Anita Rao
I have a confession to make. Last fall, something that started as a low key anthropological inquiry turned into a true obsession. After decades of knowing almost nothing about the Kardashian family, I fell into a deep rabbit hole. I watched all 20 episodes of their new reality show, I started following three of the sisters on Instagram, and I even bought something from Kim's shapewear company. Although I was fully aware of the insidious marketing tactics baked into everything they do, I couldn't help being fully sucked into their world. And I know exactly why. It tells me everything I've been programmed to believe is worth having — endless access to products and services to make my skin flawless, a personal trainer to give me the best workouts tailored for my body and effortless access to organic food. In other words, it's showing me what it would look like to have that elusive thing I desire: wellness.
This is Embodied. I'm Anita Rao.
Whether or not the Kardashians are truly well is definitely up for debate, and also none of my business. Far more relevant to my life and my wallet is the wellness industry that they promote and participate in. This industry is valued at more than $4 trillion and encompasses everything from beauty products and food brands to boutique fitness studios and meditation retreats. But when we use the word wellness, what do we actually mean?
Rina Raphael
At its base level, wellness is essentially everything that medicine and insurance won't touch. So it's all the ways we want to physically, mentally, even spiritually feel better. So that could be nutrition, it could be sleep or stress management. But there is no one exact way to be well.
Anita Rao
That's Rina Raphael, she's the author of "The Gospel of Wellness: Gyms, Gurus, Goop and the False Promise of Self-Care." She wrote this book after many years steeped in the wellness industry as both a journalist and a consumer.
Rina Raphael
So I was a wellness industry reporter for a business magazine, and, I mean, I tried everything, from basically SoulCycle underwater to, at one point, I did an electric shock HIIT workout where they put you in a power suit, and they would zap you every 30 seconds while you're trying to complete a burpee. I went to weed retreats, I went to Utah, where Silicon Valley was building, supposedly, the wellness community of the future. And I think at the time, I was really optimistic. I wanted to believe a lot of these founders who were quote, unquote, "trying to change the world." And then, we started seeing some of the problems roll out, and that's what I started witnessing. Number one, I saw that a lot of these trends and products weren't necessarily helping women, it was adding more pressures to their life or forcing them to buy certain things. It was highly, highly individualistic. And more than that, because I was a business reporter, I had access to all of these marketing plans. And oftentimes, I would check a lot of these claims with scientists, and I had to realize that a lot of these very exaggerated claims had very little, if any, scientific evidence behind them.
Anita Rao
Rina's book covers issues that trickle into many facets of our culture, but her primary focus was on American women, who make up 50% of leadership roles in the fitness and wellness industry and 65% of workers in the field overall. They're also the assumed target of many wellness products. In the online beauty publication, "Byrdie," contributing writer and chef Ariane Resnick writes, "Many hopeful article concepts land unsolicited in my inbox sent by representatives of everything from supplement brands, to fitness apps, to beauty products. If they're bulk mailers, the greetings are always 'Hey, ladies' or something similar. As someone who writes about wellness, the products I'm pitched on are usually by women. And they are nearly always, with rare exceptions, exclusively for women."
Rina Raphael
If you're to believe the polls and surveys, women are more stressed than men, so this industry is responding to complaints. At the same time, they also, sort of, prey on their vulnerabilities and desires. And this could be tying products to an aspirational lifestyle or resorting to fear marketing tactics, where if, you know, they will tell them that if you don't buy our product, if you don't do this ritual, then, you know, your life is gonna get even worse or, let's say, you're putting your family's nutrition in danger.
Anita Rao
So you got really into the marketing aspect, and that's something that I really want to talk about because as I've been reading your book, I've been looking around my own house and seeing so many things and being like, "Oh boy, I fell for this," or "I don't actually know what this product is saying." So I'd love to talk a bit about marketing. And maybe we can start with talking about the word natural, and how the word natural is used in the wellness industry context, and what you started to unpack about that word.
