I'm really just writing this for myself, but you're welcome to read it since you clicked on the thread and everything. I think it's good to write it down and post it publicly just to help me with motivation and accountability.
From the time I ended chemo in February up until the start of football season in September, I was living an extremely healthy lifestyle. I've slacked off quite a bit since September, but I'm ready to get back on the right path.
I think the most important elements of living healthy are diet, movement, and sleep. Here are my resolutions for 2018 based on everything I know about those subjects.
1. Diet
Quantity and quality both matter, and are related. It's way easier to pig out on processed foods than on whole foods. I can eat a 1000-calorie pint of ice cream in a sitting, no problem. A 1000-calorie serving of boiled potatoes would be over three pounds' worth. Not going to happen in one sitting. Regarding appetite regulation, I highly recommend Stephan Guyenet's The Hungry Brain. The bottom line is that processed foods, in comparison to whole foods, usually have a lot of added sugar, oil, and salt, with much of the fiber removed. This promotes overeating in multiple ways. See the book for details.
My plan: I'm going to eat three basic meals: my master stew, oatmeal with fruit, and salad. In addition, I'll have a few different snacks and beverages. Having the same thing repeatedly makes preparation simpler (I can make a big batch of my stew once a week), and the limited variety increases satiety. Moreover, I'm hitting all the foods that are widely considered to be the most nutritious.
I looked at the most highly recommended foods from six sources that I consider to be reputable: Examine.com, Health.com, WebMD, SuperfoodsRX, AuthorityNutrition, and CancerCenter. The lists ranged from just four foods (Examine.com) to 23 foods (SuperfoodsRx). The foods and the total number of times they appear on the lists are enumerated below. Spinach or kale (I lumped them together) are the winners, appearing on all six.
Legend:
a = it's in my master stew
b = it's in my oatmeal with fruit
c = it's in my salad
d = it's one of my snacks
e = it's in one of my beverages
List of most nutritious foods
Kale-Spinach - 6 (ac)
Dark Berries - 5 (b)
Salmon or other fish - 5 (ac)
Beans - 4 (a)
Garlic - 4 (ac)
Broccoli - 3 (a)
Oats - 3 (b)
Tea - 3 (e)
Oranges - 3 (d)
Tomatoes - 3 (ac)
Apples - 2 (bc)
Pumpkin - 2
Chocolate - 2 (e)
Honey - 2 (be)
Seaweed - 2 (a)
Soy - 2
Turkey - 2 (c)
Walnuts - 2 (c)
Cauliflower - 1 (a)
Eggs - 1 (ac)
Ginger - 1 (c)
Lentils - 1 (a)
Brussels Sprouts - 1
Apricots - 1 (b)
Avocados - 1 (c)
Beef - 1 (d)
Cabbage - 1 (c)
Chickpeas - 1 (c)
Cinnamon - 1 (b)
Coconut - 1
Cod Liver - 1
Figs - 1
Kiwi - 1
Liver - 1 (d)
Olive Oil - 1 (c)
Onions - 1 (ac)
Pomegranates - 1
Sweet Potato - 1 (d)
Spirulina - 1 (e)
I'm hitting everything that appears more than once except soy and pumpkin. Maybe I'll try to work in a pumpkin spice soy latte every once in a while.
Meal #1 - Master Stew
My stew recipe changes a little each time I make it, but this is pretty representative. I recently tried the dry chopping method for the potatoes and onions in the Vitamix, which makes it go much faster.
5 lbs of white potatoes, diced.
3 lbs of onions, diced.
48 oz of chicken or beef bone broth (usually 24 oz of each).
2-3 lbs of fresh tomatoes, blended (or can use a 16 oz jar or two of cantina-style salsa).
1 bag Bob's Red Mill dried 13 bean soup (29 oz)
10 oz baby kale or spinach (2 pre-washed packages)
Handful of chopped mushrooms (prefer to include shiitake or maitake) (usually dried or frozen)
1 lb can of salmon
1 tin of sardines
2-3 cups of fresh or frozen chopped broccoli and/or cauliflower
1 bag of frozen artichoke hearts
1 cup of water, or however much it takes to make things liquid enough to actually stir.
