Something’s hurting. That, in Zoe Modgill’s experience, is what actually brings a woman in her forties or fifties to a trainer. “Either they’ve had a scare at the doctor, which is what people will end up having, or they have an ache and pain that isn’t going away, and the physio has told them that they need to strengthen this area. I would be really surprised if anyone came to me just randomly, unless they’ve read about how important muscle is in ageing.”

Modgill ran Studio 60 in Delhi for a decade before moving to Goa and taking her practice online, where Stronger With Zoe is built around the stages of a woman’s life rather than a single generic body. She has lived most of those stages herself, training through two pregnancies and recovering from abdominal separation twice, and she is now in her forties, lifting heavy and eating accordingly, which makes her a fairly persuasive exhibit for her own argument. What follows is her order of operations for starting again at this age, and it is not the order most women expect. The diet comes nowhere in it.

Start with a blood test, not a training plan

There is no point programming exercise for a body running short of raw materials.

“Our blood work actually tells us a hell of a lot about what’s happening inside of the body. You can do a hell of a lot of face treatments; you can do so much stuff to yourself externally, but your blood work will tell you a lot about what you’re eating, and whether that’s really helping your system. So, for women in their 40s and 50s, we are looking to have their blood work analysed. What are the missing links? In most cases, vitamin D will be there for India. That is a big issue when you are trying to recover well and find good energy in the system. If you are lacking some of those things in your blood work, no matter how much coffee you drug yourself with, you are not going to be able to lift heavy. You’re going to have to sort that out first.”

She is not exaggerating about the vitamin D. Depending on the study and the threshold, somewhere between half and three quarters of urban Indian adults test deficient; women consistently worse off than men, and it shows up as fatigue, poor recovery, muscle weakness and bone loss, all of which tend to get filed under getting older. A panel costs less than a facial, and someone will come to your house to draw it.

Then eat more, which is the instruction nobody wants

“You’re going to have to sort out your nutrition, and that isn’t going on a diet. That isn’t just cutting out carbohydrates. It is not just fasting. Another one, everyone’s favourite, is if I just eat less, I’m going to be smaller. That’s the mindset that most people have. And the problem with that is, at that age, your hormones need food.”

On fasting, she is measured, and her objection is practical. “It’s got benefits, but at that age where your hormones are fluctuating, and things are changing, you need to be able to make sure that it’s getting enough nutrition in the windows that need it. So what happens is, starving themselves means then eating whatever they want during the window they eat, which might not be enough, because how much can you eat in that small window? People who are on a 2,000-calorie diet and trying to exercise makes no sense to me. Where do you get the energy to then lift or push your body?”

This is the collision most women in their forties are living inside. The habit of eating less is decades old and has been rewarded at every turn, and it arrives at precisely the point in life when the body needs more, more protein and more total food to hold on to muscle, not less.

Then build muscle, deliberately

The word she reaches for is sarcopenia, the progressive loss of muscle mass and strength that begins around the fourth decade and accelerates through menopause, when falling oestrogen removes some of the protection women had been getting for free. “This is such a big deal for so many people now, because you just can’t build muscle unless you apply a good amount of resistance to your body.”

She is sceptical of the stalled-metabolism story that usually arrives with the ache. “At this age, a lot of them think that their weight has stalled. Like, my metabolism is stuck. That is one of the most common messages I get at this age, and it’s actually that you just stopped moving enough. That is what happens as we get older. We get more scared; we want to be more careful. We’re told that more things can happen, and that’s really difficult to persuade people to understand that you’re going to have to give in order to get. You’re going to have to go through some pain in the gym, take a chance, and then build that muscle so that it will protect you when you need it.”

On yoga and Pilates, which is where most Indian women over forty are currently doing their movement, she is generous and unambiguous at once. Both build strength, and the difficulty is purely one of progression: advancing in yoga means learning harder shapes over months, while advancing with a dumbbell means picking up a heavier dumbbell. “Anything that adds some load to your body is going to build muscle. But it is a safer, more easier way to monitor and take a record of when you do something like weight training, because you can measure how much more you’re changing… you’re going to have to advance in the positions or the poses quite dramatically for you to be able to really start to see some muscle change happen in things like yoga, in things like Pilates.”

And she has a view on what a session ought to feel like. “It is not like, let me go and chill on the treadmill for 40 minutes. You want to go and push your body for 40 minutes, maybe three or four times, and then the other times do a chilled 40 minutes. I get it, but there’s got to be that pushing that happens two or three times a week.”

What to do with all of this

Blood panel first, and expect vitamin D on the list. Nutrition second, in the direction of more food rather than less, with enough protein to build what you’re about to build. Then load, two or three times a week, progressive, meaning the weight goes up over time, because a programme that never gets harder stops producing change. Keep the easy days genuinely easy, keep the yoga if you love the yoga, and add weight somewhere else in the week. Aim for 80% rather than perfection, which is the number Modgill sets for every client because it is the only one that survives real life.

The case for all of it is not the mirror. Muscle is what holds your skeleton in position, what absorbs a fall, what carries the shopping and the grandchild, and what gets you off the floor unaided at eighty. The women who will be doing that are deciding it now.

Zoe Modgill is a trainer, nutritionist, pre- and postnatal specialist, Corrective Exercise Specialist and Diastasis and Core Consultant, and the founder of Stronger With Zoe. Read part one, on pregnancy, postpartum and the research that mostly isn’t there, here. Nothing here is a substitute for advice from your own doctor.

1,000 Ways to Live Well is a Mille publication. Mille is a modern nutrition brand built around everyday rituals, starting with protein that doesn't ask you to compromise on taste. millesupergrain.com

A man once wrote to Zoe Modgill on Instagram to tell her that his wife was really big and needed to lose weight, especially around her stomach. He wanted advice. “I’m like, what? Let me just go backwards a little bit.”

She gets a lot of these, she says. “It’s hilarious how most people will judge pregnancy just by their stomach, right? You’re pregnant, oh great, you should look big. Now you’re not pregnant, oh great, you should look small.” The questions she would rather people asked are harder to decipher in a photograph. “It’s not just about the weight. You can cover yourself up with some clothes; you can look leaner, but is your body functioning pain-free? Are you comfortable? Are you not peeing every time you laugh or you jump? These are all natural things that happen to one’s body, which is quite frankly not really talked about openly.”

Watch: In conversation with Zoe, ‘What nobody tells women about their bodies’

Modgill is a trainer, nutritionist, pre- and postnatal specialist, and Diastasis and Core Consultant, and she has personally been through nearly everything she is qualified to help with. Two miscarriages. Two pregnancies past 35, one with a complication that had doctors prescribing months of horizontal stillness. Two caesareans, two rounds of abdominal separation, and a postpartum body she filmed in her underwear and posted, to the horror of her extended family. She ran Studio 60 in Delhi for a decade, one of the first places in North India where a woman could train hard in peace, and now works from Goa through Stronger With Zoe, an online platform built exclusively for women, on the premise that a woman’s body is not one body but a sequence of them. “With women, there’s a lot of up and down. There’s getting married, having babies, coming back from having babies, having another baby, or reaching menopause. My life was, or is, doing all of these stages, and it just made sense to study them along and then help women in the same boat.”

This self-study matters, in truth, because much of the science around women’s health hasn’t been done. When researchers combed through 5,261 exercise science studies published between 2014 and 2020, across twelve million participants, they found that 31% of papers had studied men only and 6% had studied women only. The paper is titled “Invisible Sportswomen,” and its implication is blunt: most of what we believe about how bodies respond to training applies to male bodies. So when a woman asks whether she can keep lifting through her first trimester, the answer she gets is frequently extrapolated from men, or from nothing, or from custom dressed up as caution. Modgill’s whole career is rooted in a curiosity to know what happens when a woman decides to run the experiment on herself instead.

Trying, losing, and what she wishes all women knew

She was past 35 when she and her husband started trying, and the advice arrived before the baby did. “There was a lot of taboo around fitness and movement. Everybody likes to give you so much information, and let’s be honest, we never had ChatGPT or AI to confirm that this is garbage.”

Then two miscarriages, early, one after the other. Roughly one in five known pregnancies ends this way, and the great majority of first-trimester losses come down to chromosomal abnormalities, decided before anyone knew anything, preventable by nothing. Almost nobody tells a woman this, so she fills in an explanation based on whatever she was doing at the time.

“Those do completely scare you into feeling that maybe I shouldn’t, maybe I shouldn’t, or should, or what, or you get questioned. Now, having looked back at the research, I just wish that most women knew this. It has nothing to do with anything you could possibly be doing to yourself, such as exercising, eating well, or building muscle. These are all very good things to have on your priority list. There’s no one telling us, oh, ‘stop drinking alcohol, stop smoking, stop eating junk food’, not as much or as loudly as you hear ‘don’t exercise, don’t move, don’t do this, this and this. There was so much more stuff that made you freaked out.’”

So she made a decision and kept it. “I remember just telling myself, you know what? I’m just gonna do what I need to do, enjoy myself.” She was, by her own account, at her leanest and fittest when she conceived Zai, her elder son.

The complication, and the homework

Mid-pregnancy came a diagnosis with a script attached. “I ended up having a low-lying placenta, which meant doctors were loving to tell me bed rest is the answer. You got to lie flat, horizontal.”

A low-lying placenta sits near or across the cervix and raises the risk of bleeding. Most of them resolve on their own as the uterus expands, and months of strict bed rest carry their own costs, in muscle, in conditioning, in clot risk, on evidence that has never been strong. Modgill did not ignore her doctors, but she did multiply them. “I insisted on finding a couple of gynaecologists, speaking to them differently, understanding what was going on with my body, which I think is another thing that women should be more empowered about. Find out what is happening with your body. I think people just love to listen to something and then they don’t want to do any homework further.” Several opinions, better questions, a working grasp of the actual mechanism, and only then a decision about what she could and couldn’t do. “That led me to realise that I could do certain movements, which made me study even more, and how important movement is for a pregnant woman as well as for the baby, not just for you.”

The underwear videos

Then the baby came. “Your body is like, whoa. You’re just like, okay. And I was like, I need to document this. I definitely shocked every family member in my close proximity,” she laughs. “Is it necessary to be standing in your underwear on the video? And I was like, yeah, it is. Just because it’s a nappy, but it’s not a bikini, there’s a problem there. This is reality.”

