Should I Delete That? - Kale, Keto and a fear of carbs: unlearning wellness myths

Episode Date: February 4, 2025

Welcome back to the second part of our investigation of the “wellness” era. In the first part of this episode, we found out that the era is actually not over at all. Many of us still carry beliefs and behaviours from that time - and today we’re going to attempt to uncover what’s true and what’s just utter nonsense….Thanks so much to our amazing guests who feature on this episode: Dr Joshua Wolrich and Tally RyeFollow @tallyrye on InstagramFind out more about Tally’s work hereFollow @drjoshuawolrich on Instagram Read more about Dr Joshua’s work here: https://drwolrich.com/ If you would like to get in touch - you can email us on [e-mail] us on Instagram:@shouldideletethat@em_clarkson@alexlight_ldnShould I Delete That is produced by Faye LawrenceMusic: Dex RoyStudio Manager: Dex RoyTrailers: Sophie RichardsonVideo Editor: Celia GomezSocial Media Manager: Emma-Kirsty Fraser Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Visit lethbridgeland.ca and take the first step towards your new home today. Welcome back to Should I Delete That, the body image series. In yesterday's episode, we took a trip back to the 2010s, a time we've come to know as the wellness era, and we found out that it's not really over. Many of us still carry beliefs and behaviours from that time, and today we're going to attempt to uncover what's true and what's just utter nonsense. It's hard to imagine a time when every other person you went to school with wasn't running a marathon, but really this obsession with exercise is a relatively new thing.

I mean, the first Olympics was in 776 BC, but okay. Okay. So the concept of exercise in a competitive sense isn't new, nor is the idea that human beings partake in physical exertions. not only have we been doing this for survival for our entire existence, but we also know sports like football have existed as hobbies for kids forever. Our want to move is innate and necessary for our survival too, but we haven't always moved as we do now. After work, fitness classes were not popular pastimes among our parents' generation and they weren't out early on a Saturday morning every week for a park run. Whilst dieting had in various forms at

various times been rife throughout the 20th century, exercise particularly for women hadn't been considered hugely aspirational. The risk, of course, was that too many muscles would make you appear masculine and femininity had long since been the priority. And as someone who's naturally very musseled, particularly my legs, this plagued me. The idea of being too mussely. A new breed of supermodels in the 1980s changed that somewhat. And with the rise of Jane Fonder and those that came after her, trainers found new and innovative ways of evolving the industry so that by now there is no demographic left untargeted. But it was in the wellness era really that so many problematic practices found themselves as part of the mainstream rhetoric. Now we have to

stress that in isolation, any of the habits that we talk about in this episode would be considered healthy. Aiming to hit 10,000 steps in a day, for example, is not in and of itself a bad thing to be aiming towards, but with such a huge amount of fitness advice available at our fingertips, it's hard to know what information we can actually trust. We spoke to Talley Wright about how we can work to build a more positive relationship with exercise, one that works for us on a personal level. When it comes to exercise going forward, we talk about these sneaky methods, the ways in which diet culture shape shifts, the language evolves. We are having to look, that much harder at what we're being sold to see really whose motive and what motive there is

for selling us that thing. When we're trying to move on from diet culture to recognize its part within our own lives, when it comes to exercise, that's quite a complicated relationship to form and to disassociate the toxic narrative that we've grown up with with what we're doing and not equate a success, a successful workout to a change in our body. how do you recommend or see the world changing or see this relationship changing for us? What would you recommend to anybody who's trying to change that relationship within themselves? How would they do it? Yeah, it's not an overnight process to change your relationship with exercise.

