How the Wellness Industry Unintentionally Reinforces Body Anxiety
By Marisa Gundermann-Lunai
When Health Has a Certain ‘Look’
I recently had a conversation with a Pilates instructor. She’s strong, incredibly fit, and passionate about helping people move their bodies. Yet she admitted that she sometimes feels like a fraud simply because she lives in a bigger body.
That conversation stopped me in my tracks. It captured something important: even a woman who devotes huge amounts of time and energy to moving her body can still feel like she doesn’t measure up – not because she isn’t fit, but because she doesn’t fit the image we’ve been conditioned to believe is what health looks like.
Have we become so used to seeing health represented in a certain type of body that we struggle to recognise health when it looks different? It made me incredibly sad. As a Body Image Coach, I help women heal their relationship with their bodies, food and exercise – but in a world where the lines between health and appearance are so blurry, what markers can we rely on?
This conversation stayed with me because it raised a bigger question: oftentimes the things sold to us as tools to gain health are really tools to change our appearance or mould our bodies, to simply ‘fit in’.
I would love to create a space to separate the two: health and appearance.
Women often believe that once they reach a certain appearance goal, they can finally exhale. I’m sure you’ve heard, or maybe even said yourself:
‘Once I am more disciplined and lose weight, I will find the love of my life’
‘If I change my appearance I will feel more confident and start the group exercise class’
‘When I have reached my bikini body I will go to the beach with my friends’
‘The constant food noise will stop when I finally become disciplined’
What all of these thoughts have in common is the belief that once we change how we look, we’ll finally allow ourselves to live: to be happy, to feel confident, and to go for what we really want.
The desire to change our bodies is often not really about the body itself. It’s about what we believe that change will give us: belonging, confidence, acceptance, freedom and permission to take up space.
Why do these thoughts arise? Because we believe our looks are tied to our worth. Being worthy of being a fitness instructor, in that instance, doesn’t have much to do with skill. It has to do with appearance.
Are We Pursuing Health, or Are We Pursuing Acceptance?
Being healthy isn’t always measured by internal markers – instead, it gets benchmarked against appearance, against numbers (aka BMI) and against socially acceptable norms.
So how far, as a society, are we willing to go in our pursuit of the perfect body, disguised under the language of health?
The Tools Change, but the Pressure Remains
Throughout history, the tools have changed, but the desire to fit a narrow body ideal has remained. In the 1950s and 1960s, amphetamines were widely prescribed to women, marketed as a solution for weight loss and increased energy, at a time when they were expected to manage demanding roles at home. Crazy, right?
In an attempt to be ‘good’, we follow detoxes, diet trends, juicing, wellness optimisation, intermittent fasting, diet pills and the current rise of GLP-1 medications, along with so many other trends being sold to us as solutions that will solve our longing for belonging and acceptance.
The question is not simply whether these tools work, or whether they can be beneficial in certain contexts, but what is driving our desire to use them?
For decades the message that thin is more attractive has equally morphed into the message that thin equals health.
Healing the Relationship With Your Body
For women who want to heal their relationship with their bodies, while still holding onto the belief that health has a certain appearance, this becomes incredibly difficult to untangle.
For example, two people might engage in the exact same behaviour, but the relationship underneath that behaviour can be completely different.
Movement can come from a place of enjoyment, strength and connection with our bodies. Or it can come from fear, guilt and the belief that our bodies need to be controlled. From the outside these actions may look identical, but internally they are very different experiences.
A healthy body is one that is loved.
A healthy body is one that is looked after through nourishing, regular food that fuels us, supports our hormones, helps recovery after injury and lets us experience life to the fullest.
A healthy body is one that is moved with joy and genuine care, listening to its aches and pains instead of pushing through, and understanding the signals that it is craving movement when our head might say: not today.
A healthy body is one that isn’t a project, but a home and a partner.
And a healthy body relationship starts not with the next diet or detox, but with a woman healing her relationship with her body from the inside out.
The Work Is Deeper Than Knowing
Understanding this intellectually is one thing, but changing the relationship we have with our bodies is another. For many women, healing body image requires more than knowing that diet culture exists; it requires learning how to rebuild trust with themselves, their bodies and their own definition of health.
The next time you do something labelled ‘healthy’, it may be worth pausing and asking yourself:
‘Is this coming from genuine care for my body?
Or is this coming from a desire to change my body so I can feel more accepted?’
Because perhaps the question we need to ask ourselves is not only ‘How can I become healthier?’ but also ‘Am I pursuing health, or am I pursuing acceptance?’
If You’re Struggling With Your Body Image
If this article has made you stop and think about your own relationship with your body, I've created a free 6-question interactive Body Image Quiz to help you explore where you might be getting stuck.
It’s free, practical and designed to give you something useful to take away with you.
And if you already know that you want deeper support to heal your relationship with your body, food and movement, you can learn more about my 1:1 Body Image Coaching.
Originally published in GOOD Magazine on 13 August 2026.
© 2026 Kokon Coaching | Created by Marisa Gundermann-Lunai.
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