For Citizen Femme’s new series, ‘How Experts Stay Well’, our wellness director sat down with Fee Drummond, founder of the wellness community Wilding Tribe, to explore her food and feelings-first approach to wellbeing in an overwhelming modern world.
Thought wellness was all about 5am wake-up calls and painstakingly tracking every bit of data you possibly can to ‘biohack’ your way to better health? Not so, says wellness expert Fee Drummond. In a wellness culture currently fixated on optimisation, Fee’s philosophy is refreshingly simple: true health begins with a deeper connection to nature, nourishment, and ourselves.
A speaker, journalist, photographer, world traveller, and mother of three, Fee has spent her life as a multi-hyphenated businesswoman, exploring what it means to truly live well. She’s called Jordan, India, Singapore and now England’s South Coast home, and her international travels have had an integral role in shaping her belief that food can be medicine and that nature remains one of our most powerful healing tools.
Following her own recovery from chronic illness, Fee has now created Wilding Tribe, a set of programmes, retreats and events that are designed to help you live more intuitively. Throughout our conversation, clear themes emerged of constant adaptation, nutrient-dense living, daily rituals, cultural wisdom, and the often-overlooked power of hydration.
Read on to discover her fascinating insights – and how they can be applied to your everyday life with ease (promise).
What does wellbeing mean to you?
“Wellbeing is really about inner peace, happiness, and the ability to find your own joy – and to do that, you can’t be in a constant state of codependency, or anxiety,” explains Fee. “As I’ve aged, I have a much slower, longer-term perspective on wellbeing. The frenzy of youth is exhausting – that constant push to do more, buy more, cram in more wellness. However, I see true wellbeing as less, not more: a calm, grounded sense that you’re living in alignment with yourself, not with what’s being marketed to you.”
It’s a powerful notion, and one deeply shaped by her childhood, which saw Fee and her parents travel and interact with many cultures during her formative years.
“Wellbeing isn’t only what you do; it’s who you belong to,” Fee continues. “A lot of the countries I have experienced living in integrate multi-generational living, and there’s so much to be learned from that,” she reveals. “The cooking in community, the daily interactions between young and old, the sense that you are woven into something – that is as regulating for the nervous system as any supplement.” And, she doesn’t just appreciate that societal set up – Fee lives it; her 96 year old grandmother lives in a house at the bottom of her garden and her parents are very close to hand.
“I’m obsessed with watching older people in a culture: in many places, they’re still crouching, cooking, gardening well into their eighties,” Fee explains. “Meanwhile, in much of the West, older people are in homes or beds, removed from daily life. I think, in the modern world and especially in the West, we’ve tried to replace the village with social media. But, it’s a poor substitute.”
How to navigate data-driven wellness without losing yourself
Fee acknowledges that we now live in a technological world flooded with health metrics, wearables, and lab tests, and in some ways that can be hugely beneficial. “I actually love data – when it’s meaningful. I’ve used blood work, biomarkers and biochemistry for over 15 years, both for myself and my children,” she reveals.
But, “people are awash with data now. What does the data mean, and what’s the pathway to using it properly?” she asks. “Lots of companies are very happy to sell you numbers, yet what matters is: what do you do with those numbers?” Many businesses don’t bother to give you help with that and that can leave people stranded, having seemingly ‘invested’ in their wellbeing without the knowledge they actually need to improve their health.”
Another issue is that people often look to this kind of tech to point out the ‘quick fixes’ to take, but these shortcuts can often create an “unseen biochemical debt” that means you feel better in the moment but not for the long term.
“It’s very easy to rob Peter to pay Paul in your body,” Fee says. “If you make a quick change, you’ve caused a biochemical impact somewhere else. That’s why, in my work, I focus on using data to fine-tune how we live a nutrient-dense life, not to chase quick fixes.”
The wellness coach is also particularly concerned about fashionable injectables and GLP-1 drugs, whose long-term effects, she says, we’ve barely begun to see: “There’s huge implications to long-term future health that no one is feeling the repercussions of yet, but we will. That’s why I believe in combining the science of nature with lab data, not using tech to ignore nature entirely.”
