Casey Wilson
24th Annual Costume Designers Guild Awards, Los Angeles, California, USA – 09 Mar 2022
Casey Wilson talked to PEOPLE about rejecting harmful body standards ahead of Fed Up, the Wondery podcast she hosts about the F-Factor Diet
Casey Wilson admits that she used to dabble in diet culture.
The Saturday Night Live alum, 41, told PEOPLE about her experiences with diet fads and Hollywood’s body standards as related to her hosting gig on Fed Up, a Wondery podcast that explores the feud that grew out of the F-Factor Diet.
“Back in college, I remember one time, my mom and I went to Weight Watchers and they were doing something that really did make me laugh,” she recalls. “It was right before Thanksgiving and they were doing a ‘dry run’ of Thanksgiving.
“So, they gave everyone paper plates and they had us pretend to get up, physically get up, and go to a buffet and put fake foods on our plates and eat. I was just looking around at all the lovely women and poor souls, all of us, that were sitting there. And I’m like, ‘This is really a new low.’ Some people went back up for seconds with imaginary food. I did,” Wilson adds.
She recounts how she and her late mother Kathy Higdon, who later died of heart failure in 2005, immediately blew all their Weight Watchers points after the meeting.
“We’re literally sitting in the car, pulling out, and in the rear view mirror, we see the golden arches and we screech out of the parking lot and we have McDonald’s in under five minutes,” Wilson recounts with a laugh, adding: “So many points, so many points.”
Although she admits to enjoying the lifestyle-tracking app Noom, Wilson has mostly abandoned food restriction. “I’ve done a lot of diets in my day. I’m happy and luckily I’m in a place now where I don’t really get up to them much,” she says.
But the Shrink Next Door admits that she has felt Hollywood’s pressure in the past.
“Certainly, as an actress, I’ve had my own run-ins with ‘needing’ or being told to be thinner,” Wilson said.
“It certainly affected me, but I’ve actually tried to kind of maintain a healthy sense of self within this business, which I think has been hard,” she adds. “I’ve just done therapy and I’m in comedy. So I try to just kind of let it roll off and just do what makes me feel good in my own skin.”
In Fed Up, Wilson examines Tanya Zuckerbrot’s high-fiber F-Factor diet and the resulting social media feud with influencer Emily Gellis, who blew the whistle on the diet’s allegedly harmful effects by sharing anonymous testimonies from those who tried it.
“It verges on true crime in the best sense in that it’s surrounding garbage, influence-y, wealth, diet culture. It’s all the things I personally love very deeply, for better or worse,” Wilson says.
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