Intuitive Eating is Not the Answer to Wellness Industry Diet Culture
I work in the “wellness industry.” Specifically, I’m working for a startup that’s seeking to help people delay or avoid cognitive decline through lifestyle changes and supplementation. Before this job I worked for another early-stage wellness startup.
Novelist Jessica Knoll has written a timely, scathing rebuke of the way the $4.2 trillion (and growing) wellness industry has whitewashed weight loss. Brands know that words like “diet” and “low-calorie” are unfashionable. So now women are “eating clean,” “counting our macros,” and “being good.” Even Weight Watchers has rebranded to focus less on weight loss and more on wellness.
But at the end of the day, the real goal is often the old goal. “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,” Knoll deftly writes.
What bothered me about the piece is that Knoll takes her experience of hating her body and struggling with bulimia and imposes it on all women.
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.
While undoubtedly many, many (maybe most!) healthy women are going Whole30 and eliminated dairy mostly to lose weight, a lot of us are doing it to try to feel okay. Our doctors have dismissed us and called us crazy, so we’re looking for anything to help with our brain fog, fatigue, insomnia, chronic yeast infections, and stomach distress.
Knoll contrasts the way women eat with the way men eat with longing and jealousy. “[Women are] 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.”
This is, in a word, kind of insane. Eating like shit is not the way to fight the patriarchy ladies.
Knoll solved her disordered eating with intuitive eating, where she tunes into and follows her body’s signals of hunger and satiation. For an otherwise healthy, thin person, this certainly sounds healthier than the binge, purge, and hate yourself cycle that Knoll had been on.
But for most of us? This is a terrible, terrible idea. First of all, most of us are fat. And if you’re fat, your fat literally hijacks your brain’s hunger/satiety signals to make you more fat.
Second, calorie-dense, nutritionally devoid, processed foods are cheap, easy, abundant, delicious, and heavily advertised in the US. If we lived in a world where salmon, brazil nuts, and kale were as cheap and easy and tasty and advertised as Oreos, well then intuitive eating would be a great idea. But we don’t. So it’s not. It’s really, really not. Not for most of us, anyway.
Here’s where we all need to get, in my opinion: “I no longer define food as whole or clean or sinful or a cheat. It has no moral value.”
Fat is not a moral issue. Health is not a moral issue. You can be healthy and fat. You can be unhealthy and thin. You cannot know someone’s health by looking at them. You don’t owe anyone thinness or good health.
Heath, wellness, and thinness are all much more economic issues than moral ones.
As the wellness industry has moved beyond selling mere weight loss to wealthy women, Anorexia has become the middle-class woman’s disease. Anyone can count calories. Well-heeled women have moved on to Orthorexia, which requires time, skill, and money to pull off.
As Knoll writes:
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.
Body weight and health are determined by a combination of factors, most of which most of us have limited control over, including education, access, genetics, and environment.
The wellness industry may be dieting in disguise. But the right reaction isn’t to start eating whatever we want, whenever we want, in whatever amounts.
After all, lowering your sugar intake, eating mostly Meditereanean, and exercising regularly are all extremely clearly associated with greater actual wellness. Women who are struggling with brain fog, fatigue, insomnia, chronic yeast infections, and stomach distress absolutely should be changing the way we eat and live. Because the data is clear. The standard western diet is killing us.
But none of these things are all that intuitive in 2019 America, where our government subsidizes corn and not kale.
The real problem with the wellness industry, from an insider’s perspective, is that promoting healthy lifestyle changes to people at all income levels isn’t very profitable yet. That’s what really needs to change.
