The Big Four

Although I do not have any authority in the health and wellness community (yet) I am sometimes asked by friends, family and acquaintances what they can do to lose weight and improve their health. I used to think I had this question all figured out back when I was in nutrition school, but the more I learn, the less I feel I know. Many people out there in the health field will say things like "it's simple" and "we've got it all figured out people just need to stop being lazy and follow our advice." Newsflash: it's not simple, it's very complicated actually and the best approach to health for each person needs to be individualized based on their own environment, genetics, hormones and epigenetics. A lot of the advice out there are guidelines for the masses and doesn't take into consideration inter-variability between individuals. There is a spectrum to how people respond to many different treatments and stimuli. If you look at coffee, people have known for a long time that some people are more sensitive to caffeine than others and there exists a spectrum where some people are very sensitive, some people are not very sensitive and then most other people fall somewhere in the middle. Coffee has been shown to be high in antioxidants and actually accounts for a majority of all antioxidants consumed by Americans each year. This is great news for a country so in love with their cups o' joe, but they're finding now that there is a spectrum of responses to this antioxidant capacity as well. Antioxidants is something we like to think we just automatically get from eating (and drinking) healthy things, but it turns out even that may depend on your genetics.

While optimal health may depend on many things and be highly individualized there are improvements everyone can make no matter who you are or what your environment, genetics and epigenetics look like. The four main areas of improvement are: sleep, stress management, diet and physical activity. This is not a comprehensive list but these four areas are almost guaranteed to help you no matter what your own personal health status may be.

Many people do not get enough high quality sleep and this can affect almost every other aspect of life including mental and physical performance, immunity, energy, weight management, stress reduction and many more. Artificial lights and overuse of stimulants for energy has thrown off our natural circadian rhythm and negatively affected sleep quality. Because of this most people are now sleep deprived. Fitness and nutrition expert Shawn Stevenson wrote a great book on the importance of sleep and 21 tips on how to sleep better called Sleep Smarter. He also has a great health and wellness podcast called the model health show and he discusses these tips in episodes 4, 5 and 6.

While we do not face many of the stresses our cavemen ancestors faced we have our own, arguably worse mountain of stressors to contend with in modern day society and many people believe we aren't wired to handle the amount and types of stresses we face every day. During caveman times if you saw a lion running after you, your body would release a stress response that would help you run away from danger. Now we still elicit that same stress response but don't have the same release of running away from danger. This chronic stimulation from driving in traffic, dealing with passive aggressive abuse from our boss at work, bills, busy schedules and so on, without a possible escape or release has been proven to be terrible for our health on many levels. Finding ways to mitigate this stress is no easy task but is something we must be conscious of because we all deal with it on a daily basis. Breathing exercises and meditation are a great way to take action and become mindful of what is causing us the most stress and how to fight back.

Diet is one of the obvious choices for improving health and something I have been interested in for a long time. Like I  mentioned earlier, the optimal diet for each person is highly individualized and takes a great amount of effort to determine. Furthermore, there is no one diet that is best for someone throughout their entire life. As we age, the environment around us changes, our health improves or declines and our optimal diet changes. Fortunately, in the theme of keeping things simple, there are easy steps to help improve diet. One of the things I have found most empowering is learning how to cook and prepare my own meals. In doing this you begin to take control of what you're eating and better monitor what works and what doesn't work to improve your health. Another big and simple tip is to eat real, whole foods. While you're at the grocery store picking out foods to help you start to prepare your own meals you might as well stick to the outside of the grocery store. Eat things that don't have a label and aren't packaged and processed. The switch to highly processed and commercial foods has been terrible to human health. Earlier in this century, food companies thought they could use technology to man make foods for us that are cheaper and better than the way nature does it. We're now finding out this was completely wrong and the system of digesting and processing food is very complex and using technology to mimic what nature has already done so well isn't worth it. We evolved along with the world around us and if we stick to eating whole and natural foods our bodies will know what to do with them and handle the rest.

It is very common in the world we live in to have your day look something like this: Sit in the car, drive to work, sit in the cubicle on the computer all day, sit in the car on the drive home, sit at the dinner table, sit on the couch watching TV until bedtime. As humans we weren't designed for this much sitting, that's why the new phrase "sitting is the new smoking" has been coined because it's bad for our bodies to be stuck in this one position for so long. On the same side of the coin a typical day at the beginning of the industrial revolution before cars and cubicles looked like this: walk to work, spend all day standing at a conveyor belt, walk home. During this time many people suffered injuries from standing too much and that's why they always said "standing is the new smoking." Not really because they weren't that clever back then and also they didn't realize smoking was bad yet but I think you get the point. Probably what people should be saying is"static positioning is the new smoking." Our bodies are designed to be moving around all day not stuck in these predetermined postures one way or another. It's important to stay active and moving throughout the day and constantly changing your position. Standing, walking and moderate sitting should be part of everyone's daily routine to keep our body guessing and our overall activity level high. Notice I haven't mentioned actual exercise yet. This doesn't mean exercise isn't important but it is also important to make sure we're staying active the other 23 hours of the day when we're not in the gym.

