Anti-diet dietitian Leah Kern joins us to discuss how struggling with anxiety made her susceptible to a wellness diet that promised safety and longevity, how that diet quickly spiraled into full-on disordered eating, how being eco-conscious and “earthy” can easily lead into wellness traps, the connection between spirituality and wellness culture, why she finally stopped trying to fix her anxiety with food and started taking meds, and more.
Leah Kern is an anti-diet dietitian and certified intuitive eating counselor who specializes in helping people heal their relationships with food and body. Her approach to coaching is firmly evidence-based, rooted in the Health At Every Size (HAES®) & Intuitive Eating frameworks. In her private practice, Leah teaches her clients to harness their body’s innate wisdom to govern how they eat and live. Leah believes that the work involved with unraveling years of conditioning in diet culture and learning to come home to one’s body is deeply spiritual work and she treats it as such. It is Leah’s mission to help her clients make peace with food and body so they can unlock their most aligned and fulfilling lives. Learn more about her work at leahkernrd.com.
Resources and References
This list contains affiliate links to Bookshop.org, where I earn a small commission for any purchases made.
Christy’s latest book, The Wellness Trap: Break Free from Diet Culture, Disinformation, and Dubious Diagnoses and Find Your True Well-Being
Subscribe on Substack for bonus episodes and more
Christy’s episode of Leah’s podcast
How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell
Going vegan in recovery (“you are an animal, too”)
Christy’s online course, Intuitive Eating Fundamentals
Transcript
Disclaimer: The below transcription is primarily rendered by AI, so errors may have occurred. The original audio file is available above.
Christy Harrison: This podcast is made possible by my paid subscribers at rethinkingwellness.substack.com. Not only do paid subscriptions help support the show and keep me able to make the best free content I possibly can, but they also get you great perks like early access to every episode, bonus episodes (including one I did with Leah, which you’ll hear on Friday), biweekly bonus Q&As, subscriber-only comment threads where you can connect with other listeners, and lots more. Just go to rethinkingwellness.substack.com to sign up. and if you're already a paid subscriber, thank you so much for your support. It really helps me keep doing the work I'm doing.
This episode is also brought to you by my second book, The Wellness Trap: Break Free from Diet Culture, Disinformation, and Dubious Diagnoses and Find Your True Well-Being, which is now available wherever books are sold! The book 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 well-being. Just go to christyharrison.com/thewellnesstrap to learn more and buy the book. That’s christyharrison.com/thewellnesstrap.
Now, without any further ado, here’s my conversation with Leah Kern. So Leah, welcome to the show. I'm so glad to have you with me, and we just did a great episode on your podcast, so I'm excited to continue the conversation here.
Leah Kern: Yeah, I'm so excited too. It was really, really wonderful to connect a few weeks ago for my podcast. It was special to get to chat.
Christy Harrison: Love to have you start off by introducing yourself and just sharing a bit about what you do.
Leah Kern: Yeah, absolutely. So I am an Intuitive Eating dietitian, a certified Intuitive Eating counselor and also a registered dietitian. And I work in my private practice to help clients heal their relationships with food and body through one-to-one and courses. And I say this all the time, but I think it's so important to name, it really feels like the exact work that I was put on earth to do, and I feel so grateful constantly that it's the exact work that I get to do and I'm happy to kind of go into my own story, which really informs why I feel so connected to the work.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, I would love to get into that. So I want to talk about how you got here because you were not always anti-diet, right? You were not always an Intuitive eater, and you mentioned that reading a certain book in high school kind of catapulted you into wellness culture and then spiraled into disordered eating. So can you tell us a little bit about that?
Leah Kern: Yeah, absolutely. So my story kind of begins, I think it's really important to name, I grew up pretty sheltered from diet-culture, and part of that is due to unearned thin privilege, and I always think it's important to say unearned because sometimes it feels like you want a prize or something, but really it's nothing related to anything I earned. It's mostly a matter of genetics. And so that kept me pretty sheltered from comments from, well-meaning family members or doctors unsolicited advice. So I didn't really encounter diet-culture in my face until I would say high school. My earliest memory is my sophomore year of high school. I did a semester abroad, which is kind of rare to go abroad in high school. And looking back, I have so many complex feelings about this experience. I was pretty young. I, no, I think I was 15, I turned 16 abroad and there was so much exposure to other teens.
The program was an international high school and we were living away from home and I saw a lot of other people's habits. There was people older than me, I think the youngest were sophomores, and then there were juniors and seniors, people from all over the country. I grew up in New Jersey on the east coast and there were girls from California who were bringing the behaviors that they engaged in and kind of exposing us. And I learned explicit eating disorder behaviors from living in close quarters with other peers, which was a really new experience. Obviously in high school, most people are living under your parents' roof or your guardian's roof and kind of confined to their influence until you get influenced by social media and other things. So this was one of the early breadcrumbs leading me to eventual disordered eating specifically in the form of wellness culture.
When I came back from that abroad program, I think I read the book that I'm referencing junior year, so I usually wouldn't say the name, but I actually think it's important in the context of this conversation. I think it was called Eat to Live. And the whole premise was it's simple, you should just eat to live. That's all there is to it. And it was written by a doctor, and we know now that doctors get very limited nutrition training, and I totally just drank the Kool-Aid of this book and was like, yeah, it's simple. You should just eat to live. And I was kind of going around proselytizing when I was learning in the book and very much started to lean into this healthy, crunchy persona where it was like I was bringing raw spinach leaves and tofu and berries for lunch. And as I mentioned, I grew up in New Jersey.