The reality she was filming is the one the bounce-back narrative airbrushes out. “Your body is stretched left, right and centre. Even if you eat well and exercise, your body still grows and changes. You accumulate a lot of extra fat and loose skin. That is how it works. There’s nothing I can do to prevent much of that, so it’s also about accepting it and understanding that this is what it is and this is how we work with it. I think it helped me be okay with where I’m at.”

It also gave her the diagnostic she now uses on every client, because a woman who cannot look at her own body has no baseline to work from. “I’ve actually met so many women who can’t take a picture of themselves, don’t like taking their video, and don’t like looking at it. And that is a red flag. We have to be able to accept where our bodies are in order to then change them.”

Your abdominals separate, and… then what?

Both pregnancies gave her diastasis recti, the condition in which the two vertical bands of abdominal muscle are pushed apart at the midline as the uterus grows, stretching the connective tissue between them. It is not an injury. It is how the baby gets the room. “All women do, in fact, experience that, whatever they think they can do, because that’s just how the baby needs to grow. There needs to be more space.”

The numbers are startling if you have never seen them: in a Norwegian study of three hundred first-time mothers, 60% had a measurable separation at six weeks postpartum, and a third still had one a full year after giving birth. Left unaddressed, the effects run past the cosmetic, because the abdominal wall works with the pelvic floor and the deep back muscles as one pressure system, which is how a soft middle turns into back pain, poor posture, and the leaking Modgill refuses to stop mentioning in public. Her diagnosis of why recovery takes so long is the useful, unpopular one. “Women in general are so deconditioned prior to having a baby that that core connection thing isn’t really there to begin with. So it will end up taking a hell of a lot of time and practice and effort and eating well postpartum to actually work that area of the body confidently.”

Eating well is doing real work in that sentence. Rebuilding muscle and tissue is construction, and construction needs materials, which means the standard postpartum instinct, eat as little as possible and shrink as fast as possible, works directly against the repair.

The plan, and the 80%

Her coaching runs on a four-week written programme with her on the other end of the phone, and she is upfront about what it is not. “My coaching plans are not spoon-feeding. I give you what to do, but unless you do the work, nothing works. Unless you’ve got a progressive plan, you’re not really going anywhere; you’ll just repeat, which is what most people end up doing. They end up trying to start fresh on a Monday every time because they’ve reached a dead end.”

Progressive is the operative word, and it is the single most common thing missing from how women train: a programme that never gets harder stops producing change, which is why the same three sets of the same twelve reps with the same weight for two years produces the same body for two years. The compliance target is 80%, because 80% survives real life. And for mothers, her argument is arithmetic rather than inspiration. “Your entire duty is to keep this child alive, which means it’s 24/7 vigilance, right? So the first thing you end up cutting out is yourself. And I’m guilty of it too. But that 30 minutes that you took away from stressing about something will actually give you five hours of really energetic, helpful, positive endorphins that you can then transfer on.”

The stakes run past you, as it happens, because there is an audience in the house. “Kids do what you do. They are just sponges. The way in which you deal with stress, or how you talk about your body, without even knowing, oh, I’m so fat today. This is what your kids pick up and learn as well.” Her own household has a short diagnostic. “When I’m edgy, and I’m not having a great day, my husband will be like, did you work out today? And I’ll be like, no, I need to.”

What to take from all of this

If you are trying to conceive, keep training and keep eating, and know that the guilt women carry after a loss is almost always attached to the wrong thing. If you are pregnant and holding a diagnosis with an instruction stapled to it, ask for the mechanism before you accept the instruction, ask whether it comes from your scan or from general caution, and ask more than one doctor. If you are postpartum, assume some separation, treat it as rehabilitation with a nutrition component rather than a cosmetic problem, take the photographs you’d rather not take, and measure yourself against function- your back, your posture, your continence, whether you can lift your child without bracing- rather than against the circumference of your stomach.

And whatever stage you’re at: 80%, not perfection. Your children are writing down everything you say about your body.

Zoe Modgill is the founder of Stronger With Zoe. Part two, on what your forties actually need from you, follows next week. Nothing here replaces advice from your own doctor, particularly during pregnancy.

1,000 Ways to Live Well is a Mille publication. Mille is a modern nutrition brand built around everyday rituals, starting with protein that doesn't ask you to compromise on taste. millesupergrain.com

Most of the advice about sitting is about not sitting. Stand up, walk more, get a standing desk, take a call while you’re on your feet... all good, all true, and all slightly beside the point on the days when life or work requires you to be seated at a desk for hours.

But there’s a way to offset a little of that, with a muscle that doesn’t need you to stand up at all. It’s called the soleus. It sits deep in your calf, under the more famous gastrocnemius, and it is the part of you that holds you upright and steady whenever you’re on your feet.

Marc Hamilton, a professor at the University of Houston who spent years making the case that sitting too much is a massive health problem, looked for a way to fix it without just asking people to stop sitting (because he knew they wouldn’t). He found that the soleus has an unusual talent: ‘activated’ the right way, it can keep its metabolism raised for hours, burning glucose and fat while you sit at your desk and do nothing else. He called the movement the soleus pushup.

It looks like almost nothing. You sit with your feet flat on the floor. You let your heels rise as high as they’ll go while your toes stay down, then let them drop, then repeat, in a slow, steady rhythm. If you’ve ever tapped your foot without thinking about it while concentrating, you already know the shape of it. The only difference is that this version is deliberate, and the muscle is doing the lifting rather than nervous energy.

Why it works comes down to how the soleus is built. It’s made almost entirely of slow, fatigue-resistant muscle fibre, the kind designed to keep going for hours without tiring, and it doesn’t rely on the body’s usual quick-burn glycogen stores. So instead of pulling energy from a limited tank and needing a rest, it can draw steadily on glucose and fat in the blood, for as long as you keep it gently going.

When participants performed the movement continuously for 3 hours after a glucose drink, their blood sugar response improved by about 52%, and they needed about 60% less insulin. Hamilton also found it roughly doubled the rate of fat metabolism between meals.

But worth knowing: those numbers came from people doing the movement more or less continuously in a lab, with sensors ensuring they were activating the muscle correctly. The effect lasts for hours because you keep it going for hours, not because a minute of heel-tapping buys you an afternoon off. Hamilton has said the movement is specific enough that, to get the maximum effect, you really want wearable feedback to confirm the right muscle was firing. So the sensible way to hold this is not as a hack or a quick fix, but as something to keep quietly ticking over while you’re already sitting, especially in the stretch after a meal when your blood sugar is rising and you’re going to be still anyway.

Which is what makes it a good microhabit. No schedule change, yoga mat, change of clothes, or gap in calendar needed! So this week, try it. Next time you sit down to work after eating, plant your feet, and set your heels tapping in that slow, even rhythm. Let the muscle do the work. Keep it going while you answer emails, while you’re on a call, while you read this.

The Mille Microhabit is a collection of small things, easy to incorporate, and with big impact. Nothing here is a substitute for advice from your own doctor, particularly if you’re managing blood sugar or diabetes.

1,000 Ways to Live Well is a Mille publication. Mille is a modern nutrition brand built around everyday rituals, starting with protein that doesn't ask you to compromise on taste. millesupergrain.com

There was a phrase you used to hear constantly, at dinner parties and in changing rooms and any time the subject of women lifting weights came up. “I don’t want to get bulky.” For decades this myth, that lifting more than the two-kilo dumbbells or anything heavier than a handbag would transform you overnight into a bodybuilder, kept a lot of women tethered to the treadmill and the two kilo weights. A victory is that you hear it far less now. Science and evidence have made clear to most that building that kind of visible, sculpted muscle is actually punishingly hard, the product of years of dedicated training and eating engineered for exactly that purpose. If it could happen inadvertently, or by accident from a couple of sessions a week, gyms would be full of reluctant Amazons.

Women don’t produce nearly enough testosterone to bulk up in that way without dedicated, concerted, consistent effort. What actually happens when a woman lifts consistently is that she gets stronger, her body feels firmer and more capable, and, more often than not, she starts standing a little taller in front of the mirror.

So that bogeyman is more or less retired, and the more interesting conversation is the one underneath it, which is about why lifting weights, and progressive overload (aka progressively lifting heavier and heavier weights) is even more important for women than it is for men.

Muscle is not just a vanity project.

It is, increasingly, understood as one of the most powerful things we have for protecting our health as we age, and it matters more for women because for most of us, we start further back. We carry less muscle than men to begin with, annoying but true, and after about thirty it begins a slow decline (a process called sarcopenia) that accelerates sharply around menopause as oestrogen falls away. Left alone, that loss shows up eventually as weakness, poor balance, and that fragility that we once associated with getting older.

Resistance training is one of the only things proven to slow it, and in many cases reverse it. That alone is reason for us all to be sprinting to the weights rack, but other knock-on effects include: stronger bones, better balance, improved metabolic health, a lower risk of heart disease and type 2 diabetes, and, across large population studies, lower all-cause mortality among women who train. There is a reason grip strength, of all the unglamorous and inconsequential-sounding things, turns out to be a better predictor of how long you’ll live than your blood pressure is.

If the old barrier was fear, a newer one is confusion

In years past, there was a perception that lifting was intimidating. That rulebook has been rewritten. In early 2026, the American College of Sports Medicine published its first major update to resistance-training guidance in seventeen years, built not on expert opinion but on 137 systematic reviews covering more than thirty thousand people, which makes it the most thorough look at how we should all actually be training that anyone has assembled. The headline, from the study’s lead author Stuart Phillips, is almost startling in its plainness: the best resistance training programme is… (drumroll please) the one you’ll actually stick with. Yep, it’s that simple. Much of what the update did was give people permission to stop worrying about things they’d been told were essential, and for women returning to training (or for some, arriving at it for the first time) telling them that the most important thing is just to show up.

Plus, you don’t have to go at it hammer-and-tongs every day. In fact, two sessions a week is enough to show real results. For years we were told a minimum of three sessions or no point, but the evidence now points firmly otherwise, provided you train with genuine effort and cover all the major muscle groups. No two kilo weights in hand while ambling on the treadmill. Luckily that’s also a number most lives, no matter how busy, can actually accommodate.