It does take time and it takes inner work. And I think that feels really sometimes confusing when we think about exercise because we think of it as an external thing. But actually, you're right, there's so much about changing. how we perceive exercise and why we're doing exercise. That's really important. I always say, as a trainer now, I'm far less interested in what you're doing and I'm most interested in why you're doing it and what is going on for you when you're making choices around exercise. So I specialize in something called intuitive movement and when I work with people, we do just that. We transform their relationship with exercise. People who may not exercise at all.

because of a kind of traumatic history with it, people who are very all or nothing with exercise, and I think especially, you know, in a new year, that is a really heightened time to feel like you have to go all in on a brand new workout regimen, and you're going to change your life and you're going to be super healthy, and then all of a sudden a life event happens, you've missed a workout, and then it all seemingly kind of comes to a halt

because if it can't be perfect, then why bother doing anything? Or you get people who have had a really rigid relationship with exercise. And these people, I identify as one of those people, my history was very rigid with exercise where it was very obsessive. I couldn't miss a workout because it would feel me with so much fear and anxiety and guilt if I did. And so those kind of three different personalities, we would want to change your relationship with exercise kind of slightly differently tailoring to each of those people. I think the key thing is, is to find the things you enjoy first and foremost. So think about

what movement you actually want to do. And a lot of what I do is like helping people realize that a dance class or going climbing with your friends or paddleboarding or whatever it is is movement. It absolutely counts. Your dog walk absolutely counts. And starting with things that you enjoy doing that feel attainable to you, that feel accessible to you, rather than jump jumping in at full speed, five workouts a week, you've got to commit to all these things and then suddenly feeling like, hang the second, this doesn't actually fit into my life whatsoever. Find things you actually enjoy in that feel achievable. So I always say with people, start with one thing, aim to do it once a week and grow it from there. Because this is

about building confidence in what you're doing, feeling comfortable with what you're doing, and almost like getting good at the easy thing first. So let's take a walk as an example. Getting really good at that walk and feeling like, oh, I can feel, you know, I've really enjoyed doing that. I've realized I've brought that into my life semi-regular. I've, yeah, felt like I'm good with that. Okay, like, what's the next thing? For people who are super self-conscious, that might be doing something in their home. So then we might lead to more workouts where it might be like a YouTube workout, for example, and it might be something short, 10, 20 minutes, 15, 20 minutes. Exercise can be so, like I said, all or nothing. And so the goal is always to find something.

And I think that actually works for people across the board, no matter kind of their mindset to begin with. So find something you enjoy. Aim to do something. Listen to your body when you're doing it. So start to listen for your body's cues for rest, for when it wants to move. and honour those cues. Now that is hard, but it's really important that your body understands that you are working with your body. You're on the same team and that there's a trust there. So going back to our walk as an example, I talk about something called unconditional permission to rest with movement. So when you are walking and say in your mind you're like, well, this walk workout, I should be going nonstop. From the moment I leave my front door to the moment I get home, I'm not allowed to

stop at any moment because that would be cheating. That's a failure. That's not a proper walk. That means I've not doing my workout properly. That's actually not true. Your body still feels the benefits of that walk, whether you take breaks on that walk or not. So then with unconditional permission to rest, you might go on that walk and take breaks when your body feels like you want to and on your own terms. And then knowing when your body knows that you can stop whenever you want to or take breaks or like have a moment, it starts to trust you and make you realise you can actually probably do more than you think you can. Walk is an example. I think that's especially true of running. I find that people who run, I work with a lot of people that, you know,

like to like 5K for example. And I think, right, I've got to run this 5K absolutely nonstop, because otherwise it doesn't count. I've got to get the times. I've got to track it. Well, firstly don't track it and secondly do that run and just see what your body's saying like do I just need to take a breath here and sometimes it might be like oh the end of this song I'm just going to walk for a bit and I can start running again when I want to and then you get back to when you can and knowing you can always stop and turn back and go home at any point is also I always call it it it's almost like you've got this like joker in the back of your pocket like playing a card to yourself. I know I've always got that like backup plan there that like if this all

turns to shit, I can just go home. And the same with if you're in the gym or whatever you're doing. Like whatever happens I can stop is actually really helpful for your brain. It's like a subconscious safety net for you that's there. And then I think the last thing to do is start filling your feeds with people that look different to you that are moving in different ways than you do. So really try and diversify what you're seeing. So that may see, you know, I'm thinking of people, I follow, I follow a hijabi woman who poll dances. I follow plus size triathletes. I follow wheelchair dancers. I follow all these people who are moving in so many different ways and they all look so different to just constantly remind myself that movement does not look a certain way.

