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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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.

This isn't coincidence. It's strategy.

The Individual Choice Obsession

We've been sold a story: your health is entirely in your hands. Buy the expensive produce. Filter your water. Choose the farmer's market over Dollar General. Take control of your health.

But here's what this narrative conveniently ignores. Not everyone gets to make these choices. And more importantly, focusing on individual choices distracts us from the collective ones that actually determine who gets to be healthy in America.

The Choices That Actually Matter

Individual choice: Buying organic produce
Collective choice: Whether everyone has access to any produce at all through food assistance programs

Individual choice: Installing a home water filter
Collective choice: Whether we regulate industrial pollution of our water supply

Individual choice: Avoiding processed foods
Collective choice: Whether we fund school lunch programs so kids aren't hungry

Individual choice: Taking supplements
Collective choice: Whether we fund scientific research on disease prevention

Individual choice: Going to a functional medicine doctor
Collective choice: Whether we guarantee healthcare access for everyone

The Distraction in Action

While we argue about food dyes, we're:

• Eliminating Medicare and SNAP benefits

• Rejecting expertise on preventable infectious diseases

• Choosing greater vulnerabilities over collective protection

• Ignoring that your zip code is a better predictor of health than your genetic code

This isn't an accident. When people are focused on individual consumer choices, they're not demanding systemic change. When wellness becomes about what you can afford to buy, it stops being about what we choose to guarantee each other.

Why This Matters Now

The "Make America Healthy Again" movement is conspicuously silent on universal healthcare. It focuses obsessively on tweaking consumer products while ignoring healthcare access entirely. This isn't oversight. It's the point.

Countries with universal healthcare don't just have better health outcomes. They have less health anxiety. When people don't fear medical bankruptcy, they actually seek preventive care.

But universal healthcare challenges the fundamental premise that health is an individual responsibility and market commodity.

The Real Choice

We can keep obsessing over whether your kombucha is properly fermented while people ration insulin they can't afford. We can keep debating Coca-Cola's sugar content while Americans pay more for healthcare than any developed nation with worse outcomes.

Or we can recognize that individual choices matter most when everyone has real choices to make. That personal responsibility means nothing without collective responsibility. That wellness culture's obsession with individual optimization is often just elaborate victim-blaming.

The question isn't whether you should eat organic vegetables. The question is whether we're going to choose policies that ensure everyone has access to vegetables at all.

The choice is ours, collectively.

Men in power can be fat, old, and downright ugly (has anyone checked on Steve Bannon's exercise routine or Steve Miller's skincare lately?), but women need to achieve an increasingly absurd standard, now exemplified by the Mar-a-Lago face of all the women in Trump's inner circle. This paradox sits at the heart of our cultural moment: as bodily autonomy shrinks, beauty standards tighten.

My entire career has been about unpacking the ideals of what wellness looks like versus what it actually means to sustain yourself. In her 2022 book The Gospel of Wellness, Rina Raphael writes, "Wellness has both empowered and enslaved women." Let's unpack how our exercise routines and dietary dogmas can be sites of liberation, obedience, or both.

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Self-Policing And Constant Atonement

At the root system of wellness culture is dieting. I've been around long enough to see Atkins, Paleo, Keto, intermittent fasting, and now everyone's trying to achieve "protein goals." There's always another set of RULES, even though they're always changing, but your adherence to them is paramount.

“Achieving” wellness means constantly monitoring yourself. Every ounce of hydration, always counting & measuring food, and putting foods into categories of good or bad. Being a good girl means an inherent distrust of hunger, pleasure, and assuming that smaller bodies are the only ones "under control." Every bite becomes a morality test: Eating salad means you are good. Eating fries makes you bad. It easily becomes a preoccupation, a fixation, and super-egoic self control.

With patriarchal confines, women's bodies need to be controlled, and the best way to accomplish this is to have them police themselves. As Naomi Wolf* wrote in The Beauty Myth, "A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience." Sometimes I wonder if the self-absorption is by design. Ignore what's going on with ICE and the police state; police your own plate instead.

While diet culture makes pleasure suspect, fitness culture offers constant atonement. The perpetual calculus of sweating off calories is a never-ending tally. The message from Instagram influencers and the gym crowd is that you should be lifting more, sweating more, and always pushing harder.