Home counts as much as a gym. Serious results don’t actually demand serious equipment. Get yourself some resistance bands, a couple of dumbbells, and you’ve always got your body weight, and that’s a setup that you can work with which does away with cost, commute, and self-consciousness, if any of those were the impediments to beginning.

You don’t have to train to failure. This is perhaps the most freeing finding of the lot. The old gospel that every set should be pushed until you physically cannot manage another repetition. Turns out, highly unnecessary. Stopping with two or three reps left in the tank delivers the results without the misery, and without the injury risk that comes with grinding to collapse.

Effort matters more than the weight on the bar. “Light for toning, heavy for strength” was always a false distinction, invented in part to keep women away from the heavy end. Light and heavy are simply relative. What matters is that the weight feels challenging by the last couple of reps. Find that point, then nudge it upward over time as it gets easier. That gradual, deliberate progression is called progressive overload and is the real engine of getting stronger. Eat enough protein alongside it, too, since the training is only the signal; the protein is what your body actually builds with.

You don’t need leg days and arm days. The elaborate business of splitting your body across the week and keeping your muscles “guessing” is optional. One workout covering all the major muscle groups, done consistently, is just as effective, and if simplicity means you actually turn up, then simplicity always wins.

Train whenever suits you. Morning, evening, the twenty minutes between the school run and a meeting: the time of day makes no meaningful difference to the results. This is a big relief for women attempting to squeeze training into the gaps of a busy life.

And finally, it is safe, at every age. The fear that lifting will wreck your back or your joints is, for most people, the bigger problem than any real risk. One analysis of over thirty-eight thousand people found that resistance training does not, in itself, raise injury risk. Where problems occurred, they traced back to pre-existing conditions, usually solved by adjusting the load or the position. The one sensible caveat: get your doctor’s clearance before you start, particularly past fifty, and ask about a bone-density scan if you’ve never had one, since undiagnosed osteoporosis is the real thing to know about before you load a spine, and get a trainer to help you get started until you’re feeling confident about continuing on solo.

For many years women were sold an idea of wellness that centred on the idea of subtraction: lose weight, occupy less space, for there to be less of you. Instead we know now that the real win is building strength, building capacity, resilience, and something durable. The sort of strength that has you pulling your bags off the baggage carousel with ease, walking confidently wherever you go, and allows you to get up off the floor (yes, the floor) unassisted at eighty.

1,000 Ways to Live Well is a Mille publication. Mille is a modern nutrition brand built around everyday rituals, starting with protein that doesn't ask you to compromise on taste. millesupergrain.com

We talk a lot about small things done consistently, and the truth of the matter is that sleep is not a small thing at all. But it is something that, when done consistently, can really alter the course of a day: your mood, your ability to tackle even a difficult one, the whole view you take of it. It’s undeniable that after a night of bad sleep, you’re crabbier, that small things can derail you in ways they wouldn’t otherwise, and that a minor irritation can feel like the last straw. Sleep really well, and chances are you’ll look at that same day, with all its same problems, through far more rose-tinted glasses.

There is an old line, probably handed down from someone’s grandmother, that every hour of sleep before midnight is worth two after it. Like a lot of nani-knows-best wisdom, it is directionally right and short on explanation, the sort of thing repeated so often it hardens into fact. And as tends to happen, the science eventually catches up to the folklore and sorts the truth from the overstated. In this case, it turns out sleep is not something you simply bank by the hour. Some of it is worth far more than the rest, and the valuable part comes early.

To see why, it helps to know what sleep is actually doing. A night moves in cycles of roughly ninety minutes, each one carrying you down through light sleep into deep sleep, technically slow-wave sleep, and back up into REM, the dreaming stage. These stages are not evenly distributed throughout the night. Deep, slow-wave sleep dominates the first couple of cycles and then tapers off sharply, so most of it is done before the halfway point, while REM does the opposite, arriving in longer stretches towards morning. The night is not a flat line. It is front-loaded with the heavy, restorative stuff and back-loaded with the dreaming, so when you fall asleep and when you have to be awake, decide how much of each you actually get.

That front-loaded deep sleep is where a lot of the heavy lifting happens, and it does four distinct things.

The first is physical repair.

Within about an hour of falling asleep, as you drop into that first deep cycle, the pituitary releases the bulk of the day’s growth hormone, most of it in that early-night window, tightly coupled to slow-wave sleep. Growth hormone is not just for children; in adults, it drives tissue repair, muscle recovery and bone maintenance. Miss the deep sleep, and you measurably blunt the hormone, which is why a bad night shows up in how your body feels the next day, and why athletes who skimp on sleep recover more slowly.

The second is the brain’s cleaning cycle.

During slow-wave sleep, the glymphatic system, the brain’s own waste-clearance plumbing, enters its most active phase, flushing out the metabolic debris that accumulates over a day of thinking, including proteins associated with long-term cognitive decline. This is, in the most literal sense, the brain taking the bins out, and it does most of it down in the deep.

The third is memory.

The slow waves of early-night sleep are when the brain consolidates the day’s learning, moving information from temporary storage into something more durable and clearing the synaptic noise so you wake with a less cluttered system. The dreaming sleep that comes later does its own kind of emotional processing, but the filing happens in the deep.

The fourth is the reset of your stress system.

Deep sleep is when the balance of your nervous system tips furthest towards rest, sympathetic tone dropping, the body’s alertness machinery powering down properly rather than idling. It is the closest thing you have to a nightly nervous-system reset, and it lives in the same early window as everything else.

So does timing matter? That original grandmother, whoever she was, did have a point. The size of that first, deepest slug of slow-wave sleep is governed by two things at once: how long you have been awake, which builds sleep pressure across the day, and your circadian clock, which schedules when deep sleep is biologically available. The two are meant to line up. When you are properly synced to the day, sleep pressure peaks just as your clock opens the window for deep sleep, and the early cycles come rich and heavy. Start your night late, against your clock, and you compress that window from one end while the alarm eats into it from the other.

Which gives us the genuinely useful version of the advice, and it is not a time on a clock. Your body has a preferred window, set by your own clock and chronotype, and the goal is to sleep within it rather than after it. For most people, that window opens somewhere in the mid-to-late evening, which is where “before midnight” comes from, but the real instruction is consistency and alignment, not a hard cutoff at 11.59. Some people are wired to sleep later, and forcing them to lie in the dark at ten does nothing but breed frustration.

So find the bedtime that lets you fall asleep near the start of your natural window, and hold it steady across the week, because an irregular schedule scrambles the clock as badly as a late one does. Protect the first three hours in particular, since that is where the repair, the cleaning and the filing are concentrated, which is why a glass of wine or a late heavy meal that fragments those early cycles costs you more than it would later on. Get morning light not long after waking, which anchors the clock and, a full day later, helps that evening’s deep-sleep window open on time. And stop treating total hours as the only number that counts, because seven hours starting at eleven and seven starting at two are not, physiologically, the same seven hours.

Your grandmother was right that the early part of the night is worth more. She just did not have the vocabulary of growth hormone and glymphatic clearance to say why, and she was measuring it against a clock face when the thing that actually matters is your own.

1,000 Ways to Live Well is a Mille publication. Mille is a modern nutrition brand built around everyday rituals, starting with protein that doesn't ask you to compromise on taste. millesupergrain.com

Take a second to think about this: the fatigue we feel in November is a different animal from the tiredness of August. August’s tiredness is overheated and depleted, the tiredness of too much heat and humidity and not enough stillness. November tiredness is heavier, slower, more interested in bowls of something warm and in going to bed at 9pm. Our bodies vocalise what they need in ways like this, and when we’re listening, we make different choices, responding to these nudges.

Most of us do not. We eat the same foods year-round because the supermarket makes everything available. We sleep approximately the same number of hours regardless of whether the sun sets at 5.30pm or 7.30pm. We maintain the same pace through summer and winter, monsoon and dry season, because the calendar of work and obligations does not account for the weather.

I lived in Delhi for years, and the difference between winter and summer eating was impossible to ignore. Winter in Delhi is cold, dry and grey, and your body wants warm things, rich things, and suddenly you’re thinking about dal makhani and paratha for the first time since April, and that nimbu paani at 4pm no longer appeals. The idea of eating a favourite salad in January, I recall, felt both ludicrous and like punishment. Summer is the opposite: that heat that makes the thought of heavy food insane, when you want chaas, cucumbers, and things that involve no cooking whatsoever. The truth is, our bodies know exactly what they need, and they’re not particularly subtle about telling us.

Festivals as seasonal instructions

The Indian festival calendar is largely lunar, and if you look at what it actually marks, it’s far from arbitrary. January brings Lohri, Makar Sankranti and Pongal, each a different regional name for the same thing: the sun’s transit northward, the end of the shortest days, the return of warmth and light. The bonfires common to many of these celebrations aren’t merely decorative; fire in midwinter, gathering around warmth, these are the body’s seasonal needs made communal. The foods aren’t just handed-down celebratory habits either: til, jaggery, peanuts, puffed rice, dense and warming and calorie-rich, eaten at the coldest point of the year because that’s when the body needs more energy to maintain its temperature.

Holi arrives in March at the spring equinox, the moment the year tips towards warmth, and with it brings colour and water and the release of winter’s heaviness. Onam in Kerala marks the monsoon harvest in August. The festival calendar is a map of the agricultural year, which is itself a map of what the body needs at different times: when to eat heavily, when to fast, when to celebrate abundance, and when to rest or cleanse.

What your body is tracking

There is a place where all this inherited wisdom meets biology, and where we see how both describe the same thing, albeit in different languages. Our bodies read the season through light, and they do so with shocking precision. Deep in the brain, in the hypothalamus, sits a cluster of around twenty thousand neurons called the suprachiasmatic nucleus, the master clock that keeps the rest of the body roughly on schedule. It takes its cue from a specialised set of cells in the retina, ones that exist not to help you see but purely to report how much light is hitting your eyes and of what kind. That signal sets the clock daily, and, crucially, it also tells the body what time of year it is, because the clock tracks not just when it’s light but for how long.

