I USED TO HAVE A GYM MEMBERSHIP. NOW I HAVE A TEAM.

I remember the weeks before my wedding, 19 years ago, as a simple kind of desperate "crunch time." The goal was clear: shed the ten pounds I’d gained eating, drinking and cavorting my way toward wedded bliss. My entire wellness strategy centered on this: Calories in, calories out.

The gyms were Equinox, Reebok, or bust.

I found a hole-in-the-wall place near my 57th Street apartment and thought I’d struck gold. I went before work, after work, sometimes on my lunch hour. I was a woman possessed, ellipticizing my way into a dress on a steady diet of fat-free butter, “light” bread, and pure grit. It was unglamorous, mildly deranged—and honestly, effective.

Somewhere along the way, the point of all of this got...reframed. Fitting into the dress? Passe. Feeling better? I think that was the pitch.

And yet here I am, paying $75 to lie on the floor while a woman with the posture of a swan tells me to “breathe into my back body.” As I do my best to slowly inhale, it becomes clear that everyone around me is in so deep they’re practically levitating. I have never felt more aware of my flaws. Spiritually, at least. My quads are fine.

I shudder to think what my younger, more impressionable self would have done with today’s menu of sweat / drop / strengthen / twist / hang / burn. Back then, there were no fitness influencers or coordinated sets. It was just me, an oversized T-shirt, a Walkman, and a wildly buff trainer named José. He pushed me to my limits, but I didn’t aspire to be him. I didn’t track my protein intake like it was being audited. I was just there to sweat, leave, go home and eat lettuce.

The real genius of today’s wellness culture is that it took the oldest game in New York—who has more, who matters more, who got there first—and wrapped it in the language of self-care.

You aren’t working out; you’re healing. You aren’t gatekeeping; you’re protecting your energy.

You know this woman. She’s the friend who earnestly brings up her functional medicine doctor four times before the appetizers arrive not because she’s bragging -- she genuinely wants everyone to feel better. That her “resource” costs $900 a session, has a three-year waitlist, and requires a blood oath is, she swears, not her fault. Also, have you tried magnesium threonate? No, not the one from Whole Foods. The other one.

I roll my eyes and yet it’s in my cart by dinner.

Fitness has become a personality. A Pilates reformer is now table stakes; saying you “do Pilates” is like saying you have a checking account. The real question is whose Pilates, whether your instructor does privates, and how many people you had to step over to get on the schedule.

Are you a sound-bather—lying on the floor while a roomful of singing bowls vibrate and everyone pretends not to wonder if it’s working?

Or are you a rage-class person—screaming your feelings into the void with twenty women at 10 a.m., then grabbing coffee like you didn’t just exorcise something before lunch?

Perhaps you’ve graduated to the EMS suit—strapped into electrodes, looking like you’re being prepped by NASA, holding a four-minute plank while a trainer who definitely judges you explains that this is equivalent to four hours of regular exercise?

(Which, if true, means you’ve basically found the ChatGPT of working out. Congrats!!)

Meanwhile, no one is really all that well. Text any of them at 3 a.m. and you'll find out you're not the only one who can’t sleep because she had a sip of wine two days earlier.

At this point, it;s so much wellness we're likely making ourselves sick. We are a generation of women with excellent practitioners, curated supplement stacks, and integrative pharmacists—and still, somehow, catastrophic cortisol. We feel guilty if we miss a workout and then pay for expensive IV infusions to recover from the stress of trying to outsmart our own DNA.

My kids think it’s “lame” to just go to the gym. To them, a gym is beneath contempt because it lacks branding. They want the experience. They want the class. You know, the one followed by a 6,000-calorie smoothie at Pura Vida and, depending on the weather, a $24 Uber. Sometimes I want to lock them in a room with a StairMaster and tell them to sweat it out while watching Law & Order—like a good, old-fashioned fight-the-scale hustler.

And look, I’m not above it. I still try to stay “athletically relevant.” I see a woman on the Upper East Side who does something for my lymphatics that I cannot explain to my husband. I have been on three waitlists simultaneously for things I do not understand and will almost certainly cancel.

Part of me loves the theater of it. The material, if you will.

But I’ve reached the point where I honestly don’t know if I do all this because it helps—or because I wouldn’t know who I am if I stopped.

Deep down, my truest self is still that perfectly disheleved gym rat rocking out on the Precor. No healing, no optimizing, no regulating—just sweating and leaving.

She, without the proprietary magnesium or the three-year waitlist, might be the most well person I know.