Rina Raphael
Yeah, so I fell for a lot of these things too. It doesn't mean that you're dumb, or you're an uninformed consumer. What it means is that you've been targeted. This marketing is just so good, and it's so clever, it's really, really hard to unpack some of it. In terms of natural, you know, I would see things like natural beauty, you know, at my local Sephora, and I think, oftentimes, when you see something repeated over and over again, you just, sort of, take it at face value. But the truth is is that, number one, there are no lipstick trees, right? There are no eyeshadow bushes. Like, this idea that, you know, a cosmetic can be natural is kind of absurd. Everything is made of chemicals — even fruit. This is why the term "chemical free" is just so absurd. But also, it really speaks to our bias that we assume that everything that is natural is better, and that's simply not true. That's ignoring, oh, I don't know, poisonous mushrooms, earthquakes, asbestos, a whole bunch of things. It's just not true, but it's a bias that we have, and this industry really, really preys upon that. And in my book, you know, for example, I speak to a food scientist who told me that she worked at an organic brand that would use these type of tactics. And they would, just, you know, the scientists would clash with the marketing team, they'd say, "This just isn't true." And the marketing team would say, "Well, this will sell, and we can scare parents about chemicals. So we're going to run with it." That's kind of what's happening with a lot of these brands. I'm not saying every brand, but some of these brands.
Anita Rao
I will admit that this book sent me on an investigative journey into my bathroom cabinet. My deodorant bottle says, "clinically proven formula with essential oils." My curl cream touts that its recipes are "a workout for your curls" and "packed with super foods." There's also all the catchphrases like "brain boosting," and "number one recommended," but without a lot of context. The wellness industry has also co-opted and commodified more conceptual ideas around healthy — like self-care.
Rina Raphael
Self-care was a medical term at a certain point about how people can, sort of, manage their own health. And at a certain point, it was also adopted by marginalized communities that really, sort of, banded together for communal care — of how the community can come together and really manage their health and medical treatments. But what you see today is that it's been butchered into something that is highly consumerist and individualized. Self-care today is all about the things that you can do on your own, and usually something you have to buy. And not just something you need to buy, but something very expensive. So you know, we ride our Pelotons alone in our room, we take bubble baths alone in our bathtub, we buy skincare masks and put them on alone. It's all these very lonely things, you know, and then we wonder why we're in a loneliness epidemic in the United States.
So that's one of the issues I have with the term self-care, because I don't think it's real self-care. And it also puts the onus on the individual. So you'll see this with, like, workplace wellness programs, where if you go to the director and say, "Wow, I can't keep up with this workload, it's too much work. I'm very stressed out, and I'm not sleeping," you might get an answer like, "Well, have you tried a meditation program?" instead of them looking at why you might be stressed. So self-care today, kind of, divorces itself from social, political, economical contexts. And so, that really sets you up to self blame. It's all on you to fix what's wrong. It's just these Band-Aids, right? You're not looking at the root issues of why you're stressed. Instead, they're telling you that you're stressed because you don't take enough bubble baths.
Anita Rao
So let's talk about some of the reasons why we do feel unwell and some of those that are more structural. You mentioned medicine and the healthcare industry, and there is so much less research out there about the bodies of people who are assigned female at birth, and how they work. The few, or — only recently has there been a lot of attention put into chronic illnesses like, endometriosis, for example. So talk to me about how the wellness industry has capitalized on this more systemic problem, which is the lack of research on certain people's bodies.
Rina Raphael
Part of it is the fact that we just don't have enough research into women's health conditions. You know, women weren't federally mandated to be in clinical trials until the 90s. And so, we're not just a couple years behind, we're several decades behind. And so when women feel like they're not being heard in their doctor's office, either because they feel like they're being ignored or gaslit, or there's just nothing there for them, you know, it kind of leaves the window open for a competitor to breeze in. Now granted, there isn't always going to be, you know, a fix for every sort of medical condition. You know, medicine is very complex, oftentimes it takes a long time. And what you see sometimes with these wellness influencers is that they promise you the quick fix, right? And if you're desperate or you're in so much pain, first of all, you might just try anything, but also you might want to believe that. So much of this industry is just based on belief.
Anita Rao
So what role does traditional media play in bolstering and promoting the wellness industry? And maybe from your own experience being inside it, were there practices that you engaged in earlier in your career that you would do differently now?
