Author and podcaster Mary Jelkovsky joins us to discuss her history as a fitness influencer starting at age 16, and how it triggered and exacerbated her eating disorder; how social media algorithms drive us toward extreme diet and wellness content; why and how Christy took a huge step back from social media, and why Mary is contemplating doing the same; career moves for influencers after influencing; why “just try not to think about it" is sometimes the most helpful advice in the face of wellness culture's constant push for self-optimization in every area of life; and more.
After recovering from a lifelong battle with food and body obsession, Mary Jelkovsky started her Instagram @maryscupofteaa to inspire people to accept their bodies and learn to love themselves unconditionally. Now Mary is the author of the bestselling book The Gift of Self-Love as well as the journal 100 Days of Self-Love. Over the past five years, she's been leading worldwide self-love retreats and her message has been highlighted in TEDx, Teen Vogue, Shape, and Health Magazine. She is also the host of the Mary’s Cup of Tea Podcast: the Self-Love Podcast for Women, which has more than 1 million downloads. By openly sharing her personal journey to self-acceptance, Mary has helped inspire millions to accept their bodies and love themselves unconditionally. When Mary's not writing, podcasting, or hosting retreats, she is spending time with her little sister Ilana, who is her biggest inspiration.
Resources and References
Christy’s new book, The Wellness Trap: Break Free from Diet Culture, Disinformation, and Dubious Diagnoses and Find Your True Well-Being
Mary’s books, The Gift of Self-Love and 100 Days of Self-Love (Bookshop affiliate link)
Christy’s online course, Intuitive Eating Fundamentals
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 25 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 fellow author and podcaster Mary Jelkovsky, who joins me to discuss her history as a fitness influencer starting at age 16 and how it triggered and exacerbated her eating disorder. We also talk about how social media algorithms drive us toward extreme diet and wellness content, why and how. I took a huge step back from social media and why Mary is contemplating doing the same career moves for influencers after influencing. Why? Just try not to think about it is sometimes the most helpful advice in the face of wellness cultures, constant push for self-optimization and lots more. I'm excited about this one because one of the things I've really been wanting to explore more here is how social media spreads harmful wellness misinformation and undermines true wellbeing, which has been a huge interest of mine for the past several years, and I get into it a lot in my new book, but I wanted to continue those conversations here.
So Mary's story really resonated with me, and I can't wait to share it with you in just a moment. Before I do, just a few quick announcements. 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 Wellbeing, which is the longest subtitle ever. I'm realizing when I have to say it. But it's a great book. I'm really excited about it, I'm proud of it, and it's now available 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 and integrative and functional 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 or pop into your favorite local bookstore and grab a copy there.
That's christyharrison.com/thewellnesstrap to order it online. If you like the show and want to help support it, I'd be so grateful if you take a moment to subscribe, rate and review it wherever you're listening to this. And you can also get the podcast as a newsletter in your inbox every other week where you can either listen to the audio or read a full transcript or both. You can subscribe to that for free at rethinkingwellness.substack.com. And if you upgrade to a paid subscription, you'll get early access to regular episodes plus occasional bonus episodes. Just go to rethinkingwellness.substack.com to learn more and sign up.
Now, without any further ado, let's go to my conversation with Mary Jelkovsky.
So I'd love to start off by talking about your experience being an influencer. Like you've mentioned, it was kind of before influencing was even a thing and you had a fitness account and became an influencer at the age of 16 and competed in these body building and bikini competitions. So I'm curious how you got into all that and what that did to your relationship with food and your body.
Mary Jelkovsky: Oh, well, the short answer is that it messed it up and wreaked havoc on my relationship with food and my body, and to be really transparent right off the bat, it's still affecting my mental health to a point where I'm really questioning my place on social media and how long I want to be on it in my adult life. But I think starting off early on social media during puberty, the most formative years of my life, struggling with an eating disorder and at the same time trying to put forth this facade of, look how great I'm doing and look how much I'm working out and how healthy and clean I'm eating, and this perfect body that I'm putting out on stage in a bikini. And my whole account revolved around glamorizing my disordered eating and poor relationship with food. And it's sad to admit that I was one of those people that I am now, so against the people that promote woo-woo wellness solutions and that have this very narrow definition of health and beauty and wellness for that matter, it was a long journey to realize that what I'm doing was wrong, not only for myself and my own wellbeing, but for my whole audience and the people that I was promoting this for.
So I got into it because, well, I remember actually being really resistant to joining Instagram, but one of my friends from dance because I used to also dance a lot, and that definitely played into my poor body image being in such intensive ballet classes and the body stereotype that often demands, I suppose I was really resistant to joining Instagram, but then when I did, I started growing my following really organically. Every time I would share a workout or a photo of myself, I would just gain all these followers. And it's worth mentioning that most of them were gross men following me for my minor body, and that's a really difficult part to admit. I'm not going to lie, Christy. It kind of makes me sick to my stomach and just really sad for my past self and when all this was starting is actually the same exact age that my little sister is now.
