The first part of this episode is available to all listeners. To hear the whole thing, become a paid subscriber here.
Disordered-eating dietitian Katherine Metzelaar joins us to discuss her history with diet and wellness culture, how she developed orthorexia, how praise and compliments from others affected her behaviors, and the role of the internet in her relationship with food. Behind the paywall, we get into how orthorexia led her to become anti-vaccine and believe in conspiracy theories, how naturopathic doctors missed and compounded her problems, how she found her way to recovery from orthorexia and conspiracism, the sense of identity that comes along with perceived food sensitivities, and lots more.
Katherine Metzelaar, MSN, RDN, is a relational nutrition therapist, registered dietitian, and certified intuitive eating counselor committed to revolutionizing how people connect to food and their bodies. As the founder and owner of Bravespace Nutrition, she helps individuals break free from the fear of food, uncovering the joy and pleasure it can bring to their lives. Katherine guides her clients in reclaiming their relationship with food, free from the restrictive rules of diet and wellness culture, teaching them how to nourish their bodies without the pressure of perfectionism. She also leads "You're Not Broken: A Women's Body Image Group That Will Transform The Way You See And Experience Your Body," where she fosters a supportive environment for women to heal their relationship with their bodies. Katherine specializes in disordered eating, eating disorders, and body image challenges.
Resources and References
Christy’s second book, The Wellness Trap: Break Free from Diet Culture, Disinformation, and Dubious Diagnoses and Find Your True Well-Being
Subscribe on Substack for extended interviews and more
Katherine’s website
Katherine’s Instagram
Katherine’s TikTok
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: So Katherine, welcome to Rethinking Wellness. I'm so excited to talk with you.
Katherine Metzelaar: I'm so excited to be here.
Christy Harrison: You were on my other podcast, Food Psych, way back in 2019, which is like pre-pandemic, pre-the-world-changing, such a different time. So I imagine many people either won't have heard that or have heard it so long ago that it's good to have a refresher. You shared your story there, so people can listen to that for the full take. But can you just talk a little bit briefly about your history with diet and wellness culture and sort of how it's led you to do the work that you do today?
Katherine Metzelaar: Yeah. So my journey has been a winding path, and when I reflect on how I ended up where I am right now as a dietitian doing the work that I do, I can say that a lot of it was driven by my own history and experience with my eating disorder, my mom's family's messed up relationship with food and dieting, and my aunt, my mom's sister's "secret" eating disorder. That was kind of part of the family dynamic growing up, which I'll talk more about in a moment.
I grew up largely in what I consider now to be a food positive home. My mom was trying her best. She was put on a diet at age six, which is heartbreaking. And without reading anything, without having access to any information, she just sort of intuitively knew, okay, I want to do things differently for my daughter. So she would bring in a variety of different kinds of foods. There were no food rules. She was very supportive of me eating and tried to just do her best.
Same thing with my dad. Despite them being divorced, they were both on the same page about supporting me, being adequately nourished, and knew too that I would likely be exposed to all kinds of messages and pressures as a young girl. I also think that sports protected me and I know that's not always the case for many people, but in the sports that I played, and maybe it was my coach or a combination of things, they were very much encouraging of eating and eating for nourishment. And so I didn't actually go on any kind of formalized diet or program when I was in high school.
And at the same time, and I've described this in the past of kind of arriving to a play and they open up the curtains and it seems like everything was just sort of there when you arrived. But there's been so much that has gone on, gone into and gone on behind the scenes in order to prep. Think about the actors and how long they've been rehearsing and all the different stage development. That's how I like to think about my history of my own disordered eating and then eating disorder.
So in that way, growing up my mom was always on a diet. She hated her body. My mom was also in a larger body, so she experienced a lot of weight stigma, which ultimately impacted her later on with her cancer diagnosis and eventually her death. A lot was ignored because of her body size. She was constantly told just to lose weight every time she went to the doctor. So my mom was dieting and at the same time, like I said, trying her best to do things differently than how she had grown up and been taught. And then at the same time, every time we would hang out with and go spend time with her family. My aunts and my grandmother were obsessed with dieting. All they would do is talk about the foods they were cutting out and what diet they were on and how much they were exercising.
My mom's sister had bulimia but never got treatment. And so it was kind of this hush-hush experience growing up. My aunt would excuse herself and engage in certain behaviors and then come back. No one talked about it, but everyone was talking about it behind the scenes. And so when I think about that kind of experience as well as the genetic component of eating disorders that we know of, all of it starts to fall into place and make a little more sense for me. And then in addition to all of this, of course I existed in the culture at large and so I was being exposed to all kinds of wellness and diet culture messaging.
