As we ready ourselves to welcome a new year, I wanted to offer some food for thought for your health journey in 2025. Some of these tips come from my clinical experience, and others from a re-visiting of James Clear’s excellent book, Atomic Habits, which I read for the first time a year ago and have re-visited this week, as well as an interview James Clear gave on The Drive podcast with Peter Attia. Enjoy!

Osa Guidance for Health in 2025

1. Get some data

Data is motivating. Those of us who have frightening diagnoses or have experienced some kind of health crisis may already have the motivation we need. Dr. Terry Wahls is a great example. When faced with a rapidly progressing, uncurable, debilitating disease that did not respond to conventionally available treatments, she completed an entire overhaul of her lifestyle and has since sustained those changes (and motivated many, many others in addition) because her health relies on her doing so. However, for people with less severe illnesses or who are in a stage at which prevention is still possible, motivation can be harder to come by. Our economic and social systems do not often reward healthful behavior change; actually, they typically do just the oppostie. This means that choosing health is akin to swimming upstream. For better or worse, this is a reality of our modern lives. Having something measurable helps us sustain meaningful changes and can also help us correct imbalances before they manifest as larger health problems. If your goal is prevention, you need to be proactive–it is unlikely that your primary care provider would recommend this kind of data gathering to you. Here are some suggestions of trackable data that relate to nutrition:

• Biomarkers: Choose markers relevant to your own health concerns or goals and ask your provider to help you track them. Some examples of worthwhile biomarkers related to metabolic health and cardiovascular disease risk are apoB, Lp(a) (this one is considered to be genetically determined but can be influenced by dietary and lifestyle factors), HbA1C, fasting insulin or c-peptide, fasting glucose, GlycoMark (a measure of blood glucose variation), high sensitivity C-reactive protein (hsCRP), and homocysteine.* Most of these are readily available through basic labs, but depending on your current diagnoses, you may end up paying out of pocket for some of them. Check with your provider and your insurance to see what kind of coverage you may have for these or other biomarkers and what your out-of-pocket cost might be so you can budget appropriately.
• Nutrient status assessment: Micronutrients are needed to run all the biochemical processes in the body. Many common symptoms like fatigue, brain fog, mood swings, and poor sleep can be ameliorated or resolved with micronutrient repletion. That said, having excessive levels of nutrients in the body is also deleterious. If you really want to know what levels of nutrients you have AND how well your body is utilizing them, investing in a nutrient assessment is the way to go. Multiple functional lab providers, including Spectracell, Genova, and Vibrant, offer excellent intracellular micronutrient panels. An organic acid test (OAT) is also a great option, as it provides information about B-vitamins and also offers insight into neurotransmitters, oxidative stress, and mitochondrial function. OAT is also available through conventional lab providers including Quest and LabCorp. The cost of any of the above mentioned tests runs around $300-$400.
• DIY tracking: This is a free way to get more data about what you eat to help make decisions about your nutrition and facilitate change. Just the act of writing down what you eat can create behavior change. Free food & mood journal templates are readily available online; or, you can make your own with pencil and paper. (If you are a client, a food and mood journal is also available to you through Practice Better). Use a journal to track how what you eat affects your energy and mood throughout the day.
  For more data, I recommend using Cronometer (both free and paid versions available), which is a food logging service that gives you a readout of your macronutrient and micronutrient intake. There is a learning curve, but it’s well worth it for the quality of the data you get from it.

2. Change your automatic settings

This is probably for me the most important takeaway from Atomic Habits: if we want to create new habits, we need to change our environment to make it conducive to those habits. For example, if you wanted to start lifting weights at home, you might put the weights out where you plan to use them instead of having to fish them out from wherever they might be stored; and if you want to go running first thing in the morning, it’s helpful to have your clothes and shoes set out the night before. rather than buried in a drawer or hidden in a closet. This may seem obvious, but it’s remarkable how we can stand in our own way when it comes to change. Simply thinking that we want to make a change or setting an intention to make a change is not enough. Small actions (I like to call these “pre-decisions”) that decrease the friction that comes with doing something different or novel pave the way for creation of new habits.

In terms of nutrition, Peter Attia of The Drive podcast calls these automatic settings our “default food environment.” What do you see when you look in the pantry or open the fridge? What choices are available for you, and which are the easiest? The answers to these questions largely establish what your automatic, or “default”, settings are when it comes to what you eat. Accept that you are most likely to choose what is easiest or most accessible (and possibly most palatable) when you get hungry. If you don’t want to snack on Cheez-its, stop letting them into your house. Make it easy. And no, I don’t care that your partner or your children want the Cheez-its. Relying on “will power” alone is a form of self-sabotage. Will power isn’t for the long haul, and this health thing is the long haul. Don’t be afraid to hold your line when it comes to foods that have no rightful place in the food supply. (See my previous discussion on setting food boundaries for more on this topic).

So the Cheez-its aren’t there, but what is there? If you want to eat more colorful vegetables, for example, what can you do to make that easier? Making it easier will over time make it the default choice. A few simple ideas: buy the pre-washed greens; take 5 minutes after grocery shopping or during dinner prep to cut vegetables to keep in a tupperware for snacks; have a dressing and a dip that you like (these can be store-bought or homemade, but do always mind the quality of the oils used); stock frozen vegetables like cauliflower and spinach if you’re a smoothie person.

3. Let go of “all or nothing”

When we are pursuing big changes, flexibility is not a luxury; it’s a necessity. I know I sounded a bit tough back there about the Cheez-its, AND at the same time–even when we’ve taken care to put systems in place that support the choices we want to make–there will be times when there is a disruption to the system or something throws us off. Such is life, and it’s OK. The most important thing is how we respond, and bringing awareness to our thought patterns and our self-talk is paramount here. Let’s elaborate on this point.

In Atomic Habits, James Clear writes that every action we take is like a vote cast for the type of person we want to become–in other words, we create our identity with our habits. I think that Carl Jung described this reality most pointedly when he said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” Most of the habits we perform on a daily basis are done unconsciously. By bringing awareness to our habits and then consciously laying the ground work for purposeful habits that support our aspirations, we are writing our own stories about who we are. When things don’t go according to plan and we slip up, it’s really important to frame this appropriately. Our mistakes and slip-ups don’t define us. They are just little blips. You’re still that person who _____(fill in the blank with your healthy habit of choice). Tell yourself, tell yourself, tell yourself!
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In his book, James Clear reminds us that the most successful teams and most successful athletes have short memories of their mistakes. They simply move on. They don’t let their mistakes limit them or hold them back from success in any way. And you shouldn’t either. Everyone makes mistakes. Everyone needs a day off or some extra slack now and again. Remember the big picture, the overarching story of who you are and where you are going.

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Wishing you the most happy and healthful New Year,

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash