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n a brief history published in 2010,
the New York Times traced the
modern use of the term wellness to
the 1950s, just after the World
Health Organization equated health
with “physical, mental, and social well-
being.” It’s a trend, and even a movement,
that’s steadily gained traction ever since,
expanding beyond the realm of “hippies in
the Berkshires eating health food,” says
Elizabeth Beier, executive editor at St.
Martin’s, and into the mainstream.
Riding the still-cresting tide, publishers
are releasing books that combine an array of
topics to embrace an ever-broadening defi-
nition of wellness. Diets are for losing
weight, but also for balancing hormones
and combating stress. Fitness and a con-
certed spiritual, or even magical, practice
are stepping stones to emotional health.
Feeling empowered is inextricably linked to
feeling physically and emotionally powerful.
There is no health without happiness, new
wellness titles say, and there is no happiness
without self-care.
Habits for Humanity
As Deb Brody, editor-in-chief of nonfiction at
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, puts it, “Wellness
means everything in your life now.”
In Tiny Habits (HMH, Dec.), B.J. Fogg, a
behavior scientist at Stanford, defines this
everything as the desire to “eat healthier, lose
weight, exercise more, reduce stress, get
better sleep”—plus be better parents and
partners, and be more productive and cre-
ative. Readers can achieve these goals by
making small adjustments to their usual
routines, using what Fogg terms “behavior
design.” He told PW in a recent q&a, “The
behavior model is, in some ways, a break-
through that is like the answer to the riddle.
And once you see it, it’s like having keys to
a car.”
Fogg’s plan embraces a Venn diagram of over-
lapping fields, including health, psychology,
and self-help. “Anything that contributes to
making you feel better in all aspects of your
life—that’s what people are looking for in
these books,” Brody says.
Jessica Cording, a health coach and regis-
tered dietician, takes a similarly holistic approach in The Little
Book of Game Changers (Viva Editions, Jan. 2020), focusing on
Health Books
improving overall health by reducing stress
and anxiety. Cording suggests adjusting daily
habits and technology use; learning the dif-
ference between good and bad carbs, and
making meal plans; and finding time to
meditate and de-clutter.
Like Cording, who contributes to the
popular wellness website MindBodyGreen,
health journalist Pilar Gerasimo, founding
editor of the health and fitness magazine
Experience Life (143,000 Facebook followers),
has a built-in fan base that editors see as
critical to marketing wellness books. In The
Healthy Deviant (North Atlantic, Jan. 2020),
Gerasimo maintains that “most people have
become habituated to some form of chronic,
low-grade misery.” The only way to break
the cycle of unwellness, she writes, is to
deviate from a reliance on crutches such as
“symptom-suppressing drugs” and instead
experiment with mindfulness, movement to
build strength and flexibility, and what she
calls “real,” or unprocessed, food. She lays
out the benefits: “increased energy and
resilience, radiant health and vitality, and a
dramatically expanded sense of what’s
possible.”
At DK, the series A Little Book of Self-
Care comprises four titles, gift-size and
pastel-illustrated, each focused on a single
health-minded practice. In January, Self
Reiki by Jasmin Harsono and Sleep by Petra
Hawker join Breathwork by Nathalia
Westmacott-Brown and Trigger Points by
Amanda Oswald, both of which pubbed in
September. Together, the books add up to
what DK Life managing editor Dawn
Henderson calls “a 360-degree approach to
modern wellness.”
Similarly, in The Wellness Remodel (Harper
Wave, Apr. 2020), HGTV host Christina
Anstead and nutritionist Cara Clark offer a
prescription for what the publisher terms
“full-body wellness.” The book presents “a
practical approach to mind/body/spirit
wellness, addressing everything from nutri-
tion and movement to meditation, gratitude,
and spiritual practice,” says Harper Wave v-p
and editorial director Julie Will. “Readers
are increasingly aware of the importance of
addressing mental health in a category that
has tended to focus more on the body and conventional
thinking about physical health.” Anstead shares the emotional