Going broke on wellness

Summary

“Going Broke on Wellness”

Today, Explained – Vox (August 2, 2026)
Hosts: Jhon Glen Hill (guest hosting for Sean Rameswaram and Noel King), Hadi Mwagdi (Producer/Reporter)
Guests: Amy LaRocca (journalist, author of How to Be Well), Jonathan Stia (clinical psychologist, author of Mind the Science), Megan Butler (President of Kuya Wellness), Chase Salazar (Kuya Wellness member)

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Episode Overview

This episode dives into the booming “wellness” industry: what it actually means, who’s buying in, and at what cost. With reporting from Kuya Wellness, a high-end wellness club in Austin, and insights from experts who unpack the history, culture, and economics of wellness, the episode explores how self-care has become both a luxury product and a cultural fixation, all while raising questions about the science, accessibility, and contradictions at its core.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. What IS “Wellness”?

• Wellness is everywhere — from collagen in smoothies, to luxury clinics, to bank accounts and condos.
• Amy LaRocca: “I’ve seen that word attached to absolutely everything…from massages to vaccines, to checking accounts, condos.” (03:39)
• The definition is fuzzy, but after extensive research, Amy describes wellness as “a luxury good and the packaging of our health and our beauty into a consumable for-sale product.” (04:03)

Memorable Quote

“Wellness is a luxury good and it’s the packaging of our health and our beauty into a consumable for sale product.”
— Amy LaRocca (04:03)

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2. Inside a High-End Wellness Club: Kuya Wellness (Austin, TX)

• Hadi Mwagdi experiences Club Kuya, where memberships can cost up to $1,000/month depending on city.
• Offerings aren’t about beauty treatments—think infrared saunas, sensory deprivation tanks, IV vitamin drips, and storytelling/breathwork workshops.
• Clubs cater to young, fit, and affluent professionals seeking a way to relax from high-stress, high-paying jobs.

Scene Highlights

• Cold plunges are central, with Hadi and member Chase Salazar jumping in.
  (Sample banter:

  “We gotta get you to cold punch with me, bro.” – Chase (01:46)
  “We're literally taking a dip in wellness.” – Hadi (01:58))

• Atmosphere: Relaxed, wellness as exclusivity and lifestyle aspiration.

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3. Who Is Wellness For?

• Hadi: "These are really pretty young people... and they're also making a lot of money." (06:38)
• Discussion highlights how wellness has become a status symbol, marketed to those with disposable income, especially white women.

Memorable Quote

“I would say it is really marketed at kind of white women with disposable income because there’s money to be spent, and there’s, you know, a lot of historical precedent for sowing insecurities and getting money out of that population.”
— Amy LaRocca (26:51)

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4. Wellness as Moral Virtue & Pseudoscience: A Brief History

• Jonathan Stia traces the roots of modern wellness to the late 19th century:
  • John Harvey Kellogg and the Battle Creek Sanitarium: Blending virtue, diet, and pseudo-religious ideas, promoting “biologic living.”
  • Bernard McFadden: The original “wellness influencer,” hostile to vaccines and steeped in eccentric health practices.
  • Modern term “wellness” was shaped by Halbert Dunn in 1959, distinguishing “good health” from “high-level wellness” (optimal functioning).
• Stia warns how pseudoscience and the veneer of research get used to market wellness products and fads.

Notable Quotes

“The problem is that one of the ways in which wellness promoters market their materials is by promoting quote-unquote science...”
— Jonathan Stia (14:04)

“The problem is that... health is not a moral virtue.”
— Jonathan Stia (19:09)

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5. Why Are People Turning Away from Medicine Toward Wellness?

• Loss of faith in the traditional healthcare system due to neglect, harm, or financial exploitation.
• Even though wealthy people have access to excellent healthcare, many still seek perceived “control” through wellness spending.
• Amy LaRocca frames this shift as an outgrowth of disappointment with mainstream medicine, especially among those who feel excluded or harmed (historically or financially).

