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New York Times bestselling cookbook author Julia Turshen joins us to discuss intuitive cooking and how it relates to intuitive eating, how diet-culture recovery has influenced her approach to cooking and recipe writing, learning to accept that not every meal is going to be stellar (and why that’s a powerful antidote to social-media diet culture), her new book, What Goes with What, and more. Behind the paywall, we discuss how we’ve both gotten to a place where work isn’t our whole life, some behind-the-scenes looks at book publishing and book deals, Julia’s experience of powerlifting and how it’s changed her relationship with her body, how she navigates the diet and wellness culture in powerlifting, and both of our thoughts on the extreme protein consumption pushed by strength coaches and “protein girlies.”
Julia Turshen is a New York Times bestselling cookbook author. Her latest book, Simply Julia, is an IACP award-winning national bestseller. Julia has written for multiple publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Vogue. She is the founder of Equity At The Table (EATT), an inclusive digital directory of women/non-binary individuals in food, and the host and producer of the IACP-nominated podcast Keep Calm and Cook On, which the New York Times has called “an antidote to diet culture.” Epicurious has named Julia one of the ‘100 Greatest Home Cooks of All Time.’ She sits on the Kitchen Cabinet Advisory Board for the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History and is a member of God’s Love We Deliver’s Culinary Council. She writes a weekly newsletter, teaches live cooking classes every Sunday afternoon, and is a competitive powerlifter. Julia lives in the Hudson Valley with her spouse Grace and their many pets. Her next book, What Goes with What, will be out on October 15th.
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
Julia’s new book, What Goes with What
Julia’s previous book, Simply Julia
Julia’s Substack
Christy’s protein piece
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: My guest today is New York Times bestselling cookbook author and friend of the Pod, Julia Turshen, who is back for her second appearance on the show to discuss her new book, What Goes With What? Which is all about intuitive cooking. We talk about how that relates to intuitive eating, how diet culture recovery has influenced her approach to cooking and recipe writing, learning to accept that not every meal is going to be stellar, and why that's such a powerful antidote to social media diet culture and lots more.
Behind the paywall, we discuss how we've both gotten to a place where work isn't our whole life, some behind the scenes looks at book publishing and book deals, Julia's experience of powerlifting and how it's changed her relationship with her body, how she navigates the diet and wellness culture inherent in powerlifting and both of our thoughts on the extreme protein consumption pushed by many strength coaches and, quote unquote, protein girlies.
If you want to hear the whole thing, which is so, so good, and get lots of other great perks, you can become a paid subscriber at rethinkingwellness.substack.com. If you do, you'll not only get to hear extended interviews like this one, but you'll also get subscriber only Q&As and essays, full access to the archives, commenting privileges, and a place to connect with other listeners and more. Just go to rethinkingwellness.substack.com to sign up or click the link in the show notes.
And thanks so much to everyone whos already a paid subscriber. I truly couldn't do this work without your support and it just means so much to me. Also a quick plug for my second book, The Wellness Trap, which I think you’ll love if you’ve enjoyed this podcast. I know I’ve talked about it a million times here before, so I wont go on about it, but you can check it out christyharrison.com/thewellnesstrap to learn more or pick it up at your favorite bookstore. With that, here's my conversation with Julia Turshen. So, Julia, welcome back to Rethinking Wellness. I'm so excited to talk with you again.
Julia Turshen: I am so happy to be here. I've been really looking forward to it.
Christy Harrison: It's so great to be connected with you. And our last episode, by the time this comes out, it'll be over a year ago, but we talked about cooking without wellness rules, and I think that was a really resonant topic for a lot of people because I think cooking has become so fused with orthorexic thinking for a lot of people. And I think your new book is so exciting because it really just kind of extends on this conversation and takes it to the next level.
It's called What Goes With What? And it feels very much like intuitive cooking, which is so exciting to me as someone who practices and teaches intuitive eating because it's really not a part of the conversation about intuitive eating very often, and I think is such a helpful adjunct and something that really supports people in an intuitive eating practice. So I'm really curious to talk to you about the philosophy behind this book and whether you see it as something that is an extension of your own intuitive eating practice as well.