My peers were going because we were allowed off campus for lunch, they were going to get bagels, and I was just on the sidelines, GNA on my raw veggies that I brought from home and trying to perform this wellness persona that I really learned from this book. But what was happening was the more I started to follow this wellness protocol, which at the time I would've never called a diet, it was very sneaky the more that I started to feel out of control around food and the more I binged behind closed doors. So there was this shame that I started experiencing because I was performing wellness in front of my peers specifically, I was really seen as this holistic crunchy girl, but then behind closed doors, I was feeling so out of control and I had a lot of shame about why couldn't I do what the author of the book was saying, why couldn't I just crave foods that would be most supportive for my body?
And of course, looking back now, I see that the doctor who wrote the book had tunnel vision for dietary health and completely ignored other equally if not more important aspects of health, other reasons we eat for community connection, ritual, any of those things. So that kind of led me the obsession with health and what I would look back at call orthorexia led me to go to school to become a dietitian, which I know is part of so many dietitian stories of the desire to get involved in the career and initially comes from a disordered place.
Christy Harrison: That was the case for me for sure,
Leah Kern: And it's kind of wild like, okay, what would I have done? I don't know. It really sent me down a path that I'm not sure I would've gone down if I hadn't had these struggles with my relationship with food.
Christy Harrison: I'm curious how it unfolded from there. Then when you went to school to become a dietitian, did you get deeper into that orthorexic mindset?
Leah Kern: Yeah, so I went to college in Vermont, which is a part of the story as well because the whole crunchy granola kind of wellness is very, very alive and well there. It's very kind of front and center. But I got really lucky in terms of the undergrad program that I did. I was a part of my undergrad dietetic program. The professor who was head of the program, she was a certified Intuitive Eating counselor, which was pretty rare at the time to have that exposure in undergrad. She exposed us to Intuitive Eating. I remember learning about Intuitive Eating my freshman year, and everything clicked for me. I was like, oh, I suddenly realized I'm struggling with disordered eating. I didn't even have that awareness or language before. And from there, I started to implement what I was learning and started to move through healing My relationship with food and seeing how it was was not only about food, but it was about becoming more in alignment with my authentic self instead of performing a version of myself that I thought I was supposed to be, because that's what wellness culture told me.
It started to help my anxiety. I was pretty anxious and tried to channel that into controlling food and healing. My relationship with food helped me to become less anxious ultimately because I wasn't so obsessive and restrictive and didn't have such a white knuckle grip on my lifestyle regimen. And I was just really shocked by how life changing the work was. And this brings us back to how I got to this place where I knew I wanted to help other people get to this place. Obviously everyone's story looks different, but I knew I wanted to help people unlock their most aligned and fulfilling lives, and I really felt like I had been sort of existing in a different reality. And then when I healed my relationship with food, it was like the lights came on and I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, this is, oh my God, I can't believe people feel this way and people aren't just going around obsessing and having laser vision for calories and good and bad. So it was completely earth shattering, and that led me to ultimately want to pursue supporting folks in this way in my future career.
Christy Harrison: You mentioned anxiety. How do you think struggling with anxiety made you more susceptible to falling into wellness culture?
Leah Kern: Yeah, this is something I've only had clarity on really recently and looking back on. So I think wellness culture promises a lot of control, and a lot of your destiny is in your hands, your health is in your hands, an sort of individual responsibility. And so as someone with anxiety, which for me and I think for many people really boils down to fear of the unknown wellness culture promised that I could have some control over my health, over my mental state, over my life. And of course, to some degree we do have control, but part of being a human is so much is out of our control, and that's just a fact. And so I think that as a sort of susceptible teenager fearing just being predisposed to anxiety, I was really attracted to the promises that wellness culture was kind of dangling in front of me of not only can you control aspects of your life and your health with food, but you can also control your anxiety with food. It was like those trendy BuzzFeed articles that was eat these five foods to cure your anxiety. And now I look back at that and I'm like, maybe for some people it could touch the level of anxiety they feel, but for most people, I just think of the phrase, it's like a bandaid for a bullet wound. It's like, all right, no amount of almonds is really going to move the needle here.
Christy Harrison: Was there also information about cutting out certain foods for anxiety? Did you fall into that trap?
Leah Kern: I'm sure there was, but that wasn't really, I mean, it's funny you say that, and I'm like, no, no, no, I didn't fall into that trap, but certainly I did the thing of there are yes foods, there are no foods, and it all boiled down to this book of what I was reading in there, and it was very much the typical whole foods help your body, help the vibrations in your body, a lot of that language. And then the more processed foods, processed foods are not good for your body and therefore not good for your anxiety. So I guess in turn, I had associated shame and restriction around the processed foods. But yeah, it's funny, my initial reaction was to be like, no, no, no, I didn't cut anything out. But yeah, I certainly did.
Christy Harrison: I want to talk a little bit about the vibrations and stuff because that is such a common thing I think for people to fall into in the more woo woo corners of wellness culture. But I mean, as you said, this person was a doctor who wrote the book, so it's like even in a book by a doctor, there can be that sort of woo woo language.