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6. Contradictions, Limitations, and the Allure of Wellness

• Many wellness practices border on ritual (“oil pulling,” “clean, vegan makeup,” intermittent fasting) and often lack robust scientific evidence.
• Industry preys on insecurities, especially among women, and exploits trends as luxury must-haves — even though small, accessible habits (sleep, moving, eating whole foods, managing stress) are most effective.
• Notable contradictions: People shun pharmaceuticals but uncritically embrace unregulated supplements from influencers.
• The “fun” aspect: Hadi & Jhon admit the pleasure in saunas, hot/cold therapies; Amy cautions only against going into financial distress over it.

Notable Quotes

“You need to sleep. You need to move your body. You need to eat food that’s as close to its original form as possible... The basics are really what make the difference.”
— Amy LaRocca (27:31)

“Why are we so scared of the pharmaceutical, but so willing to gobble these partially labeled, untested tablets handed to us by like influencers, not doctors?”
— Amy LaRocca (30:25)

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Notable Quotes by Timestamp

• Amy LaRocca on the business of wellness:
  “We become obsessed with this idea of wellness, which is something that we can take on for ourselves, that we can buy, that we are told if you spend enough money, you can have it.” (24:34)
• Chase Salazar on motivation:
  “Trauma’s a good reason for change sometimes... some people are like, the only way I learn is if I touch the hot stove type people.” (08:15)
• On cold plunging:
  “I don't think I've ever sweated so much doing absolutely nothing. I was just sitting there and just pouring out sweat.” — Hadi Mwagdi (08:53)
• On chasing wellness trends:
  “And then the next email will come, like, wellness secrets. And I’m like, oh, here they are." — Amy LaRocca (29:02)

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• [01:11] – [04:33] What is wellness? Definitions, hype, and Amy LaRocca’s introduction.
• [04:33] – [11:05] Inside Kuya Wellness: Hadi’s field report, club culture, cost, treatments, and the pursuit of “feeling good.”
• [13:34] – [22:08] The history and roots of the wellness industry: Kellogg, McFadden, the rise of pseudoscience.
• [24:15] – [31:14] The modern wellness moment: luxury, accessibility, who’s really benefiting, and the contradictions and truths at the heart of the wellness “epidemic.”

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Final Thoughts

Wellness is now a trillion-dollar industry, but its science is often shaky, its benefits unevenly distributed, and its essence shaped as much by marketing and class as by health evidence. At its root, the appeal of wellness is universal—wanting to feel better, live longer, and control our destinies. But, as the episode explores, the cost (financial and otherwise) can be steep, and the basics—sleep, movement, stress management, wholesome food—are often left overlooked amid the trend-chasing.

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For More

• Amy LaRocca’s book: How to Be Well: Navigating Our Self Care Epidemic One Dubious Cure at a Time
• Jonathan Stia’s book: Mind the Science

Transcript

[Sponsor Announcer]

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[Megan Butler]

We all want to live long, healthy lives without pain. That is like the single most important thing.

[Jonathan Stia]

The problem is that often what we see in the wellness world is that the cart is putting before the horse.

[Chase Salazar]

So if I'm coming in here on a day to day basis, I'm definitely hitting the cold plunge and I'm definitely hitting the sauna.

[Jhon Glen Hill]

We're all in our wellness era these days. And our producer Hadi Mwagdi had the chance to play around with some extreme wellness. He got to improve his mood, to enhance his muscle recovery and to have a great night's rest.

[Chase Salazar]

We gotta get you to cold punch with me, bro.

[Hadi Mwagdi]

Come on. I should have brought shorts.

[Jonathan Stia]

Well, you know what they have here shorts for you.

[Jhon Glen Hill]

All he had to do was decide to take the plunge.

[Hadi Mwagdi]

We're literally taking a dip in wellness.

[Amy LaRocca]

Oh, man.

[Hadi Mwagdi]

All right, I'm ready. I'm ready. Oh, my goodness, this is freezing.

[Jhon Glen Hill]

I'm Jhon Glen Hill and this is a rerun of a favorite episode of Explain it to me from Vox.

[Jonathan Stia]

Breathe, breathe. Slow it down.

[Jhon Glen Hill]

We're the show that takes on the big questions. Questions like, what is wellness?

[Jonathan Stia]

Wellness.

[Jhon Glen Hill]

It's a word influencers use as a hashtag in videos of them pouring collagen into their smoothies.

[Amy LaRocca]

Collagen is so good to help support healthy skin. Hair, nails, joint support. It's just everything good. And it's so easy to throw into

[Jhon Glen Hill]

smoothies that celeb chefs use to describe the theme of their newest book.

