J Wortham's Inspiring Wellness Practice Will Help You Rawdog Reality

A conversation with the star NYT Magazine writer about quitting drinking, acupuncture, their favorite healthy recipes, and the public health influence of the Young Lords.

Welcome to the HEAVIES Feelgood Routine, a series that talks to cool, interesting, and creative people about how they design their busy schedules to accommodate good habits.

My first real job in media was at Time Magazine, where I worked as a cub tech journalist for one of its old verticals, Techland (RIP). This was around 2011, and I remember looking up to a handful of established tech reporters, mostly white guys in San Francisco, in awe of their ability to write about, like, phones and apps and shit lol.

One of the writers I admired most back then was J Wortham of the New York Times, who, to my mind, expanded the narrow scope of what tech coverage could even be. They brought an undercurrent of fearlessness to the work, and I’d devour just about anything they’d publish. 

Over the years, and lucky for us, the aperture of J’s work has widened considerably, from their award-winning culture podcast “Still Processing” (co-hosted with Wesley Morris) to their razor-sharp music criticism to their remarkable profile of Brittney Griner, the groundwork of which was years in the making.

Not to mention J is legitimately one of the coolest people in all of New York City. Incredible aura. When I learned that they make their own bone broth (DM me and I’ll share the recipe) and have not one, but four acupuncturists in the weekly rotation, the HEAVIES siren in my head started popping off.

I caught up with J a few weeks ago over Zoom to talk about getting sober, finding wellness inspiration in the work of Simone Leigh, the art of gentle transitions, and making time to doomscroll. I also highly recommend following J at their amazing and recently resurrected Substack, channeling.

And if you enjoyed this interview, please consider becoming a paid subscriber for the monthly cost of a Big Mac a la carte.

Onto the chat.

Chris: I loved your essay in The Small Bow about getting sober. I thought it was beautifully done.

J: Thank you for saying that. I've had a kind of writer's remorse since writing it because I wrote so much about 12 Step, and I think there are a lot of different ways people get sober. I certainly participate in a lot of them. There are a lot of decolonial spaces, like the Black Girls Sobers Club, which is amazing. 

But for that, I just kind of wrote about what worked for me. The thing that worked for me was hearing people in their fifties, people with decades of sobriety under their belt, talking… and their stories sounded a lot like my story. Before, I couldn’t imagine going to an event without a drink. Drinking enhanced everything for me. And that's how I used to feel, like I could never be sober. 

Since quitting drinking, have you found other rituals that help you fill the void?

Yeah, that’s exactly it. It's all about filling the void in healthy and unhealthy ways. It's actually kind of funny. You and I have talked about this a little bit before, but as a neurospice pop girly, today I was like, “I should start my own beverage company.” So I was literally watching somebody’s Masterclass because I was like, how do I make a good non-alcoholic alternative? I hate the word mocktail and I don't want to pay $15 for, like, a juice. We want to keep the added sugars low.

When I was first quitting alcohol I was drinking a lot of seltzer. Like a case a week. Then, when I first started going to events again I would just mainline seltzer. If I’m out to dinner with a bunch of people who are drinking, I'll usually pull a server aside. A lot of people in the restaurant industry are familiar with people who are sober, and a lot of them are sober themselves, and I'll just be like, “Oh, I’m sober. Can I just have the largest bottle of sparkling water that you have? And just keep bringing it to me. I’ll pay for it.”

That's smart.

And that really helps. Usually my go-to is just seltzer, no ice, lots of bitters and lime juice. That is just a delicious drink. When I go places in Mexico, they have something called suero, which is basically just that with a salt rim. Seltzer and lime juice. And it’s delicious.

I was never into the fake tequila or fake whiskey, mostly because I don't want to pretend to drink. That's kind of what created the problem for me in the first place. It's not about recreating the thing I'm supposedly missing out on. 

I’m not really a fan of the fake spirits either.

