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Does Workplace Wellness Need a Shift?
For those who follow the Gregorian calendar, January often brings a wave of resolutions and reinvention, but for many, it feels overwhelming rather than energizing. Amid “new year, new you” messaging, workplace wellness culture often intensifies, echoing broader trends like the resurgence of thinness, biohacking, and performance tracking, and reinforcing the idea that productivity, health, and bodily worth are inseparable.
Workplace wellness programs shape how people feel in their bodies, how they are treated by others, and what becomes normalized at work. From step challenges and meditation apps to aesthetic expectations and inaccessible benefits, many initiatives reflect dominant ideals rather than the realities of diverse teams.
It is no surprise, then, that many people feel excluded, exhausted, or unseen by wellness efforts that claim to support them. When wellness is narrowly defined, it can reinforce systems of harm, including racism, ableism, fatphobia, and colonial legacies, while leaving the structural drivers of stress, illness, and burnout untouched.
This guide helps workplaces unpack the deeper roots of today’s wellness culture and how those legacies show up in policies, programs, and everyday norms. It offers a systems-centred path forward that prioritizes care, dignity, collective well-being, and belonging across bodies and identities, with a focus on workplace structures and practices, not individual bodies, health conditions, or medical choices.
But Wait, Can We Even Talk About Bodies at Work?
Yes, but at the systems level. Commenting on individual appearance or health is inappropriate. But ignoring bodies altogether can obscure how workplace structures reinforce bias, exclusion, and stigma.
We can name fatphobia, diet culture, ableism, and colonial beauty standards. We should examine how workplace policies, dress codes, benefits, and leadership norms impact people’s sense of self and access to care. What we cannot do is treat someone’s body size or health status as a proxy for professionalism or worth.
At the same time, workplaces have a responsibility to check in when someone seems unwell, with care, not assumption. A trauma-informed, body-neutral check-in might sound like: “I have noticed you have not felt like yourself lately, and I wanted to check in. Is there anything you need or support that would be helpful right now?”
This approach centers dignity and consent. It opens the door to meaningful support without speculation or surveillance. Workplaces should ensure they have clear, trusted pathways to accommodations, inclusive care, and manager training that avoids pathologizing people’s bodies or emotions.
Wellness should not be a trend. It should be a sustainable culture of inclusion and care; one that supports every body, across size, race, gender, and ability.
Who Defines Wellness, and Why Does It Matter?
Wellness is often presented as universal and objective, but in practice, it is shaped by power, access, and dominant cultural values. In recent years, the wellness landscape has prioritized control, optimization, and appearance, reviving narrow body ideals and reframing them as markers of discipline, longevity, and success. These narratives do not exist in a vacuum; they are shaped by industries and institutions that benefit from defining which bodies are deemed healthy, professional, and worthy of investment.
When thinness, self-surveillance, and productivity are positioned as indicators of wellness, systems of racism, ableism, fatphobia, and colonialism are reinforced. Racialized, fat, disabled, and gender-expansive people are more likely to be scrutinized and excluded under these standards, particularly in workplace settings where wellness is tied to performance, leadership potential, and “culture fit.”
Current wellness trends, including the medicalization of weight loss and the commodification of “healthy lifestyles,” reveal how wellness is increasingly shaped by desirability and access rather than care or collective well-being. Who gets support, whose needs are prioritized, and whose bodies are framed as problems are deeply political questions. Examining who defines wellness, and who is left out, helps organizations move away from framing health as a personal issue and toward more just, inclusive, and care-centred approaches.
The Commodification of Wellness
The North American use of the term “self-care” was popularized in the 1950s by Dr. Halbert Dunn. Many refer to him as “the father of the wellness movement,” though he was certainly not the first to engage with or promote wellness. Practices of wellness and self-care have deep roots in Black, queer, and Indigenous communities, where they are grounded in collective survival and resistance. Over time, these practices have been commercialized and rebranded by the dominant culture, often stripped of their cultural meaning and sold back through a lens shaped by colonialism and white supremacy.
Since the 1980s, the wellness industry has grown into a global market valued at over $1.5 trillion. Through this process of commodification, wellness has become associated with a narrow ideal: a white, thin, non-disabled body. Thinness has been repackaged as a lifestyle of discipline, efficiency, and desirability, positioning certain bodies as inherently healthier or more successful. Public figures who meet this ideal can monetize their image, while those outside it often face exclusion or invisibility.
This market-driven approach to wellness drives up the cost of legitimate health supports and creates access barriers for many groups experiencing marginalization. Additionally, profit-driven companies often appropriate cultural practices, from yoga to plant medicine, flattening their significance and reselling them as trends. The prevalence of expensive yoga studios with predominantly white teachers, for example, reflects how colonial dynamics persist in Western wellness spaces.
