Cookbook author Julia Turshen joins us to discuss her history with an eating disorder and how orthorexic thinking showed up in her work, how a loved one’s boundary on diet talk helped her realize her relationship with food was problematic, how letting go of diet and wellness rules changed her cooking, why social media is like diet culture and how she’s taken a big step back from it, and more. PLUS, in a special bonus episode for paid subscribers, we continue the conversation with Julia interviewing Christy about her new book!
Julia Turshen is a New York Times bestselling cookbook author. Her latest book, Simply Julia, is a national bestseller. She has written for multiple publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Vogue, and more. 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 podcast Keep Calm and Cook On. 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 lives in the Hudson Valley with her spouse Grace and their pets. She teaches live cooking classes every Sunday afternoon. Find her online at juliaturshen.com.
Resources and References
Special bonus episode for paid subscribers where Julia interviews Christy!
Christy’s new book, The Wellness Trap: Break Free from Diet Culture, Disinformation, and Dubious Diagnoses and Find Your True Well-Being
Julia’s latest book, Simply Julia
Christy’s first book, Anti-Diet
Christy’s online course, Intuitive Eating Fundamentals
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Transcript
Disclaimer: While every effort has been made to provide a faithful rendering of this episode, some transcription errors may have occurred. The original audio file is available above.
Christy Harrison: Welcome to Rethinking Wellness, a podcast exploring the diet culture, disinformation, dubious diagnoses, and disordered eating that are so pervasive in contemporary wellness culture--and how to avoid falling into these traps so that you can find your own true well-being. I’m your host Christy Harrison and I’m a registered dietitian, certified intuitive eating counselor, journalist and author of the books Anti-Diet, which was published in 2019, and The Wellness Trap, which came out on April 25th and is now available wherever books are sold. You can learn more and order it now at christyharrison.com/thewellnesstrap.
Hey there. Welcome back to Rethinking Wellness. I'm Christy, and my guest today is cookbook author Julia Turshen, who joins me to discuss her history with an eating disorder and how orthorexic thinking showed up in her work, how a loved one's boundary on diet talk helped her realize her relationship with food was problematic, how letting go of diet and wellness rules changed her cooking, why social media is like diet culture, and how she's taken a big step back from it and lots more. I'm so excited to share this conversation with you in just a minute. But before I do, just a few quick announcements. Now you can ask me all your questions about Wellness diets, how to spot Wellness scams and misinformation, how to know whether you've gotten a dubious diagnosis and anything else I cover on this podcast. Just subscribe at rethinkingwellness.substack.com to get new answers every other week and a chance to ask your questions.
And if you upgrade to a paid subscription, you'll also get tons of bonus Q&As early access to podcast episodes plus occasional bonus episodes and other members only content. Just go to rethinkingwellness.substack.com to learn more and sign up. This podcast is 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 available now wherever books are sold. The book explores the connections between diet-culture and Wellness culture, how the Wellness space became overrun with scams, misinformation and conspiracy theories, why many popular alternative medicine diagnoses are misleading and harmful, and what we can do instead to create a society that promotes true wellbeing, just go to ChristyHarrison.com/TheWellnessTrap to learn more and buy the book. That's ChristyHarrison.com/TheWellnessTrap, or just go to your favorite independent bookstore and ask for it there. Now, without any further ado, let's go to my conversation with Julia Turshen. So welcome to the show, Julia. I'm so excited to talk with you.
Julia Turshen: I am so happy to be here. I am such a fan of your work and so grateful for it and I'm just delighted to talk with you.
Christy Harrison: Oh my gosh, thank you. And same, I am a huge fan of yours and just really excited to talk with you and hear your story about how you came to the place you're at now and your relationship with food. And we'd love to just start by having you tell the listeners a little bit about that kind of journey in terms of your relationship with Wellness culture and how you got to where you are now.
Julia Turshen: It's a long story, but I'll try to make it short and it's a story that has changed a lot, I guess. So to go way back, I have always loved food since before I can remember and specifically have loved cooking, and I was always drawn like a magnet to the kitchen since I was a little kid. I watched a million cooking shows. I mean, this was before Food Network, I consumed cookbooks before I could even read, I just flipped through the pages. So big fan of food, especially of creating it, it's always made me just feel very excited. But my relationship to consuming food has been really different and really complicated. So I grew up as so many of us have grown up in diet-culture and steeped in diet and Wellness culture. So even though I loved cooking food and felt very connected to that act of eating, it just felt a lot more complicated to me.
