Dr. Mara Einstein joins us to discuss how cult-like marketing tactics have taken over the wellness and diet industries.
She explains how Weight Watchers and other diet programs operate on cult-like principles, why food noise might be a kind of internalized cult leader, the many problematic aspects of how GLP-1s are marketed, and why conspirituality is so problematic.
Behind the paywall, Christy and Mara discuss the cult marketing spectrum, influencers as “cult-like” figures and conspiracy theorists, the anxiety economy that profits from doomscrolling, MLMs, affiliates, and how to get out of brand cults.
The first half of this episode is available to everyone. To hear the whole thing, become a paid subscriber here.
Dr. Mara Einstein is an internationally recognized expert on deceptive marketing. She is a former TV and advertising executive and the author of 8 books, including Hoodwinked: How marketers use the same tactics as cults. You might also recognize Dr. Einstein from her appearance in the Emmy-winning Netflix documentary, Buy Now: The Shopping Conspiracy, which exposes the impact of overconsumption on people and the planet.
Resources and References
Contains affiliate links to Bookshop.org, where I earn a small commission for any purchases made.
Christy’s second book, The Wellness Trap: Break Free from Diet Culture, Disinformation, and Dubious Diagnoses and Find Your True Well-Being
Subscribe on Substack for extended interviews and more
Mara’s book Hoodwinked
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: Mara Einstein, welcome to the show. I am so excited to talk with you today about your books and your academic work on how marketers use the same tactics as cults, especially in the wellness and diet space. Because I think there is so much cultishness sort of floating around in these spaces. But before we talk about all that, I’d love to just hear briefly what brought you to this work.
Mara Einstein: Oh boy. Well, in terms of the cult work, that started probably almost 50 years ago, I’ve actually been interested in cults since I was about 13, but academically, I’ve been studying the intersection of marketing and religion for the last 30 years. And one of my first books was called Brands of Faith: Marketing Religion in a Commercial Age. And what I discovered over time is with the introduction of digital technology, that connection in terms of religion or grew exponentially to be more cult-like and not just sort of religious. And that we see that with everything in the digital space. It’s not that you are just a vegetarian, you are a vegan. It’s not that you just like a particular candidate, you love a particular candidate. And so we get separated into all these silos and I’m sure we’ll talk about that.
In terms of weight, I would say that my interest in that goes back about as far. I was on Weight Watchers for the first time when I was 13 years old and so long ago that some people may remember that’s when you used to have to have liver once a week as part of the diet plan. It was awful. Oh my God, it was so awful. And so I’ve been indoctrinated myself into this sort of diet thinking. And I find myself whenever I write a new book, and Hoodwinked was my eighth book, so this will be my ninth book. I find that I write something that I get very angry about because if you’re really pissed off about something, it will drive you forward in terms of how you write the book. It’s a more powerful book.
And so what I found while working on my last book was this idea of how do some of these weight loss plans start to take on the same category of cults, how they are like cults. One of the things actually where I really started to think about this is early on when I was presenting material from the book, people would say to me, yes, but when you’re talking about consumer products, you don’t have a charismatic leader. And I went away and thought about that and I said, no, but you don’t have to. And the reason why we don’t have to is that we have been indoctrinated into a consumer culture over the last 75 years. So there’s certain things we have been trained to think. And that’s particularly true in the weight loss and fitness category.
And so what I sort of discovered within thinking about this is that we have an internal cult leader, particularly if you’re talking about weight loss. Anyone who’s ever been on a diet knows how many calories are you supposed to eat, how much are you supposed to work out? If you’re on Weight Watchers, how many points are you supposed to have? And so you don’t need somebody outside telling you that you have internalized all of that.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, I think that’s really important. And I mean, some of the case studies you talk about in your book Hoodwinked, there is kind of a charismatic leader involved. There are some consumer cults that are driven by a charismatic leader or influencers that you define as cult light and we can get into sort of those gradations and stuff. But yeah, there doesn’t always have to be one because like you said, you sort of internalize this message.