And it also is not one specific type of exercise. I think of mainstream fitness, We think of running, we think of the gym. And I think if you don't, if those two things don't really resonate with you, you kind of think, oh, well, I don't like doing those things. And what else am I going to do? When there's so many things you can do and so many ways to move your body, it starts to feel more like, oh, I can see myself in this. And I think especially people living in a larger body struggle to see themselves in fitness media,

I think that is slightly changing. But generally, they don't. But when you follow people that are doing stuff, it kind of makes you feel like, oh, well, if they're doing it, then maybe I could do it. I think of someone I really enjoy following the writer, Bethany Rutter. I don't know if you've had Bethany on the pod. She got really into spin and then really into running.

And I think, I know she gets so many people contacting her saying, oh, seeing you do this as a plus-sized girl makes me feel like, oh, well, if you're doing it and you're super red face and sweaty and not looking like the fitness girls you expect to look like, then maybe I could do it. And I think that's so empowering too. So remember all movement counts, listen to your body, trust yourself and follow people that look different to you.

And I think when you're starting with that, slowly over time, it can really transform the way you think about fitness. We've been doing a lot of research in recent years, collecting a lot of data. I use the collective we, not Alex and I, and doing a lot of stuff. studies, particularly in the realm of health and wellness. Everybody wants to know what should I be eating, what workout should I be doing? We are drowning in conflicting advice. And in the same way that we jump between fad diets in the 90s and 90s, during the wellness era and beyond, we poured over the research, this time looking for information on what workout held the key to our dream

body. But rarely, if ever, did we look beyond the headline or the marketing slogan to think about whose agenda this research might benefit? If, for example, you were a podometer manufacturer, it's absolutely in your best interest that you garner as much information and noise as you can about the benefits of human beings counting their steps and tracking their movements. Is it a coincidence that this new instruction was given to us as Fitbitz flooded the markets? Similarly, if you manufactured standing desks or those treadmills that you can put your laptop on, would it not be a good idea for your company to fund a butt ton of research into how, how bad it is for us to be sitting on our bums at the office all day.

Every other day, there is a daily mail headline proffering hope that a glass of red wine a night might keep dementia at bay in amongst findings that any alcohol at all could shave years off your life. You'll walk into one gym and the trainers there will be waxing miracle about the benefits of high-intensity interval training, telling you it's the best thing you can do for your heart and your waist. But in the Pilate studio next door, they'll be reeling off information about the benefits of low-intensity exercise

and how more mindful movement is the key to both inner peace and your dream body. Put simply, a lot of these findings are manufactured or manipulated at any rate. The data can normally tell you anything if you want it to and if you know the right questions to ask. And marketing analysts do. By asking a very specific group of 100 people, a very specific group of questions in a very specific way, you will get a very specific answer, an answer that you can sell into a specific paper to target a specific audience with your specific agenda? I don't think I ever appreciated how the sausage were made, so to speak,

until boy Alex, my husband, well, until he started doing this for a job, really. He's worked in PR, he has worked in PR for 10 years. And he's kind of done like the breadth of it. Obviously now he's our manager. So I'm not going to throw him too much under the bus in terms of like shady dealings of his career like career years gone by. He's above board, honestly. Yeah, he's such a chick, but this was a really big part of the last job that he had, which was in PR, a really big part of the job would be in order to sort of make the

marketing plan, in order to make the PR plan, in order to work out how best to sell this product or this information, you would fund a very specific piece of research. And you would know exactly what you needed that research to say when you were. were making it. So in planning stages, they'll be like, right, we'll do some research to show that we need this specific answer. And when we get it, we'll call the daily mail or no one calls anyone to do that anymore, but they'll send an email to their contacts at the papers and they will buy in this research, this new research. Thus, the story is out there. You don't even need to have it linked in terms of declaration, in terms of, you know, papers aren't held to the same

standards of influencers. They don't have to declare ad. They don't have to declare their affiliations. They don't have to declare, they do declare where the research has come from, but it'll be tiny print on the bottom. It won't say in the headline, this article that you're reading about how good walking is, is literally funded by Fitbit, because they don't. So we read it and then coincidentally, a little ad with a, with a Fitbit will pop up on the sidebar and we think, oh, that would be a useful tool to help me do this thing that I've been targeted. with without having been, without having realised. It's crackers.

