In a hard-hitting, no-holds-barred opinion piece in the New York Times, author Jessica Knoll takes on the entire wellness industry and the clear and evident psychological harm it is doing to millions of women. While many parts of the industry have nothing to do with dieting and food, the implications and core messages are in many cases similar, if not exactly the same. Most of it should be shamed and boycotted into oblivion, with only the ethical and harmless practices kept. Knoll doesn’t take long to get to the crux of how the wellness industry is victimizing women. For women, and not men, being skinny is automatically a sign of good health, no questions asked, all assumptions made:
“I
called this poisonous relationship between a body I was indoctrinated to hate
and food I had been taught to fear ‘wellness.’ This was before I could
recognize wellness culture for what it was — a dangerous con that seduces smart women with pseudoscientific claims
of increasing energy, reducing inflammation, lowering the risk of cancer
and healing skin, gut and fertility problems. But at its core, ‘wellness’ is
about weight loss. It demonizes calorically dense and delicious foods,
preserving a vicious fallacy: Thin is healthy and healthy is thin.”
As
babies and normally as children, we innately do what we were created to do, eat
when we’re hungry, and stop when we’re full. This is called intuitive eating:
“Intuitive
eating has been around for decades, but it’s suddenly receiving a lot of
attention. Perhaps it’s because women
are finally starting to interrogate the systems that hurt and exploit us.
Perhaps it’s because we’re driven and ambitious and we need energy — not
lightheaded, leafy-greens energy but real energy, the kind that comes from
eating the hearty foods men eat.”
Knoll
enlisted the help of a dietician who helped her with this approach:
“Two
years into my work with her, I feel lighter than I ever have. Food is a part of
my life — a fun part — but it no longer
tastes irresistible, the way it did when I told myself I couldn’t have it.
My body looks as it always has when I’m not restricting or binging. I’m not ‘good’
one day so that I can be ‘bad’ another, which I once foolishly celebrated as
balance.”
Unlike
what is preached by the wellness industry, there is nothing wrong with comfort
food:
“Emotional
eating is a coping mechanism. We’re told it is an unhealthy habit, one we must
break, but that’s another wellness lie. It
is not vodka in our morning coffee. My binges stopped once I stopped
judging myself for wanting to eat the foods ‘wellness’ vilified, sometimes for
reasons other than physical hunger …… I no longer define food as whole or clean
or sinful or a cheat. It has no moral value. Neither should my weight, though
I’m still trying to separate my worth from my appearance.”
Knoll
now feels good about her body most of the time:
“That
said, I am probably never going to love my body, and that’s O.K. I think loving
our bodies is not only an unrealistic goal in our appearance-obsessed society
but also a limiting one. No one is
telling men that they need to love their bodies to live full and meaningful
lives. We don’t need to love our bodies to respect them.”
Knoll
pulls no punches in castigating the industry:
“The
diet industry is a virus, and viruses are smart. It has survived all these
decades by adapting, but it’s as dangerous as ever. In 2019, dieting presents
itself as wellness and clean eating, duping
modern feminists to participate under the guise of health. Wellness
influencers attract sponsorships and hundreds of thousands of followers on
Instagram by tying before and after selfies to inspiring narratives. Go from
sluggish to vibrant, insecure to confident, foggy-brained to clear-eyed. But
when you have to deprive, punish and isolate yourself to look ‘good,’ it is
impossible to feel good. I was my sickest and loneliest when I appeared my
healthiest.”
The
Spartan, austere approach to health is inevitably harmful:
“If
these wellness influencers really cared about health, they might tell you that yo-yo dieting in women may increase their
risk for heart disease, according to a recent preliminary study presented
to the American Heart Association. They might also promote behaviors that
increase community and connection, like going out to a meal with a friend or
joining a book club. These activities are sustainable and have been
scientifically linked to improved health, yet are often at odds with the
solitary, draining work of trying to micromanage every bite of food that goes
into your mouth.”
Gwyneth
Paltrow’s Goop and other wellness gurus are essentially catering to men’s
desires and to women with money:
“The
wellness industry is the diet industry, and the diet industry is a function of the patriarchal beauty standard
under which women either punish themselves to become smaller or are punished
for failing to comply, and the stress of this hurts our health too. I am a thin
white woman, and the shame and derision I have experienced for failing to be
even thinner is nothing compared with what women in less compliant bodies bear.
Wellness is a largely white, privileged enterprise catering to largely white,
privileged, already thin and able-bodied women, promoting exercise only they
have the time to do and Tuscan kale only they have the resources to buy.”
Knoll
concludes exposing the underlying, often invisible cultural mindset that is
harming millions of women every day:
“Finally,
wellness also contributes to the insulting cultural subtext that women cannot be trusted to make decisions
when it comes to our own bodies, even when it comes to nourishing them. We
must adhere to some sort of ‘program’ or we will go off the rails. We cannot
push to eradicate the harassment, abuse and oppression of women while
continuing to serve a system that demands we hurt ourselves to be more
attractive and less threatening to men. And yet that is exactly what we are
doing when we sit around the lunch table and call our stomachs horror shows.”
Source
Jessica
Knoll, “Smash the Wellness Industry: Why are so many smart women falling for
its harmful, pseudoscientific claims?” https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/08/opinion/sunday/women-dieting-wellness.html
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Photo: https://www.teacaketravels.com/6-female-graffiti-artists-empowering-women/
Jerry De Luca is a Christian freelance writer who loves perusing dozens of interesting and informative publications. When he finds any useful info he summarizes it, taking the main points, and creates a (hopefully) helpful blog post.
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