Food Psych - Intuitive Eating, Health At Every Size, Positive Body Image, Eating Disorder Recovery, Smashing Diet Culture

In this episode, Christy answers an audience question about disordered eating and food rules. She shares two food rules that she used to follow and four eating principles that she now tries to live by.This episode is cross-posted from our other podcast, Rethinking Wellness.More from Christy:Check out Christy’s three books, Anti-Diet, The Wellness Trap, and The Emotional Eating, Chronic Dieting, Binge Eating & Body Image Workbook for a deeper dive into the topics covered on the pod. If you’re ready to break free from diet culture and make peace with food, come check out Christy's Intuitive Eating Fundamentals online course.For more critical thinking and compassionate skepticism about wellness and diet culture, check out Christy’s Rethinking Wellness podcast! You can also sign up to get it in your inbox every week at rethinkingwellness.substack.com.Ask a question about diet and wellness culture, disordered-eating recovery, and the anti-diet approach for a chance to have it answered on Rethinking Wellnes

Body image scientist and researcher Charlotte Markey, PhD joins us to discuss the many factors that impact body image and how parents can help their kids develop a positive sense of self.Christy and Charlotte both share examples from their own parenting, including how to handle tricky conversations about body size, gender, and more. They also unpack the difference between body positivity and body neutrality—and why the popular definitions of those terms are different from their use in research.Behind the paywall, Charlotte explains how she thinks about makeup for girls, adaptive vs maladaptive grooming routines, ways to tell if a kid is struggling with body dysmorphia, and a six-step process for helping young people develop media literacy.This episode is cross-posted from our other podcast, Rethinking Wellness.Charlotte Markey, Ph.D., is a body image scientist and researcher, having studied all things body image and eating behaviors for nearly 30 years! She is passionate about understanding what makes us feel

New York Times bestselling author and former CNN political analyst Kirsten Powers joins us to discuss her history of chronic fatigue and her experience with dubious diagnoses and wild wellness treatments.She also shares what she discovered about the true causes of her issues, how disordered eating helped mask and exacerbate her symptoms, how she’s rethought her relationship with work in general (and her own past work in particular), her viral post “The way we live in the United States is not normal,” her decision to move to Italy, and more.  This episode is cross-posted from our other podcast, Rethinking Wellness.Kirsten Powers is a New York Times bestselling author and writes the bestselling Substack newsletter Changing the Channel. Kirsten served as a CNN senior political analyst for seven years, providing on-air analysis for major political and cultural events. The Columbia Journalism Review called her "an outspoken liberal journalist" in a sea of opposition at Fox News, where she previously served

Pharmacist and Certified Intuitive Eating Counselor Sarah-Jane Garcia joins us to discuss how smart people get caught up in wellness culture.She shares her path from the realities of being a pharmacist experimenting with elimination diets to how getting certified in integrative medicine exacerbated her orthorexia to why becoming a parent finally opened her eyes to the fear-mongering happening in wellness communities.Behind the paywall, Christy and Sarah-Jane discuss what it actually took for Sarah-Jane to break free from diet culture, as well as how she returned to conventional medicine through Intuitive Eating.This episode is cross-posted from our other podcast, Rethinking Wellness.Sarah-Jane Garcia is a Certified Intuitive Eating Counselor with personal experience navigating binge eating, restriction, and obsessive clean eating. Discovering Intuitive Eating freed her from intense struggle with food—and inspired her to become a counselor, so she could help other women do the same. Sarah-Jane offers 1:1 coach

Writer, speaker, and weight-inclusive health/fitness professional Ragen Chastain joins us to discuss the potential side effects and other downsides of using GLP-1 drugs (like Ozempic and its ilk) for weight loss, the massive influence the manufacturers of these drugs are having on the public discourse about them, why the media don’t often report on these conflicts of interest, how drugmakers have co-opted talking points about weight stigma and weight cycling, how opposition to these drugs in some integrative- and functional-medicine spaces still perpetuates stigmatizing ideas about body size, and more.The first half of this interview is available to everyone, and you can hear the whole thing by becoming a paid member at rethinkingwellness.substack.com.Ragen Chastain is a speaker, writer, researcher, Board Certified Patient Advocate, multi-certified health and fitness professional, and thought leader in weight science, weight stigma, health, and healthcare. Utilizing her background in research methods and stat

