Health and Fitness in One Page

Over the last six years I have tried to answer the question "What is a Healthy Lifestyle?". The following is a brief summary of what I have learned. By applying what I have learned I am in better condition in my 50s than I was in my 20s. In the coming months I will do longer posts that look at each of these areas in more detail.

Sleep At Least 7 Hours

There is ever increasing evidence that sleep is absolutely critical to a mentally and physically healthy life. It is believed healthy adults need between 7-9 hours of quality sleep each night and children require even more sleep. While we don’t yet fully understand all of the ways sleep impacts our health, there are a number of important processes that primarily activate while you sleep, particularly during the deep, delta wave stage such as:

• Release of human growth hormone which is critical to fighting the effects of aging and repairing damage
• The glymphatic system clears toxins and "trash" from the brain which are likely responsible for Alzheimer’s disease and other neurological disorders.
• Interplay between the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex which is critical to long term memory

I experienced the importance of sleep first hand when my body rebelled after a nine month period when I was averaging less than 4 hours of sleep / night. It took years for me to fully recover. I was further convinced of the importance of sleep by the book The Promise of Sleep written by one of the pioneers in sleep research. Since this book was published there have been numerous studies that only strength the case for sleep. 

Eat Healthy Foods

Lifehacker’s the only three things everybody agrees on is a good starting point when developing a healthy diet. I would elaborate / expand their list slightly

• Eat as many non-starchy vegetables as you can, especially those that have deep colors. The caloric density of these vegetables is small enough that you will not eat too much. The vegetables are packed with health promoting micro nutrients and good quality nutritional building blocks. This will also get your fiber consumption up to an healthy level. Fiber is critical to your micro-biome health.
• Limit or avoid highly processed food including bread, pasta, fruit juices.  A combined Stanford and NIH study found that when it come to weight lose, the quality of food was the single most important factor.
• Minimize the sugar in your diet, and eliminate any products that have added sugar. There has been significant evidence since the 1960s that sugar is directly linked to a number of health issues including heart disease.
• Eliminate all “foods" which are high in trans-fats. There is significant evidence that trans-fats have only negative impacts to health.
• If you eat meat, focus on cold water fish and free-range / grass fed animals
• If you need additional calories: eat whole foods such as beans, lentils, nuts, or fresh fruits. 

A great resource for thinking about healthy eating is Reframe Health Lab's Healthy Eating page which contains links to a short screencast and several resources available on the Internet.

Stay Active… Move!  Get some Exercise.

Our bodies are made to move and our brains are made to direct that movement. One of the most natural and health promoting activities is walking.  We should walk at least 30 minutes each day, ideally walking several hours to accumulating 17,000 steps / day. Besides the physical benefits, walking engages our brain, strengthen our creativity, and ability to focus.

Vigorous exercise has many positive impacts. It helps control stress hormones, strength the circulatory systems and metabolic systems.  It is often recommended that we should engage in at least 30 minutes of physical activities that raise your heart rate to above 80% maximum 3-5 times a week, with 2-3 of these exercise periods to include strength exercises. There is a growing body of evidence that suggests a high intensity interval training (HIIT) program could produces the same results in 30 minutes /week what more traditional aerobic training programs accomplish in 90-300 minutes.

Push Beyond Your Physical Comfort Zone

Humans are the most adaptable species on the planet. Our adaptability comes from our bodies natural ability to physiologically adapt to highly varied conditions as well as our ability to transform the environment we live in. Civilization has favored adapting our environment to provide a "comfortable" experience rather than encouraging people to exercise their physiological adaption "muscles". I believe we need to periodically move outside our comfort zones so our body doesn't "forget" how to adapt to changes. Example of the adaptability we should cultivate:

• High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) produces better performance improvements than more static training in short periods of time.
• Short duration exposure to heat (sauna) and cold (ice baths) improves overall health in numerous ways
• Periodic fasting reset several human systems and can be an effective treatment for several conditions.

Thanks to Paul Roy to mentioning that something should be added... 

Practice Mindfulness

There is a growing body of scientific evidence, not to mention millennia of traditions / wisdom that a intentional mindfulness in the form of meditation or contemplative prayer literally re-wire our brains for the good producing improved physical and mental health. There is stunning imagery from fMRI scans while people practices these disciplines showing changes in the areas of the brain that are activated. Mindfulness can improve empathy and gratitude which in turn leads to more joy in everyday life which results in a significant protective effect to health. Gratitude and joy, unlike happiness are not dependent on external circumstances, but rather are an internal response which we can choose. Though I am not Catholic, I found the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius to be very helpful. A while ago I wrote about how start with the mind and spirit might be the best way to improve the human condition.

Have Strong Social Connections

The Harvard / MassGeneral  Adult Development Study started in 1939 has studying the the lives of two cohorts and now their children found that one of the strongest predictors of a healthy (and happy) life was an individual's quality of social relationships. Researcher Susan Pinker found that the secret to living longer may be your social life due to the correlation between social connections and people who are 100+ years old.

Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.

I Corinthians 6:19-20

Exercise and Modern Society

In the last few years I have not been taking care of myself.  Libby was often needing to go to treatment or a doctor's appointment several times each week.  Adding one more trip seemed too much, so I just never got around to scheduling appointments with my doctor, dentist, etc. I wasn't eating as well as I should. My backpacking trips drop to almost zero because I wasn't comfortable leaving Libby for more than a day.  The only exercise I got was riding my bike to/from work.