Julia Turshen: Yes, to all of the above. I'm so glad to hear you kind of give your impression and experience with it. It means a lot to me to hear. And I agree so much. I think the line, or I guess the bridge between cooking intuitively and eating intuitively is often not discussed. And I think to eat, especially if you're trying to eat intuitively, food has to be prepared at some point, whether it's you cooking or you're getting it somewhere. And I think a big part of making intuitive eating just easier and less stressful and just bringing more joy to the act of eating, just ease, I think having a more intuitive relationship with cooking really helps.
That might sound really obvious, but I think it's just worth saying because I think my fellow home cooks often get really stressed out in the kitchen. And cooking at home, whether you're doing it just for yourself, whether you have a partner or roommates or children or whoever is eating in your household, even if it's just you, cooking at home is a lot of work. It's an incredible amount of labor. It's not just the cooking it's shopping and planning and budgeting and cleaning up and figuring out what to do with leftovers. And I just feel like this labor often doesn't get acknowledged in the way it really needs to be. And I think when we make that labor as easy as possible, as fun as possible, of course it makes sense we're gonna have an easier and more fun time when it comes to the eating.
So those are some rambling thoughts, and I think it's stuff that I think about all the time. I try to practice in my own life, in my kitchen, in my day to day cooking and eating, and for the new book for What Goes With What, I tried to bring all that into the book. The recipes are incredibly simple, and the thing that I feel so excited about with the book are these charts that I've offered to kind of frame all the recipes. So the book is 20 charts, and each one gives you kind of the infrastructure, kind of like a formula for how to make something. So there's one for salad dressings. There's a couple for soups. There's one for baked goods. There's one for sheet pan meals.
I tried to think of all the useful categories and the chart gives you this kind of formula, and then I give you all these examples of how you can employ that formula, and then you turn the page, and then there's recipes for all the examples. So it gives you not just simple recipes, but a way to kind of understand why the recipes work, how they work, so that you can have that more intuitive relationship with cooking. You can riff on things. You can substitute an ingredient. You can leave something out if you don't like it. You can get all that kind of confidence that comes with cooking intuitively.
Christy Harrison: Yeah. I think there's that sense of ease and freedom in the kitchen that can come only when you feel really supported and confident and you know why things are going where they are. I shared with you offline that I had sort of taken a break from cooking for, like, two years, really. I cooked here and there, but I wasn't the designated cook in the family. My husband was doing that labor, and so I was just sort of sitting back and being fed, which was lovely. And I think there's a real place for that. And, yeah, I probably needed that. At that point in my life, having a young child and work and just trying to balance all the things. And now I feel a little bit more firmly on my feet, and he's back working in the city, and so I've taken on that labor on weeknights, anyway.
Getting back into it, I had had a pretty intuitive relationship with cooking previously. Actually learned to cook from a roommate when I lived abroad in Paris for my junior year of college, who happened to be the daughter of the guy who started Saveur magazine, which was just random cool coincidence. And so she passed down all this cool stuff to me of intuitive ways to cook and ways to think about putting things together and all this stuff. So I had taken that and some other stuff I had learned and then worked at food magazines. And so I felt pretty confident in the kitchen. And then I just was like, "I'm tired. I can't do this. Cooking seems so exhausting. This is too much."
And now I'm coming back to it. And at first I thought we'll get one of these meal delivery services or whatever, where they send you the ingredients and they send you recipes, but that's so expensive. And we weren't able to afford that. How can I make it sort of that type of experience where it's easy, the food sort of appears and I cook through the recipe? And I've been doing that for a while, we sort of divide the labor where my husband does the shopping and I do the cooking, and so he does make all the stuff appear, except that when I'm using recipes with that stuff and only doing recipes, not really thinking as much about what goes with what and how to substitute things and how to use up what I have in my fridge.
