Sharyn Casey talks to Capsule about falling for different wellness trends – including a disastrous experience with fit tea and being scammed by a naturopath, the disturbing return of thin culture with Ozempic and why her new podcast, Better Me (Hopefully) aims to take readers along for the ride as she searches for wellness wisdom that actually works.
“There’s no more vulnerable moment than being an adult in activewear and being on the verge of pooing your pants,” says Sharyn Casey, summing up in one sentence why she is exactly the person you want to have hosting a wellness podcast.
She’s chatting to Capsule about her new podcast, Better Me (Hopefully), and how even she has had her fair share of ventures down the wellness rabbit hole. Not limited to the time she tried a ‘fit tea’ a few years ago and almost ended up pooing her pants while driving home along Auckland’s Harbour Bridge.
“I was in so much pain from my bowels about to… explode,” she recalls. “I got home just in time – like, I left my car in the middle of a shared driveway, left the front-door wide open – and it was like a full-on exorcism.” She shakes her head. “I was like, what am I doing? Why am I drinking this tea? It’s not going to make me fit, or skinny, it’s a hard-core laxative.”
With a full-on career and two young children, Sharyn is at the stage of wellness that a lot of us reach where the main priority is trying to just stay awake, alive and pull together some semblance of healthy living. Because so many of us are time poor and overly stretched, it makes us susceptible to sneaky little wellness trends that end up making us feel worse than we did when we started.
“I feel like there is so much in this world that is there to make us feel like shit,” Sharyn says frankly. “And I feel like the wellness industry really prays on the vulnerable.”
“I have spent so much money on all of these products that promise to make me feel better, or make me a better person,” she says. Whether it’s wall Pilates – “my entire Instagram explore page is just wall Pilates or an AI personal trainer??” – or yet another influencer “drinking a green juice and wearing beige activewear,” Sharyn said she had got to the stage where all these suggestions were just eating away at her.
“I wanted to do a podcast that found actual things that would make your life better and make my life better. Because I’m sick of being tired, and I’m sick of having to spend money on stuff that promises it will work, and it doesn’t.”
The main theory of Better Me (Hopefully) was to take an in-depth look at a variety of wellness related topics and work out what helps, and what hurts. Sometimes, it’s both – as discussed in the second episode, where Sharyn tackles the messy topic of Ozempic with author Johann Hari, who wrote the bestseller Stolen Focus and has now moved on to Ozempic, a product he has been taking himself and has mixed feelings about.
Ozempic feels like such a fraught discussion – as we’ve discussed here – because for many people, it’s become a question of aesthetics, over health. The original product was designed to help people living with diabetes, but its rapid weight-loss effects mean it has turned into something else entirely.
“I read an article recently about how ‘heroin chic’ is back in fashion!” Sharyn says. “It freaks me out.” She worries that the growing trend for extreme thinness means that we’re going backwards as a society. “Seeing all of this [pro-thin] stuff, it just makes me so mad. It’s like, ‘Guys, we had just reached a stage where trackpants were cool in public, with cool sneakers. We had just started to be able to be all shapes and sizes, different cultures, different colours, different religions and we were accepting of each other.’ And now…” she shakes her head. “It’s so disheartening.”
Sharyn says she still finds the more public-facing aspects of her job “surreal” in terms of being a well-known broadcaster. Her presenting role on Dancing With The Stars dramatically increased her public profile, which she said was quite overwhelming. “It’s a massive reason behind why I don’t drink anymore,” she says of her decision to stop drinking alcohol. “If someone came up to me and I’d been drinking, I felt hugely anxious – like I was being watched.”
She says she’s better at dealing with it now – but her eldest son is also at the stage where he now notices Sharyn and her husband Bryce Casey, also a hugely popular broadcaster, being recognised in public.
“I just say, ‘Oh, they know us because of the job we do,’” she says. “I try not to think about it, but I do feel a lot of pressure to always do the right thing. If people don’t like me, I don’t have a job. And that’s a very weird concept.”
Whether it’s sharing her and Bryce’s fertility journey to have their two sons – and the baby losses they experienced as part of that – Sharyn has always been open about the more vulnerable parts of being a human out in the world. And Better Me (Hopefully) is just another way she can turn her own personal experiences into something that other people might find helpful. And whether it’s being scammed by a naturopath, accidentally becoming a vaper or the fit tea experience, there’s a lot that Sharyn has learned the hard way – a way she’d rather you avoided.
“My aim with the podcast is to make people think and have interesting conversations; I’m not there to be preachy,” she says. “Maybe an episode will trigger something that may end up making your life better, that’s all. I don’t want people to think I’m some kind of expert, telling them what to do, because f—k I’m still trying to figure it out myself. We’re all still learning, right? Because as soon as you think you know everything, that’s the day you turn into an asshole!”
Better Me (Hopefully) is available on rova and all major podcast platforms.
