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Dietitian and author Julia Lévy-Ndejuru joins us to discuss fatphobia in health and wellness spaces, the problems with making sugar and snacks off-limits, the determinants of health that have nothing to do with our weight, how to recognize diets that masquerade as wellness, the importance (and limitations) of nuance in our discussions of diet and wellness culture, and lots more.
Julia Lévy-Ndejuru is a dietitian, PhD candidate, and author from Montreal, Canada. She has spent the past several years advocating for a weight-inclusive approach to health and nutrition. Her work spans various sectors, including media, clinical practice, and academia. Julia's research interests include approaches that help develop a healthy relationship with food. In October 2023, she and her colleague Marilou Morin-Laferrière co-authored the book Au-delà de la grossophobie: redéfinir son bien-être et habiter son corps. This work is a resource for anyone wishing to better understand and mend their relationship with their body and food. Julia also co-owns Pratique Inclusive, a company that offers training on the weight-inclusive approach to health professionals.
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Christy's second book, The Wellness Trap, is available wherever books are sold! Order it here, or ask for it in your favorite local bookstore.
Get Christy’s new book, The Emotional Eating, Chronic Dieting, Binge Eating & Body Image Workbook.
If you're looking to make peace with food and break free from diet and wellness culture, come check out Christy's Intuitive Eating Fundamentals online course.
Resources and References
Subscribe on Substack for extended episodes and more
Christy’s second book, The Wellness Trap: Break Free from Diet Culture, Disinformation, and Dubious Diagnoses and Find Your True Well-Being
Julia’s new book, Au-Delà de la Grosssophobie
Julia’s website
Julia’s Instagram
Julia’s episode of Food Psych
Christy’s new book, The Emotional Eating, Chronic Dieting, Binge Eating & Body Image Workbook
Christy’s online course, Intuitive Eating Fundamentals
Transcript
Disclaimer: The below transcription is primarily rendered by AI, so errors may have occurred. The original audio file is available above.
Christy Harrison: Welcome to Rethinking Wellness, a podcast that offers critical thinking and compassionate skepticism about wellness and diet culture, and reflections on how to find true well-being. I'm your host, Christy Harrison, and I'm a registered dietitian, certified intuitive eating counselor, journalist, and author of three books, including Anti-Diet, which was published in 2019, The Emotional Eating, Chronic Dieting, Binge Eating & Body Image Workbook, which will be out on February 20th, and The Wellness Trap, which was published in 2023 and is the inspiration for this podcast. You can learn more and order it now at christyharrison.com/books.
Hey there. Welcome back to Rethinking Wellness. I'm Christy and my guest today is dietitian and author Julia Lévy-Ndejuru. We discuss fat phobia in health and wellness spaces, the problems with making sugar and snacks off limits, the determinants of health that have nothing to do with our weight, how to recognize diets that masquerade as wellness, and lots more. Paid subscribers get to hear the full episode, which includes an extra 30-ish minutes of this great conversation with Julia, where we dive into things like the importance and the limitations of nuance in our discussions of diet and wellness culture, our relationships with social media, and more.
To upgrade to paid go to rethinkingwellness.substack.com. If you do, you'll not only get to hear extended interviews like this one, but you'll also get subscriber only Q and A's, full access to our archives, commenting privileges, and subscriber threads where you can connect with other listeners and more. Plus, you'll get my undying gratitude for helping support the show. Just go to rethinkingwellness.substack.com to sign up or click the link in the show notes. And thanks so much to everyone who's already supporting us.
I also want to make sure you know about my second book, which is called the Wellness Trap and was the inspiration for this podcast. I launched it to continue the fascinating conversations I was having when I wrote the book manuscript. And if you like the interviews here, I think you'll love the book. It explores the connections between diet and wellness culture, the proliferation of scams, misinformation, and conspiracy theories in the wellness space, how alternative, integrative and functional medicine can lead people down paths of disordered eating, and what we can do instead, both individually and as a society to promote true well being. Just go to christyharrison.com/thewellnesstrap to learn more and buy the book. You can also click the link in the show notes or get it at your favorite local bookstore.
