Anti-diet Pilates instructor Helen Phelan-Guillemot joins us to discuss her history as a dancer and how that affected her relationship with food and her body, how she moved from disordered eating into wellness obsession, how she’s come to hate toxic fitness culture while still loving fitness itself, how to know when you need to take a break from exercise, why we don’t need to constantly self-optimize, and more.
Helen Phelan-Guillemot is a comprehensively certified Pilates instructor, prenatal and postpartum corrective exercise specialist, Institute for Integrative Nutrition health coach, intuitive eating student, and founder of on demand pilates platform, Helen Phelan Studio with 10 years of experience. The HPS method was born because Helen was feeling frustrated about how social media portrayed wellness: one could either wholly reject exercise and athleticism, or reject their actual health and body image. Helen's intuitive pilates classes are known to be equal parts rigor and restoration to help you build strength, body awareness, while being kind to yourself. She won a Women's Health Magazine Fit Tech Award for "Best Body Neutral Workout" in 2021 and has been featured in InStyle, Bustle, Well and Good, Huffington Post and more. You can find her on IG/Tiktok @helenvphelan, on Substack writing Well Hell, or on helenphelanstudio.com to check out her anti-diet pilates classes.
Resources and References
Christy’s latest book, The Wellness Trap: Break Free from Diet Culture, Disinformation, and Dubious Diagnoses and Find Your True Well-Being
Subscribe on Substack for bonus episodes and more
Taylor Wolfram, anti-diet vegan dietitian
Intuitive Eating by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch
Christy’s online course, Intuitive Eating Fundamentals
Transcript
Disclaimer: The below transcription is primarily rendered by AI, so errors may have occurred. The original audio file is available above.
Christy Harrison: Welcome to Rethinking Wellness, a podcast exploring the diet culture, disinformation, dubious diagnoses, and disordered eating that are so pervasive in contemporary wellness culture--and how to avoid falling into these traps so that you can find your own true well-being. I'm your host Christy Harrison, and I'm a registered dietician, certified Intuitive Eating counselor, journalist, and author of the books Anti-Diet, which was published in 2019, and The Wellness Trap, which came out on April 25 and is now available wherever books are sold. You can learn more and order it now at christyharrison.com/thewellnesstrap.
Hey there! Welcome back to Rethinking Wellness. I’m Christy, and my guest today is anti-diet Pilates instructor Helen Phelan-Guillemot. We discuss her history as a dancer and how that affected her relationship with food and her body, how she moved from disordered eating into wellness obsession, how she’s come to hate toxic fitness culture but love working out, how to know when you need to take a break from fitness, why we don’t need to constantly self-optimize, and more.
This is a great conversation, and I can't wait to share it with you shortly. Before I do, just a few quick announcements. This podcast is brought to you by my second book, The Wellness Trap: Break Free from Diet Culture, Disinformation, and Dubious Diagnoses and Find Your True Well-Being, which is now available wherever books are sold! The book explores a lot of the themes we talk about on this podcast, including the connections between diet culture and wellness culture; how the wellness space became overrun with scams, misinformation, and conspiracy theories and how you can avoid those traps; why many popular alternative-medicine diagnoses are misleading and harmful—and what we can do instead to create a society that promotes true well-being. Just go to christyharrison.com/thewellnesstrap to learn more and buy the book. That’s christyharrison.com/thewellnesstrap. or go into your favorite local bookstore and ask for it there.
This podcast is made possible by my paid subscribers on Substack. Not only do paid subscriptions help support the show and keep me able to make the best free content I possibly can, but they also get you great perks like early access to every episode, bonus episodes (including one I did with this week’s guest, Helen), biweekly bonus Q&As, subscriber-only comment threads where you can connect with other listeners, and lots more. Just go to rethinkingwellness.substack.com to learn more and sign up. That’s rethinkingwellness.substack.com and thanks so much to everyone who has signed up and become a paid subscriber so far!
Now, without any further ado, let’s go to my conversation with Helen Phelan-Guillemot. So welcome to the show, Helen. I'm so excited to talk with you today.
Helen Phelan-Guillemot: I'm excited to be here. Thank you for having me.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, I'm really excited. And I'd love to start off by just having you tell us a bit about your history with wellness culture, which I know has been a long and winding path as it is for many of us, and how you came to do the work that you do now.
Helen Phelan-Guillemot: Absolutely. So TLDR, I started dancing when I was three. I'll try to summarize
Christy Harrison: Three. Oh my God!
Helen Phelan-Guillemot: Yeah. Apparently I was twirling around the house after seeing Pocahontas and my mom was like, huh, there's something there. And I was very hyperactive. So I do feel very lucky that my mom was intuitive and knew that it was something that I would enjoy. You of course hear horror stories of people being forced to do sports and stage parents, and my parents were never like that. However, even if you love something, there can still be shadowy, sort of toxic aspects of it. So those without saying, growing up in the dance world, I was exposed to a lot of really unhealthy negative body image relationship to food stuff, and I have a lot of empathy for the authority figures that were in my life there because it was never intentional. It was never malicious, it was never meant as harm. It was always meant as so many of these things you see online are people think that they're doing something that they're helping you, they're going to help you get further in your career, they're caring about you.
They just are not necessarily fully educated or aware of the depth of how that can be impacted. So there was that, and then I of course developed some disordered eating and I worked really hard on recovering from that, and that's when I found wellness and I sort of tricked myself into thinking I was fully recovered when I found wellness because I was so fixated on being healthy, and I thought that was such an improvement. And in a way it was a baby step towards getting better, but it just became a new thing to control and a new obsession. And I got really intense about the type of food that I was eating in a different way than I had been in the quote textbook manifestation of disordered eating.
