There’s nothing special about me. I’m just an average fortysomething New Yorker who spent her childbearing years in Tribeca, home to some of the most woo-woo women on the planet. My obstetrician wouldn’t even let me join her practice until I’d hired a doula. My children are tweenagers now, but soon after they were born I became patient zero for Big Wellness. I blame this partly on vanity and an urgent-seeming desire to just keep everyone alive, but I’m also a zeitgeist-chasing journalist, and this industry is as attention-seeking as Brooklyn Beckham.
At some point, someone decided that health isn’t just about eating well and exercising. It is also about buying into a spurious, $2 trillion industry that sells toe spreaders and beef-organ protein powder that tastes like honey and smells like cat food. Brands are always sending me their inventions, and I’m sorry to say that I’ve submitted my body to many of them.
With her red-light hat, to guard against hair loss, weighted vest (osteoporosis) and infrared therapy mat
JUDE EDGINTON FOR THE TIMES MAGAZINE. SHOT AT THE EMORY, LONDON
The worst was the postpartum pelvic floor trainer, which I purchased because I was peeing myself during triathlon training. (And yes, I should have seen a specialist.) Its name has been so thoroughly repressed that even Freud could not summon it from my psyche. A cross between a dildo and a vibrator, it randomly shot mild electrical currents into my vagina, leaving it no choice but to attempt Kegel exercises. If you’ve seen a hound zapped by an electric fence, then you can imagine my expression when I tried this one while watching Bake Off. It was binned before the end of the signature challenge.
Then I saw an alarmist nutritionist who made me breathe into a souped-up snorkel to determine my metabolic rate and suggested that if I ate more than 1,743 calories per day, “anything could happen”. She also recommended regular colonics — this was the era of peak “cleansing” — so I allowed a man whose only credential was “holistic health practitioner” to stick a rubber hose up my bum. The flushing of intestines wasn’t painful, but I didn’t really see the point since I had no trouble handling this particular biological function on my own. (Also, plenty of other wellness fads will send you straight to the loo with much less faff: turmeric curcumin supplements, drinkable aloe vera, cabbage-seed tinctures, for starters.)
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Then there was dry cupping, which my yoga instructor friend swore by, probably because Jennifer Aniston did too. This was done to reduce pain I didn’t have and increase blood flow, which is generally helpful unless you’re dead. A kindly practitioner came to my apartment carrying bags of plastic cups like he was catering a fraternity party. He made me lie on my stomach, lined them up along my trapezius, used a hand pump to vacuum out the air, and left them to suck on my flesh while he played Candy Crush on his phone. He stopped after four minutes when I started weeping. Then I was $150 poorer, looking like I’d been attacked by a tennis-ball machine and, finally, feeling some pain.
Baker is on her second Oura ring — “the first eventually warped after three years of constant use”
But can you blame me for trying to feel good, cheat death and control the uncontrollable? It’s way easier to justify the purchase of a hyperbaric chamber if it’s done in the name of health, which we’ve come to confuse with virtue.
Now, I’m barely recognisable to my twentysomething self who rang in Sunday mornings with a walk home at dawn across the Williamsburg Bridge. As an expat in west London seizing the so-called prime of my life — see how we rebranded middle age? — I’ve become a total freak of nature.
The first thing I do after waking should be kissing my husband or snuggling my children or, at the very least, admonishing my cocker spaniel for sleeping under the duvet yet again.
But those are second-tier priorities. First, I need to know how I fared overnight. So I ditch the eye mask and noise-cancelling ear buds, dump electrolyte powder into my Hydro Flask and check my Oura app, as anxious as a Romanian gymnast. A resting heart rate of 46 beats per minute, heart rate variability of 65, overall sleep score 94, and a readiness score of an unprecedented 96? This must be what Nadia Comaneci felt like when she took three gold medals in Montreal.
