Religious-ethics scholar Liz Bucar, author of Beyond Wellness, joins us to discuss the religious roots of wellness practices, why bringing religion back into “spiritual” wellness spaces might be the key to promoting true well-being (even for non-religious people), and how the very human need for control shows up in diet and wellness culture.
For paid subscribers, we do a deeper dive into how religion has contributed to Americans’ troubled relationship with food and how religious foodways can also help us heal from diet culture, with some detours into the longevity movement, GLP-1s and the thin ideal, and more.
Liz Bucar is a religious ethicist and professor of religion at Northeastern University, as well as a certified intenSati and Kripalu yoga instructor and the author of the new book Beyond Wellness. Her popular writing has appeared in The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Times, Teen Vogue, and The Wall Street Journal, and she is the author of four books, including the award-winning Stealing My Religion and Pious Fashion. She lives in Brookline, Massachusetts. For more about how religion shapes us all, even if we don’t believe, subscribe to Liz’s newsletter at LizBucar.com.
Resources and References
Contains affiliate links to Bookshop.org, where I earn a small commission for any purchases made.
Christy’s second book, The Wellness Trap: Break Free from Diet Culture, Disinformation, and Dubious Diagnoses and Find Your True Well-Being
Subscribe on Substack for extended interviews and more
Liz’s new book, Beyond Wellness
Liz’s newsletter, Religion, Reimagined
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: Liz Bucar, welcome to Rethinking Wellness. I’m so excited to talk with you.
Liz Bucar: Oh, thanks for having me. I’m excited too.
Christy Harrison: You’ve written a book with a fascinating thesis, which is that we need to bring the religious roots back to wellness practices even if we ourselves are not religious. And I’m not, so I was really interested to read this book in light of that. But before we dive into the book, I’d love to just hear a little bit about your background and especially your experiences with wellness and diet culture.
Liz Bucar: Oh, okay. So let me start with a little bit of my background in terms of why I wrote this book and why I talk about religion, and then I’ll talk about my background in wellness and diet culture. Okay, that’s a whole other bucket. So I’m a professor of religion, so I have a PhD in religion, but I came to the study of religion as always kind of an outsider. I actually came from nonprofit social justice work in DC, and I was working on reproductive health, particularly in Latin America. I’d lived in Brazil as a kid, and so I had this real interest in Latin America and women’s health. And if you’re interested in reproductive health in South America, the Catholic church is a player. It’s not something you can kind of be like, oh, they don’t matter. They’re just a super important cultural institutional player. So I got interested in religion as sort of like, if I want to do this advocacy, religion is part of the equation. I have to know, understand these religious institutions and the religious teachings.
And when I went off to grad school, that’s what I was thinking of. Not so much that religion was a problem or an obstacle, but maybe it could be a resource to NGO work. But myself at that point, no religious affiliation. So it wasn’t like I went to do a ministry degree. And then most of my career, I became a comparativist, meaning I studied many religions and did field work in Iran and Turkey and Indonesia. I did a lot of work on Islam, learned Persian and Arabic, became more like an anthropologist of religion. I’d go in and embed myself in communities and do interviews and do focus groups, but always again as an outsider, really interested in ethics and norms and values.
And then, maybe this is a midlife thing, but as I’ve gotten to this point in my life, I realized reflecting on all that work and thinking and working in religious communities, even though I don’t have religious affiliation and I’m not really looking for one or planning to get one, I guess I realized that my worldview has changed because of this.
It changes how I interpret what’s going on, what I see going on, and also how I want to respond. And so this book Beyond Wellness comes out of—like you, I don’t have religious affiliation, I don’t consider myself religious—but comes out of all that work and teaching and research. And that had me see that there’s all this embedded logic in wellness culture that no one’s really paying attention to that’s a little bit icky that I want to uncover. And then also the religious traditions, if you go past mainstream white Protestants and Christian nationalism, the other forms of religion and religious communities have some resources to push back and help, me anyway, think about what does real wellbeing look like beyond what I’ve been sold as wellness?
