A conversation with Jay Feldman on bioenergetic health, stress physiology, and what mainstream fitness culture misses
This week I have a really exciting interview for you with Jay Feldman of Jay Feldman Wellness, and this conversation felt like such a natural continuation of everything we’ve been unpacking lately around calories, metabolism, stress, food, fitness culture, and what happens when the body finally says, enough.
If you listened to the episode I dropped a couple weeks ago, Calories In, Common Sense Out, this conversation with Jay is the perfect next step.
That episode laid the groundwork for something I keep coming back to: the body is not a calculator. Yes, calories matter. But the way modern fitness culture talks about calories often strips the body of important context: stress, hormones, thyroid function, energy production, sleep, recovery, nervous system load, and years of restriction.
Jay and I both come from backgrounds where we have done restrictive dieting, pushed hard, and learned the hard way that the body eventually keeps the score. That shared history is part of what made this conversation so good. We’re not talking about metabolism from a detached, abstract place. We’re talking about what happens when people spend years under-eating, overtraining, living on caffeine, pushing through exhaustion, and then wondering why their body no longer responds the way it used to.
In this episode, we talk about Jay’s approach to bioenergetic health, which starts with cellular energy rather than just calories, macros, or “discipline.” Instead of asking only, “How do I lose weight?” we ask a deeper question:
Does the body have enough energy to do what we keep demanding from it?
A lot of my audience includes current or former athletes, military and veteran types, fitness-minded people, chronic dieters, and folks who are used to pushing through pain. Many have spent years being praised for discipline while quietly feeling cold, exhausted, anxious, inflamed, underfed, over-caffeinated, and metabolically stuck.
We get into the difference between looking fit and actually being healthy. Can someone look lean, disciplined, or high-performing while internally running on stress hormones? How can you tell the difference between real energy and survival energy? Are cold hands and feet, waking at night, cravings, low libido, anxiety, or needing caffeine just to function clues that something deeper is going on?
We also talk about one of the most frustrating places people end up:
“If I eat more than 1,500 calories, I gain weight.”
That is such a common fear, especially for people who have dieted for years. And this is where the conversation gets really practical. We talk about metabolic adaptation, why the body may resist weight loss after long periods of restriction, and why eating more can feel terrifying even when it may be part of the long-term solution.
This also ties into something I’ve talked about before in my Earn Your Right to Diet episode: sometimes the next step is not another fat-loss phase. Sometimes the next step is rebuilding. That can mean a slow, strategic reverse diet—gradually adding calories back in, supporting thyroid and metabolic function, reducing stress load, and spending time at maintenance before asking the body to diet again.
Reverse dieting is not “just eat everything and hope for the best.” It is a methodical process of giving the body more energy while watching biofeedback: temperature, sleep, digestion, mood, training recovery, hunger, cravings, cycle health, libido, and overall energy.
Toward the end of the episode, Jay gives tangible advice on how people can start making sure they are eating enough food.
We talk about using basic calorie-needs charts as a starting point, especially because many adults are eating amounts that are closer to what a child or sedentary teenager might need… then wondering why they feel awful.
I also share some visuals during the episode, including examples of what 1,800, 2,000, and 2,200 calories can actually look like across three meals and two snacks. Because sometimes people hear those numbers and assume it means massive amounts of food, when in reality it can look pretty normal, nourishing, and manageable.
This episode is for anyone who feels like their body is betraying them after years of trying to do everything “right.”
We talk about:
bioenergetic health and cellular energy
the limits of “eat less, move more” advice
chronic dieting and weight-loss resistance
stress physiology and caffeine-driven energy
the difference between discipline and health
former athletes, veterans, and burned-out high-achievers
reverse dieting and rebuilding metabolic capacity
why the body may need more food before it can safely lose fat again
This is not a conversation about abandoning personal responsibility or pretending calories do not matter. It is a conversation about restoring much needed nuance and context.
Because sometimes the problem is not that you need more willpower.
Sometimes the problem is that your body has been running on fumes for far too long.
And that’s all I have for you folks, I’d love to hear your thoughts, leave me a comment or shoot me a private message to share them. If you appreciate this kind of work, please share and subscribe—that would mean a lot to me!
On metabolism, nourishment, food reverence, and the systems that shape what feeds us
Welcome back to Taste0fTruth Tuesdays. Today, we are mixing things up with a subject that is very near and dear to my heart: nutrition, metabolism, and our increasingly distorted relationship with food in our modern world.
This episode covers a lot of ground. We are moving from diet culture and my own history with restriction into metabolism, morality, industrial food, local agriculture, and the growing technological control of our food systems. It may sound like several different conversations, but they are all part of the same story.
This episode will also lay some of the groundwork for an upcoming interview at the end of the month with Jay Feldman Wellness.
Jay is a health coach, independent health researcher, and host of The Energy Balance Podcast. His work explores bioenergetic health and nutrition, including ideas influenced by biologist Ray Peat—principles I have found myself returning to, on and off, for the last several years.
But before we get there, I need to explain why this conversation is so personal for me.
As many of you know, I have spent more than 20 years in the health and fitness world. I have also written openly about how intense and complicated that journey has been.
I came of age during the late 1990s and early 2000s, an era saturated with diet magazines, celebrity weight-loss stories, low-fat everything, Special K commercials, “bikini body” workouts, and television programs that treated shrinking the body as both entertainment and moral achievement.
And those cultural messages did not exist in isolation.
I grew up in a household where my body was not simply noticed. It was scrutinized, compared, and commented on.
Those kinds of comments do not disappear with time. They become part of the architecture of how you see yourself. They follow you into mirrors, fitting rooms, photographs, swimming pools, doctors’ offices, and every room where you become aware that other people can see your body.
They teach you that the body must be managed and monitored.
They plant the belief that remaining small is the price of safety.
I grew up believing that if I could control my body well enough, I could avoid humiliation. I could avoid becoming the punchline. I could avoid being seen in the wrong way.
For a while, I turned that fear into something our culture rewards: discipline.
But fear does not stop being fear simply because it learns the vocabulary of health and fitness.
In high school, I followed plans like the Special K diet. I relied on Carnation Instant Breakfast instead of complete meals. I skipped classes to work out before heading to my afterschool job. My protein intake was low. My fear of gaining weight was high.
Restriction became familiar.
And because restriction was praised as willpower, I did not always recognize it as deprivation.
That is the background I bring into this conversation. I am not critiquing calorie culture because I have never understood its appeal. I understand it intimately.
Numbers can feel safe.
Numbers feel objective. They offer the illusion that if you calculate carefully enough, track consistently enough, and exert enough control, the body will become predictable. Calories give food a score. The scale gives the body a verdict. And when you have learned to fear your own appetite, arithmetic can feel more trustworthy than sensation.
I have lived through periods in which weight loss looked like success from the outside while my body was becoming increasingly undernourished, stressed, depleted, and disconnected from its own signals.
So when I say that weight loss and health are not synonymous, trust me: I learned that lesson the hard way.
That is why I am interested in the bioenergetic perspective. Rather than asking only, “How little can I eat to make the number on the scale decrease?” it asks a more useful question:
How well is the body actually producing and using energy?
This episode is not intended to settle every claim made within bioenergetic nutrition. That is part of what I want to explore with Jay during our upcoming conversation.
Today, I want to lay the groundwork by examining the difference between consuming calories and producing usable cellular energy; between losing weight and becoming healthy; and between treating food as a number and understanding it as biological information, ecological relationship, and participation in a living system.
Because the body is not simply a furnace. Food is not merely a number.
And losing weight is definitely not proof that a person is nourished or healthy while doing so.
Modern nutrition has flattened food into arithmetic while removing almost everything that makes it meaningful.
SAD is the perfect acronym for the Standard American Diet because, whew, it really is sad what modern food culture has become.
And I do not just mean sad in the obvious “everyone is eating ultra-processed food and wondering why they feel terrible” kind of way. I mean sad in the deeper sense.
Sad as in spiritually impoverished.
Sad as in disconnected from land, animals, seasons, labor, gratitude, death, and actual nourishment.
Sad as in we have managed to turn food (one of the most intimate relationships a human being has with the living world) into a bland, plastic-wrapped transaction between a lonely person and a microwave, or a vehicle going to a fast food drive thru window.
That sounds dramatic.
But is it really?
We live in a culture that calls ultra-processed food “good enough,” celebrates weight loss regardless of how it was achieved, and then treats anyone who questions that framework as judgmental, elitist, or unnecessarily intense.
But that is exactly the problem.
Our culture has reduced food to numbers while stripping it of meaning. Calories. Macros. Points. Deficits. Cheat meals. Protein hacks. Low-cal swaps. “If It Fits Your Macros.” (I lived and breathed that lifestyle) We talk about food like it is accounting, not relationship. Like the human body is a calculator.
Of course, calories matter. I am not pretending energy balance is fake. But if your entire health philosophy begins and ends with calorie math, you are missing the human being attached to the equation.
Food is not only fuel. Food is information. Food sends a signal. Food affects insulin, thyroid output, leptin, ghrelin, cortisol, digestion, gut signaling, inflammation, mitochondrial function, cell communication, mood, cravings, satiety, sleep, fertility, and gene expression. A Hot Pocket and a grass-fed steak may both contain calories, but they do not speak the same biological language once they enter the body.
The lie of “calories in, calories out” must die.
Not because energy does not matter. It does. But because reducing food to calorie math is one of the dumbest things modern nutrition culture has done to the human body.
A calorie is a unit of energy, but the number printed on a label cannot tell us how effectively a food will be digested, absorbed, converted into ATP, or allocated among the body’s competing demands. That process requires minerals, vitamins, enzymes, hormones, functioning mitochondria, adequate protein, and a body that is not constantly underfed, inflamed, stressed, or depleted.
This is where the “just eat less” crowd loses the plot.
Most people are not building truly nutrient-dense meals, even when they think they are. They may be tracking protein, counting calories, or hitting some macro target, while still missing the deeper nourishment their body needs to actually turn food into energy. If someone is living on refined grains, muscle meats only, no seafood, low mineral intake, low variety, and almost no traditional foods, they can be “hitting their calories” while still undersupplying some of the micronutrients and cofactors involved in energy metabolism, tissue repair, and hormonal function.
But producing energy is only part of the story.
The body must also decide where that energy goes.
Mitochondrial psychobiologist Martin Picard and his colleagues have proposed an emerging framework called the Energy Constraint model. Their central idea is that the body operates with a limited but dynamic energy budget that must continually be allocated across cells, organs, systems, and behaviors.
Everything costs energy.
Neurons firing costs energy. Producing proteins costs energy. Mounting an immune response costs energy. Digestion, movement, cognition, reproduction, tissue repair, and communication between cells all carry energetic costs.
Nothing is free in biology.
Hierarchy of Energy Needs. From @martinpicard, “Energy Constraint on Health,” based on the Energy Constraint framework developed by Alexander Behnke, Evan Shaulson, Herman Pontzer, Chris Kempes, Martin Picard, and colleagues. Reproduced with permission from Martin Picard. Original article and primary paper linked here.
In their framework, the body’s energetic demands can be divided into three broad categories: vital functions; stress responses; and growth, maintenance, and repair.
At the base are the vital functions necessary to sustain life in the immediate term: breathing, heart activity, brain function, membrane potential, ion exchange, and basic metabolism. These processes receive priority because they are necessary for survival over minutes, hours, and days.
The next category includes stress-related demands. Exercise is a stressor. So are infection, inflammation, toxins, psychological distress, injury, sleep loss, and activation of the sympathetic nervous system. All of these require the body to spend energy responding and adapting.
At the top are growth, maintenance, and repair. These processes may not be essential for surviving the next several minutes, but they are essential for healing, resilience, muscle maintenance, reproduction, cognition, motivation, vitality, and long-term health.
When the body’s total demands become difficult to sustain, energy is not distributed evenly. More urgent vital and stress-related processes may be prioritized while investment in growth, maintenance, and repair becomes compressed.
In other words, the body may preserve what is necessary to keep you alive while reducing what is available to help you recover, reproduce, think clearly, maintain muscle, and feel fully alive.
This does not mean these higher functions simply switch off in a rigid order. It means the body makes trade-offs.
And duration matters.
Not every stressor is harmful. Exercise itself temporarily redirects energy, but when it is appropriately dosed and followed by sufficient nourishment, sleep, and recovery, the body can adapt and become more resilient.
The deeper problem is stress that becomes excessive, chronic, or inescapable.