Leah Kern: Yeah, I mean, I just want to clarify. It's hard for me to parse out looking back where the woowoo came from, if it was the book or other things I was consuming. I was big into Tumblr at the time and Pinterest, and I think Instagram was starting to become popular, just to clarify. Yeah,
Christy Harrison: Yeah. Gotcha. So you were sort of just immersed in that world and it was part of the world you were in, which I think is so common with wellness culture. It's like this slippery slope where you might come in through the door of changing or eating ostensibly for your health and then get caught up in all these sorts of out there things and increasingly out there kinds of things as you go down the rabbit hole of wellness culture. Right,
Leah Kern: Exactly. There's so many ways in, and it's a whole convoluted maze in there. And part of my story in high school and into college too was this, I've used the word crunchy granola hippie several times already, but that was part of this aspirational identity for me. And in those corners of the internet specifically, I was involved in Pinterest and Tumblr, and again, I think Instagram is starting to become popular maybe in later high school for me, but it's not the one I think of when I think of where I got all of this from. There was these earthy looking woman and they weren't even necessarily prescribing a diet, but it was this aspirational thing where they would show, I remember they called them Buddha bowls, which looking back, I'm like, it just seems problematic. It was just essentially a really aesthetic bowl of what they would call super foods.
And I literally, if you scroll all the way back on my, what is now my anti-diet dietitian Instagram page, one of my earliest pictures is Budd Bowls. I've kept it there because it's part of my story, the evolution. I think it just speaks to wanting to emulate these people who I looked up to who seemed so peaceful. That was always something that was aspirational to me as someone who struggled with anxiety and so in touch with the earth and crunchy. And so I wanted to do what they did, and they seem to be eating and only craving whole foods. And then again, back to the shame of why don't I just crave whole foods? Why is it that the more that I try to restrict myself to Whole Foods, I am finding myself finishing a sleeve of Oreos at the counter at end of the night. And so again, that shame between who I wanted to be and who I was aspiring to be and how I was actually landing in my body.
Christy Harrison: So interesting. And I think that's such a common experience for people to have the attempts at restriction result in a lot of rebound eating or binge eating in some cases, and this shame that comes from that and the people who are held up or holding themselves up as these paragons of what we should be eating. I feel like in a lot of cases, they too are struggling. They might not say it, they might not talk about it until much later or at all perhaps, but I know for a fact that at least some influencers who are putting out some message about what they eat and what's good to eat actually do things very differently behind the scenes.
Leah Kern: Right. And I know you've had people on the show who have talked about that explicitly, and I think that's such a great point of you might be seeing someone at a point in their story where they haven't yet come to terms with that, but it doesn't mean it's not happening. Right,
Christy Harrison: Exactly. And it doesn't mean that we should go after people who are posting those kinds of things and shame them for what they're doing or whatever. But I think it's just the reality of trying to restrict your eating is that that rebound effect really commonly happens. It's not some shameful weird secret and something bad about you. It's kind of a natural phenomenon,
Leah Kern: Right? Yeah, exactly. And when you aren't as educated about the impacts of restriction, you don't have that awareness of this is a normal response. This is my body trying to protect me. Instead, you're thinking, why am I not so naturally drawn to Whole Foods like this woman who I'm following on the internet?
Christy Harrison: I want to talk a little bit more about that kind of culture and that sort of aspirational idea of being really in touch with the earth and really crunchy. It sounds like you were surrounded by that a lot in Vermont as well. What did you see playing out there in terms of the connection between that crunchy kind of community and wellness culture?
Leah Kern: Yeah, it's such a topic that I love talking about because it was really everywhere. So as you said before, there's different ways in. So I think there's this thread in, I would call Burlington, by the way, where I went to college, a mountain town because it's a little city in the mountains, and I think that I've had someone on my podcast who is a dietitian in a mountain town in Montana, in Bozeman, and we kind of reflected on some of these threads that run through the mountain town culture. And so I would say that first there's a lot of interest in sustainability and being environmentally conscious, which is a great thing and can lead to restriction under the guise of social justice, which I saw a lot of. And it's also college a time when everyone's trying to find themselves and find their voice and express what they stand for.
And so I think that there was a lot of experimenting with dietary restrictions under the name of being concerned with the environment and from social justice lens. But then often I've had lots of conversations with folks, myself included, I used to be vegetarian, where we reflect back and it's like, okay, was that really about the environment or was that a way to have a socially acceptable excuse to restrict? And I think for a lot of people it's both. It's like no, really that felt like a impactful way to take a stance and live through actions of something that I'm passionate about and lowkey, it was also about restrictions. So I think it's not so black and white as this either. But I've also had a professor from my time at UVM on my podcast, and she talks about the problem with the idea of voting with your fork and how that conjuress up diet-culture, ideology of it being all personal responsibility versus environmental changes being systemic.
Christy Harrison: I agree. I think that's such a problematic concept and something that I also personally was really invested in back in the day that was such a central part of my disordered eating was orthorexia based on wanting to do things the most sustainably, the most perfectly for the environment for food justice and sustainability and thinking that every single decision I made about food was so loaded and was so meaningful and would make or break my environmental impact, I guess, and my ethics as a person really, it felt so loaded. And I think it's tough to talk about that because it is understandable that people want to make ethical decisions or eat in a way that's in line with their values, and maybe they're doing a lot of other things in their life that are sort of geared towards trying to minimize their impact or vote with their dollar in some way. And I think that I've increasingly seen, I mean, I used to work at an environmental magazine where the whole concept, it was like a lifestyle magazine. The whole concept was vote with your dollar for sustainability. So I've really had a reckoning with is that the way, is that actually how change is made? Is that actually something that is impactful or is it more detrimental to the person trying to do it? Because you can never quite live up to those ideals and it's really guilt inducing in some cases to try and fail,
Leah Kern: Right? Yeah, the guilt,
Christy Harrison: Yeah, it's tough feeling that kind of guilt. And I know there's probably a lot of folks listening who do care about sustainability and want to make choices in line with those values, but I think it's just important to recognize how it is impacting your mental wellbeing, your overall wellbeing, and then also to think about the fact that this is something that requires systemic changes, not just individual responsibility and all the voting with your fork or your dollar, whatever is a drop in the bucket compared to things that could be addressed at the policy level at much more systemic levels than just individuals.
