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Psychotherapist, nutrition counselor, and author Pixie Turner joins us to discuss her history with wellness culture, the Belle Gibson scandal and how it ignited her skepticism, how we can think critically about the plant-based diet trend, the truth about “what I eat in a day” videos, and how social media influences our relationships with food. Then, in the paywalled portion of the interview, we get into her controversial take on how we should approach wellness content on social media, the troubling reason why some people who are skeptical of pseudoscience and the wellness industry are NOT skeptical of diet culture, how people who want to make certain food choices for ethical reasons (like eating fewer animal products) can do that without falling into disordered eating and black-and-white thinking, and more.
Pixie is the director and lead clinician at The Food Therapy Centre. As a psychotherapist and nutrition counselor, she specializes in disordered eating, body image work, and LGBTQ+ concerns. She has several years of clinical experience in all these areas, as well as experience in working with complex trauma and how it manifests in someone’s relationship with food/themselves in adulthood. She takes an integrative approach, discussing both food and emotions to get a more complete understanding of a person. Her overall aim is to help improve someone’s relationship with both food and themselves. Outside of her clinical practice, her science communication work extends across several platforms: social media, teaching at BSc/MSc level, public speaking, writing, and media work.
Resources and References
Christy’s second book, The Wellness Trap: Break Free from Diet Culture, Disinformation, and Dubious Diagnoses and Find Your True Well-Being
Subscribe on Substack for full interviews and more
Pixie’s practice, The Food Therapy Centre
Pixie’s books
Pixie’s Instagram @pixienutrition
The Skeptic (UK) magazine (“reason with compassion”)
Christy’s online course, Intuitive Eating Fundamentals
Transcript
Disclaimer: The below transcription is primarily rendered by AI, so errors may have occurred. The original audio file is available above.
Christy Harrison: So, Pixie, welcome to the show. I'm so excited to talk with you today.
Pixie Turner: Thank you so much for having me. This is great.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, really, really excited to chat. We've known of each other, I guess, for years, so it's nice to have a chance to finally connect. To start, I'd love to have you tell me a bit about your history with diet and wellness culture and how you came to do the work that you do now.
Pixie Turner: So I was never really someone who was around a lot of diets growing up, which I think perhaps differentiates me from quite a lot of people in this space. I did encounter a lot of wellness information and the wellness community when I was in my late teens. And one thing that really opened my eyes to the whole wellness culture kind of in general, and the whole wellness bullshittery was that I was in Australia at the same time as the Belle Gibson scandal went down. And that was a real moment of, whoa, this space is really dangerous and really harmful and full of people who are either lying or who are misguided or who don't know what they're talking about. And I found that to be a really interesting kind of springboard from which to critique and really kind of dig into various wellness claims and do some debunking.
I kind of moved from there into realizing that if I was going to do this as a social media person and I was criticizing various wellness people and bloggers for not being appropriately qualified, I should probably go and get a qualification so I wasn't a hypocrite. So that was one of my main drivers towards doing a master's degree in nutrition. And from that point, I started working in the nutrition space. And seven, eight years later, here I am. I think eight years almost, which is wild to think about for me.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, it really flies by. I wrote about the Belle Gibson scandal in my second book, The Wellness Trap. But for anyone who doesn't know about that, can you just share some broad strokes of what happened and sort of how it made you realize that wellness culture, a lot of what goes on in wellness culture is scammy or problematic or just not based in good evidence.
Pixie Turner: So Belle Gibson was a really well known, very, very popular wellness blogger. Her entire platform was based around the idea that she had various forms of cancer, but particularly brain cancer, and that she was healing herself through various wellness and quote unquote, natural remedies and solutions instead of kind of traditional medicine with chemotherapy and surgery and things like that. And she claimed to be curing herself. But also depending on what day you looked on her Instagram, some days she seemed okay, some days she wasn't. And eventually it came out that not only did she not cure her terminal brain cancer, she lied about having cancer at all, which was a huge scandal.
