The first part of this episode is available to all listeners. To hear the whole thing, become a paid subscriber here.
Employee well-being consultant and health coach Heather Sayers Lehman joins us to discuss how workplace wellness programs often make people LESS well by promoting disordered eating, body shame, and even some woo-woo wellness trends. She also shares her history with diet and wellness culture, how having thyroid issues made her vulnerable to wellness misinformation, and more.
Paid subscribers can hear the full interview, and the first half is available to all listeners. To upgrade to paid, go to rethinkingwellness.substack.com.
Heather Sayers Lehman, MS, NBC-HWC, CSCS, NASM-CPT, CIEC, CWP, is a behavior change expert and certified health and wellness coach. She has enjoyed a passionate career in health and well-being for over 30 years. Heather is a TEDx speaker who loves speaking engagements for employee well-being and conferences.
She founded and operates Overcoming U - Cultivating Employee Well-Being. Overcoming U provides in-depth health and well-being courses, webinars, and health coaching for employee wellness programs. The focus is building skillsets and changing mindsets to create and maintain healthy habits.
Heather hosts the podcast The Air We Breathe: Finding Well-Being That Works. She enjoys candid conversations with experts, doctors, creatives, and activists, debunking health myths, navigating health enhancement without diet culture, and learning to seek peace over perfection.
She authored Don’t Eat It. DEAL With It! Second Edition: Your Guidebook on How to STOP Eating Your Emotions to help you create a healthier relationship with food. The guidebook enables you to improve self-talk, expand emotional coping skills, create mindful eating practices, and foster self-compassion.
You can find Heather at HeatherSayersLehman.com and OvercomingU.com. She is available for one-on-one health coaching, employee wellness program consulting, and weight-inclusive, anti-diet health education for employees.
Resources and References
Subscribe on Substack for extended interviews and more
Christy’s second book, The Wellness Trap: Break Free from Diet Culture, Disinformation, and Dubious Diagnoses and Find Your True Well-Being
Heather’s website
Heather’s employee well-being platform, overcomingu.com
The Air We Breathe podcast and my episode
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: Welcome to Rethinking Wellness, a podcast that offers critical thinking and compassionate skepticism about wellness and diet culture, and reflections on how to find true well-being. I'm your host, Christy Harrison, and I'm a registered dietitian, certified intuitive eating counselor, journalist, and author of three books, including Anti-Diet, which was published in 2019, The Emotional Eating, Chronic Dieting, Binge Eating & Body Image Workbook, which came out on February 20th, and The Wellness Trap, which was published in 2023 and is the inspiration for this podcast. You can learn more and get them all at christyharrison.com/books.
Hey there. Welcome to this episode of Rethinking Wellness. I'm Christy and my guest today is employee wellbeing consultant and health coach Heather Sayers Lehman, who joins me to discuss how workplace wellness programs often make people less well by promoting disordered eating, body shame, and even some woo woo wellness trends. She also shares her history with diet and wellness culture, how having thyroid issues made her vulnerable to wellness misinformation, and lots more. As a paid subscriber, you get to hear this full interview and all of our extended and bonus episode. And I want to thank you so much for your support.
I also want to make sure you know about my second book, which is called The Wellness Trap and was the inspiration behind this podcast. I launched the show to continue the great conversations I had in my reporting for that book, and so if you like the interviews here, I think you'll love the book. Theres a section on workplace wellness that includes a deep dive into the evidence on the effectiveness, or lack thereof, of typical workplace wellness programs, the history of this field and how it got started, and interviews with people whose disordered eating was triggered or exacerbated by workplace wellness initiatives.
The book also explores the connections between wellness and diet culture, how the wellness space became so overrun with scams and misinformation and conspiracy theories why integrative and alternative and functional medicine can lead to disordered eating and other harms, and how we can both protect ourselves as individuals and reimagine well being as a society. If any of that sounds interesting, you can pick up the wellness trap wherever you get your books, or go to christyharrison.com/thewellnesstrap to order it.
