"Take care of your body. It's the only place you have to live." — Jim Rohn (Jim Rohn was an American entrepreneur and author whose work on personal development influenced a generation of writers and coaches, including Tony Robbins. He died in 2009.) I've read two key books on nutrition: The Magic Pill by Johann Hari and Ultra-Processed People by Dr Chris van Tulleken. Both are must-reads, and both say a similar thing: the obesity epidemic we're experiencing in the west is due to processed food in our diets. There's significant scientific evidence that exercise does little compared to a healthy diet for losing weight. This hit home for me, so I decided to try it. For a month I ate only steak and eggs, and the weight flew off me. The more I investigated it, it wasn't due to the carnivore diet, it was due to the lack of processed food. I want to be clear: I don't recommend the carnivore diet. Carbohydrates are the body's primary fuel source and cutting them out entirely isn't sustainable or necessary. What made the difference was removing processed food, not removing carbs. This changed my outlook completely. Now I aim for 80% of my diet to be made up of one-ingredient foods. There are days when you must have that Indian takeaway, or the alluring smell of Gregg's steak bake draws you into a shop, but overall, aim for 80% single ingredients: meat, fish, butter, cream, cheese, eggs, vegetables, and fruit. Don't be drawn in by the myth that fats are unhealthy. The corporate demonisation of fat is one of the most successful marketing campaigns in modern history. When flawed research in the 1970s suggested saturated fat caused heart disease, the food industry didn't just capitalise on the fear, they amplified it. Cereal giants like Kellogg's led the charge to reframe breakfast from eggs and bacon to bowls of processed grains. They funded studies that conveniently favoured their high-carb products whilst positioning themselves as the healthy alternative. These companies poured millions into marketing campaigns that painted fat as the dietary villain, plastering "heart-healthy" and "low-fat" across packets of sugar-laden flakes and loops. The result? A multi-billion-pound industry built on convincing generations that processed corn with added vitamins was somehow healthier than the eggs humans had eaten for millennia.

There's an old Japanese practice called kintsugi, which means "golden joinery." When a piece of pottery breaks, instead of discarding it, artisans repair the cracks with lacquer mixed with powdered gold. The philosophy behind it is profound: rather than hiding the damage, they highlight it, making the object more beautiful precisely because of its history. Now, imagine if we treated our own failures and struggles like that. Instead of seeing them as shameful scars, what if we viewed them as golden seams, proof that we've lived, struggled, and survived? There's a saying often attributed to Richard Nixon: "Defeat is a bruise, not a tattoo." It's a reminder that failure is not permanent. A bruise heals. It may hurt, it may linger, but it eventually fades. What makes depression so insidious is that it tries to convince you otherwise, it whispers that failure is permanent, that you are broken beyond repair. But this is a lie. The truth is failure is unavoidable. It's a natural part of life, and more importantly, it's necessary. Every failure is just a step on the path. Success isn't the absence of failure; it's moving from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm. That's what Winston Churchill said, and it's one of the most liberating truths you can accept. Why We Fear Failure The reason failure stings so much is because we're taught to fear it. From childhood, we're conditioned to believe that mistakes are shameful. Get the wrong answer in class, and you're embarrassed. Fail a test, and you feel worthless. But the most successful people in history are the ones who failed more than everyone else. The difference? They didn't let failure define them, they let it refine them. - Thomas Edison famously failed over a thousand times before inventing the light bulb. - Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team. None of these people were "naturally gifted" in a way that shielded them from failure. They simply kept going. Turning Your Cracks into Gold

