Christy discusses vitamin D for blood-sugar control and preventing diabetes (part of our series on commonly used supplements). If you spend a lot of time in online wellness spaces, you’ve probably heard a lot about how supplementing with vitamin D can supposedly regulate blood sugar and prevent diabetes. Even some mainstream diabetes organizations promote this idea, based on a small number of studies that seem to show a benefit. But what does the overall body of evidence say? Is this another case where the hype outpaces the science?

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Get full show notes and references here.

Christy's second book, The Wellness Trap, is available wherever books are sold! Order it online 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, come check out Christy's Intuitive Eating Fundamentals online course.

Philosopher and medical ethics professor Arianne Shavisi joins us to discuss why alternative medicine isn’t the answer to a patriarchal healthcare system—and why in many ways it’s even worse. We get into the common misconception that alternative medicine is feminist, how alternative medicine differs from scientific medicine, the role of values in people’s attraction to alternative medicine, and more. Behind the paywall, we discuss why true patient autonomy and informed consent are impossible in alternative medicine, her thoughts on how to improve scientific medicine so that people aren’t drawn to worse alternatives, how she responds to claims that criticizing alternative medicine means discounting “non-Western” cultural knowledge, and more. 

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. 

Arianne Shahvisi is a Kurdish-British writer and academic philosopher. She studied astrophysics and then philosophy at the universities of Cambridge and Oxford, and now teaches applied philosophy at the Brighton and Sussex Medical School, where her research focusses on gender, race, migration, and health. She writes regularly for the London Review of Books, and her essays have also appeared in the Guardian, the Independent, and the Economist. Her first book, Arguing for a Better World: How Philosophy Can Help Us Fight for Social Justice, was published by Penguin in 2023.

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Support the podcast by becoming a paid subscriber, and unlock great perks like extended interviews, subscriber-only Q&As, full access to our archives, commenting privileges and subscriber threads where you can connect with other listeners, and more. Learn more and sign up at rethinkingwellness.substack.com.

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, come check out Christy's Intuitive Eating Fundamentals online course.

Christy discusses how to tell whether your symptoms are related to perimenopause or something else, what perimenopause has in common with dubious diagnoses (even though it’s a real condition), and what the best available evidence says about hormone therapy, weight gain, and more.

This episode is for paid subscribers. Listen to a free preview here, and sign up for a paid subscription to hear the full episode!

Get full show notes and references here.

Christy's second book, The Wellness Trap, is available wherever books are sold! Order it online 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, come check out Christy's Intuitive Eating Fundamentals online course.

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. 

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. 

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 she combines her love of hand lettering with her vision of fat liberation. Amanda lives with her husband and four kids in northeast Texas, and she writes a weekly Substack called The Fat Dispatch. 

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Support the podcast by becoming a paid subscriber, and unlock great perks like extended interviews, subscriber-only Q&As, full access to our archives, commenting privileges and subscriber threads where you can connect with other listeners, and more. Learn more and sign up at rethinkingwellness.substack.com.

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, come check out Christy's Intuitive Eating Fundamentals online course.

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

The full version of this episode (with 9 tips for coping) is for paid subscribers. Listen to a free preview here, and sign up for a paid subscription to hear the full episode!

Christy's second book, The Wellness Trap, is available wherever books are sold! Order it online 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, come check out Christy's Intuitive Eating Fundamentals online course.  

Returning guest Amelia Hruby—who is now our very own podcast producer, as well as a podcaster in her own right with a PhD in philosophy—co-hosts this special episode for the 2-year anniversary of Rethinking Wellness. We discuss how Amelia’s thinking about astrology and tarot has shifted since her first appearance on the pod, why the spirituality-to-QAnon/MAGA pipeline is still going strong, how editing this podcast has changed her relationship with science and medicine, and more. Behind the paywall, Christy shares more about the origins of this podcast in a way she hasn’t before, including why she shifted her focus to wellness culture and how researching the harms of social media changed the tenor of her work. She also discusses some of her favorite things about this new platform, why she thinks it’s so important to do science communication without a side of fat-shaming, what she’s dreaming up for the future of Rethinking Wellness, whether there might be another book in the works, and more.

