Like most wellness trends I’ve poured time and money into over the years,I was neck-deep in freezing water on a rooftop in West End for mostly arbitrary reasons.
The face of cold water immersion therapy,Dutch extreme athlete and ice bath enthusiast Wim Hof,as nature intended.Supplied
There’s a purported benefit to this activity. A promise of “improvement” and “drastic” change,an empowered mind and energised body to be unlocked if only I can ignore the physical pain.
There have been times when there’s not much I wouldn’t have done in the name of self-improvement. I’ve had a long and sometimes rocky relationship with wellness culture as far back as the ’90s in suburban Brisbane.
I grew up during the peak of the weight-loss industry boom,an era filled with low and no fat products,fad diets and SlimFast shakes. My mum went to Weight Watchers,Jenny Craig was a household name,and the thin,white beauty ideal reigned supreme.
By the time the internet was moving beyond dial-up speed and I was head down inCosmopolitanmagazine,I was dipping in and out of disordered eating patterns and obsessed with eliminating all traces of fat from my body.
“I’ve got early memories of[finding] those FatBlaster tablets,” dietician,exercise physiologist and University of Queensland professor Lauren Ball tells me.
“I was a kid and I remember thinking like,‘what is this? Why would we do this?’”
Ball grew up in Sydney and moved to the Gold Coast to study in 2008,about the time I moved there. We both witnessed a potent burst of health and wellness trends during the decade that followed. “Everything has come across my desk:raw foods,clean foods,juice cleanse,low-carb diets,I’ve seen it all,” she says.
If high-fat foods were our greatest fear in the ’90s,carbs were next to be demonised in the ’00s. While working at a gym in 2010,I learned to avoid starchy carbs (the ones that threatened to derail all weight-loss efforts) and the windows of the day when it was safe to eat “clean” carbs.
Self-made health and fitness influencers were quick to capitalise,including Gold Coast entrepreneur Ashy Bines who,despite having no nutritional qualifications,started selling Clean Eating Guidelines (an eating plan later deemed risky and nutritionally unsound by the Dietitians Association of Australia). There was also Freelee the BananaGirl,a vegan influencer who made headlines with her diet of 50 bananas a day.
Commenting “Bring back Souvlaki Hut” under posts for Ashy’s Clean Eating Kitchen,which opened in Mermaid Beach around the corner from where I lived,is the closest I’ve ever come to online trolling.Brook Mitchell
Friends and co-workers cycled through diets such as keto,paleo,the carnivore diet,raw eating,liquid fasting,juice cleanse,master cleanse,even something called the baby food diet,where adults replaced meals with products designed for infants.
And who could forget SkinnyMe tea,a product that could help you shed kilos via bouts of diarrhoea. Is it any wonder eating disorders?
“If I were to be optimistic,it’s all coming from a place of appreciating health,” Ball says,presumably to the exclusion of laxative teas. “We’re talking about someone who wants to be healthier than what they are now.
Celebrity chef turned conspiracy theorist Pete Evans was criticised for co-authoring a paleo diet book for babies which was later dumped by its Australian publisher. A masthead once described him as “craggy-faced”,which is something I still laugh about.James Brickwood
“So many of these fads and trends are driven by wanting to look good naked,which we know is different to being healthy.”
Living at the Gold Coast,I started to notice the emergence of “wellness”. Though tied to health,wellness was a more intangible concept that covered everything from mental and social health to sleep and work-life balance.
The Global Wellness Institute defines wellness as “the active pursuit of activities,choices and lifestyles that lead to a state of holistic health”. InHow Do We Know We’re Doing It Right,British journalist and author Pandora Sykes writes about just how far this category can stretch. “Wellness now comprises anything and everything that makes us look and feel good ...
“It’s jade eggs up your noony,BulletProof coffee,celery juice,transcendental orgasms,turmeric lattes,pink Himalayan salt lamps,activated kefir,gratitude journals,colouring books,detox cleanses,face masks,perineum sunning,placenta pills,chia seeds,matcha powder,selenite wands,alkaline water…”
It’s also a largely unregulated industry with an of $US4.3 trillion in 2020.
One of my first memories of a commodified form of wellness was the arrival of sensory deprivation therapy (also known as float therapy),about 2015. You’d climb into a dark pod,lie back and float your way into a transcendental state.
Brisbane business duo Jeremy Hassell and Tim Butters tried flotation therapy during this period,on the recommendation of a friend. They enjoyed it,minus the closed pod and plastic-chair wind down afterwards.
City Cave founders Tim Butters (left) and Jeremy Hassell (right) launched their first flotation wellness centre in Fortitude Valley in 2016.Supplied
“There was all this talk of stress and burnout and all these terminologies emerging around wellness,” Hassell says. “But there wasn’t really an offering out there that I could see other than your typical Endota or day spas in hotels.
“Me and Tim kind of put all the pieces together and made a prediction that people were going to need to find urban escapes where they could step out and foster their health and wellbeing.”
It was the right idea at the right time. In 2016,they launched their own take on flotation therapy,opening the first. It’s grown into a franchise that spread to 70 locations and turned over $70 million in 2022. Their next stop is the US,where they hope to open 3000 centres over five years.
I ask Ball what she makes of the commodification of wellness we’re seeing today. “If I’m being positive and I think about the Byron Bay way of living,for example,while many people mock it,these are people who are valuing their own health and turning it into a lifestyle.
“They’re almost stepping out of the rat race of big cities and saying,‘this is how I want to live my life’.”
Health and wellness culture isn’t as embedded in Brisbane’s fabric as it is in Byron Bay and the Gold Coast – yet.
In Ball’s opinion,we’re yet to see the industry reach its full potential here. “Fast forward 10 years and I think we’re going to be even more obsessed with our health.”
It felt disingenuous to write about flotation therapy without trying it,so last night,I went to my first session at City Cave in Paddington. “Just go into it with an open mind,” Hassell told me. “And just see how you go.”
Flotation therapy is said to help reduce stress and anxiety,and immerse the body into deep relaxation.City Cave
Leaning into the pool filled with 400 kilos of epsom salts,I was ready to enter a deep meditative state. It never quite came.
Instead,I spent the first 10 minutes on a ridiculous thought train about the animatronics inLake PlacidandJaws before worrying I hadn’t inserted my ear plugs properly and was going to irritate the eardrum I perforated last year.
After 20 minutes,I started to feel motion sick,possibly worsened by the excessive amount of Jatz I ate an hour before my float.
This morning,I stood in the bathroom and rubbed an ice cube in small circles on my face,a de-puffing ritual I learned from an interviewee last year. Did you know you can now buy a tool that helps you do the same thing,but costs $34.95?
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