Getting into shape means reclaiming a body that is wired, tired, and numbed out. And yet wellness keeps lacquering on additional expectations, chasing the next diet, performing the latest protocol, piling more onto bodies that are already overwhelmed.

I’ve learned to read the patterns: how we work, whether we still play, and all the emotional baggage we schlep around. How to take a body that is out of whack, reset its posture, reframe its relationship to effort, and actually get stronger. Strength training is as much undoing as it is doing. It’s simple but not easy, because we are humans.

The Loads We All Carry

Every body carries loads. Every body solves physical problems every day, and every body has deeply ingrained patterns for getting the job done. The dentist hovering over mouths, the warehouse worker pulling ten-hour shifts on concrete, the desk jockey grinding through Microsoft Teams meetings for hours: the shoulders tense up, the eyes narrow, the breathing gets shallow, the hips stay locked in flexion. After a few decades in the same postures and perspectives, specific parts of the body get stuck, too tight, overstretched, and numbed out.

Feeling drained at the end of the day, at the gas pump, at the grocery store checkout, makes sense when daily life is inherently extractive. But we don’t all carry the same loads. The nurse working overtime to feed her family is not the same an executive with a staff of people managing his life. We don’t all carry the same metabolic and mental burdens.

Unpaid (Emotional) Labor

The invisible loads are often the heaviest. We are constantly pummeled with news that is baffling and heartbreaking, while the kids need to get to practice and the car needs an oil change and there’s email and meetings and dishes to be done. As an average American who is working, paying attention, and actually gives a damn, the expense of daily life plus the unrelenting existential toll accumulates and begins to thwarts our movement.

We down the coffee, build up the defenses, and eventually hit our threshold. We contort around our deepest insecurities, calcify around unresolved traumas, and keep going anyway, walking around with open wounds, which honestly all of us are. Too wrung out to stay open, we clam up around whatever feels protective, showing up and acting like we have our shit together.

Armored Up

Armor isn’t only a survival strategy, it’s also an identity. The strongman mentality takes it to the extreme, downing peptide stacks and banging out chest presses. Just punish yourself with exercise, adhere to strict dietary regimes, track every biomarker, follow the YouTubers who seem to have it all figured out. The promise is that you can escape your insecurities and lack of security by achieving the image.

Whether it’s masculine coded as muscular, feminine coded as skinny, or the current hybrid: extremely thin and also visibly muscular (as typified by Lauren Sanchez Bezos and Demi Moore). Male, female, or anywhere in between, the message is clear: your body needs a lot of work. Beyond eating healthy and exercising regularly, you can be endlessly injected, implanted, and botoxed until you look cartoonish. Dressed up as extreme self-care, the pursuit of “wellness” has morphed into systematic armoring. In times of uncertainty your body can become a specimen of predictability and imperturbability.

But you can never be perfect enough. Most of our insecurities are a marketing scam and our lack of security is a policy decision. As ecosystems and institutions collapse around us, take an anti-inflammatory supplement. Feeling powerless? Up the protein. Feeling confused and overwhelmed? Follow the nearest self-appointed wellness guru, who will tell you exactly how to eat, move, and sleep while constantly selling you something else to obsess over. You won’t even notice the jet stream collapsing. You too can be perfect and immune.

Conclusion

What if deconditioning was just finding our power under all the BS? Regularly reminding ourselves our power actually lives, regardless of whether you have visible biceps.

Despite living in an inherently extractive economy and contending with crumbling institutions, we can practice what is simple and regenerative. We can be disciplined without being blindly obedient. We can tend to ourselves without being self-absorbed. We can move our bodies without punishing them. We can stay anchored and energized when everything feels like too much. We can build community in at every squat rack and at each yoga mat along the way.

My next post gets more practical: how to train tension skillfully, why movement patterns matter more than muscles, and what it actually looks like to get stronger without armoring up further.

I began studying and practicing strength training in 2001 when I ventured past the elliptical machines and into the weight room at my local 24 Hour Fitness in San Francisco. I entered into gym bro culture: grunting through bench presses, downing protein concoctions, and preening in the mirror with each biceps curl.

Here’s what I’ve observed over the last 25 years: You can look very strong and still not move well. You can be completely ripped and still too weak to deal with hard conversations and adult responsibilities. Despite age or body type, almost every body can get stronger with the right support. So how you define strength determines how you strength train.

Like so many of the strongmen, you can appear super buff but still be ruled by insecurity, terrified of vulnerability, and desperately crave belonging in a hierarchy. I’ve seen extremely muscular guys fail grueling kettlebell certifications and a bodybuilder quit the yoga teacher training because it was too emotionally confronting. Strength training can be all about beefing up- adding muscle as an armor against big feelings and vulnerability. Or we can train to stay open, aligned, and still able to get shit done (even when it feels like everything is falling apart.)

During my thousands of hours of training folks, I’ve studied how they get stuck, how they get out of pain, and how they get stronger. Getting strong always demands liberating ourselves from years of conditioning, from too much sitting, from old injuries, from trauma, from ingrained insecurities. It’s as much about undoing the patterns and postures that have limited us as it is about lacquering on more reps, more muscle, and more defenses.

Now as I approach 50, the pressure to shrink and conform is louder than ever. Pressing a 55 lb kettlebell overhead with one arm or deadlifting over 200 lbs feels extraordinary. The stronger you are, the more immune to bullshit, especially your own.

The Flat Muscle Man

Before the Wellness Strongman found his first podcasting mic, he was doing “guns and buns” workouts and trying to look like the poster on the wall. The muscle anatomy poster hanging somewhere behind the dumbbell rack in virtually every gym. He has a front: biceps, pectorals, quadriceps. A back: glutes, lats, hamstrings. No skin, minimal connective tissue, no organs, no nerves, no feelings. Usually expressionless, no depth. (Kinda like a date I went on 15 years ago.)

His job is to demonstrate muscularity, and for decades that defined what it meant to be strong. The sport behind him is bodybuilding, built around hypertrophy: isolate discrete muscle groups, make the most visible ones as large and symmetrical as possible. It demands, hours of training, rigid dieting, and strategic dehydration and it’s also entirely subjective. Contestants aren’t judged on strength, speed, or endurance.

It’s about appearance, not function. That distinction is what this whole series has been circling.

Fitting the Mold vs Moving Well

While most folks aren’t dedicating themselves to bodybuilding, a lean body with pronounced muscles is now trending as the perfect body du jour. Of course women, have been bombarded for years by the fitness, diet, and ever increasing wellness industry with constantly shifting and shrinking aspirational standards. But now, thanks to social media trends of looksmaxxing, and the manosphere, guys get to have widespread body dysmorphia too!

Over two and a half decades in wellness. I’ve watched an endless rotation of diets to “trick” our hungers and exercise packaged as atonement. Trying to “achieve” the current idealized body type is more likely to lead to torn hamstrings and disordered eating than lasting health. I’m constantly reminding my students the difference between trying to fit the mold and sustaining yourself.

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Hollow Power

Throughout my entire career in wellness, I’ve watched the same idea resurface in different packaging: the body can and should be dominated. Your body should conform and you should obey. The bro podcasters amplify this idea of wellness as shredding your pecs, torching your abs, and obsessing over every ounce of macronutrients. Self-care gets reduced to following exact instructions: what to eat, which supplements to down, which peptides to inject. But remember, these rules are written by young, able-bodied, already-basically-healthy guys, often trying to sell you supplements or off-market peptides. The standards are not set to include folks but to create impossible aspirations, like staying forever young or maintaining an unnecessarily oversized muscle mass. Health and functional strength are beside the point.

Looking and presenting like an exaggerated version of “a real man” is a hedge against insecurity, a shield against vulnerability. And when that performance goes mass-market, as Wilhelm Reich articulated, it becomes the breeding ground for something darker. As if doing a hot take on the manosphere, Reich nails it:

The Little Man does not know that he is little, and he is afraid of knowing it. He covers up his smallness and narrowness with illusions of strength and greatness, of others’ strength and greatness. He is proud of his great generals but not proud of himself. He admires thought which he did not have and not the thought he did have. He believes in things all the more thoroughly the less he comprehends then, and does not believe in the correctness of those ideas which he comprehends most easily.

Deeply conformist, invested in hierarchical pecking orders, desperate for belonging and approval. The manosphere playbook is to project as much of the image of strength as possible: flashy cars, big bank accounts, and bulging quads. You can be jacked AF and still be desperate to follow the leader, falling for every get-rich-quick scheme and the next diet trend, treating Huberman or Asprey like they’re preaching gospel. It’s like those lifted F-150s I see on my country road around my home in North Carolina: huge wheels, shiny paint, looks like they’ve never spent a day on a job site or gotten any real work done.

The Real Work

Beyond being able to carry loads or maintain our stamina, the hardest work we face is often more emotionally challenging than physically demanding. Getting through a busy work day, showing up to support a family, taking care of ourselves, and enduring so much upheaval requires fortitude not just a bombastic veneer.

Real strength means you wrestle with your insecurities instead of projecting them onto the nearest trans person, immigrant, or woman. Instead of being spooked by shadowy desires, you own them. Instead of fortifying against vulnerability you are able to stay open. It’s about living in a body that can show up, not just show off.

Every day in the gym I practice and teach folks how to ground, organize their skeleton, and breathe skillfully and leverage heavy weights. Instead of trying to look like a Marvel character, it’s about how we can carry, squat, push, and pull. These physical practices keep us aligned, especially now, when the patriarchal puppet show is falling apart. A strong body with a clear mind is its own form of resistance.

The Wellness Strongman: What authority looks like in modern wellness

The Wellness Strongman: The Playbook: Authority, authoritarianism, and why we buy it

The Wellness Pipeline to the Manosphere: Reflections on Netflix’s Inside the Manosphere

This Post ~ The Wellness Strongman: 5 Myths to Stop Buying

Next Post ~ Strength Training: Showing up, Serving, and Building Agency

The Wellness Strongman wakes up at 5am to an impeccable morning routine. He rakes in passive income. He is rich, he is buff, and he has his shit together. In all his self-determined glory, he wants to prove that you, and you alone, have control of your health, your body, and your life.

He’s also a boring blowhard. He peddles ice baths and supplement stacks with the promise that if you just keep counting those grams of protein, you too will be safe, spared, and sheltered from the uncertainty we all face. He talks too much, thinks he’s figured it all out, and is blinded by his own bravado. He is the perfect mascot for a culture built on the myth of American meritocracy, the belief that we all have an equal shot if we just work hard and optimize relentlessly.

But there is no such thing as a self-made man. There is no high-performer who hasn’t had an extraordinary amount of support, much of it invisible, much of it unpaid. There is no billionaire who hasn’t extracted wealth from the labor of others. Wellness and wealth are always a group project but they don’t benefit everyone equally. The wellness industry would prefer you not think too hard about any of that, because the moment you do, the whole personal optimization project starts to look a lot lonelier and a lot less heroic than advertised.

What follows is a series about the illusions underneath the strongman bravado. Attitudes and assumptions that we may have internalized without realizing it.

The Illusion of Choice Reality: Shopping Will Not Save Us

We’re told, repeatedly and insistently, that being healthier is mostly a matter of being a better consumer. Cut the ultra-processed foods, drive an EV, buy the performance shampoo (yes, that is actually a thing). Wellness arrives with a barcode and proudly proclaims what it lacks: gluten, parabens, corn syrup, and a carbon footprint. You too can earn redemption, salvation, and double credit card points.

If you zoom out just a little, you notice the absurdity. Endless options in the all-natural toothpaste aisle while the EPA guts clean air protections. Dozens of diaper brands while affordable childcare is nearly impossible to find. Wellness products everywhere while our health insurance rates skyrocket. The message is consistent: focus on your buying power and ignore your political power.

While we debate the calories in leading protein bars, we are making enormous choices together that we barely discuss. We are funding another oil war. We are maintaining a tax code that redistributes wealth upward. Collectively and repeatedly, we have chosen not to have universal healthcare, gun reform, or invest more into renewable energy. Those are important health decisions but they don’t come with a loyalty rewards program.