Yes, we need to challenge our cardiovascular and muscular systems but it easily gets wrapped up in constantly never letting yourself off the hook. Spend enough time around fitness freaks and you quickly get the sense of not doing and being enough.

Strong Enough to Question the Status Quo

For the 23 years that I've worked in wellness, I've never fit the norm. I'm rounder and now older than any pre-fab TikTok wellness influencer. Over the years, my body has changed, but it could always be used as a "before" picture in the ubiquitous weight loss transformation advertising.

I'm also in excellent shape. At 48, I can deadlift over 200lbs, I can do a full backbend, and don't have nagging injuries. I have never cycled through diets and recruited my students into diet trends. I haven't pushed myself into chronic injuries with exercise. It's not easy to constantly be defying a relentless and shrinking image of perfection.

To stand in front of classes and promote myself online takes a lot of vulnerability. But being inclusive to all types of bodies has been my brand. I feel proud and lucky to live mostly pain-free and to have the energy to be teaching, writing, and being a wellness entrepreneur. My entire career has been in defiance of the hegemonic wellness ideal. Like all of my students, I look nothing like the fitness ideal but we are still moving!

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Redefining Self-Care

As a health educator, I'm constantly dismantling beliefs about how to exercise and why to exercise sustainably. Surrounded by the wellness industry cacophony, contentment is one of the hardest workouts. As Rina Raphael asked, "When women furiously pedal away on a Peloton to 'silence their mind,' you begin to ask: Why should we silence our mind?" Are we just running as fast and as long as possible to escape the feeling of never being or doing enough?

I'm constantly teaching especially women that we can do just enough. My Movement Medicine classes are short, only about 25 minutes with a few minutes of relaxation at the end. I'm always aiming for the minimum therapeutic dosage because we need to practice doing just enough, regularly. For a lot of very driven women, learning to relax is more challenging than always pushing themselves.

Resisting the constant "not-enoughness" is power. Knowing how to challenge yourself without burning out is power. Knowing how to rest is power. Knowing how to feed yourself is power. Knowing how to define yourself beyond the hegemony is power.

But true health and true power comes from questioning whose rules we're following and why. It means choosing functional strength over aesthetic compliance, trusting your hunger over dietary dogma, and asking why we should silence our minds when the world desperately needs us to speak up. Maybe real empowerment isn't about perfecting our bodies to fit the mold, but about breaking the mold entirely.

*Naomi Wolf wrote this before becoming a conspiracy theorist.

• Water – Add electrolytes if you want to zhuzh it up a bit.

• Sun protection – Hat, sunglasses, sunscreen. Yes, even if it’s cloudy.

• Plenty of snacks – This is about getting organized, not getting hangry.

• Solid shoes – Get your steps in and fight fascism—but no blisters, okay?

• Clever signs – Fight back with humor and snarkiness.

• Phone, fully charged – Post those selfies and show the revolution is everywhere.

• Your overwhelm, isolation, and despair – Bring it and march it out. You’ll be in good company.

• You: the most important part. Just show up. Stand up for what you believe in. Participate. Get off the sidelines- its good for your health and the health of our democracy.

I have a theory: Over the past two decades, we’ve seen a massive increase in wealth disparity, an erosion of the public safety net, and a fraying healthcare system. Meanwhile, the wellness industry has been on a meteoric rise. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

It’s a scary, uncertain time that’s only intensified since the current administration stormed into the White House. There’s a gnawing, low-grade anxiety—like everyone’s wondering, “Am I going to be okay?”

The wellness biz responds: Yes, you’ll be okay if you just buy—fill in the blank—another disposable diet, a creatine supplement, an antioxidant facial serum. Buy something. Be empowered. Feel better.

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But what’s really being sold? Promises of power and the illusion of control in an increasingly chaotic time. Global tariff battles feel scary? Start obsessively counting grams of protein. Freaked about access to basic reproductive care? Maybe a $299 detox program will help you get a grip.

Stepping over the unhoused to get to Pilates, buying superfood smoothies while wildfire smoke fills the air—are we all just trying to make ourselves look and feel better while our country crumbles and the climate collapses?

Karl Marx said religion was the opiate of the masses, but these days, wellness is how we placate ourselves. We pray in spin class, intermittent fast for atonement, and obey influencers as our gurus. (Check out Rina Raphael’s The Gospel of Wellness for the full analogy.)