So I had what I now understand to have been a very active eating disorder from a pretty young age and my relationship to, I would say Wellness culture from that, that was sort of my personal relationship. But professionally, I've worked on cookbooks for going on, it's close to 20 years now. I've worked on 15 different cookbooks and in some ways, I think my cookbook career really allowed me to hone in on and even capitalize on my obsessive tendencies with food. I've been able to build a career that's about measuring things down to the teaspoon writing really precise instructions, telling people this is the way to do it, and a lot of that I now recognize to be my eating disorder behavior channeled into my work. So that has all changed quite a bit since the last few years when I kind of recognized my eating disorder for what it was when I came to understand Wellness culture for what it is. And I know we'll talk about all of that, but I think that gives you kind of a sense of, I guess where I've been and how it kind of started and how it has evolved and how it's continuing to evolve.
Christy Harrison: And it's never a static point. We're always in development.
Julia Turshen: Yeah, I definitely don't have everything figured out. I don't have all the answers. I'm just very willing to be honest about what I've learned far.
Christy Harrison: Which is huge. And I think to your point about being someone who writes cookbooks and is in the food space, telling other people how to cook and eat. So many of us in food media, counting myself in that boat in the past I was very much there myself too. I was in the throes of an eating disorder while writing about food politics and food culture and food itself in major national Magazine's. And I've gone through some old emails and some pitches and stuff that I did back in the day and was just like, oh my God, how did people not recognize? How did my editors not see how disordered I was with food? Because I see it now so clearly from that. But I think there just is a lot of endemic disordered eating and thinking about food in a lot of those spaces. And even people who have really beautiful relationships with food or who are drawn to creating food from this sense of pleasure and abundance maybe also are struggling themselves with their own relationship with food. You were. So I think being open about that and sort of helping people think critically about where our food media professionals are coming from maybe is helpful to folks who are in that place of disordered eating and perfectionism about food.
Julia Turshen: Absolutely.
Christy Harrison: I'm curious to hear how you think your eating disorder and maybe specifically orthorexic thinking about food translated into some of your work in the past and how you're working to change that now.
Julia Turshen: Sure. And just your first point, the things we're talking about today are present in so many different communities and industries, but I think specifically to the food industry, which is a huge umbrella term that includes so many different industries, whether it's like people who work in restaurants or catering or people who work in food media, it's all people who love food, which is so great. But I think a lot of us come to it because we are obsessed. And so I think eating disorders and all of the kind of traps of Wellness culture, which you talk so wonderfully about, it's so present. And the more I've talked about my own experiences, especially with other people in the food industry, the more I've just realized how not alone I am, how not unusual my experience has been, which I just think is really interesting. And I just appreciate any opportunity to name that because I think a big thing that happens with diet-culture and specifically with eating disorders is we often, I know I have felt very lonely and isolated.
So I think always just good to know that you're not alone. But anyway, to answer your question about how that stuff has shown up in my work, I think it's shown up in really obvious ways saying a recipe is healthy without me defining what that word means. And I think it's come up in less obvious ways, in small ways in a recipe calling for less sugar in a cake because I think it's somehow better. I'm using air quotes that you can't see to have less sugar, but it's a cake recipe, like it should be sweet and delicious. And so I think policing my amounts of things, the certain ingredients I use, that's not me talking about diet-culture or Wellness culture, but it's the impact of diet and Wellness culture coming into my recipe writing.
Christy Harrison: That makes so much sense. When I think about putting less sugar in a cake, for example, I think about the people I've known in the food world who are like, I just don't like things to be too sweet. This sort of virtuous virtue signaling around wanting less sugar or something, as though that's supposed to be a good thing. And yes, there can be things that maybe taste too sweet to an individual palette, but also, it's just so interesting what that's saying. And I remember recipe headnotes that were like, we really like cookies that are not too sweet. And sort of framing the recipe in that way and what that tells people about what they should want.
Julia Turshen: I mean, I have definitely done that for sure. I actually had a really interesting experience, maybe, I don't know, a couple months ago, I now do a lot of teaching cooking classes online that's become kind of this fun side job of mine. And sometimes in those classes I revisit recipes from some of my cookbooks. And I actually had, it was a pretty profound experience for me. I taught a cake recipe. I think that's probably why the example is coming to mind. This coconut cake recipe that I wrote in a cookbook called Now and Again that came out in 2018. And as you know from working on books when they come out, that doesn't mean you were working on it that year. So I was probably writing that recipe in say like 2016, and I remember creating that recipe, this coconut cake and loving it. And then when I revisited it just a couple months ago, so many years later in my class, I made it and then the class was over, and I cut a slice and I ate it, and I really didn't enjoy it.
