The 8 things I do for my health and wellness at 47

Michael Le · 12 September 2026 · 13 minute read

I have always trained. Health has never been the thing I ignored. I was in the gym through the restaurant years and I was in the gym through the rebuild, and I have the discipline for it.

Then I fell into the trap anyway. Not by skipping training. By building.

For about twelve months my days ended at 2am. Not now and then. Most nights. I got more built in that year than in the five before it and I would not give it back. What I gave up instead was sleep, because it felt like the one thing I could borrow against.

You can. It just charges interest. My focus went first. Then my concentration, then my energy, and then something I did not expect at all, my outlook. The work was the same size. I was smaller in front of it.

That is the part worth saying out loud. I was doing almost everything right. Training, food, the lot. One discipline was missing and it quietly took the value out of the rest.

So in September I made one change. Lights out at 10pm, booked in like an appointment instead of set like a goal. Inside a week, everything else on this list got easier.

Everything below is the correction, and none of it is clever. That is deliberate, because clever does not survive a bad week.

One quick note before the list. If you have read the 8 things that changed my life, that one is the mind. This one is the body. Two lists, and they carry each other.

And read this the right way. These are the things I do and they work for me. They are not rules and I am not prescribing them. Take what fits, drop what does not, change the numbers until they suit your life, and make it your own. The version you will actually keep beats the version that looks best on paper.

1. Three wins a day: one physical, one mental, one spiritual

Every day I want three wins on the board. One physical, one mental, one spiritual. The rest of the list hangs off that, and on a bad day it is the only part that survives.

The physical win is anything that makes me breathe harder. Gym, run, walk, or carrying the shopping in one trip. The mental win is reading or journalling, usually both, and it does not have to be a chapter. Two pages counts. The spiritual win is meditation, sitting still, being present, or just ten minutes where nothing is trying to sell me something.

On a flat day all three take about twenty minutes. Nobody gives you a gold star for it. You just get to be someone who keeps their word to themselves, and everything else is built on that.

2. Wind down at 9:30pm, lights out at 10pm

Sleep is the biggest one here, and it is not close. Two in three Australian adults report at least one sleep problem. Nearly half report two or more. That is from the Sleep Health Foundation national survey the AIHW built its 2021 sleep report on. We are not a well rested country.

My version is boring and exact. The laptop closes at 9:30pm whether the thing is finished or not. Then I read. Lights out at 10pm. No food for three to four hours before bed, no water for the last two hours, so I am not up at 3am negotiating with my own bladder. Room dark, cool and airy.

A proper night's sleep does more for me than any supplement I have ever bought, and I have bought a few duds in my time. It is the cheapest thing on this list and the one that changes the most. A restful night does wonders. It is the closest thing I have found to a switch that turns you into the best version of yourself, and it is free.

3. Gym four days a week, same boring split

Four sessions a week, same lifts, same order, same days. I have trained for years and the program has barely moved since 2016, the year I competed. People assume the routine is the interesting part. It is the opposite. It is boring on purpose, so showing up is never a decision.

If four sounds like a lot, relax. The official Australian advice is strength work on at least two days a week, plus two and a half to five hours of moderate activity. Two is the bar. I do four because I like it, not because you have to.

At 47 the goal is not a stage photo anymore. It is carrying my own bags at 70. Strength decides how the next thirty years feel, and you cannot buy it back later at any price.

4. Walk or run three days a week, and 10,000 steps a day

Three walk or run sessions a week on top of the gym. I aim for 10,000 steps a day. Here is the fun part. The 10,000 number was not born in a laboratory. It came from a Japanese pedometer sold in the 1960s called the Manpo-kei, which literally translates to ten thousand step meter. You have been chasing a product name.

The University of Sydney tracked about 2,100 adults over 40 for roughly ten years. People averaging 7,000 to 9,999 steps a day had a 60 to 70 per cent lower risk of early death than people under 7,000. Going past 10,000 added nothing measurable. So if you hit 7,000 and stop, you have not failed. You have just read the study.

I still aim for ten. Partly stubbornness, mostly because the walk is where the thinking happens. Half of what I have built got sorted out on a footpath in the inner west, not at a desk. It is the one meeting I never cancel, mostly because nobody else is invited.

5. High protein, and stop at 80 per cent full

Protein goes on the plate first, then everything else. I stop eating at about 80 per cent full. The Japanese have a name for that second part: hara hachi bu. It comes from Confucian teaching, it is still practised in Okinawa, and it means eat until your belly is eight parts out of ten. Okinawans who follow it average about 1,800 to 1,900 calories a day, and Okinawa has one of the highest numbers of hundred year olds in the world.

The whole technique is putting the fork down while you could still eat more. It costs nothing, needs no app, and nobody can sell you a subscription to it. Which is probably why you never hear about it.

