Health and Wellness

You Do Belong in the Wellness Community

If you don’t have a swimsuit model body, it’s a lot harder to feel at home in the health and wellness community.

Leigh Victoria Phan, MS
Living Well Is the Best Revenge
5 min readFeb 21, 2020

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Illustration Courtesy of VectorMine

If you’re early in your journey toward living a comprehensively healthier lifestyle, it’s hard to feel like you belong. But what does it even mean to be healthy?

Whenever I sit down to write about something about my health journey, I feel like a fraud. I feel like I snake oil saleswoman who dropped her briefcase of wears, causing the bottles to shatter, and ends up covered in stinky oil.

I’m not in perfect shape. Last year, I lost 30 pounds, kept it off, transformed my regular diet, and advanced my yoga practice, but I’m not at my goal yet. That’s why I end up feeling like a fraud when I try to write about health and wellness.

The commercialization of health and wellness is a big part of why people like me feel like frauds when we try to improve ourselves.

I do believe that all bodies are beautiful, but I still have a little more body fat than I should for my height. It’s not that I want to wear size 0 jeans — it’s that I am still dramatically more…

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Leigh Victoria Phan, MS
Living Well Is the Best Revenge

Brooklyn-based writer and poet. Designer in NYC. Drinks books and loves coffee. Has an MS from NYU in Integrated Design & Media. Working on an MFA in Fiction.