And then in terms of what you asked about my interactions with wellness culture and diet culture: So just broadly, I’m 52, so I’ve been sold wellness culture most of my life in very gendered terms, whether or not that’s perfection, whether or not that’s about beauty or thinness, particularly recently longevity. As a midlife woman, everyone’s worried about my bone density and apparently all the cardio I was told to do my entire life was ruining my cortisol levels and I should have been lifting heavy the whole time. So there’s all this health advice I feel like I’ve been fed my entire life. I am that person that the Goop algorithm targets. I feel like Gwyneth Paltrow is all over my feed. And I think that I have so my reactions to that as someone who’s now in their midlife. I was just being sold a bunch of stuff that in some ways didn’t work or didn’t give me what it promised, but also was too low of a bar.
I want something beyond whatever hitting those markers that I was being told to hit. And I want to push back against some of that idea of feminized perfection that is just not really about my flourishing. So that’s a general reason for the book.
And then diet culture, I mean, we’ll probably get into this, but I just found it interesting. I have never had a diagnosed eating disorder, but I was sort of thinking I don’t really know any woman who has not always had diet culture affect them negatively in some way. I mean, I think we’re always dancing with the edges, even if you don’t have disordered eating, dancing with the edges of, well, how do you consume food? How do you restrict food? I think about food too much because I think that women just are, particularly women are targeted with diet culture. So I have grown up in the ‘80s and ‘90s and got fed all that toxic diet culture junk.
And then I think even now, I mean part of this is family. My mother talks a lot about food and body size. My grandmother did as well. She moralized body size. But then more closely related to me, and I do talk about this in the book, which is why I feel okay talking about in podcasts, is the closest women in my life have all had a diagnosed eating disorder, by which I mean my two sisters, my sister-in-law, and my teenage daughter. And I wrote this book—in fact, I edited the chapter about eating when she was hospitalized, which is just very fresh while I’m writing it and still very fresh for her. She’s still in recovery. I’m looking for someone who hasn’t been touched at all, but even when I say I don’t have a eating disorder, it’s certainly part of my life.
I grew up with one sister who passed out in high school kind of thing, classic sort of anorexic, another sister who was bulimic for a long period of time and nobody knew. And then my sister-in-law didn’t come out about it until recently when I was writing this book and she read a version of this chapter I wrote about eating and was like, “I just want you to know.”
So yeah, I’m kind of in it with everybody trying to figure out our way through what eating well looks like and what real wellness looks like and how food can be more than something that I need to control or restrict or track or whatever and how it can be about community and savoring and coming together. And I actually think that religions, and we’ll get into that, I think that religions have some resources to offer us on that.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, for sure. It’s such an interesting thesis. And to your point about everyone you know being touched by it, I too have had the same experience. I mean, I had an eating disorder myself that was not diagnosed and then about a decade of disordered eating, having grown up as an intuitive eater, having grown up not really touched by it, but having people around me certainly have severe struggles with eating disorders. And many of my friends I didn’t know at the time were struggling, including some of my punk rock alternative friends in high school who from the outside seemed like they weren’t trying to adhere to any sort of beauty ideal and in fact were doing the antithesis of it, but then actually secretly behind the scenes were struggling with their own internalized beliefs about how their bodies should look and what they should eat and what was good and bad and all of that stuff.
So it definitely was around me at all times. And my mom was not a severe dieter, but certainly was always talking about wanting to lose a little bit of weight.
Liz Bucar: Yeah, exactly. Same.
Christy Harrison: Those last X pounds or whatever from the baby or whatever it was, and just eating a little bit less than the rest of us. And I definitely clocked that at a certain point, she would serve herself less or that she would leave some things off her plate and that the purpose of that, that wasn’t just because she didn’t like them or she wasn’t hungry that night or something, but it was that she was looking to change her body. So all of that was swirling around me as I grew up. And as soon as I gained a little bit of weight (because I had all this thin privilege when I was growing up and people made fun of me for being able to eat whatever I wanted and stay thin), at a certain point in college, I gained a little bit of weight and then it was just right there.
All of that diet culture messaging was right there in my mind, ready to go. And I fell pretty quickly into disordered eating and what would’ve been diagnosable as an eating disorder if anyone had caught it, but for various reasons nobody did. And I was fortunate to be able to pull back from that edge quickly as a result of many things that I’ve talked about before. But yeah, it does, I think, touch us all in some way. And it’s really interesting.