When energetic demands continue for weeks, months, or years—whether from illness, infection, psychological stress, overtraining, sleep disruption, undernourishment, or some combination of pressures—the body may repeatedly postpone the repair work that was supposed to happen later.
This framework helps explain how someone can technically be eating enough calories (or even losing weight successfully) while experiencing fatigue, poor recovery, low libido, disrupted cycles, reduced motivation, brain fog, loss of muscle, or declining resilience.
It does not mean every one of those symptoms has a single energetic cause. But it gives us a much richer way of understanding health than simply asking whether someone stayed within a calorie target.
The body is not failing to obey an equation.
It is adapting to competing demands.
Nutrient status is only one part of this energetic landscape, but it is an important one. The body’s ability to produce, allocate, and use energy is also shaped by sleep, illness, stress, activity, mitochondrial function, recovery, and the cumulative demands being placed upon it.
This is why vitamins and minerals matter so much. They are not little bonus points sprinkled on top of a diet. They are part of the machinery that turns food into usable energy. They help build hormones and neurotransmitters, repair tissue, maintain immune function, support the liver, regulate the nervous system, and keep the organs doing their jobs.
Or said more simply: macronutrients burn on the flame of micronutrients.
That is the part calorie math misses. A Hot Pocket and a mineral-rich, protein-rich, whole-food meal may both contain calories, but they do not offer the body the same tools. One delivers energy potential wrapped in industrial convenience. The other provides the raw materials the body needs to actually build, repair, signal, regulate, and produce real cellular energy.
So when people say “it’s just calories in, calories out,” what I hear is a worldview that has confused potential with function.
A body is not helped by potential alone. It needs conversion. It needs nourishment. It needs signal. It needs minerals, protein, fats, carbohydrates, vitamins, salt, sunlight, rest, and rhythm.
Food is not just a number entering a furnace. Food is a set of instructions entering a living system. And if the instructions are poor, incomplete, synthetic, depleted, or chaotic, the body will respond accordingly.
This is where the lazy appeal to “thermodynamics” becomes almost comical. Yes, the laws of thermodynamics exist. Congratulations. But the human body is not a closed metal box in a lab. It is a living, adaptive, self-regulating organism. Inputs change outputs. Food changes appetite, energy expenditure, hormones, cravings, sleep, mood, metabolic rate, and behavior. The “calories out” side is not fixed. It responds to the quality, timing, and composition of what we eat.
Rupert Sheldrake has criticized the way modern science can harden living systems into dead-mechanistic models, and that critique fits here. The calorie model treats the body like a machine. But we are not machines. We are organisms. Food is not merely burned. It is received, interpreted, metabolized, stored, signaled, and woven into the body.
So yes, calories matter. But “calories in, calories out” as a complete theory of health is basically nutritional kindergarten, and it’s time to grow out of that.
But calorie reductionism is only one way modern food culture disconnects us from the complexity of nourishment.
We also have a tendency to turn eating into a moral identity. Foods become clean or dirty, virtuous or shameful. Diets promise not only better health, but innocence: a way to eat without exploitation, suffering, contradiction, or death.
I understand the appeal of that promise because I lived inside it.
I was vegetarian for years. At the time, I genuinely believed it was both the healthier and more ethical choice. I cared about animals. I still do—deeply. I did not want to participate in harm if I could avoid it.
But eventually, health-wise, vegetarianism stopped working for me. My body was not thriving. Practitioners I trusted encouraged me to reconsider whether I was receiving enough protein and nourishment, and over time I began incorporating animal foods again. That transition gradually led me toward a more pro-metabolic, ancestral approach to food.
I am not as critical of vegetarianism as I am of veganism because vegetarian diets can still include many traditional, deeply nourishing foods: eggs, butter, cheese, milk, yogurt, cream, and honey. These foods can still connect us to animals, farms, fermentation, older foodways, and the forms of nourishment on which human communities have relied for generations.
Veganism is different. I understand the moral impulse behind it. But modern veganism often depends heavily on the very industrial food system it imagines itself resisting.
It often depends upon global supply chains, fortified products, industrial monocrops, protein isolates, seed oils, and laboratory-like replacements for foods that once came directly from local land, animals, kitchens, and communities.
That does not describe every vegan meal or every person who avoids animal foods. But veganism as a widely accessible modern lifestyle has been made possible, in large part, by the industrialization and globalization of food. It became easier to imagine a diet detached from local ecology only after the modern food system detached nearly everyone from local ecology.
Before supermarket abundance, refrigerated transport, synthetic supplementation, and year-round imports, diets were far more directly shaped by region, climate, labor, animals, seasons, preservation, and survival.
This is what troubles me about the moral certainty that can surround veganism. Morality can bind us around compassion, but it can also blind us to costs outside the frame we have chosen. A person may avoid animal foods while remaining dependent upon monocropping, habitat loss, exploited labor, heavily processed substitutes, and corporations with no meaningful relationship to the land being depleted.
The suffering has not necessarily disappeared.
It has moved out of sight.
An ethical identity can become so focused on the visible animal that it loses sight of soil, insects, wildlife, farmers, rural communities, and the ecological relationships required to sustain human life.
This is why I keep thinking about survival programs like Alone. You do not typically see people in genuine survival conditions adhering to rigid dietary identities made possible by modern abundance. They eat the carbohydrates they can gather. They fish, hunt, forage, trap, and preserve whatever food the environment makes available.
A television program does not settle the ethical debate. But it does expose how much our modern food identities depend upon stability, infrastructure, supplements, supermarkets, and global abundance.
Most of us have no idea what we would actually eat if supermarkets, refrigeration, restaurants, and global supply chains disappeared.
It is easy to construct an identity around dietary purity while standing beneath fluorescent lights in a store containing food from every climate on Earth.
Survival has a way of stripping ideology down to appetite, ecology, and availability.
The point I’m trying to make here, is the deeper problem is not simply meat. It is our total disconnection from food itself.
The Standard American Diet is not built around reverence. It is built around convenience, profit, shelf life, hyper-palatability, and perpetual consumption. It is often high in refined carbohydrates and industrial fats, low in nutrient density, easy to overeat, and engineered to override the body’s natural signals.
It keeps people fed but not nourished.
Full but not satisfied. Stimulated but depleted.
I do not blame meat itself for the sickness of modern food culture. I blame the collapse of small and local food systems. I blame industrial agriculture and the consolidation of food production. I blame ultra-processed convenience food. I blame the severing of people from land, seasons, animals, kitchens, skills, and community.
I blame a culture in which people no longer know where their food comes from, what it took to produce it, or what kind of life and death made it possible.
Because that is the uncomfortable truth: death is always involved in food.
Neither vegetarianism nor veganism remove death from the food system. Fields are cleared. Habitats are displaced. Soil life is disrupted. Insects, birds, rodents, snakes, rabbits, and countless unseen creatures are killed through large-scale crop production. Farm workers are exploited. Water is diverted. Communities are transformed to serve distant markets.
Even a plate composed entirely of plants carries a cost.
That does not mean all dietary choices are morally equivalent. It means purity is not available to us. The moral task is not to imagine that we have escaped the web of life and death. It is to become more conscious of how we participate in it.
Nature is a total system, and within that totality it is not morally tidy.
We often use the word “natural” as if it means good, pure, balanced, or morally clean. But nature does not produce constant perfection. Nature produces totality. Beauty and monstrosity. Strength and weakness. Flourishing and failure. Healthy forms, botched forms, failed adaptations, extinction, decay, renewal.
Food belongs to that same uncomfortable order. There is no pure way to eat outside of life, death, appetite, cost, and consequence. The fantasy of a morally spotless diet is just another modern escape hatch from reality.
Morality works in a similar way. It is not merely a list of rules imposed from above. It is an energy-management system. It curbs violence, lust, greed, vengeance, ambition, and appetite so a group can maintain some version of peace. Morality contains the passions so they do not destroy the social body.
At both the personal and social level, morality determines which appetites may be expressed, which must be restrained, and which costs remain visible.
And maybe this is why modern food culture feels so spiritually sick. It has stopped containing appetite. It does not discipline desire. It engineers it. It stimulates it. It tells us we can eat industrially manufactured, hyper-palatable food and reduce the whole thing to calorie math, as if the body is not receiving signals, adapting, craving, storing, resisting, inflaming, and remembering.
Food is energy, yes. But not in the dead mechanical sense. Food is energy moving through a living moral and biological system.
That is why “calories in, calories out” feels so thin. It treats food as if it enters a furnace. But food enters a body. And bodies are not furnaces. Bodies are fields of signal, memory, hunger, restraint, ancestry, hormone, and meaning.
I completely understand the discomfort around eating conscious animals. I have read so many stories from first-time farmers who raise animals with love and then struggle deeply when it is time for slaughter. That pain means something. I respect it. Honestly, I trust that pain more than the numbness of the average grocery store shopper tossing factory-farmed meat into a cart with no thought at all.
The pain shows there is still reverence there.
And maybe that is what we have lost most.
We have been removed from the reality of food for so long that we tend to swing between two false extremes. On one side, we sentimentalize animals from a distance and pretend we can opt out of the death cycle entirely. On the other hand, we consume without thought, without gratitude, without responsibility, without even a pause. Both are forms of disconnection.
The more honest path, at least for me, is not pretending death can be removed from food. It is learning to approach food with more gratitude, humility, and responsibility.
That means caring about how animals are raised. It means caring about soil. It means caring about farmers. It means caring about local food systems. It means asking whether our food builds health or slowly drains it from us. It means understanding that “cheap” food often has hidden costs paid somewhere else, by animals, by land, by farm workers, by our own bodies, by our children, and by our communities.
And yes, it also means having higher standards.
I am tired of the cultural pressure to pretend that all food choices are basically the same as long as the calories work out. They are not. A calorie deficit may lead to weight loss, but weight loss is not the same as nourishment. You can lose weight while eating foods that do very little to support your metabolism, hormones, digestion, mood, or long-term health. You can shrink a body while starving it of what it actually needs.
Real nourishment asks more of us.
It asks us to pay attention. It asks us to recover old skills. It asks us to cook, to preserve, to source better when we can, and to know the difference between food shaped by land, animals, microbes, seasons, and human hands—and food assembled in a factory to survive for months in a freezer.
This is where food becomes spiritual for me.
Not spiritual in the vague influencer sense. Not “raise your vibes with an açai smoothie bowl” nonsense.
I mean spiritual in the older, more connected to earth sense: eating is an act of dependence, participation, and transformation.
Rudolf Steiner once approached nutrition through the idea that eating is never merely mechanical. Whatever one makes of his more esoteric language, I think there is something valuable in the underlying insight: food does not simply enter the body and disappear into a calorie ledger. The body must meet it, break it down, transform it, and incorporate it into the self.
What was once sunlight, soil, rain, grass, grain, fruit, milk, muscle, mineral, or microbial life becomes blood, tissue, hormone, neurotransmitter, heat, thought, movement, and memory.
Eating is one of the most literal ways the world becomes us.
That alone should make the act feel less trivial.
We are not floating minds temporarily renting bodies. We are dependent creatures. We require soil, water, sunlight, animals, plants, microbes, farmers, bees, rain, death, decay, and renewal. Every meal places us inside a web of relationships whether we acknowledge them or not.
And this means that food may shape more than our body weight.
What we eat can influence energy, mood, cognition, resilience, inflammation, digestion, and the clarity with which we move through the world. I do not mean that one perfect diet produces spiritual enlightenment, or that illness reflects moral or spiritual failure. Food is not a purity test.
But neither is it neutral.
The quality of what we repeatedly take into the body helps shape the material conditions through which we think, feel, recover, create, and relate to others.
Modern food culture wants us to forget all of this.
It wants food to be easy, cheap, fast, addictive, and morally weightless. It wants us to believe that a frozen pocket of refined flour, industrial oils, modified starches, sodium, flavoring agents, and processed ham is simply another option.
Just calories.
Just convenience.
Just people doing their best.
But I do not believe “doing our best” means lowering our standards until nothing matters. Nor do I believe the answer is to shame ordinary people for choosing the foods that our economic and agricultural systems have made cheap, available, familiar, and nearly effortless.
It is easy to preach ancestral nourishment from a well-stocked kitchen.
A serious food ethic must also account for price, time, disability, geography, cooking knowledge, working conditions, and access. Reverence that only the wealthy can afford is not reverence.
That does not mean pretending a Hot Pocket and a nutrient-dense meal are biologically or spiritually interchangeable. They are not.
It means directing our anger beyond the individual shopper and toward a system that has made industrial convenience easier to obtain than genuine nourishment—and then taught us to call that arrangement freedom.