And it just tasted like bread. I mean, I enjoy bread, but I was looking forward to coconut cake and it just wasn't sweet. And I realized, I thought about when I wrote that recipe and what was going on in my life and I was not in a great place, and I was in a pretty sad place with my eating disorder, and it just came through in the recipe. And I actually wrote to everyone in my who took that class, I write a follow up email to people who come to the class, and I apologized. I was like, there's not enough sugar. Like this isn't a good cake and I'm sorry and this is what happened. And if you haven't made it yet, please double the sugar or triple it. I can't remember what I said, but it was really this interesting opportunity to revisit something and then also be honest about it and offer a different way forward.
Christy Harrison: That's really beautiful and I just appreciate so much that transparency because I think that can be really hard and emotionally, I think takes a lot to get to a place where you can share those kinds of things without fear or defensiveness. You mentioned, of course you're as we all are, a work in progress that you don't have this all figured out and haven't found this sort of ultimate healing necessarily from the eating disorder, but that you're in a better place now for sure than previously. What do you think has helped you get there and get to the place that you can be open about this past work and feel more relaxed around food than you did in the height of your eating disorder?
Julia Turshen: Yeah, I mean so many things, and I think that's important to mention too, just that it's not one thing. I think for so long I've approached many things including my eating disorder recovery as a search for one thing that will fix it. And I think really embracing the multitude of things I've required for healing has in and of itself been really important. So one thing that was major and a big turning point was just the ongoing conversation I've had with my spouse, Grace, since we met. I feel like our relationship has been one long conversation. And when Grace and I met, I was not in a place where I realized really how poorly I was treating myself. And Grace had been through a pretty rough experience with an eating disorder starting at a young age and had done a lot of work to heal and recover.
And then all of a sudden Grace meets me and I am in this not great place with my body, and all of a sudden, I am just triggering Grace like crazy. And so Grace started to set up a lot of boundaries in our relationship, asked me not to talk about certain things I was doing, asked me not to mention whatever new thing I was trying to make myself smaller. And I think my reaction to those boundaries was my first big turning point. And at first, I was really frustrated, and I was like, but this is what I want to be doing. I was very defensive. And then I got to a place where I realized Grace is the person I love so much, and here I am harming Grace triggering these not great thoughts and memories. And then I thought, wow, if I'm harming Grace, what am I doing to myself?
So those conversations and those boundaries that Grace was so, I think brave, to set. That was a big thing for me. And then I realized when I sort of made that shift, that pivot, I needed to learn more. You've written so helpfully about diet-culture being the air we all breathe. And when I realized there was other air available, I had to learn about it cause I didn't know about it. So reading books like yours, reading books like Aubrey Gordon and Sabrina Strings and Sonya Renee Taylor, and all those kinds of amazing resources, listening to different podcasts, really educating myself on this, understanding the roots of all of this being in white supremacy was incredibly helpful for me to sort of depersonalize it. And then beyond that education, seeking professional support from therapists. I've done a lot of individual one-on-one therapy. I've worked with a variety of different therapists.
Sometimes I joke that my hobby is trying different types of therapy, which has been really amazing but is also such a privilege and I wish was more accessible. But I've worked with somatic therapist, I worked with someone who is specifically a body justice therapist, which was an incredible experience. She's amazing. Her name's Carmen Cool. I always like to mention her because there's not that many therapists who do what she does. And I also sought out group therapy because I was saying before, I think that one of the ways diet-culture thrives is by making us feel isolated. So doing all this one-on-one therapy was incredible. It continues to be. But I also have found that I am someone who just needs community, which makes me pretty much the same as everyone else. And I found that I got to sort of as far as I could get, just talking with one person about myself. And when I started to do group therapy and then joining other types of groups, like I'm part of a Body Liberation hiking club, which was super cool when I started to do things in groups that again helped with the kind of depersonalizing. So I'm a big fan of that. I really encourage people to find those kinds of groups. So yeah, I would say Grace was, and continues to be, such a huge part of my healing and a variety of different therapy, individual and group therapy and reading different things, listening to different things. I always think about it. I had to learn a new language and the best way to learn a language is to immerse yourself in it.
Christy Harrison: So many interesting threads there of what you're saying. I think one thing that really struck me was when you were talking about Grace and how those conversations helped you reflect on your own disordered behaviors and the ways you were treating yourself. It's interesting because as a dietician working with people who have disordered eating, I'm often coming at it from the opposite place of helping them talk to their partners about what their partners are doing to set those boundaries. And people often are scared to do it and often are sort of anticipating those defensive responses or just like, oh, this is so much a part of them that how am I going to cut off their ability to talk to me about this or whatever. Oftentimes I do find also that when people set those boundaries, it helps the partner look at themselves if the partner's ready and in a place to do that. But it sounds like for you that was very much the case, that Grace setting a boundary around what was going to be triggering was enough for you to be like, okay, why would that be triggering to someone else? Let me look at how this might be harmful to me too.