Leah Kern: And something I think about too, which maybe is a bit of a hot take, but I think about, okay, the concern from the environment is from a beautiful place and it is so valid, and we are part of the environment. Human beings are part of the environment, or even if it's a concern for animal rights, we are animals too at our core. And what about our levels of how we're feeling, how we're being treated, and when we limit ourselves to such rigidity and restriction and shame, and it's just such a white knuckle grip on our relationships with food that has harmful outcomes for us. And I think often in the conversation about the environment that is missed, we exclude ourselves and we are just part of the whole thing. We are part of the living picture on earth.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, I've literally said that in answering people's questions about these things too. You are an animal too, and you have an ethical obligation to, if you really are caring about animal rights and making these choices for animals, then including yourself in that mix is paramount and not doing things that are going to harm you in the process because if we're trying to do no harm or do less harm, harming ourselves can't be part of that.
Leah Kern: Yeah. Oh, I've never connected with another dietitian who has had that thought. I love that. I think it's such a valuable way of reflecting back that position.
Christy Harrison: And I think it probably is a controversial take in some sorts of animal rights communities because I think there's a sense of wanting to put ourselves one down and sort of lift up animals that have been mistreated or whatever and make sacrifices for them. So I think in some communities it's hard for people to wrap their heads around this idea that they are in fact animals that should be given rights and compassion as well. But I think it's that sort of binary of us or them either or is not helpful to anyone really.
Leah Kern: Right. Absolutely. Yeah. And aside from the environmental social justice related pipeline to wellness culture from crunchy culture, there's definitely other parts of it that are in the soup. And I think about one of those parts being the spiritual element. There's a lot of just alternative ways of living that exist in these communities. Sometimes that kind of spirituality, new age spirituality, it's like you're not any religion, but you're going to crystal shops and doing a lot of yoga, which nothing wrong with any of those things. I think sometimes you can be stewing in that culture of one can be stewing in that's culture, and suddenly a teacher or a mentor or a book or whatever it is, is recommending high vibrational foods to get you closer to spiritual enlightenment and to your highest self, and then suddenly that leads you to eating certain foods because you feel like that's what you're supposed to be doing or that's what your teacher or mentor is preaching.
So that's definitely sort of another way into wellness culture. That one I didn't experience so much personally. I think I was kind of coming out of it and having, thinking more critically at the time that I got to college in Vermont. But I mean there was definitely a moment where I remember reading somewhere this idea of live foods versus dead foods, and it was like, how could you eat meat? That's a dead food plants are living. And I was like, oh, yes. To the point where my dad a few years ago was like, Lee, I'm having a lot of live foods saying it back to me. And I'm like, oh my God, I can't believe I said that. And so yeah, I think that the spirituality thread is another thing in the soup of the crunchy mountain town culture that can very much rocket someone into the wellness trap,
Christy Harrison: Right? Yeah. I think that new age culture is such a hotbed of ideas that can be problematic or harmful to people's wellbeing. I mean, there's a great podcast called Cons Spirituality that really digs deep into that sort of pipeline of new age spirituality into toxic wellness culture, but also into right-wing reactionary stuff and conspiracies of course. And it's an interesting kind of mix of people who sort of find themselves in that space, especially these days with social media, I think because people come in through one door of wanting to feed their kids well or wanting to deal with a health concern or something like that, but then they kind of get funneled in these directions of increasing the extremes through the algorithms and can get into, there's the yoga and wellness to Q Anon pipeline, for example, where it doesn't make a lot of sense on the surface why people in that world would be getting caught up in a conspiracy theory like Q Anon. But sort of makes sense when you think about the logic of this idea of seeing the unseen or there's a lot more to, there's a lot more than meets the eye and that kind of stuff that's sort of rampant in spiritual communities and new age communities,
Leah Kern: Right? And it's hard, some of it for a lot of people, they might be like, no, I find a lot of meaning in those communities, and this isn't to take that away. I think it's more to bring light and be critical of a place to draw the line of, okay, you're at a yoga studio and suddenly the yoga studio is preaching a diet. And that's hard too. There are culturally significant food protocols that go with different yoga practices, but often in the West it's plucked out of context and probably not supportive in the way that it was initially intended. But I do think just thinking critically of where do I draw the line here? Or I'm at a crystal shop or I'm at a yoga class and suddenly I am feeling like I'm being pushed down this hole of having certain restrictions and protocols. Does that make sense? Is that a place I want to go? But I think for so many people, it's like you start to admire someone and it happens slowly and much more subtly, and it's much more sneaky than you might imagine, especially if you're in a susceptible place or you're looking for community and identity. It can be really tricky, which I know you write about
Christy Harrison: That yearning for community and identity I think is so tricky. Of course, it's something that we all want and we all deserve, and when we're in that place of not having it and seeking it, I think we're vulnerable to so many pitches and so much harmful stuff that's being pitched and sold under the guise. And sometimes in a lot of cases, I think not even intentionally harmful or not even intentionally targeting people, but it's just sort of what happens when people stumble into a certain community, a spiritual community or a crunchy community or whatever it is, seeking that kind of connection. And then there is this sort of rigid way of seeing the world. I think it can be hard to separate out this genuine connection and community that people have versus what might be not so useful. The kinds of practices about food and wellness and body that maybe are more harmful in that space.