Rina Raphael
Right, so I'm a member of the media, but I am the first to say that, unfortunately, wellness is treated a lot like fashion these days. Oftentimes, you'll see it in the style section, or you'll see it reported on by fashion magazines. And reporters are not checking with the scientists, medical researchers or toxicologists before they promote a brand or even scare you about a certain ingredient. It's not put upon them to do that, and it's partially because they've seen it repeated everywhere else that they just take it at face value. And that's, sort of, the problem that we're seeing now. And I think that's something that I probably did early on when I was reporting on this as well, you know. I just assumed clean beauty was right, and I didn't do the work of actually checking with toxicologists. I think that's changing a little bit now, but if you read a story on a wellness ritual or product, make sure that they've talked to experts who are respected in their field, and they're the right experts. So for example, if you're concerned about the safety of an ingredient, well, then you should really hear from a toxicologist.
Anita Rao
You expressed some optimism toward the end of the book, as you're saying, with a growing skepticism of some of these unfounded wellness myths, but also some generational differences in buying into wellness trends and actually buying products. Talk to me about some of the research you've done with Gen Z consumers and what gives you optimism about their approach.
Rina Raphael
I do think that consumers are tired of being told what to do, how to look, what they should buy, and again, they just have too much stuff that didn't work. So they have a more skeptical eye now when they buy something, you know, they're not going to buy in on all the claims. And especially Gen Z, you know, they're really rebelling against this sort of productivity-pressured, perfectionist idea of wellness that is more, sort of, associated with the millennial generation. So they're, kind of, taking a different approach to what they think wellness is, they don't think they need to spend a ton of money on it. We're seeing, now, an increase in them trying, at least, to think about how social support is more important. They might say things like, you know, maybe wellness is listening to Taylor Swift, maybe it's going on a walk. It doesn't necessarily have to be about buying this very expensive thing.
Anita Rao
So we've talked about, you know, being more savvy consumers, and the role that can play in being more critical of the wellness industry, or just thinking more about how we approach it. But what are some of the structural changes that you'd like to see to improve people's health and wellness on a more global scale, beyond just the individual?
Rina Raphael
The stuff that I'm interested in that I think are real wellness are things that I don't think people think about when they hear that term. So it would be, better maternity benefits, more supportive child care policies, increased funding to women's health conditions research. You know, I would also even say better work life balance, right? People need more time on vacation or to spend at home. There are all these things that I think would actually make us feel well and really get to the root causes of why we don't feel good, and that to me would be real wellness.
Dr. Ellen Vora
We are living in a moment where our wellness industrial complex is marketing, a lot of messaging touches on wellness. Part of the messaging implies that we are, on some level, fundamentally broken. It not only creates clutter and creates issues for us, it also distracts us from what is actually the path to allowing our wellbeing to be at the foundation of our lives — healthy sleep, nourishing our bodies and moving our bodies.
Liza Kindred
It can be hard to separate out true wellness from the wellness industrial complex, but there are two key ways that we can differentiate between profit-driven wellness and things that will improve our real holistic wellbeing. The first is to be wary of things that are trying to change or fix us. True wellness? It's about loving, not changing. The second way to differentiate is to pay attention to who is trying to make real, systemic, community-based changes, and who is pretending like health and wellness are strictly a result of personal choices. Systemic oppression is real, the climate crisis is real. Real wellness is a loving, interconnected way of being with the world around us.
Anita Rao
That was holistic psychiatrist Dr. Ellen Vora and Liza Kindred, founder of Holy Shift Studios. As Rina said, more and more people are resonating with a wellness philosophy similar to what Ellen and Liza are talking about. And becoming savvy to the fact that despite what marketers in the wellness industry want us to think, a new beauty cream or the latest in standing desks isn't going to solve many of our problems. There's also been a push to talk about another key component of wellness — the collective.
Dr. Della Mosley
Not often are people talking to us about how we integrate to become truly and fully well, right. They don't encourage us to parse out the different ways that we've been socialized to prioritize certain aspects of healing and to deprioritize certain aspects of healing.
