How Wellness Culture Does More Harm Than Good

By Paula Freedman-Diamond, PsyD, author of Toxic Striving

In recent decades, there has been increasing cultural emphasis on health and, more nebulously, wellness. While it’s human nature to seek pain relief, our obsession with wellness has spiraled beyond the basic desire for ease into an aspirational lifestyle that companies have been happy to pounce upon for financial gain. According to registered dietitian Christy Harrison (2023), the global wellness industry is valued at $4.4 trillion. We jump eagerly at whatever trend in health, fitness, medicine, and alternative medicine comes through the revolving door next. There is a glorification of “natural” remedies for ailments, eating “clean” and “whole” foods, and eschewing anything processed or containing additives or chemicals. At the same time, we want a quick fix, a pill or formula that provides guaranteed results. We’re obsessed with biohacking, attempting to control health outcomes beyond what is realistic. We’re allured by the promise of wellness influencers and alternative health providers who swear by their complicated nutritional formulas or miracle herbs and supplements.

While most people want to be well, the degree to which we pursue wellness may actually be making us sicker, if not physically, then certainly mentally. There is significant emotional consequence to obsessively controlling every aspect of one’s well-being, from diet and exercise to pain management, blood sugar, and sleep. Sometimes, the fixation on health symptoms and preoccupation with finding answers can lead us down a rabbit hole of potentially dangerous, unregulated treatments or pursuing unnecessarily restrictive lifestyles. When you’re convinced that a certain food, substance, or product is toxic, the anxiety you feel when around that product and the lengths you go to avoid it can be what’s actually harming you, or at least exacerbating any real effects. Wellness culture preys on our existential anxiety “by promising to stave off death” (Harrison 2023).

The assumptions of wellness culture are inaccurate at best, and discriminatory and dangerous at worst. Wellness culture promotes healthism, the interweaving of goodness and morality with health. For many people, these healthist beliefs become religious; engaging in health practices makes you superior or virtuous, and not pursuing health makes you sinful. Healthism blames people for their health problems. This perspective is also ableist, denigrating people based on ability. Harrison (2023) refers to wellness as “the rich person’s version of health,” especially as social currency is awarded not just for being healthy, but for actively striving toward greater well-being, through seeing alternative health providers (often not covered by health insurance), buying special and costly organic cooking ingredients, and devoting time and resources to these pursuits that many individuals simply do not have.

One of the more prominent branches of wellness culture is diet culture. In Anti-Diet: Reclaim Your Time, Money, Well-Being, and Happiness Through Intuitive Eating, Christy Harrison (2019) describes diet culture as a system that “worships thinness and equates it to health and moral virtue…promotes weight loss as a means of attaining higher status…demonizes certain ways of eating while elevating others…[and] oppresses people who don’t match up with its supposed picture of ‘health,’ which disproportionately harms women, femmes, trans folks, people in larger bodies, people of color, and people with disabilities, damaging both their physical and mental health.”

While anyone can experience pressure to achieve unrealistic body ideals or attach morality to their health status, people socialized as female, people of color, sexual minorities, people in larger bodies, and people with disabilities often face the brunt of these pressures. The pressures themselves emanate from systems of patriarchy, racism, ageism, and ableism. Consider what’s held up as the ideal body: it’s often young, thin, white (or with Eurocentric features), abled, cisgender, and free of disease. In Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia, Dr. Sabrina Strings (2019) points out the intricate ways in which the glorification of thin bodies has sprung directly from racist beliefs. Diet culture and wellness culture work hand in hand with anti-Blackness, pathologizing the natural diversity across our species.

Diet culture tells us that body size is completely within your control. Wellness culture tells us that health is completely within your control. By diet culture’s logic, it’s your fault if you don’t have the ideal physique. By wellness culture’s logic, it’s also your fault if you have health problems. These assumptions are flat-out false. You cannot determine someone’s health or habits by looking at them. Most of us know people who are naturally thin, despite eating nothing but fast food and sitting on the couch all day. On the flip side, there are plenty of people who are naturally larger, even if they run marathons and primarily eat nutritious foods. There are people who are thin with lots of health problems, and others who are fat with excellent health markers. Most of us know that health is complex. No matter how much spinach you eat, you can’t control for genetics, early childhood environment, or the stress of discriminatory systems. Not everyone has access to quality health care or a safe environment in which to be physically active. These, and numerous other factors, affect our health.

It’s important to remember that despite the false narrative pushed upon you that body size is a choice, bodies have always come in a variety of shapes and sizes.

PP. 10-13, Excerpt taken from Toxic Striving

Paula Freedman-Diamond, PsyD, is a licensed clinical psychologist, certified intuitive eating counselor, and owner and clinical director of HumanKind Psychological Services, where she specializes in treating anxiety, perfectionism, and disordered eating. She regularly contributes to Psychology Today in her online series, “Fat is Not a Feeling.” She has been a featured expert for The New York Times, Oxygen, Allure, Reebok, and Bark Technologies. She regularly provides mental health advocacy, education, and engaging content to her audience on Instagram and TikTok.