Liz Bucar: And that’s so annoying to me. The more I realize that, I’m like, there’s not really any woman I know who’s not—
Christy Harrison: And increasingly men too, or people of any gender really. I think people just, there’s different ways that it’s presented in different cultures, different genders, but it touches us all in some way and it’s really insidious.
Liz Bucar: My neighbor is actually, so she’s in adolescent health. She’s actually in the same practice that my daughter saw, basically her boss in her practice. But she mostly treats young boys. And it’s not anorexia. It’s more the anxiety around eating. So very, very, very narrow amounts of food that they eat. I forget what the diagnosis is, it begins with an A.
Christy Harrison: Is it ARFID?
Liz Bucar: Yeah, ARFID. Thank you. And then how very common that is becoming, probably way underdiagnosed previously with boys. Oh, he’s just a picky eater, and that anxiety is showing up. So yeah, I think I think about it as gendered because I have a partner who still—he is like you were in high school. He’s very intuitive eater, eats what he wants to. He’s been the exact same size forever and never has felt that noise or that judgment or whatever, that shame. We’re going to talk about that, all the different ways in which diet culture has done us dirty.
Christy Harrison: I know. It’s so problematic. And yeah, let’s definitely get into that. I want to talk all about how diet culture shows up in wellness spaces and the sort of religious underpinnings of it as well, because you have a really fascinating section about that. But I think before we get there, I want to talk about some other things that you highlight in the book that are really interesting because the central questions that you ask in your words are, “if we ignore the religious context and content of our spiritual techniques, are they missing their special sauce? Could they be even more powerful if we added the religion back in? Is there a way to do so without joining a religious community or declaring a religious identity?” I thought that was really interesting just as a way to frame this whole exploration of wellness practices, whether it’s yoga, meditation, food, or various other things. What made you start to ask these questions?
Liz Bucar: Yeah, I guess I think I was starting to realize that a lot of the stuff, I mean, this is my religion nerd brain turning on. I was realizing a lot of stuff I was getting sold in the wellness spaces, first of all, there were techniques that were getting plucked from particularly indigenous and Asian religious and cultural communities and being kind of packaged as like, “Oh, there’s this new thing.” I was like, “It’s not that new.” But also, “don’t worry because it’s not religion. It’s spirituality.” So partly this is a branding issue. I realized things are being called spiritual or wellness practices because people don’t like the word religion. They don’t like religion for good reasons. I say religion has a PR problem and it’s well deserved. There are people who are deconstructing higher-control upbringings in religious communities. There are politics of Christian white nationalism.
For my students, I know a big thing for them is LGBT issues within some religious communities not lining up with their core values. There’s a lot of institutions in general—people don’t like institutions. They don’t like religious institutions. They don’t like the idea of hierarchy or clergy. So things were kind of, I felt like I was getting marketed stuff that to me looked watered down, but also just out of context to practice it. So no longer a community, no longer an ethical framework, no longer a history, no longer the metaphysics—just the practice, just the technique. Just do this thing. Don’t worry about it, just do the sound bath. Don’t worry about it, just do the yoga because it’s so wise and ancient and it’ll help fix you.
And I do all that stuff. I’m into all that stuff. This is not an anti-wellness book.
I do all these things. I made it very easy for, I am a certified yoga teacher. I do all this stuff and I like all this stuff, but I just realized that the yoga classes that I like the most start to feel more devotional. And I get more out of yoga, the more I know some of this context. So that was part of it. Me trying to think about, well, if psychedelics are your thing, what about psychedelics in a religious container would make psychedelics work better for you and maybe come with less risk and maybe be more aimed at the collective and the community? Because a lot of wellness culture is focused on the individual, as if we can be well alone in isolation—that’s not how it works. And then also just because I’m interested in ethics and norms and values, that the central value of the wellness industry is sort of just self-optimization, whether or not that’s beauty or thinness or longevity or whatever, peak performance at work.
But for me, again, that’s just too narrow of a view of fully human flourishing. What does that look like? And what does it mean to show up and be a good person in community? And what can some of these practices do to reinforce those ideas I have about what it means to have a good life? So that’s part of where the book comes from, but I do know it’s a little bit of uphill battle. I mean, that quote that you just read is a good example because my students, for example, they like the spiritual practices. They’re really drawn to them. They’re intrigued by either if they’re exotic or they think they might be nice quick fixes, or not even quick fixes—they’re willing to put in the work, but they don’t want to get involved in the mess of religion. And I actually think that it’s wrong that you’re safe just because you’re doing a spiritual practice and not a religious practice.