Leah Kern: Yeah, absolutely. And just think about college, how susceptible folks are in college because a time where you're in a new community and you're trying to find yourself and establish a sense of unique personal identity. And so I think of that as another main ingredient in the soup of just what I kind of observed in my time and college in Vermont. And I would say that there's another main piece at play, which is the emphasis on natural in a place like Vermont where there was a lot of hiking and connection to the land and a lot of, I moved to New York City after I was living in Vermont and just so different with the fashion, and I feel like a lot of people in Vermont, it's like flannels and more kind of hiking gear, whereas somewhere New York City is much more fashion forward. But yeah, I think that that does kind of go back to natural ways of being in that kind of being a value there.
And then of course, there's the rabbit hole from natural ways of living to one should eat naturally and one should handle their medical concerns naturally. And of course they can end up in the anti-vax place. And so I worked at Trader Joe's in college and there was this other grocery store across the street from Trader Joe's that was a health food store. And I went in there once for something that we didn't have at Trader Joe's after my shift. And I just remember walking around there thinking, I hope everyone's okay in here. I hope you're okay. Because I remember in my story going exclusively to places like Whole Foods because of that health halo and feeling like this is the only place it's safe to shop because it had gotten so intense, my feelings of needing to go to natural grocery stores. And so I would always have that kind of thought. And there was also a co-op downtown in Burlington, and when I'd walk around there after having healed my relationship with food, I remember just thinking, I wonder how many people are in here because they feel like it's the only safe place they can shop.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, that's a really sad and powerful question to ask in places like that. I definitely feel like there's a lot of haunted people kind of walking around in stores like that sometimes. I'm curious to get in a little more to how you made that shift. That's a powerful place to be able to recognize it and see it from the outside and to have empathy and compassion for people who are in that place, but to not be in it yourself anymore. Especially too, I think with the wellness culture piece, I've talked to a lot of people who've said giving up dieting per se was sort of easier in some ways because you kind of can know when you're really dieting or if you're following a commercial diet. It's easy to tell and easy to give that up. Not easy, but it's clearer sort of what's actually happening versus when you're in this wellness culture place where there's a lot of Rhetoric about what's natural or about healing things holistically and only doing alternative types of approaches and the kind of new age spirituality piece and all of that.
It's like it makes it a lot harder, I think to tease apart what is dieting and disordered eating versus what is maybe a genuine ethical choice. And like you said, there's so much gray area in there and so much sliding between the two. And it's not a binary thing to come out of wellness culture and to see it for what it is I think takes a lot of work and takes maybe a certain kind of orientation or a certain lens on recovery that maybe is not so standard in a lot of eating disorder treatment or sort of even general anti-diet spaces in a lot of cases. So I'm curious if anything resonates in that for you and how you were able to shift your focus a little bit.
Leah Kern: Yeah, absolutely. I would say the biggest thing for me was lived experience. As I started to dip my toes in loosening my grip on wellness and rigidity, I started to feel better. I started to feel actually well versus when I was doing everything that I was told was going to make me feel well. And so that little bit of connecting to, huh, actually this feels much better and more peaceful and less stressful, gave me the momentum and the self-belief to keep going. And that in combination with in college, I met two women who are now my best friends still, who were so unique in that they were sort of unicorns in the sense that they arrived to college at 18 years old, almost completely untouched by diet-culture, wellness culture. And they both benefit from thin privilege. That's absolutely a part of it. But they just had unique upbringings.
I now deeply know both their families and it makes a lot of sense to me. And I would see them just go to the dining hall and one of them would be like, Hmm, what's the special today? That looks good. Cool. And they just seemed so carefree about it. And the more time I spent with them, this is kind of almost the exact foil to my experience studying abroad in high school where it was the more time I spent with these people, the more I learned disordered behaviors, these two best friends in college. The more time I spent with them, the more I was like, they're fine. They're eating whatever they're doing, whatever. They're not rigid about exercise. They don't even know what a superfood is, and they are just fine. In fact, they seem much more peaceful than I am, which obviously is complex.
It's not just about food. It's also genetics and upbringing and all the things. But yeah, I remember some big landmark moments happening with them of there was this cafe on campus and they had these giant cookies and one of these two friends between classes, she was like, do you want to get a coffee and a cookie? And I was like, whoa, that's insane. And we did that and I was just like, oh, this is lovely. And I feel socially connected and that's beneficial for my health. Starting to see the social determinants of health and how connecting with a loved one over a cookie is beneficial for your health, it's beneficial for your stress levels, for your overall wellness. And so I just started to have these hits of seeing it play out either in my own life or observing people who I admire. And I started to realize that it wasn't all about food and exercise. There was so much more that contributed to authentic wellness than I had been led to believe.
Christy Harrison: That's beautiful. It sounds like your anxiety started to lessen a little bit through that process, but maybe wasn't totally gone. I want to talk a little bit more about the role of your anxiety in your relationship with food, but also you shared with me that recently you started taking an SSRI for anxiety and that it took you years to work up the courage to do that. So I'm curious what role you think wellness culture and your experience with wellness played in keeping you from trying that sooner?