In this episode, Christy answers two audience questions about period pain, endometriosis, and whether “anti-inflammatory” protocols or elimination diets can alleviate symptoms.This episode is cross-posted from our other podcast, Rethinking Wellness.More from Christy:Check out Christy’s three books, Anti-Diet, The Wellness Trap, and The Emotional Eating, Chronic Dieting, Binge Eating & Body Image Workbook for a deeper dive into the topics covered on the pod. If you’re ready to break free from diet culture and make peace with food, come check out Christy's Intuitive Eating Fundamentals online course.For more critical thinking and compassionate skepticism about wellness and diet culture, check out Christy’s Rethinking Wellness podcast! You can also sign up to get it in your inbox every week at rethinkingwellness.substack.com.Ask a question about diet and wellness culture, disordered-eating recovery, and the anti-diet approach for a chance to have it answered on Rethinking Wellness. You can also subscribe

Anti-diet dietitian Leah Kern joins us to discuss how struggling with anxiety made her susceptible to a wellness diet that promised safety and longevity, how that diet quickly spiraled into full-on disordered eating, how being eco-conscious and “earthy” can easily lead into wellness traps, the connection between spirituality and wellness culture, why she finally stopped trying to fix her anxiety with food and started taking meds, and more. This episode previously aired on our other podcast, Rethinking Wellness.Leah Kern is an anti-diet dietitian and certified intuitive eating counselor who specializes in helping people heal their relationships with food and body. Her approach to coaching is firmly evidence-based, rooted in the Health At Every Size (HAES®) & Intuitive Eating frameworks. In her private practice, Leah teaches her clients to harness their body’s innate wisdom to govern how they eat and live. Leah believes that the work involved with unraveling years of conditioning in diet culture and learnin

Christy offers 5 tips for dealing with diet evangelists and diet-culture messaging this time of year. This episode originally aired in January 2023.If you're ready to break free from diet culture once and for all, come check out Christy's Intuitive Eating Fundamentals online course.Pre-order Christy's second book, The Wellness Trap, for its April 2023 release!Christy's first book, Anti-Diet, is available wherever you get your books. Order online at christyharrison.com/book, or at local bookstores across North America, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand.Grab Christy's free guide, 7 simple strategies for finding peace and freedom with food, for help getting started on the anti-diet path.Subscribe to our newsletter, Food Psych Weekly for weekly Q&As and more.For full show notes and a transcript of this episode, go to christyharrison.com/foodpsych.Ask your own question about intuitive eating and the anti-diet approach at christyharrison.com/questions.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircl

Journalist and professor Mallary Tenore Tarpley joins us to discuss her new book Slip and the realities of life in the middle of eating disorder recovery. She shares how losing her mother as a young girl led to disordered eating, why residential treatment was beneficial (and not), and how the pressures of maintaining “full recovery” led to years of struggle.Behind the paywall, Mallary and Christy discuss the many definitions of “full recovery,” the challenges of writing a book about disordered eating that’s honest without being activating, and how Mallary talks to her kids about food.Heads up that Mallary’s book (and parts of our conversation) contain a frank discussion of eating disorders including some potentially triggering details.   This episode is cross-posted from our other podcast, Rethinking Wellness.Mallary Tenore Tarpley is the author of the new memoir SLIP, which blends personal narrative, reportage, and research to offer up a new way of thinking about recovery as a "middle place" where sl

Katja Rowell, M.D. joins us to discuss responsive feeding, picky eating, and how to parent without passing diet culture norms on to your kids. We also explore the science behind a few common misperceptions from parents and doctors including: why playful or gamified tactics to change eating habits can be harmful and backfire, the problems with many “early interventions” around child BMI, and reasons to question growth charts in early childhood.This episode is cross-posted from our other podcast, Rethinking Wellness.Katja Rowell, M.D. is a family doctor, author, and feeding specialist. Described as “academic, but warm and down to earth,” Rowell believes that helping children grow up to have a healthy relationship with food and their bodies is preventive medicine. Her interest in the world of feeding was sparked by her own worries as a parent, ending up with a toddler preoccupied with food. Helping her family get onto a better path inspired Rowell to learn more. Rowell expanded her knowledge; learning from and c

