Healthism was coined by Robert Crawford in a 1980 paper for the International Journal of Health Services. In the 1970s the U.S. had seen a wave of renewed interest in holistic health and wellness, and Crawford was wary of how that investment in health was curdling into a perceived responsibility to seem healthy to others. He defined healthism as “the preoccupation with personal health as a primary—often the primary—focus for the definition and achievement of well-being; a goal which is to be attained primarily through the modification of life styles.” That is, for Crawford, healthism flattened the health of whole populations from a dynamic and multifaceted issue with many and varied influences, to a simple matter of personal responsibility. Crawford saw health as inherently political, a reflection of systems that create and perpetuate poverty, racism, misogyny, and more. But under healthism, health was an individual matter, not a systemic one, which meant that the individual was primarily responsible for their own health. “For the healthiest, solution rests within the individual’s determination to resist culture, advertising, institutional and environmental constraints, disease agents, or, simply, lazy or poor personal habits.”