let me give you a referral to a therapist. And even when that’s really well-meaning, and if it is couched in a really nuanced conversation about the mind body connection and stuff, I think people who are desperate and experiencing symptoms that are causing them pain, when they hear that they can take that as a real dismissal and as a real kind of slap in the face, it feels like saying, well, what you’re experiencing physically doesn’t count. And I know for me too, I don’t remember because it was 20 plus years ago at this point when I was really in the early stages of figuring out some of my chronic health conditions that I know now played a role in how I was feeling back then in addition to disordered eating, which was not really addressed at the time.
But what I remember of that time is that feeling of dismissal, that feeling of people saying, yeah, you know, should probably go to therapy even if that’s not exactly how they said it or even if it’s not exactly what they said. But that was sort of what I picked up. And I think that sort of legacy of dismissal of people’s pain and especially women’s pain and difficulty of the conventional medical system in accounting for chronic pain or chronic symptoms, chronic illness, makes it really appealing to go into a space where they’re not telling you that except, or it doesn’t feel like they’re telling you that, right? It feels like they’re giving you empathy and support. The interesting thing is that actually in some cases people do end up feeling dismissed and made to feel like it’s all in their head or made to feel like this just is what it is.
I talked to someone in the book, a woman named Jennifer who asked that I just use her first name, who said that at first when she worked with this functional medicine provider, she felt really heard and understood and empathized with, and the nurse practitioner was giving her time and space to really figure out what was happening. And that was something she hadn’t gotten in the conventional healthcare system. So she felt really good and was like, this person’s going to get to the bottom of it. And then eventually after a bunch of tests and protocols and stuff that hadn’t worked, this provider was like, well, when your whole system is inflammed like yours is, you’re just going to have pain. That was a tipping point for her of thinking, okay, now I feel totally dismissed by this person. And the care effect wore off for her, and she was able to decide to go to a different provider.
And what ended up happening was, she had a tumor that that had been totally missed in this functional medicine approach. It was a tumor that was a very rare and aggressive type of tumor that was living on her pancreas and was intertwined with critical blood vessels. And the doctor said, she said she had the surgery the day or the week before her 38th birthday, and the doctor said, this is such a rare and aggressive type of tumor, and it was so intertwined with these blood vessels if we hadn’t caught it and had the surgery now, you probably wouldn’t have lived to see 45. Obviously, that’s not something that happens every day or to everyone, by any means. It’s a very rare case. And, I think it speaks to the issues in these wellness systems and these alternative systems of healthcare that say everything is attributable to food and inflammation and gut microbiome and stuff that’s not really understood or measurable.
And that where the science is in a really young state and providers are sort of overinterpreting information like reading tests and lab values in non-standard ways and saying, oh, well, in our practice we see this as suboptimal, even if it says normal on the lab, but we really want to see it at this level in our practice or whatever. Getting so granular and specific and into the weeds on these things that don’t have really good scientific evidence behind them, I think can lead providers to miss real conditions that people have that actually do have good evidence behind them in good treatment that’s available when they’re caught early enough and when it’s found by someone who knows what to look for. And one of the things with Jennifer’s experience that really stood out to me is that she said none of the providers she saw before conventional or functional palpated her abdomen and located the place where the pain was. And that to me just seems like such a basic part of patient care. She came in with abdominal pain, was one of her symptoms. And so it just seems to me that’s something that any good provider should be doing is checking out where the pain is and to get so in the weeds with other explanations when you haven’t even done that sort of basic level workup feels like a real missed opportunity if not malpractice.
Katie Dalebout: Yeah. Yeah. That’s such an intense story, and I want to talk about how social media plays into all of this. And in the book, you break down how social media and algorithms have contributed to this massive growth of modern Wellness culture, which I believe is a $4.4 trillion global industry. Is that right?
Christy Harrison: Yeah, that’s the statistic by the Global Wellness Institute, their estimate of the valuation of the wellness industry.
Katie Dalebout: It’s so wild. There’s so much in your book about the role, the internet as a whole played into building it up to what we see it as now in a relatively short amount of time, just reflecting on that day in 2014 when we met to now it’s night and day where it is. But with that, or before that, I guess talking about the care effect and talking about how all of these intense conditions that we have that might come from trauma and be mental health related and just the isolation and loneliness that so much of us felt every day within the pandemic, our reliance on each other is innate to us, and I think very human. And is there anything in your research of the book or in thinking about the book and in your own experience now of preparing for the book launch, and you’ve become a mother in the last few years as you wrote this book, and you’ve had so many experiences with that, I’m just curious, are there anything we can do to protect ourselves from needing our providers to provide so much without, I’m not saying turning to social media or turning to Dr.Google, but just in community and in connection and friendship, and is there anything that you’ve seen in your life to be helpful to mitigate some of that coming at you?
