Surviving the Winter Wellness Battle
I am Sisyphus and this is my rock.
On the first of every year I find myself at the bottom of a mountain of emails:
"Wellness re-imagined" with all new supplements to offer to my patients. Blog and newsletter suggestions for weight loss and diet tips. "New year, new you" marketing ideas for the people who put their health and well-being in my hands.
Hands I'm laying against this same old rock.
If you're on Instagram, you might have seen a post floating around in late December that said something to the effect of, "It must have been a sadist that came up with the idea that the darkest and coldest time of year was the best time to start a new exercise routine."
And while I am not one for armchair diagnosis or commentary on people's private lives, I do agree on one thing: Starting an intense exercise routine or strict diet in the winter feels bad.
It feels bad because our body is trying to run on energy saver. If we did everything right in the autumn, we banked enough qi and blood to get through the winter. If we didn't, our body is economically taking only what's needed from our stores. The last thing we need to do is increase the demand.
If you've made a new year's resolution to be healthy this year, that's amazing. As a health care practitioner, I am ecstatic that you've decided to build this connection with your body. I wonder, though, what wellness means to you.
Are you defining wellness externally, with ads on your social media feed telling you how much you should weigh and how far you should run? Or are you defining it internally by what makes you feel well.
So, if this is the year that you have decided to embark on a fitness journey, perhaps the first step isn't a gym membership. It's opening up a journal and asking yourself, "What truly makes me feel alive?"
Meeting health goals in the winter
It would be in poor form for me to leave you without solutions after so rudely snatching away our Western Wellness Paradigm. So let's give you the tools to take care of your body this year without over-stressing your body
With the Small Cold solar term (小寒 xiǎo hán in Mandarin) starting in just a couple of days we want to make sure that we're strengthening our Kidneys, supporting our digestive system, and protecting the energy that we have. None of that means saunas or treadmills or kale smoothies.
For the next two weeks, I want you to consider things like:
making sure to dress warmly when you're out and about
wearing socks at home if you're not the slipper sort
wearing long underwear (because your new year's resolution was wellness, not fashion)
eating warming foods like meat, soups, and stews
adding a meditation practice, like a seated mindfulness meditation or an active qigong or taichi routine
keeping a log about what made your body feel good and what made it feel not great throughout the day
These sound like small, inconsequential things, I know. But these are the bricks that lay a foundation of health; the soil that the seed of yang the winter solstice bore will grow in. If you want wellness that lasts, the solution isn't in the perfect HIIT workout or whatever this year's fad diet is. It's in daily, habitual actions that are suited to you and what's right for you.
If 2026 is your year for wellness, don't build a wall of impossible external expectations. Start a dialogue with your body. Soften into well-being by learning the things it truly wants. Year after year, I watch my patients rediscover themselves with this process and it's why I keep laying my hands on this rock every year.
It's slow. It's hard. It's worth it.
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