Schalk, Author at Happy Healthy Wealthy Productive Sustainable

Schalk November 27, 2022

2.7 - Financial Freedom electricity, energy, heating, insulation, money, savings

10 Practical Steps to Dramatically Lower Energy Bills

Save money, the economy, and the environment all at once

Energy bills are attracting bewildered stares across the world | Modified Pexels image by Mikhail Nilov

The global economy is teetering on the brink of recession thanks to rampant inflation, driven mainly by high energy prices.

Aside from pressuring household budgets around the world, today’s energy market turmoil is linked to many far scarier problems. Poverty alleviation is stagnating, socioeconomic instability is rising, geopolitical relations are fraying, and environmental protection is sliding down the priority list.

So, is there a way to address all these problems at once? Certainly: Help the top 10% of world citizens (those living on more than 1200 $/month) who are responsible for half of global emissions save loads of energy (and money).

The good news is that most rich-world households can rapidly reduce their energy consumption. If you’re interested in understanding exactly how such dramatic savings work, here is an extensive article explaining the science in detail. If not, the following top 10 list is all you need.

1. Air Flow Management

Space heating/cooling is the main driver of household energy bills in most parts of the world. And a large fraction of all that energy is wasted on heating/cooling unnecessarily large amounts of ambient air.

Every home needs some fresh air flowing through it to maintain healthy air quality, and all this air needs to be heated/cooled to a comfortable indoor temperature. But because we never think about air flow management, the amount of air flowing through our homes is often far too large. To make matters worse, natural air circulation is driven by temperature differences between the inside and the outside. Thus, the amount of unnecessary air we heat or cool naturally increases during times when we need the most heating or cooling, further augmenting the amount of wasted energy.

Awareness of this issue is the most effective route to dramatic energy savings for any household in a region where it often gets very hot or cold. And all you need to deliver this awareness is a simple $100 (or cheaper) home air quality monitor capable of measuring CO2 concentrations.

The aim of the game is to keep indoor CO2 concentrations in the 800–900 ppm range whenever the outside air is considerably hotter or colder than you want it to be inside. If it falls below this range, it means you’re circulating too much air that must be heated/cooled to a comfortable temperature. If it is above this range, it means you’re circulating too little, and poor indoor air quality may be affecting your mental performance.

Many homes have vents that can easily be opened or closed to regulate airflow. Thanks to your air quality monitor, you’ll quickly learn how to manage those vents most effectively to enjoy lower energy bills and better air quality year-round.

If you have an older home, you may find it to be so leaky that you must replace some windows and doors to avoid excessive air circulation. Even though this will be a larger project, it will bring added benefits from improved insulation, as we will discuss in Section 3.

Action steps

Buy an air quality monitor
Learn to regulate your vents to keep CO2 levels at 800–900 ppm

2. Solar Radiation Management

Fun fact: The sun sends as much energy to Earth every hour as the entire human race uses in a year. When it’s cold, we welcome this energy. But when it’s hot, not so much. Thus, it makes good sense to manage solar radiation so that as much of it as possible enters your home when it’s cold and as little as possible enters when it’s hot.

If you live in a cold region, all you can do is ensure that your curtains are never drawn when the sun shines. The slanting winter sun flooding through a large window can save you plenty of heating energy.

Those in hot regions should seriously consider some solar window film. This film reflects most of the sun’s heat so that it never enters your home. Yet, you can still see out the window. Smart blinds are another interesting solution, although they are considerably more expensive.

If you’re feeling a little more ambitious, you may even consider painting your roof white. It will give your home a unique look and reduce your indoor temperature by an impressive 2–5 °C on hot and sunny days.

Action steps

Install window film if you live in a hot country and ensure you let in every bit of sunshine if you live in a cold country
Paint your roof a light shade of you live in a hot country

3. Improved Insulation

Home insulation projects can be rather intimidating, but the right strategy can yield good returns for relatively little effort and cost.

If you have one, loft insulation is the most practical and cost-effective option. It’s not a major operation, and it will probably pay for itself within a year in the current environment of high energy prices.

Modern double or triple-paned windows are the next step, especially if your windows are old and your heating/cooling bill is rather high. Installing new windows is a bigger and more expensive operation, but it can be profitable even without the energy savings because it will significantly increase the value of your home.

