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Lately, I’ve been thinking about how easy it is to make health feel far more complicated than it needs to be. 

There is always another metric to track, another supplement to try, another programme promising better results. Meanwhile, the simple basics often get pushed aside. I catch myself doing it too.

That is exactly why this post is going right back to basics. 

We are looking at the 8 things that actually matter for your health. 

Not all at once and not with some impossible idea of perfection. Just one small step at a time until it becomes part of real life.

Let this be your reset if you feel like you've been doing all the things but still aren't making the progress you expected.

1. Hydration

It sounds almost too simple, but most people are not drinking enough. 

A good rule of thumb is to check the colour of your urine: dark yellow means you need more fluid, light and pale means you are doing well. Aim for at least 64 ounces a day, though some people need closer to 100.

One practical tip: if eating and drinking at the same time feels like too much, separate them. Focus on food at meals, then give yourself windows in between to get your fluids in. Plain water is great, but everything counts.

2. Fiber

Women need at least 25 grams a day, men at least 38. This is not just about feeling full — your gut microbiome depends on it, and it plays a real role in long-term disease prevention.

Start by doing a quick audit of where you are right now, then increase slowly by about 5 grams at a time. Going too fast can cause bloating and digestive discomfort, so there is no rush. Good whole food sources to lean on:

• Lentils and legumes
• Berries
• Avocado
• Vegetables like carrots and broccoli
• Apples

3. Protein

Around 100 grams a day is a good place to be for most people. But this varies depending on your size, muscle mass, and goals. The key thing here is to let data guide you rather than guessing. If your body composition is holding steady and you are not losing muscle, your protein intake is probably fine. There’s no need to create a problem that is not there.

4. Body Composition

If you are only tracking your weight on a regular scale, you’re missing most of the picture. A body composition scale (a bioimpedance scale with 4 touchpoints) tells you what is actually happening with your muscle and fat. This matters because losing muscle silently while the number on the scale drops is one of the most common and costly mistakes in any weight loss journey. (See patient Jacqui’s experience with muscle loss here.)

Muscle is not just about how you look. It protects your metabolism, supports insulin sensitivity, improves balance, and is one of the strongest markers of long-term health. We want to keep it.

If you need support understanding what your body composition numbers actually mean, check out my practical course: Body Composition Decoded.

5. Sleep and Rest

Sleep is the obvious one, but rest is just as important (and often completely overlooked). Rest means actual downtime. Time where you are not producing, not optimizing, not ticking things off a list.

If you are someone who finds it hard to switch off, that is worth paying attention to. A nervous system that never gets to recover is going to make everything else harder. Rest is not a reward for getting everything done. It is part of the process.

6. Movement

This is not about intense workouts. It is about making sure your body moves every single day in some way — walking, swimming, stretching, whatever works for you. A minimum of 30 minutes a day is a solid goal, and it does not need to be all at once.

Movement improves mood, supports brain health, regulates cortisol, and makes everything feel more manageable. The goal is to get to a place where it is just part of your day, not something you debate or negotiate with yourself about.

7. Strength Training

Movement and strength training are not the same thing, and both matter. Strength training is specifically what protects your muscle as you lose weight. If you are worried about weight regain, this is one of the most important tools you have.

It does not need to be an hour at the gym. Even 10 minutes, three times a week is enough to make a real difference. Starting is the hardest part.

Dr. Ali Novitsky's year-long strength program is a great place to start. It begins with chair-based movements and progressively builds from there. Just 10 minutes, three times a week, with a full year of unique workouts. You can now access the program through my clinic here.  

8. Systems Over Decisions

This one ties everything together. You cannot rely on motivation to show up every day, because it won't. What works is removing the decision altogether.

For me, that looks like:

• Laying out your workout clothes the night before
• Prepping food at the weekend so healthy choices are already made
• Building one habit at a time until it is fully automatic, then adding the next

When something becomes a system, you stop spending energy on whether you are going to do it. You just do it. That is where real, lasting change lives.

Your Turn

Read back through this list of eight basics and ask yourself honestly: which of these needs a little work right now? Pick just one. This is not a complete overhaul. Just choose one small area to focus on until it feels easy.

That is how this actually works. Simple, unglamorous, and far more effective than anything complicated.

Listen to the full episode for the complete breakdown of all 8 areas, including how to build habits that stop relying on motivation and why rest might be the most underrated tool you have.

TRANSCRIPT:

Disclaimer: The transcript below is provided for your convenience and may contain typos, errors, or grammatical inconsistencies, as it has not been professionally edited or proofread. Please enjoy it as-is and read at your own discretion.

