The Los Angeles wellness obsession has gone bonkers.

This isn’t new information— I live in a city where people pay thousands of dollars to have their fat frozen and spend a week’s take-home wage on juice cleansing — but it’s gotten out of control.

The straw that has broken this camel’s back came last night when I popped into the supermarket. As I quickly dashed about filling my basket with veg, milk, and eggs, my inquisitive-journalist ears picked up the sounds of a conversation that would only take place in a city like L.A.

Following the treble tones, I turned into the aisle to find two women having an anxious and in-depth conversation about which brand of water they should buy.

I kid you not.

It went like this:

“This one is reverse osmosis”, says the brunette wearing a red neckerchief and holding a $6.99 bottle of H20.

“But this one has added electrolytes,” counters the blonde, pointing her manicured fingers at a label that has flown halfway across the world to sit on this mid-Wilshire shelf.

“Perhaps we should buy the glass bottles?” suggests the first. “To avoid BPA.”

“Sure, that works…just make sure you read the nutrition label,” replies the second, a little more quietly as she catches me watching, transfixed.

I tear my eyes away, stash a few (home-brand) club sodas into my basket and head to the self-service checkout, trying not to giggle at the scene I just observed.

Read the nutrition label on your water? Now that’s a new one!

Look, I’m not scoffing at these women’s determination to hydrate — drinking clean water is very, very important. And if you have the luxury of being able to afford the brand that is alkalized, charcoal-filtered or lovingly bottled at a cold mountain spring, and drinking that type of water floats your boat, then power to you.

But the reality is that it’s totally unnecessary to take a simple health habit — drink more water — and make it something complicated, and frankly a little bourgeoisie. Honestly, do YOU have the time or mental bandwidth to deliberate the pros and cons of various water brands? I sure as heck don’t!

As your wellness coach, I suggest that you spend more time drinking water and less time worrying about the ideal way to do it. (Insider tip: the tap turns to the left.)

This goes for any new healthy habit…the easiest way to make progress is by simply starting.

Want to get fit? Lace up your sneakers and walk around your neighborhood.

Want to eat healthier? Load up your basket with fruit, veg, and whole grains, and stop buying brightly colored boxes plastered with words like “healthy!” and “fiber!”. (These words are often there to disguise the whopping amount of sugar, sodium or trans-fats that the product contains.)

I know that I’ve talked about this before, but I will continue to beat the drum until we all get the message that being healthy is actually very simple.

The healthiest people that I know are not the ones who agonize over every last detail to make a perfect choice. They don’t obsess over what they eat, how they move, or what they weigh. They don’t trap themselves into rigid lifestyle habits or overload their days with unrealistic goals and expectations. And they certainly don’t spend Sunday evening in the supermarket, analyzing the merits of drinking water.

So your goal for this week is to commit to becoming one of the truly healthy ones. You can do that in three steps:

1. Pinpoint an area of your life that is being held back by perfectionism, analysis-paralysis or straight up laziness.
2. Then set an intention to change one single habit related to that area.
3. Take swift action, today, tomorrow, the next day, and so on. Improve as you go, and know that each day you choose to do something different is the day that your life will change.

As always, let me know how it goes…

With love,