Action steps

Install loft insulation if possible
Install modern multi-paned windows if your heating/cooling bill is high and your windows are old

4. Thermally Regulated Living Spaces

One of the biggest reasons why heating/cooling bills are so large across the world is that we try to keep our oversized homes within an unnaturally narrow temperature band. Obviously, unwanted heat exchange with the surroundings will scale directly with the surface area of your home and the temperature difference between inside and outside.

There is little you can do about the heat exchange area other than moving to a smaller place, which will be a step too far for most people. If it is an option, however, moving from a large house to an apartment building is an outstanding way to slash your heating/cooling bills (and your mortgage).

The more practical option is to allow the temperature of your home to follow the outside temperature more freely. Put another way, you should focus more on regulating your own body’s temperature than regulating the temperature of your home.

This is easier and far more comfortable than you might think. Because we tend to spend most of our time within only a small part of our homes, it’s often easy to set up a little temperature-controlled bubble that keeps you comfortable despite larger variations in your home’s temperature. Figure out where those spaces are and set to work creating your own strategic temperature bubbles. Here are some examples applicable to someone spending a lot of time working on a computer in a cold or hot region.

Cold. I live in Norway where I save loads of energy by allowing my indoor temperature to drop to 17 °C (15 °C in the sleeping room) in winter. Yet, I’m writing these words from the most comfortable conditions imaginable with my feet up on a recliner under a comfy duvet in front of a big screen with a cup of hot tea beside me.
Hot. Similar degrees of comfort can be attained in hot regions using a fan (which consumes negligible amounts of energy), a computer chair with a breathable backrest, and plenty of ice-cold drinking water. If you consume your water in the form of ice, the heat absorbed when melting the ice will make it even easier to stay comfortable.

Action steps

Notice where you spend most of your time in the house
Tailor those spaces to keep yourself comfortable over a broader temperature range and adjust the thermostat accordingly

5. Smart Showering

After space heating/cooling, water heating is generally the next-largest contributor to household energy bills. Heating things is very energy intensive in general, and the average rich-world citizen heats crazy amounts of water for bathing/showering.

If you’re in the habit of taking regular baths or long showers, smart showering can save you a surprisingly large amount of energy. Here’s the secret to the smart shower technique: Simply turn off the shower while you’re doing the actual washing, using the water only for a minute of wetting before and a couple of minutes of rinsing afterward.

You’ll be surprised at the practicality of this method. When you wash with the shower off, the soap is not rinsed away instantaneously, allowing you to work up quite an enjoyable lather. Usually, the shower is sufficiently insulated that you won’t get cold when the water is turned off, and if you do get a little chilly, the rinsing step becomes all the more rewarding.

Buying a dedicated low-flow showerhead will further cut your energy bills, not to mention all the water savings.

Action steps

Get into the habit of turning off the shower when washing
Install a low-flow showerhead

6. Hot Water Tank

If you adopt the smart showering technique, the energy required to compensate for gradual heat losses from your water heater will probably be larger than the energy needed to heat the water you use for showering. A good way to limit these losses is to turn down the thermostat on your water heater to 60 °C. This reduced temperature will limit the heat losses while still avoiding risks from dangerous bacterial growth.

If you live in a hot region, heat losses from your water heater are particularly detrimental because they will also heat up your home, causing extra air conditioning load. Consider wrapping an extra layer of insulation around your hot water tank to minimize this double penalty.

Lastly, families living in sunny regions (especially those with sunny winters) can cut their water heating bill close to zero by installing a solar water heater. However, if you have implemented the smart showering technique, turned down the temperature, and insulated your water tank thoroughly, you will need at least four people in the household to use enough hot water to justify the expense of a new solar water heater.

Action steps

Turn down the thermostat of your water heater to 60 °C
Wrap the hot water tank in an extra layer of insulation if you live in a hot region
Larger families in sunny regions can consider a solar water heater

7. Smart Washing and Drying

First thing: Go to your washing machine, dial in the cold setting, and then proceed to forget about it. In the vast majority of cases, your clothes will wash just as clean in cold as in hot water, and avoiding the need to heat your washing will save plenty of energy.