So keep going to the farmer’s market and boycott Target. But it is far too easy to feel virtuous at the checkout when the wellness industry thrives on keeping your attention small and personal. Real power is messier, more collective, and a lot harder to monetize.

The Illusion of Prepackaged Perfection
Reality: One-Size-Fits-All is a Marketing Ploy

As fascism tightens its grip, the ideal body is shrinking. The narrowing definitions of “good” bodies tell us exactly who is in power, who is out, and what is required to belong again. MAGA women look like Barbies who’ve been in the sun too long. Manosphere bros juice up to look like superheroes. Meanwhile, trans bodies are policed, immigrant bodies are detained, and middle class anxiety is quietly managed by trying to “be good” and healthy.

We are being blasted, continuously, with an ableist, misogynistic, and deeply Eurocentric ideal of what a body should look like and how it should perform. It feels too obvious to say that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to health and there is no one healthy body type. Yet body normativity and its attendant rules are being enforced with more vigor than ever. There are high carbohydrate diets built around rice that sustain billions of people. High fat diets that have kept Alaskans alive for generations. Nonnas in Italy who are squat and strong and climb steep steps into their 80s. Masai warriors. Sumo wrestlers. The diversity of skillful, joyful embodiment across human cultures is vast, and that diversity is precisely the threat. Control requires conformity.

Fitting the narrow mold and being genuinely healthy are two very different endeavors but the wellness industry has worked hard to conflate them. If you don’t fit the mold, especially genetically, if you trust yourself to make reasonable choices, that is framed as a problem to be solved. This is alarming enough on its own, and becomes something closer to terrifying as MAGA policy inches toward eugenics.

The Illusion that Vulnerability is Escapable
Reality: Center Cradle to Grave Care

Every guy who claims to be bulletproof once had his diapers changed. Now someone does his laundry, fixes his car, and handles his accounting. There are invisible hands propping up his “independence.” Other people’s labor is woven into what he calls self-made, and underneath it all, he’s got the the dumb luck of being born an American instead of, say, a Gazan.

As humans, we are born completely helpless and at every stage of our lives we need touch, support, and love. We will get injured, endure sickness, have our hearts broken, and face grief. Our independence and heroic physical abilities, are an occasional blip rather than a permanent state. As my grandmother used to say, “We are all temporary able-bodied.” So vulnerability is not a moral failing. It is the human condition, and coming to terms with our own fragility is actually the key to our collective survival.

But the wellness industry, coupled with hustle culture, has sold us the opposite story. That we need to figure it out alone, stay constantly relevant, keep improving, keep producing, or risk being left behind. It’s a story built on a very real fear, which is exactly what makes it so effective and so corrosive.

Instead of endlessly chasing the next level of personal optimization, what if we tended to the most vulnerable among us, trusting that this is what actually makes all of us safer, healthier, and more secure?

The Illusion of Immortality
Reality: Letting That Shit Go*

Even with pristine biomarkers and a supplement stack that rivals a pharmacy, but spoiler: you will still die. If your body is your greatest achievement, how do you contend with it slowing down and, if you’re lucky, inevitable frailty? Despite your best efforts, you will lose control, and the optimization project has no finish line except the one we don’t talk about.

The uncomfortable truth is that someone can command a high-performing body and be utterly miserable, sit at the helm of a massive empire and never feel like they have enough, or be their most aligned and at peace on their deathbed. Peak biomarkers do not guarantee a good life, and they certainly don’t guarantee a good death.

Because every one of us will eventually say goodbye to everyone we’ve ever loved, every possession we’ve cherished, and every penny we’ve saved. The real measure isn’t how much we can amass but how gracefully we can release our grip on our bodies, our identities, our need to be winning at wellness. By all means, live robustly, climb the mountains, fall in love, take the dream trips. But along the way, remember to sink into savasana and practice letting it all go. Because, beyond your blood pressure and Vitamin D levels, that’s what it means to be fully human.

The Illusion of Achieving Results
Reality: Navigating Uncertainty

Remember March 2020, when we were all freaking out and wiping our groceries down with bleach? None of us knew WTF was going on and we felt completely powerless. That’s exactly when the wellness industry went into overdrive, peddling the same seductive promise it always does: that for the low price of $19.95 you can lose 25 lbs, bulletproof your immune system, and find the fountain of youth. It was BS then and it’s BS now, but it worked, because it always works when people are scared.

The “getting results” siren song has been fitness marketing’s greatest hit for decades, because it works on a very human impulse. When we feel out of control, a fast, painless, measurable outcome feels like solid ground. The problem is that real transformation is rarely cheap, fast, and pre-packaged.

As a personal trainer, I know what it means to keep showing up and cheering my clients through the hard work. I’ve seen genuine transformation in folks in their 60s with multiple diagnoses getting stronger than they’ve been in years, people unraveling decades of chronic stress, athletes recovering from serious injuries to lift massive weights overhead. The results didn’t arrive on schedule, where were often unexpected, delightful, and rarely matched notions of the “perfect body.”

Change requires showing up regardless - that’s the muscle worth building. The quotidian care when it’s tedious, the agency when the world feels heartbreaking, the refusal to let nihilism prevent you from getting out of bed. You won’t always get the result you planned for, but you can absolutely get stronger as you navigate the unknown.

Conclusion

The self-made man is a trap, and a seductive one. Easy enough to lampoon, harder to dislodge from the places he lives in us: the guilt about skipping the workout, the shame around the medical diagnosis, the gnawing sense that if you just optimized a little harder you’d finally feel secure. Having worked in wellness for almost 25 years, I am still actively unlearning so much of this.

And while we optimize, we are lonelier than ever. Disconnected from our lineages, our communities, our ecosystems, we are prescribed ever more self-absorption as the antidote to a loneliness epidemic we are not supposed to name. More personal achievement. More protein. Another protocol, another set of marching orders issued to an army of one.

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The constant performance is isolating in a way that’s hard to articulate because the whole point is to look like it isn’t. The bravado is a house of cards that requires continuous reinforcement. The prison of machismo, it turns out, is just as confining for the man inside it as for everyone he’s crowded out.

There is another way to carry this. Not a strong woman playing by the same exhausting rules, but something more genuinely matriarchal: tending rather than dominating, sharing the load rather than hoarding the credit, understanding power as relational rather than extractive.

We don’t have to keep performing our way through this alone. That’s not wellness. That’s just a different kind of suffering with better supplements.

The Wellness Strongman:
What authority looks like in modern wellness

The Wellness Strongman: The Playbook
Authority, authoritarianism, and why we buy it

This post: The Wellness Pipeline to the Manosphere:
Reflections on Netflix’s Inside the Manosphere

Redefining Wellness
Sustaining Ourselves, Sustaining Each Other, Sustaining the Planet

Strength Training for the Resistance
Showing up, serving, and building real agency

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In the middle of my “Wellness Strongmen” series, Netflix popped up with Inside the Manosphere as a textbook example of the promises of strength, discipline, and dominance that I’ve been articulating. It shows how fitness and wellness are both a throughline and a pipeline for these young, very ripped, and ostentatious influencers. Let’s take a look at this shift and grift from body optimization into political grievance.

Every bit of their self-branding and laser-focused content speaks to young male disenfranchisement. They speak to:

• A yearning for muscular, virile embodiment. For a generation raised on screens, there’s a deep longing for robust physicality and fitness.

• Financial freedom, opportunity, and status. Money is power, and you don’t want to answer to anyone else to get it.

• Belonging and leadership. Even if it’s just a subscription to a private Discord or Telegram channel, there’s a desperation to be on a team and have someone rooting for you.

• The need to express libido and actually feel their feelings. Don’t know how to express your desires? Project it onto women. Act all dominant.

Above all this documentary speaks to young men’s desire to improve their situations and carve out a path to mastery. Sounds completely fair to me. But why are we leaving it up to the manosphere to so tightly define the version of masculine success to emulate?

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As our economy mortgages the futures of young people, saddling them with student loans, impossible housing costs, a mental health crisis, and AI already coming for entry-level jobs. With plenty of adolescent irreverence the manosphere responds with an escape from the “Matrix” of wage earning. Its offer ups anti-establishment ideology without ever acknowledging capitalism or the kinds of policies that create the current economic circumstances. The manosphere boosts an every-man-for-himself ethos, full of bravado. These influencers promise dominance, outsmarting the system, and the ultimate: control. Control your body, control your woman (or women), and control your life, even in an economy with fewer and fewer real opportunities.

It’s valuable to peek into the rabbit holes of the internet to understand how ideas permeate the broader culture, shaping how we talk about wellness and our politics. Many pundits and pollsters contend that manosphere support swung the 2024 election, as MAGA learned to harness this testosterone turmoil. Even if Joe Rogan is now questioning the Iran war and ICE raids, figures like Erika Kirk are saying the quiet part out loud: “Don’t let anyone disenfranchise you because you’re a young man… especially a young white male man.” A sentence like that would be laughable if it were not politically manipulating so much young male angst.

Meanwhile the administration forgives student loans while recruiting ICE agents to dress up in camo and play appalling real-life video games. That is the investment we are making. Those same resources could fund something closer to a modern Civilian Conservation Corps or AmeriCorps. We don’t need ICE in Vermont or Minnesota. We need massive public investment in infrastructure and to prevent and respond to natural disasters. What is we offered young people work with dignity, skill building, and a real career path? We could be funding opportunities to develop very needed skills, to feel capable, and to serve communities beyond all the bro-y parasocial fantasies.

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Now we hope they don’t get too radicalized as they remained parked in front of screens, buying crypto and creatine while spiraling through Reddit threads of incel victimhood. Let’s give these guys some boots, some tools, a living wage, and a chance to be a damn hero.

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The Wellness Strongman
What authority looks like in modern wellness

The Wellness Strongman: The Playbook
Authority, authoritarianism, and why we buy it

Redefining Wellness
Sustaining Ourselves, Sustaining Each Other, Sustaining the Planet

Strength Training for the Resistance
Showing up, serving, and building real agency

In this post, we move from naming the character to studying his playbook. The Strongman is not just a personality with a microphone or a premium protocol. It’s a specific playbook that tells us how to behave and who belongs. A set of repeated instructions for how to live in a body right now, how fascism becomes internalized, and how easily we start believing the myths of meritocracy and health.

Over time, those rules stop sounding external. They start to feel like common sense. They shape how we exercise, how we eat, how we judge ourselves, and what kind of authority feels trustworthy. If we want to dismantle this version of wellness, we have to understand the moment we’re living in, how it gets under the skin, and what it will take to move beyond it.

The Era of the Unwell, Insecure, and Unsure

Strongmen rise during economic and cultural instability. This is one of those moments.

The old American promise, work hard and follow the rules to earn ease and security, is shattering. Instead, income gaps are widening exponentially, housing is only available to those with generational wealth, AI is devouring stable middle-class professions, and the lack of universal health care keeps reminding us that if we get sick, we could go broke.

Saturated by technology that promised connection and convenience, we’ve ended up isolated, inflamed, sedentary, and dissociated from our bodies. We are constantly grazing at an information buffet while starving for wisdom.

As manufacturing jobs disappear, women pull ahead in academia, and gender norms shift, this is an especially disorienting moment for young men. The game feels rigged, and our nervous systems know it. Add ecological collapse, nonstop political turmoil, and a pandemic, and of course we feel fried.

When the Bros Crashed the Party

Desperate to feel better in the upheaval, wellness was rebranded and became ubiquitous. Back in 2006, when I was in graduate school for Holistic Health Education, wellness was still coded as girly, too amorphous and introspective to be taken seriously. Health was framed as personal exploration and overlapped with a lot of “woo-woo.” (That’s a whole other alt-right pipeline I need to unpack if we’re going to understand Casey Means.)

But about a decade ago, as the question of how to take care of ourselves grew more urgent, the bros stormed in with protocols, metrics, and a whole lot of certainty. We seem to be surrounded by wellness and yet increasingly unwell. That’s because what we’re swimming in isn’t care. It’s an instruction manual for internalizing patriarchal power.