We end up with all this extra stuff and we end up spending way more money than we need because I'm getting a jar of some interesting thing that I'm only using once and then it's hanging out in the back of the fridge and were doing that every week. So I'm trying to figure out now how to get back into more intuitive style of cooking. So I feel like your book landed in my lap just at the right moment where I'm getting my head around the principles here and how to use different things and make them work together.
Julia Turshen: I totally get that. What you're describing is stuff that I obsessed with. I love thinking about these details and I try to consider them when I'm writing recipes. So I live in a pretty rural area. I live a couple hours outside of New York City, and I try to not include any ingredients in my recipes that I can't find within like half an hour of my house. It's just sort of like a little rule I try to follow. But when I break that rule, because I made the rule, I'm allowed to break it, I'll always tell you where you can find that thing. I'll tell you what you can do with the rest of the jar of whatever it might be because what you're describing happens to all of us.
And there's a part of me, I guess, a generous way to say it is like a person who just tries to be helpful. I think the truth is, people pleasing. I'm very solution oriented. There's a part of me that just wants to write everyone's meal plans and take away all the decision making and labor and just make it easy. As someone whos passionate about giving home cooks tools to make, again, what you're describing as easy as possible, I actually dont think thats the most helpful thing I can do. I think the most helpful thing I hope I can do at this point is to explain why all this stuff goes together and why it works so you can make those decisions on your own.
I feel like its a puzzle that I've been trying to figure out my whole professional life, and I'm sure I'll continue to try and figure it out more. But I guess I should also say I do the same thing as you all the time. There's always half a jar of something. There's always something wilting, there's always something in the freezer I forgot about. I'm not immune to any of this.
Christy Harrison: That makes me feel better, too. Maybe we're never going to be perfect about it, but to get a sense of how to deal with stuff when it comes up is useful. And I feel like empowering people to make their own decisions or figure things out on their own is so aligned with what I want to do and sort of how I want to show up for people with intuitive eating and also with thinking about wellness culture, critical thinking skills, media literacy and all that stuff. I want to help people think through these questions for themselves and not necessarily need to rely on me to give some sort of formula or recipe or whatever.
And I think that so much in the food world anyway, of what I've experienced, feels very regimented or a certain controlling-ness to it. Of wanting to write recipes that people follow to the letter. And I remember when I was working at a food magazine, there was a sense of real pride in the fact that we tested our recipes, that everything that was there needed to be there, that you weren't really going to substitute. And sort of looking down upon the riffing that was happening online, or even when our recipes were posted online and people were like, "Oh, I swapped out this for this." And some people there would be sort of annoyed by that, be like, "Well, that doesn't work. It's not supposed to be that way."
And actually, some of the stuff that I experienced in the food world as well around disordered eating and that stuff that maybe we'll talk about in a little bit, I think sort of goes along with that need to control and manage everything with the food experience. I'm curious for you if your effort to break out of that a little bit and not manage every aspect of things has continued to evolve with your continuing divestment from diet culture, which I know you wrote in the book, was part of the process of writing the book, too, is that you were in your continued recovery.
Julia Turshen: Yeah, I guess my short answer is yes, it's definitely continued. And I think it's not at all a coincidence to me that my recipe writing style has become more relaxed, more flexible as my relationship to my body, to my cooking and eating and body image and all these things, as that relationship has gotten more positive and neutral also, and just more easygoing. I guess the quicker, better way to say that is the more I divest from diet culture, the more flexibility there is in everything in my life, including my work and my recipe writing.
And I think what you are speaking about with your experiences in food media and both working in it and observing it are really, really important to acknowledge because you've done such a great job in your workbooks, newsletter, podcast, everything. I've learned so much from you about how diet, culture and wellness culture, which are just tentacles of white supremacy, how these things came to be. And when I see it all through that lens, when I see food media through that lens and cookbooks through that lens, it is all just more of the same, tools of control and measurement and restriction and a sense of authority.
If someone left a comment on that recipe saying, "Hey, I substituted this and turned out pretty good," and then someone's like, "No, that's not the thing." They still made a meal. Maybe it was even better. Maybe it was just fine. It also doesn't matter. So I think the more I come to understand all this, the bigger systems at play, two things are true. The more I'm just like, "Yeah, none of it matters, who needs a recipe?"