So I got a little bit of protection, a fair amount that I'm really grateful for. And then I went off to college and then I was on my own. And we know that transition periods are incredibly vulnerable times for humans generally and leaves us at risk for the development of disordered eating and/ or an eating disorder. And there's so much that you're going through when you transition into college. And my body shape and size changed. And that summer was the first diet that I went on. And it was one that my mom had been on, interestingly, and maybe not surprisingly growing up that I remember, and my body changed quite a bit. And that was the first time that I started engaging in purging behaviors and I was surprised and I was scared and I was confused. That then transitioned.
So I think about it in sort of phases and stages. So I've got my life up till high school, then I've got college, which just felt like a lot of peaks and valleys in regards to the start of my disordered eating, that then changed into binge eating, that then changed into vegetarianism, that then changed into veganism. And then over time it just continued to develop into more restriction and more restriction as I read and was exposed to more and more, which eventually landed me in the place that I ended up staying for the longest, which was orthorexia, which is sometimes defined as sort of the over obsession or obsession with being healthy.
Now, I think that there's a lot more that I could say about that description, but I often describe this to my clients and I think about this for myself. If you had caught me at a certain phase in my life, I might have received a different kind of diagnoses, that eating disorders sort of ebb and flow in that way in regards to the symptoms and how they present and did not know it at the time that I had orthorexia.
It wasn't actually until I went to graduate school for nutrition that was being driven by my own eating disorder, because I just thought I knew all of the answers and I just needed the stamp of education to teach people the "ways of healthy eating" and I was going to fix everybody's problems and then went to grad school, had a couple lectures on eating disorders, and had this epiphany when I was in class of, oh my gosh, after hearing about orthorexia, realizing that's me. Gosh, it's such a vivid memory because I remember being in class and I would bring those big large salad mixing bowls. I would bring that in tow. So I had this pretty large size salad with me and I'm in this orthorexia lecture and then had this, it almost sounds like something out of a fictional novel, but sort of realizing that that was me.
That was the beginning of my healing path and journey. I did end up getting therapy and support. There's just a lot of learning and unlearning and I was able to access things, I think, in a sometimes different way than I've witnessed my clients because I was in graduate school. So I was able to really dive into research and really was being challenged at the same time to question everything that I had learned up until that point. Google was gospel to me. If someone said that research supported it, I was like, okay, this means that it's absolutely true. And graduate school just kind of shattered that whole illusion that just because someone says research supports it, we don't actually know what the research said. And that there's all kinds of research and is it good quality research and so many things.
So grad school really helped me. It helped me to get help, to get support, to realize what was going on and to learn how to critically think about the information that I was consuming. I don't know how things would have gone in the absence of grad school. I think it would have taken me, truthfully, a lot longer to get help and support because orthorexia is so normalized and praised, the behaviors in particular that are associated with orthorexia. And I was getting that. That was part of why too. I went to grad school. I was like, "Everyone comes to me for advice." It felt so good.
And then things changed after I went to grad school, but not right away. I also like to emphasize that recovery is a long, winding journey and path. And even after I moved out of meeting clinical criteria for orthorexia, there was still a lot of disordered eating going on. It's like peeling back the layers of an onion that I wouldn't realize that something was happening until I would realize it. And then I would sort of had this moment of, oh, gosh, I didn't even realize that this was still around or was doing this in this way. So it's been a long journey. And what has driven me to be a dietitian in the work that I do in helping people to heal the relationship with food and body is this, is my own lived experience and also hopefully trying to help people to not have to get to the place that I got to and trying to work towards the end of prevention.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, there's so much there and what you shared. Thank you for sharing all that. And I feel like it resonates so much with my experience, with what a lot of listeners have probably heard me talk about in my own path toward becoming a dietitian. Very similarly, I was seen as the healthy one and people asked me what my secret was. And I was in a job where I was telling people what to eat in the skies of journalism and writing stories about various nutrition related issues, but from a really disordered place and really interested in how I could "perfect" my own eating.
And that sort of dietary perfectionism was what drove me to go back to school and become a dietitian and get a master's in public health nutrition. I wanted to tell everybody what to eat basically and help people be as "healthy" as I was, and yet behind the scenes was struggling so much and really didn't see how my own struggles were the direct result of trying to eat in this perfectionistic way that I was telling everybody else to do. I'm curious for you, how that sort of praise and being held up as the healthy one or whatever played a role in driving the orthorexia and driving you to want to study dietetics.