Let’s name the instructions of the Strongman wellness playbook.

• Follow the Leader
• Police the Body
• Scarcity and Status
• Arm Yourself with Bro Science
• Escape Vulnerability
• Elitism is a Feature, Not a Bug

Follow the Leader

Drowning in information, dissociated from the body, and economically struggling to stay afloat, the natural response becomes: Just tell me what to do.

Basic health advice, eat your veggies, get enough sleep, exercise regularly, is a way to daily microdose personal agency and self-care. It gently puts power back into your hands through simplicity and consistency. But the basics, and trusting your audience, are not enough to build a following.

Strongman wellness digs into mythologies of hypermasculine hierarchical power. The questions being answered aren’t just How do I feel better? They’re closer to How do I gain dominance? How do I feel powerful again?

The advice both addresses and reinforces a desperate grasp for certainty, confusion about embodiment, and a longing for agency in an economy that drains us. They tell you precisely how to get your life together, what to optimize, what to obsess over, and incidentally, what to ignore.

Eat all the meat, crush your workouts, inject yourself with peptides: The Wellness Strongman promises that if you are obedient, you will rise through the ranks, because the path to power demands adherence, not self-trust.

All those pesky social determinants of health? Ignore them. You can hack your way to the front of the line.

Police the Body

Our wellness could be liberatory. It could free us from Reichian limitations, help heal generational trauma, and prepare us to better serve our communities.

But in the manosphere, wellness is about rigid self-control and dominance. The old diet culture playbook that kept women hungry and compliant has been rebranded as longevity hacks, intermittent fasting, and high-intensity intervals.

To maintain health, the body must be digitally monitored and vigilantly policed. Every bite is a chance to track your macros, and every movement needs to be a quantifiable rep. At the root is a deep distrust of the body: controlling hunger, suppressing desire, and training us into obedience.

There’s a big difference between keeping yourself together and tipping into rigidity. I see this especially on my Italy retreats, when Americans arrive with deeply ingrained ideas about what they should be eating and how much they need to burn off any pleasure.

Scarcity and Status

As the billionaire class manufactures scarcity, manosphere wellness becomes less about feeling good and more about gaining a competitive edge. Health isn’t about feeling better. It’s about becoming more efficient, more focused, more productive.

The goal is to achieve a body. One that signals discipline, optimization, and success. Wellness becomes something you perform, something you display.

The mantra of Strongman wellness is PERFORMANCE. Always on. Always optimizing. Always needing to prove it. (When I was single, I went on many dates with this type of guy. It was exhausting.)

If we break down, wellness is supposed to fix us instead of asking why we keep burning ourselves out.

Don’t ask why groceries are getting more expensive.
Just work harder so you can afford them.

Arm Yourself with Bro Science

Getting men on the wellness bandwagon en masse required a very specific communication strategy, one that deploys anything science-y as authority.

The assumption is that you’re a sitting duck if you aren’t armed with the right information. That you, the dear listener or follower, don’t know jack squat and need an authority to tell you how to live in your body.

Enter bro science.

If knowledge is power, information is your arsenal, data is your bullets, and certainty is your shield. Science stops being a way to investigate our biases and becomes a way to invoke authority.

Huberman devises research studies to show that deep breathing is important. Shocker. He espouses the importance of getting sunshine, especially in the morning.These are obvious ways to stay healthy, and I don’t disagree with him. It’s his delivery that has always felt patronizing. Instead of reinforcing what we already intuitively know about caring for ourselves, he frames these ideas as breakthrough discoveries.

Asprey is even worse. He deploys the sensationalized, reductive, and myopic “science” of biohacking while trafficking in untested, unregulated longevity products.

Meanwhile, they ignore the scientific consensus that actually shapes our health: climate change and the overwhelming evidence that income drives health outcomes, because neither one is easy to parlay into an Athletic Greens discount code.

And that omission isn’t accidental. If the real drivers of health are structural and ecological, there isn’t much to sell. So the story shifts.

Escape Vulnerability

As we teeter toward ecological, economic, and existential uncertainty, the biohacker bros arrive triumphantly with longevity hacks. It’s a brilliant marketing strategy. Longevity sells because its a hedge against our personal obsolescence.

Driving around Silicon Valley, the unhoused people living in shanty towns along the freeway are a daily reminder that we abandon our most vulnerable. We are a society that treats other human beings are treated as disposable.

All the longevity hoopla is promise that if you constantly stay on top of your game, you won’t be trashed and abandoned. The podcasters, especially in the menopause space, constantly remind us to stay strong so we can avoid dependence as we age. God forbid we ever become frail, need care, or rely on someone else.

I want to be climbing steps for as many decades as possible. But can we stop preying on the fear of needing each other? The deeper anxiety isn’t aging. It’s living in a society that leaves people behind.

How about we stop treating each other as expendable and center cradle-to-grave care? (More on that in my next post.)

Elitism Is a Feature, Not a Bug

As the administration targets immigrants, denies health care, and limits reproductive care, we feel viscerally who belongs and who doesn’t. Meanwhile, wellness influencers operate as the softer arm of the propaganda machine, constantly reinforcing what the “ideal” healthy body should look like.

The hierarchy is clear: bros at the top, the rest of us pushed to the margins, and white women desperate for proximity to power. The aspirational “ideal” body is increasingly centered around wealthy, able-bodied, middle-aged, cis, hetero white dudes.Not surprising.

These bodies are not just the most privileged. They’re also something like a blank slate for exercise and health recommendations. When a young, able-bodied guy gets off the couch, starts exercising, and eats better, yes, he will often “get results.” So he starts to believe his body works like everyone else’s and begins spouting cookie-cutter advice.

If it worked for him, it should work for everyone. If it doesn’t work, it’s probably your fault.

Meanwhile, bodies with uteruses, bodies with more adipose, older bodies, trans bodies, differently-abled bodies, and bodies with chronic illness are de-centered, shamed, policed, or ignored. That’s most of us.

Instead of expanding the definition of a healthy body, health gets framed as an achievement. The aspirational ideal is designed to be unattainable and unsustainable, while keeping everyone believing they aren’t doing enough. A healthy diet and regular exercise aren’t enough. You need protein in your water and expensive wearables. When accessibility is dismissed, elitism becomes the business model, a hamster wheel that exhausts us while generating the revenue stream.

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All Regimes Collapse

It’s exploitative. It’s exhausting. And it was never meant to include all of us. That could describe the Strongman version of wellness, our current administration, or late-stage capitalism.

Eventually, this patriarchal pyramid scheme will fall. Authoritarian systems, like overly restrictive diets, collapse under their own rigidity because they were never designed for thriving, only control.

Regardless we will maintain our focus on repairing generational wounds, (re)building our communities, and supporting human flourishing. Our work now is to critique and dismantle the excesses of current power structures while simultaneously creating more robust alternatives.

If we do not fundamentally redefine what we mean by wellness, we will not survive what is unfolding. In my next post, I’ll share some ideas for reframing wellness. Let’s start building.

As much as I would like to laugh off the antics, I believe this clown show is masking something far more sinister. It looked absurd, but it reveals how wellness and power now perform together. This four-part series explores the rise of the Wellness Strongman, a hybrid of authoritarian and showman that perfectly embodies how power operates in the Information Age.

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What’s a Wellness Strongman?

During the last decade, as MAGA consolidated power, a cadre of male wellness influencers claimed the podcast airwaves and online town squares to define what “wellness” means. Focused on biohacking, longevity science, and functional medicine, figures like Andrew Huberman, Mark Hyman, David Asprey, and Peter Attia have built empires of influence through book deals, endless supplements, and elitist, often unnecessary diagnostics. They differ in the degree of pseudoscience they peddle, the scale of their personal scandals, and how closely they align with the current administration, but they share a similar orientation toward the body, toward wellness, and toward power. This series examines how wellness became a proxy for power, how that power gets deployed, and how we might reclaim our strength on a deeply personal level.

When I researched “strongman,” I found two primary definitions of this archetype: the authoritarian political figure and the old-time carnival act who lifts massive weights. I began to see these male health influencers as a hybrid, part showman, part promoter of a distinctly authoritarian agenda.

These Information Age power players know exactly how to edutain. They have built empires of persuasion, mastered the art of capturing attention, and often contort information into propaganda under the guise of health advice. The Strongman is a charismatic figure with all the answers, clearly defined enemies, and precise instructions for obedience. They are a key branch of a larger broligarchy machine and, when it comes to your health, there is always more mansplaining to do.

Like many autocratic leaders, they present themselves as outsiders, populists, even saviors. Mark Hyman frequently rails against Big Pharma, Big Ag, and the medical establishment while promoting healthy living. He talks about reforming the food system while cozying up to an administration that helped make American food both less nutritious and more costly. Yet he co-founded a company with RFK Jr and built a business valued at two billion dollars selling boutique diagnostics and supplements, a model that would be threatened by something like universal health care.

He names the problem, then sells the solution. When we’re asking, “What’s wrong with me and how do I feel better?” the answers are ready, packaged, and expensive.

Much of this Wellness Strongman content masquerades as accessible health advice, but you cannot build multimillion dollar companies by telling people to take a walk, go to bed earlier, and eat more vegetables. To hold attention and sustain revenue, the message has to grow more extreme, burrow into deeper fears, and inflame sharper anxieties. Dave Asprey’s biohacking enterprise, for example, rests on the premise that the boring basics like healthy food and exercise are not enough. You need the special coffee, the branded creatine, the elaborate routines and devices, the constant supplementation. There is always another spectacle, a new diet, an optimized workout, or a flight to the jungle for the latest psychedelic revelation they have “discovered.”

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Abuse of Power is No Surprise

Peter Attia and Deepak Chopra showing up in the Epstein files. Dave Asprey receiving a warning from the Federal Trade Commission over claims about “hacking” coronavirus treatments. Andrew Huberman’s sex scandal and subsequent complete denial of accountability. Once again, powerful men stepping over the line. Everyone act surprised!

The think pieces debate whether we should still worship these wellness heroes or separate the message from the messenger. But in the trenches of wellness, I’m less interested in their personal dramas, than in their framework which has always felt so damn patronizing. Every day I help people make sense of living in their bodies, simplify their wellness, and remove the barriers that make wellbeing feel complicated or out of reach.

So many well-meaning folks have absorbed hours of content and are still left chasing the next protocol. The confusion, the information deluge, the sense of not-enoughness, and the growing dominance of the body inside the manosphere all point to the same thing.

Ultimately, it’s obvious to me that the Strongman is more interested in his own authority, his bank account, and the accumulation of power than in what he claims: spreading the gospel of wellness. In my next post, I’ll unpack how these messages have become encoded in our society, our psyche, and our bodies (yes, that’s why protein is now in everything). We need to understand the playbook to move beyond it. Rigid control, whether it shows up as fascism or strict diets, doesn’t hold for long. Systems built on domination crack and Strongmen eventually fall.

When they do, we need a version of wellness that is more sustainable, collective, and grounded. That’s what I outline in the third post in this series. Finally, I bring it back to the body and my own approach to strength training as a way to reclaim agency, keep showing up, and learn how to function without gung-ho gurus.

1. The Wellness Strongman
   What authority looks like in modern wellness

2. The Business of Wellness Authority
   What they’re selling and why we buy it

3. Beyond the Spectacle
   Redefining wellness after the guru era

4. Strength Training for the Resistance: Showing up, serving, and building real agency

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Lately, my feed has been split between two versions of masculinity: armed, masked men tearing through Minneapolis and, in sharp contrast, gorgeous, gay hockey players falling in love on Heated Rivalry. Beyond the graphic, steamy love scenes (FYI, don’t watch it on the plane), I’d argue the show is revealing more than truly excellent butts. It’s tapping into a zeitgeist about how we’re coping with fascism. I posit that this popularity has a lot to do with our wellness and with that low-grade jaw clench many of us have been carrying for the past few years. Hear me out.

