Choose Your Hard

In Choose Your Hard, Professor Grant Schofield shows lasting health comes from choosing the right kind of discomfort. Drawing on hormesis, he shares seven practical truths on movement, nutrition, heat and cold, focus, dopamine, emotions, and meaning - honest, practical, and irreverent.

1. World-class scientific credentials with a mainstream voice

Prof Grant Schofield has over 18,000 citations in the scientific literature and has been at the forefront of health and performance research for three decades. He communicates complex science with warmth, humour, and radical honesty, a rare combination that earns trust with both general readers and health professionals.

2. Honest, irreverent, and deeply relatable

Grant writes as someone who also gains weight, struggles to stay motivated, and has to work at his own health. There is no guru posturing here. The book’s candid, self-deprecating voice, including an ‘anti-character’ who challenges the author throughout, makes it uniquely disarming and genuinely funny in places.

3. Established author with a proven platform and audience

Grant’s previous What the Fat? books were New Zealand and Australian best-sellers, with co-author Dr Caryn Zinn. He has a strong, engaged community through PREKURE, his health education organisation, and a track record of generating significant media coverage and public conversation around health.

4. Introduces the cutting-edge science of hormesis and mitohormesis

The book brings an accessible explanation of hormesis, the biological principle that small, deliberate stressors make us stronger, and its cellular counterpart, mitohormesis. This is the emerging science behind why practices like fasting, cold exposure, sauna, and vigorous exercise work at a cellular level. It’s new, it’s compelling, and it gives readers a unifying ‘why’.

5. A genuinely holistic health framework across seven evidence based truths

Most health books tackle one dimension: diet, exercise, sleep, or mindset. Choose Your Hard covers all of them in an integrated framework: movement, dopamine and reward, nutrition, heat and cold exposure, focused attention, emotional regulation, and purpose and meaning. It is a complete roadmap.

6. A counterintuitive, memorable central argument with wide appeal

The book’s core premise, that both paths are hard but one leads to a better life, and you get to choose which, is surprising, sticky, and universally relatable. It reframes the health conversation from sacrifice and willpower into a question of strategic, long-term self-interest. This is a message that cuts through.

7. Highly practical, with actionable tools and the author’s own daily habits

Every chapter includes a ‘What to do now’ call to action. Part 3 includes the Prof’s 19 personal habits, a design-thinking framework for behaviour change (the N=1 experiment), and the Misogi challenge concept: one brutally hard goal per year that redefines your limits.

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