Can climate anxiety cause eating disorders? How does your desire to reduce impact on the planet by eating locally, avoiding meat, or eating “clean” slip into disordered eating? What happens when the environmental action of eating sustainably mixes with the toxic cocktail of body image, thin culture, personal trauma, and that ever-present message that we are just never enough? How can environmentalist messages of restraint, deprivation, asceticism, guilt, moral superiority, purity, anti-consumerism, and the deep shame of being a human on this earth lead to rigid rules about avoiding certain foods, body dysmorphia, and even “orthorexia nervosa”? My guest this week is Dr. Lucia Tecuta, a researcher and therapist who studies this under-researched nexus between disordered eating and climate anxiety.
Show notes:
- Lucia Tecuta’s website
- My essay in the Journal of Sport and Social Issues on what I called the “wilderness body ideal,” “Risking Bodies in the Wild: The Corporeal Unconscious of American Adventure Culture”
- Weighing In: Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism, book by Julie Guthman
- Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture, book reference and author interview here
- Lucia’s essay, “Climate Change Worry and Eating Related Eco-Concern”
- Dr. Tecuta’s article discussing the links between climate anxiety and disordered eating: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s40337-025-01477-7
- The paper on purpose in life in anorexia nervosa mentioned: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/eat.22197
- Aeon Psyche guide on dealing with climate anxiety: https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-cope-with-climate-anxiety-and-take-action
TRANSCRIPTION
Lucia Tecuta: You might grow up with a maybe very critical parent. You might deal with maybe school bullies by being a perfectionist and being really good in school. Like I'm just sort of making up random examples. It just like accumulates and then, you know, you become maybe super eco aware of the climate crisis. You decide to study environmental studies and then you get messages that it's never good enough and then boom, right? It could be sort of like the last, you know, the last straw that breaks the camel's back in a way.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: I'm Dr. Sarah Jaquette Ray, an author and a professor of environmental studies at Cal Poly Humboldt. On "Climate Magic", I invite experts, spiritual leaders, researchers, neuroscientists, educators, and activists to help me distill digestible, applicable ways to help you tap your own climate magic.
Environmentalists have long advocated for refraining from consumption and have successfully convinced us that how we eat, for example, is the most important single contribution to climate change, ecological destruction, and even labor injustice. When we eat, we are intimately connected with nature. And oftentimes, what is the healthiest for our bodies is also the healthiest for the planet.
But what happens when this environmental action of eating sustainably mixes with a toxic cocktail of body image, thin culture, personal trauma, and that ever-present message that we are never enough? How can environmentalist messages of restraint, asceticism, guilt, deprivation, purity, moral superiority, and just that deep shame of being a consuming human on this earth, lead to body dysmorphia and rigid rules about avoiding certain foods? Put another way, can climate anxiety result in disordered eating?
My guest this week is a researcher and therapist who studies this under-researched nexus between disordered eating and climate anxiety. Dr. Lucia Tecuta just published a paper with colleagues on this subject called "Climate Change Worry and Eating-Related Eco-Concern" in the Journal of Eating Disorders. Dr. Lucia Tecuta is an American and Italian bilingual psychotherapist and clinical psychologist based in northern Italy in the city of Bologna with over 20 years of experience, practice, and research in the U.S. and Italy. Dr. Tecuta holds a Ph.D. in psychological sciences and a clinical training in cognitive behavioral therapies, as well as an advanced training in psychotraumatology. She recently trained in eco- and climate-conscious therapy, as well.
In this conversation, we explore the deep, unmet needs that might lead someone to eating disorders in the first place. We talk about the unique category of eating disorder related to eating sustainably that people are calling orthorexia nervosa, and how climate anxiety can exacerbate unhealthy relationships with food and your body, or become a more acceptable cover for disordered eating. This is one heck of an episode.
Some sensitive content warning is warranted, though. We do talk about how climate anxiety can lead to the impulse for self-erasure, both in terms of disordered eating, but also in terms of suicide. But we don't end there. Dr. Tecuta beautifully outlines what we can do to deal with all of this.
Spoiler alert, once again, it turns out that having a healthy relationship with the earth really requires a lot of emotional intelligence and doing the work to heal our deepest wounds. This is a fantastic conversation about an under-researched, yet widely experienced phenomenon. Let's dive in.
[ Music ]
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Welcome to the show, Lucia.
Lucia Tecuta: Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: One of the reasons I wanted to talk to you is because I had a student several years ago who wrote about her own journey with disordered eating and environmental worry. And her essay for my class really hit me like a ton of bricks. And having had my own background with disordered eating and then being an environmental studies professor, I was really shocked by this.
And also, with her permission, would love to share some of her words from her essay and ask you, you know, is this what got you sort of thinking about this, right? Just jumping right into the deep end on this show on the links between disordered eating and climate anxiety.
So here's what she says:
“Having struggled with an eating disorder in high school, I sought recovery by ensuring that the food I ate was as real as possible, believing that it would improve my relationship with food as an avenue for activism. When grocery shopping or preparing meals, thoughts fired off so quickly in my mind that sometimes I thought it would overheat. Overwhelmed with the inescapable reality that almost every product I looked at somehow contributed to the ecological, social, and personal health problems, my mind would fall into a swirl of panic over the choices at hand. Sometimes I would leave without food altogether, deciding it was better to go hungry than to make the wrong decision. Despite my great hunger and anxiety, this seemed perfectly justified based on the narrative I had been fed by people like Michael Pollan and the real food movement and the whole clean and healthy food industry. To disappear, to become smaller, was to be beautiful. I consumed fewer resources. I had disciplined myself into a good environmentalist, given myself over to this larger, more important cause. This was my reality. I wanted to save the world and I wanted to be beautiful. To be a good environmentalist meant to be constrained in your consumption, which meant being thin.”
