What does your morning routine look like? Doomscroll, coffee and toast, school run? Or do you manage a few stretches?
Whatever you do, it’s unlikely to match how Dr Barbara Sturm starts the day. The 55-year-old aesthetics doctor and founder of the eponymous skincare megabrand takes a route to health and wellbeing via the anti-inflammatory lifestyle. Spending the day with Sturm at her home in Gstaad starts with some yoga. On our drive to the class, the German-born Sturm (bright as a button, having already cleared the school run with her 11-year-old daughter, Pepper) says: “It’s good to start with something calm. But I am not very good at yoga.” During our class she appears to be as bendy as a 20-year-old. As she bosses a headstand, I wonder what she means by “not very good”.
Back at Sturm’s chalet after class, I lie on top of an electronic “grounding sheet” chatting to Sturm until it’s her turn. This wellness gadget uses pulsed electromagnetic field technology, which, through regular use, she believes, reduces inflammation in the body, which she says is the key to good health. Sturm lies a few feet away on an infrared-light bed, a contraption that looks like a giant sunbed. Exposure to this light is said to penetrate the cells and stimulate repair. One of her little dogs is lying on the bed beside her. “I think he just finds it relaxing,” she says. I discover, moments later, that the pooch is right.
