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Concern about obesity has prompted numerous public health campaigns that urge people to be more physically active. The campaigns often include normative statements and attempt to impose restrictions on individuals' lives without considering the complexities of daily life. We suggest that broadening the focus to reflect everyday practices would foster better targeted public health campaigns. This article is based on our participation in FINE, a multidisciplinary Danish research project. The core methodology of FINE was a randomised controlled trial in which 61 moderately overweight men were put into different exercise groups. In this article we analyse the scientific work of the trial as representing entangled processes of bodywork, where data are extracted and objectified bodies are manipulated and care practices address the emotional, social and mundane aspects of the participants' everyday lives. Care practices are an inherent part of producing scientific facts but they are removed from the recognised results of scientific practice and thus from common public health recommendations. However, knowledge about the strategic use of care practices in lifestyle interventions is important for public health initiatives and future efforts should incorporate this aspect.

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In this article, we situate the practices of health and physical activity in household collectives, and conceptualise everyday health ‘behaviour’ and lifestyle as complex, collective practices. Based on an ethnographic study on everyday family life and health practices, we provide a framework for understanding the household as a collective, where the household collective may take precedence over individual preferences, and individual behaviour has collective implications. We describe the household as a node for practices, gathered by the activities that draw together and align actors in collective practices of everyday life. In the everyday efforts of the households to live up to ideals and balance conflicting practices, healthy living is about more than simple, individual choices about whether to follow health recommendations or not. It is also dependent on pragmatic negotiations, the distribution of roles and tasks and conflicts between ideals and what is feasible in the everyday management and maintaining of the household. We suggest that engaging with these collectives could serve as a useful point of departure for health promotion activities, situating health promotion in the here and now of collectives, tinkering with their specific constellations, values and identities in the entangledness of multiple household practices.