This is the first Pocket Prescription — short episodes for people who want to think more clearly about health without the noise.
In this episode, I ask a simple question that’s harder than it sounds: what does being healthy actually mean?
Health isn’t how you look, and it isn’t always how you feel. Both are unreliable. Appearance can hide exhaustion, anxiety, or fragility. Feelings fluctuate with sleep, stress, hormones, and life.
Instead, this episode explores health as capacity — the ability to meet the demands of life, recover when things wobble, and continue. Not perfectly. Just sustainably.
Drawing on insights from great books such as The Seven Ages of Death, by Dr Richard Shepherd and Sod Sitting, Get Moving by Sir Muir Gray, I look at how the meaning of health shifts with age — from performance early on to resilience, independence, and margin later in life.
This isn’t about optimisation or transformation.
It’s about building something that lasts — and staying in the relationship with your health, even imperfectly.