Here is a question I get asked more often than you might think: do health practitioners actually live the way they tell everyone else to live? It's a fair thing to wonder. So on a recent episode of me&my health up, I handed the microphone over and let Caitlin, an intern with me&my wellness, interview me about what I genuinely do from the moment I wake up.
What follows is my real daily routine as a clinical nutritionist. But I want to say upfront what I said to Caitlin: this isn't a template. It's one person's forty-year work in progress, and the useful part isn't the specifics — it's the thinking underneath them.
I haven't used an alarm clock in decades. My cue is the birds starting up at sunrise. If I stir in the middle of the night and feel the stillness and coolness of the air, I know it isn't time yet and I go back to sleep.
That sounds romantic, but it's practical. It keeps me tethered to my circadian rhythm rather than to a number on a screen. My body knows roughly when the day starts, and I've spent years letting it stay that way instead of overriding it.
Then comes the part I genuinely look forward to the night before: one cup of black coffee. Not because I need it — I can go weeks without it and feel nothing — but because the ritual matters. I love the bitterness, and that quiet window is my best thinking time. What do I want from today? What do I want to give?
With the coffee I read — news, financial markets, the health journals and magazines I subscribe to. Then breakfast, which has barely changed in years: a slice of my wife's apple, oat and walnut loaf, toasted, with nut butter, a scatter of LSA (ground linseed, sunflower seeds and almonds), around 200 grams of mixed berries, and a dollop of coconut yoghurt. It's my biggest meal of the day. Lunch is next biggest, dinner the smallest.
I keep the morning almost religiously consistent on purpose. Variation comes later whether I invite it or not, so a predictable start gives me a sense of control over the day and the capacity to absorb whatever turns up. There's also something in the accumulation of small wins — made my coffee, learned something, got the kids fed and walked to school. Each one builds a little confidence and momentum before the real work starts.
And we eat together. I always ask the kids what they're looking forward to, rather than what they're dreading. It tells me where they're at, and it starts their day pointed in the right direction too.
I track my steps, but I'm not precious about a number. I sit somewhere between seven and a half thousand on a quiet day and up to twenty thousand on a big one. I walk the kids to school — it has to be seriously wet before I'll drive — and I walk to the gym. I'll happily walk four kilometres rather than take the car.
The trick that has made the biggest difference is walking meetings. Before I accept a meeting I ask whether it genuinely needs a screen. If it doesn't, I let the other person know we're walking and talking. Team meetings happen that way routinely.
On top of that baseload: resistance training, some high-intensity interval work, karate three times a week, and stretching essentially every day. I'm at the gym a minimum of three and up to six times a week.
This is the distinction I wish more people made. When my energy dips, I ask what kind of dip it is.
If my brain is foggy but my body has done nothing all day, that's a mental drop — and the gym clears it. I come back with energy I didn't have an hour earlier. But if my body feels heavy, if movement itself feels like effort, that's physical exhaustion, usually from a poor night's sleep. Then I don't push. I'll nap, or do breathing exercises, or meditate.
Getting that call right matters, because exercise and sleep feed each other directly for me. On the days I've been sedentary, sleep is harder to come by and poorer in quality. Knowing that is exactly why I protect the activity.
I run a scheduled day, but with firm boundaries around it. Meetings only happen inside defined windows; outside those, it's my time and family time. Guests in other time zones are the occasional exception, not the rule.
At sunset, every device goes into night mode — that warm orange cast that strips the screen of everything that makes it attractive. That ugliness is the point. It's a cue to my brain to start winding down, and it stops notifications reaching me. No devices in the bedroom at all; mine sits at the far end of the house, inaccessible enough that "I'll check in the morning" wins every time.
My reasoning is about resilience. At night we are naturally more vulnerable — it's dark, our defences are down, and we have far less capacity to absorb bad news, a harsh comment or a stream of social media. During the middle of the day, when I'm well rested and well fed, you can throw almost anything at me. So I only let the world's stimulus in during the window where I can actually withstand it. If I didn't protect both ends of the day, the middle wouldn't hold.
Lunch, by the way, is usually leftovers from dinner — protein with a large volume of vegetables in as many colours as I can manage. I'm time poor like everyone else, so I'm prepared rather than heroic.
But here is the part I care most about. I've been working on my health since primary school. That's forty years of refinement, and it did not arrive overnight. If you take one thing from my routine that gave you a lightbulb moment, embed that one thing, then move to the next. Habits form through focus, not breadth.
I'm also firmly against extremes. I spoke recently with someone who did thirty days on fluids only. He got his result — and his mood was terrible, his sleep and energy were shot, his family couldn't wait for it to end, and he had changed none of the habits he would return to afterwards. Restriction like that almost always produces a rebound, because nothing was learned in the middle.
Which is also why I don't label foods good or evil. Lollies look like junk until you're an athlete using them as race fuel. Coffee isn't healthy or unhealthy in the abstract — I know a second cup compromises my sleep, so I have one, while someone else manages two without consequence. Excess caffeine is reliably associated with poorer sleep and with feeling anxious and jittery, so the work is finding your own point of moderation rather than adopting mine.
Everyone has a personal definition of health, and everyone is wired differently — some people can't tolerate tomatoes. I don't tell clients to live like me. I ask what health means to them and help them get there.
Everything above is really one idea wearing different clothes: health is holistic, and it is personal. My sleep depends on my movement, my movement depends on my boundaries, my boundaries protect my resilience, and my resilience is what lets me show up for my family and my clients. That's how we work at me&my wellness — not with a protocol to impose, but by finding the foundations that are shaky for you and strengthening them in an order you can actually sustain.
Want to go deeper on this? Book a free 30-minute discovery call with Anthony at meandmywellness.com.au