Although I’d much prefer the comfort of romantic escapism, we have to look back to 1933, when Hitler rose to power. (I know, I’d rather not go there either.) That year, Wilhelm Reich, a protégé of Freud and a radical psychoanalyst, published The Mass Psychology of Fascism. Writing during the rise of the Nazi Party, Reich argued that authoritarian regimes consolidate power not only through politics, but through sexually repressive ideology and internalized bodily control. For the state to tighten its grip on a mass scale, he believed that control lives in the bodies of the populace.

Reich observed his patients bracing against vulnerability, quelling anxiety, and rigidly conforming through what he called character armor. He linked this to patterns of chronic physical tension, particularly in the jaw, chest, and pelvis, which he referred to as muscular or body armor. (This concept of muscular armor has deeply informed how I teach yoga and strength training, though I realize that’s for a future post.) In other words, what we might now call toxic masculinity wasn’t just a set of beliefs for Reich. It was a personality structure, a way of inhabiting the body, a posture toward life itself.

This character type is a perfect ICE agent: already emotionally armored, and now physically outfitted with external armor paid for by our tax dollars. These fragile, insecure men are being paid to play a real-world video game, hunting down immigrants and proving their worth through domination and force. And after “completing their mission”, all the president’s men applaud them as heroes. As bell hooks wrote:

“Cultures of domination attack self-esteem, replacing it with a notion that we derive our sense of being from dominion over another. Patriarchal masculinity teaches men that their sense of self and identity, their reason for being, resides in their capacity to dominate others.”

To dominate, anything deemed “other” must be controlled. Anything defiant is violently attacked. Anything transgressive is ridiculed, shamed, closeted, policed, detained, beaten, and too often, killed. When the only power we know is dominance, there is never enough, and this malignant masculinity becomes its own cultural contagion.

It’s infected us all. We’re pouring massive resources into surveillance, policing, and detainment, incarcerating immigrants as well as citizens in the process. At the same time, we’re targeting a handful of trans athletes, stripping away reproductive rights, and draining public healthcare funding. Whether it’s the constant flattery of our orange emperor, the corrupt financing behind it all, or the steady dehumanization of our neighbors, the facade requires endless reinforcement and perpetual violence. It is so damn exhausting because what’s happening politically isn’t just abstract or ideological. As Reich understood, it’s a collective, visceral experience that takes up residence in our bodies. For years, we’ve all been bracing against vulnerability, quelling anxiety, and trying to keep our shit together.

That tension, the one lodged in your jaw, has become a profit and propaganda pipeline. The MAHA side of wellness culture, along with a cadre of bro-sphere podcasters, has doubled down on internalized bodily control while routinely disregarding the social determinants of health. “SkinnyTok” isn’t just about thinness. It’s about controlling our appetites, our bodies, and pleasure itself. The trending body type values ultra-thin musculature as visible proof of discipline. Conforming to diet culture becomes shorthand for being “good,” even morally superior, while a newly inverted food pyramid lectures us about “personal responsibility” at the same time this administration makes healthy, affordable food harder to access.

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We’re told we’ll be safe and successful if we focus on following the rules. Regulate your nervous system, schlep around in a weighted vest, and adhere to the latest Huberman protocol.

Stay regulated. Don’t freak the fuck out.

But maybe freaking the fuck out is exactly what we need right now. Maybe we’re exhausted by the faux strongman bullshit and desperate for something else, something like Heated Rivalry. Maybe we’re ready to escape our own internalized compliance. We’ve policed pleasure so thoroughly that we didn’t realize how hungry we are. Locked into the confines of trying to be good, we crave belonging to something more transcendent—which explains the show’s record-breaking popularity.

Across its six episodes, the characters strip out of the straightjacket of character armor, allowing for a torrent of emotional vulnerability and plenty of physical nudity. If nothing else, the show deserves accolades for its masterful lighting design, where shadowy desire is no longer policed and gives way to sunlit tenderness. The series illustrates Reich’s “character armor” and how it works to suppress the chaos of the erotic. He also recognized this as fascism’s deepest threat. External violent control and internalized suppression can never fully contain the unknown, the shadow, or desire itself. This is why the Grindr server keeps crashing at the RNC.

I’ll admit I would much rather watch beautiful cinematography of queer ecstasy than American citizens gunned down by perverted power. But I’d argue these are two sides of the same story of oppression. They point to the scale of change we’re experiencing, and to a deep hunger for something more humane. When we’re released from the shackles of shame, when we no longer hide in fear, we find the bravery to step out of the shadows, let our desires see daylight, and take to the streets. Our wellness practices can be about unshackling ourselves from the armor and liberating us from brittle patriarchal norms. We can exercise the core strength to stand up for what we believe in. Unlock our jaws to speak up for what we believe. Once we give ourselves permission, we can feel it in our bones: the drumbeats of collective liberation, radiating outward from Minneapolis.

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In closing, I’m including this quote by poet, writer, and activist Audre Lorde. My rule of thumb: when it feels like the arc of justice is bending way too slowly, invoke the Black feminists:

“The erotic functions for me in several ways, and the first is in providing the power which comes from sharing deeply any pursuit with another person. The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.

Another important way in which the erotic connection functions is the open and fearless underlining of my capacity for joy, in the way my body stretches to music and opens into response, harkening to its deepest rhythms so every level upon which I sense also opens to the erotically satisfying experience whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, or examining an idea.

That self-connection shared is a measure of the joy which I know myself to be capable of feeling, a reminder of my capacity for feeling. And that deep and irreplaceable knowledge of my capacity for joy comes to demand from all of my life that it be lived within the knowledge that such satisfaction is possible, and does not have to be called marriage, nor god, nor an afterlife.”

― Audre Lorde

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The message is clear: we can all make better choices to improve our health. Eat the right foods, crush your high-intensity intervals, hit your step count, listen to the right podcasts, down the supplements, get adequate sleep, and you’ll be perfectly fine. Just do all the right things, work hard, be disciplined. Sound familiar? These ideas reflect American meritocracy and rugged individualism, repackaged as self-care.

The belief that you, and you alone, are responsible for your health outcomes has a name: healthism. Coined by sociologist Robert Crawford in 1980, healthism describes the preoccupation with personal health as a moral obligation and personal achievement. It treats health as something we earn through good behavior, while quietly ignoring genetics, income, environment, discrimination, public policy, and sheer bad luck.

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Healthism is so normalized that we barely notice how it shapes our response to current events. Watching ICE terrorize neighborhoods? Regulate your nervous system. Afraid of getting sick without adequate healthcare? Eat more antioxidants. Losing financial ground in a volatile economy? Go bulk up at the gym. When the world feels out of control, we’re sold the idea that tighter control over our bodies will save us.

This framework asks too much of individuals and far too little of systems. In practice, that shows up in a few predictable ways.

It’s too much to carry alone

Anyone else overwhelmed by the expectation to stay healthy, well-regulated, thin, and perpetually young? Doing all the right things can feel like a full-time job, one that easily costs hundreds of dollars a month. Health becomes a status marker, another place where we can never quite keep up, where not doing enough is treated as a personal flaw rather than a predictable outcome.

It rewards the performative and the narcissistic

Healthism slides easily into spectacle, especially on social media. Scroll through TikTok and you’ll find all-meat diets, crash cleanses dressed up as detoxing, and plenty of coffee enemas. The loudest, most extreme, and most self-absorbed voices end up defining what it means to “take control of your health.” And it’s not just the algorithm rewarding this behavior. Rather than holding press conferences or offering coherent public health guidance, we’ve ended up with our HHS secretary performing pull-ups in airports alongside wellness influencers for a photo op.

It conceals privilege as virtue

Having the time and energy to hit Pilates, shop for fresh ingredients, and chop vegetables for a wholesome dinner is very different from working late and relying on the drive-through to feed hungry kids. When self-care is framed as willpower, that difference disappears. Those with the resources to take care of themselves are praised as more disciplined, more intelligent, and more morally upstanding, while those with less bandwidth are cast as lazy, irresponsible, or uninformed.

It blames the victim

Healthism arrives as empowerment and quickly turns judgmental. We subsidize corn, flood the market with cheap ultra-processed foods, and then blame people for eating them and getting sick. Instead of changing policy to make fresh food accessible, responsibility is pushed downward. Struggling to stay well in an increasingly unaffordable society is treated as a personal failure rather than structural pressure. Healthism isn’t neutral advice. It’s gaslighting.

Most importantly, it’s absolute BS

Our health is shaped far more by where we’re born and the zip codes we live in than by what we put in our grocery carts. This is the core insight of determinism, a lens that reveals what healthism conceals. In Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, Robert Sapolsky argues that our lives are formed far more by biological and environmental forces than by individual choice. Genes, fetal environments, childhood stress, income, education, trauma, and social position all mold impulse control, health, and behavior long before “choice” ever enters the picture. As Sapolsky puts it, “we are nothing more or less than the cumulative biological and environmental luck, over which we had no control, that has brought us to any moment.”

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No control? Ouch. At first, determinism feels like a real bummer. As someone who feels genuinely proud of my breakfast smoothies, exercise routines, and early bedtimes, it can sound like Sapolsky is dismissing my commitment to wellness. But read more closely and that’s not what he’s saying. He isn’t arguing that some people lack willpower or that others are blessed with a magical reserve of discipline. He’s pointing to the environments that shape impulse control and executive function. I’m not healthy simply because I work hard at it. I’m healthy because I have the capacity to take care of myself. And that capacity is shaped by support, stability, and resources long before it shows up as “good choices.”

Our social, socioeconomic, genetic, and environmental conditions shape health far more than individual behavior ever could. Healthism is not merely an illusion of meritocracy; it is marketing, increasingly translated into policy. The MAHA emphasis on personal responsibility and empowerment eclipses a more basic truth: human beings require sustained, collective nurturing over a lifetime. While the wealthy purchase expansive support systems, poorer folks are inundated with cheap coping mechanisms and told to call it resilience. The result is a culture that insists we can optimize our way out of structural neglect, even as the conditions for health continue to erode.

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As I was writing this, I came across the concept of Inheritocracy, developed by Eliza Filby, which makes a data-driven case against meritocracy by showing how inherited support, not effort alone, determines opportunity in housing, education, childcare, and affordability. She doesn’t explicitly address health, but the connection is obvious. Who gets praised for discipline, who is punished early for “poor impulse control,” and who was ever actually given the conditions to sustain themselves in the first place? Inherited genes, environments, and financial scaffolding shape who has the capacity to care for themselves at all.

This is where the wellness slogans finally collapse. Who actually gets control over their body and their time, and therefore their health? Who can make long-term investments instead of constant short-term tradeoffs? We do not all have the same 24 hours in a day when some people are insulated from economic pressure and others are working multiple jobs while caregiving and recovering from chronic stress. Framing health as personal control in a landscape this unequal is not empowerment. It’s propaganda.

Don’t buy it.

You don’t sustain yourself through restriction, self-loathing, or chugging magic pills. Intensity might sell, but it rarely lasts. What actually carries us through busy seasons, demanding work, and real life don’t photograph well or promise transformation in 14 days.

I call them the Deep Basics.

They’re the unsexy, mostly free practices you can actually commit to consistently. They help you stay regulated, resourced, and showing up without burning yourself out.

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The Deep Basics of Wellness

Hydrate

Yes, it’s obvious, and yes, you still need the reminder. Drink the water or tea. Don’t let your brain, your joints, or your immune system shrivel up like a raisin.

Move to Get Unstuck

Stress lodges itself in the body. Walk, stretch, squirm in your chair, shake it out. Movement shifts mood in the moment, not just for long-term fitness goals. Let your emotions become raw material and put them in motion. Emote, emotion, and motion all come from the same root word: movere, Latin for “to move.”

Don’t Get Hangry

Solid meals and handy snacks prevent unnecessary downward spirals. Forget the diets and food rules. You don’t need to constantly reinvent how you eat, you just need to feed yourself in a way that sustains you. A well-fed body keeps your mood, mind, and energy steady.

