When Healthy Living Meets Real Life

Yesterday I was watching a series about a startup founder who runs a wellness company. The show introduces him, quite dramatically, as one of the healthiest men in the world. Proof of that? You see his morning routine.

He wakes up early and makes himself a smoothie. The kitchen counter looks like the set of a wellness ad. A very organised, very expensive gourmet grocery store probably supplied the  seeds, berries, leaves and fruits. There are jars of powders being scooped out with very precise measuring spoons. He pours his concoction, a neon green gloop into a tall glass, just as his housekeeper arrives to begin her day. She cleans, organises, and keeps his hi-tech home in apple-pie order. 

While she does that, he goes to the gym. An hour on the treadmill and then weights. He spends time in the sauna. A personal sauna in his house. Of course he has a personal sauna. I have to admit that before I thought about it, the sauna felt like the real luxury in the whole routine.

Later he’s sitting by the pool. His private pool. Simply relaxing. At one point he’s reading a book on his couch while wearing one of those LED light therapy masks over his face. At night he meditates for an hour before going to bed. In a special meditation room, full of special candles, idols and paraphernalia no doubt arranged by his housekeeper. 

The show presents all of this as extraordinary discipline. And I suppose it is discipline. Then, my thought was, when does he run his business? He spends the whole day like he is on a wellness vacation. A character on the show expanded the thought. 

“If I had his money and his time,” she said, “I’d probably be very healthy too.” 

This character, a single mother with three children, living paycheck to paycheck ran a household where every dollar clearly had a job. When she needs someone to watch her two-year-old, she pays her sixteen-year-old daughter to babysit. The same dollar is doing two jobs. Babysitting money and pocket money.

Once she said it, you could see something else sitting inside that perfect routine. Time. Money. Privilege.

A life where health could sit comfortably in the majority of the day instead of being squeezed in around everything else. Most lives are organised very differently. Even people who care about their health, even people who read all the right articles and know exactly what they should be doing, are usually working around structures that don’t move very easily.

Work schedules.
Family needs.
Social obligations.

Meetings clashing with your pilates classes because your client is on the other side of the globe. Meals that have to accommodate at least one small human who refuses vegetables as a matter of personal philosophy. Dinner invitations where refusing dessert would require more effort than simply eating and burning it off later.

Health, in most people’s lives, gets negotiated in the middle of all that. I have to admit, I admire people who are able to track their daily macros and stick to workout routines in the middle of everyday life exhaustion, both mental and physical. I know about the exhaustion first hand, because I once tried to change my lifestyle in a fairly serious way. 

Back in 2011, I read about something called the Wheat Belly Diet. Around the same time an acquaintance of mine went through an extraordinary transformation after following it. She lost more than half her body weight. It was one of those transformations that makes you stare at before-and-after photos for slightly too long. And this was before the era of AI, so you knew this as the real deal.

What she said, though, was that it wasn’t really a diet. It was a lifestyle change. The entire household shifted. What they cooked changed. What they bought changed. Certain ingredients simply stopped appearing in the kitchen. What made it possible, she admitted very frankly, was that the family changed with her. Her and her husband. They both ate the same way. 

I realised the importance of this admission. It went way beyond simply supporting her. He walked the path with her. Because when one person in a household suddenly starts eating differently while everyone else carries on exactly as before, the logistics become ridiculous very quickly. You end up cooking two versions of every meal, buying separate ingredients, and running a small parallel food system inside your own kitchen. No points in guessing that most often the person managing all that extra work is the same person who was already managing the kitchen. So in her case, the change worked because the household changed.

Watching her convinced me that I should probably try at least some version of this healthier lifestyle myself. At the time I was working and raising a toddler, which is not exactly the ideal environment for a controlled nutritional experiment, but I reduced wheat and sugar and almost stopped having processed food. It worked.

My energy improved. My skin and hair improved. I lost weight.

I discovered something else about “healthy living”. It comes with a very particular emotional reward. When you are the person eating carefully, exercising regularly, waking up early to do the virtuous thing, a small feeling begins to appear.

You feel… slightly superior.

In an unobtrusive way. Nobody walks around announcing this. But somewhere inside your head there is a quiet little scoreboard. You notice other people’s breakfasts. You notice who orders dessert. You notice the people who say they’re too busy to exercise. I know, I’ve been on both sides of this table.

For a few months I carried around a mild, private smugness. I wasn’t preaching fitness. I wasn’t standing on tables shouting about quinoa and kale. But I did feel like I had cracked some code. I’d solved life. Which is a dangerous feeling, because life has a habit of immediately disproving it.

For a while I felt quite pleased with myself. Then something else started happening. My body became extremely intolerant to wheat and sugar. One day I went to a birthday party and had a slice of cake. Within minutes I felt sick and ended up throwing up. Standing there retching, holding the paper plate with half the cake still on it, I remember thinking this was not how I wanted to experience birthday cake. 

I didn’t want dessert to become a medical event. I didn’t want to read restaurant menus like they were legal documents. So I slowly loosened the rules until the system stopped running my life. For a while, that felt like a small victory.

But human beings are very good at replacing one form of discipline with another. A few years later I found myself chasing that feeling again. This time it wasn’t food. It was running. I decided I was going to train for a half marathon. Five kilometres every evening. Timing myself. Watching the numbers improve. Experiencing the small thrill of finishing a run a few seconds faster than the day before. I felt smug again. 

Then I went to Munich on a work trip. I had one day to myself on that trip. That enthusiastic day of sightseeing in -4 degree weather sent me back with a camera full of gorgeous photos and a toe that refused to bend. Intense pain woke me up whenever I slept. Four weeks of physiotherapy later, the toe recovered slightly. The half marathon did not. This is how the human body sometimes expresses its opinions.

For a while I was irrationally annoyed about it. I had been quite fond of those runs. They had become part of the identity I was quietly building for myself. And once you start noticing that quiet pride in healthy pursuits, you begin to see it everywhere.

But at what point does the pursuit of health quietly become another performance? Another place where we measure ourselves. Another invisible standard we’re trying to reach.

Eventually I realised something about healthy living. It is not just about discipline, as the gurus would have you believe. It works best when it fits inside the life you already have. Not the life you might have if you owned a sauna.

For me the answer has now become simpler. Food that is mostly healthy but still enjoyable. Movement that fits naturally into the day. Activities that can include the people you live with. I’ll take an evening walk with my husband over a 30 minute run on the treadmill any day. The walk helps with mental health too. We talk. We discuss the weather. We marvel at the lush greenery that exists around us, in the middle of a desert. Sometimes we walk far enough to justify the post-dinner ice cream.

None of it looks very impressive on a fitness tracker. But it feels like the sort of healthy life that ordinary people are actually able to live. Which may not look like discipline on television. But it does look a lot like real life. Trackers are useful. They motivate. They reveal patterns. But for me, they work best as indicators. Not dashboards that begin to run your life.

The man in that series may well be one of the healthiest people in the world. His life allows him to organise his day around that pursuit. I keep thinking about the woman who said she would probably live like that too if she had his money and his time. For many of us, health is something we keep adjusting quietly so it can coexist with everything else that makes up an ordinary day.