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Dietitian and author Jenna Hollenstein joins us to discuss her experience with alcoholism and recovery, the intersection of disordered eating and disordered drinking, the sobriety trend in wellness culture, Dry January, mindful drinking, “food addiction,” and more.
Jenna Hollenstein, MS, RDN, CDN, is an anti-diet dietitian-nutritionist, certified Intuitive Eating Counselor, speaker, meditation teacher, and author of five books, including Eat to Love and Intuitive Eating for Life. She blends Intuitive Eating with mindfulness to help people transform food and body shame into joyful eating and movement.
Jenna received a BS in nutrition from Penn State University and an MS in nutrition from Tufts University. She has trained in numerous integrative modalities, including polyvagal theory, somatic self-compassion, trauma-sensitive mindfulness, and embodied social justice.
Jenna has spoken at universities, retreat centers, and extensively online for both consumer and clinician audiences. Her work has been featured in the The New York Times, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, U.S. News & World Report, Yoga Journal, Health, Self, Lion’s Roar, Mindful, Vogue, Elle, Glamour, and Women’s World. Learn more about her work at jennahollenstein.com.
Resources and References
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
Jenna’s website
Christy’s piece, Is Alcohol Really Unsafe At Any Dose?
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: Jenna, welcome to Rethinking Wellness. I'm so excited to talk with you.
Jenna Hollenstein: I am too. I'm so glad to be speaking with you.
Christy Harrison: So we have been in touch for years at this point. We talked many years ago for my first podcast, Food Psych, and that was way back in 2017. So I imagine most people listening haven't heard your story and I think we only touched a little bit on alcohol, but that's what we're really going to be talking about today is alcohol, your experience of recovery and your thoughts on the current sobriety trend and wellness culture. So I'd love to start off by having you tell us about your history with alcohol and alongside that, your history with diet culture and disordered eating, since I know they were kind of intertwined for you.
Jenna Hollenstein: Yeah, they are all woven together. Sometimes when I say it out loud, it's a little surprising, other times it doesn't hit me quite the same way but I started drinking when I was 12 years old, and that was because I had untreated anxiety and depression as a child. And then I was a victim of mean girl culture in middle school and fell in with a group that had some older siblings who would get beer or whatever. It became sort of part of socialization. I liked the way that it helped me feel different in a situation that otherwise would feel really fraught for me. Just all those teenage kind of concerns about belonging and vulnerability and everything like that.
And then I continued drinking through high school, college, and early adulthood and managed to stay in sort of a gray area in terms of being able to be on the basketball team and get good grades and perform in college, et cetera, et cetera. And as you mentioned, the, the diet stuff really kind of wove in there because it was probably in high school where I really started to try to control how I was eating or I became very self conscious about my body and sort of focused on how I might change it through dieting.
And I noticed over the course of my drinking that the relationship with food would take on many different forms where sometimes I was restricting to accommodate the calories from alcohol. Other times I was eating to excess because I wasn't as in touch with my body because of alcohol. Other times I was trying to cut back or stop drinking, and I was substituting food and just the act of eating to fill that space. During this time, I was an undergraduate at Penn State studying nutrition, and then a graduate student at Tufts University studying nutrition. Nobody really understood that I was basically becoming a highly functioning alcoholic.
And even that word alcoholic never felt like it applied to me because I didn't fit my own stereotype of an alcoholic. And I remember at some point in my 20s starting to really question, like, is this harming me? Not even necessarily from a health standpoint, but is this taking away from my experience of my life? Because all the alcohol ads, all the studies, all the media coverage about alcohol is about how it makes life better, right? And how it's really about enjoyment and connection and celebration. That idea was sort of running through my head all the time and I didn't start to question it until I had been drinking for a good 15 years.
So 15 years in, I'm like maybe this is actually taking away from my life. And so I would go online and I would take this standard little quiz about whether you have an issue with alcohol. And it was like, have people told you they're concerned about how much alcohol you drink? Have you ever blacked out? But there was one question that I always answered in the negative, and that was have you ever had an eye opener, which is a drink in the morning, like the hair of the dog and because I answered no to that one question, I thought that made me okay. And it was such an unnuanced look at my relationship with alcohol, which is funny to me now because everything that I do, everything that I think about, everything that I reflect on is so nuanced, it's so complex. How did I get away with thinking about this in such a harmfully black and white way for so long?
