What Does 'Wellness' Actually Mean? Reclaiming the Word From Diet Culture
Wellness is everywhere. It is on the covers of magazines, in the names of supplement brands, stitched into the identity of influencers who post their morning routines and green smoothies and carefully curated evidence that they have figured out how to be healthy in a way you have not yet managed.
The wellness industry is worth hundreds of billions of dollars globally. And a significant portion of that revenue comes from one very effective business model: convincing you that you are not well enough, and that the next product, program, or practice will get you there.
I named my community Reclaiming Wellness on purpose. Because I think the word itself is worth fighting for. And I think what diet culture has done to it deserves to be explored before we can build something more honest in its place.
What Wellness Has Come to Mean
In its current cultural form, wellness has become almost entirely synonymous with control. Control over what you eat, how much you weigh, how your body looks, how disciplined your habits are. It has become a performance of health rather than an experience of it.
The wellness industry version of being well looks specific. It is thin, or at least actively trying to become thinner. It is eating clean, whatever that means this week. It is waking up early, moving constantly, supplementing strategically, optimizing relentlessly. It is a kind of fulltime project of managing the body, and the implicit promise is that if you manage it correctly enough, something will finally feel okay.
That promise is false. And the version of wellness it is selling is not health. It is anxiety dressed up in athleisure.
What Diet Culture Took From the Word
Before it was co-opted by the wellness industry, the word wellness had a broader meaning. It referred to a holistic sense of flourishing across multiple domains of life, physical, emotional, social, spiritual, purposeful. It was never supposed to be just about the body. And it was certainly never supposed to be about the size of the body.
What diet culture took from wellness is nuance. It narrowed a concept that was meant to be expansive and made it almost entirely about appearance and control. And in doing so, it excluded the vast majority of people who will never meet its narrow physical standards, no matter how hard they try.
What Wellness Actually Looks Like
When I talk about wellness with my clients, I am not talking about food logs or fitness goals or before and after photos. I am talking about something that looks much quieter and much more real than any of that.
Wellness, to me, looks like:
Listening to your body without fear. Trusting that when you are hungry, eating is the right response. Trusting that when you are tired, rest is the right response. Trusting the signals your body sends rather than overriding them with external rules.
Creating safety instead of shame. A body that is chronically ashamed is not a well body. Psychological safety, the ability to exist in your own skin without constant judgment, is as much a part of health as anything you put on your plate.
Letting rest and nourishment count as care. Not just movement. Not just discipline. Stillness, pleasure, enjoyment, connection around food, all of these are legitimate components of being well.
Practicing compassion even when it feels clumsy. Wellness is not the absence of struggle. It is the ability to meet your own struggle with some degree of kindness.
Making space for pleasure, connection, and being human. Eating food that tastes good. Celebrating with people you love. Letting a meal be enjoyable rather than strategic.
Healing in community, not isolation. Wellness is not a solo project. The research on connection and health is consistent and compelling. Being known by other people, being supported, belonging to something, these are not extras. They are fundamental.
Why This Matters for Your Relationship With Food
When wellness is defined by control, food becomes a site of constant moral evaluation. Every meal is either evidence that you are doing wellness right or evidence that you are failing at it. That relationship with food is not healthy. It is exhausting and it is one of the primary drivers of the disordered eating patterns I work with every day.
When wellness is redefined as something broader, food gets to go back to being food. Nourishing sometimes. Pleasurable sometimes. Social sometimes. Complicated sometimes. Human always. And your worth as a person stops being tied to what you chose to eat for lunch.
That shift is not small. For people who have spent years in diet culture, it can feel like the ground moving beneath them. But it is the direction of healing, and it is what I try to point toward in everything I do.
What Reclaiming Wellness Means to Me
When I started Shore Wellness Counseling, I knew I wanted to take the word wellness back. Not to abandon health, but to expand what health actually means. To insist that wellbeing includes emotional safety, body trust, food freedom, and the ability to be fully present in your own life.
Reclaiming wellness is not a rejection of caring for yourself. It is a rejection of the version of self-care that requires you to be smaller, more controlled, and more disciplined to deserve it. It is the insistence that you are already worth caring for, in the body you have, right now, without any conditions.
That is what I want this community to be. A space where a broader, more honest, more compassionate version of wellness gets to exist.
Carianne D'Oriano, Licensed Professional Counselor
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