Leah Kern: Yeah. I feel really passionate about this and it's very current, so my anxiety has shape shifted and evolved over time. It was pretty much hidden when I was in the depths of disordered eating because it was all being channeled into food When I healed my relationship with food and made it over the main hump of the work, my anxiety, it was kind of dormant for a little while, which could have been related to so many things, but it was the season of life that I was in, being surrounded by friends and being out of my family of origin, which was quite activating for my anxiety though of course I love them. I can very much see where it comes from for me, but it really resurfaced and it would kind of like, I might get this metaphor wrong, but I'm thinking of a parasite that needs a host.
There'd be different hosts, food being one of the earliest, and then a pretty toxic relationship that I was in. College was totally a host of the parasite that is anxiety for a period of time. But where it really started to surface when I finished college, did my dietetic internship, I moved to New York and it was pretty much, again, it had a host while I was in my internship. It was like I was doing my rotations, and so I could channel my anxiety into that. And then after I finished my internship, shortly after I started my business, which was a big source of being able to channel it, and it was really in the last few years that my business became more stable and less of a place for me to channel my anxiety into that. My anxiety kind of surfaced more. And I spent years in two years with my therapist who's wonderful, and it was a whole journey of ultimately having this nagging feeling that no amount of reflection and talk therapy was going to touch this part of it that I always call this creepy feeling.
That's how I always describe it to my therapist. It was just this lingering spookiness that it felt like was always following me around and ultimately got to a place where I had a pretty, actually with those two best friends, we go on hiking trips every summer and that we were in Big Sur this past summer, and I had a really just scary anxiety episode, I guess you could call it. And I said to both of them, I was like, I know when we get out of the woods, it was a week long trip, and this was on the first night. I said to them, I know when we get out of the woods, I'm going to have rose colored lenses and be like, oh, it wasn't that bad. Please don't let me forget how intense and scary that was. And they did, and we talked a lot about it.
And that ultimately led me to be like, if I never try anxiety medication, I will always wonder, and I compared it a lot to my relationship with food healing. I was thinking, what if when I try anxiety medication, I'm like, oh my God, this is how people feel like, whoa, I'm living in this whole new kind of wavelength. And that was exactly how I felt when I healed my relationship with food. Like, oh my God, this is how people feel. And so I felt like I really owed myself at least the chance to try, and it has been so supportive for me. And so life-changing in a pretty subtle way, but in a really meaningful way. To me, my partner notices. And I feel like without all of that kind of stewing Rhetoric about natural and do it yourself, it's personal responsibility. You shouldn't need a medication.
You should be able to exercise and journal and meditate. I would've potentially tried it sooner. And I'm not the kind of person who's kind of, I don't know, looks back and is like, oh, I wish I had it sooner because I don't. I see kind of my story playing out in the way it did for a reason. But I do think it's important to talk about, for anyone listening who feels like a barrier to trying a real evidence-based medication for mental health like an SSRI is that feeling of shame. You should be able to do this yourself, or you should be able to do it naturally.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, that is such a huge barrier, I think, for a lot of people, and I'm so glad you were able to overcome that and do something that feels really right for you and feels like it's helping. What do you think helped you get over that hurdle?
Leah Kern: Yeah, again, I think it's seeking out examples of people who I admire and trust, who disclose that they are taking medication for mental health and kind of gathering examples and stories and sort of proof for myself that, look, you can be a fully functioning human being. You can be a wonderful human being. This doesn't make you bad. This doesn't mean you're doing anything wrong. So gathering those stories and examples for myself, which is sort of similar to how I moved out of wellness culture in the first place of seeking out examples. And I mean, what's going on deeper than seeking out examples and seeking comfort and validation and knowing you're not alone is shifting neural pathways of like, look, it doesn't have to be what you've kind of been indoctrinated to think it has to be, which is you're this terrible person who can't figure it out on yourself and has to have medication. It can look different. And I think that really starts with shifting your feed if you're on social media, who you follow, how they talk about things, shifting who you surround yourself with or the examples you're seeking out.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, that makes so much sense. I really appreciate you sharing that, and I think hopefully your example will help other people maybe be a little drop in the bucket of evidence that it's okay to take medication for mental health, and you don't need to white knuckle it or do it naturally, or there's nothing wrong with taking it. I think you're so right about the social media piece too. I think about that a lot as people get so stuck in one type of world and one type of way of seeing things, and there's this lens on the world, I think that you can get through social media communities where it feels like this is just how it is, and there's no way out. There's nothing other than this. It feels like that's the way you have to be and the way everything has to be. And I've had so many experiences like that in my life with different things, with health related things and food, and also just life stuff, thinking that my life had to be set up in a certain way and work had to be in a certain way or whatever, and then realizing, oh, no, there's different ways to approach this and I can make it easier on myself.
It doesn't always have to be this way, and I can ask for help and I can accept help. That's such a powerful thing. But I think for me personally too, getting away from social media I think has been a huge key to unlocking how my life can be different, how things can look different, and how I don't have to just do things the same way as everybody else does.
Leah Kern: Yeah, Christy, you've been such an inspiration for me, and it's a very current thing. So I think this is the link that I went down. So I think I went from your Substack to Lee, From America, what's Lee Tilghman, and then found this woman who teaches you how to leave social media Amelia.
Christy Harrison: Yes, she's coming on the podcast.