One of the funny things that happens when you don't have any spirits for a while is your tongue resets. There was one time when I was on a date with my partner and I ordered a virgin mojito with no sugar, but the bartender made me a regular mojito. It was kind of a funny moment. We were in the Lower East Side. It was like a hundred degrees. It's summer, it's sexy outside, I've been sober for two years, and I thought: What if I had a drink? 

That was a question I had started to circle. It was just a little seed in my mind. We're having dollar oysters, and this lady brings me the drink. We’re like “cheers!” and I grab the straw, pose for a funny picture, and down most of it. And I started choking because I was like, “Oh, this is just straight-up rum!” And so my partner got very worried but I was like, “It's fine. It's truly fine.” 

The bartender was so upset, and I eventually ended up talking to my sponsor about it. It answered the question about what would happen if I had a drink. First of all, it tasted terrible—like I drank rubbing alcohol. And second of all, I got a little tipsy and I was very uncomfortable. I was like, “Ooh, I hate this feeling and I cannot wait for this to go away.” 

You seem like a person who's very dialed in with your acupuncture and your routines. Was that something that came before sobriety? 

Yeah, that's been a part of my life for a very long time. I've always done things like yoga. A friend of mine at UVA in Virginia worked at a health food store, and they gave him passes to their adjacent yoga studio, so we would all go. Plus, my parents are kind of pseudo hippies about food. They wouldn't let us have sugar growing up and stupid things like that. At the time, Charlottesville was very indie. Still racist as fuck, but it had a very small town-feeling. 

But the big thing was I wrote an article in 2016. I always cite this moment because it was a real intervention for me. There was this artist Simone Leigh, who's a sculptor, a very beautiful, incredible artist. She had a show at the New Museum. And in 2016… I was really fucked up. I felt really sick. We just had the election and I was having a really hard time sleeping. My anxiety was really high. I’ve always taken antidepressants, on and off, and I've always been in therapy. 

But her exhibition was very inspired by the Black Panthers and the Young Lords and their public health practices. The Young Lords were like a brown Black Panthers uptown. They had this guy come in and train everybody on the NADA protocol, where you can do acupuncture in your ear with seeds. And they did free clinics. They hijacked a tuberculosis screening truck and drove it around New York because the trucks weren't coming to Spanish Harlem. 

The Young Lords

Simone invoked all of this and transformed the New Museum into this free hospital, essentially. And I went every day. I went to every single program. They had a tea ceremony, an herbalism lecture, acupuncture, and it just… it was just the answer for me. That’s when I realized is that it wasn't just about the practice, but the practitioner.

Before then, I would go to sound baths at Maha Rose in Greenpoint, and I was doing some yoga in Williamsburg, but I was mostly working with white practitioners. At the time, I didn't know a lot about lineages of treatment and the ways in which different people are treated differently. They have different bodies of knowledge that they're bringing. It became really important for me to make sure that the care I'm getting is rooted in people who have the same sets of concerns and sets of oppressions as me. 

All of that came into my life when I felt like I was going insane. Black death was everywhere. There was so much violence and it was all collapsing. I needed help. So, that was really where a lot of the stuff I’m into got started. 

Now that I'm more sober, I have more data points about my body. I'm really aware of how sleep and food and sugar and exercise or lack of exercise affect me. What I’m reading and what I'm watching, for better or for worse. 

People always tell me, “You're rawdogging reality”—which, I'm such a Scorpio! I love it! I want the deepest possible experience life has to offer.

I’d love for you to walk me through an ideal day where you’re firing on all cylinders. You're feeling good, you're feeling relaxed. What sort of practices and eating habits are you building in? 

Oh, shit. Okay. Well, I feel like I have to caveat this by saying that health and food right now are the number one priority, and this has not been true for me for a long time. I also work from home. I have a flexible schedule. I'm a writer, so I can devote a lot of time to these things. I'm not a parent yet.

I really want to say that because I think sometimes people read these things and there's a little bit of guilt or a worry about projected shame. 

Yeah. Now that I’m a freelancer and not in back-to-back Zooms all day I try to be more mindful about being too prescriptive about time.

And I feel very lucky because I worked hard to have this much freedom. When I was younger and first getting into more wellness practices, I talked about it a lot from this perspective of: Why isn't everybody doing this? You're crazy if you're not. Health is wealth. But I didn't understand how anti-black and anti-class all those sentiments were. I had a very narrow window of what it means to take care of yourself and who gets to do that. 

So anyway, I'm done caveating. And the last thing I'll say is that I have a lot of chronic fatigue and chronic inflammation from years of being a waitress. So my body hurts almost every day. I don't know why I'm caveating this so much. I think this is a very POC thing. [laughs]

No, I feel you!

If I’m not on deadline and I don't have any meetings or appointments, this is fully a day where I'm just planning to try and write all day until the evening. 

I'll probably wake up pretty naturally between seven and seven thirty. This is going to sound so corny, but usually, once I’m aware that I'm awake, I say a little prayer of thanks for my life, which is very much a post-sobriety practice. It’s another way to really start the day with gratitude, because one of my inner selves is a petty bitch, and if they get the reins for the day, it is a fucking wash. 

[laughing]

You feel me? Some of those inner selves… you’ve got to keep them in check. 

Today was a good morning. I woke up very gently. I learned this from AJ Daulerio [of the Small Bow], but I write out my fears, my current fears, and then I write out my gratitudes. Then I meditated for three minutes, and I was like, we're fucking golden.

Perfect.

All in all that’s a five minute routine. And sometimes I go to the gym right away. Today, though, I wanted to get into my day writing, so I'm going to go to the gym later. I used to think if I didn't go to the gym first thing in the morning, I would never work out. But I’m learning that I like to have a morning where I'm not just throwing myself at the city. It's one of the ways that I feel I can have real longevity in New York, where I don't interface with the world right away.

Anyway, I got up and made the bed. I washed my face. And I drank some water out of my customized Stanley Cup, which says “little daddy” on it. [holds the cup up to the camera]

Fire.

I also have my other Collina Strada glitter water bottle, which—

Oh, wow.

They both trick me into drinking enough water. And then I turn the shower on. As an ADHD person, I will get into a loop about what I'm going to eat if I don’t already have it planned out, so I do a lot of meal prepping to save money and time. 

I worked with my nutritionist on this, but I have a smoothie ready to blend.

Let’s hear the smoothie recipe.

This is a long list, okay? But I do plain Greek yogurt, whole fat. Then it’s a good amount of protein. I'm doing a scoop of collagen powder; protein powder; fiber, just like golden ground up flax seed. I put chia seeds in it. I don't actually know what they do—

I don’t think anyone knows what chia seeds actually do.

Right? And then it’s a dozen blueberries and whatever other fruit I've saved from the summer goes in there. That’s all in a NutriBullet with unsweetened almond milk. 

Before I get in the shower, I take it out of the fridge and let it sit, because I don't want the first thing in my body to be cold. Then I take a very quick shower. Lotion. Do all my cute things. Put on my vitamin C, antioxidants, put on my hyaluronic acid, and then I drink my smoothie. 

When I drink my smoothie, I'm sort of sitting at my little makeshift desk. I'm thinking about what I'm going to write for the day. I'm really getting my brain together, and I'm kind of talking myself into working. I'm like:  Today we're going to outline this essay. It doesn't have to be perfect. We're going to try to write just the top. It's just an attempt. It's not the final draft. We're just going to sit down. We're just going to write 500 words and see what happens.

After I have my smoothie, I drink some more water and do my supplements, which my nutritionist helped me with.

Right now, we’re trying to correct some of the things that have been going on. I've been having energy brownouts because I have low blood pressure. So I'm trying to really fix my iron and my vitamins right now. I take grass-fed liver pills. I'm doing some vitamin A drops, which you have to make sure you really need. So that's something I'm doing with blood work and supervision. 

I also take prenatals. And I take this stuff that I just kind of got into with my nutritionist for energy, because my energy levels really dip and around this time of the day [4:30-ish], I start craving sugar. I just go crazy for candy.

I take Hematite, which is for blood building, and then I take some anti-aging stuff called NMN that one of my doctors recommended. Fish oil. And the prenatals pretty much have all the daily vitamins, so that's helpful because I don't think about vitamin D or Z. 

[Ed. note: J’s full list of supplements is at the bottom of this post.]

After that, I drink a bunch of water and write until I’m hungry.

So when’s lunch? 

Probably around 11:30. Today I turned the oven on at 12. I meal-prepped these  little meatballs, usually with whatever I can get at the farmers market. Sometimes I'll do lamb with some cut-up bacon, sausage, some liver, an egg. Just whatever I have in the house.

That sounds so good.

I'm also not picky when I cook just for myself. 

I become a gremlin who just eats over the sink when left in my own devices. 

Straight up. What's a gremlin meal that you've had by yourself?

I'll do the rotisserie chicken. Just picking at it over the sink so I don't spill. Or the dog will clean it up. It's nasty out here. It's like Cookie Monster time. 

I love that. I love eating rotisserie chicken and scooping out some avocado with some salt, and then you're just like, that was a great meal. But right now what we have are these little meatballs. So I had some of those with just like a salad, some lettuce on the verge of going bad, some sunflower seeds. Honestly, I was just looking through the cabinets. And then I made a miso vinegar dressing with olive oil. I have this really nice olive oil from Palestine that I've been using. It’s really good for salad dressing. 

I also have a soda maker, whatever one the Wirecutter recommends. I'll make seltzer and have a bunch of that with some bitters to help with digestion.

I didn't have acupuncture today, but I would usually have an afternoon acupuncture appointment at one of my four places I go to.

How many days a week are you getting acupuncture done?

Two to three days a week right now. I've never felt better, honestly. I was an acupuncture skeptic for years, and this year I started going really regularly. And just the way I move my body is completely different. 

I will say that all my acupuncturists, save for one of them, are covered by my insurance. That's really important to note. But my skin is better, my sleep is better, my digestion is better. Everything is better. And just, I really feel like a new person. 

Are you a snacky person?

Usually in the afternoon, when I get that sugar craving. I'll probably have some of that Good-brand fermented cottage cheese. My friend is on the board of Patagonia and they just gave me a bunch of their spicy anchovies in tins, which are bomb as hell. I'll make a piece of gluten-free toast with ghee, cottage cheese, and then whatever else I have on top. And right now these anchovies. That’s my snack bomb.

But then tonight, because I've been eating healthy all day, I'm like… I kind of want to get nachos?  

Nachos are salad, is what I would argue. 

You know what I'm saying? I want pizza, because we did good all day. 

When you go to the gym, are you doing anything specific? Do you have a trainer?

A friend of mine is a fitness instructor, and I hired her to be my trainer during the pandemic because I realized that my approach to taking care of my body was to basically treat it as something to be managed. Or something to be wrangled.

It was really misogynistic. It was just really violent. I was really into calorie restriction. I was into real punishing workouts, you know what I mean? Just pushing myself just because of body dysphoria. It's really hard for me to know what my body looks like. 

And so the way I would deal with that was just basically really punishing regiments and then basically black it out with alcohol or whatever. I'd work too much or I'd eat too much and then I’d do drugs or whatever. 

So basically what I realized during the pandemic was I was like, okay, I need to exercise. I'm going crazy. I'm kind of going a little batty. I don't really like running, but I think if I didn’t live in New York City I would like it? I cannot handle when you are struggling for breath and you smell pee! 