For dishwashing, we need some temperature in the water to remove fatty food residues, but you can still achieve considerable energy savings by always using the cooler eco setting. Don’t worry about the cycle being longer. Reducing the cycle temperature saves far more energy than is consumed by pumping the water around for a longer washing cycle.

Next, please sell your drier. It uses loads of energy to do something nature does for free. If you live in a hot region, you can even gain a substantial additional cooling benefit by hanging your clothes indoors to dry. Water evaporation consumes plenty of heat, so letting the water evaporate from clothes hung indoors will cool your home.

Of course, the reverse is true in cold regions. When you need to heat your home, resist the temptation to dry your clothes in front of the heater. The evaporation of water will consume plenty of additional energy, and it can even cause water damage by condensing on windows or other surfaces if it’s very cold outside.

Action steps

Wash clothes on the cold cycle and dishes on the eco setting
Hang clothes indoors when it’s hot and outdoors when it’s cold (and sell the clothes dryer)

8. LEDs and Energy Saving Mode

Those living in hot regions should immediately upgrade all their lights to LED technology. Inefficient lighting not only consumes more energy; it also heats up your house with all the unnecessary waste heat it produces.

If you live in a cold region, this is less of a problem because the waste heat from inefficient lighting helps heat your home. Still, it’s best to buy LEDs whenever an old lightbulb dies. Their long lifetimes compensate for their higher cost, and they also reduce the waste problems of older CFL bulbs.

And let’s not forget about the most energy-intensive light in our homes: the TV. So, grab your remote, dive into the settings, and ensure that every energy-saving option is active. Most importantly, the screen should dim automatically when ambient lighting becomes low, which also helps protect your eyes. When buying a new TV (or computer screen), please don’t go crazy with the size, and be sure to choose LED technology.

Action steps

Replace all less efficient bulbs with LEDs in hot regions and gradually make this replacement when old bulbs fail in cold regions
Activate the energy-saving options on the TV (and other devices)

9. Smart Cooking

Cooking is another activity that requires energy-intensive heat. But luckily, the amount of food we need to heat for cooking is far less than the amount of water we need to heat for showering. Still, smarter cooking habits can save considerable amounts of energy.

The first smart cooking move is to cook in bulk in the oven. Heating up the oven itself takes plenty of energy, so it pays to cook as much food as possible whenever you have your oven up to temperature. Cooking in bulk and saving some of it for later also saves loads of time in comparison to cooking each meal individually.

Next to all the ethical, health, and environmental reasons, cooking heat demand is another good reason for reducing meat consumption. Meat-rich diets generally require much more cooking than vegetarian diets.

It’s also wise to follow any natural inclination to cook less in summer. When it’s cold, all the heat generated during cooking will help heat your home, but this extra heat is unwelcome on hot days when it only serves to increase your air conditioning load. Besides, a hot kitchen is no fun on a hot summer’s day when cold meals are more appetizing anyway.

Action steps

Cook in bulk and reduce your meat intake as much as possible
Preferably cook more in winter and less in summer

10. Efficient Appliances

Buying a more efficient appliance seems like a very attractive option for cutting energy consumption. We all like new stuff, and if our new stuff is more efficient, we can save energy without having to change our habits.

But the truth is that buying a shiny new appliance is rarely the best solution. More efficient appliances are generally considerably more expensive (which also means they consume more energy during manufacturing), and they often have long payback times. If you’re considering scrapping a perfectly functional older appliance and buying a more efficient new one, know that you’ll probably lose money (and may well be doing more harm than good for the environment).

For any household that has implemented most of the preceding guidelines, the case for more expensive energy-efficient appliances becomes even weaker. When it comes to space heating/cooling and water heating, the guidelines given in Sections 1–6 above will reduce your energy demand so much that an efficient new heat pump, air conditioner, or heat-pump-driven water heater will never pay for itself.

There are at least two exceptions, though. The first is LED lighting mentioned in Section 8, and the second is refrigeration for households in hot regions of the world.

The energy efficiency of fridges and freezers has improved strongly in recent years. In addition, the extra energy consumed by inefficient older fridges causes additional indoor heating, which is OK in cold regions but very much not OK in hot regions. Thus, a new fridge or freezer with a high energy rating can be a viable option for households in hot countries when the current models reach 10–20 years of age.