The mechanism it uses is melatonin, the hormone most people think of only in relation to sleep. Melatonin is released in the dark and shut off by light, which means the length of the nightly melatonin window is, in effect, the body’s internal reading of the season: short in summer when nights are brief, long in winter when darkness stretches. Studies conducted at high latitudes, where the seasonal swing is dramatic, find exactly this, with the duration of nocturnal melatonin secretion running longer in winter and the whole rhythm shifting. Your body, in other words, holds an internal representation of day length, and it adjusts your physiology to match. The winter urge to sleep longer, to want heavier food, to feel slow in the low-light months, none of this is a failure of discipline. It’s a body doing precisely what it evolved to do, reading a long night and responding to it.

The trouble is that we have hidden the signal. Under electric light, the body never quite gets the long, dark winter night it is trying to read, so the system sits slightly out of phase with the actual season, receiving a muddled version of the information it was built to track. This is where a small intervention does real work: getting outside in the morning. It’s so small, this shift, and so simple, but outdoor light (even under clouds) delivers somewhere between ten and a hundred times the intensity of ordinary indoor lighting, which is too dim to register as a proper daytime signal. Ten minutes of it in the first hour after waking sharpens the clock’s sense of where it is in the day and the year, and it does so through the same light-sensing pathway that governs the cortisol you need to feel awake. It is the single most effective way to tell your body which season it is actually in.

And this is exactly what ritucharya, Ayurveda’s framework of seasonal living, was formalising long before anyone had mapped a retinal ganglion cell. Its principle is that the body has different needs across the six seasons of the subcontinent and that food and routine should move with them: warming foods, more oil and more rest for the winter body; cooling foods, lighter meals and more water for the summer one; easily digestible food and fewer plans for the monsoon body dealing with humidity and erratic light. The tradition arrived at this through centuries of accumulated observations, while biology arrived at it through electrodes and saliva samples. What’s remarkable and very cool is that they agree! It is, if you sit with it for a second, such a lovely and reassuring thought, that both the oldest instruction and the newest evidence are pointing at the same small, daily things.

Small adjustments that work

Eat the produce that is actually in season, which in India changes often: strawberries in winter, mangoes in summer, jamun and litchi before the monsoon ends, guavas when the chill arrives. Let sleep shift slightly with the light rather than overriding the earlier tiredness of winter evenings with screens until midnight. Get outside in the morning, because ten minutes of natural light before 9am does more for the body’s sense of where it is in the year than almost anything else.

Cook with warming spices in winter and cooling ones in summer, which most Indian cooking already does by instinct: winter saag heavy with ginger and garlic, summer chaas flavoured with coriander and mint. Give yourself permission to cancel plans in the monsoon, to stay home on a particularly heavy evening of rain, because this is seasonally appropriate behaviour rather than a lapse.

Use the festival calendar as a set of prompts to eat differently and to mark the passage of time with your body rather than just your diary. Eat til and jaggery at Makar Sankranti. Cook those festival foods and lean into the seasonal specialities… These are acts of seasonal attunement that also happen to be delicious. What is the challenge in that?

The thing to remind oneself is that the point is not purity but direction: moving generally towards alignment with the year, noticing the cues the body is already sending, and responding to them when it is easy rather than overriding them on principle. Your body already knows what season it is. The practice is learning to listen.

1,000 Ways to Live Well is a Mille publication. Mille is a modern nutrition brand built around everyday rituals, starting with protein that doesn't ask you to compromise on taste. millesupergrain.com

We all know the perfect bite. The sandwich with the exact right filling-to-bread ratio, the roti wrapped around just enough of your favourite sabzi, the rice and dal that make the hardest day a little better… It’s when everything goes together perfectly, and that’s half the pleasure of eating. So here’s the good news up front: nobody’s asking you to give that up.

The idea this week is only about sequence. On any plate, start with the protein and the vegetables, and let the rice or roti follow a few bites later. The meal you were planning to eat remains unchanged; all that changes is what reaches your stomach first.

Two things happen when you do it. The protein and fibre slow the rate at which the carbohydrates break down into glucose, so the same meal gives you a much gentler blood sugar rise rather than a sharp peak and a dip following it (you might know this feeling as ‘the afternoon slump’ or ‘why I reach for a sugary drink around 3pm’).

Because protein takes the edge off your hunger early, you tend to arrive at the bread/roti/rice in a more measured fashion, instead of loading up while you’re still ravenous and eating faster than your body’s satiety response, aka when it sends you a little message saying, ‘hey, I’m full!’

You don’t have to eat less, count anything, or swap a single item on your plate… It’s the rare change that costs nothing and takes nothing away!

This week’s microhabit: on any plate, a few bites of protein and veg before the starch joins in. Just a small reshuffle of the order. You’ll still get your perfect bite… You just make it the second or third one.

1,000 Ways to Live Well is a Mille publication. Mille is a modern nutrition brand built around everyday rituals, starting with protein that doesn’t ask you to compromise on taste. millesupergrain.com

A microhabit is not a lifestyle overhaul. It's a single, little action that’s small enough to do without needing to plan for it, repeated often enough that it stops being a decision and starts to become, well, a habit. A little breathwork with intention, a small stretch that means your spine isn’t compressed after a long day at your desk, a moment of movement after a meal, or the sequence in which you choose to consume what you were already planning to eat… one their own, none of these seem like very much, but when you start to weave them into your day suddenly you are calmer, less anxious, less tight… those are big wins, I think we can all agree.

A big transformation requires a great deal of focus, time, and willpower… the exact resources that most people feel short of when life is busy. But a microhabit? Well, these ask for almost nothing, which is why they’re so easy and so essential to incorporate, or at least to know that you have at hand in your little arsenal. Over the last couple of months, we've been sharing these one at a time, and here’s a roundup because sometimes it’s the little things that make big, big shifts, and why not make these easier to find?

The Box Breath
This one’s for when the day has been running hot since 9am, and you need it to stop. Box breathing, a practice you’ll find in many ancient wellness traditions, takes 5 minutes or less.

The rice that’s better for you
This one’s for the extra spoonful of rice you always cook out of habit. Cool it in the fridge instead of eating it hot, and some of the starch turns into a form your gut bacteria can actually use, with a smaller blood sugar spike as a bonus. Reheating doesn’t undo any of it, so tonight’s extra pot is tomorrow’s better lunch.

The hack that makes chia seeds more effective
This one’s for the chia pudding you’ve been eating for months for not much reason. Whole seeds mostly pass through with their fatty acids locked inside, but grinding them, or soaking them overnight instead of the usual fifteen minutes, breaks that coat open and lets your body reach what’s inside. Thirty seconds in a coffee grinder, or an evening in the fridge, and the same bowl works twice as hard.

Progressive Muscle Release
This one’s for when you’re wound so tight you’ve forgotten what it feels like to unclench. The practice is as simple as squeezing all your muscles, everything, all at once, then letting it go. It takes three minutes.

The Vagus Nerve Hum
This one’s for those moments when you need to find your calm and it’s not proving easy. The practice: a low hum on the exhale, and your nervous system stands to palpably unwind. Thirty seconds is all it takes, but you can go for longer.

The Dead Hang
This one's for all of us, hunched over our desks and laptops, with spines compressed since 9am. Grip a bar, let your feet leave the ground, and let gravity do the rest, and most people feel the difference before they've even let go. Sixty seconds is all you need.

The Hip Flexor Stretch
This one's for the tight, low-grade ache in your lower back, another universal experience. That's actually your hip flexors, shortened from sitting, pulling your pelvis forward and your lower back along with it. The fix takes a minute on each side, and it's done in two minutes.

The Soleus Pushup
This one’s for the long desk-bound stretches when standing up isn’t an option but sitting still all day isn’t doing you any favours. There’s a muscle in your calf, the soleus, just 1% of your body weight, that keeps burning glucose and fat for hours when you activate it right. A minute gets it going, then keep it gently ticking while you work.

This is a living list, and we'll keep adding to it as the series grows, so it's worth bookmarking rather than reading once. If any of these have been useful, sharing them with someone who'd get something out of them is the best way to pass that on.

1,000 Ways to Live Well is a Mille publication. Mille is a modern nutrition brand built around everyday rituals, starting with protein that doesn't ask you to compromise on taste. millesupergrain.com

Welcome back to the Mille Microhabit. Each week, one quick, simple shift that can meaningfully improve the quality of your day.

If you’re eating chia seeds, you may not be getting the most out of them, which is the sort of thing that sounds like overcomplicated wellness advice but is actually just basic plant biology. Chia seeds have a tough outer coat, and if you eat them whole, most of what passes through your gut does so largely intact, with much of the fatty acid content staying locked inside where your body can’t reach it. A randomised, controlled trial in postmenopausal women compared ground versus whole chia seeds directly, and the results were fairly stark: the whole chia group saw virtually no change in plasma omega-3 levels, while the ground chia group saw plasma ALA, a plant omega-3, increase by fifty-eight per cent, and EPA, the active cardiovascular omega-3, go up by thirty-nine per cent.

Grinding doesn’t change the fibre. It just breaks open the cell structure so your gut can actually reach what’s inside, which is why you’re eating them in the first place.

The second thing worth trying, a more common practice, is soaking your chia seeds, but not just for the fifteen minutes most recipes call for. A fifteen-minute soak gets you the gel effect, that viscous mucilage that slows carbohydrate absorption, increases satiety, and forms the prebiotic that feeds your gut bacteria.

But research is showing that extended soaking, overnight or a full twenty-four hours, improves the extractability of the omega-3 fatty acids from the seeds by replicating some of what grinding does, because the water has time to penetrate and soften the seed coat, making more of the internal fatty acids accessible without the effort of grinding.

This isn’t unique to chia. Grinding nuts and seeds generally—almonds, flaxseeds, walnuts—disrupts the plant cell wall matrix and makes nutrients more accessible, and it’s also a genuinely easy way to add invisible nutritional diversity to dishes that otherwise wouldn’t get it.

Sprinkle ground seeds into your breakfast, your salad, your dal, and you’re adding both fibre and the fatty acids your brain and heart actually need, which is the sort of small shift that compounds across a year far more than you’d expect from something this easy to incorporate.

The microhabit, then: grind your chia seeds, or soak them overnight, or both if you have the time. Either way, you’re changing what your gut can do with them.