And, oof, I remember being there at the time and talking to people about it, and people were like, "No, I'm sure there's some kind of mistake. She must be misguided." And I just had this sense of like, yeah, this person is absolutely lying. And if this person is lying, who else is lying?
Christy Harrison: Right? I mean, that is a big eye opening thing to have at sort of a formative moment in your wellness culture journey. It sounds like it was pretty early on for you, so you were able to kind of develop skepticism relatively quickly.
Pixie Turner: Yeah, it was an interesting time because I was in Australia, so I live in the UK usually, but I was doing that typical kind of UK gap year thing of working in Australia, and I was working in an organic health food shop. So I was surrounded by people who were aspiring naturopaths, a lot of aspiring naturopaths. So it was a very interesting space to be around at that time.
Christy Harrison: I bet. Oh, my gosh. How did they all respond to that? Was there a lot of skepticism in that world that you saw, or did people kind of just go about their wellness path?
Pixie Turner: Oh, there was no skepticism. It was very much a space of, "Oh, no, there must be some kind of mistake. She's a wonderful person. Belle is fantastic. There must be some mistake." And I'm like, "She's lying." And she was lying.
Christy Harrison: Yeah. So you had sort of an inherent skepticism. Something set off alarm bells for you that it didn't for other people.
Pixie Turner: I think I had enough media literacy by that point, and a degree in biochemistry probably helped as well. I saw that it just didn't make sense for it to be some kind of conspiracy. The only thing that made sense was that what the reporters were reporting was true and that she had lied about everything and there was too much evidence to back it up to think otherwise.
Christy Harrison: That's wild that some people wrote it off as a conspiracy, that this investigative reporting that was happening and all of the evidence that came out was just considered not real or conspiratorial in some way.
Pixie Turner: Yeah. Although now, from the vantage point of today, everything is a conspiracy theory nowadays. Everything is turned into conspiracy theory. So I no longer see that as surprising in any capacity whatsoever.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, no, for sure. Today I feel like conspiracy theories are so rampant and the conspiratorial mindset is so common in wellness spaces, especially. And I guess there's always a lot of crossover between conspiracism and wellness culture in the sense that the belief that everything is connected and nothing is a coincidence sort of is common in a lot of new age spaces.
Pixie Turner: Oh, absolutely. And also this sense of moral superiority.
Christy Harrison: Totally. But I think back then, that was 2013 or so?
Pixie Turner: I think it was even 2015, actually. Yeah, it would have been the first half of 2015 because I started my masters in September of 2015, just after I left Australia.
Christy Harrison: Yeah. I just feel like it was a different time back then in terms of social media, wellness culture, where now immediately when some sort of big reporting happens. I'm thinking of the Andrew Huberman piece that just came out recently in New York magazine. It was in some ways kind of a hit piece on his personal life, but also raised some really important points. And immediately it sort of got transformed among his fan base into a conspiracy theory. Like Big Pharma somehow paid for this take down of him because they don't like him pushing supplements and all that stuff.
But back when the Belle Gibson scandal erupted, I feel like that machinery wasn't quite as quick on the draw. There wasn't quite as much conspiracism already in the social media zeitgeist, but it could be wrong. Maybe it's just so rampant now that we really see it, but it was still there then. I feel like now the conspiracy theory machine is so well oiled, it's like people are just jumping right on any sort of investigative reporting and saying that it's a conspiracy or looking at it as evidence of a conspiracy. But I feel like back then, that machinery wasn't quite as obvious, I guess. So it's just interesting to me. I feel like the Belle Gibson scandal in many ways is like this prototypical or sort of early example of what happens on social media all the time now in a lot of ways.
Pixie Turner: Oh, yeah, I absolutely agree with you on that. And I think in a sense, it was a bit of a tipping point in the wellness industry, at least here in the UK. It felt like up to that point, that had been a relative absence of skepticism around the wellness community, around wellness bloggers and authors. And from that point onwards, it seemed like something changed a little bit. Everything became a lot more divisive. There were those within the wellness community who seemed to become a lot more entrenched, which then, I think very much, as you said, kind of led more into that conspiratorial mindset of, "No, no, everyones against us, we know best."
