By the fourth week of January, many people are already exhausted by self-improvement. More goals, more routines, more pressure to optimise everything. We are constantly encouraged to add more.
But what if the biggest wins do not always come from what we put in, but from what we take out?
Last week, we touched on this when we looked at a television programme showing how one couple dramatically improved their cardiovascular risk markers in just six weeks. This was not by following a complicated new regime, but by removing ultra-processed foods from their diet.
And this is a pattern we see again and again in biology.
Health is often presented as something we build by stacking more on top of what we already have. A new gym membership, a new plan, a new product, a new protocol. Some of these things can be genuinely helpful.
But if you don’t feel you are getting the results you hoped for, there is another question we can ask alongside “What should I add?” and it is one that often gets overlooked.
“What might be quietly draining me?”
You may have heard the phrase ‘you can’t outrun a bad diet.’ It usually means that no amount of exercise can cancel out habits that work against you. At it’s heart, this is really about understanding how the body really works.
We are often taught to think of the body as fragile, as something that constantly breaks down and needs fixing. But biology tells a very different story. Cells renew. Tissues rebuild. Systems recalibrate. This is not something you have to instruct the body to do. It is already happening.
The challenge is not that the body does not know how to heal. The challenge is that it often has too much to deal with.
Why Removal Can Be So Powerful
One helpful way to think about this is as a kind of daily energy budget. Your body uses that budget to manage inflammation, repair tissue, support immunity, clear waste, regulate hormones and maintain balance. When life is calm, some of that budget can go toward renewal. When life is full of constant, low-grade stressors, most of it goes toward damage control. There is very little left for repair.
This is why removal can sometimes feel more powerful than addition.
One of the clearest illustrations of this comes from some recent research I read on smoking cessation and visible ageing. The study found that when participants stopped smoking, the appearance of their skin did not just stabilise, it visibly improved. Not because they added anything special or followed a complicated protocol, but because they removed something that had been draining their system every single day.
The body already knew how to repair. It simply needed the space.
What This Might Look Like in Real Life
For many people, one of the most powerful places to start is with food, particularly ultra-processed foods, as in the case of the couple in the TV show. These do not just add extra sugar or calories, but can actively disrupt the gut microbiome, increase inflammatory signalling and place an ongoing detoxification load on the body. This means your system is constantly managing damage rather than focusing on repair.
So a meaningful change might be reducing regular consumption of ultra-processed food, to lower the background noise your body is dealing with. Try to get into the habit of reading food labels as UPFs can be lurking in places you were not expecting!
Final Thought
Health is not always about doing more. Sometimes it is about doing less of what quietly wears you down.
If this idea of gentle subtraction resonates with you, I would love to hear what you decide to experiment with. You can always reply to this email, as I really do read every message. And next week we’ll take a look at other areas where this process can make a difference.