Christy Harrison: Yeah, I think there’s a lot there, and I unpack a lot of different aspects of this in the book. One thing we haven’t even really touched on here and don’t probably have time to get into is the social determinants of health and how those play a role in people’s health outcomes and such a bigger role at the population level than we’re led to believe. And I think our healthcare system needs to do a much better job of understanding those and accounting for those and not expecting people to be solely responsible for their own health and wellbeing. There are a lot of societal level changes that need to be made, and it’s not really up to the individual to make these changes. I think there are things we can do in the current system to help ourselves stay safe from wellness mission disinformation and heal from wellness culture approaches that have led us down slippery slopes of disordered eating and harmful protocols and practices and things like that.
And it shouldn’t be the individual’s responsibility. So another societal level approach that I think is really important is to regulate social media companies so that they are not spreading wellness misinformation and disinformation the way they are now. And I think the sort of the market-based approaches to that, the effort to fact check and use artificial intelligence to try to cut down on certain kinds of content that are being posted online, just really hasn’t worked and hasn’t been effective, and there’s so much that has slipped through the cracks with that. Fact checks really don’t work to dissuade people from believing or clicking on and sharing misinformation and disinformation, and AI just can’t keep up with the sort of way that people who want to spread this stuff are getting ahead of it and trying to outsmart it. And there really needs to be human moderation, but I think even more than that, there needs to be regulation and consequences on these companies for letting their algorithms promote that kind of mis and disinformation that is leading to, in some cases, like public health crises, right? Fanning the flames of COVID and causing people to issue the vaccine and refuse use to use masks and spreading the virus and exposing so many more people to this deadly pandemic. It’s just one example of how this happens.
I mean, I think also about even non-pandemic stuff that happens in wellness culture where people are led into issuing conventional treatment for cancer or for any other serious or potentially fatal disease because they’re being told that they can do it naturally with food and alternative practices and stuff. I think that there will always be people who want to spread that kind of information. And I think it’s not all disinformation, it’s not all spread with malicious intent. I think in some ways cases, it’s people who really think they’re doing the right thing and want to share information, and it just happens to be untrue information.
But I think really the responsibility should lie with social media company’s algorithms for promoting that kind of content. And unfortunately, the algorithms are designed to maximize engagement. And the thing that happens to maximize engagement is a couple of things. Novelty, moral outrage discussed controversy, right? Negative emotions that keep people clicking and sharing and engaging in flame wars in the comments, and so much wellness culture stuff really hits all those points. It’s like the novelty of like, Ooh, you can really outsmart. Here's what doctors don’t want you to know, or you can outsmart your disease by doing this three little weird hacks that you never thought would cure Hashimotos or whatever it is. And so I think the social media companies need to be responsible for what their algorithms are amplifying, and people need to be able to sue them if they come across things that lead to harm and we’ve actually started to see that happening in the courts. Some interesting cases have been, I won’t get into the weeds of section 230 in the law. I do get into the weeds of that a little bit in the book, but it’s super interesting. But section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is called the 26 words that created the internet. That’s what it’s often referred to as because it shields social media companies and other internet service providers from any sort of liability for what their users post. So in traditional publishing, publishers have to fact check and have to are responsible for spreading any harmful misinformation and people can sue them for spreading that information. But with Section 230, anything that users are posting on the internet and sharing on social media, the social media companies are not liable for that content and I think they need to be. So that’s one thing I think that at a societal level we can do to help stem the tide of some of this harmful stuff and wellness culture.
As for individuals, I think a couple of things that I’ve found helpful that I think are helpful to people I’ve worked with and talked to about this is trying to just be really skeptical of wellness culture approaches approaching complementary and alternative and integrative and functional medicine with as much skepticism as you’ve been conditioned to approach conventional medicine. And even more so perhaps because there really isn’t as evidence based behind those things and not just sort of taking at face value that something is natural and therefore it’s good or safe. Another thing we didn’t get into that I go into a lot in the book is the supplement industry and how harmful and barely regulated it is and how problematic that all is. And I think people are in wellness culture condition to view supplements as again, it’s natural, it’s gentle, it’s safe, what harm could it do?