This is certainly not a comprehensive list of improvements to make to help improve your health. This is just a short long-winded introduction based on my own thoughts and experiences on these four aspects of health and wellness. I hope to dive deeper and learn more about each of these aspects of health and post about them in the future.

Stay healthy San Diego,

-Devin

Links

Coffee antioxidants

http://phys.org/news6067.html

Sleep epidemic

http://www.cdc.gov/features/dssleep/

Shawn Stevenson

http://theshawnstevensonmodel.com/

Cooking websites

http://civilizedcavemancooking.com/

http://paleoleap.com/

"Sitting is the new smoking"

http://sittingissmoking.com/

       

Honest N-of-one

Hello there everyone!

I wanted to start this blog as a way to organize my thoughts and share what I have learned about health, nutrition and exercise over the past year or so. I have always been interested in nutrition and exercise, I even got a masters in biochemical and molecular nutrition. I'll wait while you're impressed for a second, I know that sounds super impressive. But to be honest (and as I'll explain later honesty will be a theme of this blog as you may have guessed from the title) I didn't feel like I had learned much about nutrition when I left graduate school. I learned a lot about biochemistry and I had been given facts about nutrition and looked at tons of conflicting studies that just left me confused.

About a year ago, thanks to Joe Rogan, I started listening to podcasts. I currently work as a lab tech in a research lab and there's a lot of repetitive pipetting which is a great time to listen to podcasts and learn a little something or maybe have a laugh. I knew I wanted to listen to podcasts related to health, nutrition and exercise since that's what I'm interested in but it seemed like all the top ranked nutrition podcasts were all paleo related. I had heard of the paleo diet before and I was like ""no thank you that's the dumbest diet I've ever heard." Eventually I gave in and started listening, albeit begrudgingly at first, to some of the paleo podcasts. After a few months of hearing a lot of the same messages over and over again and thinking through the concepts in the context of what I had learned in the past I knew there must be something to this whole paleo, ancestral approach to things.

This past September I moved into a new apartment and I decided to turn over a new leaf. I decided to start cooking the majority of my meals and even started bringing my lunch into work. After doing that, I decided to start eating a more paleo-like diet and experimenting with what made me feel good, look good and have more energy (these are three things I think we can all agree we'd like from a diet and a lifestyle, right?). In later posts I'll share what some of those things I learned and tried are but for now I just wanted to explain the title of this blog and my current philosophy about what it takes to take control of you health and become the best version of yourself you possibly can be. "Current" is the key word in that last sentence because as I learn new things I'm always changing and  adjusting my views and game plans.

In science, we carry out experiments to help answer questions about the population on the whole. Since it's impossible to carry out a study on the entire population, we use a smaller subset of people in the experiment to make predictions about what that will mean for the population as a whole. The people participating in the study is known as the sample size or often abbreviated as n. In a drug study with 100 people, if half receive the drug being tested and the other half receive a placebo then the n=50 for each group. This is a way over simplification of study design but it's just to explain why I named the blog what I did. Generally speaking, in a study, the larger the n the stronger the power of the study which allows you to make better predictions about the population.

Why then would I call this blog honest N-of-one? Isn't an n=1 just about the worst you can do without having no experiment at all? Actually the answer is quite the opposite. At the end of the day, all the studies you hear are just averages and they can only give generalized information that may or may not apply to you. Ultimately, you have to take steps to take control of your health and decide what works best for you. There could be 100 studies saying a certain food is good for you, but if you eat it and it makes you throw up every time then it may not be a good idea to eat that food. People will always say "I could never eat that" or "I could never stop eating that" but the truth is you really never know until you try it. The second half of being an honest N-of-one beyond experimenting with yourself, is being honest with yourself. There are a lot of people, companies, organizations out there that will lie to you because they are pushing an agenda. Don't join them and start lying to yourself, do yourself a favor and be honest about what actually makes you feel good and helps you live a better life. The point behind honest N-of-one is to go out there and take control of your health constantly learning new things about yourself along the way. Your own personal N-of-one experiment (also known as life) is the most important experiment, by far, to living a happy and healthy life.

'Til Next Time,

-Devin