And at the same time, I feel like I talk to home cooks every day. I teach online cooking classes. You've been part of it. I write my newsletter and cookbooks. I'm in conversation with the people who come to my work all the time, and I ask people questions and I try my best to listen to what is making all of this challenging, and are there any tools I can offer to make it less challenging. As opposed to "let me tell you what to do," which I think we see a lot of and I just don't think it's very fun.
Christy Harrison: Yeah. When you start to see how problematic it is and question the foundations of that sense of control, I think it starts to become a lot less fun and you become interested in other things. And I do really appreciate that sort of helpfulness because as with intuitive eating, I think I've had some people say to me, this is rare, but occasionally people will ask, "Why are you over intellectualizing everything with intuitive eating? And why do we need all this talk? Shouldn't we just be listening to our bodies and that's it?" Yes, and that's great if you're there and if that's what you want to do and sort of where you're at, you don't need me. Go forth and do that for yourself.
And I think a lot of people coming out of diet culture who are so used to having all these rules and restrictions about food and asking themselves a million questions and questions that aren't about what would truly feel good to them or be pleasurable or satisfying, but more about, am I allowed to have this? Is it time? Is this too much? Or whatever, all of that. It's helpful to have some sort of scaffolding to build from that to a more intuitive style of eating. And I think that's probably true with cooking as well.
Julia Turshen: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I've spoken to you about this. I've written about the following. I lived for many years with an eating disorder, and I have learned in my, also, years of acknowledgement of that recovery, etcetera, that one of the biggest impacts that diet culture, I would say, had on me was dissolving my self trust. I felt like I just couldn't trust myself. I couldn't trust myself to make decisions around food and my body and all this stuff and I would say a big part of my recovery is rebuilding that trust. And this is, again, something you know very well and are so good at helping people with.
And I think the same is true, I guess, as we just sort of keep saying, in cooking as it is in eating, I think the way that a lot of food magazines, cookbooks, food television, the way all of this stuff has developed, a lot of it is people telling other people what to do because the people they're talking to can't possibly know or something. I think it assumes I that a lot of home cooks just don't have trust in their abilities and intuition around decisions, because cooking is just making a bunch of decisions over and over again.
So as I've learned to kind of rebuild that trust with myself when it comes to consuming the food that I so love to prepare, I really think it has helped me gear my work towards helping people trust themselves in the kitchen. I know I need this in various parts of my life, sometimes you just need someone to give you permission, even if it's not theirs to grant, but just to hear someone say, "Yeah, of course you can use that instead. You don't have a lemon. Yeah, use a lime. No big deal." That might sound so obvious, but a lot of people get worried, and that anxiety can become a barrier to having this easygoing relationship with cooking. Yeah, I think that trust is just a big i mportant thing.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, it's huge. And it's interesting to think about the parallels between diet culture and culinary culture. Diet culture is built on this foundation. I mean, the deeper foundations, like you said, white supremacy and this sort of controlling of everybody's bodies, but also a foundation of people don't know how to make decisions for themselves and so we're going to tell them what to do and give them the solution. And the same is true in a different way for maybe different reasons, but also some of the same reasons with culinary culture.
It's just interesting to think about what would it mean to let go of all of it? I know, for me, when I was first coming out of the deepest levels of my disordered eating, I was working in food magazines, I was around a lot of food people, and it was very helpful for exposing me to different ways of thinking about food and also just kind of like exposure therapy, where I was eating with people, eating exciting, different things that I probably would have restricted myself from eating at home and then not able to leave and go compensate. And so I was just forced to be more normal with food, more relaxed with food, whatever.
But also, I think in that world, there still was a level of disorder that maybe was a helpful bridge to me at the time, out of disordered eating, where people would talk about food in these ways that were like, "It's not worth the calories if it's not delicious" or something. And even really well known food writers and chefs and stuff that I talked with would say some version of that if sort of we got down to it. And so I really appreciated something that you said in the book where you were like, contrary to what social media might suggest, not every meal you eat has to be the best meal you've ever had. I think that is a risk and a pitfall that sometimes we fall into when we're first, or at least some of us, when we're first sort of making peace with food or starting to open back up to pleasure. There's a sort of typical disordered eating pattern. Maybe that's like you have to earn your food through exercise or whatever, but here it's like you have to earn your food through culinary perfection.
