Hack Yourself Healthy with Julia Bradbury
Julia Bradbury has spent much of her career coaxing us out of our living rooms and into landscapes that can restore us. Now she returns with a new purpose and a new book, Hack Yourself Healthy, with its message as brisk and bracing as a walk around Rutland Water on a bright autumn day: don’t just try to live longer – live better, with strength, clarity and joy…
Hack Yourself Healthy… that’s the message from Rutland’s Julia Bradbury as she returns to us with a new purpose and a new book, imparting a message as brisk and bracing as a walk around Rutland Water on a bright autumn day: don’t just try to live longer – live better, with strength, clarity and joy.
Julia calls it healthspan rather than lifespan, and it’s the philosophy that underpins both her book and a forthcoming appearance at Stamford Corn Exchange where, on Sunday 19th October, she’ll settle in for an intimate Fireside Chat about the experiments, experts and everyday habits that have reshaped her life.
For readers in Rutland and Stamford, Julia’s story has the soft familiarity of home. She was raised here, in England’s smallest county, a place whose lanes and hedgerows have a quiet grandeur that never clamours for attention.
Those early years set the compass for a life spent outdoors, a life that made sense when she became one of television’s most versatile and trusted presenters, equally at ease on Watchdog or Top Gear, and eventually helping to revitalise BBC One’s Countryfile with that trademark blend of authority and warmth.
Millions tuned in to Britain’s Best Walks, a series that has kept its appeal since 2016 because it never felt like exercise disguised as entertainment; it felt like a permission slip to get out there.
A run of travel shows, from Australia coast-to-coast to the Isles of Scilly, showed the same curiosity, while The Greek Islands with Julia Bradbury wove her family roots through questions that matter now: plastic pollution, sustainable fishing, the preservation of beautiful places for our children. That balance of intimacy and public-spiritedness is her hallmark.
The private story many of us saw most starkly though was in 2021, when she heard the three words that stop time: ‘you have cancer.’
The journey through diagnosis, mastectomy and recovery was documented in Julia Bradbury: Breast Cancer & Me, an ITV film that landed because it refused melodrama; it was truthful about fear and fatigue, and equally truthful about hope.
For a mother of three, the stakes were visceral. It wasn’t enough to be alive, she points out. You also want to be well enough to climb the stairs two at a time, to keep up on long walks, and to scoop up grandchildren one day without wincing. Healthspan, not lifespan.
In Hack Yourself Healthy Julia says it plainly: she wants to run after her children for decades, to lift and carry, to bounce when she stumbles. That, she writes, is the point of all this, the ordinary, miraculous business of a body that still feels capable.
In the book, Julia calls herself a ‘crash test mummy,’ submitting to two years of medically guided testing and trialling in search of what genuinely moves the needle of health and wellbeing. She gave blood, saliva and stool samples; she wore the mask for a VO₂ max test; she let specialists decode her DNA to understand risk; she was scanned, mapped and measured, sometimes with unwelcome surprises like the discovery of a benign pineal cyst ‘smack bang’ in the centre of her brain.
It is striking to watch the old Julia, the inveterate walker, the cheerful explorer, fold herself into this new role as human dataset. She is not an evangelist; she is a reporter again, this time reporting on herself.
One of the most revealing chapters follows her through a full-baseline day at Hooke in Mayfair, a personalised health clinic that treats optimisation as seriously as medicine treats disease. The VO₂ max mask goes on, the treadmill tilts up, and she runs to failure; the score (47.7 ml/kg/min) puts her in the 99th percentile for her age, a reward for years of investment in walking.
Elsewhere in the same session she learns her resting pulse, blood pressure, hip-to-waist ratio, body-fat distribution and grip strength; identifies an unwelcome stomach guest (helicobacter pylori) and a small pelvic cyst; then studies her balance, jump height and ‘fat adaptation,’ all of which are fed into a 76-page bioportrait that becomes a baseline for change. This is the tenor of the book’s strongest pages: it’s not just a buffet of tips, but a case for knowing where you’re starting from.
From those data points flows a set of ‘hacks’ that are both surprisingly practical and intensely human. Julia’s clinicians emphasise metabolic health (the constellation of blood pressure, glucose regulation, waist circumference, triglycerides and HDL cholesterol that predicts so much of our future risk) and the cheerfully unglamorous work that improves it: more movement, more protein, better fats, better sleep.
She includes a ‘mini Hooke at Home’ section with tests you can request via the NHS – from cervical smears and mammograms to HbA1c, lipid panels, ferritin and vitamin D; for the right people, Dexa, spirometry and ECG; and allied health support such as health coaches and social prescribers – because the point is not moneyed exclusivity but access and agency. It is rare to find a celebrity wellness book that says, with a straight face, ‘make friends with your GP.’ Julia’s does.
Movement comes first because it changes almost everything else. Julia remains a partisan for walking, no surprise there, but Hack Yourself Healthy freshens the pitch with details that stick. She advocates the occasional reverse walk, or ‘retro-walking,’ an old physiotherapy trick that challenges the knees differently, seems to recruit cognition and spatial awareness, and forces presence because the world is coming at you from behind.