With that, here is my conversation with Heather Sayers Lehman. So before we get started, because I want to dive into all the complexities of workplace wellness and your experience with it and the problems and unintended consequences of this whole industry. But before we do, I'd love to have you just tell us a little bit about yourself and your history with diet and wellness culture.
Heather Sayers Lehman: So I have been really a card carrying diet culture person for a very long time. I started in college, of course, I studied kinesiology so that exercise would be top of mind. And I worked in fitness and athletics for a very long time. And then I moved into health coaching in 2011 for multiple reasons. But I really liked helping people put everything together. I love problem solving and I like organizing things. And so it's been like a really natural fit because when I was working in fitness, it's sort of siloed as a side part of their life. But I like the piece of how you deal with everything, whether it's boundaries, but also the fitness and how you eat and stress management, but how that works with your family, your budget, your time.
So I had a three year stint. When I started I worked for an insurance carrier at our county here, and I was the health coach, and I did about 3,000 coaching sessions in three years. So it was jumping in, talking to a lot of people, and I learned so much, and people were so kind and vulnerable to share really what was holding them back with different habits they wanted to keep. And I will also say, when I started in that environment, in graduate school in the nineties, I did my thesis on eating disorders. So I was an exercise science major. But because of my own issues during undergrad, I wanted to study eating disorders, which, as you can imagine, the literature in the nineties was much different, but had a lot of different arrows pointing to different things. I think really back then it was, blaming the moms actually was one of the bigger pieces. So I had all of that information.
And when I started in worksite wellness, I was like, "So are we just trying to cause eating disorders?" It was not a consideration. And I will still say all these years later, it's not talked about: eating disorders, disordered eating. And for a field that talks about weight, body size, weight loss, it's stunning that it's not a topic.
So I actually started my own company in 2013, and so I do deep dive courses into creating behavior change. So how do you plan, shop, and cook? How do you put together an exercise program or stress management program? But I created those in my own learning management system because I know for employees, it's very hard to learn skills and it's hard to change mindsets, especially because you might be working while you're doing this. So I made kind of some bite size education pieces. So then in four weeks, you kind of put all of those pieces together to have more sustainable behavior change. Small steps that really followed the tenets of behavior change, which I find a lot of worksite wellness does not.
And I fell into your Wellness Trap, which I was thinking for your book, if you did almost like a bingo card of all of these different pieces, and then it could have a grade like a cosmo quiz at the end, because I was like, check, check, check. But in 2016, I was diagnosed with thyroid disease, and I had my thyroid removed. In 2018, I just slid down all of the hills because I was so afraid. And so then obviously very vulnerable to all of the things, the diet, I mean, cutting out major food groups and then all of the supplements I saw a naturopath and endocrinology was no help.
Christy Harrison: Do you feel like your endocrinologist kind of left you hanging and thats what made you vulnerable to all those wellnessy things?
Heather Sayers Lehman: 100%. I was actually hospitalized because I had Graves' disease and I had a resting heart rate of 110. And they thought it was something more serious, but luckily it was just my thyroid. But the first endocrinologist I saw was kind of like an older guy. Just couldn't have been less helpful because I'm like, "Hey, I'm having this symptom, hey, what about this?" And I started putting on weight right away with the medication, and I was like, well, should this be happening? And it was.
I saw two different ones before I went more woo woo wellness, because they just were unconcerned with things that were heavily impacting my quality of life. I mean, obviously, I don't need to sleep 11 hours a day. That is not conducive to raising kids or just, you know, blah, or don't feel good. So, yeah, absolutely. Had I gotten better answers from the healthcare system, I definitely would not have pursued a naturopathic remedy.
Christy Harrison: How did that work out for you, the naturopathic route? Did it feel like it had answers at first, or were you sort of skeptical?
Heather Sayers Lehman: I found myself, in looking back, sort of cherry picking what information I wanted to be true because I was having some gut health, like, digestive issues and ended up cutting out some ingredients with that, even though the lab said these are not ingredients you need to cut out. And I was like, "But Doctor Mark Hyman says".... "Oh, well, obviously you should do that." SoI can look back through the whole thing and see where I was like, "Well, I would really like for this to be true because I don't like the answer of we don't know why your stomach feels like this at all." Like, okay, well, let me try some things.
