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- [00:01]
Kevin Allison
On this episode of Risk Reacts.
- [00:03]
Danielle Minard
In college, I was choosing my major based on what I thought my condition could handle in person sales. That requires, you know, making deals and eating meals with other people. Out of the question. English major though. I'll be unemployable. Perfect. Risk.
- [00:33]
Kevin Allison
Hello folks, this is Risk, the show where people tell true stories they never thought they'd dare to share. I'm Kevin Allison and this is another one of our Risk Reacts episodes, a video and audio episode where I listen to a story for the very first time and give you my instant reactions. Now if you're hearing this on our podcast feed and you want to watch the video version inst, there's a link to that in the show notes. But all of our audio episodes go back 16 years and are at risk-show.com or wherever you get your podcast. So let's get started. Our friends at the Story Collider sent us this story by Danielle Minard that was on their podcast on July of 2024. It was an episode called Food Fights. Now, I have never heard that episode. So beside it having something to do with food, I have no idea what the story is about, but one of our Risk producers, Taj Easton, he listened to it and he thought that I would find it really interesting. So I guess we're going to find out how well Taj knows me. So after this quick break, we'll hear Danielle Minert's story from the Story Collider.
- [01:53]
Danielle Minard
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I wish by the time I'm 30, a real grownup that I could eat anything. Eight years prior, I was born half deaf, and I could eat anything. My parents called me the garbage disposal because I'd grab anything I could get my little grubby hands on. And by the time I was 2, I got an ear surgery to address the first condition I was born with. A doctor pried my mouth open, drilled a hole in the roof, and drained the fluid that led to my ears. On the way home, in the backseat, I held my hands over my ears, open, closed, open, grinning at this new sense I'd gained access to. I could hear, but I couldn't eat. My parents spooned my favorites into my mouth. Broccoli, fluff, mustard, creamed corn. Because I was a toddler, but if it managed to make its way in, it immediately fell out. I developed this gag reflex for just about every food and smell near me. Just about any. Anything that I could try to eat before or that I loved to eat before read as inedible to me. I don't remember any of this. I was about 2 years old. It's right before the age where little kids start forming long term memories. But I do recall the way I ate for the next 27 years. For example. Again, 8 years old. Back at that therapist's office, sitting at her giant desk, staring at a chicken finger. She's begging me to take a a single bite. And if I do, she's promising the reward of a reliable plain animal cracker. I can't eat the chicken. At 16, a teenager. I go to a birthday party and I go straight for the cheese pizza. Absolutely thrilled to see a happy, safe food there. I bite into it and there's a surprise pepperoni right underneath of the cheese pizza. Sorry to do that to y', all. Y'. All. And I could not finish the pizza. I gagged. I looked around, I felt just shame in my chest. And I left early. I was a teenager who couldn't eat. This stuck with me in college. I was choosing my major based on what I thought my condition could handle in person sales that requires, you know, making deals and eating meals with other people. Out of the question. And English major though, I'll be unemployable. Perfect. I literally won't have coworkers to comment on why I'm eating the same Easy Mac every day for lunch. It's a plan. I'd grown up with this condition called ARFID A, R, F, I, D. It stands for Avoidant Restrictive Food Intake Disorder, which is the only acronym I'll share with you here tonight. And it can manifest in many ways. But for me, it meant that almost all, all food was disgusting. I could smell a fresh ripe orange on the other side of the room and think that we'd left out last month's trash to rot. This made me feel like my brain was configured wrong. Like the wires that are supposed to properly transmit information to tell you about food were just like clumped together, snipped out and thrown away. And when you feel like your brain is configured wrong, you tend to hide from the world. I knew I couldn't live like this. I didn't want to live like this. So as an adult, I took myself back to therapy. Just regular talk therapy this time I thought maybe I could talk my way out of my condition or convince myself not to have an eating disorder. But turns out my expectations were a little bit misaligned. Did have some great therapists who really helped me emotionally cope with what was going on, but needed a different tactic. So I tried exposure therapy, similar to when I was 8 years old. But I'm a grown up now. I've got a grown up brain. Maybe I can do this differently. Maybe I can eat a walnut. I can if I convinced myself for about three weeks to work up to it. And can I keep it in my diet? No. But look, I ate it, I tried the walnut, and then I went to YouTube.com and I thought maybe I'll just try some at home. Hypnotherapy. It's. It didn't work, but anything is worth a shot. That was earnestly my perspective a year and a half ago. Settled at home after eating buttered toast for dinner, laying in bed, eyes heavy from a long day at work, just like cycling through Netflix, letting it tell me what I'm going to watch tonight. And then I heard this narrator on this show say, psychedelic assisted therapy can help eating disorder patients recover in as little as a single session. What? I sit up in bed and I Google psychedelic assisted therapy, Arfid, psychedelic shrooms, mushrooms for people who are scared of them. I literally cannot move fast enough. I am stoked on the idea. There's nothing online or in this documentary about my particular condition. But it did not matter to me. Taking psilocybin containing mushrooms on purpose to say goodbye to my eating disorder. This could be the solution. This is a really important time to describe to you all that I was a narc growing up. In high school, I overheard my neighbor telling his friend that after school he was going to buy weed. And empowered with a whole childhood community of misinformation Absolutely terrified for his health and safety, I immediately called my mommy. But I thought, how wild. Taking psilocybin containing mushrooms that