Christy Harrison: Did you get professional help at all for the disordered eating?
Helen Phelan-Guillemot: I did, yes. I was in and out of therapy from middle school on actually, it was apparent from a young age, but I also, even when I was diving into wellness, I did have a therapist also that I brought up orthorexia with, and I was like, sometimes I worry that I've just transferred these feelings. And she was like, I don't think there's anything wrong with wanting to be healthy. And it's an unfortunate instance that I think a lot of people have gone through where a lot of mental health professionals, because it is so gray, have a hard being able to when theia or the wellness behavior is turning into orthorexia because it's not officially recognized. So I do think I spent a long time in, I was called that my limbo era of thinking that I was doing all the right things but still feeling really bad and having this difficult relationship with exercise, food and my body.
Christy Harrison: It's so interesting that you had that intuition that maybe you were just trading in the sort of textbook disordered eating for more orthorexic thinking. What do you think sort of alerted you to that?
Helen Phelan-Guillemot: Well, I've never really been one to do things halfway. That's sort of in my personality, and that is something that shows up in I think a lot of people who have this sort of relationship with wellness. But I think just the fatigue, I was still feeling as exhausted as I felt in the middle of my official eating disorder, and I knew that it was not normal to think about food as much as I did. And I actually talked about this when I did Katie's podcast two years ago. I know, but when I moved in with my partner who is French and he is also a cis straight white man, has a very different relationship with his body and food, and I think that also mirrored to me how obsessive my behaviors were. And the cultural difference too really highlighted. I think America is this interesting case study of wellness culture because, and issues with wellness all around the world, but there is something linked to capitalism and the American dream and all of that tied up in how Americans negotiate wellness. So I think after a few months of living with my partner, I was like, oh, this doesn't seem like the right way to do things.
Christy Harrison: So how old were you when you were going through all of this?
Helen Phelan-Guillemot: Let's see. We moved in together when I was 25, so I was going along through my twenties thinking that I was recovered and also it's sort of an unfortunate badge of honor, but the disordered eating thing is something that I don't know any dancer, honestly, any woman or female identifying person in their early twenties, late teens who has not had some sort of brush or negative emotion around this stuff. So it's really so much more, what's the word? Global or just everywhere than some people think. Some people think it's just the little ballerinas being really intense or models, but it's everywhere.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, it is very pervasive for sure.
Helen Phelan-Guillemot: That's the word.
Christy Harrison: Yeah. What wellness trends did you really buy into and how did they sort of relate to dance for you?
Helen Phelan-Guillemot: Well, I am applied instructor and I sort of made my whole identity fitness and Pilates specifically, and this also coincided with me deciding that I wasn't going to pursue dance professionally anymore. When I moved to New York, I was auditioning and I had gotten a few gigs, but I was still feeling really, what's the word, not unfulfilled. I still love to dance, but just the whole commercialization of that industry makes it really tough to exist in it if you're not in a good place with your body. And I was really loving teaching, so I sort of transferred that thing of my identity is, hi, I'm Helen. I'm a dancer too. Hi, I'm Helen. I'm a Pilates instructor and I don't want to say any triggering things, but I am all the things that you think of a really toxic wellness person doing and spending their time doing. And it just became the new way to transfer my obsession.
Christy Harrison: So a lot of food related thoughts, and I'd imagine probably concerns about purity of foods and perceived healthfulness and all of that stuff.
Helen Phelan-Guillemot: Yes. Actually you asked me when I knew something was up, I was actually in a Whole Foods produce section with my mom. I was home visiting for the weekend and literally in the produce section, so of all places to be having a meltdown, I had a panic attack calculating all the stuff in my head, and I realized my eyes were watering. I was tearing up in looking at salad and I was like, okay, this can't be healthy.
Christy Harrison: That sounds really intense. So the food rules and the food beliefs about purity and cleanliness and all that stuff was really overwhelming, it sounds like.
Helen Phelan-Guillemot: Yeah, and I grew up, my dad was a Marine and he was also an athlete, and I was so focused on dance and I wanted to be so good and to pursue something athletic professionally, you have to be a little bit. And so it was very hard for me to separate what is passion and dedication and what is actually a mental illness. And I'd argue that a lot of professional athletes are struggling with that, especially if you ever saw that the weight of Gold, I think it was that documentary about all the Olympians struggling with depression. It's real. Not that I was an Olympian, but that is the top level of what you see there
Christy Harrison: And the single-mindedness that is required is probably that much more intense at that level. But it's for all, I mean, I've known professional athletes as well, and I'm like, yeah, it definitely sort of makes you have to be obsessive about food in your body in some way.
Helen Phelan-Guillemot: And there obviously wins that come with that, the successes that they get, but there is a cost.