[Amy LaRocca]

This is the book that I wish I had when I was confused about what to eat and how to eat.

[Jhon Glen Hill]

And it's an obsession of the Secretary for Health and Human services.

[Amy LaRocca]

We're spending $4.5 trillion annually on health care in our country and we have

[Hadi Mwagdi]

the worst health outcomes.

[Jhon Glen Hill]

But what does it actually mean?

[Hannah]

Hi, this is Hannah calling from the Hudson Valley of New York. I'm a 35 year old psychotherapist, so I think of wellness a lot. I also think wellness is so much more than just going to a yoga class and drinking electrolytes. I think it's a lot deeper, it's spiritual and it's something that we all need to be thinking about on the regular.

[Jhon Glen Hill]

Here's how journalist Amy LaRocca describes wellness. She's the author of how to Be Navigating Our Self Care Epidemic One Dubious Cure at a Time.

[Amy LaRocca]

I've seen that word attached to absolutely everything. I've seen it attached to massages and I've also seen it attached to very serious things to do with important health choices like vaccines. And then I've seen it attached to really weird stuff like checking accounts, condos.

[Jhon Glen Hill]

After her research, Amy snailed down her own personal definition of it.

[Amy LaRocca]

My working definition is wellness is a luxury good and it's the packaging of our health and our beauty into a consumable for sale product.

[Jhon Glen Hill]

We're going to hear more from Amy a little later in the show. But first, Hadi is going to take us to a place where wellness is top of mind. A health and longevity club called Kuya Wellness in Austin, Texas. Okay, Hadi, I assume that you are out of the tub and all warmed up. Are you ready to go?

[Hadi Mwagdi]

Absolutely. Let's do it. J.Q. i had heard of these places called social wellness clubs. Folks pay less lots and lots of money to be part of these clubs. In New York and LA, I've saw memberships for as much as $1,000 a month. And these places, they don't have gyms or massage tables. There aren't beauty offerings. There's no med, spa or body sculpting happening. And instead this is a place where people rest. A place where people who are well get well. Here's Megan Butler. She's the president of Kuya.

[Megan Butler]

Kuya is very, it's a clinic, right? So we do wellness modalities. We have deeper medical experiences, but it doesn't feel like a clinic and it's built that way on purpose. So you're invited to want to stay.

[Hadi Mwagdi]

You know, Megan told me about a infrared light sauna.

[Megan Butler]

You sit in the sauna about 15 minutes in a safe space to detox, right to vasodilate.

[Hadi Mwagdi]

About ice baths, about sensory deprivation tanks.

[Megan Butler]

So there's no light, there's no sound, there's no weight. This is really the only time that you're completely weightless. You're laying down, but you're buoyant in about 2,000 pounds of sodium, magnesium, water.

[Hadi Mwagdi]

But also about injectables. These things are administered by health professionals and you can get things like an IV vitamin therapy treatment.

[Amy LaRocca]

Today you're getting one of our most popular signature infusions, the total Vitality drip. It has an amino blend, a mineral blend, vitamin C, and also a bait complex in it. It's great for recovery.

[Hadi Mwagdi]

But these year round memberships, they include free Kuya events like storytelling workshops, aromatherapy workshops, and breathwork classes inside of a sauna.

[Sponsor Announcer]

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[Jonathan Stia]

2, 1.

[Jhon Glen Hill]

Oh my gosh. So who is the clientele at this place?

[Hadi Mwagdi]

Well, the easiest way for me to say this, jq, is that these are really pretty young people. Everyone there was in great shape and they're also making a lot of money. But the thing that really caught my eye when talking to people was that they were all looking for a way to relax. These are people who have high power jobs. They have busy schedules and wellness is something that they find as a key or important factor in their life. So they're pursuing it. I'll tell you about a guy I met named Chase Salazar. He was like all smiles to talk to me, especially about wellness. This man knew about peer reviewed studies.

[Chase Salazar]

Google Scholar, baby, Google Scholar.

