Susie O’Brien: All this wellness can’t be healthy
WELLNESS advocates love to tell us how to live our lives but an avalanche of unsolicited advice can’t really be healthy, writes Susie O’Brien.
Susie O'Brien
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WHEN it comes to ridiculous celebrity daily routines, actor Meg Ryan takes the cake. She wakes up and pretends to be a horse for two hours. When I wake up, I don’t act like a horse, just eat like one.
Fellow actor Jennifer Aniston starts the day sipping on a special blend of adaptogens, veggies and collagen peptide, which gives her skin a seriously enviable glow.
I don’t even know what adaptogens are but I do get an enviable glow from waking up still drunk from the night before.
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And there’s Aussie wellness blogger, nutritionist and author Jessica Sepel who says you should “tune into your digestion and ask yourself what you truly want to eat”.
So what happens if the answer is salted caramel Tim Tams rather than oven-baked kale chips that taste like air-dried cow dung?
Sepel says she wants people to “quit dieting” and “find freedom”. Yet her healthy eating regimen involves starting her day with two glasses of filtered water followed by a sip of hot water with freshly squeezed lemon juice. A sip? Just one sip? Here she is banging on about the evils of fad diets and she’s measuring her water intake by the sip? Really? Sepel also enjoys a “shot of apple cider vinegar”. I tried it. It tastes like horse wee.
Sepel’s lunch is organic chicken and lots of leafy greens and she turns off her phone so she can enjoy a “mindful eating experience”. I once had a mindful eating experience where I dreamt I had the degustation menu at Vue de Monde and Shannon Bennett had cut off his greasy ponytail. Aaah, that’s bliss.
After dinner, Sepel has a social media blackout from 8pm and then she puts her legs up against the wall for 10 minutes. I tried that once in a yoga class and ended up kicking the man next to me in the face because I nodded off, not realising my hoo-haa was on public display.
I find it bizarre that health nuts like Sepel are so adored when all they seem to do is substitute normal food with expensive, hard-to-get show-off ingredients. How is that progress?
Sepel says her workout routine focuses on “daily movement and listening to my body”. My routine focuses on daily bowel movements while hoping no one is listening.
She also relaxes by going for a “long walk in nature”. I once got lost at Doncaster Shoppingtown and ended up in Laura Ashley surrounded by flowered dresses. Does that count as a nature walk?
It seems successful wellness gurus like Sepel appear not to practise what they preach. She says she spent a week at an Ayurvedic clinic in India which taught her that “silence is so healing” and “solitude is so healthy” but she’s constantly updating her 183,000 Insta followers.
She might want less screen time, but her whole business is screen based. In fact, although Sepel talks a lot about being mindful, spiritual and connected, she admits she’s had to sacrifice her social life and even having children in order to run her business. “It’s become increasingly hard to switch my mind off because my work goes everywhere I go.”
Sepel even admits that you don’t make $5 million a year — her company’s revenue in the past financial year — without putting in some pretty serious hours.
“The hardest thing (about the business) is that it’s just 24/7. I work non-stop every day and through weekends at the moment,” she says.
“What people don’t see is that I’m usually in my office from 8am until around 8pm or 9pm. Even when I’m not there, I’m thinking about it 24/7.”
So where does she fit in all those breathing spaces, nature walks and screen-free zones?
To give Sepel credit, she has a Bachelor of Health specialising in Nutritional Medicine — unlike many of her contemporaries on the health food scene. Sepel wants women to “make time for self-love”, which doesn’t involve battery-operated devices but repeating positive affirmations such as “I’m grateful for the abundance in my life”.
No doubt she’s grateful there is an abundance of people willing to pay $40 for a bottle of 60 capsules to make their hair shinier.
Sepel’s wholefood philosophy has more silly ingredients, complicated rules and judgy judgments than all the fad diets she rails against in her books and blogs. There’s also a lot of preaching.
To “recover from a binge or an overindulgence”, Sepel says the key is “forgiving myself and trusting my body to break the food down and get back on to the journey of healing”.
I recover from a binge by getting right back on that horse. I forgive myself immediately and trust my body to do it all again the following Friday night.
My journey of healing is a world where there are no young leggy women with hair extensions telling me to go on a journey of healing.
Susie O’Brien is a Herald Sun columnist
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