In the last 3 years I’ve jumped into healthy living with both feet. In this article I’ll share some of the things I’ve learnt when it comes to diet and exercise.
Before we start though, there are a couple of principles that I think are key to recognise.
Principles
The first is the importance of acquiring knowledge. It is remarkable how many axioms we are all able to trot out but which are actually unhelpful. Some examples: everything in moderation, a calorie is a calorie, fat clogs your arteries, five a day, breakfast is the most important meal of the day, no pain no gain. So, the most important step in healthy living is to unlearn much of what we assume is true and then build up real knowledge. For example, you can learn that a red pepper has three times as much vitamin C as an orange. With this sort of knowledge you can make the best choices. Unfortunately, good knowledge doesn’t seem to have as many slogans as the above unhelpful examples, which is probably why we have a metabolic health crisis.
The second principle is to not rely upon willpower. If something is difficult and painful you will be less likely to do it. The biggest myth is that we must suffer to make gains. With the right knowledge however, it is perfectly possible to get healthy by only doing things you want to do. And by building up good habits slowly over time rather than trying to change everything in one go.
Diet
The foundation of healthy living is your diet and you should fix this first before focusing on exercise. If you are overweight, prioritise losing fat. I have extolled the transformative effects of a low carb/ketogenic diet in previous articles. Spending about a year on keto dramatically improved my metabolic health. If you can spend an extended period of time on keto you will likely see improvements in your all-round health that you didn’t think possible. Keto was much more effective and easier for me than intermittent fasting.
When it comes to diet, eat wholefoods cooked from scratch, avoid processed food and takeaways. Throw away all of your vegetable ‘seed’ oils and margarine. Replace these with traditional fats such butter, olive oil and lard. Stop eating sugar except as a rare treat and limit bread and grains. Base meals around meat and vegetables/salads. Stevia is an excellent substitute for sugar.
Modern diets are high in omega 6 but low in omega 3. You want to reverse this by eating oily fish such as mackerel, sardines, salmon, and walnuts. Research has suggested we need 1.2g to 1.6g of protein per kg of body weight each day, which is a surprising amount and becomes more important as we age. Eat lots of eggs and cheese. Bacon is fine too.
The other variable is when you eat. Restricting eating to a time window of say 8 hours is very beneficial to improve metabolic health. The easiest way to do this is to skip breakfast. Fasting for a day or more is also beneficial. But if you are fasting remember to get your protein in before and after. One of the big benefits of going low carb is that hunger is massively reduced as the hunger we feel if we skip a meal is mostly carb withdrawal, not actual starvation.
Supplements
Fixing your diet will improve the nutrients your body receives and is able to absorb. I take a number of supplements to top this up.
I start the day with coffee and mix in a tablespoon of MCT oil (coconut oil) along with 1-2g of taurine. MCT oil provides your brain with direct energy in the form of ketones and is a simple way of getting some of the benefits of keto without being in ketosis. Taurine is what they put in Red Bull and may have significant anti-aging effects.
With a meal I take the following supplements each day: Vitamin D and K (4,000 ius) – vitamin D is needed because we don’t get enough unless sunbathing. The official recommended dose is also way too low. Vitamin K works with vitamin D so I get a supplement with both in.
Magnesium citrate (250mg) – magnesium always comes high up in recommended supplements because it’s easy to not get enough from your diet and it is vital for health. The citrate version is well absorbed. Magnesium also helps with sleep if you take it before bed.
I also take a high strength garlic capsule, turmeric and black pepper (1.2g), and lions mane (1g) each day – these are all said to have various health benefits and have been considered traditionally medicinal for thousands of years, so my attitude is I might as well take them.
Before bed I’ll have a herbal tea and mix in 10g of hydrolysed collagen peptides (bovine) – collagen is mostly protein containing various amino acids and is what you get from drinking bone broth; and 3.5-5g of creatine.
Vitamin C and cod liver oil are other popular supplements. However, I try to get these from my diet because dietary vitamin C is the complete complex version, not simply ascorbic acid. And fish oil supplements may go off easily and oxidise, so I prefer to eat my omega 3s.
As mentioned, taurine and creatine are the two wildcards in this lineup. Research is consistently showing that these are very beneficial to muscle and brain health, especially as we age. We get them naturally from meat, but usually not enough.
Exercise
If you are losing weight you should avoid high intensity exercise. To lose weight you want to mostly walk whilst focusing on changing your diet. This will promote fat burning through low intensity aerobic exercise. Doing high intensity training whilst reducing calories will make you burn muscle and reset your metabolism so that you gain more weight when you stop the diet. Lose the weight first, then step up exercise intensity when you are lean.
Resistance Training
Weight training to improve your strength is hugely beneficial to your overall health. There is much debate about how to approach this. I use machines at the gym and will exercise a muscle until the point of muscle failure – where I am physically incapable of doing another ‘rep’. I only do this once per machine. This is the Mike Mentzer approach to achieving ‘hypertrophy’ with the idea being you stress your muscles so that they repair stronger. I then rest for 3 or 4 days before going back. This way I spend about 2 hours only per week doing weights. In the first 3 months of doing this I doubled the amount of total weight, or volume, at each workout session, proving that my strength had increased. I think the key thing is to have a strategy when it comes to resistance training, rather than randomly just lifting a few weights a few times at the gym.
Cardio
The other thing I do is slow running. I used to run 5km on the treadmill as fast as possible but now I do 30-60 minutes of running at a slow pace. The aim is to do zone 2 training – keeping your heart rate at 60% to 70% of its maximum and being able to breathe slowly through your nose rather than being out of breath. Slow running avoids injury but builds up your fitness. You can do whatever exercise will put you into zone 2 for a reasonable amount of time. A combination of weight training and zone 2 seems to be the most efficient way to improve all round fitness.
The other thing you can do is high intensity interval training. A favoured routine is exercising at a high heart rate for four minutes and then doing low intensity such as walking for three minutes and repeating this four times. This will increase your VO2 max. capacity which is one of the biggest predictors of health. This is actually a bit more in the spirit of no pain no gain though so I don’t do this as often.
Other Techniques
I’ve written a previous article on the Wim Hof method of breathing exercises and cold showers, so I’d refer you to those. https://going-postal.com/2023/05/the-wim-hof-method/
A very quick breathing exercise – (this helps with stress) is to breathe in fully through your nose, then take a final sharp breath in to totally fill your lungs and then slowly exhale. Lookup physiological sighing on YouTube to see it demonstrated.
The other thing I’ve added to my routine is taking saunas. I try to go twice a week, and stay in for at least 15 minutes at a high temperature before having a cold shower and repeating.
Hopefully, you might be inspired to do some of these things to improve your own health and wellbeing. As I said, these are things I have added into my routine gradually over the last 3 years. It would be impossible to do everything on day one. But slowly forming habits that you enjoy is the way to go about it. No pain, but gradual gains.
© JimmySP 2024