I’ve spent a long time thinking and writing about diet culture and this system of beliefs that makes us think it’s better to be thin, that denigrates larger bodies, that tells us it’s healthier to eat a certain way and to avoid certain foods. And the good and bad food rhetoric and the oppression that happens of larger bodied people, all of that is just the water that we’re swimming in. I’m curious for you, what brought you to Weight Watchers at 13? And then also we talked before this about sort of your trajectory of getting out. And I think that’s a really interesting part of the story as well.
Mara Einstein: Yeah, my mother, that’s how I ended up at Weight Watchers. She was going there too. And I mean, I wasn’t fat, but I also wasn’t happy with how I looked. So I don’t blame my mother about this. It’s like I was unhappy with something she was doing. It was something that she believed would help me feel better about myself and it did. But what happened is it created a mindset for me over the course of my life to constantly think about what I was eating and also the way that Weight Watchers in particular is set up. And this is really cult-like. You show up to a meeting every week, you become part of a community the community validates you for the things that you do to listen to what the group is telling you to do.
So all of those things are very cult-like in that respect, but what it also does is it regiments your food, which is also cult mentality. And so what happened over time is this sense of deprivation. If I didn’t eat every piece of food that I was entitled to under that regimen, so if I was allowed 20 points and if I made the meat and the vegetables and everything that I had on my plate, gosh darn it, I was going to eat everything because I was entitled to that. And what it then trained me to do was to not listen to my body, to not listen to when I was full, and to eat everything because I was entitled to that and I wasn’t going to give it up.
Christy Harrison: I mean, it makes so much sense, being a disordered eating dietitian and thinking about how people respond under deprivation. It’s like that hoarding mentality and that sense of like, I need to get this all in because I don’t know when my next points are going to come. This is all I have for today, so I have to eat it now. And you’re probably chronically deprived. Most of those diet and weight loss plans have you undereating for what your body actually needs. So it makes sense that you would feel that mentality and that feeling that you needed to eat everything that you possibly could.
Mara Einstein: Right. Well, then you were asking me about how I got out. One of the things cult experts or cult therapists talk about is how do people get out of cults? The way people get out of cults is that there’s this continuing sense of cognitive dissonance, right? This idea that something’s not making sense. And they talk about it in terms of a bookshelf. And so you have one piece of information that doesn’t make sense and you put that on a bookshelf and another piece and you put that on the bookshelf until you have so many pieces on the bookshelf that the bookshelf breaks.
Well, the bookshelf breaking moment for me was I was on Weight Watchers when I was going through menopause, and I was following everything. I’d been doing this for 40, 50 years, and I was following what you’re supposed to do. It had always worked for me before. Six months later, I still hadn’t lost an ounce. And I went to the leader and I said, look, you write it down. Anybody Weight Watchers knows, you write it down or you put it in the app or whatever it is you’re doing. And I showed it to her and I said, this isn’t working for me. And she asked, are you going through menopause? I said, yeah. She said, oh, this isn’t going to work for you. I said, so what am I doing here? What am I doing here?
So that was the breaking moment for me. And what’s really interesting, in, like, the last couple of weeks, Weight Watchers has started promoting a special plan for people for women going through menopause. Interesting, no?
Christy Harrison: Very interesting. And they’ve also started promoting GLP-1 medications. I think that’s a really interesting piece because people are having strong reactions to that. Can you talk a little bit about what you’ve seen in the Weight Watchers in terms of people’s reaction to the GLP-1 push?
Mara Einstein: Well, particularly in terms of Weight Watchers, but certainly not just there. Particularly longtime members, because the whole point, getting into the whole cult, part of this is the goal in Weight Watchers is to become a lifetime member. Because when you become a lifetime member and you maintain your weight, then you don’t pay to go to the meetings anymore. And so you have people who have been doing this for decades, and they have followed the plans and they followed the leader, in air quotes, and then they buy this company that is a telehealth company that allows them to also use GLP-1s.
And so there was a tremendous uproar from people who had been part of the program for all of this time who said, well, wait a minute. You’ve been telling us this is what we’re supposed to do. This is how we’re supposed to lose weight, and now you’re telling us all we need to do is take a drug. So you’ve been lying to us. There were tremendous pushback from people who had been part of the company for a long time. Weight Watchers didn’t change because they knew the trajectory of where weight loss was going. But they did say to people, well, you don’t have to. I don’t have to use GLP-1s. Right? x
But the thing about GLP-1s that I find that’s really interesting. I mean, there’s so many things that are interesting. That’s kind of a rabbit hole. I don’t want to go too far down in the new book because so many other people have talked about it. And what I’m more focusing on is, what are the marketing messages? What are the cultural messages that we’re getting? But what I do find interesting about GLP-1s is, one is this idea of food noise. And I think food noise I would equate with the internalized cult leader. We can think of those things as the same thing.