I will say, absolutely, I think I saw this naturopath for three years, and the best thing to come out of it is miles on my credit card from all of the things that I paid for because I've got these persistent symptoms and, okay, well, these supplements didn't work. Well, maybe it's this or what about a colonic? Or maybe you need these other things. And so it was just so expensive. And again, it's not exactly like money that I had, but again, it's so hard when you don't feel good and my quality of life changed tremendously, especially after I had it out.
So I, as I started my own eating disorder recovery, working with a therapist, because I realized I had backed myself into a corner because I cut out so many things. And then my body was changing after surgery. And from the different ideas that I had in my mind, all of this was just not tenable. So I got help for orthorexia, and I saw a great eating disorder therapist. And when I started seeing her, I just couldn't keep seeing that other doctor because she was very weight oriented and, quote unquote, junk food or this or that.
And I started seeing someone else who switched me from generic synthroid to regular synthroid, and I felt 100% better. And I was like, "Okay, so now I'm paying $21 more a month for this prescription, and I feel so much better. And this other doctor could have done that as well." But it wasn't something that she was looking at. There's no profit for her in switching my pharmaceutical medication. I actually have an endocrinologist now who I really have done well under her care, and it's just changing a lot of the meds around. And so it's very frustrating to realize after all of that, "So this is all I needed to do? Oh."
Christy Harrison: Yeah. I feel like with thyroid stuff, I have Hashimoto's thyroiditi so it has the opposite effect but has a similar etiology in the sense that it's an autoimmune thyroid condition and your body attacks your thyroid and causes problems similar to Graves' disease. And I feel like I'm so grateful that I went through my diagnosis and finding the right treatment way early. This was like 20 years ago I got diagnosed at this point. And I just think I'm so lucky not to have been diagnosed or going through the process of getting diagnosed in this day and age of social media and misinformation and where the Internet rabbit holes are so much bigger and so much deeper and can suck you in so much more easily with the help of these powerful algorithms
I already was sucked into rabbit holes back then just in the early Internet message board kind of culture and people in my life who were alternative medicine people telling me to do this or that, but I'm lucky that it didn't go so much farther based on what I'm seeing people go through today.
Heather Sayers Lehman: Oh, absolutely. I left Facebook in 2017, so I was fortunate to not have to have all of that influence. I mean, overall it was really terrible and the search because then I'm just Googling things and whos got good SEO and whose title of their article made it easier for me to find. It just means theyre good at marketing. It doesnt mean that they have a good answer. And I think that makes it challenging. But absolutely, I can't imagine being in the throes of it now because even then, you know, Food Babe was around and all of that, but there's a zillion Food Babes and I'm shocked at the numbers and obviously utter lack of qualifications by so many people that are very confident in their solutions.
Christy Harrison: Yes, it is utterly horrifying how much of that there is out there. I'm so curious about your experience with workplace wellness and the disordered eating you've seen there and some of the unintended consequences. How do you see workplace wellness being intertwined with diet culture and wellness culture?
Heather Sayers Lehman: I think they are incredibly intertwined for multiple reasons. Those of us who work in workplace wellness probably have a penchant for going a little bit overboard in a lot of things. So same reason people go to school to become a dietitian, an exercise scientist, or you've got some kind of interest, and sometimes it's a healthy interest, and sometimes it's driven by an unhealthy interest. And mine has always been weight oriented. And if I go to a conference, for the most part within wellness, the majority are white, generally straight sized women. Most of the people I work with, my clients, I'm almost always working with a white, straight sized woman.
So we're problematic at best in this area as well, because, again, you're making decisions on an entire employee population based on your experience as a white, straight sized woman, and it doesn't encompass a lot of diversity or inclusion, because that's just not your experience.
