What Attracts You to Wellness—and What Makes You Want to Run Away?

Introducing The Thursday (Re)think

A couple weeks ago, I tried an experiment: a subscriber discussion thread. I wasn’t sure how it was going to go. Being someone who critiques diet and wellness culture for a living, I’ve come to expect online comments sections to be tricky at best, and for my own sanity I’ve mostly stopped participating in them. I even have comments turned off on my social media platforms (though these days I barely post there anyway), and that’s helped lift a huge cloud I didn’t know was following me around for years.

I just find it’s so much easier for me to preserve the mental space and creative energy I need to do my work if I don’t have to deal with the anger, trolling, and harassment that social media algorithms incentivize. While the vast majority of comments on my feeds were lovely, I knew there was always another shoe (or an entire shoe store) about to drop. That constant feeling of vigilance made it hard for me to focus on the things I really care about—in both my professional and personal life.

But I had an inkling things might be different here, and I’m happy to report that you proved me right! Our first subscriber thread was absolutely lovely. I had a great time connecting with you all and seeing what you shared, and I’m excited about the possibility of giving readers a place to chat with each other going forward. So I’m making discussion threads a regular feature in this newsletter, every other Thursday to start.

Commenting will be reserved for paid subscribers, but I think it would still be fun/useful for everyone to have a space to reflect on questions raised in this podcast and newsletter—questions about wellness and diet culture, how we get lured into wellness traps, how we can get out. Even if you never comment, I’m hoping these biweekly emails will inspire you to think about your relationship with food, your body, and wellness culture in a new way. To rethink wellness! Or to think about certain aspects of it for the first time, or more deeply.

Introducing The Thursday (Re)think.

For our first official installment, I thought this week’s podcast episode would make a good jumping-off point. I’ve been critical of wellness culture for many years, but in writing The Wellness Trap it was interesting to explore why I and many others were initially drawn to the idea of wellness. My guest in this week’s episode, Colleen Derkatch, does a deep dive into that very topic in her new book, Why Wellness Sells.

So why does wellness sell to so many of us? For me personally, it was largely a mix of several different things: wanting to heal my chronic health problems “naturally,” because I’d been burned by the conventional healthcare system and was also deeply invested in living an eco-friendly life; wanting to “optimize” my health so that I would never get sick again; and wanting to meet cultural beauty standards, which in wellness culture are often disguised as “looking well” (and of course include being very thin). In Colleen’s terms, I was driven by both the logic of restoration (wanting to restore yourself to health) and the logic of enhancement (wanting to be better than just not-sick).

To be honest, although I’m generally not sold on enhancement anymore, I still sometimes get drawn in by the logic of restoration. I don’t generally buy whatever is being pitched to me under that guise, but emotionally I sometimes feel a pull to at least look into things that promise to cure my symptoms. And while I’m always skeptical going in, underneath that there’s often a flicker of anxiety: what if I’m missing something that could help me, heal me? What if this really is a breakthrough, a game changer, a miracle?

So far, none of the wellness products and protocols I’ve investigated have been any of those things. And I’ve had enough practice sifting through wellness claims that I’m usually able to dismiss misinformation and scientific overreach pretty quickly. Still, that emotional tug lets me know that I’m still vulnerable, that I need to keep thinking critically, and that this isn’t just a me problem—so many of us struggle with this, and we need societal safeguards to help stop these dubious claims from proliferating.

But enough about me. Let’s talk about your reasons for being drawn to wellness—as well as the things that now make you skeptical (or maybe even downright repulsed). Do you feel compelled by the logic of restoration or the logic of enhancement, or both? Why did/does wellness sell to you? And if it doesn’t anymore, why not?

As before, please just follow a few ground rules to help keep this a supportive space: