“I hate paywalling stuff, but that seems to be the only way to get people to pull out their credit card.”

The TPF Q&A with writer and editor Liz Baker Plosser

Liz Baker Plosser knew it was time. After seven years at the helm of Women’s Health she stepped down at the end of 2024. She felt that she had gained real skills in her 20 years in health journalism and was ready to ply her trade outside the confines of a glossy magazine. She launched a newsletter, Best Case Scenario, where she writes about her own fitness journey, wellness trends, and interviews coaches and experts (like my favorite former Peloton instructor Kristin McGee). She consults with brands (Kion, Canyon Ranch, GoRuck). And, like the rest of us, she’s still figuring it out.

Three Point Four Media called her up to talk about life on the other side, the cliché of “storytelling,” workout routines, writing about wellness in the age of Ozempic, and how she decides if a brand partnership is right for her.

Liz getting ready to throw around some kettlebells.

Three Point Four Media: Editor-in-chief, for a lot of people in media, is the apex of the field. Why did you go freelance?

Liz Baker Plosser: It too was my dream to reach the top of the masthead, and running Women’s Health was beyond my wildest dreams. But I had been thinking for a couple of years about stepping out on my own. I’ve been in the health journalism space for more than 20 years; and in the last few years, I felt like I had cracked a lot of nuts, learned a lot, and pivoted many times. I’m not afraid of that! I rolled up my sleeves and loved it, but I started to feel deeply that I needed to take my skills, my experience, and my network and go out on my own. Most terrifying of all, I did not know what that meant or would look like. I just committed to learning and exploring this year and keeping an open mind.

I also had been at Women’s Health for seven years and felt like I made the impact I could make. I’d just completed a redesign across all platforms with the team. It felt like the moment.

Time to hand the keys over to someone else. What sort of designs did you have on this next phase of your career when you went out on your own?

I had a few ideas. I definitely wanted to do consulting and stick with the health, fitness, nutrition, and wellness space. That’s my passion, and that didn’t change one iota because I left Women’s Health. Given my background in the women’s health space and what I’ve learned about what makes women engage with content, buy something, become a member, give their email address—all things that consumer brands are very interested in—I felt like I had a lot to offer.

On the newsletter front, I’ve been a Substack geek for a very long time. I subscribe to many. I pay for some. I had been thinking and experimenting at Women’s Health with how to bring that Substack energy and deep relationship with the reader into our universe, and for a variety of reasons—perhaps because we needed longer to train our audience and logistical red tape at a big media publisher—we never went where I believed we could go.

Once you’re out on your own, you’re nimble and liberated. And I was like, you know what, I’m going to do it! Very, very quickly I realized this newsletter lights me up. The further I rose in my career, the less and less writing I was doing. I was really just green lighting other people’s ideas. So I didn’t realize until I started doing it again how much I missed reporting and writing.

A magazine’s worldview comes from the editor-in-chief. One thing I like about your newsletter is that it feels like Women’s Health was your vision but Best Case Scenario is crawling into your brain. Maybe these are stories you would have assigned! But now you get to write them from your point-of-view, instead of Women’s Health.

I love that you see that, and I think you put it so well. A lot of these story ideas or things that get published—and certainly my Monday wellness world round up—are just little bits and pieces I used to Slack to the team or talk to colleagues about in the hallway. I wouldn’t describe my Substack as a business newsletter, but it goes there. It veers into the business of wellness, and that wasn’t really our lane at Women’s Health.

I realized I have a lot to say. I’m hearing a lot, seeing a lot, and getting some scoops and leads—and hearing whispers!—and now I have somewhere to put them that’s not, like, the void of a team Slack where maybe one nice teammate would chime in.

I felt so much pressure at Women’s Health to protect and advocate for the brand. As the leader of it, you are the forward-facing ambassador. But now I feel more liberated to just be Liz and to say things that I probably would have checked and balanced at Women’s Health. Now, if I break anything, it’s mine.

A lot of your newsletter does not feel gender specific, and as a straight white male I enjoy reading it. Is that by design, or is that just how you think about health and wellness?

