Next Book Deal, and Changes to Come
I’m thrilled to finally be able to share the news that I got my next book deal!!
The working title is Rethinking Wellness The Wellness Myth, and in it I’ll explore how wellness culture became inundated with with misinformation and disinformation, how it ignores the factors with the greatest impact on well-being (namely, trauma and social determinants of health), how it targets vulnerable people—and what we can do instead to create a truly health-promoting society.
This book builds on the previous writing I’ve done about how wellness culture is the new guise of diet culture, while also widening the lens to address a wellness landscape rife with scams and conspiracy theories—and what makes us susceptible to these things in the first place. I’ll share some of my own experience with chronic illnesses and PTSD, along with lots of interviews, analysis, and scientific evidence.
The book is being published by Little, Brown and Company’s Spark imprint, the same publisher I worked with for Anti-Diet, because I love my editor and the whole team there, and they’ve all done such a great job of helping that book get out into the world. In fact, Anti-Diet just went into its fourth printing (which is a lot for a book that’s only been out for a year), and it’s also been translated into three other languages so far, including a new French edition that comes out later this month in Québec and in April in France!
I’m so grateful to my publishers, my agent, and of course my amazing readers for their incredible support with my first book, and I can’t wait to do it all again ❤️
Of course it’s going to be a long process—everything in book publishing is—so Rethinking Wellness The Wellness Myth won’t be out until early 2023. But I don’t have a full two years to write it; I actually only have less than a year, because in traditional publishing about half the time is devoted to things like physical production, printing, and distribution.
Which brings me to some other, more bittersweet news: since I’m covering such a huge topic in this new book and have relatively little time to do it, I’ve had to pare down my commitment to other things, and unfortunately that’s going to include my podcast, Food Psych.
So the podcast will be going on hiatus starting March 15th, and I’m hoping to come back with Season 9 sometime in late 2021 or early 2022, but I don’t have a date nailed down.
That was a really tough decision because I love the podcast so much, and it’s been wonderful connecting with all my listeners over the years. But I have much more limited capacity to produce the show right now, and I need to honor that. And above all I don’t want to sacrifice the attention and level of the content I create for listeners.
Luckily, though, there is one aspect of the podcast—the audience Q&As—that I’ll still be able to keep doing, just in a different medium.
Which brings me to the last piece of good news I want to share: Starting next week, I’ll be answering readers’ questions every week in my email newsletter, which is now going to be called Food Psych Weekly. So even though the podcast is going on hiatus, that doesn’t mean I’m going on hiatus—you’ll just have to find me in a different place, which is in your inbox.
If you want to ask a question for me to answer in the newsletter, you can do that right here. I’ll also continue working my way through the hundreds of questions folks have asked over the years, so if you’ve previously asked a question for the podcast, not to worry—there’s still a chance I’ll answer it here in the coming weeks/months.
Also, the Food Psych archives will continue to be there whenever you want to listen, and I’ll be pointing you to archival episodes in the newsletter each week to supplement my answers to readers’ questions.
I’m sad to have to stop the podcast for a while, and this week actually marks 8 years since I started working on it. If you’ve been a Food Psych listener at any point during those years, thank you, and I look forward to continuing to connect with you in the newsletter, although I know it will be a little different.
But there is one podcast I’m going to keep doing, and that’s the one I do every month for my Intuitive Eating Fundamentals course. So if you want to keep getting new audio episodes from me even while I’m working on my new book, consider joining the course.
You can also hear more of my voice blabbing about anti-diet stuff in the audiobook for Anti-Diet, which is available at Audible, Audiobooks.com, or wherever you get your audiobooks.
We’ve got some great podcast interviews in store for the final 4-5 weeks before the hiatus, including this week’s episode with longtime Health At Every Size® therapist Nancy Ellis-Ordway.
Nancy and I discuss weight stigma in education, healthcare, and beyond; why individual health behaviors are less important than they’re made out to be; the evolution of HAES® over time; the role of money and industry in perpetuating diet culture; and so much more.
Plus, in the beginning of the episode I break the big news that I’ve shared with you above.
Check it out right here, and be sure to subscribe so that you don’t miss any of our upcoming episodes before the hiatus, or Season 9 when we return!
Here’s to the exciting new things to come,
Christy