And then on this other path, a much more well defined kind of branch of skepticism around wellness is more so in the mainstream media as well than there had been before. So it was a really interesting, almost like point at which things seemed to change and things became a lot more divisive.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, it was kind of like this inflection point. And it's so interesting, too, that her whole rise and fall and fallout all happened on social media, which we can get into this more later because you wrote a book about how social media shapes our relationships with food. And I'm really interested in that. And I'm also interested in how social media shapes our relationships with the truth and with reality and with wellness culture. And sort of whether we sort of fall on that skeptical side or fall on a more true believer sort of side. It's harder and harder, I think, with social media because it's so polarizing to have any sort of middle ground of skepticism, but not necessarily with something like Belle Gibson, but with some new protocol that comes along or something to say, "Okay, well, this sounds interesting, but I'm also skeptical." To have that kind of nuance in some ways, you're conditioned to be either all in or to totally reject it in a way that is very strident and black and white sometimes.
Pixie Turner: Yeah, absolutely. I think it's very black and white, very polarised. And social media, I think, really feeds that in quite a significant way.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, I want to talk about all that later, but at first I want to talk a little more about your background because I'm really interested in this addition of psychotherapy to the mix. So you're already a registered nutritionist, and then you also became a psychotherapist. What made you decide to go back and get that additional credential?
Pixie Turner: Yeah, that was not part of my original plan, really. I was very happy with my nutrition masters, I was very happy with the work I was doing, especially my clinical work, really settling into that, feeling really great about it, feeling like it was developing really well. And then over the course of a couple of years, what I really noticed is that my clients were starting to treat the sessions more and more like therapy and to the point where some of my clients would even call me their therapist. And it felt like the direction a lot of our conversations were going in was moving away from food as the kind of primary subject and a lot more into kind of the deeper psychological issues that were going on in their lives.
And I came to this realization that I had two options. Either I had to set more of a kind of professional boundary in the sense of really kind of being much more explicit about my scope of practice and reining that in, or I could give the people what they want and do another three years of training to become a psychotherapist, which here in the UK it's at least three years of training. And yeah, I did another three years whilst working so kind of working full time, studying part time. It was such a good decision, but I mean, holy shit, it's so hard to do that training. I would rather do ten master's degrees at the same time than ever do psychotherapy training again. It's so hard. But I'm so glad I did it because so much of my work now is so heavily therapeutic. It's so heavily kind of therapeutically focused that my clinical work very much feels like I'm a therapist first, nutritionist second at this point.
Christy Harrison: What was hard about that credential? What made it more challenging than the other masters you did?
Pixie Turner: A bunch of things. It was a less academic kind of training and much more experiential kind of training experience. And you basically do hours and hours and hours of group therapy, like all the time. We did an hour every week of a large group therapy, kind of like an experiential space, and we would do a couple of hours every couple of weeks of kind of small group therapy. We had to have individual therapy as well. And a lot of the learning was very kind of heavily leaning towards experiential learning. We had to relate everything back to our own lives, our own experiences. We had to really delve very deep and explore all of our biases, our judgments, our views, our various issues, let's say, that were likely to come up when working with clients. And there was no escape from any of that.
There was no hiding anything because the tutors were very, very observant. You know how when people say, "Oh, you know, I'm fine, I'm just tired" or "Oh, I think its just my hormones." There was no escaping in anything like that. It was, "No. If you're feeling some way you have to really delve deep into what exactly is going on and why," and you're pushed very, very hard. We were basically told that the training would break us down into little pieces and build us up again. And it definitely felt that way. It definitely felt that way. It's probably the hardest thing I may have ever done in life, which is why I don't want to do it again, but I'm glad I've done it.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, that sounds absolutely grueling. And then while working full time as well, that sounds like just recipe for exhaustion and burnout for sure.
Pixie Turner: It was very, very tiring. Yes. And having to go on placement as well. So class, two placements, work and therapy. It was a lot.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, that is intense. But it sounds like you're happy with having gone in that direction, that you would rather do a more therapeutic approach with your clients rather than to draw that boundary and say, "You know what, we're just going to talk about the food and go over here for therapy to someone else."