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.

Amelia Hruby is a writer, educator and podcaster with a PhD in philosophy from DePaul University. Over the past decade, she’s been a university professor, a community organizer, and a radio DJ. Now, she is the founder and executive producer of Softer Sounds, a feminist podcast studio that supports women and nonbinary small business owners in creating purposeful, powerful podcasts. Since leaving social media in April 2021, she’s also launched Off the Grid, a podcast about leaving social media without losing all your clients. On the show she interviews business leaders and former influencers, and shares stories, strategies and experiments for growing your business with radical generosity and energetic sovereignty.

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Support the podcast by becoming a paid subscriber, and unlock great perks like extended interviews, subscriber-only Q&As, full access to our archives, commenting privileges and subscriber threads where you can connect with other listeners, and more. Learn more and sign up at rethinkingwellness.substack.com.

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, come check out Christy's Intuitive Eating Fundamentals online course.

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.

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.

Janice Dada is a weight-inclusive registered dietitian with a private practice in Newport Beach, CA. She is a certified intuitive eating counselor, certified diabetes care and education specialist (CDCES), and certified eating disorders specialist (CEDS). She is passionate about simplifying and destigmatizing the nutrition- and weight-based discourse around diabetes. Intuitive Eating for Diabetes: The No Shame, No Blame, Non-Diet Approach to Managing Your Blood Sugar is her first book.

If you like this conversation, subscribe to hear lots more like it!

Support the podcast by becoming a paid subscriber, and unlock great perks like extended interviews, subscriber-only Q&As, full access to our archives, commenting privileges and subscriber threads where you can connect with other listeners, and more. Learn more and sign up at rethinkingwellness.substack.com.

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, come check out Christy's Intuitive Eating Fundamentals online course.

Christy answers an audience question about the health effects of taking vitamin D supplements.

The full version of this episode is for paid subscribers. Listen to the first question here, and sign up for a paid subscription to hear the rest!

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. 

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.

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.

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 Intuitive Eating Workbook for Teens and The Intuitive Eating Journal: Your Guided Journey for Nourishing a Healthy Relationship with Food, and a chapter contributor to The Handbook of Positive Body Image and Embodiment as well as a chapter contributor to Weight and Wisdom: Reflections on Decades of Working for Body Liberation. She has published journal articles, print articles, and blog posts.

Elyse does regular speaking engagements, podcast interviews, and extensive media interviews. Her work has been profiled on ABC, NPR, CNN, KABC, NBC, KTTV, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Associated Press, KFI Radio, USA Today, and the Huffington Post, among others. Elyse is nationally known for her work in helping patients break free from diet culture through the Intuitive Eating process. Her philosophy embraces the goal of reconnecting with one’s internal wisdom about eating and developing body liberation, with the belief that all bodies deserve dignity and respect.  She is a social justice advocate, a member of the Healer’s Circle of Project Heal—Help to Eat, Accept, and Live, and consults with and trains health professionals. Elyse is also a Certified Eating Disorder Specialist and Consultant, on the Advisory Board of Within Health, a Fellow of the International Association of Eating Disorder Professionals, and a Fellow of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. Learn more about her work at elyseresch.com.

If you like this conversation, subscribe to hear lots more like it!

Support the podcast by becoming a paid subscriber, and unlock great perks like extended interviews, subscriber-only Q&As, full access to our archives, commenting privileges and subscriber threads where you can connect with other listeners, and more. Learn more and sign up at rethinkingwellness.substack.com.

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, come check out Christy's Intuitive Eating Fundamentals online course.

In this solo episode, Christy shares an essay about what her daughter’s experience with the flu taught her about intuitive eating and the importance of certain nutrients. The piece is also out today in written form on Substack.

This episode is for paid subscribers. Listen to a free preview here, and sign up for a paid subscription to hear the full episode!

Get full show notes and references here.

Christy's second book, The Wellness Trap, is available wherever books are sold! Order it online 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, come check out Christy's Intuitive Eating Fundamentals online course.