But reverence cannot remain an individual lifestyle choice.
Our relationship with food is shaped by the systems surrounding us: what is affordable, what is available, what is subsidized, what is processed, what is imported, and what people realistically have the time and energy to prepare.
It is one thing to tell people to eat closer to the land. It is another to live inside an economy that has made industrial food cheaper, faster, and more accessible than the local, nutrient-dense food we claim to value.
So, this is not only a question of personal responsibility.
It is also a question of access, power, and who controls the conditions under which nourishment is produced and distributed.
As of May 2026, grocery prices were 2.7 percent higher than they had been one year earlier. Fruits and vegetables were up 6.1 percent. Food away from home was up 3.5 percent. Meanwhile, overall energy prices had risen 23.5 percent over the same period. These increases are layered on top of years of cumulative inflation, and they shape what families can realistically put on the table. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Consumer Price Index Summary—May 2026.” June 10, 2026.
At the same time, the infrastructure surrounding American agriculture is becoming increasingly centralized and digitized.
In February 2026, the USDA announced its “One Farmer, One File” initiative, which is intended to create a single record following each farmer across the Farm Service Agency, Natural Resources Conservation Service, and Risk Management Agency. The department says the system will reduce duplicated paperwork, retire outdated technology, improve program delivery, and be completed in 2028.
“Protecting America’s farmland is protecting America itself, and this work gives USDA the visibility and speed needed to safeguard our food supply,” said USDA Chief Information Officer Sam Berry.
The government presents this as modernization: faster services, stronger cybersecurity, reduced fraud, better disaster response, and greater protection of American farmland and the food supply. Some of those goals are understandable. Farmers should not have to enter the same information into a dozen broken government systems. Disaster assistance should not be trapped behind obsolete technology. Modernization is not inherently sinister.
But neither is it irrational to ask questions when enormous amounts of agricultural information are consolidated through a company deeply involved in defense, intelligence, surveillance, and government analytics.
Who controls the data? Who is permitted to access it? How is that access audited?
Can information gathered for one purpose later be used for another?
What happens when one private contractor becomes embedded deeply enough in public infrastructure that removing it becomes nearly impossible?
How are farmers protected from political misuse, commercial exploitation, cybersecurity failures, or policies imposed by people who understand data models far better than they understand soil, weather, livestock, and living ecosystems?
Food is not merely another sector to be optimized.
Agriculture is biological, regional, unpredictable, and rooted in relationships that cannot be fully represented on a dashboard. Technology may assist farmers. Data may make government programs more efficient. But efficiency and resilience are not the same thing, and greater visibility from the top does not automatically create greater security on the ground.
A resilient food system requires more than centralized information.
It requires independent farmers, healthy soil, regional processing facilities, seed diversity, local knowledge, accessible markets, functioning supply chains, and communities that retain some capacity to feed themselves. It requires people who know how to grow something, preserve something, cook something, and recognize nourishment before a corporation packages and markets it back to them.
That is why the spiritual, biological, economic, and political dimensions of food cannot be separated.
The same reductionist worldview that treats the body as a furnace can treat the farm as a data point.
The same culture that reduces nourishment to calories can reduce agriculture to output.
The same system that tells us a calorie is a calorie can tell us that control is merely efficiency and dependence is merely convenience.
I reject both forms of reductionism.
A body is not a furnace to be calculated.
A farm is not a monocrop to be optimized or a data file to be controlled.
Food is not merely fuel, inventory, content, or data.
It is soil transformed by sunlight. It is water, labor, death, digestion, memory, culture, and life passing into life. To control food is to touch the most intimate point of contact between the individual body, the community, and the living world.
So, the question is no longer only whether we can eat without forgetting.
It is whether we can remember soon enough to reclaim some agency over what feeds us.
What Women Were Never Told About Weight, Aging, and Control
The Science They Never Told Us
This is the first episode of 2026, and I wanted to start the year by slowing things down, getting a bit personal instead of chasing the latest talking points.
At the end of last year, I spent time reading a few books that genuinely stopped me in my tracks. Not because they offered a new diet or a new protocol, but because they challenged something much deeper: the story we’ve been told about discipline, control, and women’s bodies.
There is a reason women’s bodies change across the lifespan. And it has very little to do with willpower, discipline, or personal failure.
In Why Women Need Fat, evolutionary biologists William Lassek and Steven Gaulin make the case that most modern conversations about women’s weight are fundamentally misinformed. Not because women are doing something wrong, but because we’ve built our expectations on a misunderstanding of what female bodies are actually designed to do.
A major part of their argument focuses on how industrialization radically altered the balance of omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids in the modern food supply, particularly through seed oils and ultra-processed foods. They make a compelling case that this shift plays a role in rising obesity and metabolic dysfunction at the population level.
I agree that this imbalance matters, and it’s a topic that deserves its own full episode. At the same time, it does not explain every woman’s story. Diet composition can influence metabolism, but it cannot override prolonged stress, illness, hormonal disruption, nervous system dysregulation, or years of restriction. In my own case, omega-6 intake outside of naturally occurring sources is relatively low and does not account for the changes I’ve experienced. That matters, because it reminds us that biology is layered. No single variable explains a complex adaptive system.
One of the most important ideas in the book is that fat distribution matters more than fat quantity.
Women do not store fat the same way men do. A significant portion of female body fat is stored in the hips and thighs, known as gluteofemoral fat. This fat is metabolically distinct from abdominal or visceral fat. It is more stable, less inflammatory, and relatively enriched in long-chain fatty acids, including DHA, which plays a key role in fetal brain development.
From an evolutionary standpoint, this makes sense. Human infants are born with unusually large, energy-hungry brains. Women evolved to carry nutritional reserves that could support pregnancy and lactation, even during times of scarcity. In that context, having fat on your lower body was not a flaw or a failure. It was insurance.
From this perspective, fat is not excess energy. It is deferred intelligence, stored in anticipation of future need. This is where waist-to-hip ratio enters the conversation.
Across cultures and historical periods, a lower waist-to-hip ratio in women has been associated with reproductive health, metabolic resilience, and successful pregnancies. This is not about thinness, aesthetics, or moral worth. It is about fat function, not fat fear, and about how different tissues behave metabolically inside the body. It is about where fat is stored and how it functions.
And in today’s modern culture we have lost that distinction.
Instead of asking what kind of fat a woman carries, we became obsessed with how much. Instead of understanding fat as tissue with purpose, we turned it into a moral scoreboard. Hips became a problem. Thighs became something to shrink. Curves became something to discipline.
Another central idea in Why Women Need Fat is biological set point.
The authors argue that women’s bodies tend to defend a natural weight range when adequately nourished and not under chronic stress. When women remain below that range through restriction, over-exercise, or prolonged under-fueling, the body does not interpret that as success. It interprets it as threat.
Over time, the body adapts, not out of defiance, but out of protection.
Metabolism slows. Hunger and fullness cues become unreliable. Hormonal systems compensate. When the pressure finally eases, weight often rebounds, sometimes beyond where it started, because the body is trying to restore safety.
From this perspective, midlife weight gain, post-illness weight gain, or weight gain after years of restriction is not mysterious. It is not rebellion. It is regulation.
None of this is taught to women.
Instead, we are told that if our bodies change, we failed. That aging is optional. That discipline and botox should override biology. That the number on the scale tells the whole story.
So, before we talk about culture, family, trauma, or personal experience, this matters:
Women’s bodies are not designed to stay static. They are designed to adapt.
Once you understand that, everything else in this conversation changes.
Why the Body Became the Battlefield
This is where historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg’s work in The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls, provides essential context, but it requires some precision.
Girls have not always been free from shame. Shame itself is not new. What has changed is what women are taught to be ashamed of, and how that shame operates in daily life.
Brumberg asks a question that still feels unresolved today: Why is the body still a girl’s nemesis? Shouldn’t sexually liberated girls feel better about themselves than their corseted counterparts a century ago?
Based on extensive historical research, including diaries written by American girls from the 1830s through the 1990s, Brumberg shows that although girls today enjoy more formal freedoms and opportunities, they are also under more pressure and at greater psychological risk. This is due to a unique convergence of biological vulnerability and cultural forces that turned the adolescent female body into a central site of social meaning during the twentieth century.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, girls did not typically grow up fixated on thinness, calorie control, or constant appearance monitoring. Their diaries were not filled with measurements or food rules. Instead, they wrote primarily about character, self-restraint, moral development, relationships, and their roles within family and community.
One 1892 diary entry reads:
“Resolved, not to talk about myself or feelings. To think before speaking. To work seriously. To be self-restrained in conversation and in actions. Not to let my thoughts wander. To be dignified. Interest myself more in others.”
In earlier eras, female shame was more often tied to behavior, sexuality, obedience, and virtue. The body mattered, but primarily as a moral symbol rather than an aesthetic project requiring constant surveillance and correction.
That changed dramatically in the twentieth century.
Brumberg documents how the mother-daughter connection loosened, particularly around menstruation, sexuality, and bodily knowledge. Where female relatives and mentors once guided girls through these transitions, doctors, advertisers, popular media, and scientific authority increasingly stepped in to fill that role.
At the same time, mass media, advertising, film, and medicalized beauty standards created a new and increasingly exacting ideal of physical perfection. Changing norms around intimacy and sexuality also shifted the meaning of virginity, turning it from a central moral value into an outdated or irrelevant one. What replaced it was not freedom from scrutiny, but a different kind of pressure altogether.
By the late twentieth century, girls were increasingly taught that their bodies were not merely something they inhabited, but something they were responsible for perfecting.
A 1982 diary entry captures this shift starkly:
“I will try to make myself better in any way I possibly can with the help of my budget and baby-sitting money. I will lose weight, get new lenses, already got a new haircut, good makeup, new clothes and accessories.”
What changed was not the presence of shame, but its location. Shame moved inward.
Rather than being externally enforced through rules and prohibitions, it became self-policed. Girls were taught to monitor themselves constantly, to evaluate their bodies from the outside, and to treat appearance as the primary expression of identity and worth.
Brumberg is explicit on this point. The fact that American girls now make their bodies their central project is not an accident or a cultural curiosity. It is a symptom of historical changes that are only beginning to be fully understood.
This is where more recent work, such as Louise Perry’s The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, helps extend Brumberg’s analysis into the present moment. Perry argues that while sexual liberation promised autonomy and empowerment, it often left young women navigating powerful biological and emotional realities without the social structures that once offered protection, guidance, or meaning. In that vacuum, the body became one of the few remaining sites where control still seemed possible.
The result is a paradox. Girls are freer in theory, yet more burdened in practice. The body, once shaped by communal norms and shared female knowledge, becomes a solitary project, managed under intense cultural pressure and constant comparison.
For many girls, this self-surveillance does not begin with magazines or social media. It begins at home, absorbed through tone, comments, and modeling from the women closest to them.
Brumberg argues that body dissatisfaction is often transmitted from mother to daughter, not out of cruelty, but because those mothers inherited the same aesthetic anxieties. Over time, body shame becomes a family inheritance, passed down quietly and persistently.
Some mothers transmit it subtly.
Others do it bluntly.
This matters not because my experience is unique, but because it illustrates what happens when a body shaped by restriction, stress, and cultural pressure is asked to perform indefinitely. Personal stories are often dismissed as anecdotal, but they are where biological theory meets lived reality.
I grew up in a household where my body was not simply noticed. It was scrutinized, compared, and commented on. Comments like that do not fade with time. They shape how you see yourself in mirrors and photographs. They teach you that your body must be managed and monitored. They plant the belief that staying small is the price of safety.
So, I grew up believing that if I could control my body well enough, I could avoid humiliation. I could avoid becoming the punchline. I could avoid being seen in the wrong way.
For a while, I turned that fear into discipline.
The Years Before the Collapse: A Lifetime of Restriction and Survival
Food never felt simple for me. Long before bodybuilding, chronic pain, or COVID, I carried a strained relationship with eating. Growing up in a near constant state of anxiety meant that hunger cues often felt unpredictable. Eating was something to plan around or push through. It rarely felt intuitive or easy.
Because of this, I experimented with diets that replaced real meals with cereal or shakes. I followed plans like the Special K diet. I relied on Carnation Instant Breakfast instead of full meals. My protein intake was low. My fear of gaining weight was high. Restriction became familiar.
Top left is when I started working out obsessively at age 16, top right and bottom photo are from middle school when I was at my “heaviest” that drove the disordered behaviors.
