Intuitive Eating co-author Elyse Resch joins us to discuss her history with the natural-food movement, how trying to eat “naturally” led her into orthorexia and other forms of disordered eating, how intuitive eating is being co-opted by wellness culture, what to consider if you’re interested in “natural” foods, and more.
Elyse Resch, MS, RDN, CEDS-S, Fiaedp, FADA, FAND, is a nutrition therapist in private practice with over 40 years of experience specializing in eating disorders, Intuitive Eating, and Health at Every Size. She is the co-author of Intuitive Eating, now in its 4th edition, the Intuitive Eating Workbook, and The Intuitive Eating Card Deck: 50 Bite-Sized Ways to Make Peace with Food. Elyse is also the author of The Intuitive Eating Workbook for Teens and The Intuitive Eating Journal: Your Guided Journey for Nourishing a Healthy Relationship with Food and a chapter contributor to The Handbook of Positive Body Image and Embodiment. She has published journal articles, print articles, and blog posts, and does regular speaking engagements, podcasts, and extensive media interviews. Her work has been profiled on ABC, NPR, CNN, and NBC, and in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Associated Press, and USA Today, among others.
Elyse is nationally known for her work in helping patients break free from diet culture through the Intuitive Eating process. Her philosophy embraces the goal of reconnecting with one’s internal wisdom about eating and developing body liberation, with the belief that all bodies deserve dignity and respect. She is a social justice advocate, a Certified Eating Disorder Specialist and Supervisor, a Fellow of the International Association of Eating Disorder Professionals, a member of the Healer’s Circle of Project Heal, and a Fellow of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, and she supervises and trains health professionals. Find her at elyseresch.com.
Resources and References
Elyse’s website
Elyse’s Intuitive Eating books
Christy’s latest book, The Wellness Trap: Break Free from Diet Culture, Disinformation, and Dubious Diagnoses and Find Your True Well-Being
Data on the social determinants of health
Jonah Soolman on the truth about alternative medicine
Subscribe on Substack for bonus episodes and more
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: Hey there, happy New Year and welcome back to Rethinking Wellness. I'm Christy. I'm a little under the weather today, so my voice might be a little scratchy, but I'm excited to get you this episode. My guest today is Intuitive Eating co-author Elyse Resch, who joins me to discuss her history with the natural food movement, which I don't think a lot of people necessarily know about. She's known for Intuitive Eating and she had her own history with disordered eating, but she talks about how trying to eat naturally led her into Orthorexia and other forms of disordered eating, and I think that's a super important conversation, especially this time of year when diet and wellness culture are in full swing and there's lots of pressure to change your eating. So I'm really excited to talk with Elyse today. We also talked about how Intuitive Eating is being co-opted by wellness culture, another important thing to look out for at this time of year, and what to consider if you're interested in natural foods. This is a great conversation. I can't wait to share it with you shortly. But before I do, just a few quick announcements.
This podcast is brought to you by my second book, The Wellness Trap: Break Free from Diet Culture, Disinformation, and Dubious Diagnoses and Find Your True Well-Being, which is available wherever books are sold! If you like this podcast, you’ll love the book—it’s a deep dive into so many of the things we talk about here, like how wellness culture often drives disordered eating, the role of influencers and social media algorithms in spreading wellness misinformation, problematic practices in the alternative- and integrative-medicine space, and more. Just go to christyharrison.com/thewellnesstrap to learn more and buy the book or pop into your favorite local bookstore and ask for it there.
My first book, Anti-Diet, is also a great resource at this time of year, if you feel yourself being pulled towards diets and other aspects of diet-culture. So you can pick that up wherever you get your books as well, or you can go to christyharrison.com/antidiet.
This podcast is made possible by my paid subscribers at Substack. Paid subscriptions not only help support the show and keep me able to make this podcast free for everyone, but they also get you great perks like bonus episodes and Q&As, early access to regular episodes, commenting privileges, posts from our archives that aren't available anywhere else, covering a huge range of topics about wellness and diet culture, and lots more. Just go to rethinkingwellness.substack.com to sign up. And if you’re already signed up, thank you so much for your support!
I want to give a quick shout-out to a couple of folks who became paid subscribers recently and left nice feedback: Sandy said the content is “informative, evidence-based, and a hugely welcome break from the constant barrage of diet and wellness culture." Sara Suseyi said, "Your writing and research have changed my life." And Kristin Mullinax said, "Thank you for being a voice for people trapped in wellness culture!" So thanks to those folks for their support and those kind words. and if you want to join them, just go to rethinkingwellness.substack.com to sign up. That's rethinkingwellness.substack.com.
Now, without any further ado, here's my conversation with Elyse Resch.
So Elyse, welcome to Rethinking Wellness. I'm so glad to be talking with you for this podcast. We've spoken many times over the years and several of those conversations were for my first podcast, Food Psych. So we'll link to those episodes in the show notes and in those episodes we talked about your Intuitive Eating books, which you co-authored with Evelyn Tripoli, and I'm sure many listeners will know you from that work. But when we were chatting Offline earlier this year, you mentioned that you have a strong history with the natural food movement, and I don't think many people probably know that about you. I know I didn't before you said that to me. So can you tell us a little bit about that?