Christy Harrison: Absolutely. So it sounds like you started to realize that the cost was outweighing the benefit of pursuing dance in that way at least, but then you sort of translated it to Pilates. Do you feel like you pursued Pilates in that kind of single-minded way? At first,
Helen Phelan-Guillemot: Totally. And also this is like 20 14, 20 15 boutique wellness boom of New York City and all the Instagram healers are coming out of the woodwork and stuff, and I really am interested in alternative modalities, but I got really down the rabbit hole of manifestation and all of these things that can be really spiritual bypassing and toxic in a spiritual way too. And it just sort of became this negative bubble
Christy Harrison: That's interesting how negative those kinds of worlds can be. And I wrote a little bit in my new book about manifestation and the problems with it and sort of the weird roots of it and new thought movement and also how toxic it can be for people who have any sort of propensity to anxiety and obsession because it starts to feel like the reason if anything goes wrong in my life, the reason is that I thought the wrong thoughts and I literally brought them into being with my thoughts and I'm responsible for everything that happens to me, which is terrifying and overwhelming. And I wrote in the book about how I sort of managed to skirt past the secret. I never ended up reading it at the time when it came out, but I definitely read self-help books that were influenced by that. And the idea of manifesting is kind of everywhere, but I wasn't so sucked into it. And then I started thinking about the problems with manifesting and how it connects to larger wellness culture and writing about it in this book. And I actually went and looked at the secret in detail and found myself flooded with anxiety for at least a day after reading it and was like, oh my God, thank God I didn't encounter this when I was so much more vulnerable and would've probably tumbled into a pit of self-blame thinking that my thoughts literally create reality. The magical thinking of that is so intense and so harmful.
Helen Phelan-Guillemot: And on a somewhat related note, I was just having a really interesting conversation with a private Pilates client of mine, and she's also a yoga teacher, so she's a former dancer. She's very attuned to her body and we're having this discussion of, I was queuing her into a single leg bridge and I was saying, you want to make sure both of your hip points are facing the ceiling without, don't drop one side down now that you're on one leg. And she was sort of talking it out with me out loud that she was like, it's so frustrating for me. I know that there's going to be a little bit of shift because it's impossible. You've removed all that support. I can literally feel she such strong and I can feel like my organs shifting to the side, that subtle teeny little weight shift, and it makes me feel like I'm doing it wrong.
And I was like, do you feel your glutes working? And she's like, yeah. And I was like, do you feel your back feeling good? And she's like, yeah. And I was like, then you're doing it right. It's just so Pilates really lends itself to, because it's so specific and so it's very satisfying for these A type people, myself included. But it also, if you don't get ahold of how much you're letting it get to you, it can undo you as well. We just have to try to negotiate this balance of how far are we going to take a cue, how far are we going to take a self-help book or an Instagram quote or whatever. It's just the lack of nuance on social media to it makes it very hard for people to feel comfortable in the in-between.
Christy Harrison: There's so much there. I want to unpack that idea of interception is fascinating and maybe we can circle back to that. But I was also curious to ask you what role social media played in your wellness obsession?
Helen Phelan-Guillemot: Oh my God. I was also, as I was getting into posting on Instagram and I was posting a bunch of exercises that I was doing, I was connecting to Otherize instructors. I was a new instructor, so I used Instagram quite a bit for choreography inspiration. And so that was really positive, but also there's quite a bit of the early aughts, no pain, no gain type of fitspo quotes, and that was super negative. So at a certain point I did somehow have the wherewithal to start unfollowing some of that stuff. And I actually credit one of my dance friends from college who was also a trainer, she posted one Thanksgiving, a quote, something along the lines of, instead of Turkey burn thinking of being grateful for your body if you're working out today. And I was like, wow, that shouldn't be such a revolutionary sentiment. But it did give me pause to think about like, oh, why am I killing myself with a workout just because that seems to be what I'm supposed to do today?
So that sort of set me on this path of trying to seek out more anti-diet, body neutral content, even before I really had verbiage that's what I was looking for. I wasn't really searching by hashtags because I didn't really know what to search by. But I also did follow a lot of eating disorder recovery content. And there's also, I have the screenshot on my phone still. I screenshotted some recovery account that had, maybe you've seen this poem, it's like a little sketch of a flower and it says paraphrasing. I can't remember exactly. Think about how much it doesn't make sense that you're more afraid of a banana than you're of dying. And that's something that I still have saved on my phone and it became included in me that I needed more of those wake up calls on my feed because I was spending so much time scrolling.
Christy Harrison: And so is that when you started to delve into anti-diet, Intuitive Eating kind of content?
Helen Phelan-Guillemot: Yeah, I absolutely started curating unfollowing a lot of fitness content and that also became difficult because a lot of my peers are in that space and people that I care about in real life, but we don't exactly have the same views because people, it takes time to sort of open up to this space because it is so antithetical to everything you're taught about health and wellness and bodies, especially if you do this as profession. So it's tough. Sometimes I use the mute button quite a bit and I definitely seek out, now that I have the vocabulary for things, I definitely seek out following certain hashtags and making sure that the stuff that shows up in my feed is positive for me or it doesn't come up in my feed.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, that's great. Sounds like it was a process to winnow that down a little bit.
Helen Phelan-Guillemot: Oh yeah, this happened over many years.
Christy Harrison: And in that time, I'm curious about your own relationship with food in your body and exercise and physical activity in that time. Because what you mentioned about interoception really strikes me the way that people can get so obsessive about it, dancers and people with that sort of intense sports background. But I think especially dancers because of the placement of body parts being so important in dance, I can imagine that you're just so constantly aware of any physical imbalances or shifts in weight or body placement, and if that translates at all to, at least for you, if that translated to a hyperawareness of hunger and fullness or sort of a fixation on those kinds of cues, I definitely see a lot of people getting really caught up with that. Am I really hungry? Am I really full? What's full enough? What's too hungry? What's hungry enough to eat?
All of these sorts of questions that I think there's this diet-culture message at the root of that which is like you're not allowed to eat unless you're hungry enough and you have to stop eating when you're exactly the quote, right amount of full and all of that, which is really a twisting of Intuitive Eating and not helpful. But I think early in the process for so many people, they get sort of caught up in that interception with food and with hunger and fullness I think is harder for a lot of people and for some people may never fully come because of neurodivergence issues or things like that. So anyway, I'm curious if any of that resonates for you or what your experience of interception related to food was like.