There’s all kinds of bad abuse that can happen in a spiritual community, for example, or a wellness community. I think we’re seeing a little bit of the death of the wellness guru, the spiritual guru. We’re a little bit... That jig is up. But also maybe we shouldn’t be so scared of religion. I just think there was a lot of stuff left behind to make these things more digestible to your average non-religious American, for example. And some of that stuff that made it more digestible could be stuff that you would find valuable. Not a one-size-fits-all. Maybe some stuff works for you and other stuff doesn’t. But there was a lot left on the table when we just took the physical practice, for example, and did it, or we just took this one idea about food and eating and applied it to diet culture without more of the framework there.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, totally. I’m of two minds about this, and it was really interesting to grapple with this idea as I read your book. I think you made a lot of great points about the importance of the ethics and the morality aspect of religion being stripped away and how that can inherently make it more of an individualistic pursuit and takes people out of community and community mindedness. And so I think that’s really important. But then I also think about my experience of yoga, because I’ve been practicing yoga now for, I don’t know, 20 years, something like that, which started in a gym. It started as I was going to physical therapy, I was having a lot of back pain, and my physical therapist prescribed all these exercises that I just did not want to do and found really onerous to do on my own.
And then I thought, well, some of these are—I had taken one yoga class in college and I knew a little bit about yoga and I was like, “Some of these are yoga poses, and maybe I can just go to a yoga class and use that as my physical therapy.” And I tried it and it helped my back a lot. And so I just kept going. And then I moved to a place that was away from that gym. And I was like, “Well, if I want to keep practicing yoga, I have to join a yoga studio.” And so I did, and it happened to be a Jivamukti yoga studio. And I started to get into that world and took a lot of these classes that had more of the religious lineage woven in, I think.
And I don’t know a ton about Jivamukti even still, as opposed to some other lineages, but I know that there were a lot of devotional aspects to it, and there’s also a really strong push towards veganism and that’s central to that style of yoga. And to me at the time who was struggling with an eating disorder, it was really difficult and problematic to be hearing all of that stuff because I didn’t ultimately go vegan, but I did bring in—I felt guilty about eating animal products and would try to [eat vegan] and then not be able to. And so it added to this pressure that I was feeling and this layering on of different diet rules that was a characteristic of my eating disorder and I think many other people’s eating disorders, where it’s like you just take bits and pieces from all the diets you’ve ever tried and those just stack up in your mind.
And so you’re like, “Well, I’m supposed to be doing this, but also I really shouldn’t be doing that.” And you just get painted into a corner. And so for me, I think the ethics of it was really beautiful in some way about thinking about non-harming and the mark we leave on the world and the way that we affect others, other beings. And it also just sort of dovetailed with a lot that was going on for me at the time that was really tricky. It got very tangled up with the eating disorder, I think. So I’m curious to hear your thoughts on how we can engage in some of the more—and this is also like I’m a white woman. I’m a lifelong non-religious white woman. I have some Jewish heritage, but I’ve never practiced any religion. And so how is it that I ended up there?
And for a while was considering myself kind of Buddhist and doing some Buddhist meditation and stuff as well. But just that is another problematic layer to it. So yeah, I’m just curious if you have any thoughts on that piece of how can we think about bringing in religious practices or some of the more the actual religious aspects to these practices that we might think of as just wellness in a way that is also honoring where we’re coming from, especially for people with disordered eating, because I know a lot of folks listening are in that boat.
Liz Bucar: Yeah. Okay. So that second part’s interesting. I hadn’t thought about that before. So one thing to note, the book I wrote before this book was a book about cultural appropriation and religion. So the book was called Stealing My Religion, and there’s also a chapter about yoga in that book. So that book was a lot about thinking about harms that happen because of our entitlement and privilege that we hold as white women and yoga students that are places of maintaining white privilege or civility or not politicized or just spiritual bypassing, all kinds of problematic things. And then this book was more like, okay, I see that. I’ve leaned into my guilt about that, so where do we go from there? And so we just take the example of yoga. I mean, I basically do this with every single practice and there’s seven different practices in this book.