Elyse Resch: Sure. And I'm so happy to be here also, Christy, great to see you again. So interestingly, I grew up in a home that was not at all connected to either diet-culture or wellness culture. We had everything in the house. Eating was a joy. My mother didn't like to cook. Cooking wasn't a joy for her, but we just ate and there was no conversation about healthy food or unhealthy food. I didn't know anything about that. And as I said, no connection to diet-culture either. I didn't know anything about that. And then I started college and my first day, I may have said this in a past podcast, but my first day at UCLA, I was in the dorm and I went down to the cafeteria to pack my lunch for the first day of school. I was so excited and I was standing in line and got this great big Kaiser roll.
These are these great big red rolls. I started to put a whole bunch of tuna on it and the girl behind me literally yelled, oh my God. And I said, what's the matter? Is there a fly on it? She said, no, that's so fattening. And it was like Greek. I didn't understand what she was talking about, literally. I know I was pretty naive. I didn't understand. But that was the first moment that I heard any connection between food and anything else other than pleasure. Okay, moving on. That was September of my freshman year. In the spring of my freshman year, I met a boy who ended up becoming my first husband and the father of my son and his family. I now look back was extremely orthorexic. I obviously wouldn't have known that title or wouldn't have understood it at all, but here's how it went.
So on our first date, he was in a fraternity and the party was at his house. And I went there and I met his parents and it was the beginning of a wonderful love affair between his parents and me. They were wonderful, wonderful. He was an only child. I was the daughter they never had and I adored them. And so they would invite me over for dinner on a regular basis and he'd come pick me up at the dorm and bring me back there, which I was thrilled because it was much better food than the dorm food. And I was introduced to really wonderful, delicious food. My mother tried hard, but she wasn't a very good cook. And my mother-in-law was this, well, she wasn't my mother-in-Law at that time. She was a fabulous cook. So Alice, I was there after a while, I started to hear some things about healthy eating, but I don't know that they registered so much, although I will say that I was on a date with him and we were going to get dessert.
This is probably pretty early on in the relationship, and I ordered, I think it was cherry pie with some kind of pie, and he ordered fresh pineapple and he started to cry and he said, oh my God, I can't believe you eat like that. You're going to be the mother of my children. How can you eat that terrible food? And that was the beginning. And you're young. I was young. We met when I was 18, he was 17, and at this point we were both 18, I think, and I just wanted to please, and so I said, fine, I won't eat any, we talked about what he considered unhealthy food. I won't eat any more of those foods. And I just stopped eating them. And that was the beginning. And then I fell into the natural food movement. Now I wanted to say something. I was not a nutritionist at that point.
I got out of college as an elementary school teacher, although my interest in nutrition started to bloom with this relationship. But I didn't know anything about nutrition. And as time went on, I was more and more orthorexic. I was more and more only eating healthy food. And somehow I did it. I don't know, it didn't seem to be a problem, but it definitely became a problem. And then when I got pregnant with my son, I had a doctor who was really tied into diet-culture and was monitoring what I was eating. So all around my eating was being monitored at one point during the pregnancy, this is kind of personal stuff, but I don't mind talking about it. I was dying for a piece of apple pie. Here we go back to the pie, and there was this wonderful little restaurant in West LA called the Apple Pan, and I really wanted to go and get it, and he wouldn't lemme have it.
He said, no, you're carrying my child. I do not want you to eat that food. So it was pretty deep also in relationship to my former mother-in-Law. She was wonderful. I miss them terribly. But she was guided by Adele Davis, which whom I'm sure you've heard of. Have you heard of Adele Davis? Yeah. She was considered one of the most prominent nutritionists at the time, and she actually had a really great education. She was a nutritionist, a dietitian. She had a master's degree in biochemistry, but she pretty much, I think started the natural, well, I dunno, you would know better than I, but she was a major component of the natural food movement. I like to look through a lens of psychology all the time. And interestingly, I think she was the youngest of five kids or something, all girls I think. And her mother had a stroke when she was 10 days old and died when she was 17 months old and never really was able to nourish her and she had to be fed with an eyedropper.
So she never had that being held with a breast or a bottle and being fed. And she said something about how she treated her patients as if they were herself. She wanted to be their mother and try to make them healthy. And it was so interesting because my mother-in-Law really wanted her family to be healthy psychologically. She was brought up in a home of limited funds and her parents had a fruit and vegetable stand, and so she got into natural foods with that. But I think that for my mother-in-Law, and it sounds like also as I read about Odell Davis, that there was this sense of control. If they could just control people's health, then people wouldn't leave them. People would be there for them. And I know that that was, I'm presuming this about Adele Davis obviously didn't know her by the way. She wrote her first book I think in the forties, and then that was a textbook on nutrition.