Helen Phelan-Guillemot: Yeah, absolutely. I think like you said, all athletes, but particularly dancers, ice skaters, gymnasts, because that's part of the technique is developing this equal parts superpower and curse of just being so painfully and you are able to do these incredibly virtuo movements, but it can become this negative thought loop in your mind. And I absolutely have had to have moments where I step back and try and assess what actually are the sensations that I'm feeling and am I at the same time undoing a lifetime of trying to mute those hunger cues, those fullness cues because I thought that I was doing something positive for my training for my career. That's what you're told to do. And then you weaken that muscle of awareness there of being able to tell what's actually hunger, what is actually full. In the beginning, I definitely had to just set timers and set mealtime and eat regardless of how I was feeling because it felt so foreign and it was really scary of course at first to go against all of the things that felt safe, all of the food rules, all of the things that I had gotten very comfortable doing and people were praising me for having such good discipline and self-control.
It's also very hard to, especially dancers are conditioned to see themselves as someone else's instrument. It's not the most independent way to foster a sense of agency. You're used to being this malleable thing for someone else to create art with. So it was very hard to go against things that were giving me so much external validation. And it was also a process. And again, I don't know that if I hadn't been living with a partner and us having cooking dinner together, dinner when I lived alone, I did not cook dinner for myself. So it was also sort of the feeling of being perceived and not watched because he wasn't examining or judging what I was doing, but I became much more conscious of it and had to sort of exposure therapy my way through it until it started to feel more natural.
Christy Harrison: That's really interesting. How did that process go? What was that like for you?
Helen Phelan-Guillemot: It was uncomfortable. I used to be staunchly vegan and I am still, I'm a pescatarian now. I don't don't eat poultry. And I convinced myself that I was vegan for ethical reasons, and I still don't eat poultry because I over identify with little cows, but the not eating of the cheese or the dairy or eggs or fish. And I do think there is a healthy way to be vegan if that's important to you, morally, religiously, ethically. I was using it as a way to cover things up and feel like I could hide the disordered thinking in plain sight. So little by little, again, the cultural differences of living with a French person, it was hard to not eat cheese. And I just became tired of having to look at restaurants before we went and having to put so much thought into things. So it was sort of this meeting of exhaustion and frustration and the inkling that it didn't have to be that hard.
Christy Harrison: And that's really interesting what you said about veganism too, the difficulty of untangling ethical reasons from other reasons, from disordered reasons, which I think is so hard to do in this culture at this point in time. Not that some people can't do it. And I think there are examples of people who are anti-diet vegan influencers or whatever, dieticians, I'm thinking of Taylor Wolfram for example, who show that it is possible to be vegan and also anti-diet. And I think it's really difficult to get to that place, and a lot of people might have those moments of those things being really tangled up, like the disordered eating and the veganism being really tangled up and hard to untangle and needing to step away from it and take a pause and maybe come back eventually or maybe not come back at all or sort of have it be open-ended rather than being sort of militant about those eating choices.
Helen Phelan-Guillemot: Well, the cruel irony of this, which it's kind of funny now in hindsight, but I was a double major in dance and psychology, and when it came to writing my thesis, the theme of my thesis group, everyone was writing about animals in some way, our humans relationships with animals. And my teacher, my advisor suggested that I write my thesis on the coexistence of veganism and eating disorders. And I was like, that sounds silly and made up and I wrote it into something else, but now I'm like, oh, wow, maybe they spotted something that I wasn't quite aware of
Christy Harrison: That might've been a little like, Hey, flag this for you. Oh my gosh, that's funny. Yeah, and it's interesting that you weren't ready for that. It sounded made up or not real. I also had an experience of when I learned about orthorexia, which is why I asked you that question about like, oh, you had this sort of inkling that it was about you. Because when I first heard that term orthorexia, it was like 2006, the term had just sort of become popularized or popularized I guess from Steven Brotman's book. And I came across an article about it and was blogging for a food blog at the time and blogged about this article and was like, isn't this weird orthorexia whatever, and here's what the criteria are, whatever. Totally didn't see myself in it and was just like, these are those people over there. And I guess the way it was framed made it so that I didn't have to see myself in it. It felt so extreme. But meanwhile, I was spending hours in the grocery store reading labels and looking at menus before I went anywhere and totally obsessed and very much in the throes of orthorexia and chained up by my food obsessions and rules and stuff, and completely didn't see it for myself. So it's just interesting that it takes a while sometimes for these things to break through and maybe the way they're presented doesn't always capture us at the right moment or we're just not ready in that moment to see it.
Helen Phelan-Guillemot: And I try to have a lot of empathy when I see the dumb TikTok videos or Instagram posts or get annoyed with specific fitness influencers rising to fame for doing incredibly problematic things. I can see a lot of my former habits and thoughts in the type of thing that they're posting. I know that you just don't clock it until you clock it, but it's still frustrating. And I also think that there's a lot of privilege involved in me even being able to have empathy because I'm, at the end of the day, even as a recovered person, still a thin able-bodied, many levels of privilege. So I can't imagine what it's like to be scrolling through your feed and be in a different body and how toxic that is, how othering that is. It's really awful.
Christy Harrison: Completely having that level of empathy requires a lot of distance, I think, and distance that not everybody has a privilege to have. Well, I mean, speaking of toxic feeds, your newsletter is called, well Hell, and you talk about toxic aspects of wellness culture and fitness culture. I'm curious what aspects of wellness culture you're finding the most hellish these days.
