On July 16, 2026, Jillian Michaels went on Fox & Friends and criticised “healthmaxxing” — the trend this company is named after. She’s right, and it’s worth saying so plainly.
Her warning, in her words, was about “health FOMO” and about young people taking wellness advice from influencers who “don’t know what they’re talking about.” Health, she said, is not an “arms race.” She pointed people toward medically trained doctors and toward foundational habits instead.
We build an app named after that trend. So let me be the one to agree with her.
The loudest version of healthmaxxing is the worst version
The version that spreads fastest online is the one where you copy a stranger’s supplement stack, chase a perfect wearable score, and treat your own body like a leaderboard. That isn’t optimisation. That’s anxiety with a tracker attached.
It also isn’t what most people are actually doing.
The survey behind the segment makes her point for her
The 70%-of-Gen-Z statistic that framed that Fox segment comes from a Talker Research survey commissioned by The Vitamin Shoppe — 2,000 US adults, fielded in late May and early June 2026. Read past the headline number and it says something more interesting.
Among the 51% of Americans who said they plan to change their wellness routine this year, 44% are simplifying — going back to sleep, movement, and foundational nutrition — compared with 21% chasing advanced optimisation. The simplifiers outnumber the optimisers more than two to one.
Most people don’t want more protocols. They want to do less, better. The rest of the numbers are here, each with its source and sample size.
What that means for what we’re building
It’s the reason HealthMaxxing isn’t another scoreboard. The point isn’t to hand you one more number to maximise — it’s to help you notice which of your own habits actually track with how you feel, and which ones don’t.
That second half matters more than it sounds. The app is designed to tell you when a habit you’ve been logging shows no detected pattern. Sometimes the most useful result is “this doesn’t appear to be doing anything for you” — which is permission to stop, not a prompt to try harder. Our open protocol treats “no clear relationship” and “not enough information” as valid answers, on purpose.
Keep the ambition, drop the arms race
Michaels is worried that people are weaponising their own health against themselves. That’s a fair worry, and “just try harder at everything” is not a wellness plan. The ambition is fine. Point it at your own baseline instead of a stranger’s highlight reel — and take the medical questions to an actual clinician, which is exactly what she said.
HealthMaxxing is coming soon to iPhone and Android. Core tracking is free at launch — join the waitlist and we’ll email you when it’s live.
- Fox News: “Jillian Michaels warns against social media health advice as ‘healthmaxxing’ trend goes viral” — Fox & Friends, July 16, 2026. The segment discussed above.
- Fox News: “Jillian Michaels addresses healthmaxxing trend, warns against influencer advice” — July 16, 2026. Source of the “health FOMO” and influencer quotes.
- Talker Research for The Vitamin Shoppe: “Are Americans more selective with health trends?” — published July 15, 2026; n=2,000 US adults 18+, fielded online May 26–June 1, 2026. Source of the 70%, 51%, 44% and 21% figures.
Quotations are from the publicly posted Fox News clips and their published descriptions, read July 2026. This page comments on a public discussion about a wellness trend; it is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or produced in cooperation with Jillian Michaels, Fox News, Talker Research, or The Vitamin Shoppe.