A physician I was researching for a project told me something offhand that I haven’t stopped thinking about. She mentioned she hadn’t missed her morning light routine in nearly three years. Not sunrise yoga, not a scenic walk. Just ten minutes outside, no sunglasses, before touching her phone. She said it like it was obvious. …

There was a study published several years back by researchers at Northwestern University that made me re-read the abstract twice. They found that people who got more natural light exposure in the morning had a significantly lower body mass index than those who got their primary light later in the day, and this held up …

The 10,000-step thing keeps coming up. People talk about it like it’s a clinical recommendation. Clients mention tracking it on their smartwatches with a kind of quiet guilt when they fall short. It shows up on fitness apps, corporate wellness challenges, and treadmill displays at gyms around the world. I’ve lost count of how many …

Something I find genuinely jarring, even after years of reading health research, is how rarely the most popular wellness habits have the clearest evidence behind them. The habits that get the most air time online, the ones showing up in morning routine videos and “what I do for my health” posts, are not always the …

Something I see in health content all the time: goal-setting failures get explained as motivation problems. The person didn’t want it enough, didn’t stay accountable, gave up too easily, needed a stronger “why.” That framing appears in January wellness content, in corporate wellness programs, in coaching frameworks, almost everywhere that health behavior change gets discussed. …

Something I kept running into when I started writing health content professionally: the information circulating online wasn’t usually fabricated. That would almost be easier to deal with. What I kept seeing instead was something more complicated, and genuinely more frustrating. Real research, from actual peer-reviewed studies, reduced to a headline or a graphic, with the …

The claim is everywhere now. Intermittent fasting “resets” the immune system, “detoxes” the body, gives your white blood cells a chance to regenerate, makes you harder to infect. It’s not fringe anymore. These talking points show up in wellness podcasts, supplement company newsletters, and research-adjacent social media accounts with followings in the hundreds of thousands. …

“I’m doing everything the same as I was at 35,” a client told me. “Same diet, roughly the same exercise routine. But my body isn’t responding the same way. Am I doing something wrong?” She was 43 at the time, and genuinely confused. The effort was consistent. The results weren’t. This is one of the …

A reader emailed me a few years ago with a question I’ve thought about many times since. She was in her early 40s, didn’t smoke, exercised three or four times a week, and ate what she described as “a pretty clean diet.” Her annual bloodwork came back with nothing alarming. Her doctor said everything looked …