I have spent the better part of seven years chasing an unattainable image facilitated by wellness influencers and culture, and I have come to believe that the wellness industry has become a corporate beast, fuelled by consumerism and facilitating unhealthy practices.
Wellness culture is driven by the goal to be in a state of optimum health. It is propped up by the health and fitness industries and is fed to the masses by social media marketing, and particularly by social media influencers. On the surface, wellness culture seems great; who would debate that organic food and early morning yoga classes proved otherwise? But on closer inspection, I’ve realised that wellness culture has cultivated a fertile breeding ground for the weight-loss industry to propagate fad regimes that are cloaked in the costume of ‘wellness’.
The days of religiously following restrictive diets such as the Ornish and Atkins diets seem like they’re gone, but wellness is starting to feel like a façade for the same behaviour through lifestyle choices that emphasise ‘clean eating’. Clean eating is the concept of eating wholefoods and avoiding or minimising processed foods. But following a nutritious diet free from ‘nasties’ can be taken out of hand until it, like many diets, becomes an obsessive habit, providing the perfect gateway to an eating disorder. Not to mention that it encourages viewing foods as ‘good’ or ‘bad’, and that ‘good’ foods tend to be costlier, convincing me to buy overly-expensive gluten free granola for years, or that dousing everything in chia seeds will apparently make me a better person.
Wellness marketing reminds you that to be well you need to consume kombucha, turmeric lattes, lunar lattes, milk from substances that can’t actually be milked, cold-pressed juices, organic everything, goji berries, maca powder, alkalising super greens powder, acai, apple cider vinegar, hemp, detox tea, mushroom elixir, and activated charcoal. Or that you need to practice mindfulness, yoga, Pilates, reiki, body-sculpting, mud-bathing, facial peeling, ‘living your best life’, and charging your crystals at the next full moon. Need I go on? While many of these products and lifestyle choices are great, and I use some of them, I struggle with the narrative that you are neglecting your wellbeing if you don’t purchase expensive health items.
This transition from a desire to be thin to a desire to be ‘well’ was an incredible opportunity for many businesses. The global health and wellness food industry is projected to be worth more than US$811 billion by 2021. Between 2016 and 2017 in the U.S, chia seeds had a 14.7 percent increase in retail sales while quinoa saw a 15.6 percent increase. Wellness marketing appeals because it promises an improvement in overall health, whereas cold hard dieting does not have the same allure.
The rebirth of Weight Watchers is the epitome of this carefully disguised dieting re-brand. The company that has informed women on how to get skinny and subsequently get happy since 1963 has relaunched as WW International with the tagline ‘wellness that works’ and promising ‘weight loss and wellness help’. The reinvention came after consumers began rejecting a brand solely focused on weight loss, causing what CEO Mindy Grossman called a ‘near death experience’ for the company when its value dropped from US$1.84 billion to US$1.16 billion in 2014. Grossman said the new strategy of WW aimed to take advantage of the booming health and wellness market, in which people didn’t want to diet so much as improve their overall health.
I am the ideal target audience of the wellness industry: a twenty-two-year-old woman who engages with social media and who has subconsciously absorbed the narrative that mainstream media pushes – that a woman’s appearance is the epitome of her success and worth. I have spent far too much time idealising Instagram influencers. Seeing their perfectly taut abs, balayage-d hair, Bondi Sands skin and impossibly flawless make-up served as daily reminders that I needed to look better. Social media has opened a world of comparison that has morphed into feeling like a responsibility to always look your best. It pays to remember that this is a job for influencers, with every product and brand they promote earning them up to US$100,000 per post depending on their number of followers.
For years, clean eating and my quest to be ‘well’ hid what I realised was a very unhealthy relationship with food. Since the age of 15, I have spent years calorie counting and intermittent fasting. I sporadically and desperately tried a multitude of diets, including anti-inflammatory, vegetarian, pescatarian, vegan, dairy-free, paleo, gluten-free, refined sugar-free, carb-free, fat-free, and a very unsuccessful attempt at caffeine-free. I gained deep satisfaction from pushing my body into a state of calorific deficit, by over-exercising and under-eating on a strictly ‘clean’ diet.
There is a definition for this madness. It is called orthorexia, defined by the online dictionary as an obsession with eating foods that one considers healthy, and systematically avoiding specific foods that they believe to be harmful. I believe the wellness industry is perpetuating and unconsciously promoting orthorexia. Research shows that 15 per cent of women will experience an eating disorder during their lifetime, and an estimated 20 per cent are undiagnosed. Eating disorders are the third-most common chronic illness among young women. These women are vulnerable to projecting their body-image insecurities onto ‘wellness’ only to end up in another obsessive mind frame.
I’ve spent years on a quest for optimum health, only to find that I felt my best when I stopped over-exercising, and obsessing about every morsel of food I consumed. It took growing older and wiser (although only slightly) for me to understand that I needed to stop being so harsh on myself. I learnt to accept that my body’s natural state was not how it looked on an 800 calorie per day diet, and that I don’t need an array of expensive health products to be ‘healthy’.
I do still love yoga, I am a big advocate for eating local, organic foods and I actually quite like turmeric lattes. I have just realised that when I was caught up in the commercialised struggle for ‘wellness’ I had stopped trying to be healthy and instead become a pawn in a relentless cycle of consumerism.
So my problem doesn’t lie with the idea of wellness, it’s that wellness culture has become synonymous with weight loss and it is a display of privilege through an expensive market of luxury health products. As I’ve come to understand, and I think many others are also realising, being well is not a challenge. You really do feel a whole lot better when you forgo following the perfectly curated photos of wellness bloggers, ditch the unnecessary ‘health necessities’ and break the damn intermittent fast.
Connor Amor-Bendall is a New Zealand-born journalist and artist who is based in Melbourne. She has a keen interest in politics, poetry and pastries.