And I think as far as diet culture is concerned, I have clients from 50 employees to 25,000 employees. And so you see vastly different things because those that might be getting guidance from their insurance carrier or a broker, most of the time, that's a lot more evidence based. And then when an employer is smaller, at times they don't have a budget. So in lieu of seeking out what might be more evidence based, somebody in HR benefits is either voluntold to do it or kind of what I think is worse is the person who just loves exercise but doesn't have any degree or any experience or any education in health and well being at all. And so that could be an MLMer, that could be marathon runner. It could be somebody that just started with fasting and is super exciting because it's going really well.
Christy Harrison: And are these people who are employees themselves in the workplace, or maybe HR employees who just have this as kind of a side hobby? Or are you talking about, like, they're hiring someone from outside who's kind of an uncredentialed person?
Heather Sayers Lehman: Both actually exist. But if it's in HR benefits, because, again, of funding, that's why they might just take an existing employee of like, "Does anybody want to do this?" And those are usually the people who will be like, yeah, and also, so well intentioned. Like, "I love fitness, and I want to share my joy around this," but you can also be well intentioned and misinformed at the same time. But then there are also hires. So if somebody is coming in because we need somebody to run our worksite wellness program, but we also need somebody to help with open enrollments or benefits or retirement. So they generally don't hire somebody who's well versed in wellness but has no idea how retirement works, they'll hire somebody who knows how those programs work, and then they can just wing it with wellness.
Christy Harrison: Right. Because the more specific qualification they need is actually to do these HR things that are very specific. And it's interesting how so many people outside of health and wellness fields will think of themselves as having some sort of expertise because they like fitness or they like, quote unquote healthy eating, or they've sort of educated or see themselves to have educated themselves on these topics by reading on social media or reading online. And it's like such a different thing than actually having that education.
I certainly don't think that all registered dietitians or all health and wellness professionals who are trained have it together either, because there are many of us, like you said, that go into these professions because of our own disordered eating, because of our own obsessions with food and exercise and body size and wellness beliefs that we might then impart onto people. So it's not like it's a guarantee, but at least there's a little more regulation on people who are trained in these sorts of things.
Heather Sayers Lehman: Yeah. And I think of some of the things I see because again, I got my master's degree and never learned one thing about weight inclusivity and never had any direction that weight was not completely controllable. You can control all of these factors, health conditions. So my education in some ways wasn't exactly helpful.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, there's a lot to unlearn from it, too, probably.
Heather Sayers Lehman: And I feel like now there's so many people who feel very confident in their YouTube education. And I always wonder because I think maybe some of that's the confidence of the person that's speaking about it. Because again, like Food Babe, she's pretty confident. Or, you know, FlavCity, like he's confident. Or, you know, the guy's wearing no shirts in the grocery store. That's confidence.
Christy Harrison: I feel like charisma is the ticket in for so many of these, whether it's a credentialed professional or not. It's like, that's a commonality. Right? Is charisma.
Heather Sayers Lehman: Yeah. And I think that then it seems like it makes people hold that information a lot closer, that they're like, "Oh, well, I heard it from here." And of the things that I hear people talking about, especially, if I go to a conference that is just wellness people, it's still pretty wild, the things that I hear in the crowd because, again, a lot of insurance carriers will have a person to help an employer with their programming and I work with a lot of them. They are really smart and educated and really looking at what programs are going in and being able to look at the research behind it a little bit closer because any vendor has got a super slick deck and we're going through my PowerPoint and it's all like whiz bang.
I worked at a very large company, a Fortune 50 company, for one year in wellbeing operations. It was all I could do to make it a year in that environment. And we had a decision maker that she had moved from HR into wellness and had no experience, no education, fancied herself a professional, but she was the one that was in charge of buying programs. And she really couldn't have been less informed.
This is a little ways back when, I think it was right before Weight Watchers bought Kerbo. She really wanted to get Kerbo, which is a weight loss program for children. And I was like, "Oh, let me bring up a few discussion points about putting children on diets." And she just wouldnt hear any of it. She's like, "We really need to have something for kids. We hear that a lot from employees. They want something for kids." And I was like, "Well, it's like the equivalent of getting fireworks for your kid as a toy. This is not just something for them to do. This is actually harmful. And there's plenty of data to show that this is harmful" and just wouldn't listen to a lick of it. I don't think they ever did it.