can rewire your brain on purpose to say goodbye to your eating disorder. Anything is worth a shot. So I signed myself up for an at home, undirected, unofficial clinical trial of sorts, led by my sweet husband, almost a doctor in creative writing. And I knew I needed to feel prepared. So I read everything I could about every clinical trial that had been done in the US in the world, on using psychedelics to help people heal from tons of conditions, ptsd, depression, other eating disorders. It's going in my notebook. I'm making a guide. What am I gonna do the night before the day of? Hopefully eat some food. What about after that? And the weeks after that? I also made a guide for my sweet almost doctor in creative writing husband, which was a little bit shorter. It said, please make me food the day that we go on this trip. And also, please make sure I don't fall off a ledge. Thank you so much. And then the night before we go grocery shopping, we grab the big cart. Budget in hand, we walk inside the grocery store. I'm real tempted to make a beeline straight for the frozen pizza section like I do every time when I go to the grocery store alone. But this time we go to the produce section and we walk past some nectarines that smell like trash. But I pick one up, it's in the cart, and suddenly we're picking up a dozen fresh, new to me foods that I've never considered eating before but have always wanted to. Bell peppers, green onions, tofu. Why not avocados? They're all in the cart. They're going home with us. The next morning, I wake up and I feel like it's my birthday. I don't know if this will work, but I believe that it will. I'm nervous, I'm scared. I'm looking through my notes again. Again. Psilocybin creates new neural pathways in the brain. This is what you want to do. You want a new brain? You can do it. Time to get out the coffee grinder. Use it on my three and a half grams of psilocybin. Mushrooms. I'm now a drug experimenter. I'm ready to do this. I grind up the three and a half grams in the coffee grinder. I dump it in a cup, I fill it with water, I spoon it around, I smell it. You might be asking, how is she going to drink mushroom tea? I was also asking that. And so I pace and I delay, and I turn on Carly Rae Jepsen to try to feel a little more pumped up and confident. And I find myself my favorite Swiss Miss hot chocolate mix. And I dump it in the mushroom water. And does it mask the taste? No. But I drink it. I chug it. It's the biggest food exposure therapy of my life. I have to do it. It's in my stomach. The mushrooms are in my stomach. And so I wait. Ten minutes later, I'm on a boat floating in the air, and the horizon is shifting my walls of my kitchen. And the sun is brighter than it's ever been in my living room, looking at the ceiling light. And so I know that it is time to walk over to the couch, put on an eye mask, to close my eyes, and turn on the Johns Hopkins psychedelic therapy Psilocybin Spotify playlist made public for this very moment. And look inside my brain. In the corner, I see this sweet, friendly, scared, fluffy purple monster kindly wearing a name tag for me. Arfit. It's really sweet of him. And I was high at this point, obviously, but not so high that I didn't remember what I was here to do. I remembered from my reading this advice that said, if you see a creature in your brain, an entity, say hello, greet it. See what you can learn from this part of your brain that's here to teach you something. And so I said, okay. Hi. Arfid, right? Yeah. Okay. Nice to meet you. See you. Thank you for keeping me safe, but I don't need you like that anymore. I love you. Goodbye. I push my eye mask onto my forehead. I look at my sweet, almost doctor husband and I say, I'd like that nectarine, please. He grabs my hand. He walks me to the kitchen, sits me on the bench. I'm high. He grabs a nectarine, runs it under the water of the sink, puts it on the counter, gently slices into it with a knife, picks up the piece, walks it back over to me on the bench, puts it in my hands. I'm holding a nectarine and I'm toying with it, like a bag baby learning solids for the first time. It's wet and soft and juicy and it smells like a sweet flower and it tastes like sunshine on a cold day after a wind just passed by. Food can do this. I am stoked. I eat everything I can. A juicy purple plum food, Definitely food, and delicious. A kale salad with lemon juice and goat cheese food. Neutral, maybe. Great. I'm not so sure yet. But it's food. A raw slice of Avocado. I finally understand why my peers can't afford houses. I am eating food. There's this tiny voice in the back of my head every time that says, danielle, are you so sure you want to do this? Are you and your purple, fluffy monster friend Arfid gonna be all right? Can you handle it? Yes, I can. I eat the food, and every time the voice disappears, it's just food. The next day, sober and nervous, my usual state. I don't know if I can keep up the progress. So I go to the freezer. I take out my favorite frozen pizza, put it in the toaster oven. When it's time to eat it, I reflexively start taking off the three pieces of very generous basil the frozen pizza company give us. And I stop myself, and I smell it, and I eat the basil on the pizza for the first time. And it tastes like herby oil harvested for royalty. But it's for me. The next day, I think, maybe I can make it 10% more challenging than what I did yesterday. And I'm licking the bowl clean from my first Caesar salad. By the end of the week, I'm eating raw sushi and pig's feet and trying 10 flavors of hot sauce on literally anything. I can try. I love food. I am alive. The past year and a half, I have been learning how to eat food as an adult. The years in your childhood that you get to experience learning how food interacts with your taste buds and your brain and your body. I get that as an adult now with adult consciousness and adult therapy skills, and that is a real joy. And I'd like to talk to you about oranges. They're like gushers, except good. And have you ever heard of sandwiches? You can put literally anything on a sandwich. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. I'm alive. I'm eating for the first time, and I understand what it's like to take in this sense without fear or being terrified. And every moment, I have the ability to try to unite people through food, because it turns out, most of us don't have an easy time with eating. I was born without one sense, my hearing. But when I gained that, I lost another. But now I'm 30, and I eat everything. Thanks.