Katherine Metzelaar: It played a significant role. It felt so good to get that kind of attention, admiration. I also realized just in my own family of origin, there was a lot of messaging around utility in being a provider of information. And so that reinforced that sort of dynamic of now I had something I could provide, now I had this information that I felt a sense of certainty around. Even though, as I mentioned, all of it kind of came crashing down in grad school and my own perfectionistic tendencies, now all of a sudden I felt like, or at least outwardly, was able to present as, "I arrived. I have all the answers."
And there was so much, too, and I think about this a lot for my clients as well, so much of a false sense of promise around health when it comes to, I think, generally wellness culture, but especially when I think about the experience of orthorexia. This idea that I'm taking all these steps to "prevent disease" and prevent bad things from happening to me. And of course, we know that even if you do all the "right things," bad things can still happen, diseases still develop.
And yet I remember that feeling, even though it wasn't temporary, but it felt so good to feel like, "Okay, I've got it figured out. Bad things are not going to happen to me." And if I could do that for other people too, great. And so the praise was almost like a drug. And I think that that's what led me to then go on and continue to study it, because I wanted more of it. I wanted people to continue to elevate me in that way. All of a sudden I felt like I had a voice and what I was saying mattered.
Christy Harrison: You mentioned that Google was sort of your primary source of information or one of the highest sources for you. What was your relationship with so social media like at the time, and how did that play into maybe the increasing extremes of your orthorexic eating behavior?
Katherine Metzelaar: Social media at the time was not what it was today, I will say. And there was just Facebook. Most of my information that I was getting at the time was from various blogs that I was following. And now that I am on social media as much as I am, I love social media, I will say, and I also take a lot of issue with it. So I have a complicated relationship with social media. But nonetheless the pipeline as some people describe it, was quite different in that I intentionally sought information out and by virtue of being on various blogs, then I'd be exposed to more and more. So it started with vegetarianism and learning more about that and then it would be like oh, only eat organic food. And then, well, what about the chemicals and the things that are used in your house? And then, and then, and then and then and it would get more and more restrictive.
My orthorexia expanded beyond just food. It was everything in my life. I was so afraid of the world and, at the time, what I felt like were harmful toxins in everything around me, all the way to exposure to cell phones and Wi-Fi. You name it, I was afraid of it. And this was largely because of the information that I was being told once I ended up on these various blogs at the time. Now with things like Instagram and TikTok, now that pathway happens much faster. I don't know how much time. I know there are people that study this and I imagine it could be just a couple of days. You look up something about health and now all of a sudden you're being told that you can't trust the FDA or the USDA or that you need to stop taking medication or there's all kinds of messages that one might receive in a much quicker way than I did at the time.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, you had to really seek it out a lot more and sort of the algorithm was you, actually. Maybe to some extent there were some cross promotional recommended things that had some sort of algorithmic component. But I imagine that it was mostly just like discovering blogs from other blogs and then going deeper into a given blog and sort of finding their fringier views or whatever it might be.
Katherine Metzelaar: Yes, yes. I love the way that you put that. I really had to seek it out and I created my own algorithm so I had some choice in it. Once I got sucked into it, and I imagined similar things happen on social media, once you find someone that you feel like you can trust, which that can be based on many different things, you're kind of in it and all the things that they say or reference, you're much more susceptible to believing because now you've developed some felt sense of trust with this person.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, and so then when they lead down a path of sort of increasing extremes, you're more likely to follow them and trust what they have to say. Where do you think that sort of distrust of household toxins or cell phones, Wi-Fi, et cetera, all of those things, where do you think that came from for you? Do you think there was any sort of psychological component that made you more vulnerable in particular to those things? Do you think some of the content that you were following was just pushing that really hard and making that connection?
Katherine Metzelaar: I think it was a combination of things. I have always experienced very high levels of anxiety. I've never received a formal diagnosis in that arena. And just reflecting on my past, my childhood, early adulthood, it was all-consuming. And so it makes sense to me that then it would transfer into this arena. Now I had something to focus on, a felt sense of control versus the constant feeling of things being out of control in a way that felt debilitating at times and definitely impacted my schooling and test taking and just the way I move through the world. And so it makes sense that there definitely was a psychological component.