Lucia Tecuta: Wow, thank you for that.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Yeah, so yeah, what an amazing story, right? And probably more common than we think. And so my opening gambit for you is, have you seen a lot of this kind of sentiment in your thinking and how would you unpack what you just heard there?
Lucia Tecuta: Right. Well, what I just heard is very much in line with what we're actually finding in some of our last, latest studies that look specifically at climate change worries. We're using a specific instrument called eating-related eco-concern, which looks at ecological concerns and how they sort of change your eating behaviors. So for example, all the items are pretty much statements like, I avoid eating meat products because of my environmental concerns.
And we're seeing that pretty much what this student is describing, that being really concerned about environmental degradation and the climate crisis is associated with rigid tendencies of behaving with food in a very sort of, I would say, yeah, very rigid, you know, way. The sort of talk of like clean and purity and quality and the sort of preoccupation with, you know, making the right choice, you know, on a daily level can lead down sort of this path of a sort of unnatural and we could say also sort of dysfunctional relationship with food, right? Specifically, we found association with what's called orthorexia nervosa, which is a proposed eating disorder. It's not yet in the DSM, like an actual eating disorder, but it's been proposed for quite a while.
And, you know, clinicians and researchers are using the questionnaires to measure it and to study it and to understand more about it. And orthorexia nervosa specifically is concerned with the purity and the quality of foods. So that doesn't surprise me that there would be some sort of overlap, right, between sort of choosing the right food when it comes to environmental concerns, the slippery slope, and then become sort of a obsessive concern with also quality and purity and everything. Right? Because there is sort of an overlap. If you look at what a sustainable food is, it does tend to be the cleaner, you know, sort of food. Right? Like the pesticides, they're bad for us, they're bad for the environment.
So you see how there's like overlapping qualities of the actual foods, you know, and food choices. And that's why it sort of becomes a slippery slope because orthorexia nervosa itself over time can lead to then developing, you know, one of the big, you know, three official traditional eating disorders. Right? So we have anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, binge eating disorder. And then we have the not otherwise specified forms that sort of like fit the criteria, but might have some atypical characteristics. So this is kind of like the specific thing that we're seeing. And the study was on quite a large sample, about 900 individuals. It was Italian population, but we assume it sort of generalizes to other, you know, Western populations and cultures.
But yeah, it definitely needs to be studied more because it is quite a niche sort of topic, right? If you look up like eating disorders and climate change and distress, there's literally maybe like 10 studies or something. With eating disorder risks specifically in all forms of eco-anxiety, climate change worry, or climate change anxiety, we have all these little different constructs that kind of, you know, sometimes overlap, sometimes don't. But they're generally sort of psychological distress about climate change, right? We could say sort of like the common factor.
So our study was really interesting because what we found kind of replicates the studies on climate anxiety and how it could be the sort of preoccupation, being worried about one's food choices because of environmental concerns has a sort of double-edged sword like climate anxiety, right? So on the one hand, it could help people be motivated, right, to eat sustainably and engage in pro-environmental behaviors. But on the other hand, it can be, you know, a risk factor for eating disorders, specifically at least from our findings through anorexia nervosa. So that was sort of interesting to see. So if we look at these environmental concerns over one's food choices, there was like a negative correlation with, a direct negative correlation with eating disorder risk.
So you know, having more environmental concerns about one's food choices actually lowered the risk for the big eating disorders, but it increased it for, sorry, orthorexia nervosa, which is this other, right, syndrome, which then could lead to an eating disorder. So it was sort of like an indirect effect. So it is quite a double-edged sword, and that doesn't surprise us if we look at all the data on climate anxiety, right? So on the one hand, it could promote pro-nvironmental behaviors of all kinds, but on the other hand, it could also lead to worse mental health outcomes in terms of, you know, anxiety symptoms, depression symptoms, and even a lower tendency of pro-environmental behavior. So it actually like inhibits us, right, a paralysis, right, not being able to do anything, yeah.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: I have a million questions spiraling out of what you're just saying. Where do I even go with this? It's like not even on my list. It's coming from what you're saying. I'm wondering what makes a person tip over from that one side of the sword to the other. So just as sort of a little bit of background, so much of what the student was saying also, and in their essay they actually quote Wendell Berry and quote Michael Pollan, and there's sort of this big movement, sub-movement within the environmental and climate space that is all about the food we eat and the politics of the food we eat. We have multiple classes on food and food politics and the environmental connections with food on our campus, you know?
Lucia Tecuta: The way the food system is set up is a big issue, right?
Sarah Jaquette Ray: It's huge. And if we think about how much it contributes to the emissions problem, right? So transportation of food, food itself, all of the ways that food touches on, and that would be like a third of our methane or whatever. So there is so much. When people get the message, the number one way that you can have the biggest impact on reducing emissions for climate change is through your eating habits. As an individual, I want to highlight this kind of like the individualistic message that you can do this through the way you eat has been picked up by, you know, natural food. Like the Whole Foods Market thing in the U.S. is a big thing, right? Like there's a whole industry around eating healthy and pure that is good for laborers, that is good for free trade, that is good for -- I mean, the shopping, the consciousness around good, healthy, you know, green shopping, and also how that will then make you a beautiful person. And if you're thin and beautiful, you must also be more close to nature, right?
So I'm just sort of curious how one slips from it being a good thing, right, pro-environmental behavior, participating in a healthy way and improving climate change. And where does that slip happen? For whom? Are there pre-existing aspects of a person that might be needed to be there? Is it gendered? Is it cultural? What is the thing that might, if you have a sense of this, that might tip somebody over into something like more of disordered eating?
Lucia Tecuta: Yeah, I mean, there are a lot of different risk factors for an eating disorder, right? So if we look at the sort of general picture, we really want to zoom out in general for eating disorders. There's genetic predispositions, and we have studies on that. There's hormonal issues that could also contribute. And then there's psychological and personality factors that also play a role. Of course, also sociocultural and environmental factors. I mean, social media pressures and societal ideals that, you know, go way back. It's even before, you know, Instagram and TikTok and all of that, right?
Sarah Jaquette Ray: And certainly before any consciousness of climate change, right?
Lucia Tecuta: Exactly, exactly. So there's already all of that. But if we want to sort of zoom in a little bit, just as a, you know, now I'm sort of taking off my researcher hat and putting on my clinician hat. If we look at more of the sort of psychological mechanisms that could explain this, which would be sort of a mechanism that could also be present in eating disorders in general, and not just maybe a climate distress related eating disorder. What could be happening is that for people that are using, let's put it this way in simple terms, people that are using eating sustainably, right, or eating in a climate friendly or environmentally friendly way as a way to reduce psychological distress that is already there for other reasons, anxiety, depression, or even for the climate crisis. But just like, let me reduce my anxiety by doing something.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Agency, like a sense of agency. Yeah, yeah.
Lucia Tecuta: In the short term, it could give us -- I mean, I'm not saying this applies to everyone, okay? Like, there's still, like, a subgroup of people that are vulnerable to this. Knowing the eating disorders literature and just in general what we see as clinicians, I mean, female, younger age, so, you know, teenagers, adolescents are at higher risk of developing eating disorders, specifically restrictive anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa, right? Binge eating disorder comes on usually a little bit later in life. But, you know, if you're using food, whether it's tied to climate or not, the climate issue or not, but if you're using food either restricting or eating, right, so binging, to regulate your emotions about climate or about your life or other things, that's where it can become an issue, right? Because you're using something outside of you to regulate something that's happening, you know, emotionally, physiologically, like physiological arousal and uncomfortable emotions and feelings. You're sort of channeling them all towards one thing that can become very rigid and obsessive.
And if it becomes your only way, I'm not saying it's wrong if someone does that, because I'm very well aware of the discourse of action is the antidote to climate anxiety. And yes, for many people, it could be. But if it's varied action and different things, then perhaps that can help people certainly have a sense of agency. If it becomes perhaps the only or the main thing that you're doing, that could be, I think, an issue. It's not something that we specifically looked at in this study, but just from a clinical perspective, that could be what's happening.
A second thing, so it's using something outside of me to regulate my emotions, as opposed to, I'm distressed, I will try to be sort of in touch with what I'm feeling, express my emotions in a healthy way. And then when I'm regulated, I decide, you know what, I really would like to do this thing that's in line with my values, in line with the world that I want to see. That's quite different than, oh my God, what's going to happen? What are we going to do? You know, and sort of in a spiraling mindset, then focusing on, okay, individual, you know, actions like eating sustainably and avoiding all these different types of foods. There we could go towards a sort of restrictive, you know, disordered eating area, right? So that's the first thing. Does that make sense? Okay.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Oh, absolutely.
Lucia Tecuta: You can see that, yeah. The second thing, and I think this is also very eating disorder related, is using, again, in this specific context, pro-environmental behavior in terms of food choices to achieve some kind of sense of self-worth, right? Or some kind of sense of moral superiority, because one of the components of orthorexia nervosa is the feeling of being morally superior in one's food choices. You know, I'm eating clean, I'm eating healthy, the quality of my food is so much better than the other crap that other people eat, maybe, could be one of the thoughts, I mean, I'm imagining in terms of, like, the actual, you know, lived experience of it.
But just feeling better and feeling better than other people because of this, and then getting also a sense of self-worth where you don't have a solid sense of self-worth without this, again, external thing, right? And that makes sense to me because talking to people that -- and I would want to ask you if you see this too, people that have way more experience in the sort of environmental, you know, environmental studies, environmental activism sort of, you know, scene or whatever we want to call it, or discourse, I've been told that sometimes environmentalists, like, really, you know, can be very, very rigid about the best way and the only way to be, like, a good environmentalist, right? So that tendency of being very rigid, very perfectionistic about it, right, and also getting a sense of self-worth can make sense in this context, right, where eating disorders, environmentalism and activism and food behaviors all sort of can come together.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Yeah, I mean, you're hitting the nail on the head, and this is something that the environmental movement and the climate space in particular is spending some time doing some self-reflection about, the kind of, what they call purity politics. And the purity politics of eating has been probably one of the biggest things. That and what you drive, probably, you know, and whether you fly, you know, like, how much gas do you consume with transportation, right, and what you eat, because what you eat is on display all the time, right? So I do think that there's a sense of, you know, even I feel pressure to not eat meat when I'm hanging around environmental folks, you know, and just, I'm just, you know, sharing a little bit.
Or when I talk about the student's experience, when I give talks on climate anxiety, the amount of young people that come up to me and say, I've never heard anyone say that, I am experiencing that, that is so true for me. So I really have felt that it's an unspoken about detail, including also the anti-fat bias within the environmental movement. So I think that there's also, I've had many students come to me and say, I don't really think of myself as environmentalist because of my body. The universe, like you described, the sociocultural long history of pressure around anti-fat bias and around thinness and the way your body looks, right, like the kind of beauty myth stuff and the need for especially young girls to be thin, you know, there's, there's a lot of that pressure, right?
Lucia Tecuta: Right, yeah.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: And then if you overlay that with the pressure coming out of the environmental movement for rigidity around your eating practices as your activism, right, this is like a dangerous cocktail.
Lucia Tecuta: Right.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Can you talk more about that?
Lucia Tecuta: I mean, quite simply, you're restricting more and more food groups and types of foods, even packaging, types of packaging. Like maybe if you're already excluding like, you know, high calorie, you know, foods and you're excluding meat and then you're excluding dairy and then you're excluding anything in a plastic package that seems like excessive package and that's even excluding foods that could potentially be okay by the other standards, but then they're not okay because of the environmental plastic impact, right? So it just becomes this really like a snowball of --
Sarah Jaquette Ray: GMOs. Who picked it? What was the labor practice? What was the transit? How far did it come from?