1,000 Ways to Live Well is a Mille publication. Mille is a modern nutrition brand built around everyday rituals, starting with protein that doesn’t ask you to compromise on taste. millesupergrain.com

Mounjaro arrived in India in the spring of last year, Wegovy a few months behind it, and suddenly, conversation everywhere referenced this small weekly injection, in clinics, WhatsApp groups, at dinners, and at work. The before-and-afters began circulating, the faces and the figures, the celebrity did-she-or-didn’t-she hypothesising… and it lodged itself in the culture in a way you can’t have failed to notice.

The drugs themselves, the semaglutides and tirzepatides sold here as Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro, belong to a class called GLP-1 receptor agonists, which is a mouthful. GLP-1 is a hormone your gut already releases every time you eat: it prompts your pancreas to make insulin, slows the rate at which your stomach empties, and tells your brain that you have had enough. These injections are a synthetic copy of it, turned up and made to last, so that the body spends the whole week inside a fullness signal it would ordinarily produce only in brief, modest bursts. They were originally formulated for type 2 diabetes, to keep blood sugar in check, and the weight loss arrived as a side effect that soon eclipsed the original purpose.

So it’s a weight-loss drug, you might think? And yes, it is definitely that, but that’s not all it is. The weight loss is the primary benefit that we hear about most, and it has enabled many who’ve struggled with the scales for a lifetime to finally hit their goals, but a scale only tells you how much of you there is, and on these drugs a serious share of what ‘leaves’ is muscle rather than fat.

Whether you should be on one of these is a conversation for you and your doctor, and not the business of this piece. What is certain is that a great many people now are, and that very few of them are being told the next part. That is the part we’re going to focus on here. You can’t replace this medication with food, so all those ‘Nature’s Ozempic’ articles are nothing but clickbait, and nothing you eat can or will do what the injection does, but the point is to eat so the two work together: how much protein you actually need to hold on to your muscle, the easiest everyday ways to get there; the fibre that amplifies the fullness the drug is already creating. Essentially, the small daily habits with real trial evidence behind them, meal timing, the walk after eating, a proper night’s sleep; how to take the edge off the nausea and reflux through the way you eat and not only what; and when something is worth a call to your prescriber. The drug is exceptional at subtraction, but also… indifferent to what it subtracts. The composition of your body, what remains, and whether you reach the far side of this lighter and stronger or lighter and depleted, that’s very much in your hands.

The weight that isn’t fat

The large trials that brought these drugs to market scanned a portion of their participants rather than only weighing them, and the picture underneath the number turned out to be less flattering than the number itself. In one of them, STEP-1, the study that won semaglutide its approval for weight loss, around forty per cent of the weight people lost was lean mass rather than fat, which is to say muscle and the tissue that holds it together. Tirzepatide, the molecule inside Mounjaro, came out a little gentler in SURMOUNT-1, its own equivalent trial, closer to a third. These are averages, and your own split will vary, but across the research, the findings agree: a real and substantial share of what disappears is muscle, unless you give your body a reason to hold on to it.

Take a second here to pause and think about what muscle actually does for you. It is most of what sets your resting metabolic rate, the energy your body spends simply existing, lying still, keeping itself running; it is what gets you up off the floor, what carries the week’s shopping up to a third-floor flat with no lift, what keeps you steady and capable into your sixties and well beyond. And it is, more than almost anything else, what decides whether the weight stays off once you stop, since a body carrying less muscle burns less at rest and slides back into the fat more easily.

Begin with the protein

The first lever, and the one most worth pulling, is (you guessed it) protein (learn how here). The weight-loss research settles on somewhere between 1.2 and 1.6 grams of it per kilo of body weight a day to defend lean mass, which for a woman of around sixty kilos comes to roughly seventy-five to ninety-five grams, a figure that sounds enormous right until you stop picturing chicken breasts and start counting what is already on your plate. A katori of dal, a bowl of dahi, paneer through the sabzi, eggs at breakfast, a fistful of roasted chana: it accumulates faster than the number implies, provided you spread it across the day rather than saving it for one heroic dinner. (The figure comes from a review of forty-nine studies on building muscle while training, where the benefit levelled off around 1.6 grams.)

Spreading it is the actual instruction, because the body can only use so much protein in a single sitting, and twenty to forty grams at each meal does more than the same total amount poured onto one plate at night. On days when the injection flattens your appetite to almost nothing, which it will, the move is to eat the protein first instead of letting your limited appetite be monopolised by the carbs, the rice and the roti. A slowed stomach has its preferences, and they happen to line up with the softest, most ordinary things in an Indian kitchen: the dahi and the dal, the soft paneer, the egg, the fish, the plain glass of milk.

Give the muscle a reason to stay

Protein on its own is only half an instruction. The other half is giving the muscle a reason to remain, which in practice means resistance training, whether that load is a dumbbell, a resistance band looped around a door handle, or simply your own body weight lowered slowly enough to count. The way you train while on a GLP-1 is important, because it’s also the clearest message you can send a body mid-deficit to keep what it has rather than dismantle it for fuel. A European working group on obesity found that strength work, rather than cardio, helped people retain lean mass while dieting. Two or three full-body sessions a week are enough to make the point, and the better measure of whether it is working is how much stronger you are getting and how your clothes have started to sit, rather than anything the scale says.

Keeping the weight off, once the drug has done the easy part, is its own project, and it helps to hear it from someone who has been through the whole arc. Simon, an Italian businessman in his forties who asked to stay anonymous, started on a low dose of Mounjaro as, in his words, an act of self-care, and found that the drug was less the answer than the opening. “I took it as an opportunity to broaden my self-care and engage in regular training, which was the very first time,” he says. “I slowly reduced the things I thought were affecting my weight, starting with carbs, then sweets. I kept the discipline going, and I became quite regular and fit.” He lost around thirteen kilos and several sizes, but the part he returns to is not the weight. “As of today, it’s my discipline in training and food that sustain my weight and my well-being.” The injection, in other words, did the subtraction; the training is what made it stick.

Where food starts working with the drug

Up to here, food has been playing defence, protecting what the medication would otherwise strip away. Fibre is where it changes sides (read about fibre and how to get more of it here) and begins working with the drug rather than merely around it. The injection makes you feel full by acting on a satiety system your gut already runs: fermentable fibres, once the bacteria in your gut have broken them down, prompt your own body to release the very fullness hormones the drug is imitating, so you end up, on a good day, with the drug’s signal and a little of your own beneath it.

The fibres that manage this best are the slow ones, already abundant in rajma and chana, whole unhulled dals, root vegetables, and in the resistant starch that forms when rice or potato is cooked and then left to cool. Yesterday’s rice, taken from the fridge and reheated, is better at this than rice eaten straight from the pot (and here’s why), which is a small and pleasing licence to cook extra. Eaten alongside high-volume, low-calorie things like fruit, vegetables and salad, they give you a great deal of fullness for very little. The one caution is to build the fibre up gradually and drink more water as you go, or you will trade hunger for bloating, which is a rubbish exchange. A measured, consistent increase here helps most, as long as it stays gradual rather than enthusiastic.

There is a less-discussed benefit that has nothing to do with the number on the scale, and Simon puts it better than most. “I’m a businessman, I’m very busy, and my brain is my main asset,” he says. “My ability to see clearly was often influenced by hunger.” What the drug quietened for him was less appetite than distraction. “People talk about microdosing helping with mental clarity, and I get it. It’s not really a psychological effect, it’s simply that it reduces what I call the food noise.” That phrase, food noise, has become the shorthand for the constant low hum of thinking about the next meal that these drugs seem to switch off, and for some people it matters as much as the weight.

A brand-new European consensus statement, published in The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology this July by the obesity, dietetic and patient bodies EASO, EFAD and ECPO, wants clinicians to watch out for exactly this. When that ‘food noise’ goes silent, it’s not always a relief. Food, as we all well know, is so much more than mere sustenance. It can be comfort, reward, celebration… and so removing desire or thinking around it can create a void that’s not always good. The consensus recommends screening for these shifts, in mood, in coping, in how people relate to eating and to their own bodies, rather than treating a suppressed appetite as an unambiguous win. It also recommends screening for alcohol use disorders before starting, since the same pathways are involved.

When you’re doing everything right

Not everyone who ends up on one of these drugs is looking for a dramatic transformation. Some arrive at it from the opposite direction, having done everything the wellness playbook asks and watched it stop working anyway.

One woman I spoke to, forty-four, describes exactly this. She trains hard and trains well, progressive overload, a coach, the sessions logged and the loads climbing. She eats enough protein and sleeps her seven or eight hours. On paper, she is the model of someone who should be lean and strong, and for years she was. Then came a slow, creeping weight gain that no amount of doing the right things seemed to touch, the kind that arrives in the years around perimenopause, though in her case the bloodwork stubbornly refuses to confirm that’s what it is. What it added up to was months of working harder for worse results, which is its own particular kind of demoralising, because there’s no obvious lever left to pull when you’re already pulling all of them.

It wasn’t only the scale. She talks about inflammation, a body that felt puffy and reactive in a way it hadn’t before, and gut issues creeping in alongside the weight, the sense of a system slightly at war with itself. This is worth naming, because the conversation around these drugs is so fixated on fat that it misses the people whose real complaint is that their body has stopped feeling like theirs.

She went on to use the drug at a very low dose, well below the standard prescribed amount, a practice that has picked up the popular name microdosing. The term is worth pausing on, because it is a consumer coinage rather than a medical one, and the manufacturers explicitly do not endorse it. What people mean by it is taking a fraction of the usual therapeutic dose, in the hope of getting some of the metabolic and appetite benefit while sidestepping the harsher side effects, the nausea and the gut distress, that tend to come with full doses. Some people settle at a low dose deliberately; others are really describing the early titration steps that every prescription starts with anyway.

Simon’s own path is a case study in how far this can drift from the label. Fourteen months on, he takes roughly an eighth of a standard dose every three weeks, having stretched the interval out from weekly to monthly and beyond, and never returned for his scheduled follow-ups. “I still have syringes left,” he says, “because I started reducing the intake to a fraction of what it was supposed to be.” He has held his loss steady this way, and for him it has worked. It is also, precisely, the kind of self-directed dosing that the evidence hasn’t validated and that no prescriber signed off on, which is the tension running under the whole microdosing conversation: people are finding their own protocols faster than the science can assess them.