But that can be really problematic when people that are making decisions, and this happens a lot over the heads of people who are well credentialed. A decision might come from a financial perspective that's not coming from their department. And it's people that are like, "Oh, you know, again, the PowerPoint was really great. And they said they have research," and it's like, what kind of research?
But also a cornerstone of workplace wellness has been weight loss. And obviously the evidence there is not good. This is not intentional weight loss. It's not sustainable. And weight cycling and all of the problems with that, and yet people continue to move forward with programs that center weight loss. So that's always kind of a tough one to say, like, "Oh, we're evidence based." And it's like, "Well, there's evidence on weight loss. It's just not good. I guess if that's why you want to couch it."
Christy Harrison: Let's talk a little bit more about that cause you mentioned buying the programs. So wellness programs are often farmed out to vendors, including big diet companies. This is something I learned from you that I was vaguely aware of but didn't know exactly how it worked. And I think probably some listeners will be curious about how these things come to pass because there are companies like Weight Watchers and Noom and stuff like that in charge of workplace wellness programs, or those are the programs being offered through the guise of workplace wellness, right?
Heather Sayers Lehman: Yeah, it's obviously done differently in different environments, depending on budget and how things kind of shake out like that. So at a very large company they will get a third party vendor, and it might be a big one that, quote unquote, does everything. So, like, Virgin Pulse would be an app that has webinars in it, it has a place to track your food. It has stress management. So it, quote unquote, does everything. So some people really like that. And also it's an easier administrative lift because now I'm managing one vendor, I'm not managing six. So I think that really caught on, and a lot of people didn't like managing a lot of vendors.
So when I was at that Fortune 50 company, I managed three different ones, and there was another me there that was managing equivalent, because it's a lot of lift to manage those programs also from an IT standpoint. So you can have kind of like one big one that will do it all, or you can kind of piecemeal it and have Weight Watchers. But we also have this smoking cessation program. We have this program that does challenges, maybe an activity challenge. So it's always kind of interesting because at a certain level, you're really just managing these things. And that's what I think I didn't realize when I went there, because I was like, I am not going to manage diet programs. Like, I can't think of anything worse for me to do.
So some people like that. And then there are other different sizes where the wellness professionals that work there might actually be doing the programming. They might be doing lunch and learns. They might be running a couch to 5k or something like that. So it can be a lot more hands on, relying on that person's knowledge and expertise at that level. And then you've got people that still want to do The Biggest Loser. "And Tammy from HR said that she'll help. So, yeah, we're going to. I'll bring my skill from home," and they're just putting it all together themselves, which is obviously disastrous.
There's a huge amount of profit to be made by companies doing programs. And I have one of those companies, so I bring in four and six week courses to help people learn health sustaining behaviors. So that has been my company. And for groups, it's easier to have me do that than for them to because to put together a four week course is a ton of work, and so they don't always have the bandwidth to do that education themselves.
And the carriers provide different pieces as well. Certain carriers have a bank of telephonic health coaches, so members can call if they need help with their medication, or the doctor said they need to do this, but they're not sure how to employ that on their own. So there are lots of different pieces and parts from everywhere. And there's definitely of all of my clients, there's no one look at how people do it. A lot of it depends on the decision makers, it depends on bandwidth, it depends on funding. So it can really be all over the place.
Christy Harrison: What are some of the unintended consequences you've seen of workplace wellness when it is things like Tammy from HR doing a biggest loser challenge, or when it's a big company implementing Noom or Weight Watchers or another platform as their weight loss component.
Heather Sayers Lehman: All as to be expected. Certainly diet culture is such a huge part of wellness culture, worksite wellness culture, again, because of the people who are running it, but also the programs. I mean, obviously Weight Watchers is straight diet culture brought to you, normalized and encouraged by your employer, "because obviously we should be on diets, obviously we should be doing all of these things." And sometimes there are financial incentives for you to be doing that, or you're trying to avoid a financial penalty and doing the programs.