How to avoid ‘quick-win’ wellness shortcuts
Fee’s particular approach can be summarised into two new buzzwords for the wellness world: “optimal thrive state” and “nutrient-dense living.”
“Your optimal thrive state can be defined as when your body is in cellular energetic harmony,” she explains. “It’s the baseline where your cells are properly fuelled, your biochemistry is stable, and you can adapt to whatever life throws at you – from emotional spikes to sugar crashes. You might still have ups and downs, of course, but the foundation is steady.”
To get there, Fee’s ruthlessly selective about what she lets into her life and that includes food, people, and media. Her upbringing surrounded by different landscapes and different cultures taught her that “everything carries a kind of ‘nutritional’ weight: people, places, conversations, not just what’s on your plate.”
That’s also where her concept of nutrient-dense living comes in: “Nutrient-dense living is not just about food; it’s about every form of input. It is a way of calculating the nutrient density in every moment – every food, every energy. What am I listening to? Who’s in my sphere? Because all of that is feeding me.”
That said, even Fee admits that no one is immune to the urge to ‘cheat’ on their wellness routines. In fact, she calls herself ‘Mrs Shortcut’ – an innate personality trait she’s acknowledged since school. However, it’s how she’s reframed that feeling that’s allowed her to make a true impact on her own health and those that she coaches.
“Ultimately, there is no shortcut if you want the best, sustained results for your health. You have to do the work.” Fee explains. “To help people understand what I mean by that I like to use the metaphor of your body as a bank. Every day, we’re making deposits and withdrawals from our body’s resources. So, where does the funding come from? Are you overdrawn, and why? After overcoming my own chronic illness, I’ve learned that sustainable wellbeing comes from consistent, intelligent deposits, not raiding the bank for a quick hit when you are struggling.”
For her, the most powerful “deposit” we make every single day is food. That’s why, through her six-week nutrient-dense living programme, she helps people see exactly what their “funds” look like, and what they need to deposit over three to six months to truly rebalance.
How to build five minute rituals for busy lives
If you feel you are just ‘too busy’ for wellness or healthy eating routines, Fee has a message for you as well: try to avoid shutting out the world around you, even when you are stressed – you might just learn something from it.
“Nothing in nature exists like [humans rushing straight to work],” reveals Fee. “I watch animals a lot. Before they hunt or perform, they stretch, bask in the sun, preen, regulate. Humans tend to do the opposite: we wake up and go straight into hunting mode – emails, deadlines, performance – with no prep. That’s where we start to lose our wildness.”
Another mistake a lot of us are making, according to Fee, is that we rely on one big ‘wellness reset’, normally about once a year to ‘fix everything’. But that’s not sustainable wellness. “People think ‘wild’ means a once-a-year retreat: plunging into the sea, disappearing into a forest. That’s lovely, but the real power is in daily wildness – small, repeatable rituals that keep your cellular energy in a good place,” she explains.
“At home or away, I focus on tiny practices I can do in five minutes, even three times a day when I’m on the move,” Fee continues. “It’s so important to create a methodology that is simple, quick, and easy… wherever we are, to enable us to bring more of that wild back in.”
They don’t have to be hard or ‘wellness approved’ options like meditation either. In fact, Fee advocates for choosing ways to be kind to yourself. For example, her own daily tools include journaling and ‘brain dumping’ to clear mental noise and she loves rituals like lymphatic drainage, facial massage and dry brushing, which not only stop heavy legs and puffy faces but help calm your nervous system.
Another thing you won’t find Fee obsessing over? Ninety-minute gym classes that punish rather than protect. Instead, her signature ritual, which you can find within her Wilding Tribe platform, is a five‑minute daily practice called Wide Awake – a movement-based yoga flow she does every day. Her main piece of advice: “Just take away the perfection and do it wherever you are. It can take five minutes and you do not need gym kit, a studio, or perfect conditions. I’ll do it before the kids wake up, between school runs and even in airports if necessary,” she reveals. “People say to me, ‘Where is your glow from?’ and I’m like ‘it’s not Botox, it’s food and flow.'”