Julia Turshen: Yeah, being the person on the side of the boundary being set it. Yeah, it was hard. Yeah, there was a lot of defensiveness from me, but yeah, now when I look back, I really do see how brave that was for Grace to do. And I'm just so grateful. And I guess Grace would be the person to ask more about that than me, but I think I'm the beneficiary of it. So glad Grace did that. And so if that's helpful to hear, I'm happy to share that.
Christy Harrison: Well, and it sounds like you were able to hang in through your own defensiveness too and didn't shut down completely and you were able to let it marinate, which I think is helpful and key to having that work.
Julia Turshen: Absolutely. Something I've been really working on is just embodiment, understanding what that is, understanding how I feel it. I've often felt like I am someone who operates so much in my head and kind of separate from my body, which I think is so true with anyone who's ever struggled with body image or disordered eating or eating disorders. And when Grace would set those boundaries with me, I mean this was easier probably to say looking back than it was in the moment. But even though I felt defensive, my emotions, my cerebral mental response was very defensive. I feel like my body knew that Grace was right, and my body wanted to hear what Grace was saying. And that's kind of a hard thing to describe, but I think that's part of why I was open to it because I was so sad. I hated my body, and I didn't want too anymore. And I feel like my body was like, please stop hating me. So I think that was part of what helped me be open to that and kind of move past my defensiveness and not shut down, which is something I like to do when I'm feeling defensive. I've learned.
Christy Harrison: Many of us. Yeah, I I'm the same way. But that's really, really interesting and so powerful that you were able to just notice. And especially in retrospect, I think it becomes easier, but there often is that little inkling of something like, okay, this is hard, and what this person's saying is making me really upset. But also, can I hang in with this? Maybe there's something here. You mentioned community as well as being something important for you. And one thing that we've talked about offline that I think would be really interesting to bring into this conversation is social media and cause I think a lot of people think of social media as a form of community. In some cases it's the only form of community people can have for work on healing from diet and Wellness culture and finding that different approach and path. And it can be definitely valuable from that perspective and valuable for other reasons too, beyond just body image work and stuff.
And there's so much downside to it as well. And I know you've experienced that and had your own reckoning with your relationship with social media. And I talk a lot about social media in my new book and I'm starting to on this podcast more as well because I think social media is the site of so much miss and disinformation about Wellness and that it also, social media also has such a negative impact on our wellbeing and can really take away from mental and physical wellbeing in a lot of ways. So I'm curious to hear how you've come to reckon with social media's role in your life and whether it was kind of hindering your wellbeing as well.
Julia Turshen: You're so right. I mean it's such a yes, and there's so much community, so much just exposure to different people living in all different bodies and having different experiences and so much connection we can have. And there's so much that's truly beautiful about what can happen. And there's so much that is just so just toxic, and I think dangerous and difficult. So yeah, my own relationship to it has been, again, an evolving journey. I don't know when I joined Instagram, probably 10 years ago or something, 15 years ago, however long it's been around, it's the only form of social media I still use. I've dabbled in others very briefly, but never really got into it. So Instagram has been the only one I use. And it started as a sharing pictures of my coffee and whatever. And then as my cookbook career took off when I started doing my own cookbooks, cause I've also done, I've collaborated with a lot of people on other cookbooks, but when I started really doing my own, it became this helpful tool for promotion.
And I would say around that time, so my first solo cookbook came out in 2016, so probably around that time is when I noticed my relationship to social media shifting and I became much more attached to it. And I felt like my sense of success, worth, all those things started to become more tied to it, honestly, the way I used to feel often when I would step on a scale, which is not something I've done in years, and I would have my self-worth tied to these numbers and these metrics and this kind of engagement. And when I started to notice that I didn't really do anything about it, when I started to notice that I kept doing it and doing it and doing it, I would say the first time I really took a pause from social media was around the beginning of the pandemic.
Julia Turshen: And I felt very plugged in as I think many of us were feeling so scared of what was happening and isolated and just wanted to be connected to other people. And then I just felt too connected. I felt like I was so anxious about what was happening and then I was watching everyone else's anxiety unfold and it was just too much for me and I stepped away. And I actually also stepped away from my cookbook career for a bit for the first time in my adult life. After my last cookbook came out, which was 2021, I didn't immediately start working on another one. And I actually took a job at a vegetable farm in my town, and I worked on the farm crew for a season and I would leave my phone in the car for the first few months of work and I knew it meant that for at least eight hours I wouldn't be looking at a screen.