2-3 bulbs of minced garlic (usually blended with tomatoes).
A few jalapenos or other peppers
A few pinches of dried seaweed.
A teaspoon or so each of turmeric and black pepper.
Sriracha to taste.
Put everything in a stock pot and heat while occasionally stirring until everything is kind of soft. (It's usually the peas and lentils that take the longest, so I add them first [after the broth].)
By my calculations, that's about 8,323 calories of stew. Broken into 12 servings of about 693 calories each, each serving should have about 100g carbohydrate (including 31g fiber), 18g fat, and 35g protein. I sometimes eat it cold out of the refrigerator. If I reheat a serving of it, I'll usually stir in an egg yolk (not included in nutritional info). I'll sometimes also add some chopped avocado.
It's extremely filling in terms of satiety per calorie, and it tastes good.
Meal #2 - Oatmeal with fruit, nuts, cinnamon, and honey
Self-explanatory. Fruit can be fresh, frozen, or dried. When in a hurry, I replace oatmeal with almond-coconut milk, so it's basically cold cereal made of nuts, honey, and fruit.
Meal #3 - Salad
In addition to salad greens, I like adding onions, tomatoes, olives, walnuts, almonds, sauerkraut, and garlic, and either turkey, salmon, or sardines. My dressing often consists of mixing together hummus, salsa, guacamole, an egg yolk, lemon juice, and a little anchovy paste. It's really good dressing that can be eaten with a spoon even if there's no salad around.
Snacks
1. Fresh fruit, especially oranges or tangerines, but really anything.
2. Baked sweet potatoes, plain (can bake a few pounds at once and store them in the refrigerator -- eat cold or reheat in microwave). (I don't eat the skin of sweet potatoes, as I would with white potatoes.)
3. Epic beef liver bites.
Beverges
1. Water.
2. Mushroom matcha.
3. Mushroom cacao.
4. The two supplements I take are creatine monohydrate and spirulina, which I take together once a day with a glass of water. [2/13/18 Edit: I’m no longer taking any supplements.]
Eating out
Usually there's an option like an ahi salad or something, but whatever. This is the time to live a little; just try to be semi-reasonable.
Fasting
I'll also do some water-only fasts occasionally.
2. Movement
I have no intention of joining a gym. I prefer a sidewalk to the treadmill, a bicycle to the stationary bike, and pushups to the bench press. Moreover, I don't really like the mindset of going to the gym for an hour or two and thinking that's all the movement I need. A 90-minute workout is to healthy movement what a vitamin pill is to a healthy diet. (That's Katy Bowman's analogy <-- awesome book!) It's beneficial in some contexts, but it's really not sufficient in itself. My intention is to move as much as possible throughout the day.
The single best idea I've come across is Max Shank’s five-minute flow. Shank has a series of videos on it for about $60 -- they are quite good, but also completely unnecessary. The idea is to just move around in an improvised way for five minutes as soon as you wake up in the morning. Use dance movements, yoga movements, calisthenics movements, animal movements (crawling, etc.), somersaults, cartwheels, rolling, stretching -- whatever pops into your head and feels good at the time. Put on a song that lasts about five-minutes and keep moving while the song is still playing. It's hard to overstate how much better it makes me feel throughout the whole day afterwards, and it's just five minutes. Extremely efficient in terms of benefit-per-minute.
Another thing that I think is very worthwhile is doing something like 100 pushups a day. It's become popular as a 30-day challenge, but there's no reason to do it for only 30 days. Do it every day until you're 90. Do a few pushups at a time throughout the day -- 10 x 10 or 5 x 20 or whatever you're comfortable with. And use the exact same principle to hang from a pull-up bar many time a day for 30-45 seconds at a time (or whatever you can do). Or if you can do pull-ups, do a few of those 10 or 20 times a day.
