Lifestyle
Grab a smoothie, draw some blood. Inside L.A.'s new $50,000-a-year wellness club
I sat in my car, in an El Segundo shopping mall parking lot, looking up at a new storefront touted as a one-stop shop for feeling physically fit, emotionally grounded and socially connected. My shoulder ached. It was my good luck that on the same day I was touring Love.Life — a new luxury health center conceived by John Mackey, co-founder of Whole Foods Market — I was also nursing a gym injury.
After weeks of navigating our infuriatingly slow medical system, it felt promising, if not surreal, to arrive at the doorstep of an establishment with nearly every treatment I could think of under one roof: diagnostic tests, rejuvenating therapies as well as fitness and nutrition plans to stave off future health problems.
I walked up to Love.Life’s entrance. Its gleaming picture windows and grass green exterior might as well have been the gates to the Emerald City, behind which mysterious healing modalities awaited. I clicked my heels together — I happened to be wearing red suede sneakers — and mumbled to myself: “There’s no place like a posh, membership-only holistic health club.” Then I headed inside, passing under block lettering that read: “Nourish Heal Thrive.”
“If this idea won’t work in L.A., it won’t work period,” says Love.Life co-founder John Mackey, who was also a co-founder of Whole Foods Market.
The lobby was blindingly bright, with porcelain floors and mod furniture in peppy colors. There was a spacious cafe on one side and a futuristic gym on the other, animated by various blinking screens. Around the corner were what looked like red-white-and-blue space pods. What they were for, I had no idea.
“Hi there,” said a receptionist at a clinically simple desk. Was I in the lobby of a boutique hotel? A doctor’s office? Or was this an astronaut training center? Or all of the above?
The idea for this lavish temple of wellness had been swirling in the back of Mackey’s brain for almost four decades. After co-founding Whole Foods in 1980, and growing the natural and organic foods store into an international network of more than 460 outlets, Mackey and company sold the publicly traded company to Amazon in 2017 for $13.7 billion.
For his next venture, the vegan, breathwork enthusiast and pickleball lover wanted to “change the way people think about health and wellness,” he told me a few weeks earlier when I met him at the not-yet-finished Love.Life space. “This is a continuation of my own higher purpose in life.”
Mackey left Whole Foods in 2022 but had already started working on plans for the club a year earlier. (It’s part of a multipronged parent company, Love.Life, that he co-founded in 2020.)
Over the last three years, he and his Love.Life co-founders — Whole Foods former Chief Executive Walter Robb and longtime executive Betsy Foster — transformed his dream into a reality: a swanky, holistic health center that’s part state-of-the-art gym, part high-end spa, part highly personalized doctor’s office and part exclusive social club. It touts specialists in both Eastern and Western modalities, as well as an on-site physical therapy clinic. Its “plants-forward” café serves superfood-filled dishes with names like Ocean Bowl and Green Tartine. Regular live events include meditations, soundbaths and breathwork classes. Love.Life even has three indoor pickleball courts.
If successful, Mackey envisions other centers in other cities before expanding internationally. But for now, the flagship Love.Life opens Saturday adjacent to — you guessed it — a palatial Whole Foods Market.
“If this idea won’t work in L.A., it won’t work period,” Mackey says. “People here are more into their health, they’re more into looking good, feeling good, they’re into longevity.”
Love.Life personal trainer Shelle Tarver plays on the pickleball court.
Love.Life team members demonstrate a yoga class.
Love.Life team members Marcie Icovino, center, and Maddy Isbell demonstrate pilates equipment.
Love.Life’s mission is to help its members live longer, healthier lives by deep-diving into their health history, executing an array of specialized tests and then suggesting fitness and lifestyle changes, paired with as many preventive health measures as humanly possible.
“We’re trying to help individuals become the healthiest, best versions of themselves — physically, emotionally and spiritually,” Mackey, dressed in jeans and a Love.Life-branded polo, says. “When do most people go to a doctor? When they get sick. Our idea is: We want you to start seeing a doctor 1723376780 so that you don’t ever have to see a doctor for the chronic diseases that kill.”
There’s a good reason most people in America don’t see a doctor until they feel ill or, say, experience shoulder pain. Our country’s healthcare is often prohibitively expensive and difficult to navigate. The “individuals” Mackey aims to help, Love.Life’s target market, are those with deep pockets who can afford to circumvent the system.