So that's pretty extreme. I don't know that everyone needs to do that, but it was very helpful for me. Sounds delightful. I'm kind of envious of that. Yeah, I mean it was pretty incredible. And since then, something I've really tried to hold onto in my eating disorder recovery, but just in life in general is not giving into the black and white thinking I'm really prone to. So trying not to be all or nothing, trying not to be at either end of the extreme and taking more time to just pause and think a little bit more critically. There was a moment when I was like, well, I should just totally get rid of this app. If it's not making me feel good, why have it? But then for me, there's other things that happen. It is a really helpful tool for my work and there are really great connections I've made.
So I decided to kind of going back to this boundary thing, I decided to set some boundaries for myself. So one that I set was that in terms of what I share, I wanted to keep it really just to my work, which right now is those classes I teach, I have a newsletter, so I try to only put things out on Instagram that are related to my work and to use it as a tool for that and not to share so much personal stuff the way I used to. And then in terms of consumption, I actually went through the process starting probably two years ago of unfollowing. Most of the accounts I followed to the point where recently I unfollowed every account. I followed zero accounts. And it doesn't mean I don't look and see what friends and family are up to, but I wanted to give myself the opportunity to see what it felt like to use social media just as a tool to share what's going on in my work and try to reach other people through that and to connect with people on dms and stuff, to have actual conversations with people and not to just be sort of endlessly scrolling.
And it feels a little extreme for me to be honest, to not follow anyone. It's been just a couple weeks now that I've been at zero. But it has been really interesting to go to people's accounts really on my own terms and not just to see them pop up. And I like treating social media as something that I can do on my own terms, refollow people when I want. I'm not working for the app, the app is working for me, that kind of thing. So yeah, approaching it with a lot of curiosity has been really helpful. So yeah, that's where I am with it right now. And it came from just not feeling great about it and doing a lot of the things that I think I've done previously within diet-culture, comparing myself to other people, especially other people who work in food media, living by numbers, followers, comments, that kind of thing. I also mean this, I don't think applicable to everyone, and I don't need to get really into it, but I experienced some not great stuff too being trolled by people. And I just felt like that was a moment as well when I wanted to just get off of it entirely. And then I thought that felt, again, all or nothing, maybe there's some way I can feel a little bit more control of this and not have it feel like it's controlling my life. Anyway, that's a lot of thoughts. But yeah.
Christy Harrison: No, I think that is all really resonating with me and probably with a lot of listeners as well. I also have had a relationship with social media that's really evolved in the last several years and I've also gotten off of it pretty much entirely unless I'm posting for work related stuff, posting about the book or the podcast or newsletter or whatever. But hadn't really shared personal things on there for years anyway, it had always been, from the time I started more or less was about work, but I, I felt so compelled to be creating content specifically for Instagram and then got published out to Facebook as well or for Twitter, and then I would screenshot it for Instagram and Facebook and was the kind of thing where I was seeing myself giving away ideas that needed more development or that were interesting kind of prompts for me to go further in my own writing and maybe turn something into a longer piece, a more thoughtful nuanced piece, and taking those germs of ideas and just putting them out there on social media in a way that was lacking in nuance and depth and yet was getting so rewarded by these algorithms, right?
Because I think as I learned over the course of my time on social media, those are the things that get liked. Those are the things that get shared and go viral and the things that don't have a lot of qualifiers in them, the things that are like this X type of person is full of shit, those types of incendiary posts, which in my work around anti-diet, there definitely is a place for anger and getting mad and calling out diet-culture and harmful Wellness fads and all of that stuff. And I think we need to do it with more nuance than I was doing it. And then I see so many people doing it on social media because one unintended consequence of that can be that people start to shame themselves and feel bad about themselves for the parts of themselves that are still holding onto those things or because they're engaging in those behaviors.
And so they're like, well, I'm bad and I'm wrong. The anger sort of turns inward. And I think it's just also really not great for society and public discourse to have the discourse be determined by these algorithms that privilege, outrage, and novelty and people having angry comment flame wars because that's what keeps them on the platform and keeps them engaged. And so learning about that, learning about the structure of social media and how it's designed to keep us engaged and has these addictive properties and these properties that amplify division and hate and things that we don't really want more of in society. I kind of just reflexively started feeling disgusted by it. And also my own experiences too, of being trolled and being harassed and just having these unpleasant experiences, even with communities that I thought were relatively safer places for discourse. Just seeing that all unfold also made me feel like, oh my god, this is not good for me.