Action steps

Carefully calculate the payback time before buying a more expensive energy-efficient appliance (especially if your current model is still fully functional)
Consider a new energy-efficient fridge and freezer if you live in a hot region and your current models are 10+ years old

Final Thoughts

The guidelines outlined in the ten sections above were designed to deliver maximum returns in minimum time. To make implementation even easier, they involve no great act of sacrifice or environmental martyrdom.

Aside from the obvious financial benefits, anyone who is clued up with global issues will be rewarded with a warm fuzzy feeling of contribution to the greater good after saving all this energy. Our world seriously needs to conserve energy right now, and if we are to uplift the 87% of world citizens still living on less than 1000 $/month without destroying our natural environment, we’ll need to maintain these savings for decades to come.

Good things can come from crises. If we play it well, the current energy crisis could help millions of people around the world waste far less energy on things that contribute nothing to their welfare. And that will certainly make a powerful contribution toward building a better world.

Schalk September 11, 2022

2.6 - Self Mastery happiness, health, life efficiency, personal development, productivity, sustainability, wealth

The Path to Greater Life Efficiency

Finding health and happiness in a smaller ecological footprint

Here’s an interesting question: If we could get everyone fully invested in one metric of individual success, which metric would do the greatest good?

To me, it would have to be “Life Efficiency,” conveniently estimated using this new online calculator.

Simply put, your Life Efficiency is the number of happy and healthy life years you gain from each dollar of daily spending. It’s built on two basic truths:

We all want happy and healthy lives
The world has a finite amount of productive and ecological capacity for supporting the health and happiness of 8 billion people

As estimated in a previous article, the average rich-world citizen could boost their Life Efficiency by as much as 500% relative to today’s level. In other words, we’re consuming a massive amount of effort and resources for relatively poor returns in health and happiness.

Given that around 6 billion world citizens remain below decent living standards, such waste cannot continue. We must do better.

Six out of every seven world citizens live on less than $1000 a month (the vertical line) and one out of every four on less than $100 a month (please take a moment to imagine what that must be like) | Gapminder

But how should we go about it? Grudgingly give up the things we love for the sake of the natural world and poor communities in faraway countries?

No, that would never work. The human race will always strive for better lives. But there is a solution: We can leverage the intelligent curtailment of wasteful spending as a springboard to happier, healthier, and more productive lives. That’s what Life Efficiency is all about.

The paradigm of building a good life on the foundation of sustainable consumption leads to an intriguing list of interconnected best practices. Let’s take a tour through the list of seven proven pathways to a more Efficient Life.

1. Remember: The Best Things in Life are Free

It’s an old cliche but so very true. Many of the things that give human beings the greatest happiness and the longest lives don’t cost a thing. Sadly, we’ve been losing touch with these basic sources of fulfillment recently, seduced by the instant gratification of social media feeds and all the (mostly useless) stuff their personalized advertising algorithms tell us we need.

Efficient Living requires that we find our way back. Here are some proven paths to health and happiness you can access for free.

Prioritize relationships

Humans are social creatures. It’s hardwired into our beings through millennia of evolution. Thus, even though vegging out in front of Netflix by yourself is far easier, quality relationships will give you far greater health and happiness.

You don’t need many relationships, but you do need a few good ones. Thus, take special care of those dearest to you. Make time for them, and make sure you are 100% present during that time. Aside from the obvious direct benefits of being part of a loving family, the age-old biochemical responses of your body will reward you with a lasting sense of wellbeing.

Get into nature

Spending time in the natural world has been scientifically proven to boost our health and wellbeing. And no, you don’t need to book an expensive trip to some exotic jungle. Regular strolls in your local park will do just fine, perhaps augmented with the occasional trip to the closest bit of untouched nature in your vicinity.

Read a book

So, when was the last time you saw the inside of a library? In our age of ubiquitous digital video, chances are that you can’t even remember. Yet, science is uncovering many ways in which reading benefits our wellbeing. It can even help us live longer. So, pick up a good book and break through the little bit of initial resistance required to get into it. From personal experience, reading in nature takes the experience up another notch.