So just thinking about her doing what I was doing back then makes me nauseous. But the thing is, the more you do it, the more you get sucked in. I think that's the same theme with diet-culture and dieting in general. Obviously eating disorders, similar patterns, but also social media and a lot of the things that we do that become kind of addictive in our society, whether that's working or even the more esoteric, getting people to like you that can also be addictive in its nature. And I think between body building fitness, my disordered eating and poor body image and then the layer of social media on top of that, it was just this perfect hodgepodge for me getting very, very deep into that black hole of body obsession and attention seeking and looking for validation in all of the wrong places.
Christy Harrison: You mentioned to me offline that you don't think you would've gotten into fitness competitions at all if it hadn't been for social media that sort of introduced you to those concepts. Can you talk a little bit about that, about how social media pulled you into that world?
Mary Jelkovsky: I think a lot of people listening probably can realize that there was a time before social media and after social media. So for me, I never heard about bodybuilding competitions. Granted I was really young, but even some of the people I've talked to, they're like, I never even knew what this is. And I think this really became apparent to me when I finally started healing and in recovery, I actually moved to Canada and I started hanging out with totally different people in my new university and just reinventing myself quite literally in a place where no one knew me. And that's when I was gaining weight and learning to accept myself at a higher weight than I was when I was competing. And I remember I was having a conversation with one of my new friends up in Canada, and they're like, so Mary, where are you from?
What brought you here to the University of Calgary? And I'm like, oh, well, I used to live in Arizona. I would compete in body building competitions and now I'm not doing that anymore. And I shit you not, this person looked at me so confused and was like, what's that? And it got me thinking that’s my environment, there's a very small percentage of people in the body building industry. There's a very small percentage of people that are in that whole gym culture, although not as small as we would like it to be for me personally. But it is kind of like this culty atmosphere and when you're in it, it feels like everybody is doing this and I must be doing this. But really it's because of social media and these algorithms that those are probably the people you follow. Those are probably the people that Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, wherever you're on, even Tumblr and MySpace, if we want to go way back Pinterest, they all have their own fair share of algorithms that just keep making it seem like everybody is doing it and you must be doing it.
And if you don't do it, then you're a failure and you're lazy and you're this and you're that. So everybody has their own little place on the internet. I've recently been following a wide variety of creators and there are even creators in the plant world, people who teach people how to propagate and take care of plants that have posted feeling guilty for not having enough plants or the most beautiful plants or the greenest plants. And it's just funny how everybody has, especially on the internet. I think if in real life you could definitely get sucked into community, but that's often a little bit more of a positive thing. I mean, I think any place can get culty when you're more sucked in, but at least you have a dose of human-to-human connection, like real life. Whereas on the internet, you get sucked into these little communities and it's really hard to find your way out, which is why with fitness and body building, for example, for me it was my whole life. I never thought, literally thought it was going to be my career forever. I didn't see any other way.
Christy Harrison: Wow, that's really intense. And it sounds like it became a career for you at a really young age. Did you start making money from the stuff you were posting or from these competitions?
Mary Jelkovsky: Yeah, my first real sponsorship was, well, I started studying for my personal training exam when I was 17 and I aced it the day I turned 18. So I instantly got a job at a boutique personal training studio, and I was doing 30-minute sessions with moms or moms to be, and that was paying really well because of the affluent community that the studio was located in and the amount of sessions I could squeeze in. I think you can imagine at 18 years old having a paycheck where you're making $150 an hour. I mean, that's insane. And on top of that, through social media directly, I also got sponsored with a company that was part of a big chain of supplements. And even though I was only making I think four or $500 a month with them, that's still a lot given how young I was, how new the industry was, just like how little followers I had. It felt like it was something that really had potential to grow and continue to be my career. And I think just knowing from the friends that I've hung out with and the people who are still in that industry and still having it be their primary source of income at that point, it's even harder when it starts becoming your livelihood.
Christy Harrison: It's so hard to get out of something like that. Yeah, just like you said, if you can't see your way out of it community wise, if it feels like everyone around you is doing this and there's this guilt and shame for thinking about even stopping or slowing down or getting out, let alone getting out, and then on top of that you're making money from it and perhaps even making your whole living from it, yeah, it's like just the walls have really been constricted around you. It's hard to see breaking out of that.
Mary Jelkovsky: And I think it's apparent when we're talking about something as toxic as bodybuilding on a 16, 17, 18-year-old body or disordered eating body image struggles. I think we all know that's probably obsessive and unhealthy both physically and mentally, but it gets me thinking about a lot of what is considered the perfect lifestyle these days, which is flexible work and having your own business and being a content creator and essentially monetizing every little piece of your life. And depending on who you ask, some people will say that it's the best thing ever, but I think some creators like myself who have been in it for so long and see some of the dark sides of it, it can be a really slippery slope because there are blurred boundaries between what's really for you, what's really your life and what you're trying to make your life because that's what people want to see or because that's making you money.
And it could be all fun and games at the beginning and really cool when you're successful and getting that attention and connecting with the community. I wouldn't trade that for the world, but when you're sitting there in your house and you're like, okay, I need to make a post, so what do they want from me? And even in recovery, when I started sharing more of that recovery content, it definitely healed me because I do believe in when in doubt, focus out and trying to help other people through the pain that you experienced. I also think that there might have been some elements of my recovery that were forced before I was ready only because I was already blogging about them.