[Hadi Mwagdi]

He was telling me about his IV treatments. Chase was the kind of person who doesn't drink, limits the meat he eats, wakes up every morning at 4am and tries to get in bed before 8:30pm so that he could pursue wellness. Chase told me a story about being

[Chase Salazar]

clinically obese when I was 15 and a doctor pulling me to the side and telling me, hey, do you want to live this lifestyle for your entire life?

[Hadi Mwagdi]

On top of that, unfortunately, his mother dealt with cancer and he saw firsthand what it was like for her to deal with these health issues. And it felt as though to Chase, that if she had been healthier to begin with, maybe she could have fought that off a little bit longer.

[Chase Salazar]

Trauma's a good reason for change sometimes. And more importantly, like, you know, some people are like, the only way I learn is if I touch the hot stove type people.

[Jhon Glen Hill]

So that's Chase's story. What sort of treatments did you partake

[Hadi Mwagdi]

in Well, I mean, when we started the episode here, you heard me gasping for air inside of a cold plunge with Chase, actually. And I also did a sauna class which included a cold plunge. Again, I will tell you, I don't think I've ever sweated so much doing absolutely nothing. I was just sitting there and just pouring out sweat. But I have to admit, by the end of it, I felt this high and so did so many of the other people who were in there with me.

[Jhon Glen Hill]

Yeah. Okay, I admit, whenever I do a cold plunge or a sound bath or, you know, a new facial treatment, I think this is gonna fix me. Did any of this work for you? Did it fix you?

[Hadi Mwagdi]

Did it fix me? Is that the question? I can tell you, jq, that in the days before I visited Kuya, I was actually dealing with like one of those 48 hour flus. And then I got to Kuya, I did my cold plunge and my heat, my sauna class, and at the end I felt really energized. I also felt super, super thirsty. So I also got an IV treatment and I definitely felt hydrated by the end of that iv. Then the treatments continued. I decided to jump into a sensory deprivation tub. Now, did I get that feeling of, I don't know, separation from the world? I didn't. I quickly realized, jq, that like, I'm scared of the dark.

[Jhon Glen Hill]

Oh, yeah. I would have a full on panic attack in a sensory deprivation situation. No, thank you. All right. I guess, like, that makes me wonder, how do you think of wellness now that you've done all this? Has the way you've thought about it changed?

[Hadi Mwagdi]

Well, I guess it has because, you know, it's hard to not be skeptical of paying so much for a club. I don't know that these are practices I'll take into my everyday world, but I can see myself buying a day pass and going back and saunaying and cold plunging and, I don't know, laying around on that sound bed after a very long work week. You know, wellness is still this phrase that we're trying to really dissect, but I did feel pretty great at the end of my trip.

[Jhon Glen Hill]

All right, Hadi Mwagdi, thanks for going on this journey for us.

[Hadi Mwagdi]

Oh, yeah, it was a pleasure.

[Jhon Glen Hill]

Okay, so wellness is this trillion dollar industry, but how did we get here in the first place? That's next.

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[Hadi Mwagdi]

Dying to live.

[Hannah]

Well,

[Jhon Glen Hill]

we're back. It's Explain it to me. Okay, so as a whole, we're doing a lot of things in the name of wellness these days, but how did we get here? I spoke with Jonathan Stia to find out. By day he's a clinical psychologist, but his side hustle is combating pseudoscience and misinformation. He wrote a book called Mind the Science that's all about it and he says he gets why all this stuff appeals to people.

[Jonathan Stia]

I would say that obviously we can't blame anyone for seeking alternatives. The problem is that one of the way in which wellness promoters market their materials is by promoting quote unquote science or research to support their claims. And when you do a deeper dive into that research, what people will often find is that you can find a study, say, to promote or to support any kind of treatment or claim. And if you dig even deeper than that, there's a hole, it opens up a can of worms. Because this is what in part, we mean by pseudoscience. Pseudoscience is a. Is in short, a very hijacked or fake attempt at science. I think we can trace the modern wellness industry back to about the. The late 19th century. That's when two prominent figures really played a role in shaping kind of the, the modern wellness industry we see today.

[Hannah]

We.

[Jonathan Stia]

One of those players was a guy named John Harvey Kellogg. And what he and his brother did, his brother was named Will Keith, is they built something called the Battle Creek Sanitarium, which was a really huge, famous medical center. It was a spa, it was a grand hotel. And it really attracted a lot of wealthy, high influential people from its time all over the world to this place. And what John ended up doing in that center was promoting a lot of his ideas about health and about how to treat diseases. They tended to really blend a lot of what he called biologic living, which is really just a kind of virtuous way of approaching our health and kind of blending that with some of religious, kind of Christian beliefs.

