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I Can’t Afford Your Wellness, but My Self-Care Is Good Enough
Being healthy shouldn’t feel financially out of reach
I’ve always known it was important to be “healthy.” But for much of my life, I didn’t know how to get there.
Growing up in the South, “health” was most often framed around spiritual wellness. As far as my elders were concerned, as long as there was time to regularly pray and read the Bible, I’d achieved the only self-betterment that mattered.
Don’t get me wrong, my family found it sinful to move through the day without having a “good breakfast.” But those meals looked nothing like the food pyramid I was taught to follow at school — at home, we ate mat-o-meal and Hot Pockets in the morning — but they fed me nonetheless.
Classes at school reaffirmed the importance of an active lifestyle and balanced meals. But those things felt more like theory than practice. Getting out of my chair at school without permission was a great way to be punished. Eating healthier meals seemed to take more time and cost more, so I didn’t ask for them. It wasn’t until I was out of high school that I realized I needed to treat my body better.
But when I started researching ways to become healthier, I was bombarded with images of thin, calorie-obsessed white women that didn’t speak to me, and instead, left me on the outside looking into a culture I didn’t understand.
Calorie counting sounded horrible. And paying a monthly fee to run on a treadmill never felt right. I wanted a healthy lifestyle, but in order to achieve that, I was told I needed to spend money I didn’t have on supplements, expensive workout clothes, and alkaline water. The way wellness is marketed today makes it seem like being healthy is a luxury. People want to be healthy, but the systems in place make out of reach. And in the meantime, we suffer.
“Many people, like myself, have been socialized to believe health is an unnecessary expense.”
The Department of Health and Human Services says less than 5% of Americans receive 30 minutes of physical activity a day. And this lack of exercise in the United States takes a social, mental, and physical toll…