And to that end too, I would sometimes be sitting with a cocktail in hand talking to my friend, saying I really feel like I should think about my drinking. I should take a hard look at my drinking. And instead of saying, well, then why don't you just stop? Or why don't you talk to someone about that? Most people congratulated me for being so self aware. And then we just kept drinking. So it went on like that for a while. And at the same time, I started to get treatment for my depression and my anxiety. I saw a therapist, I started taking medication, and I started to become aware of how the alcohol was sort of potentially doing battle with the inroads I was making around this mental illness.
The people I worked with, a therapist, a psychiatrist, they were the ones who started to sort of encourage me to take a more intentional, serious approach to living without alcohol. And what I discovered was a lot of times what people will say was, "Well, do the things that you normally do. Just don't drink and see what it's like." And so I would do that. I would kind of white knuckle it through a couple of weeks. But then what I noticed was when I started drinking again, the pendulum had swung even farther in the opposite direction. It's not unlike what we see with restriction and binging. And so I started to understand that moderation management was not going to be an option for me. Because I was basically like holding my breath while I was not drinking, just waiting for the moment I could drink again.
I decided, I don't remember exactly when it started to become more of a possibility, but a serious relationship had ended, I was starting a new job and I wanted to go into it with a clearer mind. I started to think, I think I can do this. I'm going to try to do this for real. And I took my last drink on my 33rd birthday and it was a glass of crappy red wine. And then I just said goodbye to it. And I did this like three week IOP that started the second week in January and went through New Year's and just stopped. And there's all kinds of nuances of what happened during the IOP, after the IOP, why I didn't do AA, that we'll probably get to but this was a major part of my life that went unaddressed for a really long time.
Christy Harrison: Yeah. That's so fascinating, all of that. I'm so curious how being a nutrition student and a dietitian related to your alcohol use and if any of that came up in your training and your schooling.
Jenna Hollenstein: Well, I was a big proponent of the Mediterranean diet because you know what's at the top of that pyramid.
Christy Harrison: Yeah. It's like the daily glass of wine, right?
Jenna Hollenstein: Yeah, exactly. I focused on what I wanted to. The same way I remember the morning news shows focusing on what they wanted to when the studies came out suggesting benefits of moderate drinking. I just always remember these co-hosts on a morning show being like, "Oh, okay, it's 5:00 somewhere" and bumping elbows and having this camaraderie around the fact that they had permission to drink. Essentially, it had the health halo around it.
Christy Harrison: That's such an interesting aspect of it. People can interpret what they want to interpret from this phrase, "moderate drinking."
Jenna Hollenstein: Totally. Right. Because I knew, probably on multiple levels, but clearly not on one level, that I was not doing something that could be called moderate drinking. Moderate drinking is one drink a day per women, two drinks a day per men. But then when you start to look at that being a daily habit, it really adds up.
Christy Harrison: And if you feel like you need it every single day.
Jenna Hollenstein: That's the interesting thing because the studies that this is supposedly based on were observational. They looked at lifestyle. They looked at people who had many different components to their life, including not having a ton of stress, enjoying food together, not having a pace of life that was so oppressive and strangling that we've all gotten used to. And so we sort of placed more emphasis on the things that we wanted to, like the fact that they were drinking wine.
Christy Harrison: It's easier to say you should have a glass of wine a day for your heart or whatever, than it is to say we should rethink our capitalist structure, our hyper capitalist structure, slow down the pace of life.
Jenna Hollenstein: Absolutely. And then, just as part of that capitalistic structure is all of the alcohol companies throwing these ads at us. When I was growing up in the late 80s and the 90s, Absolut vodka had this whole thing about different bottles and different designs, things like that. And we as high school students, we collected them. We collected images of Absolute vodka. We collected actual bottles. It didn't happen in my family, there was no honest conversation, like, can we talk about this? Can we talk about your drinking? Can we talk about the fact that you have bottles on the floor in your closet? And I wonder for my friends who had a line of bottles of Absolut vodka in their bedroom, and they were still, like, 16, 17, did anyone talk to them about it?