I also eat roughly the same meals on repeat and decide none of it at 6pm. I grew up in a takeaway shop in Kingsgrove and then ran a kitchen for eleven years. I am world class at eating badly at midnight with the fryers still on. The fix was never willpower. It was removing the decision.

6. Two and a half litres of water a day

The Australian guidelines put daily fluid at about 2.6 litres for men and 2.1 litres for women. That is from everything you drink, and most of it should be plain water.

Honest confession: I average about two litres and I am chasing two and a half. I am not going to stand here and tell you I hit every number on my own list. First glass goes down before the first coffee, because it is the easiest promise of the day to keep. Last glass is two hours before bed, for the reasons in item two.

7. Sauna and red light, because recovery is scheduled, not earned

Recovery goes in the calendar in advance, same as training. The two things I actually use are the sauna and red light.

The sauna has the better evidence by a mile. A Finnish study in JAMA Internal Medicine followed 2,315 middle aged men for about twenty years. The men using a sauna four to seven times a week died of any cause about 40 per cent less often than the once a week men. It is observational, it is Finnish men, and it is not a promise. It is still a big number, and the sauna feels great, which helps.

Red light I am more careful about. It is thought to work on the mitochondria in your cells. Cleveland Clinic's own summary is that the evidence is promising but thin, strongest for skin, with a lot of small studies and missing placebo groups. So I will not tell you it is magic. I use it because I like how I feel afterwards, and I would rather be straight with you about the research than sell you a panel.

Underneath both of them, rest is the actual point. One full day a week where I do nothing useful on purpose. For years I treated rest as something you earn by finishing. The work never finishes, so I never earned it. That is not discipline. That is a slow way of running yourself into the ground while feeling noble about it.

8. Stack habits, and drive to the mountains once a month

Habit stacking is where this list stops being eight separate chores and starts being a life. The best example I have is sitting on the grass under a tree with a book.

Look at what that one spot gives you. A mental win from the reading or the journalling. Fresh air and daylight, which sets the clock that gets you to sleep at 10pm. A spiritual win, because sitting under a tree with no screen is about as present as a person gets. And a bonus I enjoy more than I should: leaves soak up almost all the red light that hits them, but bounce back about half the near infrared. That is the same end of the spectrum those expensive panels fire at you, and it is why trees glow white in infrared photos. Three wins, one patch of grass, no subscription.

Once or twice a month I drive to the mountains for the full version. Phone down, nothing booked in, just unplug and unwind. I journal, I read, I get my goals back in focus, I remember what quiet sounds like. Then I reward myself with a vegetarian pie and an apple cider, which is non negotiable and the actual reason I get in the car. The pie is not a cheat. The pie is the point. You are allowed to enjoy the life you are building, otherwise what exactly are you building it for.

The two small ones that did not need a number

No phone in the first hour of the day or the last hour before bed. Not in another postcode, just not in my hand. Whoever owns those two hours owns the day, and I wrote about what the scroll really takes in the hidden cost of distraction.

And once a year: book the doctor, get the blood work done, then actually open the results instead of filing them. The second half is where most people quietly fall over, me included for about a decade. The point is not any one number. The point is that you stop guessing about your own body.

I am an operator, not a doctor. This is what I do, not a prescription. Talk to your GP before you change anything that matters, especially if you are on medication or something feels off.

Why any of this matters

More energy, and decisions that stopped being emotional. That is the honest summary. The work did not get easier. I just stopped needing a good mood to do it, and that is the whole game when nobody is checking whether you showed up.

There is a knock-on effect I did not see coming. Once the body was sorted, the rest of the rebuild got a lot less dramatic. Fewer wild swings, fewer 2am decisions I had to undo by Thursday. Strength is one of the eight pillars in the 8S practice for that reason. How you treat your body is a message you send yourself every day, and the body keeps very good notes.

Here is the part I want you to take. The version of me running that restaurant would have read this list and called it soft. He was flat out, he was needed, he was proud of how much he could carry. He was also the man with nothing left over for the people who mattered, because he had spent it all before he got home.

To be the best version of yourself you have to hold a discipline toward your own health, your wellness and your sleep. Not one of the three. All three. I had two of them for years and I still got caught.

You are not doing this to look good in a photo. You are doing it so you have something left to give at the end of the day. That is the whole reason.

How to start if you are starting from nothing

Pick one. Make it sleep. Set a lights out time you can hit on an ordinary Tuesday, not a perfect one, and hold it for two weeks before you add anything else. If 10pm does not suit your work, pick the time that does. The hour is mine, the habit is the point.

Then add the three wins, because they are free and they take twenty minutes. Everything else on this list is decoration until those two are running.

Do not build the whole stack on day one. I know that is the fun part: the whiteboard, the new app, the shopping list, the panel you saw on Instagram. It is also why most people are back where they started by week three. One boring habit, kept. Then the next one. This list took me years to put together and it will still be here when you get to number eight.

Questions people ask me about this