Green Time > Screen Time

We push our minds to the point of indigestion with endless information and fear-driven feeds. The antidote to doomscrolling is simple: green time. Step outside, notice the season, breathe fresh air, and let your senses recalibrate. Even cooking dinner, tending a plant, or taking a shower can be a return to something real.

Rest

Sleep is not optional. Recharge fully and often. Learn how to turn the knob between effort and recovery, and remember that rest takes many forms. The ability to turn the day, the work, the week off and not let the to-do creep into your chill time.

Be Kind to Yourself

We are constantly told we need fixing, optimizing, or reshaping. Practicing contentment is an act of rebellion. Ease up on the inner critic, notice what you’ve endured, and give yourself credit for making it this far.

Stay Connected

Isolation breeds outrage, and outrage makes us more vulnerable to nonsense. Stay connected to friends and family instead. Share the meme, organize the potluck, tell the truth when someone asks how you are. A strong community is more powerful than any self-care hack.

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If you’ve got money to spend on wellness, skip the magic pills and spend it on support. Find a class, a teacher, a therapist, a gym, a walking buddy, or a community that helps you keep showing up. Structure and connection will take you further than any supplement ever will. Wellness sticks when you’re not doing it alone.

Every day I bounce between the sharp, urgent grind of hustling and the tender, buoyant moments of healing work. Writing this recap made me realize that I’m damn proud of how I’ve made a living. As the most extreme personalities in the wellness industry seized power and violently dismantled our social safety net, I worked in grassroots wellness. Running a multifaceted wellness business meant holding it together while so much seemed to fall apart.

Here’s my report on where I showed up:

Online:

Movement Medicine

My Movement Medicine virtual classroom has a lively, regular group. Many show up to the live Zoom classes three times each week, while others fit in the recordings around work schedules, family obligations, and real life. This year we dove deeper into anatomy, practiced functional training before “No Kings” rallies, and checked in on caring for children, grandchildren, aging parents, and ourselves. Many Movement Medicine students work in public health or policy, so I’m glad to keep them active, often in their pajamas, before heading into valiant, demanding workdays. These classes connect me to people across the country and anchor my own movement practice.

Workplace Wellness

I piloted an online workplace wellness program for the Organic Trade Association, a lobbying, policy, and education nonprofit representing the organic sector and advocating for our food system. With the upheaval in DC, I addressed a lot of creaky shoulders, the isolation of remote work, and the ongoing challenge of staying healthy under intense workloads.

Italy Retreats

Despite a very bumpy year for marketing, I gathered groups in May and September. Together with my Italian business partners, we created retreats with morning yoga, hikes through vineyards, and farm-to-table meals paired with stunning wines. These trips consistently reframe my jaded American hustle mentality and give me the chance to work alongside Alice, a friend of over 30 years and a masterful chef. For those who can make it, the experience is once-in-a-lifetime.

Asheville:

I work for three women-owned wellness businesses in Asheville, which allows me to focus on the direct service I love without the constant headache of the overhead.

Functional Flow

Every Tuesday and Thursday at 5:30, a rowdy-but-exhausted group rolls into West Asheville Yoga fresh off WFH desks, nonprofit jobs, and the retail & service industry gigs that keep Asheville running. We banter, squat, sweat, stretch, and eventually melt into a savasana puddle. I would not have made it through the Hurricane Helene recovery or the February DOGE massacres without this crew.

Fitness Training

I returned to personal fitness training at All Bodies Movement and Wellness, an emphatically inclusive gym committed to offering space to exercise for people marginalized by or averse to mainstream gym culture. Many of my older clients face osteoporosis or multiple sclerosis, live with several fused discs, or are recovering from surgeries. Younger clients are navigating gender transitions, autism, depression, or ADHD. Almost all of them are new to lifting weights and need support to start a regular exercise routine. I also lead strength classes for people across a range of body types who want a solid workout without diet/ fitness shaming. I’ve coached several folks to personal records, including deadlifting over 250 lbs or pressing 50 lbs overhead. Every day I’m reminded that we are strong enough to face our physical and emotional obstacles.

Tarot

Through the Asheville Wellness Tours and other collaborations, I offer tarot readings at dinner events and for small groups of visitors. Reading cards is like personal training for your intuition and telling these hero’s journey stories I often need to hear myself. I aim to make the mystical practical, and the work often creates a release of tears, belly laughs, and sudden aha moments.

Reflections on getting through the year:

Sustaining Myself

After Helene last fall, winter in Asheville was pretty damn depressing. As the growing season returned, I noticed crews dredging the river of debris and nature slowly mending her open wound. I returned to hiking trails scarred by downed trees but reopened by chainsaws. The community celebrated businesses reopening as Asheville’s creative and ecological vitality returned.

Although often overwhelmed, I stayed connected to friends and family. I showed up for baby showers, a too-early funeral, a wedding, and family gatherings. I hosted a few damn good parties. I stayed open to grief, joy, and the realities of aging, because that’s the real work of belonging. IRL, I was less the wellness persona who has it all figured out and more the friend just keeping it together. And while I may not have it all dialed, at least I’m not an insufferable, narcissistic influencer no one wants to invite over for dinner.

Despite a bout of sciatica, because sometimes life is literally a pain in the ass, I completed my annual birthday fitness challenge. I nailed the 100-rep, 5-minute kettlebell snatch test, pulled a heavy AF deadlift, and reminded myself that I can still do both a full backbend and a full split. Aunt Sadie’s still got it, for now.

Sustaining the Writing

Luckily, I’ve baked most of my physical practice into the workday and reserve my precious mornings for writing. My body is holding up pretty damn well, which allows my mind can keep exercising its strength.

Usually mired in the transactional, writing is my reach toward the transcendental. I posted on Substack 43 times this year. When did I manage that?

I especially appreciate my ten unsolicited, paid subscribers (thanks, everyone!) I’ve needed this space to step back from monetizing my offerings and interrogate the context of the wellness hustle. That often requires fending off emails and early-morning calls to Italy to protect an hour of focused time, fueled by my husband’s impeccable cappuccinos.

This year, writing often felt like a punishing boxing match with our current political realities. This Substack is my attempt to gain traction and clarity while being pummeled by endless what-the-actual-fuck moments. I’ve kept the paywall down because I feel a profound responsibility to define wellness beyond the extreme, the weaponized, and the nefarious political operators who have claimed so much of its language.

Sustaining Each Other

So as I close out my 23rd year of working in wellness, I don’t have a serum to reverse aging, “7 health secrets the medical industry isn’t telling you”, or an MLM to pitch.

What I can report is that I’m proud of who I serve and who I work alongside. Those of us still eking out small, service-based wellness businesses are the ones actually making America healthy. Our job is to feel the ache, know what to do with it, or at least how to hold it.

It’s a privilege to be in the trenches with my retreat partners and the women keeping the doors open here in Asheville. Relentless self-promotion makes us cringe when we would much rather offer direct service. We balance affordable, accessible pricing with paying our people and ourselves a decent wage. Every day we wrestle with expensive, exasperating software that promised to make business management easier. We barely keep up with emails, admin, and endless to-do lists. We all need to update our websites. We all think the algorithm is a real asshole. We are all trying to relax. We are all tired of being so damn resilient.

But we keep showing up.

We have not achieved bodies of plasticized perfection. We have not meditated ourselves beyond ever needing medical care. We are not paragons of purity. Actually, we cuss like sailors and know that sustainable health includes the occasional cheeseburger. We keep it real because that is all we can afford to do.

Within the shrinking confines of capitalism, the grief of ecological destruction, the full assault on public health, fabricated economic scarcity, state-sponsored terror against immigrants, attacks on trans kids, and the nauseating migraine of our current administration, my job was to show up energized, on time, upright, focused, and recently showered. As a somatic trail guide I feel the overwhelm, coax out the frantic gripping, and realign spirits so we can keep up the resistance training. In a year that often felt hopeless, the workout was rejecting isolated outrage. We got through it by carrying the ache together.

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When we walk into a yoga class or a gym, we are searching for something. Not just a place to hang out, not just an exercise routine or some camaraderie through the sweating. We are often seeking something more foundational. Belonging in our own skin.

I understand what it feels like not to belong, because my body has been scrutinized, judged, and eventually vilified by fitness, diet, and even wellness culture itself. As a fitness trainer and yoga teacher for more than twenty years, I’ve moved through this world in a body bigger than the typical yoga teacher and thicker than the standard trainer.

I’ve been consistently and exceptionally healthy, yet navigating this field means enduring relentless hostility toward my phenotype. It’s a daily effort to find belonging within myself. But that effort has also been the key to my success. When I’m teaching, I’m aiming at more than relieving neck pain, perfecting triangle pose, or improving squat mechanics. Ultimately I want my students to feel more at home in their bodies. Less pain. More ease. More skill. More joy. Less believing they are never enough.

It starts with how I stand in front of the classroom and the spaces I create.

Limping Along, Pushing Harder

If belonging feels hard, it’s because most of us aren’t starting from neutral. Just getting through the workday, through the news, and through the caregiving, we often numb out. We brace with mostly unconscious tension, bury grief, and get stuck in autopilot. Self-care slips to the bottom of the list. As the grid grinds us down, the body can feel abandoned, neglected, or abused.

Yearning to feel better, we seek out the structure and support of wellness third spaces.

Fitting In

I remember when I first started yoga in my neighborhood studio in San Francisco. Struggling through sun salutations, I glanced around and clocked that I was the fattest person in the room. In that moment it felt like there were only two options. Leave to avoid the humiliation or push hard enough to earn my belonging. Stay home or pummel myself with intensity.

That all-or-nothing pattern shows up everywhere in wellness culture. Abandonment or overboard. It has become my mission as a teacher to help folks step out of that mentality.

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Don’t Even Try

I understand why folks are nervous to step inside a gym, a studio, or any kind of third wellness space. Exercise can feel performative, punishing, or clicky. People tell me all the time, “I’m too inflexible for yoga. I’m too weak or too broken for strength training.” These spaces can be notoriously unwelcoming to anyone in a bigger body, differently abled, dealing with injuries, or simply not naturally athletic.

I’m grateful I didn’t give up before kicking into my first handstand or realizing my knack for backbends. I had the pluck to figure out the weight room even when it was packed with bros. Because hiding out, trying not to be judged, and protecting ourselves from vulnerability keeps us away from all the good stuff.

Finding my home in these third spaces gave me access to so much healing, agency, and a deep sense of belonging to myself. But I also know that belonging has a dark side.

Never Enough

To stick around in these “healing” spaces is to immerse yourself in a culture of constantly changing diets and pushing physical limits. Already limping along, we are told to whip ourselves into shape. Lose weight, fight aging, push harder, restrict more. No excuses.

You belong in a CrossFit gym if you can max out your deadlift and keep up with constant competition. You belong in the spin studio if your skinny butt fits the seat and you are sweating your balls off to the trendy playlist. You belong in the barre studio if you look cute in your Lulus and endure endless reps with the pink weights. I have spent many hours in these spaces feeling like an outsider and still showing up for the benefits of a solid workout.

There is a fine line between pursuing health and chasing the workout, the diet, and the body that fits the brand. Under the aspirational ideal and collective zeal lives the belief that the body always needs to be fixed, perfected, and performing.

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In the frenzy of self-optimization, trying to fit the mold can, and often does, compromise long-term health. I’ve known yoga teachers who pushed so far into flexibility they needed hip replacements. I’ve known gym junkies who trained so hard they ended up with knee, back, or shoulder surgeries. I’ve watched too many health-conscious friends teeter into orthorexia.

Looking the Part vs Belonging

Being entrenched in wellness culture, I’ve found a middle ground between bailing out and going overboard. I push myself through deadlifts and am equally skilled at recovery. I trust myself to eat well without dieting dogma. I stay committed without slipping into obsession.

The real resistance training has been navigating the years of messaging that tells us we are too fat, too old, too weak, too injured, too uncoordinated, too stiff, or too much of a loser to ever belong. To belong again we are supposed to buy into the next big trend, push ourselves to exhaustion, or micromanage every bite and biomarker.