Christy Harrison: Can you say more about that? Like, how does food noise relate to the internalized cult leader?
Mara Einstein: Well, the idea that when people talk about food noise and they talk about GLP-1s, they say that one of the things that’s so valuable about GLP-1s is they don’t have that constant noise, that constant thinking in their heads of when I can eat again, what can I eat? If I eat that, is that bad? And so it’s this constant battle within your mind about how am I going to negotiate my life with food and still have the body that I ultimately want to have? And so what GLP-1 does is shut that down. So that talk, that food talk is the cult leader saying, you can eat this, but you can’t eat that. You better work out some more. You better take another walk, right? All of that stuff that we constantly say to ourselves.
Christy Harrison: I mean, it’s interesting too, from my perspective, because I’ve been very critical of GLP-1s, and as a dietitian, I’m always thinking about what are the responses to deprivation and how is food deprivation playing a role here? And I see food noise and that kind of chatter in people’s minds as so driven by deprivation. Not just the diet mindset, but the actual act of having too little energy coming in and too little variety in food and feeling so deprived of both pleasure and just enough food in general.
And so it makes sense that when you take an appetite suppressant, it would blunt some of that because it’s blunting your appetite and appetite is often what drives that thinking in the first place. And so when people talk about how GLP-1s quiet the food noise, I’m sort of like, well, yeah, to a point and while you’re on the drug, maybe that’s true. Right, but then what happens when you come off it?
Mara Einstein: Well, that ties into the marketing, right? With the marketing of GLP-1s, you don’t hear about what the problems are with GLP-1s. This whole Serena Williams connecting herself, promoting Ro and my issue with that is one, it wasn’t widely promoted that her husband is an owner and on the board of Ro, which then says that she’s not promoting this because she went out and did a lot of research to find out what the best way to take this medication might be, number one. And number two, it is a medication. It’s not like she’s selling tennis balls or tennis rackets or clothing. She’s selling a medication that people are going to put into their bodies. And because she is who she is, people are going to look at that. And that goes down some dangerous roads that I don’t necessarily think we want to do.
The other thing that I find fascinating in terms of the marketing of GLP-1s now is, is up until recently, this idea of microdosing GLP-1s was something for the hoity toity, right? It was for the rich people would go to the doctors. Well, now Noom is offering microdosing of GLP-1s and the lack of education for people around what they may be doing to their bodies and rather just thinking, oh, I’m going to get thin. Oh, I’m going to get thin is just such a disservice. And this is what I mean about getting pissed off about something.
But the other thing is not just about GLP-1s, but overall and this is the crazy statistic, and it depends on if you include fitness and diet programs and all. But all of that is about $160 billion a year industry. $160 billion a year with a 94 to 98% failure rate and we would accept that in no other category.
Christy Harrison: I have talked about this a lot too, and thought about how bananas it is that that is something we just accept and that this industry continues to exist and continues to flourish and grow and that it’s not something people have put their foot down about, which I think comes partly from the fact that we’re just conditioned to blame ourselves when these things don’t work and when diets inevitably fail for the vast majority of people because of the nature of food restriction and deprivation and the fact that we are not really designed to do that long term. But when we think that, we’re the failure, that it’s a problem of willpower and that we just needed to stick to the diet.
Because some people, if they do the diet and like, you kept going back to Weight Watchers again and again, for some people, if they follow the diet, they can lose weight and keep it off for a time, but then usually something happens. And people will sort of frame it as like, oh, life got in the way, or I just couldn’t keep it up anymore because of whatever’s going on for me right now. But I don’t think that’s really the whole story. I think that it was always destined to fail. You were never going to be able to sustain that long term. Some people can sort of white knuckle it for a long time, but then things interfere. And they do say willpower is a muscle. And if you’re trying to sort of willpower your way into something that’s going to get exhausted after a period of time.