And now, without any further ado, here is my conversation with Julia Lévy-Ndejuru. So, Julia, welcome to Rethinking Wellness for the first time. We first spoke for my other podcast, Food Psych, more than four years ago now. And in that episode, you shared your history with food and weight. So we'll link to that in the show notes for anyone wants to hear the whole story, but for those who haven't heard it, I'd love to start off having you share a little bit about your history with diet and wellness culture and how it informs the work you do now.
Julia Lévy-Ndejuru: Yes, it's been a while. The last time we spoke, I was pregnant, I believe, and kind of discovering a whole new world of body feelings, I guess, and new sensations. And as someone who had gone through very difficult times, I would say with food and the body, it was a challenging time. And I think I shared that with you when we did the interview. So my history with food, as I shared, goes back ever since I was, I want to say, like, extremely young, so probably three, four years old. And my mother was quite concerned with my weight, so that I would say, really informed my relationship with food and the fact that she was really trying to take care of me by preventing possible weight gain or me living in a larger body, I think she was very worried about that because of her own experience. But I would say that what happened, in a nutshell is that I experienced a lot of pressure to eat a certain way and ended up kind of eating, hiding when I was eating the foods I loved and feeling a lot of shame and guilt around food very early on, and eventually really kind of focused all my energy on fixing, quote unquote, myself. So, first of all, how do I control my weight and how do I stop having these overeating episodes? Because, of course, I thought that was the issue, eating too much.
And so eventually, over time, that led me to study nutrition because I thought this would be my ticket to finally understanding how body weight is regulated and kind of controlling my own weight long term and basically making that, like, my life's work to control my own weight and also help other people control their weight. But when I started in nutrition quickly, I kind of went very deep in a very difficult relationship with food, but then kind of hit that rock bottom. And I think I said, like, I started listening to you around that time, that rock bottom, and then really just starting my recovery from there because I realized that this was unsustainable.
I discovered that other options existed. I discovered that weight wasn't just calories in, calories out. There were so many more determinants of our weight. And so, yeah, I just kind of took a step back and realized how complicated weight regulation is. But also, like fat phobia, all the sociocultural pressures around thinness, all of that, I really had almost no idea about. So once I understood all of that, then it really put me in this new direction of, well, first feeling better for myself and then kind of working to help our society move forward and help other people also move forward that were struggling.
Christy Harrison: One thing you shared in that episode was that sweets and processed snack foods and stuff like that weren't really allowed in your house growing up, which I think is such a common thing now in wellness culture. There are a lot of families that feel the need to do that, and I think that's existed for a long time, too. I remember my parents kind of banning sugary cereals for a while when I was little. And having this stigma on sugar and processed foods, I think has been around for generations, but I think it's reaching a particular fervor now with sort of the way that wellness culture and orthorexic thinking about food has been disseminated.
And I think it comes from a place of love. Parents want the best for their kids. They want to help their kids be quote unquote healthy, but that often backfires. And I'm curious to hear a little bit about your own experience with that. What did it do to your relationship with food to have those foods be off limits?
Julia Lévy-Ndejuru: I think it made me very much preoccupied with those foods. And I remember that the few foods, sweet foods that my mom would allow into the house, or the few occasions where they would be allowed into the house, I would definitely overeat. And also, I remember precisely that there was this aunt that I used to go to, to her house, and they had a whole cupboard full of all these forbidden foods at my house. And it was like the first thing I did. And this really came with a lot of shame, I would say, on my part. So all I wanted, all I could think about when I entered that house was that cupboard. And how do I go there to eat those foods, and how do I get my cousin to also want to eat it? Because this is her house and it's easier if she also wants to go and have those foods. So I was definitely very preoccupied.
And I still love sweet things. I think I just, many people do. That's just a normal thing. But I think having all those rules around them or not being exposed to them as just part of a normal diet. It really made them special and made me feel a lot of shame and guilt whenever I did eat them, and definitely always over ate them when I was exposed to them. And also, another thing I remember is the foods that we could have at home. I would definitely eat, once again, overeat, if you will, in the sense that I would eat them very quickly and without necessarily enjoying them. I don't know if it was compulsions or what it was, but it was just there was this sense of urgency to have those foods when they were at my house.
