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Being healthy shouldn’t feel this complicated. Yet every week brings a new wellness fixation, from “fibermaxxing” to “zone 2 training”, creatine and cortisol-hacking.
Between prescriptive plans, complex science and often contradictory advice, it can seem like being healthy is a full-time job – or a hopeless cause.
It’s neither, argues Dr Ezekiel J Emanuel, a leading public-health physician, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and former adviser to the Obama administration. In his new book, Eat Your Ice Cream: Six Simple Rules for a Long and Healthy Life, Emanuel dismantles the “wellness industrial complex” in favour of a few basic, sustainable principles.
“The way I like to think about it is we both make it too complicated – and we also make it too simple,” he says. Here is Emanuel’s expert pick of the wellness advice you can afford to leave behind in 2025 – and what to focus on instead.
Let go of: Intense fitness challenges
Bring in: More movement – of all kinds
We all know the importance of exercise, but it doesn’t have to be complicated or extreme. As Emanuel writes in Eat Your Ice Cream: “Just get off your ass and move around.”
Fitness trends like “zone 2 training”, focusing on keeping your heart rate between 50% and 70% of your maximum, often overcomplicate things. “I think making an obsession of getting all the details right is absolutely the wrong thing,” he says. Simply getting some exercise and getting your heart rate up should be the goal.
Walking, then progressing to running or other aerobic activity, delivers major gains. But after a point, more exercise isn’t always better, says Emanuel: “There is a plateau to how much benefit you’re getting.”
The sweet spot remains 150 minutes a week (roughly 20 minutes a day) of activity vigorous enough to leave you slightly out of breath. Beyond that, you may be at risk of injury, Emanuel says.
More important than benchmarks or challenges is consistency – and not just with cardio. Strength training and flexibility training are just as essential, at every life stage, Emanuel says:
“For wellness to really be impactful for a healthy, long life, you have to be doing it for years and years – it has to be a habit.”
But, he adds, “perfection is not the goal”.
Let go of: Sad solo meals
Health advice often neglects social connection, despite strong evidence that relationships are essential to wellness, longevity and happiness. Friends, family and even “weak ties” can matter more for health than diet or sleep alone, Emanuel says, while loneliness is increasingly linked to early death.
One simple intervention: eat with other people. In 2023, roughly one in four Americans reported eating all of their meals alone, a sharp rise over two decades. Eating alone is also associated with poorer nutrition.
Inviting someone over for dinner delivers multiple benefits. “Cooking a wonderfully nutritious meal, exercising your brain in that, then making it social by inviting other people to share it is a big wellness trifecta,” says Emanuel.
The same goes for exercise, he adds: hitting the gym alone is better for you than not working out at all, but “if you’re smart, you’ll make it a social activity”.
Let go of: Habit-tracking and stats
Bring in: Screen Sabbaths
Restorative sleep is essential for health, but Emanuel is against tracking it with tech. The data is often inaccurate, potentially misleading people about their individual patterns, and can exacerbate difficulties with falling or staying asleep.
While stats can motivate some people to form good habits, Emanuel argues that time on screens generally undermines wellbeing by displacing social interactions and distracting us from the present.
As well as no phones at the dinner table or in the hour before bed, he tries to spend every Saturday entirely screen-free. He has yet to achieve 52 consecutive weeks, Emanuele admits – but the intent is important.
“If we rely on our own willpower, we’re going to fail … You have to create an environment where it’s easy to say no,” he says.
Let go of: ‘Wellness’ as an interest
Bring in: Hobbies and interests … for wellness
It’s increasingly the norm for wellness to be taken as a passion or interest in and of itself. This worries Emanuel, along with the fixation on longevity. He says: “There seems to be this sort of obsession that you need to make wellness the focus of your life … Your life should be bigger than wellness.”
Too much focus on fitness, physical health and longevity can even come at the expense of other activities – such as socialising – that would make us happy and potentially healthier, he adds.
“There’s an opportunity cost: if you’re spending all this time exercising, you’re going to miss out on doing other things – talking to your friends, cooking nutritious meals or just enjoying a book.”
