How to Handle the Onslaught of Diet Culture This New Year

Body-image therapist Zoe Bisbing joins us to discuss why body image is such a challenging part of disordered-eating recovery, how to deal with our body-focused inner critics, and why many people have such visceral reactions to public figures losing weight. In a deeper dive for paid subscribers, we discuss why setting limits with food won’t automatically give your kid an eating disorder, which limits are developmentally appropriate, and how parents who’ve had our own histories of disordered eating can avoid becoming overly permissive. This episode is cross-posted from our other podcast, Rethinking Wellness. To hear the full episode including the deep dive, upgrade to paid at rethinkingwellness.substack.com.

Registered dietitian Aaron Flores joins us to discuss why Andrew Huberman and other biohacking wellness bros have such massive appeal, and how their rhetoric can lead to disordered eating and body-image distress. In a deeper dive for paid subscribers, we get into how to talk to partners or loved ones who’ve come under the sway of bro-wellness culture—and how to set boundaries when their diet/fitness talk challenges our recovery from disordered eating. We also get vulnerable about mortality, grief, and why it’s so hard to confront aging and death head-on, and Christy shares an unexpected response to a past interview on the pod. This episode is cross-posted from our other podcast, Rethinking Wellness. To hear the full episode including the deep dive, upgrade to paid at rethinkingwellness.substack.com. More from Christy: Christy's second book, The Wellness Trap, is available wherever books are sold! Order it here, or ask for it in your favorite local bookstore. If you're looking to make peace with food and break free from diet and wellness culture, check out Christy's Intuitive Eating Fundamentals online course. Subscribe on Substack for full interviews and more! Support the podcast by becoming a paid subscriber, and unlock great perks like extended interviews, subscriber-only Q&As and essays, monthly office hours to ask your questions, commenting privileges, and a place to connect with other listeners.

Religious-ethics scholar Liz Bucar, author of Beyond Wellness, joins us to discuss her history with diet and wellness culture, the religious roots of wellness practices, why bringing religion back into “spiritual” wellness spaces might be the key to promoting true well-being (even for non-religious people), and how the very human need for control shows up in rigid diet and wellness behaviors. This episode is cross-posted from our other podcast, Rethinking Wellness. For paid subscribers, we do a deeper dive into how religion has contributed to Americans’ troubled relationship with food and how religious foodways can also help us heal from diet culture, with some detours into the longevity movement, GLP-1s and the thin ideal, and more. Liz Bucar is a religious ethicist and professor of religion at Northeastern University, as well as a certified intenSati and Kripalu yoga instructor and the author of the new book Beyond Wellness. Her popular writing has appeared in The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Times, Teen Vogue, and The Wall Street Journal, and she is the author of four books, including the award-winning Stealing My Religion and Pious Fashion. She lives in Brookline, Massachusetts. For more about how religion shapes us all, even if we don't believe, subscribe to Liz’s newsletter at LizBucar.com. To hear the full episode including the deep dive, upgrade to paid at rethinkingwellness.substack.com. More from Christy: Books: Anti-Diet The Wellness Trap The Emotional Eating, Chronic Dieting, Binge Eating & Body Image Workbook Courses: Intuitive Eating Fundamentals Intro to Intuitive Eating Newsletters: Rethinking Wellness Food Psych Weekly

Christy answers an audience question about the “adrenal body type” and unpacks the weight stigma, ageism, and pseudoscience embedded in this twist on the dubious diagnosis of “adrenal fatigue.” This episode is cross-posted from our other podcast, Rethinking Wellness. The paywall on this episode has been removed! Sign up for a paid subscription to hear lots more like this. Get full show notes and references here. Ask a question of your own for a chance to have it answered in a future episode! Christy's second book, The Wellness Trap, is available wherever books are sold. Order it here, or ask for it in your favorite local bookstore. If you're looking to make peace with food and break free from diet and wellness culture, check out Christy's Intuitive Eating Fundamentals online course.

In this episode, Christy shares some personal thoughts on how anxiety impacts the gut, and offers a perspective on how to handle digestive distress that’s triggered by stress without getting pulled down wellness-culture rabbit holes—especially if you have a history of disordered eating.