Pixie Turner: Oh, absolutely. I have no regrets about it whatsoever. I find my work now even more rewarding than I did before and it just kind of made sense. These were the deeper kind of psychological conversations were to me much more interesting as well. So it didn't make sense to kind of cut that off, to not go in that direction. No regrets. Really glad I've done it and I think my clients are benefiting from that as well. I'm in a very unusual position.
From what I understand, there are not very many people in the UK who have this dual qualification and dual accreditation like I do. And I think that puts me in a position that is not like completely unique, but is unusual. And so clients come to me for very specific reasons now and it's very much aligned with the work I want to be doing as well as the work that I know I'm really good at. And so it really fits beautifully together, which is really wonderful. I think when that happens.
Christy Harrison: It is. That's fantastic. And I love evolution. I love stories of people's evolution. And it sounds like you've really, and something that I have done a lot, too, is following my interest and curiosity. And it sounds like you did that as well in your work. You weren't content to shut down that curiosity. You wanted to follow it.
Pixie Turner: Oh, absolutely. And it's not at all where I thought I would be at this point in life. Ten years ago, I still had my heart set on being a doctor, and now I'm really happy that I'm not a doctor. So it's funny how these things turn out for the best sometimes.
Christy Harrison: And still, in the helping profession and still healing in some way, but just a different way than you might have envisioned.
Pixie Turner: In a way that I actually think is more suited to me as a person as well.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, for sure. One of the reasons I thought to reach out to you is because you have this background as a plant based influencer before you became skeptical and turned away from all that. And I think you're really well positioned to address some of the misconceptions around plant based eating. And it's having another moment, I guess, in the US. There's a Netflix documentary that came out recently that was kind of yet another pro-vegan documentary and sort of made a lot of people in my world and audience feel sort of scared about eating meat or dairy or processed food and starting to think about going plant based and stuff like that.
So I just was curious to have you on to talk a little bit about how we can think critically about the plant based trend as well as what you think the trend gets right and what it gets wrong, and kind of a nuanced discussion around this whole plant based idea.
Pixie Turner: That's a big question. There's a lot there. I'm trying to think about where to begin. I think I probably want to start with the fact that these documentaries are very good at making propaganda look like absolute truth. I think they do that exceptionally well. I haven't seen this latest one. I generally stay far away from them now because I spent a fair amount of time in not, well, relatively recent years exploring these documentaries in quite a lot of detail. But I've seen enough to know that they generally are very much propaganda pieces and they're always biased. Especially more recently, they are so good at looking so sleek and so professional and so good at making everything seem like there is only one truth. And basically, if you're not following it, then, "You're an idiot. What are you doing? You're ruining your life. You're destroying your insides and your outside and everything."
And I think because it's so well done, I think it makes it a lot more difficult for people to think critically about not just the documentary itself, but about the whole aspect of being plant based. The irony being that plant based and vegan are now seen as equivalent, I think when originally the definition was that they were actually separate things. To my understanding, they are seen as equivalent things now, which they are not supposed to be.
Christy Harrison: Can you talk a little more about that? Like what the definition of plant based means to you versus vegan?
Pixie Turner: Yeah, I guess I base it on research that was done probably at this point, at least ten years ago where plant based used to mean based on plants, but not 100% plants. So the foundation of what you were eating was plant focused. So plants made up the foundation of what you were eating. But then on top of that, you could sprinkle anything you like, which I suppose we might call that, I guess, a flexitarian now, I think. What I find fascinating about these things is how quickly they become an identity. And when a way of eating or a way of approaching food becomes an identity, there is automatically a greater sense of attachment to it because it's an "I am" rather than an "I do" or "I eat." We say, "I am vegan," not "I eat vegan." "I am plant based," not "I eat plant based."
