“The Difference Is Exercise”: 37 Doctors Share Their Biggest Advice They Have From Experience

Taking care of your physical, mental, and emotional health is a lot of hard work. It requires discipline, dedication, and sacrifice. If it were easy, everyone would be fit, and there wouldn’t be things like the current global obesity epidemic.

The World Health Organization reports that around 1 in 8 people live with obesity. In 2022, 2.5 billion adults were found to be overweight (43% of the global adult population); 890 million of them were obese.

Obesity doesn’t just impact your self-esteem, it also vastly increases the risks of getting serious diseases and conditions ranging from heart disease, stroke, and various cancers to depression. You’re also more likely to develop asthma, reflux, gallstones, liver disease, kidney disease, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol, as well as fertility issues.

Furthermore, being obese wrecks the quality of your daily life because it can lead to chronic exhaustion, back and joint pains, breathlessness, and social isolation.

With all of this in mind, it’s vital for you to put in daily effort to move more, eat better, sleep properly, and drink plenty of water. The exact guidelines might vary from source to source and might impact you differently due to your genetics, environment, and lifestyle. Nonetheless, you should aim to get at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise each week, avoid ultra-processed foods, get around 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep each night, and drink 2 to 3 liters of water per day. Again, the exact numbers might look different depending on who you are and what you do, but these are the general guidelines.

But setting your fitness and nutrition aside for a moment, you shouldn’t forget your social life. A decades-long study from Harvard found that it’s your positive relationships that have the biggest impact on your health, happiness, and longevity. In short, when you invest your time and effort into deepening your relationships with awesome people, you bounce back from all the stress that life throws at you much quicker.

Negative relationships, on the other hand, are detrimental to your health. And social isolation is as toxic as being a heavy smoker. So, no matter your fitness level, you should not sideline the people you love. Spending time with them and around them isn’t just enjoyable, it also does amazing things for your overall health.

Before you make any drastic changes in your life—say, at the start of the new year to become a better version of yourself—talk to your doctor. If you’ve been living an unhealthy, sedentary lifestyle for years or decades, you should change your expectations. We all want to look and feel great with minimal effort, but you won’t get results very quickly. Your doctor can give you some tailored advice for how you should approach getting fit. Meanwhile, they’re bound to help you out if you want to move away from unhealthy habits like smoking, drinking alcohol, or excessive caffeine consumption.

Commit to making a handful of small changes, incrementally changing your life over the upcoming weeks, months, and years. What you’re aiming for is sustainable change and a lifestyle you can keep up indefinitely, not burning out and regressing once your initial burst of motivation dries up.

Find some physical activities that you genuinely love doing so that you can maintain the habit even when you’re not feeling 100%. For yours truly, that’s hiking and swimming. For you, it might be soccer, dancing, weightlifting, martial arts, jogging, puppy yoga, or any combination of the hundreds of ways people have found to make moving fun. Whatever you do, getting into the habit of doing it is more important than how intense the exercise is at first. Break a sweat, sure, but don’t go overboard. Just be sure to show up the next time… and the time after that, and the time after that, and… you get the idea.

There are tons of other things you can do to live healthier, but you have to weigh them against all your other responsibilities in life, like work, family stuff, studying, hobbies, etc. You don’t want to live a life where you’re only focusing on maintaining your body because there are so many different things to do and see and try in life. Nor do you want to live in a way where you’re ignoring your body’s needs altogether.

For example, be sure to brush your teeth because neglecting your oral health is going to bite you in the future. But not everyone will have the time and patience for a half-hour-long flossing routine. Floss a bit if you can. Do things imperfectly but regularly.

Unless you’ve got millions in your bank account and an army of top-tier doctors on call, you won’t ‘perfectly’ optimize your health like entrepreneur Bryan Johnson. But so long as you get the main things right, you’re good. Remember: prioritize your relationships, move lots, eat well, sleep well, and enjoy life.

What is the best health tip that you’d give someone hoping to make a change in 2025, dear Pandas? What health advice would you give your younger self if you could send a message back through time?

What do you struggle with the most when it comes to health and fitness? Do you have any health-related regrets? Let us know! We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.