10 Health Mistakes We Made Trying to Be Healthy
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Even a family medicine physician falls for what social media presents as truth. That's the honest premise of this episode: David and Dr. Lara each walk through five things they were once certain were healthy — some picked up from wellness culture, some from clinical training that later got updated, some just from trying too hard in the wrong direction. None of it is a comprehensive list of every mistake a person can make. It's specific to their own history, offered with the kind of humility that's harder to find in health content than it should be.
David frames it through something he calls the teachability index — a personal, ongoing check-in on two questions: how willing am I to learn new information, and how willing am I to actually change behavior based on it. Both tend to be strongest early in life and get harder to maintain as people settle into "I already know this." The habits below are what happens when that willingness slips, even briefly.
David's List
Taking far too many supplements. A multivitamin, creatine, fish oil, magnesium, and more — most of it driven by marketing that convinced him modern food couldn't possibly provide enough nutrients on its own. Years later, after switching to a network-marketing supplement business and researching heavily to defend his own product line, he came to see the pattern for what it was: motivated reasoning dressed up as research. Most of those supplements are gone now, replaced by whole foods. A full cabinet of bottles, as he puts it, mostly just makes for expensive urine.
Treating a gallon of water a day as a health requirement. At his peak, David was drinking a gallon and a half daily, tracking it obsessively, buying jugs with motivational marks printed on the side. The science doesn't support water intake at that extreme as inherently beneficial — and taken far enough, overhydration is genuinely dangerous. Diluting blood sodium to dangerous levels through excessive water intake causes real, hospitalizable harm. It's a clean example of a broader principle: something being healthy at a normal dose doesn't mean more of it is better, and something being harmful at an extreme dose doesn't make it inherently bad.
Believing low-carb was inherently healthier and burned more fat. This one ran deep. Early in his transformation, carb-cycling produced a pattern where low-carb days consistently preceded faster weight loss on the scale — which felt like proof that carbohydrates themselves were the obstacle. That belief deepened into full carb elimination and fueled real arguments with his own father. What he's since learned, and what the research actually supports: total calories and protein intake drive fat loss, not carbohydrate content specifically. Carb quality matters — fiber and whole-food carbohydrates carry real benefits over refined sugar — but "low-carb" and "healthy" were never the same claim, and he spent years treating them as identical.
Believing fasting and intermittent fasting were metabolically special. Multiple five-day water fasts, documented in his own earlier writing, built on the same insulin-focused thinking that fueled his low-carb phase. The evidence comparing continuous calorie restriction to intermittent fasting approaches shows no meaningful metabolic advantage to one over the other — both work, when they work, by creating a calorie deficit over time. Fasting isn't wrong as a personal strategy for structuring eating, but the specialness attributed to it — enhanced fat-burning, unique metabolic benefits — isn't supported by the data. If it helps someone sustain a deficit they'd otherwise struggle with, that's a legitimate reason to use it. It's not a superior mechanism.
Binging and purging through a cheat-day mentality. The most serious item on his list. During significant weight loss, David built a pattern of hyper-restricting Monday through Friday specifically to justify an enormous single-day binge on Sundays — full pizzas, dessert, eating well past comfortable fullness — followed at times by a full day of not eating and heavy cardio to compensate. He's direct about what that actually was: a volatile, unhealthy relationship with food, whether or not he recognized it as such at the time. The contrast now is real — he eats more treats and indulgent food today than during his most restrictive period, and describes his current relationship with food as far more sustainable specifically because it no longer swings between extremes.
Dr. Lara's List
Undervaluing sleep during residency. Faced with the option to sleep or exercise during grueling night shifts, Dr. Lara consistently chose the hospital gym over rest — running on a treadmill in a facility technically intended for cardiac rehab patients, because movement felt like the more virtuous choice. In hindsight, sleep was very likely what her body actually needed during that period, and the instinct to prioritize exercise over recovery reflected a broader tendency to value visible effort over invisible restoration.
Believing running was the single best thing she could do for her health. A high school and early-college runner, Dr. Lara kept running six days a week well past the point of enjoying it, driven by a belief that stopping would somehow undo her fitness entirely. Nagging injuries eventually forced moderation into cross-training. The larger realization came later: she never actually loved running — she did it because it felt like the responsible choice — and strength training and lean muscle mass have since proven far more valuable to her overall health than the volume of cardio she once treated as non-negotiable.
Skipping proper nutrition during the day to save calories for an evening treat. For years, alongside her sister, Dr. Lara ate light and imprecisely during the day specifically to preserve room for a nightly dessert. Both stayed lean throughout, which reinforced the pattern as harmless. But being thin masked genuinely poor nutritional quality — inadequate protein, inconsistent energy throughout the day — that had nothing to do with weight and everything to do with how her body was actually being fueled.
Absorbing the blanket message that everyone needs to eat less. So much of mainstream health messaging defaults to calorie restriction as the universal answer, and Dr. Lara internalized that message even though she never had a weight problem to begin with. She became, in her words, "a pro at eating less" — without recognizing that the advice didn't actually apply to her situation. She sees the same pattern regularly in patients now, particularly women whose actual nutritional need is to eat more, not less, but who've absorbed the same one-size-fits-all cultural message she once did.
Equating thinness with health. The most significant realization on her list. For years, being thin felt like sufficient proof of being healthy — she ate three meals, included plenty of vegetables, stayed lean, and assumed that combination meant everything was fine. It doesn't. Being too thin carries real risks: metabolic disruption, reduced bone density, gut and hormonal health consequences. Weight alone, in either direction, is a poor proxy for actual metabolic health — a heavier person can be metabolically healthier than a thin one, and appearance-based judgment misses that reality every time.
What both of them want you to take from this
Neither David nor Dr. Lara is claiming to have it all figured out now, either — that's precisely the point of the exercise. Being wrong isn't a failure of intelligence or effort; it's what happens when good-faith trend-following meets incomplete information, and the fix isn't defensiveness, it's the willingness to update. As David puts it, perfection was never the goal. Progress is.
Vitals & Values is the podcast of Concierge Medicine of West Michigan, hosted by Dr. David Roden and Dr. Lara Baatenburg. New episodes available wherever you listen.