Some of this is easier for me than it would be for other people because I work mostly from home. I have a pull-up bar in my bedroom and I don't have to worry about looking funny at "work" if I stop do to a few push-ups or whatever once or twice per hour.
I also carry around a kettlebell from room to room with me. If I'm going from my bedroom to the kitchen, or from the kitchen to the bathroom, I'm carrying a kettlebell with me. A relatively heavy one as if it were a suitcase, or a relatively light one as if it were a tray full of drinks. (And throughout this post, when I say "I do X," what I mean is that I've done X sporadically at certain points in the past, but I'm planning to do X consistently in 2018.)
I also got rid of my desk chair. The surface of my desk is about 18 inches off the ground, so I sit on the floor to work. Unlike with sitting in a chair, sitting on the floor becomes uncomfortable if you stay in the same position for a long time, so without even thinking about it, I'm shifting around pretty frequently -- from sitting cross-legged, to squatting, to kneeling, to sitting in a hurdler-stretch position, to sitting in a lopsided position (where I spend the most time because it's the most comfortable for me). I started doing this in February and I needed several cushions at first. A meditation cushion that's maybe 8 inches high for my butt, on top of another, wider cushion that's about 3-inches high for my legs and feet. I was way too inflexible to sit on the floor in any reasonable position without some elevation from a cushion. But I eventually took some of the stuffing out of the taller cushion, then ditched it completely when that was comfortable, then ditched the other one as well, and now I sit on a yoga mat. I'm quite happy with the change because not only have I gotten more flexible without consciously working on it, but it also does keep me moving every few minutes throughout the entire day. Also, getting up and down off the ground 30-50 times a day is worthwhile in itself. It's like doing 50 air squats a day without making any conscious effort to do so, or even being aware of it.
Finally, I try to make my more prolonged movements either utilitarian or fun. By utilitarian, I mean walking or biking to get somewhere. If I need to go to the store or the bank or something, I intend to walk or ride my bike as often as possible instead of driving. By fun, I mean just for the pleasure of taking a leisurely bike ride, playing basketball with friends, doing yoga, etc. One of my favorite things to do is to walk down to the beach and crawl over the tide-pool rocks before playing in the ocean. Crawling on all fours is great, and the rocks on the beach are perfect for it. Jumping in the ocean is always invigorating and relaxing at the same time. I should do this at least four times a week. It combines so many worthwhile things: being in the sun, moving, being in nature, and having fun. I could try to do all of those things separately, but doing them all at the same time seems better.
Some of you may enjoy working out, but I really hate regimented workouts. So I need to get myself to move around without doing anything that actually seems like a workout.
Earlier this year, I was doing something that resembled a workout: a calisthenics circuit where I did upper-body push, lower-body pull, core, upper-body pull, lower-body push, core, repeat. For example, here are three cycles of those six categories:
Push-ups
Kettlebell deadlifts
Ab roller
Chin-ups
Goblet squats
plank
Kettlebell presses
Kettlebell swings
Back bridge
Pull-ups
Lunges
Medicine ball twists
Dips
One-legged deadlifts
Kettlebell juggling
Bent-over rows
Uneven squats w/ medicine ball
Side plank on forearm
Turkish getups (its own category)
I have a power station (pull-up bar, dips handles) in my bedroom with some kettlebells and other small bits of equipment. I haven't decided whether I want to get back into doing actual workouts, though. I'm just putting that calisthenics circuit here as a possibility in case I decide to pick it back up.
3. Sleep.
I love sleep, which is convenient, because it's really good for you. My (probably unrealistic) goal is to consistently be in bed by nine and asleep by ten. I got these goofy orange glasses to wear once the sun goes down. My room is dark. I'll keep this section short because I'm tired of writing, and sleep isn't terribly complicated. But you know I can't not be weird about stuff, so I got rid of my bed for reasons similar to getting rid of my chair. I sleep on the floor (on a rubber mat). It took about a week to get used to, but after that it's been great and I have no intention of going back to a mattress.