Christy Harrison: That's really important insight. And yeah, I think that the performative nature of life as an influencer is, I think we all kind of know that influencers are performing some version of their life, but when you're in it and you're performing something that is so personal as recovery and feeling pushed to go further in it or to paint a picture of it that is not necessarily where you're at right at that point or pushing things along to satisfy followers, that sounds really difficult and harmful. I'm sure that that must have been a struggle and perhaps is still a struggle living in that way.
Mary Jelkovsky: Yeah, it's still something I'm grappling with. I think I'm, at least I'm aware of it now. It also makes me hella nervous because I'm like, what am I going to do with my life? How am I going to make money? Why would I give up every single thing that I worked hard for in these people that I truly love? And some people I talk about them on a first name basis, even though I've never met them. We've just been DMing for years and my husband knows exactly who they are. When I say so and so messaged me, I wouldn't trade that for the world. But now I'm a little bit more aware of, like you said, the performative nature of it. And I think it's one thing when some listeners might be thinking like, okay, well I'm not an Instagram influencer. I think with the newer platforms coming out, even TikTok for example, the shift in the way that these platforms are, so with Instagram for example, it started by I'm following my friends and I'm posting and consuming to stay updated on my friends' lives and to update my friends on my life.
And you're really only seeing people who follow you unless you specifically, or sorry, people who you follow unless you specifically go to something like the explorer page, which is secondary on the Instagram platform. TikTok, on the other hand, the explorer page or they call it the for you page, is actually the primary place that people consume content. So now you're not just exposed to people that you follow that you specifically want to see. Now it's what TikTok wants you to see or what TikTok thinks you want to see, and your friend's page is more of that secondary aspect. And I asked my little sister because she's 15, so she has great insight, and I'm like, do you ever scroll through the friends tab? Because very rarely do I go on looking at the people. I follow content because I know that if I follow people, they'll appear on my for you page, but not vice versa.
Does that make sense? So the main place that I hang out is that Explorer Feed, and my sister basically said the same thing. She's like, yeah, once I kind of scroll through, see what my friends are up to, the majority of the hours I spend on TikTok weekly are on that for you page. And the reason why this is so important is twofold. I think the given is about algorithms and they're feeding you, whatever's going to make you stay longer. But there's this secondary reason that's becoming more and more prominent as more and more people are considering being creators themselves, whether that's for personal creative reasons or trying to build their business in brand and using social media, TikTok as a way to promote it. What starts happening is that now everyone's an influencer. Everyone's trying to get on that for you page. It's no longer just for your friends because the chances of just your friends seeing it are slim, but the chances of landing on that for you page is kind of what TikTok is all about. So we're no longer on there just to connect with our friends. We're all there for performative reasons. Nobody posts on TikTok just to show their friends what they're eating, like back in the good old Instagram days. It's a lot more than that when everybody's a creator and everybody's a consumer on a platform like that. Whereas on Instagram, I think there's still some kind of boundaries between who's an influencer and who's just there to see what people are up to.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, that's such a good point that TikTok on TikTok, everybody's an influencer. That's really true. And I feel like I've seen, I'm not even on TikTok, but I feel like just what I've seen come across my desk embeds that people will send me or things in news stories or whatever, it feels so obvious, the performative nature of it and the way that people are setting up accounts for their kids or their pets or whatever, hoping to get them to influence our status, it just feels really icky and makes me think of something I write about in my book about the sort of effect that social media has on us all on both the influencers and the influenced that and that kind of, we're all both, I think even people who are not on TikTok or even Instagram at all, maybe they're just on Facebook and they have a few friends there, they don't have a huge circle or whatever.
I think even still, there's this sort of dynamic feedback loop that happens where you get a sense of what people are going to like of what's going to do well, of what people want to see from you. And you do more of that, and you are a micro influencer in that sense too, because whoever is, whatever friends are watching your content and seeing you post about what you're eating or your workout routine or a place you went on vacation or whatever, there's reaction that happens I think in people who see that the people in the plant world you were talking about, I think that happens on a micro scale too, where it's, and some of this is just as old as keeping up with the Joneses or whatever. It's like, oh, they're doing it, got to do it. But I think with social media, there's this added algorithmic thing that happens where when you watch the thing, when you watch someone do their DIY kombucha recipe or you watch someone do their skincare routine or whatever, even if it's just a friend in your friend's feed that tells the algorithm they like this content, they want more of that, and with Facebook it's going to bring you more news and your newsfeed that's like that, or more ads, all of them are going to serve you more targeted ads related to wellness routines or beauty or whatever sort of content you are spending time on.
And then with TikTok, because it is so extra algorithmically driven, it's not just the feeds that the newsfeed, which people, a lot of people now are suppressing the newsfeed and just getting to see friends or on Instagram, like you said, you don't necessarily have to go to the explorer page. I almost never do. I mean, I'm honestly not even on Instagram at all anymore. I'm kind of secretly still on Instagram because I, I'm a ghost way. I don't know. I send my husband content to post on my behalf and I don't even go on the app. So I don't know what's there, what it's serving. To me with TikTok, I feel like it's not just the ads and not just the newsfeed kind of content or the friends content that they're going to surface more, but it's also all this content from people around the world that is wellness related or eating and exercise related or whatever it is that you spend the most time on.