Never has health or the promise of it been more exploited. And it was often more sinister than convincing everyone that they needed to drink kombucha or make chocolate moose out of avocardis. God, I did that a lot. Did you? All the fucking time. How did it taste? To be fair, I'd still do it.

It's pretty good. I've got a lot of like vegan friends. It's a pretty effective. recipe. Is it? Yeah. I'll make it for you one day. It's okay. As long as the avocados are good, which is always a risk, because they're often not. I think I'll live with that, but thank you for the kind of offer. With the rise of wellness empires like Gwyneth Paltrow's group, we were being coerced into investing more and more every day into our health. Someone who knows all about that is Dr. Joshua Wilrich, an NHS doctor who

wrote a bestselling book called Food Is Not Medicine. Within this, he worked to debunk so much of the misinformation that shrouds the diet and wellness industry. Some think he coined as Nutrabolics. Where did Nutrivolics come from? I was coming across so much crap when I first started using social media. Which was? Well, as in timing wise. Yeah.

2016, probably, that kind of time. And I just found myself kind of wondering whether any of this stuff was true and started getting a little sucked into some of it because I was 26 and a bit gullible and looking for solutions to what I thought was my weight problem and was just seeing all of this stuff that promised everything was like, oh great, didn't teach you about this in medical school, this seems reasonable. Most, if not all of it, wasn't. And as I was going through it and realizing that actually this was actually quite easily believable and I didn't really know how to sift through it, it just, it was just bollocks. Bullocks was the kind of British term that I

had in my head of just complete nonsense. And at the beginning, my focus was quite kind of food and nutrition aimed. And so kind of nutrition bollocks or nutry bollocks made sense. And then I realized there was another guy on what was Twitter at that point who was using it as a poll every week. And I was like, this is great. And I reached out to me. It's like, I love this word. It was like, I agree. It's kind of since morphed, I don't actually tend to use the word as much anymore, only because it doesn't cover the expanse of nonsense that is there anymore. And it's now kind of turned into a lot of wellness bollocks and health bollocks and just things further out from the nutrition sphere like infrared lights for the morning and saunas that

will cure everything and ice baths, they don't really fall under the bracket of nutrition anymore, but they're used in tandem with also telling you to avoid gluten. and don't eat too much and all this stuff that comes around all the time. What are your thoughts on the sort of wellness boom of the 2010?

Is it as simple to say that you think it's just diet culture rebranded? I think so. I also think there's an element where it was always going to happen. It's just a question as to kind of when. And I think the more that we have

access to knowledge through things And I think the internet has played a massive role in a lot of that because I'm not to try and sound like, oh, I'm so old because I'm not. But I remember the times of actually having to look through encyclopedias to do homework and stuff like that to find out information. The ability to just Google something was minimal. You're to put a CD-ROM into the computer to boot up the encyclopedia and stuff like that after the books. and now that we have the ability to just Google insulin or Google gluten and then Google milk and come across something that they're like, oh, well, it's casomorphine. Oh, I agree. That must mean that milk is addictive. And because people have the ability to just read this stuff, but with a

minimal amount of understanding, and that's not a dig, that's just genuine. Like, this stuff is complicated. We're not meant to understand all of this stuff. But because we have this minimal amount well I know what the word morphine means and I've now read a substance that's in milk that has the word morphine in it so therefore when someone tells me milk is addictive and I should stop eating it I believe him right and so I think the the influence of the internet has definitely played a big role in this becoming more widespread because it's it's easier to believe when you can give a little bit of information alongside the claim that you're making if you went out into the street, you know, 20 years ago and some guy was just like, milk is addictive. You'd be like,

this is weird, I want to see what's going on. But now you've got someone making an Instagram video saying, milk is addictive because it's got casso-morphine in it. And people go, oh, he sounds like he knows what he's talking about. And I think that's a bit of, I think that's probably quite a big aspect too. And I'm sure you've seen elements of that where it seems like people are giving a little bit of where you're like, oh, is that true then? I don't know. But the overriding sentiment seems like nonsense. So it's probably not true. But also this is now a little confusing. So I think that's probably one of the biggest factors in the most kind of recent time period.