Please note: The content shared in this podcast and blog post is for informational and educational purposes only and is not intended as medical advice. Always consult your healthcare provider for personalized medical guidance.   

 Welcome back to another episode of the podcast. I have just had a most delightful lunch and a skill that I'm working on right now is to slow down how fast I'm eating. I took a continuing medical education here recently, by the way, it was a Saturday from 12 to six at night. Sometimes I sit there, I'm like, yeah, I said a lot of my weekends doing these trainings.

But it, it was good. I'm always learning things and I, it was like a throwaway comment that was made in one of the lectures, but they were talking about how basically one of the tools that they use in their clinic, they recommend that people set a 20 minute timer if they're a fast eater.

And this is obviously something that we, at some point, I've mentioned this, right? Doing monk meals where you're not talking and you're. Really able to mindfully enjoy your food, things like that, and setting a timer and putting your fork down in between. These are all just very rudimentary things that you can try.

I go through this in my clinic where if someone's struggling with different aspects, these are the little kind of things that we're adjusting and then there gets to more, more bigger boulders, if you would. But this is one of them. So I thought to myself, I set a timer and I thought, well, it probably takes about 15 minutes when I eat.

No, Friends, it was nine minutes. I was like, okay, so that's my baseline is nine minutes and I'm gonna work on slowing down. The thing that gets in my way is that I wanna get back to the work I need to do because I'm thinking, well, if I bring the food back to my desk and I eat when I'm working, somehow that's gonna make it all better.

And I know intellectually at this point that does not work for me. It's as though I didn't eat the food. I know I have to physically sit down at a table. I have to be doing nothing else. I've worked on a lot of things over time, but just seeing how quickly I eat, it's definitely something that I'm gonna keep working on.

So that, that's where I'm at right now. But I've been thinking a lot here recently about how people just really overcomplicate what is needed. To work on their health. I see people, they're, they're tracking 15 different things. We call this like the controller, where you think if I, if I track and write and do enough things perfectly, everything's gonna work out.

You're wanting the perfect supplement plan. You have this analysis paralysis, which option is the best thing for me to do? Meanwhile, simple basics aren't happening. Today we're just gonna rewind it all the way back, and I wanna talk about a few areas that if you are not doing this, stop trying to get fancy, doing all this creative stuff that's way out there when you're not doing the basics.

Number one. You guessed it. Hydration. Now it's simple, but everyone's not necessarily doing it. I always say that the best way to know if you're hydrated, it's to look at the color of your urine.

If it's super dark, yellow and concentrated, you know you need more fluid. If it's a really light color, you know you're doing great. Most people, it's gonna be at least 64 ounces. Some people might push it up to a hundred. What's really gonna dictate your hydration journey is where you're at as far as if you just started a GLP one.

Sometimes it's actually hard to get in all that fluid, but then as you're on it longer, that will get easier. One thing I would suggest, if it's hard for you as far as volume with food and liquids to separate. The liquids to not have them at the meal. During the meal, you focus on getting the nutrition in that you need and that you maybe wait 30 minutes to an hour until you have the liquids.

The two, three hours between when you're not right before another meal, you give yourself windows where it's either hydration or food. Obviously plain water's amazing. But really everything counts.

I don't care if it has caffeine in it. I don't care if you put electrolytes in it, although that's not mandatory. That's a billion dollar industry that popped outta nowhere. Do whatever you need to do so that you like that liquid. And you can get it down consistently. That's the first step here.

Okay. Number two, and again, these aren't in a particular order, when you're listening to this, I want you to think about, Hey, what area could I do a little bit of work with? And you just focus on that. The point is not to every single area. Now you go and do that.

It's just don't over complicate. If you're not doing these things there, you shouldn't be doing crazy CrossFit exercises. We'll come back to here. Number two, fiber. For women at least 25 grams or more for men, at least 38 grams or more. This is not just about satiety. Your gut microbiome needs it.

This is your colon cancer prevention. We are seeing younger and younger patients get colon cancer. They are in their young forties. This is unheard of in the past and one of the main reasons that we're seeing this is that with the rise of all this ultra processed food. People are literally not getting fiber in their diets. And this makes sense because if you're eating very processed fiber is not necessarily appealing. It's not really part of things, I want you to get fiber from whole sources.

You might have to take some time to figure this out, and that's okay because it's part of the process. That's the reason why in every single course that I do, but particularly that twice a year when I do 30, 30. We talk a lot about fiber in that WhatsApp group. We're like, oh my gosh, what'd you make? That looks great.

