Turning 40: The Best Investment I Ever Made Was In My Own Health

Hey, welcome back.

This week, it’s personal. I'm going to share what I did to 'get healthy', briefly explain my efforts and failures, introduce you to my personal health dashboard on Claude and show you to how make your own one - I'll keep it all surface level to protect your time, but if you want to learn more, reply and let me know what about.

On Saturday, I turn 40 and I'm celebrating with 35 friends (I did invite 40 but 35 isn't a bad turnout) in Ibiza this weekend. I've had a goal of 'Ibiza Body' but this time it meant something different, and maybe that's why it stuck.

But first - something I never thought I'd do - my before and after photos this year. They're at the bottom of this email, something about turning 40 also made me realise not everyone will want to see that, at least not without some warning lol, so in the meantime, heres a photo of my health data dashboard I built using Claude.

Health Through The Decades

My 20s were riddled with poor mental health. Now I'm in a great place.

My 30s were a function of chaotic startups, new beginnings and going from being broke, single and a failed startup at 30 to being a millionaire with a wife, 2 kids and a company I love by the time I'm 40 - a lot can change in a decade.

Growing up fat, in my 20s I had bulimia and got too skinny - by 30 I had kind of stabilised but was never able to build the body I wanted. This is because growing up fat made me insecure, obsessed about 'weight' and it all finally clicked for me when I gave up on aesthetics and moved my mindset to longevity science - the foundation of everything I was building at Heights too.

My Dad, And Being A Dad

My dad was my role model in everything but health. His was poor health for most of his adult life. He didn’t look after himself well — diet, weight, the usual things men of that generation didn’t prioritise or perhaps didn’t know how to. And he was taken far too early. I think about that a lot. More than I probably let on.

You grow up with a parent and somewhere along the line you realise that you’re not just their child. You’re also their echo. You carry some version of their patterns — their habits, their tendencies, their relationship with their own body. And the question becomes: which parts are you going to repeat, and which parts are you going to change?

I knew early on that I didn’t want to repeat that part.

I looked ahead and thought: everything gets harder as you get older. Recovery takes longer. Muscle is harder to build. Habits are harder to start. Biology becomes your adversary instead of your ally.

If I wanted to feel genuinely strong and healthy at 40, 45, 50 — the time to start was not at 40. It was now.

So I made a decision. I gave myself two years. This is the thought that suddenly clicked it for me - "I'm going to be 40 in 2 years either way - how do I want to feel, and how much responsibility will I take for that?"

Prevention is the cure.

That’s the line I keep coming back to. The best healthcare is the care you give yourself before you need a doctor to fix something. It’s not sexy. It’s not urgent-feeling. There’s no alarm going off. But the alarm that goes off later is so much harder to answer.

My word for this year (as I wrote about in January) is 'health'. Not as a vague aspiration. As a genuine operational priority - but I had been building towards that goal for years already.

Where everyone (myself included) goes wrong.

Short term goals (like summer body).
Trying all the things at once and failing from overwhelm.
Trying to change your identity overnight
Pretending you are someone you're not.

What I did to fix this

Long term goal - turning 40, giving myself 2 - 3 years to change
Doing one thing at a time to make a habit before moving on to the next one
Accepting I am never going to be that big sexy insta guy but I can still be the best version of me
Accepting I find habits hard, so figuring out what I can make easy

What order I chose

Baseline nutrition. This is the unlock - I already knew the power of supplements with my journey at Heights and how they can transform your sense of energy, sleep and mental clarity. I already felt the benefits from improving my own mental health. Next step was to cut out UPFS (ultra processed foods) and increase my protein.
Changing my workout schedule to 3x a week weight training. The next year this became 4x a week.
Measuring things as part of the habit building. Bloods every 6 months. Dexa Scans every 3 - 6 months to check my progress.

What turning 40 actually means to me.

I don’t dread it. I genuinely don’t.

What I feel is something closer to readiness.

I’ve spent two years building the foundation. The work is done — not finished, it’s never finished — but the foundation is laid. The habits are embedded. The data baseline exists. The systems are working.