In college, I became a strict vegetarian out of compassion for animals, but I did not understand how to meet my nutritional needs. I was studying dietetics and earning personal training certifications while running frequently and using exercise as a way to maintain control. From the outside, I looked disciplined. Internally, my relationship with food and exercise remained tense and inconsistent.
Later, I became involved in a meal-replacement program through an MLM. I replaced two meals a day with shakes and practiced intermittent fasting framed as “cleanse days.” In hindsight, this was structured under-eating presented as wellness. It fit seamlessly into patterns I had lived in for years.
Eating often felt overwhelming. Cooking felt like a hurdle. Certain textures bothered me. My appetite felt fragile and unreliable. This sensory sensitivity existed long before the parosmia that would come years later. From early on, food was shaped by stress rather than nourishment.
During this entire period, I was also on hormonal birth control, first the NuvaRing and later the Mirena IUD, for nearly a decade. Long-term hormonal modulation can influence mood, inflammation, appetite, and weight distribution. It added another layer of complexity to a system already under strain.
Looking back, I can see that my teens and twenties were marked by near constant restriction. Restriction felt normal. Thriving did not.
The book Why Women Need Fat discusses the idea of a biological weight “set point,” the range a body tends to return to when conditions are stable and adequately nourished. I now understand that I remained below my natural set point for years through force rather than balance. My biology never experienced consistency or safety.
This was the landscape I carried into my thirties.
The Body I Built and the Body That Broke
By the time I entered the bodybuilding world in 2017 and 2018, I already had years of chronic under-eating, over-exercising, and nutrient gaps behind me. Bodybuilding did not create my issues. It amplified them.
I competed in four shows. People admired the discipline and the physique. Internally, my body was weakening. I was overtraining and undereating. By 2019, my immune system began to fail. I developed severe canker sores, sometimes twenty or more at once. I started noticing weight-loss resistance. Everything I had done in the past, was no longer working. On my thirty-fifth birthday, I got shingles. My energy crashed. My emotional bandwidth narrowed. My body was asking for rest, but I did not know how to slow down.
Around this time, I was also navigating eating disorder recovery. Learning how to eat without panic or rigid control was emotionally exhausting even under ideal circumstances… but little did I know things were about to take a massive turn for the worst.
COVID, Sensory Loss, and the Unraveling of Appetite
After getting sick with the ‘vid late 2020, everything shifted again. I developed parosmia, a smell and taste distortion that made many foods taste rotten or chemical. Protein and cooked foods often tasted spoiled. Herbs smelled like artificial chemical. Eating became distressing and, at times, impossible.
My appetite dropped significantly. There were periods where my intake was very low, yet my weight continued to rise. This is not uncommon following illness or prolonged stress. The body often shifts into energy conservation, prioritizing survival overweight regulation.
Weight gain became another source of grief. Roughly thirty pounds over the next five years. I feel embarrassed and avoid photographs. I often worry about how others will perceive me.
If this experience resonates, it is important to say this clearly: your body is not betraying you. It is responding to stress, illness, and prolonged strain in the way bodies are designed to respond.
When years of restriction, intense exercise, chronic stress, illness, hormonal shifts, and emotional trauma accumulate, the body often enters a protective state. Metabolism slows. Hormonal signaling shifts. Hunger cues become unreliable. Weight gain or resistance to weight loss can occur even during periods of low intake, because energy regulation is being driven by survival physiology rather than simple calorie balance.
This is not failure. It is physiology.
The calories-in, calories-out model does not account for thyroid suppression, nervous system activation, sleep disruption, pain, trauma, or metabolic adaptation. It reduces a complex biological system to arithmetic.
Women are not machines. We are adaptive systems built for survival. Sometimes resilience looks like holding onto energy when the body does not feel safe.
Despite this biological reality, we live in a culture that ties women’s value to discipline and appearance. When women gain weight, even under extreme circumstances, we blame ourselves before questioning the system.
Diet culture frames shrinking as virtue.
Toxic positivity encourages acceptance without context.
Industrial food environments differ radically from those our ancestors evolved in.
Medical systems often dismiss women’s pain and metabolic complexity.
Social media amplifies comparison and moralizes body size.
None of this is your fault. And all of it shapes your experience.
This is why understanding the science matters. This is why telling the truth matters. This is why sharing stories matters.
In the book, More Than a Body, Lindsay and Lexie Kite describe how women are taught to relate to themselves through constant self-monitoring. Instead of living inside our bodies, we learn to watch ourselves from the outside. We assess how we look, how we are perceived, and whether our bodies are acceptable in a given moment.
This constant self-surveillance does real harm. It pulls attention away from hunger, pain, fatigue, and intuition. It trains women to override bodily signals in favor of appearance management. And over time, it creates a split where the body is treated as a project to control rather than a system to understand or care for.
When you layer this kind of self-objectification on top of chronic stress, restriction, illness, and trauma, the result is not empowerment. It is disconnection. And disconnection makes it even harder to hear what the body needs when something is wrong.
Weight gain is not just a biological response. It becomes a moral verdict. And that is how women end up fighting bodies that are already struggling to keep them alive.
The Inheritance Ends Here
For a long time, I believed that breaking generational cycles only applied to mothers and daughters. I do not have children, so I assumed what I inherited would simply end with me, unchanged.
Brumberg’s work helped me see this differently.
What we inherit is not passed down only through parenting. It moves through tone, silence, and self-talk. It appears in how women speak about their bodies in front of others. It lives in the way shame is normalized.
I inherited a legacy of body shame. Even on the days when I still feel its weight, I am choosing not to repeat it.
For me, the inheritance ends with telling the truth about this journey and refusing to speak to my body with the same cruelty I absorbed growing up. It ends here.
Closing the Circle: Your Body Is Not Broken
I wish I could end this with a simple story of resolution. I cannot. I am still in the middle of this. I still grieve. I still struggle with eating and movement. I am still learning how to inhabit a body that feels unfamiliar.
But I know this: my body is not my enemy. She is not malfunctioning. She is adapting to a lifetime of stress, illness, restriction, and emotional weight.
If you are in a similar place, I hope this offers permission to stop fighting yourself and start understanding the patterns your body is following. Not because everything will suddenly improve, but because clarity is often the first form of compassion.
Your body is not betraying you. She is trying to keep you here.
And sometimes the most honest thing we can do is admit that we are still finding our way.
References
Brumberg, J. J. (1997). The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls. Random House.
Lassek, W. D., & Gaulin, S. J. C. (2011). Why Women Need Fat: How “Healthy” Food Makes Us Gain Excess Weight and the Surprising Solution to Losing It Forever. Hudson Street Press.
Kite, L., & Kite, L. (2020). More Than a Body: Your Body Is an Instrument, Not an Ornament. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Scientific and academic sources
Lassek, W. D., & Gaulin, S. J. C. (2006). Changes in body fat distribution in relation to parity in American women. Evolution and Human Behavior, 27(3), 173–185.
Lassek, W. D., & Gaulin, S. J. C. (2008). Waist–hip ratio and cognitive ability. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 275(1644), 193–199.
Dulloo, A. G., Jacquet, J., & Montani, J. P. (2015). Adaptive thermogenesis in human body-weight regulation. Obesity Reviews, 16(S1), 33–43.
Fothergill, E., et al. (2016). Persistent metabolic adaptation after weight loss. Obesity, 24(8), 1612–1619.
Kyle, U. G., et al. (2004). Body composition interpretation. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 79(6), 955–962.
Simopoulos, A. P. (2016). Omega-6/omega-3 balance and obesity risk. Nutrients, 8(3), 128.
Trauma, stress, and nervous system context
Sapolsky, R. M. (2004). Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. Henry Holt and Company.
Walker, P. (2013). Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving. Azure Coyote Books.
When I first joined a multi-level marketing company, it felt like destiny. Freedom. Empowerment. Community. So much so that I tattooed “trust the process” on my body as a daily reminder. But the deeper I got, the more I noticed the cracks: emotional manipulation, magical thinking, and an almost religious silencing of doubts.
If you missed last week’s episode here is the deep dive of my own experience.
That’s why I’m thrilled to share this week’s podcast interview with Robert L. FitzPatrick. Robert has been sounding the alarm on MLMs for decades, long before it was common to describe them as cult-like. He’s the author of Ponzinomics: The Untold Story of Multi-Level Marketing, co-author of False Profits, and a respected expert cited by the BBC, The New York Times, and courts alike. For years, he’s been giving people the tools (language, data, and perspective) to recognize MLMs for what they truly are: predatory business models, not opportunities.
Here is the image of the “Airplane Game” we reference in the interview
In this episode, we cover:
The Spark: Robert’s first encounter with a scam-like business in the 1980s, which pushed him into decades of research on MLMs and fraud—mirroring the way my own personal MLM experience prompted deep self-examination.
Why “Not All MLMs” Is a Myth: The business model itself is designed to funnel money upward, making it impossible for the vast majority to succeed, regardless of the company or product.
Puritan Theology & Prosperity: How old ideas linking wealth to virtue evolved into the prosperity gospel, and how MLMs exploit that mindset.
Cultural Hooks: From hustle culture to self-improvement mantras and spiritual undertones, MLMs borrow heavily from mainstream culture to recruit and retain followers.
Narrative Control: How pre-scripted objections, emotional manipulation, and silencing tactics maintain loyalty and block critical thinking—something I’ve noticed both in MLMs and high-control religious groups.
The Hard Numbers: Realistic odds of success are brutal—most recruits lose money, almost all quit within a year, and mandatory purchases like “Healthy Mind and Body” programs or the Isabody Challenge trap participants financially and emotionally.
Legality & Political Protection: If MLMs are fundamentally unfair, how are they still legal? And what protects them politically?
Beyond the MLM Mindset: MLMs don’t just drain your wallet—they reshape identities, fracture communities, and erode trust in yourself and others.
This conversation is essential for anyone curious about MLMs, whether you’ve been drawn into one, have friends or family involved, or are simply interested in understanding how these systems work under the surface. Robert’s insights give us not just the numbers, but the language and tools to recognize the scam and the courage to break free from it.
Tune in for an eye-opening conversation that goes beyond the hype and digs into the real human cost of MLMs.
Today we’re unpacking several interwoven topics I’ve explored in my writing before why people get drawn into high-control environments and how forgiveness in Christian culture is often weaponized, not as a path to healing, but as a tool to silence victims and protect institutions. This isn’t just a personal issue; it’s an institutional one.
This came into sharp focus after Erika Kirk, Charlie Kirk’s widow, said she forgives her husband’s killer. I’m not here to critique her grief, that’s her own process. What I want to explore is the cultural framework that makes this kind of forgiveness expected, celebrated, and even demanded in evangelical spaces. I have a MUCH MUCH longer blog linked here if you want to go much deeper than I plan to cover today.
Before even touching forgiveness, let’s pause on why this moment is so primed for revivalist recruiting. Sociologists and psychologists have long noted that people are most vulnerable to high-control groups (whether churches or MLMs) during times of disruption and emotional chaos.
Laura Dodsworth, in her book Free Your Mind, calls this a “blip.” A blip is any disruption that cracks our normal defenses: loss, illness, exhaustion, grief. Even smaller stressors (Think HALT) Hunger, anger/anxiety, loneliness or being tired can chip away at our resistance. Push long enough, and the conscious mind collapses into a state of openness, hungry for belonging and ready to absorb new narratives.
That’s exactly what makes funerals, memorials, and major crises fertile ground for recruitment. Orwell nailed it in 1984:
“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in shapes of your own choosing.”
Jehovah’s Witnesses even admit to targeting what they call “ripe fruit”-the recently bereaved. In Brazil, recruiters have driven cars with loudspeakers through cemeteries on All Souls’ Day, broadcasting sermons to tens of thousands of mourners. That isn’t compassion; it’s strategic exploitation. Naomi Klein would call it the Shock Doctrine: trauma as an entry point for control.
We’re seeing the same tactics play out online right now. Someone posts about “returning to church” after years away, and within hours their feed fills with love-bombing-likes, comments, and digital hugs. It feels affirming, but it’s also classic manipulation: vulnerability plus attention equals a wide-open door into manipulation.
And so it’s no surprise that revivalist energy is surging in the wake of Kirk’s death.
Situational vulnerability + orchestrated belonging = fertile ground for expansion.
The Myth of “Christlike” Forgiveness
This brings us back to forgiveness. I want to be CLEAR HERE, obviously Erika Kirk wasn’t coerced into forgiving, but in evangelical culture forgiveness is never entirely personal, it’s baked into the ethos. The more you forgive, the more “Christlike” you appear.