Lucia Tecuta: And it's easy to spiral into that even if you're not at risk for an eating disorder, right? Like you could get there through health anxiety, for example, right? That could be another one, right?
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Can you tell us more? What do you mean by that?
Lucia Tecuta: Part of orthorexia nervosa -- I can't even say that word today. It's also preoccupation with like health, right? So like quality, purity of food, because it could be unhealthy, it could be bad for my body. So what health anxiety is, I mean, I guess the older term that sort of is no longer used as hypochondria, right? So being very preoccupied with having a health condition, looking for a lot of reassurance from the outside. So other people or even doctors or medical professionals and sort of lots of checking behaviors, right? So make sure that everything is fine, that I don't have this thing that I'm fearing, right?
Sarah Jaquette Ray: I sort of want to pull out the thread here that you said something about earlier about a sense of self and righteousness and agency. These are the sort of deep underlying needs that every human needs, right? If you think about every human needs those things, then climate change has really challenged that. And that's kind of the premise of the show, really, is how do we reclaim agency in the context of something that feels completely untouchable as an individual? And one of the ways we do that as an individual, as you pointed out earlier, is through action, right?
Like you're going to solve your anxiety through action. And one action you can take is through what you're eating or what you refrain from eating. And I think, you know, thinking about action in terms of a collective, thinking about action not as an individualistic thing, might go a long way to avoiding some of these problems. I want to put that out there to you. What do you think about that?
Lucia Tecuta: Yeah, I think that's sort of the key. I think that's the answer to this sort of dilemma, right? Because you could get a sense of agency through collective actions, too. And it's actually probably more powerful, right? Because you're not, you know, going at it alone. And same thing as a sense of self-worth. I think we're still sort of stuck in this. And it's been said time and time again. I'm not saying anything new. But the sort of idea of, like, the individual that, like, saves the day through individual behaviors is kind of sort of the whole, like, capitalist, right, rhetoric of productivity and how the individual has to, you know, rise above the masses and distinguish him or herself or themselves, right?
When you can get a sense of self-worth that's probably way deeper, way more, you know, satisfying through the group, the social group, you know, that you belong to or the group that you want to create, right? Back in the day when we were in more sort of collectivist societies, I mean, as Western cultures, I mean, you know, we know outside of our cultures, there's people that live lives in groups in a completely different way. But we used to get a sense of self-worth from the roles that we had in our society, right?
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Yeah, right.
Lucia Tecuta: And we don't really get a whole lot of that anymore, I feel like, right?
Sarah Jaquette Ray: T's going against the grain, let's put it that way.
Lucia Tecuta: Very hard to get that, right?
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Yeah.
Lucia Tecuta: I feel like some social roles do get that sort of feeling and role, you know? But again, they're devalued in other ways, you know, if I think about, I don't know, teachers, for example, right, not getting paid enough. So mothers that have, like, literally, I don't know, no support, you know, no safety net, you know, raising children in our own little, you know, nuclear families and no longer, like, the, you know, famous village that is completely, you know, ravaged, non-existent. So I think the answer, which is not new, is the same that's come up time and time again in your podcast, which is the whole sense of, like, community. You get everything from community, right? You get everything from -- it doesn't even have to be a huge, wide community. It could literally just be, like, you know, whoever is in sort of proximity to you that you interact with once in a while and creating that net with them, right? That sort of support, mutual support, you know?
Sarah Jaquette Ray: I also sort of wonder if there's a little bit of, when I asked you earlier, what's the kind of preexisting condition or what might be the thing that might chip someone over from one side to the other? I kind of wonder if one had that sense of collectivity, one had gained your sense of purpose and sense of agency through the role that you played in the movement or in your community or whatever. I you somehow could cure magically your individualism that made you think that this is the only way to do it, that neither one of those options would even be interesting to you. You wouldn't even want to do the pro-environmental behavior in a healthy way.
Lucia Tecuta: So I can answer that indirectly by thinking of, like, some studies that we've done on eating disorders and psychological well-being. We looked at a sense of autonomy, environmental mastery, purpose in life. These were all, like, the different dimensions of this one model called psychological well-being developed by Carol Reif in the States, actually, American. And we sort of applied it and studied it in eating disorders, active acute eating disorders. And what we found is that a lot of the dimensions were impaired.
And we even did correlations between the eating disorder symptoms and the well-being. And if I am not mistaken, I mean, I wrote the paper a while ago with my lab, so I don't remember everything crystal clear. But I think some of the symptoms, the symptom scales were correlated with a purpose in life. Like, I've invested things that I need that are part of positive functioning for, you know, for me as a human being in my eating disorder. There's a lot on eating disorders and sense of identity and worth. That's also, right, something that's quite well-known, right, sort of, it gives a sense of identity and a community, you know, to sort of belong to.
I remember, I don't know if it's still a thing, honestly, but at least 10 years ago, there were still, you know, the pro-ana sites, the pro-anorexia sites with, that were sort of a place, a virtual space where whoever was affected by anorexia nervosa would come together to actually maintain the disorder, give tips and tricks on how to, like, keep the disorder going as opposed to recover from it, right? So that tells us that, yes, there is a lack of maybe the ability to form an identity and a sense of worth and a sense of purpose. And the eating disorder is sort of used to fill in sort of that void.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: And then that's your gateway to the community, too. I mean, that's just shocking.
Lucia Tecuta: And it's also your gateway to a very warped community, right? So I would say, you know, this was sort of the other end to what you were saying. If someone did have those resources, then they probably would be at much lower risk for an eating disorder. As a clinician, as a therapist, yes, I'd be inclined to say that.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Yeah, yeah, interesting. Yeah. Wow. Okay, so we were talking about agency here. We're talking about collectivity and a sense of how individualism, so these sort of cultural things combining together with psychological things. This is really where the nexus of really deep questions are for this show, which I really appreciate. I have a trick question, though. This is along those lines. Okay, so which comes first, eco-anxiety or mood disorders in general or inclinations toward disordered eating? So which comes first? Does disordered eating come from mood disorders or eco-anxiety? You know, there's these three things happening, kind of eco-anxiety.