A Love.Life core membership starts at $750 a month for either a “High Performance,” “Heal” or “Longevity” membership, depending on the goal. They include five visits a year with a Love.Life primary care doctor, as well as health coaching, medical testing, fitness and recovery services and access to practitioners across 20-plus disciplines including traditional Chinese medicine, sports performance, yoga and nutrition. The membership cost tops out at the “Concierge” level, which costs $50,000 a year and includes unlimited doctors visits, 24/7 care and the most detailed level of medical testing the facility offers. There are also limited memberships, such as a medical-only or fitness and recovery-only membership for $500 a month and $300 a month, respectively.
Cold vapor billows out of a cryotherapy chamber as the author steps in.
A red light lamp offers the author collagen stimulation.
Upon enrolling, members can undergo a series of tests so facility specialists have a 360-degree view of their health. It’s a journey into the bodily unknown. They may draw blood for an advanced lab panel measuring more than 120 biomarkers, have their musculoskeletal layer assessed or undergo a DEXA body composition assessment and bone mineral density scan. Other specialty tests address the microbiome, hormone health, cardiac health and food sensitivities, among other things.
From there, Love.Life experts put together a personalized fitness, nutrition and lifestyle plan for the member, which they can follow at the facility’s gym or through various treatments. Red light therapy beds to support healing? Check. Breathwork class to manage stress? Check. Hyperbaric oxygen therapy pods to reduce inflammation? You better believe it.
Members book all appointments on an app, which also stores their health history and tracks fitness progress. They can also use it to share that information with any of Love.Life’s practitioners, reserve a pickleball court, book a massage or order lunch.
The Ocean Bowl at Love.Life is packed with superfoods, like blue spirulina, cacao and chia seeds. Though memberships to the wellness club start at $300 a month, members of the public are welcome to visit its cafe.
Some parts of Love.Life will be open to the public, such as the cafe, select healing therapies and the spa, for which anyone can buy a $100 day pass. But Mackey emphasizes that membership and community are key to the experience.
“If you have friends with good habits, you’re gonna pick that up,” he says.
That one-percenter healthy living also comes with its fair share of window dressing. In designing the 45,000-square-foot space, Mackey says Love.Life worked with an acoustical engineer to manage the sound flow. Passing from the airy, bustling lobby and cafe area into the spa, the halls narrow and the lights dim. A preserved moss wall absorbs ambient sound, but for a gurgling fountain and soothing music. Crystals, mirrors and chimes were ensconced in its walls per the advice of a Feng Shui expert. A warm Turkish Hammam Table allows visitors a place to stretch and lounge opposite a wall-sized fountain.
The preserved moss wall at Love.Life, which absorbs ambient sounds to keep the spa quiet.
The author undergoes a resting metabolic rate assessment, measuring energy expenditure and caloric burn at rest, attended by Danél Lombard, physical therapist, back center, and Davon Murray, exercise physiologist.
I paid a $100 visitor fee to enter and relaxed into a plush, leather Zero Gravity Chair, with heated seats and massage nodes, my head draped backward and my feet pointed high. This was a resting metabolic rate assessment, which measures your energy expenditure and how many calories your body burns at rest (the test was part of my reporting, and is not included with a spa pass). Attendants fitted me with a snug Vo2 max mask, which was synced to a nearby laptop. Then I zoned out for about 20 minutes, nearly falling asleep.
When they returned, I learned exactly how many calories my body needs to think, breathe and otherwise stay alive (not nearly as many as I’d hoped for). Had I been a member, I might have met with a Love.Life nutritionist next, to configure my caloric and macronutrient needs to support weight loss or exercise performance.
From there, Love.Life regional president, Michael Robertson led me into a private room where I slid my lower limbs into what looked like a space suit, while lying on a table. The FDA-cleared Ballancer Pro lymphatic compression therapy, he said, enhances lymphatic drainage to rid the body of toxins and reduces swelling and muscle soreness. Robertson zipped me up and tapped a button before the suit began to swell and squeeze my legs. It was oddly relaxing.
Love.Life personal trainer Shelle Tarver performs squats on a high tech OxeFit machine, which gives real-time feedback on power, velocity, load and balance.
Though I skipped the gym during my visit, personal trainer Shelle Tarver was there doing squats on something called an OxeFit machine. She faced a giant, vertical screen on which her digital avatar mirrored her moves and gave her real-time data about her power, velocity load and balance so she could make her workouts more effective.