That's a very real New York experience. 

I'll happily go out for a run when I'm in residency. But in New York? No!

Anyway, my friend, she taught me a lot about using body weight and pilates and lifting and working with resistance. Once you get into your forties, you start to realize that the body you have is the body you have, and it's actually not really going to change that much. I like moving my body. I love being physically active. I love swimming. I love pickleball. I want to learn to play tennis, which I’m not good at. Basketball—same thing. I want to rework my relationship to physical exercise because I just don’t want it to be this punitive response to something I ate or this expectation I was putting on myself.

Do you think that covering tech early on in your career, being around all these people who are “always on” and concerned about maximizing productivity, made you more mindful about how you approach health and creative stuff?

Kind of, yeah. I think I just really burned myself out. Recently, when I was having some of those energy issues, I had a moment where I went to bed at 10:00 p.m. and I could not get out of bed until 10 the next day. And I had a real anxiety moment, because it was one of those days where you're just like, I have such a big to-do list, I have calls, I have so much going on. I was almost in tears where I was just like, Oh my God, thank you body for resting, but also, we are fucked!

And then what happened?

Every single thing on my to-do list that day got done that day. [laughs] And it kind of blew my mind. I was done early. 

I guess this myth that I have to be at my computer at 8:00 a.m. to 5 p.m. to get stuff done probably isn't true. So that’s been really helpful for me to reroute expectations around productivity.

I mean, there are just some days that are monsters because we're all like multifaceted multimedia people who do a thousand different things. But I'm just really learning that I can be high-functioning and very productive without killing myself. The work is better when I do that.

What I appreciate about how you approach the day is how gentle your transitions are into different activities. Like, everything feels so intentional and sustainable. So, tell me, when do you fit in your doomscrolling? 

[laughs] Normally I’d do it at the end of the night as I’m winding down. I'm doing a little skullcap tea, which helps me relax and get ready to sleep. And after that, I'm like cracking my knuckles. I like to lock in for the doomscroll, because I don't know how long I'm going to be on here. It’s almost like I’m getting ready for an international flight.

I’m just like, let me get these giggles off! And sometimes there’s a good TikTok where I will just be crying. I love to do TikTok in the bathtub now that it's getting cooler out. I love a magnesium bath before bed with some bath salts.

That sounds like an ideal way to doomscroll. Okay, last thing. When do you usually read the news?

I have to take breaks to do the news. I’m really trying to pay attention to everything right now, so I really have to build in time for that. The Diddy stuff right now is overwhelming. Obviously, reading anything that's happening in Gaza. But I try to make time for it because I just feel like, right now I really, really, really want to do cultural criticism, and so I'm just trying to absorb. It’s why I feel like I need a lot of sleep. 

I really have just come to realize that taking care of the self is such a gift, and it is like a full-time job! My father died pretty young, and my mom has pretty significant issues in her sixties, and I just want to live a long happy life, which is why I take this stuff so seriously.

J’s Full Supplement list

Morning:
Needed prenatals
Vitamin A emulsion
Hematite for my anemia
Dr. Ron's grass-fed Liver pills
Nordic Naturals DHA (fish oil)
Double Wood NAD supplement
RevGenetics NMN
Homemade bone broth weekly & regular castor oil packs on the liver

Smoothie additions (1 scoop each)
BUBS Naturals Unflavored Collagen Peptides Powder
simply tera's organic whey protein powder, dark chocolate flavor
organic ground flaxseed

with lunch (at least two hours after vitamins/supplements)
Organic Psyllium Husk Powder 

Evening potions:
Calm Magnesium
Cup of Skullcap tea

Liver/Kidney Chinese herbs by Evergreen as prescribed by my acupuncturist
1 scoop of each with warm water on empty stomach in AM and PM

Western Meds:
Lexapro (so needed)

Thanks as always for reading HEAVIES! New post later this week.