When Life Changes

Wellness culture, career pivots and the life changes I've been navigating.

Life is made up of a whole lot of really small decisions that we have to make regularly. And from time to time, we’re faced with much bigger ones.

Decisions like, should I end this relationship? Should I have a baby? Should I make a pivot in my career that I spent years building?

I’ve done many a pivot in my life and, fortunately, always made it out alive, even when said pivots were really, really challenging. I fundamentally believe that everything always works out in the end, but there’s still so much fear anytime we make a change. Especially one that upends everything you’ve ever known and tied your identity to.

And so, here we are. Let me elaborate on some of the big shifts I’ve been making in my life, personally and professionally.

A stew of cognitive dissonance

For a very long time I was floundering about in a stew of cognitive dissonance. It’s an uncomfy place.

Cognitive dissonance happens when your actions don’t align with your values. It’s holding two contradictory beliefs at the same time.

Let’s backtrack.

In 2012 I became a holistic nutritionist and shortly thereafter began building an online presence via YouTube and Instagram. Over the course of the subsequent decade, I felt intense passion and drive. I was living my purpose. I was pursuing my dream. I was building a career in a field I believed in through and through. I was trying to make the world a better place by inspiring others to live well.

Somewhere along the way, in 2020, I started questioning my beliefs within the wellness space and realized I’d been struggling with orthorexia. At its core, orthorexia is an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating. I have a blog post sharing my entire story as well as a recent video on YouTube talking all about it. This realization led me to a doozy of an identity crisis. All through the years, my beliefs as a purveyor of wellness culture ideals became who I was, and all of a sudden, it started crumbling away.

What exactly is wellness culture?

Wellness culture asserts that certain food and lifestyle choices, as well as a certain type of body, is how we attain ultimate health. It adopts many of the principles of diet culture, typically promotes natural healing and alternative health modalities over conventional medicine, and emphasizes individual choice and responsibility over social determinants of health (which actually have a much bigger impact on health outcomes). A lot of the time, it assumes that everyone has the time, money, and resources to adhere to strict and sometimes very expensive wellness practices.

The shiny promises and beautiful aesthetics of wellness culture can lure people into a never-ending quest for perfect health. You’re never quite healthy enough. This can quickly turn into issues like disordered eating and feelings of moral superiority. It can also lead people to disregard sound (and sometimes even life saving) medical advice due to mistrust.

Seeing through a new lens

I spent years of my life not only scoffing at foods or ingredients that weren’t up to my standards, but also denigrating just about anything that went against my beliefs. Health anxiety fuelled a lot of the beliefs I had, too, and I think wellness culture offers a sense of comfort and control over the things we fear most.

It’s now 2024, which means I’ve spent four years working on healing my relationship with food and playing ping-pong in my head with the dozens of conflicting beliefs I started to form as my outlook on food and health broadened.

It took me a long time to shed my old way of thinking and replace it with a new lens. To this day I’m still finding more layers to peel away. When wellness culture grabs hold of you, it holds on real tight. Its creepy crawly hands are insidious and unsuspecting. I had to wiggle my way out of the hold it had on me.

It was a whole web of a mess, really, in my head. I’d bounce between the attachment I had to the identity I’d known for so long—a holistic nutritionist with a passion for all things natural—and the newfound perspectives I was rapidly gaining around not being so obsessed with following a strict “clean eating and living” lifestyle. It wasn’t only about letting go of a fixation with it (although, as I mentioned, orthorexia certainly is a part of my story), it was also about actually opening up my mind to the realities of the industry that I’d been part of for so long.

No wonder it was such a murky, convoluted psychological mess. I had to untangle years of beliefs that were slowly no longer serving me, let alone come to terms with the fact that many were flat-out false (like gluten being basically poison, “natural” is always better, or vegetable oils should be avoided at all costs). I started feeling agitated by some others in the wellness space, because so much of what is being spread online is massively problematic and misinformed. My disordered eating alarm sounds a lot more nowadays as I see it’s more pervasive than I ever knew. I found it helpful to unfollow several accounts and replace them with evidence-based professionals instead to help keep me grounded.