Helen Phelan-Guillemot: There's the usual that we've all been talking about, but I think the big trend on TikTok that I've seen a lot, and I always click not interested is gut health. It's so frustrating because it's like I'm sure there are people who do have genuine gut issues, but it's probably not, I don't know, some 19 year old in LA and a bikini is not probably the person you should be seeking out to help support you with your gut health troubles. And just a lot of that is, as with anything in diet-culture, just so coded in anti-fat instead of actual health promoting behaviors or feelings of illness. So it's just for me, and I'm sure you have the same frustration, it feels so obvious when you see that stuff, but then I read the comments and I'm always like, people are eating this up. So it's angering sometimes.
So gut health thing is big, healthy and protein too, which I find really interesting because the principle of gentle nutrition they say is at the end of the book for a reason because you shouldn't fixate on it. And I have just recently come to a place where I feel like I can gently add more protein into my day without fixating on counting things, but have this intention in the back of my mind like, oh, I want to choose a breakfast that has a lot of protein because I'm going to be strength training today, or we're going for a really long hike. I can think of food in that way now where it's a lot more neutral, but it took me so many years to get there, and I also talked about this in my newsletter on one of the first posts being like, it's really not that complicated for so many people and the average person does not need, if you're not training like a marathoner or a professional athlete or someone who works out for their profession, it's truly unnecessary. If you don't have a health condition of some kind to hyper-focus on gut health or getting enough protein or whatever, x, Y, Z supplement, as long as you eat enough and sleep enough and drink enough water, most of us are going to be good to go. So it's been frustrating to see that people should eat protein. Protein's important, but it's frustrating to see some people run with it in a negative way.
Christy Harrison: I'm curious how you got to the place where you can sort of embrace gentle nutrition and the nuances of that being someone who works out for a living. And also, I have a million questions for you based on this place you're at now of also how you got to a place where you can work out for a living kind of or teach fitness for a living and not be so obsessed with it yourself.
Helen Phelan-Guillemot: Yeah. Well, I think in terms of the food thing, I had to not allow myself to think about nutrition. So anytime a thought of is this clean or blah, blah, I, like I said, I'm not one to do things halfway completely removed labels. I'd scribbled them out when I bought things or I would just will myself into not looking. I knew if I looked at a label, I couldn't help but do math in my head, and it was just a lot of trying to be very honest and integrity with myself, and obviously it was not a perfect process. It took a long time to be able to, in the grocery store, not go through that or go to a restaurant and not look up stuff on my phone, how much X is in a thing of fettuccine, whatever. Also, I think a lot of people who have done that for a long time, all that information is also living in their mind.
So there's some things I didn't have to look up. I knew it already from years of obsessively looking stuff up. So looking up, it would just be a sort of exposure therapy, like I said, practice of being like, okay, I know that this is high in calories, but it's not going to kill me. I can enjoy this. This is something that someone put a lot of care into making. It's someone's birthday, whatever. I tried to do the thing where you give yourself a few extra positive reasons for every negative reason that pops into your head to sort of crowd out that negativity.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, that and what about for the fitness piece?
Helen Phelan-Guillemot: That was tougher. I think that by me beginning to cut out the negative fitspo stuff, the negative, earn your brunch, whatever posts, Instagram really it feels silly being like social media has such an impact, but it does have such an impact by beginning to take that stuff out. I tried to focus on positive aspects because I was like, okay, this is literally my job. I don't really have the freedom or luxury right now to just start a new career because I'm struggling with this. So I had to carve out a little safe space for myself by making sure that my class wasn't using any of that Rhetoric, and at the time I was director of choreography at a studio, so I would go to other people's classes and do quality control and give teachers feedback. And I feel grateful that the studio owner that I was working with at the time gave me agency to include that in feedback and try to shift the culture at the studio because the whole ethos of the studio where I was working was that movement should feel good.
So there's a lot of things that stars aligned for that to be able to be a process that started happening. If you work for a major franchise as a trainer, sometimes you are teaching a script. You're using language that has been chosen for you, and that makes it a lot harder, even if you're trying to challenge that within your own belief system. If you're having to regurgitate it every day, then it's obviously going to be even trickier. But it was just really important to me to not be that triggering voice or at least do as best as I could to not be that triggering voice, because I do think it's going to be hard to separate movement and diet-culture for as long as we live. That's just the reality of the situation. So I know that I'm going to do it imperfectly sometimes, but I always try to be as clear as possible and to own up when I fumble over my words or I say something that was maybe an automatic thought from the recesses of my brain.
I also think that what is great about Pilates is that while it can be frustrating if you're so detail oriented and you want to nail every single move because there's so much going on, you have to stay in your body, you have to stay aware. And that is really helpful for someone who's used to avoiding themselves in the mirror when they're working out or zoning out, going somewhere else, thinking about their to-do list. If you're in a plank and I'm cuing all the muscles you should be feeling, all the ways that I can help you visualize those muscles working. It's a lot more grounding and embodying if you're in a safe space to be able to do that. Because also for some people, that's super overwhelming. And for those people, I think maybe you just take a break from fitness, which is a frustrating answer, but some people do need to take a little time off because it's just difficult.
So you have to be starting from a place of self-awareness in the first place and then focus on the sensations that are showing up, being in your body, getting comfortable with not being the best at things. The only way we actually build strength is going through things that are challenging and thinking about all of the other alternative motivations to move. So I'm always better sex, better orgasms, better sleep, more energy. There's so many reasons to work out, that's why it is so closely related to our health. The beauty aspect of fitness is a relatively recent thing associated to the current standard of beauty. So there's a lot else there for us to choose from. If we take the time to think about it a little bit more,
Christy Harrison: How do you think people can tell when they need to take a break from fitness? What would you recommend?