So, yeah, it made it extremely complicated. When I grew up, I kind of preferred not to have them in the house, or I really tried to avoid them. And that just did not solve things, as we know, that's not a way to make foods normal. Right? By avoiding them, you're just adding to how special they feel and just adding to the tension around them, if you will.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, completely. I resonate with that a lot. I grew up in a house, other than that sort of temporary prohibition on sugary cereals, and there was a weird line of what was considered sugary, but at a certain point, my parents kind of dropped that, and we could just have whatever we wanted. We had lots of different snacks and sweets and stuff like that, and we could help ourselves. And I think I developed a pretty peaceful kind of easy relationship with those foods and wasn't obsessed and didn't gravitate towards them when I was out of the house and stuff like that.
I mean, I obviously still like them and ate them, and kids love sweets and candy and all of that, but I wasn't that experience that you're talking about that I've heard so many people talk about who are restricted of food as kids, where it's, "Okay, where is the snack drawer? How can I get there? How can I engineer my friends to want to go there?" That sort of is so understandable for kids who are deprived in that way. But when I got older and decided I needed to lose weight, I think I've mentioned this here before, and I know I probably mentioned it on our episode together, but I studied abroad in Paris my junior year of college and gained a little bit of weight and decided I needed to lose weight.
And that was the first time I ever was on a diet or thought about my weight in that way. And I became obsessed in pretty short order and became pretty orthorexic, too, like, tied up in these ideas about sustainability and purity and what was morally good to be eating or whatever. So it was a lot of fruits and vegetables and trying to avoid carbs and processed foods and stuff like that, but not, quote unquote, succeeding at that in the long term because I would end up binging on those foods when I did have access. And we live in a world where there's access to those foods, right?
We live in a world where we're going to go to somebody's house and those foods will be there. We're going to go to outside and go to pass a corner store where those foods are there or whatever it is. And so I think now I've come to understand this. We really need to learn to live at peace with those foods and sort of navigate them in a way that is not fraught with this compulsion. Because growing up as a child with pretty liberal access to whatever I wanted to eat, and thankfully, the food security to be able to have that versus my dieting days and disordered eating days where I was deprived of those foods and didn't have access, I can really see the stark difference in how peaceful I felt as a child. And again now as an intuitive eater versus that compulsive time in my life when I was just so obsessed with those foods because I wasn't allowing them.
Julia Lévy-Ndejuru: Yeah. And it's really wild to think about the years, right? So when I hear your story and I compare it to mine where it took me, I want to say it all started when I was a child. So maybe like three, four years old. And then I would say I kind of found peace with food when I was probably, like, in my mid 20s. So that's 20 years of struggling, really struggling on a daily basis. And it's really sad. It's really sad to think about that. And like you said, I also had food security. So when I decided to try something different, I was able to. I was able to work on that access, giving myself access to these foods. And there wasn't that barrier, that additional barrier of, well, I can't really afford these foods or the access that would be optimal for me to really make peace. So that's another thing that, yeah, that's something that I didn't have to go through.
But just with this experience of spending all these years, it feels like a miracle today when I look at my relationship with food because of how long this struggle lasted. And for some people, it's even longer than that before they are able to make a change. So it's incredible. And the way it impacts our lives is so deep, right? Like it's an everyday, multiple times a day experience of feeling defeated, feeling out of control, like it's really pervasive.
Christy Harrison: You said in that episode too, that you really fell hard into the wellness trap when you were studying nutrition. What did that look like for you and how did it start to turn around?
Julia Lévy-Ndejuru: So when I first started, I was mostly thinking about weight control. How do I do that? That was my main concern. And when I started in nutrition, I learned about the health aspect other than, of course, weight was then used as like a component of how to improve our health or prevent illness. All these things, that's how it was presented. But there also the different nutrients and just the different food groups. I wasn't that interested honestly in that at first, but then I kind of learned about that and I thought it was really interesting and I really enjoy physiology and understanding the scientific background of all the science about health and eating and stuff like that. So it kind of gave me like a larger view. And then this is when I think I veered into wellness.
So weight was still a component of my perception of health and what I should achieve. But it was like, now it's like, but actually not only is it for, I wanted to feel better about myself, but it was like, actually it's also for health. And now there's also these other components of how someone should, quote unquote, eat and all these things. So it kind of wasn't as much in the forefront in terms of the discourse, but it was definitely still my main focus or my main want or my main concern. But it just kind of became all mixed in with this discourse of wellness and also enjoying the foods that you eat because that was not something I was really concerned about because when I was growing up, it was like, you diet, you just follow the rules, and it's great if you enjoy some of the foods, but it's not expected. Whereas now and in school, we talk a bit more about enjoying foods and cultural foods and all these other aspects, but the main focus and the underlying discourse was still weight control. Weight control, weight control.