I love that you saw that, too. I’ve been really surprised by how many men read my Substack. I can’t find a gender breakdown. I don’t think Substack asks you that when you register. But anecdotally when I see the names of new subscribers, I’m pleasantly surprised by how many men read it.

As a 46-year-old woman with three kids, there’s some things personally that are interesting to me in the midlife space, hormonally, and gender specific. When I read a new study I can’t help but check, well, we’re women included? How many? But I’m rounding up the stuff that also—if we’re painting with broad strokes—applies to cisgendered men and hopefully being respectful and inclusive of people who fall all over the place in between.

What are some of your best performing newsletters, and is there some sort of common thread? Does the more personal stuff, like your creatine piece, do better? Or does the more investigative stuff drive traffic?

Creatine always performs for me. [Laughs] I did a deep dive on creatine in late March and I don’t know if you can call it viral, but it went pretty viral. It got thousands of likes and hundreds of comments, which way outperforms a normal piece for me. People also like it when I talk about nutrition and protein, which makes sense with how much that’s in the ether.

I did a piece called your “body on sex,” which was about sex, relationships, and intimacy, and how it connects to our health and well-being. It was very much a health story. That one performed really well for me. It didn’t get the same number of likes as a top performing post. Maybe people were a little shy? But it did convert a lot of subscribers and new paid subscribers.

Personal stuff does well. When I include my children, people tend to engage with it more, which is very sweet. I shared in the intro to one of my Monday news roundups about my sobriety, and that one did really well on Substack. But it actually crushed on Instagram, which was interesting, because I find it very difficult to convert. In the Venn diagram of audiences, there’s not as much overlap as I would like. Sometimes it’s close to crickets when I drop links in my IG stories, but that one way out performed.

So what’s the endgame with the newsletter?

My husband’s an economist, and he asks me the same question! [Laughs] In total candor, right now, I’m having so much fun. I would say I’m really privileged that I’ve gotten to the point where I can devote some time to something just because it makes me happy. Having said that, I want people to read it, because I work really hard on it, and I truly do want to help people feel better in their bodies and get ideas and go on adventures with my content.

I want it to grow. I wish it was growing faster, though I’m very proud of how fast it is growing. I would like to make more money off it, I wish I could monetize it with more paid subscribers. I hate paywalling stuff, but that seems to be the only way to get people to pull out their credit card. This is not paying my bills right now. My consulting is, so I do need to paywall some things and continue to grow my paid subscriptions if I want to maintain the amount of time I’m investing in it. And to be honest, I would love to invest more time in it.

So I’ve done two sponsored posts. One was with AG1. One was with Mush, which was for a protein forward overnight oats they were launching. I’ve been offered others that I’ve turned down because they didn’t align with my philosophy on well-being for various reasons, no shade to them it just wasn’t a good fit.

The health and wellness space is littered with spon con and ads. How do you decide if it makes sense for you? I bet your inbox is blowing up.

Number one, is it safe? I’ll do the research: Has it been tested? Are there studies? What experts are aligned with it? What are their conflicts of interest? Number two, is it something I’ve actually tried and used? And number three, did I like it? Would I keep picking it up and using it?

That eliminates like 90% of inbound requests. I was going to say you’d be surprised, but you would not be surprised!

When I had my regular health and fitness column for GQ I got so much shit in the mail. And I always told publicists, I’m not going to write about this unless I like it, which felt rare at the time and is probably even more rare now.

That’s exactly how I feel. I don’t even know how people find my shipping address, to be honest. I always tell people that I do not make a promise. I do not feel beholden to anybody. If there are brands I am excited about, I will be transparent about those partnerships.

What sort of consulting work are you doing outside the newsletter?

I’m currently working with three brands. Each project is really different. One is Kion. It’s less editorial support and more thinking about how can we reach more women and explain the science of their supplements in ways that are approachable and inclusive. Canyon Ranch is another brand I’m working with. My official title is “editor at large,” but it’s a whole mix of evolving things, like working closely with their executive team on developing programs for retreats and more straight-up editorial content. The third client is GoRuck, where I’m the creative director. I’m working with the co-founder, Emily McCarthy, who has a vision of making rucking more accessible to women, demystifying it, and making it less intimidating. I led a retreat in Costa Rica. I work on email and copy. I helped redesign the women’s landing pages on the site. It uses my brain in very different ways.