Christy Harrison: Major oversight on the part of their parents.
Jenna Hollenstein: Yeah. Because in hindsight, it makes a lot of sense why I did it and why we all did it. And it's hard to not compare the culture then with the culture now where we're more conversant in things like anxiety and depression and addiction and things like that. There was just so much denial and secretiveness.
Christy Harrison: Yeah. I don't know if you're open to sharing this and feel free to say no, but I'm curious if in your family of origin there was any problematic alcohol use.
Jenna Hollenstein: Yes. On both sides of my family, definitely.
Christy Harrison: So I wonder even if they noticed the bottles, maybe it didn't feel like a big deal or something.
Jenna Hollenstein: Well, even within my family, drinking was the norm. I remember, for example, knowing somebody's cocktail when they came to your house was a way of showing them that you loved them and that you paid attention to those details. I have your Seagram 7 and your 7Up. It was part of the culture in my home. And at the time. And then when I went to Tufts, I was in Boston. I feel like Boston was such a drinking town. It was always normalized. It was always very normalized, very social, very related, in a way that feels strange to say now, but related to a better quality of life.
Christy Harrison: Well, you said that at one point you got into wine, right? You told me this offline, that you were like a wine connoisseur, right?
Jenna Hollenstein: Because if you're drinking good wine, you can't be a drunk. And so I was dating somebody who was very knowledgeable about wine and I think was part owner in like a vineyard or something like that. And we would travel all over California and we'd go wine tasting and just totally overdo it. There's a ton of very dangerous behavior that was going on at that time. People were driving the sort of windy roads of Napa and Mendocino and Sonoma tipsy or just drunk. But again, it was the lifestyle. This is a part of the culture here that we're deeply kind of engaged with. There's a science to this. There's a craft to it.
There was one place that I always think about that had like a little pocket guide that would help you identify the different flavors in the wine. So you would take a sip and you would describe it, and then you would look at this little pocket guide and have all these different flavors: Black cherry, pencil shavings, apple, whatever. It helped you feel like it was an intellectual exercise to drink wine.
Christy Harrison: I remember doing wine tasting sometimes in my 20s when I was working at magazines and having a sommelier doing a tasting of this organic winery's wines and describing all these different flavors and stuff. And I had to be drunk enough to actually be able to discern these flavors. There was something about for me, I never could really be like, "There's pencil shavings and a note of leather and mahogany" or whatever.
Jenna Hollenstein: I know, it's so funny.
Christy Harrison: It took being at a certain level of lowered inhibition and kind of just altered state to be like, "Oh, yeah. There's peach fuzz in here" and whatever.
Jenna Hollenstein: Well, and also, it bears mentioning. I don't know if you would identify with this, but I was very dissociated from my body because of the rejection that I experienced from my peers, because of my anxiety and depression, because of my sort of misfit status. And just being a girl in the 80s and 90s, which was a toxic, hostile time to be a girl on Long Island. And so there was an access to yourself that you gained when you were drinking that was sort of interesting and liberating. It unlocked a sort of sensuality that I otherwise had no access to.
Christy Harrison: I think that's probably it, what you're describing, that I was able to notice these things in a different way that. And I was so out of touch with my body at the time and engaged in disordered eating and really just cut off from myself in so many ways and have noticed since I stop disordered eating and have stopped drinking the way I used to. And maybe we can get into this a little later, but I was not a problem drinker in the way that you were. But I also was drinking more than I needed to, than sort of really was right for me. And I think I was using it as a crutch in certain ways that I was able to figure out other coping mechanisms for, thankfully through a lot of therapy and work on myself and work healing from some of the other patterns in my life.
And so once I went through that process and got to a place of relative healedness, not that anyone's ever fully there, but got to a place where I was much more in touch with myself than I had been previously, my tolerance went way down. I really now cannot drink the way I used to. I'll have half a drink at most and be like, "Oh, I really feel it. I know my limits. I'm going to stop." Or less than that even, and sometimes just be like, I don't really want to feel this way right now. And it's wild to think how much I would just breeze past that. And some of it, I think for me, had to do with hunger as well. I wasn't eating enough. And so I was getting glucose and calories from the alcohol that I needed. And so it was kind of maybe easier to blow past those warning signs that I had too much because my body just needed it.