Matthew 6:14–15“For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.”
That expectation is dangerous. Forgiveness is sacred when it grows out of genuine healing. But when demanded prematurely, it becomes a weapon. Survivors are told to “forgive as you’ve been forgiven” before they’re ready, before their pain is acknowledged, and typically long before their abuser is held accountable.
Pete Walker, in The Tao of Fully Feeling, argues that forgiveness is not a one-time act but a continual choice and that choice only works after grief, rage, and hurt are fully processed. Skip that, and forgiveness turns into compliance, a way to silence anger and keep victims stuck.
In other words: real forgiveness empowers the survivor. Weaponized forgiveness protects the institution.
How Churches Use Forgiveness to Protect Themselves
We’ve seen this pattern across evangelical institutions:
The Guidepost Report (2022) exposed that SBC leadership maintained a secret list of over 700 abusive pastors, shielding them from consequences while survivors were ignored, discredited, or retaliated against.
Jennifer Lyell, an SBC abuse survivor, was vilified by church leadership when she came forward. Instead of support, she was publicly shamed, and her abuser faced no consequences.
Christa Brown, another survivor, spent years advocating for reform after being assaulted by her youth pastor. The SBC’s response? Stonewalling, gaslighting, and further silencing.
Jehovah’s Witnesses have a longstanding pattern of protecting sexual predatorsunder their “two-witness rule,” which requires at least two people to witness abuse for it to be considered valid. This impossible standard allows abusers to go unpunished while victims are shunned for speaking out.
In each case, forgiveness isn’t about healing. It’s about compliance, silence, and institutional survival.
Nietzsche, Freud, and the Cycles of Guilt
This isn’t new. Nietzsche warned that Abrahamic religions hijacked older wisdom traditions, reframing them into systems of obedience rather than life-affirmation. Freud saw religion as a kind of collective neurosis, trapping people in loops of guilt and repression.
What is ironic, Freud’s own psychoanalytic model looks eerily similar to the religious structures he critiqued. As historian Bakan and others have suggested, Freud may have drawn (consciously or not) on Jewish mysticism, replacing priests with analysts, confession with therapy, sin with repressed desire. In trying to explain away religion, Freud ended up reproducing its patterns in secular form. In other words, the pattern of taking human vulnerability and channeling it into control runs deep.
And this is where Laura Dodsworth’s idea of the “blip” becomes so relevant. The blip is that moment of rupture…when you’re grieving, disoriented, exhausted, or otherwise cracked open. Your defenses are down, your critical mind isn’t firing at full strength, and the brain is searching for something to hold onto. In these liminal spaces, new ideologies rush in.
That’s why this moment is so ripe for revivalist energy. It’s not just about forgiveness…it’s about the total atmosphere of grief and disruption that can act as a blip. And high-control groups know it. It’s why political movements, religious revivals, and even MLMs wait for crisis points: job loss, divorce, a death in the family. The blip isn’t compassionately held-it’s exploited.
So when we watch something like Kirk’s memorial, we’re not just seeing personal mourning. We’re watching a social script unfold, one that revivalists know how to activate. In this script, forgiveness, obedience, and “turning your life over” aren’t neutral virtues—they become instruments of recruitment. Which means the real question isn’t should people forgive, but who benefits when forgiveness and emotional openness are demanded at the exact moment people are least able to resist?
Sources & Recommended Reading
Laura Dodsworth, Free Your Mind: The New World of Manipulation and How to Resist It (2023) – esp. Chapter 10, “Watch Out for the Blip.”
George Orwell, 1984 (1949) – “Power is in tearing human minds to pieces…”
Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007).
Pete Walker, The Tao of Fully Feeling: Harvesting Forgiveness out of Blame (1996).
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (1887); The Antichrist (1895).
Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion (1927).
David Bakan, Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition (1958).
When Willpower Isn’t Enough: Media, Metabolism, and the Myth of Transformation
You’re listening to Taste Test Thursdays–a space for the deep dives, the passion projects, and the stories that didn’t quite fit the main course. Today, we’re hitting pause on the intense spiritual and political conversations we usually have to focus on something just as powerful: how technology shapes our bodies, minds, and behaviors. We’ll be unpacking a recent Netflix documentary that highlights research and concepts we’ve explored before, shining a light on the subtle ways screens and media program us and why it matters more than ever.
I have a confession: I watched The Biggest Loser. Yep. Cringe, right? Back in 2008, when I was just starting to seriously focus on personal training (I got my first certification in 2006 but really leaned in around 2008), this show was everywhere. It was intense, dramatic, and promised transformation—a visual fairy tale of sweat, willpower, and discipline.
Looking back now, it’s so painfully cringe, but I wasn’t alone. Millions of people were glued to the screens, absorbing what the show told us about health, fat loss, and success. And the new Netflix documentary Fit for TV doesn’t hold back. It exposes the extreme, sometimes illegal methods used to push contestants: caffeine pills given by Jillian Michaels, emotional manipulation, extreme exercise protocols, and food as a weapon. Watching it now, I can see how this programming shaped not just contestants, but an entire generation of viewers—including me.
Screens Aren’t Just Entertainment
Laura Dodsworth nails it in Free Your Mind:
“Television is relaxing, but it also is a source of direct and indirect propaganda. It shapes your perception of reality. What’s more, you’re more likely to be ‘programmed’ by the programming when you are relaxed.”
This is key. Television isn’t just a casual distraction. It teaches, it socializes, and it normalizes behavior. A study by Lowery & DeFleur (Milestones in Mass Communication Research, 1988) called TV a “major source of observational learning.” Millions of people aren’t just entertained—they’re learning what’s normal, acceptable, and desirable.
Dodsworth also warns:
“Screens do not show the world; they obscure. The television screen erects visual screens in our mind and constructs a fake reality that obscures the truth.”
And that’s exactly what reality diet shows did. They created a distorted narrative: extreme restriction and punishment equals success. If you just try harder, work longer, and push further, your body will cooperate. Except, biology doesn’t work like that.
The Metabolic Reality
Let’s dig into the science. The Netflix documentary Fit for TV references the infamous Biggest Loser study, which tracked contestants years after the show ended. Here’s what happened:
Contestants followed extreme protocols: ~1,200 calories a day, 90–120 minutes of intense daily exercise (sometimes up to 5–8 hours), and “Franken-foods” like fat-free cheese or energy drinks.
They lost massive amounts of weight on TV. Dramatic, visible transformations. Ratings gold.
Six years later, researchers checked back: most regained ~70% of the weight. But the real kicker? Their resting metabolic rate (RMR) was still burning 700 fewer calories per day than baseline—500 calories less than expected based on regained body weight.
In everyday terms? Imagine you used to burn 2,000 calories a day just by living. After extreme dieting, your body was burning only 1,300–1,500 calories a day, even though you weighed almost the same. That’s like your body suddenly deciding it needs to hold on to every calorie, making it much harder to lose weight—or even maintain it—no matter how “good” you eat or how much you exercise.
This is huge. It shows extreme dieting doesn’t just fail long-term; it fundamentally rewires your metabolism.
Why?
Leptin crash: The hormone that tells your brain you’re full plummeted during the show. After weight regain, leptin rebounded, but RMR didn’t. Normally, these rise and fall together—but the link was broken.
Loss of lean mass: Contestants lost ~25 pounds of muscle. Regaining some of it didn’t restore metabolic function.
Hormonal havoc: Chronic calorie deficits and overtraining disrupted thyroid, reproductive, and adrenal hormones. Weight loss resistance, missed periods, hair loss, and constant cold are all part of the aftermath.
Put bluntly: your body is not passive. Extreme dieting triggers survival mode, conserving energy, increasing hunger, and slowing metabolism.
I know this from my own experience. Between May 2017 and October 2018, I competed in four bodybuilding competitions. I didn’t prioritize recovery or hormone balance, and I pushed my body way too hard. The metabolic consequences? Echoes of the Biggest Loser study:
Slowed metabolism after prep phases.
Hormonal swings that made maintaining progress harder.
Mental fatigue and burnout from extreme restriction and exercise.
Diet culture and TV had me convinced that suffering = transformation. But biology doesn’t care about your willpower. Extreme restriction is coercion, not empowerment.
This isn’t just a TV problem. The same mechanisms appear in social media fitness culture, or “fitspiration.” In a previous podcast and blog, From Diary Entries to Digital Screens: How Beauty Ideals and Sexualization Have Transformed Over Time, we discussed the dangerous myth: hard work guarantees results.
Fitness influencers, trainers, and the “no excuses” culture sell the illusion that discipline alone equals success. Consistency and proper nutrition matter—but genetics set the foundation. Ignoring this truth fuels:
Unrealistic expectations: People blame themselves when they don’t achieve Instagram-worthy physiques.
Overtraining & injury: Chasing impossible ideals leads to chronic injuries and burnout.
Disordered eating & supplement abuse: Extreme diets, excessive protein, or PEDs are often used to push past natural limits.
The industry keeps genetics under wraps because the truth doesn’t sell. Expensive programs, supplement stacks, and influencer promises rely on people believing they can “buy” someone else’s results. Many extreme physiques are genetically gifted and often enhanced, yet presented as sheer willpower. The result? A culture of self-blame and impossible standards.
Fitspiration and Self-Objectification
The 2023 study in Computers in Human Behavior found that exposure to fitspiration content increases body dissatisfaction, especially among women who already struggle with self-image. Fitspo encourages the internalized gaze that John Berger described in Ways of Seeing:
“A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself… she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman.”
One part of a woman is constantly judging her body; the other exists as a reflection of an ideal. Fitness becomes performative, not functional. Anxiety, depression, disordered eating, and self-objectification follow. Fitness culture no longer focuses on strength or health—it’s about performing an idealized body for an audience.
The Dangerous Pipeline: Fitspo to Porn Culture
This extends further. Fitspiration primes women to see themselves as objects, which feeds directly into broader sexualization. Porn culture and the sex industry reinforce the same dynamic: self-worth tied to appearance, desire, and external validation. Consider these stats:
Over 134,000 porn site visits per minute globally.
88% of porn scenes contain physical aggression, 49% verbal aggression, with women overwhelmingly targeted (Bridges et al., 2010).
Most youth are exposed to pornography between ages 11–13 (Wright et al., 2021).
91.5% of men and 60.2% of women report watching porn monthly (Solano, Eaton, & O’Leary, 2020).
Fitspiration teaches the same objectification: value is appearance-dependent. Social media and reality TV prime us to obsess over performance and image, extending beyond fitness into sexualization and body commodification.
Contestants were given illegal caffeine pills to keep energy up.
Trainers manipulated emotions for drama—heightened stress, shame, and competitiveness.
Food was weaponized—rationed, withheld, or turned into rewards/punishments.
Exercise protocols weren’t just intense—they were unsafe, designed to produce dramatic visuals for the camera.
The documentary also makes it clear: these methods weren’t isolated incidents. They were systemic, part of a machine that broadcasts propaganda as entertainment.
The Bigger Picture: Propaganda, Screens, and Social Conditioning
Dodsworth again:
“Watching TV encourages normative behavior.”
Shows like The Biggest Loser don’t just affect contestants—they socialize an audience. Millions of viewers internalize: “Success = willpower + suffering + restriction.” Social media amplifies this further, nudging us constantly toward behaviors dictated by advertisers, algorithms, and curated narratives.
George Orwell imagined a world of compulsory screens in 1984. We aren’t there yet—but screens still shape behavior, expectations, and self-perception.
The good news? Unlike Orwell’s telescreens, we can turn off our TVs. We can watch critically. We can question the values being sold to us. Dodsworth reminds us:
“Fortunately for us, we can turn off our television and we should.”
Breaking Free
Here’s the takeaway for me—and for anyone navigating diet culture and fitness media:
Watch critically: Ask, “What is this really teaching me?”
Respect biology: Your body fights extreme restriction—it’s not lazy or weak.
Pause before you absorb: Screens are powerful teachers, but you have the final say.
The bigger question isn’t just “What should I eat?” or “How should I train?” It’s:
Who’s controlling the story my mind is telling me, and who benefits from it?
Reality shows like The Biggest Loser and even social media feeds are not neutral. They are propaganda machines—wrapped in entertainment, designed to manipulate perception, reward suffering, and sell ideals that are biologically unsafe.
I’ve lived some of those lessons firsthand. The scars aren’t just physical—they’re mental, hormonal, and metabolic. But the first step to freedom is seeing the screen for what it really is, turning it off, and reclaiming control over your body, mind, and reality.