Helen Phelan-Guillemot: Well, the obvious one is over exhaustion or overin injury. I have a client who I had to tell to take a break because she was dealing with a back injury, and I was like, I empathize with the frustration. And also for a lot of people, exercise is closely tied to stress management for me definitely and for taking care of their mental health. But at the same time, while something can be cathartic and stress relieving or it can be the cause of stress if you're feeling guilty about missing workouts. So I always like to ask people if they're like, oh, I feel bad that I missed a workout. Do you feel bad because you don't have as much energy today as you would've if you worked out, or do you feel bad because you feel like you're bad for being lazy or whatever other negative thing you assigned to not being as productive as humanly possible.
So it's like a series of questions you have to ask yourself about what's the real sentiment behind things? And I feel like I say this every time I do a podcast. It's so frustrating for everyone, including myself, because it really depends. It's one of those, there's no right answer, and that's another reason why the misinformation spreads like wildfire on the internet because we have decision fatigue and we're tired and life is hard and we want someone to tell us what to do, but that's not what Intuitive wellness is. It's starting to trust yourself so that you can listen to your body, which is less sexy.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, less sexy and less easy, like you said, because of all the decision fatigue and the idea that we just want someone, and I mean, I think so much of this is rooted in diet-culture and wellness, toxic wellness culture and fat phobia as well, that we want someone to tell us what to do so that we will meet these standards that are actually really harmful. But I think part of it too is just wanting someone to tell us what to do so that we can sort of outsource that aspect of our lives and not have to be constantly thinking about it. So having someone on social media or whatever, being like, here's your workout plan for the next week, or whatever. It's just like, okay, I know what I'm doing. It's easier in some way.
Helen Phelan-Guillemot: Yeah, I even think about this same thing in relationship to good form. Obviously you want to have alignment and technique when you're doing an exercise to stay safe, but everyone's good alignment is going to look different. My alignment will look different than your alignment when you're moving in a healthy safe range. I feel like people get a little bit stuck in their heads sometimes about, oh, it's supposed to look a certain way. Oh no, I have 25 years of dance training. That's why my leg goes a little bit higher. It's not necessarily going to make a difference in your movement practice in terms of functional gains for you to your life for your leg to get a little higher. Our spines all have a little bit of a different curvature. Our bones are all different sizes. It just varies. And I think a lot of, at least when I first did my first training, I would like to think that that's shifting a little. We're told there's a right way to do a movement in the wrong way, but really there's a lot of degrees in between that that are still totally beneficial and safe.
Christy Harrison: Yeah. What was it like for you to become a Pilates instructor and to train in Pilates at the time that you did? I know we spoke Offline a little bit about how that was kind of so obsessive and perfectionistic and the way that Pilates is often taken up by especially dancers can be problematic and perfectionistic.
Helen Phelan-Guillemot: Yeah. Well, I've been doing Pilates as cross-training for dance since a young age, and so in many ways it was supernatural a lot of ways I credit it with really helping me get through social anxiety because as a dancer, it's not like I was public speaking. I did a few post modern pieces where there was some spoken word, but for the majority of the time, it's being silent and just doing the athletic thing. So it really helped me feel confident talking to it's public speaking, talking to a group of people that I didn't necessarily know. So that also was really great for my confidence in general at a time where I was feeling all the feelings about my body, but I also desperately wanted to be really good at it because I don't like being bad at things. So I was obsessively training, observing classes, teaching classes, and once you realize that you have these tendencies, you'll see them show up in many different areas of your life, professionally, emotionally, personally. So it was also a matter of trying to create some work life boundaries as well.
Christy Harrison: You've written that your newsletter is for people who hate toxic fitness culture, but love working out, and that's such an interesting person to me because I don't see myself as loving working out necessarily. I love practicing yoga or I love going for a walk or playing with my daughter or something, but I don't really love working out. So I'm curious what that means to you to love working out in the absence of toxic fitness culture.
Helen Phelan-Guillemot: Yeah. I mean, I think it attracts a lot of people who played sports in school or maybe went on semi-professionally or whatever, but anyone who has enjoyed a runner's high or the adrenaline boost after a workout or left a class feeling like, oh, my back doesn't hurt anymore, and just noted the positive impact that exercise and movement, maybe it's not a hit class, maybe it's a gentle stretching, foam rolling workshop that movement in general has on how you feel. Maybe they are a fitness fanatic and they love to go to all the trendy studios and they have all the outfits, but maybe they're just someone who knows that they feel more creative. I wrote a whole thing on creativity recently, and I have personally found that when I don't move my body in some way, whether that's an actual workout or a dog walk around the park, that I feel spacey and I feel disconnected, and I feel sort of not grounded. So there are a lot of reasons to feel that exercise is an important part of your life, whether it could be that you love to conquer a new goal, you love to hold your plank a little bit longer. That's very satisfying for me as someone who has identified as an athlete their whole life. But it comes back to that finding those alternative motivators or other reasons to keep you showing up when you're feeling like skipping the workout for whatever reason.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, I do identify with the spaciness and this sort of feeling like I'm not really grounded if I don't do something physical, and it's not necessarily a structured workout per se, but it's like going outside and just taking a walk and clearing my head or even just doing some stretches. I do a little vocal warmup and stretching mini, not yoga really, but just a tiny stretching practice to open up my voice before I do a podcast or a speaking event or something like that. If I do that and spend the time really feeling into my body, it helps my mind too. It helps me feel more present and alert, and it's hard to talk about that when some people really do need to take a break from any sort of structured fitness, but I think there is room for these unstructured ways to move our bodies and to sort of feel what that feels like and feel the benefits that come from that.