You know? I'm like, oh, I forgot. Yeah, I forgot I could use lentils. Oh my gosh. Forgot about avocado. Forgot about how good berries are for fiber, right? Sometimes when you see it happening in a group, you get a lot more ideas sparked, but work on your fiber. See where you are right now. Do a little audit.

Then up it by five grams. Don't go crazy. The reason you wanna go nice and slow with upping fibers, 'cause otherwise you have a lot of gas and digestive issues. So we don't wanna go too crazy, but I want it from Whole based Foods. I don't want it all from little gummies and things like that. Now, I'm not gonna lie, the Gros, those little gummies that they have that have, I think it's 20 different types of vitamins in it and the sugar free one.

Those are the ones that I get. Each little packet is 20 calories, six grams of fiber. I love those, but I'm not relying on that being the only fiber source, there's a few per week, but don't get yourself into a situation where everything is, you know, the low carb tortillas that have a bunch of that type of fiber stuff added.

A lot of the times people end up having even worse digestive issues with that, but make sure you're getting your fiber work on it slowly. Keep it easy. Like a lot of the times when I'm working with younger patients and let's say they're busy in college, I ask them like, Hey, can we add an apple with breakfast?

Can you get a veggie party platter? You take your reusable Ziploc bag and you put a few baby carrots and whatever other veggies, and you bring that for your lunch that you're gonna. Have that with whatever you get at the cafeteria. Let's just make this easy on you. You can do this.

You're just gonna have to seek out those easy fiber options, and it's gonna take you time to figure out what you like. Okay? That's fiber Number three here is gonna be protein, and I want the data to guide you with how much you need. Most people need at least 20 to 30 grams, if not more, depending on gender and build and muscle mass, all that kind of stuff.

But most people, if they're getting around a hundred grams, are good. Now, do some of you need less? Absolutely. Some of you do just fine On 60 grams a day, do some of you need much more? 1 40, 1 50? Absolutely. Okay, so how are you gonna know this? I'm always gonna recommend that you use a body composition scale.

That's a bio impedance scale, one that has four different touch parts, the two feet and the arms. I talk a lot about this. I did a mini course, body composition decoded, where I talk about all of this, how to pick the scale, how to use the scale properly, when to use the scale, how to interpret the data, what to actually do with it, because no one talks about all this

and I'll do another episode on it if you're not able to get that course. I'll talk about some of it. What's convenient in that course though, is that I have all the formulas and everything written out in one handout, so you have all the little videos that you can go through. It's super quick, but then you have that resource that you can always.

Calculate things like the percentage of muscle loss. Is it here and there? All over my stuff? Yes. But who has time to go through 150 episodes to figure all this stuff out? So it's all in one spot. But with protein, if you're doing a monthly body composition, you will know if you're maintaining.

For not losing more than 10% of your skeletal muscle mass, that likely the amount of protein you're eating is good. I can tell you in that group 30 30 program that I was telling you about, it is very common that someone will say, well, my goal this week, I'm gonna up protein. And my first question is always, how do we know it's a problem?

And they'll say to me, oh, because they just assume, because we have, some general goals and things that you can reach. And the reality is they're not losing muscle mass. They're doing great where they're at on their journey, the pace, everything like that. All signs point to there's nothing happening here that I need to change.

So we're not trying to create problems where it's not, but you know, if you're subsisting on granola bars,, and you're like, yeah, I'm just not getting the protein in. So that's food for thought there with the protein part. Alright, number four here is body composition. Again, same thing we talked about above.

I don't want you to be obsessed with this, but I truly am of the belief if you're not using a body composition scale, it's like you have a blindfold on and I put you on the highway and I said, now drive. You would say, that's insane. I'm not doing this. It is. Really insanity to try to lose weight and to not know what is happening with the body composition scale.

It's also not honoring likely how amazing your body is. You don't know if you have higher muscle mass. You have no idea about any of this, and all you're thinking is that number needs to get lower. I can't tell you how often when I have patients in the clinic and we're going through their body composition, they, I always say, cat in the cat out of the hat.

They decide some random number. Then we look at how much muscle they have and what's happening with their body. And I'll never forget this one patient, we calculated it, she would need to have 10 pounds of body fat. That's incredibly low. She would need to have 10 pounds of body fat to reach the number that she was talking about.

And then she realized, okay, that's not gonna be the goal that I'm going for. Body composition is going to help. Tell you, is it just fat that I'm losing? Am I able to hold onto muscle? Now, it's very normal when you're losing weight to lose some muscle. We just don't wanna lose more than 10% because the reality is muscle is so hard to put back on.

