Christy Harrison & Rethinking Wellness: Banned for 99 Years and Counting!!
Wellness is allegedly my “field”—though at this point it feels more like a cross. Pilates is always swept into this trendy, flaxseed-loving category, so in the name of research (and maybe masochism), I actually paid to subscribe to Christy Harrison’s Substack.
I posted one (truly tame!) comment—something less controversial than a New Yorker cartoon—and got hit with this:
Seems a bit excessive. I’m 84. Unless Harrison thinks I’ve cracked the wellness code and will live to 183, that’s a lifetime ban... and then some.
But she’s not alone! Noah Smith—whose Substack is appropriately called NOAHpinion—banned me for a full century. If JD Vance had a Substack, I’m sure I’d already be on his watchlist, too. Apparently, I’ve stumbled on the one subject that magically unites the far left, the far right, and everyone NOT on Ozempic: obesity as a metaphor for American decline.
Of course, “obesity” is just consumerism in oversized clothing—what used to be called gluttony before we rebranded it and gave it a podcast. And wouldn’t you know, this has ballooned (pun intended) into a trillion-dollar wellness-industrial complex. Aren’t we good at slick packaging? Who cares about substance? Wellness is the definition of phoniness: saying the right things to sell without actually being those things. Wellness branding coddles. It wraps the facts in soft language to project a feel-good fantasy that prevents a person from doing the right thing: downsizing their food/beverage consumption.
I've witnessed every trend since 1963—the founding of Weight Watchers and the beginning of our national pastime: playing with food and pretending fat-burning exercise is fun. Since 2021, when we tiptoed out of Afghanistan, I’ve used that failure as the perfect metaphor for why Americans can’t spot branding propaganda if it’s wearing Lululemon and talking about gut health.
But the media, the government, and wellness influencers have distracted the public with fantasies of “good health” and “longevity,” neither of which is remotely achievable for the majority of Americans even with the GLP-1. So when I started to wonder why my metaphor wasn’t landing (besides the fact that everyone is so touchy) I turned to the one entity that won’t ban me: ChatGPT. My friend there wrote a thoughtful, logical explanation. Naturally, I’m publishing it while I still can. Before someone bans me for another century.
“The U.S. war in Afghanistan should be a defining symbol of the country's current dysfunction—but somehow, it isn’t treated that way in the mainstream narrative. Here’s why:
America has an extraordinary ability to move on without reflection. Vietnam ended in disaster, and within a generation, the country was back at war in Iraq and Afghanistan—without learning the core lesson: you can’t nation-build through bombs. After the fall of Kabul in 2021, there was no real reckoning.
If people did look closely at the Afghanistan debacle, they'd see:
Endless spending with no accountability
A bloated military-industrial complex profiting from failure
Politicians lying to the public for years.
A refusal to confront reality until it collapses
This is what’s wrong with America today. But facing it would require grit. The public is not ready to accept hard truths.
Americans are raised on stories of heroism, progress, and moral clarity. Afghanistan is an uncomfortable mirror showing us that we can’t distinguish between mission and myth.
The U.S. is in cultural, political and institutional decline. So instead of facing the issues, we rally around a promise of some imagined greatness. We already started the branding a decade ago by proclaiming that we are EXCEPTIONAL. At least, exceptionally hungry.”
Anyway, until the big shot Substack writers and the Media include our bodies in their analysis of why America is divided, ignore them. Nothing will stop the selling of gut supplements and sleep gadgets and miracle foods, but you can remember: it’s hormones not calories. If your waistline is 35 inches—the WHO definition of obesity—a GLP-1 paired with 80Bites will work. Take a step to tame your hunger. One billion people are starving.