There’s a viral clip of Steven Bartlett — the host of The Diary of a CEO podcast — where he claims drinking a few glasses of wine “ruined three days of his life.”
As he goes on to explain, the wine caused a domino effect where he slept worse, which screwed with his dopamine and cortisol, which made him eat worse. This made him a worse podcaster. He skipped the gym for a couple of days because, I guess, he was too busy curled up in a ball crying about all of this. And he knew the full extent of this physiological fuckstorm because his Whoop helpfully reported it to him.
After seeing that clip, I thought about Nassim Taleb’s idea of antifragility. Taleb’s basic point, which takes him over 100,000 words to make, is that fragile things are harmed by stress and disorder, while antifragile things actually become stronger because of them.
It makes me wonder whether all this optimisation is having the opposite effect: making us less able to cope with the vagaries of life.
If you need eight perfect hours of sleep, with every sleep stage optimised; if one night out ruins your whole week because you drank a little more than planned; or if you can’t start your day without following a rigid 10-step morning routine to “lock in”—I dunno, that seems like the opposite of why most people want to be healthier and fitter, no?
And yet, that’s the promise optimisation culture is selling: that your health (and body) is a system to hack. Follow this exact morning routine, buy the right supplement stack or wearable, track every metric, and you too can transcend the annoying realities of being human — become leaner, stronger, and healthier, prevent ageing and live forever.
But I have some issues with this whole cult of trying to maximally optimise every aspect of our health.
Let’s talk about it.
Don’t get it twisted
This isn’t an attack on tracking. I’m not going to finish this article by organising a group meet where we all burn our fitness trackers and then ride off into the sunset as the closing credits roll.
I like tracking. But I like it because it turns vague intentions into actionable goals.
“I want to be less sedentary” is easier to achieve if you keep an eye on your physical activity levels. “Lose weight” is more likely to happen if you’re weighing yourself. And “eat more protein” becomes a target you can hit if you’re tracking protein intake.
And the research supports this too.
For example, people are more likely to achieve a goal when they monitor their progress, and it works even better when progress is physically recorded. We see the same in weight management research. When people self-monitor food and physical activity, they tend to lose more weight, and wearables tend to increase physical activity levels.
But that doesn’t mean every metric should be tracked. Tracking is useful when the metric being tracked is reasonably accurate and gives you information you can actually act on. For example, wearable activity trackers are generally pretty accurate for estimating step counts and measuring heart rate, but they’re terrible at estimating energy expenditure.
Which brings us to the first problem with all this health optimisation: what, exactly, are we trying to optimise, and can we even measure it accurately?
What are we optimising for?
If we’re going to optimise for something, we need to be able to answer three questions:
- Is the metric reasonably accurate?
- Does improving said metric correspond with improvements in health, body composition, or performance?
- Can we use the information to decide what to do next?
Unfortunately, many devices people use to inform decisions on their health and fitness don’t even pass the first point.
In a recent review of 310 consumer wearable devices, researchers investigated how accurately devices from major brands such as Apple, Fitbit, Whoop, Garmin, and Oura measured things like heart rate, steps, sleep, physical activity, and energy expenditure. To do this, they looked at studies comparing wearables with established gold-standard methods.
Across 249 validation studies, only 166 compared the wearable against an accepted reference standard, and only 75 used appropriate methods to assess accuracy. There weren’t even enough comparable studies of the same device measuring the same thing for the researchers to combine the results into one reliable estimate.
And that’s only looking at the individual metrics.
But wearable companies often combine several measurements—such as heart rate variability, resting heart rate, sleep, and recent activity—into proprietary readiness, recovery, or stress scores.
So, how accurate are those scores?
A 2025 review identified 14 ‘composite health scores’ (i.e., scores that combine several biometrics into a single number to quantify readiness, recovery, stress, or overall well-being) from 10 of the major wearable brands.
The researchers noted that while these scores are built from established biometric measurements, such as heart rate and HRV, the final scores have received far less scientific scrutiny.
As they wrote, “None of the manufacturers disclosed their exact algorithmic formulas, and few provided empirical validation or peer-reviewed evidence supporting the accuracy or clinical relevance of their scores.”
To use an example: Imagine I’m selling you a fat-loss supplement. I tell you it works, but I won’t tell you exactly what’s in it, how much of each ingredient it contains, or show you any evidence that it actually helps people lose fat. I’m pretty confident you would be very sceptical. After all, you don’t know what’s in the product or whether the product even does what it claims to do.
Yet that same scepticism goes out the window when it comes to wearables. Perhaps there’s a kind of tech halo effect: these companies have teams of engineers, fancy apps, and provide plenty of data, so we assume their products – and ‘health’ scores – must be accurate.
But, in my opinion, there’s a bigger issue. If you wake up and your smartwatch tells you that you aren’t fully recovered, what exactly are you supposed to do with that information?