That same European consensus recommends dose-scaling led by a dietitian or clinician to reduce the nausea and gut distress that cause so many people to abandon the drugs early. But moving a dose downward with supervision is the recognised clinical practice; the evidence does not support doing it alone. These drugs were trialled at specific doses; the low ranges people are improvising are under-studied, and a protocol assembled from a forum thread and a friend with spare syringes is very much not the same thing as a titration plan.

Living with a slower stomach

Most of the discomfort people report in the early weeks, and after every dose increase, traces back to this same slowed stomach: the nausea, the reflux, the odd experience of feeling overfull three bites into a meal. A surprising amount of it is governed by how you eat rather than by what you eat. Smaller meals taken more often sit far better than three large ones arriving in a stomach in no rush to empty. Eating slowly and stopping at the first real hint of fullness matters too, because the signal now arrives late, and overshooting it is exactly what tips comfort into queasiness. Keeping meals lighter on fat while you are feeling rough helps, since fat slows the stomach even further; staying upright after eating rather than lying down eases reflux; and ginger, as adrak in your chai or simply chewed, works well against nausea. A short walk after a meal, even five or ten minutes around the block or in your living room, will help the food move along and take the edge off the rise in blood sugar that follows a meal.

Faster is not the prize

There are a few other small habits worth incorporating if they’re not already part of your everyday routine. The body handles food better earlier in the day, so a fuller breakfast and lunch with a lighter dinner will sit more comfortably. Sleep matters more than it is usually given credit for, too: seven to nine hours, because short nights push the appetite hormones in unhelpful directions and undo some of what the drug is doing. Plus, the instinct that faster is better is erroneous. Losing weight too quickly raises the risk of gallstones sharply, which is why the steadier half a kilo to a kilo a week that these drugs tend to produce when used sensibly is the gentler and smarter road. One thing worth saying plainly, since better eating can lower your blood sugar on its own: if you are also on insulin or other diabetes medication, talk to whoever prescribes it before you change how you eat in any significant way.

What it takes to use one of these responsibly

Nothing in this piece is an argument for going on a GLP-1. It is an argument that if you are on one, you should be getting the most from it and the least harm, and that second half depends almost entirely on how you go about it.

The first rule is that these are prescription drugs and belong in the hands of a doctor, start to finish. That sounds obvious, and yet the ease of access now, the online forms, the pharmacies that barely blink, the generic price collapse, means a great many people are effectively self-prescribing, titrating by anecdote and adjusting by feel. A community of strangers who are also guessing is not a substitute for someone who can see your bloodwork.

The second is monitoring. Responsible use means a baseline before you start, your vitals, your relevant bloodwork, and then regular checks, monthly to begin with, so that anything the drug is doing to your body is being watched by someone qualified to interpret it. These drugs affect far more than appetite, and the point of monitoring is to catch the things you cannot feel. Micronutrients are the clearest example; when you suddenly begin to eat dramatically less, you also absorb dramatically less, so iron, B12 and a handful of others can drift downward over months even as your weight is also doing that drift. This means the first sign of trouble is often fatigue, and the European consensus is clear that nutritional adequacy, protein, vitamins and minerals together, needs to be actively managed rather than assumed, ideally with a dietitian involved. It also asks for body composition and functional capacity to be tracked, not simply weight, since a number falling tells you nothing about which tissue is leaving. If your prescriber is only weighing you, ask for more.

The third is the hard contraindications, which are not negotiable and are exactly the sort of thing a prescriber exists to check. If you or a close family member have a history of medullary thyroid carcinoma, or the genetic condition MEN2, these drugs are off the table entirely, a boxed warning, not a footnote. A history of pancreatitis is a serious conversation to have before starting rather than an automatic bar, and pregnancy, or trying for it, means coming off well in advance. None of these are things you can (or should) assess on your own, and they are the reason a doctor is not optional.

And the last point is that a drug this powerful deserves respect rather than casualness. The culture around it has made it feel like a lifestyle choice, something to microdose for a wedding or cycle on and off around a holiday. It is a serious intervention in a serious system; stopping, pausing, lowering the dose, what happens to appetite and weight afterwards, what support exists at that point, all of it should be a real conversation with your prescriber, decided with you and up front, rather than something worked out in a panic eighteen months later when supply runs short, or the cost becomes untenable, or you simply decide you have had enough. An exit plan is not pessimism about the treatment. It is the difference between finishing a course of something and falling off the end of it.

Until very recently, these drugs were expensive, the better part of twenty thousand rupees a month, which meant that only certain income brackets were likely to sign up. That has now gone. Novo Nordisk’s patent on semaglutide lapsed in India in March, the generics arrived almost the same week, and dozens of brands are already competing on price, some starting doses down near a tenth of what the originals cost, so a great many more people, across many more cities, with far less guidance from a specialist at their elbow, are now on them, or about to be.

What does not come in the box is any of the above: the protein eaten first, the resistance band by the door, the gentler pace, the walk after dinner… These determine whether you reach the far side strong or simply smaller. More of us will be on these drugs every year, which is all the more reason to understand that the medicine does the losing, but the living well around it is still, as it always has been, done by hand.

1,000 Ways to Live Well is a Mille publication. Mille is a modern nutrition brand built around everyday rituals, starting with protein that doesn't ask you to compromise on taste. millesupergrain.com

Cook it, cool it, reheat it. A small change that turns ordinary rice into something your gut prefers.

Welcome to the Mille Midweek Microhabit. Each week, one small, doable shift that can meaningfully improve the quality of your day. Here’s a genuinely counterintuitive one. When you cook rice or potatoes and then let them cool fully, some of the starch reorganises itself into what’s called resistant starch, a form your body can’t digest in the usual way. Instead of breaking down quickly into glucose, it passes through to the large intestine largely intact and becomes food for your gut bacteria, which ferment it into the short-chain fatty acids that keep the gut lining healthy. The upshot is a smaller blood-sugar rise and a meaningful feed for your microbiome, from the same bowl of rice you were going to eat anyway.

The satisfying part is that reheating doesn’t undo it. Once the resistant starch has formed during cooling, it largely survives a trip back through the pan or microwave, so last night’s rice, taken from the fridge and warmed through, is measurably better for you than a fresh pot, which is a rare instance of the more convenient option also being the healthier one. Cook extra on purpose.

The habit: make more rice or potato than you need, cool it in the fridge for a few hours or overnight, and reheat to eat. That’s it, and it works for pulao, for potatoes destined for a chaat, for the base of tomorrow’s lunch.

1,000 Ways to Live Well is a Mille publication. Mille is a modern nutrition brand built around everyday rituals, starting with protein that doesn’t ask you to compromise on taste. millesupergrain.com

The phone goes off somewhere between the dal and the second roti. Then again, before you’ve finished the thought you’re halfway through saying out loud. A delivery update, a message in the building WhatsApp group, someone reacting to something you sent at four in the afternoon. The instinct to check Instagram while waiting for the kettle to boil… Most people don’t think of these tiny interruptions as stress because they’re just so ingrained into the texture of everyday life. But our brains do notice.

A recent review in Nature Human Behaviour put a number to that feeling: younger people now receive a median of 237 notifications a day, each one a small instruction to stop what you’re doing and look elsewhere. The volume of interruptions seems to matter more than the hours spent on the screen, which is to say a day full of buzzes can leave you more frayed than an afternoon lost to a film.

What wears you down is the switching. Every alert asks the brain to drop the task, take in something new, work out whether it’s urgent, and then find its way back to where it was. The cost of one is nothing, but Gloria Mark, a psychologist at UC Irvine who has spent two decades studying how technology affects attention, found that we now spend an average of 47 seconds on any screen before switching to something else. In 2004, that number was closer to two and a half minutes. The direction of travel is not encouraging. More striking still: after an interruption, it takes the brain around 25 minutes to fully return to the original task. So yes, while the cost of one notification is almost nothing, the cost of several hundred could potentially be the whole day (Gloria Mark, Attention Span, 2023).

Part of why this is so hard to resist comes down to anticipation. Every notification carries the chance that something good could be waiting, and the brain is built to chase that kind of uncertain reward. A phone never gives you the satisfaction of being finished either, because there is always another refresh, another thread, another reel cued up behind the last one, and so you spend the day in a low hum of alertness without noticing, and the bill arrives later as poor sleep, a shorter fuse, a vague sense of being depleted. Researchers refer to this as ‘attention fragmentation’ or ‘“cognitive fragmentation’, a state where focus becomes repeatedly disrupted throughout the day. Over time, the brain starts adapting to interruption as its default mode.

I don’t know about you, but where I notice it most is in those little ordinary gaps: there was a time (although it feels like fiction now) that you’d planned to meet someone and so you’d go there and you’d… wait. And while you waited, you’d look around; perhaps you’d be a bit self-conscious and twitchy, sure, but you did look around and people-watch in that little gap. An auto ride or a queue at the bank? Downtime, between-time, but those gaps don’t really exist any longer because they’re always filled, and so our nervous systems learn to expect input, to go looking for it when none arrives.

The body was built for rhythm, for stretches of effort followed by real recovery, and that is the part modern days have slowly written out. But what we miss is that this is where the repair lives, too: the first hour of the morning when the phone doesn’t get touched, an unbroken stretch of work… of course, there are simple remedies as well. Notifications off by default or allowed only by the few things that deserve them, or the phone left in another room overnight, so the day neither starts nor ends inside it.

Which is why perhaps attention might be the next big thing in wellness; for so many years, the dialogue has leaned heavily on the idea of optimisation. Better supplements, wearables, routines…. But a growing conversation is emerging around protecting attention itself. People are turning off nonessential notifications, creating screen-free mornings, leaving phones outside the bedroom, and becoming more intentional about when and how they consume information, not because they’re looking to walk away from modern life, but because of a realisation that they are calmer and feel clearer when their brains and thoughts aren’t constantly interrupted. In a time when information is everywhere, it’s no longer the thing I’m craving. I’m craving the sensation of being fully in the present moment again.

1,000 Ways to Live Well is a Mille publication. Mille is a modern nutrition brand built around everyday rituals, starting with protein that doesn't ask you to compromise on taste. millesupergrain.com

Welcome back to the Mille Midweek Microhabit. Each week, one quick, simple shift that can meaningfully improve your day and your life.

It’s 4pm. Your shoulders have drifted up near your ears without you noticing, and your lower back has that dull, low ache that you’ve started to think is just what the end of the workday feels like. By the time you’re heading home, your spine feels like it’s spent the whole day gripped in a clenched fist. Familiar? It doesn’t need to be.