Actually quite a bit of harm. There’s really no one looking out for us in terms of what goes into those pills and those bottles because of supplement industry lobbying at a 1994 law that allows supplement companies to put their products on the market without any testing for safety or efficacy. And it’s only after the fact with enough consumer complaints that the FDA can look into something, potentially recommend a recall, but sometimes they just send warning letters. Very few of the things that are reported to the FDA necessarily get recalled from the market. And even the ones that are recalled or where the companies receive warning letters, often it takes years for them to even get them off shelves. The companies will just keep those things in stores or stores won’t get rid of them and they, they’ll just stay in circulation for a long time, potentially harming people.
And the things that go into supplements that are problematic are in some cases just ineffective. There’s not standardized doses or the product in question doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do. It doesn’t have enough of an active ingredient to do anything. Or I think in more concerning cases it can be laced with drugs, with actual pharmaceuticals or with other illegal banned substances. There have been amphetamine like substances found in a lot of commercial weight loss supplements that are sold in vitamin chains across the country. These things are incredibly harmful. There’s adrenal supplements that you can get that can often have thyroid hormone or corticosteroids steroid hormones in them. Those are medications that need to be properly dosed and regulated and not just sort of slipped in secretly to a supplement to make it feel like it’s having an effect because it probably is having an effect if it has those drugs in it.
But people don’t know that consumers aren’t told and these things, the pharmaceutical industry for all its problems. And there are definitely many, especially when it comes to weight loss drugs, the pharmaceutical industry is still regulated, and companies have to prove the safety and efficacy of their products before they go to market. And that just is not true for the supplement industry. And the supplements are not at all harmless the way that they’re made out to be. So I think again that at the societal level, we need to do a much better job regulating the supplement industry. That 1994 law should be repealed. We need to have a lot more oversight of supplements. And I think at the individual level, just knowing that and being skeptical and not taking supplements without a lot of vetting and a lot of research and also just maybe taking as little as possible. For me, I used to grew up in a family that had a ton of supplements. We had these big cabinets full of over-the-counter medications and supplements and just were constantly encouraged to take them for any sort of symptom we could be having or general wellness as well.
And as an adult, I continued that. I had a whole cabinet of my own of supplements, but when I started to look into this and started to, I mean really it was when I went back to school to be a dietician, I realized that supplements aren’t necessary. Vitamin and mineral supplements especially aren’t necessary in most cases. But really looking into the supplement industry and how poorly regulated it is and all the problems that can cause has really caused me to just go cold turkey on most supplements except for anything I need for a deficiency. And you can talk to your doctor about what that is and really, I think push your doctor in some cases, especially if it’s an integrative or functional or alternative medicine provider, really pushing them on what the actual evidence is behind supplement recommendations and whether they can write you a prescription or really stand behind their recommendation of a particular brand of supplements. Because unfortunately, it’s just such a wild west of an industry.
Katie Dalebout: Of all of the points you said about the supplement industry, that point that really drove it home most to me or that my jaw dropped was that they can be laced with the actual pharmaceuticals was just so intense and wild. And my cameo in your first book, I was interviewed in that about how much money I’ve spent on diet-culture in that book. And if I was interviewed in this book, I didn’t, unlike you, I didn’t grow up in a family that had a ton of supplements. I didn’t have any actually. But as a late teens, early twenties when was down the wellness wormhole, I spent so much money on supplements. And as a case study, I can tell you I never noticed a difference from anything. And that sounds like I got lucky because I didn’t notice a negative effect and have something I learned so much from this book and always learned so much from you. And I mean people can tell just by listening to this, how much research and how much care went into this book and covering just so, so much. And I think that it would be interesting to leave people with or have you discuss a little bit the connection between wellness culture and diet-culture. Obviously as I mentioned, your first book, Anti-Diet, and you said this at the beginning, you cover wellness culture and how it’s the new guise of diet-culture, but you expanded your understanding to see there’s actually a symbiotic relationship between the two. Can you talk about that?
Christy Harrison: Yeah, absolutely. I think that was such an interesting part of reporting this book was looking into the history of wellness culture itself. And I knew that it wasn’t just the modern guise of diet-culture that there were other aspects to it. But I think the researching that and looking into the history of that was really what kind of hit at home. So what I have come to define wellness culture as is that it’s a set of values that equates wellness with moral goodness and posits certain behaviors and a certain type of body as the path to achieving that goodness. And it really overlaps with diet-culture, I think, which I described in Anti-Diet is a system of beliefs that equates thinness, muscularity and particular body shapes with health and moral virtue promotes weight loss and body reshaping as a means of attaining higher status, demonizes some foods and food groups while elevating others and oppresses people who don’t match it’s supposed picture of health. And what I came to find was that at the outset of wellness culture, of this concept of wellness in sort of its modern guise, and I say modern dating back to the 1950s and sixties basically in 1959, the word wellness was used for the first time in what we see now as the modern sense of optimization. It’s not just the antonym for illness, but the sort of pursuit of wellness in and of itself from that sort of first 1959 definition. I won’t get into all this, but we’ll have that in the bonus episode for people who are curious.