In a chronically overwhelmed, off-kilter world, self-care easily tips into self-absorption. There’s plenty of profit to be made when we privatize rather than politicize our anxieties. We’re far more likely to buy expensive, unnecessary, confusing individual “solutions” than to face our massive, collective crises.

But maybe that shred of turmeric in your latte isn’t curing your inflammation—because your anger is bigger than that. Maybe the CBD isn’t helping you sleep—because we’re rolling back consumer fraud protections, the Clean Air Act, and food safety standards.

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Isn’t It Ironic
Here’s the irony: as our public infrastructure of care is attacked, we need self-care more than ever. We have to be skillful and consistent to stay calm, focused, and not lose our shit every time we see another manufactured crisis. It’s a daily practice not to panic, buy into more BS, or retreat into our own little enclaves of victimhood.

Focusing on the deep basics keeps us grounded in the question: How will we be okay?

Because we can’t self-care our way out of the housing crisis, climate disasters, or massive public health threats. There’s no such thing as individual wellbeing—it’s just another capitalist illusion.

If we care about survival, our task is to understand that individual, collective, and ecological wellbeing are all part of the same damn project. Yeah, I know—it sounds totally obvious. But it’s not how we act.

We can’t escape the truth: we’re just another organism in a threatened habitat. You don’t need a spirit animal or a dreamcatcher to get on board. Our wellbeing and our fate feel more urgent, more interconnected, and more doomed than ever.

Take care of yourself. And take care of each other.

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And sure—now kinda does suck. So the fantasy of going back—living like our grandparents, or even our ancient ancestors—can be wildly appealing. Maybe if we just put everything in reverse, we could land in some golden era where we didn’t have to worry about what Elon’s doing or a constantly overflowing email inboxes.

But… which time, exactly?

For some, that imagined past looks like a wholesome, Norman Rockwell America—complete with rigid gender roles, rigid hierarchies, and overt white supremacy.

For others, it’s a more “natural” life: raw food, unpasteurized milk, primal workouts, and a total rejection of modern medicine (somehow still with reliable Wi-Fi to post about it).

These visions tend to amplify patriarchal projections while completely ignoring the messiness of history. They glorify eras shaped by segregation, homophobia, and back-alley reproductive care. Or they cherry-pick pre-industrial life, forgetting that infectious diseases like measles killed millions and that life expectancy barely scratched fifty.

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Nostalgia isn’t a reliable archive. It airbrushes over hard-won progress. And let’s be real: if someone I love gets sick, I want the full benefit of scientific advancement. Give me vaccines, cancer treatments, and public health protections over a romanticized past that never actually existed. (Also, I am very grateful to live in the age of spellcheck.)

Even though I don’t align politically with the MAHA folks, I get the longing. I, too, crave a simpler, slower, more analog life—something rooted in the seasons, connected to community. I also feel deep ambivalence about how tech has hijacked so much of our attention, especially as it becomes increasingly weaponized.

The desire to go backward is understandable—it’s far easier than imagining a better future. But no matter how seductive nostalgia may be, we can’t go back. And even as science is defunded and derided, we need it—desperately—to meet the moment we’re in with the modern tools we have.

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So, if the perceived past isn’t the answer… what’s next?

In the next piece, I’ll explore another common response to the chaos of now: armoring against the future—through biohacking, escape fantasies, and the illusion that we can outsmart collapse.

Stay tuned.

The MAHA crew credits RFK Jr. as “the only one” talking about chronic disease and taking on corporate interests in health care, agriculture, and pharmaceuticals. Apparently, he has a master plan to save us—though whether it’s anti- or pro-regulation remains unclear. Regardless, without much understanding of how the government works or how disease spreads, he’s somehow convinced people he has the magical ability to push his agenda through the federal government.

Taken directly from their website, the MAHA agenda sounds great:

• Tackling the Chronic Disease Epidemic

• Advancing Regenerative Agriculture

• Protecting Natural Habitats

• Exposing Corporate Corruption

• Eliminating Environmental Toxins

As a yoga teacher who’s into natural wellness, that all sounds great to me. Yes! Let’s revamp our food and health care systems.