Thank you for taking the time to read/listen!
🙏 Please help this podcast reach a larger audience in hope to edify & encourage others! To do so: leave a 5⭐️ review and send it to a friend! Thank you for listening! I’d love to hear from you, find me on Instagram! @taste0ftruth , @megan_mefit , Pinterest! Substack and on X!
Until then, maintain your curiosity, embrace skepticism, and keep tuning in! 🎙️🔒
If you’re a woman in midlife witnessing changes in your body, let’s be honest—hearing one more expert say “just move more and eat less” might make you scream. That tired, oversimplified advice ignores the very real ways our bodies change—and the decades of life we’ve already lived in them.
Midlife, generally defined as the ages between 37 and 65, isn’t just a calendar phase. It’s a biological, emotional, and identity-shifting chapter. For women, it often marks the beginning of perimenopause—the transitional period leading up to menopause, when the ovaries gradually produce less estrogen. Menopause itself is defined as the 12-month mark after your final menstrual period, but the hormonal fluctuations and symptoms often begin years before and can last well beyond that point.
To really understand what’s happening in our bodies now, we have to rewind the clock.
From puberty, our bodies have been shaped by an elegant hormonal dance. Estrogen, progesterone, and to a lesser extent testosterone, govern everything from our cycle to our skin, from our energy to our emotional responses. These hormones rise and fall in predictable patterns until they don’t. And when they don’t, you feel it.
Hot flashes. Sleep disruptions. Brain fog. Mood swings. Slower recovery from workouts. A scale that doesn’t seem to budge no matter what you do. And the silent undercurrents like the gradual loss of bone density—osteopenia—that often go unnoticed until it’s too late.
These aren’t random annoyances. They’re signals. And they deserve to be understood.
In this post and in today’s podcast episode, I talk with registered dietitian and research wizard Maryann Jacobsen about what actually helps us thrive during perimenopause and menopause. We get into why muscle is metabolic gold, why cardio isn’t always the answer, and how biofeedback your body’s own cues like hunger, energy, sleep, and mood can tell you more about what’s working than any calorie tracker or influencer’s reel ever could.
We also challenge the idea that your bathroom scale is the best measure of health. Spoiler alert: it’s not. Tools like DEXA scans provide deeper insight into your bone density and lean mass—two things that matter more than “weight” ever could in this stage of life. And while your smart scale using bioelectrical impedance might not be as accurate, it can still help you track general trends if you know how to interpret it.
One part of our conversation that hit me hard was Maryann’s mention of the body fat research around fertility. Scientists have found that a minimum of 17% body fat is required just to get a menstrual cycle, and about 22% is needed to maintain ovulation. But here’s the real shocker: in mature women, regular ovulatory cycles are often supported best at 26–28% body fat. (PMID: 3117838, 2282736) That means what many of us have been taught to chase ultra-lean physiques (around 17 BF% or so), chronic calorie restriction, or overtraining can actually backfire on our reproductive health, bone health, and overall vitality.
In populations where food is scarce or physical demands are high, we see patterns: delayed first periods, longer gaps between births, earlier menopause. It’s the body adapting for survival. But in modern life, we sometimes impose these same conditions on ourselves in the name of “fitness.”
And while estrogen usually gets the spotlight in menopause care often treated as the main character it’s progesterone that deserves a standing ovation. Many women are told they “need progesterone” just to protect themselves from estrogen’s effects, as if it’s merely a buffer. But that undersells its brilliance.
The name progesterone literally means “pro-gestation,” but its impact goes far beyond fertility. Progesterone is a master regulator. It stabilizes tissues, supports metabolic balance, calms inflammation, protects against stress, and even plays a role in brain health. While estrogen stimulates, progesterone shields. While estrogen builds, progesterone restores.
Fascinatingly, our bodies produce far more progesterone than estrogen especially after ovulation and during pregnancy. That’s not a fluke. It reflects just how critical progesterone is to our overall well-being.
So when ovulation slows or disappears in midlife, it’s not just your period going quiet. It’s this entire downstream network of hormonal resilience especially progesterone that starts to fade. And that’s when symptoms ramp up.
Understanding this isn’t just about managing menopause. It’s about honoring your biology, updating your strategy, and supporting your body like the powerful, responsive system it actually is.
If we want to balance and optimize our hormones in midlife, we have to re-evaluate our goals. This isn’t about grinding harder it’s about getting smarter. And to get smarter, we need to zoom out.
Ovulation isn’t just some fertility footnote-it’s the main event of your cycle. But many of us were taught that the bleed is the cycle. Nope. That’s just the after-party. The headliner? Ovulation.
Why does this matter in midlife?
Because ovulation is what triggers the production of progesterone a hormone that plays a critical role in metabolism, mood, sleep, brain function, and bone health. And spoiler: progesterone is the first to dip off the radar as we enter perimenopause. That’s why your energy feels off, your sleep gets weird, and your tolerance for stress tanks. Your body isn’t broken—it’s adapting.
Here’s where things click into place: your body will only ovulate consistently if it feels safe and nourished. That means you’re eating enough, not overtraining, and not living in a cortisol-fueled chaos spiral.
Ovulation isn’t just about reproduction it’s a vital sign of health. And the two hormones that anchor your entire cycle, estrogen and progesterone, do so much more than regulate periods.
From bone density to brain function, from insulin sensitivity to mitochondrial health, these hormones influence nearly every system in your body. So, when they fluctuate…. or flatline… you feel it. Not just in your body, but in your entire day to day experience.
So, let’s break the rules, rewrite the midlife playbook, and finally start listening to the wisdom our bodies have been whispering all along.
Hey everyone, welcome to the very first episode of Taste Test Thursdays! If you’re new here, this is a special bonus series where I’ll be giving you a behind-the-scenes look at the topics I didn’t get a chance to fully explore during Season 3 of Taste of Truth Tuesdays. Think of this as the leftovers—the ideas that were simmering on the back burner but never made it onto the main plate.
But this series isn’t just about what I didn’t cover. It’s about giving you a deeper look into my thought process—how I research, why I choose certain topics, and the unfiltered thoughts I don’t always include in the main episodes. Some weeks will be casual, some will be research-heavy, and some, like today, will be personal.
Because for this first episode, I want to start with a topic I’ve touched on but never fully shared: my own experience with chronic pain and how it shaped not only my fitness journey but my entire approach to health and resilience.
The Story Behind My Chronic Pain & Fitness Journey
Let’s rewind a bit. Growing up, I was always active, but I never saw fitness as something I’d build my life around. That changed when I started dealing with chronic pain. At first, it was subtle—nagging aches, stiffness that didn’t go away. But then it became something more. Pain wasn’t just an inconvenience; it dictated what I could and couldn’t do. Doctors didn’t always have clear answers, and at times, it felt like I was being dismissed.
That frustration pushed me to start researching on my own-diving into biomechanics, nutrition, corrective exercise, and the ways the nervous system and pain are intertwined. I wasn’t just looking for relief; I was trying to understand why my body was responding this way. And what I found changed everything.
A while back, I wrote a blog post about this—one that really captures my experience in a way that feels raw and honest. And instead of just summarizing it, I want to share it with you here. So, here’s that piece, in its entirety.
This experience didn’t just lead me into fitness; it redefined how I approach movement altogether. It made me realize that pain isn’t just a physical experience—it’s emotional, neurological, and deeply personal. It’s why I’m so passionate about evidence-based approaches to health and why I push back against a lot of the oversimplified fitness narratives out there.
I’ve seen firsthand how the right training, nutrition, and mindset shifts can change the way someone interacts with their own body. And I’ve also seen the damage of quick-fix culture—where people are told they just need more discipline, or worse, that their pain is all in their head.
What I Wish More People Knew About Chronic Pain & Fitness
One of the biggest misconceptions I had to unlearn is that pain automatically means damage. That’s something I wish more people understood. Pain is real, but it’s also complex—it can be influenced by stress, trauma, movement patterns, and even the stories we tell ourselves about our bodies. Learning that was a game changer for me.
Another thing? There is no one-size-fits-all approach. Healing, strength, and movement look different for everyone, and that’s okay.
What to Expect From Taste Test Thursdays
So, that’s today’s leftover—a topic I didn’t get to fully explore in Season 3 but felt like now was the right time to share. But Taste Test Thursdays won’t always be this personal. Some weeks, I’ll take you inside my research process—breaking down how I fact-check, where I find sources, and the information I don’t trust. Other weeks, I’ll revisit ideas I didn’t have time for, explore unfiltered takes, or answer your burning questions.
Next week, we’ll be talking about how I put together my episodes—how I decide on topics, what I look for in sources, and some of the biggest red flags I watch out for when researching.
I’d love to hear from you—what’s been your experience with pain and fitness? Have you ever had to unlearn things about your own body? Let me know over on Instagram or in the comments if you’re listening somewhere that allows it.
Thanks for being here, and as always—maintain your curiosity, embrace skepticism, and keep tuning in!
I had a lot of different topics in mind for my final solo episode of Taste of Truth Tuesdays Season 3. For example, The Stress-Mitochondria Connection: How B vitamins, Taurine and Magnesium Fuel your Energy, A world without religion: Freedom or Fragmentation, How Emotional Trauma contributes to Chronic Pain or the Social Media Dilemma How to Break Free from the Digital Grip… But then, a new development landed right in my lap—one that perfectly encapsulates the concerning trends I’ve been observing in the deconstruction, ex-Christian, anti-MLM, and ex-cult communities.
My friend Brandie, who I had on in Season 2 for the episode From Serendipity to Scrutiny, recently blocked me. And why? Because I simply pushed back and asked questions. We’d had some private conversations in the DMs that had already raised red flags for me, but apparently, even the slightest bit of pushback was enough to get me cut off. This isn’t just about one friendship—it’s about a much bigger pattern I’ve seen unfolding.
The Deconstruction Pipeline: When Leaving a High-Control Group Means Entering Another
One of the biggest ironies in the ExChristian circles is how quickly people flee high-control religious environments only to land in equally dogmatic ideological spaces. This isn’t a coincidence—it’s human nature. As Jonathan Haidt lays out in The Righteous Mind, our reasoning evolved more for argumentation than truth-seeking. We are wired for confirmation bias, and when we leave one belief system, we often replace it with another that feels equally absolute but now appears “rational” or “liberating.”
This is where figures like Steven Hassan and Janja Lalich come in (because this isn’t just about Brandie) self-proclaimed experts on cults who, ironically, exhibit the same control tactics they claim to expose. Hassan, a former Moonie turned cult deprogrammer, has made a career out of helping people escape authoritarian religious systems. But a deeper look at his work reveals an ideological bent (it’s hard to ignore). He frequently frames conservative or traditional religious beliefs as inherently cult-like while giving progressive or leftist movements a pass. He has called Trumpism a cult but is conspicuously silent on the high-control tactics within certain progressive activist spaces. His criteria for what constitute undue influence seem to shift depending on the political context, (BITE model) making his framework less about critical thinking and more about reinforcing his preferred ideological narrative. I did what Hassan won’t: use his own model to break down the mind control tactics of the extreme left.
Janja Lalich follows a similar pattern. A (supposedly) former Marxist-Leninist, she applies her cult analysis primarily to religious and right-wing groups while glossing over the coercive elements in the far-left spaces she once occupied (or still does). Her work is valuable in breaking down how high-demand groups operate, but she, too, appears to have blind spots when it comes to ideological echo chambers outside of the religious sphere. These represent a pattern rather than an isolated incident. Other platforms like (The New Evangelicals,Dr. Pete Enns (The Bible for Normal People), Eve was framed,Jesus Unfollower, Dr. Laura Anderson just to name a few.) highlight control tactics when they appear in traditional or conservative groups but fail to apply the same scrutiny to their own ideological circles.
This selective analysis creates a dangerous illusion: it allows people leaving fundamentalist religious spaces to believe they are now “free thinkers” while unknowingly adopting another rigid belief system. The deconstruction pipeline often leads former evangelicals straight into progressive activism, where purity tests, ideological loyalty, and social shaming operate just as effectively as they did in the church. The language changes: “sin” becomes “problematic,” “heresy” becomes “harmful rhetoric”, but the mechanisms remain the same.
Haidt’s work on moral foundations helps explain this phenomenon. Progressive and conservative worldviews are built on different moral intuitions, but both can be taken to extremes. The key to avoiding ideological capture is intellectual humility—the ability to recognize that no belief system has a monopoly on truth and that reason itself can be weaponized for tribalism.
