> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.dafinasmith.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Your Health Can't Be What's Left Over - URL: https://www.dafinasmith.com/your-health-cant-be-whats-left-over/ - Published: 2026-10-09T16:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-16T14:14:14.000Z - Description: I figured out how to get 10,000 steps a day by applying one of the most important lessons I learned building my business: the things we value can't survive on whatever time, money or energy happens to be left over. - Author: Dafina Smith - Tags: The Coveted Body ### I figured out how to get 10,000 steps a day by applying one of the most important lessons I learned building my business: *the thing you value can’t be what is left over.* --- There is privilege in even having the ability to rearrange my life around my health. I own my businesses. I have resources, and I have more control over my calendar than a lot of working women do. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But I’ve also realized that having flexibility doesn’t automatically mean you use it well. You can own the company and still build yourself a job that takes absolutely everything you’re willing to give it. For the last couple of years, I’ve been trying to figure out how the hell a working woman with a family, businesses, a commute that is more than an hour each way, and all of the other responsibilities of an actual life is supposed to fit 10,000 steps into a day. For a long time, I treated it like a scheduling problem. Where could I squeeze in another walk? What little hack could make it easier? How was I supposed to find more time in a day that already felt completely spoken for? I now average around 11,000 steps a day. Combined with weightlifting, walking has helped me lose and keep off about ten pounds that I had gained and didn’t want, which is great. But the more important change wasn’t discovering some amazing walking hack. It was realizing that if I actually wanted my health to be a priority, I had to start treating it like one. It couldn’t keep being what I did when everything else was done. It couldn’t be something I hoped I could squeeze in between meetings, or the thing I would finally get serious about when work calmed down, the kids needed me less, or life somehow became more accommodating. I have been alive long enough now to know that none of those things are coming. There will always be something else that wants the time. **And the funny thing is, I had already learned this exact lesson in business.** One of the ideas that completely changed the way I ran my business came from a book called *Profit First*. It’s a book a lot of entrepreneurs know, and the premise is basically that we’ve been thinking about profit backward. Most businesses bring in revenue, pay all of their operating expenses, taxes, and everything else that seems to need money, and then whatever happens to be left at the end is profit. **Except, very often, nothing is left.** *Profit First* says to reverse the equation. Decide on the profit first, take it out first, establish percentages for the other major categories, and then force the business to operate within what remains. It sounds simple, but applying it required me to rethink the way I ran my entire company. Expenses that had seemed necessary suddenly had to justify themselves, and there were things we couldn’t do just because there was money sitting in the operating account. Profit wasn’t the hoped-for result of running the business well. We engineered the business to produce it. That philosophy transformed my financial life and ultimately my family’s financial life. At some point, while trying to figure out my health, I realized I already knew how to do this. I just hadn’t applied it here. If your health only gets the time that’s left after work, family, friends, and everything else has taken what it needs from you, don’t be surprised when there isn’t much left. ## There are more kinds of wealth than money This is something I’ve been thinking about more as I’ve gotten older. We spend an enormous amount of time talking about building wealth, and obviously I believe in financial wealth. Financial independence has given me choices that have fundamentally changed my life. But money is only one form of wealth you need to enjoy a full life. Health is another one, and increasingly I think about health the same way I think about money: I want it to start compounding as early as possible. I don’t want to wake up at 65 and suddenly decide that now I have enough time to focus on strength, mobility, and cardiovascular health because I’ve finally accomplished everything else. **I want to make the deposits now.** Once I started thinking about it that way, I stopped asking myself how I could squeeze 10,000 steps into the life I already had. I started asking what I needed to change about the life I already had so that my health had a protected place inside it. And just like with *Profit First*, some expenses had to go. **Except this time, the currency was my time.