And then she wrote a more popular book, a few more popular books. I think she sold millions of books actually in the fifties, I think was when her popular book came out. In any case, the way I see a parallel with Let's Control People's Health, her mother had a stroke. She wasn't there for her. She wasn't nurtured that way. My mother-in-Law, her parents were not available. She was pretty much left on her own a lot. And so I see that now because again, I look through a psychological lens, and I think it was for me as well, a concept of control in a world where I just really didn't feel like I had much control as I got deeper and deeper into the natural food movement. So I had my son, and when I started cooking for him, I made all of his baby food because Adele Davis told me in her book, didn't tell me, but she said in her book that processed baby food was dangerous for kids and you should make all your own food.
And I remember the doctor telling the pediatrician telling me I should start Feeding him at two months old. Can you believe that, Christy? Oh my God. And so I bought some brown rice and I grounded up and I cooked it, and then I curated or whatever I did with it. I just tried to get it down to something that I could put in his mouth. And of course I stuck it in his mouth and he spit it out. But I know that I pushed natural food on him As a small child. I look back at it with horror. I took him as A-Team, a toddler, and we'd go to parties. I'd bring him some, you're going to laugh a Cara brownie instead of the chocolate brownies. When he was three, I remember him saying to me, mommy, I just want to eat what the other kids are eating.
And I had the wisdom to say, fine, I'm going to stop doing that. But I really regret having pushed that on him. So moving along here I am now deciding I don't want to be a teacher anymore and not having any more children, and I want to go back to graduate school. So what was the natural thing? Go to become a nutritionist? By the way, sidebar. Adele Davis didn't say everything that was bogus. I mean, she said some things that I remember when she would promote going on acidophilus, which is one of the strains of a probiotic after you've been on an antibiotic, which is so interesting because in today's world, it's encouraged to have probiotics from some doctors after you've been on an antibiotic. And she didn't promote crazy foods. I mean, she just wanted natural foods. She just wanted whole grains and fruits and vegetables and unprocessed foods, and that's what I followed for quite a while. Well, then I went to graduate school, became nutritionist and learned a lot more, but it was in that period that my own eating disorder also started. So I've had, I guess two eating disorders, orthorexia, and then it turned into a diet and binge thing. It went from being very particular about what I ate to being focused on my own body. That's kind of my history on that, and it's profound to me, actually.
Christy Harrison: Yeah. Do you feel like the orthorexic phase, the sort of natural food movement that you were a part of, tied up with any sort of beliefs about the environment and ethics? Was that a part of it for you at all, or was it mostly human health?
Elyse Resch: Yeah, no, I think she was really worried about pesticides and chemicals and processed food, but it didn't come from an ethical standpoint. It came from I want to preserve this family. I want to keep everybody alive and well forever kind of thing. That's how she brought up her son. That's how she took care of her husband. I dunno whether you want me to go a few years later. I think I will. My father-in-Law, my former, well, they both rest in peace. He had a bump on his head and she didn't believe in doctors particularly or at all I should say. And so she was rubbing the bump with olive oil for two years, and the bump was getting bigger and bigger. Finally, he started losing his eyesight and he finally went to a doctor and he had hydrocephalus. He had water on his brain, and he literally became blind. And that's a real danger from the natural food movement. She also, I mean, she really didn't believe in doctors. I remember when my son had his first ear infection as a baby, the pediatrician prescribed an antibiotic for him. She was hysterical. She thought that she was going to take us to court because we were, yeah. She said, you just are not bringing up your child. And so you have to temper that with the fact that she was loving and wonderful, but food was her whole life.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, it sounds like she was very orthorexic herself.
Elyse Resch: She wouldn't put a bite of anything in her mouth that wasn't natural unprocessed. Now, of course, we know that cooking something is processing it, but in her mind, something that didn't come in a package, she cooked everything and she was a wonderful cook, and the food was delicious and it was varied and balanced, and she didn't really restrict anything. She wasn't a believer in a lot of sugar, although she would make things with dates and that had a natural sugar in them.
Christy Harrison: It's interesting the way people think of restriction or not restriction and what they think of as processed or not, versus this is a safe type of sugar or something.
Elyse Resch: And so I do have an anecdote about her that I might forget to mention later. So I'll say it right now. When she was in her eighties and she had dementia at that point, and she was living in an assisted living facility. She forgot all about her rules and she started eating all the foods that she wasn't letting herself eat her whole life. And it was to me such a poignant and sad thing to watch because now she was just enjoying going down and having the ice cream that she never let herself have in the cookies, but she didn't have the memory anymore that she had banned them. I find that so sad. I actually wrote it up for The, New, York, Times, but they didn't expect accept it. I thought it was quite an ironic story.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, completely. I mean, I'm glad she got to enjoy those foods at the end of her life. If not, it would've been nice if it had been her whole life. Right,
Elyse Resch: Exactly. Exactly.
Christy Harrison: So you said that Orthorexia started to transition to a more diet oriented eating disorder when you were in school for nutrition. But it's interesting that it sounds like the Orthorexia helped drive you to be interested in nutrition in the first place, and then dietetic school maybe got you in deeper to the whole weight loss diet part of it.
