The Wellness Strongman: 5 Myths to Stop Buying

On optimization, loneliness, and what we actually need to thrive

This is the third installment in my series understanding The Wellness Strongman. We’ve named him, dissected his playbook, and watched him perform live courtesy of Netflix. Now it’s time to ask the harder question: if not this, then what? This is the part where we stop just dismantling and start building that sustains us.

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.

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.