Sleep

Hustle culture makes sleep sound like wasted time when the truth is that it’s one of life’s healthiest and most enjoyable indulgences. The central importance of sleep to human health is clearer than ever, but it should not be viewed as some sort of medicine to be taken out of necessity.

A contented mind on a personal schedule that prioritizes sleep can derive great pleasure from this activity. See what happens when you replace your evening screen-staring session with a warm shower, some gentle music, possibly some slow yoga and/or a guided meditation, and an earlier bedtime. And when sleep occasionally refuses to come, have a good book standing by.

Create

Humans have an innate desire to create. As we’ll get to in Section 6, the ultimate goal is to shape your occupation into a set of creative activities you would happily do for free, but until that time comes, a fun hobby will do.

Subtract before you add

Finally, a heads-up: Don’t try to force these things into an already overcrowded life. First, make space by scaling down the (often self-sabotaging) ways in which you try to buy happiness today. You know, stuff like digital entertainment, sensationalist media, retail therapy, overeating, and other addictive substances.

If your attempts to make a change for the better leave you feeling overwhelmed, you’ll quickly revert back to these instant-pleasure vices. Be very mindful of this threat, and be sure to subtract before you add.

2. Develop a Deep Interest in Your Family’s Health

The internet and the world’s bookstores are filled with quality health advice capable of adding many good years to our lives. Yet, we’re in the midst of a lifestyle disease epidemic — one of the most vicious destroyers of Life Efficiency. Indeed, our unhealthy habits shorten our lives and make us spend massive amounts of money on reactive healthcare, often to accomplish little more than needlessly prolonging intense suffering.

Lifestyle diseases dominate the global death count | Our World in Data

Reversing this terrible global trend holds the key to rapid permanent improvements in Life Efficiency worldwide. Let’s see how it can be done.

The four pillars

The wealth of information at our disposal makes it clear that excellent personal health rest on four pillars:

Healthy diet: Whole foods, mostly plants, with little or no refined sugar
Regular exercise: The equivalent of at least 7000 steps per day
Enough sleep: Giving the body the amount of sleep it naturally demands
Mild stress: Avoiding the chronic presence of fight-or-flight hormones

There are also more advanced health-promoting practices that stimulate the body’s natural repair mechanisms to extend healthy lifespan. These include fasting, occasional vigorous exercise, and hot/cold exposure.

A self-sustaining interest

Although I have written extensively on the topics of diet, exercise, sleep, and mental health, this article is not the place for details on how these four pillars can be securely planted. Instead, I want to condense matters into two fundamental guiding principles:

Strive to build an environment where healthy actions happen naturally
Do all you can to kindle a genuine interest in the field of personal health

Everyone’s situation is unique, so we all need to follow subtly different paths to sustainable healthy living. And the key to finding your own path is to develop a lasting interest in the fascinating challenge of building a healthy environment for yourself and those you care about. Spark this interest, and the rest will take care of itself.

Efficient Living promotes health

As stated earlier, our lifestyle disease epidemic is the very antithesis of Life Efficiency. Thus, it follows that a focus on building an Efficient Life would naturally promote healthy living.

Here, it’s important to understand how unhealthy habits reinforce each other. For example, someone who is stressed or suffering from chronic sleep deprivation is more likely to consume unhealthy food, while those suffering from obesity and other effects of a poor diet are less likely to exercise and more likely to develop self-sustaining mental health problems.

Life Efficiency practices will interrupt such self-sustaining self-destruct cycles by creating a natural environment for more physical activity, better sleep, and better mental wellbeing. And the relationship goes both ways: Enhanced vitality and awareness cultivated by a healthy lifestyle make it easier to build a truly Efficient Life. Activating this virtuous cycle is highly recommended.

3. Forget About the Joneses

Be honest now: How many of the things you own were bought more for their promise of impressing other people than their practical function? Humanity wastes an astounding amount of effort and resources on this phenomenon of “keeping up with the Joneses.”

Trying to prove your worth to the world through the possessions and experiences you buy is pointless. In fact, it’s beyond pointless — an act of spending more money on lower wellbeing.

“Most strikingly, those who are worst off in society are no longer those on the lowest wage. The worst off will be people with a sufficiently high wage that they are induced into work because of the Keeping up with the Joneses Effect.” | Ulph (2014)

Don’t fall into this trap. Whether your status symbol of choice is a fancy car, a big house, or anything else, it will give you little other than a big debt burden and an even bigger ecological footprint. It’s not worth it.