That’s not just fatigue. It’s compression, and it’s purely mechanical. Gravity, a chair, and a day spent leaning slightly forward over a screen or a phone all push the vertebrae together, hour after hour, and almost nothing in an ordinary day asks them to come apart again.

The dead hang is the simplest possible reversal, and it’s been around for a very long time, long before chairs existed to compress anyone in the first place. Grip a bar with both hands, lift your feet off the ground, and hang there, letting your own body weight do the work no one else in your day is doing for your spine.

The mechanics are embarrassingly straightforward. Under the pull of your own weight, the spaces between the vertebrae open back up. The shoulders, rounded forward all day over a keyboard, finally get to move in the other direction. The upper back gets a passive stretch it essentially never receives anywhere else in an ordinary week, which is a strange thing to realise about something this basic. Hang for sixty seconds, or as close to it as your grip allows, the first few times, since grip strength tends to catch up faster than people expect. Most people feel the difference immediately.

The only real obstacle is finding a bar, and that’s easily resolved. A doorway pull-up bar is a one-time, ten-minute install and is easily found online. All gyms have one, and if your weekend plan involves a playground with the kids, the monkey bars do exactly the same job, borrowed for a minute from a five-year-old who will almost certainly let you have a turn.

1,000 Ways to Live Well is a Mille publication. Mille is a modern nutrition brand built around everyday rituals, starting with protein that doesn't ask you to compromise on taste. millesupergrain.com

Rishi Solanki’s morning is largely built the night before. The chia seeds go in to soak in anticipation of breakfast, along with several other little preemptive plans. By the time he sits down to work, the first coffee is poured (a Blue Tokai light roast, with a second already planned). He takes his calls at a standing desk so that it’s easy to move and pace, walking around the house while he talks. Rishi coaches founders and executives across the whole on how they live, on mindset, movement and nutrition together, and the life he has built on this terrace in Mandrem is the most visible representation of the things he teaches: that living well is mostly arranged upstream, in the hours and small decisions that happen before any willpower needs summoning.

His starting point is simple. ‘We are humans, we are not plants,’ he says. ‘We are quite literally meant to move.’ Sit still in one position all day, and you lose function. Most of the complications people pile onto movement, that it has to mean running as fast as possible or lifting as heavy as possible, get in the way of the question he actually cares about, which is what your particular body needs. He is an ectomorph, tall and lanky, with a femur he describes as ‘absurdly long’, and he uses himself as an example: everyone is built differently, so the real job is first to understand your own body and arrange your practices around it.

He calls this framework the unique code. There are things you love that work for you and things you love that do not, and the skill is in learning the difference. Finding it means asking questions most people have stopped asking somewhere in their twenties. ‘What gave you joy when you were younger? What kind of games were you playing? How did you lose that pattern?’ Usually, the answer is the hustle years, the long stretch when work took up the whole of someone’s attention, and play fell away. The aim is to land on the few things that fit well enough to last, the practices a person will still be doing in forty years, chosen for balance and continuity. Push hard in a direction that doesn’t suit you, and you might get two good years before the shoulder goes. ‘What are you benching now?’ he says of the type who peaked at eighteen.

Food works the same way, by accumulation. ‘You are what you eat,’ he says, ‘you are what you eat consistently.’ He coaches in proportions rather than calories, the idea that the body wants a similar weight of food day to day but not a similar density, so a 450 gram bowl might be mostly raw and cooked vegetables when output is low, then tilt towards carbohydrate and protein as training load climbs. His own protein runs between one and a half and two and a half times his bodyweight, depending on the season, and it is monsoon now, so he is home, training heavy, chasing strength while the beach is unusable and little else pulls him out of the gym. Strength built in these months holds for the rest of the year, and what it buys is readiness. ‘It’s like you can do anything anytime you want,’ he says, ‘to have that confidence in your body and your mind.’ Most people, asked to move suddenly, freeze, and that is where the injuries come from: the ACL that goes in an office corridor because the body has forgotten how to respond.

None of this is delivered in an evangelistic way. He has more or less stopped posting his work online, worn down by an industry where everyone insists their way is the only way and the next person’s is wrong, and he is wary of the fear that tends to get sold alongside wellness.’Not an extremist,’ is how he puts the alternative. ‘Just a holistic view on everything. It’s relaxed; it’s real.’

He arrived at all of this the long way round. A school athlete in Bombay, sprinter and javelin thrower, gold medals, even as a child, Rish says he had no patience for sitting behind a desk. So he went looking for something nobody around him had done and trained as a commercial deep-sea diver, completing a three-month course in South Africa, where he scored full marks and ended up coaching the other divers (Nigerians, Angolans, and Malayalis who shared no common language) through the physical tests. A year of offshore work in India followed, until a day he nearly died saving someone else, at eighteen or nineteen, made him ask what any of it was for.

CrossFit came next and took the better part of a decade, at a box in Bombay running two or three hundred people through it a day, a place in the country’s top twenty for five or six years, and then the same pattern he would later build his whole method against, people arriving, improving, travelling, falling away. ‘Fitness is not the answer to everything,’ he realised. ‘What does your lifestyle look like for the next forty years? Why are you dead after work? Do you think about why you feel like you need to drink six coffees a day?’ He knew the questions because he had lived them. A line from the diving years stayed with him through all of it: that a smooth sea never built a skilled sailor, and he still reaches for it.

So he started travelling to Bali and Thailand, watching how people who were always on the move lived, and the idea that would become On The Move took shape there. He came back in 2019, Covid arrived behind him, and when the world reopened, he rebuilt the life he had found abroad in a place he had been visiting for a decade, landing in Mandrem and staying. He lives there now with his partner Caro, a furniture and interior designer he met while travelling in Sri Lanka and then ran into again six months later, by accident, at an airport.

That long view is partly why he reads the way he does. He’s been working through Peter Attia’s ‘Outlive’, a book he called ‘fairly clinical’ but illuminating because, for all the science, it comes back to the daily basics and to your own genetics, the centenarian research, the people who make it past a hundred and what they have in common. The answer is never a single dramatic intervention. It’s the unglamorous stuff held steady over time. The crux of a life On The Move and the conviction he keeps returning to is that the quality of a life comes down to the quality of its ordinary days, the coffee already measured, the chia already soaked, the movement already folded into the hour, the small things held steadily for long enough that the body and the mind both come to feel them.

Find Rishi online here and reach out to On The Move Life here.

1,000 Ways to Live Well is a Mille publication. Mille is a modern nutrition brand built around everyday rituals, starting with protein that doesn't ask you to compromise on taste. millesupergrain.com

A tightness settles at the front of the hip, right where the thigh meets the torso, and most people who feel it assume it’s their back. It isn’t, not exactly. It’s the hip flexors, the muscle group running from the lower spine down through the pelvis to the top of the thigh (the psoas and iliacus, if you want the names), whose entire job is to lift your knee toward your chest, a movement almost nobody sitting at a desk for eight hours a day is doing often enough.

Sitting shortens them, not dramatically, not overnight, but steadily, the way anything shortens when it’s never asked to lengthen, and a shortened hip flexor pulls the front of the pelvis down and forward, tipping the lower back into a slight, permanent arch it was never built to hold all day. That’s the ache. It’s one we all know, every one of us who sits at desks and on our laptops, and it’s an ache that sits low and dull, and most people can’t actually trace its origin back to the hip, and so spend years treating it as back pain instead.

The fix doesn’t need a mat, a class or even a physio referral. Drop into a low lunge, one knee forward and bent, the other leg extended behind you with the top of that foot resting on the floor, and gently press the hips forward until you feel the stretch along the front of the back leg’s hip. Hold for a minute, then switch sides, and do it daily if you can, since the effect compounds each time you return to it. Posture tends to shift before the ache does, the pelvis no longer being dragged forward, finding it easier to sit up straight on its own.

Do it at the desk, by the bed, or while the kettle boils. It costs nothing and takes less time than making the coffee that had you sitting there in the first place, which is more than most fixes for a day spent sitting can claim.

1,000 Ways to Live Well is a Mille publication. Mille is a modern nutrition brand built around everyday rituals, starting with protein that doesn't ask you to compromise on taste. millesupergrain.com

Somewhere in the last year, fibermaxxing arrived on TikTok, with health creators urging followers to pack as much roughage into their diets as possible. It has since migrated, as these things do, into carousels and podcasts and everywhere else in the content cycle, and fibre has been declared the successor to protein, the thing we all need more of, the nutrient that was right there all along.

That last part, at least, is true.

Protein went through exactly this a few years ago, and it stuck because the underlying science holds up. Thirty grams at breakfast, protein at every meal: solid advice. Fibre does many of the same things for muscle, satiety, blood sugar and metabolic health, has always done them, and is only now getting equivalent airtime. What’s worth your attention is where fibre keeps surfacing once you leave the carousels behind, which is in the research on how long a life stays good, the back half of it, the years you’d like, also, to enjoy.

This is the conversation underneath the viral one, and it’s the one most of us will find more useful. For a long time, we measured ageing in years, the number you reach, and treated the decline as something that simply arrived alongside it. The frame that’s now gaining ground, most visibly argued by longevity physician Peter Attia in his book ‘Outlive’, is the idea of healthspan: the stretch of life you spend capable and well, able to do the things that make a day feel like your own. Travelling without it feeling like an ordeal, sitting down on the floor to eat and getting up again without help, carrying your own bag through an airport, taking the stairs and arriving at the top still mid-sentence. These are the small markers of a life still your own, and most of what people are really asking for when they say they want a long one. Few of us are looking for another decade spent unwell. What we want are more years that feel good.