Elyse Resch: It was before that actually. If I look back at it and I see the first, sometimes you see a sign, but you don't know it. At the time when I cut out all those foods that he told me I shouldn't eat, I lost some weight. I had never been focused on my weight. I had never been focused on my body in that way. I just grew up without that. And I did note that. And then I think that what really happened was when I wanted to get pregnant again, I thought I should lose some weight because that was the narrative. I didn't think that the first time. And that's when I started dieting and I started binging. I started dieting and binging and dieting and binging, and never got pregnant again. It's another personal story I learned once I got into graduate school that even a small amount of weight loss a week will cause infertility.
It's a very personal interview I know, but if I can help anybody out there not diet and not restrict themselves because it can have terrible consequences, I think by the time I went to graduate school and I really changed my life dramatically and had some agency in my own life, the eating disorders really went away. And ironically, I mean, there was no treatment for eating disorders in those days. I did have a therapist asked her once if she thought I had an eating disorder, and she said, no, I don't think so. And that was it. But I think it was my own healing, mostly not from graduate school because graduate school had a lot of the prescribed meal plans and all that. It was more from the therapy I was in for years and years and years that I was able to heal from that.
Christy Harrison: So do you feel like your recovery helped you get out of the natural food movement and orthorexia as well, or how did you start to move away from that piece of it?
Elyse Resch: I moved away from that family, not that I wasn't still connected with my in-laws, and they adored me and I adored them, and I would visit them, and my mother-in-Law would push food on me, but I didn't have that control over me anymore. I remember I had a history of loving food, loving all kinds of foods, having joy in eating, and I rediscovered that. And I think that it was really mostly taking, well, I used the word agency, agency over my own life and making a lot of changes in my life, including starting my career. So I feel really great about the fact that when I started as a nutritionist, dietitian, registered dietitian nutritionist, I had really healed that eating disorder. It was gone at that point. I think it was probably a big impetus to fighting against, we were taught in graduate school about helping people by helping them lose weight. In those days, that was what dietitians were supposed to do, horrifying making meal plans. And I did that in the beginning. All I knew, but it just didn't ever feel right because it no longer was a part of my life.
Christy Harrison: Did you sort of connect the dots? I mean, I know for me personally, I started to have this real cognitive dissonance because I had also had an eating disorder. Also started to heal it with Intuitive, Eating actually, and therapy, and was coming back to my origins as an Intuitive eater while I was starting my career in dietetics. And I was doing very traditional dietitian things, like educating people on healthy plate and blah, blah blah, and portion control and all of this stuff, and started to really have this cognitive dissonance of like, but I don't do that. And actually the people who are taking my advice and running with it and are my star students or star clients or whatever, were the ones who reminded me of myself when I was the most disordered. And I was like, that seems not okay.
Elyse Resch: I agree with you. I remember having a client once who was doing Intuitive Eating, meaning she was only eating when she was at a certain level of hunger and stopping at a certain level of fullness, and she refused to go anywhere to go out because she couldn't be so focused on it. And I remember thinking, and of course talking to her about this is not Intuitive Eating, and this is not a healthy relationship with food.
Christy Harrison: She turned it into a diet.
Elyse Resch: She absolutely turned it into a diet.
Christy Harrison: So interesting. Do you feel like your experience with that natural food movement helped you see orthorexic tendencies in your clients? I know Orthorexia didn't become sort of codified as a term until the 1990s, but I'm sure it was around in the natural food movement in stories like yours way before that. So it was interesting to see how it manifests over the years, right?
Elyse Resch: Yeah. And I'm sure I did. Here would be somebody who was refusing to eat anything processed. Again, I'll use that quote around it and cutting out certain things that they thought were unhealthy, and that was the terminology. It was, this isn't healthy for me, or I'm not going to be able to fix my whatever physical problems they thought they were having by not eating those foods. So yeah, I was really tuned into that and remembering what my life had been like during that time. I mean, I don't discount the pleasure I had in the food I was eating during that time. It was delicious food. It was just I didn't get to have the things that I really wanted to have on top of those yummy foods. I didn't get to have the things that I used to eat and love and eat out and love.
Christy Harrison: That guilting experience about the pie really sticks with me. It's like that you'd have to give that up and that it was so connected to, it's just so interesting too, how connected that was to motherhood and to this idea of your body as this vessel for someone's child.
Elyse Resch: And at the same time being told by my doctor, he said, I should not gain very much weight during the pregnancy. He was trying to keep my, he was angry at me. I remember coming in one time on a Monday after having been out for a weekend, and he got me on the scale and he said, oh my God, you've gained too much weight. It was both of those, they kind of fit together at that point.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, it's a perfect storm kind of. Yes. I mean, pregnancy is such a moment for so many people that pushes them into much more disorder. I feel so lucky that throughout my pregnancy I was able to avoid stepping on the scale for almost all of it. It was the beginning of starting at this practice, and then at the very end when they were like, you might have to go into surgery and we need to weigh for anesthesia. And I was like, okay, that's fine. But other than that, I really was not. I just would refuse every week and they would kind of let it go. And I avoided having those kinds of conversations.
