Krystal Heeling is the CEO of Verdant Corpora, a boutique wellness brand and, when she writes an email to her brand ambassadors, she doesn’t pull her punches. “If I catch any of you appealing to the broke and not the woke, you will no longer represent our brand,” she writes in one of her trademark missives. Holding tight to the reigns of the power Krystal wields in the world of supplements, detoxes and New Age therapies, she crisply and methodically instructs her Wellness Ambassadors on the dos and (many) don’ts of the luxurious wellness industry.
In a series of letters, Krystal responds to her team’s legitimate concerns, such as questionable supplement ingredients and lack of scientific evidence for their product claims, while always pointing out why Verdant Corpora is far more ethical than Big Pharma, an industry of profit hounds and data manipulators. Heeling’s underlings fall like flies as they unwittingly commit one solecism after another, falling short of the Paltrowian ideals to which Heeling so ardently aspires; principles that she herself cannot consistently achieve.
Yours in Wellness, Dr. Stair’s second book, is a short, incisive, humorous take on the wellness industry that you will be sure to enjoy while sipping an $11 acai-wheatgrass kombucha. As we say in the land of coffee enemas, “Bottoms Up!”
Erin Stair, MD, MPH, is the founder of bloomingwellness.com, creator of ZENBands, host of the Causes or Cures podcast and author of Manic Kingdom: A True Story of Breakdown and Breakthrough. She currently lives in New York City.