And even though it's a subtle change in language, it becomes a greater sense of attachment that means we are much less capable of looking at these things in any kind of objective way. We immediately view anything related to this through this kind of lens of "this is my identity." And that really distorts our ability to look at these things objectively and to look at any kind of information or views or evidence or research about these things objectively. I mean, as humans, we're very bad at being objective anyway, but this kind of adds an extra layer, I think, on top of that. And you can see, it's fascinating how this becomes this almost complete kind of confirmation bias, like an additional level of confirmation bias around this.
And what frustrates me is that there are so many good arguments for eating more plants. And I say that in the broader sense possible, because I really dislike putting specific numbers on things wherever possible. I love broad, very general, very open to interpretation ways of approaching food, if that makes sense. So, like, lots of plants, but like, which plants, how many, how often, which types cooked in what way? I don't care. It doesn't matter. It's deliberately all open to interpretation. I do think it is this influence of social media that the idea of plant based, being plant focused, eh, it's not enough. Because social media feeds all these extremes. It does feed these kind of dramatic, kind of extreme, kind of black and white ways of looking at things.
So plant based was never going to stay plant focused. It was always going to be only plants, because that is what would get the most attention on social media. And I remember this back when I was a plant based influencer, because whenever I posted more extreme hashtags, my content would get more engagement than if I used more general hashtags. #vegan would get way more attention than #vegetarian. And like #rawvegan would get way more attention than #vegan, which is in some ways bizarre to me because the community is smaller and yet so much more vocal. I feel like I've gone on a slight tangent there, but I think this is a really fascinating subject.
Christy Harrison: Oh, yeah, it's super fascinating. I think this is really important and kind of gets to the heart of a lot of the issues that I see with wellness culture. People being pushed to those extremes and social media creating those polarizations. And, I mean, you talked about identity, like your handle was @plantbased_pixie, right? So it was like, right there before your name even. And I think that's, again, the pressure to do that, to sort of niche down and make yourself one specific thing that people can sort of understand and is legible quickly. All of that comes from those pressures of social media, I think.
Pixie Turner: Oh, I absolutely agree. It's this real interesting identity, but also this idea of impression management that I find really interesting as well, which is that the way that we use social media, in particular, because it's so curated and because we have such tight control over what people see, we get to really curate an image of ourselves that is much more aspirational, perhaps, or more attuned to what we think people will approve of. Because there's an interesting way in which we use food in particular to signal certain either characteristics or aspects of ourselves, because we make so many assumptions about people based on food.
And there is so much that is layered and attached to food, like issues around class or power or identity as well. And so the foods that we showcase or the way that we talk about food is almost like we're giving people a shortcut to understanding ourselves. I very strongly believe that people don't do that consciously, but it is a very kind of unconscious process whereby people will only post certain foods on social media because of what they signify.
Christy Harrison: People end up seeing all this highly curated version, sort of the highlight reel of somebody's food, and it's often geared towards what's going to actually work on the platforms. Like on Instagram. It's beautiful, flat lays of colorful food. You're probably not going to see a lot of beige and a lot of boring stuff and a lot of processed food because it's considered not to look as good. It's like the aesthetic that people are going for. There tends to be colorful plant bowls and stuff. So that's what gets seen.
And then I'm always curious of what happens to the audience when they see that. I think so many people in my clientele, my audience will see influencer's food posts and see that there are all these beautiful veggie bowls and smoothie bowls and all this stuff that's just colorful plants with maybe a tiny bit of vegan dairy thrown in or whatever, and think that they're supposed to eat that way. I think there's a sense of this is what somebody should be eating, and then when you're deviating from that, you feel bad about yourself.
Pixie Turner: Yeah, absolutely. There's so much scope for inducing guilt in people on social media. What happens when we look at pictures of food on social media in terms of what happens in the brain, from what I can remember, it's basically the same as looking at actual food, as if it's in front of you. So it activates the same different pathways in the brain, for example, around the potential connection to hunger or the exploration of, "Am I hungry? I'm looking at food. Am I hungry?" There's also the activation of various food based memories. Where have I seen this before? What do I associate with this? What do I connect with this? What meaning do I assign to this? Both in terms of memory and also in terms of messaging and various other kind of signals.