Everything from, like you said, yoga and mindfulness to AA, eating, exercise and psychedelics. But if we just stick with yoga, so part of this, in every case, I think part of what adding, say, devotional aspects, if the word religion makes you itchy, is partly finding a community or a teacher that is practicing in a way that I think lines up with your core values and somewhere, what you want to get out of or what you want to learn from so that you’re not doing this on your own. There is not one answer to how to make yoga more devotional or make it look more religious. This book isn’t about “there is this essence, this authentic essence, and if you reach back this many years and do exactly this,” because yoga itself is this dynamic always in flux practice and it’s not based in one religion. It arises within this matrix of many religions in the South Asian and Asian context.
But just if we stick with one little piece, say we wanted to stick with ethics and we want to think about values and norms, and how could we make our yoga practice not just heal our backs?
And I should say I also started yoga because of my back. My mom was a yoga teacher back before that was cool. She was one of these OG white yoga teachers when that wasn’t anything anybody did. And so I’d seen yoga, but I didn’t do it myself until I had a back injury from rowing in college. And it also helped heal me physically. But if we wanted something more than just physical healing, if we started going a lot and we realized, wow, this is really doing something cool to my central nervous system, or I’m really finding a time to reflect, then we can start thinking about how yoga fit into this larger devotional practice that had many different limbs and many different things that people were doing.
And it was a physical practice, most of these physical practices that I look at, that was meant to remake you into a certain kind of person. So all that other stuff that was going on around yoga, the observations, restraints, some of the ethics, for example, ethical framework or some of the meditative stuff and the yoga postures were not just meant to heal your back and heal your body, but they were ways to change who you are. And so thinking about yoga that way, if you do it within a community or with a teacher, how am I trying to use this practice also to remake myself? And I like to start with a very simple example because people have heard of it before, the yamas and niyamas. So these are the restraints and so the things you shouldn’t do and the things that you should do according to the eight limbs of yoga of Patanjali.
I don’t mean that you should go back and read these ancient texts and find out what their lists are. I mean for my students, for example, I’m like, what is your list? Putting the mat aside for a second, what’s the list of things that you would like to make sure you are doing and things you’re not doing? So non-harm is a good example. That comes up in the classic text. What does non-harm look like to you? What does moderation—this is probably the trickiest one for people with food. So moderation in the classic text is about sexual moderation. In some yoga studios, it’s more about food and stuff. But moderation doesn’t have to mean restriction. It can also mean abundance or freedom or intuition or whatever for eating. So I think it’s taking that extra step to be like, okay, well, what are my list of observations and my list of restraints?
What are my yamas? What are my niyamas? What are my things I want to be doing more in my life or things I want to be doing less in my life? And then how can I reflect on those, brainstorm those, journal about those? And then maybe when the yoga teacher asks you to set the intention in the beginning of class and everyone kind of rolls their eyes usually or whatever, but actually use that time. Today I’m going to think about this thing from my list and I’m going to use my practice and my breath work to imprint this value on me. And I’m going to come out afterwards when I’m in that great post-yoga bliss and I’m going to try not to be so reactive to my kid, for example. Or I’m going to try to think about what moderation might look like in this aspect of my life in terms of whatever, checking email or social media, whatever it is.
So I think it’s just that extra layer of not just doing the physical practice that you were told is a thing that will make you well, but also thinking about what that physical practice did in a bigger container and context. And could you also do that practice in that way, in a way that fits into your life and who it is that you’re trying to become? It’s a little theoretical what I just explained, but that’s just an example of what I mean when I say I’m not trying to give you here’s the romanticized, ancient, authentic, pure version of what yoga needs to look like for it to be proper. I just think that there’s all kinds of different ways of linking yoga, the physical practice of yoga, the asanas to the bigger practice of yoga so that we’re not just working on self-optimization or a good yoga butt or healing our back.
Healing our back is important. Great. I love that. I love mobility. I was actually just thinking I should be doing yoga more often than I am because I’ve been weightlifting so much I’m kind of getting stiff. All those physical things are important. It’s just a floor, not a ceiling of what I think yoga can do for people who really want to dive into it in whatever aspects that they find interesting.
Christy Harrison: Well, yeah, and I think about my own evolution with it where it started off with back pain, but I think for me, the back pain and a lot of it was holding and gripping and tightness throughout my body in various places that my back was taking on a lot that it shouldn’t have been taking on because of other places that were so tight and overworked. And overexercise was a big part of my life at that point too.
