Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Foreign.
[00:00:04] Wealth divide part 2 of 6 physical activity why ultra high net worth individuals can be surprisingly unhealthy and how wealth secretly undermines the six pillars of health When I got sobering staad, I started moving again. I'd been an active child. I loved being outside, wandering the streets of Monaco after school, or exploring the forest behind my stepfather's castle in southwestern France.
[00:00:30] Then we moved to damp, cold Newport, Rhode island, and I became sedentary.
[00:00:35] At 18, my first boyfriend got me into the gym, and when the relationship ended, so did the habit. I gained 10 pounds.
[00:00:42] Tomorrow I will work out, I'd tell myself. Then morning would come and I'd be too tired or too hungover to keep the promise.
[00:00:50] Every so often I'd run excessively out of guilt, trying to sweat out toxins and shame. By the time I quit drinking, I was 20 pounds overweight. Getting sober changed everything.
[00:00:59] I started walking the 30 minutes downhill to town, pushing my 18 month old son in his pram with our dog on a leash. I'd tie the dog outside the grocery store, load my backpack and the pram basket with food, pay, and haul everything back up the steep hill. I decided this was my sport.
[00:01:17] Once a week I lifted weights with a trainer named Roland, the one who invited me to karate.
[00:01:22] At that point I was going through a divorce and getting used to single parenting, and I was scared and I was lonely. I went anyway, and there I met healthy, positive people who showed up and encouraged me. Week after week I kept going, and in the spring and summer I worked in the garden, mowing, weeding, cutting branches, building terraces out of rock. I was outside so much I caught sunsets by accident. I jogged 2 or 3 times a week, always 5k, never too fast, just enough to straighten out my head.
[00:01:50] At six months sober, I had well defined arms and hit my ideal weight, 57 kilos or 125 pounds.
[00:01:57] During summer vacations in Newport, friends at the beach club asked what I was doing to have such a body. I told them karate twice a week, weights once a week, gardening and the occasional hike or run.
[00:02:08] Weights only once a week. They exclaimed. That was it. No elaborate plan, just a life where I moved.
[00:02:14] Today I train Shotokan karate, ideally four to six times a week. I walk my dog, I hike, ski and ride horses.
[00:02:23] I'm rebuilding Zone two cardio after a meniscus injury.
[00:02:26] I lift weights with a trainer, including Roland. When I'm in stad, stretching is built into the karate routine.
[00:02:33] The difference between now and then isn't discipline. It's motivation. I no longer feel the need to punish myself.
[00:02:39] Growing up between Switzerland, Monte Carlo and southwestern France, movement wasn't a category. It was just life. We walked places, we hiked, we swam, we skied. Nobody called it exercise.
[00:02:51] In Monaco and in southwestern France, people went to the Marche while we were in school to buy fresh produce, meat and fish. It was social. It was community.
[00:03:00] In Newport, our Chinese nanny shopped for the entire household on her bicycle, little basket in front, sometimes twice a day. No car. She refused to get a driver's license. My Swiss grandparents shopped on a foot well into their late 80s, pulling a canvas cart behind them. They'd pair it with lunch in town, errands and pleasure in the same trip. My grandfather moved constantly. He was a high tension wire electrician who climbed poles for a living. He scythed grass on steep inclines for local farmers. He walked everywhere, often carrying his accordion to gigs. Once he missed the last bus and walked most of the night to play at a friend's wedding. They let him sleep upstairs at the venue for four hours before the ceremony.
[00:03:43] Then he played. That was normal. Movement wasn't something you scheduled. It was how you got things done.
[00:03:49] My Swiss grandparents lived into their mid-90s. In contrast, my American grandmother, very intellectual, joked that she took sunbathing at Bryn Mawr as her sport.
[00:03:59] Sadly, she died at 77.
[00:04:01] In her spirit, I chose stage crew over athletics at boarding school. My small rebellion against what I felt like too little emphasis on the arts.
[00:04:11] Eventually I joined cross country and felt much better.
[00:04:14] On the Huberman Lab podcast, NYU neuroscientist Dr. Wendy Suzuki describes how physical activity boosts attention and memory, both in the short term, after a single workout and over time. Movement supports thinking.
[00:04:28] Wealth can buy access to the best inputs. Time to train personal trainers. Sometimes $500 an hour. Private Pilates studios, a peloton in the guest house. Wearables that track every step.
[00:04:40] I'm guilty. I use both a whoop and a Garmin recovery protocols, cryotherapy, infrared saunas and hyperbaric chambers. In theory, you can be perfectly fit.