Fibre has a real part in that picture, and the gap most people are running is both large and largely invisible. The Indian recommendation, set by the ICMR, sits at around twenty-five to thirty grams a day, and surveys put the average intake closer to fifteen, with the shortfall widest in exactly the places you’d expect, urban diets built on refined grains and packaged food, where the fibre has been milled and processed out of what used to carry it. That deficit shows up as flatter energy, worse skin, more cravings, and patchier focus, and closing it requires neither supplements nor a content strategy. One cup of dal gives you about 15 grams. A bowl of rajma, close to the same. A guava, one of the most fibre-dense fruits going, adds about five, skin and seeds and all. Three cups of popcorn, which is a whole grain and rarely the first thing people reach for when they think ‘fibre-rich snack’, add nearly four. The maths is not complicated, and the food is not hard to come by

What it does inside you is the part worth knowing. Some fibres form a gel in the gut that slows digestion and softens the rise and fall of blood sugar, which sounds dull and matters more than it gets credit for, because every blood sugar crash triggers a cortisol response, and cortisol, kept chronically high, has knock-on effects across the hormonal system that women in particular register as anxiety, poor sleep, and the sort of cycle irregularities that tend to get waved off as normal. Fibre at every meal is doing the heavy lifting beyond digestion alone, steadying the whole cascade that begins with what happens to your blood sugar in the hour after you eat.

Other fibres feed your gut bacteria directly, building a more diverse microbiome and favouring the species that ferment fibre into short-chain fatty acids, which support immune function, keep the gut lining in order, and, through the gut-brain axis, have a hand in mood as well. Your gut is in more or less constant conversation with your brain, and what you feed one, you feed the other. There is also a specific group of compounds called lignans, in flaxseed, sesame and cruciferous vegetables, which gut bacteria convert into substances that help the body process and clear used oestrogen. The everyday tadka of til oil, the sesame in a chikki, the methi in a dal, are all doing this kind of work, the sort of thing you don’t need to know about to benefit from, though it does make the case for keeping these ingredients in regular rotation rather than treating them as nostalgia.

The diversity matters as much as the quantity, since different fibres feed different strains, so the methi in a dal, the apple eaten on the way somewhere, the seasonal sabzi that changes with what’s in the market, all of it does more together than a mountain of any single thing, which is its own kind of unpleasant, so don’t. A useful frame that’s been circulating in gut research is the thirty plants a week idea, which sounds like a lot until you start counting and realise a single thali, properly kitted out, can carry you through a third of that in one meal. Indian food, eaten as it has traditionally been eaten, is already built for this kind of variety, and the drift away from it is recent enough that a return is fairly simple.

One caveat worth keeping in mind amid the noise is that more is not always immediately better. Fibre behaves like a sponge, and without enough water, pushing intake up too fast is a quick route to discomfort, so go gradually and drink enough alongside, which is the practical bit the trend tends to skip. It also works better with protein than the one-at-a-time logic of the trend cycle suggests: the architecture that’s circulated in longevity circles is roughly thirty grams of protein early and thirty of fibre across the day, a sound enough shape even if you never hold yourself to the numbers.

The reason this sort of advice keeps winning is that it is almost embarrassingly ordinary, and the ordinary is what holds up across decades. Move most days, keep the muscle that steadies your balance and lets you catch yourself when you trip, since that loss is the one that does most to decide how independent your later years are, sleep properly, stay close to the people you like, and eat in a way that feeds you across a life rather than for a fortnight. None of it trends or photographs well, and it keeps surfacing in the research for the unremarkable reason that it works. The body does well with a manageable amount of challenge, a load it can recover from and come back sturdier for. A workout is one such demand; roughage, in a smaller way, is another, a mild stress the gut adapts to by building something more robust. The comfortable life we have built, food on tap, the perfect indoor temperature, a chair for every hour of the day, takes away those small useful challenges, and the body notices their absence.

Trends will keep cycling, and fibermaxxing will peak and give way to whatever comes next, none of which needs to change what ends up on your plate. You are eating, in the end, for the long good life, the one spent capable and well and glad to be at the table, and that has always been built from the same ordinary, delicious things.

1,000 Ways to Live Well is a Mille publication. Mille is a modern nutrition brand built around everyday rituals, starting with protein that doesn't ask you to compromise on taste. millesupergrain.com

He is not that person anymore, or not only. These days, Nishant is much more likely to be up at 5.30am, and he will tell you he loves it with such zeal that it is hard to believe it was ever any other way.

The years before Goa were restless ones. Thailand first, learning the art of craft cocktails and hospitality. Then Bali, where the intention was to stay and manage the coffee bar and gelateria at Cibo, Diego Martinelli’s Italian grandmother-style cucina and deli, a kind of place that ran on the philosophy of good ingredients, carefully-sourced, great quality, with keeping it clean and simple as the main focus. Something about that life, the pace of it, the attention to ingredients, the greenness of it, started to settle into him. Diego had a way of going back to basics, of letting good produce do most of the talking, and it stuck.

He returned to Mumbai just before the pandemic, ready to launch Grind Bar there with his co-founder, Prashasti. Then the pandemic hit, everything closed, Mumbai became unavailable, and they landed in Goa instead.

Goa, it turned out, had a lot in common with Bali. The light, the slowness, and above all, a sense that the day could be organised around pleasure rather than productivity. They liked it, so they stayed. And what they noticed, once they had settled, was one noteworthy gap: speciality coffee, the kind that takes its sourcing seriously and its atmosphere just as seriously, was not really a thing in Goa at the time. So they made it one.

Grind Bar is a small place with a very considered point of view. The design is good, the music is good, and the ingredients are non-negotiable. For instance, Nishant and Prashasti work with Eleftheria, who make some of the finest cheese in the country, and the menu is short enough that everything on it is basically the very best version of itself it can be. This kind of brevity requires more confidence than a long menu does, because nothing is hiding behind variety. The coffee is excellent. The toast and the scrambled eggs alone are worth the trip. Diego’s lesson, absorbed somewhere in Bali, runs through the whole thing.

The ethos of Grind Bar, high-quality ingredients, traceable sourcing, and clean consumption that does not announce itself as virtuous, turned out to map neatly onto the life Goa was building around Nishant. He did not set out to reinvent his days. The place just made certain things inevitable. The ocean was there, and the nature, and the rhythm of a city that does not really do late nights in the way Bombay does. The early mornings followed.

The 5.30am start is still, he admits, surprising to him sometimes. “The darkness thinning, birds beginning to wake, animals stretching, moving into the day,” he said. “It’s the other side of the night, experienced from the opposite direction. What used to be the end of the day is now its opening.” He is so joyous about it that you cannot help but smile.

Whether this is a personality change or simply a reorientation is not really the right question because Nishant doesn’t talk about it as a transformation; more a preference that calcified into a practice, and a practice that turned out to suit him in ways he hadn’t anticipated.

The other thing that has become part of practice is padel. He came to it the way many people do, through someone else’s enthusiasm, a game, a court, a community that was already there. But it’s stayed and grown, he said, because it does something unexpected: “It’s meditative?” It sounds counterintuitive for a sport played at speed, but it makes sense once you have watched a long rally. The concentration required empties the mind of everything else, which is, functionally, what meditation does.

In Goa, the padel community is something else entirely. “The finest in the country,” Nishant said, with some conviction. Games run to three hours, even in the deep heat of summer, because no one is in a rush to leave. The court becomes a place where the same people show up in the same heat for the same unreasonable length of time, and over time it grows into something beyond sport: friendships, rituals, a shared commitment to showing up. Which might be the best kind of community there is.

Plus, below, links to two summer smoothies that Nishant makes when he is not behind the bar or on the court. Both are the kind of recipes that look simple but taste like they took much more thought than they did, which is, again, the Grind Bar philosophy applied to a blender.

The Triple Berry Smoothie here and the Chocolate Peanut Butter Smoothie here.

1,000 Ways to Live Well is a Mille publication. Mille is a modern nutrition brand built around everyday rituals, starting with protein that doesn't ask you to compromise on taste. millesupergrain.com

The best recipes are quick, delicious and good for you. Guess what? This one’s the trifecta. This one from the team behind Goa’s Grind Bar would work great as breakfast, a cooling pick-me-up, or even as a pretty damn good-looking dessert. Starring chocolate peanut butter, cacao, banana, Greek yoghurt, and Mille Dark Chocolate protein, we blended it thick with a couple of ice cubes. Two minutes, one blender, no regrets.

1,000 Ways to Live Well is a Mille publication. Mille is a modern nutrition brand built around everyday rituals, starting with protein that doesn't ask you to compromise on taste. millesupergrain.com

The food philosophy at Grind Bar in Goa

is simple: good ingredients, minimal interference, nothing that doesn't need to be there. This smoothie runs on the same logic. Three kinds of berries, a banana, Greek yoghurt, and a scoop of Mille unflavoured protein that disappears into the whole thing without adding anything but protein and creaminess. Bright, cold, and so much better than it has any right to be for the effort involved.

1,000 Ways to Live Well is a Mille publication. Mille is a modern nutrition brand built around everyday rituals, starting with protein that doesn't ask you to compromise on taste. millesupergrain.com

Most of us are carrying tension that we have completely stopped registering. It has been there so long it has started to feel like the baseline, a slight clench in the jaw, shoulders that sit a little too high, a belly that never quite lets go. You do not notice it until someone points it out, or until you actually release it and realise, with some surprise, how much you were holding.

Progressive muscle relaxation has been around since the 1920s, developed by an American physician named Edmund Jacobson, who noticed that physical tension and mental anxiety tend to travel together and that deliberately releasing one has a measurable effect on the other. It has since become one of the better-studied techniques in the stress management toolkit, used in everything from clinical anxiety treatment to pre-sleep protocols to sports psychology. It is also, unusually for something with that kind of pedigree, completely free and takes three minutes.

The practice is straightforward. Clench every muscle in your body at once, or work through them group by group if you prefer, feet and calves, then thighs, then abdomen, then hands and arms, then face. Hold the tension for five to seven seconds. Then release completely, all at once, and let the relaxation wash through. Do this three to four times.

The reason it works is in that last part. Deliberately releasing tension after is not the same as simply trying to relax. When you actively clench first, you are giving the nervous system a clear contrast to work with. The release registers as a signal, not merely an absence of effort, and the body responds accordingly. It is the difference between turning off a light and watching the room go dark.

The best time for this is the end of the day, before sleep, or whenever you have been at a desk or in back-to-back conversations for too long and the tension has gone quiet and invisible. In three minutes, you should feel it shift immediately. That immediacy is the point of a microhabit: not a long-term investment you take on faith, but something that pays out in the moment you do it.

1,000 Ways to Live Well is a Mille publication. Mille is a modern nutrition brand built around everyday rituals, starting with protein that doesn't ask you to compromise on taste. millesupergrain.com