So just the normalization of dieting and weight centric behavior, to me is one of the most problematic pieces. People are still paying financial penalties based on their BMI, or they might have to do a program because their BMI was out of range. I mean, it's stunning to me that BMI is used, but it is pretty prolific still. And there are different ways that you can run a program, but there is still a lot of what we call outcomes based. I'm always pushing behaviors, not outcomes. But then there are a lot of groups that are like, "No, we're very interested in your outcomes." And it's like people can't control their outcomes. Why are we doing this?
Christy Harrison: Is that the way they justify having a workplace wellness program?
Heather Sayers Lehman: It always differs depending on the group. I think the outcomes based, that's probably the most interesting piece to me because I work under the tenets of behavior change, and most outcomes based are the exact opposite of what same you would do if you wanted people to change their behavior. You don't give them extrinsic rewards. You don't have a carrot or you don't have a stick, and there's a lot of sticks. And that doesn't change people's behavior. If anything, it makes them angry.
And I would be as well because people aren't forced, quote unquote, to do anything. But if you're going to pay $200 more a month for your health insurance and that takes $200 out of your grocery cart or your prescriptions or your kids basketball shoes, yes, they're going to do whatever it is that they had to do. I don't view that as a choice. But again, that's not how people change their behavior, because they're just listening to their employer and trying to get through whatever mandatory education session or mandatory health coaching session they have to do. That's not what inspires people to change.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, it's so interesting that you say carrots and sticks and that you say there's a lot of sticks because I think the way that it's sometimes framed by these workplace wellness programs is like, "Oh, it's a carrot. We're dangling an incentive to help you get healthier. And you can take it or leave it," but in reality, if you are going to be charging people $200 more a month for health insurance or giving them a $200 break on their health insurance, of course it's going to feel like a penalty. Of course it's going to be like, well, it is actually a stick because I'm being penalized for not meeting these arbitrary standards.
Heather Sayers Lehman: And arbitrary is a perfect word as well. And when you start even digging deeper, it's more infuriating because even blood pressure numbers get changed by the American Heart Association because they've decided that, "Okay, we did say it was 130 over 90 is high blood pressure. Now anything over 120 over 80." So those things have changed. Cholesterol numbers have changed, and by whom is always very interesting because those associations have a decent backing from pharmaceutical companies. So it certainly behooves a pharmaceutical company to have the blood pressure standards drop lower and more people are eligible for medication.
Christy Harrison: It's so hard to talk about this stuff without feeling like a conspiracy theorist. I feel like I'm always walking this line because I think wellness culture and so many alternative providers and integrative and functional providers are weaponizing these real failings in the conventional healthcare system and saying, "Yeah, you can't trust big pharma. Come over here where we're doing everything, quote unquote natural." And of course, it's a huge industry as well. The supplement industry is a multibillion dollar operation. Alternative medicine's a multibillion dollar operation. Like, all of it is for profit and not at all philanthropic the way that they frame it but it's weaponizing and harnessing these issues within the conventional healthcare system.
And I think sometimes people when they hear stuff like, "Yeah, the American Heart Association has pharmaceutical ties, and maybe that has something to do with why they're lowering these standards." And it's like, yeah, maybe it also has something to do with clinical science and outcomes, but also science can be influenced by the pharmaceutical industry and other industries. And it's also complicated and tricky. To tease it all out requires a lot of critical thinking and skepticism and not reflexive skepticism of everything, because I think when you're just sort of skeptical across the board of any industry, then it puts you at risk of those sorts of pitches and makes you vulnerable to snake oil by people who are on this other side saying, "Yeah, pharmaceuticals suck. Big pharma's out to get you. Come over here where we're doing everything right."
And so it's really tricky to have these conversations. And I think for anyone listening who is in that place of early skepticism about some of this stuff, I want to just caution not to paint with a broad brush and say that everything is corrupt or whatever, because, yeah, there is corruption everywhere. And there are also good people doing good work, science minded, really doing good research, and relying on the evidence, too. So we can't impugn the whole conventional healthcare system.
