I wrote a book about a wellness cult, now the MAHA folks think I’m on their side
Plus a giveaway celebrating the German release of Something Happened to Ali Greenleaf
Good morning!
Most authors don’t get booked on a satellite radio tours by their publisher. But because my new book, You Belong to Me, is about a young girl who gets sucked into a wellness and beauty cult, and since the wellness industry is in a relentless pursuit to convince us that everything under the sun is wellness—even Barbie has a Wellness Self Care doll—my publicist added this to the marketing plan for my new novel.
Excuse me while I interrupt for a moment of self-promotion! Where can you buy, read or listen to You Belong To Me?
You can buy it from any independent book store even if you don’t live near one through Bookshop.org
You can listen to it on Libro.fm, an audio company that supports local bookstores
You can request that your local library carry it, or listen to it on Libby, the book and audio borrowing app
And if none of those option work for you, you can get it on Amazon, Barnes and Noble or any of the other big book stores.
Please, please, please… don’t forget to leave a review on Goodreads or Amazon. It really really really matters. You can leave a review on Amazon even if you didn’t buy it there
Back to my story!
The tour was filled with NPR affiliates where the hosts and I were enthusiastically in agreement: Cults are bad! Wellness and makeup companies often use cult-like tactics to influence adults and teenagers! Depression, self-harm and suicide are rising among American adolescents! Book me on the Today show next!
Except soon, I was booked on a live AM radio show. “The host is very into wellness,” my publicist told me. I checked the show’s website and saw that Suzanne Somers who died from cancer in 2023 had once been a guest. I loved Suzanne Somers. Who didn’t love Suzanne Somers? Didn’t she opt to do homeopathic treatments instead of chemo when she got cancer? And didn’t she get liposuction even while she was promoting the exercise machine, the ThighMaster?
The host was a raspy, rapid-fire, old school radio personality who fervently spoke about the unregulated wellness industry and how kids were getting influenced by social media at alarming rates. But the conversation quickly turned to her delivering a diatribe about how red dye in M&M’s were poisoning our children and that the fluoride in the water was going to kill us all.
I thought about the half-eaten bag of M&M’s in my freezer (because they’re best frozen) and I wondered: Is this radio host MAHA? MAHA, if you don’t know, is short for the Make America Healthy Again movement, a right-wing outcry that stands for “health freedom” and believes that the country has been poisoned by everything from vaccines to hormones to fluoride in the water.
“Thankfully Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is going to save us from all that,” she said.
I thought back to my initial conversation with my publicist. When she said the host was into “wellness,” what kind of wellness did she mean? I guess you could say that we’re currently we’re living a multi-tiered wellness reality. Did she mean overzealous, money-making wellness that usually involves a pyramid scheme and has very little to do with wellness itself? Did she mean celebrity wellness that sells “clean” face scrubs and declines to be fact-checked? Or did she mean the kind of wellness where raw milk fans and vaccine skeptic parents live harmoniously?
Long before wellness became a 6.3 trillion-dollar industry, long before Amazon and Whole Foods were interchangeable, I was a fairly educated wellness person. I was a vegetarian since I was 10. I was taking probiotics when people couldn’t even say the word “acidophilus.” I worked in a health food store in San Francisco in the 1990s. Twenty-one years ago, my acupuncturist “induced” me as an alternative to Pitocin. Both of my kids were delivered by midwives, okay?
Yet the wellness world has disappointed me. I’m terrified of moms who do “cleanses” with their kids. I’m terrified of the influence that wellness world of social media has had on my already anxious teenage daughter. How it’s made her scared to use fluoride toothpaste, how she’s been bombarded by the thin body equals wellness messaging, and how she can easily slip into obsessive thoughts when we eat out because if you don’t make your all of your food from scratch you’re not healthy enough. I’m terrified that Donald Trump just nominated a wellness influencer and vaccine skeptic as the U.S. Surgeon General.
In this new world, I’ve been forced to re-evaluate what wellness means. Am I even a “wellness” person anymore? Will the MAHA folks mistake me as one of theirs?
I was first drawn to wellness because my family was filled with chain-smoking, weight-obsessive meat-eaters with heart issues. I had a grandmother who was just as concerned with calorie-counting as she was at making sure we ate every last bite of her beef barley stew. Eat more. Eat less. If you eat too much, you’ll get fat. If you don’t eat enough, you’ll get sick.