And that's where I think it gets really dangerous too, because I think we talked about this on your podcast, that those algorithms have been found to amplify extreme mis and disinformation and extreme diets and lead people down these rabbit holes where they can start out looking for healthy eating recipes or a workout routine, and then they end up in more and more extreme diets and eventually in pro-eating disorder content and self-harm content just because that's what the algorithm drove them to. It's not because they sought that out. And that I think is really, really scary, especially when it comes to young kids who start using social media at 16 or younger with you.
Mary Jelkovsky: Yeah, exactly. And the algorithm rewards you for that kind of extreme content. So there are incentives for doing so even outside of the dangerous dieting content. The more in your face and extreme and controversial you can be, the more you're going to grow. And it's really unfortunate. It's a big double-edged sword for me. But I'm curious to know, I feel like you used to be on Instagram a lot more. When did you decide to basically give it up for good and outsource it to your husband?
Christy Harrison: Yeah, I mean, honestly, I will say too, there's a huge part of me that's like I'm going to truly give it up for good and leave as soon as I hit some metric of financial security that I don't know exactly what that is. I don't know if that's hitting the New York Times bestseller list or making a certain amount of money with the book or whatever that I am okay. I feel secure that I don't have to use this to sell the next book or to fill my courses to be able to make a living or whatever that I can feel comfortable truly walking away and I'm not there yet. And I feel like I have to kind of build up some other things first, but even to get to this point of so close to pushing that delete button and basically not going on the app at all and just letting my husband broadcast for me and not taking in any content from it really.
Unless I mean for book research and looking up trends and stuff like that or finding what somebody said that's being reported in the media, I do look at it not on my own account. I usually try to do as much as I can, not logged in. When I really started taking a huge step back from, it was for years, at least five years I think I've been interested in internet privacy and some of the issues around that and reading and learning about how to protect yourself online that way. But through that sort of research, I definitely started getting wind of these issues with the algorithms and the attention economy and surveillance capitalism and all this stuff that, because an issue with privacy is that these companies build giant dossiers on us by tracking what we do around the internet.
And so if we're searching for health-related things or we're searching for things based on a specific location or gendered things or whatever, it can tell so much about us from our behaviors. And then of course we give away a lot of that information on those platforms and profiles we create too. I started thinking about that. I've been thinking about that for a long time and being careful about what I posted in that way. But I think what really made me start thinking about the effects on the discourse was seeing the documentary The Social Dilemma. That was one big moment, I think, where I started to really think about how these algorithms are pushing us towards more and more polarized content. I also listened the New York Times Podcast “Rabbit Hole”, which I highly recommend. It's about YouTube and how YouTube does the same thing, radicalizes people and pushes them to extremes.
And The Social Dilemma had a lot about the harms of the business model and how the business model is really the problem. But surveillance advertising model is why they have to maximize engagement to keep us on the platforms and the things that happen to maximize that engagement are the most extreme, the most controversial, the most anger inducing and outrage inducing and fear inducing. And then how that really ties into wellness, mis and disinformation as well. I started to see that. I think The Social Dilemma came out in summer of 2020 and all through that year of 2020, I had been seeing all this misinformation from the pandemic and all the wellness crap that was coming, all the claims, all the bogus wellness claims and stuff that were kind of proliferating on social media. And I had already had my own difficult mental health challenges with using social media cause I did used to post a lot and I was really available.
I was responding to comments, I was looking at other people's stuff and commenting. I was like, I tried to have a lot of boundaries around dms, but I still was somewhat in dms and it just was overwhelming. It was just a lot. And the controversy that exists in the anti-diet space, just inherent in being someone who is anti-diet and sort of the pushback you get from people who are really wedded to diet-culture, that was already weighing on me. And then I think I just started to think more and more critically about, oh, this is not just a me problem. All the anxiety I feel and the sort of default mode of reaching for my phone and opening up Instagram before my eyes are even barely open. All of that behavior that I thought was like, oh, I really have to work on this and this is not good, was not me.
It was the way that these algorithms are designed, the way that these platforms are designed to exploit vulnerabilities in the human mind and our desire for approval and recognition and all this stuff that goes very deep. So since about summer of 2020, I think I've been seriously thinking about this and really started dialing back my posting probably around that time. But it was all relative. I went from looking at the apps every day and posting a few times, actually probably posting at least two times a week if not more. And looking at the apps every day and commenting and managing comments and all that stuff to maybe posting once a week, maybe twice a week and looking less but still looking. And then it was deleting the apps off my phone, but then putting them back to post and then getting sucked in and responding to comments and all this stuff to, I went on maternity leave and swore off social media entirely during that time and I didn't look and I didn't log on.