And also, I know because I have interviewed people who used to post "what I eat in a day" videos, and they have told me that they used to lie about it. So I know for a fact that so much of it is a lie because people would just lie about what they were eating, because again, these influencers were also worried about what people were thinking of them or the ways people might judge them or the assumptions people might make about them if they put something unhealthy on there. It's interesting.
And I absolutely agree with what you were saying as well, about how these kind of colorful, plant based vegan dishes do so well on social media, on Instagram in particular, because all these colorful vegan dishes are so suited to Instagram because they are so colorful. Because they are this, again, as long as you put veganism and natural wellness stuff together, which is, I suppose, kind of what plant based is, then it's very, very suited to Instagram. And I think Instagram is one of the reasons why veganism, especially this more wellness focused branch of veganism, has become so popular is because Instagram enabled it and Instagram aligned with it perfectly. I don't think it would have become as popular as it has if it weren't for the way that Instagram allowed it to thrive.
Christy Harrison: That makes so much sense. I can very much see that because my impression of #plantbased is it's sort of this version of veganism for the Instagram age or something. It's this version of veganism that is very much tied to wellness culture and to this certain aesthetic and to youth and femininity. And there's certainly a lot of crossover. And I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this, but I know some people who are older Gen X or boomer vegans who were punk rock kids and became vegan for animal rights reasons and sort of anti-establishment reasons, maybe. And it was a completely different thing and a different avenue into veganism versus plant based. I don't see a lot of people having that same pathway in. It's much more the pathway seems to be from social media.
Pixie Turner: Oh, I absolutely, 100% agree with that. I think if you asked people about the idea of being plant based, I don't think people's first thought would be around either animal rights or ethics or the environment. I think the immediate association with it is around health and wellness. Whereas with veganism, perhaps, I do think especially, I'm going to say, kind of older, maybe pre Instagram veganism was very much, to my understanding, very ethics based, very environmental based in that sense. And I think there will probably be some people listening to this right now going, "Oh, but you know, this was all in like 2014, 2015, like, this is all ten years old." It's actually not.
I really thought that all of this stuff was very much confined to that very heavily clean eating kind of space of that time, but it's all coming back. The last maybe year, maybe two years, something like, I can only go based on what I've noticed. But it all seems to be making this huge comeback. So everything that was popular at that time is now popular again. And I'm sitting here like, "Didn't we debunk all of this bullshit back then? Didn't we tackle all of this? Why is it back?I thought we got rid of it for good," but of course we never really seem to get rid of these things for good.
Christy Harrison: I've very much seen that too. I think it's like this resurgence of, and sort of a forgetting of history, or maybe not knowing of history. I don't know if it's jus that the next generation is coming of age and sort of going through this the way that our generation, or, I don't know, I'm older, millennial cusp of Gen X. But it often seems to me that people go through some of this in their twenties and thirties, of exploration of identities around food, sort of discovering new ways of eating and identities through that and adopting, whether it's clean eating or veganism or plant based as an identity. And then maybe over time, perhaps softening or nuancing their relationship with that or something and starting to think more critically, sometimes.
I think that's certainly the trajectory of me and some of my friends. And then for other people, I think it can be much more entrenched and take longer. But I wonder if some of this trend reemerging is just like there's a new crop of people, young people, who are sort of on this food identity journey themselves, that didn't see any of that going down in 2014 or whatever, and are on TikTok or on Instagram in spaces where that history isn't represented. And it's just all new and there's nothing new under the sun. And so all of this stuff is being recycled.
And then, of course, there are entrepreneurs and influencers who are profiting off of that and capitalizing on that and sort of looking to the past, perhaps for ideas of things to resurrect, and maybe not consciously. Maybe not like, "I'm going to find this thing that's new again and capitalize on it." But maybe it's more of an unconscious thing of looking for healing and discovering these things. I'm sure that there's a mix of those things. Because there are certainly some wellness entrepreneurs that are very calculated and know exactly what they're doing and do a lot of research on SEO and what are keywords that they can really own and what are things they can make trend and all that stuff. So it's kind of a mix. But I'm curious, your thoughts on all of that?