** ## I started looking at where my time was actually going The first thing I had to get much more aggressive about was my calendar. There are so many meetings we accept because they’ve always been meetings, and there are family obligations, work obligations, and recurring commitments that somehow become permanent without anyone ever stopping to ask whether they still need to exist in the same form. I started looking for the places where I could reclaim time: - unnecessary meetings - video calls that could be phone calls - recurring commitments that no longer needed to exist in the same form - time on social media that I was barely conscious of spending - parts of my existing day that could include movement instead of requiring another appointment If I didn’t need to be there, I tried not to be there. If something could be a call instead of a video meeting, I made it a call. If we didn’t need to be looking at a screen or reviewing a deliverable, why did we all need to be sitting at desks looking at each other’s faces? Then I looked at social media, which was slightly more embarrassing. I could say I didn’t have 45 minutes to go for a walk and then somehow find 45 minutes to scroll without making any deliberate decision to do it. So I started trying to migrate that time. If I’m going to scroll, I make myself go outside and walk while I do it. And the funny thing is that once I’m actually outside, half the time I don’t even want to scroll anymore. I look around and think, this is so lame. I’m standing in a beautiful place looking at other people’s lives through my phone instead of participating in my own. Sometimes I still scroll. I’m not trying to turn walking into another opportunity to be morally superior about technology. But simply changing the environment changes the impulse, and suddenly that time isn’t invisible anymore. ## Walking became more than exercise The other thing that surprised me is how many categories walking started collapsing for me. Initially, a walk was exercise. It was a way to get the steps. Now I sometimes think of it as a combination of exercise, meditation, and therapy. I used to think about wellness as this list of separate things I was somehow supposed to find time for: - exercise - meditate for 20 or 30 minutes - journal - get outside - spend less time on my phone - talk to someone if I need to work something through **That’s a lot of appointments with yourself.** What I’ve found is that sometimes I can just walk. If something is bothering me or I’m trying to work through a decision, I’ll go without my phone and walk it out. I don’t always come back with an answer, but I almost always come back having moved the thought somewhere. There is something about physically moving that changes the way my brain works. I notice this in meetings too. I really don’t think most of our best ideas come from sitting behind a desk trying very hard to have a good idea. So now the walk doesn’t have to compete with all of these other things for a slot on my calendar. Sometimes: - the walk is the thinking time - the walk is the meeting - the walk is the commute - the walk is the break from social media That made 10,000 steps considerably easier. ## I stopped treating my commute like dead time I commute into New York City twice a week, and for a long time I thought about the commute as basically the time it took me to get from my house to my office. Now I take an earlier train when I can and walk from Grand Central to the office. It’s somewhere around a 30- to 45-minute walk depending on the route and how quickly I’m moving, and at the end of the day, I walk back from my office to the train. Those two walks alone make an enormous difference in my steps twice a week, and I haven’t added a separate workout or another obligation to the day. I’ve changed how I move through a day that was already happening. I’ll take calls during that time, and if someone at the company is also trying to get more steps, we’ll walk. At the office, especially when New York is beautiful, we’ll do walk-and-talk meetings around the block when there isn’t something we need to be looking at together. I actually enjoy those meetings more. People talk differently when they’re walking, and I think differently when I’m walking. There is less of that strange performative thing that sometimes happens when four people are sitting around a conference table supposedly being creative. Again, the point isn’t really that everyone should walk from Grand Central. It’s that once I decided movement was getting funded first, I started seeing parts of my existing life that could contain it. **Before that, I mostly saw a very full calendar.** ## And then there are the little walks The least glamorous thing I’ve done is probably one of the most useful: walk for ten minutes after I eat when I can. Ten minutes is not a very intimidating amount of time. It doesn’t require changing clothes, and I don’t have to call it a workout. I can walk around the block, walk through the city, or walk around my house if the weather is terrible. And if you want to be really aggressive about building the habit, you can make yourself take a short walk whenever you eat. I’ve found that it makes me more conscious of mindless eating too, because now I’ve attached something to it. Sometimes I think about grabbing something and realize I don’t even really want it enough to bother with the whole process. None of this is revolutionary. The things that have actually helped me are pretty simple: - take the earlier train - walk after meals - take a call outside - walk during a meeting - walk while you scroll - walk through a problem instead of sitting somewhere thinking about it - look for movement inside the day you already have They’re hacks, and hacks are useful, but I also think we can spend so much time looking for the perfect hack that we avoid the much more uncomfortable question underneath all of them. **Are you actually willing to prioritize yourself?