In 2023, wellness was a $6.3 trillion dollar industry, it’s also notoriously riddled with grifts and scams. As online  wellness influencers drive the anti vax movement, white Christian nationalists and the Make America Healthy Again movement are transforming body purity into body fascism. On today’s show, host Richelle Wilson is joined by journalist Amy Larocca to talk about the world of wellness and her new book, How to Be Well: Navigating Our Self-Care Epidemic, One Dubious Cure at a Time.
Larocca started tracing the emergence of our current wellness movement when she noticed the marketing techniques used for luxury products were being used for health products. This was also at a time when healthcare was becoming less and less accessible. Women (especially) have been sold lotions and potions long before, which leads Larocca to say that the beauty standards haven’t changed but the methods and products being sold to them have. Our current wellness moment is only a veneer that covers up the same toxic world of weight loss and thinness. Even the shift to body positivity melted away with the emergence of Ozempic and “the opportunity to be thin on demand.” But it’s hard to escape the promises of “feeling better” and glowing up.
They also discuss the cruel ways that the wellness industry steps in to fill the gaps in mainstream healthcare that leaves so many women and chronically ill people behind. Wellness has also become a kind of secular gospel, expressed through ecstatic movement in CrossFit boxes and SoulCycle studios. And in the US the world of wellness is deeply enshrined in political life with the rise of MAHA. 

Amy Larocca is an award-winning American journalist. She spent 20 years working at New York magazine as both Fashion Director and Editor at Large. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Vogue, Town & Country and the London Review of Books, among others. She lives with her family in New York and North London.
Featured image: the cover of How to Be Well.
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