The Wellness Practice Nobody's Talking About: Bagels

Or, how my husband's Saturday bagels became our most popular "wellness program"

By Heather Holland, Founder of Upswell

Here's something they don't teach you in yoga teacher training: sometimes the most profound wellness practice is just a really good bagel.

Every Saturday morning for the past year, my husband Joel has been making bagels from scratch for the Upswell community.

He's not a nutritionist. He's not a "wellness" chef. He doesn't bake vegan or gluten-free. Just classic flour, water, yeast, time, and the kind of precision he learned working alongside some of the greatest chefs, bakers, and restaurant founders in the world.

This is a guy who can tell you the exact hydration ratio of a proper baguette, who understands gluten development at a molecular level, who spent years in the relentless pace of restaurant kitchens where every detail matters.

Now he makes bagels. For a neighborhood wellness club. Every Saturday.

Here's the thing that keeps surprising me: people care more about the bagels than almost anything else we offer (at least on Saturday mornings).

It Started With Bread

Joel and I met in New York City. He was working with Steve Ells at Chipotle. I was working with Alain Coumont at Le Pain Quotidien. If you know anything about either of those founders, you know they share an obsession: bringing real craftsmanship to everyday food, making quality accessible, refusing to compromise on ingredients or technique just because you're serving a lot of people quickly.

Our entire relationship was born from breaking bread with people. Our friend group formed around tables. Our family grew in kitchens.

When we moved to Denver so I could help grow CorePower Yoga, food came with us. Joel cooked for our yoga leaders in Eric Kufel's kitchen (CorePower's beloved former CEO). He made salads in jars and homemade hummus and bread for board meetings. He made focaccia sandwiches for park yoga classes and run clubs in the early days of Upswell.

For us, great yoga, active recovery, and breaking bread weren't disconnected concepts—they were the most natural ways humans connect.

The Most Unlikely Pairing (Except It Isn't)

Upswell didn't start in a beautiful studio space. It started in City Park with a park permit, BYO yoga mats, Yeti chairs, Normatec boots, some cold ones from our friend's brewery Westbound & Down, and Joel's food. Focaccia sandwiches in the evening. Bagels in the morning. Park yoga, run club and really good bread, all mixed together under the Denver sky.

From an "industry trends" perspective, this made no sense. The Wellness Zeitgeist of the time preached restriction, optimization, clean eating, macro counting. Bread—especially bread made with full-gluten flour and covered in everything bagel seasoning—doesn't exactly scream "biohacking."

But to us? It's always been perfectly natural.

Because in our world, wellness isn't actually about following protocols. It's about practices that make you feel more human, more connected, more alive. And I don't know many things more fundamentally human than moving your body and gathering around good food.

The Dogma Fatigue Is Real

If you're reading wellness content these days, you're probably exhausted. I am too, and I literally founded a wellness studio.

The topics are tiring: Optimize your morning routine. Track your metrics. Follow this protocol. Here are seventeen supplements you need. This is the one science-backed method that will finally fix you. There's always another thing to optimize, another box to check, another impossible protocol to stick with.

Meanwhile, on Saturday mornings at Upswell, our members finish their sauna sessions or their classes, and they stay. They don't rush to the next thing. They grab a bagel—fresh out of the oven, juicy tomato slice, the just-right amount of crunch, the everything seasoning—and they just... talk to each other.

To the person next to them. To someone they've never met. About nothing important. About everything important.

There's no app for this. No biometric feedback. No points or streaks or badges.

Just a simple, shared human moment: "damn, this is a good bagel"!

How It Started

One day Joel asked: "Do you think the Upswell members would want bagels on Saturday?"

"Um, YES."

And the ritual was born.

That's the whole origin story. No market research, no focus groups, no competitor analysis. Just: people like being here, they'd probably like your bagels, let's make bagels.

It's not a conversion tool or a marketing gimmick. I don't think we've ever even posted it on Instagram. We just love our community and want to make them bagels.

The Science of Slowing Down (Without Making It Weird)

I appreciate neuroscience as much as the next person. I could tell you about how shared meals release oxytocin, how social connection impacts longevity more than exercise, how the vagal nerve responds to feelings of safety and belonging.

