The wellness industry wants you to believe you have to optimise every iota of your life to be healthy, and it’s bullshit. In reality, if you do the following, you’re ticking almost all the boxes for being fit and healthy.
Body composition
Body composition – i.e., muscle and body fat – has a strong correlation with the risk of all-cause mortality and overall health. Carrying excess body fat is linked with an increased mortality risk, while this risk decreases as fat-free mass increases. 1
When most people hear this, they assume they need to be super shredded. But you might be surprised to learn that the risk associated with body fat tapers off at levels much higher than most people would assume. Jayedi and colleagues found the lowest mortality risk was observed at a BF% of 22% for men and 35% for women. 2
If you want to get leaner because that’s something you want to do–great. But from a health perspective, leaner doesn’t necessarily mean better.
As for muscle mass, skeletal muscle is an independent marker of metabolic health, and low muscle mass and strength are linked to an increased risk of metabolic disease. 3 And let’s not forget lifting weights can help stave off sarcopenia (age-related loss of muscle mass, quality, and function) and osteopenia (when grandpa fucks around and breaks his hip because he tried being a hero opening a jar of whatever the fuck).
Avoid being too sedentary
I don’t think I need to explain the benefits of regular movement and physical activity to Physiqonomics readers.
But to contextualise how detrimental a lack of movement is, being sedentary for 10 hours per day is associated with a 48% increase in the risk of death. When sedentary time increases to 12 hours per day, the risk increases to a whopping 192%. 4
On the flipside, more movement, at any intensity, is linked to a lower risk of death.
Specifically, maximum risk reduction kicks in at around 375 minutes/day of light activity (e.g. slow walking, household chores) or 24 minutes/day of moderate-to-vigorous activity (e.g. brisk walking, cycling, running). 4
As for step count, based on the most recent review of the topic, anywhere between 7,000 and 9,000 steps/day seems to be the optimal dose for reducing mortality risk (though there are slight benefits to doing more). The same study found that each additional 1,000 steps/day was associated with a 9% reduction in the risk of all-cause mortality. So even a little bit is better than nothing.
Eat fairly healthy most of the time
While I won’t go as far as to say “food is medicine,” there is a strong association between diet quality and lower mortality risk from all causes, including cardiovascular disease and cancer. This association may be due to healthier diets lowering inflammation, reducing oxidative stress, and providing antioxidants from fruits and vegetables, neutralising harmful substances and protecting cells from damage. 5 6
From a body composition perspective, a healthier diet can help you manage hunger and reduce calorie intake, decreasing the likelihood of gaining excess body fat (see point 1).
While I tend to stay away from giving concrete guidelines on this stuff, some good guidelines would be:
- Aim for around 0.7g/lb of protein (though this can be slightly lower or higher depending on your personal situation – more on that here).
- Try to eat 400g of combined fruit and vegetables every day since this is where the risk of all-cause mortality plateaus. 7
- Most of your diet should contain minimally processed, nutrient-rich foods like whole grains, legumes and healthy fats like olive oil and nuts—the stuff you know you should eat.
- (Try to) Keep added sugars <10% of total caloric intake. However, this is less of a concern if you’re physically active and maintaining a healthy body fat % (just be sensible).
- Aim for 250 mg of combined EPA and DHA (i.e. fish oil).
- Set fiber intake to around 14g/1000 kcal. So, at 2000 calories, you’d aim for 28g. However, everyone’s a little different, so you might need to experiment to find your sweet spot. For example, if you crank up your fiber intake and suddenly find yourself bloated, constipated, and producing enough gas to power a small city, it’s probably time to dial it back a bit.
- Once the above is in order, you can set carbs and fats per your preference or not worry about them.
Limit how much alcohol you consume
There’s a popular belief that low levels of alcohol intake provide protective effects against the risk of all-cause mortality. I hate being that guy (I don’t–I love it), but this doesn’t seem to be true.
A recent review involving more than 4.8 million people and ~425,000 deaths found that, when all biases and potential confounders were accounted for, low levels of alcohol consumption (<25g/day) didn’t protect against the risk of dying from any cause (compared to lifetime nondrinkers). 8
And the risk increased as alcohol intake exceeded this amount. According to their analysis, women who drank more than 25g of alcohol per day and men who drank more than 45g of alcohol per day had a higher risk of mortality compared to those drinking less than these amounts.