I have known that I should be taking better care of myself. There is good evidence about how diet effects both the quality and quantity of life.  There has also been a lot of research into the effects of exercise. There is a fascinating screen cast about how 30 minutes of walking makes a big difference in people's health. Click the link because it's really interested, and for some people, I hope life changing. There is Growing Evidence of Links Between Exercise and Mental Acuity. There is also well documented evidence that exercise helps control both depression and anxiety. I have seen some of these effects in my own life. I find my mind sharper after I have exercised and I feel more ready to face the day. Several years ago I developed a habit of taking 1-2 days personal retreats when life seemed to be getting away from me. These retreats would be solo backpacking trips where I was walking 20+ miles each day. This is a fairly significant physical workout. Often times, solutions to problems I have been struggling with for weeks would jump into my mind as I was walking. Part of this was likely the solitude, but I think the physical activity played a part in this as well.

After Libby went home to her Lord, Helen made it very clear that I was to take care of myself because she had no desire to be an orphan. Her concern broke my heart and gave me the motivate to get serious.  I did a personal assessment and I realized I was in pretty poor shape. I decided I needed to visit my doctors and dentist, start eating better, lose some weight, and I really needed to get more exercise. I wanted to believe that my daily life provided me with enough exercise, but clearly it had not been working out. I hate the idea of exercise for exercise sake, but I have the need for some serious catch-up.

So, for the first time in my life, I joined a gym.  I met one of their trainers and got a basic assessment.  I was in even worse shape that I realized. I learned that my scale at home was under reporting my weight by eight pounds. It's going to be some serious work to get to where I should be.  As I surveyed the instruments of torture contained within the gym's walls I realized I didn't have any idea how to use the machines, and certainly no idea how to design a workout to get back into shape. I decided to sign up for several sessions with a trainer so I wouldn't break myself.  I suppose I could use some iPhone app like iMuscle or GAIN, or follow something simple like Vic Magary's minimalist fitnesss guide, but having a human being who could watch what I was doing seemed like a good idea.

I have been going to the gym six days a week since the end of November.  The trainer has kept me pushing to my limits but not going so far that I break myself. There have been days that I am not sure that I could turn the steering wheel to drive the car home from the gym, or when I got home I wasn't sure I could lift a glass filled with water to my mouth, but I was able to do these things.  I hope and pray that in several months I will be in reasonable enough shape that the gym won't need to take up as much time and energy as it is right now. I can see progress: my heart no longer continues to race for tens of minutes after I stop exercising and I have dropped more than a percent of body fat. I have also noticed that I am feeling better, and it seems like it's easier to concentrate. Maybe there is something to the healthy body / mind connection.

Enter curmudgeon model... seem to have been doing that a lot in these recent blogs:

When I was a kid I wasn't into team sports, but I was active.  Yes, there was a lot of reading, building electronics, and hang out with friends, but I also walked or rode my bike as transportation, using manual tools to build things, climbed trees, and regularly went backpacking/climbing.  I wasn't a jock, but I was fit.  Somehow all of those muscles are gone.  I suppose it was life getting more busy.  Well, that, and I dose of simple laziness. I also think a major contributor is that more and more life seems to be spent interacting with electronic devices rather than the real world.

This has gotten me thinking about exercise in modern society.  Many of my coworkers regularly go to the gym just as I am now.  We pay for the privilege to do hard work.  Often times, we are doing this in somewhat dark smelly places, even before the sun has come up. Some of us go beyond that and pay someone to push us further and harder than we think we can go. I find myself imagining in a conversation with one of the jews from Moses' time.  I tell them what I am doing and they say:

אז תנו לי לקבל את זה מצר, אתה בוחר להיות עבד לאדון עבד במשך מספר שעות ביום.

אתה לא צריך לעשות את זה. אז אתה נותן כסף כדי לעשות לך את זה השתגעת

alright, maybe not that (any Hebrew I knew when I was 13 is completely gone), this was google translate attempt of going english -> hebrew from the text

So let me get this strait, you are choosing to be a slave to a slavemaster for several hours a day.  You don't have to do this.  You are giving them money to do this to you?  Are you crazy?

There was a time than nearly everyone engaged in hard physical labor in the course of their daily lives. They didn't have power tools, electric kitchen appliances, cars, etc. The day was spent moving.   Muscles got built from daily activities. People looked forward to when the hard labor would end, and they could rest. Often people dreams of jobs that didn't require them to have to engage in such back breaking work.  These days, many of us spend our whole day of "work" sitting.  Maybe we get up and walk around the office a bit to talk with people.  Some people don't bother doing this, Skype, Jabber, or AIM remove the need to move.  While we are sitting around our physical bodies are getting weaker and weaker.  When work is done can we enjoy our leisure?  Nope.  We now need to get through traffic (sitting in our cars) to get to a gym, where we pay for the freedom to exercise in the comfort of a gym.  Something seems a bit off here.

I find myself wondering how we can back to lives that are more integrated and don't have us sitting around so much. There are things like the sit/stand desks, but that doesn't see enough to me. I don't have any great ideas. Maybe something will come to me, or maybe one of you have some ideas.  Care to share?

As for me, I am going to the gym for awhile. I have a Costco $319/2years membership to 24hour fitness.  The money has been spent, so I should take advantage of it, or it just goes to waste. If I had done a month to month membership it would have been easy to rationalizing quitting the gym after a couple of months "to save money".  I have also resolved never to let myself get back into such an awful state but also not to let exercise get out of control. I have see many people who try to build strength beyond what is needed or their bodies could handle. Rather than getting healthier, they are limping around with injuries from their excercise. A good cautionary tale was just in the NYT about how yoga can wreck your body. Well, it's off to the gym now for my next round of torture.