Why I Stopped Working Primarily in the Wellness Space

For more than a decade, I was, primarily looking at health and wellness through a relatively privileged lens, both physically/health-wise and financially.

I’ve been extremely lucky that the genetic hand I was dealt hasn’t included autoimmunity or many of the other acute or chronic illnesses from which many of my friends and peers have suffered for years. At least not to-date.

And, while I haven’t had healthcare (insurance) for a very long time, the times I’ve needed the support of a doctor - a checkup, vision or dental checks and care, etc. - I’ve been able to pay out-of-pocket for that care.

I also went many, many years spending money on things like organic and gluten-free/“fancy” groceries without paying much attention to their prices. I recall saying to my husband many times “how lucky are we? That we can just come to the store, buy whatever we want or need, fill up our fridge and pantry, and that’s that.”

Though that was my lens primarily, I was of course not blind to how my own lived experience was absolutely not that of everyone at-large. I have always realized that many would-be “health foods” were economically out of reach for a lot of folks, and that we do not, in fact, all “have the same 24 hours in the day as Beyoncé.”

Or, perhaps they simply haven’t faced a health or financial hardship that felt at least partially out of their control, to the point where it made them reconsider their previously held beliefs that “anyone can be healthy and wealthy if they just try hard enough.”

Or, they could be just so firmly convinced that poor health or a lack of wealth are moral failings - that someone should have “done more” or “made better decisions.”

Or, they could still believe that public health officials are not, by and large, good people whose lives have been dedicated to protecting the health of the American people.

Ultimately, maintaining the same belief-system about health and wellness in a post-COVID America that you did in a pre-COVID America seems to me like a solid use of a bury-your-head-in-the-sand technique for ignoring the ever-present facts swirling about what went down in that roughly 2-year period (and in many ways continues on today).

While the Appeal to Nature Fallacy claims that “natural is always better,” which undermines public health efforts and the public confidence in them (like vaccines, or standardized food additives), the Naturalistic Fallacy claims that something natural is the “good and moral choice,” thereby making you a “good and moral person for making that choice.”

I realize that my own perspective was absolutely clouded by both of these fallacies for a long time.

It became exceedingly clear that there was a major divide happening in the wellness space in the early days of the pandemic.

These folks were claiming COVID was a hoax, or you could:

• prevent either contracting it or dying from it by following diet, lifestyle, and supplement protocols, or

• you could take an alternative medical treatments for it, or

• that it only really killed people who were in poor health due to their own lifestyle choices.

The deniers claimed that masking and social distancing protocols were “oppressive,” or were “infringing on their rights,” and displayed an extremely individualist points of view. “If I can’t do what I want to when I want to while this pandemic is raging on, it’s an attack on my rights as an American.”

It essentially felt like people were looking for a reason to not only take the pandemic and the public health recommendations personally, but also to simply deny that it was an issue or that they might have any shared responsibility as a member of a society to look out for their neighbors.

This community of folks whose audience was so largely comprised of people seeking nutritional and lifestyle support for their bodies while dealing with autoimmunity turned its back on those people, and fast.

Instead of recognizing how public health measures are intended to help us all, at-large, they made rules and restrictions into a much bigger deal than they truly were, and acted oppressed by them.

People acted like a small, thin protective layer across their faces were chains of enslavement.

They posted selfies while traveling on airplanes without masks, “showing off” their resistance to the “oppression.” Give me the biggest break.

I truly cannot comprehend being so selfish and ignorant as to not recognize that doing something as simple as wearing a mask in confined spaces could help to keep people around you from contracting a potentially deadly disease.

I also truly cannot comprehend the inflated ego and wild Dunning Kruger effect at-play when wellness folks claimed to know much of anything about a highly contagious infectious disease that even virologists and experts didn’t know much about at the time. Phew. It. Was. WILD.

If you’re here and reading this, I assume you’re in alignment with me, and for that I say, holy Hell THANK GOD we can still think critically and not turn our “wellness” beliefs into a religion - or even a cult - as it appears many have.

I titled this article “Why I Stopped Working Primarily in the Wellness Space” because I do feel that I still work partly in the space - right here in this Substack as well as via my Instagram account.

As someone who has been a very real person sharing my opinions, hot takes, insights, and experiences for more than 15 years, there’s a big part of me that enjoys continuing to do so. I like being a grounded voice, someone who is sane and works to provide a balanced perspective - not wholly a “just eat real food” voice, and not wholly a “what you eat doesn’t matter” voice. I land somewhere in between - squarely.

And I am okay with that. I hope you are, too.

More to come… I definitely have more to say on my changing perspectives on health and wellness over the past 5-6 years.