Food Psych Podcast with Christy Harrison · Christy Harrison, MPH, RD, CEDS

Anxiety Dieting, Disordered Eating, and the Crunchy-Granola-to-Wellness Pipeline with Leah Kern

·57 min·3 clips

Reading Eat to Live in high school pushed Leah into a crunchy wellness persona and bingeing behind closed doors.

Christy Harrison opens an episode with Leah Kern about anxiety. Leah traces how a wellness diet first promised safety and longevity. It soon slid into disordered eating, and the food rules picked up more emotional weight than they could hold. Christy guides the conversation from Leah's personal history into the cultural and emotional forces that made those rules feel convincing. Crunchy culture matters here. Leah describes eco-conscious, earthy communities where wellness can look virtuous before it starts narrowing what feels acceptable. Spirituality comes in too. She talks about New Age habits, crystal shops, yoga, and the pull of being told certain foods are closer to spiritual enlightenment. The show leaves room for those impulses without pretending they are harmless once they get tied to eating. Leah remembers the language. Ideas like live foods and dead foods sounded convincing at the time, even though they now read as revealing. Christy widens the frame. Environmental and social justice threads sit alongside the food rules, showing how those communities can feed into wellness culture. By college, things shifted. Leah says she was getting more critical by the time she reached Vermont, but the old scripts still hung around. The ending is practical. Leah describes finally stopping the effort to fix anxiety with food and starting medication as part of that shift.

As heard by us

Anxiety, wellness culture, and food rules collide in a conversation that keeps each thread distinct.

Leah Kern's story tracks how anxiety can make a wellness diet feel like safety, until that promise turns into food rules and disordered eating.

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Why you'd press play

You want the wellness-to-disorder pipeline around anxiety explained without the fluff.

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