Wellness Culture
Wellness culture is a set of values that equates wellness with moral goodness, and posits certain behaviors—and a certain type of body—as the path to achieving that supposed rectitude.
Wellness culture overlaps with diet culture, which I described in my first book, Anti-Diet, as a system of beliefs that regards thinness, muscularity, and particular body shapes as markers of health and moral virtue; promotes weight loss and body reshaping as a means of attaining higher status; demonizes certain foods and food groups while elevating others; and oppresses people who don’t match its supposed picture of health.
Wellness culture more or less incorporates these values wholesale from diet culture, but it also adds several other major tenets of its own: denigrating conventional medicine and idolizing alternative, “integrative,” “natural,” and “holistic” approaches to healing, with a particular reverence for methods perceived as “ancient” and non-Western (even if those characterizations aren’t always accurate); stressing the importance of the individual’s ability to pick and choose which wellness practices to adopt, in a way that often results in taking healing modalities out of context and creating cultural appropriation and fetishization; lionizing individual choices in general, downplaying or outright ignoring the social determinants of health that have a far greater impact on people’s well-being than individual behaviors; and giving anecdotes and social-media testimonials more weight than sound scientific evidence, enabling the spread of mis- and disinformation.
My second book, The Wellness Trap (April 2023), is an in-depth exploration of wellness culture and the myriad ways it creates harm and robs people of true well-being. The book is the culmination of many years of research into these topics, which began in 2014 with explorations of orthorexia and “clean eating.” Click to learn more about The Wellness Trap, and scroll down for a collection of my writing, podcast conversations, and other content sketching the contours of wellness culture.
Articles & Essays
My Whole Identity Was Health and Wellness. My Reality Was Disordered Eating (SELF, 2019)
Why Detox Diets and Cleanses Always Fail (Refinery29, 2016)
The Truth About Gluten Sensitivity That No One Wants To Hear (Refinery29, 2015)
The REAL Truth About Clean Eating (Refinery29, 2015)
Interviews
What Is Orthorexia? How "Healthy Eating" Can Turn Into a Disorder (Good Housekeeping, 2021)
Maybe You Just Think Rice Makes You Sluggish? (Burnt Toast, 2021)
Well-Being > Wellness (Let It Out, 2020)
(Un)Well Season 1, Episode 4: Fasting (Netflix, 2020)
Weight Watchers Is Changing Its Name, But Is It Trying To Have Its Diet Cake And Eat It Too? (BuzzFeed News, 2018)
When Healthy Eating Becomes an Obsession (Food Heaven podcast, 2018)
Orthorexia: How My 'Clean Eating' Turned Into Anorexia (SELF, 2017)
Blog Posts
Podcast Episodes