David Young Oh
Wellness must be something accessible and available to everyone. And even while we have distractions or learned habits that take us away from our own innate wisdom and wellness, we must be able to return to it without regard to our body size, abilities, financial privilege, class, educational status.
Dr. Della Mosley
I think it's also important for us to consider our positionality and where we have power, and privilege, and resources, and where we experience more barriers to our wellness, so that we can make the right call for ourselves personally to decide what we need to do. But then also to, like, know where — where we can give, because there is no wellness at all if it's not a collective wellness.
David Young Oh
I think oftentimes the wellness industry promotes wellness through a capitalistic lens. While this is inevitable to some degree, it can carry with it many vulnerabilities including conflating wellness with having a certain type of body or hairstyle or financial privilege. I believe the true window into wellness is one of abundance. I know we are on the right track with wellness when our cups were so abundantly full that we work towards bringing wellness into the lives of others.
Anita Rao
That was Dr. Della Mosley and David Young Oh, directors of the Radical Healing Collective in Durham, North Carolina. Thinking about our personal health in the context of a larger community is a step toward collective wellness, but taking this step requires you first to get clear about your own priorities.
Kim Young
How do I reclaim my own time? How do I manage my boundaries? How do I say no? How do I lay down when I need to lay down? How do I watch something meaningless on television because it's what I need to do, and what my spirit and my body need in those moments?
Anita Rao
That's Kim Young, or the Dope Black Social Worker. She's a licensed clinical social worker who's been in our dream guest list for a long time, ever since she led a training for our station on organizational trauma in early 2022. I remember pulling up Slack almost minutes into the training and sending my team the brain explosion emoji. Kim had reframes for thinking about wellness at work that were really hitting home for me as a self-described overachiever. One key concept she introduced: your wellness belongs to you.
Kim Young
Yeah, like nobody can give it to you, no one can give you permission to take the time that you need, and no one can give you permission to put yourself first but you. You know, we get inside of jobs, and sometimes we forget that we're whole humans that are functioning, that have our own traumas, our own joys, our own families, our own challenges. And we put that to the side instead of inviting that into the work that we do. Or then, we feel like we can't make room to take care of ourselves, but yet we can make room to take a six o'clock meeting we didn't want to take. And so your wellness is really up to you — how you want to conceptualize it, what you would like to do with it and making sure that you are choosing yourself first.
Anita Rao
I'm gonna say some of the things that came up in my head when you were saying that that I imagine people might be thinking listening in their car, which is like, yeah, that sounds good in theory, but how do I actually do that and keep my job? I'm expected to show up at 6 p.m., that's the way it works around here. Well, what am I going to do about that, Kim?
Kim Young
Yeah, I mean, it starts with a lot of learning and unlearning and deprogramming. We are really conditioned — especially just due to capitalism — to think if we're not productive, we don't have value or worth. If we're not doing something for a job, for a program, initiative for a client, whomever, that our contributions do not matter. And so, it really requires a lot of deprogramming and restructuring to understand that you have value enough simply for who you are, and that rest is a form of resistance, and that we don't have to get permission, and we don't have to do anything to earn it. And I know it's a lot, it's a heavy concept to really, kind of, pull apart because we do often wonder, well, if I tell my manager no, if I say I'm not going to do something, what are my consequences?
Anita Rao
Yeah, I mean, so we are in this state, often, of what you call over-functioning. And describe that to me, so that, you know, those of us who over-function can understand if that's us.
Kim Young
Yeah, I think, our over-functioning we feel in our bodies, in our psyche before anywhere else. So your over-functioning can certainly look like, just, exhaustion, fatigue, isolation, increased irritability, not really being able to engage in social relationships or familiar relationships in ways that we once did. Over-functioning also looks like trying to plug in the holes in the ship all by yourself while the ship is sinking, instead of calling for help. And so we over function a lot in various industries, across various gender and racial identities. We over-function at very high levels in this society.
Anita Rao
You are in the field of social work, and I have many friends working in that field, and they are coming up against these systems all the time that feel insurmountable. How do you stop from over-functioning in that context? When you're really, on a daily basis, coming up against structural things that you can't change that are harming the lives and the livelihood of the people you work with?