Elyse Resch: You're much younger than I am, and I think you had more sense of agency or yourself speaking up than I did at that point. I was so young. I was 25 when I got pregnant, and I didn't have a voice.
Christy Harrison: I was 39. So yeah, I also had much more life behind me, I think too.
Elyse Resch: It didn't occur to me at all to fight against this doctor until later. I did fight against him, and he said to me, you asked too many questions. You need to find another doctor. This was years, this was after my son. So a lot of patriarchal stuff going on in my life from my father through my doctors and other people.
Christy Harrison: And so it sounds like having a career and sort of breaking away from that and starting to speak up for yourself was really pivotal for you. Your relationship with your body shifted a lot during that time too.
Elyse Resch: I'm a completely different person than I was when I was 35 years old. That's when I started therapy. Completely different person, by the way. I thought of another anecdote around what happened as a result of my mother-in-law's influence around natural stuff. You and I talked about this. I think I had got these two little kittens for my son. He was about eight at the time. And oh my goodness, I fell in love with one of 'em, particularly because his name was Tiger, and he was the sweetest, most gentle little kitten, and he would come on my lap all the time. The other one, her name was Amanda, and she was pretty aloof and jumped up to the top of the cabinets and stuff. But my mother-in-Law at the time, not believing in doctors, not believing in the regular veterinary community, brought a veterinarian who knows whether he really was or not to the house to vaccinate these cats. And it didn't take on Tiger and Tiger died, and it was such trauma for me, horrible trauma to this day. Remember when I heard, when they called me from the vet that I just broke out in hives all over my body? That wouldn't go away until I went to an allergist to get some kind of, I dunno, Benadryl shot or whatever it was. It was devastating. It was really traumatic. And I know that's because I wasn't allowed to take these cats to a real veterinarian who would give them the right kind of vaccination.
Christy Harrison: So this might've been some kind of random natural vaccination or something that,
Elyse Resch: Yeah, something like that. She didn't really believe in doctors even see what happened with her husband and how angry she was that I was giving my son an antibiotic.
Christy Harrison: Antibiotic mean. And yeah, thank God for antibiotics keeping us all alive. I don't think many of us would be here today without them, really.
Elyse Resch: Absolutely.
Christy Harrison: Yeah. It sounds like she had a really strong influence on you and on her son's life too, and sort of how he approached food and nutrition and all of that. It
Elyse Resch: Was so complicated, Christy, is that I love these people and I love this woman so much. She was so warm and so loving and so giving to me, and it was really a family that I adored being with. And so it's a little hard, or it's harder, I think, to question when you're not being traumatized or abused or neglected or something, when it's just so much full of love, you just take it in as well. This is coming from love. And so I think I just, and was always coming from love pushing food on us, on me the rest of her life too, until she couldn't cook anymore. It was the way she expressed love, but I realize now that I couldn't combat it. There was nothing negative beyond that.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. There's a real pull to stay close, I think, when it's someone who's so warm and connected with you. Otherwise, it's hard to disentangle
Elyse Resch: If it were Today, I have a voice today. I've had a voice for a long time now, and I'm sure in a very gentle and loving way, I would've set some boundaries, but then I didn't know how to do that.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, I can relate. I didn't know what boundaries even were until I was like 25, at least 28, maybe something I'd never heard of that term. I was just completely enmeshed with the people around me. So yeah. Where did the book Intuitive Eating fit into all of this? Obviously it's after you became a dietitian, but I'm curious how you sort of went from your own experience with disordered eating and Orthorexia to writing that book.
Elyse Resch: I think that's a profound and important question, Christy, because I don't think I could have written Intuitive Eating if I was still tied up in good food, bad food, healthy food, unhealthy food. I couldn't have, here I was an am a dietitian, and I'm helping people tune into what they want to eat without restriction, making peace with all food. And I think there would've been such a cognitive dissonance going on if I really still believed that certain foods were bad foods and other foods were good foods or healthy and unhealthy, whatever terminology want to use. So I think that Intuitive Eating had to have happened at that time. It couldn't have happened earlier. It had to have happened after I had broken free from the Orthorexia, broken free from the eating disorder. Otherwise, I couldn't have been authentic in writing it, because as a dietitian, I did believe in nutrition.
Of course, we believe in nutrition, we have to eat, we have to nourish ourselves. But I think it would have kept me in the more natural food, good food, bad food thing if I hadn't gone through my own healing process. So I'm really grateful that I was at that point when this book was written originally 30 years ago in 1993 was the beginning of the reading. It was first edition was published in 95, so it's been out for what, 28 years now. And poor editions of it. And thank goodness, I mean, thank goodness it's been such a profound book for healing for so many people that I'm really grateful that I was able to do that then I wouldn't have been able to, I couldn't have written it.
Christy Harrison: Right. And it probably wouldn't have even been on your radar to write a book about that. It would've just made no sense if you still believe those things.