But then when I came back I was like, huh, yeah, I didn't really need this. And my business dipped a little bit, but not as much as I would've expected for posting zero things on social media during that time. And I think that really helped me just be like, okay, I don't really need this. And I kind of instituted my new way that I'm doing things now where I'll post very infrequently sometimes once a month or less. I mean now it's more cause I have a book to promote, but I turned off comments at that point too. I just realized I don't need to be available in this way and when my comments are open, I have this constant worry in my head of like, oh God, got to check. Got to make sure the comments are as safe space or as safe as possible because I don't want people seeing horrible stuff on my comments and getting triggered.
And so felt this sense of responsibility to deal with the comments and then also felt a sense of responsibility to be available for discourse by the community of people who follows me, which I'm still available if people want to email me or email my team and I'll get it. I think there's this false dichotomy that sometimes happens with social media where it's like if you disable comments, you're shutting yourself off from the world, or if you log off these platforms, you're like never going to be connected. And it's true that it's going to be different, but it's not like you're losing all connection to the outside world. You still have email, you still have video chat, you still have, there's so many ways you can still communicate with people. Anyway, that was super long-winded, but yeah, that's kind of been my journey with it. I'm curious to hear about yours, and how you've started to rethink your relationship with social media as well.
Mary Jelkovsky: Well, I'm currently in the place you were at in 2020. I have some beef with The Social Dilemma because they release that mid pandemic knowing that everybody's spending their entire lives online knowing that that's our only source of joy and some type of information amidst so many mixed messages from the government and policymakers. And also knowing that the people in that movie are the same people who created these algorithms are also the same people who don't let their children use these platforms. And then a couple years later they go on their high horse, the “Good Guys.” And I think I watched that movie just feeling really depressed. A lot of people did, thinking about how, okay, I have been sensing this now I know it as a fact, but there still doesn't seem like a way out. And when you were talking about feeling like you'll be completely off once your books hit a certain metric or your business is at a comfortable stable point, I really resonate with that.
I feel like I'm so far away from that, even farther this year than I was for example, last year. And so much of what I have, the retreats that I've hosted all over3 the world, the amazing humans that I've met, the beautiful places I've gotten to see the two book deals that I got at 21 years old, the ability for me to have a podcast, be able to talk to somebody as incredible as you that I literally idolized in my recovery and it coming full circle right now. I feel like I wouldn't be able to do all that if it wasn't for social media. And I feel really stuck and torn and as I'm thinking more about becoming a mom and knowing that mommy blogger content is what could pay my child's entire college fund, and at the same time absolutely refusing, I'm like 99% certain that I will not show my baby's face online at least until they're able to very clearly verbally communicate.
But who knows when that age is that they really understand the consequences of their decisions. And I made some mistakes with my little sister that she's spoken to me openly about since she's gotten older and we've put in place some newer boundaries. And I'm hyper-vigilant about the consent that I get from her about every single thing that I post. And even my husband, I met him on Hinge! Like if it wasn't for social networking, there's so much that I couldn't have so much freedom. And there are days where I feel like high on life. I'm like, I can't believe I get to do this and work from anywhere. And all it takes for me is a couple of posts. It's really hard to reconcile. Also knowing that my deepest darkest times, the times that I made my husband install deadbolts on all our doors because I was freaking out getting severely cyber bullied.
I'm sure you've received some of those kinds of threats from the type of content that you post and just getting literally paranoid that somebody's going to find out where I live and come for me or the times that I just felt so unsafe. I received one message the other day and my entire day, and it wasn't even a mean message, it was just something that felt a little bit invasive. It just sends me into this anxiety. And I'll be honest with you, I spent this whole morning crying. I had a really hard family day dealing with some drama, and I overthought this video that I made. I curled my hair and I wanted to show people my curled hair because I did it in this new way, nineties blowout hairs back, fyi. And I really wanted to show it. And at the same time, I'm sobbing, but I didn't want to not post that because what kind of message would it send to only show my highlights and not any of my lows?
But then that's also a double-edged sword because like you said, it's access and privacy and blurred boundaries and capitalizing, even if not financially, but still getting some sort of positive feedback from that kind of vulnerability. And I don't have an answer honestly. It breaks my heart. I can get emotional talking about it. I don't have an answer. And that's the hardest. I applied to a couple high school teaching jobs and I got rejected. And some of my friends brought up that maybe what I've been doing on social media is getting in the way of the jobs that I applied for because it just is hard. I understand, again with privacy and who I am online versus who I could be as an educator, for example. So I feel like for me right now, the only solution that I see in my current mindset is ditch it completely and get another day job and try to never look back.
But I also don't know if that'll make me fully happy because I know that I love running my own business. I love the flex, I love the people, I love people and I'm so extroverted and I'm basically made for this job. But I feel like I'm made for the parts that let me be connected to real humans when I'm talking with you, when I'm at a retreat, when I'm speaking at a university, when I'm hosting a little online workshop and getting to see real faces. But I feel like I can't do that unless I play this dirty algorithm game and sell my soul in all the most vulnerable parts of my life for likes. It's, I don't know. I wish I was prepared for some sort of solution for your listeners here too. Cause I almost feel guilty highlighting all of this depressive without offering any comfort or any answers.