John Stuart Mill warned of this centuries ago: the greatest threat to truth is not outright censorship but the cultural and social pressures that make certain ideas unspeakable. Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s The Coddling of the American Mind echoes this concern, showing how overprotective thinking and emotional reasoning have created a generation that confuses disagreement with harm.
Franklin O’Kanu’s concept of the “fake intellectual” is particularly relevant here—people who claim to be champions of free thought while aggressively enforcing ideological orthodoxy.
In this episode, through my experience with Brandie, I’ll illustrate how skepticism is selectively applied, and how ‘critical thinking’ communities can become just as dogmatic as the systems they reject. And unlike Hassan or Lalich, my connection with Brandie was personal. And that’s why I felt this warranted an entire podcast episode. Because what happened with her is a microcosm of a larger issue: people leaving high-control spaces only to re-enter new ones. They are convinced that this time, they’ve finally found the “truth.” Spoiler alert: that’s not how truth works.
So, let’s talk about it.
Blocked for Asking Questions
Recently, Brandie posted on Instagram about DARVO—a psychological tactic where abusers Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender to avoid accountability. I agree that MLMs use DARVO. But I wanted to add friendly pushback, that I’ve noticed anti-MLM advocates use similar tactics to silence critics—especially when it comes to questioning the food industry— but she had turned the comments off.
DARVO stands for Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender—a tactic frequently used by abusers, cult leaders, and high-control groups when they’re called out. It flips accountability on its head, making the person asking legitimate questions seem like the aggressor while the actual manipulator plays the victim.
How MLMs Use DARVO
Multi-Level Marketing (MLM) schemes thrive on DARVO because their entire business model is built on deception. Here’s a classic example:
Deny – A distributor is confronted with the fact that 99% of people in MLMs lose money. Instead of addressing the data, they deny it completely: “That’s just a myth! I know tons of people making six figures!”
Attack – When pressed further, they go on the offensive, accusing the skeptic of being negative or jealous: “Wow, you’re so close-minded. No wonder you’re not successful!”
Reverse Victim and Offender – Finally, they paint themselves as the victim and the questioner as the bully: “I’m just a woman trying to build a business and empower others. Why are you trying to tear me down?”
This tactic shuts down meaningful discussion and keeps people trapped in a system that exploits them.
Do you know what else exploits individuals? Fear and propaganda.
I saw this firsthand in a recent conversation with a friend who’s deeply entrenched in leftist ideologies and what I’d call “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” She shared a post warning people to change their bank accounts because of a false claim that Elon Musk’s staff had access to personal financial data. I pointed out that the post was misinformation, but instead of engaging with the facts, the conversation quickly shifted in a way that mirrors the DARVO tactic.
First, she denied that the post could be harmful or misleading. Then, she attacked me for not understanding the larger “fear” that people are feeling in the current political climate. Finally, she reversed the roles, casting herself as the victim of a chaotic world and me as the one creating unnecessary tension by questioning the post.
This is a textbook example of DARVO, a tactic that deflects accountability, shifts blame, and keeps people trapped in fear-driven narratives. It keeps them from having honest, fact-based conversations and prevents any real understanding of what’s going on around them.
How Brandie Used DARVO on Me
Ironically, despite being an anti-MLM advocate, Brandie used the exact same manipulation tactics when I pushed back on some of her positions. This is a woman who criticizes manipulative marketing tactics in MLMs, yet here she was, employing the very same tactics in our discussion. It’s a stark example of how these patterns can be so ingrained that even those who oppose them can fall into using them.
Deny – When I questioned her promotion of dietitians who endorse processed foods like Clif Z Bars (which recently faced a class-action lawsuit for misleading health claims), she refused to acknowledge the legitimate concerns. Instead, she dismissed it by claiming that caring about food ingredients was more stressful for the body than just eating the food itself—a false dichotomy that undermines any nuance in the conversation, especially when she often critiques the same logical fallacy in other contexts.
Attack – Rather than engaging with my points, she made it personal, implying that I was being antagonistic or bad-faith for even questioning her stance.
Reverse Victim and Offender – Finally, when I didn’t back down, she blocked me, flipping the narrative to make it seem like I was the one causing harm simply by asking questions.
When Therapy Becomes Thought Control: The Weaponization of Mental Health
What makes this dynamic even more interesting is that both my friend in Portland and Brandie, an anti-MLM advocate, are therapists. These conversations have all unfolded within a culture that professes to value feelings, emotional well-being, and mental health awareness. More people are going to therapy than ever before, and an increasing number of people are training to become therapists—mostly women. Currently, around 70-80% of psychologists and therapists are female, and those seeking help are also more likely to be female.
The field has increasingly become a vehicle for ideological activism. Dr. Roger McFillin has spoken extensively about this shift, describing how therapy now often reinforces victimhood narratives rather than fostering resilience. Instead of helping clients process experiences and build coping skills, many therapists nudge them toward predetermined ideological conclusions—especially in areas of identity, oppression, and systemic injustice.
This shift has eroded one of psychology’s most fundamental ethical principles: informed consent. Clients, particularly young and vulnerable individuals, are often funneled into ideological frameworks without realizing it. Under the guise of “affirming care” or “social justice-informed therapy,” therapists may subtly guide them toward specific worldviews rather than offering a full range of perspectives. What should be a process of self-discovery instead becomes thought reform, where questioning the prevailing narrative is framed as harmful or regressive.
Therapy is no longer just political—it has become a mechanism of enforcement. We see this in counseling programs that demand ideological conformity from students, in therapists who blur the line between clinical work and activism, and in public figures like Janja Lalich and Steven Hassan, who claim to expose undue influence while engaging in the same tactics. This is ideological gatekeeping disguised as expertise.
Rather than fostering open exploration, the field is increasingly defined by rigid dogma. Questioning the dominant ideology isn’t framed as critical thinking—it’s labeled as resistance, ignorance, or even harm. And when that happens, dissenting voices aren’t debated; they’re erased. If this trend continues, therapy won’t just be a tool for self-improvement. It will be a tool for social control. It already is.
The Hypocrisy of Selective Skepticism
Brandie and the anti-MLM crowd claim to combat misinformation, yet they overlook a significant issue: the influence of Big Food and Big Pharma on public health narratives.
On her social media story and in private conversations, Brandie has defended dietitians who actively promote ultra-processed foods. Some registered dietitians with large platforms endorse products like Hawaiian Punch and Clif Z Bars as acceptable—even healthy—options.
Clif Z Bars, for example, were recently involved in a $12 million class action settlement for falsely marketing their products as “healthy and nutritious.” These bars are 37% added sugar, essentially sugar bombs.
Yet, a dietitian Brandie supports feeds these bars to her young children, publicly calling them a “healthy snack.” Why is this not considered misinformation?
These conflicts of interest raise serious concerns about industry influence over public health recommendations. Yet, if you question this, you’re labeled anti-science.
This kind of blind faith in authority is no different from religious dogma. The pursuit of truth should always leave room for debate. This also highlights why blindly trusting “credentialed experts” is insufficient. Degrees and titles don’t guarantee that recommendations are free from corporate influence.
Rather than acknowledge these conflicts, Brandie and her followers discredit those asking valid questions, often accusing them of using the “Just Asking Questions” fallacy.
The “Just Asking Questions” Fallacy
A common tactic used to dismiss skepticism is labeling it as the “Just Asking Questions” (JAQ) fallacy. This fallacy occurs when people imply that merely questioning an issue is a form of misinformation or bad faith argumentation.
Many dietitians and anti-MLM advocates are deeply entrenched in mainstream narratives on topics like vaccine safety, climate change, and pharmaceutical efficacy. When skeptics ask pointed questions about these subjects, they are often accused of using JAQing off—a term that suggests they are sowing doubt without providing counter-evidence. The accusation assumes that asking difficult questions is inherently conspiratorial, rather than a legitimate means of inquiry.
But skepticism is not the same as denialism. Critical thinking demands that we interrogate all claims—especially those made by institutions with financial or ideological incentives. Dismissing questions outright only serves to protect entrenched power structures.
The Counterpoint: Intellectual Humility and the Dogma of Data
While it’s vital to engage critically with the information we’re presented, it’s equally crucial to consider the potential pitfalls of blind adherence to any ideology—whether it’s religious, political, or scientific. In the modern age, science and data have often become the new forms of dogma. The scientific community, which prides itself on skepticism and inquiry, is sometimes treated as an unassailable authority—leaving no room for dissent or alternative perspectives.
The worship of science and data as infallible can feel eerily similar to religious dogma. It demands conformity in the name of progress, dismisses alternative viewpoints, and often shuts down debate—all while asserting that it’s in the name of critical thinking and rationality. In this system, the pursuit of truth can ironically become an exercise in tribalism and intellectual rigidity.
What is critical to recognize is that science and reason themselves are not immune to bias, corruption, or influence. Take, for example, the “revolving door” between regulatory agencies and the pharmaceutical industry, which compromises the integrity of public health policies. This conflict of interest is a significant factor in the mistrust surrounding many mainstream health recommendations, especially when we see how corporate interests shape the outcomes of clinical trials, the approval of drugs, or public health initiatives.
Take the nutrition field, for example. The dietitian mentioned earlier endorses Clif Z Bars for her young children, but if you challenge this, you’re accused of being anti-science or fear-mongering.
Similarly, when figures like RFK Jr. highlight pharmaceutical industry ties to regulatory agencies, critics don’t engage with the data. Instead, they attempt to discredit the person asking the questions.
The Real Issue is Deception from Trusted Intuitions
The real misinformation often stems from corporate-backed institutions. Public trust in physicians and hospitals fell from 71.5% in April 2020 to 40.1% in January 2024—not due to misinformation, but because people witnessed firsthand the contradictions, shifting narratives, and financial incentives behind public health decisions. Trust is eroded by deception, not by questioning.
RFK Jr. isn’t “sowing doubt” for the sake of it. He’s pointing out documented cases where pharmaceutical companies have manipulated clinical trials, buried adverse data, and exercised significant influence over regulatory bodies. His book The Real Anthony Fauci outlines a heavily researched case against the unchecked power of Big Pharma and its ties to government agencies. If his claims were false, he would face lawsuits, yet his work continues to spark vital discussions.
True skepticism means demanding better science, not blindly trusting authority. The real danger lies in silencing those who ask critical questions.
Big Food and the Shaming of Health Advocates
A recent study has revealed something I find all too familiar: intimidation tactics used by industries like Big Tobacco, ultra-processed food companies, and alcohol sectors to bully and silence researchers, whistleblowers, and anyone challenging their agenda. This tactic—used by Big Food to discredit critics—reminds me of the way people are shamed or bullied for questioning processed foods or advocating for healthier diets. If you’ve ever pointed out the risks of sugary snacks or fast food, you’ve probably been labeled an extremist, a health-obsessed “wellness warrior,” or worse, a “purity culture” advocate. I can’t help but feel this is just another form of gaslighting, where we’re told that it’s worse to worry about the ingredients in our food than it is to consume those ingredients, even if they are known to contribute to chronic health conditions.
Ironically, this kind of manipulation is the same strategy Big Tobacco used for decades to muddy the waters around the health risks of smoking. And now, ultra-processed food companies are doing the same thing—distracting us from the very real, documented consequences of a poor diet.
Why We Need to Trust Ourselves, Not JUST the Experts
What frustrates me is how the anti-MLM community often jumps on wellness advocates who want to clean up their diets for health reasons. While I agree that MLMs are a breeding ground for manipulation, this should not mean we ignore the very real need to question the food industry’s stranglehold on our diets and health. It’s vital to recognize that not all experts have your best interests at heart. Many of the mainstream recommendations we’re told to follow come from organizations or industries with questionable motives—whether it’s Big Pharma, Big Food, or Big Tobacco. These same industries have a long history of misleading the public, and many of their experts are bought and paid for by corporate interests.
Wanting to improve your diet to manage or reverse chronic health conditions shouldn’t be dismissed as obsessive or extreme. It’s a rational, self-preserving choice that empowers you to take control of your health, even when the mainstream narrative tells you otherwise.
Is This Healing or Just Another High-Control Belief System?
Brandie often talks about “cult recovery” and the importance of psychological resilience. But is she really modeling resilience? Because true resilience isn’t about avoiding discomfort—it’s about engaging with it, questioning your own biases, and standing firm in discussions, even when they challenge your worldview.