Kim Young
Yeah, I released the idea that I alone can fix or change any of that stuff. So I surrender to the notion that, you know, oppression, racism, systemic failures, they all existed before me, and they will likely be there when my time in this field is done. It doesn't make me apathetic though, it doesn't make me believe that I can't do good and have major contributions. But I have perspective that I alone will not solve all those issues. I did not create those problems, nor do I benefit from those problems. And so I released the idea that I alone can do anything to fix really big and really heavy social issues.
Anita Rao
I'm curious about how those of us with more power and privilege can help lower the barriers for others we're in community with to make wellness more accessible, or I guess a good health more accessible.
Kim Young
Just this idea that wellness, in general, is just something you can buy or package up, if you do a little yoga, take a little walk outside, sniff a little lavender, that things will be better, when in actuality, wellness is really a function of more abolition and less oppression. And so when you ask the question around, like, what can folks that have more power and privilege do is really take inventory in the ways they behave or don't behave that might be contributing to the oppression of others that don't have the same power and privilege and access.
Anita Rao
So if you're in a job circumstance where maybe you feel like you're not the one with a lot of power, you're in the bottom of the hierarchy, for example, or you're new to the job, you're new to the industry. What are some reframes you'd offer to them to feel more power or acknowledge the power that they already have?
Kim Young
Yeah, everybody has power. We've been tricked into believing that we don't, but everyone at every single level has some sort of power. And I know Eric Liu talks about it in, you know, "You're [More] Powerful [Than] You Think," and this — this idea that a lot of people are just illiterate in power. They don't understand how it functions, what to do with it, if they have any. And so I would really, just, encourage people to reframe their thinking. When you feel powerless, that is a function of power, someone else has used their power to make you feel and believe that you do not have power. When the truth is you have it, and you've had it all along. Just a matter of standing in it and figuring out what you would like to do with it.
Anita Rao
Well, damn. I'm gonna have to be journaling about that one for the next month. But seriously, this whole power thing is an ongoing challenge for me, and something I talk about all the time in therapy. As someone who was socialized to be accommodating and a team player and grew up with pretty strict parents, I'm really working hard in this decade of my life to think about how to access and channel my power in a way that doesn't lead to over-functioning. I'm sincerely open to tips. Email me — really.
One way Kim is asserting her power and prioritizing her health at work is that she's already planned her retirement from social work — in seven years. She's in her early 30s now, and wants to switch gears away from the social work field in 2030. To make way for the next generation, to acknowledge that this service is hard work, and to think about what it looks like to plan for wellness, not just for today, but for your lifetime.
Kim Young
It's the freedom of choice. Like, I don't know if we're putting enough emphasis on how much freedom and liberation somebody can experience when they're just offered choices. So maybe not having to choose to take on a second job in order to cover their expenses, and then have to sacrifice various wellness practices, or not choosing to take on a new project at work because they don't feel like they are trusted by a manager or a supervisor. But the freedom to choose, for me, is one of the greatest forms of, just, lifetime wellness that somebody can choose to do something instead of something else. Like for example, yesterday, I chose to eat a full breakfast instead of being on time to work. Right, so like just this freedom to choose. And then, by feeding myself the way that I did, how I was able to give in ways and work at work that I knew would not have been possible if I went hungry. But like, these free — like a freedom to choose is honestly just the greatest practice of longtime wellness that somebody can be offered.
Anita Rao
Embodied is a production of North Carolina Public Radio-WUNC, a listener-supported station. If you want to lend your support to this podcast and WUNC's other shows on demand, consider a contribution at wunc.org now. Incredible storytelling like you hear on Embodied is only possible because of listeners like you.
This episode was produced by Kaia Findlay and edited by Amanda Magnus. Madison Speyer is our intern and Jenni Lawson is our sound engineer. Quilla wrote our theme music.
You can find information about everyone we talked to this week in our show notes. And hey, we would love for you to take a minute and support our podcast post about this episode or one that you've liked recently on social media and tag us. Or if you're not on the socials, text this episode to a friend or family member who you think would like it. Thank you in advance for your support.
I'm Anita Rao signing off. Good wishes and be well.