I have a pedometer that tracks my daily steps, and I absolutely love it! Attached to my wrist with a fancy little contraption that I found last year on Etsy, it ventures forth with me every day as I plot my path, set my course, walk the walk, take a hike.

Now I happen to be the sort of person, with clothing for every sort of weather, who is not much bothered by the rain, snow, heat, or cold. In fact, I especially love to walk in the falling snow. In the summertime, if it’s been really hot, I sometimes walk at sunrise or late in the evening to avoid the heat of the day. And there’s also an elliptical in the basement just in case it’s absolutely pouring. But in my mind, there’s no substitute for fresh air. So my pedometer and I plan to get out pretty much every day, no matter what.

Yesterday I was thinking about how to manage the Arctic temperatures of the past few days, and so I experimented with marching in place while I looked out of the large windows in the dining room. My pedometer does not actually register steps, except where it synchs on my phone. Instead, it tracks my progress with lights, like a short runway, so I get just a vague notion of how I’m progressing. The farther I walk, the more lights I see at the end of the day. Now that might bother some people, but it doesn’t bother me. ‘Cause I’m not in this for the numbers. I’m in it for the game. And the name of the game is feeling good and strong and healthy and well. Well, which is related to the word for “whole.” Wellness is being whole.

What do I say to patients who come for counsel and advice? I tell them that wellness consists of three interrelated and equally important pillars: rest & relaxation patterns, eating patterns, and activity patterns. Notice I didn’t call the last two diet and exercise. That’s because eating patterns is a larger idea than a “diet.” First, we know that diets don’t work. You can find plenty of information on that throughout this blog and elsewhere. For starters, ask anyone who’s heavy and doesn’t want to be. The goal of a diet is to deny yourself food. But the goal of improving your nutritional status is to shift your foods in the direction of more fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, and beans, and less fast food, corn syrup and partially-hydrogenated oil. If you haven’t tried that yet, it’s a good place to start.

And activity patterns are a lot more than just “exercise.” There’s no need to take an exercise class, or train for the Olympics, or do calisthenics, whatever those are. We simply need to make opportunities to move. Like standing on one foot while brushing your teeth, stretching out your lower back after a shower, walking while on the phone, taking the stairs instead of the escalator, parking at the edge of the lot, or using the printer that’s farther down the hall. If you want, you can get a pedometer to find out what your baseline looks like. But you don’t have to if you don’t want to. You can just start to move around more.

Relaxation may be the most difficult of the three. Most of us don’t get nearly enough sleep. How much do you need? Well, if you fell asleep at 10 p.m. without setting an alarm, what time would you wake up? There’s your answer. It’s not just a nighttime problem, however.

We’re all on information overload, taking in more in a single day than most people who lived in the 18th century took in over an entire lifetime. You must give yourself permission to rest. Whether you quiet your mind with yoga, meditation, massage, gardening, knitting, singing, walking or basketball, it’s good for your heart, mind, body and soul. It’s good for your children as well, and not just little ones. I would hope for the day that schools begin to incorporate meditation or yoga, and that rates of so-called attention deficit disorder begin to fall when we do. And yes, I believe that taking away recess is a very short-sighted strategy. You don’t get your best mileage with your gas pedal pressed all the way to the ground.

Each of these pillars — eating, moving, and relaxing — strongly affects the other two. To get a sense of how everything is connected, think about how much hungrier you get when you’re tired, how much better you sleep after a long walk, how little you feel like moving after you eat too much, how great it feels to swing your arms, how hungry you are after a swim. You can leverage that synergy to make small changes feel like a million bucks. That’s wellness.