Christy Harrison: Well, oh my gosh, first of all, so much empathy and compassion for what you're going through, and thank you for sharing all that. I think it's very real and I've felt some of that myself. I dunno if you saw that piece that came out probably, I don't know a little while ago by the time people hear this, but the piece about life after influencing in the New York Times profiling Lee from America.
Mary Jelkovsky: Oh my gosh, yes, yes, yes. By the way, I loved Lee from America. I'm not subscribed to the New York Times. I know a shocker. So I'm going to go pay for a membership just to read that because actually two of my friends sent me that article.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, it's really helpful. I mean, I think it was just, it's a lot of stuff that I've been thinking about lately, how to pivot. And I actually know a couple people who are major influencers who've done these pivots and have spoken with them, and maybe sometime they'll come and share on the podcast. Right now they're kind of private about it, but just seeing her share openly about her career pivot and going from influencing to a regular job and how she felt when she would hear people say, oh, you're living the dream, or I wish I could have the flexibility that you had. And she was like, no, the flexibility is the shackles. The flexibility is actually you end up working a whole lot more than if you had a job could just leave at five o'clock and a job working for someone else that you weren't so invested in or you weren't like the face of or that didn't feel like your entire being was on display and was the thing being sold.
And I really identify with that. I've come from a family of entrepreneurs. Most people in my family have worked for themselves in some way or other. And I've been doing it now for, I mean, gosh, I don't know, 15 years on and off maybe more. And it's starting to feel like, yeah, working for someone else might be the kind of thing that actually is better for my wellbeing because I think about, I've definitely worked for companies and had some toxic workplaces there too, but I don't think I've had a more toxic workplace than in my own business in the last five years. Truly. Well,
Mary Jelkovsky: Let me just highlight that. It was probably not in your own business, it was in Mark Zuckerberg's business. A lot of it.
Christy Harrison: That's right. That's the thing. It's like this giant workplace. Even when we work for ourselves, we're in this sort of workplace, this marketplace being an influencer or being a content creator or journalist or whatever sort of field you're in at this point, we're all having to sell ourselves online, a lot of us anyway who are entrepreneurs. And it is kind of being in this giant workplace with no HR department to help resolve conflict where it's just open season on one another and it really sucks and it's not something I'm suited to. I'm an introvert, I'm a highly sensitive person. I have like PTSD and anxiety, social anxiety. This is not something that I'm suited for. And I've tried all of the things, right? I've tried to create the boundaries and do the practices that help ground me and sort of reconnect with my values and why I do this work.
But it's starting to feel like the negatives are outweighing the positives. And I don't feel that way every day, but I think it's started to feel much more like that now that I have a daughter because it just takes me away from being the kind of present parent with her that I want to be. And I mean, even when I was on maternity leave, even though I wasn't on social media stuff found me stuffed, pierced the bubble of the beautiful time that was so rare in this culture to get time off work, to just spend with family, to just heal your body and bond with your baby or whatever, to have a leave of absence from work is such a rare gift. And I feel like it got destroyed in some ways. And I don't want this forever. I don't want this for the rest of my life. I'm thinking definitely that for my overall wellbeing, I think would be better served doing something else. And that's really sad and hard to admit because I love doing this and maybe there's a way to keep doing this podcast, which is one of the things I truly love. And doing some writing and going back to a career in where I get to apply my writing skills all the time in the course of my work, but not be so visible but not be so public. That's where I'm sort of feeling called these days.
Mary Jelkovsky: Yeah, I feel that. Does it ever remind you of the battle with disordered eating and recovery? It feels like very similar themes, at least for me, where I want to recover and be free, but I kept keep getting sucked back in and there's these glamorous, sexy aspects of it, but then the brain blocks out all the really difficult lows that it provides too. I think the only thing that we can start with is by admitting what you said at the very beginning, which is recognizing that it's not just you. These platforms were designed this way. Your problem is not how to stop comparing yourself to others and looking online for that content to try to not do that anymore. The problem is the exact spaces and places that, like you said, are using the brain's vulnerabilities to continue make you compare yourself to others or whatever that is, those queries that we're constantly going to the internet for a lot of them can be solved by literally taking a step away from the internet.
And I feel this way about many industries. diet-culture is a very obvious one that I'm sure all of your listeners are very educated on. But there's a lot of, even the self-help industry, even the industry that I write books for about self-love. And sometimes I'm like, maybe you don't need to love yourself. Maybe you could just not think about improving yourself all the time in every way and just let yourself be for a second. And I think that's why my latest journal has been just, I'm just proud of the latest journal and the time of my life that it represents because it is a Self-Love journal, but not from a, here's how to fix your self-lens, but just a little prompt to get you thinking for just five minutes and hopefully through this journaling practice that I hope everybody has some sort of journaling practice now more than ever to tune in with yourself instead of the outside world.
Hopefully what we can keep coming back to is just pure self-acceptance that even if you're struggling, there is also so much right about you. Even the struggle is right about you. It is absolutely human to struggle. Life is struggle, but maybe a lot of the pressure that you're putting on yourself to not struggle is also what's creating the struggle. So in that way, I think the only solution is self-acceptance first and maybe reconsider being online and reconsider going on that diet or buying all these books that you think might fix you, maybe there's a way to be with yourself first and putting that energy in before looking for places to fill that void for you.