My cognitive dissonance grew bigger and bigger as I continued to hold on to some old beliefs (because it’s what I knew! It was comfortable! It was who I was!), or at least try to twist them and scrunch them up and squish them to fit into my newly forming belief and value system. But it just wasn’t really working well. I mean, when you have to force things, does it ever work? I knew I needed to make a change but I genuinely did not know how or what direction to even go. I’d lost a lot of the passion I once had and didn’t know what my message or my mission was or what I even believed in anymore. I started seeing a therapist again because my anxiety was at an all time high and I was plagued with bouts of depression because of how truly confused and lost I felt.

Eventually, the whole ordeal became so draining and soul-sucking that it was no longer possible for me to hold on any longer. The old knitted scarf had unraveled far too much. There was no putting it back together. It was time to knit a new one.

Time for a change

It happened rather abruptly earlier this year, at least in the way that I was honest with myself. That’s really all it was; being honest. I think I journaled it out, or maybe talked about it with my husband when we were laying in bed one night, and certainly so when I was in a therapy session a week or two later.

I realized that the changes I so desperately needed to make were in how I showed up online and the kinds of topics I shared—and ultimately, to create some space between myself and the wellness sphere. For a time I thought perhaps my new mission in life was to bust the food myths that float around the internet, but that quickly overwhelmed me. I found that what I actually wanted, was to just mentally step away from so much of the “healthy” and “clean living” stuff that had been on my mind near constantly for more than a decade, and put my energy into other things. Not to say that I’d never speak about any health-related subject ever again, I just wanted to pare it back a bit, and if anything, make sure I approach it as thoughtfully and unbiased as possible when I do.

I’m not anti-wellness now or something, to be sure, or against choosing the more natural or organic option. Living and eating well—for myself, my family, our society as a whole—is very important to me. I still enjoy green smoothies and avocado toast and my nightly rosehip oil as much as the next person. But I’m also no longer above choosing the regular jar of mayonnaise instead of the one made with avocado oil *gasp*. My approach to food and health has morphed into one that seeks more balance, appreciates nuance, and thinks far more critically. It’s no longer something I approach in a neurotic kind of way. I no longer wish to optimize the minutiae of my existence like I spent so many years trying to do. I’ve shed many of the food fears I had and swapped out false nutrition information with evidence-based facts. Food and wellness doesn’t have to be complicated. I don’t want it to be. And so for me it no longer is.

I found that what I was gravitating towards was incorporating more of what I’ve always found joy in, like simple and intentional living (which for me means a lot of what I’m talking about today—adhering to our values, listening to our intuition, and making intentional choices to nurture the kind of life we want to live). I wanted to spend more of my time on activities that were always special to me, like making art and writing. More matching my outsides to my insides. And so much more happiness as a result.

Living life on your own terms

Once I got honest with myself, the biggest weight was lifted from me. I could finally let go of the pressure I was putting on myself to keep going the way I was used to. It felt right and it felt good and it felt freeing, because I was aligning my actions with my values. I was course-correcting. I was pivoting. I was paying attention to what I really needed: to make a shift, to make a change.

I think one of the biggest advantages I’ve found in healing my relationship with food and having an awareness of the ways wellness culture can shape our behaviour, is that I have so much less anxiety and do things on my own terms now. Whereas before I had no chill and operated under what I believed were the correct set of healthy-life-rules, I now feel like I can just… live my life. I can eat a turkey sandwich, or go for a walk, or buy groceries, or go to the bathroom, or play with my daughter, or pour myself a glass of water (or wine), without the underlying need to make sure every step I take is of utmost rectitude, as if I might spontaneously combust otherwise. I have craved so much more of the ordinary in my life, which is a whole other topic. Perhaps for a future Substack post!

I exist now with a rekindled love and appreciation for what propelled me toward striving for a meaningful life so many years ago. Our values shift and evolve over time as we travel through life and I think it’s important to reevaluate what’s most important to us every now and again. That way, we can make little pivots in our actions and choices that are most suitable to new wants and needs.

That’s where the real magic happens.

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Thank you so much for reading. If you have any questions for me, leave them in the comments below. Maybe I’ll do a follow up post if there’s anything in particular you’d like me to touch on further!

xo Meghan