Registered dietitian Jackie Silver joins us to discuss nutritional approaches that are helpful for neurodivergence, why neurodivergent people are often the targets of wellness and diet culture, the kinds of wellness-culture messages she’s gotten as a person with a disability, and why the advice to cut out gluten for autism is often harmful. Behind the paywall, we get into why ultraprocessed food consumption doesn’t cause autism and why cutting out these foods doesn’t “cure” it, the harmful discourse around autism and ADHD in the culture right now, why it’s harmful to categorize foods as “good” and “bad,” and more. This episode is cross-posted from our other podcast, Rethinking Wellness.Jackie Silver is a Registered Dietitian and founder of Jackie Silver Nutrition, a virtual private practice specializing in supporting neurodivergent kids, teens, and adults with ADHD, autism (ASD), and intellectual/developmental disabilities (IDD). Her team offers neurodiversity-affirming, nonjudgmental, and weight-inclusive ca

Physician and writer Mara Gordon joins us to discuss diet and wellness culture among medical doctors, why she took Ozempic for weight loss (and what made her quit), how she came to practice weight-inclusive care, and lots more. Behind the paywall, we get into why she was initially reluctant to write about weight inclusivity, her perspective on Ozempic and other GLP-1s now (and whether she prescribes them to patients), her upcoming book, and more. This episode is cross-posted from our other podcast, Rethinking Wellness.Dr. Mara Gordon is a family physician and writer based in Philadelphia. She is a frequent contributor to NPR and often writes about size-inclusive medicine, fatphobia in health care, and is at work on a book about body justice. She also writes the Substack newsletter "Chief Complaint" at maragordonmd.substack.com. Check out Christy’s three books, Anti-Diet, The Wellness Trap, and The Emotional Eating, Chronic Dieting, Binge Eating & Body Image Workbook for a deeper dive into the topi

Eating-disorders dietitian Marci Evans joins us to discuss the current science on “food addiction” (sometimes called “ultraprocessed food addiction”)—and what’s changed since I first interviewed her about this topic for Food Psych back in 2016. We get into how food addiction is defined and measured (and what that definition leaves out), the overlap between disordered eating and high scores on food-addiction scales, how food-addiction discourse perpetuates weight stigma, the nuances behind the research showing that people’s brain scans are different when eating ultraprocessed vs. minimally processed food, and whether it’s really useful to think about food in terms of addiction. In the paid portion, we talk about practical applications: how Marci would help someone who has addictive-like tendencies or thinks of themselves as being addicted to food, what we can learn from this discussion of “food addiction” to help people have a better relationship with food, and more. This episode is cross-posted from our other

Filmmaker and podcaster Kelsey Snelling joins us to discuss her new podcast, Camp Shame, which exposes the troubling history of a notorious weight-loss camp. We get into the effects of deprivation and starvation, the cult-like nature of the camp, how it weathered its many scandals, whether it’s possible to run a camp for larger-bodied kids that’s weight-inclusive or ethical, how she made the podcast, and more. Kelsey Snelling is a Philadelphia filmmaker whose work centers social and environmental justice. Her dream is to direct music videos for Billie Eilish, hike the Appalachian Trail, and return to her previous residence of Alaska to live on a farm overrun with cats. “Camp Shame” is her first audio project.Check out Christy’s three books, Anti-Diet, The Wellness Trap, and The Emotional Eating, Chronic Dieting, Binge Eating & Body Image Workbook for a deeper dive into the topics covered on the pod. If you’re ready to break free from diet culture and make peace with food, come check out Christy's Intu

Author and activist Amanda Martinez Beck joins us to discuss her experience of taking Ozempic for diabetes while also working to accept her body and break down anti-fat bias in society. She shares her history of dieting and disordered eating, how chronic conditions including diabetes as well as fibromyalgia and post-Covid syndrome have impacted her relationship with food and her body, why she started taking Ozempic in the first place, how diet culture is a new form of religion, and how her actual religious faith has influenced her eating-disorder recovery. Behind the paywall, we get into the tricky landscape of Ozempic and eating disorders, how Ozempic has fallen short of what the ads and influencers promise, her take on all the GLP-1 hype, and more. This episode previously aired on our other podcast, Rethinking Wellness.Amanda Martinez Beck is a fat activist, educator, and the author of More of You: The Fat Girl's Field Guide to the Modern World. She runs the Instagram account @your_body_is_good, where s