Lucia Tecuta: We don't know what's happening with eco-anxiety yet, but I do remember reading a bunch of papers that looked at what came first, mood disorders, eating disorders. And there's really different pathways. So for some people, the eating disorder comes first as a sort of, you know, way of gaining a sense of control, of self-worth, identity, all these things that we sort of talked about. And then, of course, over time, the eating disorder really sort of erodes even further, right, your psychological resilience and it creates all sorts of problems. So then you end up developing a mood disorder. But it could be the other way. You have the mood disorder and you're trying to regulate your emotions, like we said, by doing something externally. So let me control my food intake and then maybe spiral into binging and then go back and forth. So you're using food to regulate uncomfortable emotions and maybe even like an actual, right, anxiety disorder or depression. Major depression overlaps a lot with eating disorders. So it could really be, you know, either way.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Yeah, that was the trick question part.
Lucia Tecuta: Yeah. It's very complex.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Yeah.
Lucia Tecuta: And I imagine it's the same with eco-anxiety. Yeah. It could be, I mean, I would be more inclined to say that eco-anxiety is a risk factor. So it comes before and then the eating disorder comes after. But I could see how maybe someone perhaps recovering from an eating disorder, they're like well on their way. And then they latch on to the environmental issue and activism. And perhaps they -- because I think there is some data on recovery from eating disorders through vegetarianism and veganism. So that could also be a slippery slope, right? So I'm finally eating healthy. I have my rules, but they're better rules. They're not dysfunctional rules. They're just vegetarian and vegan rules to follow, right?
So I still feel like I'm in control perhaps, right? But in a healthier way through anorexia nervosa, we get to vegetarianism and veganism, but not disordered, right? But perhaps over time, you could slip into, again, another eating disorder where this time the preoccupation isn't with, you know, body weight and body shape and not gaining weight, but it's the environmental issues and the climate crisis, right?
Sarah Jaquette Ray: And you said something in your paper -- the paper, of course, I'll be putting in the show notes. But in your paper, you even said something like the climate and environmental reasons or excuses or rationale for the disordered eating makes it easier for people to sort of hold on to the rationale of it, right? Like it doesn't feel as shameful. It feels like you're contributing to an important cause that's bigger than yourself. And, I mean, there's sort of -- it tricks you into sort of thinking that you're doing something morally good rather than something self-destructive. I'm wondering -- yeah, there was a little bit of both happening in your paper. So yeah.
Lucia Tecuta: Yeah, yeah. And there are some papers also on vegetarianism and veganism and eating disorder risk. So we kind of already saw that. It's very easy to cover up. I think when we said that in the paper, we're probably referencing those studies as well because it's sort of a tricky area that's already existed before climate, you know, came into awareness for a lot of people, right? But even just, you know, vegetarianism, even for, you know, animal, you know, rights reasons and other reasons could still be a slippery slope for people, yeah. And, again, I think it's because there's some other psychological issues there. Like, we talked about, like, the perfectionism, the sense of self-worth, trying to get it from the outside or trying to regulate your emotions with, you know, an external thing rather than trying to find it within or with your community and in your social groups, right?
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Yeah, I am imagining that this is probably -- you know, there are probably a lot of listeners who are thinking, yes, I have some connection to this. You know, I never even thought of it in these lenses. Along those lines, you know, environmentalism has long been all about deprivation, asceticism, right, sacrificing pleasures and consumption for the sake of the planet, anti-consumerism, right? I mean, even in my own practice, I'm often thinking, gosh, I really need to work on what it is that's causing this sense of graspiness and wanting around consumption, around things that I know are not good for the planet, right? So the sort of, like, desires become a little bit shameful, right, desire to obtain and have things and consume things, whether that's through our mouth or, you know, products, you know, on Amazon.
So the overall message from the environmental movement and often the climate space is -- well, it's been a long time in the environmental movement -- has been to refrain from consumption, right? And so, you know, can you maybe bring a little bit of that into your thinking? Like, where does this kind of refrain from consumption, moral righteousness of climate and environmental movement, you know, how does that maybe shape or play out in thinking about disordered eating or the sort of orthorexia part, which is, like, a whole -- to me, that feels like it's -- I don't know if that's part of the definition that the folks are trying to propose to the DSM, but I'd be curious, yeah.
Lucia Tecuta: So with orthorexia nervosa, I don't think -- but it's more the moral superiority bit and the preoccupations with the purity and quality of foods. And then the other element is sort of then having this impact your daily functioning. Like, you can't, like, eat with other people, you know, without being distressed about it, you know, and things like that. But with anorexia nervosa, there is some overlap there, like you said asceticism. Is that how you say it? I forget how to say it. Yeah. As a bilingual, I get my words mixed up.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Yeah, I love it. No, you didn't. That's great. Asceticism is sort of, like, almost religious, you know?
Lucia Tecuta: Yes. It's actually a subscale in one of the most used psychological questionnaires for eating disorder risk. It's actually one of the components. So that is there. So I would see some overlap and some risk coming specifically maybe from that particular aspect, right? Like, I don't deserve, like, I need to be deprived of things, right? And I think that ties into the self-worth again, like trying to get your sense of self-worth from an external thing, something outside of you. So even not buying, it's a behavior, but it still has to do with something outside of you. Does that make sense? As opposed to gaining it from, you know, from an internal sort of sense of, like, I have worth because I'm a human being and I can make mistakes and I can have, you know, harmful desires and needs just because I'm a human. I'm not a robot, right? I think that's sort of the -- right?