Jenna Hollenstein: Sure, sure. In one way, it absolutely did. And I think also part of the beauty of aging, too, is that our levels of alcohol dehydrogenase go down. We already have less than men tend to. And some people just genetically have more or less. But I learned that a lot of problem drinking really starts to emerge when these levels start to go down and people don't acknowledge that a change has occurred.
Christy Harrison: Interesting.
Jenna Hollenstein: And so they keep drinking as they did in their 20s, even though they're not able to break it down. And it's having more intoxicating effects and probably more hangover negative effects following drinking. And so that perspective of comparing what you used to drink and what you are able to tolerate now is probably helped by that interoception and the awareness that a lot of changes have happened physiologically, emotionally, somatically, self awareness wise.
Christy Harrison: That is such a great point. That's really interesting to think about too, that there were physiological changes that happened in my body that made me less able to drink than I was and more the self awareness piece probably came into play and thinking I don't have to drink the way that I used to. I don't need to prove anything to myself or anybody and I'm going to stop when my body is asking me to stop and be able to listen to that.
Jenna Hollenstein: Well, and also, you know, when we think about the sort of hard wiring for connection and belonging too, in a culture that equates drinking with quality of life, celebration, connection, it's easier to go along, to get along. And now we are having a more nuanced conversation about being willing to be different and still sort of belong. You can go out with your friends who are drinking and not drink, and not all the time, right? There's always going to be that person who's like, "Don't make me drink alone" kind of a thing. But I think that more people are having the conversation now.
Christy Harrison: Let's put a pin in that because I think that is a really interesting piece of this conversation about sobriety and wellness culture circles and Dry January and the trend of sobriety these days. It's sort of a double edged sword, I think, and there's some good things about it too, but also some interesting downsides. But before we get into all that, I'm curious where your disordered eating recovery played a role in your recovery from alcoholism or your giving up drinking.
Jenna Hollenstein: So my disordered eating was a lot like my drinking in that it would never have raised the reddest flags. And it also had lots of different incarnations over the years. I just remember, I can't even imagine it now, but restricting so severely and maintaining this really low weight as a nutrition grad student while simultaneously drinking a quantity that was so inappropriate for me, especially because I was underweight. And so the two just always were kind of enmeshed.
And when I did finally quit drinking, it was around the holidays and it was tough because people were like, are you sure you want to quit? Is this is the best time of the year to quit? I was like, well, if I can get through this, then maybe I have a chance. Because of some of the circumstances around how I stopped drinking and the IOP that I attended in which I was the only participant who hadn't just come out of jail or rehab or the hospital and was literally told I didn't belong there, I didn't end up doing AA. So I just didn't start the habit of going to meetings. I didn't do the 90 meetings in 90 days. I didn't do anything like that.
And so what I did do was what a lot of people call dry drunk behavior, which is to sort of substitute another fixation, another distraction for the drinking. And I think it's substituted for both the chemical aspect of the drinking, but maybe at times, I think it substituted even more for the behavioral aspect of drinking. Because I remember coming home to my place in Boston and the best moment was walking in the apartment with a new bottle of wine and taking the foil off, right? Taking the cork out. It was before I even drank anything. The best part was the moment up to taking that first sip. And then after the first sip, it was all just downhill from there. And so there was something about the ritual that was very meaningful to me.
And so when I wasn't coming home and doing that, I would go to stores and look at the sale racks. This is the beginning of online dating at the time, right? So I'd go on freaking match.com and basically do the equivalent of swiping back then. These were all just distractions and fixations. I watched a lot of Law and Order because there was a formula to it, and I liked that I knew it was all going to be resolved at the end of 55 minutes.
I started to observe all these weird behaviors in myself of like, I need to fill in this space. I need a crutch. I need something to lean on. And part of that included dieting. That's when I did my first juice cleanse. And then at other times, I actually kind of echoed this wellness trend now because I was thinking of it as a means of taking better care of myself. And so I tended more toward, not restriction as much, but changing how I was eating. Sometimes that would have a backlash of binging or eating mindlessly or kind of just throwing my hands up in the air for a couple of weeks or whatever. But I experimented with a sort of holistic sobriety early in that process.