But wait—questioning all established vaccine research? More measles outbreaks? Wait, what?! Despite what some MAHA folks claim, Trump and RFK Jr. have more in common than not. Both are transactional, misogynistic, and insatiably power-hungry. Both use modern propaganda to amass wealth, fame, and influence.

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They both:

• Capitalize on real frustrations. Just as Trump has galvanized the disenfranchised, RFK Jr. has seized on very real frustrations with health care, Big Pharma, and industrial agriculture. Yes, these systems are deeply flawed and haven’t been properly addressed by either political party. We’ve all read Michael Pollan; we know our food system is screwed. But how these critiques are being weaponized concerns me.

• Use fear-based propaganda. Pesticides lurking on our raspberries! Red dye in Doritos! Toxic spatulas! If you’re tapped into the MAHA sphere, you’re constantly reminded of the dangers of ULTRA-PROCESSED FOODS. Of course, we should minimize junk food, but this paranoia feeds a lucrative pipeline of dubious detoxes and endless (unregulated) supplements. Even more concerning? MAHA fixates on the ubiquitous environmental toxins while Trump rants about the “enemy within” and “vermin,” using increasingly authoritarian language.

• Defend a vision of purity, tradition, and “natural” order. It’s easy to see how this aligns with Trump’s not-so-thinly-veiled “otherism”. The MAHA rhetoric of “pure” food echoes the rhetoric of a “pure” nation. What is deemed traditional is patriarchal, and what feels under attack must be defended. No dirty food, no dirty people. You see where this could go?

• Distract from more sinister policymaking. While RFK Jr. wants you worried about red dye in Fruit Loops, we should all be more concerned about forced childbirth. To align with Trump, he’s quickly abandoned his previous stance on reproductive rights and has already announced plans to challenge established safety standards on abortion pills. So much of MAHA rhetoric is about “protecting children,” yet they ignore policies that would actually support families—like paid family leave and ensuring that all children are wanted.

• Torch institutional stability. Trump wants to gut the federal government. RFK Jr. wants to dismantle the FDA, disregard decades of infectious disease research, and completely disrupt the NIH. Ban bad pesticides, remove fluoride from water, and flood the market with raw milk!

• Promote elitism disguised as meritocracy. MAHA circles push the idea that if you just use the non-toxic cleaning supplies, buy the expensive milk, and eat organic, you’ll never need medical care. Sure, we all do our best to take care of ourselves—but needing a doctor isn’t a personal failure, just like needing financial help isn’t a moral failing. Health is a privilege. This idea that you can “optimize” your way to immunity from disease is a dangerous illusion.

• Ignore the biggest predictor of health: income. Just as Trump ignores climate change and blames DEI for the Los Angeles fires, MAHA thinking ignores the biggest driver of health outcomes: poverty. This administration is doing everything it can to widen income inequality, exacerbating health disparities at every turn.

• Claim to be our savior. MAGA and MAHA alike believe they’ve found their charismatic leader. Just as Trump’s supporters excuse his indictments, RFK Jr.’s followers overlook his bizarre conspiracies, brain worm, bear-dumping antics, and pet emu. The messiah can do no wrong.

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RFK Jr. leading Health and Human Services is not a silver lining in the Trump administration. Both his and Trump’s refusal to answer questions about conflicts of interest proves this isn’t about public well-being—it’s about their own power, fame, and wealth. You can’t go halfsies with fascists. Either you’re advancing Project 2025 or you’re pushed out. I don’t know how long this bro-mance will last, but for now, I believe this:

If we really wanted to Make America Healthy Again, we’d eliminate the billionaire class and systematically reduce poverty. We’d have universal healthcare, paid family leave, affordable housing—ya know, the nice stuff that comes with a strong safety net. The problem isn’t the food dyes; it’s cancerous capitalism. And no amount of lavender essential oil is going to fix that.

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First, what are we talking about?

I never looked up a definition of these two approaches until writing this post. Here’s what I found:

Public health is “the science and art of preventing disease, prolonging life and promoting health through the organized efforts and informed choices of society, organizations, public and private, communities and individuals” Link

Holistic health is “an approach to life that considers multidimensional aspects of wellness. It encourages individuals to recognize the whole person: physical, mental, emotional, social, intellectual, and spiritual.” Link

Note that in these definitions, public health prioritizes the collective, placing the individual last, while holistic health centers on the individual. Public health starts at the population level and spirals down to the individual, while holistic health begins with the individual and expands outward to the social and ecological level.

