Watch: Gabby Windey Marries Robby Hoffman In Vegas Ceremony
Gabby Windey is not feeling too rosy.
The Bachelorette alum shared she broke her back while using a vibration plate, a motorized workout device that rapidly moves back to forth to promote muscle activation, circulation and balance.
“Most mornings, I vibrate. On a plate. The cheeks of my ass convulse side to side, like a seizure,” Windey wrote in a Substack essay titled “Broke back, no mountain” on Oct. 2. “The vibration plate is designed to rid stagnant lymph fluid, by shaking up the turgid and sallow with probable microplastics, from my rotting carcass.”
However, it all went awry one day when she set the machine to “level 30, supersonic speed.”
“Seemingly, subtly, somewhere on the way to 30, maybe 10 or 20, my vertebrae turn crooked and rub against each other,” the 35-year-old recalled. “A small piece breaks off from friction. It catches air. Then it lands softly, too softly, so softly the landing’s in question.”
“It was too fast vibrations I guess, and too many vibrations maybe, and too much pressure to shake,” she continued. “And it broke. Broke right off, like your ex-boyfriend’s bumper. Well, technically, it cracked.”
Since then, Windey said she’s been dealing with what she described as “insatiable” paresthesia—a medical term for a tingling, pins-and-needles sensation, according to the Cleveland Clinic.
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“It’s the strangest feeling the tickling nerve. It’s ineffable. If I had to pick one word to describe this tickle of this nerve, it’s tormenting. No. Maybe tantalizing. No, titillating. Yes, titillating!” Windey wrote. “This is the greatest sense of condemnation; of persecution, I’ll ever feel. And I do wish it on my worst enemy If only they hadn’t wished it on me first.”
Now, the Traitors winner is “in the community. A society of bad backs.”
“A bad backer is easy to identify. Because they identify themselves first, with loudness by proudness,” she quipped. “By all measures they cannot resist the telling of anyone in proximity that they are in fact in the community, and in fact have a bad back, and in fact has had surgery two years ago and it took the greater part of the two years to trust the nuts and bolts enough to reach to into the future, or into past.”
Gabby Windey/Instagram
Calling her back “debilitating in its affliction and indignant in its movement,” Windey—who has been married to Hacks star Robby Hoffman since 2025—went on to reflect on what initially led her to use a vibration plate, writing, “Of the problems needing to be solved above, one may believe, the original spore from which this particular back injury spread, is the beauty standard.”
“Is it the beauty standard? Or is it self-love and care? The boundaries blur,” she added. “So one must vibrate until one’s vertebrae chops off. And so on.”
For more celebrities getting candid about their health struggles, read on.
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