And again, I wasn't really talking about my drinking with anybody but my therapist. I was reading these books called First Year Sobriety, Second Year Sobriety. I forget the author right now. And I had already read every alcoholism memoir in existence, and most of them end when the person decides to get sober. And I'm like, well, where's my manual for how to live my life now without my favorite wingman? Because I was so disordered in my eating and my drinking when I finished grad school, I didn't take a typical route into nutrition. So I stayed in the medical writing and editing world. So I felt sort of outside of the nutrition world in a way.
Christy Harrison: And probably for the best. I remember you said that in our first interview that you sort of felt like it was protective of yourself in a way, or maybe protective of other people.
Jenna Hollenstein: I think it was protective of myself and other people. I knew I was in no position to be advising people on how to eat. I had no idea what it really meant to be a dietitian who would companion someone through a recovery process. My conception of what it meant to be a dietitian 25 years ago was completely different when I finished grad school, was completely different than it is now. The nutrition field and career and identity was sort of far away from me for a while as I was working in biotech and scientific publishing and things like that.
And then because of my recovery, I started to come back to it because after about a year and a half of white knuckling, dry drunk behavior, I started meditating. And then I started reading books about meditation and Buddhist philosophy and I started to understand a little bit better what I was actually doing, what was actually happening in those moments where I felt like I just need something to take the edge off. And that's actually what led me back into the nutrition field because I was like, oh, you could take out alcohol and sub in eating. You could take out eating and you could sub in restricting, take out restricting and sub in shopping or working or dating or anything.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, there's a way to sort of approach any behavior in that same way. And can you say a little bit more about what you think was actually going on in those moments when you were reaching for a drink or reaching for something else?
Jenna Hollenstein: I was lonely. I was so lonely. I was still struggling with so much anxiety and depression. I didn't feel I was lovable and so especially in my 20s and early 30s, as people are starting to pair off, I just could not see that happening for me. And in other times, I was just bored and restless, but usually there was an utter intolerance of myself that was present.
Christy Harrison: Yeah. Wanting to escape yourself.
Jenna Hollenstein: Oh, it was so painful because I remember one time sitting at my cubicle thinking, oh, man, I can't wait to get out of here. I'll feel so much better at home. And then when I got home, I'm like, well, shit, I'm still here. Wherever you go, there you are.
Christy Harrison: I very much identify with that.
Jenna Hollenstein: Yes, yes. That was the constant, I think, Christy, was the just utter intolerance for myself.
Christy Harrison: And so what helped you move past that?
Jenna Hollenstein: Spending time with myself unmedicated. And that was something I learned through meditation. It was just sitting with myself, seeing all the thoughts that pass through, feeling all the physical states, feeling all the emotions that move through. Guided by the dharmic writings and things like that, starting to really understand suffering as just a part of life, not that you did anything wrong. Impermanence, right? Things just moving through discomfort and the sort of paradox that the more you resist discomfort, the more uncomfortable you get.
And also something that really kind of scandalized me, which was Buddha nature or basic goodness, right? I was raised Catholic, and so I was raised in the tradition of original sin, and that suffering was basically a means to sort of pay your dues so that you could reap a reward in the afterlife. And then to learn this other way of looking at your life and everyone's life as you're born whole. You can't mess that up. You can't lose it. You don't need to earn it. Your work is to be somewhat steadfast in being present as you move through the inevitable ups and downs of your life.
And so it took so many years, and it's still ongoing, of being with myself and starting to have softness and warmth and affection for myself. Because I remember just flashing back to second grade, looking up in the sky and thinking I need to keep myself in check because if I like myself too much, people won't like me. And so it was sort of a radical notion that liking yourself in the Shambhala tradition, which I used to be a part of, they call it unconditional friendliness to yourself, which is kind of dorky sounding, but it makes me like it even more. Could I be unconditionally friendly toward myself even when I'm being a dick? And that started to take root because of repetition, just repetition and really investing in studying and practicing.
Christy Harrison: And so you didn't do the 12 step thing, you kind of made it work with meditation and practice and therapy. And how is that different from what you see in the recovery world traditionally?
