Is Wellness Making Us Sick? Rina Raphael Tells the Dirty Truth About "Clean Health"

The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum

Society & Culture

4.7 • 855 Ratings

🗓️ 26 September 2022

⏱️ 74 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

If you are terrorized by your Fitbit, guilt tripped by half the items in your refrigerator, or broke from trying every new juice cleanse that comes along, this week's guest, Rina Raphael, will make you feel better. Her new book, The Gospel of Wellness: Gyms, Gurus, Goop and the Promise of Self-Care, examines the roots and ramifications of America's latest health craze; extreme health.

Rina is perhaps not your typical Unspeakale guest. She's not full of "dangerous" ideas or "unspeakable" opinions. But she had the courage to look not only at the wellness industry but also the validity of now-sacred concepts like self-care and clean eating. Surprise, surprise; many hypocrisies and contradictions lurk within. Rina is a longtime journalist who's covered the health and the fitness industries decades. In this conversation, she talks about how healthy living has become a lifestyle brand, explains what orthorexia means and reflects on her own obsessive patterns when it comes to diet and exercise. (Meghan, in turn, explains why when she eats a donut she always breaks off and discards one piece before finishing the rest.) Rina talks about the meaninglessness of the term "natural," why women turn to self-care partly because they feel let down by the traditional health care system, and how thinking too much about being healthy can sometimes make you quite sick.

Rina Raphael is a journalist who specializes in health, wellness, tech, and women's issues. She was a features contributor for Fast Company magazine and has also written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, CBS, NBC News, and Medium's Elemental, among other publications. Her wellness industry newsletter, Well To Do, covers trends and news and offers market analysis. Raphael has spoken on the wellness industry at national conferences such as the Global Wellness Summit and the Fast Company Innovation Festival. Previously, she served as a senior producer and lifestyle editor at TODAY.com and NBCNews.com.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Unspeakable Podcast. I'm your host, Megan Dowm. If you are sick of wellness,
0:09.6	which is to say if you are terrorized by your Fitbit, guilt tripped by half the items in your refrigerator,
0:16.0	the way I am, maybe even broke from trying every new juice cleanse or fitness boutique class that comes along.
0:23.8	This week's guest will make you feel better. She is Rina Raphael, and she has a new book out called
0:30.7	The Gospel of Wellness, Jim's, Gurus, Goop, and the Promise of Self-Care. Now, Rina is maybe not your typical unspeakable guest.
0:40.8	She's not full of dangerous ideas or anything like that, but she had the courage to look at
0:46.0	not just the wellness industry, but at the whole concept of fitness and wholeness and things
0:51.7	like clean eating and point out the hypocrisies within those things.
0:56.1	She's been a journalist covering health and fitness for a long time.
1:00.0	And in this conversation, we talk about the way healthy living has become a lifestyle brand.
1:05.8	She talks about her own obsessive patterns when it comes to diet and exercise, especially in the past. I explain why I have
1:13.2	never eaten an entire donut. I break off a tiny piece and throw it out and eat the rest of the
1:19.1	donut. We talk about the meaninglessness of the term natural, the way women sometimes turn to
1:24.8	self-care when they feel let down by the actual health care system,
1:28.6	and how thinking too much about being healthy can sometimes make you quite sick.
1:34.2	So here is our conversation.
1:38.8	Rina Raphael, welcome to The Unspeakable.
1:42.2	Thanks for having me.
1:43.1	I'm excited to be here.
2:03.2	There is so much to talk about in this book, The Gospel of Wellness, Jim's, gurus, goop, and the false promise of self-care. And we're going to get to a lot of it. But I thought we would just open this conversation with you reading a brief passage from, it's actually chapter nine of the book.
2:08.6	And it has to do with exercise, which is one of many, many things that you cover in this book. But I just think this is kind of a remarkable passage. And it would set the stage for what we're going to talk about.
2:16.1	So could you just kind of dive in?
	...

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