Forty isn’t the end of something. It’s the starting line for the best physical decade of my life, if I keep going from here. The springboard, not the peak.

My daughters are 4 and 9 months old. Margot will be a teenager before I’m 55. Kaia will need me strong and present for decades. My dad didn’t get to do that. I intend to.

That’s the real reason behind all of it. Not aesthetics. Not vanity. Not even longevity in the abstract.

It’s presence. It’s capacity. It’s being the kind of father and partner and person who shows up fully and keeps showing up.

Health is the infrastructure everything else runs on.

What I’d say to you.

You don’t have to be turning 40 for this to matter. You don’t have to have lost a parent early, or have a health scare, or reach some dramatic moment. The best time to start is always a bit earlier than you think you need to.

Here are the things that actually moved the needle for me:

Get the data. You cannot manage what you don’t measure. If you’ve never had a DEXA scan, book one - its fast and easy. If you haven’t had a comprehensive blood panel, do it. Not because something is wrong — because you want to know before something goes wrong.

Find consistency over intensity. Four times a week, every week, for 14 months beats any 6-week programme you’ll burn out of in March. The boring rhythm is the secret.

Make it the priority. Not a priority. The priority. If the gym is the first thing you move when life gets busy, it will always be the first thing moved. Put it in the diary first. Build the rest around it.

Cut the ultra-processed stuff. Not forever, not perfectly. But meaningfully. Your body is remarkably good at responding to better inputs. Give it better inputs.

Think in decades, not months. The question isn’t “how do I look this summer.” The question is “what do I want to be capable of at 50?” That frame changes everything.

I started this newsletter with my dad.

I want to end with him too.

He didn’t have the tools I have. He didn’t have the information, the technology, the culture around health that exists now. I don’t blame him for any of it. I just learned from it.

Prevention is the cure. And prevention starts before you think you need it.

Here’s to the next decade.

With love and health,

Dan

PS: If you are curious about my Claude health dashboard. Hit reply and let me know if you'd like to see how I did it - maybe that will be next week's newsletter with prompts, visuals and everything so you can do it too. As promised, progress photo.

40 years old, still day 1

PPS. If you’ve been thinking about getting a health scan done and haven’t done it yet, just book it. The results are almost never as scary as the avoidance. And if they show something, you’ll be glad you caught it early. I recently became an investor in CoreVitals as I was so impressed with their service (options for just bloods or bloods and MRI scan).

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Story of NVIDIA and Jensen Huang. LOVING it. Forgot how much I love an epic biography. What a guy, what a story.

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Industry Series 4

Fun fact, the brilliant Max Minghella, who plays mercurial, mesmerising Tender boss Whitney Halberstrom, is one of my oldest and best friends. He does a great job of bossing Kit Harrington around, proud friend!

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A 2020 study published in Emotion found that people who learned to accept their “non-ideal emotional states”, including low motivation, low energy, and neutral days, experienced significantly higher overall well-being and lower stress.

The key insight: self-acceptance amplifies emotional resilience, while self-judgment weakens it.

📌 Quick Takeaway →

Your average days aren’t failures; they’re emotional training grounds.
When you stop punishing yourself for being human, everything in your life compounds faster.

→ Link to study

In my goal to help more entrepreneurs/people who are looking to level up their careers, I've just started taking 1-1 consulting calls (only 1 a week)

Why book a call? Some of my expertise/success:

I've built 5 startups. 1 win, 1 fail, and 3 still going.
E-Commerce: Heights - with revenue over £20M a year.
Community: Foundrs, one of the UK's top founder communities
Podcasting: Leaders Media - I bootstrapped a media company that made the UK's top business podcasts including Secret Leaders, with over 50M downloads across the network.
Health/Mental Health: Overcame burnout, insomnia, depression & anxiety in pursuit of success. Hear me on Steven Bartlett's on Diary of a CEO
Angel Investing: I've invested in over 100 startups
Coached & Mentored: Certified coach & 5* mentor on Mentorpass
Personal Brand: Over 400,000 followers across social

So if you're interested in booking a session with me to talk all things business or building a personal brand, book for 30-minutes or 45-minutes. (limited spots).

Book a Call with Dan