So it's just as bad for people who are preoccupied with their weight. It just makes it a bit more confusing. But at the end of the day, it's still very clear what the person wants and what they're preoccupied with, right. And if they try to do some changes, but then their weight doesn't change, they probably won't keep doing those things. It's still very much tied to weight control. So it made things a bit more complicated. But then how did it start changing? I guess something I can say is one of the things I became really focused on before I started doing better was like, mindful eating. Really the mindful eating used as a tool to diet. So to me, this is very much part of wellness culture.
Just using something that could be used neutrally to explore one's relationship with food, explore one's preferences, be a very interesting exploration, but that's used to control how much someone eats. So definitely that's the type of thing that I would really fall into, like, oh, looking at maybe like, eating behaviors. I was really interested in that. What makes us make the choices that we make? Well, if I eat something I love or if I eat mindfully, then I will eat less. And so this will allow me to lose weight or control my weight. So these are the types of things in the wellness culture aspect that I really got sucked into. It's hard to say when it started to change, probably when I realized that I was feeling out of control again. So for a while I was feeling in control, and then I started feeling out of control.
That's when I kind of looked for what to do. And that's when I found the literature on health at every size, your podcast and things like that that were radically like the opposite of what I wanted. Right? It was not promising that the weight would just do this and you'll be able to keep controlling your weight. I really had to let go of that. And once I found that, and I guess, I don't know, there was just a part of me that was done. So I was like, you know what? If this is what I need to do, that's what I'm going to do, just going to let go of that. And I think now, looking back, there was a lot of privilege probably tied to that, in the sense that before I didn't realize that I had thin privilege.
So even though the sizes I wear are on the higher end of the straight size spectrum, I'm extremely privileged in the sense that I can find clothes that fit me in most stores. So letting go is much easier when you don't think about, will I be able to find clothes if I gain weight? Right? There's like all these things that I didn't even realize, and it was very difficult for me, nevertheless. But now that I think back, I think, wow, I was able to let go, and I'm really happy I did. But I was definitely benefiting from privilege in the sense that I could make that choice without really being so concerned about will I be able to dress myself? Will I be able to fit into different spaces and all that stuff?
Christy Harrison: Totally. I think it's much easier, not that it's impossible, and I know many people who've done it, but I think it's much easier to heal one's relationship with food when you don't have all of those outside pressures and societal pressures pushing against you as well.
Julia Lévy-Ndejuru: Yeah, definitely.
Christy Harrison: It sounds like your pursuit of wellness was very much wrapped up in the pursuit of thinness and went along with that. And I think that's the case for so many people. And like you said, people will undertake some sort of protocol or plan or whatever that's not calling itself a diet these days, but framing itself as a wellness plan or something. And then if they don't lose weight, I think there is often a tendency to be like, "Well, onto the next thing", like, that didn't work or that it's not useful after all. And I think wellness culture really obscures its own fat phobic roots by sort of framing things as, "Oh, this is for your wellness, and like, PS, you'll lose weight, and PS, all the poster children for this plan or program or whatever are thin and there's not even a question about it."
Julia Lévy-Ndejuru: Yeah, and I see a parallel between that and greenwashing because it's so insidious. Like, the words that are used, like self care, which is self care is something that we want, but it should not be used in the way it's used. And there's so many other words like that or messages that you hear the person talk, you hear their words, it just doesn't fit with what they're actually selling. And it's very enticing.
Christy Harrison: I feel like there's even, like intuitive eating washing that's happening now, or anti-diet washing, right where it's like, this isn't a diet, this is a lose weight without dieting or take control of your health without dieting. Make peace with food even without dieting, and yet is still promoting weight loss, it's still promoting restriction and deprivation and good and bad foods, and it's just the same thing under a different name. Your book is about fat phobia, and I'd love to talk about it. It's in French and it's called Au-delà de la grossophobie, which means beyond fat phobia. Can you define fat phobia and share why you wanted to write this book about helping people move beyond it?
