I Interviewed Over 70 Health and Fitness Experts in 2024. Here's What I Learned.
It's okay to experiment with your health—but social media doesn't have all the answers.
The best part of my job as a journalist is getting the opportunity to talk to wildly smart individuals about everything I’m curious about—from caffeine’s link to anxiety, to post-workout soreness, to genetics and longevity, to women’s reproductive health. This year, I had conversations with over 70 health and fitness professionals including academics, researchers, trainers, physical therapists, and dieticians. Each chat left me with a little nugget of wisdom that reshaped how I think about health and wellness. These conversations all pointed back to 5 key lessons I found myself returning to over and over again:
There’s No Quick Fix For The Basics
These days, everyone seems to want a hack for better health. How short can my workout be to get still benefits? Will red light therapy instantly clear up my skin? And can taking turmeric rid my body of inflammation?
After hearing the same thing during dozens of conversations, the message was clear. It all comes down to the same five building blocks:
Exercise regularly, ideally hitting the WHO recommendation of 150 minutes of moderate activity a week
Eat a balanced, nutrient-dense diet that works for your body
Prioritize quality sleep, because not much else matters if you’re only getting 4 hours a night
Lower your stress levels because stress management isn’t a luxury, it’s a necessity
Maintain social connections—they’re proven to lower stress (see above) and even improve longevity
Sure, there are lifestyle tweaks and tools to make these easier—but there’s no magic supplement or shortcut.
You Shouldn’t Go 0 to 100 When You’re Getting Back to A Fitness Routine
When the motivation to work out hits (hello new year), it’s tempting to go all in—heavy weights, HIIT classes, double workout days, long runs off the couch. It’s so easy to get swept up in the excitement of being back (like after an injury) or wanting to see progress ASAP.
But trainers and physical therapists all echoed the same warning: start slow. Not only will it help you avoid injuries and debilitating muscle soreness, but it will also stave off burnout and maybe even help you enjoy working out.
First, keep an eye on your volume. John Rusin, DPT, physical therapist, personal trainer, and founder of Pain Free Performance, suggests planning out the total volume you’re going to do or setting a time clock, like 45 minutes. Then, choose exercises you’re confident and competent in. “Chasing novelty right away in a return to a gym is not the recipe for success,” he told me. (That’s not to say you can’t try a new class like pilates or boxing—this is more specific to lifting.) Brad Schoenfeld, PhD, CSCS, professor of exercise science at Lehman College, even recommended staying far short of muscle failure in your first couple of weeks back.
This is transferable to running or cardio, too. The TikTok videos of people running a marathon without training are impressive, but not realistic. Our bodies are capable of so much, but building a solid foundation before pushing harder is the smart way to rebuild strength and avoid setbacks.
The Women’s Health Research Gap Still Has A Long Way to Go
The internet erupted earlier this year when a study revealed the presence of toxic metals in tampons. While much of the drama was overhyped (no, you don’t need to throw out all of your tampons), the lack of knowledge about the content of our menstrual products mirrors a larger issue in women’s health: A historical failure in research. Why didn’t we already know this? And what else don’t we know?
I asked this question to Miller Morris, MPH, founder of period care company Comma which funds clinical science about menstruation. “I wish I had an answer that was better than misogyny within the consumer space, the medical space, but there's just a neglect of women and female bodies in clinical research,” she told me. “I mean, '[women] weren't mandated to be included until the year I was born—in 1993—and even now we're still seeing a huge gap between what kind of questions are being asked in the women's health space and what answers women actually want to have.”
The gap is bigger than just period products, though. A few months ago, I worked on a story about the luteal phase—the time between ovulation and the start of your period, when the hormone progesterone increases—but it never ran because the publication didn’t have the resources to edit it. The gist was: Gynecologists have long been taught that the luteal phase length is a consistent 14 days, with little variation. Turns out, it’s much more variable than that. A recent research study showed that it can vary even in people with “normal” cycles, potentially affecting fertility or increasing miscarriage risk during shorter luteal phases.