Julia Turshen: Absolutely. The perfectionism of it all is exhausting. It's totally exhausting. And I think that even Pete Wells, who is the now former restaurant critic of the New York Times, in his goodbye letter, when he wrote about leaving that job and that position, it centered on his weight. And, it was, in my opinion, an incredibly anti-fat lens and this idea of what you said, like earning calories, that kind of thing. I think also the language we use around, especially restaurant culture, I'm reminded of, this might seem out of left field, but the poet and novelist, just the great writer, Ocean Vong. He's written really beautifully about the language we use in our culture about success.
I might be butchering this, but we say things like I'm gonna kill it, or, you murdered that. You crushed it. It's such violent language. And I think a lot of that happens in food, too. If a chef goes into a restaurant, knows the other chef, often they'll send things out to the table, and people will say things like, "Oh, they're trying to kill me." This kind of language, the way we talk about it, is just so aggressive. And I think it's sort of tied in a way to the language about earning it and it's just all so intense.
Christy Harrison: Yeah. There's, like, a competitiveness to it.
Julia Turshen: Yeah. A very aggressive, competitive kind of tense language. And I also think the sort of Instagram of it all, the social media of it all, this pressure for things to look beautiful, to be the, quote unquote, best version of something. Again, it's intense. It's so much pressure. And it also keeps you away from the pleasure that can be found in really simple things. And you use the word pleasure before, and I just kind of put it on a little post it in my brain because I think having a pleasure centered lens around it all is really, at least for me, it's been a really helpful thing.
We're at peak tomato season where I live. One of my favorite things in the world is a piece of just bread with mayo and thick slice of tomato and plenty of salt and pepper. And people have waxed poetic about tomato sandwiches, but it's really simple. It's like, bread, mayo, tomato, salt. You don't even need the pepper. And I don't have anything new to add to that conversation about tomato sandwiches, you know? And I eat them on a paper towel. I'm not putting them on a beautiful antique plate, photographing it in the natural light. I'm just eating it over my kitchen sink because it's a mess.
And I love that. I look forward to it all year. It makes me so happy, and I'm never gonna write down a recipe for that. Or, you know, it just. makes it seem harder than it is to write a recipe for that. Like, just enjoy it. An that could be a ripe piece of fruit. It could be an Oreo dunked in milk. It could be a grilled cheese.
Whatever it is, these simple things to me, they're some of the most satisfying and just full of pleasure. And I think when we kind of succumb to that pressure of perfectionism, we're keeping ourselves away from those opportunities. And it's just capitalism. It's just pure capitalism. It's complicated dishes and beautiful photographs and stuff. It's usually in an effort to try and sell you something, you know? And I know I acknowledge, I'm trying to sell a cookbook. I get it. I'm part of it. I understand.
Christy Harrison: We're all in the water.
Julia Turshen: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. We're all just trying our best.
Christy Harrison: It sort of reminds me of something that you talked about recently in your newsletter about what counts as cooking. And I definitely think people have a sort of hang up about that sometimes, that they're like, "Oh, I'm not really a cook." Even when I just said I didn't cook for two years or whatever, that's not really true. I did prepare a lot of meals. I prepared a lot for my daughter. I prepared things for myself. I just wasn't, quote unquote, cooking by turning on the oven and chopping. But I was putting food together. And I think sometimes that gets missed in the social media glorification of the exquisite thing that isn't simple or the sort of overanalyzing of something that is really simple.
Julia Turshen: Yeah, absolutely.
Christy Harrison: Just sort of giving people permission to say, "No, I do cook. I can take care of myself with food and prepare things." Even if it's not something that feels elaborate and feels like it should, quote unquote, count as cooking. I think it's nice to have that permission, too.