Julia Lévy-Ndejuru: Yeah. So defining fat phobia. Well, I think it's the widespread discrimination and oppression of fat people. So the reason why we called it "beyond" is because we wanted to push kind of the discussion, especially as people will have understood. This is a book that was written in French, and I co-wrote it with my colleague, Marilou Morin-Laferrière. And we wanted to address fat phobia, and we also wanted to address the different roots of fat phobia. This is why we called it "beyond fat phobia," if you will. That's kind of why we named it that way, because we felt that especially in our province where we work in Quebec, in Canada, we found that there wasn't much talk about the roots of fat phobia and even fat phobia itself.
I think diet culture was more a term that many people use and is well understood, but we kind of saw and heard people talk about the roots of fat phobia and how it's much deeper than that and all around us, but mostly in English. So we thought it would be interesting to bring that discussion in French. And also we included testimonies of people who live in larger bodies, who have different experiences to tie into the book as well, because we didn't want it to be like our perspective. We wanted to kind of have a discussion, basically, and to bring in different people with lived experience. We also brought in different experts, and there's an overlap also between the two. Right? People with lived experience can be experts on other things. But, yeah, we wanted to bring everyone together to have a discussion and discuss more than fat phobia. We address fat phobia. We talk about diet culture also, and then we also talk about the origins, if you will, of fat phobia and how it ties in with other systems of oppression.
Christy Harrison: What do we miss when we believe that body size supposedly reflects wellness and how healthy we are? And why isn't weight loss actually a ticket to being well?
Julia Lévy-Ndejuru: What do we miss? I think we miss a lot in terms of the science of it. Now, it's very obvious that just looking at someone's weight doesn't really tell us much about their health. And also, even if there's an association, meaning a correlation, if you will, in terms of health when it comes to weight. So someone who lives in a larger body has a higher risk for certain chronic illnesses, there's also the fact that weight stigma, which is a form of oppression in and of itself, can have an impact on health. So we're missing that. We're missing the fact that body weight is regulated by so many things, including genetics. And also we're missing the fact that health is determined by so many different things, and that people can live in larger body and maybe have access to, let's say, good health care and have less, let's say, risk of illnesses. As someone who lives in a larger body who doesn't have access to good health care and so is more at risk. So we're equating weight with health way too much. And I think that there's just a constellation of things that come between these two factors, or variables, if you will.
Christy Harrison: And you have a list in the book of some of the real determinants of health that have nothing to do with weight, which I think is really helpful and just gets people to think about kind of what goes into health and well being beyond weight and beyond food, too, because I think there's a sense in our culture that food and exercise and body size are kind of like the biggest determinants of health and that everything is down to those things. But there's really a lot more to it, right?
Julia Lévy-Ndejuru: Yeah, there's a lot more to it. And even exercise, by thinking that exercise favors health outcomes because it impacts weight, is really not the story. Like, that's really not the truth. We know that exercise, for example, can have a very positive impact on cardiometabolic health, regardless of its impact on weight. So I think by focusing so much on weight, we're diminishing the impact of things that can be really helpful for everyone. If we come back to the list that we wrote, the first thing we wrote was socioeconomic status. And so this goes back to the example I gave earlier of someone who has access to good health care, someone who has access to adequate income, how much that has an impact. Where someone lives is going to have an impact on their health because it impacts their access.
Someone's experience of stress is going to have an impact on health. And this also goes back to weight stigma or fat phobia, which can create stress, of course, can create stress for people who are going through episodes of discrimination or who are discriminated often that can have an impact on their stress levels, and stress can have an impact on the body, especially chronic stress. So, yeah, there's so many factors that impact our health that go way beyond the number on the scale.
Christy Harrison: Yeah. And I think when people start to take those into consideration, it becomes a lot more possible to actually prioritize true well being rather than looking at weight loss as the ticket to well being or weight loss as the ticket to health, because for most people, they never get there. They never get to sustained weight loss. It can happen in the short term for some people, and then in the long term, they end up gaining back all the weight they lost and often more. And it's this vicious cycle. And that cycle, in and of itself, puts people's health at risk. Weight cycling is a risk factor for many of the things that get blamed on weight itself. So I feel like, yeah, taking a broader view of well being and looking at all the factors that go into it that have nothing to do with weight, and not seeing weight as the ticket to well being just gives people a better chance of actually achieving true well being, which includes mental, emotional, social well being, social health.