Finally, it was time to chill out — literally. Robertson led me to what looked like a tall commercial refrigerator bathed in blue and purple light. The cryotherapy chamber was set at minus-120 degrees Fahrenheit. It was so cold that the instant I stepped inside — wearing a face mask, earmuffs and mittens for protection — ice crystals began to form on my nose and snowflakes fell from the ceiling. Cryotherapy is meant to reduce inflammation and increase circulation, Robertson said; but when I stepped out after one minute, I just felt very awake.
Preventive healthcare — spending money to stay well rather than on costly medical bills once sick — is a growing trend. Whether this proactive attitude is a response to America’s sluggish healthcare system or a quest for control at a chaotic time in history is anyone’s guess. But businesses have popped up to meet the desire.
West Hollywood’s Remedy Place offers high-end, holistic “social wellness services,” plus chiropractic and biometric testing; Healthspan, a digital medical clinic, aims to help patients fight aging and chronic disease. Even traditional gyms like Equinox are now offering a $40,000-a-year concierge membership that includes sleep coaching, personal training, massage therapy and nutrition advice.
Love.Life combines all these services into one club — and goes one step further. Its members can use their designated doctor at the club as their primary care provider. The company doesn’t accept insurance, but they do offer a super bill which members can submit for reimbursements if the tests and treatments qualify under their plan. Membership, Mackey clarified, is not meant to replace health insurance, however, which is still necessary for emergencies, among other things.
When Whole Foods opened in 1980, it merged the utilitarian supermarket experience with a hippie-minded desire to nourish oneself from the land. As the brand grew, it became synonymous with a certain crunchy aspirational lifestyle. Whole Foods became more than a place to pick up a carton of milk, it was a place to assert your values, and to feel good. (And spend, as many people joked, your “whole paycheck.”)
Can Mackey find the same success with Love.Life? To thread the same needle in the legendarily opaque realm of healthcare seems a much further stretch. But when your target market has bottomless pockets, a fantasy can become a reality.
Janette Rizk, Love.Life’s communications director, has her blood pressure checked in the medical clinic.
As exciting as that might be for some people, it could have negative affects on the larger population, says Paul Ginsburg, a professor of health policy at USC.
“They’re extending the scope of what medical care is for their wealthy clients,” he says of Love.Life. “If you’re wealthy, it’s a wonderful opportunity. But physician resources are stretched pretty thin today, and if the centers were to take off, engaging physicians in service to very wealthy people means drawing their time away from treating the general population — that’s the downside.”
Mackey hopes that Love.Life will follow in Whole Foods’ philanthropic path. (Whole Planet, a project of the grocery chain’s nonprofit, has invested $113 million in global communities since 2005.)
“Philanthropy comes from success,” Mackey says. “We will do things to help improve the health of poor people. But it’ll come because we’ll have the resources to do that.”
One of Love.Life’s many cold plunge tubs.
Love.Life’s spacious hemlock wood sauna in the spa.
Once my tour was over, I wistfully returned to the parking lot, a strawberry-Ashwagandha smoothie in hand. I’d enjoyed the experience more than I thought I would and longed for Love.Life’s services at my fingertips. After that whirlwind of peculiar chambers and treatments, I wondered if my ailing shoulder even felt a tad more limber.
But would I ever travel down this yellow brick road again? At Love.Life’s price points, likely never.
Britney Spears
Open to Treatment Plan After DUI Arrest, Source Says
Published
Britney Spears‘ team is hoping the judge mandates treatment for the pop star over jail time following her Wednesday DUI arrest … and Britney isn’t fighting them on that, TMZ has learned.
Sources familiar with the situation tell TMZ … Britney is willing to comply with a treatment and support plan.
We’re told her team is in the early stages of developing a plan and they’re exploring multiple options, including mental health services, detox, and dual-diagnosis programs.
It’s unclear whether she would do inpatient or outpatient treatment, and it’s also unclear whether she would enter treatment before her May 4 court date.
Broadcastify.com
We broke the story … Britney was pulled over by California Highway Patrol officers around 9:30 PM Wednesday in Westlake Village, CA, not far from her home. She was later taken to a hospital — not for any injuries, because we’re told she didn’t sustain any — but to draw her blood to determine her blood alcohol content.
According to CHP, she was arrested for “driving under the influence of a combination of drugs and alcohol.”
Sources familiar with the investigation told us an unknown substance was found in Britney’s car, which was sent to be tested.