She describes deliberate cold exposure not as stoic suffering but as a way to train your nervous system to transition between states. Cold showers count, ice baths if you must, and if you step into a cryotherapy chamber you’ll feel the catecholamines (dopamine, adrenaline, noradrenaline) carry you into wakefulness.
She notes, with gusto, that three numbing minutes can burn between 500 and 700 calories, which puts some worldly sparkle on the science. Heat gets equal love: a 25-minute sauna can, she reports, produce heart-stress benefits comparable to a 25-minute spin session, while longer-term sauna habits correlate with lower blood pressure, slower muscle wasting and reduced cardiovascular risk.
The joy of Julia’s voice is that you can hear the grin in it; she sweats, freezes and then tells you precisely how it felt. Her nature prescription is equally specific.
She leans on the 120-minutes-a-week ‘Golden Rule,’ urging us to spend two full hours outdoors because the physiology follows: cortisol softens; HRV (the beat-to-beat variability that signals resilience) improves; blood pressure slides down; pain perception blurs at the edges; mood steadies.
In her own experiments, measured with researchers from the European Centre for Environment and Human Health, she found that birdsong could lift HRV to ‘Jedi status,’ which is both a delightful phrase and a neat way to demystify a cardiac metric. This is where the local resonance is strongest. Two hours outside is not an ordeal in Rutland and Stamford; it’s a pleasure.
You can loop the Hambleton Peninsula and watch cormorants dry their wings; you can take a mindful turn through Barnsdale’s borders and notice exactly which greens make your shoulders drop; you can trace the River Welland under Stamford’s bridges at an amble that leaves your phone forgotten in a pocket. Julia’s book reads like an invitation to use what we already have.
Food is the hack that compounds all the others. Julia gives ultra-processed foods a cool appraisal (our diets are saturated with them, and the cost shows up in inflammation and metabolic drift) but she refuses to write a grim sermon. Instead she reframes meals as a chance, three times a day, to make a slightly better choice.
Some of her advice is joyfully direct: bananas, kiwis and tart cherries are natural sources of melatonin and can help re-populate a microbiome thinned by antibiotics or UPFs; alcohol, alas, is ‘the worst,’ but if you’re heading out, she offers realistic Boozy Rules so you enjoy the night and recover with minimal collateral damage.
Julia also brings in breathing coach Patrick McKeown to link breath and gut via the vagus nerve, turning an abstract connection into something you can feel after a five-minute drill.
One of the book’s most compelling conversations is with functional medicine physician Dr Kara Fitzgerald, whose eight-week programme can lower the biological age of both men and women. This is achieved by utilising dark greens and crucifers, mushrooms, seeds, eggs, liver and fatty fish, as well as examining your Omega 3 intake.
Along with nutrition, the subject of cancer inevitably threads back through the discussion of food, not as a spectre but as a teacher. Physician-researcher Dr William Li appears in Julia’s pages to argue for a ‘whole person’ approach to treatment that includes the microbiome alongside drugs and surgery.
His case histories include a striking pattern: patients with a healthy population of the bacterium akkermansia muciniphila seem to respond better to certain immunotherapies; where akkermansia is absent, outcomes often worsen. The good news is that akkermansia can be encouraged: pomegranates, cranberries, Concord grapes, peaches and even Zhejiang black vinegar all help; so can the broader ferment culture as Julia explores with helps from fermenter Kathryn Lukas.
Julia is candid about her concern (one of her own tests showed zero akkermansia), and you can feel the flicker of competitiveness in her voice as she sets about coaxing back her levels of akkermansia. Suddenly a bowl of fruit with a spoon of live yoghurt is a small, delicious therapy.
Sleep, stress and hormones are given the same blend of science and survivable advice. Julia interviews hormone expert Dr Sara Szal Gottfried, who reframes hormones as ‘text messages’ rippling through the body and makes the case for measuring, not guessing, where you are at different decades: baseline sex hormones in your twenties and thirties; the tango of oestrogen and progesterone as perimenopause approaches; cortisol and thyroid status when energy flags; glucose and insulin as muscle mass shifts in midlife; bone density and cardiometabolic risk in the fifties and beyond.
The repeated theme is agency through information. Pair that with Julia’s own iron story (low transferrin saturation can sabotage sleep and energy, so she leaned into iron-rich foods and adjusted omega ratios) and you have a portrait of someone refusing to smooth over inconvenient numbers.
Breath also proves to be a hinge between body and mind. Julia’s work with Patrick McKeown unpacks why nasal breathing, slower cadence and brief breath-holds can stabilise CO₂ levels, calm reactivity and even make sleep more likely to stick. Add a little yoga and, if you’re up for it, a blast of cold, and you have a home toolkit for stress that requires neither Lycra nor a monthly subscription.
To that, Julia adds a gentle stoicism. The Himalayan chapter, where she stays at Ananda and explores Ayurveda, yields one of the book’s most quietly useful qualities (awareness, acceptance, action) which she treats less like philosophy and more like the three deep breaths you take before you say no to something that doesn’t serve you.