Christy Harrison: So well said. And it makes me think about the difference between the kind of letting yourself be that you're talking about and just letting yourself truly accepting yourself. And then the incentives created by social media and just capitalism in general. I think that make us feel like we always have something to have to fix and to change and to prove, and that we would be better off if we took these supplements or we'd be better if we did this beauty routine or whatever it is, and how easily we can be pulled into that kind of thinking, especially when we're vulnerable, especially I think for me and for so many people who've struggled, I'm sure it sounds like you too struggled with mental health challenges or struggled with chronic illness or struggled with anything where you're seeking answers. I think we can be so vulnerable to these messages that if you just do this, it'll be fixed.
If you just buy this product, if you just do this protocol, this cleanse, this detox, this diet, whatever, that that's going to solve all your problems. And yeah, there's something so liberating and healing about just accepting yourself and accepting even some of the pain and some of the challenges. And I know that's so hard when you have chronic pain and chronic illness and symptoms that are really invasive and make it hard to think about anything else sometimes. And I think that just, there are certainly failings of the conventional healthcare system, but I think one thing that wellness culture does is sort of steps into that void and says, I can fix it. We can fix it. And you just have to do all of these things in order to fix it. And so it takes us away from accepting ourselves and maybe finding some measure of acceptance for whatever's going on for us, and a way to live with the ebb and flow of symptoms or whatever, and instead puts us on this hamster wheel where we're just constantly running to try to fix the thing and do all these protocols and practices and take all these supplements and diets and whatever that just push us further away from ourselves at the end of the day.
Mary Jelkovsky: Yeah, it reminds me of a very funny conversation I had with my really good friend who we often talk about these themes with too, because she's a new mom and also has had her fair share of PCOS and disordered eating and anxiety and just kind of the things that a lot of people experience. And we also both come from immigrant families. And it's really funny getting our immigrant parents perspective on certain things because as ridiculous as they might sound at times and as ignorant as some of those outdated beliefs, there are elements that can hopefully make it a little bit more lighthearted, make you laugh, and just ease that pressure. So the scenario is that I have historically not slept well. Insomnia runs in my family, and I'm always really interested in how to sleep better. And I have the blackout curtains and the earplugs, and I tried taking the magnesium and the CBD and the melatonin and all of that.
And so that's a kind of an industry that I get sucked into sometimes. I'm like, I just want to sleep better because I know how important it is, and there must be something that I can do to make myself sleep the perfect eight hours every single night. And my friend being a new mom, that desire is amplified obviously. So she asked her dad, what do you do when you can't sleep or when you're so tired, do you have any advice for dealing with a lack of sleep? And he goes, yeah, I just don't think about it. And it made me laugh so hard because it's the answer that my mom has given me with so many things I've come to her about because they come from, well, first of all, a different country, a different world, and a different time period where a lot of these things that we're trying to hack and fix and optimize weren't even problems because they didn't have the luxury or time to worry about them.
And so my friend's dad's response of, yeah, I never thought about how much sleep I'm getting because I had to work. I had to feed my family. I was just trying to get by and be a dad and feed my family, I think is the biggest thing that he would say. It just reminded me to just give myself a little grace and maybe not get too caught up in looking at how much REM sleep I got every night and knowing that even if I'm a little bit tired or a little bit cranky, I can still have a good day. I can still do what I need to do. I don't have to obsess over it.
Christy Harrison: Yeah. Oh my God. So well said. And I feel like that's such good advice. I am reminded of something. I read Emily Oster write about parenting worries that she brought to her pediatrician and said, what about this? What about that? I worry that this could happen to my kid? And the pediatrician was just like, yeah, I would just try not to think about it. Same kind of thing, just like not getting too caught up in what we're told to get caught up in, which I know is so challenging, right? Because when you're not sleeping, I mean, I went through this too in the early days of parenthood when I wasn't sleeping enough and definitely was like, what can we do to get this baby to sleep and up all night Googling? And thankfully I was not on social media at that point and I use all kind of privacy blockers and stuff, so I wasn't getting targeted with ads about these kinds of things, but I was still finding myself down rabbit holes.
But I think about those moments in my life too where I'm like, that was probably just always going to pass. That moment was going to pass. And when I was in it, I was so caught up in trying to figure out what to do and how to make this better. And really the only thing maybe that did was time. I think about that with some of my chronic conditions that are so much better now that I'm not as obsessive about them as they were back when I was trying to do all the wellness things to manage them. Sometimes they're still annoying and invasive. I still have acid reflux, gastroesophageal reflux disease. I still have a hiatal hernia. That's just a physical reason why that happens. And I still have IBS and my stomach is just kind of a mess sometimes. And I've learned to just sort of accept it and feel like, well, I've tried all the things that they say you're supposed to do for this.
