Tracy Anderson believes most people today have had their attention spans hijacked by social media and their perception of beauty corrupted by trends.
“I’m always aware of large patterns of what people are doing, and the word trend, or what’s trending, has become, I believe, part of our collective lack of well-being,” said the celebrity fitness instructor in conversation with WWD. “The fact that we are now so programmed to do what is trending means we have a sense of belonging in trends, and that is to the detriment of our health.”
When thinking about this, Anderson asked herself, “How am I ever going to help people find their way back home to their bodies and their own power to take care of their bodies?”
Enter Atlas, her new wellness magazine.
Debuting Saturday at TracyFest, Anderson’s first experiential festival in LaBelle, Fla., Atlas will be an annual publication featuring interviews with leading experts across holistic healing, health ethics, nutrition and more. This is the exercise mogul’s second print publication after her eponymous magazine, which launched in March 2020 and sold online and in select grocery stores and newsstands around the country.
“We had [Tracy Anderson] for five years, and I decided to pause it, not because I didn’t believe in the mission, but because I tend to watch where people are going,” Anderson said. “I took a pause to reassess how I’m going to make a difference and how I’m going to show everyone that there’s real beauty in caring for yourself and caring for others.”
Atlas, unlike Tracy Anderson, or TA, will not include glamour or fashion tips. Instead, the first issue puts a microscope on Anderson’s own mind and method of research for the last 25 years, with insight from the likes of Dr. Eric Racine, Dr. Habib Sadeghi, Dr. Michael Spitzer, Coleman Barks, Clare Byrne, Dr. Julia C. Basso, David Kennet, among others. The majority of interviews are published in a question-and-answer format to make the content, while certainly dense, easier to digest.
According to Anderson, readers can expect to feel “a lot more beautiful” if they actually absorb and put the information provided to them into practice. “Most people sit in a space that is filled with vanity and chasing glamour, and then they just freaking miss the exit to beauty,” she said. “As your glamour fades, if your wisdom grows and your clarity grows, that’s beautiful. But you have to massage your attention span to pick this up.”
On why she decided to venture down the print route yet again, Anderson noted the impossibility of teaching anything of “deep meaning” on social media. If she were to make this into a video series or an app, it would contradict its mission.
“We live in a top-down world, and our brains are getting pulled even farther from our somatic self, from our bodies, and when we go to bed at night with our devices to learn, we’re actually creating a lot of what Dr. Siddiqui says is dis-ease, which turns into disease,” Anderson said. “I don’t care that most people want to watch some miserable woman look like she has a perfect life, making a matcha. That’s not going to help you; that’s only going to hurt you and waste your minutes in your very precious life. So I was like, ‘I’m going to make something meaningful.’”
The magazine rollout will kick off at the first annual TracyFest, where eight of the 20 experts highlighted in the launch issue of Atlas will speak in between dance parties, DJ sets and a heart stone ceremony. “This will come to life every January for people to align and grow,” Anderson said of TracyFest.
As for future Atlas plans, Anderson has a few ideas, but she’s waiting to finalize anything until she sees how the first magazine resonates with readers. “If you’re a great teacher, you need to see where everybody is at before you throw something out there,” she said.