Elyse Resch: I might've gotten into how dieting is terrible and diets lead to eating disorders, et cetera, but I think the good food, bad food that comes with the natural food movement would've been an obstacle to being able make peace with food.
Christy Harrison: Well, that's such an interesting point, and I think it leads me to a question of how do you see Intuitive Eating now being sort of co-opted not just by diet-culture, but by wellness culture? The beliefs at the heart of the natural food movement I think are still present very much today in these ideas floating around in wellness culture that certain foods are toxic or bad, that people need to detox. People need to avoid certain things and eat clean, and everybody has a different definition of that. Do you have to avoid all sugar or just one thing or just another? And the different macronutrients that are sort of lionized, I think differ among different sort of wellness groups, but there's such a good food, bad food morality to all of it, just really as an undercurrent in wellness culture. And yet I see Intuitive Eating becoming popular in wellness circles too, and it feels very fraught to me to see that, because I feel like there's some misinterpretation of Intuitive Eating happening and taking parts that seem in line with wellness culture, but not really understanding the full picture of
Elyse Resch: It. It makes me very angry when it is. It makes me very angry when people try to ride on the tail of something that is so powerful in terms of helping people heal when Intuitive Eating is fully understood and taught in a way where it's fully understood, the depth, the nuances. So it infuriates me. On the other hand, sometimes people fall into Intuitive Eating maybe to start with in the wrong way, but then it leads them to actually reading the book and not just buying into what has been thrown at them, especially when they're recognizing that they're falling off of diets, they're falling off of restriction, they can't do it anymore. And they've heard this term, Intuitive Eating, but the anger is still there on my part that it's capitalism. I think it's the idea, well, this is a successful book. Let's see how we can take words from it and use it in our diet programs.
And I won't even mention, I don't want to give any credit to any of any audience to any of these things out there, but some of my words, by the way, I have seen lifted in one of those diet programs out there, words I wrote personally in the book were lifted directly out of that and put in there, and we consulted an attorney about, well, what can we do? And we were told, you have no power over this because they have so much money and lawyers and all that that it's just going to wipe you out of energy, money, all of that. So you have to let it go. There's also a middle group, Christy, there's the people you're talking about now, and then there's the group of, well-intentioned, a lot of them dietitians who are teaching Intuitive Eating, but really aren't trained in it. I'm finding I'll have clients come to me who saw someone else who said they weren't Intuitive Eating counselor, but they weren't really getting true Intuitive Eating because they weren't really trained in it. And that's a group that troubles me quite a bit because there's such great training out there, and if you're going to promote yourself as an Intuitive Eating counselor, then be a truly trained Intuitive Eating counselor to do that.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, that's really interesting and so unfortunate when people stumble into that version of Intuitive Eating where it's just kind of reinforcing a lot of the good and bad Rhetoric or other diet-culture beliefs. I definitely see people who don't seem trained really in Intuitive Eating, but call themselves Intuitive, Eating nutritionists or dietitians or whatever, coaches saying things like, if you're eating intuitively, you'll want unprocessed foods. You won't crave sweets anymore, you'll get rid of your cravings. All this, which is really going back to this idea of good and bad foods, and that there are certain foods that you're not supposed to want and you're not supposed to crave.
Elyse Resch: Well, it's a real betrayal of Intuitive Eating, and it's really unfair and wrong. And I pretty much, I do have a voice now, and when I see things like that, I will contact people, and I've made a lot of people upset and angry, but let them know this isn't okay. You are promoting something that is not Intuitive Eating and is harming people by what you're promoting. I don't have that much extra time, but boy, when I see something that infuriates me, I find the person, I track them down and I contact them. Some young woman who was a trainer or something who was, she put on her website, she's an Intuitive Eating counselor. She might've even had, I think Intuitive Eating was even in the title of her website. I contacted her and I said, this isn't okay. First of all, she was showing pictures of herself and very revealing exercise clothes. I said, this isn't okay. This is not, this is not right. She was very upset with me, and I said, have you read Intuitive reading? Well, no, I haven't really read it. She said, I was like, oh my goodness. I'm sure.
I don't think she probably did anything about it, but you can't control the world. You just hope to reach out with a truth to people. And here's another response to I think one of your last questions is when I have clients come to me who are very tied into this movement, this wellness movement, this is the good and bad foods telling me, they know that if they eat that certain food, they get this reaction, this or that. I have stopped trying to educate them right off because I know they're not going to hear me. I moved to a place of talking to them about sustainability. When somebody comes to me and says, I absolutely cannot eat sugar. If I eat sugar, I get acne, and I'm never going to eat sugar again. And helping them understand that, I will say, I don't believe in what you're believing in.