4. Location, Location, Location

Everyone knows the three most important things to consider when moving house: location, location, and location. But defining what exactly the ideal location means for you is no simple task. There are so many things to consider that rational prioritization can feel impossible.

But what if you simplify it by locating your home solely for the purpose of maximizing Life Efficiency? Let’s see what that might look like.

Car-free living

The typical car-centered suburban lifestyle is another powerful destroyer of Life Efficiency. Indeed, if the location of your home forces you to spend an hour or two each day trapped inside an expensive metal box, navigating stressful and dangerous traffic, it severely handicaps your ability to build an Efficient Life.

The car-free future cannot come soon enough | Images from Wikipedia and Dutchreview.

In contrast, a car-free lifestyle where you are intelligently positioned within safe and convenient walking/cycling distance of everything you need will create a large and immediate boost in Life Efficiency. If you have kids, living in a city where they can safely and independently move around strongly enhances the positive effects of this smart lifestyle choice.

Let’s see how car-free living benefits the three components of Life Efficiency:

Spending: A car is the average consumer’s second-largest expense. Dropping it instantly boosts Life Efficiency and accelerates your journey to the joys of creative freedom (Section 6).
Health: Travelling by human power instead of fossil power uses the body as it was designed to be used, naturally promoting health. No more need to pay a gym for the privilege of running on a treadmill like a hamster.
Wellbeing: No more traffic jams, car maintenance hassles, or money problems from car and gasoline payments.

The unfortunate reality is that car-free living remains outright impossible in many cities, but, as the old wisdom goes; seek, and you shall find. The range of options is expanding, and the vast rewards of a car-free lifestyle are well worth some focused seeking.

Access to nature

As mentioned in the first section, spending a good deal of time in the natural world brings a range of benefits. Unfortunately, accessing nature is difficult for most of the world’s growing urban population.

That’s why nature should be high on your list of things that must be within walking/cycling distance of your home. A safe and well-maintained park is good, but untouched nature is even better.

Luckily, the digital age makes it possible for many workers to avoid regular trips to an office or a busy city center. An increasing number of people can now work from a home office and order most of the goods they require online, greatly expanding the number of suitable locations for their next home.

The autumn view from my favorite reading spot located a mere 10-minute walk from home

If these possibilities are open to you, give them careful consideration. Yes, being trapped in a home office in a noisy inner city apartment is no fun, but I can attest that a home office in a quiet semi-urban neighborhood with nature in your backyard is pretty much the ideal working and living environment.

Living closer to nature can also cut our greatest expense: housing. Property away from the city center is often cheaper and, more importantly, the possibility to step out into the natural world whenever you want makes it easy to live in a smaller home. Thus, nature presents an excellent avenue for building a better life on the basis of intelligently curtailed spending.

Family

If you have a close bond with your family (or some special friends who feel like family), living in close proximity offers a big Life Efficiency boost. Those with young kids can get a particularly large benefit from having their parents nearby. Grandmothers in particular benefit greatly from regular interaction with their grandkids, and most young parents could really use such free and trusted childcare services.

You might even consider joining the reviving trend of the multi-generation household. Having more people under the same roof is also a great way to reduce spending on housing, the #1 expense for most families.

Inspiration

Finding the Life-Efficiency-enhancing creative flow that flips your mind from consumer mode to creator mode (Section 6) will come more naturally when you live in an inspiring environment. Where that inspiring environment can be found will depend entirely on the type of creative expression that speaks to you, but whatever it is, finding the location that houses the people and places most likely to fuel your creative fire is a great idea.

Peer pressure

Aside from locating your home somewhere that allows car-free living, access to nature, close family ties, and natural inspiration, it would also help to become part of a society that already values health and community over wasteful consumerism.

Living among people who lead relatively Efficient Lives will make it considerably easier to maximize your own Life Efficiency. From my experience, the Nordics offer some good possibilities.

Broaden your horizons

When considering the location of your next home, don’t limit your scope to your current city or even your current country. The world offers an almost infinite range of possibilities, many of which will allow you to build a truly Efficient Life. Spending the time and effort required to find the ideal location for your unique life could be the best investment you ever make.