Depression isn't loud. Not most of the time. It's a hum, low and persistent. A dull ache in the soul that makes everything feel heavier, slower, harder. Some days it's barely noticeable. Other days, it wraps around your chest and squeezes until even breathing feels like a chore. This chapter is about those days and what to do with them. There's a a strange little Canadian superhero called Puck. You don't know him unless you're into the deeper cuts of the Marvel Universe. He's not flashy. He's short, scrappy, scarred. Not the sort of character who usually gets the spotlight. But his story says something powerful about pain and about endurance. Puck, whose real name is Eugene Judd, lives in constant physical agony. Not metaphorically, literally. His body locked in a state of suffering after trapping a dark, magical entity inside himself to save others. Every day, he wakes up in pain. Every move, every breath, hurts. But he doesn't stop moving. What makes Puck remarkable isn't a shiny superpower. It's that he fights through pain, not by ignoring it, not by numbing it, but by focusing past it. It's a form of mental discipline that's deeply human. It says: Yes, this hurts. But it does not own me. Pain Doesn't Have to Be the Enemy Mental anguish isn't so different from chronic physical pain. It drains your energy, messes with your memory, robs you of joy. Depression lies. It tells you nothing will ever change. That your thoughts are truth. That the feeling you're in right now is permanent. Learning to focus past the pain means accepting its presence without letting it control you. You don't have to fight it directly. You don't have to pretend it's not there. But you can learn to move through it. This is not toxic positivity. This isn't "just think happy thoughts." This is about developing the mental muscle to stay standing even when you're carrying weight you didn't ask for. It's choosing to take the next breath. To stand up. To reply to that text. To take a shower. To show up for the things that matter. Not because you feel great. But because you're still here and that means there's still a choice.

When dealing with depression, you need a kind of self-defence against, at best, stupid and annoying comments and, at worst, hurtful put-downs. This isn't about criticising people who genuinely want to help or the loved ones who mean well. But as a species, I think we'd be better off if we collectively learned to bat these kinds of comments back over the net, making people think twice before they say things like: "You don't need to worry/cheer up/calm down/snap out of it." This implies that depression or anxiety is something you can simply switch off, as if a flick of a switch will instantly remove the heavy, suffocating weight of depression or the gnawing fear of anxiety. The underlying assumption is that if you're not "snapping out of it," you must be choosing to stay miserable. But if it really were that simple, don't you think we would? "It could be worse." Yes, it could. But it could also be better. My uncle, who battled depression, once told his mother, "It wouldn't matter if the streets were paved with gold — it would all be grey to me." Depression doesn't care about your external circumstances. It will convince you that if you're rich, you don't deserve it, and if you're poor, you're a failure. It will find a way to make you hate yourself, no matter what. So no, for someone in that state, it really can't be worse — because they're already at the point where everything feels unbearable. "What you need to do is…" (Followed by a comparison to someone else) This one is especially frustrating. People who have never experienced depression — or have no understanding of what's causing yours — often feel entitled to hand out advice. But if you don't know the inner workings of someone's mind, their history, or the complexities of their illness, why would you assume you have the solution? It's like trying to help someone complete a crossword without seeing the clues or knowing what the grid looks like, but still insisting you have the right answers. You wouldn't do that — so don't do it with mental illness.

Most people are carrying more than you can see. Remember that before you open your mouth. There’s a quote often wrongly attributed to Robin Williams: “Everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about. Be kind. Always.” Doesn’t matter who said it. It’s true. And if you really let it guide you, it changes how you move through the world. The guy in the pub on Universal Credit isn’t a scrounger. He just lost his partner and can’t bear being in the house alone. Three pints and some pointless chat is the only thing standing between him and total collapse. The young woman who flinched when you brushed past her in a crowd isn’t overreacting. Something happened to her. Her body remembered before her brain could catch up. The bloke who seems absolutely fine at work? He’s not fine. He’s just had a lot of practice pretending. According to Mind, one in four people in the UK will experience a mental health problem each year. That’s not a distant statistic. That’s someone on your street. Someone in your family. Maybe you. Minding your own business isn’t indifference. It’s respect. It’s accepting that you don’t have access to someone’s full story, and you never will. Judging people doesn’t make you wiser. It just makes you bitter. And when you stop spending energy policing other people’s behaviour, something actually useful happens. You get more space to deal with your own. Which, honestly, is more than enough to be getting on with.