Liz Bucar: Right. There’s your moderation.
Christy Harrison: Right? Yeah. And starting to practice yoga was a step away from that. And when I did it at first, I would do other things at the gym too. And my yoga teacher would see me afterwards be like, “You’re always working, huh?” And over time I moved away from that and started to realize, I think it was the experience of relaxing into my body and opening up things that were tight and allowing my movement to be more gentle and not push myself to the degree I was, started to help me do that in other aspects of my life as well. And it started to inherently spill off the mat into my life.
Liz Bucar: Yeah, that’s exactly the kind of holistic beyond the asana, beyond the physical practice that we started thinking about. And that idea of what it would mean to allow that ease in different parts of your life. And I love a hot yoga class. I’m not going to pretend like I don’t love a hot yoga class, but there was a period in my life where all I wanted to do was classes that were in 95 degrees. And then you come out and you’re dizzy and it’s like, “Great, I’m dizzy. I must have done it well.” And that’s the kind of yoga class my 18-year-old kid really likes. But then really it’s 95 degrees outside today in Brookline. I do not need to go to a hot yoga class. So what do I need physically and emotionally? And if you want to say spiritually, and mentally, whatever. And what would that look like?
And there are a lot of different things that yoga can offer beyond that power flow, aggressive, athletic. I started doing that. My mom’s like, oh, that’s not yoga. Because to her, yoga was what she did on a braided rug in her living room every morning. And it was that softening and relaxing and quiet time and reflective time in a different kind of way. So there’s a range of different ways different physical practices can do different things. But I love the way you put that. You discovered, again, that value of moderation in the physical practice itself. And then what does that mean for moderation in other parts of your life?
Christy Harrison: Yeah. And that word moderation, which can feel so tricky when it comes to food, really can feel—when I think about the moderation that I needed at that time, it was to just ease up, ease up on my eating, ease up on my exercise, ease up on the restrictions, ease up on all the rules I had for myself. Let myself just be and enjoy and take pleasure in food.
Liz Bucar: Right. And the perfection, maybe the macros aren’t perfect today. I’m starting to hear more advice actually from nutritionists and fitness and wellness influencers even on Instagram that that strictness and that restriction itself is counterproductive. Also, you’re under-nourishing yourself, you’re underfeeding yourself, then your body is reacting problematically to that as well versus living in some ease for yourself, but then also just for the rest of your life. I like the example, or I don’t like the example rather, of Bryan Johnson. And I’m sure your listeners all know who he is, but he’s one of these tech bros who’s spending $2 million a year trying to live forever and has also started a religion where he himself is sort of the center of it. But one thing he says he does is he stops eating 11 o’clock every day, every morning.
Christy Harrison: Crazy.
Liz Bucar: Yeah. I mean, I just can’t imagine. You don’t eat lunch and dinner with anybody ever? Just socially what that does.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, it’s really sad.
Liz Bucar: And so if Bryan Johnson lives 10 years—I don’t think he’s going to make it more than 10 years longer than me, quite frankly. I have longevity genes in my family, so everyone lives to be late 90s, 100. So maybe he makes an extra 10 years than me. But he lived 50 years like this. So thinking too about the good life is not the perfect life, and giving up on that perfection of the perfect eating regime and the perfect physical regime and realizing that the wellness industry has told us that the goal is perfection. They promise perfection. But I think that religious traditions and deeper philosophical traditions acknowledge that that’s not possible. Human life, we’re vulnerable.
We get sick, we have moments of friction. There are bad vibes and good vibes. There’s all kinds of emotions. And that all of that, and it’s messy and we die, and all that stuff is part of the full human life and full flourishing. And I want it all. If Bryan Johnson’s here for another 50 years, I’m here for another 50 years, I think I can have a fuller life. And that’s how I think about religion. They’re my conversation partners. I’m trying to think past what the tech bros are doing and past what Instagram is telling me in terms of wellness and longevity and perfection and whatever, and think about what a full human life looks like. Not just a long life, but a good life. And I don’t mean just by good life, like a happy life, a content life, a really, really fully human life.