This is not good for my mental health. This is not helping me. I think your analogy to diet-culture is really spot on that we can get so fixated on comparing ourselves to others on judging ourselves by these metrics. And in my life in recovery, having worked so hard to get away from attaching value to a number on the scale or even weighing myself or looking at that number and getting away from at attaching value to other metrics related to body size or even health status and things like that, it was antithetical to that work to be doing that still with social media. So I've taken a really big step back and I think facilitated by maternity leave, I was able to just be like, I don't want any part of this sort of intruding on my relationship, my experience of being a new parent and bonding with my daughter and having that special time to ourselves. And when I came back after that, it was really like, oh yeah, I just don't really want to be here. Yeah, I do miss connections with people that I've made on there, but I can cultivate those in other ways too. I'm working to find ways to connect with people and build community off social media, and I think that's been really rewarding.
Julia Turshen: I'm just sitting here nodding aggressively to everything you're saying. And I think it's so interesting too that free maternity leave was that tipping point in a way because sometimes it can be so much easier to do something on behalf of someone else or just easier to see, it sounds like maybe for you, that's your child. For me, in certain ways it was realizing how my behavior was affecting Grace that helped me change how I was affecting myself. So that kind of sticks out to me. But this kind of narrative we have of creating a safe space, I'm holding up my air quotes again. I think realizing that that's never going to be on a social media platform for me has actually been really helpful because I thought, I'm writing about food and I'm giving these sweet recipes and such nice people follow me. I mean, everyone's so nice. But then it's like, no, it still belongs to this larger system. And that was so helpful to read in your new book about how the system is built, what are its goals, and to realize that by participating in it, we're helping to serve those goals, not ours. And I, you also seek these kind of safe spaces for those more nuanced conversations, just like you were saying. So for me, I've shifted, and it sounds like you have too, my use of social media to be, I guess the best way to think of it for me is it's a funnel for me to let people know about other places they can find me. It might work that feel to me a bit safer because I reach more people on Instagram than I do anywhere else I have access to. So I guess I don't want to give that up.
I think that's valuable, but I want to use it to bring people to my classes where I can get into the nitty gritty of cooking and talk about it in this nuanced way and give different suggestions and stuff. But also, I know everyone who's there in my classes has signed up. They want to be there. It's not this anonymous thing and I feel similarly about my newsletter. So yeah, I like using social media as a funnel for other content that I put in places where I think it's a little bit more protected and valued. And so far, that's been very rewarding for me, and it makes me feel less like a cog in the wheel or whatever that phrase is. I dunno.
Christy Harrison: I love that. It's such a great way to look at it. And yeah, I feel like it's interesting thinking about how people are sort of incentivized to behave on social media and the ways that those incentives might take them away from their actual values and who they really are. I think about myself and my own less nuanced posts, or sometimes when I would get, years ago, I, I'd feel the need to respond to every comment in critical comments or people asking questions sort of pointedly about my work. I felt the need to dive in there and be like, well, here's this study and go back and forth with people in a way that ultimately I don't think was productive for me. Certainly I don't think it was helpful for my wellbeing and my sort of boundaries around work and life, but also, I don't know if it was helpful for the people on the other side of it.
And in some cases I think there were people that were just sort of deliberately riling me up, so it wasn't helpful for really anyone in the equation. I think about that versus how I try to act and the values that I hold and try to enact in other spaces in my life more successfully, having those boundaries and allowing people space for their own journey to unfold. And not in my personal life when I meet other moms or things like that, I don't wear it on my sleeve that I’m anti-diet or try to push those values on people. I hear people talk about weight loss and I might change the subject or say a little thing about, well, here's my approach or whatever, but I'm very low key about it and I don't feel the need to get involved. And in some cases I don't even say anything.
And I feel like that is actually more in line with who I am, where I want to allow people to have their own experience. And I'm not here to proselytize or dictate how anyone lives their life. I have something to say and something to offer to people who want it and are interested in that and maybe ready for it or whatever. And some people are just never going to be into it, and that's fine too. I think about that, how different contexts and spaces in our lives, we can show up in ways that are more aligned with who we really want to be and our values. And then social media kind of pushes us to do something different. And it sounds like you're finding that using it as a funnel and bringing people in, but directing them quickly away from that space that can amplify so much negativity towards these spaces that maybe help people enact their values, help people live in line with who they really want to be, is really is helpful. And I've found that myself too, interacting with people on different platforms where the incentives are not that, where people are given space to just be who they really are and enact the values that they hold, which are overwhelmingly positive. I think overwhelmingly people want to interact in ways that are kind and respectful with each other.
