How to Be Well

A deeply researched, lively, and personal exploration of the multibillion-dollar wellness industry -- about why women are feeling so un-well and how this trend has shaped our thinking about health and self-care

Peloton. Pilates. Biohacking. Colonics. Ashwagandha. Today, the wellness industry is a $3.7 trillion behemoth that touches us all. In this timely and clear-eyed book, journalist Amy Larocca peels back the layers behind the wellness movement and reckons with its promises and profits. How did we get here and how did the idea of wellness become integrated with women's lives? And how did we end up spending so much money on products that may not work at all?

Amy Larocca takes readers into the communities that swear by their activated charcoal toothpaste and green juice enemas, explaining what each of these practices really is—and what the science says. Larocca holds a magnifying glass to alternative medicine and nouveau lifestyle prescriptions -- and tries a lot herself along the way -- ultimately delivering an assessment of how the wellness industry embodies our (gendered, class-based, racialized) perceptions of care and self-improvement, and how it preys on our unshakable fear of the unknown. She traces the history of how the beauty and fashion industries have peddled snake oil to women for decades—and why we keep coming back for more.

A clear-eyed and honest portrait of the weird world of wellness, How to Be Well lays bare the ways in which the simple notion of caring for oneself has become a seriously big business.

★ “A sharply pointed look at the vast wellness industry and ‘the burden of being healthy and attractive’ it places on consumers. ‘Medicine is increasingly a retail prospect.’ Health journalist Larocca realizes as much when visiting a New York doctor whose clinic now ‘looks like somewhere you’d go with a group of girlfriends for brunch.’ Underscore girlfriends, for Larocca focuses on the health and wellness experiences of women—not just ‘today’s ideal woman…hopped up on her plant-based diet and elaborate adaptogen regimen,’ but also the harried workaday woman who aspires to feeling better psychically and physically. It’s a $5.6 trillion industry, Larocca notes, and a vast portion of the till comes from catering to the idea that everyone can become that ideal woman. Some of that desired ‘wellness’ is attended to by the medical industry, which is increasingly bespoke for those who can afford it: Larocca depicts one members-only clinic with a mere five-minute waiting period, 18 times less than the average ER; such concierge medicine speaks to, in one of her nice, bemused turns of phrase, ‘something else, something more, some sort of extra health.’ Some of that wellness is also the province of specialty groceries. Does anyone remember a time before kale? As it turns out, it’s only been a dozen years or so since kale became groovy. On the matter of grooviness, Larocca is excellent on the New Age aspect of the wellness business, with its mantras and microbiome-supporting organic coffee and mindfulness, which, a longtime practitioner laments, ‘is usually being refashioned into a banal, therapeutic, self-help technique.’ And of course, much of that wellness centers on pharmaceuticals, on prescription diet drugs along with CBD, microdosing, ayahuasca, and all the rest. Larocca takes on the wellness biz with a healthy dose of skepticism, and the result is both eye-opening and good fun.”
—Kirkus (starred review)

★ Larocca (coauthor of New York Look Book) has done it all—and lived to save wellness-focused women everywhere money, time, and sanity by sharing her story alongside science-backed and well-documented alternatives to the pipeline of cleanses, detoxes, magic pills, retreats, and procedures that ultimately fail them. Divided into chapters centered on promises of magical cures, glow-getting beauty secrets, spiritual and soul-seeking practices, and cleanses, the book explores how wellness is an ideal against which women measure themselves, which in turn becomes a solipsistic process (i.e., wellness for its own sake). Larocca delves deep into Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop empire and how it has trickled down into Walmart’s wellness days and Dunkin’ Donuts’ avocado toast—meaning that aspirational bodies and the price tags they come with are everywhere and indicate that, as this book demonstrates, there’s always a better version of you for sale.... At once an exposé of beauty and wellness trends, a critique of patriarchal culture, and a guide for individuals seeking real wellness not by purchasing things but by developing inner resources and making sustainable choices, this is the detox many people need from, well, detoxes and their often-detrimental effects.
—Library Journal (starred review)

★ "The present-day vogue for wellness is merely the latest attempt to convince women to buy products to correct for imagined deficiencies, according to this trenchant debut critique. Fashion reporter Larocca suggests that beauty product manufacturers responded to the rise of body positivity in the 2000s by promoting the concept of “glow,” rather than thinness, as the central marker of beauty, creating the illusion of inclusivity while insisting that looking good requires topical ointments and body brushes. Surveying the dubious science behind many wellness practices, she recounts getting a colonic (an enema “on steroids”) from a doctor who claimed that foods with opposite ionic charges “pile up... like sludge” inside the body without clinical intervention. Larocca also covers the more harmful aspects of the wellness space, positing that such trends as intermittent fasting and elimination diets promote disordered eating by implicitly equating skinniness with health. The nuanced analysis notes that while wellness culture’s appeal stems in part from legitimate concerns about the pharmaceutical industry’s insidious influence on mainstream medicine, the supplements hawked by alternative medicine practitioners are usually subject to the same corrupting profit motives. Penetrating and thought-provoking, this will cause readers to think twice before reaching for the latest purported cure-all.
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“What does it mean to be a “well” woman? And how has wellness become such a mammoth industry, with an alarming amount of space for the kooks and the quacks? Fashion journalist Larocca surveys the vast array of products and treatments traditional and new, reliable and questionable. She notes the assumption that the well woman is slender, though not all slimness is created equal. Weight-loss drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy offer a “chemical thinness” that lacks “glow” and “morality,” Larocca observes. As for wellness fashion, there's Lululemon, founded in 1998 by a Canadian American Ayn Rand fanatic who took up yoga because of back pain. This brand popularized high-end trendy athleisure clothes favored by the stylish well woman who does juice cleanses and avoids gluten (only one percent of the U.S. population actually has a gluten allergy). Larocca offers interesting portraits of famous people like Goop founder Gwyneth Paltrow (a wellness “she-god”) and regular people like herself, admitting the “embarrassing truth” that her socioeconomic status is most relevant to her health. Readers will find lots of informative and entertaining food (or juice) for thought.”
— Booklist

“A magical synthesis of crackerjack reporting, incisive cultural commentary, and, most importantly, elegant, self-reflective memoir, How to Be Well perfectly captures the defining ethos of our day. I've been a fan of Amy Larocca for two decades and this book, to me, felt like a gift: An opportunity to spend a few days inside her head, as she works out the manifold contradictions and confusions at the heart of contemporary womanhood.”
—Joanna Rakoff, author of My Salinger Year

“Amy Larocca brings her buoyant wit, cultural fluency, and indispensable skepticism to this rollicking exploration of our desperation for wellness, our devotion to CBD, self-care, and
Soul Cycle, deftly separating the gobbledygook from the truly transformative.”
—Ariel Levy, author of The Rules Do Not Apply

AMY LAROCCA is an award-winning American journalist. She spent twenty years working at New York magazine as both fashion director and editor at large. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Vogue, Town & Country, and the London Review of Books, among other publications. She lives with her family in New York and North London.

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