Leah Kern: Okay, awesome. And really connected. Totally went crazy listening to all her episodes and was like, yes, yes, yes. This is the next thing for me. I actually met with her yesterday and am taking that step planning to leave by my birthday, which is inspired by her. She left on her birthday, my birthday's in March. So you've been such an inspiration. And actually on that hike where my anxiety was really intense, I was listening to downloaded podcasts that I had on my phone to try and suit my anxiety, and one of the ones I had downloaded I think was Lee, and she was talking about leaving social media. Plus I was in the woods for a week with no social media. So I was just having so many thoughts about it. And I really think that that is going to be a crucial part of releasing all of these aspirational ideals. And it goes so much beyond food of, like you said, how you structure your day. Should you be journaling and drinking this much water before you do movement or all these little rules that there can just be this deep undercurrent of shame of not doing it the way that other people say you should or that would be the most optimized.
Christy Harrison: And I think it goes beyond for me too, it's gone beyond even food and lifestyle stuff, but how I'm supposed to show up in the world, how I'm supposed to talk about certain things, the stride, see with which I'm supposed to speak. All of that I think has been to release that and to not feel like I have to just make a statement about every single issue or that I have to be present in a certain way on social media, that I have to use my platform in a certain way, just to be able to let go of that pressure and to feel like what actually feels right to me, what actually is going to be supportive of my life and my wellbeing and my mental health. I think that has been huge. And it's funny because I had long noticed and critiqued the role of social media in people's relationships with food and people's relationships with wellness and health practices, but I think it was such a light bulb moment when I realized, oh, but I'm doing the same thing in my relationship with these other aspects of life. I'm just falling into the same traps, and it's so easy to see it in this other area of life where I've dedicated my career to helping unmask some of those cultural forces. But it's bigger than that. It can happen to all of us in so many different areas of our life.
Leah Kern: And it's so similar to diet-culture in that you can try everything. You can set all of the limits on your phone and the boundaries and do all the things and delete the app, but you're going to keep coming back to it. And that's not your fault. It's because it's the nature of the app. Just like when you keep trying and failing, trying and failing diets, it's the nature of the diet. It's not you. But I'm so curious if you're comfortable sharing what the moment for you was of being like, I know I want to get off.
Christy Harrison: It was really a steady buildup, I think, of moments. It wasn't like one. I mean, there were a couple where when I had just given birth and I was off social media for maternity leave and then popped back on real quick for something and was just met with sort of an onslaught of hard, difficult, yucky, I don't know, it feels like algorithmically fueled anger. That was one thing. It became so clear because I was in my little maternity bubble and I was also healing from a traumatic birth experience and bonding with my baby, and there's just so much real life, real deep stuff that was happening there. And then to come on and see this stuff that just was so antithetical to what I was trying to do. I think that was powerful. That actually was kind of a moment for me to crystallize things.
But I think before that, it had been a buildup of moments. It was like I fell down the stairs once I was checking social media on my phone. I would sometimes wake up in the morning and my phone would be in my hand, and I was like, I know I put that on the nightstand or sometimes even in a drawer, why is it in my hand? What am I? And I would be already going to Instagram before I was even really awake. So there were some moments there where I was just like, this is not okay. This doesn't feel good. I'd be checking it in the bathroom while I was getting ready and I'd make myself late for something because I was like, oh, I just have to respond to this one comment. So those things all, I was like, huh, this is interesting. As it happened, I was like, that doesn't seem good.
But it wasn't quite there yet to where I felt like I could actually leave or I could actually do something about it. And even the time when I was on maternity leave and felt just bowled over by how yucky it all was, I had been reading Jenny O'Dell's book, how to Do Nothing. And so I was like, and I had seen the social dilemma and I was reading a lot and steeping a lot in this dismantling of social media and critiquing of social media space. So I was actually starting to think about the possibility of leaving. I think that was part of it too, where I think it hit me in a different way because I had started to open up to the possibility that things could be different. I had started to see models of how things could be different, whereas before, when I fell down the stairs or when I woke up with my phone in my hand or whatever, I wasn't seeing those sorts of models.
I wasn't seeing that it was possible to leave. I was just like, guess this is how it is. That sucks. But that's the career I've chosen. It wasn't, wasn't a possibility. And I feel for anyone who's early in a media career or in a career of any kind that requires self-promotion, having your own business of any kind, I think it's harder to leave social media in that place. And I think we need to recognize and honor that too. People might be listening thinking that they should do that, or this is just another thing they need to feel guilty about and a stick to beat themselves with or measure themselves against. And I think that's not always the case for everybody. Not everybody's in the position where they're able to leave or to step back. I haven't even fully left. I've just stepped way back and I've stopped using it.
I've stopped having it on my phone. I don't feel the pull do it anymore. I feel like I've given up an addiction. It really feels like that, and I've had to create boundaries for myself to do that. So far. One of the boundaries has not been leaving entirely, and we'll see how that goes. So I just want to say I empathize with anyone too, for whom it's hard or feels impossible to leave. I think that's probably part of the reason I also didn't see it as a possibility before is that I needed it for my living. And that felt very important and very real.