Julia Turshen: Yeah. It's like a more expansive or inclusive definition of the word. It doesn't mean cooking is only for when you make a lasagna from scratch, including the pasta, and you make your own ricotta and you make your own tomato sauce. Then there's, of course, time and space for that. And that can be a beautiful experience and bonding with whoever you're making it with or serving it to. I'm not trying to say that that's not good, but I know even me who makes a living from basically cooking at home and talking about it. And I have a flexible schedule. I have financial security to buy whatever ingredients. I have time. We don't have children. I'm not picking anyone up from school. With all of that in mind, I'm not making lasagna like that.
Christy Harrison: It's nice. It's helpful to know.
Julia Turshen: Yeah. So I think when we understand cooking to be a thing that many of us do, when we're just putting food together, just as you said, it just includes more people, it includes more experiences. I think that's worthwhile.
Christy Harrison: Totally. I mean, I think it relates to something that is very much in the culture right now, which is this fear of ultra processed foods, right? And the sort of denigration of anything processed. And I know when I was in my orthorexic era, I often felt like I had to make everything from scratch. And it was so liberating when I started to be able to embrace processed foods again. And it was like a slow process. And now I'll look at my pantry and there's so many things that I never would have touched back in the day, but that are staples of making something that is a delicious meal or something. Just make things easier and cut down that labor, but also can be really delicious in and of themselves, like store bought, canned, whatever.
And so I really appreciate in your book, you have a whole essay about sort of your love of pre-made ingredients and processed foods. And I think it's important to have that permission too, and sort of push back the tide of fear mongering around those things. I'm curious if that was a process for you of coming to re embrace or embrace for the first time or whatever, those kinds of ingredients.
Julia Turshen: Oh, absolutely. I mean, I definitely grew up eating a lot of, I'm using air quotes which no one listening can see, but I definitely grew up eating a lot of processed food. I think we talked about this last time, but I grew up in eighties, nineties, peak diet culture, definitely a Snackwell's cookie house and all those kinds of packaged goods. I ate a lot of fast food and all that kind of stuff. And then as I really got immersed in diet culture, wellness culture, in my peak eating disorder, disordered eating years, there were a lot of orthorexic tendencies in me and my behavior and a lot of perfectionism and a lot of all the things we're talking about this pressure to feel like I had to make everything from scratch or only buy vegetables of the farmers market or whatever it might be.
And I would say I started to really embrace all foods, I can't pinpoint a certain date or time, but for me, I think about it a lot through the lens of race and class and what is seen as acceptable and what is seen as not good. And I think about how many highly, highly processed foods are sold for so much money at stores like Whole Foods or Erewhon. I'm making this up, but this product might exist like a cauliflower lentil chip, which is, again, I'm making this up, but maybe $12 a bag or something, and there's like four chips in it.
How do you think the cauliflower and the lentils became chips? Processing had to happen. And when we cook, we're processing food. When a farmer harvests kale and washes it and gets it ready to go to the market, that's processing it, that's making it available to sell. To eat food is to process it in some way. I think the word "processed" is a little natural or any of these other words that are actually kind of meaningless.
Christy Harrison: For sure. I'm glad that you sort of found your way back to accepting all foods and the more, quote unquote, processed ones as well.
Julia Turshen: Yeah. And I think there's a really nice way for me to just think about this, and it's through what you kind of brought up before and we talked a bit about, but through this lens of pleasure, and I'm thinking about something as simple as tomato sauce. I used to think that the best tomato sauce was one you made yourself, and the following is obviously not sponsored or whatever, but I just love Rayo's tomato sauce. I think it tastes so good.
Christy Harrison: Oh, me too. Also not sponsored, but so delicious.
Julia Turshen: Yeah. It's not the most inexpensive one, I know, but I think it tastes so good. And when I make tomato sauce on my own, I want it to taste like Rayo's. So I just buy Rayos. I think this tastes the best and that's what I'm seeking. That's my priority in cooking and eating, and it's just finding that pleasure. And I think finding it through the most sort of simple, efficient ways as possible is also pleasurable. So if it means eliminating the labor of making my own tomato sauce and buying this jar, that's part of pleasurable experience.