Pixie Turner: Oh, yeah, I was thinking about TikTok as well. I'm thinking there's potentially a combination of TikTok and content appearing on TikTok that people wouldn't have seen on Instagram ten years ago because they were probably too young. And the pandemic, I think the pandemic has to be thrown in there as well, because, I think especially if I'm thinking about suppose kind of traditional trajectory of late teens, early twenties, like, "What am I doing with my life? Like, oh, my God, my health." And now, "Holy shit, there's been this massive pandemic." And now I'm thinking about my health and my wellbeing in a completely different way because I've been forced into this once in a lifetime, once in a generation horrible event that has reshaped my entire kind of life for a couple of years and reshaped how I now look at myself and the world and people and my health. And at the same time, here's this new platform that is very shiny, very kind of catered towards these beautiful dopamine hits like a slot machine. Scrolling, scrolling up and up. Every 15 seconds, there's something new. Maybe this next video is even better. Maybe this next one's even better.
And then I think because of all of this, this real almost desire, or just very strong receptiveness to health messaging on TikTok that is then not looked at critically at all, that is absorbed because someone is perhaps if they are in their kind of late teens, early twenties, much more vulnerable and receptive to that because of age. I think being at that younger age, I do think that makes you more vulnerable to those kinds of messages. And then having just been through a pandemic at a really critical time in life, in this whole kind of reshaping and understanding of the world. Again, there is a sense of vulnerability to that because the world has been turned upside down and what even is happening? And that just does make you psychologically more vulnerable to these things. And so there is a perfect opportunity for to kind of take all of these things from ten years ago and bring them back because they're so simple, so appealing.
I think it's the same in the US, but here in the UK, there's been a very strong demonization of processed foods lately. There's been an undercurrent of that for a really long time. But it has come up super strongly with very absolutist statements, statements that go far beyond what the research says and really exaggerate and extrapolate in an absurd way. But that has this very powerful fear mongering type messaging that is very effective to get people to pay attention, which is ironic, considering that I really do think that fear mongering messages are so bad for people's health.
Christy Harrison: The way that nutrition and health get sort of lionized and raised up as the be all and end all of health, it's like what you put in your body is the only thing that matters, and mental health and wellness will just sort of fall in line. That sort of current of like nutritional psychiatry and all that stuff where it's like eat to support your mental health, where it sort of explicitly is about taking out processed foods and eating certain things that are supposedly good for your mental health and that you can hack your health. And in some extreme cases, people just saying that you can get off medication entirely or not need any sort of mental health support when you're eating the quote unquote right way, all of which is super problematic I think.
There's this sort of denigration and downgrading of mental health and wellbeing in the overall picture of people's health and food, and to some extent exercise. But I think really, food is held up as the highest example of health and the most important thing, the most important input to well being.
Pixie Turner: Yeah, and I agree, food, more than exercise, there is something around this symbolic aspect of putting food into your mouth, swallowing it, and of it becoming part of your body that just has a different kind of symbolic effect to exercise. Exercise has these different kind of symbolic, metaphorical aspects to it, such as, the burning fat, sweating out, and like people say you gotta sweat out your fat and all this horrible, horrible messaging. It's a different kind of metaphor, but I don't think it hits quite the same way as this idea of you're putting something into your body, you're eating something that then becomes a part of you. It's got a lot more power to it in that sense.
And, yeah, I think especially on TikTok, there is a lot of very extreme messaging around food and mental health as well, and also just mental health in general. It's the same polarization. It's like either you take meds or you stop eating sugar and your anxiety goes away. As if it's that simple. Or this idea of everyone is super traumatized. Like, "everyone's a narcissist." Like, "everyone who you don't like is a narcissist." It's this very extreme kind of polarization. Everyone's gaslighting and everyone's a narcissist, and everyone has super severe trauma. And of course, there's nuance to this. Because there are people who have strong narcissistic behaviors which we then encounter. And there has been historically, perhaps, a dismissal of events and situations that are genuinely traumatic for people.