Most importantly, the big difference is who is footing the bill. Public health is funded publicly or philanthropically while most holistic health services and products are paid out of pocket. There’s a big difference between what can be funded vs what is marketable.

Remembering the Roots

When choosing my career path, I was deeply aware of my family's legacy in public health. My grandfather taught environmental engineering at the University of North Carolina School of Public Health and spent a lot of time studying and developing water sanitation solutions in South and Central America. My grandmother’s career focused on women’s health, both internationally and locally, as a founder of the North Carolina chapter of Planned Parenthood. Before she retired, my aunt continued the family tradition as a pediatrician in clinics open to all, treating mostly Spanish-speaking patients.

Honestly, when I made my choice, public health felt very important but also somewhat boring. The curricula were worlds apart: Epidemiology seemed a bit dry while Eastern models of energetic medicine sounded more intriguing. Holistic Health Education felt more my style, and it combined teaching with learning self-exploration. For nearly two decades, I've had the privilege of helping people to understand how to care for themselves. But over the past few years, it's become increasingly challenging to promote my work online, maintain my integrity, and focus on the basics amid the ubiquitous wellness misinformation.

Especially since Covid, many prominent voices in holistic health became more bizarre, conspiratorial, and dismissive of public health. Our deepest insecurities and our worst fears are exploited to market hyper-individualized “wellness optimization.” As we struggle to take care of ourselves in a rapidly changing climate, a tech-dependent economy, and a fractured society, grifters abound, misinformation spreads like wildfire, and the basics seem to have been forgotten.

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After Hurricane Helene, my hometown of Asheville didn’t have running water for 55 days and suddenly my grandfather’s work seemed a lot less boring and a lot more important. I will never forget teaching yoga at the local studio when we heard the water return to the pipes.The whole class praised the dedicated work of environmental engineers and public health officials as we took deep breaths of relief. (Personally I would really appreciate knowing that some very dorky, very talented, and very dedicated folks are focused on bird flu right now.)

Our obsession with personal optimization thrives while the systems that keep us safe—clean water, public sanitation, and accessible healthcare—are quietly crumbling. Have we forgotten that the most essential and holistic form of healthcare is collective care?

Public health makes personal wellness possible. It ensures that when disaster strikes or disease spreads, we aren’t left to fend for ourselves. While we chase wellness through organic food, breathwork, and optimization, the infrastructure that truly keeps us safe—clean water, public sanitation, and accessible healthcare—is quietly eroding.

We can’t self-care our way out of a broken system. Real wellness is both personal and collective. A strong public health foundation allows us not just to survive but to thrive. When we invest in both public health and holistic well-being, we create the conditions for true vitality, connection, and resilience.

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I’m all for eating veggies, using herbal remedies to fend off a cold, and taking care of ourselves. But self care has gone over the deep end of rugged individualism. Wellness influencers have convinced us that we will all be ok if we dunk into ice baths, gulp $14 green smoothies, and use their discount codes to buy another BS supplement. What many of my colleagues conveniently ignore is that we stand on the privilege of generations of public health. We’ve forgotten how lucky we are to have clean water, a lack of infectious diseases, and a safe food supply. 

But now we’ve arrived at RFK Jr. joining an administration of climate change denialists with plans to gut health care. We are debating fluoride when women are dying in hospital parking lots from sepsis. 

If the new administration actually cares about our health, here are a few ideas for them:

• Fund preventative health care instead of gutting the ACA

• Expand prenatal and maternal care, instead of arbitrarily criminalizing certain procedures 

• Take global leadership on climate change 

• Pass a farm bill that supports small farmers instead of stripping food safety regulations 

If you are truly interested in holistic health, you’ve got to have some basic respect for public health. It’s not a sexy sell. It’s often kinda boring but really important, now more than ever.

Given my anger, it would be so nice to take a bath with calming lavender oil. But my hometown of Asheville will be without clean water for over 2 months because of a catastrophic storm caused by climate change. I just want to make myself feel better but unfortunately our wellbeing, like our democracy, is yet another group project. I wish that RFK Jr. & his new buddies understood that a safety net for one is a safety net for all.