Christy Harrison: Especially if it's going to stand in the way of you doing it at all. I feel like sometimes when I was in that phase of thinking I had to make everything from scratch, it was just so daunting to do anything that I would tie myself in knots trying to come home from work and get something on the table. Why am I doing this to myself?
Julia Turshen: Yeah. And it's completely unsustainable. And I think about all this in the context of all the tradwife stuff that's online, which I'm not an expert in whatsoever, but this idea of literally churning your own butter and stuff, which, again, nothing wrong with making your own butter. Do whatever you want to do. But I just don't think that's the most sustainable way to get through the day.
Christy Harrison: Right. And it's also sort of the commodification of it for the lifestyle mediaization of it, if that's a word. Right? Turning this thing that might be something that you want to do for fun or for whatever reasons, into this lifestyle brand that then other people are sort of asked to emulate, even if you're just sharing from what feels like an authentic place of just wanting to share, in this media environment we're in, it just becomes something else. It just becomes this sort of invitation to or command almost to do things like I do. The parasocial relationships that form on social media are so powerful. And I think it's just hard to avoid making people feel bad, making people feel like they're supposed to be doing something that is a huge amount of labor that maybe doesn't fit into their lives.
Julia Turshen: It's all so complicated.
Christy Harrison: Well, I'm curious about your relationship with social media, actually, because the last time we spoke, you were mostly off it and had been really off it when you were working on the farm and then sort of reimagining your relationship with it. I'm curious, a year further on. And now you have a new book out. There is probably some pressure to post about it and do things on social media. How are you navigating that?
Julia Turshen: Sure. I will tell you, I guess, the logistics of my relationship with social media now and then I feel like there's also a more macro feeling about it all when I zoom out. So I think when we last spoke, I remember I was in the throes of trying to figure out my relationship to it and just trying not to be all or nothing, which is something I'm just working on in all aspects of my life. You can confirm that with my therapist, because there's a part of me that's like, oh, just do away with it. This thing isn't 100% good. Why have it? But it also is a useful tool for my work and connecting with people. And so over the past couple of years, just trying to figure out my kind of sweet spot with it and I think I'm in a pretty good spot these days.
What it looks like for me, again, could be different for everyone. I only use one platform. I only use Instagram mostly because I just feel like I am nothing funny enough or cool enough for TikTok or fast enough to understand how to do it. So I just use one platform. I, at one point, unfollowed every single account that I followed. I think we talked about that.
Christy Harrison: It was so inspiring to me. I ended up doing the same, actually, and it's been amazing.
Julia Turshen: Yeah, I decided if I followed no one, then I wouldn't be consuming the content so much. So I did that for a while, and then I think I kind of pulled from that sort of more extreme to somewhere a little more in the middle of the spectrum. I keep the amount of accounts I follow, I don't have a hard and fast rule about this, but I keep it, like, under 200. And I really just follow people I'm friends with. I guess the thing that I keep in mind is anyone I follow on Instagram is that someone I would text, is that someone whose phone number I have, is that someone who's in my community or friend group in some way? And obviously, it's fine if not, I follow Ilona Maher because I think she's great. I'm not texting her.
So those are some things I keep in mind. And I basically, in doing that, helped kind of extricate myself a little bit from food media, which was feeling very consuming to me. And I love so many of my colleagues. I respect and admire their work and enjoy it, but I just found when I was seeing it all the time, it was just making me feel competitive, and I was getting into comparison stuff and just didn't feel great. So I look at people's accounts and stuff all the time, but I go on my own terms as opposed to it just showing up. So those are some things about who I follow, how I've navigated that.
And then in terms of what I shared, I keep using the word rule but I guess what I mean is my boundary and the boundaries I have around what I share, I try to just share about my work. I try to just share about if I have a class coming up I'm teaching, if my book is coming out, what I wrote about in my newsletter this week. I try to share that kind of stuff. And every now and then something else feels like I just want to share it. And I do, but that happens less and less frequently. And I used to share so much, just personal, political. Sometimes I feel really torn about it. Just to be quite frank, I've posted a bit about being in favor of Palestinian human rights, but there's a part of me that's like, "Should I have posted more? I don't know."