I never arrived at the promised land of results advertised by every fitness brand. I never found eternal youth, got my foot behind my head, completed a marathon, or sculpted six pack abs. I also never pledged allegiance to a single method, found a guru, went down a dieting rabbit hole, or handed my identity to a tribe. After grueling kettlebell certifications and intense yoga teacher trainings, I didn’t even get a tattoo. I never needed that mark of belonging because I already had a sense of it within myself.

I never achieved the constantly changing body ideal. After decades of intense and varied exercise I haven’t wrecked my joints or my metabolism. I’m still me. Healthy and steady in my routines. Built like my mother and grandmothers. Built like a brick shithouse, as we say back home in West Virginia.

What I’ve learned is simple. You can do everything right and still never fit the mold because the mold was never designed to include the range of healthy bodies that actually exist. I’m not a bulletproof body positivity warrior. I have insecurities like everyone else, and those insecurities often stand between us and the belonging we want. Every day I contend with the idea that our only options are to isolate or to overdo it.

My own definition of wellness is having the ability to show up, imperfectly and consistently. That’s what I’ve been able to do for myself and for thousands of classes and training sessions. As the principal emotional architect of so many wellness third spaces, I’ve shaped what abilities are celebrated, how we push ourselves, how we relax, and how we support each other. Breaking the mold gives us far more room between hiding out and burning out.

This has been my work for years. Shaping how we belong in these spaces, how we belong to each other, and how we belong in our bodies.

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Ever wonder why wellness culture has become so damn ubiquitous? Everyone’s in athleisure, sipping lavender elixirs, and posting about detox enemas. Beyond the influencer discount codes for unregulated supplements, what’s really being sold? More importantly, why is there so much demand?

We are surrounded by products promising to make us feel better with more wellness for sale than ever, yet everyone seems to feel worse. I have a theory why.

Over the last two decades we’ve seen a massive increase in wealth disparity, the erosion of public safety nets, and the fraying of the health care system. Homelessness is rising, our social fabric is fraying, and technology keeps us numbed behind our screens. Meanwhile, the wellness industry has been on a meteoric rise and that is no coincidence.

It’s a scary and uncertain time, made worse by an administration that stormed into power with a plan to extract as much wealth as possible. There’s a gnawing, low-grade anxiety humming through everything. Everyone’s wondering, Am I going to be okay?

The wellness biz answers: yes, you’ll be fine, just buy something. Another disposable diet. A creatine supplement. An antioxidant serum. Buy something, feel empowered, feel better.

But what’s really being sold are promises of certainty and the illusion of control in an increasingly chaotic time. Global tariff wars making you anxious? Count your protein grams. Worried about access to reproductive care? Buy a $299 detox to “take your power back.”

Maybe that shred of turmeric in our latte isn’t taming our inflammation because our anger is bigger than that. Maybe the CBD isn’t helping us sleep because we’re watching consumer protections, clean air laws, and food safety standards disappear. Because at any moment, someone deemed an enemy of the state could be snatched off the street.

The Root Causes

“Take control of your health” has become the mantra of wellness influencers now moving into policy. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, even though the system is rigged to make the poor poorer and the rich richer. Follow all the rules, eat the kale, and self-care your way through skyrocketing health insurance premiums, rising grocery bills, and disappearing reproductive rights.

Despite the claims to address the “root cause” of disease, we never seem to reach the cure. The real cure would be living on a thriving planet, within a supportive community, where care is prioritized from conception to death.

But that’s not the kind of root cause the industry is selling. Instead of a lack of childcare or affordable housing, we’re told we’re sick because we don’t eat enough beef tallow or because we should detox.

Karl Marx said that “religion is the opiate of the masses” but these days wellness is how we placate ourselves. We pray in spin class, fast for atonement, and worship influencers as gurus. There’s enormous profit in privatizing anxiety. It’s an easy sell to when we’re overwhelmed, self-blaming, and desperate for control.

Our overwhelm easily slides into self-absorption. The threat is coming from inside the house, in the form of hyper-individualism, consumerism, and the endless chase for self-perfection. Narcissism is its own disease, especially when you apply your $150 serum without recognizing the privilege of your skin.

We’re stepping over unhoused people to get to Pilates and sipping superfood smoothies while wildfire smoke fills the sky. Are we trying to make ourselves look and feel better while our country crumbles and our climate collapses?

Isn’t It Ironic

Here’s the irony: as our public infrastructure of care is gutted, we need self-care more than ever. We need to be disciplined and compassionate enough to stay calm and functional without disappearing into cynicism or consumerism. Every day becomes a practice in not panicking, not buying into more bullshit, and not retreating into our private cocoons of curated wellness.

We can’t self-care our way out of housing crises, climate collapse, or public health threats. Individual wellbeing is a myth sold as freedom.

If we care about survival, ours and everyone else’s, we have to see that personal, collective, and planetary wellbeing are the same project. We are just another species in a fragile habitat, bound together whether we like it or not.

Here’s the good news: we already have everything we need to take care of ourselves and each other. We just have some healing to do.

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Author’s Note

If this piece resonated, share it with someone who’s tired of performative wellness and interested in how we sustain ourselves right now.

I teach Movement Medicine, a combo of yoga, strength training, and keeping ourselves moving through uncertain times.

🌀 Subscribe for essays, classes, and stories about the future of care: grounded, communal, and alive.

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Space to Move Freely
The yoga studio that happened to be opening was called Open Door, a place where you could hang out on the cozy window seat and sip tea after class. As I became a regular, yoga began to change me. I learned to shift back into my hips in downward dog, strengthened my standing poses, and radically changed how I inhabit my body. The owners greeted me by name, and I eventually I even helped one of them move apartments. I felt like I finally belonged in my body and at my neighborhood yoga studio. I found my thing and my place.

Since Covid and the rise of working from home, boutique gyms and studios have become a “third space,” a place to go beyond home and work. In his article Welcome to the Wellness Era: Gyms Are the New Third Space, Bryan Elliott writes, “In a world where digital connection often substitutes for real community, gyms are providing something increasingly rare: authentic human connection around shared goals. They’re not just places to exercise; they’re becoming the heart of community life. The coffee shop era may be over, but the era of wellness is just beginning.”

Gym as Church
For the last two decades, I’ve traveled through many of these spaces: packed yoga classes, gritty CrossFit boxes, rock climbing gyms, and bougie barre studios. It’s like visiting multiple churches around town. In her 2022 book The Gospel of Wellness, Rina Raphael dedicates an entire chapter to the gym-as-church idea. “Fitness brands may have created new ministries,” she writes, “but people need more than just a priest. They need a congregation. People need people. And those people need to feel something.”

As a student, I know that deep need to feel something. After long hours working on screens, endless interruptions, and low-level panic, I’ve shown up to class stiff, anxious, and mentally fried, hoping to sweat, connect, and feel human again. Ideally, the movement space is where we can arrive as messy wrecks, sweat out our existential dread, and wring ourselves out. It’s where we flex our heroism and find our healing.

The yearning to belong in our bodies again, and to each other, has become a booming industry. Responding to that longing to atone and commune, brands like Equinox have packaged exclusivity, community, and aspiration (sweetie selfies optional). Over the years, I haven’t just moved between modalities and interior design styles, but between these mythologies.

Movement Tribes
Seeking camaraderie and a good workout, these third spaces shape how we gather for devotional rituals. From CrossFit to spin studios, each has its own liturgy of collective exercise: the leadership, the physical intensity, and the redemption of a good sweat session. Each “congregation” gathers in standard-issue wardrobes, follows its trending diets, moves to the same music, and wears the same footwear (or none at all). The barefoot yogis detoxing and sun salute through trance beats, the spinners in spandex ride to retro tracks in their clip-in shoes, and the CrossFitters chug creatine smoothies as they put on their lifting shoes.

Wearing similar clothes and eating similar foods, we aren’t just doing reps together; we are repeating the same stories about our bodies, our discipline, our (dietary) sins, and our yearning for transcendence. Whether it’s SoulCycle or Zumba, the rituals of belonging are remarkably similar. It’s more than an outfit or a workout. It’s a mentality and, increasingly, a political ideology.

The intensity of belonging often matches the intensity of the workout (and a reliable revenue stream.) When people treat their workout as their religion, seeking community, ritual, discipline, and purpose, there’s always a dark side. Who belongs and who is exiled? Who gets to feel at home in their body and in these spaces? Who’s in charge, and how is community created?

I’ve wrestled with these questions as a student but more directly as a teacher in these third spaces. I’ve been both a seeker and a space holder, not only holding my own but holding space for others. I’ve been the one to welcome newcomers, just like Barbara did for me in that first yoga class. I witnessed how belonging to places, products, and people can both heal and harm.

As connection becomes a commodity, reclaiming belonging starts within our own skin. From there, we can build spaces where more of us and more parts of us feel welcome, not just the ones who fit the brand.

When I started teaching yoga in 2003, I picked up a part-time job at a new-age bookstore. It was the kind of place where spiritual seekers and casual browsers lingered among incense clouds, tinkling wind chimes, and shelves of glossy self-help books. We sold Deepak Chopra and Eckhart Tolle, Carolyn Myss, chakra jewelry, feng shui tchotchkes, yoga DVDs, and a LOT of crystals. It was a one-stop shop for relaxation, spiritual exploration, and enlightenment.

One afternoon, a man came in looking for amethyst because he heard it could help with his aching knee. I walked him through the crystal display, letting him hover his hand until he “felt the right energy.” When he found his stone, we chatted at the register. I asked, offhandedly, if he had ever tried yoga. He said he liked the idea, tucked the $2 stone into his pocket, and headed out into the world. I never saw him again.

As the door closed behind him, I thought: this guy could use lunges more than crystals. I didn’t fault him for believing in alternative forms of healing, but I did think it was absurd that this stone would magically fix his knee. Like many folks in new-agey circles, he was rejecting the philosophy of materialism: that everything can be reduced to physical matter, mechanical processes, and that consciousness is just a byproduct of our physical reality.

But knees are mechanical. Releasing hip tension, balancing muscles, and actually using the joint is usually a good place to start. Walking, lunging, and squatting are not as romantic as a glowing purple stone, but they are usually a better starting point. Reductionism may not be the whole story, but ignoring it rarely leads to healing either.

People often end up rejecting philosophical materialism while blindingly buying into commercial materialism. In other words, they reject the idea that everything is just matter, then turn around and put their faith in stuff. The belief becomes tangible through a purchase. A stone with “healing energy” is not just a rock; it is a transaction that says, “I believe.” When buying becomes the ritual, does it rob us of the power it promises?

As alternative spirituality moved into the mainstream, it was immediately commodified, and we were relentlessly sold on the philosophy of idealism. The metaphysical marketplace pushed the idea that consciousness, not matter, is the basis of reality. We heard phrases like “we construct our own reality” and “you can manifest your dream life” while being sold the products and aesthetics to match. Transcendence for whoever can afford it.

Obviously, I’ve participated in this economy, don’t completely reject it, and understand the seeking behind this consumer pattern. We crave meaning beyond the measurable and quantifiable. We want to be more than a meatsuit with a metabolism. And especially when faced with a catastrophic healing crisis, we want to believe that our beliefs will transcend physical reality.

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Consciousness is indeed powerful, but reality has a way of asserting itself. Yes, positive thinking and manifesting have their place. On the other hand, there is the stubborn reality of aching, aging bodies and a planet with finite resources. This is where the real questions live. How much agency do we truly have? How much power is personal, and how much is shaped by privilege, access, and circumstance? How do we live with the knowledge that we are not, in fact, endlessly special?

My work has always lived in that tension. I guide people through movement practices that help them navigate the unknown interiors of their bodies and minds. I confront the interplay between our mythologies, mindset, and musculature every day. Over time, this work reveals the capacities of bodies and the limits to our imaginations.

I don’t have a problem with buying a “magical” stone. I do contend with the idea that our buying power is our primary power, and that we are exceptional enough to consume our way out of discomfort. It’s a seductive story, but a shallow one.