These norms and narratives inevitably shape how wellness is presented at work. Without reflection, organizational wellness programs risk reinforcing the same ideals, prioritizing thinness, equating productivity with health, and offering support accessible only to some team members.
Beyond Western Wellness: Exploring Indigenous Understandings of Wellness
We can trace the concept of wellness back to ancient civilizations. Across cultures and eras, wellness has taken many forms and meanings and has continually evolved. In the late 1980s, Black feminist Audre Lorde sparked a conversation about self-care in her essay collection, “A Burst of Light.” She believed self-care was a political act. For people experiencing marginalization, self-care pushes back against a society and culture that does not always care for them.
Before Lorde’s interpretation and popularization of self-care, many Indigenous worldviews had long understood wellness as relational and collective, emphasizing the deep connection between culture, community, land, body, mind, and self-determination. Indigenous author Robin Wall Kimmerer suggests that tending to the land and our relationships within an interconnected ecosystem promotes collective well-being. By practicing reciprocity, care, and mutual responsibility, we extend well-being beyond the individual.
Moreover, many Indigenous understandings of wellness differ significantly from dominant Western models. For example, movement is often understood as a form of community connection or cultural practice rather than as a tool to control or reduce body size. Indigenous Peoples have also consistently prioritized wellness through advocacy for healthcare equity. Colonial medical systems have frequently created barriers to care, and there are well-documented instances of neglect, harm, and abuse within healthcare institutions. These realities shape how wellness is experienced and accessed today.
Across these traditions, wellness is closely tied to collective care and resistance to oppression. However, these relational and justice-oriented perspectives are absent from contemporary Western wellness culture, which tends to emphasize individual responsibility, consumption, and bodily optimization. When Indigenous wellness frameworks are discussed, they are too often framed through deficit-based narratives rather than as sources of knowledge and leadership. Workplaces have an opportunity to learn from these strengths, engaging Indigenous perspectives with respect, humility, and accountability.
Moving beyond Western wellness means challenging the idea that self-care is primarily about commodities, productivity, or achieving a specific body ideal. It requires examining how dominant wellness norms are rooted in colonialism, fatphobia, white supremacy, and ableism. Wellness is not about replicating what is currently considered “in” or conforming to a norm to be valued. Instead, it invites workplaces to ask how care, dignity, and belonging can be cultivated collectively.
What Does It Mean To “Decolonize” Wellness In The Workplace?
Decolonizing wellness means understanding the complex histories behind dominant wellness practices and recognizing how colonialism has shaped whose bodies, traditions, and approaches are centred, commodified, or erased. It also means recognizing how colonialism has created narrow beauty and body standards that outline acceptable and desirable bodies, stigmatize fatness, and equate thinness with health, discipline, or worth, and working intentionally toward alternative ways to support people’s wellness.
Moving forward means challenging dominant wellness norms, including those shaped by whiteness, thinness, and ableism, and including everyone in the process of re-establishing “wellness” to reflect their needs, values, and lived experiences through intentional, systems-centred wellness programs.
Here are some hallmarks of a systems-centred approach to wellness in the workplace
- Addressing root causes of burnout, not just offering yoga classes
- Designing benefits and space with all bodies and identities in mind
- Valuing rest, care, and connection, not just output and optimization
- Recognizing how colonialism, capitalism, and ableism shape wellness narratives
- Building trust, inclusion, and accessibility across every level of the organization
Recentering Workplace Wellness: From Individual Responsibility to Collective Care
Rather than focusing on how individuals can work harder, optimize themselves, or conform to dominant norms, workplaces can shift attention to how organizational systems, expectations, and environments contribute to stress, exclusion, and burnout.
Increasingly, people are calling out the limitations of wellness programs that focus on individual self-care, like fitness incentives or mindfulness apps, while ignoring the root causes of workplace harm. A systems-centred approach involves examining workload, culture, policies, benefits, and physical or digital environments to build structures that support collective well-being.
One of the most effective ways to begin is by listening. Use surveys, open conversations, or listening sessions to learn directly from team members about their experiences and what support would be most meaningful. When designing a wellness assessment or feedback tool, consider exploring the following areas:
- Do your current wellness offerings meet your team's needs? Evaluate whether your benefits, programs, and everyday practices are accessible and meaningful across a range of identities and lived experiences. Ask what additional supports would make a real difference in people’s lives. This could include expanding wellness stipends to cover therapy, rest, culturally grounded healing, or community-based care. Centring care and inclusion in your offerings builds trust and demonstrates that wellness is not limited to physical fitness or individual performance.