And also there was just the exposure piece too. It didn't take much once I was in a certain area of the Internet to then be exposed to more and more and more. And also the sort of product element which is connected to. I started to get to a point where everything that people were talking about, there was always a supplement that was being pushed or a product to buy or something to sort of fix it. And I think that that shattered some of the facade a little bit over time where I started to question, like, wait a minute, you're selling all of these products to sort of fix the world that we exist in. But nonetheless, I will say that despite my temporary felt sense of feeling more in control, the experience of having orthorexia and being constantly afraid, and maybe this sounds like an obvious thing to say, led to more anxiety.
I was constantly fearful and anxious, and I was definitely not fun to be around at a dinner party and didn't even like to go out. It got so extreme and restrictive in that I would not be able to freely just eat out. When I would travel, I would look up restaurants and ingredients in advance. I would only eat at "organic" restaurants. One quite sad memory that I have a lot of compassion for myself around was I lived in Italy in the past, and I remember one time I was going there to spend an extended period of time and I packed a whole suitcase full of food that felt safe for me in addition to my suitcases full of clothing because I was just so wrecked with fear around food. And that's what felt safer at the time. Although I wasn't aware of it. I just thought I was doing the right thing.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, I'm sure you're getting so many messages that that was the right thing and that like, "Oh my gosh, you're so healthy. What's your secret? Can I be more like you?"
Katherine Metzelaar: Absolutely. I remember people would come up to me in various settings and just ask me questions or I became sort of the go to person in my family and amongst my friends. So all of that was very much encouraged. The places that I went to to even buy the food. And I think that's an element too that often I don't see but I do talk about, which is how the felt sense of community that you get from being part of some of these practices or ways of eating or looking at the world. Especially in the case of orthorexia, there was a sense of community.
Now I will say that in certain times it was sort of a pseudo community because I was connected, but connected via disordered eating and disordered thinking about things. But I don't want to disregard that element of the experience for myself and other people that it is completely understandable when I reflect on my experience and other people's experience that we would be drawn to something that helps us to feel a little less alone in the world.
Christy Harrison: Absolutely. I think that's a huge role that wellness culture plays for people today as well, and through social media and sort of the creation of groups. And I think it's just increased the sense of community. Even though it's not necessarily a true community or a deep community or a lasting community because people can lose that sense of community as soon as they change their views or if they start to question things or whatever. But for that time and for a temporary moment, you might feel like you're really part of something.
Katherine Metzelaar: Yeah, it's profound feeling like you're part of something and that it's kind of like "us against them" or us against the world.
Christy Harrison: Well, especially if everything in the world is toxic, if everything is out to get you and there's radiation everywhere. It's almost a sense of camaraderie through battle or something where you're strategizing about how can we survive in this environment where our very survival is threatened. It heightens a sense of community, I think.
Katherine Metzelaar: I also think about the amount of stress that it causes generally and on the body. I think that's another interesting piece of this conversation around wellness, which is the stress and anxiety I was feeling at the time very much was more harmful for me than any other thing that I was being told that was "harmful" for me and that part is usually largely ignored or mentioned in passing. I thought what was really interesting in looking at some information on TikTok in preparation for this podcast was there would be people that would talk about how unhealthy foods are and certain things that you should avoid and walk you down the aisles of grocery stores and say you should avoid this whole aisle of cereal or other things. And they would be naming things that you should do to be healthier to avoid "processed" foods.
But then they'd say don't stress about it too much. I heard that a lot and I thought that's so interesting. Something is permeating in the sort of zeitgeist, if you will, and how curious that you have just told me all these things that I should be afraid of or I should be avoiding and then you casually mention that I shouldn't be too stressed about it because stress is also harmful or impacts our health and well being. And I was like, oh gosh, this is so interesting and I imagine confusing for the person who's watching it.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, and also I think about how I was back in the day and my relationship with food and all of this fear and anxiety about what was in our food and what was in our environment and all of that and I think that that message at the time would have sounded very reasonable and would have sounded like, "Oh, yeah, yeah, that's what I'm doing. I'm not stressing too much. I'm just being reasonably cautious." And I think about how you said your experience in grad school learning about orthorexia was this light bulb moment. For me, when I first learned about orthorexia, I was like, "Oh, this is so weird." I treated it like a curiosity. I treated it like this thing over here that some people have that I don't have.
I blogged about it for this blog that I was writing for at the time about nutrition and food politics. And I came across a piece about orthorexia that I included in this roundup I was doing. It was just small enough of a taste and very limited picture of what it was that I was able to be like, "Oh, that's really extreme and that's not me. I don't do those things." But then meanwhile, I was obsessing about what I was buying at the grocery store and spending really long hours researching what was in my food and what menus were safe at restaurants and all those things that you mentioned. I was doing those things. I just wasn't aware of how they were impacting me.
