No — not me, I know I have it.
You've got cancer too.
The difference is (hopefully) your immune system and lymphatic system are working day and night to protect you.
That's not meant to shock or provoke. It's just a fact. It's meant to reframe how we think about cancer, immunity, and why some people develop disease while most don't.
Let's get into the numbers. Your body is made up of between 30 and 40 trillion cells. On average they replicate every 7 years — which equates to 10–15 billion cell replications every day. Cell replication is a direct copy of the cell's DNA used to generate a new cell.
If I asked you to write lines 50 times or even 100 times you'd probably not make any errors. If I asked you to write the same words 10 billion times, errors would creep in. This is cellular replication failure — and can be the source of trouble, including cancer.
The uncomfortable truth is: we all produce abnormal cells every day. Cells with damaged DNA. Cells with dysfunctional mitochondria. Cells that don't behave as they should.
Most of the time, these rogue cells are quietly identified and removed long before they ever become a problem. Cancer doesn't appear overnight. It develops slowly, over years, sometimes decades — as damaged cells escape detection, survive, and eventually grow.
The difference between health and disease is rarely the presence of abnormal cells — it's whether the systems designed to deal with them are still working.
The Immune System: A Coordinated Defence Force
We often talk about "the immune system" as if it's a single thing. It isn't. It's a coordinated defence network made up of specialised units — much like a military.
Dendritic cells and macrophages are the scouts. They patrol tissues constantly, sampling their environment and looking for anything that doesn't belong. Their job isn't to fight. It's to notice and report.
Helper T cells act as intelligence officers. They decide whether a threat is real, whether it needs escalation, and which forces should respond.
Cytotoxic T cells and NK cells (Natural Killer cells — I love that name) are the soldiers. They destroy cells that have been flagged as dangerous or abnormal.
B cells are responsible for antibody production, immune memory, and long-term targeting. In lymphoma like mine, it's these B cells that have gone wrong. That's why modern treatments don't just "kill cancer" — they specifically identify and remove the corrupted immune cells while the rest of the system is rebuilt.
Reframing Cancer
I've started to reframe cancer. It's actually an incredible natural behaviour — and uncomfortable as it is, the responsibility ultimately sits with the host environment. That can be tough to accept when you feel you live a healthy life and exercise regularly.
When you really stop and think about it, it's hard to hate cancer cells. At their core, they're not malicious. They're not invaders. They're cells that are trying to survive.
Nature has one overriding principle: persistence — the primary objective of all living things, even at a cellular level. Polar bears changing behaviour as ice sheets melt. Plants growing through concrete. Bacteria evolving resistance to their environment. The same principle applies at the smallest scale — a single cell in your body.
When a cell's environment becomes hostile — through chronic inflammation, metabolic stress, repeated oxidative damage, sedentary lifestyle — its ability to function normally is compromised. When that happens, survival becomes the priority. Not optimisation. Not efficiency. Just survival.
Nearly a century ago, Otto Warburg observed that many cancer cells generate energy differently from healthy cells — relying more heavily on fermentation pathways even when oxygen is present. The Warburg effect describes cells that have shifted strategy. Cancer cells behave like cells under stress. They adapt to conditions that no longer support normal function.
This perspective changed something for me. It stopped cancer feeling like a betrayal by my body and started to feel more like a signal that something, over time, had drifted out of balance.
The Lymphatic System: The Overlooked Network
Understanding the immune system without understanding the lymphatic system is like trying to understand traffic without knowing the roads exist.
The lymphatic system is your body's drain for waste. The network exists throughout your body and waste products move through it suspended in a liquid called 'lymph' (Lympha is Latin for 'water' — which speaks of the knowledge of this network humans have had for millennia). Lymph moves through the network to two major drainage points near the heart and enters the blood, where it is ultimately filtered out as urine by the kidneys.
And it has one critical difference from the cardiovascular system.
There is no pump
Your heart pumps blood. Your lymphatic system has no equivalent pump.
Lymph moves only when:
- you move
- you breathe deeply
- muscles contract
- the diaphragm works
If you don't move, lymph stagnates. When lymph stagnates — waste clearance slows, immune surveillance weakens, local inflammation increases.
Today we sit to travel, sit to work, take the lift not the stairs, come home sitting on a train, sit and eat, sit on the sofa, and finally lie in bed. Nothing moves. Eventually things block — and then, before you know it, you are in my club.
Movement is not optional. Because there is no pump, movement becomes medicine. Not intense exercise. Not punishment. Just regular movement. Walking. Stretching. Breathing. Changing posture.
Practical ways to support a healthy immune system — the 1% Protocol
Once I stopped thinking of the immune system as something to "boost" and started thinking of it as a system to protect and de-stress, the actions became surprisingly simple.
Support immune logistics — Move every day. Walk, take the stairs, change posture. Use deep, slow breathing to engage the diaphragm. Most wearables will notify you to move hourly — don't ignore it.
Protect sleep relentlessly — Consistent sleep and wake times. Reduce light and stimulation late at night. Leave your phone downstairs. Most immune repair and regulation happens while you sleep.
Reduce chronic stress signals — Build deliberate pauses into the day. Spend time outdoors where possible. Daylight is key for vitamin D production and your circadian rhythm. Chronic stress hormones suppress immune surveillance and increase inflammation.
Keep blood sugar stable — Avoid large spikes and crashes. Eat whole foods. Pair carbohydrates with protein, fat, or fibre. Immune cells are sensitive to metabolic chaos.
Feed the microbiome — Eat a wide variety of plants. Include fibre, legumes, vegetables, nuts, and seeds. Use fermented foods. A large part of immune regulation begins in the gut.
Be selective, not maximal — Avoid stacking supplements without clear purpose. Be cautious around "immune boosters" — these are mainly marketing. More input doesn't equal better output in complex systems.
Avoid immune friction — Minimise alcohol. Avoid ultra-processed foods. Reduce exposure to things that disrupt sleep and recovery. Small, repeated irritants matter more than occasional excess.
Lymphatic drainage and massage
A large part of the 1% protocol is daily lymphatic drainage and massage. I have a routine devised from multiple sources that is broadly based on elements of Tai Chi and Qigong from ancient Asian cultures — something Western medicine has largely forgotten but Eastern cultures never abandoned.
My routine consists of 7 exercises that all involve bouncing, twisting, or stretching repeatedly for a minute each. It's actually a great way to warm up after a morning cold water dip. I follow this with lymphatic massage — rubbing the areas of lymph nodes quite vigorously toward the heart.
The lymphatic network comes together and squeezes through a small hole in the diaphragm, then joins the upper lymph network from your arms, armpits, and the glymphatic network in your brain — eventually meeting just under your collar bones before entering the blood near your heart. From there the waste is transported to the kidneys and filtered out as urine.
Cell DNA replication failure, immune system detection and destruction of rogue cells, waste collection, transportation and filtering, then exit. How clever is that? All you have to do is look after it all — and MOVE.
The 1% Principle, applied
None of these actions are revolutionary on their own. But taken together — and done consistently — they reduce friction across immune surveillance, signalling, transport, and clean-up.
Not chasing perfection. Not forcing outcomes. Just creating the conditions in which complex systems can work properly.