That’s the fun of it all, right? One thing we found when we started Three Point Four is that we had worked in media our entire adult lives; once you get out of that bubble you realize you have a real trade. People say they are a storyteller, but they actually don’t know how to tell a story.

Storytelling is the word that comes to mind, which I know is perhaps a cliché in this day and age for the type of work we do, but it really is true that it translates from the editorial space into the consumer space. What’s cool is that the brands I work with, their teams are so passionate, and they understand the DNA of their brand inside and out. It’s really fun helping pull that out of them and turn it into engaging, clicky, exciting, and innovative content.

Do you feel like you have more time now that you’re not an editor-in-chief?

No, I do not. First of all, it’s just me! I’ve gotten better at asking for help. But I have three email addresses, three Slacks, plus my newsletter, three teams to meet with throughout the week. I’m not sitting in an office building in back-to-back meetings all day, but I’m doing a lot more work in the in-between hours.

My schedule is flexible. I used to go to the gym first thing in the morning before my kids got up. I learned this year that is my prime writing time. That’s when I’m sharpest. So I never would have expected this, but now I’m writing during those hours, then I hit the gym after I drop my youngest off at elementary school.

You beat me to my next question. We’re big fans of the mid-day workout here at Three Point Four. As the lore goes, that’s how the company started. I find that if I run at 11 or lift weights at lunch, it can help me shake loose some ideas or solve some problems.

We are two peas in a pod. And I feel like a traitor, because I even wrote a book called Own Your Morning, where I go into great detail about all the benefits of working out at the crack of dawn and why that powers me forward. I still believe that, but in this chapter it’s just not what’s working. I’ve really come to love the later morning or lunchtime workouts. I’ve had the same experience, I find I’m more focused and energized afterwards, like you’re dusting off whatever bad energy glommed onto you.

How do you approach health and wellness in the Ozempic era?

It’s a great question. It’s definitely one I thought about at Women’s Health a lot, too. The first thing I’ll say is that it’s been fascinating watching the conversation about weight change over the decades as someone in the space. When I was a junior editor I was writing headlines that would make me cringe now, like “how to get a bikini body in two weeks.” I remember the first nutrition story that was green lit for print when I worked as an editorial assistant at Self was called “the big cost of little bites” and it really demonized, like, taking a bite off your kids mac and cheese at the end of dinner.

So I have much compassion for former Liz, to little Liz—who thought that was totally normal—and all the readers we were speaking to as well. And yet, as an editor and somebody who’s focused on data and performance, I hate that this is true, but that stuff worked, and it worked for a reason: it preys on the vulnerabilities of women.

To put that in context, I have spent many years thinking about this and arrived at a place where I want to be so careful with my words and the visuals I choose when I talk about anything relating to our bodies. I deeply believe in body autonomy. Which, speaking of Ozempic, means that is a decision between a woman and their doctor. I would never make a judgment about somebody’s decision.

I also think it’s super interesting, and not talked about enough, the new ways it’s positively impacting our health, like for substance abuse disorders or heart disease.

I’m never going to demonize weight loss or make a woman feel guilty about that, it’s a conversation between you and your health provider. My goal with my content is that I would rather people come to mine—which is science backed, expert based, leverages the latest research and studies—than get it from spon con influencers or AI slop on social media.

Last question. It’s one I get a lot from friends and loved ones who are in a rut and come to me seeking counsel: What do you tell someone who asks about “getting back into shape”?

I love this, and I’m chuckling a bit because I was just helping a friend out with this exact thing last week. I always say, start small to build momentum and prevent injury. I love it when people have motivation, but I don’t want them to burn that candle out. I want that flame to keep burning. That’s number one.

The other big one is, if you can afford it, try to work out with a trainer or speak to an expert. I think there’s a lot of intimidation about what do I do at the gym? Or what equipment do I actually need at home, and what am I supposed to do with it? There can be paralysis in that state—whether you’re intimidated, overwhelmed, or don’t know where to start—speaking to an expert can help build momentum.

“I found writing to be pretty isolating and lonely.”