Registered dietitians and diabetes educators Jessica Jones and Wendy Lopez join us to discuss why weight loss isn’t necessary for managing blood sugar, why the popular wellness-culture notion of diabetes “remission” or “reversal” can be harmful, how the popularity of Ozempic and other GLP-1 drugs as diet drugs is affecting people who use them for diabetes, the continuous-glucose-monitor trend for monitoring blood sugar in people without diabetes, Jess’s experience navigating prediabetes and other health conditions, and more. This episode previously aired on our other podcast, Rethinking Wellness. Wendy Lopez and Jessica Jones are nationally recognized Registered Dietitian Nutritionists and Certified Diabetes Care and Education Specialists. With over a decade of clinical experience, they have helped thousands of individuals improve their relationship with food and achieve better health outcomes. Wendy and Jessica are the co-founders of Diabetes Digital, an innovative telehealth platform designed to empower ind

Journalist Virginia Sole-Smith joins us to discuss how GLP-1 hype has changed the conversation about diet culture, the importance of body autonomy, how “bro” diet culture became public policy, how she handles haters, the “fed is best” approach to parenting, and lots more. Behind the paywall, she shares her experience of weighing herself for the first time in years, what it’s been like to date for the first time in a larger body, how she’s changed her relationship to cardio, and more. This episode is cross-posted from our other podcast, Rethinking Wellness. As a journalist, Virginia Sole-Smith has reported from kitchen tables, graduated from beauty school, and gone swimming in a mermaid’s tail. Virginia's latest book, Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture, is a New York Times bestseller that investigates how the "war on childhood obesity" has caused kids to absorb a daily onslaught of body shame from peers, school, diet culture, and families—and offers research-based strategies to help par

Parent coach Oona Hanson joins us to discuss how going to a physical therapist for back pain led her down a wellness-culture rabbit hole, why dietary restrictions to “fight inflammation” just ended up harming her relationship with food and her body, how she got the dubious diagnosis of “adrenal fatigue,” and more. Behind the paywall, we get into how she helped her child heal from an eating disorder (and how that process changed the course of her career), how parents can help their kids navigate pressures from diet and wellness culture, why smart and science-minded people can still fall for wellness misinformation, her experience with perimenopause and wellness culture, and more. This episode is cross-posted from our other podcast, Rethinking Wellness. Paid subscribers can hear the full interview, and the first half is available to all listeners. To upgrade to paid, go to rethinkingwellness.substack.com. Oona Hanson is a nationally recognized parent coach who supports families navigating diet culture and eatin

Dietitian and diabetes educator Janice Dada joins us to discuss why there’s so much stigma and blame on people with diabetes, the wellness-culture belief that people can “reverse diabetes” by restricting foods and taking a bunch of supplements, why people don’t “give themselves diabetes” by eating too much sugar, the myth that people with diabetes can’t eat sugar or carbs, her new book on intuitive eating for diabetes, and more. Behind the paywall, we get into the myths about diabetes and body size, the harms of trying to lose weight with diabetes, issues with the “prediabetes” label, the GLP-1 craze, and how to practice intuitive eating with diabetes. This episode is cross-posted from our other podcast, Rethinking Wellness. Paid subscribers can hear the extended interview, and the first half is available to all listeners. To upgrade to paid, go to rethinkingwellness.substack.com. Janice Dada is a weight-inclusive registered dietitian with a private practice in Newport Beach, CA. She is a certified intuitive

Registered dietitian and INTUITIVE EATING co-author Elyse Resch returns to help dispel myths about intuitive eating, including that it means *only* listening to instinct and not the rational brain, that it’s incompatible with eating-disorder recovery, that it’s impossible in an environment rife with “ultraprocessed” foods, and more. She also shares her definition of gentle nutrition, plus some behind-the-scenes looks at the latest books in the IE series and her new intuitive eating app in development. This episode is cross-posted from our other podcast, Rethinking Wellness. Elyse Resch, MS, RDN, CEDS-C, Fiaedp, FADA, FAND, is a nutrition therapist in private practice with 43 years of experience, specializing in eating disorders, Intuitive Eating, and Health at Every Size. She is the co-author of Intuitive Eating, now in its 4th edition, The Intuitive Eating Workbook and The Intuitive Eating Card Deck: 50 Bite-Sized Ways to Make Peace with Food (Bookshop affiliate links). Elyse is also the author of The Intuit