And I just think religious communities and thinkers and traditions have thought about that for a long time. So I just find them helpful for being like, “Hey, have you thought about this or tried this kind of thing?” So as a counterweight to what the cultural push is.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, I agree. I think about that a lot with the longevity push and people like Bryan Johnson, who, if you’ve seen that spreadsheet he has of all of his labs or whatever and his supplements and all the things, it just feels very obsessive and compulsive. And I have those tendencies myself and it’s not something that I want to lean into that hard for the rest of my life. That feels like it would just shut down so many other aspects of my life. What do you have to give up to live like that? That’s not for me. And maybe for him and for people like that, I mean, I’m certain that there is some sort of sense of control and pleasure that’s derived from that and a sense of being in charge of all of these things that feel so out of our hands actually much of the time and that really still are, even if you’re tracking all of these metrics, you could die in an accident or there could be something that you’re not tracking or that you were tracking and you’re taking supplements for, and yet it was actually doing the opposite of what you thought it was. And I mean, I think about the previous longevity gurus who’ve died early. There’s a long list of them.
Liz Bucar: I mean, I think it’s also helpful to say, and to be honest, that I also have those tendencies. I wear a wearable, and so I can see all this data about myself. And I find, for example, the sleep information very, very annoying and upsetting. I know I’m not sleeping enough, but it tracks things and I see myself being like, “Well, why is my pace of aging like this week versus last week? And oh, I would like to be nine years younger than I am, not seven.” All this data. And you can just see how that data you can be obsessed about and obsessive. And so how much of that is useful for me? It also has a recovery thing too, which is helpful to be like, “Today, you should take it easy.” But how much of that that I’m also drawn to is really actually just messing with my head?
But the other thing you just said, and I think I also have this tendency, and I wanted to stop a moment, talk about this idea of control, because that was a huge theme that I was worked through in the book and it came up. I mean, it comes up in every chapter because I think that partly what religious worldviews do is push back on this idea, which is very attractive and very intoxicating that we can master our own wellbeing. So if you have a religion or like a theism where God is central to the whole thing, they’re like, “You’re not in charge. God’s in charge.” So I think that in general, that’s part of what putting things back in a religious container does: it helps alleviate the idea of control and I think, ultimately, responsibility. There’s so much pressure we put on ourselves and then like, “Well, I got cancer, what did I do wrong?” No, I mean, these things happen.
It’s not like, or I got dementia, maybe I should have been doing more puzzles when I was young. All this stuff we’re blamed then for just things that happen. Genetics happen, environment happens. But the chapter where that came up the most for me, and I don’t even know if we were really going to talk about this, but it was the chapter about AA.
Christy Harrison: Yes, I was just thinking that, the higher power.
Liz Bucar: Yeah. I’m very vulnerable in this book, so I talk a lot about myself and my family. And that chapter is a lot about my dad who has passed. He died of pancreatic cancer a couple years ago, but he was an alcoholic and he was an alcoholic for whom he could never work the AA program because he just found it too God, too much religion, too much God talk, he’d say. And so I sort of thought about that. What does it mean that we give a lot of people with addiction 12-step programs or we offer them something like AA, which often has—look, I know people say who are in AA that it’s not religious, but it has religious origins. I mean, it just does. It comes out of a Protestant framework. It comes out of something called the Oxford Group; the 12 steps are based on steps to avoid sin. It’s very, very, very Christian in its origins and still in its language. And then also God and higher power is all over that program.
So I try to think about, I wish it had worked for my dad. What could have worked for my dad? What could work for me? And I say that for me, I don’t mean that I struggle, I actually don’t drink at all because my dad drank too much. But again, is there a portable idea from AA that I can use even as a non-religious person? And I really wanted one. I was like, I just got to find something here that would work. And I went to, not AA meetings, but Al-Anon meetings, which are meetings for family and friends.