I don't think I got a deep enough understanding of what orthorexia actually was to see myself in it. And so I was just like, "Oh, yeah, that's those people over there." It almost reified what I was doing even more. It made it sort of build this wall of me versus them. "I'm over here on the healthy side and people are over there on the orthorexic side and I'm never going to go there. I'm never going to cross that line or whatever." But it was a very artificial line that I made up in my head.
To be fair to me at the time, there were reasons that I was caught up in that. The sense of community, the sense of control, the need for certainty in an uncertain world, the anxiety. All of that stuff was there for me, too. And so that was sort of the deeper drivers of the behavior. And I just think how interesting is it that people are paying lip service to not being too extreme or not stressing yourself out? And I just wonder how much they are even taking in or absorbing that message themselves.
Katherine Metzelaar: Yeah, you bring up such a great point, which I missed a little part of my story, which is what led to the moment of "aha." And I can relate to your story quite a bit because when I was on these various blogs looking at information, I remember there was a particular one that was about orthorexia. The person that wrote it spent the blog talking about how absurd orthorexia is, and how could they basically criticize us and come at us for being healthy? And I remember relating to that a lot. I was like, "How could this be a thing? I'm doing the right thing." You couldn't have told me anything otherwise.
And so there was something about what I have been exposed to and the nature of grad school, probably a combination of things, that when I heard it later, I was open to it. But I will say leading up to that point, no one could have convinced me. And similarly to you, I would have never said, "Wow, this is really stressing me out." Maybe in certain moments when I was deep in a binge or wrecked with anxiety about what I had eaten or what products I was using or around, but otherwise I was very convinced that I was doing it moderately and everything was okay. And it took quite some time to realize just how not okay I was.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, it's never really immediate. Even those binge moments where I was sort of like, "Okay, something's wrong here, this isn't right. I'm feeling so terrible after a binge and guilty and ashamed." The shame for me was more about how can I stop eating out of control like this and get back to the clean, pure, whatever way that I'm eating the rest of the time, that I had in my head as the ideal. How can I get back to this ideal way of eating and just cut out this portion of my eating that feels so antithetical to that and so out of control and so not in line with who I want to be? That was sort of my attitude towards it. Phrasing it compassionately now, it was very harsh at the time. It was very self denigrating about how could I possibly do this to myself? All of these really self critical messages.
And so I think about that now a lot, how I've come to understand, and I think you and many of many people in our field have come to understand that restriction often begets bingeing and that the binge is often a really natural consequence of the restriction. the deprivation and low level of energy that's being consumed and the rules about foods, good and bad foods and all that stuff, that feeling out of control or having a rebound eating episode or a rebound binge is a very understandable response to that. And so you sort of have to look at it as a full picture, this is the overall way that this person is relating to food in response to this restriction.
But then I was seeing it at the time as two separate things. It was just something that was terribly wrong with me psychologically that was driving me to eat like that, or an addiction to particular foods or in the sort of height of my orthorexia, really blaming those foods and thinking those foods in particular were uniquely addictive because they were processed, because they were not "natural," all that stuff. I think it's interesting to kind of zoom out now and think about it as it's all part of the same thing. It's all part of this restrictive mindset.
Katherine Metzelaar: I think, about how much wisdom there is in our body to one, survive and do everything it can to keep us alive as human beings. And also just the binge eating experience in and of itself, as you were mentioning, similarly, I did not think this at the time and I equally was very self critical, very filled with shame. When I would experience binge eating. I would definitely feel like there was something wrong with me and also blame the foods. And that was reinforced by everything around me that still the same messages exist today of, well, it must have been the food's fault, must be sugar's fault, must be processed food's fault. They're being designed to be a certain way and therefore they're addictive. Although I will say I also binged on things that didn't fall under that category.
Christy Harrison: Same, same.
Katherine Metzelaar: Some of the things were just really interesting, but so much driven by my body just trying to do its best to get more nourishment on board. And it can be a challenging thing in healing our relationship with food and in the context of disordered eating to reckon with that, that our bodies were just trying to help us out by getting more food and nourishment and that they don't have this objective to do us harm.
And yet at the time I just thought it was either my fault or the food's fault or a combination of both. And similarly, I just needed to restrict more and cut out more foods and double down and be more vegan or be more fill in the blank and that of course only led to more binge eating and more anxiety and the cycle just begets itself. More restriction leads to more preoccupation with food, which leads to more binge eating as we know. And it's quite difficult to get out of the cycle. And the idea of then eating more, especially when you're experiencing binge eating, is so tough.