Skip training? Reduce your sets? Sleep another hour? Cancel your morning podcast because two glasses of wine wrecked you? Likewise, what if your recovery score is low but you feel great — then what? Do you skip your training because an app told you to?
So not only are the numbers questionable, but a low ‘recovery’ score could also risk a nocebo-like effect: You think you’re under-recovered, so you start to feel or behave like you are, even when you’re fine.
This brings us back to the three questions from the start of this section. We don’t really know how accurate many of these scores are, there’s little evidence that chasing a better score improves health or performance, and when recommendations are provided, they’re often too vague to guide any meaningful decision-making.
When normal physiology becomes the enemy
But, of course, this is the cult of optimisation, where no amount of data is ever quite enough. Tracking your sleep, heart rate, and stress was only the beginning. If more data means better health, then the logical next step is to push the boundaries of what can be measured.
Enter continuous glucose monitors.
Oh, no, I don’t mean CGMs for people with diabetes. I’m talking about CGMs being marketed to perfectly healthy adults.
Yep. This is a real thing that’s happening because, at some point, wellness-culture fuckfaces decided that a normal physiological response was another thing that people needed to track and worry about, despite the evidence saying otherwise.
This 2026 review found that CGMs are most useful when — wait for it — people actually have glucose-related problems, and “no significant glycemic benefit was observed in normoglycemic individuals.”
Additionally, using a CGM didn’t reduce BMI. The authors went on to explain that while using a CGM might improve behaviour change — for example, by eating fewer carbohydrates — this doesn’t necessarily mean people will eat fewer calories.
There’s also a more philosophical question about how healthy these behavioural changes really are. Choosing to eat fewer sugary foods because doing so genuinely makes you feel better is one thing. Cutting out perfectly healthy foods because you’re afraid of a normal rise in blood glucose is something else entirely.
Leaving humanity behind
Now we’ve arrived at the final stage of optimisation culture. Once you’ve run out of things to measure, what comes next?
Simple: You start injecting poorly studied compounds that promise faster recovery, more muscle, less fat, and a longer life.
Allow me to introduce you to the weird and not-so-wonderful world of peptides.
Just so we’re all on the same page, a quick primer: Peptides are short chains of amino acids (the building blocks of proteins) that act as signalling molecules throughout the body. Insulin, for example, is a peptide hormone, while medications such as semaglutide and tirzepatide have transformed the treatment of obesity and type 2 diabetes.
However, there’s another class of peptides that are super hot right now, claiming to accelerate injury recovery, increase muscle growth, reduce body fat, improve athletic performance, and even slow ageing. And, as you would expect, many are marketed based on cell or animal studies, mechanistic theories, and/or anecdotes, despite having little or no human evidence to support their use.
A recent review examined the evidence for several peptides commonly promoted for injury recovery and athletic performance and found that, in almost every case, the marketing claims were miles ahead of the actual evidence.
Take one of the more popular peptides, BPC-157, for example. If you hear how people talk about it, you would think they discovered a Wolverine serum for muscle, tendon, and joint injuries. Yet, the evidence supporting these claims comes largely from animal data.
The only human evidence is one retrospective study of 16 people who were given BPC-157 injections for knee pain and phoned up months later to ask, “Hey, does your knee hurt less?”
I wish I could say I’m surprised, but I’ve been doing this long enough now to know it doesn’t take much for bullshit artists to sell bullshit.
Finally, there’s the small matter of safety. We don’t know much about the long-term risks of many of these peptides, and that’s before we get to buying injectable compounds from some rando on the internet whose quality-control policy amounts to, “Just trust me, bro.”
Optimising for the right things
I want to be clear that I don’t have an issue with optimisation when it’s actually useful and beneficial. You might realise your sleep habits are impacting your daily life, so you focus on improving your sleep hygiene. As a result, you feel more energetic, you’re less hungry, and your training performance is better. In this example, ‘optimising’ your sleep had a net positive benefit across different areas of your life.
But if you become so obsessed with hitting the perfect sleep score (which I recently learned is called orthosomnia) that it starts negatively impacting other areas of your life, well, congrats, you’re a world-champion sleeper, but at what cost?
That’s the key distinction.
I don’t know about you, but I want to live a (hopefully) long life so I can be there for my family, watch my daughter grow up, and optimise for the things that can’t be tracked in an app. Health and fitness help me do that. They’re a means to an end—not the end itself.
Maybe the goal isn’t to build a body whose HRV never drops, whose sleep is never interrupted, whose calorie intake never deviates, and whose workouts are never missed.
Maybe it’s to build a body that can tolerate less-than-optimal conditions. One where you can stay up late occasionally, miss a workout now and then, eat too much at Christmas, have a glass of wine if you drink, and wake up with a shitty recovery score and then…just get on with your life.
Because if your perfectly optimised health routine falls apart the moment life happens, it might be worth asking what exactly you’ve optimised it for.
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