And many of them were just ineffective. And many of them actually made things worse by creating an exacerbating disordered eating. Although I think the disordered eating also initially brought on some of the digestive issues too. But just recognizing I'm someone with anxiety. I'm someone who's very sensitive to changes in my environment and routine. And so if those things are happening, if I'm under a lot of stress, I'm probably going to have some stomach issues as a result, and I can try to manage my stress. I can do the things I know for that, but also maybe I'm just going to have some stomach issues and I'm going to be okay with that because I know the alternative is to get so tied up in knots and obsessive about it that it actually just makes things worse.
Mary Jelkovsky: I couldn't agree more. And that applies to so many things, and hopefully a lot of people's experiences there is such a thing as trying too hard. You are going to stress yourself out and sometimes make things worse, unfortunately, because like you said, especially with a lot of the fixes that wellness culture tries to push down our throats and ultimately sell us on, they often just keep you in that industry. It's like a MLM scheme, you know what I mean? They just keep you there. And I really quickly want to circle back to the social media thing because I don't want to leave people with doom and gloom. So I want to share just the biggest thing that's helped me as a creator and consumer on literally all the apps I do, Instagram, TikTok, even YouTube. I have a podcast, the thing that's helped me the most in every single area of my life.
And this extends beyond the apps, beyond work, into my relationships and my entire wellbeing. The only thing that I keep coming back to that gives me some sort of peace and solace and security within myself is slowing the fuck down. So when I'm consuming, I try, although I'm not good at it at times, and again, the algorithm's not built for this, so it is going to be a battle. But knowing that most of us will be using the apps, can you read people's captions? Watch the whole video. Take a minute to leave a thoughtful comment. Can you remind yourself that there's a real person there? And then as you go to the next post, can you take a deep breath and do the same thing and ask yourself how you're feeling in this moment as you're consuming the image of this other human being on the other side of the phone.
I do this when I'm watching stories, for example. It's so easy to just click through people's stories, volume off. Let me just very quickly see what they're up to, snoop and maybe leave a reaction here and there. But that creates this frantic intentionless environment that only deeper feeds into the speed of the algorithm. So I try to, if I'm watching somebody's stories, I set it up, I turn the volume on, and I look at this human being who I'm clearly following for a reason because they make me happy in some way. And when I'm posting some thing, I'm trying to slow down and just think about why I'm posting this and try to be helpful or useful or connecting in some way. I'm not saying you have to be this commodity, but just not doing everything so fast. I think we should all single speed, even maybe half speed our lives, especially when it comes to consuming content on the internet.
Christy Harrison: That is hitting me where I live as someone who lives who listens to things like at one and a half speed or 1.25 most of the time. So yeah, I think that's important.
Mary Jelkovsky: I do too, Christy.
Christy Harrison: Well, Mary, it's such a pleasure talking with you. Thank you so much for sharing all that you did. And can you let us know where people can find your books and learn more about you and your work?
Mary Jelkovsky: Thank you, Christy. You are my role model in so many ways, especially most recently through these two heart to heart conversations that I've had the privilege of recording with you. So thank you so much for having me. I am on the interwebs though hopefully not for too long. Currently I am Mary's Cup of tea everywhere. So Mary's Cup of tea on Instagram is kind of the main place working on being just a little bit more authentic, more of myself, but also less of myself at the same time. So we'll see how that turns out. Mary's Cup of tea on TikTok as well. And my website is maryscupoftea.com, and that's where you can get both my Self-Love workbook, which is called The Gift of Self-Love, and my new self-love journal, which is called 100 Days of Self-Love. And they're meant to be compliments of each other.
So the workbook has a lot of stuff about body acceptance and dealing with weight gain, unlearning some of those fears, and also trying to come at self-love with the holistic approach. So looking at relationships and your lifestyle, I suppose, as a whole. And then 100 Days of Self-Love is kind of a daily dose journal where it just has one little excerpt and prompt where you can write, explore different topics and themes related to self-love to hopefully keep you just going on this journey because I find that at times it can feel a little bit stagnant or lonely or kind of like, okay, I know all the things now. So this journal is hopefully something that can keep you in that self-compassionate mindset toward yourself, and both of those are available everywhere books are sold. And you can also get a little more information on my website, maryscupoftea.com. Oh, Christy, can I also mention that you were on our podcast?
Christy Harrison: Absolutely. Yeah, I was going to say we should link to that in the show notes as well.
Mary Jelkovsky: Yes. Oh my gosh. Christy had the most wonderful, I mean, every single podcast she puts out is amazing. But if I am to be biased, the latest interview with her on Mary's Cup of Tea where we talk about The Wellness Trap and her new book, and some of those wellness traps specifically in the podcast, that was just such a well-rounded and wholesome interview that I was totally geeking out about because like I said, Christy, I love you. I learned from you so much, and I just really hope that this podcast interview is something everybody gets to hear also. So that's on my podcast, which is Mary's Cup of Tea as well.
Christy Harrison: And we'll link to that in the show notes and link to your book and your website and you on the socials so that people can find you too easily. Thank you so, so much for being here. It's such a great time talking with you. I really enjoyed this and our first conversation and hope we'll stay in touch and have lots more.
Mary Jelkovsky: Oh, likewise. Thank you, Christy.
Christy Harrison: 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.
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