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Lucia, you're preaching right now because that to me feels like the wound, right? The wound they’re related -- I mean, I'm just sort of thinking about all the ways that environmental messaging over the years is sort of like a, you know, pouring fuel on the fire of what the requirements are to meet, you know, for a diagnosis of a disordered eating. And it's just like, wow, environmentalism just amplified that and environmentalism wants more of that from you, you know, and it's just like, wow, you can see how these coming together would be really dangerous. And this is why my students' description just really hit me in the chest, you know. Relatedly, you just said, I'm a human, I'm not a robot. I have desires and needs that will harm. And how do we accept that?
I think one of the things that is really coming to a head here as we speak about this is that much of the climate narrative is about humans being bad, right? Humans do terrible, irreparable things to the environment. They are designed to be greedy and extractive. It's just human nature. There's this kind of narrative built into the climate world that is really cynical about humans. And the way this message lands on my students often is that they think that there's nothing good they can do. They only can have what is referred to in environmental spaces as impact, you know, like what's your carbon footprint of that email you just sent or that banana you just ate, right?
Lucia Tecuta: It's so anxiety-provoking.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Yeah, you can feel your heart rate. You're like, oh, my God, every single thing I do has a carbon footprint. And oh, my gosh.
Lucia Tecuta: It feels like the message is it's never good enough. Like it's never good enough. So I think if someone's already struggling with that internally from, you know, childhood, adolescence, life in general, like it's going to latch on to that, you know. And then your psyche is sort of going to run with it until you realize that you're really suffering mentally because of it and you need to change something, right?
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Yeah, so you're suggesting that lots of people have already some life experience and either predisposed genetically or through their environments to not feel like they're enough? You think capitalism might tell us that on a daily basis? I think you might be onto something there.
Lucia Tecuta: I think the context already. So you know, the research on risk factors, it really is about cumulative effects, right? So it's not just like one thing will make you, you know, develop a disorder. But it's like repeated, right, risk factors.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Yeah, you're too much of an impact.
Lucia Tecuta: You might grow up with a maybe very critical parent. You might deal with maybe school bullies by being a perfectionist and being really good in school. But if we're feeling good first -- like I'm just sort of making up random examples. Like it just like accumulates and then, you know, you're become maybe super eco-aware of the climate crisis. You decide to study environmental studies and then you get messages that it's never good enough and then boom, right? It could be sort of like the last, you know --
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Ou can just imagine this path.
Lucia Tecuta: The last straw that breaks the camel's back in a way.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Yeah, and then you're not part of a collectivist society. And so you feel like the only way to do anything pro-environmental is through your food because you're told that that's the best way to do it.
Lucia Tecuta: You're told that's the number one individual action you can take that has the biggest impact is your food choices.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Yeah, I mean I think this fundamentally comes down to, like you said, I'm human and I need to have some compassion for that. I really think that many young people, many people would feel that the -- you know, this is sort of where the Church of Euthanasia from the '70s, you might remember, save the planet, kill yourself, you know.
Lucia Tecuta: Yes, yeah.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: You know, I don't deserve to be on this planet. Humans are so terrible. I have so much profound shame for being human.
Lucia Tecuta: And also not wanting children now because it's like why add another human to this mess? That can also just, you know, cause more damage. Yeah, right, yeah. I mean, yeah. And the message is, you know, not to just, you know, follow your desires and whatever and who cares, but it's really learning to sit with that discomfort of being like, okay, there's this thing that I would like to do or I feel like doing. Let me deal with that sort of, you know, distress that I feel, that uneasiness first, right? And then, you know, from a calm sort of inner space decide, do I do this or do I do that, right?
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Yeah, I do think at the root of all this stuff is this sort of profound need to have a lot of compassion for all of the imperfections and harm we're going to do in the world as humans. And also, I suppose one of the ways that I deal with this in teaching, and I mean, I suppose I'm informed by the psychology you're just describing, but I also try to come up with -- it's like the hidden emotional curriculum of what I'm teaching, which is to come up with more examples of humans being good and humans being good in collectives, right?
Lucia Tecuta: Sure, yeah. It's a narrative that we're bad, we're inherently bad, and we just, like, yeah, destroy everything, yeah.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Yeah, the beauty in you, the beauty in the humans around you, and look at all the good people are doing, and this is so awesome. And, I mean, obviously not to be Pollyanna about it.
Lucia Tecuta: Yeah.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: But a little bit of counterbalancing so that people are not so profoundly in this hole of despair, of hating themselves, not thinking they deserve to feel good about anything.
Lucia Tecuta: They feel like anything they do isn't good enough anyway, so why even do it? Because that's the other risk is sort of total fatalism, right, of like, well, it's too late anyway. So I feel like, yeah, this sort of perfectionism and tying one's individual behaviors to sense of self-worth in a very rigid way, right, and not admitting that we could be fallible, we could make mistakes, we're allowed to make mistakes, could really, you know, not help by bringing us in either direction, right? Like, total climate anxiety, whatever, and climate distress leading down the path of depression, anxiety disorders, eating disorders from our paper to complete fatalism and disengagement. So either way, it doesn't work, right? Yeah.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: That moment of clarity around my students' nihilism, bordering on wanting to completely erase themselves from the planet, to put it in a soft way, but, you know, something like that essay my student wrote about how that involved taking up less space, right? Taking up less space, having less impact.
Lucia Tecuta: Taking up less space, yeah.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Yeah, you know, that really combined with these other insidious messages coming from society that you aren't enough and you need to, you know, be thinner and all the things just, you know, we're like a cocktail.
Lucia Tecuta: Do more, yeah, yeah.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Be perfect.
Lucia Tecuta: Be perfect.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Yeah, without doing all that healing work. So this leads me to this part of the conversation.
Lucia Tecuta: And without any support or help, right?
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Oh, yeah, do it by yourself.
