Book Review: The Gospel of Wellness-Gyms, Gurus, Goop, and the False Promise of Self-Care by Rina Raphael

You’ve done Keto and have eschewed carbs. You invested in a Peloton and go to a hot yoga class weekly. You try to align your chakras and think only positive thoughts. You berate yourself for eating a brownie or for skipping a day at the gym to just “Netflix and chill.” You know it’s a good thing to exercise, get fresh air, and eat right, but at times you wonder if you’ve gone a little to far on your journey to better health, self-care, and enlightenment. Perhaps you are treating wellness, physical, mental, and spiritual, as some type of intense worship.

Rina Raphael understands this mindset, and she writes about many people’s addiction to this issue in her book The Gospel of Wellness: Gyms, Gurus, Goop, and the False Promise of Self-Care.

Once caught up in the worship of being a higher state of being herself, health and wellness journalist and former senior producer and lifestyle editor at The TODAY Show, Raphael takes a very important look at the wellness industry that takes in trillions of dollars. Many of these wellness practices are rooted in positive and effective practices like fitness, eating right, and getting plenty of sleep and fresh air.

However, the gospel of wellness is also filled with far too much hyper consumerism, crackpot theories, and desperate hope for millions of people who want to better their lives physically, mentally, and spiritually. And sadly, there are far to many opportunistic grifters only too willing to take advantage (and a whole lot of money) of people who want to achieve greatness. Though some in the wellness industry rely on encouragement and positive affirmations to encourage followers, many of them manipulate people’s insecurities, especially women. So many women feel so out of sorts these days, whether it comes to work, relationships or the home front. And the pandemic only made things worse. Women are desperate to have some semblance of peace and command over their lives. So does it hurt to buy a $30.00 tranquility candle?

Well, that candle may make your house smell nice, but it won’t lessen sexism in the workplace, improve your marriage, or give you thinner thighs.

The Gospel of Wellness takes a very thorough look and examines the various products and practices that have become popular in the past several years. She looks at how fitness influencers and instructors have become like rock and roll demi-gods and goddesses to their faithful followers. She attends Gwyneth Paltrow’s GOOP wellness retreat and gives us the scoop on GOOP’s quackery and money making endeavors.

Raphael also explains on why so many women have eschewed so many mainstream medical practices in favor of new age healing methods and advice. Raphael looks at some women’s addiction to eating only “clean” foods and slathering one’s body and face with “clean” beauty products even though there isn’t always science to back these practices up.

And the path to better health and an elevated state of being isn’t a phenomenon of the modern age. People have been trying to obtain these things for eons. The Gospel of Wellness goes down memory lane informing us about different practices people in decades ago did to remain hale and hearty, like the precursor to Pilates, the Mensendieck system, which was practiced in the nude during the 1930s. Or Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound, a “health” tonic from the 1870s, which claimed to cure women of headaches, menstrual cramps, indigestion, and labor pains. And more currently, I can remember the promise of oat bran, Dexatrim diet supplements, and aerobic dance studios. Today there is an app that somehow helps you align your workouts to your menstrual cycle!

There is one issue that Raphael examines in The Gospel of Wellness that really made me think. It’s the idea of “Wealthness,” that health and wellness is often only accessible to people with a great deal of wealth and time. Gyms, especially fancy boutique gyms are quite expensive. Purchasing a Peloton and its monthly subscriptions are quite pricy. Organic food is more expensive than non-organic food, and some people in urban and rural communities live in food deserts and don’t have access to proper healthcare, let alone a gym. Sure, someone can always get exercise by walking but some communities don’t have sidewalks and others are plagued with violence. And if you’re working two, three jobs just to survive, it might be easier to go through a McDonald’s drive-thru than go home and cook a healthy meal.

While, reading The Gospel of Wellness, I got such an education. Raphael has most definitely done her homework. And I must admit, I, too, have gotten caught up in the gospel of wellness. I’m still kind of beating myself up for indulging in to much fattening food between Christmas and New Year’s. And I’m still pissed off at myself for not going to the gym for several days when I had a bad head cold last November. Yes, I know this is nuts, but I still feel like I got off track. Thank goodness, The Gospel of Wellness let’s me know I’m not alone.

Graphic and Novel

Book Review: Poser-My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses by Claire Dederer

There are many paths to the practice of yoga. Writer Claire Dederer’s path began when she hurt her back while breast feeding her daughter Lucy. And she writes about her path and her subsequent journey through the practice of yoga in her memoir “Poser: My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses,” using various yoga poses, triangle, mountain, downward dog, to describe this journey.

Despite her interest in yoga, Dederer has her reservations. In “Poser” Dederer muses, “I thought yoga was done by self-indulgent middle-aged ladies with a lot of time on their hands, or by skinny fanatical twenty-two-year-old vegetarian former gymnasts…”  She also wonders about privileged white people taking on an ancient practice and making it too trendy or elitist.

However, Dederer gets over her reservations and signs up for a Hatha yoga course. As she progresses in her yoga practice and gains more insight Dederer soon branches out into other yoga styles trying to find the right fit, not only physically, but emotionally and mentally, too. In amazing detail Dederer describes how she and her classmates tried to achieve their personal best in obtaining precision in their yoga poses, sometimes succeeding and sometimes not. She also wittily writes about the oddities found in some of her yoga classes, realizing as much as she loves yoga she might not be the ideal yogini exalted in the media. Still, she keeps at the practice.

But for Dederer, yoga is so much more than about balance, flexibility and maintaining the perfect “yoga butt.” In yoga, Dederer finds herself confronting both her present and her past. Dederer works as a freelance writer and is married with two young children. She makes her home in the Seattle-area where she tries to balance family and work and the idea that her generation could “have it all.” She admittedly gets upset at her husband, questions herself as a mother, and wonders if she’s losing her competitive edge as a writer. But instead of being a whiny navel-gazer, obsessed with her “first world problems,” Dederer looks at her life with both vulnerability and self-deprecation and at times she evoked both empathy and laughter in me.

And then there is Dederer’s past. When Dederer was a child her parents separated but never fully divorced. She and her brother were passed back and forth between her father’s new home and the home her mother made with her much younger boyfriend. As a young woman she dropped out of college, moved to Australia where she lived with her punk rocker boyfriend and made a living driving a forklift truck and loading boxes in a warehouse. Years later Dederer wonders if her desire to provide steadiness and stability to her own children and live up to some unobtainable ideal has anything to do with the chaos and uncertainty of her own youth.

“Poser” is not necessarily a book about yoga, and this might upset readers who might want to learn more about the practice and less about the musings of a middle-class white Generation X-er. However, it is entertaining, funny and at times, quite moving. Using yoga to open up about the messiness in her life is a very clever touch and proves Dederer is a creative writer with a unique voice. And I hope “Poser” isn’t the last of Dederer has to offer.