Britney’s manager, Cade Hudson, previously told TMZ … “This was an unfortunate and inexcusable incident. Britney will take the right steps, comply with the law, and we hope this marks the start of long-overdue change in her life. She needs help and support during this difficult time. Her boys will be spending time with her, and her loved ones are putting a plan in place to set her up for success and well-being.”
Michael B. Jordan plays twin brothers Smoke and Stack in Sinners.
Warner Bros. Pictures
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Warner Bros. Pictures
Ryan Coogler’s supernatural horror stars Michael B. Jordan playing twin brothers who open a 1930s juke joint in Mississippi. Opening night does not go as planned when vampires appear outside. “In a straightforward metaphor for all the ways Black culture has been co-opted by whiteness, the raucous pleasures and sonic beauty of the juke joint attract the interest of a trio of demons … they wish to literally leech off of the talents and energy of Black folks,” writes critic Aisha Harris. The film made history with a record 16 Academy Award nominations.
We asked our NPR audience: What movie would you recommend to someone who loved Sinners? Here’s what you told us:
Near Dark (1987)
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow; starring Adrian Pasdar, Jenny Wright, Lance Henriksen
If you want another cool vampire movie with Western kind of vibes, check out Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark — super underseen and kind of hard to find, but really gritty and sexy and another very different take on what you might think is a genre that had been wrung dry. – Maggie Grossman, Chicago, Ill.
30 Days of Night (2007)
Directed by David Slade; starring Josh Hartnett, Melissa George, Danny Huston
It follows a group of people in a small Alaskan town as they struggle to survive an invasion of vampires who have taken advantage of the month-long absence of the sun. Both this and Sinners revolve around a vampire takeover and the people’s fight to outlast the “night.” – Nathan Strzelewicz, DeWitt, Mich.
The Wailing (2016)
Directed by Na Hong-jin; starring Kwak Do-won, Hwang Jung-min, Chun Woo-hee, Jun Kunimura
In this South Korean supernatural horror film, a mysterious illness causes people in a quiet rural village to become violent and murderous. A local police officer investigates while trying to save his daughter, who begins showing the same disturbing symptoms. The film blends folk horror, religion, and psychological dread, exploring themes of faith, evil, and moral weakness. Like Sinners, it centers on a supernatural force corrupting a close-knit community, builds slow-burning tension, and examines spiritual conflict and human frailty. – Amy Merke, Bronx, N.Y.
Fréwaka (2024)
Directed by Aislinn Clarke; starring Bríd Ní Neachtain, Clare Monnelly, Aleksandra Bystrzhitskaya
In this Irish folk horror film, a home care worker, Shoo, is assigned to stay with an elderly woman who’s convinced she’s under siege by malevolent fairies. Like Sinners, Fréwaka blends folk traditions and social commentary with horror. The social failures Shoo copes with (untreated mental health issues, religious abuse) are just as frightening as the supernatural forces. – Kerrin Smith, Baltimore, Md.
And a bonus pick from our critic:
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (2020)
Directed by George C. Wolfe; starring Viola Davis, Chadwick Boseman, Glynn Turman
This is an adaptation of August Wilson’s play about a legendary blues singer (Viola Davis) muscling through a recording session with white producers who want to control her music. Chadwick Boseman’s blistering in his final role. – Bob Mondello, NPR movie critic
Carly Rubin and Ivy Buck contributed to this project. It was edited by Clare Lombardo.
The tiny town of West Goshen, Calif., was exactly the kind of place that community solar was designed for.
Near Visalia, most of its 500 residents live in mobile homes, where companies won’t install rooftop panels without a solid foundation. And until recently, they used propane for heating and cooking, with price fluctuations in the winter posing hardships for low-income families.
Community solar, in which residents get a discount on their bills for subscribing as a group to small solar arrays nearby, was designed to help low-income residents, apartment dwellers, renters and others who can’t put panels on their own roofs.
Over the last 11 years, New York, Maine, Minnesota, Massachusetts and other states have built thriving community solar programs. But California has built, at most, only 34 projects since 2015, and experts say that’s a generous accounting.
“We’ve had community solar for a dozen years, and it simply has not produced anything of scale and anything of note,” said Derek Chernow, director of Californians for Local, Affordable Solar and Storage, a developer trade group that’s pushing to get a more robust program off the ground. “Projects don’t pencil out.”