Technology doesn’t get a free pass, but it gets its turn. In Chelsea, at Julia tries a hyperbaric oxygen session (ears popping, mind drifting), an NAD (nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide) infusion that she memorably likens to ‘nectar of the gods,’ an Emsella chair session that jolts the pelvic floor through thousands of contractions in under half an hour, and an intermittent hypoxic-hyperoxic routine with LungStrong, essentially altitude training without a mountain. She also steps into Europe’s coldest cryo chamber (minus 140°C, socks, gloves and a hat her only concession to warmth) and emerges exhilarated, starving and oddly proud of staying calm while icicles seemed to grow in her nostrils.
Julia is the first to admit that some of this kit is niche and pricey, but she frames it as a glimpse of a future that will diffuse outward. In the meantime, there’s an NHS ‘Hooke at Home’ list for the rest of us, inexpensive intelligent scales, a tape measure, a wearable if you like them, and the same old kitchen we’ve always had.
Perhaps the book’s most disarming strength is that it marries brass-tacks medicine with Julia’s oldest, simplest love: nature. She calls sunlight on your face, green in your eyeline and wind in your lungs Vitamin N, and she treats it as seriously as a supplement. It is not a throwaway claim; it is measurable physiology.
You can feel that in our patch of the East Midlands more intensely than almost anywhere: the long, rain-clean light across the Welland, the hush in the woods at Exton when the first frosts sweeten the air, the way Stamford’s stone seems to store sunshine and give it back in October’s slant. This is a book written by someone who knows what those things do to the nervous system because she has stood in them for years.
The personal never disappears. Julia remains a mother first, proud of Zephyrus and her twin girls, Zena and Xanthe, and every time she talks about healthspan you can see the three of them at the end of the sentence, tugging at her sleeve, asking to be chased in a park.
She remains a campaigner as well (an ambassador for Keep Britain Tidy and the National Trust; a champion for Ordnance Survey; a supporter of women’s charities and environmental groups… and the first female President of The Camping and Caravanning Club) which gives her message a civic dimension: our bodies matter, and so do the places we move them through. You can’t have one without the other.
What, then, should a reader in Rutland or Stamford actually do after closing the book? Julia would say: start embarrassingly small. Take a fifteen-minute walk this evening and listen intentionally for birds; if you can hear three species, that’s your HRV nudge for the day.
Swap tonight’s UPF (ultra-processed food) snack for a bowl of Greek yoghurt with a few cranberries and a drizzle of black vinegar; your akkermansia will thank you later. If sleep has been brittle, eat a kiwi at dusk and set your phone down an hour earlier; breathe in for four, out for six, ten times, and notice how your shoulders fall.
If you’re curious about metrics, book the routine NHS checks you’re due and write the numbers down; if a number worries you, ask your GP what would move it in the right direction and try that for a month.
If you’re feeling adventurous, end your next shower cold for twenty seconds and watch how quickly your mind adapts; the point is not Spartan heroics but learning you can steer your state. And when you have ninety free minutes at the weekend, go to Rutland Water and walk until your cheeks glow.
There is a pleasing symmetry to the idea that Julia Bradbury, who once persuaded us to lace up our boots simply by letting us see what awaited us outside, now hands us a handful of habits that, combined, amount to a longer, better walk through our years.
When she sits down at Stamford Corn Exchange this October, expect the tone of the evening to mirror the tone of the book: candid, curious, generous. She will talk about scans and breathwork, about cold plunges and mushrooms, about the oddness of a helmet that reads your brainwaves and the relief of a mammogram that does what it should.
She will talk about the day she found out and the days after, and how she built a scaffolding of habits that made sense to her and might make sense to you. She will talk about Rutland, and how a small county can shape a big life. And she will almost certainly send you out into the Stamford night thinking, not about a complicated programme, but about something you could start tomorrow morning that would make your mind clearer and your body kinder to live in.
That is the quiet triumph of Hack Yourself Healthy. It is a manifesto and a field guide for the rest of us: a book about tests and trackers that keeps circling back to a walk, a bowl of cherries, a better breath, a laugh with friends, and two hours a week outside because that is where the nervous system remembers it belongs.
Julia’s style is less like advice and more like gentle encouragement. We can do this here. We can do it now. We have all we need. And if you want a nudge to begin, circle Sunday 19th October as the date that your perspective on your health and lifestyle changed forever.
A Fireside Chat with Julia takes place at Stamford Corn Exchange on Sunday 19th October from 2.30pm, tickets £20.50 including book signing event and donation from ticket sales to The Outdoor Guide Foundation. Available for pre-order from September, published by Hachette’s Piatkus imprint, in hardback, £25, 325 pages. Available from all good independent bookshops or signed by Julia with a personal message for your recipient at www.theoutdoorguide.co.uk.
Read the full feature in the October edition of Stamford Pride, at https://www.pridemagazines.co.uk/stamford/view-magazines?magazine=October-2025