Wellness Is Not the Enemy

Writer Jessica Knoll recently published an op-ed in the New York Times titled “Smash the Wellness Industry.” in which she suggests that our pursuit of “wellness” is actually undermining both our health and our happiness—especially that of women.

In her piece, Knoll recounts her recovery from what she describes as a “poisonous relationship between a body I was indoctrinated to hate and food I had been taught to fear.” Like many successful young women, Knoll got sucked into a toxic culture of extreme dietary restriction, excessive exercise, and various other rituals of purification and penance all packaged in the guise of “wellness.”  

Dieting has become something of a dirty word lately, and rightfully so: it clearly doesn’t work. But the most toxic aspects of dieting culture—the pursuit of an unrealistic body ideal at the expense of your physical comfort and emotional well-being—haven’t gone away. According to Knoll, dieting has simply been rebranded as wellness, and under cover of this benign new label, is continuing to perpetrate the same fraud.  We now have a generation of wellness influencers selling detoxes, cleanses, and elimination diets as a way of looking and feeling your best.

Dieting has become something of a dirty word lately, and rightfully so: it clearly doesn’t work.

In her pursuit of wellness (or, more accurately, thinness), Knoll found herself alternating between bouts of “clean eating” and violent bingeing. That’s not wellness. That’s not looking or feeling your best. Fortunately, Knoll finally found relief from this unhealthy cycle working with a dietitian who specializes in intuitive eating, a process she describes in more detail in her article.

Jessica Knoll makes some important points in her article. But there are a couple of things I’d like to respond to.

One is the idea that men are largely immune to this unwholesome influence. She describes having lunch with some highly accomplished and successful women who spent the first part of their meeting bashing their bodies and comparing their respective diet rules. Knoll fantasizes that the men at the next table were unburdened by these...

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