Well+Good head of content Faye McCray returns to discuss the 2024 wellness trends she's most excited about—and the ones she plans to skip. Plus: a food-related wellness trend that's less about diet culture and more about taste and culinary tradition, and why Christy isn’t sold on how wellness-food companies are pivoting their marketing to be more about pleasure and simplicity.
Faye is Head of Content at Well+Good. She is an author, executive leader, journalist and attorney with a passion for brand building and storytelling. For nearly a decade, she practiced law in competitive, fast-paced environments while building her own platform as a notable freelance writer and author. Faye founded and helmed Weemagine, a website devoted to inspiring creativity in children, before leading acquisitions and engagement for a leading tax publication. During Faye’s tenure, the social media platforms increased by over 200%, video content received over 500% more views, and podcast downloads increased to almost a half a million downloads and secured multiple advertisers.
Most recently, Faye led mental health content and diverse and underrepresented audience strategies for a billion dollar publisher that hosts over 100 million monthly views. Faye led the rebrand, relaunch, and double-digit % YoY growth strategy for their mental health strategy and efforts to increase audience for the entire portfolio of brands. Faye was honored on the Cynopsis Digital <It> List for innovation and leadership in digital media.
Faye is also a notable public speaker appearing on a number of media outlets and podcasts as well as numerous conferences and events including Reuters, ViVE, Ad Week, and many more. Her bylines have been featured in Authority Magazine, Huff Post, Parade, AARP Magazine and many more. She is a graduate of Binghamton University, (B.A.), the Johns Hopkins University, (M.A., magna cum laude), and Howard University School of Law. Most importantly, Faye is a married mom of three beautiful sons, a two-year old calico cat and a six month old Bernedoodle. Find her work at wellandgood.com.
Resources and References
Christy’s latest book, The Wellness Trap: Break Free from Diet Culture, Disinformation, and Dubious Diagnoses and Find Your True Well-Being
Subscribe on Substack for bonus episodes and more
Christy’s online course, Intuitive Eating Fundamentals
Transcript
Disclaimer: The below transcription is primarily rendered by AI, so errors may have occurred. The original audio file is available above.
Christy Harrison: Hey there. Welcome to this bonus episode of Rethinking Wellness. I’m Christy, and my guest today is Well+Good head of content Faye McCray, who returns for a bonus interview to discuss the 2024 wellness trends she's most excited about—and the ones she plans on skipping.
Faye and I didn’t end up discussing the main food-related fad from Well+Good’s trend roundup—which is that some wellness brands are positioning their “functional foods” as more pleasurable, comforting, and simple—because we ran out of time due to technical difficulties during our interview. But honestly, this trend wasn’t high on my list to discuss anyway, since it feels to me like these wellness brands are just trying to pivot away from the hardcore diet culture that’s going out of fashion in certain circles, while still retaining their front-of-package labels that tout their high protein and low sugar content. So still pretty diet-y in some ways, and they’re also adhering to wellness-culture mandates of having a small ingredients list and cool-looking packaging.
I'm not necessarily knocking these brands. I've eaten some of their products and enjoyed them, but to me this trend doesn't feel particularly exciting or really all that much different from what I've been noticing among wellness food brands in the past five years or so, and wellness culture in general and how it's sort of replacing diet culture in some ways, but still incorporating so many tenets of diet culture into its belief system. But there is one food related wellness trend on the list that feels pretty unique in that it's less about diet-culture and more about taste and culinary tradition, and that was refreshing to me. In this episode, Faye and I discuss what that trend is and why even there, there's still some diet-culture marketing being used to move products. Without any further ado, here's my bonus interview with Faye McCray.