[Jhon Glen Hill]

So when I hear the name Kellogg, I admit that I think of my breakfast cereal. Was John Kellogg a scientist or an inventor of some kind? Is that where this came from?

[Jonathan Stia]

Kind of, yes. So his brother Will Keith actually started the cereal company. John was a physician and he was a best selling author. He had a magazine, he did lectures. His magazine was followed by millions of people.

[Jhon Glen Hill]

So was he the inventor of wellness as we know it today?

[Jonathan Stia]

Not quite. When he was promoting his ideas, it was before the term wellness as we use it today was formed. He was promoting a precursor to wellness called biologic living, which essentially promoted the idea that all diseases and all health conditions can be treated with a basically a trifecta recipe of good sleep, good exercise and eating a specific diet, which was sort of, in his view, a bunch of vegetables and fruits, et cetera, which in and of itself is not a bad thing. I mean diet, exercise and sleep.

[Jhon Glen Hill]

Yeah, I was about to say like exercise, diet, sleep, eating fruits and veggies. That feels like something I hear from my doctor.

[Jonathan Stia]

Totally. And that's a part of evidence based care. And that's really foundational to even what we do in the hospital. The problem is that it's what we see even in the modern wellness industry is when people sell these things as a cure all, as a panacea for all health conditions. So John had a lot of ideas that if we weren't following a trifecta recipe of sleep, eating and eating well and exercise, and we were doing other things like drinking alcohol or eating meat or sugar or even if people were overweight, he considered that to be non virtuous and essentially really bad behaviors. And he would view it in a very punitive way. Even masturbation was considered self abuse by John Kellogg. And he thought that it would lead to things like mental ill and cancer and moral destitution. And he would advocate treating people who would masturbate. In boys, he would recommend circumcision or bandaging their hands together. And in girls, he would recommend pure carbolic acid to the clitoris.

[Jhon Glen Hill]

Oh, my God.

[Jonathan Stia]

And even its removal.

[Jhon Glen Hill]

Oh, my God.

[Jonathan Stia]

Yes.

[Jhon Glen Hill]

Was John Kellogg the only person like this of his time, or was this more widespread?

[Jonathan Stia]

It was more widespread, and I would say that he was one of the most prominent ones. And then in parallel with his ideas, there was another huge player that played a role in the birth of the modern wellness industry. And he was a guy named Bernard McFadden, who some consider the 20th century's first celebrity health influencer. This guy was equally eccentric to John. I mean, Bernard McFadden would strut around New York barefoot so that his souls could absorb the earth's energy. And, you know, he would sleep on the floor so that his energy would align with the earth's natural magnetic rhythm. And he was very hostile to vaccines.

[Jhon Glen Hill]

Oh, okay. So you're telling me that an anti vaxx wellness influencer is not a new phenomenon?

[Jonathan Stia]

Very old, over a century old. And that's because a lot of these ideas tend to coalesce. And similar to John Kellogg, you know, Bernard McFadden would also sell this kind of idea of health as a moral virtue, where it's all about virtuous eating, it's all about virtuous exercise. And the problem with these ideas is that health is not a moral virtue. What these ideas do is they promote an idea about health that ignores the science, and then they downplay the role of other important things that we know play a role in health, like genetics, social factors, and just plain old bad luck.

[Jhon Glen Hill]

It's very interesting that all of this happened in the 19th century, because I also think of that time as a lot of, like, I don't know, advancements in science and in health.

[Jonathan Stia]

Totally around the same same time that these wellness ideas were kind of percolating. There was also something called the Flexner Report of 1910, and that really ushered in the dawn of modern medicine. And what that report did was it essentially wanted medicine and medical schools to get their act together and make them much more scientific. And so it would encourage schools to either get rid of alternative medicine from their curriculum or just shut these schools down altogether. At the same time, it really disadvantaged folks who were economically underprivileged. And what that did is it opened the arms, so to speak, for again, alternative medicine or wellness to kind of step in and to take the role of the art of listening and humanizing and, and comfort.

