Yearender 2022 | 5 must-read health and wellness books

Books remain the most immersive medium to understand how our bodies work and how we can change ourselves in pursuit of that “good feeling”. (Photo: Cottonbro Studio via Unsplash)

The amount of attention, hype and knowledge around wellness—and “feeling good”—in the last couple of years, has surpassed anything we've seen in recent history.

The pandemic, of course, has much to do with it. In 2022, the year we shakily re-embraced “normal”, wellness truly became an index of the good life.

In a study published in 2021, McKinsey predicted the future of the $1.5 trillion global wellness market through a survey of roughly 7,500 consumers in six countries. Consumers in every market they researched reported a substantial increase in the prioritization of wellness over the past two to three years. The study estimated an annual growth of 5-10 percent for this market.

Closer home, market research company IMARC published a study in 2022, which concluded that rising incidences of chronic lifestyle diseases, along with growing awareness towards healing practices are primarily driving the health and wellness market in India. It predicted that the Indian health and wellness market will exhibit a compound annual growth of 5.45 percent during 2022-27. Beauty and personal care products hold the largest market share right now, with skin health exhibiting a clear dominance in the market. It also concluded that West and Central India largely drives this market.

Data aside, there’s a bewildering variety of opinions, advice and new findings being on social media as well as OTT platforms like Netflix, in which the number of documentaries related to health and wellness are growing every year.

Often, the best way to navigate the plethora of information and advice on offer is to be ourselves aware and up-to-date about our own bodies, feelings and limiting beliefs and narrow down what we seek. But books remain the most immersive medium to understand how our bodies work and how we can change ourselves in pursuit of that “good feeling”.

This year, a dizzying spectrum of topics related to healing and how to future-proof our minds and bodies came out in the form of books. Here are five that stood out:

1. The Song of the Cell by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Pulitzer-winning author and oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee’s 2022 book makes us go deeper in the healing orbit—into the singularly versatile and still mysterious building block of living organisms, the cell.

Combining personal experience of navigating the therapeutic frontiers for cancer as well as the novel coronavirus with research that goes into the history of cellular research and ongoing experiments, Mukherjee provides a bible for understanding not just the mechanisms of our bodies, but also how complex mind-body interactions are ultimately a function of our cellular biology.

He warns of radical experiments to change our biology to halt ageing.

Mukherjee’s scientific temper is on view on every page, as he emphasizes again and again, how the coronavirus reminded medical establishments that there’s still so much that we don’t know.

A must read for anyone with interest in medical non-fiction in accessible yet beautiful literary prose.

2. The Gospel of Wellness: Gyms, Gurus, Goop, and the False Promise of Self-Care by Rini Rapahel

This, in a nutshell, is what this eye-opening book by American health journalist Rini Raphael is about, in her own words: “A self-care nation, though arguably one that still lacks the fundamentals of well-being.”

It helps break down many myths around the bewildering universe of wellness gurus and “fitfluencers”.

Raphael finds little reliable evidence behind diets that wellness gurus and dieticians claim to be backed by science. “Food has become an utterly fraught ordeal for the average woman,” she writes. Diets are a “Fear Factor episode that never ends. If you’re to take extreme wellness gurus and fad diets at face value, you cannot consume any sugar, gluten, pesticide residue, dairy, ‘chemicals,’ and more.”

She makes the controversial claim that chemical pesticides infecting vegetables and fruit are over-emphasized, because the amount of pesticide is minuscule.

Raphael delves incisively into the marketing techniques used by so-called wellness companies and finds a remarkable level of manipulative cynicism. Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop line is a prime example. “Their health advice always seems to converge to one end point: buy more stuff,” writes Raphael.

Writing with authority, empathy and rigorous journalistic research, Raphael narrates a disturbing story of how a good thing can turn on its head when overdone and overstretched.

3. Ritual by Vasudha Rai

In her beautiful first book Glow, Vasudha Rai laid out four tenets of beauty in Ayurveda: vitality, clarity, radiance and peace. She goes on to categorize and explain the foods that would help attain those tenets. In her new book Ritual that was published in 2022, she makes the process of gaining natural vitality and radiance a romantic enterprise.

The book is dividing into two parts: moon and sun; or am and pm rituals. It tells those interested in and invested in the idea of using natural ingredients like ghee, coconut oil, neem and several other oils and herbs, how to optimise the natural energies of the day and night.

Know all about sunbaths, sound healing, cleansing kriyas, beautifying masks, massages, breath work and navel therapy and let this book be a guide for your own bespoke ritual.

4. Bitter-sweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole by Susan Cain

This book is a soulful and literary follow-up to Whitney Goodman’s Toxic Positivity: Keeping It Real in a World Obsessed with Being Happy, another of this year’s noteworthy wellness books.

Susan Cain’s debut, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking (2012) established her as a powerful and empathetic voice in the way she dissected cultures obsessed with conventional primers of success. She shattered myths about what it means to be introverted and urged her readers to recognize that communities suffer when introverts are cast aside, igniting conversations about communication, leadership, and how to value the quiet among us.

In Bitter-sweet, Cain challenges a more deeply entrenched idea in all societies and cultures today: Painful emotions are useless, shameful, and should be suppressed. Cain asserts that sorrow, longing, and grief are the authentic gateways to joy, love, compassion, and soulful connections.

In Cain’s words, bittersweet is “a tendency to states of longing, poignancy, and sorrow; an acute awareness of passing time; and a curiously piercing joy at the beauty of the world.”

With a mix of case studies, personal anecdotes, and spiritual movements, she writes about powerful examples of beauty spawned from embracing melancholy, and offers advice for how to move through loss, allow pain to inform all kinds of leadership, and come to terms with the inevitability of death.

5. Take It In: Do the Inner Work. Create Your Best Damn Life, by Giselle La Pompe-Moore

In a span of a few months since her book Take It In came out in March 2022, Giselle La Pompe-Moore became synonymous with redefining spirituality for millennials—appearing regularly in podcasts, magazine spreads and on Instagram.

Pompe-Moore is a trauma-sensitive spiritual guide and teacher based in London. Using personal anecdotes, easily doable exercises and practices and other practical tools, her book emphasises the need to do the inner work—and according to her, that doesn’t mean buying a ton of expensive oils or vegan supplements.

Increasingly, we see ourselves as our Instagram bio, as the new-age girlfriend or husband, the millennial boss and so on. Pompe-Moore writes that when we look for ourselves in those roles, we see ourselves through some lens of perfection or the other. Through the tools that the book offers, she promises that if we do the inner work, we don’t “become” something, but return to who we are underneath all the layers that adult life imposes on us, and it clears our blocks and empowers us to be what we want to be.

I love the book’s n0-nonsense, no-jargons approach, and its smart, logical take of the limits of spirituality as well as its liberating aspects.