This is the Weight and Healthcare newsletter. If you like what you are reading, please consider subscribing and/or sharing!
If you’re new here, I have a series called 5 Questions With… where we meet experts in weight-neutral health and healthcare! Previous interviewees include Dr. Lesley Williams, Mikey Mercedes, Aaron Flores, Dr. Gregory Dodell, Lisa Du Breuil, Dr. Asher Larmie, and members of Medical Students for Size Inclusivity. In the next three months I’m excited to share interviews with Chrissy King, Leslie Jordan Garcia, and Jessica Jones.
And today we get to learn about journalist, anti-diet registered dietitian, certified intuitive eating counselor, and author Christy Harrison, MPH, RD, CDN.
1. Tell us a bit about yourself and your work
I’m a journalist who’s been covering food, nutrition, and health for more than 20 years, and I’m also an anti-diet registered dietitian and certified intuitive eating counselor. I have a virtual private practice and teach online courses, but I spend most of my time writing and podcasting. My goal in all my work is to help people think critically about wellness and diet culture, make peace with food, and practice compassion and acceptance for themselves and others. I’m also a mom to an amazing 2-year-old daughter, which is a very different kind of work! And I hope to raise her with these values, too.
2. How did learn about the concept of weight-neutral, body affirming care?
I first learned about it around 20 years ago, through a journalist friend—a scientific skeptic who was interested in HAES(tm). At the time I was in my own eating disorder and wasn’t ready for those ideas at all, so I didn’t really engage with them. But about six years later, that same friend asked me to guest-edit a package on kids’ body size for the magazine where he was working, and I edited a piece he wrote that challenged a lot of my beliefs about weight. I even bought some books, including The Fat Studies Reader and Lessons from the Fat-O-Sphere. But I was studying dietetics and continued to have a disordered relationship with food, so I still wasn’t totally ready for these ideas that called into question everything I thought I knew about weight and health.
It was another year or so before I got into solid recovery, began training in eating disorders, and started learning more about the weight-neutral approach via conferences and trainings. It was only then, when I saw how important this approach was for eating-disorder prevention and recovery, that I fully embraced it and made it a foundational part of my work. From there I continued to learn more and deepen my understanding not just from an academic perspective, but also by reading and listening to many activists and educators in this space, including Ragen!
3. How have you/do you apply those concepts to your work?
At this point, the weight-inclusive approach is a part of my value system and infuses all of my work in some way. My first book, Anti-Diet, and my first podcast, Food Psych, are both explicitly about challenging diet culture, rejecting weight stigma, and finding body liberation. I have two collaborative projects, The Making Peace with Food Card Deck and a forthcoming workbook, that I wrote with other anti-diet clinicians to help people heal from dieting and disordered eating and accept their bodies at any size. A weight-inclusive framework is also the foundation of my primary online course, Intuitive Eating Fundamentals, and the intro course that goes along with it.
In my Substack and my second book, The Wellness Trap, I’ve branched out from that foundation to cover and critique the broader landscape of wellness. In that work, my mission is to offer critical thinking and compassionate skepticism about wellness and diet culture. I delve into the lack of evidence behind popular wellness diets, how wellness culture often drives disordered eating, the truth about trending topics like gut health, how to recognize and protect yourself from wellness misinformation, the role of influencers and social-media algorithms in spreading that misinformation, problematic practices in the alternative- and integrative-medicine space, how to care for yourself in a deeply flawed healthcare system without falling into wellness traps, and more. Through all this exploration, I continue to highlight how anti-fat bias shows up in wellness culture and why we need to be critical of efforts to rebrand dieting as wellness. I’m also hoping to help re-align scientific skepticism with a critical approach to weight science and diet culture, which I think is too often missing today.
4. What’s one thing that you wish people who are still working from a weight-focused paradigm could learn/know? ]
I wish healthcare providers, journalists, and anyone else prescribing or pushing a weight-normative approach could understand how flawed the evidence behind the weight-normative approach really is. That’s especially true when it comes to the GLP-1 drugs being hailed as miracles, and I so appreciate Ragen’s continued and detailed reporting on this. The supposed scientific basis for these drugs feels like a house of cards in many ways. People are being told to stay on them forever, even though we don’t know about their long-term effects and the short-term data is already extremely concerning: There are the recent studies have found increased risks of pancreatitis, gastroparesis, bowel obstruction, and gallbladder disease, which is more common in people taking these drugs for weight loss than for diabetes, and for those taking them long-term as opposed to short-term. There’s the FDA “black box” warning, the most serious type of warning that the agency can issue. There are the extremely common yet often debilitating side effects like nausea and vomiting. And that’s not even to mention the way the marketing weaponizes weight stigma and preys on people’s body insecurities—or the rampant conflicts of interest in the media reporting about these drugs.
If the trajectory of GLP-1 agonists is anything like previous “blockbuster” diet drugs, I think it’s possible that some of the “rare but serious” side effects will eventually be enough to get these drugs removed from the market. But how many people have to suffer before then? And how much more entrenched will anti-fat bias be in society at large? I wish the media outlets and influencers and industry-sponsored doctors fanning the flames of this trend would seriously consider these issues instead of looking the other way.
5. How and where do we find you and your work?
People can find me on my Substack or check out my books, The Wellness Trap and Anti-Diet. I also co-authored a third book that will be out in February called The Emotional Eating, Chronic Dieting, Binge Eating & Body Image Workbook, which I’m really excited about! If you like podcasts, you can subscribe to Rethinking Wellness and Food Psych wherever you listen. And if you’re interested in my online courses and coaching, you can go to my website, christyharrison.com.
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More research and resources:
https://haeshealthsheets.com/resources/
*Note on language: I use “fat” as a neutral descriptor as used by the fat activist community, I use “ob*se” and “overw*ight” to acknowledge that these are terms that were created to medicalize and pathologize fat bodies, with roots in racism and specifically anti-Blackness. Please read Sabrina Strings’ Fearing the Black Body – the Racial Origins of Fat Phobia and Da’Shaun Harrison’s Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness for more on this.
I appreciate this so much, especially because Christy's answer to #4 is exactly how I feel whenever I read about these new 'miracle' drugs in the mainstream and generally respected sources of journalism I habitually check every day. Not a single one looks at Ozempic etc. from a detached and critical perspective; the most they ever offer is a 'balanced' take that still presumes fatness is a disease and weight loss is an inherent good, while nodding to the existence of side effects as a trade off.
Thanks for having me, Ragen! 💕