[Jhon Glen Hill]

What about the term wellness specifically though? When did that officially become a thing?

[Jonathan Stia]

Some consider the father of the modern wellness industry to be Halbert Dunn. He was a biostatistician and he first used the term wellness as we use it today, publishing an article in the Canadian Journal of public health in 1959. And what Dunn did is he distinguished good health, which he defined as freedom from illness, from what he dubbed high level wellness, which is a kind of optimal functioning in one's environment. And I think his definition was quite thoughtful, but it really didn't stick.

[Jhon Glen Hill]

I was about to say that's an actually pretty good way to think about wellness.

[Jonathan Stia]

Totally. It's sort of, yeah, one's freedom from living and then, and then you have an optimal functioning in one's environment. The problem is that from there, the term wellness quickly took a life of its own. And nowadays in many parts of North America, wellness is everywhere and anywhere. And the definition has really ballooned to include anything and everything. And if we, you know, if we ask one wellness guru to define wellness, we'll hear a different answer from, from another one.

[Jhon Glen Hill]

So that's then. But where does wellness stand now? That's after the break.

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[Amy LaRocca]

Well, well, wellness.

[Jhon Glen Hill]

Remember how Hadi tried all those different wellness treatments? Well, Amy La Rocca does that for a living all the time. She's a journalist and author of the book how to Be well Navigating Our Self Care Epidemic. One Dubious Cure at a Time.

[Amy LaRocca]

We become obsessed with this idea of wellness, which is something that we can take on for ourselves, that we can buy, that we are told if you spend enough money, you can have it.

[Hadi Mwagdi]

These mushrooms make you feel better.

[Jonathan Stia]

They increase focus and energy while keeping you calm and stress free.

[Amy LaRocca]

This is the future of foundational nutrition. One scoop once a day.

[Jhon Glen Hill]

Being a human is hard, especially if you're a woman who's also having trouble doing that totally normal thing all humans do. Oh, you mean pooping.

[Amy LaRocca]

And that's where it gets into. Why do people want it? Because it's a luxury product. Why do people want a Prada handbag? And I think wellness is kind of following that trajectory. I'm a wellness girly, of course I start my morning with oil pulling. I'm a wellness girly of course I only use clean, vegan, cruelty free makeup products because we have a really messed up healthcare system in this country. But healthcare to the very wealthy is excellent. Probably the best it's ever been anywhere in the world. Again, wellness is a luxury.

[Jhon Glen Hill]

Yeah, you know, we have like this western idea of treating the whole patient, but it feels like a lot of people have lost faith in traditional medicine. How did we get there?

[Amy LaRocca]

I think we got there because so many segments of the population have been neglected and really mistreated by the medical establishment.

[Hadi Mwagdi]

Patients were being harmed by a lot of the embedded conflict of interests within United's business empire and its operations.

[Amy LaRocca]

Steward executives had slowly taken money out of the system and that patient care had suffered. We found 15 patients died and thousands more were put at risk.

[Jhon Glen Hill]

Who is wellness marketed towards? Who is wellness for? Is it for everyone?

[Amy LaRocca]

Right now it's really being marketed to everyone. It's kind of like the sort of devil wears Prada blue sweater. Right.

[Unidentified Guest]

You go to your closet and you select, I don't know, that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you're trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs. And it's sort of comical how you think that you've made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when in fact you're wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room.

[Amy LaRocca]

But I would say it is really marketed at kind of white women with disposable income because there's money to be spent and there's, you know, a lot of historical precedent for sowing insecurities and getting money out of that population.

[Jhon Glen Hill]

You've talked about this idea of being a well woman.

[Amy LaRocca]

Yeah.

[Jhon Glen Hill]

How can you be a well woman? And is it worth it?

[Amy LaRocca]

Well, I mean, if you think of like the Orwell woman as Gwyneth Paltrow. No. Most of us are never, ever, ever going to be that. And thank go dinner early in the evening. I do a nice intermittent fast.