The real question is what actually helps us transcend, especially beyond our individual consumer impulses. How do we step outside the reflex to soothe every ache and uncertainty by buying something new?

It feels like yet another impossible group project: transcending the materialism that reduces us to consumers and commodities, that reduces the earth to raw materials, that quickly placates our deeper yearnings with shopping lists.

Can we manifest an off-ramp from the collision between our consumption and our ecological future? Can we get together and make a vision board for that?

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This essay is part of the series Beyond Belief: Woo-woo, Science, and Seed Oils. Upcoming pieces (may possibly) include:

• Magic, Manifestation, and Meritocracy

• The Somatic vs. the Scientific

• The Natural Way: Holistic Health, Processed Foods, and MAHA

• Where Do We Belong: Finding Your (Wellness) Tribe

• Uncertainty: An Anti-Fragile Belief System

• Muscular Mysticism, Tarot, and Spelunking the Unknown

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When leadership reeks of corruption and we are constantly faced with turmoil, we feel it in our nervous system. We clench our jaws, our shoulders tighten, our backs stiffen. Stress makes us weird and desperate. We crave mythologies that explain the chaos, scientific explanations of our pain, and leaders who promise certainty and belonging.

Titans of the wellness industry and legions of influencers have rushed to fill that void. It’s seductive to follow the loud, confident voice that insists if we just cut the processed foods and follow the rules, we’ll be safe. In aligning with authoritarianism, they borrow the same playbook of fear-mongering, scapegoating, and purity-as-salvation. The CDC is cast as the villain, eager to hook you on pharmaceuticals. Ignore our lack of universal health care, point instead to immigrants and food coloring. Atone with a detox for $19.95. Reject authority and expertise, then replace them with a cult of personality.

We are desperate to take care of ourselves but late-stage capitalism has already hit the iceberg. Are our attempts at healing just arranging the deck chairs? Maybe I should buy the anti-inflammatory, anti-aging red-light UV face mask, so I get a flattering selfie against the backdrop of climate collapse in the backyard. Beyond the absurd beauty standards and expensive wellness routines, facing our reality is exhausting. Nihilism is such a pain in the neck.

So what stories actually keep us afloat? What beliefs give us buoyancy?

As much as I would love to drift into idealism, I can’t summon that kind of dissociation right now. Witnessing and grieving our collapse is an essential to knowing our truth. As Christian Nationalism tightens its grip as the foundational American mythology, MAGA smashes democratic norms, destabilizes institutions, and corrodes scientific integrity. Tracking the rise of white supremacy, widening wealth disparities, and accelerating ecological destruction is exhausting. Although the alarm and critique are both urgent, thrashing in constant reactivity only drains us further.

So we have to keep our heads above water and still have the bandwidth to craft a counter-narrative. How do we rebuild community cohesion, rein in technology, revive science, and repay colonial debts? It’s a lot when you’re also dealing with a nagging hip issue. Where do we even start?

To wrestle with the fragility of being in a body, being with each other, and being on a planet requires a robust belief system. While most folks I know would identify as “spiritual but not religious,” that doesn’t feel clear or strong enough right now. When my most fundamental beliefs are under attack, I have to ask what my core values really are. What do I actually believe? What can I anchor to that gets me through the day?

To answer those questions, I’m embarking on this series about belief systems. Some pieces have been simmering for years, others are I’m just at the edge of articulating. Here’s my current open tabs and rough outline of posts:

• Woo-Woo, Inc.: Questioning Materialism and Selling Crystals

• Magic, Manifestation, and Meritocracy

• The Somatic vs. the Scientific

• The Natural Way: Holistic Health, Processed Foods, and MAHA

• Where Do We Belong: Finding Your (Wellness) Tribe

• Uncertainty: An Anti-Fragile Belief System

• Muscular Mysticism, Tarot, and Spelunking the Unknown

I will defend the scientific method (more on that in an upcoming post), but I also believe the stories we tell about our bodies, our politics, and our fragile planet shape us more than any dataset. Methodologies are not mythologies. The real challenge is not just deciding which facts are true but choosing which ideologies sustain us.

Even when we feel like we’re drowning, we need something to tether to. Embodying regeneration requires an advanced skill set and a profoundly different mindset, something that gives us buoyancy. We can get stronger, we can get clearer, and we can remind ourselves that we are in this together and can stay afloat.

If the Make America Healthy Again slogan meant anything, we’d have more access to health care, lower disease rates, and stronger environmental protections. Instead, we are living in a much darker time. The armed attack on the CDC and the forced expulsion of career CDC experts who refused to align with RFK Jr.’s extreme ideology feel like a culmination, not an accident.

It is tempting to dismiss these events as another Trump-era spectacle, but that misses the point. What we are seeing is the result of years of attacks on public health and the steady erosion of scientific authority. It is not random or chaotic, it is a coordinated dismantling of the very systems that keep us safe, united, and healthy.

So let’s take a closer look at the bigger picture, check up on the body politic, and diagnose our health under Trump and RFK Jr.:

• Food Safety: Our food supply is less safe, with inspection budgets slashed and recalls climbing.

• Air and Water: Environmental protections rolled back, opening the door to more pollution.

• Research: Critical medical research eliminated, including groundbreaking cancer trials.

• Equity: DEI programs gutted, widening health inequalities and silencing diverse perspectives.

• Reproductive care: Post-Dobbs, giving birth is more dangerous and OBGYN access is shrinking, especially in rural areas.

• Agricultural Support: Family farms undermined by weakened protections, corporate consolidation, and reduced support for sustainable agriculture.

• Safety nets: Cuts to food assistance programs are exacerbating poverty and childhood hunger.

• Pandemic preparedness: We are less informed and less prepared for the next outbreak.

• Vaccines: Nobel Prize–winning mRNA research canceled, leaving us more vulnerable to preventable diseases like measles.

• Climate: We have less funding and less preparation for the next disasters, while green energy projects are halted right before completion.

• LGBTQ+ safety: Protections rolled back for trans and queer communities, creating barriers to health care access and increasing exposure to violence.

• Public health trust: Confidence eroded by a AI-generated report, the firing of top experts from vaccine advisory panels, and a growing distrust of CDC statements.

But at least our ice cream and our Fruit Loops will be less colorful.

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The Politics Behind the Public Health Crisis

When he joined Trump’s campaign, RFK Jr. married extreme wellness culture with authoritarian politics. As his coalition of anti-vaxxers and “crunchy moms” rallied behind him, I kept hearing two familiar points from his sympathizers.

The first was that he is “the only one talking about our health.” That simply isn’t true. Michelle Obama tried to push for healthier eating and was slammed for “nanny state” overreach. And through every administration, thousands of scientists, researchers, and doctors at the CDC have devoted their entire careers to safeguarding our collective health. They were overlooked not because they lacked dedication or results, but because they never packaged their work into fearmongering clickbait the way Kennedy has.

The second point was that while Trump is not preferable, it would be better to have RFK Jr. inside the administration, advancing his own agenda independently. Kennedy does sometimes appear to be going rogue, particularly in undermining Operation Warp Speed, Trump’s most visible health achievement from his first term. But let’s zoom out. The Republican agenda to dismantle public health, environmental protections, and even the financial system was laid out in Project 2025, released in April 2024, well before Kennedy joined the ticket. The blueprint made clear that the GOP goal was never to improve health, but to weaken every system that sustains it.

When we step back we see Kennedy’s role is less that of an independent actor and more of a convenient cover. Under the banner of “Making America Healthy Again,” the administration advances policies that make Americans less safe, less united, and less healthy. And the most consequential move so far may be the recent tax bill. If health is wealth, this is an attack on both.

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So What Do We Do?

As a wellness professional, I could easily churn out content about probiotics, cryotherapy, and the latest hacks for sleep. That kind of content might sell supplements, but while the CDC is under siege from both gunmen and deranged political ideologues would feel like willful denial.

What makes this moment even more dangerous is how much of the online wellness community has supported the assault, sometimes directly and sometimes by looking the other way. By dismissing scientific expertise and ignoring the decades of public health progress we inherited, wellness influencers feed an economy built on fear. Fear sells. People are anxious, and too many companies cash in by offering products that claim to make us “future proof” or peddle another longevity tonic. The irony is that while consumers buy powders and protocols to soothe their sense of vulnerability, leaders like RFK Jr. and Trump are putting us in very real jeopardy.

What I can offer instead is pattern recognition. Holistic health is not only about the choices we make as individuals, it is also about seeing the political and economic forces that shape those choices. In times like these, the real work is to metabolize fear without becoming paralyzed by it, to step back from the constant overwhelm in order to see the larger agendas, and to keep showing up for what matters most.

Because no matter how many green smoothies we drink or how perfectly we track our steps, our health has always rested on our interdependence. I would prefer that we not be pushed to the edge of vulnerability to learn that truth, but that is the lesson this administration is forcing upon us.

As Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, the departing head of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, reminds us:

“Public health is not merely about the health of the individual, but it is about the health of the community, the nation, the world. The nation’s health security is at risk and is in the hands of people focusing on ideological self-interest.”

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Wellness Podcast Platforming
Loved seeing Dr. Jessica Knurick featured on both the Rich Roll and the Ready State podcasts. Two major wellness podcasts platforming one of the clearest voices critiquing MAHA and highlighting systemic barriers to health. This feels like a step forward, moving beyond selling individual solutions toward recognizing the larger systemic factors in our

well-being.

The Daily: How America Got Obsessed with Protein
This was the perfect listen before heading to my annual Italy retreat. Every year I bring a group of Americans to revel in Italian food traditions, and every year we drag along our nutrition baggage. Right now the carry-on is protein. My business partner and retreat chef just stares, baffled, at the mountain of eggs on our breakfast table while the bread sits untouched. Once again, America clings to a fad while other cultures lean on what actually lasts: traditions, not trends.

Fit for TV: The Reality of the Biggest Loser
I love a good exposé, so the new Netflix doc had me hooked. Instead of shrugging it off as “wild TV from back then,” it shows how much the show still shapes our ideas about bodies, wellness, and MAHA politics. In case you missed it, here’s my full take.

Make America Healthy Again: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver
John Oliver’s blend of journalism and humor cuts right to it the hypocracy. Once again, the jester speaks truth to power.

On Serena Williams and GLP-1
This isn’t about critiquing Serena. She can do what she wants. It’s about us: why can’t we accept that one of the greatest athletes of all time doesn’t fit into our ever-narrowing idea of the “ideal” female body? Her achievements obliterate our thinness-equals-health fixation, yet the culture still can’t let go.

On Staying Moving
Movement doesn’t have to mean max effort. Sometimes, ultra-low-stress activity is the secret: just getting off the couch, moving your body, and letting consistency build capacity.

As a fitness trainer and wellness educator, I watched this show closely and critically for years. The new documentary confirms the show was cruel and its weight-loss approach impossible to sustain. Yet at the time it was a smash hit, a propaganda machine, and vertical marketing innovator raking in revenues with it’s various branding deals. In 2014 I wrote “13 Reasons Why The Biggest Loser is Bad for Our Health.” Rather than a smug “I told you so” (tempting, I admit), let’s trace how the show still shapes identity, wellness culture, and MAHA politics.

The Function of the Grotesque
The Biggest Loser wasn’t just about weight loss. It was about the spectacle of being fat. The show trafficked in disgust, humiliation, and shame: contestants in unflattering clothes in front of crowds, sweating through their shirts, pushed to extremes, and repeatedly calling their bodies “disgusting.”

For the millions watching at home, we constantly got the message that any fatness is grotesque and is worthy of ridicule. We learned to fear any and all fatness, that is it abnormal and should be shamed. One of the reasons that this show was such a hit was because this fear lives deep in the American psyche. If we accept the caste system Isabel Wilkerson defined, I would argue that fat people are America’s “untouchables”: all assumed to be poor, lazy, and stupid.

