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Acknowledgements
Stephanie thanks Ian, Viola and Juliette, family and friends, who provided support at the time of writing this book.
City, University of London, have been generous in granting Stephanie a sabbatical, which assisted with the research for, and writing of, this book.
Chris would like to thank Luke, Kate, Amelie and Chloe, Eugene McLaughlin, Simon Susen, Barry Smart, Dan Cook, Maggie O’Neill, George and Sue Ritzer.
Stephanie and Chris would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers, who provided useful feedback on this manuscript, and the staff at Polity – including John Thompson, Mary Savigar and Ellen MacDonald-Kramer – for bringing this book into print.
Introduction
Our study of lifestyle gurus began in 2015 with the case of Belle Gibson. Gibson presented herself online as a cancer survivor. She claimed that she healed herself from terminal brain cancer by adhering to a healthy diet and lifestyle, rejecting conventional cancer treatments in favour of natural remedies. Using her blog and social media to document her experience, she created an online persona based around inspirational quotes, attractive selfies, healthy recipes and a general air of presumed intimacy. Gibson used these technologies to build an online community of over 200,000 followers. Her claims of self-recovery formed the basis of her online persona and successful global brand, with a bestselling app available on Apple, an international book deal with Penguin and series of public accolades built around her narrative of survival. Gibson’s association with Apple and Penguin gave her story a sense of legitimacy and extended her global reach. Comprised of a collection of recipes, her book and app were about more than food; they were framed more broadly under the rubric of lifestyle philosophy as guides on ‘how we should live, combating stress, achieving wellness and a healthy, wholesome lifestyle’. In short, Gibson’s products were marketed to consumers as manuals filled with ‘good advice on promoting better living’ (Barker 2014).
The moral payload of Gibson’s message was the unexamined assumption that most people do not live well and do not know how to acquire good advice to remedy the problem. Part of the appeal of Gibson’s story was that she provided many of those suffering from cancer with hope. If Gibson was able to cure herself from cancer through nutrition and adopting a healthy lifestyle, perhaps others could do the same. Her audience was comprised of those who were ill, as well as health-conscious individuals seeking to optimise their well-being. Gibson, referred to on Instagram as @healing_belle, presented herself as a ‘wellness guru’ and an advocate of clean eating. She not only claimed to adhere to clean eating principles by restricting her consumption of coffee, gluten and dairy, she also rejected conventional cancer treatments, such as chemotherapy and radiotherapy. In this respect she was distrustful of elite-professional interventions. She advocated alternative therapies, inspiring her followers to do the same.
In 2015, Gibson was exposed as a fraud. It was revealed that she never had cancer and failed to donate the $300,000.00AUD in proceeds from her book and app, The Whole Pantry, to charity, as promised. The scandal caused public outrage and prompted a series of questions: How was Gibson able to pull the wool over the eyes of so many people, including her followers and many branches of popular media? Why did the companies who promoted her products fail to verify whether she had cancer by fact-checking her claims? Why were people so willing to believe the advice of someone they followed online over established medical expertise? Our interest in exploring these questions was the impetus for writing this book. The more we considered this topic, the more we realised that the scandal spoke to a larger cultural phenomenon at play: the rise of lifestyle gurus in the digital age and, by extension, the crisis of confidence in the interventions of experts and professionals.
People go online to make sense of the world around them. Most of us use Google on a daily basis to search for mundane information: directions, transport times and weather updates. We also routinely use social media to connect with friends and social networks online. However, more than ever before, the internet is where we turn when we are lonely, concerned or afraid. Protected with the anonymity afforded by most forms of digital communication, the internet provides us with the capacity to explore many of life’s most pressing questions in secret with those whom we perceive to be just like ourselves. Without doubt, this shared experience can be extremely rewarding, providing rich emotional connections in the form of online chat rooms, support groups and forums. The interactions enabled by these technologies can also foster meaning, identity and a sense of belonging. This is especially the case when individuals feel excluded and misunderstood by their immediate community, family and friends. Whereas in former times, one might have turned to a novel or film in times of need, the internet now provides a plethora of advice and solutions to life’s eternal problems. What these media share in common is their capacity to facilitate a sense of ‘mimetic vertigo’, the recognition that the object represented also represents you (Taussig 1992). Their significance lies in the fact that they speak to the subject directly, while enabling them to reflect on their concerns at a safe aesthetic distance; achieving emotional pertinence through fusing the subject and object into a common narrative (Baker 2014). One of the key differences between novels, films and the stories documented online, is that the protagonist we read about online can speak back. The direct forms of communication afforded by social media enable users to engage in dialogic exchange with the protagonists they read about online. They can also communicate in visual form via images and videos, enhancing the feeling of proximity and intimate exchange.
Digital communication has changed the way in which people seek advice. In the twenty-first century, we are subject to more information than ever before as a result of the internet: 24-hour news channels, blogs, vlogs, forums, social network sites and a series of other online sources. One of the problems that users encounter when searching online is how to sift through the plethora of information. Much of the advice found online is conflicting and scientifically inaccurate, particularly in relation to health and well-being. Take coffee, for example. A quick Google search ‘does coffee cause …’ provides the following results: cancer, bloating, constipation, acne and anxiety. Conversely, the search ‘does coffee cure’ provides the results: headaches, hangover, constipation, cancer and cold. The same is true of chocolate and wine, which are said to be both the cause and remedy for various ailments. With such contradictory advice found online, it is no surprise that people are confused about what health advice to follow. The average person is not an expert on these topics. Most of us have neither the time nor skills to explore these claims in detail. Moreover, much of the health and wellness marketing behind this content is deliberately designed to mislead and beguile. In light of these issues, the lifestyle dilemma becomes – who to believe?
In the saturated health and wellness market, celebrity advice reigns supreme. Celebrities exercise significant influence over our lives, how we view ourselves and who we aspire to be. This is particularly the case in relation to our ideas about our health and well-being due to their associations with beauty, dieting and fitness. The detox and cleanse market, for example, has been driven by celebrity endorsements. The same holds with respect to the lucrative wellness and beauty industries. Celebrities shape the concerns of consumers and feed on their insecurities by endorsing the products and services of weight-loss and anti-ageing industries. They promote products that are not only expensive but, in some cases, useless and harmful. Much has been written on this topic about celebrity culture as a source of pseudoscience and misinformation (Goldacre 2009; Caulfield 2015; Nichols 2017; Warner 2017). Books of this kind examine and debunk the claims and promises made by celebrities and pseudoscientists in relation to health, nutrition and beauty. In the book, Is Gwyneth Paltrow Wrong about Everything? (2015), Timothy Caulfield suggests that celebrity culture is ‘one of our society’s most pernicious forces’, contributing to poor health decisions, wasted investments in useless products and services, a decreased