Un-Balance

Let’s start with the obvious: we think balance is everywhere in nature. Night and day. Work and rest. Netflix and… eventually sleep. Your body follows the same principle, constantly juggling everything from hormones to blood sugar to keep you alive and kicking. But it is actually - two extremes!

We have become slightly obsessed with balance.

Balance your work and life. Balance your diet. Balance your hormones. Balance your exercise. Balance your stress. Balance your chakras, your screen time and apparently even your relationship with carbohydrates.

It sounds sensible. It also sounds exhausting. Because if balance means that every day has to contain exactly the right amount of exercise, nutrition, relaxation, sleep, socialising and pleasure, then most of us are failing before breakfast.

And perhaps we are looking at the problem from the wrong direction. I have been thinking about this a lot lately, especially through the lens of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's idea of antifragility. An antifragile system doesn't become strong by avoiding everything that could disturb it. It becomes strong by being exposed to manageable stress while protecting itself from catastrophic damage.

And that made me rethink health. Perhaps longevity isn't about finding the perfect balance. Perhaps it is about creating strategic imbalance. Extreme discipline on one side. Extreme enjoyment on the other.

Very little room for catastrophic downside. A lot of room for life.

Your body isn't supposed to live in a bubble The human body is remarkably good at dealing with variation. You don't eat exactly the same meal every day. Your blood glucose rises and falls. Your heart rate changes. You exercise, recover, get stressed, relax, sleep, wake up and do it all again.

This constant adjustment is part of physiology. Homeostasis is the body's ability to keep its internal environment within a functional range. But homeostasis doesn't mean your body likes everything to remain perfectly static.

Quite the opposite.

Your muscles become stronger because you stress them. Your cardiovascular system adapts because you ask it to work harder. Your bones respond to mechanical loading. Your metabolic system becomes more capable when it has to switch between fuels. Even the immune system learns from exposure.

The body is not a museum piece , but an adaptive system. And that distinction matters. Because if you interpret health as "keep everything perfectly balanced," the natural response is to remove every stressor. But remove every stressor and you may remove the very stimulus that creates resilience.

The trick is knowing which stressors make you stronger and which ones simply damage you.

This is where the asymmetry comes in

Imagine two sides of a scale. On one side is your everyday life: what you eat, how you sleep, how much you move, how much muscle you carry, how you manage stress, whether you smoke, whether you drink, whether you spend eight hours sitting in a chair pretending that walking to the bathroom counts as exercise.

These are the boring things. And boring is good. Because they create your baseline.

Then there is the other side: the wedding, the holiday, the three-day food festival, the late night with friends, the ridiculous dinner you will remember for ten years, the trip where breakfast becomes lunch and lunch becomes something you discovered at 4 p.m. from a tiny shop in a street you've never heard of.

Life happens there. And I don't want to eliminate that side. I want the first side to be strong enough to absorb the second. That is the asymmetry. The downside is protected. The upside is allowed to be huge.

Think of it as a financial portfolio. Taleb uses the idea of a barbell strategy: instead of putting everything in the middle, you protect one end aggressively and leave the other exposed to upside.

I think health can work the same way. Your daily life should be almost boringly conservative. Don't smoke. Keep your metabolic health in check. Build muscle. Maintain cardiovascular fitness. Eat enough protein and fibre. Sleep properly most of the time. Keep visceral fat under control. Don't make ultra-processed food the foundation of your diet. Do the things that reduce the probability of the big disasters.

Then, on the other side of the barbell, allow yourself to live. Travel. Eat something ridiculous. Stay up late occasionally. Have the dessert. Spend six hours talking nonsense with friends. Explore a city on foot. Go somewhere beautiful and completely forget about your step count.

The point isn't that these things are "healthy." They don't have to be. The point is that your health should be robust enough to accommodate them. That, to me, is a far more interesting definition of resilience.

I don't want a body that survives a spreadsheet

This is where longevity can become slightly absurd. We can optimise everything. The perfect meal. The perfect fasting window. The perfect sleep score. The perfect workout. The perfect supplement stack. The perfect HRV.

And eventually you have created something technically impressive but completely incompatible with being a human being.

I don't want longevity to mean living to 110 while spending the last 40 years calculating whether the olive oil in your salad exceeded your weekly lipid target. I want the opposite. I want to build enough physiological reserve that I can occasionally behave like an idiot without paying for it for the next six months. That means building capacity before demanding freedom.

If your cardiovascular fitness is poor, a holiday involving 20,000 steps a day may feel like punishment. If your metabolic health is poor, three days of restaurant food can turn into a two-week recovery. If you have little muscle, a few inactive weeks can have a disproportionately large effect. If your sleep is already fragile, one late night can knock the entire system sideways.