Instead, she’s teaching people to coddle their minds. To create ideological echo chambers where questioning the “right” experts is heresy. To avoid any perspective that might cause discomfort. If she’s teaching people to avoid discomfort rather than work through it, I’m not sure how that aligns with the principles of ethical psychotherapy.
True healing requires grappling with discomfort, not running from it. When you teach people to shut down their discomfort rather than confront it, you’re not promoting growth—you’re just pushing them into another high-control belief system.
That’s not healing. That’s just another form of control.
And let’s be real—if your response to fair, thoughtful criticism is to shut down the conversation and block people who used to support you, you haven’t actually deconstructed anything. You’ve just built a new echo chamber with different branding.
The Bigger Picture
This isn’t just about Brandie. It’s about a larger pattern I see in the deconstruction and anti-MLM communities. Many of them claim to be freeing minds, but in reality, they’re just recruiting people into a different kind of ideological purity test.
The message is clear: You’re allowed to be skeptical, but only in the “approved” ways.
That’s not intellectual freedom. That’s just another cult.
Where Do We Go From Here?
We need real conversations about manipulation and misinformation—whether it comes from MLMs, Big Food, Big Pharma, or influencer dietitians who profit from pushing corporate-backed narratives. It means we need to question everything—without replacing one unquestionable authority with another. And we need to be willing to hold all forms of power accountable, not just the ones that fit neatly into our existing beliefs.
Because if we’re not careful, we’ll escape one high-control group only to fall right into another.
Beyond the Glamour: The Dark Reality of the Sex Industry
Welcome back to Taste of Truth Tuesdays. Today’s episode is one that I’ve both been eager and hesitant to share. While I’ve spoken about my journey through faith, fitness and personal transformation that there’s one chapter I’ve largely kept private until now….
For most of my life, I was fed a specific narrative: go to college, get a degree, build a career, and don’t worry about prioritizing marriage or family. Financial independence was the ultimate goal.
After graduating college, I moved from Virginia to Portland, Oregon, to chase my career as a personal trainer, lifestyle coach, and professional circus performer. My income relied on clientele, and while I had busy seasons, nothing was ever truly stable. But with inconsistent income and the ever-present pressure to make ends meet, I found myself in a space that many glamorize but few truly understand—the world of sugar dating.
At first, it didn’t seem that different from the casual dating I was already doing—except now, dinner was covered, and there was a financial incentive. But the deeper I got, the more I realized how unstable and unsafe it was. Most of these men didn’t care about you as a person; they just wanted no-strings-attached access to your body. And when I found myself in situations where I wasn’t in control—where boundaries were ignored, protection was negotiable, and at times, I left empty-handed even after doing my part—I started to see the cracks in the ‘empowerment’ narrative. I remember one night, sitting in my car after being verbally and physically assaulted, I realized I had no one to report it to. No way to warn the next woman. That’s when the illusion fully shattered for me.
That’s why today’s conversation is so important. I’m joined by Sloane Wilson from Exodus Cry, an organization dedicated to exposing the truth about sexual exploitation and advocating for survivors. We’re unpacking the hard truths about the sex industry, the myths that keep women trapped in it, and the cultural shifts that have normalized what should never be considered “just work.”
But we’re also diving into something deeper, faith. Both Sloane and I have gone through our own journeys of deconstruction and reconstruction. She’s seen firsthand how the church can mishandle encountering survivors and how delicate and complex these situations can be.
The Reality of “Sugar Dating”
Some nights felt harmless—like having dinner with a businessman who just wanted company and conversation. But most nights? They were anything but that. The truth is, the fantasy of sugar dating—mutually beneficial, long-term arrangements with financial stability—was just that: a fantasy. Most men weren’t offering monthly allowances or ongoing support. They wanted pay-per-meet agreements—no strings attached, no safety net, just transactional sex. And when survival depended on it, I found myself scrambling to secure the next “daddy.”
I struggled to assert myself, especially in two key areas: insisting on protection and ensuring I was paid upfront. That put me at immense risk—both for my health and my safety. One night, I was forced into acts I didn’t consent to, verbally assaulted, and then left empty-handed. Sitting in my car afterward, I realized something chilling: there was no one to report it to. No way to warn the next girl. No system to hold these men accountable.
Some men had hidden home cameras, recording our time together without my consent. Others were forceful, rough, and used sex toys in ways that crossed every boundary I had. And yet, as awful as those experiences were, I knew I was lucky—because it could have been so much worse.
Most of these men pushed to move conversations off the platform as quickly as possible, demanding explicit photos before agreeing to meet. When you’re in a financial bind, it’s hard to say no. That’s how exploitation thrives—through desperation.
The Trap of a “Luxe” Illusion
Looking back, I wonder—why didn’t I just walk away? Why couldn’t I see, from the beginning, that this wasn’t sustainable? I wasn’t like most women in the industry. I was white, college-educated, and didn’t even have student debt shackling me. My financial stress came from my own reckless spending—maxed-out credit cards and the relentless costs of bodybuilding, a sport I was pouring everything into. So why, with all the options I had, did I keep chasing this?
I think part of it was desperation. The MLM-like promise of sugar dating had me convinced that if I just worked harder, played the game right, and landed the right arrangement, I could have financial security and independence. I put more energy into curating the perfect sugar persona than I ever did into building my personal training business. And maybe, just maybe, I was chasing the mirage of someone close to me—someone who had made sugar dating “work.” I saw her succeed, and I kept believing I could, too.
But there’s another layer. One I don’t love admitting (and one my mom will absolutely deny.) My mother praised me for it. She told me, “I wish I had done this when I was your age.” That kind of validation messes with your perception of right and wrong. It made it seem like I was onto something genius, like I had cracked code other women were too scared or too moralistic to try. Was I subconsciously trying to prove something? Was I filling the void left by emotional neglect?
Or was it just my own damn fault?
That’s the thing about these choices—they never come down to just one reason. It is always more complex. It wasn’t just the financial stress. It wasn’t just my upbringing. It wasn’t just the influence of someone I admired. It was all of it, tangled together, keeping me locked in place. And it took me years to realize that no amount of effort or strategy would turn sugar dating into the safety net I desperately wanted it to be.
The Lie of “Sex Work is Work”
For a long time, I believed the mantra: “sex work is work.” It’s the rallying cry of the sex-positive movement, a phrase meant to legitimize the industry. Prostitution is often called “the oldest profession,” but historically, it has always been a last resort for survival. Women don’t enter this industry because it’s empowering. They do it because they have no better options.
The real harm in prostitution isn’t just about bad working conditions or societal stigma. It’s about dehumanization. When sex is reduced to a transaction, people become commodities. And when we treat people like products to be bought and sold, we strip them of their dignity.
Louise Perry, in The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, makes this point powerfully. She argues that the sex industry’s only real defense is a hollow, commodified version of “liberation”—one that insists, “Everyone consents, everyone is an adult, the women enjoy it, so who are you to judge?” But when consent is the only moral standard, we ignore the broader ethical issue: that people are being treated as means to an end. Consent alone does not erase coercion, exploitation, or harm.
In our postmodern culture, we’ve rejected objective morality and replaced it with a consumerist approach to sex. If both parties “agree,” then anything goes. But this is a dangerous slope—one that allows predatory men to exploit desperate women under the guise of empowerment.
Insights from Recent Research
New research exposes the blurred lines between sugar dating and traditional sex work. A study published in The Journal of Sex Research found that over one-third of sugar babies have engaged in other forms of transactional sex work, such as escorting or stripping. This challenges the narrative that sugar dating is different or “classier” than prostitution. The reality? It operates on the same fundamental exchange.
The study also found that sugar benefactors reported an average of over six arrangements, indicating a revolving door of sugar relationships. For these men, sugar dating is just another avenue for purchasing companionship and sex.
Beyond the emotional toll, sugar dating carries serious legal and personal risks. Legal experts warn that these arrangements can lead to blackmail, coercion, and threats—especially when expectations aren’t met. Many women find themselves in vulnerable situations with no real recourse. The illusion of control is just that—an illusion.
The Flawed Narrative Around Sex Work and Deconstructing Purity Culture
In the deconstruction space, there’s a growing trend of equating sexual liberation with empowerment while rejecting any critique of the sex industry as moral panic. A popular post circulating on International Sex Workers Day exemplifies this mindset, arguing that deconstructing purity culture requires deconstructing any negative views of sex work. The claim? Sex work and sex trafficking are entirely separate, and many big Christian anti-trafficking organizations wrongly conflate the two to push an agenda. The post insists that if a person is not forced, defrauded, or coerced, they are simply making a free choice to engage in sex work. But this argument is deeply flawed when examined through historical context, real-world data, and the experiences of women who have lived through it.
The Demand Problem: Why Legalizing Sex Work Doesn’t Protect Women
One of the most critical oversights in this argument is the failure to acknowledge that sex work is a demand-driven industry. As Louise Perry outlines in The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, countries that have legalized prostitution have seen an increase in trafficking. Why? Because legalizing the industry normalizes the demand for paid sex, and when there aren’t enough willing participants, traffickers step in to fill the gap. Studies show that in places like Germany and the Netherlands, where prostitution is legal, trafficking rates have skyrocketed because the market rewards pimps and exploiters. The idea that sex work can be fully separate from trafficking ignores the economic reality that supply follows demand.
Linda Lovelace’s experience in Deep Throat is a perfect example of this. The film was a massive success, grossing over $600 million, and was hailed as revolutionary at the time. But years later, Lovelace revealed that she had been coerced into performing in the film under violent and abusive conditions. Her book Ordeal exposed the hidden abuse within the industry—an industry that thrives precisely because there is a market for extreme, degrading content. This isn’t an isolated case; countless women have echoed similar stories after leaving the industry, only to be dismissed while they were still in it because they were expected to uphold the “liberation” narrative.
The Exploitation Behind the Industry
Another major flaw in the sex-work-as-liberation argument is the lack of accountability within the industry itself. MindGeek, the corporation behind the world’s largest pornography sites, has faced multiple civil lawsuits for monetizing non-consensual content—including child sexual abuse, rape, revenge pornography, and voyeuristic recordings of women showering. Reports from December 2020 revealed that the platform was infested with videos depicting abuse and that it profited from some of the darkest corners of human sexuality.
The industry thrives on the illusion that all participants are willing, yet it repeatedly fails to ensure consent. The reality is that the vast majority of those in sex work come from backgrounds of financial instability, trauma, or coercion—not from an empowered, freely chosen career path. The notion that sex work is “just another job” ignores how uniquely dangerous, exploitative, and often inescapable it can be.
The Broader Issue: Normalizing Harm Under the Guise of Liberation
This same pattern of dismissing harm under the banner of liberation isn’t exclusive to the sex industry. I recently came across another example in the deconstruction space where an account that advocates for women’s sexual empowerment was documenting her abortion experience on National Abortion Day. She filmed herself taking the abortion pill as if it were nothing—a casual, almost celebratory act. But this kind of messaging erases the medical realities and risks associated with the abortion pill. It ignores the fact that women absolutely should get an ultrasound before taking it to determine gestational age and rule out ectopic pregnancy, which can be fatal if left untreated. Reducing such a serious medical decision to a political performance trivializes the real consequences that many women face.
This connects back to the issue with sex work: the rush to de-stigmatize everything labeled as “empowerment” often leads to a dangerous lack of critical thought. If deconstruction is about questioning harmful narratives, then why aren’t we allowed to question the harm within the sex industry? Why does rejecting purity culture mean embracing an industry that, time and time again, has been built on coercion, abuse, and exploitation?
Deconstructing purity culture shouldn’t mean abandoning discernment. If anything, it should mean taking an even closer look at these industries and asking hard questions about who truly benefits from them. Because when we actually listen to the stories of women who have left sex work, the pattern is clear: what is sold as empowerment often turns out to be exploitation in disguise.
Healing & Advocacy
Looking back, my perspective has completely shifted. The journey out of the sex industry has been long and complicated, but I’m grateful for the clarity I have now. Organizations like Exodus Cry work to expose the realities of the commercial sex trade and fight for real change. And voices like Louise Perry’s are crucial in dismantling the harmful myths that keep this industry alive.
The sexual revolution promised liberation, but for many women, it delivered exploitation instead. The more we normalize the commodification of sex, the more we enable the very systems that harm us. It’s time to rethink everything we’ve been told about “sex work” and start asking: Who really benefits from this industry? Because it’s certainly not the women inside it.
If you’ve ever questioned the narrative around sex work, if you’ve been curious about the reality behind sugar dating, or if you want to hear from someone who’s been there—I invite you to tune in.
It’s time to move beyond the glamour and face the truth.
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