- Are your healthcare and wellness providers truly inclusive? Do your benefits include access to fat-positive, trauma-informed, disability-inclusive, and culturally responsive care? Are mental health services accessible and affirming for racialized, queer, and neurodivergent team members?
- How does your dress code align with inclusion and self-expression? Rigid expectations around professionalism often reinforce classist, racist, gendered, and size-based norms. Consider whether dress codes unintentionally police bodies, limit comfort or mobility, or restrict cultural and gender expression. Adopting flexible and inclusive dress policies can reduce stress and promote dignity and belonging.
- Do team members feel safe and supported across their identities? Ask whether people trust that your organization will protect them from discrimination or harassment related to race, gender, body size, disability, health status, or expression. Assess whether your reporting processes feel accessible, credible, and responsive, not just in policy, but in practice.
- Are physical workplace environments welcoming to a wide range of bodies and access needs? Examine whether furniture, rooms, and facilities are safe and comfortable for people who are fat, very tall or short, use mobility devices, or have non-normative body proportions. Design exclusions can cause real harm, including bruising from tight chairs, pinching from armrests, or injuries from unstable seating. These are not minor discomforts; they are issues of safety, dignity, and full participation at work. Be sure to evaluate beyond desks: include hallways, bathrooms, break rooms, and meeting spaces.
- Are your digital wellness tools inclusive and aligned with your values? Review digital offerings such as fitness apps, wellness platforms, or engagement challenges. Do they equate health with thinness, productivity, or constant self-optimization? Or are they flexible, trauma-informed, and supportive of disabled, chronically ill, neurodivergent, and fat team members? Inclusive tools should reflect diverse experiences of well-being, not reinforce narrow ideals.
- Does your approach to business travel consider wellness and inclusion? For team members who travel for work, consider how transportation, lodging, and destination culture may create barriers or risks. This is especially relevant for fat, disabled, racialized, immigrant, and/or gender-diverse people. Build inclusive accommodations into travel planning, and evaluate both physical and emotional safety, not just logisticts.
- How are people with different ability levels supported in practice? What does your accommodations process look like from the team member’s perspective? Are requests easy to make, timely to implement, and free from unnecessary scrutiny or gatekeeping? Identify any barriers to access, follow-through, or trust that may discourage people from seeking the support they need.
- Does your workplace recognize rest as essential to wellness? Reflect on whether your organizational culture rewards overwork or constant availability. Are breaks, time off, and mental health days normalized and encouraged? Is there meaningful flexibility for team members navigating chronic illness, caregiving responsibilities, or neurodivergent energy cycles? Supporting rest is not a perk; it is a requirement for sustainable wellness.
Learning with Care and Compassion
Working toward more equity-centred wellness is a team effort; it involves caring for one another, and this (un)learning process can take many forms.
- Provide educational resources and events that expand perspectives on body liberation. Where possible, centre voices with lived experience of fatphobia, disability, and marginalization, and collaborate in ways that are respectful and non-extractive. Engage and support thought leaders who expand on body liberation perspectives, and collaborate to share their knowledge across your organization.
- Merge wellness and education initiatives that celebrate cultural traditions such as dance, food, meditation, and spirituality as meaningful expressions of care, connection, and belonging rather than tools for productivity or body control. Engage in cultural awareness campaigns by collaborating with and supporting diverse cultural communities to learn directly from them.
- Reimagine your organization’s wellness communications to acknowledge and address systemic oppression that contributes to a lack of well-being, rather than reinforcing self-care as the only pathway forward. This includes shifting away from appearance-focused, productivity-driven, or consumption-based wellness messaging. A great way to start this conversation is to use Feminuity’s Inclusive Language Guide.
At times, we’ll need to call “in” our workplaces, team members, and even ourselves to challenge the harmful practices and frameworks perpetuated by wellness and diet culture. Calling “in” should be done with care, consent, and capacity. We may need to confront fatphobia and sizeism and engage with the collective, rather than individual, wellness models.
When body or diet-related comments arise, respond with empathy rather than correction. A simple acknowledgement, such as “That sounds really hard,” can validate someone’s experience without reinforcing stigma or trying to fix it. Avoid reframing body concerns through appearance, worth, or reassurance about beauty.
Instead, normalize body diversity and focus on affirmations unrelated to appearance. For example: Your ideas matter; you make our workspace feel safe; I value your perspective; and I appreciate how you show up for the team.
These practices should be used with everyone, not only fat team members. Dismantling harmful body norms requires shifting how we assign value in the workplace.
We are also accountable for our own learning. If you make a harmful comment, pause, reflect, and take responsibility without defensiveness.
Conclusion
Rethinking wellness at work is more than a rejection of thinness culture or performance-driven ideals; it’s an invitation to reimagine how we care for one another. When wellness is reduced to individual responsibility, appearance, or productivity, it reinforces harmful systems and leaves many team members behind.