Lucia Tecuta: Be by yourself. Be perfect by yourself. You know, everyone's watching, but no one can help you. What a nightmare.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Yeah, and the way I put that in, like, environmental terms is nothing I do is ever enough and nothing that ever could be done would ever be enough or something. I mean, this is like, you know, there's no way to win this, so give up.
Lucia Tecuta: It's a huge dilemma. We get sucked into these, like, psychological dilemmas where there's, like, no way out. Yeah.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: I want to ask you two sort of questions, and you can maybe answer them in one, or we can come back to another one. One is, what are the sort of demographic details here that would be worthwhile unpacking? Do different types of demographics experience this in unique ways? Are we losing anything by looking at the kind of general majority? You know, how does sexuality, how does geography, how does nationality or religion might play into this? We just already talked about how collectivist societies might have a different orientation around this, potentially as a risk factor.
Lucia Tecuta: Right, yeah.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: And then another question I wanted to ask has something to do with, you know, going towards these, like, solutions, right? Like, what do we do?
Lucia Tecuta: Right.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: So you know, I'll cue you up with either one of those in which direction you'd like to go.
Lucia Tecuta: Well, your first question, I feel like we don't know yet. I mean, again, there's, like, so few studies on this. It's really, really too soon to tell. But just knowing what I know about eating disorders, I would say that probably females and younger people are more at risk of this climate distress, eating sustainable, orthorexia nervosa, eating disorder risk sort of loop, right, I should say.
So it's really, we have to really watch out for how we communicate, you know, things around sustainability and food choices like you mentioned. You know, especially, I think, to younger people, you know, if we had to choose whether, you know, we have to empower them to make individual choices like eating a certain way or more collective choices, I would say definitely the collective ones first, right? Because they're forming their identities, you know, they're forming their identities and their sense of self-worth in those years, right? Yes, with a lot of baggage, we could say maybe from childhood experiences that might be adverse childhood experiences.
So it's a very tricky window, right, also for brain development. So I wouldn't really try to, like, put on too much responsibility on individual actions on younger people. If anything, I would try to get them engaged in collective actions that perhaps they could do together or -- you know what I mean? Like, I feel like that would be a little bit more protective of them and would put them less at risk because that's a whole other issue, right? Like, giving them responsibility for kind of for what's happening because even if that's not the direct message, that's the message that they receive, right? Like, now it's your turn, you are the new generation. Maybe you can fix this. Hopefully you can fix this.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, that's all they're hearing.
Lucia Tecuta: Like, I mean, yeah, yeah. And really upsetting, you know, to them. And then that ties into also moral injury and feeling like, you know, they're being damaged by the very people that should be protecting them, which is a lot of the works that are coming out, right? The big, I think, Hickman and colleagues study that came out in 2021 on younger people, right, and children and what they're feeling about this, right, and what their climate anxiety is tied to, their experience of it. So I mean, that's definitely one thing that I'd want to say. For everything else, we really don't know yet, you know, the eating disorder, orthorexia nervosa, and climate distress connection in other countries is still sort of being studied, yeah.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: And I would say around the -- what you also mentioned earlier around sort of, I don't want to say prescription, but sort of what can we do, what's in our power to do, some of the things you were beginning to describe had to do with being able to sit with distress. Can you describe a little bit more about what that would look like? How do you even get to that place where you say, I am worthy of being, and it's okay if I'm imperfect, and what I'm doing is beautiful, and I'm in a collective. How do you even get there?
Lucia Tecuta: Well, I mean, I think the very first step is sort of not jumping straight into action, but when you feel some sort of distress within you, and I mean like physical sort of discomfort, you know, whether it's in your chest or your head or any kind of feeling, you know, that you're physically feeling, that's a good way to sort of anchor, you know, what you're feeling. Pay attention to the thoughts that you're having, like what are you telling yourself about whatever is happening that is sort of, you know, creating that distress. I mean, at least I'm a cognitive behavioral therapist, so we look a lot at how emotions, you know, will be elicited by thoughts that we have, right, interpretations that we give, and then we react to the emotions. And sometimes we do it very quickly without being aware of our thought processes, right?
So I think just sort of like slowing down and asking ourselves, you know, what did you think right now, you know? What gave you that feeling of distress? Was it a thought about yourself? And those are the ones that we really want to pay attention to, because those, the negative thoughts about ourselves are really the more painful ones, you know, sometimes, right? The ones that lead to shame, which is maybe like one of the bigger emotions, right, that we're talking about here, right? That's maybe even beneath the anxiety. So the anxiety could be sort of the surface level emotion, like the distress. I'm like, oh my God, I'm anxious, let me do something. It's like, okay, well, deep breaths, what am I thinking? What am I feeling? Is there something below the anxiety that gives me more information of what I'm
Sarah Jaquette Ray: When you said shame, I was nodding very deeply. Yes, the shame, the shame.
Lucia Tecuta: The shame, the shame. Yeah, what you're describing about, like, the environmental movement totally, yeah, fits with that, right? And then, you know, just giving it a name and telling yourself, I'm feeling shame because I'm thinking I'm not good enough, I'm not doing enough, whatever it is, that will already quell a lot of the psychological distress and will calm your nervous system down. There's actually studies on this where, like, just labeling your emotions will sort of deactivate the limbic sort of system response, you know, with the amygdala firing off and being like, danger, danger, danger. And then we can have access to our thinking brains again, yay, our prefrontal cortex. And then we can talk to ourselves and say, is this really true? You know, is it really true that I'm not good enough because I didn't eat in a sustainable way since this is sort of the area that we're in because I ate something I wasn't supposed to eat? You know, what am I doing the rest of the week?
You know, like sort of really looking at sort of the evidence for and against that really sort of negative globalizing belief that we're having in that moment, right? And then we could also ask ourselves, do I really need to think this thought? Is it even useful to me? Like, where is this going to get me? Can I let go of this thought, right? Can I just sort of notice it and say, I'm having this thought, but I don't have to believe it right now, you know. I don't really need it right now, you know?