[Unidentified Guest]

I have bone broth for lunch a

[Amy LaRocca]

lot of the days. And then for dinner, I try to eat, you know, according to paleo. But I think what you can do. And a lot of people keep asking me, well, you know, what's your takeaway? And you've researched all these things and you've tried all these things. My takeaway is like really basic. You need the meat. Like, you need to sleep. You need to move your body around. You need to eat food that's as close to its original form as possible. You should drink some water. You need to manage your stress levels. Like, it's really the basics that matter. And I don't say that lightly. I know for a lot of people those basics are very elusive and very difficult to attain, but they're really what make the difference. Yeah.

[Jhon Glen Hill]

You've talked about the discrepancies in who gets to be well in America. And you know, if you're lucky, you have access to a lot of state of the art treatments. Yeah, I read all the time about like, just what it takes to keep LeBron James up and running.

[Amy LaRocca]

Yeah, for sure. But you know what? Like, LeBron James is a. Is a professional athlete. Like, yes, do it, LeBron. Like, that's your. That's your work.

[Jhon Glen Hill]

But it feels like it's like you all should be doing these things, too.

[Amy LaRocca]

That's right.

[Jhon Glen Hill]

It's like, I can't afford that. I am not King James. I am so sorry.

[Amy LaRocca]

I mean, that's just a. It's working on you, right? It works on me, too. Oh, my God. It works on me. So I'm like, yes, I am going to click on this email. And when I click on this email, inside this email, it's gonna tell me everything. And then I'm like, oh, not this time. And then the next email will come, like, wellness secrets. And I'm like, oh, here they are.

[Jhon Glen Hill]

What are some of the most interesting wellness treatments you tried out when you were writing this book?

[Amy LaRocca]

I definitely did a lot of, like, cold and hot stuff. So I've been in the cryo chambers. I've been in the cold plunges. I definitely, like, experimented with some of the food stuff. But to be very honest with you, I don't like messing around with food stuff. It's too close to disordered eating. And I did bite the bullet and get a colonic, which do not recommend thousand percent.

[Jhon Glen Hill]

Oh. Oh, okay. Because people have told me, they're like, I do it. It's great. You should do it.

[Amy LaRocca]

I think it's chasing that sort of high feeling of emptiness. There's a lot of unanswered questions and hypocrisies in wellness. So you'll spend all of your time being like, oh, my microbiome, my gut. I have to fix it. I have to fix it. And then you're like, I'm just gonna go to this place and have someone turn a garden hose up my butt. And, like, I'm like, I thought I was building my flora.

[Hadi Mwagdi]

You know?

[Amy LaRocca]

Now you're just gonna wash it all out. So, yeah, so there's a lot of things that don't add up. But I've sort of realized when it comes to the things that don't add up, the consistent factor that makes people kind of overlook things not adding up is, like, weight loss.

[Jhon Glen Hill]

Why is it that we give these things a try? You know? Like, I admit, if there's a cold plunge and a sauna, I'm gonna go back and forth.

[Amy LaRocca]

Oh, yeah, I'm in there.

[Jhon Glen Hill]

I'm gonna do that temperature.

[Amy LaRocca]

I'm in there.

[Megan Butler]

Yeah.

[Jhon Glen Hill]

Like, some of this is fun.

[Amy LaRocca]

I am not here to make anyone feel bad about anything they do. And as long as you're not putting yourself in real financial distress to do these things, do it. And then I think there's, you know, there's a sort of more sinister part of it, like, why are we taking all these supplements? Why are we so scared of the pharmaceut but so willing to gobble these partially labeled untested tablets handed to us by like influencers, not doctors, you know, so there's a lot of like, hypocrisies and things that don't make sense. But the truth is, like, there's a lot of pressure, like this idea that you're supposed to live up to something. But I think, like, also we all want to feel good and if there's a way to feel better, I think, wouldn't you want to try it? I would.

[Jhon Glen Hill]

And that's our show. We actually did an entire series about wellness. You can find those episodes in the feed and we're working hard on new episodes for you, including one about why we can't remember being babies. What's your earliest memory and how old do you think you were? Or if you're a parent, how do you feel about all the time you spent with your kid that they probably won't remember? Call 1-800-618-8545 or you can send an email to askvoxox.com this episode was produced by Hadi Mwagde. It was edited by our executive producer Miranda Kennedy. Melissa Hirsch did the fact checking and Matthew Billy engineered. I'm Jonathan Hill. Thank you so much for listening. I'll talk to you soon. Bye.

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