Helen Phelan-Guillemot: Well, that's absolutely why I teach the way I do and why I created my on-Demand studio too, because it felt really frustrating to me that it didn't feel like there was anywhere where I could balance those two things, where I could balance that love of the rigorous aspect of exercise and how it is really validating and satisfying for me to be like, I'm turn or a jump squat or whatever, insert move here that you've been working on. It's so exciting. And then you feel great the rest of the day when you do something new or better, stronger, harder, whatever. But I also know that it's very easy to take that somewhere else. So I had a really hard time finding. I'm not saying I'm the only person out there. There's tons of people that I've encountered on the internet doing this in my curation of my feed, but it was frustrating to me that you couldn't just walk into any random studio and feel like it was a safe space to test yourself physically without taxing yourself mentally.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, the no pain, no gain mindset still is so pervasive. It's hard to find the different approach to fitness that you're offering. I mean, yeah, the internet, there's lots of people in disparate places doing it, but I feel like the everyday sort of neighborhood gym might not be as amenable to that.
Helen Phelan-Guillemot: And it's a real shame because I hope one day that is the norm, but you do have to do a little bit of trial and error. And I always tell people that too, that obviously I hope you love Pilates and I hope you love my class, but you have to try a bunch of things and see what feels good. What is a positive experience for you and your body, not just do I like dancing or do I like cycling, whatever, but how is the teacher speaking to you? Are the vibes right in the studio? Can you afford it? A lot of times I feel like we're ashamed into spending a lot of money on wellness stuff or beauty stuff. The whole skincare routine thing is something I'm assessing in myself right now too. But yeah, there's layers to it and maybe you're a bar person, maybe you're a runner. It just takes a little bit of patience too. So it might be a long break and it might be a little dabbling here and there for a while too.
Christy Harrison: Yeah. What do you think about people who've had a relationship with a particular type of fitness that got really obsessive coming back to that particular activity or stepping away from it and finding something else? What have you seen be helpful for people? Or does it depend on the person?
Helen Phelan-Guillemot: I think it probably depends on the person. I personally took a long break from dance classes. I have a lot of friends who teach at dance cardio, and I would do that, but it took me a few years of stepping away from the professional dance studios in the city because there's politics there as well, and it just didn't feel like I could do this work while being there. And also I sort of had this emotional relationship with feeling like I gave up dancing, so I needed to step away from it. I've recently been going back to classes and it's been fun also because I know I'm not trying to do that as a job anymore, so I have a lot more patience and space for it to just be a fun hobby. So I think that's probably very common for people who did really intense sports in high school or college where a lot of their sense of self and success was tied up and being good at this thing that you could love it, but it could also take you to that edge of making you feel bad about yourself. So breaks are important and then you can come back and approach it in a different way, in a less, this is tied to my worthiness type of way, and it can be fun again. And some people that takes more time than others, it might just be a while.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, it's nice that you're approaching it again, like having dance in your life again in a new way. That's inspiring to think about. It doesn't have to go away forever. You don't have to step away from it and never do it again, especially since it was such a creative pursuit in some ways too.
Helen Phelan-Guillemot: Well, even when I take maybe a dance cardio class that I don't know the instructor, I just feel like I have such a better sense of boundaries now. I recently had an experience where I did go to, it was a fitness class with dance in it, and the vibes were just off. I stayed, I paid for the class, but I sort of laughed to myself on the way home. I was like, wow, this would've really sent me somewhere a few years ago. And now I think it's just comical. So I do think that once you have that space, it could be something that you enjoy, even if it ends up being kind of a bad experience because you have a little bit more perspective
Christy Harrison: And being able to laugh with yourself about it is huge. Seeing the humor in it and not getting caught up in it, just having that distance
Helen Phelan-Guillemot: Even with the body image stuff too, not, I definitely appreciate my body a lot more than I did a few years ago, but I think we were touching on earlier, it's very human for people to have negative thoughts that come up. And I feel so much more in control of noticing them and not necessarily giving them the weight of fact just because they came from my brain and it's obviously uncomfortable, but I have a little pep talk that I give to myself, and it does help in a way that would've felt inauthentic or wrong or unbelievable a few years ago.
Christy Harrison: Well, that brings me to my last question, which is that the title of this podcast is Rethinking Wellness, and I started to ask people, how are you rethinking wellness in your own life right now?
Helen Phelan-Guillemot: I think the first thing that comes to mind is it's not that serious, is that I think we're so as a interested in bio and optimization, and it's great to be productive. It's nice to feel like you did a lot of things, but I just feel like for the average person, we do not need to be measuring protein scoops and counting calories and worrying about our biome unless you have a condition that is prompting you to sort of explore that with a trained medical professional. So the prevalence of all the products out there for us to buy makes us feel like there's always something else we can do to self optimize. But I found that it is so much more freeing and enjoyable, and I'm stronger than I ever have been actually by just focusing on how I feel when I move and remembering that on the days when I don't feel super motivated to move. And also sort of assessing what is behind the motivation. Like we talked about, if I want to snooze my alarm in the morning, is it because I'm actually exhausted, then I need to actually sleep in and the workout is not good for me, or am I just feeling a little bit like off today? I'll probably feel better after I work out in that sense. So just trying to take all the optimization and the products and the perfectionist stuff out of it and doing the simple things, sleeping enough, moving my body, eating enough.
