Thread by @bgg2wl

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┻┳| •.•) The wellness industry is
┳┻|⊂ﾉ classist and racist and
┻┳| this little op-ed solidifies it

nytimes.com/2019/06/08/opi…

1) Only in America is “living well” a commodity instead of a standard that we preserve in and through policy

2) Only in a special kind of “feminism” do we wonder “what the men are doing” as if what *they* are doing is the standard to which we should live up to

But more on that later

3) I have always said that the overwhelming majority of the explosion of gluten free/grain free this that and whatever had to do with people trying to lose weight under the guise of a condition deserving of empathy instead of the guilt of “being on a diet."

4) But more than anything, what is so troubling is that this has now given way to overpriced “DNA-based” tests that check your DNA (!!!) for conditions we literally do not have the science to solidly prove. There’s every incentive for these companies to lie; every incentive +

for these companies to give you the standard “you should cut gluten, you should cut dairy, you should cut carbs, you should cut processed food” and send you away as a happy customer with an “I told you so,” with your bias being confirmed by… your eventual weight loss.

More than anything, the model for what is “well” always centers around the middle-aged white woman and what she can tolerate. The "healthiest diet," year over year, is always the Mediterranean one. The minimal-grain, minimal meat, high produce diet…

…as if that’s the only culture on the planet whose diet looks that way. You have to ask yourself why so few non-European diets are surveyed in this way in major media. Or why so many cultures’ staples become such a source of “unhealthiness” once they reach the US.

The “wellness industry” tells us that our “health” is something we’re supposed to get and take control of… and we’re supposed to do it through paying for services because, in America, we don’t vote in ways that actively preserve our health. We hope that apathetic policymaking

passive aggressively kills off the part of the population that doesn’t vote like us. So yes, people are frantically searching through everything within their reach to find what could kill them first. But that might be lost on you if you can just, well…

If your “stint” as a senior editor at Cosmo and an editor at SELF didn’t give you the impression that “wellness” is marketed and targeted to give you, a middle aged white woman, as much anxiety as possible about your body… I can only presume you also missed what it says to all

of us who didn’t fit into that mold, couldn’t find ourselves in the pages of those magazines, or in those recipes, or couldn’t afford anything more than the $3.50 newsstand price.

But it didn’t matter then because you could afford the dietitian, or something, idk.

(...which is weird because she says this, but glosses over her contributions to this as an editor for *two* of the magazines which the wellness industry helps keep afloat?)

Lastly, the thing that saddens me the most about how the fitness landscape has changed over the years, is the number of black women I’ve witnessed adopting the language of the mainstream “wellness industry” as a means of trying to (?) gain popularity on social media.

Ours were conversations that didn’t center around bodies or thinness or diets or whatever. They might not’ve based the Bechdel test (or whatever test there is for two women getting together and NOT talking about their children), but a body image test? We could’ve passed that.

And, in many instances, we still can and do.

I’m caught off guard by the idea of needing to envision and imitate the conversations of men in order to actually enjoy eating.

Not only because men have been engaging in hardcore crossfire/paleo/keto pissing contests for years now…

…but because there are and always were women who were capable of having conversations without body shame and body image issues.

I guess they just knew to avoid women like this. *shrug*