** ## Everything will take as much of you as you give it I say this as someone who owns a business: companies are consuming. There is always something else the company could use from you. Another meeting you could take, another client you could help, another opportunity you could chase, another problem you could solve, another dollar you could probably make if you were willing to give the business more of yourself. And it isn’t only work. Your family will take your time. Your friends will take your time. Your children need things. Schools need things. People ask for things, and social media can take an almost infinite amount of time if you let it. I’m not saying any of those things are bad. Most of them are things I deeply love. **But loving something doesn’t mean giving it unlimited access to you.** This has probably been one of the harder lessons for me because I am capable, I have a lot of energy, and for much of my life I’ve been very good at getting a lot done. When you’re that person, there will always be somewhere productive to put another hour. Eventually I had to start asking myself what the point of all of this productivity actually was. What is the point of having a successful business if getting it there sucks all of the life out of me? What exactly am I building the money for if I don’t have the health to enjoy the life the money was supposed to create? **And yes, I am probably leaving money on the table sometimes now. I’m okay with that.** ## I’ve seen what the later years can look like One of the biggest reality checks as you get older is spending time around people in their seventies and eighties. You start to see the enormous range in what those decades can look like. There are people who spent their thirties and forties and fifties paying attention to strength and mobility and food and taking care of themselves, and you can see what some of those accumulated choices look like decades later. I’ve seen two very different approaches to this in my own family. My mother is in her seventies and is in incredible shape. Taking care of herself has been a priority for her for a long time. My father lived differently. His career in politics was consuming, and there was always something more urgent, someone who needed something, some responsibility that came before taking care of himself. He didn’t prioritize himself in the same way. **My father is dead.** I’m very careful about what I mean when I say that because I’m not suggesting that one set of choices explains why one person is alive and another person isn’t. Genetics matter. Disease matters. Luck matters. There are things about how long we live that we will never control no matter how many steps we take or how much broccoli we eat. But there are things I can influence. And when I look at those later decades and think about the possibility of having more healthy, mobile, independent years, my reaction is actually very simple. **I want them.** I want the extra years if they’re available to me. I want to be able to walk through cities and travel and lift my own suitcase and move my body and participate in my children’s adult lives. If I’m lucky enough to have grandchildren someday, I don’t only want to be alive to meet them. I want to have the physical ability to participate in their lives. I have spent a lot of time and energy building a life I really like, and I want as much of it as I can get that is within my control. ## So I’m letting my health compound now This is ultimately where I came back to *Profit First*. The lesson wasn’t really about profit. It was about what happens when you stop hoping that something important will be left over and instead build the system around protecting it. I know how compounding works with money. You make the deposits. You leave them alone. You give them time. No single deposit feels particularly consequential, but decades later the accumulation can completely change your options. I’m trying to think about my health that way. One walk isn’t going to transform me, and neither will one strength-training session. But that’s not how compounding works. I’m making the deposits now and giving them as much time as I can. So if you’re trying to figure out how to get 10,000 steps into an already full life, yes, I have practical suggestions. Take the earlier train. Walk after you eat. Turn off the camera. Take the meeting outside. Find someone at work who wants to walk too. Look at the time you’re spending on your phone. Walk through the problem instead of sitting somewhere thinking about it. But I think the more useful question comes before all of those. **What are you willing to move, cut, decline, or give up so that your health isn’t continually funded with whatever happens to be left?** Because for me, that was the change. I didn’t finally discover where the extra time was hiding. **I decided my health got some of it first.**