Wellness culture woes
Some words about diet and wellness culture and how we've all been duped.
The more I learn about diet culture and wellness culture, the more convinced I become that wellness culture is actually making us sicker, more confused, more hypervigilant about food, more obsessive, and truthfully…quite unwell. Wellness culture doesn’t create healthier communities, it just muddies the water and distracts us from the systemic cultural shifts that need to happen in order to actually create people and communities that are truly well.
Now before I dig into my whys, let’s define some stuff.
Definitions…
I have written extensively about diet culture and what it is on other platforms, and I don’t really feel like re-hashing all of the things. So if you want a deeper dive, go read this.
In a nutshell, diet culture just refers to our culture’s obsession with and privileging of thinness at all and any cost. Diet culture is a system of beliefs, values, and attitudes that lead us to engage in a certain way with food, exercise, and our bodies. It is driven by a multi-billion dollar industry that continues to make oodles of dollars by convincing people that something is wrong with them and that their magic mushroom-collagen-protein-keto-carob chip-cauliflower powder is going to be THE THING that fixes all of their problems and finally makes them HeAlThy.
I really appreciate Christy Harrison’s work on this subject who, by the way, just released a new podcast and book that is literally all about dispelling wellness culture myths. She’s an expert on all the things I’m talking about in this post.
Here’s how she defines diet culture. Diet culture…
Worships thinness and equates it to health and moral virtue, which means you can spend your whole life thinking you’re irreparably broken just because you don’t look like the impossibly thin “ideal.”
Promotes weight loss as a means of attaining higher status, which means you feel compelled to spend a massive amount of time, energy, and money trying to shrink your body, even though the research is very clear that almost no one can sustain intentional weight loss for more than a few years.
Demonizes certain ways of eating while elevating others, which means you’re forced to be hyper-vigilant about your eating, ashamed of making certain food choices and distracted from your pleasure, your purpose, and your power.
Oppresses people who don't match up with its supposed picture of “health,” which disproportionately harms women, femmes, trans folks, people in larger bodies, people of color, and people with disabilities, damaging both their mental and physical health.
Diet culture is gross.
Wellness culture is diet culture in another form. It ups the ante. It elevates it. Wellness culture is all things fancy, like first-class. If diet culture is champagne, wellness culture is the Veuve Clicquot.
Wellness culture is obsessed with all things “clean” and exclusively organic and loves the words “cleanse”, “detox”, and “superfoods”. It is a TikTok influencer spreading misinformation about health, parading trends that range from downright dangerous to stupidly expensive.
I was reading a really great commentary on how wellness culture is making us (ironically) unwell and it estimated that the wellness industry is a $1.5 trillion industry.
THAT IS SO MUCH MONEY. There are so many humans and businesses getting rich from selling a “solution” to a made-up problem, making insecure people feel even more insecure when they can’t afford to buy an $18 juice.
But Rachel, the problem isn’t “made-up”, people are unhealthy and need to be healthy.
Hmm…let’s explore this using some critical thinking skillz…
First of all, I want you to take the word “unhealthy” and replace it with the word “fat” because – yes, I’m calling you out—that is what you mean when you say “unhealthy”. The world gets better when people are honest, so let’s finally be honest. Everything changed for me when I actually got honest and confronted my own anti-fat bias. So, I invite you to let go of your ego for a minute, suspend your self-judgment, and get curious.
Fatphobia is rampant in this culture. We’ve quite literally normalized discrimination and maltreatment towards people in larger bodies. We live in a world where it’s okay to marginalize people because of their body size and to treat them as less than human. And if you have even the tiniest moral compass (and some capacity for empathy), that should really bother you.
Here is what we need to collectively realize: there are people in ALL BODY SIZES that are both healthy and unhealthy. Read that again.
There are people with small bodies who are unhealthy.
There are people with large bodies who are unhealthy.
