What We Get Wrong About Healthy Living: A Lifestyle Medicine Doctor's Perspective

The question we keep asking wrong

After more than two decades in medicine, clinical practice, and research, I had the slow realisation that neither alone was enough. I've come to believe most of us are asking the wrong question about health. We ask what should I cut out? when we should ask what can I build in? We ask is this food good or bad? when the honest answer is almost always: it depends on the whole of your life.

Healthy living isn't a set of rules. It's a way of relating to your body, your food, your stress, and the people around you. I've always been fascinated by cultures, traditions, and the stories people carry, and some of my happiest memories have been made around a table, where good food has a way of drawing out the most honest, thoughtful conversations.

That's what Between Bites is. It brings those passions together: sharing a meal, exploring different cultures, and talking openly about health and wellbeing with friends, colleagues, and experts in the field. Less a panel, more a dinner, where the real thinking about how we live well tends to surface somewhere between the bites.

This is the first of many conversations to come. I'm so glad you're here for it.

Prevention or treatment? That's the first mistake

The moment we treat prevention and treatment as opponents, we've lost the plot. If you're in a crisis, medication and acute care are not the enemy, they save lives, and the people delivering them are doing extraordinary work. But medicine has spent nearly four centuries operating on a split, inherited from Descartes in 1641, that handed the body to science and the soul to somewhere else. We've been living inside that separation ever since.

Lifestyle medicine doesn't ask you to pick a side. It asks you to hold both: treat what needs treating, and work upstream on the daily choices; nutrition, movement, sleep, stress, and connection that shape whether the condition arises at all. Two things can be true at once. (This is also why I'm wary of the noise online: it's easy to get views by shouting that doctors are the problem, or that one supplement is the answer. Real health is quieter and more nuanced than that.)

What is healthy living, really?

If I had to reduce it, and I'm reluctant to, because it's genuinely multifactorial, healthy living rests on a few foundations most of us already know: eating mostly whole foods, moving regularly, sleeping well, managing stress, and staying connected to other people. What we get wrong is the execution, not the knowledge.

Here's the fibre statistic that stops people short: fewer than one in ten of us eat enough of it. That's not a willpower failure, it's a starting point. You don't fix it by overhauling your life. You fix it by adding beans to the rice you're already cooking, a handful of almonds, having vegetables high in vitamin C to a meal you already make.

Stop worrying about the wrong things

I sat in a lecture recently where a kidney specialist was asked, repeatedly, which type of salt is healthiest. His answer: salt is sodium chloride, whatever its colour or shape. The difference between pink Himalayan and table salt is vanishingly small compared with how much you're using.

This is the 80/20 problem. People pour enormous energy into 20%-questions; the perfect oil, the trendiest superfood, while the 80% that would actually transform their health goes untouched. When someone asks me "what's the one food I should never eat?", I've learned to ask why instead. Usually the question underneath is about control, or fear, or a need for certainty. Answer that, and the food questions often dissolve.

Small, consistent, almost embarrassingly tiny

The science of habit formation is unglamorous. What the brain responds to isn't the size of an action but its consistency, and the identity it reinforces. One minute of exercise every day beats an hour once a week, because you become someone who exercises every day. One breath. One glass of water. One short walk that, over years, becomes ninety minutes without you noticing.

New Year's resolutions collapse by February because we start from restriction and perfectionism, the "all or nothing" wagon that's either on or off. I've let go of that wagon entirely, in my own life and in how I practise. Everything is welcome. Multiple truths can coexist. That shift, from I'm either healthy or I've failed to I'm building, is more freeing than any diet.

The myths worth dismantling

A few beliefs I'd gently challenge:

• "Healthy eating is expensive." Incomplete. Some foods are pricier, and food poverty is real. I'm not waving that away. But expensive does not equal healthy. Tinned beans, seasonal veg, supermarket-brand basics, imperfect-looking produce boxes: these are accessible and nourishing. You don't need organic-everything to eat well.

• "Convenience food is automatically bad." No. A pouch of flavoured lentils, frozen vegetables, a jar of sauce that gets a real meal on the table on a hard day, these can elevate your nutrition compared with the takeaway you'd have ordered instead. If you cooked at all, you're winning.

• "Vegan means healthy." Not necessarily, and neither does "ultra-processed" always mean harmful. It's a spectrum. A plant-based burger higher in fibre and lower in saturated fat isn't the same as a low-fibre, high-sugar biscuit engineered to be moreish. Context is everything.

• "Protein/fibre-maxing." Good ideas turned into marketing. Yes, most of us need more fibre, but adding too much too fast backfires, and "everything now has protein in it" is a shelf strategy, not a health one. Get it from real food where you can.

  
  

Stress isn't the enemy

Stress is unavoidable, and there's nothing wrong with that. It's built into our nervous system; it enables us to perform, adapt and survive. The problem isn't stress, it's that we've forgotten recovery. No athlete needs convincing that rest is part of training, yet the rest of us treat it as weakness or luxury. What goes up must come down.

Two things I've learned. First, stress is a felt experience, not just a thought, you can't purely think your way out of it; you have to work with the body, through breath, movement, sleep and connection. Second, everyone's stressors are valid. One person is fleeing a war; another has missed their yoga class. Their nervous systems don't rank the events the way we might; the experience is real either way. I explored this in our “Wisdom in the Community” project.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFxS1zpeKuY

Food is connection, not just fuel

Some of my happiest memories are breakfasts at my family table, my father insisting we start the day laughing, the "portion of laughs" served alongside the food. Across cultures, food is community, ritual, belonging. What modern life has stripped away is the slowing down.

You don't need to do this at every meal, the perfectionism trap again. But a few shared, unhurried meals a week; tasting your food properly; noticing texture, smell and emotion; switching off the screen when you're with someone. These do as much for your health as the nutrients on the plate. Try eating one piece of fruit slowly, with full attention. Most people realise they've been missing the flavour entirely. And variety helps: aim for around 30 different plants a week, which is far easier than it sounds when you simply vary what you already eat.

Meeting people where they are

The belief I most had to unlearn: that we all live in the same world. We don't. We live in parallel worlds, each shaped by our own history, and inside each one, people's choices are usually justified. Healthcare too often judges, why can't you just do this?, when the honest answer involves neuroscience, capability, stress, background. Knowledge doesn't become behaviour in a blink; it builds. I resisted eating eggs for years despite being told, plainly, that I should. Behaviour change is a collaboration, not an instruction.

So my approach is integrative and, above all, collaborative. I don't much care what works; medication, nutrition, coaching, breathwork, as long as we do it together. I can't heal for you. We meet in the middle. Often, what people most need first isn't advice at all. It's to be seen and understood.

The simple truth

Here's what I think upsets people most: there are no hard-and-fast rules. "More than five ingredients is bad." "If you can't pronounce it, don't eat it." These are comforting because they're sellable, but they don't hold. Healthy living isn't about reinventing ourselves. It's about remembering what our bodies already know, and coming back to it. It's simple, not always easy, but simple.

If you'd like to begin, that's exactly the work I do. Let’s connect and you'll leave with a clear, personalised plan, built around your life.