I'll post updates from time to time with changes I make to this approach as I go.
From the time I ended chemo in February up until the start of football season in September, I was living an extremely healthy lifestyle. I've slacked off quite a bit since September, but I'm ready to get back on the right path.
I think the most important elements of living healthy are diet, movement, and sleep. Here are my resolutions for 2018 based on everything I know about those subjects.
1. Diet
Quantity and quality both matter, and are related. It's way easier to pig out on processed foods than on whole foods. I can eat a 1000-calorie pint of ice cream in a sitting, no problem. A 1000-calorie serving of boiled potatoes would be over three pounds' worth. Not going to happen in one sitting. Regarding appetite regulation, I highly recommend Stephan Guyenet's The Hungry Brain. The bottom line is that processed foods, in comparison to whole foods, usually have a lot of added sugar, oil, and salt, with much of the fiber removed. This promotes overeating in multiple ways. See the book for details.
My plan: I'm going to eat three basic meals: my master stew, oatmeal with fruit, and salad. In addition, I'll have a few different snacks and beverages. Having the same thing repeatedly makes preparation simpler (I can make a big batch of my stew once a week), and the limited variety increases satiety. Moreover, I'm hitting all the foods that are widely considered to be the most nutritious.
I looked at the most highly recommended foods from six sources that I consider to be reputable: Examine.com, Health.com, WebMD, SuperfoodsRX, AuthorityNutrition, and CancerCenter. The lists ranged from just four foods (Examine.com) to 23 foods (SuperfoodsRx). The foods and the total number of times they appear on the lists are enumerated below. Spinach or kale (I lumped them together) are the winners, appearing on all six.
Legend:
a = it's in my master stew
b = it's in my oatmeal with fruit
c = it's in my salad
d = it's one of my snacks
e = it's in one of my beverages
List of most nutritious foods
Kale-Spinach - 6 (ac)
Dark Berries - 5 (b)
Salmon or other fish - 5 (ac)
Beans - 4 (a)
Garlic - 4 (ac)
Broccoli - 3 (a)
Oats - 3 (b)
Tea - 3 (e)
Oranges - 3 (d)
Tomatoes - 3 (ac)
Apples - 2 (bc)
Pumpkin - 2
Chocolate - 2 (e)
Honey - 2 (be)
Seaweed - 2 (a)
Soy - 2
Turkey - 2 (c)
Walnuts - 2 (c)
Cauliflower - 1 (a)
Eggs - 1 (ac)
Ginger - 1 (c)
Lentils - 1 (a)
Brussels Sprouts - 1
Apricots - 1 (b)
Avocados - 1 (c)
Beef - 1 (d)
Cabbage - 1 (c)
Chickpeas - 1 (c)
Cinnamon - 1 (b)
Coconut - 1
Cod Liver - 1
Figs - 1
Kiwi - 1
Liver - 1 (d)
Olive Oil - 1 (c)
Onions - 1 (ac)
Pomegranates - 1
Sweet Potato - 1 (d)
Spirulina - 1 (e)
I'm hitting everything that appears more than once except soy and pumpkin. Maybe I'll try to work in a pumpkin spice soy latte every once in a while.
Meal #1 - Master Stew
My stew recipe changes a little each time I make it, but this is pretty representative. I recently tried the dry chopping method for the potatoes and onions in the Vitamix, which makes it go much faster.
5 lbs of white potatoes, diced.
3 lbs of onions, diced.
48 oz of chicken or beef bone broth (usually 24 oz of each).
2-3 lbs of fresh tomatoes, blended (or can use a 16 oz jar or two of cantina-style salsa).
1 bag Bob's Red Mill dried 13 bean soup (29 oz)
10 oz baby kale or spinach (2 pre-washed packages)
Handful of chopped mushrooms (prefer to include shiitake or maitake) (usually dried or frozen)
1 lb can of salmon
1 tin of sardines
2-3 cups of fresh or frozen chopped broccoli and/or cauliflower
1 bag of frozen artichoke hearts
1 cup of water, or however much it takes to make things liquid enough to actually stir.
