When Joe Wicks isn’t indulging in cack-handed publicity stunts to force awareness of ultra-processed foods, he hosts the podcast Health or Hype (available online).
Produced in partnership with private healthcare provider Bupa, it’s surprisingly thoughtful. Episodes on the importance of gut health, improving sleep and the mental health benefits of nature are far more measured than Wicks’ fearmongering Channel 4 documentary from last autumn. And considerably less likely to enrage countless food and drink experts.
Having seemingly binned his protein-packed Killer Bar, the nation’s PE teacher this week asked: “Can you befriend anxiety?” He welcomed psychotherapist & author Owen O’Kane, who eloquently explained how anxiety “moves in like a weather front”.
Numbing oneself with junk food or booze isn’t the way to respond, he advised. Neither is ridding oneself of anxiety through therapy, because you would “abandon part of yourself”.
Anxiety, O’Kane stressed, “is a protector”. The better approach is to “go towards the anxiety”, then pass “through the feeling itself and come out the other side”.
It’s advice that will do little for sales of chocolate and gin – but it could greatly benefit, say, grocery’s legion of dedicated entrepreneurs, managers and thought leaders.
Locking themselves in a wooden box to test the limits of their anxiety – as Wicks does during the episode – is probably not necessary, though.
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