And also, I think there's so much we need to be doing at the societal level to achieve that right, that it's not just up to the individual that there are these social determinants of health, like you said, socioeconomic status, access to care, housing and housing instability, or where people live and the impacts of pollution and exposure and that sort of thing. All of that plays a bigger role than individual health behaviors.
Julia Lévy-Ndejuru: Yeah, exactly. And I think weight has often been kind of put forward as something that you should control as an individual and health, of course, as well. And I find that, or rather in the book, what we wanted to say also is that this is a book for people who want to make some changes in their lives, maybe understand all these factors a little bit better. But we do end talking about those structural changes. And I think that, anyways, that was my experience. So when people are able to take a step back, feel a little bit better about themselves, then it allows them to have the mind space to work with others to achieve structural changes. So this individual work, I think, is really important to help people eventually push forth and towards larger changes.
Because when we're very preoccupied, when we're not feeling good in our bodies, and we're just looking for a fix. Right, like, what's going to fix me? This is very much something that's individualized. It's how can I feel better about myself? And it makes sense because the discomfort, even the suffering is really great. So when we're able to kind of realize, okay, this is, first of all, it's not like an individual thing, and I can do all these things to just feel a little bit better. It's not going to solve it, but I can feel better, which is what we're trying to help with in our book, looking at different ways to feel better. Once you feel a bit better, this is when you can take a step back, and this is when you can have the bandwidth and even maybe start caring more about others because you have that space to think about that. And this is when I think it becomes easier to mobilize for larger changes in our society.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, that's really well said. I really like that framing, and I think that's definitely been true of my own experience and that of some clients I've had and people I've talked to where getting to a place of not necessarily total and complete recovery, because how accessible is that really to everyone anyway, but a place of greater healing and maybe having more coping skills to use instead of fixating on weight and food and all that makes it possible to think about things outside yourself and to think about sort of the larger sociocultural picture, the things that need to be changed at the policy level.
Julia Lévy-Ndejuru: Yeah, and that was also my experience and definitely an experience that I think is prevalent. And like you said, I don't know if total and perfect and long term healing is possible because we still live in a fat phobic society and in a racist society and all these things that impact the body ideals and that make us feel unease in our own bodies and shame in our bodies and things like that. But if we're able to just take a step back, I think many people will get to that realization of, "Okay, how can I push for this?" Even in the discussions around me, it doesn't have to be writing letters to ministers. It can be, that's great. It's just an idea of pushing outside of us. We've changed some things in ourselves. How can we change things just a little bit around us, and then however big we're able to, when we want and we can, to see a change in the larger society.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, and there's such a feedback loop that happens with that. Right. When we get some measure of distance from our own stuff and we're able to take some level of action on behalf of others or with others for the larger society and social change, then that also enables more recovery and healing at the individual level too. Right? Like, the more we shift things societally, the more it actually facilitates people's healing individually.
Julia Lévy-Ndejuru: Exactly.
Christy Harrison: That kind of is a driver for change. I mean, I sometimes look at what's happened in the culture with the rise of the anti-diet movement and the increasing pushback against fat phobia, at least in the US. I don't know how it is in Quebec, but in the US there definitely has been a real trend, although I think it's enduring to some extent towards greater body acceptance and questioning fat phobia and diet culture. But then there's also been, obviously, the rise of sort of the resurgence of the thin ideal. In some ways, with the rise of, like, Ozempic and the other diet drugs, really threatening to erase some of that progress and already have in some ways.
Julia Lévy-Ndejuru: Yeah, I think there will always be pushback. That's also something I kind of thought about, is I think it's normal when more and more people start pushing us in a certain direction and it threatens whole industries. Let's face it. I think there's going to be pushback, and that's to be expected. Yeah, it's a complex topic, the topic of medications, because I believe in body autonomy at the end of the day. So the issue is really fat phobia, right? Because if there was no fat phobia, then it would be easier to make a choice that's more neutral when it comes to these things.