I see it with my clients, I experienced it myself, of you're stuck and you're feeling like you eat too much and you have all these complicated feelings about yourself and about food. And then you have someone say, "Well, you're going to need to eat more and eat more often and eat more variety of foods." And of course it's not usually that explicit in that way, but generally that's the message that we work on and it's challenging when you are stuck in that place of constantly feeling like there's something wrong with you and that it's not the way you're eating or the restriction that's contributing to the binge eating.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, absolutely. I think binge eating feels like this thing of I just eat too much and how can I stop eating too much? And so to be told, actually you don't eat too much, you probably don't eat enough, actually and that's what's driving the binges. Such a tough thing to get your mind around. I remember actually hearing that message way back, like 20 plus years ago or whatever, in the very beginning of my eating disorder and just refusing to believe it and just being like, "This is not possible. I'm not going to do that."
And only years later, when I was really in a place to hear it, when I was in a place of starting to go down the path of recovery, I could open up to that and think, okay, what if I tried this? What if I brought a little more food in and stopped restricting so much here and added this back here and started to see the results in my own lif and I think that really was a reinforcing thing. It didn't happen until many years later, maybe even five or ten years later I think.
Katherine Metzelaar: Yeah, it takes a long time or some time for each person's path and journey, of course, is different. I think it's important to talk about that. To me, as a clinician and also just someone who I would consider myself recovered, that slow and steady is the name of the game. We cannot change things overnight and oftentimes we're not ready. Most of the people that I work with and I was the same way and it sounds like you were too. Of there's a lot of fence sitting that happens that we want to often when we come into doing this work and realize something's not quite right, however we define it. We want things to be different, but we're actually not sure about it, which makes so much sense that there's apprehension. And so we change things little by little over time, which then of course in the long run makes a big difference.
Christy Harrison: Yeah. And however long it takes is okay I think. I know that I felt also frustrated in early recovery when I was really committed to it. Like, "Okay, I want to just be done with this. I want to get past this." And I think it is really hard to do that. Patience with that stuff can be so difficult to come by because of course you want to feel better and of course you want to just get over it. And I think that is a huge part of the process is just learning to slow down and learning to kind of take things a little bit more incrementally and have compassion for yourself throughout that process, too.
Katherine Metzelaar: Yes. Yeah. Compassion is essential in the healing process because it takes a while to work through this. And also, too, something I think about as well is we have to do this as we know while existing in the culture that we exist in. It's not like we get a break. I mean, sometimes for folks that go to higher levels of care for eating disorder treatment will get somewhat of a break, depending. But nonetheless, it's not like we get to escape the exact things that collude with or reinforce the disordered eating that exists or disordered thinking about food and bodies.
Also for many people, they're having to reckon with this felt sense of community and being potentially kicked out of a community that they've been part of. And so it's tough. It's tough work to do sometimes. I will say, for some people, this can be one of the most challenging things that they do in their life. It's tough and it can be really lonely.
I have a women's body image group called You're Not Broken and one of the things that I emphasize is community, because this work can feel incredibly lonely. Very rarely when we start doing this healing work do we have someone that we can turn to and that they can say, "Yeah, me too, I get it. Yes, I'm experiencing the same things," or "I've been there and this is what has helped." So it sort of feels like you're swimming upstream for a while until you can find, I think, both information, but especially community of people where it doesn't feel so hard, that they can give you a life best and something to float with, and they can also sort of hold your hand as you swim upstream together, and it feels a little less challenging and much less lonely.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, that's so well said. Community is such an important thing. I think another piece of this is the way that those communities can push us in a direction that's away from wellbeing, ultimately, and we see this a lot with online wellness culture now. And one of the reasons I started this podcast, as opposed to just having conversations about orthorexia, and wellness culture on Food Psych is because there is so much more to wellness culture beyond just the food piece, as you talked about.
For many people the wellness diet piece can be sort of a gateway into even more restriction in other areas of life and even more harmful corners of wellness culture. So you talked a little bit about the fears about household chemicals and cell phones and all of that stuff, the sort of chemophobia generally. And for you that extended also to vaccines. Can you talk a little bit about that and sort of how you slid into an anti-vaccine kind of stance?
Katherine Metzelaar: It's something that I haven't talked about and didn't for a while publicly because I think I felt so much shame around it and/or just confusion.