Mara Einstein: I will say, though, that the one thing that GLP-1s did for me and I didn’t take them, I haven’t taken a GLP-1, is that it let me off the hook. It was the one thing that said, it’s genetics, it’s genetics. You’re going to have the body that the rest of your family has. And for me to try and look like somebody who’s skinny or what our culture would say is the body type you’re supposed to have, like, the contortions that I would have to go through in order for that to happen is not how I wanna live my life. So I felt like boulders were lifted off my shoulders when it’s this medication said, it’s not you, it’s genetics. It’s something you do not have control over.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, I think it’s done that for many people. And then there’s paradoxically also the sort of increased weight stigma that the popularity of GLP-1s have brought about in the culture where it’s like, now the beauty ideal has become so much thinner again. But I think that that realization of, like, this is not something that I am going to control. The fact that my body is just designed to be this way, maybe can ease the burden on a lot of people.
Mara Einstein: I see with my students and my daughter is Gen Z, I see her and her friends not having the same kind of issue, concerns, stigma that I think that we had people of older generations. And maybe it’s just the people that I’m seeing, I haven’t studied it enough yet to know whether or not that’s true for the entire cohort. Cause obviously we have the issues of what went on with Instagram and we know from Frances Haugen when she was the Facebook whistleblower, and she specifically talked about the fact that Facebook or Meta knows how bad Instagram is in terms of making particularly teenage girls feel bad about themselves and not only makes them feel bad about themselves, that that platform is worse than other social media platforms when it relates to doing them.
Christy Harrison: Yeah. I mean, I think you’re right that growing up with this sort of constant barrage of images from influencers and from friends too. Right? From people that you know because we spoke about this before offline, but the fact that people can look at their friends images and they’re filtered and they don’t necessarily know it, but they’re like looking at these people looking so “flawless” by our cultural standards. And those images have been manipulated, I think really does a number on people’s self image.
Mara Einstein: Right. Well, it’s also performative. When you go onto social media, it’s very performative. And what people need to remember is people are showing you their best day. They’re not showing you the fight that they had with their partner or their kid or that they made breakfast and the coffee pot blew up. They’re not showing you those pictures, they’re showing you this very special, very perfect looking life, which is looking even more perfect because of what you say, that you put the filter on the picture on top of it. And there’s plenty of stories, really sad stories of influencers who looked like their lives were perfect and then...
Christy Harrison: They really weren’t. Yeah. I mean, it’s also interesting too. You talk about the highlight reel aspect of it, that people are mostly showing the good stuff. But there’s also a trend recently that has kind of emerged of people crying into the camera and showing the bad, you know, trying to be “authentic” in showing the bad stuff too. But that’s also kind of a performance because that is also not the full spectrum of someone’s life. And sometimes it’s amplified for the camera and all of that.
Mara Einstein: I think it does us a disservice. And I mean that in, we can become very cynical when it becomes a trend. We’re talking about it as a trend. And I have no doubt that there are people hurting right now. Not at all. But when we begin to see video after video after video of somebody crying into the camera or somebody saying, particularly on TikTok, stay here for the full minute so I can pay my attorney or whatever it is, we become pretty callous to that stuff because you begin to wonder, is this real? And, how many people can I help? And that’s where this idea of mutual aid becomes really important, because we can’t help everybody. We can help the people who are in our physical environment primarily.
Christy Harrison: That’s a really helpful point because I feel like I sounded callous just then, saying that this is a trend, but it’s been written about in trend pieces, and it’s become this thing where now, I find myself certainly questioning the authenticity of it or even just questioning sort of the mindset that would lead someone to that. Is that something that they would authentically, whatever authentic means, but normally, traditionally do? Is this something that they just would have thought of on their own, or is this sort of being conditioned and are they being pushed in this direction by the algorithms and what they see being rewarded as well?
I want to talk about the algorithm and how that incentivizes this cult-like, and kind of extreme behavior. But first I want to sort of get into some definitions because we’re using the word cult, and I know that’s a strong and loaded word for a lot of people. So can you define how you use the word cult and how it shows up in different ways, sort of on a spectrum in marketing and in these spaces that we’ve been talking about?