But when the baseline is strong, the same experiences become perturbations. You bend. You don't break.

This is where recovery becomes more important than balance

Stress isn't necessarily the problem. A stressor followed by adequate recovery is how adaptation happens. The problem is stress without recovery. Exercise is a stress. So is fasting. So is travel. So is work. So is emotional upheaval.

Even a great holiday can be stressful physiologically. Different food, different sleep, alcohol for some people, disrupted circadian rhythms, long flights, heat, walking, excitement, socialising. The body doesn't care whether the stressor came from a HIIT session or a boarding pass.

It has to respond. And then it needs to recover.

This is why I increasingly think of health not as a state of balance but as the ability to move between extremes without losing the plot.

My own version of unbalance

This is also how I have ended up organising my own life.

I work around food. I write about food. I attend food events. I taste things for a living. My professional life occasionally requires me to eat things that would make a nutrition textbook quietly leave the room. So trying to live a perfectly "balanced" lifestyle would be ridiculous. Instead, I've created four modes.

Daily Mode is deliberately boring.

This is where I am most careful. I pay attention to protein, fibre and the quality of what I eat. I train regularly. I get my circuit sessions in, work on balance and mobility, and generally behave like the person who writes about longevity should behave. This is roughly five and a half days of the week.

And yes, there are exceptions. If I have a food meeting or tasting, I don't lose sleep over it. A handful of meals a month isn't going to destroy an otherwise solid metabolic foundation.

The point of Daily Mode isn't perfection, but downside protection.

Then comes Unwind Mode.

This is where I deliberately loosen the reins. Friends. Conversations. Food. A burger. Pizza. Biriyani. A loaded sandwich. Notice the important bit: I don't turn every meal into a festival. One indulgence is enjoyable. Five simultaneous indulgences are usually just indigestion with good photography.

I still have some awareness of quantity, but I stop behaving as though every mouthful needs to pass a longevity committee.

Then there is Soul Mode.

This is my favourite. Travel. And when I travel, I don't want to be the person sitting in front of a beautiful local meal calculating whether the carbohydrates fit my macros. I want to eat the food of the place. I want to explore. I want to walk until I am tired. I want to discover something I didn't know existed. If there is exercise, wonderful. If there isn't, I'm not going to start doing squats in front of a 400-year-old monument because my wearable told me I haven't closed a ring.

Soul Mode isn't designed for my biomarkers. It is designed for my life. And perhaps that is an important distinction. Longevity is not merely about extending biological life. It is about making the life you extend worth having.

Then comes Revive Mode.

This is what allows Soul Mode to exist without becoming my permanent operating system. When I return from travel, I usually become very deliberate for two or three weeks. Food becomes cleaner. Unwind Mode gets reduced. Training becomes more structured. I watch my weight and other markers and work towards getting back to my usual baseline. I also occasionally do a planned two- or three-week reset during the year. The exact details can vary, but the principle is simple: I don't try to prevent deviation. I plan for recovery from it.

The important bit: don't copy my modes blindly

You can absolutely copy the philosophy. You probably shouldn't copy my exact schedule. Your body, your lifestyle, your work, your travel, your metabolism and your definition of "fun" are different. The principle is to create your own barbell.

Ask yourself: What are the things I can be extremely disciplined about? What are the things I refuse to compromise on? What are the risks I want to reduce as much as possible? And once those foundations are strong, where do I want to allow myself enormous freedom? Because there is something liberating about knowing that you don't have to be perfect every day.

You just need to make your baseline strong enough to absorb your deviations.

Perhaps balance is overrated

We often talk about health as though the goal is to find some magical middle ground where everything is perfectly calibrated. But nature doesn't work that way. Muscle gets stronger through stress and recovery. The cardiovascular system gets fitter through challenge and adaptation. Metabolic flexibility comes from switching between states. The immune system learns through exposure. And a resilient human being isn't someone who never gets knocked off balance. It is someone who can get knocked off balance and return stronger. That is a very different philosophy.

I don't want a life where every day looks identical because that is supposedly "balanced."

I want a life where my ordinary days are disciplined enough that my extraordinary days can be extraordinary. I want to be conservative about the things that can take years away from me and reckless about the things that make those years worth having.

That, for me, is the real meaning of longevity.

Not balance.

Asymmetry.

Protect the downside.

Maximise the upside.

And make sure your health is strong enough to let you live in the space between the two.

Worth Thinking About

A fortnightly essay on longevity, food, and the trade-offs nobody talks about.