This article references eating disorders.
When I was a young journalist grappling with my own health issues, I got swept up in a vision of wellness that relied heavily on restrictive eating.
I spent hours each day thinking about, preparing, and purchasing food that was as “clean” and “whole” as possible, then second-guessing my choices and often getting lost in research about the purported harms and benefits of different ingredients.
I believed that if I could just crack the code on how to “eat right,” I could send my chronic diseases into remission and prevent all future health problems (and get the body of a willowy yoga model in the process, though I didn’t say that part out loud).
The wellness ideal was unattainable and damaging to my well-being, and I unwittingly transmitted it — via a lot of proselytising about local, “whole,” “real” food – to my readers. It was the early 2000s, and wellness culture was nowhere near the well-oiled (essential-oiled?) machine it’s become in the age of social media, but already its ethos of food- and weight-shaming disguised as progressive ideas about health were in place.
People were starting to get wise to the fact that diets don’t work, and the diet industry was trying to adapt and stay afloat.
A new range of products called ‘Vitiligo Vanquish’ just launched in the UK.
At the same time, writers like Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser were opining about America as a “republic of fat” created by fast and processed food, and the more blatant and straightforward diet culture exemplified by companies like WeightWatchers and Jenny Craig was giving way to “it’s not a diet, it’s a lifestyle.”
With the rise of rhetoric about the so-called obesity epidemic, dieting began to be framed as an issue of health and wellness – and indeed a matter of life and death – rather than simply as a question of aesthetics.
One of the most egregious of wellness culture’s damaging assumptions is that if you’re really making all the “right” choices, it will show on the outside, in the form of adherence to conventional beauty standards.
If you deviate from those standards at all — by, say, having acne, dry skin, brittle hair, or any of the other myriad human characteristics that wellness culture (and Western culture in general) considers “flaws” — then that means you’re not truly well on the inside.
It means you must be doing something wrong, must not be doing wellness well enough – and must need to buy more of the myriad products that the wellness industry is right there to sell you when you have this realisation.
No, it's not “just a filter.”
Diet and wellness culture would have you believe that health disparities largely come down to eating and exercise, and that they could be fixed if marginalised groups simply had the education and access needed to “eat healthy” and move more.
And yes, nutrition and physical activity do play a role in health and can be impacted by poverty and lack of access; food apartheid, food insecurity, and neighbourhood safety can all affect eating and activity levels.
But in reality, food and exercise are far less important for collective well-being than they’re made out to be. Several studies have shown that, apart from genetics, what primarily determines the health of a population are social factors. About 70% of health outcomes are attributable to socioeconomic factors, access to and quality of healthcare, and the physical environment. Only 10% of population health outcomes are attributable to diet and exercise combined. The remaining 20% are attributable to behaviours such as smoking, alcohol and drug use, sexually transmitted diseases, and teen birth.
“When someone is struggling with basic survival what good are juice cleanses or fitness classes or skin care?”
In other words, the vast majority of factors affecting our collective well-being have nothing to do with food and exercise – or with individual behaviours at all — and everything to do with the conditions in which we live.
Living in wellness culture, it’s understandable that many people believe the reverse — that the only things that really matter are nutrition, physical activity, and perhaps other pursuits like meditation or taking supplements, and that social and economic factors play a small role. But that simply isn’t true, and wellness culture puts our well-being at risk by encouraging supposedly health-optimising behaviours that have little benefit and great potential for harm.
When someone is struggling with basic survival what good are juice cleanses or fitness classes or skin care? These things are wildly inaccessible for anyone in that situation, but even if they were within reach financially, spending time and energy on the pursuit of so-called wellness just isn’t a long- term solution when the problem is deeper, rooted in systems beyond individual control.
Extracted from The Wellness Trap by Christy Harrison, which is out now (Hodder, £16.99).
If you’re worried about your own or someone else’s health, you can contact Beat, the UK’s eating disorder charity, 365 days a year on 0808 801 0677 or beateatingdisorders.org.uk.
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