Automated Health

Automate Your Health the Way You'd Automate Your Money

Health and wealth are highly correlated, and I'm a fan of automating both. The people who build real wealth aren't the ones making heroic financial decisions every morning. They set up the system once and let it run. Health works the same way. At some point you want a set-it-and-forget-it posture toward the major decisions. You work out because it's on the schedule, not because you negotiated with yourself about it. You eat the way you eat because it's the routine, not a daily referendum. You go to bed and wake up at the same time because that's just what you do.

Jack Bogle gave the financial world index investing — stop trying to pick winners, own the whole market, and let time do the work. The health version is almost identical. The thing that actually matters is small, consistent deposits into your overall state of health, made over a very long period. Put in a little effort with some regularity and these things compound. Quietly, boringly, and far more powerfully than any single intervention.

If deposits compound, then so do withdrawals. You have to view deleterious behaviors as a debit against the account. It's fine to occasionally eat junk food or pull an all-nighter — I'm not interested in selling anyone a perfect life. But be honest about what those behaviors are. They're a withdrawal. The account doesn't care about your intentions, only your net contribution.

There are several frameworks worth borrowing from popular finance books. None of them disagree much once you strip away the tone, which is itself the point: in both money and health, the fundamentals are settled, and the entire game is doing them consistently rather than discovering a secret.

Dave Ramsey's Baby Steps

Ramsey built an entire course around what is essentially a waterfall checklist — the Seven Baby Steps. You don't move to the next one until the current one is handled.

1. Save $1,000.

2. Pay off all non-mortgage debt using the snowball method.

3. Save three to six months of expenses.

4. Invest 15% of your income.

5. Save for college.

6. Pay off the house.

7. Build wealth and give.

The snowball is the tell. Attacking your smallest balance first is mathematically suboptimal — you'd save more money going after the highest interest rate. Ramsey chose it anyway, because adherence beats optimization. A plan you actually follow beats the superior plan you abandon. Hold onto that, because it's the whole ballgame in health too.

Here's the Health Peace University version, same waterfall logic:

1. Move your body daily. This is your starter emergency fund — small, non-negotiable, and the thing everything else is built on.

2. Pay off the debt: remove excess body fat. It's the high-interest balance dragging on everything else. Knock it down.

3. Insure against catastrophe. Real health insurance, yes, but also the screenings and the buffer that keep one bad event from wiping you out.

4. Invest in muscle and strength. This is your 15%. Build toward being strong for your age — ideally in an elite category for it. Muscle is the retirement account you'll be drawing on at eighty.

5. Fund proactive systems. Spend on personal development and the systems that keep you ahead of problems instead of reacting to them.

6. Build a medical team that actually cares about you, and an HSA to fund it. Pay off the house. Own the infrastructure.

7. Support other people in making changes. Build health, then give it away.

Ramit Sethi: Set It Up, Then Walk Away

I Will Teach You to Be Rich is six weeks of setup followed by decades of autopilot. The mechanics:

1. Optimize your credit cards.

2. Open the right no-fee, high-interest accounts.

3. Open investment accounts — 401k to the match, then a Roth IRA.

4. Build a conscious spending plan: buckets for fixed costs, investments, savings, and guilt-free spending.

5. Automate everything so money moves on payday without willpower.

6. Buy low-cost index or target-date funds and leave them alone.

The whole thing collapses into one idea: when you automate, you remove the daily decision. I don't know of a more valuable concept for your health. Willpower is a depleting resource — I've written before about how environment design beats discipline, because the easiest behavior is always the one with the least friction. You can't literally autopay your protein intake. But you can engineer the decision out of the loop. Lay the clothes out. Put the gym on the commute. Keep the junk out of the house so the default is the good one. Build the system once instead of relying on a daily act of heroism.

His broader ideas port over cleanly:

1. Front-load the setup, then automate. Have an actual plan for your diet and your training. The first three months are expensive in willpower. Year three is just who you are.

2. Aim for 85%. Sethi tells people to start with an account that's good enough rather than spending six months chasing the perfect one. The optimal program you don't follow loses to the mediocre one you do. Get 85% of the way there and actually move.

3. Spend extravagantly on what you love, cut mercilessly on what you don't. Sethi is contemptuous of latte-shaming, and he's right. The small stuff isn't where the money is — or the health. People agonize over seed oils in their coffee while sleeping six hours and never lifting anything. Drink the good wine on vacation. Skip the gas-station candy you eat on autopilot. Save your indulgences for what's actually worth it.

4. A "rich life" is personally defined. The number isn't the point; the life it buys is. Match your health goals to the life you actually want to live — playing with grandkids, hiking at seventy, staying independent at the end. Health without a why becomes the same trap as money-hoarding: optimizing a metric divorced from the life it was supposed to serve.

JL Collins: The Simple Path

The Simple Path to Wealth is less a program than a creed:

1. Avoid debt entirely.

2. Spend less than you earn; invest the surplus.

3. Avoid catastrophic mistakes.

4. Put it in a low-cost total-market index fund.

5. Don't try to time the market.

6. Stay the course through downturns.

7. Build toward "F-You Money" — the buffer that buys autonomy.

The Simple Path to Health writes itself:

1. Avoid addiction. If you don't start, you probably won't get hooked. The cheapest debt to pay off is the one you never take on.

2. Avoid putting on excess weight. This is your catastrophic mistake to sidestep before it compounds.

3. Avoid sleep debt. It accrues interest faster than almost anything else.

4. Invest in relationships. The surplus you're spending less to afford.

5. Don't chase health trends — do the things you already know work. Walk and lift. This is your total-market index fund. Stop trying to time the latest protocol.

6. Stay the course when life happens. Keep taking care of yourself through the downturns, because the downturns are exactly when most people stop.

7. Build toward "F-You Shape." Be in good enough condition that you can do whatever you physically want, whenever you want. That's the autonomy the whole thing was for.

The cynic's objection is fair, so let me name it: money is fungible and you can automate a bank transfer — you can't automate eating well or sleeping. True. But the deeper point survives. In both domains, the winners reduce their reliance on in-the-moment willpower by shaping defaults, environment, and identity in advance. Warren Buffett didn't get rich chasing the hot stock of the month; he got rich doing the boring, correct thing for fifty years and letting it compound. Your body runs on the same arithmetic. Set up the system. Make the deposits. Then mostly get out of your own way.

3-Point Summary

• Automation is the highest-leverage move in both domains. Wealth and health are built by people who set up the right system once and remove the daily decision — not by people who summon willpower every morning.

• Deposits compound, and so do withdrawals. Small consistent contributions to your health quietly outperform any single intervention, the same way an index fund beats stock-picking. Junk behaviors aren't sins — they're debits, and the account only tracks your net.

• The frameworks all agree, which is the point. Ramsey, Sethi, and Collins differ in tone but converge on the same boring fundamentals. So does health. The game was never finding a secret — it's doing the known thing consistently for decades.

3 Practical Takeaways

1. Automate one health decision this week. Pick a single behavior you currently white-knuckle and engineer it out of the loop. Lay out the gym clothes the night before, schedule the workout as a recurring calendar block, or set up grocery delivery so the default food in the house is the right food. Build the system once instead of deciding every day.

2. Run the Baby Steps in order. Don't jump to step four. If you're not yet moving daily, the optimal training split doesn't matter. Handle daily movement, then body composition, then strength — in sequence. Adherence beats optimization, every time.

3. Spend your health budget on what you love and cut the autopilot waste. Decide which indulgences are genuinely worth it — the vacation meal, the drinks with friends — and protect them. Then be ruthless about the mindless ones you wouldn't miss. Restriction framed as allocation is sustainable. Blanket deprivation collapses by day nine.