I hear you believe this, but I don't believe in it, and I want to ask you, do you think this is something that you could sustain for the rest of your life? And pretty invariably they say, well, no. And then of course, they feel bad if they go against the rule they've come up with. Eventually over time, when they really start trusting me and feel safe and are really ready to let go of their restrictive eating, they will come to hear what I have to say. That Scientific truth, something that I really love talking to my clients about now is the social determinants of health. It really helps put things in perspective when they're so absolutely sure that if they eat this particular food or don't exercise this particular way, it's going to impact their health. And when I explain that what you eat and how you move really accounts for only 10%. I think it was in your book, Christy, it's 10% of your health, and here are all these other factors. Your genetics, whether you're taking in substances that are nicotine or something that's problematic, and all the social pieces of it, they sit back and they go, you're kidding, really. And I think it helps loosen them up a bit and be more open to not being so rigid about their eating.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, I think that's really helpful. And I've also noticed that with people, when I give that statistic where it's at the population level, only 10% of health outcomes are attributable to food and exercise combined, and then it's like another 20% to other health behaviors, and 70% is social determinants. People often think it's the reverse, and so it kind of blows minds to say it's 90% other things than food and exercise. Whereas in diet and wellness culture, I think we're conditioned to think it's probably 90% food and exercise and only 10% of other things.
Elyse Resch: Yeah. They're so shocked by that. And I think it's very helpful when people get that understanding. It gives them more, they've been trusting whatever sources they're trusting that aren't necessarily accurate. It gives them another counter argument, a counterargument to what they've been believing in, and it helps them move out of it, out of the good and bad food thing.
Christy Harrison: Right. I'm curious to know, you've been living and working for many years in what's arguably the wellness capital of the world, Los Angeles, and not just la, but the west side, which is where Hollywood is and goop, and it's like the birthplace of countless wellness trends. So I'm wondering how it's affected both your recovery and your client's recovery to be in this epicenter of wellness culture.
Elyse Resch: Well, I've been living here since I'm nine, so my recovery happened within the context of this. So it hasn't had any impact at all on my own personal relationship with food and my body. But I do find more and more people coming into my office who are connected to Hollywood or connected to the beach or whatever it is, and they're coming in with some pretty rigid thoughts. I don't even think I should mention the name of it, but there's a store here, not Whole Foods, but a smaller version of it.
Christy Harrison: Oh, I know. Yep. I think someone's mentioned it on the podcast before.
Elyse Resch: Yeah, I find that almost every one of my clients who comes in with this kind of orthorexic wellness, whatever, that's the only place they'll shop because that's the only place that they think they can get healthy food. And I found it very funny, and I tell this story to my clients sometimes. I was in that store one day because they actually do have some yummy, like their hot bars, really yummy food. I was looking at the breads, and I saw this bread that looked so good. It was a barley bread, and it was on the gluten-free shelf. And I just like, I'm laughing. Oh my goodness. Here's these people going into the store thinking they're getting what they should be getting, and barley has gluten in it, and there's the spread on the gluten-free shelf. Just have to laugh. And it does help when I tell my clients that to not just trust everything as if the store is the mecca of here,
Christy Harrison: The misinformation can be rampant. So if people are interested in natural foods or using food to prevent or cure disease and things like that, what do you hope they'll consider before they get in too deep to that mindset?
Elyse Resch: Well, first of all, they're taking lots and lots of supplements and to consider the fact that that's an unregulated territory and that they could possibly be doing harm to themselves when they're taking lots and lots of different things that they have no idea really whether they've been tested at all. And I also help them look at whoever's recommending a lot of these things, or is also making a lot of money out. I often say to clients, if you're going somewhere where they're telling you that you should take this and this and this, and they're on their shelves, all these things that you're paying for them, be cautious. Be aware what is going on here that they're recommending this to you. But I'm very gentle with my clients and I'm not authoritarian with them. I just try to give them information so that they can make the best decisions for themselves, but to be aware of certain things they might not have known about.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, I think that's really helpful because those kind of financial entanglements aren't something that people know about necessarily that much or consider, it's like, oh, they maybe are just sourcing the best vitamins. Meanwhile, I mean, by the time this episode comes out, I'll have aired the episode I did recently with Jonah Suleman, who's an eating disorder dietitian, who used to work in an alternative medicine clinic before changing his career to go into eating disorders. And he shared some wild stuff about pressure to prescribe supplements and the wild markup that there is on supplements that there was in that clinic, and that I know exists in other alternative medicine spaces as well. And sort of the financial incentives that providers have to prescribe certain things, not just supplements, but testing too certain kinds of tests and stuff. The point we made in that episode was that people see alternative medicine as much pure and less corrupted by money and pharma and all of that stuff that we see conventional medicine as being so under the influence of money and pharma power. And the thinking is like, oh, come over here to alternative medicine where everybody's out for your best interest and it's all natural and it's gentle and it's safe. And that's actually not really true. The framing is so different than the reality in a lot of cases.