A systems-centred approach offers a path forward. It shifts the focus from managing bodies to transforming workplaces, through inclusive policies, collective care, accessible benefits, and cultures that honour the full range of human experience.
This is ongoing work. It requires reflection, accountability, and deep listening. But organizations that commit to equity-centred wellness will not only build safer, more supportive environments, they’ll also promote the conditions where everyone can belong, contribute, and thrive.
ⓘ NOTES AND GLOSSARY
This guide does not constitute legal advice. Workplaces should ensure all policies align with applicable human rights and employment laws and seek legal review of formal workplace policies.
The language we use shapes how we think, communicate, and build systems. These definitions reflect a values-based approach to wellness, inclusion, and liberation, ensuring clarity, respect, and alignment with equity-centred practice. This resource uses terms from equity and social justice frameworks to explain systemic influences on workplace culture. Their use here is intended for educational context and to support inclusive organizational practices, not to promote political positions.
Body Liberation: Body liberation is freedom from cultural and structural systems that label some bodies as more worthy, healthy, professional, or desirable than others. It emerged from the work of the fat acceptance and civil rights movements in the United States in the 1960s and beyond. Most of the efforts to advance body liberation have been led by people who experience marginalization, especially fat, Black, Indigenous, and queer women. The term is also closely linked to disability justice, which challenges similar systems of exclusion and stigma. While some people use “body liberation” and “fat liberation” interchangeably, others view them as related but distinct.
Decolonizing Wellness: The practice of examining and unlearning how dominant Western colonial frameworks have shaped ideas of health, productivity, and “well-being,” often prioritizing individualism, control, and profit over care and collective survival. In workplace contexts, colonial wellness norms manifest as rigid productivity standards, Eurocentric notions of professionalism, and wellness programs that prioritize self-management while overlooking structural harm. Increasingly, wellness is framed through optimization, resilience, and personal responsibility, narratives that obscure histories of racialized exploitation, medical racism, and unequal access to care. Decolonizing wellness invites organizations to question whose knowledge is centred, whose bodies are disciplined, and whose ways of caring are dismissed, making space for approaches rooted in equity, relationality, cultural knowledge, and collective well-being.
Diet Culture: Diet culture refers to a set of ever-shifting ideas about food and bodies that promote the belief that lower body weight automatically equals health, and that foods can be clearly categorized as “good” or “bad.” In workplace contexts, diet culture often manifests as weight-loss challenges, fitness tracking apps, casual food moralizing, or praise for thinness disguised as discipline or professionalism. Recently, diet culture has re-emerged through trends like GLP-1 drugs, the return of thin ideals, and the framing of self-optimization as moral virtue. These narratives reinforce hierarchies about which bodies are seen as healthy, valuable, or competent. This makes it essential for organizations to adopt weight-neutral, trauma-informed, and equity-centred approaches to wellness.
Fat: We use “fat” throughout this guide as a neutral descriptor, in the same way one might use “Black” or “queer.” Many in the fat community have reclaimed the word to signal power, pride, or identity. Many also reject medicalized terms like “obese” and “overweight,” which are often used to justify discrimination or deny care. Within fat community spaces, people may use terms like “small fat,” “mid-fat,” or “super fat” to describe lived experience. In the workplace, engaging respectfully with people’s chosen language, especially in wellness communications, accommodations, and policies, supports dignity, clarity, and trust.
Fat Liberation: A social movement seeking to end anti-fat bias across social, cultural, and institutional systems. It calls attention to the systemic harm fat people face in areas such as healthcare, employment, education, and public space. The movement has roots in the same communities that sparked the body liberation movement, especially fat, queer, disabled, and racialized people. In workplace settings, fat liberation means actively rejecting fatphobia and designing programs, spaces, and practices that affirm all body sizes and create true belonging.
Wellness Culture: Wellness culture in the workplace refers to the shared ideas, policies, values, and programs that support team members' health and wellbeing. But without reflection, these programs often reinforce dominant cultural norms, equating productivity with health, thinness with discipline, or wellness with conformity. Diet culture heavily shapes wellness culture, leading to environments where larger bodies are stigmatized, wellness is aestheticized, and participation is limited to those who can afford or access narrow ideals. A more inclusive wellness culture centers care, flexibility, autonomy, and dignity for all team members, regardless of body size, ability, or health status.
About the Authors
This blog was created collaboratively by members of the Feminuity team.
Give Credit Where Credit's Due
If you wish to reference this work, please use the following citation: Feminuity. "Rethinking Wellness at Work: A Guide to Building Systems of Inclusion and Care"
