Less, but Better

I have spent a lot of my life being interested in health and wellness. I love trying things, learning from people and discovering different ways of looking after myself. I have been to clinics, retreats and health clubs, tried treatments, supplements, different ways of eating and probably every form of exercise at some point. The older I get, the more I realise that most of what makes me feel healthy is simple, and quite often, it is the opposite of what we are being sold.

There is so much information now about how to be healthy. Get up at 5am, cold plunge, fast, track your sleep, track your glucose, count your steps, lift heavier, run faster, work out harder, eat more protein, take another supplement. It’s a morning routine so complicated you need to get up an hour earlier just to complete it.

I love innovation and I am fascinated by longevity, so I am certainly not against any of it. I will probably always be persuaded to try the new thing. But I have finally learnt that more wellness does not necessarily make you more well.

For me, health has become much more intuitive.

I no longer think a workout has to leave me completely exhausted to count. In fact, I feel much better when most of my movement doesn’t.

I would choose walking, stretching, Pilates, yoga and dancing over being in a dark room doing an incredibly intense workout almost every time now. I love swimming and tennis too. I want movement that makes my body feel longer, stronger, more flexible and more alive rather than completely depleted.

That doesn’t mean I never push myself. Sometimes it feels wonderful to sweat and work really hard. I know there is lots of interesting science around high intensity exercise too. I’ve simply learnt that, for me, the best exercise is the exercise I enjoy enough to keep doing. I also no longer think exhaustion is evidence that exercise has worked, and I try not to think of movement as a way of undoing something I have eaten.

That has probably been one of the biggest shifts.

Food is not something you have to earn. And exercise isn’t punishment for eating it. For years we were subtly taught that those two things existed in opposition. You ate something “bad”, so you had to burn it off. You had been indulgent, so tomorrow you had to be good.

I don’t want to live like that anymore.

I want food to be nourishment and pleasure. Dinner with family, friends, long lunches and things I love. I want movement to be something entirely separate, something I do because I want my body to be strong, mobile and useful for as long as possible.

I have also learnt to eat when I am hungry.

It sounds ridiculously obvious, but wellness culture has managed to make even hunger complicated. Sometimes breakfast is exactly what I need, sometimes I’m not hungry until later, sometimes my body needs much more food, or sometimes less. I try to listen to that rather than turning every decision into a moral judgement.

Increasingly, I come back to real whole nutritious food. Greens, berries, vegetables, fish, olive oil, good fats, protein. Nothing revolutionary, and probably some of the least glamorous health advice there is.

The same is true of sleep.

I used to admire people who got up incredibly early. There is something very seductive about the idea of having exercised, meditated, journaled and drunk a green juice while everyone else is still asleep ,but if getting up at 5am means I haven’t slept enough, I’m taking the extra sleep. Sleep is health, rest is health, even doing nothing occasionally is health.

I have become much better at allowing myself a day when I don’t exercise. I don’t think of it as falling off anything. There is no track to fall off. If I’m tired, I rest. If my body feels like it needs stretching rather than training, I stretch. If I have lots of energy, I do more. The biggest luxury, as you get older, is knowing yourself well enough to listen.

And then there are supplements.

I have tried an enormous number over the years. These days I increasingly prefer to keep things relatively simple. Omega 3, vitamin D, magnesium and creatine are some of the basics I come back to. They are simply things I personally use, not a prescription for anyone else, and I would always rather start with eating properly than believe another powder or pill is going to do everything for me

I still love treatments. I love an infrared sauna. I love the heat, the quiet and the enforced time doing very little. I come out feeling completely reset. I don’t need to make enormous claims about what it is doing internally. I just know how it makes me feel.

That distinction has become quite important to me.

There are things I do because I understand the science. There are other things I do because I simply love them and they make me feel good. Not everything has to become a protocol.

You can spend an extraordinary amount of money trying to become healthy while forgetting to go outside, walk, sleep, eat proper food, see your friends and laugh.

Increasingly, those are the things I come back to, walk, stretch, sleep, eat well, drink water, get outside, dance, have sex, see people you love, laugh, rest. Repeat.

Perhaps most importantly, enjoy your life. I think we sometimes talk about longevity as though the objective is simply to accumulate the greatest possible number of years. Surely the point is to feel good enough, strong enough, curious enough and happy enough to actually enjoy them.

I still love discovering new treatments and learning about what is happening in health and longevity. I probably always will, but I am much less interested in perfection.

I don’t need the perfect morning routine, I don’t need every workout to hurt, I don’t need to earn dinner, I don’t need to feel guilty because I rested, and I don’t need to buy everything somebody on the internet tells me is essential to my health.

Getting older has taught me that the things that work are generally the things I can actually sustain. The movement I enjoy. The food I want to eat. Enough sleep. Rest when I need it. And a handful of things I have tried over time and find helpful. The healthiest thing I have learnt to do is actually much harder than following somebody else’s rules.

Listen to my own body, and trust it too.

AE X