[00:04:53] How wealth undermines it.
[00:04:55] But here's the twist. Wealth can also remove the conditions that make movement stick.
[00:05:00] Good trainers are valuable. They teach proper form. They spot what you can't see. They prevent injury. But plenty of trainers are half present, watching the clock, not the person. The key is finding someone tuned to you. Someone who helps you build a relationship with your own body.
[00:05:17] I know a trainer in Newport who has become the darling of high society. Why? He's personable, strict on form, and he knows exactly how hard to push each client. Other trainers stare at him mid session, trying to decode his secret instead of watching your own clients.
[00:05:32] And then there are the wearables. They turn your body into a dashboard.
[00:05:37] Steps become a quota, not a walk. Sleep becomes a score. The joy evaporates. Movement becomes one more task on a very full list.
[00:05:46] What hides behind privilege? There's a version of fitness that's really about control.
[00:05:51] The body becomes a project, something to manage, sculpt, dominate. It looks like discipline. Sometimes it's just another way to avoid being still.
[00:05:59] And there's yet another pattern. I see wealthy people who barely move at all.
[00:06:04] They're driven everywhere. They have people to carry things, fetch things and handle things. The friction is gone, and so is the movement.
[00:06:12] Especially in midlife. I see people quietly adopt the posture of I'm older now, so I sit.
[00:06:17] Their bodies become vehicles for their heads. They forget they have legs.
[00:06:23] The goal isn't elite fitness. It's a body that works, that you enjoy living in, that allows you to do fun things with others, that doesn't break down.
[00:06:32] And at Mayo Clinic, I learned about neat non exercise activity thermogenesis, the energy you burn doing everything that isn't formal exercise. Walking to the store, climbing stairs. Gardening. Cooking. Carrying groceries uphill with a toddler in a pram.
[00:06:50] Research shows neat can make a meaningful difference in total daily energy expenditure. Sometimes as much or more than a short, isolated workout because it accumulates all day long. But here's the wealth problem.
[00:07:05] Modern conveniences and staff remove the need to move.
[00:07:09] You don't carry your bags. You don't walk to the store. You don't mow the lawn. Someone else does.
[00:07:15] The friction disappears and so does the neat.
[00:07:19] My Gstaad life was full of neat before I knew the word. Walking to town, hauling groceries uphill, building rock walls, weeding. That movement wasn't optional. It was built into the day.
[00:07:30] The gym was the extra. The life was the foundation.
[00:07:34] And as I write this in Gstaad, I miss those days.
[00:07:37] Here's what worked for I built movement into my days. I walked to town and back, uphill with groceries and a toddler. I didn't hire a landscaping crew. I mowed, built terraces, weeded until my shoulders ached. I didn't train for a race. I ran 5k a few times a week, just enough to clear my head. Karate started with fear.
[00:07:57] Community made it sustainable.
[00:07:59] What I'd suggest walk somewhere every day. Not on a treadmill, outside to an actual place. Do something with your hands. Gardening. Building. Caring. Let your body be useful.
[00:08:11] Find movement that comes with people. A class, a club, a regular game.
[00:08:17] Fitness that includes belonging. Stop tracking everything. Some weeks leave the watch at home.
[00:08:23] Remember what it feels like to move without a score.
[00:08:26] I need to do this.
[00:08:28] Let some workouts be boring. The same route, the same weights, the same swim. Repetition is not failure, it's practice. The goal isn't a perfect physique or personal record. It's life where movement is woven in so ordinary you forget it's exercise.
[00:08:43] What the experts actually recommend Lifestyle medicine keeps it simple. Move every day and include strength, flexibility and aerobic activity.
[00:08:51] Mayo Clinic gets specific Aim for at least 150 minutes of moderate aerobic activity per week, or 75 minutes if it's vigorous. Plus strength training at least twice a week for additional benefits, often including weight management. Aim for 300 minutes.
[00:09:09] It sounds like a lot until you remember. Short burst count. Five minute walk counts. Gardening counts. Stairs count. The best advice Mayo gave Choose activities you actually enjoy.
[00:09:22] Next in the series Sleep or why blackout curtains and sleep trackers can't fix what late night email is doing to your nervous system.
[00:09:34] If this episode landed for you, share it with someone who might need to hear it. And if you haven't already, subscribe so you don't miss what's coming. But here's the real thing. Thing I want you to know if you're carrying something you can't talk about. If you have every resource except someone who actually understands what wealth costs. I work one on one with people like you navigating exactly that. You can reach me@diana oehrli.com thanks for listening.