Researchers have been trying to get medical standards up to speed for a while. “ It's been clear to many of us that that wasn't the case for a long time, but once an idea gets into the literature, it seems to stick no matter what the data show,” Jerilynn Prior, study author and professor of endocrinology and metabolism at the University of British Columbia, told me in an interview. The myth of a static luteal phase isn’t the only problem. Historically, research has overemphasized estrogen, sidelining the critical role of progesterone. “Since estrogen was characterized a little bit before progesterone, the immediate assumption is that men and women are the same and each has one hormone. But women are not the same—we have two hormones.” The result? Significant gaps in how we understand progesterone’s role in the menstrual cycle—and women’s health overall.
TikTok Doesn’t Know Everything About Health—But Your Doctor Probably Doesn’t Either
I met a man in a coffee shop the other day who shared his struggle with long COVID: debilitating brain fog, serious mental health issues, and a ravaged gut that left him barely able to get out of bed. Traditional medicine failed to provide answers, so he fell into a Reddit rabbit hole. There, he found accounts of people tackling similar symptoms by altering their gut microbiomes. He pinpointed a few bacteria that Redditers identified as problematic, took a gut microbiome test (he still takes one every few months), and focused on boosting the “good” bacteria. Most of his symptoms cleared up and his day-to-day is so much better. Would this work for everyone? Probably not. Did it change his life? Absolutely.
If you ask medical professionals, though, there simply isn’t enough data to back approaches like this. The gut microbiome is a really exciting new field, but there’s still so much to learn (and research to collect.) “People have this sense that medical doctors are wrong. It's not that we're wrong—it's just that we're very data-driven,” Asma Kapra, MD, gastroenterologist, told me when I was reporting a yet-to-be-published article about inflammation. “I think of medicine as an evolution. And when patients come in, I tell them, we don't know everything.”
Dr. Kapra believes in a balanced approach, and summarized something I had been trying—but failing—to put my finger on all year: “Medicine is not perfect. If something works for you, but it doesn't do you harm, you should try it. There's no saying that the medical community knows everything—we clearly don't.”
Another expert I spoke with, Sajad Zalzala, MD, medical director of AgelessRx, echoed a similar sentiment, offering guidance on navigating health-related trial-and-error. “The first thing you do when you evaluate an intervention is to determine if the intervention is possible. Is there physiological or psychological feasibility to the intervention?” he said during our conversation about whether volunteering can improve lifespan. “Then you also got to look, is there any harm to it? What's the worst that can happen? With volunteering, it’s pretty benign in terms of any side effects.”
Trust in medical doctors has been faltering while belief in influencer-sold supplements surges, but there doesn’t need to be a tug-of-war between emerging science, personal experimentation, and traditional medicine—they can coexist. “Physicians have not been as open to those things, and we need to meet patients halfway and understand where they're coming from,” said Dr. Kapra. “But patients also have to understand that, sometimes, there’s just not enough information.”
But for real, don’t buy every supplement you see online unless you have plenty of expendable income. That 10-step detox exists to sell you 10 different products.
Our Physical Body Affects Our Mental Health and Vice Versa
This is a bit of a generalization, but in the U.S., we tend to think about the mind and body as separate entities. “We live in a culture that suppresses signals from the body, right?” psychotherapist Ling Lam told me in an interview. “Think about it—even in elementary school, people say things like, sit down, don't move, sit up straight. These are all messages to override our bodies. But there's a whole neck-down experience that as a society, we are quite disconnected from.” I experienced that this year when I got a bunch of physical symptoms of anxiety (brain fog, tight muscles, dizziness) but no classic “anxiety” like spiraling thoughts or excessive worry. Medical professionals couldn’t pinpoint what was going on—everything on paper (or blood tests) looked good.
Luckily, over the past year, one theme emerged in my conversations with health professionals: our physical and mental health are profoundly connected. Exercise, for example, can alleviate symptoms of anxiety, while chronic stress often manifests as physical pain.
Chronic diseases—many driven by inflammation—are receiving increased attention for their dual impact on physical and mental health. Stress, in particular, has been a top topic of the year, with mounting evidence of its wide-ranging effects on the body. And then there’s gut health, which scientists are linking more closely to mental well-being. “IBS is a very classic example of where the brain-gut axis is very tightly linked,” said Dr. Kapra. “Emotional dysregulation can cause GI distress and GI distress can then lead to anxiety.”
While there are still more questions than answers, treatments like somatic therapy and breathwork practices are showing promise. In 2025, let’s continue exploring how to think about our bodies more holistically—because the mind and body are really never separate.