And there are these realities, right? And the weight loss industry is another one that has a huge influence over science and policy in the, quote unquote, obesity space and dictates a lot around body size that I think is really problematic when you dig into who's actually funding these things and who are the quote unquote obesity medicine researchers that are seen as the experts in dictating policy and clinical care, who are in the pocket of these drug companies that are making blockbuster pharmaceutical diet drugs to the tune of billions of dollars. It's just hugely complicated.
Heather Sayers Lehman: That's why I feel like when I talk about a lot of this, it always feels very rambly because it depends. There are so many different factors. And I think the most important thing is always understanding that multiple things can be true, because do I see harm in wellness programs? Yes. Are some of the people that I work with in wellness the most delightful, kind, caring, smart, savvy people? Yes. So those things absolutely exist. And, you know, for pharma, did they engineer an opioid epidemic? Absolutely. And would I die without my pharmaceutical medications because I don't have a thyroid? Yes. And do I feel so much better on the particular cocktail I'm on right now than I ever did with bark and herbs and whatever? Yes.
And are there some people that feel better with bark and herbs than they did with pharma? Yes, and I think that's just so difficult for a lot of people and certainly myself in the past as well. Once I had my thyroid out, the first thing I took was Nature-Throid, because I want to have something that's as close to natural until I'm hovering around death.
Christy Harrison: That's the one that's like thyroid extract from pigs.
Heather Sayers Lehman: And it gets recalled all the time. I actually don't know if it's still on the market, but it would get recalled because the levels were not the same. And as somebody who depends on that for overall bodily function, I would like more clinical trials on whatever I'm taking, some kind of standards.
Christy Harrison: I know. I remember looking into that as well and have looked into it repeatedly over the years because I hear things and come across clients who are like, "Oh, yeah, I take Nature-Throid or Armour Thyroid" or whatever it might be, thinking that it's more natural. And every time I look at the research, it really just doesn't seem to be standardized. And a lot of that stuff is not FDA approved even. I'll take the thing that is FDA approved and being monitored and standardized so that it can give me the levels that I need versus something that might be all over the place.
And then, of course, when you're taking something like that that isn't effective and doesn't give you what you need and your levels are all over the place, then of course you're going to have symptoms and of course you're going to be like, "Well, what else can I do to improve these symptoms?" And then there's someone right there to sell you supplements and detoxes and diets and all the rest. So, yeah, it's really complicated. And I think too, my skeptical mind, when I think about people who feel better with barks and tinctures and stuff than with pharmaceuticals, I think there's a lot of that goes into that.
And for some people, who knows? Maybe the barks and tinctures genuinely work. But I think more likely is probably some combination of placebo effects, maybe the drugs they were on before weren't the right things for them and they needed to find something different or whatever it might be. I think placebo effects are so fascinating, and I want to talk to someone who's an expert in placebo effects for the podcast and do a really deep dive, because it's not saying "it's all in your head" when you say that something is a placebo effect, it's actually saying the mind body connection is real and we have to respect it and it's powerful and it can have impacts on pain especially, but some other symptoms as well, that might have some sort of mind body element to them. It's not a panacea, it can't cure cancer or anything like that, but it does actually have real impacts in some ways. And it's important.
Heather Sayers Lehman: Yeah, and I think with that too, there's sort of this theory that like, "Oh, I took this pill and it didn't work" when there are actually a lot of different types. But I always think that it's hard because it's such a hassle to go to the doctor, you've got a copay and you know these things. And so I understand why people quit. And it's been one of the more helpful things for me to hang in and be an advocate for myself at best, "That this isn't working great. And I hear you that these two are identical, and I want to try the other one." And not skipping around every six weeks or taking like six months and two different lab draws later, that I want to try something else. That's been really beneficial. And I don't feel like that's very encouraged within the system. But a lot of times, of course, what you get the first time might not be the best for you and your particular biology and chemistry.
Christy Harrison: I'm curious to hear a little bit more about how the wellness culture piece of workplace wellness and how the mainstreaming of some of the more woo woo aspects of wellness culture have affected the employee wellbeing space and maybe some of the programming thats offered, too.