But the 1959 definition I think had a lot more in common with what I see as wellbeing, looking at the whole person and social, emotional, psychological, interpersonal, communal, collective type of impacts on people’s health and the sort of importance of mental health.
But then in the 1970s, it sort of got redefined and that became the basis of what we know as wellness today. And it was very much, it incorporated diet-culture into its foundation. So demonizing of certain foods and food groups, there was anti-fat bias, really overt anti-fat bias kind of baked into the seminal text of defining the term wellness. And it was sort of using diet-culture as this driving force. So diet culture has now cloaked itself in the guise of wellness to legitimize itself and a time when people are increasingly skeptical of diets and don’t believe the diets work. But I think wellness culture kind of uses diet-culture as a foundational set of beliefs and then built on it from there. And I think what I’ve seen it build on top of that is that it’s really denigrating conventional medicine and idolizing alternative and natural and holistic approaches to healing, as we’ve talked about.
And we haven’t even gotten into cultural appropriation either, which I talk about in the book, but wellness culture really has this particular reverence for anything that’s perceived as ancient. And even if that’s not really the case, even if the sort of practice in question is really cherry picked and not sort of the original version coming from another place, it’s anything that is perceived as non-Western and ancient that has this halo around it. And wellness culture also really stresses the importance of the individual’s ability to pick and choose from modalities and which wellness practices are going to work for you. I think once you’re thinking about food in this way of I have to be careful what I put into my body. Some foods are bad, some foods are toxins or poison, this really over overblown rhetoric around conventional foods or industrially produced foods or whatever, then I think it’s easy to slide from there into conventionally produced soap is bad for me, conventionally produced home care products, conventionally produced skincare.
Anything that you put in on or around your body, sun suddenly becomes suspect. And I think when you get into that, then you can get into an orthorexia of the home, an orthorexia of the body, an orthorexia of skincare and beauty. It’s not just about what you’re putting in your body anymore. It can also lead to orthorexic and conspiratorial thinking about vaccines as being impure. It can lead to all sorts of places that I think are really harmful to people’s overall wellbeing and true, true wellbeing, which encompasses their mental health and emotional health and social relationships and all of that. And so I think for all that, I don’t want to say that wellness culture is all bad. I do think there are aspects of it that are potentially beneficial to people. I find yoga and meditation really helpful. I also am a member of the wellness industry in some way as a dietician and Intuitive Eating counselor. And I’ve written books. I’m a reporter on food, nutrition and health going back 20 years. And so I am part of it to some extent too. And I don’t want to say that it’s all bad, but I just see so many harmful effects of it and this origin of it coming out of the denigration of food and bodies. And that also has roots stating back even earlier to the 1800s and 1700s with anti-black racism that I talk a little bit about in my first book. And that Sabrina Strings writes about really beautifully in her book, Fearing the Black Body. So it’s the roots of this are deep and complicated and there’s lots of different aspects to it. But yeah, I think wellness culture as a whole is pretty problematic and I think it’s worth being really skeptical of it, even if you like some aspects of it. Even if you enjoy experimenting with different things and products, I think it can be just difficult to dabble without getting really sucked in. And so being aware of that and being sort of vigilant and boundaried at all times is a good idea.
Katie Dalebout: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I am very susceptible of that and that was definitely my experience. And I just have to say, Christy, your work from your podcast Food Psych for the last 10 years and your first book, Anti-Diet, have helped me so much notice things that I wouldn’t have clocked in myself about diet-culture and disordered eating and then this book reading, it really helped me to see so much nuance and how my relationship to those things, diet-culture and disordered eating has been amplified and twisted and turned through wellness culture in ways that I was really not aware of. And so I can’t recommend this book more to people than I am doing right now. Really truly, if you’re here because Christy and have followed her work, then you’re really going to find a lot of novel information in here that takes things into a direction that I just wasn’t aware of.