Leah Kern: I'm really glad you said that. The piece about not wanting to give people another thing to feel shameful about of like, Ugh, now I have to feel bad that I'm not off social media. I think that there's different seasons of business for people. I also think people are different, and I consider myself a highly sensitive person, and that doesn't really mix well with constant feedback. So I think that there's differences in how people, their nervous system responds. But what I also love, and I guess by the time this airs, you'll have had Amelia's episode already. Even if you don't fully want to leave social media or if you don't fully have the privilege to leave social media, there are ways to not have all your eggs in one basket and start to think creatively about sharing your words and your ideas. And I think that that's worthwhile no matter where you are on your journey.
Christy Harrison: Totally. And I think her work is so helpful with that because it does acknowledge people are in different places, and it's not putting pressure on people to totally leave, but it's just how can you build these other avenues of reaching people or other avenues of marketing or work or whatever it is that don't involve social media.
Leah Kern: Yeah.
Christy Harrison: Well, this podcast is called Rethinking Wellness, and I've been asking all my guests, how are you rethinking wellness or how have you rethought wellness in light of your work, in light of your personal experience? And I'm so curious to hear your answer to that question.
Leah Kern: I love a good question that you ask everyone. So I think of in my work, I think the evolution of my understanding of anti-diet health at every size has evolved so much from when I first learned about it as a freshman in college. And I think I kind of went through a pretty traditional track of, oh, it's all about just have a donut. And really leaning into showing that side of it to understanding much more deeply about the social justice ties and the roots of diet-culture and wellness culture in racism and weight stigma and the oppression of people with multiple marginalized identities. So the more deeply I've gotten into it, the more I've come to understand how complex it is and how much contributes to the anti-diet health in every size space. And I think I bring that up in response to this question because if you would've asked me when I was 14, what wellness meant, I would've said eating buddhaful and meditating, and I don't know, manifesting the very much new age woo stuff.
I was very into that. And now I see wellness as really not about food at all, and honestly not really even about movement at all. I see it as so personal. And to me, it mostly comes down to self-compassion, and whatever you're doing, holding yourself with as much self-compassion as you can of whatever it is, speaking to yourself kindly and not shaming yourself or comparing yourself, which I know is so much easier said than done, but that's how I've been kind of leaning into in my own life, of honoring my differing capacity for work on different days. And if it's a day when, for whatever reason I'm feeling more low energy, not shaming myself for having things left on my to-do list, or for working in bed, like laying in bed and working instead of feeling like this isn't optimized, or I could be doing more, especially as a solopreneur, it's like you always could be doing more, but really, really leaning into meeting myself where I am and helping share that with my clients as well.
Christy Harrison: I love that. That's a really beautiful answer. Thank you so much for everything you shared. It's really lovely to talk with you, and I could talk with you for much longer. We'd love to have you stick around if you can, to do a bonus episode and chat through a few more questions.
Leah Kern: Absolutely.
Christy Harrison: Great. So we'll jump over to that for paid subscribers right now. But in the meantime, can you let everyone know where they can find you and learn more about your work?
Leah Kern: Yeah, absolutely. So as I'm moving away from Instagram, I'm moving away from sharing my Instagram s the primary way to connect with me, though there are a ton of archives of content. So if you do want to check that out, it's @leahkern.rd. The best places would be my website, leahkernrd.com, which has the link to subscribe to my newsletter, also my podcast Shoulders Down podcast, which Christy was a guest on episode aired yesterday of the time. We're recording this, and I'd also love to share a personal plug of a place you can find me, if that feels okay.
Christy Harrison: Of course. Yeah.
Leah Kern: So I've been really leaning into this idea that as a human being, we're dynamic and I don't just have to be this Intuitive, Eating dietitian and have that be the only thing I ever talk about or share about. And I started a personal Substack where I share personal writing, which has felt really nurturing and fulfilling. So if you're interested in hearing from me on topics, aside from Intuitive, Eating and body image and all those things, you can find me at leahkern.substack.com.
Christy Harrison: Amazing. We'll put links to that in the show notes. Welcome to Substack. I'm glad you're there too. It's been a cool community.
Leah Kern: Yeah, I'm loving it so far. Yeah.
Christy Harrison: Yeah. I mean, it is kind of like social media too, but it's I think a lot less toxic and negative at this point.
Leah Kern: Yeah. It's like you have to slow down because to read a full essay or a piece, you really have to slow down versus scrolling content and it's getting fast and you're flying at you. The pace of it feels very different.
Christy Harrison: It does, yeah. It feels like opening a letter and sitting down to read it or something. That's nice.
Leah Kern: I love that. Yeah.
Christy Harrison: Well, thank you so much again for being here. It's lovely to talk with you and we'll continue the conversation in a second.
Leah Kern: Thanks so much, Christy.
Christy Harrison: So that's our show! Thanks so much to our amazing guest, and to you for tuning in. If you've enjoyed this conversation, I’d be so grateful if you could take a moment to subscribe, rate, and review the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you’re listening.
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This episode was brought to you by my new book, The Wellness Trap: Break Free from Diet Culture, Disinformation, and Dubious Diagnoses and Find Your True Well-Being, which is now available wherever books are sold Just go to christyharrison.com/thewellnesstrap to learn more and buy the book or just go into your favorite local bookstore and ask for it there.
And if you’re looking to heal your relationship with food and break free from diet and wellness culture, I'd love for you to check out my online course, Intuitive Eating Fundamentals. Learn more and enroll now at christyharrison.com/course. That's christyharrison.com/course.
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. Our album art is by Tara Jacoby and theme song written and performed by Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs.
Thanks again for listening! Take care.
Anxiety Dieting, Disordered Eating, and the Crunchy-Granola-to-Wellness Pipeline with Leah Kern