How To Be Well

by AMY LAROCCA (Knopf, 2025)

“How to Be Well sets out to capture the depth and breadth of the wellness invasion—its fads, its legitimate practices, and its so-called cures. Larocca details the impressive variety of forms wellness can take: ingesting supposedly magical super-ingredients (ashwagandha, matcha, hyperlocal honey), chasing spiritual highs from fitness classes (SoulCycle, Peloton) . . . . Larocca does a good job of both explaining the wellness industry and ferreting out its scammier corners—the way that, for example, a variety of cleanses, clean-eatingprograms, and fasts are almost indecipherable from disordered eating.”

—The Atlantic

“Ms.Larocca, in a series of mostly funny but occasionally scathing chapters, describes how the wellness industry developed, what it has become, its occasionally sensible ideas and its many . . . . Ms. Larocca, a longtime fashion journalist, is at her best when lampooning the wellness industry’s excesses.”

—Wall Street Journal

"Larocca parses fads and trends, clean beauty and athleisure wear, the gospel of SoulCycle and the world according to Goop. She weighs the advantages and disadvantages of micro-dosing and biohacking. She too goes to Italy, where she attends a Global Wellness Summit featuring a spandex and sneaker fashion show and a presentation on ending preventable chronic disease the world over. . . . When Larocca goes deep, as she does on self-care, body confidence and sex positivity, she’s at her best — authoritative and witty, personal without being chummy . . . . And finally, refreshingly, she’s honest about the money at stake for the wellness-industrial complex.”

—The New York Times

“In her new book, How to Be Well, Amy Larocca dismantles the trillion-dollar industry that has made health feel both aspirational and unattainable. With clarity and precision, Larocca examines how wellness became less a matter of care and more a marker of status—sold to women as both cure and obligation . . . . Larocca examines the wellness industry through a mix of reporting, historical analysis, and personal experimentation . . . .She is especially attuned to the contradictions: that functional medicine can offer insight and promote pseudoscience; that self-care was once a radical act of resistance for women and is now a marketing slogan for bubble baths.”

—Harper’s Bazaar

“Writer Amy Larocca asks what's really behind all the promises of this industry in her new book, How To Be Well. In it, she dives into detoxes, colonics, infrared wraps, sweat lodges, wellness apps and supplements to figure out what is real and what's really just good marketing. What she uncovers isn't just a collection of trends but a vast and revealing system shaped by our beliefs about health, status, gender and worth. She's asking, who does this culture of wellness really serve? Who does it leave behind? And why, even when we see through the sales pitch, we still buy in.”

—Fresh Air, NPR

“How to be Well covers everything like catnip to me: juice cleanses, dubious diet advice, capitalism and goes deep on the ritualistic and religious aspect-devotion!— that comes with the buying and selling of "self-care" wanted to talk to her about where we are with wellness, a subject I clearly need to keep processing. Larocca understands both how zany and how insidious this world is that reads as both a satire and an exposé, but never, crucially, made me feel like I was to blame for seeking out these things and wanting to believe.”

—Marisa Meltzer, Substack

“Journalist Amy Larocca has spent seven years making sense of it all, and her book, How to Be Well, is out today. Despite its skeptical subtitle, Larocca understands that “wellness culture is too big for us to be either completely for or against it.”

—The Meteor