The Whole Truth | The secret to success is in small wins every day, Luke Coutinho attests

Representational image. (Photo: Lutchenca Medeiros via Unsplash)

Note to readers: The Whole Truth is a fortnightly exploration of wellness trends, to separate the healthful from the unhelpful.

In the past nine years, Luke Coutinho’s has been the most amplified and widely-reached voice of wellness in India. His social media engagement is staggering — his free videos on topics ranging from the life-changing power of the three-finger gratitude exercise to the role of trace minerals in our body and how to augment them have shown results, if you believe the thousands of testimonials in Team Luke Coutinho’s digital footprints.

Small Wins Every Day; Luke Coutinho (Penguin Ebury Press, 239 pages, Rs399)

A holistic nutrition and integrative health and lifestyle expert, Coutinho’s healing philosophy revolves around five broad parameters: cellular nutrition, adequate exercise, quality of sleep, emotional wellness and the spirit. All these five areas of his research and practice come together in his racy new book Small Wins Every Day (Penguin Ebury Press, 239 pages, Rs399) with tiny chapters, each outlining a highly doable small win for each day. The idea behind small wins is, when our wellness goals are small, we are likely to succeed in them, leading us to the big goals. When we achieve or succeed in something, dopamine, the feel-good or reward molecule that our brain releases, propels us further and makes us happy. “It all revolves around the beautiful word Dopamine,” Coutinho writes.

The chapters are capsules of what he has taught people through his social media handles for the past several years, and in his other bestselling books. From practising anulom vilom pranayama for three minutes every day and making our Sundays meaningful to using regular gut cleansers and fasting from sunset to sunrise, Coutinho has simplified the roadmap for practising wellness in 2023 in clutter-free, jargon-free easy ways in the book.

Wellness consumerism and individual wellness, by which I mean everybody using their own time and space to keep themselves fit or peaceful or sexy has been on the rise since 2018-19. After the pandemic, the focus has been shifting, as the highly anticipated "The Future of Wellness 2023 Trends" recently released by the Global Wellness Institute indicates. Coutinho’s wisdom in Small Wins Every Day are uncannily aligned to some of the key findings of the report created with data gathered from more than 20 countries.

The report says 2023 will be a watershed year for wellness. New spaces and experiences will bring people together, an antidote to growing loneliness; people will go to the source of ancient healing systems, think ryokans or hot springs of Japan or yoga ashrams of India; the beauty industry will return to lab-tested, science-backed products instead of clean, natural products; water-based therapies will be in demand, all kinds of soaking, ice-cold and hot, among other findings.

Coutinho has always emphasised the need for a sense of community. His own wellness programmes and his virtual presence has led to large communities of people who lean into his science-backed methods. Almost all his tools use the five senses. He dedicates one chapter in the new book to “BTSTS” or “breathe, touch, smell, taste, see”. It’s one of his anxiety mediating methods. He advises using all the five senses one after the other in a structured way at one go — “a type of focused distraction that can break the chain of unwanted thoughts in your mind.” The Future of Wellness 2023 report outlines how new directions in multi-sensory integration will emerge blending light, scent, temperature, touch and sound to expand sensory wellness. Like Coutinho, who has consistently busted the myth that fat is bad for us, the report also points out the merits of fat on our bodies and predicts that nutritionists around the world will make a distinction between white and brown fat and pave the way for the dominance of brown fat in human beings for a longer, disease-free life.

The most heartening commonality between the book and the report is the emphasis on the larger good — stepping out of our beauty and self-care chambers and connecting with the world outside, making wellness and health a larger, collective goal. Coutinho suggests passing on our small wins to others in our family, social circle and neighbourhood. “Be an accountability buddy for someone,” he suggests.

The Whole Truth is a fortnightly column that helps you make sense of the new age of wellness