The West Goshen residents were among the lucky few, becoming part of a community solar project in 2024.
“It has kind of allowed us to kind of breathe a little bit,” said resident and community organizer Melinda Metheney. Her bill has dropped by about $300 in the summer months, thanks to the 20% community solar discount, stacked with other low-income discounts and clean energy incentives, she said.
West Goshen’s panels sit about 10 miles out of town, in a field surrounded by farms. Energy and climate experts agree California must add much more clean energy to its grid, some 6 gigawatts by 2032, the California Public Utilities Commission said in a new plan last week.
Assemblymember Christopher M. Ward (D-San Diego), who in 2022 authored a bill to create a more effective community solar program, said the state needs to double its annual solar installation rate to reach that goal and is not on track to do that using only large utility-scale solar farms and individual rooftop arrays.
“We need mid-scale community solar,” he said.
Energy and climate experts agree California must add much more clean energy to its grid, some 6 gigawatts by 2032, the California Public Utilities Commission said in a new plan last week. Above, solar panels at Extra Space Storage in Pico Rivera.
(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
He and a coalition of environmental groups, solar developers and the Utility Reform Network, a ratepayer advocacy group, worked to put his 2022 law into effect. They coalesced around requiring utilities to pay community solar developers and customers for the electricity they feed to the grid using the same formula they use for people who install rooftop solar.
But in May 2024, the California Public Utilities Commission decided to go with a late-in-the-game proposal backed by the state’s investor-owned utilities to pay community solar at a lower rate.
The agency, along with its public advocate’s office, argued that crediting solar developers at the higher rate would raise bills for customers who don’t have solar, who would still have to shoulder the cost of grid maintenance. It’s similar to the argument they’ve made to cut incentives for rooftop solar.
The new program relied on federal money, including the Biden administration’s Solar for All, to sweeten the deal for developers. But the utilities commission spent very little of the $250 million available under that grant before the Trump administration tried to claw it back last summer, and now it is held up in litigation.
At a legislative oversight hearing last week, Kerry Fleisher, the commission’s director of distributed energy resources, blamed the loss for the new program’s failure to launch.
“There’s been a tremendous amount of uncertainty in terms of the Solar for All funding that was intended to supplement this program,” Fleisher said. “That’s part of the reason why this has taken longer than normal.” She said the commission still plans to release a program in the next several months.
Ward, the San Diego lawmaker who wrote the community solar bill, called the program “fatally flawed” in an interview.
He’s now considering a bill to bring the community solar program more in line with what he initially envisioned — higher incentives, requirements for battery storage, and compliance with state law that mandates new houses be built with solar.
A study last year funded by a solar trade group found that could save California’s electric system $6.5 billion over 20 years. But Ward’s effort to revive his program last year failed to pass the Assembly appropriations committee.
“All the other states in our country that have adopted similar community solar program models, they are working,” said Ward, adding that 22 states have programs comparable to the one solar advocates want in California. “The writing on the wall suggests that, exactly as we feared years ago, this was not the way to go.”
California Public Utilities Commission spokesperson Terrie Prosper called California “a leader in cost-effective, least-cost solar deployment overall compared to any other state,” in an emailed statement.
Under the commission’s definition, the state has brought on 34 projects, representing 235 megawatts of community solar. But studies from groups such as the Institute for Local Self-Reliance and Wood Mackenzie use different definitions for community solar, and they show California far behind at least 10 other states.
Meanwhile, advocates and developers involved in successful community solar projects in California say they were difficult to get off the ground.
Homes in the Avocado Heights area of Los Angeles County are part of a community solar project.
(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
One that came online in May in the unincorporated communities of Bassett and Avocado Heights in the San Gabriel Valley provides solar electricity to about 400 low-income residents. They get 20% discounts on their electric bills for subscribing to panels installed on two Extra Space Storage building rooftops in Pico Rivera.
Organizers said it took nearly five years to find the right location and comply with utility requirements. They also got a grant in addition to funding provided by the state utilities commission’s solar program.
It “would not have happened if it hadn’t been for the grant,” said Genaro Bugarin, a director at the Energy Coalition nonprofit that proposed and coordinated the project.
Brandon Smithwood, vice president of policy at Dimension Energy, the developer for the project in West Goshen, said he still hopes to see a community solar program in California that compensates projects for the way they help out the grid.
“We’ve seen it can work, and we know what we have won’t work,” Smithwood said at the hearing.
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