2-3 bulbs of minced garlic (usually blended with tomatoes).
A few jalapenos or other peppers
A few pinches of dried seaweed.
A teaspoon or so each of turmeric and black pepper.
Sriracha to taste.
Put everything in a stock pot and heat while occasionally stirring until everything is kind of soft. (It's usually the peas and lentils that take the longest, so I add them first [after the broth].)
By my calculations, that's about 8,323 calories of stew. Broken into 12 servings of about 693 calories each, each serving should have about 100g carbohydrate (including 31g fiber), 18g fat, and 35g protein. I sometimes eat it cold out of the refrigerator. If I reheat a serving of it, I'll usually stir in an egg yolk (not included in nutritional info). I'll sometimes also add some chopped avocado.
It's extremely filling in terms of satiety per calorie, and it tastes good.
Meal #2 - Oatmeal with fruit, nuts, cinnamon, and honey
Self-explanatory. Fruit can be fresh, frozen, or dried. When in a hurry, I replace oatmeal with almond-coconut milk, so it's basically cold cereal made of nuts, honey, and fruit.
Meal #3 - Salad
In addition to salad greens, I like adding onions, tomatoes, olives, walnuts, almonds, sauerkraut, and garlic, and either turkey, salmon, or sardines. My dressing often consists of mixing together hummus, salsa, guacamole, an egg yolk, lemon juice, and a little anchovy paste. It's really good dressing that can be eaten with a spoon even if there's no salad around.
Snacks
1. Fresh fruit, especially oranges or tangerines, but really anything.
2. Baked sweet potatoes, plain (can bake a few pounds at once and store them in the refrigerator -- eat cold or reheat in microwave). (I don't eat the skin of sweet potatoes, as I would with white potatoes.)
3. Epic beef liver bites.
Beverges
1. Water.
2. Mushroom matcha.
3. Mushroom cacao.
4. The two supplements I take are creatine monohydrate and spirulina, which I take together once a day with a glass of water. [2/13/18 Edit: I’m no longer taking any supplements.]
Eating out
Usually there's an option like an ahi salad or something, but whatever. This is the time to live a little; just try to be semi-reasonable.
Fasting
I'll also do some water-only fasts occasionally.
2. Movement
I have no intention of joining a gym. I prefer a sidewalk to the treadmill, a bicycle to the stationary bike, and pushups to the bench press. Moreover, I don't really like the mindset of going to the gym for an hour or two and thinking that's all the movement I need. A 90-minute workout is to healthy movement what a vitamin pill is to a healthy diet. (That's Katy Bowman's analogy <-- awesome book!) It's beneficial in some contexts, but it's really not sufficient in itself. My intention is to move as much as possible throughout the day.
The single best idea I've come across is Max Shank’s five-minute flow. Shank has a series of videos on it for about $60 -- they are quite good, but also completely unnecessary. The idea is to just move around in an improvised way for five minutes as soon as you wake up in the morning. Use dance movements, yoga movements, calisthenics movements, animal movements (crawling, etc.), somersaults, cartwheels, rolling, stretching -- whatever pops into your head and feels good at the time. Put on a song that lasts about five-minutes and keep moving while the song is still playing. It's hard to overstate how much better it makes me feel throughout the whole day afterwards, and it's just five minutes. Extremely efficient in terms of benefit-per-minute.
Another thing that I think is very worthwhile is doing something like 100 pushups a day. It's become popular as a 30-day challenge, but there's no reason to do it for only 30 days. Do it every day until you're 90. Do a few pushups at a time throughout the day -- 10 x 10 or 5 x 20 or whatever you're comfortable with. And use the exact same principle to hang from a pull-up bar many time a day for 30-45 seconds at a time (or whatever you can do). Or if you can do pull-ups, do a few of those 10 or 20 times a day.