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Certain neighbours find it odd that I speed-walk in a weighted vest. (Anything to avoid osteoporosis, love.) But I’m unruffled by any snickering. A readiness score of 96 doesn’t happen on its own. This award goes to each and every cog in the wheel of my wellness, especially my amazing assistants — the battalion of gadgets that soldier me through the day.
HigherDose red-light hat, £449
Sometimes brilliance will emerge from the crazy
I wasn’t always a person who asked Santa to bring her a vagus nerve stimulator. I used to blow it all on silly tap pants from Miu Miu. But I’m older now. Smarter. So I prefer to “invest” in items that, best case scenario, will keep me alive to witness Elon Musk move to Mars while everyone else is incinerated. After decades of research that have depleted my savings account and lost me the respect of my loved ones, I’ve decided that wellness is sort of like Britney Spears. You never know when a little bit of brilliance will emerge from the crazy.
For example: I am now on my second Oura ring (£499; ouraring.com) — the first eventually warped after three years of constant use (and sauna exposure). And do not even think about asking to borrow my HigherDose red light hat (£449; cultbeauty.co.uk) fitted with 120 bulbs that pummel the scalp with 650 nanometers of LEDs. It entered my life about a year ago, after my father died and I started moulting. Enough studies have suggested that red light can stimulate dormant follicles that there are now tons of these hats on the market. Most are black, minimalist and forgettable, like something Justin Bieber would wear to his megachurch. You’re supposed to don the cap for ten minutes daily for four months, and then three or four times a week for eternity. But because I take the advice of strangers on Reddit, I luxuriate for a whole half-hour. I’m no Princess Kate, but I no longer want to weep when examining my parting.
MiHigh infrared sauna blanket, £140
Now that my head is handled, moving on to the body. A few years ago, I got into saunas because I heard you can burn up to 600 calories an hour by zoning out in a hot room. There’s more good news about schvitzing all the time. A 40-year, 14,000-person study in Finland found that those who use saunas between 9 and 12 times per month had a significantly lower rate of dementia. Strip down between 4 and 7 times each week, and you’re looking at a 40-50 per cent lower risk of all-cause mortality. It might even leach out the microplastics from your blood and semen (yikes) that you got by drinking espresso out of a pod in 2006 (dubious claim by biohacker Bryan Johnson, no peer-reviewed studies).
For ages, I suffered in the dingy sauna at David Lloyd, but I finally got fed up with the beefy manspreaders talking about crypto. Instead, I bought a MiHigh infrared sauna blanket (£140; mihigh.com) and while it takes me a half-hour to start sweating, I get a lot of work done while marinating naked in a plasticky hot pocket. (Yes, it’s a drag to clean.)
Then I take a frigid shower. The constriction and dilation of blood vessels is good for the heart, but I’m in it for the mood enhancement. Cold exposure releases not only endorphins but the neurotransmitter norepinephrine, which helps with focus, attention and arousal. Meow. I endure for 90 seconds and then spend the rest of the afternoon trying to get my body temperature back to baseline.
I wish Oura would do a collab with Verdura
According to my Oura ring’s daytime stress monitor, contrast therapy puts me in the danger zone, but that’s sort of the point — to strain your heart and its systems until they have no choice but to strengthen. This tyrannical health tracker has been occupying my ring finger for nearly four years now. Until it gets less ugly — can you people please do a collab with Verdura? — I wear it on my left hand so it passes for a wedding band someone else bought me rather than an aesthetic choice I made on my own.
Working out in the Emory’s Penthouse
JUDE EDGINTON FOR THE TIMES MAGAZINE. HAIR AND MAKE-UP: LUCIE PEMBERTON USING CHANTECAILLE AND HAIR BY SAM MCKNIGHT
At first, I was alarmed to discover how disastrous my favourite pastimes — a 9pm steak at Straker’s in west London, a “noon balloon” rum-punch party in Antigua— were for my biometrics. But now I’ve come to expect that no matter how many good times I avoid, I will rarely earn a high readiness score, because those only go to people who never get stressed or live at Surrenne, the Emory hotel’s spa. A girl can dream.
