How to Be Well: Without Spending All Your Money and Losing Your Mind

A deeply researched, lively, and personal exploration of the multibillion-dollar wellness industry -- about why women are feeling so un-well and how this trend has shaped our thinking about health and self-care

Peloton. Pilates. Biohacking. Colonics. Ashwagandha. Today, the wellness industry is a ＄3.7 trillion behemoth that touches us all. In this timely and clear-eyed book, journalist Amy Larocca peels back the layers behind the wellness movement and reckons with its promises and profits. How did we get here and how did the idea of wellness become integrated with women’s lives? And how did we end up spending so much money on products that may not work at all?

Amy Larocca takes readers into the communities that swear by their activated charcoal toothpaste and green juice enemas, explaining what each of these practices really is--and what the science says. Larocca holds a magnifying glass to alternative medicine and nouveau lifestyle prescriptions -- and tries a lot herself along the way -- ultimately delivering an assessment of how the wellness industry embodies our (gendered, class-based, racialized) perceptions of care and self-improvement, and how it preys on our unshakable fear of the unknown. She traces the history of how the beauty and fashion industries have peddled snake oil to women for decades--and why we keep coming back for more.

A clear-eyed and honest portrait of the weird world of wellness, How to Be Well lays bare the ways in which the simple notion of caring for oneself has become a seriously big business.

AMY LAROCCA has been working as a journalist for the past twenty years. She is currently the Fashion Editor-at-Large at New York (prior to which she was on staff as a contributing editor for ten years, then fashion director for seven), and edits the magazine’s biannual Fashion Issue. Her journalism and essays have also appeared in Elle, Harper’s Bazaar, Town & Country, Allure, Glamour, Esquire (UK), The Times (London), and The London Review of Books, among other publications. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, the theatre director Will Frears, and their two children.