Is wellness making women sick – or just broke?
It starts innocently enough: a collagen latte here, a juice cleanse there. A $30 jade roller that promises to “detox” your lymphatic system. Soon, your medicine cabinet resembles a boutique spa, your skincare routine has more steps than a classical dance recital, and you’re tracking your ovulation and body temperature with a sleek gold ring. Welcome to modern wellness – a trillion-dollar industry built not just on aspiration, but anxiety.
In her piercing new book ‘How to Be Well: Navigating Our Self-Care Epidemic, One Dubious Cure at a Time’, American journalist Amy Larocca takes us on a spirited, smart, and surprisingly tender journey through the glittery maze of the wellness world. With a reporter’s curiosity and a realist’s skepticism, she asks a critical question: Why, despite the time, money, and effort we pour into wellness, do women still feel so profoundly unwell?
It is all about the glow, guilt, and green juice – The strange world of wellness and the women who live in it.
From snake oil to serums – A feminist reckoning
Larocca’s book arrives like a refreshing matcha shot to the gut of a bloated wellness culture. It’s not just another exposé; it’s a personal reckoning. Drawing on her two decades at New York Magazine and contributions to Vogue, The New York Times, and Town & Country, Larocca peels back the glossy layers of the industry with incisive humor and deep compassion.
In her New York Times interview, Larocca noted, “Wellness has become this thing where we’re being sold our own bodies with the same marketing techniques that people use to sell handbags or shoes or lipstick. It’s incredibly dangerous to live in a society that treats health like a luxury product.” This insight gets to the heart of her argument: Wellness isn’t just about health – it’s about selling a curated identity, often to women, at a premium.
She takes readers through the rituals that define the modern well woman – infrared saunas, intermittent fasting, lymphatic drainage massages, and the ever-mystifying “glow.” And she shows how these rituals, while marketed as empowerment, are often loaded with shame, classism, and impossible standards.
Wellness as status and the glow as a trophy
What is the “glow,” anyway? According to Larocca, it’s the holy grail of the wellness woman – a radiant signal of internal purity, discipline, and affluence. Achieving it requires a vigilant devotion to supplements, skincare, clean eating, and spiritual practices like transcendental meditation. As Larocca quips in the NYT piece, the glow is “what happens when you purify yourself from the inside out.”
But that glow isn’t free. It costs time, money, and an exhausting commitment to self-optimization. Larocca admits to falling for the siren call herself – donning the Oura ring, dry brushing, experimenting with red light therapy and collagen drinks. “Every once in a while,” she laughs, “a friend of mine will call me and be like, ‘My life has been changed by bovine colostrum!’ And I’m like, ‘I need bovine colostrum!’”
Is it healing or just recreation?
Larocca introduces a concept that might feel familiar to many women: recreational wellness. It’s when you know a detox tea or $200 facial won’t really change your life – but you try it anyway, because it feels good. It’s an escape, a ritual, a way to feel like you’re taking control in a chaotic world.
In this way, wellness becomes a form of social currency. As Larocca observes, “Sometimes, you walk into these wellness clinics and you’re like, ‘Am I at a spa? A gym? A boutique hotel? At the doctor? In a Kate Hudson movie?’” This confusion is intentional – the line between medicine, luxury, and leisure is deliberately blurred.
And this ambiguity opens the door for both harmless indulgences and dangerously unregulated practices. Larocca doesn’t just mock green juice or Goop; she dives into the darker sides of wellness: the encouragement of disordered eating under the guise of “clean living,” the exploitation of vulnerable people, and the erasure of systemic health disparities behind a facade of personal responsibility.
Why do women keep coming back?
Why do women, especially privileged ones – keep returning to the wellness aisle, even when they know better? Because the alternative feels like surrender. In the face of unreliable healthcare systems, toxic work cultures, and the never-ending pressure to “do it all,” wellness offers an illusion of control. “Wouldn’t it be great if these products actually worked?” Larocca muses. “And in the absence of credible information from actual experts, there’s this incredible opportunity.”
There’s also a community. Wellness can be bonding – a spa day with girlfriends, a yoga class that ends in brunch. And sometimes, Larocca argues, it’s okay to do things just because they feel good. The trick is knowing when you’re nourishing yourself and when you’re just buying into a beautifully packaged lie.
A detox from detox culture
Ultimately, How to Be Well is not a rejection of wellness but a recalibration. It’s a call to get curious, not dogmatic. Larocca doesn’t shame women for buying the serum or booking the retreat – she simply asks them to interrogate the motives behind those choices. Is it healing or performance? Empowerment or pressure?
In a culture that whispers, “You could be better if only you tried harder,” Larocca offers something radical: honesty. And maybe even peace.
The book – ‘How to Be Well: Navigating Our Self-Care Epidemic, One Dubious Cure at a Time’ by Amy Larocca, published by Penguin Random House, is available now on Amazon.
The evolution of self-care and the wellness confusion
How self-care shifted from survival and resistance to spa days and scented candles – an extract from Amy Larocca’s new book ‘How to Be Well’.
When “self-care” began to enter the cultural lexicon, Americans outside the medical world were far more familiar with self-help, with Who Moved my Cheese? and seminars where one can walk on hot coals towards a better, happier (and usually richer) life. Self-help implies the process of pulling oneself, hand-over-hand, to a higher position in the social or economic order, or even just to safety on a different shore.
Self-Help has a long and robust American history, beginning with the publication of Samuel Smile’s ‘Self-Help’ in 1859, which opens with the phrase “Heaven helps those who help themselves,” which was really just a slight variation on “God helps them that help themselves,” included by Benjamin Franklin in his ‘Poor Richard’s Almanac’ a hundred years before that. It was a maxim that would pave the way for success for people like Dale Carnegie, whose ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People’ was first published in 1936, and Napoleon Hill, whose 1937 publication of ‘Think and Grow Rich’ proved its own point by doing what it promised, for its author, at least. The idea was that you could maximize your productive capacities: Speak louder, shake hands with more of a bone-crunching grip. Sleep less, do more. Win. Alcoholics Anonymous, which was founded in 1935, also started picking up steam around that time, largely because its method of treating alcoholism with a combination of spirituality, community and talk was turning out to be more successful than any hard-medical intervention. It’s the combining of these two disparate ideas that gives us wellness: that one could control one’s health in an active, participatory way.
The new, wellness definition of self-care is a hybridization of the self-care and self-help more than it is exactly one or the other. What Arline Geronimus, a public health researcher, began to notice, as self-care began to be co-opted by the wellness and beauty industries, was how recklessly the term seemed to be used.
“I think for the first time you have people who are very privileged for whom it is a very new thing to feel marginalized,” Geronimus says now, “or who don’t understand for the first time in their lives how the world could be going the way it is, using these words,” she said. “Self-care was never about ‘avoiding triggers’, or about ‘I deserve this’, it was about finding protection from a world that was really harming me. It’s not I’ve had a crazy stressful day so I should go get my massage, or I don’t know how Trump got elected and I can’t take it anymore so maybe I should get a facial.”
Audre Lorde’s assertion that “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence. It is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare” is one of the most retweeted, Instagram, quoted and misquoted texts in this entire community. The truth is, many instances of what is now considered self-care are not, in fact, acts of political resistance or rebellion at all.