The difference is that people in smaller bodies who are unhealthy are typically praised and congratulated while people in larger bodies face constant scrutiny, judgment, and stigma.
There is not one single disease that only fat people get. In fact, people who are “overweight” according to the incredibly inaccurate yet somehow still widely used tool we call the BMI (bullshit. measuring. index) statistically live longer than those categorized as “within normal range.”
This probably challenges everything you’ve ever been taught about health and wellness. That’s because we’ve all been brainwashed to believe that thin and healthy are synonyms, that body size is the holy grail indicator of health, and it couldn’t be farther from the truth.
I could riddle off several facts that would blow your mind, information that runs contrary to what we were all taught growing up. However, this isn’t a newsletter about that. I could write one of those too but there are people who are smarter than me who have written really great books on the subject, books that radically changed my own belief systems. So, if you’re ready to confront your own biases and want to challenge your beliefs, let’s get in touch. I’d be happy to share some great book recommendations!
But I couldn’t write an article about wellness culture without mentioning weight stigma because most of why wellness talk drives me absolutely bananas is because it’s based on FALSE ideologies about what health is and how it’s achieved. The wellness world makes a shit ton of money because people are still drinking the Kool-Aid (but only the dairy-free, soy-free, dye-free, fun-free, sugar-free, supersonic-superfood kind) and for the love of all that is good, I just want people to stop drinking the damn Kool-Aid (and to use critical thinking skills). So yes, the problem is made up. Case closed. Moving on.
Here are the other reasons why wellness culture makes me roll my eyes at least three times every single day…
ONE
It rests on the assumption that wellness is achieved through individualism and individual behaviors. Like your health status is UP TO YOU AND ONLY YOU. Which is just plain wrong. There is extensive research that shows that there are many, many other factors that impact your health, factors that play a huge role but get left out of the health and wellness conversations (because addressing them wouldn’t really make people a lot of money). These factors I’m talking about are often called Social Determinants of Health.
These are important environmental, cultural, and social factors that are known to directly impact a person’s health. These factors are beyond downplayed in our culture despite being well documented in research to impact a person’s health outcomes. These factors include:
Economic stability
Neighborhood and physical environment
Education
Food access
Community and social support and relationships
Access to healthcare
Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACES) and trauma
What we now know is that socioeconomic factors and someone’s physical environment makes up around 50ish% of their predicted health outcomes. Health behaviors (tobacco use, diet and exercise, alcohol use, and sexual activity) make up about 30ish%, and the rest can be attributed to genes, biology, and access to quality healthcare.
Wellness culture distracts us from *actual* issues, issues like poverty, trauma, food insecurity, and the chronic stress that is rampant in our culture. If we actually took these issues seriously, I think we could legitimately move the needle on public health.
Want to learn more about this? Listen to this Ted Talk by Dr. Nadine Burke Harris.
TWO
Wellness culture perpetuates perfectionism, rigidity, and obsession and no matter how much these qualities continue to be worshiped and praised in our backassward culture these qualities are not actually beneficial to our health.
Wellness culture also assigns moral superiority to those who highly value the things that it says you should value. Should social status be assigned to someone based on their health status? I don’t think so but the world certainly operates as such.
THREE
This one really gets my engines firing. Wellness culture has taken what can be genuinely helpful practices like yoga, meditation, and eating vegetables and totally twisted the energy around these things. Things that can be beneficial for well-being are now viewed as ultimate things that, as I mentioned before, are now tied to your morality, goodness, and worthiness as a person. The energy around practices like moving your body and eating fiber is so frantic, not fluid, and it feels full of pressure. And we don’t need pressure, we need pleasure.
The energy in the wellness world can feel like this: do or do not do these things and only eat these things and you will become uber self-enlightened and be able to transcend all pain and suffering.
Wellness culture has literally made people afraid of FRUIT. FRUIT!? That’s sad.
Also, wellness rhetoric. The language is funny and all too ironic, contradicting itself in every way.