Julia Turshen: Absolutely. Yeah. Another thing that I'm picking up on, just talking this through with you and hearing what you just said is that kind of feeling of you have to respond to everything, whether or not people are even paying attention or listening to that and that part of it, I feel like what I hear you saying is just you doing so much labor. I recognize that in myself too. I used to pride myself, I responded to every comment, and I feel like I'm also sounding really full of myself. Oh, I got so many comments, but I just mean I felt tethered, and I felt this false sense of urgency and I felt like I had to respond, I had to engage, and all of this is really how I felt when I was constantly dieting and trying to shrink myself. Very similar feelings. But anyway, I think recognizing that work as labor, the responding to all the comments and stuff, that has been really powerful for me because I realize I want to value my work and my labor and do I want to spend it here? Do I want to do all this work and spend all this time in this place where I'm not being compensated, first of all? And also, I don't know if anyone cares, I want to put my work out in places where people care about it. Not that everyone cares about it, nor do I expect them to, but I want to find those people where they are. And I just think the more time that goes by, the more time I feel like that's, it's not going to be on social media.
Christy Harrison: I agree. I feel like that's such an important way to value ourselves and value our time and our labor because we have such limited time on this earth, all of us, and in such limited capacity to do labor.
Julia Turshen: And it's so tricky because it warps us because you think this is so important. You think you're reaching all these people, and I feel like I had to really sit down. I have a list next to me on my desk that I keep of what are my goals for my work? And one is just to help people feel like cooking doesn't have to be so hard. That's really what I care about. So I feel like when I would express something on Instagram, in my mind I'm like, well, this is a great place to reach that goal, but really, it's not the best place and the best place for me is in my cookbooks, my classes and stuff where I can really get into it more. And there I feel the person-to-person connection. And I feel like, wow, if I can help one person feel less stressed about cooking, that feels really great, and I get that feedback and I get that response so much more powerfully when I'm not trying to reach a big number of people. I feel it more when I try to reach one person and it helps me value that person more. They're not just a statistic, they're a person.
Christy Harrison: Yeah. That's so huge. That's really resonating for me too, because I feel like sort of in the heyday of my participation on social media and putting out stuff that would get a lot of likes and reading all the comments and responding to comments and stuff, I definitely started to totally inadvertently, and this is again not in line with who I really am or my values, but I think I started to devalue or take in less the kind beautiful emails I would get or messages I would get from people that were telling me how my work resonated with them. And again, not to say everybody has to have my work resonate with them or write me these beautiful things, but there were people out there for whom that happened, and that is what's meaningful. That's why I care. That's why I do this work for the people who are going to find some value in it.
And it's so common and understandable for anyone with any sort of minutely public presence, I think to get caught up in the comparison and the inevitable criticism that comes, especially on social media, again, because of those incentives that exist for anger and division, there's going to be hate coming at you. And I think humans are just wired to notice the negative and to scan for danger. And I think some of us are especially attuned to that. So it's our threat detection system is on high alert. And then I think when that happens, when we're constantly feeling we have to address the negative, the positive stuff becomes so much less resonant. It's that old adage of, you remember the bad reviews, you never remember the good ones or whatever. Taking a step back from social media has really allowed the good stuff to sink in a lot more. And especially the people who write in and say, your work really means something to me. Here's or here's why. It's like that can now sort of take its place. It's a rightful place in my heart, I guess, or my consciousness.
Julia Turshen: I've had the same experience and it's also encouraged me to put more of that out there. People whose work I really love, I try to tell them what if I know them and I have their contact information, great. If not, I'll send them a DM or something, whether or not I hear back. I'd rather be more specific and tell someone what their work has meant to me rather than just pressing a heart or something. So the more I feel what it's like to be on the receiving end of that and the less noise I permit into my life by making these changes on social media, the more I'm able to hear that. But also the more I'm reminded that it feels really good to give that as well. So I find myself doing that more, which has been really great.
Christy Harrison: I'm so curious to know what your relationship with cooking is now, how that's changed and now that you're kind of thinking differently and more expansively about food and less caught up in the rigid ideas of diet and Wellness culture.
Julia Turshen: My relationship with cooking is more joyful than it's ever been. It's always been such a positive part of my life, even when other stuff with food was not so positive, I still always loved cooking. I love making a meal. I love chopping vegetables. I love all that stuff. I really love it. And lately it is, it just brings me more joy than ever. And I just feel so much more relaxed about it. And I feel like I both take it so seriously and I care about it so much, but also, I know it doesn't really matter. I don't care what we have for dinner. And I know that sounds like two opposite things. I care so much, and I also don't care, but it feels, I don't know. I think I just feel pretty liberated around it and I don't feel as invested in what brand of this or that I use, and I just want to enjoy what I'm eating and eat with the people. I love it.