Mara Einstein: Well, there’s a couple of things to talk about in terms of cults, and for this I rely partially on the work of Lauren Dawson and also Janja Lalich, who are religion and cult scholars and experts. The first thing that cults do, and if people start to think about this in terms of your relationship or interaction with diet or exercise program, the first thing that cults do is look for recruits, and particularly they’re looking for vulnerable people. Now, nobody’s more vulnerable than somebody who recommended who is not feeling good about their body and wants to do something about it. And so the second step is to lure with deception. This almost one almost answers itself. If you use this program, you will lose weight. Yeah, maybe, but will you keep it off? All of that stuff.
The next part of the process is to upsell. So once you’ve come in, you’ve taken one class, buy a set of 10, you’ve bought the sessions. You’re paying for the sessions, okay, buy the food, right? So all of that, okay, you’ve bought the sessions, okay, pay for the app and you can then get recipes, right? So it’s all about upsell, upsell, upsell, upsell. And when I talk about this, an example in terms of a religious example so people can relate to it in terms of cults.
I spent two years researching the Kabbalah center for one of my earlier books. And part of being in the Kabbalah center is that you take an introductory class. And part of that introductory class is you get a one on one session with the teacher and you think, oh, you know, great. You’re starting a new spiritual practice, you want to understand it. You’re like, oh, great, this teacher is going to give me extra time. And then you go into the room and you find out it’s a hardcore sell. They want to sell you the books, they want to sell you the red string, all of that kind of stuff. So instead of getting what you need from a spiritual perspective, what you’re getting is a whole bunch of selling.
The next step in the process is to love bomb. So if you are in an online group or if you’re in something like Weight Watchers, you go to the meetings and everybody says, oh, that’s really great, you did great this week. And oh, you fought the devil, you didn’t eat the chocolate cake, right? Everybody’s telling you how wonderful you are. The next step in the process is tough love. And then part of that has to do with, in religious cults, it tends to do with eliciting confessions, right? So anything that they can use against you, right? So, you have issues with your mother, you have problems at work or whatever it is. In something like NXIVM, they had people take naked pictures, right? You know, all of that kind of stuff.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, the collateral, right? They collected collateral on people make sure that they didn’t feel safe to leave, right?
Mara Einstein: Think about people who want to lose weight. I mean, so many pain points that you can hurt them with.
Christy Harrison: When you think about Weight Watchers or a group fitness class or a group therapy type of situation like that, right? Where people are talking about this really vulnerable thing and like how their relationship with their body is affecting other areas of their life, not necessarily saying that Weight Watchers leaders are intentionally trying to weaponize that or the sets out to do that because it’s different than a literal cult in that way. Right. There’s not necessarily that nefarious intention behind it from the start.
Mara Einstein: No. And that’s what’s so insidious about this, is it’s not intentional. And so when I was writing the book and interviewing marketers, I didn’t tell them what the name of the book was. And so the subtitle of the book is How Marketers Use the Same Tactics as Cults. And when I told people that, I got two responses. One was, yeah, that’s what we do. And the other response was, yeah, that’s what we do. And so, some people are like, yeah, I don’t feel good about doing this, but I know that’s ultimately what we do.
So people who are doing this aren’t thinking they’re doing something bad when they’re doing it, they believe they are helping you get to your ultimate goal. Whether you’re talking about a marketer or whether you’re talking about a cult, they’re doing it because they believe it. I mean, and that’s what’s really interesting because one of the things I talk about in the book is multilevel marketing being the sort of canary in the coal mine when we talk about this. And multilevel marketing is legalized pyramid schemes, for lack of a better way to describe them.
And what happens in those cases is the people at the top are making all kinds of money and doing really well, but the people down below aren’t. But the people at the top top, they know exactly what’s going on. People in sort of that middle layer may or may not know that the people below are not doing well. And some of them, when they wake up, they just sort of assume, I’m doing really well at this so I assume everybody else is doing really well at this. And so when they finally find out that no, that’s not happening, that’s usually when the shelf breaks and they suddenly have to say, oh, yeah, maybe what I’m doing isn’t really great, but people aren’t necessarily doing this from a place of trying to sell you something bad. They’re not trying to do it to be bad people. They’re doing it because they think they’re helping you.
Christy Harrison: And because these tactics work. Right? Because it’s effective.