- [17:05]
Kevin Allison
Wow. Oh, my gosh. My initial reaction to that is, it's so lovely what happens when you listen to a good story in that it can take you out of your own head and your obsession with your own problems and just help you to see that there's so much. There's so much else possibility in the world that people are able to conquer, things that might not have even occurred to you a person might have to conquer. So that was just such a treat. So I'll tell you what, we're going to take a quick break and I will gather my thoughts and be right back to give you the rest of my reaction of that story by Danielle Minard.
- [18:08]
Danielle Minard
We'll be right back.
- [18:11]
Kevin Allison
This episode is brought to you by Netflix. Global superstar and comedy sensation Kevin Hart returns for his fifth Netflix special. Acting My Age.
- [18:18]
Danielle Minard
I'm not the same man that I used to be.
- [18:20]
Kevin Allison
I go down the stairs sideways. Go ahead. You in a rush. Go around with a fresh perspective on life, family and getting older. Older you get, the less you can have. Is this sesame seeds on that bunch of. Get it out of here. Kevin's bringing his signature high energy humor and physical comedy in a true return to his standup origins. Watch Kevin Hart, Acting My Age now streaming only on Netflix. What's up? It's Draymond Green. I'm back for my 14th NBA season and my podcast, the Draymond Green show is back, too. This season I'm breaking down games, reacting to the biggest NBA stories and sitting down with teammates, rivals and culture shapers. And trust me, I'm not holding back on the court or on the mic. Two new episodes every week, new segments, big conversations, real basketball talk for the real hoop heads. Listen to and follow the Draymond Green show wherever you get your podcast. We're back. We're better. Let's get it. We're back. Okay, we're back. You know, the first thing that was really on my mind listening to that story, there's a book called, I think it's called Inner Work and the therapist's name is Johnson, who wrote it. And it's all about Jung and Carl Jung and his. One half of the book is about dream interpretation and another half of the book is about this exercise that Jung created called active imagination, where you close your eyes and meditate and you kind of invite into your consciousness into like whatever frame you might see in front of you anything that might want to arise and then to have some sort of conversation with that thing, you know, any aspect of yourself that might want to show up as something and to somehow have a sort of a relational shift by communicating with that part of yourself in a different way. And of course, that active imagination is a thing that people are able to do much, much, much, much more easily on various psychedelics. It's kind of a natural thing that almost happens, especially with Stuff like Ayahuasca dmt, where, you know, you almost. You're gonna. You're gonna be having conversations with someone almost no matter what. So. So I thought of that because, you know, I have spent so much of my life investigating, you know, might this work. Might this other thing work in terms of my own personal growth and breaking through some things. And then the second thing that I was thinking about throughout the whole story was, you know, life is so not fair. Life is just so not fair. And I think that there is a childish part of me that just at the age of 55, still really, really, really struggles with that. Having been raised so Catholic and having been raised on so many stories of God kind of torturing people in the Bible, just having this real sense of God. I mean, the fact just is that a lot of people are saddled with problems that other people just aren't, and those things can be so huge. This, of course, is a perfect example of what we always talk about in storytelling, that you can never completely understand what someone else is living through, you know, what their background is, what their particular psychological framework for things is, and how their brain works. You know? So, yeah, I felt so bad for her throughout a lot of the story because she's got this unfair disadvantage in life that she didn't choose, you know, but then, of course, there's the extraordinary fact that people are able to transcend things, and it's kind of a miracle sometimes, and it's so worth hearing about, and it's so. I'm so glad that her partner was assistive to her in that journey. It's funny, I also kind of felt glad because behind the scenes of Risk, no one knows more than me about the ones we lost, about the incredible stories that we recorded. And then for this, that, or the other reason, we're unable to put on the podcast a legal reason, or a person changing their mind or a family getting involved and saying, you can't run that. That kind of thing. So we had a miraculous story about someone with severe OCD getting over that from mushroom therapy, which, you know, is just so, like, okay, you know what I mean? Like. But we're unable to run that story. So it's fascinating