The fears that made the show a hit didn’t stay on the screen. I hear them every day in the gym, as clients struggle to care for bodies they have been taught to despise. Often as a fitness trainer, I heard clients, of all body types, call their bodies “disgusting.” Ultimately, shame paralyzes movement and severely handicaps us. But the internalized shame was key to the show’s business model.

The Binge-Purge Profit Pipeline
On The Biggest Loser, the more shame, the more humiliation, the better the ratings. There’s so much money to be made in stigmatizing bodies, especially in the bodies that tend to hold more adipose tissue: women’s bodies, BIPOC bodies, aging bodies.

While national headlines stoked panic about “obesity epidemic”, the show became the perfect customer pipeline: binge on the standard American diet, buy into the latest craze, lose weight briefly, gain it back. Rinse, repeat. All this hoopla warped how we see ourselves and primed us to buy more gizmos, weight-loss pills, and ride the yo-yo dieting bandwagon. More self-hatred never healed anyone but it was great at selling a lot of BS.

The God Complex and Exercising Your Demons
Contestants were framed as desperate gluttons who could only be “saved” through humiliation. In the documentary, Bob Harper once accused producers of a “god-complex”, even while the walls of the show’s studio were plastered with his quotes as if they were scripture. Jillian Michaels’ notorious mantra was, “Unless you faint, puke or die, keep going!” Yikes.

As a trainer, it was brutal to watch contestants shackled to cardio equipment, with every workout framed as extreme atonement. Their messaging seeped into the culture with the rise of extreme exercise formats and the inevitable wave of injuries. Harper and Michaels’ thin-at-all-costs message drove the all-or-nothing mentality toward exercise that I’ve worked so hard to overcome.

I’ve spent my career trying helping people make steady progress, trust themselves, and commit to long-term self-care rather than self-loathing. That’s been an uphill battle harder that an hour on the stairclimber.

Diet Industry to Wellness Culture to MAHA
Eventually the show lost market share as diet culture rebranded as “wellness.” Weight Watchers became a “wellness program” and instead of crash diets everyone started “detoxing.” We had a few years of body positivity, some innovative Dove commercials, and we got one Lizzo, but under social media scrutiny and the availability of GPT-1s that progress is quickly receding. Now, with authoritarianism on the rise, women’s rights and bodies are shrinking faster than ever. As as ICE polices bodies of color, the self-policing of dieting has become stricter than ever.

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To track the “The Biggest Loser” to MAHA trajectory, look no further than Jillian Micheal’s career. Having built an empire on the torturing fat people, she remains in the spotlight with appearances on Fox News as a MAHA spokesperson. Although she refused to participate in the Netflix documentary, she recently went on CNN in to rebrand slavery and support the Trump administration’s rewriting of American history in the Smithsonian. It is unclear when she became a history expert but the deep association between fat phobia, colonialism, and racism has been well documented. (I wrote a blog post about that one too.)

Although he was never associated with the show, Dr. Oz, a celebrity wellness charlatan from the same era, who peddled weight-loss scams, is now somehow qualified to manage the CDC. I would not be surprised if RJK Jr. wanted to start state-funded detention centers, aka “fat farms” based on The Biggest Loser ranch. Obviously none of this was never about real wellness, it was always about controlling bodies, bullying the fat kids, marginalizing certain bodies, and making a quick buck.

It Was Never About Health
The show claimed to be contestants’ “last chance” at health and linked itself to a national health emergency, but this documentary revealed that The Biggest Loser producers never really cared about contestants’ long-term well-being. They reduced cooking to product placements, framed food as the enemy, and abandoned contestants after the finale. It chewed contestants up and spit them out, that’s why so many of them struggled after filming wrapped.

A show about lasting health might not be as sensational, but it would look very different. It would focus on learning to move with skill, joy, and enthusiasm; trusting hunger and satiety cues; reconnecting with cultural and agricultural food traditions instead of packaged diets; building resilience against trauma and stress; learning to cook and eat with community; and practicing skillful rest. We would see all kinds of bodies, ages, and abilities showing up to care for themselves consistently. It would, of course, be a smashing success. Joking aside, the real wellness requires systems of support, familial, social, local, and national, rather than punishing individuals. Health could be easier, cheaper, and more sustainable if we built those systems instead of turning people’s struggles into a freak show.

* The word “fat” is often used here intentionally. Many activists and scholars in fat liberation and body justice movements have reclaimed “fat” as a neutral or even empowering descriptor, rejecting its use as an insult. Reclaiming the word helps strip it of stigma and shift the focus from moral judgment to lived reality.

Ok, so we have to deal with AI. Big picture: I'm up to my quota on big, scary existential threats right now. Do we really have to rush to quickly adopt another massively disruptive tech tool without understanding the ramifications? Small picture: I've started tinkering with AI. It feels like I'm struggling to hitch my horse to a buggy while internal combustion zooms past.

While responses to AI range from purist alarm to evangelical conversion, I'm skeptical but curious. As someone who has spent a career helping folks return to their bodies after hours in the tech hunch, I'm grappling with how AI will affect my work, the economy I exist in, and the planet I live on.

The Working Body

Glued to screens to earn a living, we lose strength, our posture warps, and our minds get mushy. Digital drudgery demands mental stamina while our bodies remain sedentary. Unraveling crunchy necks, aching backs, and tight shoulders, I wonder, “Are we working on, with, or for these machines?” I've contended with how our tech tools shape how we live in our bodies: always on, expected to be omniscient, and sucking up resources to keep going. As Deane Juhan, author of "Job's Body," noted in a lecture I attended, we use our latest technology as a metaphor for the body: how it functions, how it works, and how it goes to work. Constantly reacting to massive amounts of information, optimizing our productivity, and always under the threat of not keeping up, how we interface with technology becomes how we understand ourselves.

The privilege and income of professional work has created a wellness economy. The body and our innate biology is another "invisible" resource that eventually demands care.Folks like me have built careers teaching people how to alleviate stress, keep their bodies moving, breathe deeply, basically feel human again after feeling like we've turned into machines. Instead of returning to the body after the work day, are we going to abandon somatic intelligence entirely?

Now anyone earning their living at a screen faces obsolescence, and the entire Creative Class faces obliteration (or at least massive upheaval.) The Information Age, like the Industrial Revolution, gave us tools and work conditions designed without much regard for human wellbeing or planetary health. AI now promises to accelerate progress and not just reshape work but our sense of self entirely. Seems like the embodied humans who designed Microsoft Teams never had my wellbeing in mind anyway.

Writing: The Heavy Lifting

Beyond teaching, I push my physical limits by swinging heavy kettlebells overhead, deadlifting barbells, and stretching into backbends. But the heaviest lifting I do is this writing. Each morning I sort through my mental chaos, hammer out clarity, and test my perspective's strength. At a soul level, I write to find clarity and connection during this deeply lonely, confusing, and scary time. When headlines pulverize us daily, I crave understanding beyond alarmist memes and weaponized sound bites. Writing forces me to open to dark stuff, sharpen my critiques, and mine for something hopeful or at least practical.

When this mental workout feels defeating, AI tempts me with shortcuts. When I can't quite connect some ideas or craft a cohesive argument, I've fed my messy free writing into Claude or ChatGPT. I usually get back something mediocre, bloated, and with a passable voice to casual readers but not true enough to me. When drawing from unorganized thoughts, it rarely produces anything worth publishing. It could generate generic, daily content with minimal prompts, but that's not why I'm here.

I'm passionate (and maybe a bit cursed?) about articulating what wellness means now. That feels like a process more than a product. Basically, AI doesn't do the heavy lifting for me. It also doesn't alleviate the constant existential migraine that only writing can cure.

The Packaging of Wellness

When my creative writing time ends, I return to the "real" work: hustling wellness. Earning a living as an independent contractor demands constant self-promotion: writing copy for Movement Medicine series, sharing retreat specials across various platforms, creating Instagram reels, or just finding an image for the next Substack post. Packaging myself as a product is tedious, vulnerable, and relentless.

ChatGPT helps me quickly draft promotional copy I can tweak to match my voice. I've collaborated with Claude to create a series of informational posts about workplace wellness. While I do a lot of editing of AI results, it’s and excellent proofreader and masks my dyslexia that often appears in my drafts.

To do the actually rewarding work of teaching, working with clients, and leading retreats, I have to stay present across social media platforms, even as I feel like I'm shouting into the void: "I'm here to help you stay moving while the world falls apart!" So AI enables me to produce more, get through daily tasks, and keep trying to be heard in an already deafening cacophony. But isn't that what's already depleting us?

The Right Tool for the Job

The promise of AI is that we can go faster and produce more while ignoring the resources we're consuming. AI accelerates us toward what exactly? Faster climate change? More production of what?

It's another mind-boggling tool, but it was never developed to address a particular problem. Sure, it's being rationalized as a diagnostic tool in healthcare or to compile massive scientific data, but that seems to gloss over what Daniel Pinchbeck outlined as the massive "ecological, societal, and existential risks."

The tech bros just keep designing really cool things while ignoring our most pressing problems: climate change, wealth inequality, and the consolidation of power. I have seen nothing to convince me that AI will do anything but exacerbate these issues. It promises to speed up the rat race while we're all struggling to stay human. Instead of merely neglecting our embodiment and ecological reality, this feels like complete abandonment.

Why can't we have cool new toys that actually fix things? Carbon-neutral planes, investments in fungi that consume Chernobyl's radioactive waste, scaled sustainable food systems. I want technology that gives us nice things like mass transit. Instead, we're rushing to become disembodied robots. I'm no Luddite and obviously am not completely rejecting modernity.

I'm no Luddite, am not rejecting modernity entirely but believe in appropriate technology Is it too much to ask for innovation that integrates our biological wisdom to preserve what we cherish most: our humanity? Our connection to the messy, glorious, fleeting experience of embodiment might be exactly what helps us navigate whatever comes next without losing ourselves in the process.

"A lot of times when I imagine the future, it's not flying cars. It's healed people." — adrienne maree brown

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I’ve thrashed around a lot the last few years: working in wellness feels like shouting into the void, constantly building and pivoting my business, and trying to find my place. I've struggled with how to show up right now while our country and planet seem to be hurtling toward self-destruction. I visit tearful fits of futility often when curling up, doomscrolling, and feeling hopeless is so easy.

But I'm proud to say that I actually practice what I preach. I take care of myself. I do my best to take care of my people. I keep moving. Today, on my birthday, I'm pausing to appreciate what I've built and who I get to share it with.

Professional wins:

• An online Movement Medicine community

• A steadily growing Substack

• Two retreats in Italy

• Full classes at West Asheville Yoga

• Amazing strength training clients at All Bodies Gym here in Asheville.

Most importantly, I have a solid community of friends, my family is all healthy, and I have a steady marriage (with lots of fart jokes!)

Thanks to both good luck and consistent effort, my doctor recently gave me a clean bill of health. For now, I'm healthy and living pain-free. I'm enjoying being able-bodied while the party lasts with my own personal fitness challenge:

• Completed the kettlebell snatch test (swinging 36 lbs overhead 100 times in 4 minutes and 45 seconds) Yes, its really f*cking hard.

• Deadlifted 235 pounds

• Did a full split

• Did a full backbend

• Walked away from all of these challenges a bit sore but not in pain

For me, being healthy isn't about bulletproofing your body or chasing immortality. It's about staying sensitive, empathetic, and creative when it's so tempting to completely shut down. Despite the algorithms designed to isolate us in echo chambers of fear, our wellbeing is about community: re-weaving the fabric that holds us together. As Ram Dass said, "We are all just walking each other home."

These fitness triumphs are a personal reminder that while I've overthought how to show up, I actually just keep showing up. Despite the overwhelm, often the best medicine is dragging your ass there for what's important. I'm fortunate to have designed my life to force myself to wipe away the tears, pull on the yoga pants, and show up with humor, clarity, and enthusiasm for my classes, clients, and community. Always imperfect but doggedly consistent, I stay on brand.

So after I lift the heavy weights at the gym, I'll soak in an Epsom salt bath and get ready to party. I'll be wearing caftans and drinking martinis with my friends. Because joy is not just resistance; it is sustenance.