But because there's fat phobia, there's this huge bias, there's this huge amount of oppression, discrimination, then, of course, it's going to be very difficult for people who experience so much difficulty suffering related to their weight to look at this and kind of be open, okay, to here are the pros and here are the cons. This utopic vision of how someone should be able to make a decision and just how industries are trying to rebrand in the same way that we're talking about wellness culture, just in general, there's just this whole rebrand around weight and everything that goes into these industries. It's tricky, but we need to keep pushing for sure.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, we talked a little bit earlier, too, about the fact that diets don't want to call themselves diets anymore. They'll say they're about wellness or losing weight without dieting or whatever. They co-opt any number of things or seen in the wellness space. Like intuitive fasting is such as, like intuitive eating. It's fasting, it's intermittent fasting with the sort of veneer of intuitive eating that's not really intuitive eating, it's co-opting the language of intuitive eating, basically, and it's a functional medicine chiropractor person in the US who has written a book about it and sort of is an advocate for this idea that's obviously really problematic and not in line with what intuitive eating really is, but sort of using that language from something that has become very popular. Right? Intuitive eating has become like a popular modality. And so it's trying to capture that or sort of ride that wave and harness it in service of something that is ultimately a diet.
And so it's so sneaky, right? Because I think people who don't devote their lives to studying this stuff like we do are just like, "Oh, yeah, I've heard about this thing, and that seems to be a trend. Maybe I'll check it out." And, "Oh, this intuitive eating plus intermittent fasting could be interesting, right?" It doesn't sort of ring the alarm bells for people who nobody has time to be an expert in everything, and people have their own lives and are busy. And so I think it's easy to kind of pull one over on consumers in some ways if the language is sneaky enough. And with that environment that we're in of sneaky diets and things, wellness culture, co-opting the language of anti-diet movements. I'm curious to hear what your definition of a diet is. And how can people know if they're on one, even if it doesn't call itself a diet?
Julia Lévy-Ndejuru: Yeah, I think that if there's a promise of weight loss, implicit or explicit, to me, that's a diet. And also if there's restriction on foods. So, of course, unless people have allergies and all these things, if there's a restriction on foods, that also, to me, sounds like a diet. I would say, for me, those are like the hallmarks, but I haven't thought about this before. But to me, those are the two things that I would look for.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, I think that's really helpful. And, yeah, very broad, because it's like there can be so many ways that diets show up and weaponize language or not weaponize necessarily, but there are so many ways that diets cloak themselves in different language. But at the end of the day, and I like that you mentioned explicit or implicit. I think about that a lot, too, that sometimes in wellness culture especially, or in these new "it's not a diet, it's wellness" kind of programs. The promise of weight loss isn't really made clear anywhere except in the visuals. Or sometimes it's lightly alluded to where it's like, "Oh, I released weight that I was holding" or something. It's this very woo woo sort of language.
Julia Lévy-Ndejuru: Yeah, or like, I'm feeling so much better now, and you see them, there's like a slight before and after, but it's not really positioned that way. But that's what they mean: I feel so much better, or I feel so much lighter. I would encourage people to trust their intuition. When you look at something and it makes you kind of hope that it would help you lose weight even if it's like a slight thought, like, "Oh, I wonder if this might help me lose weight." We pick up on these things. It's just that they're not explicit. So it's not as easy to explain why. But I think, especially over time, you kind of develop a radar for it, especially in our field, like for us, because this is what we do. But you can build that, and I would say trust your intuition when it comes to that.
Christy Harrison: I agree. I see it even with intuitive eating, people turning intuitive eating into a diet where it's just some influencer who's using that language and selling intuitive eating as a method of weight loss or promising that you're going to find your whatever it is, like your body's natural weight, quote unquote, through intuitive eating. And just any sort of emphasis on weight. And the body changing weight, I think, inevitably sort of triggers those hopes in people who are conditioned by fat phobia to want to lose weight.
One thing I really like about your book is the style. It asks a lot of questions, offers different reflections. There's definitely information there, too, in reporting. But I think especially as the book goes on, there's a lot more kind of like open ended reflections and invites the reader to question things for themselves without pushing them to agree with everything you say. I'm curious to talk a little bit about how you arrived at that style.
Julia Lévy-Ndejuru: Yeah. So I think it was very natural for us to write that way, both of us. Well, right now, I don't do much clinical work these days, but I have. And Marilou, she's a clinical dietitian. She's been for over a decade. So we were used to when working with our clients to kind of discuss. Right? So this is not us trying to convince, trying to push them to do a certain thing, but this is us trying to support them in learning different information and also reflecting on their own experiences and, yeah, just to help them along their path.
