This post was previously published in my newsletter, Food Psych Weekly. Sign up to get more like this in your inbox each week, and check out my new Rethinking Wellness newsletter, too!

Welcome back to Food Psych Weekly, the newsletter where I answer your questions about intuitive eating, disordered-eating recovery, and how to navigate diet and wellness culture without falling into their traps.

This week we interrupt our regularly scheduled Q&A programming to bring you some breaking news: my new book, The Wellness Trap, is now available for pre-order!

I’m so excited about this book and am thrilled to finally be able to share it with you. It comes out on April 25, 2023, from Little, Brown and Company’s Spark imprint—the same fantastic team I worked with for Anti-Diet. Here’s the cover, which I think really captures the insidious nature of wellness culture:

This book is deeply personal to me, as someone with a whole host of chronic health conditions that wellness culture constantly pushes me to “fix” with food, supplements, and various alternative practices that I’ve come to realize are at best unproven and often downright dangerous.

Many people with chronic illnesses or unexplained symptoms understandably feel dismissed or abandoned by the healthcare system, as I once did, and as those who are more socially marginalized experience even more acutely.

Wellness treatments are often framed as being gentler and more effective at getting to the so-called “root cause” of people’s symptoms than conventional medicine, and that’s exactly what so many of us with chronic conditions are seeking and not finding in the medical system.

But in my experience and that of many people I’ve interviewed, wellness practices often cause more damage than the conditions they’re meant to prevent or cure and the conventional approaches they’re intended to replace.

From the lack of pre-market safety testing on herbal and dietary supplements, to the outrageous claims made by many distributors of multilevel-marketing wellness products, to the myriad scams and schemes masquerading as secrets to health and longevity, it can often feel like no one is looking out for us in the face of the $4.4 trillion global wellness industry.

​The Wellness Trap explores why many popular alternative-medicine diagnoses like adrenal fatigue and leaky-gut syndrome are misleading and harmful, and how integrative- and functional-medicine practitioners who claim to treat the “whole person” can get so laser-focused on these dubious diagnoses (and spurious cures that tend to involve restrictive eating and fistfuls of supplements) that they miss what’s really going on for their patients—from eating disorders to endometriosis to life-threatening tumors.

And you don’t have to be living with chronic diseases to fall into the wellness trap. In the book I trace how social-media algorithms are exposing people to deeply destructive wellness mis- and disinformation, like teen girls who follow a few nutrition-related pages and quickly start getting served extreme diets and pro-eating-disorder content, or a new mom who expressed an interest in making her own baby food and soon began getting recommendations for anti-vax Facebook groups.

My reporting led me to connect with former anti-vaxxers who described how the nexus of wellness culture and social media drove them to fear and demonize vaccines, and how they eventually escaped that dark rabbit hole.

I dug into the research on conspiracy theories to try to understand why, in certain circles of major wellness influencers, QAnon beliefs have become endemic.

I looked at wellness culture’s troubling pattern of cultural appropriation and its damaging views on mental health.

I reflected on the fact that social determinants of health like poverty and racism have a far greater impact on well-being than the individual behaviors wellness culture is always pushing.

And all along the way, I kept uncovering evidence of just how poorly regulated the wellness industry is.

My hope with The Wellness Trap is to illuminate the damage wellness culture is causing, and to explore how we can reimagine our collective relationship with well-being for the better.

If any of that sounds interesting to you, I’d love it if you’d pre-order the book! Pre-orders help it gain visibility and get into the hands of more people who might find it useful, and they help support me in continuing to do this work that I love. (You can also ask your local library to pre-order it, and then reserve it as soon as it’s available.)

I’ve gotten the most amazing responses to this book from my editors and other early readers, and I can’t wait for you to read it, too. You can pre-order here to get The Wellness Trap the day it comes out (April 25, 2023)—plus some sweet pre-order bonuses that we’ll be announcing soon.

Thanks so much for reading, and I’ll be back to answering your questions here next week!

​Ask your own question for a chance to have it answered in an upcoming edition of the newsletter.

On the Podcast

In episode 295 of Food Psych, I discuss what the science actually says about dairy and acne, why most diet research is so shoddy, why cutting out foods isn’t the panacea that wellness culture makes it out to be, and some non-diet options for dealing with acne.

Check out the episode right here, and be sure to subscribe to the pod so that you get each new episode of our final season delivered straight to your device.

Thanks so much for reading! This newsletter is made possible by subscribers like you. To show your support, you can pre-order The Wellness Trap now from your favorite retailer (and/or ask your local library to pre-order it, too).

Got this as a forward? Subscribe here for weekly anti-diet support.

Here’s to breaking free from the wellness trap,

Christy

P.S. My new book, The Wellness Trap, is now available for pre-order! Learn more and reserve your copy here.