Christy Harrison: That sounds like it's like you're very present with it, and in that sense, you care deeply, right? Yeah. But in the sense of what brand or the sort of health value of it or whatever doesn't hold the same weight for you anymore.
Julia Turshen: Being present is something I'm constantly seeking. So that feels really nice that that's your response to that because yeah, I find when I'm really present, all my most challenging kind of mental health stuff goes away. My anxiety is so much about not being present. It's worrying about something that happened or worrying about something that might happen. It's like being in the past or the future, not being here. So I try to do as much as I can that really helps me be present. And yeah, cooking is definitely one of those.
Christy Harrison: Cooking, I think can be such a great tool for getting present because it requires so much concentration. You can sort of immerse yourself in the process of chopping or sauteing or kind of keeping the timing of everything. You really don't have space in your mind for a lot of other things, I think.
Julia Turshen: Yeah, no, you don't want to cut yourself. You
Christy Harrison: Have to be right aware
Julia Turshen: Of what you're doing. Yeah.
Christy Harrison: The stakes are high. For people who've gotten caught up in Wellness culture and had cooking become a really rigid thing that was about health and purity and maybe lost sight of that presence and flexibility and pleasure, what do you think are some ways to make peace with cooking and perhaps even make it more enjoyable?
Julia Turshen: I mean, two things come to mind a bunch do, but two things immediately come to mind. One is just to give yourself a break and remember that really to what we're talking about today, not everything you eat has to go on social media. Some of the things I love to eat just to name a few are like, I love a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on a paper towel. It doesn't have to be on a plate. I love a baked potato. I love just bread with some cheese on it, and I'm a cookbook author, whatever that means. I like really simple stuff. So I think remembering not every meal you eat has to be the best meal you've ever had or has to be ready for some beautiful photo. Taking that pressure, releasing that valve, I think is really helpful. And another exercise that I think is just something I love to do, and it informs a lot of my work, is remembering some of the meals I loved when I was a kid. That's a question I love to ask people. And then recreating those meals and realizing cooking gives us access to some of these really positive memories. So starting there, I think if you're having trouble feeling relaxed and happy around it, starting with a really positive memory is a nice entry point.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, that's beautiful. And I think for many people they do. They can have access to those memories of before diet and Wellness culture intruded on their relationship with food before it all got so complicated.
Julia Turshen: Yeah.
Christy Harrison: Well, I'm so happy to have had you on the show. This was such a great conversation. I would love to talk to you for another hour and hopefully we will down the line.
Julia Turshen: Yeah, for sure. There's so much.
Christy Harrison: I know. I know. For now, can you tell us where people can find you and learn more about your work, and especially these new cooking classes you're doing around diet-culture recovery, which I think is probably something that a lot of listeners will find helpful.
Julia Turshen: Yeah, definitely. All of that, everything about me, my work, all of that is Julia@JuliaTurshen.com and everything about my classes are there. And yeah, I do usually once a month these, I call them my no judgment classes where we cook and we eat together, and we talk about some of this just diet-culture stuff. And we do it in community, and we do it in a safe way on the internet. So yeah,
Christy Harrison: I love it. We'll link to that in the show notes for this episode so that people can find you and get involved. And thank you so much again for being on the show. It was great to talk with you.
Julia Turshen: Yeah, thank you so much, Christy. Thanks for all the work you're doing, and yeah, I could talk to you about all of this and so much more for so much longer. So yeah, hope we do it again. That was our bird chirping. Sorry.
Christy Harrison: Cute. Good way to end the conversation. Yeah, a real tweet, not a social media tweet. So that's our show. Thanks so much to our guest for being here, and thanks to you for listening. If you enjoyed this conversation, I'd be so grateful if you take a moment to subscribe, rate and review the podcast wherever you're listening to this, and you can get new episodes delivered by email every other week by signing up at rethinkingwellness.substack.com, where you can also become a paid subscriber for early access to episodes and to help support the show. That's rethinkingwellness.substack.com. If you're looking for help healing your own relationship with food and breaking free from diet and Wellness culture, I'd love for you to check out my online course, Intuitive Eating Fundamentals. You can learn more and sign up at ChristyHarrison.com/course. That's ChristyHarrison.com/course. If you have any questions for me about Wellness and diet-culture, you can send them in at ChristyHarrison.com/questions for a chance to have them answered in my newsletter or possibly even on this podcast sometime in the future. 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 was created by Tara Jacoby, and theme song was written and performed by Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs. Thanks again for listening.
Repost: Cooking Without Wellness Rules and How Social Media Is Like Diet Culture with Julia Turshen