It feels like overt diet culture, like in your face diet culture kind of gave way to the wellness, morphed into... A bit rebranded. Yeah, the wellness era. Why do you think this took off? I think the rebrand was quite important in that because I think people were to become skeptical of this, just being yelled at that you had to be thin all of the time. And there was a time when that was well received by people not, obviously, in general,

it was still stigma and it was still very harmful. But people seemed to think that was the go-to. That was what we should be doing. When that started to shift a little bit, people whose entire careers and existence revolved around that kind of stuff, well, we need to kind of read. phrase how we're saying this and started to use kind of what we now think of as wellness but kind of wellness um language and things around this are like you will be healthier your gut will be better you'll have more energy rather than just promising thinness but the kind of advice was

pretty much the same um but it started to be you terms like balance started to be used right rather than thin. A lot of the advice was the same. It hasn't really changed a huge amount, but it needed to be adaptive because people were actually starting to reject, for good reason, but starting to reject this mantra

that who you are is wrong and you have to change. And now it's just, well, no, you're doing to change, but we should be focusing on some sort of health. And so this is what you should, you should eat less carbs for your health right not you should eat less carbs to be thin but the advice was still the same and actually the

people behind the advice are still uh still have the agenda of weight loss it's something i often say um to clients when i when i kind of work with them is look i'm you don't have to worry that i'm secretly trying to get you to lose weight and just not telling you because that's kind of a common theme where people like i don't know if i can trust the advice that this healthcare professional has told me or this person is telling me because i don't know whether i don't know whether actually, they're just telling me that advice because they think I should be thin, but they're just not really being honest about what's coming behind it. And I think that, I mean, wellness culture at the moment, it's just diet culture without the

word diet. Yeah. It's clever. It's a clever rebrand. Yeah. You know, with a skepticism, like, threatening diet industry that is extremely profitable. They're going to lose their money otherwise, weren't they? Right.

If they're going to keep being able to sell their products and sell their plans and make money and have careers, then it needed to be rebrand. and it's they've just they've had to hasn't been hasn't been kind of them it's just necessity looking back at our experiences with diet culture wellness whatever with all of this I found this period to be the most toxic for me it was such a damaging time for like my relationship with myself with food with exercise with all of it and I wonder whether where you land, do you think it was, or do you think it's hard to quantify, whether or not this was more harmful than the overt diet stuff? Because they were kind of capitalizing on the vulnerability

and going from a health angle, did that make it more damaging than the overt diet's narrative? Well, I'm not entirely sure was is necessarily the right phrase, because I'm not sure we're out the other side of it just yet. It is. But, yeah, I think that's going to be a bit of an indebted. individual question, right? But I would say that it, I think it's harder to reject some of this stuff in general as a kind of over, you know, high level answer to that of kind of going, well, the the weight conversations and the body size conversations, they are very difficult to challenge. But they're quite, they're quite kind of unilateral in terms of there's, there's a singular

focus, whereas the health stuff, making your health a personal responsibility rather than just your weight of course. And yes, the weight stuff was often linked to health. It was often told you would die, you would get diabetes, you would this, you would that. But there was also just a lot of you don't look right. And so that was kind of a lot of the focus when people were being honest about instance what they were trying to sell. Whereas the wellness stuff is very like, well, but don't you want to be healthier? Don't you want to live longer for your children? Don't you want to do this and so I feel like there's there's more there's it's more multifactorial in terms of having to try and challenge and there's it's harder to reject some of the stuff that's thrown at you