And what I realized is the core insight, which is very religious, is not necessarily like, “here is the higher power you have to believe in, here is the God you have to believe in.” But you have to believe that you are not God. And that is actually huge. If you actually believe that you’re not God, then you’re not in control. I have this, this is my toxic trait: I think I can solve everything. I think I can fix things. I think I’m a fixer. So realizing that I’m not God and I can’t solve my dad’s addiction problem or I can’t solve my kid’s eating disorder or the anxiety she feels about going to college or my partner, he’s a federal employee. I can’t solve that in this particular—I am not God. And to me, that is—whether or not the religion is theistic or not, the idea of decentering humans and that we’re not in control is an idea I see through every religious tradition I study. And that I think if I can accept that, which I struggle with, that would make a huge difference in my life and my quality of life and my understanding of real wellbeing.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, it’s so true. I mean, oh my gosh, so many threads there that I would love to pull on. When you were talking about that, I’m like, it is really hard to embrace the idea that I am not God when I don’t believe in God. I don’t believe that something out there is—I mean, I do believe in the mystery. I do believe in that there is something going on beyond our control, that pretty much everything is beyond our control. I do believe that. And yet I forget that on a near constant basis because I want to control and I want to have some order in my life. And especially with, I have had so many health issues and I have become pretty anxious about health and a little bit obsessive. And I think part of the work I do, these deep dives into the scientific research and that skillset that I’ve developed, being able to do that was partly from my own desire to understand and control what was going on with me or what was going on for my clients or to just have some semblance of at least get my head around it even if I can’t fix it. And maybe there was some sort of fix to be found in the literature. I think that was part of a drive to do that in the first place too. And now it’s taken on its own life, but that’s definitely still there.
And so yeah, this idea that we are not God is so important and profound, and the idea that we’re giving up our control to a higher power or whatever. But it’s like, what is that higher power? I haven’t quite figured that out for myself, I guess, in a way that makes it feel like I can totally relinquish the control because I don’t believe in the traditional concept of God. I don’t believe that it’s an anthropomorphic sort of being. And so it’s tough to—and I think that’s probably what anthropomorphizing a deity can help do for us maybe, is to make it easier to relinquish control—to think, okay, this other creature has this.
Liz Bucar: There’s a guy with a beard up on the cloud and he’s looking out for it.
Christy Harrison: Not to denigrate, because I feel like that belief is so important to people and it’s probably much more nuanced than that. But that is at a fundamental level, I just don’t believe that there’s a person or person-like figure there.
Liz Bucar: I also have trouble with the idea of higher power. I’m jealous. It does sound like I was being flippant about the idea, but I’m very jealous of people who have a very strong sense of whatever that is, higher power or God in sort of an Abrahamic sort of way. Because I just think that it helps solve a lot, some of these problems in terms of control. And not that you’re not responsible, but you’re not completely responsible. And the idea of hope. I’ve been thinking a lot about hope recently because of what’s going on. And not even just politically, but yes, politically, but also environmentally and also with technology and also just all the things, and how helpful it is for someone like my mom who is Lutheran and pretty devout. She has a much greater developed sense of trust and faith and hope in the future because of her understanding of a higher power.
And so I have trouble with higher power. It’s the one thing in religion, in terms of the religion I was born into, processing that makes me not able to lean in. But I can get on board with I’m not God. That’s the first step for me. And then I find indigenous worldviews, indigenous forms of religion/culture really helpful for thinking about “I’m not God” without the idea of that sort of Christian God. Because it’s more about, it’s decentering human agency, not just even mine, but indigenous worldviews are so based on place and space and nature and plants. Plants are not just plants. They’re like our ancestors, our kin. And that’s such a very different version of my place or others. So that’s helpful for pushing me, but I have the same problem. I have trouble with the idea of higher power. But so my first step is not God.
So that’s all I’m working on. All I’m working on is I’m not God. And again, I don’t believe in God, so why would I think I’m God? So for me, it’s an easier step. I don’t believe in higher power, so I don’t get to be it.
Christy Harrison: That’s a good point. Yeah.
Liz Bucar: Yeah. So that’s why for me, I was like, okay, this is my epiphany. Yeah, I believe I’m not God because I don’t believe in that concept of God. So I cannot be God. I cannot control, I cannot fix. It cannot be me if it’s nothing, if I don’t believe in it. So to me, it’s at least one portable idea from that AA chapter for me.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, that’s huge. I’m going to sit with that for a while, I think, because that could be a key for me too.
OK, I want to now go a little deeper into one topic and a segment for paid subscribers, because we started to got into some really interesting stuff about diet culture and control. And I want to now get into how, as you put it, diet culture has religious roots, but also religious foodways can maybe help us heal from diet culture.
So I want to ask you, as a starting point for this deeper conversation, how has religion contributed to Americans’ troubled relationship with food?
