The LA Years: Green Juice and Guns in the Grocery Store… and Hailey Bieber’s Smoothie

It is very funny to me that LA is associated with this “health-nut, green juice, wellness” stereotype. Like everyone does yoga and drinks juices and meditates and is focused on wellness. In my experience, everything about Los Angeles was pretty antithetical to my idea of health and wellness.

I know I run a baking blog and obviously love to indulge in good food. But I am generally a healthy person, and I know what it takes to be healthy. I found it incredibly hard to maintain basic wellness in LA. The ways I focus on wellness are: working out (mainly running), eating lots of vegetables and balanced meals, and spending time by myself for mental health.

Running should have been easy in LA. It should be easy everywhere. Usually, everywhere else I’ve lived, you just walk out your front door and start running. But in LA, just running around is not an easy endeavor. A mile run around the block of my apartment led to encounters with more than I wanted to face on any given day. Let’s just say: it’s hard to reach a runner’s high flow state when you’re dodging human feces on the sidewalk, and wondering whether you should cross to the other side of the street because the car in front of you with its door open is clearly someone’s primary residence. (I’m not a total safety nut who believes they are constantly in danger, but I am a single woman who lacks upper body strength, so I follow some basic safety protocol. Unfortunately, that protocol did not support a run around the block.)

So, in lieu of just walking out the door, I would go to trails to run. I had a good trail in Griffith that I ran pretty consistently for a while, but it became hard to plan, and just added extra layers of logistics to my running. (See my previous essay on traffic.) It was a trail near work, but that meant I had to always pack running clothes and change at work, and oftentimes I was racing the sun setting. It was during the winter where my routine fell off, because the sun would set by 5, when I was off work at 4. Or, when I worked the night shift, I couldn’t exactly run right before work. And then running on the weekends meant driving 20-30 minutes each way. (I also one time saw a literal dumpster fire on that trail… Nothing like seeing black smoke billowing up in front of you while you’re running a 5k!)

There was a trail near my apartment, but it was a hiking trail up a literal mountain. I hiked it a lot! It was nice! And I definitely got some cardio benefits from it. But I certainly wasn’t going to be running it, and it took a long time to get to a point with a view to make it worth it. 

And what if I tried something other than running, you say? Perhaps a gym? Fat chance. That would have set me back hundreds of dollars a month. I looked into gyms with classes, like a boxing gym, and quickly stopped that line of Googling when I was seeing prices like $200/month (without the per-class cost). TWO HUNDRED A MONTH? That’s $2400 a year just to be allowed to pay more for classes. There’s so many boutique and niche gym options in LA, but all of them would cost thousands a year to be a part of. I shudder to think what a yoga or pilates studio would cost. Needless to say, I would have needed a far bigger salary if joining a gym was going to be on the table. And that’s assuming that the logistics of driving to the gym weren’t exhausting and too time consuming to do regularly.

On to food. I don’t believe that smoothies and green juices are the secret to health. Healthy food does not have to be blended combinations of “superfoods” and random “serums” But if you did believe that those were the secret to health? Get ready to pony up $20 a pop. 

The worst offender was Erehwon, the bougie grocery store that’s famous for being ridiculously expensive. I splurged for a smoothie there during my last week in LA, and it was, admittedly, quite tasty. It was called “Hailey Bieber’s Strawberry Glaze Skin Smoothie.” Which is a ridiculous name. And I can’t believe that they are trying to market this smoothie as being good for your skin? I don’t want to think of all the people who are buying these, believing they are miracle smoothies, when they actually don’t have $20 to be spending on a smoothie. I don’t think Hailey Bieber has good skin because she drinks smoothies. I think she has good skin because it’s her job to be pretty and she hasn’t experienced true stress in years.

The ingredients are: “Malk Organic Almond Milk, Organic Banana, Organic Strawberries, Organic Avocado, Organic Dates, Organic Maple Syrup, Vital Proteins Vanilla Collagen, Vanilla Stevia, Sea Moss, Zuma Valley Organic Coconut Cream, Driscoll’s Organic Strawberry Glaze.”

That’s too many things for a smoothie! Is the sea moss supposed to be the thing that makes your skin “glaze”? Must we describe beauty trends with food terms like glaze? It’s just so crazy to me that this was LA’s idea of wellness. 

And if you aren’t trying to seek the answer to all health problems through smoothies, even just going to the grocery store in LA adds its own extra layers of unnecessary stress and inconvenience. I could walk to a Ralph’s from my apartment, but walking always limits the amount of groceries you can get, and walking also meant walking past the piles of trash and debris that line the road, and holding your breath at the various stenches that just… fill the air. In the summer, a walk to the store meant a 10 minute walk uphill, with bags, in 90 degree heat. Driving to that Ralph’s was always possible, if silly given its proximity, but that also meant facing the insanity of the parking lot, where every parking space was too small, and people were driving wildly.