Muscle is protective for insulin resistance. Muscle is longevity. Muscle is gonna help you not fall when you're older. It's gonna help with balance and flexibility. You need muscle. That's the engine in everything. We don't wanna lose it. It is not fun to build up muscle later. In the best of circumstances, you can put on half a pound a month.

Like that previous episode where my. Patient came on the podcast who has done just flipping fantastic. She lost 17 pounds of muscle before getting to me. And I think if she'd known some of these principles, she's told me this, that she wouldn't have had to do that, and now you, you're in this position where then you have to recover that muscle.

Now you might not recover all of it again, because when your body's a smaller size, you might not need as much muscle. That's a whole different conversation. But in general, we're wanting to. Move you in the direction of health, not just that body size decreases, that's not what we're about. We're about health improving.

Okay, so that's number four, the body composition. Number five is sleep and rest. Sleep is self understood. How many hours are you sleeping? But the real thing that matters here is you also need rest. It is not normal to be pushing all the time. You need rest? I wanna give you an example within my business.

'cause the business examples are always so clear to me. So I'm someone where I want to be. Balls to the Wall Max effort working all the time. And for me to say, okay, that is white space, that's the time I'm gonna block. Like, no, at on Friday we end, at this time we don't work till six or 7:00 PM For me to do that, it's hard.

But what I always notice is that when I rest over the weekend, when I do these things, I get. So many great ideas. I feel I'm a better physician for it. Life is better, everything that's happening. So if I'm not resting, it's actually a disservice to everyone involved. We have this fallacy like I gotta be productive all the time.

I've gotta be doing stuff all the time. No. What if you realize that I am actually not my max healthy self when I'm working all the time. That I need that downtime, by the way, if your nervous system isn't used to this, I'm speaking to the, professional people of the world that are listening here.

You are not used to resting. You're probably used to overproducing over-functioning overdelivering. When you are used to doing that, you don't know what it feels like to just sit on the couch for a little bit. You need to get used to that. You have to train yourself. This is normal. We can rest.

I don't always need to be in motion to not feel okay. I'm not talking about those of you, that you actually like to relax with walks or playing sports. That's a different thing. But my point is that you have times where there's enjoyment, where there, where it's restorative. That's what I'm talking about.

That needs to be part of it because. If you're not respecting the process, your body's not gonna cooperate with you. This is honestly, a lot of the time, the biggest thing that's overlooked. Okay. Number six on here is movement. And I wanna separate six being movement and seven being strength training.

When I say movement, I'm talking about do you walk, do you stretch, do you swim? Do you have a fun sport that you're playing. We are made to move. Everybody, unless you have a physical disability and you can't, you're in a wheelchair or you have neuropathy and can't feel your legs there.

There are many scenarios, but if you are able. Please see this as the greatest gift that you can move your body. And let's work to increase your ability if we can. Maybe when you're just starting out, you just can sit up and sit back down. Amazing. Let's work on that with time. Can we get you walking?

Can we build up again? If there's a medical condition that's different, but if you can, we are meant to move, when we move. We have a lot of things happening. One of the things BDNF levels go up. That's the topsoil of the brain that's helping you with memory focus, cognition. You need that. We all need this to feel better.

That's one of the things. Your cortisol levels are better regulated. In my mind, minimum 30 minutes a day, you are moving your body in some capacity. This does not need to be intense. It just needs to be that you're moving. So I don't care if it's in little chunks, if it's all at once, we need to get you moving and you slowly build this up over time where it's a non-negotiable.

You're not like, do I walk, do I not? It happens on that day. It happens. You don't think about it. Number seven is strength training, and this is really about protecting your muscle.

If you are not challenging your muscle, you don't get to keep it. So I know that this is frustrating. This is tends to be the biggest thing that I see people struggle with. But this is what is protecting your metabolism. And if you're someone and put your hand up, if this is you, 'cause this is like everyone I talk to.

If you are someone that worries about weight regain and you are not doing strength training, I don't know what you're doing. Because if your worry is to regain weight. Why would you not do something that you know is gonna help you? You know, it's gonna keep the engine going, you know it's gonna be protective if there's so many things that it's doing that is your greatest insurance policy against not regaining.

That's one of the things. Of course, there's metabolic adaptation, a lot else going on, but you need to be doing strength training if you're worried about that. Is one way you can tell yourself, I'm doing everything I can on my side. I'm hydrating, I'm eating whole based foods. I'm strength training. I'm moving.

Then, you know, if the weight goes in a different direction, you know, well, I'm doing as much as I can do, and then I go to the doctor and I see, Hey, what's going on here? What do you think? Or, we do different audits, we do different testing, that's fine, but you've got to be doing the strength training.