Some of this is easier for me than it would be for other people because I work mostly from home. I have a pull-up bar in my bedroom and I don't have to worry about looking funny at "work" if I stop do to a few push-ups or whatever once or twice per hour.
I also carry around a kettlebell from room to room with me. If I'm going from my bedroom to the kitchen, or from the kitchen to the bathroom, I'm carrying a kettlebell with me. A relatively heavy one as if it were a suitcase, or a relatively light one as if it were a tray full of drinks. (And throughout this post, when I say "I do X," what I mean is that I've done X sporadically at certain points in the past, but I'm planning to do X consistently in 2018.)
I also got rid of my desk chair. The surface of my desk is about 18 inches off the ground, so I sit on the floor to work. Unlike with sitting in a chair, sitting on the floor becomes uncomfortable if you stay in the same position for a long time, so without even thinking about it, I'm shifting around pretty frequently -- from sitting cross-legged, to squatting, to kneeling, to sitting in a hurdler-stretch position, to sitting in a lopsided position (where I spend the most time because it's the most comfortable for me). I started doing this in February and I needed several cushions at first. A meditation cushion that's maybe 8 inches high for my butt, on top of another, wider cushion that's about 3-inches high for my legs and feet. I was way too inflexible to sit on the floor in any reasonable position without some elevation from a cushion. But I eventually took some of the stuffing out of the taller cushion, then ditched it completely when that was comfortable, then ditched the other one as well, and now I sit on a yoga mat. I'm quite happy with the change because not only have I gotten more flexible without consciously working on it, but it also does keep me moving every few minutes throughout the entire day. Also, getting up and down off the ground 30-50 times a day is worthwhile in itself. It's like doing 50 air squats a day without making any conscious effort to do so, or even being aware of it.
Finally, I try to make my more prolonged movements either utilitarian or fun. By utilitarian, I mean walking or biking to get somewhere. If I need to go to the store or the bank or something, I intend to walk or ride my bike as often as possible instead of driving. By fun, I mean just for the pleasure of taking a leisurely bike ride, playing basketball with friends, doing yoga, etc. One of my favorite things to do is to walk down to the beach and crawl over the tide-pool rocks before playing in the ocean. Crawling on all fours is great, and the rocks on the beach are perfect for it. Jumping in the ocean is always invigorating and relaxing at the same time. I should do this at least four times a week. It combines so many worthwhile things: being in the sun, moving, being in nature, and having fun. I could try to do all of those things separately, but doing them all at the same time seems better.
Some of you may enjoy working out, but I really hate regimented workouts. So I need to get myself to move around without doing anything that actually seems like a workout.
Earlier this year, I was doing something that resembled a workout: a calisthenics circuit where I did upper-body push, lower-body pull, core, upper-body pull, lower-body push, core, repeat. For example, here are three cycles of those six categories:
Push-ups
Kettlebell deadlifts
Ab roller
Chin-ups
Goblet squats
plank
Kettlebell presses
Kettlebell swings
Back bridge
Pull-ups
Lunges
Medicine ball twists
Dips
One-legged deadlifts
Kettlebell juggling
Bent-over rows
Uneven squats w/ medicine ball
Side plank on forearm
Turkish getups (its own category)
I have a power station (pull-up bar, dips handles) in my bedroom with some kettlebells and other small bits of equipment. I haven't decided whether I want to get back into doing actual workouts, though. I'm just putting that calisthenics circuit here as a possibility in case I decide to pick it back up.
3. Sleep.
I love sleep, which is convenient, because it's really good for you. My (probably unrealistic) goal is to consistently be in bed by nine and asleep by ten. I got these goofy orange glasses to wear once the sun goes down. My room is dark. I'll keep this section short because I'm tired of writing, and sleep isn't terribly complicated. But you know I can't not be weird about stuff, so I got rid of my bed for reasons similar to getting rid of my chair. I sleep on the floor (on a rubber mat). It took about a week to get used to, but after that it's been great and I have no intention of going back to a mattress.
I'll post updates from time to time with changes I make to this approach as I go.
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