Can wellness culture ever be healthy again?

Why I'm worried.

When I was living in New York City in the mid 2010s, wellness culture was just ramping up. Soul Cycle and barre classes were all the rage, juicing was the newest trend, and Whole Foods was the healthiest spot in town. 

I write about this era in my book, Drinking Games, and how I became increasingly obsessed with the pursuit of wellness as my blackouts and hangovers also worsened. I told myself that as long as I looked healthy on the outside, I couldn’t have a real alcohol problem. I sweat in saunas, slurped down every juice/soup/smoothie cleanse, and ate like a bird in plant-based restaurants. For me, wellness was synonymous with changing my body and being as small as possible. 

Fast forward to my move to Los Angeles in 2020. I was nearly three years sober, in a healthy relationship, and had put gluten and dairy back on the food pyramid. Through my recovery, I was becoming more comfortable taking up space not only in my body but also as a writer and woman. 

I thought I knew wellness culture, but L.A. wellness was a whole new beast. Now we were in the land of Erewhon, where smoothies with ingredients like collagen, sea moss, and astragalus (Google it) cost upwards of $20 a pop. 

Wellness has always been inherently performative on social media, but it started to feel different in our post-pandemic TikTok era. Maybe we were all desperate to feel good after so much fear and anxiety in quarantine, or maybe the wellness industry had been doing push-ups while we were all baking sourdough. Either way, I moved to L.A. at what felt like the peak of a new moment in wellness. A quick scroll through TikTok or Instagram revealed a slew of Get Ready With Me and Day In My Life videos depicting mornings filled with green powders and supplements, 12-step skincare routines, slicked back buns, and 10,000+ step hot girl walks. I wondered where everyone found the time (and money) to devote to this level of group ritual masked as self-care. 

It wasn’t enough to simply attend spin class after work; now that we were all working from home, there were more hours in the day to devote to our personal health goals. Wellness was still synonymous with being small, but it had also taken on an exclusionary quality. In L.A. (or at least the neighborhoods I frequented), I was often surrounded by dewy skinned girls wearing identical workout sets that flaunted their toned abs and tiny waists. And I noticed the looks they gave other bodies that did not fit their mold. 

Journalist Emma Specter writes about this in a recent piece for Vogue in which she drank Hailey Bieber’s Erewhon ‘Skin Glaze’ smoothie every day for a week: “Today’s trip back to the Silver Lake Erewhon is a trying one, as I show up in a sports bra and bike shorts before heading out to walk the Silver Lake Reservoir and am the recipient of what I perceive to be judgmental looks (from the thin people standing around me at the counter) (…). I usually don’t let fatphobia of that sort get to me, given that it’s pretty hard to permanently avoid in L.A., but it bums me out today.”

I know it’s not just like this in L.A. “Wellness” has become a ubiquitous term for being a specific kind of hot, and I personally am over it. Don’t get me wrong: I love pilates and walks and smoothies as much as the next millennial. The endorphins I get from exercise make me feel amazing and, as anyone in recovery from alcohol or drug abuse will tell you, chasing that high can be a helpful replacement for other unhealthy behaviors. But the language of wellness, with all its fancy trappings, has started to feel icky to me.

My mom recalls a different era of wellness culture; in the ‘80s she pressed play on Denise Austin aerobics VHS tapes and drank SlimFast shakes to lose the baby weight after I was born. My grandmother was proud of her lifelong commitment to movement: she swam in the ocean as a teenager growing up in Morocco, attended ballet classes on weekends as an adult living in Paris, and played tennis with my grandfather later in life. SlimFast aside (diet culture at its finest), I do think these activities feel more authentic than the wellness jargon we spout today. I genuinely don’t think my grandmother went to ballet to be “hot” or to look like everyone else. She moved her body because she enjoyed it and knew it was important to be healthy and strong. 

Now that I’m in the eighth month of my pregnancy, I’ve been thinking a lot about what real self-care looks like (sleep, drinking water, gentle movement). I’m looking back on former iterations of health to glean whatever positive takeaways I can, while grimly wondering what lies ahead for wellness culture as a whole. I worry about the next generation of young girls consuming unrealistic beauty and body standards masked as wellness routines on social media. And I’m hyper-aware of the looks I get when I walk into my local coffee shop these days; the quick once overs from wellness girls drinking their post-workout matcha and trying to discern whether the bump under my bike shorts is baby or belly fat. It’s a far cry from the kind of fatphobia others experience, but it’s still interesting to witness after all the years I spent butchering my body to be as thin as possible and fit in with those same girls. 

I’m also mulling over the kind of healthy lifestyle I want to model for my future baby. I want my child to view exercise as a fun outlet, to enjoy nourishing foods, to understand that we each only get one body in this life and need to care for it. So many of these values will be rooted in the actions Adam and I model at home, so we’re both practicing now. (Adam has recently started going to Silver Springs, a new heated studio offering pilates, yoga, and HIIT classes that I’m not allowed to attend while pregnant, and he has been loving it! Proud of him, even though his sweaty laundry is not my favorite.) 

What do you think of wellness culture? Has it ever been truly healthy? Can we get back there? Or has it morphed into something beyond repair?

Until next time, 

Xx Sarah