Sarah Jaquette Ray: And replace it with something that you would prefer that might feel more accurate or true. Yeah. Yeah, I'm doing my best. I'm an imperfect human. Yeah.
Lucia Tecuta: And then you go with the alternative belief. Very good. The alternative belief. But it has to be somewhat credible. You might not believe it at first, so it can't be too far off from what feels true, but it has to be close, right? And if it doesn't work the first time around, just keep on doing it. You're retraining really your mind, right?
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Muscles, like neural pathways.
Lucia Tecuta: Exactly. It needs really to be rehearsed over and over and over again, right? But really, the first step really is slowing down, right? Because when we jump to doing from a place of distress, like I said before, yeah, you could achieve maybe a short-term burst of, okay, I feel good. I'm doing something good. This is good. I'm a good X, Y, and Z, right? Whatever you want to tell yourself. But it's coming from a place of discomfort and distress, and shame, and then you're good. And then you're also attaching, you're also, like, reinforcing the ideas, like, okay, if I eat in this specific way or if I do these specific things, I'll get that sense of self-worth. And then it becomes a self-reinforcing cycle. But we have to start with a deeper sense of self-worth, right? Which comes from just being a human being on this planet, trying to do their best in a really, really, really messed up world, right? Like, I feel like most of us are probably doing the best that we can. And that's something to sort of remind ourselves of, right?
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Yeah. Yeah, these conditions for self-love and being able to sit with difficult emotions and not just act when you're feeling uncomfortable, these are all really things that are not taught very well. They're not mainstream. They're certainly not what social media and the sort of dominant water we're swimming in wants us to be doing. So they really need to be learned in a kind of transgressive way on your own. And I really do hope that that's something people are getting from listening to you speak. Sort of coming towards an end here, I could talk to you all day about this. I really am just totally animated by this conversation and grateful for your research and being able to put these ideas out there. Where do you think the research needs to go from here on the connections between disordered eating and climate anxiety?
Lucia Tecuta: I mean, it would be definitely really interesting to look kind of like what you mentioned, like in other cultures and how things sort of, you know, interact, all these variables in other countries, other cultures, perhaps even different age groups. But even testing like the specific mechanisms that we're talking about, like the sense of self-worth, the perfectionism, all these like very specific psychological factors. It would be really cool to see that, see if it really does play a role. Because right now, part of it, I'm just sort of like, you know, deducing from, right, the kind of implied research, right, connections. But it would be good to really sort of see that, you know, with actual data. Yeah.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: And last question for you, climate-aware therapy is obviously becoming a much bigger thing. You know, we've interviewed quite a few people on the show who are connected to climate-aware therapy. You, of course, did training with Thomas Doherty, who's big in this, and just written a book about this, too. So where do climate-aware therapists, in addition to being climate-aware, do they know and do they need to know, is there a training that can be done around being able to identify these kinds of connections between disordered eating and climate emotions?
Lucia Tecuta: Yeah. Well, I think, I mean, if they're licensed psychologists or mental health professionals, I'm sure they know how to pick up on this, I feel like.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: This is what they already have training in.
Lucia Tecuta: Yes, exactly. Because this comes before, ideally, before.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Yeah.
Lucia Tecuta: But I think you're right when you said it's kind of easy to cover up an eating disorder with the environmental motivation. So I do think that getting this information out there to clinicians can be helpful because, you know, patients or clients, however you want to call them, they might not come in saying, I think I have an eating disorder from my, you know, being so worried about, you know, climate change or being really distressed about this, right? So it's good to know that it's good to know that it's there, it could happen, and for them to, you know, be able to pick up on that, you know. So it is a thing that could be showing up. There's already some clinical cases that are being published and, you know, some new papers. I feel like it's going to pick up a bit, this whole area. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, I mean, you know, to watch out for, you know, sort of perfectionism, rigidity, black and white thinking, you know, negative self-talk about yourself when you're doing things or not doing things. These are all things that we sort of, luckily, are already trained in, yeah.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: And I would say, too, that it's interesting to hear you say that because, as I'm thinking, the amount of times students have come to me and said, and when I tell my therapist that those black and white thinking, rigid thoughts, blah, blah, blah, are coming from my awareness about what's happening to the climate, their therapists tell them not to think about that, right? Like, don't worry about that. You're already worrying about enough there, and I'm going to focus on your eating disorder. I'm going to focus on your rigidity or your mental distortions with some CBT. But because the climate adds this layer of complexity --
Lucia Tecuta: It adds, like, an additional -- okay, yeah, I see what you're saying. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Yeah, so it's interesting that unless you have climate-aware therapy, you might not want to connect those two things, right? Right?
Lucia Tecuta: Yeah, right.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: It just feels overwhelming. Yeah.
Lucia Tecuta: It's definitely important to go to a climate-aware therapist if there is a connection there because I think, like, yeah, they'd be probably better able to sort of, you know, integrate it and give it, you know, the attention that it deserves. But I agree, a lot of, you know, non-climate-aware therapists might not, you know, really give it enough importance when it should be, yeah.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Thank you so much for joining the show, Lucia.
Lucia Tecuta: Thank you for having me. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to talk about this work.
[ Music ]
Sarah Jaquette Ray: That was my conversation with Dr. Lucia Tecuta, clinical psychologist and researcher and author of a new study that's just come out on the interplay between disordered eating and climate anxiety. I hope you enjoyed this episode. For this and other episodes of "Climate Magic", and for show notes and transcriptions, please visit khsu.org. You can also follow "Climate Magic" and rate the show wherever you find your podcasts. I'm Sarah Jaquette Ray, and thanks for listening to "Climate Magic".
Produced at Cal Poly Humboldt.
