Somewhere along the way, wellness became a spreadsheet. HRV in the morning. Glucose curve after lunch. Sleep stages overnight. ApoB, VO2 max, resting heart rate, deep sleep percentage — pick your number, then chase it. The pitch is seductive: measure enough, and you'll live longer, sharper, better.

I've been circling this world for a while — plant medicine, psychedelic healing, addiction recovery, the whole conversation about master plants and what they actually do for people. And the metric-obsession has bled into that space too. Retreat-goers now show up with Oura rings, tracking whether ayahuasca changed their HRV baseline. It's a strange thing to witness in a maloca at three in the morning.

So when I came across an interview with Ezekiel Emanuel — the oncologist, health policy heavyweight, and author of a new book with the excellent title Eat Your Ice Cream — his answer to the tracking question stopped me. He doesn't track anything. Not a single daily metric. And his argument for why applies to anyone thinking about a retreat, a lifestyle overhaul, or any attempt at real change.

The problem with measuring your way to health

Emanuel's logic is disarmingly simple. If you're actually doing the things that keep you well — eating decently, moving your body, sleeping, staying connected to other humans — you're going to be doing them for decades. Nobody wants to spend forty years logging numbers into an app. At some point the tracking becomes the thing, and the living becomes the data-entry task that supports it.

For some people, data genuinely motivates. His wife, apparently, is one of those people. Fine. But for a lot of us, the readouts mostly generate low-grade worry. Did I sleep enough? Why is my HRV down? Is this glucose spike going to kill me? The tools that were supposed to give us clarity end up giving us a new kind of anxiety, dressed in graphs.

His alternative is older than any wearable — he listens to his body. He eats well, moves, protects his sleep, and knows within a few hours of waking whether he's on track. When he's under-slept or eating garbage, he feels it. That signal, he argues, is more useful than any dashboard. And here's the thing: it's free, it works while you're doing other stuff, and it doesn't require charging.

What's worth actually measuring, then?

Emanuel isn't anti-data. He's anti-noise. He's a firm believer in the boring, unsexy screenings that actually catch things — mammograms, pap smears, HPV vaccinations, the standard preventive stuff most people skip because it's not fun to think about.

On cardiovascular health, he wants you to know where your cholesterol sits, especially if it needs work. He recommends testing Lp(a) — once — because it's genetically determined and won't budge. If you're older and already have a cholesterol issue, a calcium score is worth getting. That's roughly it. A handful of tests when they're actually indicated. No wearable required.

Compare that to the maximalist version circulating on health podcasts, which involves quarterly full-body MRIs, continuous glucose monitors for non-diabetics, and a subscription to something with "biohacking" in the name. The gap between what's genuinely useful and what's being sold is enormous.

Willpower is a bad long-term strategy

Here's a line that hit hard: willpower fatigues. Habits don't.

Most people who fail at healthy living blame themselves for lacking discipline. Emanuel argues the frame is wrong. If you're burning willpower every single time you do the thing, you never actually enjoy it, and you never make it automatic. Eventually you quit. He points to New Year's resolutions — 80 to 90 percent abandoned by the end of February. Willpower can carry you four to six weeks. After that, if the behavior hasn't become a genuine habit, it's gone.

The threshold he cites for habit formation is doing something three to four times a week until it stops feeling like a decision. This is the same principle that shows up over and over in addiction recovery work, including in psychedelic-assisted approaches. The ceremony or the retreat can create the opening — the willingness, the insight, the fresh start. But what actually determines whether the change lasts is the boring stuff you build in the weeks and months afterward. Integration. Routine. Repetition until the new pattern becomes the default.

What his own routine actually looks like

Emanuel's daily habits are almost aggressively unglamorous. There's no cold plunge, no red-light therapy, no supplement stack. Just things he's done long enough that they no longer count as effort.

• Yoga every morning. He didn't do this a decade ago. Now if he skips it, his body complains.
• A fixed breakfast. Eggs with a piece of toast, a bowl of berries with yogurt, chia seeds, and hemp hearts. Fiber, protein, good fats, done. When he improvises breakfast he doesn't enjoy it as much — the structure itself is part of the pleasure.
• A salad at dinner, nearly every night. A habit his mother started in the early 1960s, which means he's eaten a daily salad since childhood. He credits it with hitting fiber targets most Americans miss by a mile.

None of this requires discipline anymore because none of it is a decision. His schedule is arranged around these things instead of around them. That's the whole trick. The goal isn't to be someone who forces themselves to eat salad — it's to become someone for whom skipping the salad feels weird.

Why the ice cream matters

The title of the book isn't a gimmick. Emanuel's point is that wellness built on self-denial and punishment doesn't last, and it also misses one of the actual pillars of long-term health: being around people you love, doing things you enjoy together.

Ice cream is rarely a solo purchase. It's a family thing, a friend thing, a walk-to-the-shop-with-your-kid thing. If you frame it as a cheat, you're framing the social ritual around it as a cheat too. That's the wellness industry's blind spot, according to Emanuel — it treats sociability as a nice-to-have when it's actually load-bearing.

He goes further than the usual "connection is important" line. Social interaction releases oxytocin and dopamine, lowers stress hormones, and blunts inflammation. Chronic loneliness upregulates genes tied to inflammatory disease and cardiovascular problems. He wants social fitness listed not just alongside diet, exercise, and sleep — but ahead of them. Even introverts, research keeps showing, feel measurably happier when they act more extroverted.

What this means if you're weighing a retreat

A lot of people considering an ayahuasca retreat or a psilocybin ceremony are hoping for a hard reset — on addiction, on depression, on trauma, on a stuck life pattern. Plant medicine can crack something open. That's real. But the reset itself isn't the healing. The healing is what you do with the opening in the year that follows.

Emanuel's framework maps onto this cleanly. If your post-retreat plan runs entirely on willpower — I will meditate every day, I will not drink again, I will journal each morning — you're on the same clock as the New Year's resolution crowd. Six weeks, maybe eight. Then the old defaults reassert themselves and you're left wondering why the ceremony didn't work.

What actually works is smaller and less dramatic. Pick one or two changes you'd genuinely want to still be doing in five years. Repeat them until they're automatic. Build community around the new pattern so it stops being a solo project. Say yes to the ice cream, metaphorically and literally, because the version of wellness that excludes joy and connection is a version that won't survive contact with your actual life.

The best retreats I've seen understand this — they treat the ceremony as one node in a longer arc, and they take integration as seriously as the medicine itself. For readers who want to explore this further, a range of curated plant-medicine and psychedelic retreats can be browsed on our marketplace here.

The takeaway from Emanuel is one your grandmother probably already gave you. Eat real food. Move your body. Sleep. Keep people close. Don't do anything stupid. Pick habits you'd be glad to still be doing in five years, not habits that require you to become a different, more disciplined person by Monday. The version of health that lasts is the version that doesn't feel like work.