You're Not Ugly, You're Sick

How wellness influencers latched onto our obsession with hotness

Warning: the below article isn’t about eating disorders but does touch on topics which may be upsetting for someone recovering from an ED, or anyone who is sensitive to frank discussions of body image, so be aware before you read. Thank you!

I’m about to admit something extremely embarrassing: in 2013 (because of course) I was convinced I had a nebulous “gluten intolerance.”

It all started when I was in my early twenties, and I realized that I was chronically bloated. I had been that way for a while, and for the most part I just assumed it was something everyone experienced (I’m half Jewish, after all.) But I couldn’t help but feel irritated by one detail, which was admittedly driven by vanity. In the mornings, I had a cute, nipped-in waist and flat stomach. By the end of the day, my waist had disappeared and I could have passed for four months pregnant. It wasn’t an issue of weight loss, because my nighttime stomach wasn’t soft or chubby—it was hard and bloated.

Given that my husband (then boyfriend) and I were very involved in local nightlife, I was sick of starting my nights out with a bloated stomach. I swear I looked hot this morning, I found myself saying as I tried to squeeze my belly into one of my many Bebe bandage dresses. Sometimes I would skip dinner just to avoid the bloat (this strategy also helped me get drunker on less alcohol and save money. Yes, my life used to be very different.) But ultimately I had a hard time knowing what to do. I wasn’t trying to lose weight. I was trying to lose this mysterious sickness that coincidentally happened to make me look less hot.

I saw a doctor for this issue, and all she told me (without running tests) was that I might have had low stomach acid which was preventing my body from digesting at a normal pace. But her only suggestion was to buy some kind of OTC pineapple enzyme, which I tried (it didn’t help.) Next, I turned to the Internet, where I discovered what my problem was: chronic inflammation and a gluten intolerance.

I ended up here in part because I saw Miley Cyrus show off her weight loss, which she said was achieved by cutting out gluten. I wasn’t looking to lose weight, but one thing I noticed about her “after” bod was that her waist looked really defined and un-bloated. A quick Google search showed that gluten was an inflammatory agent, and to a lesser degree this was true of most dairy, all grains and all sugars other than fruit. One thing led to another and I wound up on paleo diet forums to address my “chronic inflammation,” which I also believed was the cause of my mild acne.

Granted, almost everyone on the paleo forums was trying to lose weight, and I wasn’t. But a lot of the women reported that since getting on the paleo diet, they were less bloated, they had better skin, and they only gained weight in the “right” places. They posted photos of themselves at the beach with ample breasts and hips, flat stomachs, and credited their lack of inflammation for their weight distribution. I distinctly recall one woman’s perfect hourglass figure posted next to her daily breakfast, which included lots of steak and salsa. I realized that the “you can’t spot reduce” thing might be a myth. Maybe I couldn’t spot reduce per se, but could I spot-gain? Could I engineer my diet so that I only gained in hotness-acceptable locations?

This left me with a very specific idea—there were good foods and bad foods. Good foods (vegetables, fruits, meats, fish, healthy fats) would make me gain weight in my ass and boobs. Bad foods (carbs, sugar, grains) would make me gain weight in my stomach. I know this makes no sense, and I know that my body type is genetic (I’m pear shaped and will basically always gain weight in my legs and butt first). But to this day, if I find myself reaching for a carby treat, like a muffin or piece of cake, there is a tiny voice inside me that tells me it will go straight to my belly—whereas if I were to eat fried chicken, it will go to my ass. By the way, I’m a millennial, not a boomer, so I believe fat going to my ass is a good thing.

I became completely insufferable about food in a way that was somehow more annoying than a woman on a restrictive weight loss diet. When my Greek in-laws made lamb, I obnoxiously asked them if the lamb was grass fed, because cornfed lamb was inflammatory. As we were planning our wedding, I insisted we only serve wild salmon instead of farmed salmon because of the “toxic omega 6s” (once I saw the price tag, I changed my mind.) To avoid any kind of inflammation or bloat, on the morning of my wedding I ate plain scrambled eggs, and then made a smoothie of pineapple, mint and parsley for lunch. As we left for our honeymoon, we stopped by a Buffalo Wild Wings at the airport and I dutifully ordered a singular grilled chicken breast while my husband enjoyed wings. So much inflammation, I thought to myself. I was, of course, acting crazy, but it didn’t raise alarm bells for anyone aside from simply being annoying because I was eating a good amount of calories, especially healthy fats.

Something finally snapped me out of this. Around the mid-2010s, “flat tummy tea” debuted, propped up by influencers like the Kardashians. This tea aimed to do exactly what I originally wanted—keep my tummy flat—but something about it seemed undeniably grifty. How exactly was a tea supposed to keep my stomach flat? I did some research and discovered that among all the “natural” ingredients it boasted, one stuck out to me: senna. Senna was an extremely strong laxative, even if it was technically natural. I knew this because I took it once in college for constipation, believing that it would basically work like peppermint tea (spoiler: it did not. I will never take senna again.) Senna was thrown into the flat tummy tea description along with innocuous things like licorice and fennel. Basically, this was tea that would make me shit bricks.

Using laxatives as a weight loss strategy is a form of bulimia by the way, but y’all aren’t ready for that conversation!

The discovery of this tea (and the fact that it was a scam) sent me down another rabbit hole: what if most of the things I was doing for my “health” were just about wanting to be hotter? And moreover, what if they were completely made up? After all, even on my new diet I still had bad days where I was bloated. Typically when that happened I assumed I had inadvertently eaten something inflammatory. But what if I was making all of this up?

Arguably, that was just the beginning. Over the past ten years since my foray into proto-wellness, the wellness industry has exploded. It’s mostly on Tiktok and Instagram, but I can’t scroll on Twitter for three seconds without seeing some new supplement or food that’s supposed to revolutionize your health (and have the accidental effect of making you look like a flushed Viking maiden with massive jugs.) It’s not just for women, too. Men want to be hot (it seems the manosphere over the past decade has been slowly coming to terms with the revolutionary fact that women are attracted to good looks). The emergence (or popularity; arguably these things aren’t new) of terms like “mogging” and “mewing” (cue Dateline voice: the teens are calling it mewing…) show that being hot is more important than ever for men. And how better to be hot than to fix the systemic issue: the fact that you aren’t ugly, you’re sick.