Charlottesville-based wellness guru Renee Byrd was a successful influencer before being an influencer was cool.
Byrd launched her blog, Will Frolic for Food, in 2012. The goal was to “provide free tools for living well … recipes, advice, yoga videos, and entertainment to sensitive souls.” In a few short years, she was working part-time hours while making a full-time income through advertisements and sponsored posts.
But a bout with illness and a dose of influencer fatigue began to fray Byrd’s enthusiasm. At the end of 2020, she stepped away from her successful blog, which had earned her notice from national outlets like the Food Network, Better Homes & Gardens, and Self, to focus on her personal life and well-being.
“The thing that bothers me is the culture around influence,” says Byrd. “It can be very egotistical and fake. Thankfully, a lot of the people I’ve worked with in the past in the food realm have been great. I’ve always thought, ‘If you are going to be an influencer, be in the food space; they are kind people that are there to be educators.’”
Now, married and living in Belmont with her beloved Australian sheepdog and a baby on the way, Byrd is plotting her way back into influencer culture.
After stepping away from Will Frolic for Food, Byrd continued to create content through comedy. With a background in theater and music, she has counted herself an artist, photographer, writer, musician, yoga teacher, and entrepreneur over the years. To stay active, she developed an off-beat Instagram presence doing comedic skits with characters like the insatiable Sugar Gollum and a cringey cohort of earnest commune members. She took on issues as heavy as abortion and as light as hiking sandals. She grew her Instagram following to nearly 40,000.
“My philosophy about comedy is to be true to your own perspective,” Byrd says. “I have been very deeply involved in the wellness and food industry, and I know a lot about all those worlds. I feel it’s important to be a voice within the food world, because there is a lot of bullshit.”
Her next step is to get back to Will Frolic for Food. While she finds so much of the food and wellness influencer space to be about “greenwashing” and selling under the guise of self-help—“there is so much stuff out there that you don’t need to be healthy or happy,” she says—she still believes in the power of the medium.
Byrd, who also runs Frolic Coffee at the Ix Farmers Market with her husband, a wellness coach by training, has always focused on free-form health journeys. Folks have to follow their own path to happiness, she says, and they can do so many things to improve themselves without spending any money.
“There is a lot of amazing work being done, but it’s buried,” Byrd says. “In the wellness and health and food world, you get the best results with self-led discovery. A lot can be done with a health coach, but they can’t just tell you what to do. Proper coaching is being a masterful asker of questions so people can come to their own conclusions. To reach your own unique, ideal health, some people need to run a lot, and some people need to walk a lot.”
