Hello everyone and welcome back to an all new episode of the financial confessions.

It's me, your host, Chelsea Fagan, founder and CEO of the financial diet and woman who loves talking about money.

And one topic that we've covered quite a bit on the channel, both on my show, as well as, for example, on our podcast, Too Good to Be True on their recent episode

of Essential Oils and Wellness Culture is, well, wellness culture. It's something that has

been on people's minds more and more, I think, as we start to see the ways in which a culture

that is nominally about living in a better, healthier, more fulfilling way can often leave us with

the exact opposite.

Dubious pseudoscience and snake oil sales aside, there's also a whole part of wellness

culture that is, especially as it pertains to women, about above all else restriction.

Many of us saw, for example, the recent interview with Gwyneth Paltrow that went viral

because of the hyper-restrictive diet that she was describing and the ways that she described needing to detox from a life that was already in her own words, almost completely devoid of anything that could possibly need detoxing from.

Now, obviously, there are many more qualified people than me who can speak to some of what might be happening behind some of these ideas and why they're so dangerous for us to consume. But on the other hand, we do often live in a context that is focused on consumerism, about overextending ourselves, about consuming things that are toxic for us, both literally and figuratively, and generally making us live in a way that's unwell.

And similarly, a lot of people are realizing how much it is essential to say no to a lot of the things that, for example, late capitalism has instilled in us, this constant need to be reachable, to be working, to be

producing, to be measuring our value in extremely financial metrics, and often not even financial

metrics that necessarily benefit us. We're also often not living lives that are incredibly

healthy in terms of our physical health, in terms of what we're eating, in terms of the food

that's available to us, in terms of the products that we're buying and the intentionality

with which we're buying them. At the end of the day, while wellness culture may often offer

us fairly toxic, no pun intended solutions, there clearly is a need to do American life better

in a lot of ways. And my guest today is someone

who covers all of these topics from an incredibly interesting and unique perspective. If you're

watching on YouTube, you can see this immense stack of books, and that's not even all of them.

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