The unseen dark side of influencer culture
A former wellness influencer shares her side of the story, and why she left the wellness industry behind.
Content warning: This essay dives into topics involving eating disorders and mental health. If this is a topic particularly triggering for you, please do not hesitate to skip.
I grew up in an age where the celebrity endorsement meant everything. Taylor Swift told me to drink Diet Coke…and buy Keds. Paris Hilton told me I needed a Juicy Couture tracksuit. Oprah told me I could lose weight if I joined Weight Watchers. This type of marketing certainly worked for an impressionable mind like myself, so it was only time before the allure of influencer culture persuaded me to follow—and buy.
I’m sure it’s not a surprise to any of you that the rise of influencer culture has become quite prevalent in our world. Endorsements aren’t just meant for celebrities anymore; products are heavily marketed by creators on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube—all born form the age of bloggers where sponsored content became a huge portion of their business model. If you have enough of a following or a readership, your site (or social media page) can sell posts for significant sums of money; think thousands, sometimes millions of dollars.
Unfortanetly, while these types of posts are meant to look organic as you watch an online creator talk about why they just love to start every day with that green juice that’s simultaneously making them healthier and happier, there’s much more behind the scenes that you may not realize. Especially when it comes to the mental and physical health of the creator themselves.
Meet Lee.
I am forever grateful the ways that Substack has given me a chance to grow as a writer, including their different ways to network with other writers like myself. At a recent Substack networking event in New York, I met Lee Tilghman, a former wellness influencer turned writer, and we vibed instantly. With my passion for debunking diet culture and her passion for debunking influencer culture, let’s just say it was a match made in heaven. And today, I have the wonderful opportunity to share her story with all of you.
Lee worked as a wellness influencer from 2015 to 2019, publishing content on her Instagram as well as her blog Lee From America. She posted all of the usual things you would expect from a wellness influencer — healthy meals, clean and green products, and her beautifully zen apartment. From the outside, it seemed she had it all. But for Lee, being a wellness influencer was her way of “turning her eating disorder into a career.”
At her peak, Lee posted for almost 400,000 Instagram followers where she constantly shared her “healthy” life; pictures of frothy mugs of matcha, colorful plates full of produce, fasting experiences, red light therapy, and more.
“You name a wellness trend, I did it,” she said. “It got out of control. I took it to the extreme. But it was my job.”
After years of working barely with a break (she remembers one break in her four years of influencing, which lasted just a week or so), she decided to take a hiatus in 2019 — and found her eating disorder “got really loud.”
Lee decided to get treatment while she lived in Los Angeles, gaining a deeper understanding of the connection between wellness, diet culture, and eating disorders.
From there, Lee committed to making a change. She moved to New York (to an apartment with barely any natural light, an act of defiance to her influencing days), and started writing about her experiences publicly.
Eating disorders can develop from an obsession of being healthy.
I admit, until recently when I started researching about health and wellness, I was completely blind to the different facets that eating disorders can take. Lee’s story helped me to put language to a problem that I think a lot of people suffer with; an obsession with trying to be healthy.
In Lee’s case, she deals with orthorexia. It’s defined as an obsession with proper “healthy” eating, according to the National Eating Disorder Association. Although it is not officially recognized as an eating disorder in the Diagnostics and Statistical Manual, with the rise of influencer culture and the ever changing stats on how wellness influencing affects mental health, there’s a good chance this term will commonly be used by many.
Lee explains that although she was at risk after dealing with an eating disorder in her teens, she continued to do wellness diets because at the time, she felt they weren’t considered real diets. “But they’re all just diets,” she said. “Even if they’re eliminations and protocols and detoxes and resets and cleanses, those are all just a fancy word for a diet.”
The thing is, health and beauty sells. The wellness industry as a whole costs upwards of $4.2 trillion dollars, with the United States holding the largest market size at $52.5 billion. The personal care, beauty, and anti-aging sector make up the largest part of the market, with $1,038 billion in sales.
“It’s seen as sexy,” says Lee. “Rich people who have disposable income want the fancy cleanse. They want the organic pressed juice. Because they believe it’s better for their kids, better for the families, better for themselves.”
Lee even found herself avoiding grocery stores known for having healthy options, like Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s. Instead, she would exclusively shop at high-end grocery stores or farmer’s markets, and had her grains and spices shipped in from brands that marketed as being the “highest quality” product. Her obsession with wanting to make her diet and her health perfect is what brought her to a place where she was even avoiding produce known for having higher amounts of sugar — like red apples, sweet potatoes, and bananas.
“Oat milk was considered a treat, because it was higher in sugar,” she says.
Even outside the wellness industry, research shows that influencer culture has such a negative impact on the mental health for many — like increased feelings of anxiety, insecurity, negative mood, and low self esteem.
“Take care of you!”: Wellness brands market their products as a means for self care
It’s all about living your best life. Working a busy job? Exhausted from taking care of your family? Buy this [insert brand] product, and it will fix everything. Or at least that’s what the wellness industry has trained us to believe.
“It’s really using this messaging that makes you believe you can’t do it alone,” Lee says. “A lot of these products have things that your body doesn’t need to survive, but [the marketing] makes you feel like you need it.”
Influencers are a massive part of marketing plans for corporations these days. The global influencer industry costs $16.4 billion dollars, and continues to rapidly grow. These corporations budget millions of dollars in order to work with people like Lee, who make money by posting about a product online.
Plus, the bigger the brand, the higher the pressure. Lee found when working with bigger brand names that the process was a lot more intense; her posts would go through dozens of rounds of edits through multiple different people.
“It takes advantage of people’s insecurities, especially for women who have to take care of people so often,” she says.
Yet ultimately, behind the scenes, while Lee was posting about products encouraging others to take care of themselves, she found that her lifestyle wasn’t taking care of the person that mattered most: herself.
Figuring out her own way
Since returning back to her Instagram, Lee has been honest with her followers about why she wouldn’t be posting about wellness anymore. Yet she found that making money via her social media became rather complicated; getting brand partnerships that aligned with her new values wasn’t sustainable anymore.
“I wasn’t sure how else to make money,” she said. “I mean, all influencers have the same career path: start a makeup brand, start a clothing brand, or some other brand. Start a podcast. Or continue to accumulate followers and partnerships. I didn’t want do any of that.”
In 2020, Lee gave up influencing completely and stopped posting ads for brands. She picked up a 9 to 5 job working for someone else, but after some time, she knew her voice and her story could make a difference for others. So now she’s working to establish herself as a writer, including her Substack called Pet Hair on Everything, an honest space where Lee writes about the intersection of wellness, social media, diet culture, and eating disorders.
Her story left me really wondering what goes on behind the scenes. Of course Instagram isn’t the reality; influencers say that all the time. But what’s the real story behind the scenes, and how many of these influencers are struggling?