Mara Einstein: Right. Because then the next part is deprivation, hypnosis and meditation. And so obviously, hypnosis and meditation may or not be part of this. In some cases it is, but certainly deprivation, and then renounce anybody who tells you that there’s something wrong with the group. So if anyone tells you, I think of something like CrossFit, they tell you to work out until you throw up, which doesn’t sound particularly healthy to me. But the people who like it, really like it. And when people say, oh, I’m not sure how healthy that is, but they’re like, no, this works for me and I’m going to do it. Then after all of this, this is when a cult will introduce their core beliefs. This is who we really are. When it comes to weight loss, this may be just taking on a more extreme plan, something like that. And then the last part is making it hard to leave.
Christy Harrison: Actually, one question on that, the real core beliefs, because in wellness, I think we see that a lot as well, right? This sort of wellness culture, spaces showing what they really believe may be revealing sort of more woo woo type of beliefs or new age, out there types of things. That were not necessarily part of what somebody signed up for when they started doing this fitness routine or whatever it was.
Mara Einstein: Right. Well, that’s what is really interesting about how conservatives have been so successful in terms of bringing people into that fold. Because if you look at someone like Joe Rogan, but MAHA does this, they all do this, is talk about popular culture and then sort of feed in this rhetoric of conservative politics in it. But you grab them with the pop culture, you grab people with the original physical workout program or New Age program or yoga.
And we particularly saw this with yoga folks and new age folks during the pandemic and this whole issue of conspirituality, that this combination of conspiracy theory and spirituality and that your body is your temple and so you want to do everything you can to keep that temple clean, which is a very new age kind of a thought process. And so that somehow morphed into vaccines can’t be a good thing and we don’t know what they are and why would you put them into your body?
Christy Harrison: Right. It’s sort of an on ramp to this extreme type of thinking about wellness. Absolutely. And then the last aspect of cult indoctrination I’m curious to hear more about that.
Mara Einstein: Severe repercussions for trying to leave. So if we think about this, as in traditional cults, Scientology is a great example. They start following you around. You have to separate from the group. What’s really hard with this is that you have become part of a group. Becoming part of fitness or weight loss program is you become part of a community. And in some cases, if you have been separated from all these other areas of your life, then this becomes your new community. And so how do you find your way back after you’ve separated yourself from them, which could be for you years and if you’re sticking to a particular diet program, are there people you’ve been avoiding because you can’t stick to your program if you’re around those people?
Christy Harrison: And I think in the diet and wellness space, it might not be as overt and clear that they’re making it hard for you to leave as it would with a traditional cult where it’s like they’re coming after you or they’re telling you that your family can’t be trusted or whatever it is. But it is hard to extricate yourself. And I’ve talked to so many people who were in whatever diet and wellness kind of niche that that became their whole community and everybody around them was a part of that. And they had renounced so much of what they used to believe or kind of alienated or felt alienated from people in their lives because of their more extreme beliefs, then to go back from that was a lot harder.
Mara Einstein: Because you also have to say those people who you said, oh, no, no, no, you don’t know what you’re talking about. You have to go back to them and there’s a lot of shame associated with that. And you have to go back to those people and say I was wrong. Which is hard, but hopefully your family and friends will understand. Sometimes we go down the wrong path. We are human and it happens.
Christy Harrison: Yeah. And I hope people will have grace and compassion for others who do that as well. So I’m curious to talk a little bit more about how this cult-like behavior and cult-like thinking shows up in different aspects of marketing, especially in the diet and wellness space. And obviously, you’re not saying that all marketers are cult leaders or all brands are literal cults. Not at least not in most cases, but that there are similarities and it’s like a continuum. So I’m curious what that continuum looks like and sort of how we can spot marketing on different parts of that continuum.
Mara Einstein: The way that I got to writing Hoodwinked was that it was during the pandemic and I was in lockdown cause I live in Queens, New York, which was sort of the epicenter of the pandemic. So we were locked down for a long time. And I was watching the documentary The Vow, which was about the NXIVM cult. And I was watching the series LuLaRich, which was about LuLaRoe, which is a multilevel marketing company. And I looked at those two things side-by-side and I was, was like, wait a minute, these are the same things.
