Why I stopped waiting for the right time

The moment it really landed for me is a good story.

I was in the kitchen. One son was asking what was for dinner, the other was already out the door. My phone was lighting up about a podcast recording later that afternoon. I was holding a mug of tea that had gone cold again.

And I remember thinking: I can’t keep starting again.

Not because I didn’t care. Because life wasn’t going to suddenly get quieter and my own health was taking up more of my life than I cared for (double entendre intended).

People often assume that if you’re visible — doing media, representing NZDSOS, talking publicly about health — you must have your own routines perfectly sorted. The truth is, being media-facing just means your days are fuller, louder, and more interrupted than most.

For a long time, my own health lived in the gaps. I’d pay attention when something felt off. When I was tired. When the pace caught up with me. Supplements sat in that same category — something I’d remember occasionally, usually when I was already stretched.

I knew better, at least on paper. But knowing and living something aren’t the same.

The shift didn’t come from a big personal revelation. It came from my own health becoming a central issue at the same time to me listening.

Over time, through conversations with our good doctors — the ones taking a bigger vantage point on life, through integrative medicine and beyond — the same theme kept surfacing. Health doesn’t respond well to occasional attention. It responds to patterns. To foundations. To what’s already in place.

And one day it just clicked.

There is nothing in my life that does well with sporadic care. Not my boys. Not the plants I forget to water. Not podcast prep, advocacy work, or anything else I’m responsible for.

Everything that matters to me does better with regular care.

So why, of all things, was I treating my own body like something I could dip in and out of?

That question and my own health needs changed how I thought about supplements.

I stopped treating them like something you reach for when life is already wobbling. Instead, I treated them as part of a system — something taken regularly, quietly, without drama. Not as a response to aches or illness. But the strength of a daily foundation that didn’t require thought once it was in place.

When Andrew later asked me to write about this, he reminded me that the law doesn’t allow us to make therapeutic claims about supplements. Big pharma products, I can proclaim their virtues from the rooftops but health supplements, that’s a no. Which means I could not tell you that I’ve been taking a particular supplement that has really, really helped me — even if that were my personal experience. So, being a good citizen, I won’t.

What I can tell you is this: I didn’t change anything else.

Same work. Same travel. Same teenage boys eating everything in sight. Same conversations around the table. Same messy, unpredictable days. But I’m feeling great.

Changing my habits wasn’t anything dramatic. I made it normal, part of my life, my day, my morning actually. It was ‘my’ system. Missing a day doesn’t feel like failure and returning doesn’t require motivation. The routine was already there.

These days, I’m far less interested in extremes. I’m more interested in what fits real life — the kind that keeps going when nothing is ideal.

So… you decide.