Eat Y'Self Fitter? Unwell in the World of Wellness.

"You are what you eat" they say, whoever 'they' are, but that's not really true is it? I mean, it affects who you are but so do many many other things and if you spend too much time worrying about your diet, anguishing over nutrition, there's a good chance you're doing yourself far more harm than you are good.

That was the gist of Pixie Turner's Wednesday evening talk for Greenwich Skeptics in the Pub, the provocatively titled From 'Wellness Wanker' to Wellness Rebel in which Pixie related her own incredible and fascinating story of falling into an Internet rabbit hole of dietary fads, clean eating, veganism, and, for the most part, complete and utter bullshit, as well as how she came to see through the lies and con-tricks and turned her life around to become a fully qualified nutrionist who uses her large social media following to promote common sense and debunk the huge amount of disinformation disseminated online.

Pixie proved to be a great public speaker (not put off by either a crying baby or a barking Staffordshire bull terrier) and she had a very interesting story to relate but what was most remarkable, and best of all, was that her story was one that involved her admitting she was on the wrong path, that she'd been duped, and that she was brave enough to open up about this and change direction. It's a lesson many of us could learn from.

Pixie wasn't the only speaker at the event either. She was joined by Dr Britt Hermes whose story had taken a similar, perhaps even more worrying, arc. Britt had studied naturopathy in Seattle and on graduating had designed something she called 'the Right Detox'. All of which works to give the illusion that naturopaths are doctors but they're not.

Their bedside manner and their simple, but useless, solutions easily entice their 'patients' to part with their money but they don't do anything to improve the same patient's health. So the patient ends up both screwed financially, still ill, and now burdened with a whole load of food anxieties they could do without.

A lot of Britt's talk drilled down on, and exposed as nonsense, things I didn't (and still don't) really understand, stuff like applied kinesiology and IgG food allergy testing, but the focus on food anxiety ties in neatly with the stuff Pixie had been speaking about earlier. In many ways I saw Dr Hermes' talk as a supplementary vitamin to the hearty main meal that Pixie Turner had served up earlier.

The story begun with a nineteen year old Pixie Turner being identified as having an abnormally high cholesterol level. As a teenager she didn't want to start a life long course of statins as her endocrinologist had recommended so she did what many of us do now and employed the services of a particularly untrustworthy quack. Everybody's frenemy, Dr Google.

The first thing she tried was the I Quit Sugar programme by the unqualified Australian Sarah Wilson which unsurprisingly didn't make her feel any better at all, nor improve her cholesterol - which doctors had advised may well be a hereditary condition that she can do nothing about (except take statins) anyway.

So she turned to the wellness bloggers and their alkaline diets, plant based regimes, and anti-gluten missions. People like Madeline Shaw, Natasha Corrett, and (Deliciously) Ella Woodward and then, inspired by these charlatans, went one step further and reinvented herself on Instagram as Plant Based Pixie. There's a picture of her posing with some avocados as if to prove just how much she loves those plants. She soon picked up a sizeable following and it seems likely the fact that she is a blonde, attractive young woman didn't exactly hinder her progress.

First she cut out all animal products. Then she cut out gluten. Refined sugar followed. As did soy. So much had been removed that she needed to start adding things so in came the 'superfoods', wheatgrass, juice cleansers, and Spirulina, a drink so vile that my companion for the night, Vicki, said it made her throw up instantly - and Vicki rarely struggles to get her drinks down!

Because of her huge online following, Pixie was getting all these foods and nutrients for free but she wasn't admitting that online. She was pretending she was paying for them - and that wasn't the only untruth she was peddling. She found the food challenges she was setting for her followers (eat nothing but raw food for a whole month etc;) impossible to complete herself but she was, at that time, happy to lie to Instagram about it.

When she looks back on those days she finds herself particularly repulsed and angered by some of the hastags she used. #eatclean and #detox being particularly ugly, nasty slogans that are essentially meaningless but serve only to increase anxiety in her followers and propagate eating disorders.

She'd host events for like minded people so they could validate and enable each other and, at first, she felt a bit better for her new diet (something she now realises probably had more to do with starting to attend the gym regularly and cutting back on the booze) but, soon enough, her anxiety began to rise exponentially, she was always tired, she suspected she'd developed a B12 deficiency, and she had virtually no social life whatsoever. A fairly upsetting state of affairs for a young woman away from her family and studying at university.

She identifies her condition as being something called 'orthorexia nervosa', a "unhealthy obsession with healthy eating", and she made the case for how the language we use for food ("you are what you eat", "I've been bad, I've eaten chocolate") can be judgemental and plain wrong. You're not what you eat, eating chocolate isn't bad, in fact it's great, and clean eating means very different things to very different people. Mostly it's a term that people use to assert their superiority. If I eat clean I am clean which means you must be dirty which means I am better than you.

On a trip to Australia to luxuriate in the bubble she'd created for herself with other fad diet pushers she heard one single sentence that pulled the blinkers from her eyes:-

"I would never dream of vaccinating my kids".

If her fellow travellers, her friends, could think something as shitty and dangerous as this then might a lot of the other ideas they're proposing and propagating also be absolute rubbish too? Is this all crap? Have I bought into a load of self-serving and very dodgy bullshit?


Pixie Turner started reading skeptical websites, educating herself, and, after a not inconsiderable period of cognitive dissonance (she'd built an online persona on the back of this and by renouncing it she was opening herself up to losing friends, trolling, and, as we sadly know with the Internet, a lot worse), she got a Master's degree in nutrition at UCL.

Now she bases her writing, she's managed to retain a pretty healthy 120,000 Instagram followers, on facts not fear. She enjoys pizzas, burgers, chocolate and she listens to her body. She eats when she's hungry and she stops eating when she's full up. She now views the wellness industry as something not dissimilar to a religious cult. A place where other adherents reinforce your beliefs and behaviour and one where you're ostracised should you dare to lose faith or, worse, became a critic or apostate.

During a heartfelt Q&A session, hosted by both Pixie and Brett (while bouncing her baby to pacify her) we were able to hear some of the personal motivations (anger for Pixie, guilt for Brett who as a former naturopath had told cancer sufferers not to undergo chemotherapy) for the journey they were on. It was enlightening, educational, and emotional. At one point I thought I saw a tear developing in Dr Brett Hermes' eye and at one point there was certainly one in mine. Another great evening from Chris French and Greenwich Skeptics in the Pub.

Thanks to Vicki for joining me for this evening and then joining me for a not inconsiderable debrief in the taverns of Greenwich afterwards - and thanks to Goddard's pie'n'mash shop for providing me with the lovely, tasty, and, yes, healthy food I enjoyed beforehand.