Anxiety Dieting, Disordered Eating, and the Crunchy-Granola-to-Wellness Pipeline with Leah Kern
Food Psych Podcast with Christy Harrison
Christy Harrison, MPH, RD, CEDS
4.7 • 3.3K Ratings
🗓️ 22 January 2026
⏱️ 57 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Anti-diet dietitian Leah Kern joins us to discuss how struggling with anxiety made her susceptible to a wellness diet that promised safety and longevity, how that diet quickly spiraled into full-on disordered eating, how being eco-conscious and “earthy” can easily lead into wellness traps, the connection between spirituality and wellness culture, why she finally stopped trying to fix her anxiety with food and started taking meds, and more. This episode previously aired on our other podcast, Rethinking Wellness.
Leah Kern is an anti-diet dietitian and certified intuitive eating counselor who specializes in helping people heal their relationships with food and body. Her approach to coaching is firmly evidence-based, rooted in the Health At Every Size (HAES®) & Intuitive Eating frameworks. In her private practice, Leah teaches her clients to harness their body’s innate wisdom to govern how they eat and live. Leah believes that the work involved with unraveling years of conditioning in diet culture and learning to come home to one’s body is deeply spiritual work and she treats it as such. It is Leah’s mission to help her clients make peace with food and body so they can unlock their most aligned and fulfilling lives. Learn more about her work at leahkernrd.com.
Check out Christy’s three books, Anti-Diet, The Wellness Trap, and The Emotional Eating, Chronic Dieting, Binge Eating & Body Image Workbook for a deeper dive into the topics covered on the pod.
If you’re ready to break free from diet culture and make peace with food, come check out Christy's Intuitive Eating Fundamentals online course.
For more critical thinking and compassionate skepticism about wellness and diet culture, check out Christy’s Rethinking Wellness podcast! You can also sign up to get it in your inbox every week at rethinkingwellness.substack.com.
Ask a question about diet and wellness culture, disordered-eating recovery, and the anti-diet approach for a chance to have it answered on Rethinking Wellness. You can also subscribe to the Food Psych Weekly newsletter to check out previous answers!
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Food Psych, a podcast dedicated to critiquing diet and wellness culture and answering your |
| 0:05.0 | questions about intuitive eating and the anti-diet approach. I'm your host, Christy Harrison, |
| 0:09.7 | and I'm a registered dietitian, certified intuitive eating counselor, journalist and author of the |
| 0:14.3 | book's anti-diet, the wellness trap, and the new emotional eating, chronic dieting, binge eating, and |
| 0:19.8 | body image workbook, |
| 0:25.3 | which are all available wherever you get your books or at Christy Harrison.com slash books. |
| 0:28.1 | That's Christyharrison.com slash books. |
| 0:32.8 | And by the way, on this show, we avoid diet culture details like weight and calorie numbers, but we don't censor swear words or other adult language, so listener discretion is advised. to my food sick. |
| 1:01.0 | Hey there, welcome back to Food Psych. |
| 1:05.3 | Today's episode was a fan favorite a few years ago on my other podcast, Rethinking Wellness, |
| 1:09.9 | and I think you're going to love |
| 1:10.9 | it too. It's with fellow anti-dietitian Leah Kern, who joined me to discuss how struggling with |
| 1:17.0 | anxiety made her susceptible to a wellness diet that promised safety and longevity, how that |
| 1:22.5 | diet quickly spiraled into full-on disordered eating, how being eco-conscious and quote-unquote |
| 1:27.3 | earthy can easily lead into wellness eating, how being eco-conscious and quote-unquote earthy can |
| 1:28.1 | easily lead into wellness traps, the connection between spirituality and wellness culture, |
| 1:33.0 | why she finally stopped trying to fix her anxiety with food and started taking meds and more. |
| 1:38.2 | This was a great conversation and I can't wait to share it with you. |
| 1:41.5 | Now, without any further ado, here's my conversation with Leah Kern. |
| 1:46.5 | So Leah, welcome to the show. I'm so glad to have you with me. And we just did a great episode |
| 1:51.5 | on your podcast. So I'm excited to continue the conversation here. Yeah, I'm so excited too. It was really, |
| 1:56.7 | really wonderful to connect a few weeks ago for my podcast. It was special to get to chat one-on-one. |
... |
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