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Wellness does not need to be a moral project. Your body is not a garden that requires constant tending. Sometimes, it is just a house you live in. Some days, you clean it. Some days, you let the dishes pile up. Both are allowed.
The marriage between the and the wellness lifestyle was supposed to be a happy one. A truce. Body positivity taught us that we don’t need to shrink ourselves to be worthy. Wellness taught us that movement is a celebration, not a punishment. Together, they promised a third way: a life where you could enjoy a green smoothie and accept your soft belly; where you could run a 5K and refuse to count a single calorie.
We are here to practice wellness. But somehow, we are also performing it.
Here is the problem with the “Healthy at Any Size” rhetoric when it collides with the $5.6 trillion wellness industry: wellness has always had a favorite body type. Junior Miss Teen Nudist Pageant
There is a quiet tension hanging over the yoga studio. On the wall, a cursive decal reads, “Love the skin you’re in.” But as I glance around the room, I notice the uniform alignment of high-end leggings, the absence of visible stretch marks, and the way every water bottle looks like a piece of minimalist architecture.
The unspoken rule becomes: You can be heavy, but you must be glowing. You can be soft, but you must be flexible. You can reject diet culture, but you must still look like you tried.
The truest act of body positivity in a wellness-obsessed world might be this: Wellness does not need to be a moral project
Because you were never required to be a success story. You were only required to take up space. And you can do that just fine without the glow.
Then the algorithm found me.
Scroll through any “body positive wellness” influencer’s page. You will see a specific kind of liberation. It is a woman (almost always a woman) who is technically “plus-size” by industry standards, but who still has a flat stomach when lying down, a visible jawline, and the cardiovascular capacity to do a 45-minute HIIT class without sweating through her shirt. Her message is “radical self-love,” but her aesthetic is aspirational . Some days, you clean it
The implication, gentle but devastating, was that if I was still out of breath after one flight of stairs, I wasn’t “honoring my body.” I was being lazy. The wellness script had flipped: rest was no longer radical; it was a failure of will.
True body positivity, the kind that doesn't need to sell you a $120 yoga mat, is boring. It is mundane. It is looking at your reflection in the back of a spoon and feeling nothing at all. It is eating the cake without writing a three-paragraph Instagram caption about “breaking free from food shame.” It is taking a week off from movement because your joints hurt, and refusing to call it a “restoration phase.”
Suddenly, my feed was full of women my size doing pull-ups, running marathons, and posting before-and-after photos with the caption: “Your body can do amazing things if you stop getting in your own way.”