I left high demand religion in 2015 and started the long deconstruction and deconversion process. It is a challenging road with a lot of heartache and doubt. The foundation you built your life on, all your relationships, your career and plan for your future, the way you see the world, all have to be untangled from whatever belief system you’re leaving. If you are raised in the high demand group, like I was, everything you think you know about the world needs to be examined for truth and a new reality needs to be painstakingly constructed in its place.
Breaking up with wellness culture was a very similar path.
I was in the midst of a health crisis on the heels of my deconversion process, so it was only natural that as I was pursuing treatment and choosing care strategies for myself, the deconversion continued and I began to examine everything I had been taught about wellness to see if it reflected reality. Because what I had been doing up to then hadn’t led me anywhere good.
The wellness advice we’ve been given clearly doesn’t work. We can see with our own eyes it doesn’t work. No matter how much we torture and punish ourselves we can’t keep the weight off; a million different diet plans say they are the One True Diet that works as they demonstrate no connection to the diversity of nutritional needs; and every generation after the next struggles more with their mental health.
We are fed a steady propaganda campaign of individualism and blame, putting all the weight of history on each of our shoulders as we struggle with how to be human. We are conditioned to hate ourselves, hate our body, hate our humanity, so that we will not look at the source of these problems and disrupt the status quo.
The health advice we accept as common knowledge just does not reflect reality. Most of it was handed down from people who lived in a world that looked very different from the world we live in today. Superstitious beliefs about how you get sick and how you prevent it came about before science had explanations, and they still stick around even now that we know about epigenetics, social determinants of health, and generational trauma.
Most of this advice is rooted in a worldview incentivized to defend colonialism. It was developed by powerful people for powerful people to explain why they should keep power. The observations these beliefs rest on justify one group of people enslaving another, pillaging land and resources, and investing in a hierarchy of humanity. It pathologizes differences that threaten Power. It perpetuates biases about who feels pain and how much. It teaches us to see dominating the body through force as a virtue. It conditions us to see our self worth in productivity and contributions to capitalism. It lies about superiority.
This history of wellness is what got us here. Doing the same things we’ve inherited from previous generations will lead us to this same place. Where no one has the health care they need, body needs are an individual failing, and so many of us are suffering. As Audre Lorde said, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” More domination will not bring healing. We need options rooted in partnership.
In a dominator worldview, the body is an object you need to maintain and if it breaks down, it is a betrayal. Not being able to dictate your body size or appearance is considered a weakness of character. Treating your body like an object means you only get to value it for its appearance, its functionality, or its status. If you are disabled and can’t claim any of those traits, you are treated as if you have no value at all.
In a partnership worldview, your body is a living creature you need to respect and negotiate with. You accept that your body has needs and you work to meet those needs to be a good partner to your body and enable your body to be the best partner it can to you. When the body breaks down, it is not a betrayal but a regular feature of human biology as your body bears the wear and tear of existing in this world. Your body’s value lies in relationships, both in what it offers to you, and how it connects you to others. Your body offers you sensation to navigate this world and keeps the receipts on what you’ve been through.
Even once you accept your body needs and commit to meeting them with dignity, there are still obstacles everywhere you look. Outdated information, crumbling institutions, untrustworthy experts, and most of all, wellness predators. It takes a lot of critical examination and re-evaluation to determine what choices are right for you without falling down one pipeline or another.
Wellness predators are anyone who claims they can help you find healing, but is really just interested in your money. Unfortunately, these days, it is extremely hard to know who to trust. You can find misinformation from people with licenses on the wall, appropriated religious practices from people in strip malls, and click funnel sales scams in every sidebar.
We live in an age that requires media literacy, but also wellness literacy. It’s so easy to get seduced by someone with high energy and a slick pitch, or someone in a white coat. But since there is never going to be one right answer for anything, given how diverse our needs are, we have to learn how to screen new approaches and experiment to see if they’re right for us.
Here are some questions I’ve started asking myself as I’m evaluating which sources I should trust:
Are they right or just charming?
Was I convinced by their argument, or were they just pretty? The classic influencer conundrum. Our biases will convince us that someone born lucky has all the answers.
Does their message normalize pain?
Anything like “pain is just weakness leaving the body” or “the health shake isn’t supposed to taste good” is placing virtue in suffering. That’s just old-fashioned religious asceticism creeping in.
Is there an endpoint to their treatment plan?
Are they actually attempting to heal you? Or are they trying to lock you in as an indefinite source of cash? Some treatments may need to be open ended or require regular maintenance, but there should still be some kind of a plan.
Is it backed by good and recent science?
I will never stop recommending the podcast Maintenance Phase. I have been screaming about calories ever since I heard that episode. The BMI comes from an insurance company that wanted to deny health care to fat people, calories in calories out is based on a chemistry experiment that has nothing to do with how humans metabolize, and so many of our beliefs about health come from the same people who brought you Prohibition. Conventional wisdom needs a real overhaul.
What does Indigenous or pre-colonial knowledge have to say about this?
Indigenous and folk traditions have millennia of wisdom in how to meet the needs of the body and respect human dignity in a way that also considers the sustainability of the earth and the sustainability of the community. Science knows far from everything, and is often at the mercy of motivated funders. Considering more than one perspective can offer you greater accuracy.
What does this say about disabled people?
Does it blame people for their disabilities or imply that we earned our disabilities by not trying hard enough? Do they use fear of disability to motivate? Do they pretend disabled people don’t exist in order to boost their claims? If they don’t acknowledge the reality of disability, then their message is based in magical thinking.
Does this align with what I’ve experienced?
Most of all, does believing this require me to deny something I’ve been through or seen for myself? Most of the diet and exercise claims out there do. They require you to believe that weight loss is in our control, possible for everyone, and even an appropriate goal for everyone. It requires you to believe that people with societally approved bodies have done something more virtuous to obtain them. It requires you to believe that whatever struggles you’ve faced are due to your individual issues and not broad systemic problems.
Deconstruction requires you to be humble enough to consider that you were wrong, and brave enough to consider a new way of being in the world. But it is the only way to make the changes that will improve your circumstances. We are facing significant problems, and we are not going to be able to solve them with the methods that caused them.