And I think specifically going back to that 23-year-old that came into your apartment in 2014, at the time my podcast was called the “Wellness Wonderland”, it was right there up top in the name. And I feel embarrassed about that in some ways. And I feel far from that person in some ways. And I also have a lot of empathy because like you said here, a lot of those things can be fun or perhaps even useful and same, I also meditate. I taught yoga for many, many years and still do and have so many different practices and parts of wellness culture that are baked into me and I still find useful and enjoy. However, I do see the underbelly of it through conversations with you and through your book and was starting to see it a lot before that, even in ways that are difficult to explain when it becomes so consuming, like you were saying with functional medicine, when you start to pay attention to what you’re eating and what this means and what that food means, it’s really challenging to unsee it. And when I know how many calories a banana has, that doesn’t just leave my brain, it’s just there when I know that somebody told me this is a food that is this or that, it’s harder to deprogram that and it takes a lot of time. And then also just the amount of time that goes to managing wellness practices or having that be your hobby, thinking about what that’s taking you away from. And I think a trope of your first book of how diet-culture steals your time and your money and your identity, I think wellness culture, I think it can do the same. And I’ve starting to question who would I be? What would I have been doing with my time and money if I wasn’t putting it into this culture? And I think seeing young, so many young people get into it so early as a hobby, I wonder what that means. And so anyway, just thank you so much for writing this book and I am so excited for people to be able to read it. And can you tell everyone exactly where they can find it and what they can do to get more bonus content?
Christy Harrison: Yes. Thank you so much for this interview, this conversation for coming on and guest interviewing me on my podcast. It’s been so great to talk with you and I’m excited to have a part two on your podcast, but people can find the book at ChristyHarrison.com/thewellnesstrap or just go into your local bookstore and ask for it and people can get it on their favorite audiobook app as well. If you like to listen to audiobooks, I read the audiobook. So if you like my voice, it’s less scratchy on the audiobook I think, than it is right now because I’ve been doing a lot of interviews lately. But you can listen to it on an audiobook as well. And then if you want to get bonus content, you can subscribe to the Rethinking Wellness Substack where I’m going to be doing some occasional bonus stuff, including this bonus episode that we talked about with more on the history of wellness culture and maybe some other stuff related to this interview.
And you can find that at rethinkingwellness.com and depending on while this is going to come out the day before the book launches, so if you’re listening to this the day it comes out on April 24th, you still have one day to pre-order the book and then submit your proof of purchase to get the bonus webinar that I’m going to be doing for who pre-ordered the book comes out on April 25th on that Tuesday. So definitely get your pre-order and before that you can submit your proof of purchase once you’ve pre-ordered at ChristyHarrison.com/bookbonus. And that will get you admission to this zoom call that I’m going to be doing in May.
Katie Dalebout: Highly recommend doing all of those things. It’s really great. So thank you so much for having me, and congrats again on the new book. And like I said, I have copious notes of more things I wanted to cover, so we’ll do more on my podcast and we’ll have many more conversations about it.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, let’s hop over there to do that. And for people who are listening and want to listen to that, where can they find you and subscribe to your podcast?
Katie Dalebout: Thank you. It’s called Let It Out, and its wherever podcasts are. And I write a newsletter too that’s called the Let It Out letter, and I’m just @KatieDalebout on social media where all those weird algorithms are, and we’ll, I’m sure put links to all of that here. But thank you so much for having me and letting me interview you on your home court about such an important book, and I’m really happy that I got to be here. So thank you. It’s such an honor.
Christy Harrison: Well, thank you. It’s such a great, great conversation. So that’s our show. Thanks so much to Katie Dalebout for being a great guest host on this episode. And thanks to you for listening. The Wellness Trap is officially on sale Tuesday, April 25th, and you can get it wherever you buy books or by going to Christyharrison.com/thewellnesstrap. Sales in the first week of a book are huge in terms of potentially getting on bestseller lists, so I would be incredibly grateful if you bought the book this week, if you’re thinking of doing it, and if you pre-order the book before April 25th. So if you’re listening to this the day it comes out basically today, you can get a special bonus webinar and Q & A with me by uploading your proof of purchase at ChristyHarrison.com/bookbonus. If you enjoyed this conversation, I’d be so grateful if you’d take a moment to subscribe, rate, and review the podcast wherever you’re listening to this.
And you can get new episodes delivered by email every other week by signing up at rethinkingwellness.substack.com, where you can also become a paid subscriber for early access to episodes, occasional bonus episodes like the one Katie and I mentioned before, and to help support the show.
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 was designed by Tara Jacoby, and theme song was written and performed by Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs. Thanks again for listening. Take care!