And then in that Ralph’s there was a security guard with a gun. I’m all for security and safety. But the adrenaline shock I had when I turned down an aisle looking for pasta and I saw a man with a gun?? The rush and release of that adrenaline was more than I wanted to experience on a simple grocery store run. This wasn’t a holstered pistol. It was a two handed gun that he was holding. My first thought, before I saw the “Security” vest, was that I might die in a Ralph’s. I was just there to buy Wheat Germ.

Or of course, there was always the option to drive 15-20 minutes to a Target without any armed security guards. But a trip to Target meant facing an unknown amount of traffic (and who knows what you’ll see!), and then a parking garage. The Target itself was fine, but they began locking up basic items (like soap… and loofahs) to combat shoplifting, so that was always a great reminder of all the problems the city was facing. And on your way out you had to remember to validate your parking! And hope that there weren’t any issues with the ticket readers on the way out that would cause a backup (this happened enough times that it feels worth mentioning).

I know this may sound a bit over dramatic to some. It’s just going to the store! Suck it up! Walk 7 minutes, even if it’s uphill and past trash and unhoused people in 90 degrees! Just validate your parking and drive the 20 minutes home through traffic! And I did. I did it for years. But when you grow up in a place like suburban Indiana, with clean, massive grocery stores with spacious parking lots and friendly workers… It sets a standard that makes LA grocery stores seem like a massive headache. What can I say… I’m used to going grocery shopping and not seeing any guns. I’m just some spoiled and sheltered Midwesterner I guess!!! 

Anyways. With all this just to get groceries… I found myself leaning on takeout more often than I should, or just buying ingredients that would last longer and eating pantry staples more often. Which meant just generally not eating as well as I know I should have been! I also just stress ate a lot more, because I lived in a world where apparently armed security was needed at the grocery store.

And lastly, my third personal pillar of wellness: alone time. It’s the most vague of my needs, a sort of undefinable need I have where I notice when it’s missing. It stems from my introversion, just encompasses the time I can spend alone thinking. It’s often while being active, like walking or running, but it’s specifically the time I just let my mind wander. Sometimes to work through things, sometimes just to daydream. The main requirements are that it’s time where my mind is not unencumbered by something else (like the stream of thoughts: keep your head on a swivel. Are you safe right now? Is that unhoused person going to yell at you?), and it needs to be alone and free of distraction.

And in LA, I had somehow both too much and too little of it. I say I had too much of it because I was pretty much alone all the time. But it wasn’t quality alone time. Going outside and spending some time alone with my thoughts always got interrupted by just… the general chaos of the city. Going for a walk or a run, as I have discussed, always had some mental load attached to it, and it rarely fit the bill of me being able to mentally detach enough for that mental recharge. And just sitting alone in my room isn’t the sort of alone time I’m talking about.

There were a few times I got close to getting that alone time. One time on a midday Monday hike, I reached the summit of the mountain near my apartment, and I got 5-10 minutes alone at the top. I still think about those few minutes: alone and on top of a massive city! That was very nice! Below me, the Jonas Brothers were getting their star on the Walk of Fame, and I was up there on the mountain taking in the view. What a big ol’ crazy world. I also once made it to the beach for a 6:30am walk on a trail that was far from all the touristy beach stuff, and walking while listening to the waves was similarly very calming. 

There’s just so many people in LA, and there’s only so many nice places to just exist and be with your thoughts, so they are often overrun. (And they are often a pain to get to, which mitigates the desired effects.) 

I’ll end this on a positive note and say that getting back my healthy behaviors was the best part of my transition to Minnesota. It wasn’t instantaneous, but I was quickly able to add back in consistent running and home cooking to my routine. I feel safe and happy running just by stepping outside of my house, and I am always looking for extra reasons to just go for a walk (the library, the grocery store!). I got a bike and love exploring and biking to new places. My “time in sunlight” on my Apple Watch has been through the roof. 

I feel happier and stronger for all the changes, and I think it’s been the biggest and most meaningful change in my life. The joys of living in a place where wellness does not have to equal wealth!

So for today’s recipe, I made that silly $20 Hailey Bieber smoothie from Erehwon. Because it did taste good, and it is far cheaper to make at home… I didn’t add sea moss, but I got just about everything else. It was tasty, but no miracle cure. You should probably try Accutane for that.

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