In this bonus episode, Christy answers audience questions about how to navigate a friendship with a naturopath while trying to reject diet and wellness culture (which really applies to any friends and family members who are steeped in wellness culture), how to avoid getting sucked into wellness culture's anti-aging advice (especially as someone with a history of disordered eating), dealing with pre-wedding body image struggles, and more. This episode is a recording of the August Q&A for members of Christy's Intuitive Eating Fundamentals course, which is enrolling a new cohort now!
This episode is for paid subscribers. Listen to a preview here, and sign up for a paid subscription to hear the full episode!
Resources and References
Christy’s online course, Intuitive Eating Fundamentals
Christy’s new book, The Wellness Trap: Break Free from Diet Culture, Disinformation, and Dubious Diagnoses and Find Your True Well-Being
Christy’s list of providers specializing in disordered eating
Michelle Vina-Baltsas’ work
Transcript
Disclaimer: The below transcription is primarily rendered by AI, so errors may have occurred. The original audio file is available above.
Christy Harrison: Hey there! Welcome to this bonus episode for paid subscribers of Rethinking Wellness. I’m Christy, and in this episode I’m answering audience questions about how to navigate a friendship with a naturopath while trying to reject diet and wellness culture (which really applies to any friends and family members who are steeped in wellness culture), how to avoid getting sucked into wellness culture's anti-aging advice (especially as someone with a history of disordered eating), dealing with pre-wedding body image struggles, and more.
This episode is a recording of the August Q&A for members of my Intuitive Eating Fundamentals course, which is enrolling a new cohort now! You can learn more and sign up at christyharrison.com/course. That’s christyharrison.com/course. Now, without any further ado, here's the first question.
All right, first question is from an anonymous attendee who says, I'm finally going through the process of rejecting diet-culture and wellness culture after being sucked into it for quite a while, even while completing my degree in nutrition and dietetics. Wondering if you've written anything in your book or elsewhere about how to navigate friendships while rejecting diet and wellness culture. One of my good friends is a naturopath who is now calling herself a nutritionist as well, which annoys me, given my education. But unfortunately, the title of nutritionist is not regulated in Australia. She's hugely steeped in wellness culture, and especially clean eating, although for health, not weight, it feels so hard to continue the friendship listening to all the clean/chemicals/nasties/toxic talk. She's so lovely though, and I truly value her friendship. Many thanks for any advice or posts you could refer me to. I honestly posted on Insta about your “Kids in the long shadow of clean eating” podcast today and afterward discovered this friend had posted about a clean orange cake and I felt awful as though I was attacking her. Thanks also for your podcast. I'm really enjoying it.
Thank you so much for this question. I'm so glad that you're enjoying the podcast as well. And my work, and this is something that comes up a lot and I can't think of a specific post or place I've written about it, but I feel like I've written about it many times in different ways. I think what it really comes down to is setting boundaries, so setting boundaries with your friends and family on what kind of talk you want to have with them, what kind of subjects you feel comfortable engaging in, and what kind of subjects maybe you can say, you know what, let's not go there for a while.
I think it can be helpful with if you're comfortable, and this sounds like it's a fairly close friend, someone that you might be comfortable sharing your own history with. Just to say a little bit about, I've struggled in my own relationship with food. I'm finally working on healing it and letting go of diet and wellness talk as a really big part of that for me. So in order to facilitate my recovery, I just would love to, if we can try to avoid talking about that kind of stuff together. And if this friend asks for more information, you could go into a little bit more detail because she's a naturopath and now calling herself a nutritionist, I would imagine that maybe she has struggled with and slash maybe is still struggling with some of her own disordered eating as well. And for many people in that boat.
I know for myself back in the day when I was really steeped in wellness culture and diet-culture, I didn't consider myself as having an eating disorder or disordered eating even though at various points I definitely would've met the criteria for an eating disorder. I didn't really think about the perspective of people with disordered eating and how certain things that I was doing or conveying would've landed with them. And there were a few things that I have a good friend who's struggled with an eating disorder for a long time, who back then was struggling already and was sort of working in recovery and said something to me about calorie labels can be really problematic for people who have eating disorders. What do you think about that? And at the time, this was like 12 years ago or something, I had been working in the part of the health department that was promoting calorie labeling, and so I was sort of invested in that idea.
And to hear her say that just made me think of things in a different way made me think, oh, maybe this isn't universally helpful for people. Maybe not everybody needs to count calories. And it stuck in my head, and I'm still remembering it however many years later, but it didn't necessarily change things overnight for me. It didn't necessarily cause me to question the whole premise immediately, but it did plant a seed. And that is another thing I talk about a lot is planting seeds, sort of saying something that might spark some thoughts or help this seed germinate and maybe grow for someone that people do struggle with disordered eating that not everybody is on board with diet and wellness culture premises that seeing something about clean eating in your feed might be triggering to you. You don't have to get into so many specifics. You don't necessarily have to say to this friend when I saw your clean orange cake, that's an example of what I'm talking about.
But you can sort of talk in general terms about what has been difficult for you or hurtful for you or on the flip side, what has been helpful for you in your recovery. And I think that will start to plant some seeds for people who are ready to hear it. Obviously there's a level of readiness that needs to be there, and for me, this whatever it was, maybe it was 15 years ago at this point, this friend saying this thing didn't change my point of view. And I was still pretty dug in to diet and wellness culture, but I think it was just one little rock with which the avalanche eventually started to fall. So give it time, understand that your friend might not be in a place to really hear this and she might have her own stuff going on. And especially professional identity being wrapped up in diet and wellness culture I think makes it really hard for people to let go sometimes and they can feel really invested.
But I think just showing her an example of another way, another potential path that she could take. Maybe talking a little bit about Intuitive Eating and how it's been helpful to you or how questioning wellness cultures Rhetoric has been helpful to you could plant a seed. As for social media, I think sometimes the best approach there just to avoid having that kind of stuff show up in your feet is to mute the person or unfollow if you can do that without them seeing you. But I think muting is a good way to preserve a friendship when you don't want to necessarily see something that somebody else is sharing and to whatever extent you feel capable, you can have really direct conversations with people, but I find that that can be tough and not everybody likes having direct conversations in the first place. Not everybody feels equipped to do that anyway, regardless of the subject.
And then when it's a subject that's really personally important to you like this and that you're potentially still struggling with and still navigating yourself, it can be an added layer of difficulty to have a really direct conversation. So I think sometimes muting or unfollowing or changing the subject when you're in person rather than necessarily directly addressing it can also be helpful, but for the people that you're close with and have enough of a relationship that you feel safe sharing your own history, I do encourage doing just that, sharing what you've gone through and how it's been difficult for you struggling with disordered eating and some of the things that you've found helpful in your recovery. And this one was, let's see, this one came in previously. Hello. In addition to the course, I very much enjoyed listening to Christy and reading her Substack. I was wondering if the topic of anti-aging is it overlaps with wellness culture and all the restrictions about diet promise, longevity and health may be covered or if Christy has already spoken and written on this topic for middle-aged adults with eating disorders, it is kind of a wellness trap.