Don’t eat processed food but BUY THIS ULTRA-PROCESSED PROTEIN POWDER FOR 5 MILLION DOLLARS.
#SELFLOVE! But only if you engage in the super healthy behaviors my company is promoting…then you can #loveyourself.
It’s not a diet, it’s a “lifestyle”…(Company then rebrands and then still actively encourages counting calories, categorizing good/bad foods, and micromanaging food intake…)
Only eat REAL food with REAL ingredients…but here’s our new brand of shelf-stable pills and powders and packages that you should TOTALLY buy.
It’s all so exhausting.
The 10-foot view
Do you want to know what my biggest beef is (pun absolutely intended)???!! The thing that REALLY gets under my skin?!
It’s that wellness culture is beyond reductionistic and narrow. It offers a simple solution to incredibly complex social and cultural problems, solutions that many people blindly follow without ever questioning. And people don’t want to talk about the complexities of the problems they just want to placate massive public health issues with sloppy solutions.
AND- what really gets me is that it is literally someone’s job to leverage misinformation about health and the insecurity that they know you have about your body in order to sell products and get rich. Sure, they can hide behind the “but I really care about people’s HeAlTh” narrative until the cows come home but I don’t buy it (and I don’t think you should either).
And it is really about “health” after all? Or is it about anti-fatness and our culture’s obsession with self-objectification, appearance-based worthiness, and the ruthless pursuit of wealth at the cost of people’s actual well-being?
BRB while I go get a fresh juice…
For some of you who are reading this and who know me, you might be confused. Because if you know me at all you know that I participate in some of these practices and behaviors that you think I’ve just criticized.
I have the privilege (yes, it is a privilege) of shopping at Whole Foods sometimes. I make my own sourdough bread and I do yoga. I love to go on walks, and I even just planted a vegetable garden.
You might even be thinking, “Rachel is a therapist…of course, she cares about wellness.” And I do care about it but not in the sense of the word that it is typically thought of and understood.
Wellness culture doesn’t get to “own” things like eating vegetables and doing yoga. In fact, I have reclaimed certain practices for myself that absolutely have the capacity to be disordered. In fact, I can point to a time in my life when I drank fresh pressed juice and exercised regularly, and it was not healthy. I was not healthy.
There is a difference in engaging in a behavior, whether it’s drinking a smoothie or going to an exercise class, from a place of punishment, restriction, deprecation, and deprivation versus compassionate nurture, care, appreciation, and satisfaction.
Wellness-y behaviors can absolutely be disordered and unhelpful to a person’s mental, emotional, and physical well-being and yet this doesn’t mean that they’re always disordered. These behaviors can absolutely be a part of any eating disorder. I think they can also be reclaimed and exist apart from disorder.
It’s not really about yoga or running or hiking or eating kale. These are just behaviors. What matters is the intention and the thoughts, feelings, and beliefs that are driving the behaviors.
So can I offer some questions for you to get curious about?
Are you eating in a certain way, are you moving in a certain way because you hate yourself and feel like you must do these things in order to be worthy and secure, or because you’re being kind and living out your values?
Are you engaging in behaviors that disconnect you even more from your own inherent and embodied wisdom or do the behaviors you’re choosing – the way you nourish your body and move it in this world – actually lead to deeper embodiment, self-acceptance, and self-nurture?
There are WORLDS of differences, differences that legitimately do have implications for your health, between the former and the ladder.
A quote I always return to…
There is a quote from a book called Tuesdays with Morrie and it goes like this:
“The culture we have does not make people feel good about themselves. And you have to be strong enough to say if the culture doesn't work, don't buy it.”
This is exactly how I feel about wellness culture, wrapped up in the simplicity of a quote.
I stopped “buying it”, in multiple senses of the word, a few years ago. And it has led to unparalleled freedom and, not-so-ironically, *actual* wellness….of spirit, mind, and body.
Wellness culture is a scam.
Don’t be scammed.
XOXO,
Rachel