In Eat Your Ice Cream, Emanuel stresses the importance of hobbies, for not only enriching your days but also often bringing secondary wellness benefits.
Each year, he challenges himself to take up an entirely new activity. Last year, he learned to keep bees and make his own honey. “I learned a lot, and actually it was very good for me, because for bees, you have to move slowly and be very conscious,” he says.
This year, he has committed to learning ballroom dancing with his wife – again, promising multiple benefits, he points out: “There’s a lot of moves, you have to do a lot of coordination, you have to connect with another person.”
Such activities support wellness as a way of life – rather than being the point of it, Emanuel says.
Let go of: Your daily puzzle
Bring in: A book club
Emanuel’s annual challenge to learn something new also helps to keep him mentally sharp, he says. Many of us do crossword puzzles or word games daily to stave off cognitive decline, but repeating the same activity reinforces the same neural pathways.
Watching television, scrolling social media or engaging in otherwise passive consumption likewise don’t stretch our brains. “A diversity of mental engagement” is important for slowing cognitive decline, especially if you’re retired, Emanuel says: “And make sure you don’t just do it once.”
A regular book club can help keep you mentally nimble, combining critical thinking, exposure to new ideas and debate – along with the all-important social element.
Learning to cook or expanding your repertoire is also accessible and rewarding, Emanuel adds; he suggests attempting one new dish every week: “It doesn’t take that much to learn a new recipe, and it expands your palate and your experiences.”
Let go of: ‘Ultra-processed foods’ anxiety
Bring in: Real food
“Ultra-processed foods” may dominate public-health debate, but the “quasi-scientific” term and debate over what counts as such may be adding to confusion about how to eat, Emanuel says:
“Let’s call it what it is: junk food. It’s not healthy for you.”
It’s unrealistic to eliminate it entirely, but junk food should be minimised, Emanuel says: “From scratch, and natural – that’s the way we should be eating.”
One way to achieve this is, again, by cooking most of your meals yourself. Processed, packaged foods have been linked to depression and anxiety, as well as to faster cognitive deterioration.
Even many supposed “health foods” don’t deliver nutrition. Protein bars, for example, can be convenient during intensive exercise or while you’re on the go, but many are only slightly better for you than candy bars, Emanuel says: “You should not think they’re healthy.”
Multivitamins and supplements, too, are generally unnecessary if you aren’t pregnant or vegan or otherwise have specific needs. As for “wellness drips” and infusions, they’re a “total waste of money”, Emanuel says.
Better to focus on nutrition, and limiting your intake of empty calories. Snacks make up 500 calories per day in an average adult’s diet – nearly 25% of the daily total. You don’t need to cut them out, Emanuel says, but “make sure it’s a good snack”.
Let go of: Restriction
Bring in: Pleasure
One of the biggest issues with modern wellness culture, Emanuel says, is its narrow focus on the individual, encouraging fixation and restriction. “A lot of the recommendations are about depriving yourself,” he says, whether of food, leisure time or social opportunities.
Not only can obsessing about health and wellness come at the detriment of overall wellbeing, it can also be counterproductive, Emanuel says: “You’re not going to sustain that activity if you’re constantly depriving yourself. You’re just using too much willpower – and we know that willpower fatigues.”
Despite his commitment to health, Emanuel is an enthusiastic home baker and avowed chocaholic. He has even made his own chocolate bar, listed alongside his professional accomplishments on his website under “hobbies”.
By embracing his sweet tooth, Emanuel has cultivated new interests, learned new skills, connected with others and enriched his life. That’s the best way to approach indulgences, he suggests: make them worth it.
Hence the provocative title of his book: wellness isn’t one-size-fits-all, and pleasure plays a part.
“My wife’s grandmother ate ice-cream every day for her 101 years,” Emanuel says. You wouldn’t think of it as medicine – but, as a treat, enjoyed two or even three times a week, “it makes perfect sense”.
Eat Your Ice Cream: Six Simple Rules for a Long and Healthy Life by Ezekiel J Emanuel is out now