Aside from the Oura and a regrettable year in a first-generation Fitbit, my only foray into wearables is compression hose, which I’ve been buying at the medical-supply store since I was a teenager. My grandmother, a farmer’s wife from Missouri who made it to the age of 96 on a diet of Coke Zero and gelatin-based salads, insisted that they were key to circulation.
The category recently received a major upgrade when Anna Zahn, the Vogue-approved founder of the New York bodywork joint Ricari Studios, launched knee-highs. Her compression socks (£52; ricaristudios.com) look and feel like they were made by Brunello Cucinelli himself and are the best bloat-banishing tool in my arsenal. If you really want to get fancy, Ricari now bestows its signature mix of lymphatic massage, Lyma lasers and micro-stimulation skin treatments at the Peninsula London hotel. This is all done in a white full-body catsuit customised with one’s initials, which you are allowed to take home. My birthday is October 19.
I swear by my wired-up yoga mat
If all these efforts sound positively exhausting, the HigherDose infared PEMF pro mat (£1,299; higherdose.com) is here to help. PEMF, which stands for pulsed electromagnetic field, is a therapy that sends low-frequency electromagnetic pulses to create tiny electrical currents in every cell. I was not optimistic that a wired-up yoga mat topped with ground crystals, magnets and charcoal would keep its promises. (It’s a little crunchy underfoot.) But doctors have been using PEMF since 1979, when it was approved by the FDA to treat bone fractures. Today, it’s enlisted to help decrease inflammation, release endorphins and promote cellular repair.
The mat’s goofy light-up control panel could keep a toddler occupied for hours. There are four modes to choose from — relax, ground, focus and, my favourite, restore, which emits a 3-hertz delta brain wave to simulate deep sleep. Twenty minutes on that reliably dampens the aftermath of a red-eye flight. I also crank the infrared heat and press the “ion” button, which mysteriously charges those crystals to create negative ions, which are apparently good. (Unlike positive ones, which are made by smartphones and air conditioners and are apparently very bad.)
I had intended to store this thing under my bed, but I use it so often — there’s no downside to charging up all day — that it has assumed the rightful place of a rug. I might as well put my laptop on a breakfast tray and sell my desk, because I almost always work in focus mode, as buzzed as an eight-year-old on Red Bull.
But if I had to pick a single device to swear by, it’s the EightSleep Pod (£2,749 for the latest model; eightsleep.com), a smart mattress pad full of sensors and capillaries that attaches to a water pump. It reads room and body temperatures and tracks movements and biometrics, cooling to support longer, deeper sleep. My husband started looking into legal separation when this box arrived, but a few years later, he’s its biggest fan. Not because he particularly cares about his REM cycles or heart-rate variability, a key indicator of cardiac health — although both are in much better shape these days. The chap simply relishes a preheated bed almost as much as a new episode of The Rest Is History.
But we’re not done here. Wellness culture is built on the impulse to endlessly optimise, so I’m still fine-tuning that sleep score. The noise-cancelling Ozlo Sleepbuds (£299; ozlosleep.co.uk) dampen traffic noise, chirping birds and my children’s whining so thoroughly that wearing them feels downright reckless. LED and incandescent lights have also got to go — they can trick the body into producing more sleep-disrupting cortisol. I’ve now installed so many red-light bulbs from Amazon (£3 each) in our bedroom that it resembles the Moulin Rouge.
Now that I think about it, funnily enough, my MVPs are probably Joe & Seph’s gourmet popcorn maker and Samsung The Frame television. The Oura ring just loves family movie nights. There’s nothing more restorative.
Picture 1: top, vuoriclothing.co.uk. Shorts, falke.com. Picture 2: T-shirt and leggings, falke.com. Lyma Laser Pro, lyma.life. Picture 3: top and leggings, vuoriclothing.co.uk. Lyma Laser Pro, as before