because you can reject aspects of it but then you're going yes but I do want to live longer right and it's like well so how do I then reject all of that and find a real definition of what health looks like for me moving forward because part of your brain is going but they're not talking about weight anymore so surely this must be useful to follow um so yeah i would i would say it's harder probably but it's the insidious thing isn't it it's like it's hard to disentangle diet culture from health yeah what are some of the most common myths around diet to have come out of the wellness era yeah i think there's a difference between um the stuff that came out of the kind of diet culture era and then the more kind of recent wellness we rebrand i think the diet culture stuff was a lot of

like carbs are bad, don't eat gluten. This will cause your thyroid problems. And I think the wellness stuff is more like intermittent fasting. And to be fair, that's the big one. And also just everything needing to be about your microbiome. Thanks, Spector. So I think there's a whole obsession with kind of giving your gut a break because they're linked too, right? The whole logic behind them. So there's a lot of people who will just eat in very, very short windows and that's been sold and is still being sold to people as a cure for lots of lots of things. There's a doctor, a menopause doctor in the US or self-branded menopause doctor who loves harping on about intermittent fasting and how it's the best thing for women ever in their hormones. And, you know,

selling it down a route that people want help for, right? It's rather than it just being like, well, it's good because you eat less. So they're full. or make you lose weight. It's now a complete wellness rebrand of like it's good for your hormone levels. And so it will help you with your with your PCOS or with your periods or this or that. And it's like there's a lack of, there's a lack of help in that area of medicine. And so it's like people are just stepping in and going, intermittent fasting. To the best of your knowledge and the science that you've read or the science that exists around intermittent fasting. Do all science. All science. Around intermittent fasting. can you explain it to us, does it have these purported benefits?

No. No. Does it have any benefits? Does it have any benefits? You sleep every day or you should do. You fast every day when you sleep or you should do. Be a bit weird. If you're waking up at 4 a.m. to eat something unless, of course, this is because of your pregnancy

and that's perfectly valid and do what you need to do to get through these next few months or less. but if you're in normal circumstance you sleep and you fast overnight every night so you do a fast every day it's fine your your gut has a rest your brain has a rest everything shuts down and repairs and renews and that's good you don't need to do it again during the day there is no evidence at all categorically that there is a positive impact on anything specific by doing that again during the day god it's just crazy when you hear it like that isn't it given But it's also so obvious. It's so obvious, yeah.

There are some very specific claims that we make around renewing cells, right? And so it's like autophagy or autophagy is the word that gets thrown around a lot. And they're like, if you don't eat, your cells renew. And so it helps your body to renew the cells that need renewing. No, what's actually happening? By the way, firstly, those studies in mice. So we see it in mice. But what actually happens is fasting occurs.

Your body goes, oh, shit, don't have the nutrients I need. to do my normal daily activities right now because I'm not sleeping. I'm awake. So it goes, okay, we need to kill some of the cells over there to get the nutrients that are stored in those cells and move them to the body where they're needed right now. That's not a positive. That's just your body doing something to survive because you've refused to give it nutrients. Like it's a mechanism that your body does, but it's not something to promote as like a, if we just stop eating and we force our body to redistribute nutrients, you'll be healthier. but you just leave the nutrients stored where they are so you could use them for other things

later and eat food like that's fine so they're just you know there's nuances around if you're eating super late before you go to bed that might not be overall the best thing for you but that's not intermittent fasting that's just going well you know your your overnight window might benefit from being a little bit longer in the evening but you wake up have some food like you don't need to wait until 2 p.m because some idiot on the internet said it was going to cure something like it's just have some breakfast if you enjoy eating breakfast have some breakfast it's probably quite good for you superfoods what the hell was that it was a way to sell it was a way to sell goji berries wasn't it that's all that was and and what was the thing that looked like frogs born

cheersies cheerses i actually don't like jacy pudding it's wrong with rice pudding it's so much fun When I go on my long runs before I'm pregnant, sometimes I put cheosies on my porridge on purpose so that I know that I can pick them out from my teeth while I'm running because it's disgusting to do. Have you talked to something about this? I'm telling you, I'm telling you a doctor right now.

I'm not qualified to deal with that problem. Yeah, I don't know what these were. It was just a marketing. Well, look, celery became a superfood at one point. Did it? Do you remember the medical medium, that idiot? Yes. That blocked me in an instant because I said,

was being a tool. Celery juice became this cural for everything and celery prices went up in the supermarket. Like it was absolutely mad. Like there is no such thing as a superfood. There are foods that are slightly more nutritious and slightly have more variety or more amount of nutrition packed into a smaller thing.

But we eat meals, not foods. We don't eat individual foods. Or we shouldn't. I shouldn't just wake up in the morning and go, I wonder what we're having for breakfast, just potato. It's like, well, sure, you can do that if you want, but usually we have a combination. Because our gut's good at dealing with combinations of foods.

And our food matrix is a thing. Fancy term, it sounds fun. But our food matrix is multiple foods together, and that gives us our nutrition. And, you know, anyone that's ever needed to take iron supplements would have been told that taking it alongside vitamin C helps you absorb the iron better. Like, there are things that combine in our body that is good.

we don't need to overthink it unless we're specifically supplementing for a good for a reason but we eat foods together we don't eat individual nutrients and so this whole like this food is super because it's got all these nutrients well your body's just going to be like i didn't need all of this just you know a bit like taking vitamin C tablets you're just going to pee it out your body's not stupid it's not going to be like we'll store specific nutrients forever or just go well one example of this your microbiome adapt depending on what you need. So if you are lacking in certain nutrients, particular minerals or whatever, your microbiome will adapt to be better to absorbing those minerals. So you want to know what it's doing. You can't trick it by just having goji berries every morning. It tastes horrible as all. Thinking back to that time, it was kind of wild in the nutrition. I guess this is big neuterbolic's energy. We were making like corsette pizzas, no colifon peasasasas. Corgette spaghetti. How, and it is a big question,

but what effect do you think these healthy swaps was having on our relationship with food? Oh, just fear. Just increasing fear. Because people like to brand it's like, well, it's good because you're getting more veg, but actually it's just, it's bad because you're becoming more fearful

of the thing you've replaced. Nobody's replacing spaghetti with corsette because they were worried there wasn't enough corsette in their life. it's not happening people were replacing it. I feel very called out by that. Sorry. I eat a lot of quagetti and I don't even like it. There we go. But Zanol was doing it because they were like, you know what? Courgettes is a superfood and I want more of it. They were doing it because they were like, I have a problem with pasta and I eat too much of it and it's bad for me and it's making me fat so I should stop eating it.

And so, but I really like Bolognese. So how do I continue to have the joy in my life from food? I'll replace the spaghetti with Corgette, not realizing that that sucked most of the joy out as well because again, the joy is not just the name of the dish but actually the way the dish is made. So, yeah, I think it's just, it was one of those things that just can, by giving an alternative, actually, I'd argue it was probably worse than just avoiding the food altogether

because at least in that sense, you've realized that you're missing it and you're like, actually, maybe I do want Bolognais in my life. proper by the nice maybe i do want pizza in my life whereas people being convinced that they weren't missing out because they were making chicken crust pizzas or cauliflower crust pizzas or you know whatever the the choice was on that day they were like oh no well i'm not being restricted at least by avoiding the food altogether they were at least being honest with themselves um so it was a bit of a it was it was a it was a tricky switch um it still happens but i don't think as much i think it's a lot harder to, I think that they are sold for good reason now for things like you have celiac

disease, but you don't like the gluten-free dose. So would you like a cauliflower crust? If you're like, okay, right? So like they exist now for that, but I think there's a lot less of it going around. All of this, diet culture, wellness culture, what in your opinion is at the crux of it? Is it thinness? Is it desire to be thin? Is it money? Is it both? Are they intrinsically linked. What do you think is the, is it like a chicken and egg thing? Look, without, you could go high level and just say capitalism. But without, without either, they wouldn't exist, right? So without, without the money, people wouldn't be capitalizing on people's desire for thinness and people's body image concerns and things like that.

