Linear models of time are an under-examined, taken-for-granted element of healthy lifestyle advice that often conceptualise individuals progressing through sequential time frames as they implement new behaviours to reap the benefit of stable health. However, common experiences are of diet and exercise regimes as non-linear, effortful, and difficult to maintain. We explore complexity in how time is experienced when people attempt to engage with healthy-lifestyle advice in 35 longitudinal interviews with 22 people in long-term relationships where one partner had been with coronary heart disease. A poststructuralist-informed analysis showed that talk of engaging with lifestyle change involved multiple temporal selves within plural time frames of recovery, including histories and imagined futures. These shifting temporalities illuminated complexity and potential for oppression in discourses of healthy living that contribute to a logic of blame, spoiled health identities, and abject bodies when people fail to achieve healthy lifestyle practices or stable health. Concluding that time is a powerful, under-theorised element in healthy-lifestyle advice, we draw on Deleuze’s philosophy of time to outline a new form of health promotion that recognises how multiple time frames shape lifestyle behaviours and identities, and which can offer new, more affirmative directions for health promotion and healthy lifestyle advice.