But again, it's this heavy kind of polarization of it's either one extreme or the other. And social media is once again enabling that massively. I do see this far more often than I would like, that people say things like, "Oh, well, if I just eat right, then maybe my depression will go away." Or, "Is it true that if I stop eating sugar, my anxiety will be better?" And it is a little bit heartbreaking for me still, because I can see how people just desperately want something simple, something easy, something that they can have this control over that will just solve their problems. And I get why that's so appealing. It's so appealing, but it's just not that simple.
Christy Harrison: That's really well said. I think there's such a need for solutions and simplicity in a world that is so complicated and feels overwhelming, and there's just pressures on us that are systemic and have nothing to do with anything we can solve as an individual. And so I think it becomes really appealing to think, "Oh, if I just cut out sugar, everything will feel better," when maybe that's just not at all the case. And perhaps that might actually make things worse, because then you're getting into disordered eating and messing with your relationship with food, and that in and of itself can cause anxiety. I've definitely seen people who went down that path of whether it was chronic illness or mental health or whatever it was, but they thought just by cutting out certain foods, they would be healing themselves and then actually brought on a whole host of other symptoms and made things a lot worse.
And then, of course, the discourse in wellness culture, and you see this from some naturopaths and functional medicine people, integrative medicine people, and stuff is like, "Oh, well, you just need to cut out all these other things and you need to do this intensive supplement protocol and this chelation process for your heavy metals" or whatever it is. It's like layer upon layer of other things that are often pseudoscientific or not evidence based and very experimental. And then people get into such muddy waters with all that because then it becomes like, "Well, what even is going on with me? I have a million supposed diagnoses and foods that I'm intolerant to, and I can't eat anything, and I'm taking all these supplements. What the hell is going on?"
Pixie Turner: Yeah, absolutely. And then when you're compounding all of these things one on top of the other, and it's, like, never enough. I've seen how it makes people's lives so much smaller and how it makes people's lives so much more limited. That is a really sad thing to witness. And I say that not in a condescending way, not with pity, but it is a genuine sadness for me to see how people's lives become limited and small through this very kind of obsessive engagement with these things and how much people miss out on when they go down this intense pathway in this way. And it's so easy. It just takes one thing to the next, to the next, to the next.
It just takes over so easily. And it's then so much harder to get out of that, to kind of almost claw your way back to a bigger, more fulfilled and fuller life that also involves other people so much more. Because our lives are so limited when we can't engage socially with people, because we can't go to a fucking restaurant and eat some food.
Christy Harrison: Yes, yes. I very much identify with that. I had my life constricted in that way 15/20 years ago when I was in my disordered eating days, and I would not wish that on anyone. I was struggling, I was suffering. I was looking for answers, and I thought that these things would help me, and yet they were just making my life, which already had shrunken. I mean, this was like immediately post college when I had a lot of friends that were older than me. They had all moved away and, like gotten jobs, and I was still there, and it was like my life had already become smaller and then just became progressively even smaller with every sort of wellness protocol and dietary restriction I added on.
Pixie Turner: Yeah, it's a very lonely experience after a while, which then at that point, I can really see how people get driven towards social media because you have access to almost anyone in the world. And you can so much more easily find that sense of community, that sense of like minded people, which I think at times can be a really wonderful thing in some ways. And it can also absolutely entrench people further in a very kind of echo chambery, bubbly kind of space.
Christy Harrison: Totally. It's such a double edged sword. I'm curious, your thoughts on how people can protect themselves from misinformation on social media and all these harms that the polarization can create, too. Like I wrote in my book, The Wellness Trap, about the controversial sort of outrage inducing takes that social media incentivizes, and that not only does social media foster and drive misinformation, but also it can actually undermine wellbeing in and of itself by amplifying outrage and polarization. So with all these potential harms, how do you think people can use social media in a way that is self protective and boundaried, or do you think that the best approach, in some cases, is just getting off it entirely?
Pixie Turner: Yeah, I think sometimes the best approach is to move away. However, I recognize that that is perhaps unrealistic. I think this may be a slightly controversial opinion in some ways,