Does it need to be an hour every single day? No, it can be 10 minutes, three times a week. You all know me. I like the ally naski, her 10 minutes, three times a week. It's app-based. It's easy. She's now transitioned it to where you have to get it through a clinic. On her website. She lists all the clinics that do it.

We are one the Renta metabolic clinic. That means that you can reach out to that clinic and they can give you the link for you to be able to get it. She's wanting it to go through the medical community, which makes sense because I have so many of my patients that. Do her programs and they do really well.

And there's level 1, 2, 3. One is you can be in a chair, you can be holding onto a chair, and then it gets all the way up to level three, which is more advanced. But the point is it does not need to be super complicated, but we're gonna be following that body composition. And if monthly we're looking okay, then we know that you are doing okay.

Most of the time it's not taking as much as people think it would for them to be doing a really great job. Getting started is key if you're not already. Okay. Number eight on here. And this put the biggest star by it. Okay. Systems over decisions. You cannot constantly be relying on motivation, or I'll decide later if I'm gonna strength train.

Is today a day I do the walk? No, it's Monday, Wednesday, Friday. You just do it. You don't debate your walk, you don't negotiate your water. It's just part of your life. That's the goal. You just do it. What is needed for this to be the case is that you have to build it out slow enough where one thing ends up being on autopilot and then you add another.

That is what James Clear was talking about in the book Atomic Habits, when he was talking about habits stacking, where you start to add one thing, you already have something there. Then you add another thing in. You don't have it stack things that are uncertain where the whole tower's about to fall over.

With this, if you're not getting water, get water and really lock that down for three months, then work on protein, then work on fiber or whatever order makes most sense for you. Most people can't tackle everything at once. It's not sustained when they do it in that way. You slowly going at the stuff, making sure it is a hundred percent on autopilot. You're not having to think about it. That's where we need to get. Because you have so many decisions to make throughout the day. You can't start the day already in agony. Am I gonna get up and do the walk? What am I gonna do? It needs to be all good to go.

I'm gonna give you an example with me. I, the night before, lay my exercise clothes, I put in a little stack in the bathroom because I get up earlier than my husband. I go in the bathroom, I get dressed, I try not have the lights on and stuff, I go out. I get in the car. I already have my water.

Good to go. The headphones are already next to me in the car. They get charged on the weekend. I'm not thinking about these things anymore. Same thing with a lot of the food choices. We need to have things where you've prepped it ahead of time, you've made the decisions ahead of time.

I was looking at a video a week or two ago here, and I found this, I dunno why sometimes these medical students, their accounts on social, gets suggested to me and one of them, she's, gosh, she's like a first, second or third year, she's something where there's a lot of academic stuff going on and she talks about how she always does her food planning on the weekend and all the prepping.

And she said, this line. I was never gonna leave nutrition up to chance. Yeah. I had this moment where I was thinking, wow, if I had done that in medical school, I could have worked on all this health stuff a long time ago. But think about this girl's studying 24 7. By the way, her body is the most fit I've ever seen.

Why? She goes to the gym a few times a week. She has her nutrition locked down, and then the rest of the time she's studying. Like she's still able to do amazing things, but she's prioritizing it. She's not asking herself to constantly make decisions throughout the day. She probably wouldn't want to go for the healthy food once she's studying.

I know because I've been there. You wanna feel better. You want the dopamine hit, but if you have that thing already prepped and you just stuck it in the microwave and you start eating it, that's a different outcome. We need things to be a system so that when you're not motivated, when you don't necessarily wanna do the thing, it still happens.

If you're feeling overwhelmed, just come back to this. You've got a few things here that you can look at. Is there one of them that needs work? Then let's pick one small area with that and really do it again and again until you are feeling mastery with it. If you're gonna do this approach, you're gonna be ahead of 90% of people. It's not complicated, but it does take honesty. It does take a willingness to change things and to see am I really doing what I think I should be doing, or am I kind of making false problems for myself? And what I mean by that is, are you actually creating drama where it's not needed or can we just make this way easier?

If you, every single day would ask yourself, how can I make this easier? How can I make this easier? You get a totally different result. I really like my friend and colleague, Amanda Sabicer. She talks a lot about this in the business world, that it's the elegant solution. It's the simplest thing where when you get to it, everyone says, oh gosh, why didn't I think about that?

And then you realize, yeah, because you thought it had to be so complicated and crazy and frankensteiny that you weren't thinking of just the most simple, easy thing in the world. That's always the thing that solves it. Alright, I hope that this episode was helpful for you. Have an amazing rest of the week and I'll see you Monday.