This is not about us. This is about our clientele. So when we wrote the book, we wanted it to have that same feel of kind of a discussion, asking questions and not putting pressure on the reader to make their mind about something, but rather to just help them ask themselves questions, maybe hard questions. And also, we recognized very quickly that the topic of our book is not like an easy topic. And whenever we talk about oppression, talking about not only fat phobia, racism, the patriarchy, homophobia, transphobia, all these very difficult topics, it can be hard to read, especially for someone who's maybe exposed for the first time or doesn't know much about those topics.
And we wanted to not just throw that information and then be like, "Okay, so next chapter. So this is what we're talking about next." We wanted to acknowledge that the topics we were diving into when we're covering could raise, create, or trigger, like, difficult emotions. And we wanted to help people through those as much as possible, as much as it's possible to do from just in a book, but just kind of acknowledging that and giving them, sending them compassion. And so we made those little notes that we call "notes bienveillantes" so how would you translate that?
Christy Harrison: Yeah, let's see, like kind note or compassionate note or something. Yeah.
Julia Lévy-Ndejuru: So it's just an idea that this is like a note for them as an individual. We can imagine that this may raise difficult feelings for you, and that's totally normal. And I guess it's a way for us to kind of try to hold their hand, be like, yes, this is difficult, and maybe this is raising this and that for you. But first of all, we're going to address more things as we go that will create hope because at first we talk about hard things that are real, and afterwards we kind of discuss how we can create more well being for ourselves. How can we feel better about our food? How can we have a better relationship with food? How can we have a better relationship with our bodies and all these things?
So, yeah, it was a way for us to, I don't know, try to walk along the people that were reading our book and also allow them to disagree and just letting them know that this is not us trying to force something, this is us trying to present a new perspective that maybe they don't know much about. And, yeah, and just kind of suggest different reflections that they can have and kind of agree that it's normal, if it's hard at times to read. And also, what do you want to do about it basically for yourself?
Christy Harrison: Yeah, I've come to really appreciate that kind of nuance and sort of resistance to polemic. And I think I have a tendency, especially in my first book, Anti-Diet, there was a real stridentcy about it. And I think that also is tied up in my participation in social media at the time and my sort of having multiple accounts on different platforms, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, that especially Twitter, I think really privileges kind of black and white sort of nuance free takes and takes that are like polarizing and induce anger. There's a lot of research on that that really is what does well on Twitter especially, but on social media in general, too, is that anger and outrage and sort of controversy tends to do the best. And I think it affected my writing in a lot of ways.
I still stand by what I wrote in Anti-Diet, although some of it may be outdated at this point because it came out in 2019. But I think in general, I'm still very much behind what I put out there. But I think I would write it in a different way, in a slightly different tone if I had it to do over again and having more of that sort of questioning and sort of open endedness to it. And I tried to have more of that tone in my second book, in The Wellness Trap, because especially for that sort of topic and people who are struggling with chronic conditions and looking to alternative medicine to try to address them where they feel really unheard and unserved by the conventional healthcare system and stuff like that, I think stridency does not do very well.
I think it's important to have compassion, even in skepticism, and I've embraced this idea of compassionate skepticism and try to have that nuanced view and less stridency woven into what I do and reinjecting nuance into cultural conversations. And it's really hard because I do have strong opinions about certain things, things that I really believe in and have found really helpful for myself and my clients and that seem to have good support in the research. And it can be hard not to "there's no there there!" when people bring up topics totally out there and wild. And/or when people are engaging from a place of fat phobia, and I want to stop that in its tracks. But also, you kind of have to meet people where they are, and fat phobia is part of the fabric of our culture in so many ways. So it's really important to have nuance in these conversations.
And I've personally gotten off social media for the most part. I have someone who posts for me on Instagram, but that's it these days, and I don't go on there. I don't think comments are even turned on. I don't engage in any way. But I'm curious for you, we were talking a little bit in our pre-interview for this call about nuance and the importance of nuance to both of us personally. But then you raised an interesting point that nuance maybe isn't always necessary in certain spaces, in certain ways, black and white messages might get across better. And so I'm curious to talk a little bit about that. I mentioned in the pre-interview, too, that I felt like you had a lot of nuance even about having nuance, which is really cool, not something that you see a lot today. So, yeah, I'm just curious to hear your take on that.
