‘Wellness is a multibillion-dollar cult. Now I see through it’: the clean-living Instagrammer who learned to let go

Lee Tilghman entered the online world in the early 2010s, with a healthy food blog she had started in college. Influencing was just becoming a thing. When she moved to Instagram, with the rest of her generation, in 2014, and featured one of her smoothie bowls, she gained 20,000 followers overnight. “Brands began reaching out to send me products,” she remembers now.

Two years later, she quit her nine-to-five and moved from Connecticut to Los Angeles. Within a year, she gained another 100,000 followers, an agency and manager. “I was earning upwards of $15,000 a post and working with major food and lifestyle brands who’d sell out of whatever I posted about.”

Her lifestyle matched the wellness ethos, says Tilghman, 34, who lives in Brooklyn, New York. “I believed anything in a package was bad. I only ate organic fruit, veg and grains, no complex carbs. I was afraid to use unnatural cleaning products and I did intermittent fasting from 7pm to noon.”

Content was all she thought about, but her extreme lifestyle quickly took its toll. “My followers told me they loved me, but I had no time to spend with friends. Watching the response to my posts was like undergoing a performance review every day. I remember getting to 100,000 followers and being ecstatic for one day before I wanted 1 million.”

In 2018, the internet “semi-cancelled” her for putting on workshops that cost too much. “The truth is, wellness is really inaccessible,” says Tilghman. “I was publicly shamed to the point where I considered suicide.” Her “healthy” diet had also triggered an eating disorder. She took five months off, lived on her savings and checked into a treatment centre. “Social media rewards extremes and obsessions, and wellness is dangerous territory. My body was my business card and I had been afraid of gaining weight. It wasn’t just about what I was promoting but what I was hearing and receiving online, too.”

When she returned to her social channels, she ditched everything she had become known for. “Social media was still the place where I knew how to make money, so I went back, but I no longer did wellness,” she says. Instead, she began posting about her life, her dog, fashion, interiors.

“I ate properly and looked healthier, too. If I wanted candy, I ate candy. My favourite foods became pasta, sandwiches and Vietnamese. I let myself enjoy life and food and stopped living so rigidly. It was freeing.” However, it sparked a backlash from followers. “People said, ‘You go from one extreme to another.’ Some really cared but others wrote nasty things. Because I’d gained some weight, some speculated I was pregnant.”

Away from wellness, her follower count dwindled from almost 400,000 to 300,000 and her commercial rate dropped 70% . “Financially, it wasn’t nothing but it wasn’t worth it. I kept thinking about something a therapist had said – that she did not believe there was a healthy way to engage on social media. I was out of love with it.”

In 2020, Tilghman moved to New York and stopped posting for a while. “I basically ghosted my channels,” she says. “I gradually went back on, but it became normal usage, like anyone else, just with lots of followers.” Not only has she left wellness behind, she now consults in marketing, runs $40 workshops on how to stop being an influencer and has a book in the works about her time as an influencer and why she walked away.

“Sometimes I miss those easy early days when I made $20k a post, but wellness is a multibillion-dollar industry that’s like a cult. I see right through it. People on the street still say ‘hi’ occasionally and, sometimes, people will comment on my Instagram, saying: ‘I wish you’d just go back to recipes,’ but that’s like telling Bob Dylan to go back to folk music. I’ve moved on.”

• In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counsellor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org