Jenna Hollenstein: Well, AA is incredibly effective. They say it only works if you work it. And so if you keep showing up, you have a community, you have people who understand, you have a place where you're always welcome and there's real potential there. And what I'm realizing, even as I'm saying it, was that's kind of the way I started to feel about my meditation cushion. I'm welcome there no matter what's going on. But the AA thing sort of becomes compulsory for a lot of people. Everyone I've ever met who discovers that I'm sober but that I don't do meetings, has invited me to a meeting. I just haven't found the right one yet.
And it's interesting because as much as I love knowing what works for you and sticking with it, and I also love some of the one liners that AA has, the answer for everything. There's a part of that answer for everything that really needles me because there's not an answer for everything. And that really just, I just couldn't rectify that conflict in my mind. I was like, I need to rest in this uncertainty and really uncomfortable space that is the reality of being human, of being sober and being just on this planet. And I think I would have outgrown it at some point.
Christy Harrison: And it sounds like what you really grew into and knew you needed was what meditation was offering you at that moment. Maybe if you had discovered AA at a different point, it could have been different or something, but you were in a place where you were ready to go there to the complexity and the discomfort and all of that.
Jenna Hollenstein: It's so true because if you think about the sort of sequence of events of quitting drinking, doing this IOP, starting this new job, getting dumped, reading a book by the person who would become your meditation teacher called The Wisdom of a Broken Heart, and then sliding down from your bed onto the floor and sitting for the first time and starting to have these aha moments of "Oh, could it be this simple?" Not easy. I'm not ever calling it easy, but could it be this simple? That my drinking, if you distill it down, is an attempt to change what really can't be changed and an inability to be with things as they are.
And so now I kind of feel like that's just my work. Meditation as a way of feeling, like remembering how to feel and practicing feeling again because we do become so disembodied, allowing things to be as they are, not fighting with reality and being with. So that means if something's painful, you don't have to pretend it's not. You can be in pain, you can cry, you can rage, you can scream, and you can know that nothing's gonna change that reality and that you are moving through your emotions will carry you through, in many cases, the impermanence of whatever's happening.
Christy Harrison: I really identify with that. Realizing how emotions ebb and flow and that trying to hold something back or change something versus just letting it be and feeling the feelings, in all their suckiness and moving through that. You really do come out the other side. And it's fascinating how that acceptance can just shift things. Not easy. Again, not easy.
Jenna Hollenstein: It's not easy. It's not easy. And I think part of our culture makes it very difficult for us to understand that it's possible that the way to work with something will still let us feel badly.
Christy Harrison: Right.
Jenna Hollenstein: Right. We think that if it's going to work, if it's going to help us, then it has to protect us from suffering as opposed to support us to feel everything we're capable of feeling.
Christy Harrison: Totally. It's not the sort of sunshine and rainbows that we're promised, maybe.
Jenna Hollenstein: I can't tell you how many times I start off a talk with, "Listen, I never promised you a rose garden" because that's the truth. It's a marketing quandary.
Christy Harrison: It is.
Jenna Hollenstein: Come with me and I will help you feel the pain of your reality.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, it's not a great selling point, that's for sure.
Jenna Hollenstein: I haven't figured it out quite yet.
Christy Harrison: But for people who are in that place of being open to it and sort of understanding that that's what's going on for them or what they need, it can be powerful.
Jenna Hollenstein: Well, right. Because sometimes what you notice is that when you start to allow yourself to be touched by your life, you develop a sort of appetite for reality and you start to develop an aversion to the fantasy. And that's a very interesting process. It feels very counterculture.
Christy Harrison: I'm curious to talk about the intersections of this all with wellness culture because I mean, on the one hand, there is a real embrace of meditation in wellness culture and I think it's often a meditation in service of something, in service of productivity in many cases. And so it's not like sort of in service of just feeling all the feelings and the range of human emotions and being able to sit with that. I think that's less emphasized, but it is still there in some mainstream meditation programs and stuff like that.
But also there's now this trend of sobriety for wellness reasons. Sobriety as a way of being “holistically healthy” and we can talk about kind of what that entails and the promises that are made and how that really dovetails with a lot of diet culture type stuff.