Christy Harrison: It's interesting when you were talking about that, I was reminded of someone at one of my book events years back for anti-diet who came up to me afterwards and was like, I'm a really driven person. I'm really Type A and I'm good at what I do, and I have this perfectionistic side and I see that in you, and I see that you're really driven and stuff too and ambitious. How do you temper that or how do you deal with being ambitious, but also not letting your perfectionism take over? And I was like, well, for me, it's kind of, I've realized that it's necessary to have that other side so that I don't get just eaten up by my perfectionism. I don't have every single thing in my life be done in the most driven possible way that I have some things that I can just let go.
And that is the key to, I think she was like, how are you a successful person if you're not constantly driven with everything? And I just was struck by, you seem to have so much of that same kind of type a tendency and that you've independently found too that it's necessary to just let go of the optimization and to drop the perfectionism about various different things and be easier with yourself. And I'm sure that that's helpful overall for your career success or whatever you want to apply that sort of intense energy to, but also that you can take your foot off the gas a little bit and give yourself a break, and that actually helps in the long run to sustain you.
Helen Phelan-Guillemot: Absolutely. And even for the people who do have that persistent motivation to work out, I just had this conversation with a client that even if you're feeling good and things are going well, it's also really great for your body to take time off just for the sake of taking time off so that when you come back, you feel stronger. You can go a little harder, you can go a little heavier, you can hold the plank a little longer, whatever. You can't assess those things without taking adequate time off. Yes, you need the normal recovery time between workouts, blah, blah, blah, muscle building, but also it's good to just take time away from wellness. It's not supposed to be a full-time job. It's supposed to help us do our life. It's not supposed to be our life. And also working out at home, honestly, obviously I teach on demand, so I'm biased, but working out at home in my underwear, not on camera, I wear on camera when I'm filming, but when I'm working out by myself and I'm not performing wellness and I'm just actually doing what feels good, has also been pretty radical the last few years too with Covid and not having studios.
And I do still teach at a studio just a few times a week, and I have my private clients, but when I'm doing my own personal practice, I personally rarely go into studios A, because I'm snobby and I have my own opinions about other teachers, and I like what I teach, so I like to do what I teach, but feeling like I've created this little comfortable space in my home where, again, I also don't have to commute all over New York City if I'm just rolling out of bed into the mat on the floor in my bedroom. It's a lot less high pressure of an experience. I never will have a different relationship with that. But finding an experience that feels like, oh, I don't have to be the champion of Pilates today
Christy Harrison: And wear the special outfit and do all the things in front of other people and all of that, right, where it's like sometimes you can just tone it down and do less or skip an activity or whatever it is.
Helen Phelan-Guillemot: And obviously I love cute outfit, but it's good to have two things can be true.
Christy Harrison: Yes, exactly. Well, speaking of cute outfits, we are going to stick around for a bonus episode if you're still up for that. And maybe we can talk a little bit more about workout selfies and how people respond to images of your body and cute outfits on social media. And also more, I really want to dig in a little more on how you're rethinking wellness, specifically with the skincare routine. So that'll be on the bonus episode that we'll record in a few minutes. But in the meantime, for those who are listening to the main episode, if you want to just let them know where they can find you online and learn more about your work, that would be great.
Helen Phelan-Guillemot: Yes. So I'm on Instagram and TikTok as helenvphelan. My website is helenphelanstudio.com, and then my, Well Hell Substack is, I believe the physical address is just helenphelanstudio.substack.com. But if you search Well Hell, or you go to my website, you'll find links for that as well.
Christy Harrison: And we'll put them in the show notes as well.
Helen Phelan-Guillemot: That'll make it easy. And there's a 10-day free trial for my on-demand class if anyone is interested. And I'm actually doing a retreat in Montenegro in October, which is going to be so fun if anyone is interested in that. But yeah, I post a lot more so on TikTok these days because it's a little less curated and fun, but I'm definitely on the internet.
Christy Harrison: Yes, you're a very online person, but also not chronically online in the way that is harmful, right balance. Exactly. Yes. Well, thank you so much, Helen. So good to talk with you and excited to chat more for the bonus episode.
Helen Phelan-Guillemot: Yes.
Christy Harrison: So that's our show! Thanks so much to our amazing guest for being here, and to you for tuning in. If you've enjoyed this conversation, I’d be so grateful if you could take a moment to subscribe, rate, and review the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you’re listening. You can also support the show by becoming a paid subscriber for just a few bucks a month. With a paid subscription, you unlock great perks like bonus episodes, subscriber-only Q&As, early access to regular episodes, and much more. Sign up now at rethinkingwellness.substack.com.
Got burning questions about wellness trends, diet fads, or anything else we cover on the show? Send them my way at christyharrison.com/wellnessquestions for a chance to have them answered in the Rethinking Wellness newsletter or even on a future podcast episode.
This episode was brought to you by my new book, The Wellness Trap: Break Free from Diet Culture, Disinformation, and Dubious Diagnoses and Find Your True Well-Being, which is now available wherever books are sold. Just go to christyharrison.com/thewellnesstrap to learn more and buy the book or just go into your favorite local bookstore and ask for it there.
If you’re looking to heal your relationship with food and break free from diet and wellness culture, I'd love for you to check out my online course, Intuitive Eating Fundamentals. Learn more and enroll now at christyharrison.com/course. That's christyharrison.com/course.
Rethinking Wellness is executive produced and hosted by me, Christy Harrison. Mike Lalonde is our audio editor and sound engineer, and administrative support is provided by Julianne Wotasik and her team at A-Team Virtual. Our album art is by Tara Jacoby, and our theme song is written and performed by Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs.
Thanks again for listening! Take care!
Loving Fitness While Hating Toxic Fitness Culture with Helen Phelan-Guillemot