that this is. It reminds me of that in a lot of ways. You know, I'm not a big fan of his, but Sam Harris, I mean, I disagree profoundly with a lot of his points of view, but he wrote this book at one time called Waking up. And I'll never forget a line in the book where he said, you Know, if one of my children got to be around 18 years old, got to be around, you know, young adult age, and they expressed that they had no interest in ever trying psychedelics, I'd be disappointed in them. I was like, I'm not a dad. But I was like, I think I would be, too, just because it's such a way of connecting to parts of your consciousness that are there, right? But kind of latent, you know, kind of hidden to you based on, you know, all your just habits of thinking. So I'm so thrilled for her success, and she told that story so well. Sometimes I think of. You know, I'm not a big believer in magical or religious or those sort of miraculous sorts of stories, but it does sometimes give me solace to think of that Buddhist idea of the troubles you're saddled with are an opportunity to transcend, and then in the next lifetime, you might not be saddled with such a heavy load. You know what I mean? I mean, to look at that from a positive frame of mind rather than, oh, God's cursing me. You know what I mean? So that was nice to kind of consider that, too. I'll tell you one thing, I have got to look up that playlist on Spotify. Jeff Barr and I are eventually going to tell a story about the most traumatic experience I think I've ever been through, which was a mushroom trip gone wrong. You know, like, it's very easy to also overdose on the things and have a very nightmarish experience, which once happened to me with our audio editor, Jeff Barr, when I was visiting him in Colorado. And I think one of the things that started things off bad was me being like, okay, so you put on some music that would be good for this, and him not being, you know, neither of us kind of being able to remember, you know, like, I had this Philip Glass music in mind and couldn't remember how to find it, and he wasn't able to find it. And I was like, we have a huge music library between the two of us. What is wrong with us? And getting kind of frustrated of, oh, it's gotta be just the right kind of music. So I have to see what Johns Hopkins thinks is just the right kind of music. And, yeah, that's it. It's an extraordinary story, and it proves that you should really never give up hope when it comes to, like, personal growth. I think one of the biggest pitfalls of personal growth, working on yourself is another bad habit of mine, which is to think, oh, well, didn't I work on that? Isn't that done now? I mean, the truth is like a lot of these things we master a bit and then regress and then have to work on again. And you know, sometimes it can feel like oh my gosh, do I ever get any better? And it can be very hard to see, oh no, you've come a long way. But but it's always great to hear about people who took a risk and got really like positive intentioned about something and made real progress and then kept on that journey. I mean, that's as good as it gets. So thank you to Danielle Minard for sharing your story with us. You can find Danielle at DanielleMinert. That's Danielle M E I N E R T. Or on Social Mediart and TikTok, you can watch videos of Danielle trying all kinds of foods for the first time at learning about food. And thank you to the Story Collider for sending Danielle our way. They are a wonderful true storytelling podcast where the stories usually have something to do with science. And beside that, they're dear friends of ours here and have been at it for almost as long as we have At Risk. So check them out@storycollider.org and thank all of you for listening along with me. Let us know what you think about these kinds of Risk Reacts episodes. You can find the whole series series at risk-show.com riskreacts and if you've heard an amazing true story where you thought oh my God, Kevin Allison has to hear that one, let us know. Leave a comment about it on this video or just me on social media. But whatever you do, don't spoil the story for me. You can let us know the podcast it was on and what the storyteller's name is and the title of the story. But let it be a surprise, maybe not even the title of the story. You know you can always find us on social media, including YouTube, RiskShow and always on our website risk-show.com folks, today's the day. Take a Risk. Is. Hey Ryan Reynolds here wishing you a very happy half off holiday because right now Mint Mobile is offering you the gift of 50% off unlimited. To be clear, that's half price, not half the service. Mint is still premium unlimited wireless for a great price.
- [30:54]
Danielle Minard
So that means half day.
- [30:57]
Kevin Allison
Yeah, give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront.
- [31:01]
Danielle Minard
Payment of $45 for three month plan equivalent to $15 per month required new customer offer for first three months only. Speed slow 135 gigabytes of network busy taxes and fees extra cmno com.