Healthier than thou
Is the new holier than thou
The purity culture I grew up with in my Seventh-day Adventist upbringing was about much more than sex. It was about your entire body: what you ate, how you moved, what you wore, what you drank, and how much self-control you could demonstrate over your unruly little flesh prison. How PURE could you be?
We were fat-shaming and detox cleansing way before the iPhone was invented. Seventh-day Adventists were the OG wellness influencers, making our own soy milk before Gwenyth Paltrow was born. And some of our weird behaviors were genuinely good for us, which complicates this conversation and makes the behaviors insidous.
I'm still, at 45, a lacto-ovo vegetarian. Not because I love animals or because I've carefully weighed the environmental impact of factory farming. I'm a vegetarian because I was taught so young and so thoroughly that eating meat was morally wrong. Somewhere deep inside me, eating an In and Out cheeseburger feels like a personal flaw.
Purity culture didn't just teach you what to do with your body. It taught you that what you do with your body says something about what kind of person you are. We did not abandon this idea; we simply secularized it and then made a shit ton of money off of it. Moral superiority is a hell of a marketing strategy. Predatory wellness influencers convince people that their habits make them better than you, then conveniently sell you the products you need to catch up.
Healthier than though is the new holier than though.
Now we have clean eating and dirty foods, detoxes and collagen, cold plunges, supplements, protein goals, sleep scores, steps, and endless data about whether we're being good at having a body. Most of those things aren't inherently harmful. I eat vegetables. I exercise. People, in general, should probably eat more fiber. But this is not my first rodeo. The harm happens when health becomes evidence of virtue, when thinness signals discipline, illness suggests you didn't try hard enough, or eating the “wrong” thing requires some kind of penance.
When I was 10, I prayed for forgiveness for not treating my body like a “temple” after eating chocolate chip cookies.
Seventh-day Adventists took eating disorders to a whole new hellish level.
Leaving purity culture behind means recognizing that our bodies aren't evidence of how good we are. They're not morality projects with rubrics and grades. They're bodies, and we get to live in them. You didn't work this hard to overcome the devastating effects of purity culture just to jump into the predatory wellness culture net.
There isn't an affiliate code on earth worth your agency.
Yours in rage and love,