How to protect your wellbeing while on the go
As someone who travels frequently, Fee also knows first hand that interacting mindfully with the modern world can be a particular challenge (something frequent flyers like CF readers should bear in mind). “I travel a lot – across continents and through airports – and I see travel as entering a biologically hostile environment. Humans are not meant to travel that fast,” Fee surmises. But, while it might not be ‘natural’, she does believe we can prepare ourselves for it, especially through some simple food and drink changes.
In fact, according to Fee, the one change you can make to transform your on-the-go wellbeing routine is deceptively familiar: stay hydrated. Yet, it turns out, you’ve probably been trying to do it wrong. Drinking more water isn’t necessarily the answer.
“Most people are still walking around with massive water bottles and flushing their system, wondering why they still feel awful,” she reveals. “They’re obsessed with how much water they can drink, instead of asking what they’re actually drinking.”
Your real priority should be what’s in your water, which is why, after spending two years dealing with illness where hydration was central to her recovery, Fee now swears by travelling with high-grade salt, which she adds to her water in tiny amount for proven electrolyte replenishment and enhanced hydration. She also mineralises her water with citrus and rosemary sprays, turning it back into what she calls “live water” and she drinks it from glass bottles where possible to avoid microplastics.
“Without hydration, you don’t have absorption. Without absorption, you can’t have nutrient density,” explains Fee. “So, that familiar ‘hungover, edgy’ feeling many travellers experience after a flight is often the result of poor hydration and mineral depletion – and it is largely avoidable if you both hydrate and mineralise properly.”
Other simple habits she swears by are equally travel-friendly. She fuels with protein-rich boiled eggs brought from home and keeps dark chocolate with salt on hand for a quick energy boost — one that has even been rumoured to help with jet lag and mood thanks to naturally occurring compounds such as flavonoids. If there is nothing decent to eat, she treats flying as a fasting period rather than ‘caving’ to ultra-processed options.
“The main thing to focus on is to ensure your system isn’t running purely on adrenaline – despite the airport being a somewhat stressful environment – as this can quickly spill over into the rest of your life,” Fee says. “One thing that really works for me is always grounding myself physically in a new environment. I truly believe in a feet-on-the-earth approach. As soon as possible, I walk around outside barefoot in the place where I’ve just landed. That helps let my body and mind catch-up with arriving there.”
Five daily wellness rituals Fee swears by
- Tongue scraping (every morning) to support digestion and oral health
- Mouth taping at night for better sleep
- Chamomile tea before bed for its calming benefits
- A small travel-ready wash bag filled with core supplements (collagen, colostrum, creatine) and her bespoke three-monthly supplement protocol for wellness on-the-go
- Five-minute meditations to use in the car instead of scrolling
Wellness in eight steps: Fee’s top tips
- Tech: Use science, such as blood tests and wearables, to deepen your relationship with your body, not to outsource it
- Life: Build a steady baseline (sleep, food, movement, rituals) so you can better ride life’s ups and downs
- Mood: Accept that confidence and resilience come from showing up repeatedly, not hacking your way to the top of the mountain
- Hydration: Focus less on volume of water, more on its quality and mineral content
- Society: Seek out multi-generational spaces – family meals, community groups, neighbours – wherever possible to build your own ‘village’
- Travel: Treat travel like entering a tough climate: prepare food, water, and rituals in advance
- Activities: Anchor your day with short, repeatable body rituals that shift your biochemistry – not just your to‑do list
- Fitness: Swap “all-or-nothing” workouts for a 5–15 minute daily flow you never skip
Becki Murray is Citizen Femme’s Beauty and Wellness Director. As one of the only UK journalists to hold a Distinction-grade diploma in cosmetic science, she combines her unique knowledge with an editor’s eye to help you make smarter choices about beauty, wellbeing, and aesthetics. Becki also heads up CF’s spa guide so you could say she’s an expert in the science of relaxation too…
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Lead image credit: Fee Drummond
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