Without the, without the body image and the overfocus on weight and the prevalence of weight stigma, there wouldn't be the money to be made from it. But it is driven by that. It's driven by our obsession within us, the way that we see health, the fact that we still practice medicine in a really weight-centric manner, where we see weight as kind of the be-all-and-end-all, kind of that overrides lots of other things when it comes to health. Only this week I had a conversation with a colleague in the hospital

and just challenged about, you know, the link between body size and cardiovascular disease and like what that means and like basically challenging his language around. and going, well, look, what if we, and, you know, it's not going to, it's the way that we teach this stuff and we talk about this stuff is not, it's not ready to change yet. And because of that, you've got a lot of people who just worry about what their body is and some of it is body image, some of it is health focused, but there's always going to be people there to capitalize it and sell a fake or sell the promise of a solution to it. Even the stuff that's about like building muscle

is still comes from a place of wanting there to be muscle rather than fat. Like it's all it's all tied up in this. And none of it is you've got some crazy people like the guy that's spent millions of pounds to try and reduce his biological age and looks like a looks like some sort of slimy alien. You've got people like that who actually I don't think his primary driver is thinness. I think he genuinely just has this obsession. with his DNA and specific health markers.

So, you know, sure, but they're actually relatively few and far between. The majority of this wouldn't, these conversations wouldn't take place if there wasn't body diversity. We would just get on with it and find something else to obsess about. But this is, this is it. Being taught to fear fatness was nothing new. The very foundations of diet culture were built on the certainty that it's an easy enough thing to make a woman feel. And overtly, this has been the constant, society's modus

operandi. But there's a whole new world of information, more information than our ancestors ever could have comprehended opened up to us with the rise of the internet and then our smartphones, our fear, which was once so simple, grew like a goldfish does to the size of its tank. Where that goldfish has always lived in a little bowl on your mum or your grandma's kitchen table, this new tank was enormous and it was growing bigger every day. At its core, it was still fat phobia, but it could be so much more complicated now. Knowledge after all is power, and that was a power that was harnessed quickly and concisely by the wellness industry. For hundreds of years, thin people were exonerated from feeling the breadth of shame that

their heavier peers experienced. Of course, they lived in fear of falling from the relative safely of their privileged little perch because they knew their position was precarious and at any moment they could lose control and thus the liberties, their smaller bodies afforded them. but they understood society's party line. If you're thin, you're good. But social media brought with it a new dawn, and all of a sudden, they too could now be scared as shitless.

It was once all about how we looked. It was now all about how we lived and looked too, of course. Because did you know that it's possible to be skinny fat? And that's actually like really dangerous because you probably eat loads of trans fats, right? And they sit around your heart and that's terrible. And yeah, Diet Coke might be good for your waistline, but did you know that it was super class and true?

In fact, all sweetener is, most of this diet stuff that you love so much is processed and processed food will kill you. Probably quicker than being fat well, but it's hard to know. Well, this might have been worse, honestly, for its exploitative nature, the way it profited on fear, for its unscrupulous targeting of the vulnerable and insecure, for the way in which it shifted the blame away from the moguls of misinformation and huge corporations misleading and misin conforming the public, all the while pumping carcinogenic and addictive chemicals into our food, capitalising on confusion for its prevalence and for its shameful dishonesty. The movement in all of its glossy condescension is largely over, but its evolution is well

underway and its legacy will live on in all of us and our fear of trans fats and sweetness. Where wellness goes next is anyone's guess, but before we get too deeply immersed in our speculation, we have something else to consider, and that was a movement that erupted during the same period, the body positivity movement. Responsible for shifting, the dial further than it had ever been moved before. Body positivity was huge. Without it, the series wouldn't be here because we wouldn't be. It gave us our voices, yes, but in lots of ways it gave us our lives back to. And we're going to explore all of that and more in next week's episode. See you then. Should I delete that is part of the ACAS creator network.