I like sticking to just using it as a tool to share my work and connect with people who I want to connect with about my work. And I don't know if that's right or wrong. I don't think there's a right or wrong. I just know that those boundaries have helped me have a better kind of mental health relationship with social media. So that's kind of where I am with it now. And I have also, at the same time that that's happened, I'm just putting this together in my mind now.
But I started a Substack newsletter. I guess it was like a couple years ago. I feel like I wasn't one of the first, but I'm not in the newer wave. And that is the place where I engage the most with people because I feel like it's a smaller audience than my Instagram. I have less people who read my newsletter than who follow me on Instagram, is what I'm trying to say. But I feel like the people who read my newsletter and who leave comments or send me emails about it, I'm talking to them all the time. It just feels like a much safer place to me. It feels like a more engaged place. Not like in terms of social media engagement, but just I feel engaged with those people. I feel like we really are in a conversation and I just enjoy it more.
So that's kind of how I've been approaching it these days. And it's feeling all pretty good. And I guess the big picture, the zoom out macro lens of it all, is I just don't feel tethered to it the way I used to. And I think that is also because I don't feel tethered to my professional life as strongly as I used to. I love my work and I'm grateful to do it. And yes, we live under capitalism. I have to do something and I'm grateful to get to do what I do. And I also feel so delighted to say the following, which is, my work is not my whole life anymore. And it used to be. And cookbooks used to be my whole life.
And I love my new book. I'm so excited it's out. I'm so happy to share it. I'm so proud of it. And it's not my whole life. And I don't feel the pressure to shout about it over social media with hopes that something will happen. I don't even know what. I just feel like my book will sell as many copies as it sells and I'll do what my publisher and the publicist and everything with those professionals who are knowledgeable about selling books, what they tell me to do. But I'm not overextending myself in the way I think I used to because it just didn't feel good. I used to get sick every time I went on book tour. I would get physically exhausted. I would make myself sick over it. And I just could probably be selling more books if I did some of that. And it also just doesn't feel worth it. It doesn't feel worth it to my mental or physical health.
So I say all this and I can hear the privilege and my experience and I'm just like, "Yeah, the book will do whatever," but I feel like my job as an author is to make a thing and do my best to put it out there. And I feel like my best is what I just described. It's my best within these boundaries because more than that is actually not my best. It's like me hurting myself and I'm just less interested in that.
Christy Harrison: I feel very similarly about my work these days and feel like also I used to have my work be my entire life and have, not entire but took up way more space in my life than it does now and felt so wedded to it and also felt, within capitalism, that you have to do something right. But it was all tied up together, the personal ambition and the need to make money and then the pressure of being the primary earner in my family for a while and at one point the sole earner. And so there's that piece of it too.
But I have over the past year or so, really unraveled a lot of that and sort of let go and embraced a smaller work life for myself and having it take up a smaller space. And I move to kind of a smaller space with my Substack and im just not doing as many things. At one point I was going to try to write another book right away and I decided to put that on the shelf for a while and just not take on so much and see what it was like to have a little more space in my schedule and to have the flexibility to do the other things in my life, like being a mom and trying to have friends and hobbies and all that stuff too. And its just been lovely. It's been such a huge relief.
And there is definitely privilege in that as well, right? I couldn't do that if I didn't have a partner who had economic stability to help anchor us so that I wasn't having to just hustle all the time to make money. And I just wish that I had been able to get here sooner to a place where work just took up less space in my life. So I'm curious to hear, I know that a lot of listeners actually have resonated with pieces we've done before and interviews about people coming back from huge ambitions and sort of finding lives that were more right sized to them or professional lives that were more right sized. So I'm curious how you got to this point or got to this mindset.
Julia Turshen: How did I get here? I guess that even just asking myself that question that you just posed, what's the right size life? I think there was a moment when I asked myself a version of that question