But I won't, because that's the trap.

The moment we start optimizing connection, measuring community, and creating protocols around joy, we've missed the entire point.

Joel doesn't make bagels because fermentation is good for gut health (though it is). People don't show up for the bagels because they read a study about carbohydrates and community cohesion. They show up because Saturday morning bagels became a thing, and now it feels weird when they're not there.

That's it. That's the whole idea.

From Fine Dining to Flour Dust

Joel's path to Saturday bagels is not what you'd call conventional.

He worked with Steve Ells when Chipotle was still figuring out how to bring culinary precision to fast-casual dining—that revolutionary idea that good ingredients and proper technique didn't have to be reserved for white tablecloths. He cooked in restaurants like Nobu, Koshu, Chinois, Spago, to name a few—where the line between art and sustenance blurred. He traveled to Bath, England to study under Richard Bertinet, the French master baker whose cookery school has become a pilgrimage site for anyone serious about understanding dough.

These aren't casual credentials. This is someone who could be running the world's next big thing in food & beverage.

Instead, he's at Upswell every Saturday, dropping off a few dozen perfect bagels for whoever shows up.

And that choice—that's the wellness practice.

Hospitality as Medicine

The word "hospitality" comes from the same root as "hospital"—a place of healing for guests and strangers. Somewhere along the way, we separated these ideas. Healing became clinical. Hospitality became transactional.

We see them as the same thing.

In our worldview, the most therapeutic thing we can offer isn't another modality or protocol, but simply: here, sit down, you're welcome here, have something good.

At Upswell, we're serious about the science. Our infrared saunas hit specific wavelengths for mitochondrial benefits. Our cold plunge protocols follow research on hormesis and metabolic health. We've invested in PEMF and red light therapy because the data supports it.

But we're equally serious about the bagels.

Because wellness is so much more than what happens to your body on a yoga mat or in the sauna. It's also what happens when you're wrapped in a robe, holding something warm, laughing with a stranger about how neither of you can feel your toes after the cold plunge.

It's the moment when you realize you've been here for two hours and you weren't checking the time.

The Unexpected Pairing Nobody Asked For

Saunas and bagels aren't supposed to go together. It's not a thing. There's no trending hashtag, no competitor doing it, no industry best practice.

We’re okay with that.

From day one we've tried to create something a little different. A place to just unwind and do good things for yourself. The feeling of your favorite coffee shop, but wellness. Then the industry caught up and turned so much of wellness into performance—performing your morning routine, performing your self-care, performing your healing journey.

Our view of wellness looks more like: I come here most Saturdays. They know my name. Sometimes I talk to people, sometimes I don't. The bagels are always good. I always feel better when I leave.

Not because I biohacked my mitochondria (though, yes, heat stress does that). Not because I hit my protein targets (though, yes, the schmear has protein). But because for an hour or two, I got to just be—warm, fed, unhurried, connected.

The Recipe Nobody Needs (But Everyone Wants)

Here's what's funny: people keep asking Joel for the recipe. But I'm not convinced anyone actually wants to make bagels.

Making bagels properly is kind of a pain. The boiling, the timing, the shaping. It's a multi-day process, laborious and precise. Joel has been researching, practicing, honing his technique for over a decade. It's not exactly a casual Sunday morning project.

What people want is the feeling the bagels represent: someone cared enough to make this.

Someone showed up, again. Someone created a small pocket of the week where we all slow down together.

And that's its own kind of wellness practice.

An Invitation

Next Saturday, Joel will be making bagels again. The week after that, too. They won't cure anything. They won't fix your sleep or optimize your hormones or revolutionize your routine.

They're just going to be warm and good and made by someone who knows what he's doing and chooses to do it, not for accolades or Instagram, but because it matters to show up for people in simple, tangible ways.

Maybe showing up for each other is the medicine we need.

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Heather Holland is the founder of Upswell Studio in Denver, where they're rethinking wellness one homemade bagel at a time. When she's not questioning the entire industry she works in, she's probably in the cold plunge wondering why she does this to herself.