This was the same grandmother who would scream to my brother and my three cousins, all of us under 13, for her “pills” because we were giving her a “heart attack.” Her pills were nitroglycerin. I took her outbursts seriously when I was ten, because it always seemed that my grandmother was on the verge of death, at least according to her. She lived until she was 89.
Wellness, to me, was directly connected to fear. If you can control what you put in your body, if you could control the stress in your life, if you could control your weight, you will live longer. You will feel better. You will not have a heart attack. See what I mean?
Right out of college I started working at a health food store and there, I dove into a world of extremes. I sneered at people who didn’t take turmeric for their allergies. If you didn’t eat organic foods, you were going to get cancer. I didn’t go to an ENT or an allergist for years despite having chronic sinusitis because I was convinced my acupuncturist, along with cranial sacral therapy, was going to cure me. (Spoiler, it did not. I needed prescription allergy meds too.) I thought about parasites more than any one person could imagine.
I became a wellness brute.
As a wellness person, I was adamant about breast feeding my son. And he nursed like a champ until he turned one. I judged friends who didn’t nurse their children. I peppered them with questions. Did you work with a lactation consultant? Did you get in touch with the La Leche League? Did you use nipple cream? Did you go on the breast-feeding message board? Did you give your kid a bottle too soon? Did you... did you... Breast was best and no one was going to tell me any different. There was no critical thinking. There was no discussing the topic with me at all.
When I had my daughter, she wouldn’t nurse easily. The milk came out too fast. The milk came out too slow. The milk sometimes squirted across the room like a fire hose. I felt like a complete failure. I nursed her and cried. Then at 8pm on a Thursday night, when she was two months old, it felt like Wolverine had broken into my living room and ferociously clawed at my breasts. I had mastitis and I screamed and cried on the couch.
The next day, hopped up on antibiotics, and pumping out my infected milk with a medical grade breast pump, my husband handed me a copy of The Atlantic.
The cover story was, “The Case Against Breastfeeding.”
You laugh, but that article changed my life! Not only had mothers been manipulated into becoming “breast feeding fascists,” but it was found that breast feeding was only a little better than formula feeding, but not by much. It really all depended on your life, how much time you had, how much money you had and how stressed out you were.
When you start to distrust everything around you, if you start to think about the carbon dioxide that emits from buses, or the germs on everything you touch, or the pesticides in the water, or the microplastics in the air, you might not leave the house at all. I looked at the wellness people around me. People who had every intention of living their healthiest lives for themselves and their children, yet they ended up isolated and scared and paranoid about everything they put in their body. They lost friends and they didn’t understand why.
I have no doubt I would have ended up in the MAHA universe if I didn’t have that experience with my daughter. I was on that track.
Now I see a reiki healer once a month. I take turmeric every morning. Sometimes I make a ginger, carrot and lemon juice. But I had to deprogram myself from that extreme way of thinking.
I’m sorry if you knew me back then and I acted like a wellness conspiracy theorist know-it-all. Sometimes you don’t know who you are until you end up with mastitis on the couch.
At the end of the interview with the AM radio host, I told her that “uh, I don’t think Mr. Kennedy was our savior.” I told her that fluoride in small doses was proven to help communities who had less access to dental care. And then I read to her a list of a few of the of the most common traits of cults. That there’s no tolerance for questions or critical inquiry, that the group leader is always right and that there’s an unreasonable fear about the outside world.
I hoped someone out there in AM radio land heard me. Many other interviews went so well. Here’s one really great interview with Joe Donahue of WAMC, Northeast Public Radio, where a listener wrote into the station to say that she was “moved” by the conversation.
If you’re in the media and would like to invite me on your show, go ahead and contact me.
Giveaway!
In celebration of Something Happened to Ali Greenleaf’s German release, called Something Happened to Ally (thank you @dtv_verlag !), I am giving away copies of my books!
Here’s what you get: Something Happened to Ali Greenleaf, Something Happened to Ally (if you read German I would love to send this to you!) and my newest book You Belong to Me.
(Please note there is a trigger warning for SHTAG. It’s about a young girl who gets SA’d by the most popular boy in school, and his female friend who helps him try to cover it up.).
RULES:
🖤tell me about the book that changed your life in the comments of the Intstagram post
🖤tag a friend
🖤US only (sorry!)
🖤giveaway ends Sunday June 8 at midnight!
Thanks for reading!
xo Hayley