For example, men who drank 45-<65g of alcohol per day had a 22% increase in risk compared to men who drank 1.3 to <25g per day. This increased to ~43% when alcohol intake increased to ≥65 g/day.
Conversely, women who drank 25 to <45g of alcohol per day had a 22% increase in risk compared to women drinking 1.30 to <25g of alcohol per day. The risk increased to 35% when women increased their alcohol intake to 45 to <65g of alcohol/day.
To be clear, I’m not telling you what to do. But if we’re going to talk about health, you should be informed about the risks associated with drinking alcohol.
Try to get more sleep
Chronic short sleep is consistently linked to a higher risk of an early exit, likely through its effects on cardiovascular health, metabolism, and stress. But that risk might not be due to sleep alone — it could also reflect deeper issues, like illness, psychological distress, or socioeconomic factors. 9
This is what often gets missed in the online conversations about sleep.
Let’s say someone is working two jobs to make ends meet, living in a noisy apartment, constantly stressed about bills, and doesn’t have the luxury of a wind-down routine or 8 hours in bed. As a result, they’re only getting 5-6 hours of sleep each night.
If we look at the data, we might say this person has a higher risk of dying earlier, but is that because of the sleep loss itself, or because of everything causing the sleep loss?
- Chronic stress raises blood pressure and increases inflammation.
- Poor nutrition (due to time or money constraints) increases disease risk.
- Lack of healthcare access means chronic issues go untreated.
So when studies show that short sleep is linked to early death, it might not be the sleep doing the damage, but all of the other things that are causing someone to sleep less.
That being said, if you’re someone who, for whatever reason, isn’t able to get enough sleep, there is some good news.
From a health perspective, there’s evidence that exercise can help offset some of the negative consequences associated with sleep loss, like your body’s ability to process glucose, mitochondrial function (how well cells produce energy), and reduce inflammation. 10 11
Additionally, a 2022 prospective cohort study of 380,000 UK adults found that while poor sleep was associated with a higher risk of all-cause mortality, meeting the minimum physical activity guidelines eliminated most of the increased risk. 12
Specifically, individuals with poor sleep and low physical activity (<150 minutes/week) had a 57% higher risk of all-cause mortality and a 67% higher risk of cardiovascular disease mortality.
In contrast, individuals with poor sleep but high physical activity (at least 300 minutes of moderate activity or 150 minutes of vigorous activity per week) had a 23% increase in all-cause mortality and a 39% increase in cardiovascular disease mortality.
So, while there’s still some risk with poor sleep, it’s significantly reduced with higher levels of physical activity.
As far as body composition is concerned, sleep loss suppresses the mTOR pathway—think of it like dimming the lights on muscle growth. Mechanistically, resistance training could act like turning that dimmer switch back up, countering the effects of sleep loss. 13
For example, a recent study found that high-intensity interval training brought muscle protein synthesis back to baseline when participants were sleep-deprived, suggesting that high-intensity interval training could help counteract the catabolic effects of sleep loss. 14
But there could be another factor at play – sleep regularity.
While sleep duration has long dominated the conversation around sleep and health, a recent study makes a compelling case that sleep regularity—how consistently you go to bed and wake up—is an even stronger predictor of mortality risk.
Drawing from over 60,000 UK Biobank participants and more than 10 million hours of accelerometer data, the researchers assessed participants’ Sleep Regularity Index (SRI), a metric capturing daily consistency in sleep-wake timing. 15
(Shoutout to Stronger By Science – I found this study through them.)
The results suggest that individuals with the most regular sleep (top 20% SRI scores) had a 30–48% lower risk of death than those with the most irregular sleep (bottom 20%), even after adjusting for age, sex, physical activity, socioeconomic status, smoking, etc.
Sleep duration still mattered, but once sleep regularity was factored in, the predictive value of sleep duration dropped.
In practical terms, people who woke up within the same 1-hour window each day had significantly lower mortality risk than those whose wake times swung by 2 hours or more, regardless of how long they slept. So yes, getting 7–9 hours matters—but, according to this study, keeping a regular sleep/wake window might be more important.
The bottom line?
You don’t need a cold plunge, an overpriced health tracker, or a supplement stack that costs more than your monthly grocery bill to be healthy.
Move your body, lift some weights, don’t eat like an asshole, manage stress, get enough sleep with consistent wake/sleep times, and ease up on the alcohol.
If you’re doing that, you can safely ignore the endless noise on social media, knowing that you’re doing perfectly ok.
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