Elyse Resch: That actually leads me to something you and I were talking about prior to this Offline that I wanted to mention. Someone in my life, very important person in my life who is a physician, pediatric endocrinologist, in fact, in charge of that whole department and has started an integrative medicine department at the hospital where he works. And I was asking him, well, I knew myself, but I talked to him a little bit too about what his concept of integrative medicine was. And it was so interesting. He said his approach, well, I know that his approach was about mindfulness and guided imagery and spirituality, but his idea of integrative medicine is integrating mind, body, and soul. And he thinks that these other alternative or functional medicine, he steers away from him. He says he sees them as patriarchal and directive, that they believe that there's something wrong with you, and then they tell you what the formula is to fix them and that they'll do a lot of unnecessary tests and they're making money on the tests that they're doing. And he says it's really for some of it, it's a lot like western medicine. So his belief about the integrative model is they have to work toward the best healing and what's most positive for each person through things like mindfulness meditation. He was trained to guide an imagery many years ago, and spirituality, his integrative department there is not based on functional medicine or alternative medicine.
Christy Harrison: Oh, that's great. That's really nice to hear that people are approaching it that way because yeah, when I think of integrative medicine, I think that the term integrative sort of came out of this idea of integrating alternative and conventional medicine, but it sounds like he's much more about integrating the whole person, like truly holistic health, not just focusing on the physical.
Elyse Resch: Exactly. And it's very much as we all are understanding of the connection between the mind and the body, the mind body connection in terms even, well, we can't go. We don't have time now to go into it, but polyvagal and vagus nerve and microbiome and all, I mean, we are connected that way, and then he's very much spiritual, so he brings that piece of it in as well.
Christy Harrison: That's really interesting. Well, thank you for sharing that and for sharing everything you did and getting personal in this conversation. I really appreciate it. Can you share for people who probably everyone listening knows your work, but would love to know what you're working on now, if you can talk about it and where people can learn more about your work if they don't know?
Elyse Resch: Sure. So we're working on the second edition of the Intuitive Eating Workbook, which originally came out in 2017. So sometime in 2024 there'll be a new edition and with two new chapters, one of them on social justice and one of them on integrating Intuitive Eating into eating disorder treatment. That's going to be added to that workbook. And I, of course, then I have my Intuitive Eating Journal and my Intuitive Eating Workbook for Teens that I love. In fact, with the new book, I'm asking the publishers to not make my journal look like the Intuitive Eating workbook. They're exactly identical except my journal's a little smaller. And a number of people have said, oh, I already have that. And I said, no, no, no, that's a workbook. This is a journal, which is a whole different approach. Anyway, so there's that, and there's of course the card deck.
And so there's a number of places where people can learn more about Intuitive Eating by reading and listening. There's some audio versions as well. And then I have my own website, ElyseResch.com, and there's the Intuitive Eating website, of course, which has a list of a lot of the research studies, which were over 200 research studies now validating Intuitive Eating. Really good research, so to speak. And the only social media that I am on is on Instagram, and I think it's @ElyseResch. Do not, if you hear this, do not go to the rush release account. That was the one I started when I was on my Instagram account was hacked. I'm not on any other social, I mean, maybe I have accounts, but I don't ever go to the other social media. I don't like social media. It's too, I don't takes up too much of your life if you let yourself.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, well, and a whole other can of worms, but it kind of, I think destroys people's minds too. So there's that.
Elyse Resch: I do. I really do. I think it kills brainwaves if you spend too much time on it.
Christy Harrison: And yeah, turns us into really mean people in a lot of ways. I think kind of the worst versions of ourselves. But anyway, I like your websites. I will link to those for sure, and we'll link to the Instagram that you use as well in the show notes for this.
Elyse Resch: Thank you.
Christy Harrison: So that's our show! Thanks so much to our amazing guest for being here, and to you for tuning in. If you've enjoyed this conversation, I’d be so grateful if you could take a moment to subscribe, rate, and review the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you’re listening.
You can also support the show by becoming a paid subscriber for just a few bucks a month. With a paid subscription, you unlock great perks like bonus episodes, subscriber-only Q&As, early access to regular episodes, and much more. Sign up now at rethinkingwellness.substack.com. That's rethinkingwellness.substack.com.
Got burning questions about wellness trends, diet fads, or anything else we cover on the show? Send them my way at christyharrison.com/questions for a chance to have them answered in the Rethinking Wellness newsletter or even on a future podcast episode.
This episode was brought to you by my new book, The Wellness Trap: Break Free from Diet Culture, Disinformation, and Dubious Diagnoses and Find Your True Well-Being, which is now available wherever books are sold! Just go to christyharrison.com/thewellnesstrap to learn more and buy the book or go into your favorite local bookstore and ask for it there.
If you’re looking to heal your relationship with food and break free from diet and wellness culture, I'd love for you to check out my online course, Intuitive Eating Fundamentals. Learn more and enroll now at christyharrison.com/course. That's christyharrison.com/course.
Rethinking Wellness is executive produced and hosted by me, Christy Harrison. Mike Lalonde is our audio editor and sound engineer, and administrative support is provided by Julianne Wotasik and her team at A-Team Virtual. Our album Art is by Tara Jacoby, and our theme song is written and performed by Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs.
Thanks again for listening! Take care.
"Natural" Foods as a Gateway to Disordered Eating with Elyse Resch