5. Purposefully Approach Financial Freedom

While wastefully spending money in attempts to buy happiness and status will only harm long-term health and happiness, saving and investing money is a different story. Indeed, wealth appears to be a good predictor of happiness and even life expectancy.

Wealth and financial freedom

Clearly, financial security is an important part of a good life. Money worries can be highly stressful and frustrating. Thus, having a solid rainy-day fund and low debt is an important part of wellbeing.

But far greater life satisfaction awaits as your wealth grows. When your investments eventually start yielding returns comparable to your income, a whole new world of possibility shows itself: the world of financial freedom.

Financial freedom is the point where money no longer needs to have any say in the way you spend your time. Most importantly, you get to work more on things you want to do and less on things you have to do. Furthermore, you get to put your wealth to work in investments that align with your values. All this makes financial freedom a very pleasant place to be.

Automate saving and investment

So, why do so few people enjoy financial freedom? Well, the primary reason is that our consumer economy is designed to generate a constantly growing desire for more stuff. Resisting this pull is the key to building wealth. And the best way to do that is to implement a fully automated plan that invests a gradually increasing sum out of your salary the moment it hits your bank account. It must be like it was never even there.

Once this is set up, the next thing to decide is how much you want to save. As illustrated next, the point at which your investment income covers all your spending needs can come surprisingly soon if you save aggressively.

Pathways to financial freedom

For example, the solid blue line in the following graph shows that, if you keep your savings rate at 10% of your growing income, you will have to keep a steady job for the entirety of a 40-year career and scale down significantly in retirement (unless you get a solid state pension). In this scenario, the passive income from your investments only reaches half your spending by the end of your career.

However, if you manage to keep your real (inflation-adjusted) spending constant, you will reach financial freedom halfway through your career (dashed blue line). This timeline can be accelerated strongly through higher savings rates, as indicated by the orange lines.

Illustration of the time required to reach full financial freedom (the point where passive income surpasses the spending needed for a good life) at different savings rates. Solid lines = spending grows with income; dashed lines = spending is kept constant. Assumed real investment returns = 6% and real income growth = 3%.

Efficient Living promotes wealth

Increasing Life Efficiency is all about boosting health and happiness while reducing spending. Thus, Life Efficiency would naturally increase your savings rate and accelerate your journey toward financial freedom.

And once again, it goes both ways. As we’ll see next, financial freedom can be leveraged to strongly increase Life Efficiency.

6. Free Creative Expression

While an automated investment program will help, the very best (and most enjoyable) protection against wasteful consumption is the freedom to spend your days on creative activities you find naturally inspirational. And here’s the good news: With a focus on Life Efficiency, this ideal is much closer than you might think.

The virtuous cycle

Life Efficiency at work creates a virtuous cycle like the one shown below. The more meaning and enjoyment you get from your work, the less you will be tempted by the advertising industry’s false promises of “happiness through consumption.” This, in turn, accelerates your journey toward financial freedom, which holds the key to a naturally inspirational career.

Sadly, most people are stuck in a vicious cycle going the opposite way: Stressful work leads to more attempts to buy happiness, creating debt burdens and spending habits that trap us in soul-killing jobs. This cycle is another renowned destroyer of Life Efficiency around the world. An escape into the virtuous alternative shown above offers a fundamental solution.

Claiming creative freedom

You don’t need to wait until full financial freedom to claim your creative freedom. In fact, it’s safe to start even when you’re only about 20% there.

The idea is to leverage your growing stream of passive income to gradually shape your work into something you do because you want to, not because you have to. There are two main practical avenues:

Ramping down your present level of employment, negotiating that you give up your least enjoyable activities in exchange for a lower salary
Taking a new and more enjoyable job (or even starting your own venture) even though it might pay less

And rest assured: In most cases, the salary you give up will only be temporary because you will naturally create much greater value when working on truly inspirational tasks. More importantly, you won’t even miss the income you temporarily gave up because you’ll be far too busy creating inspirational value to worry about trying to buy happiness.

Taking the first step

Any journey starts with the first step. And this journey’s first step is particularly difficult. I’m sure you can feel deep down that willfully giving up some salary comes about as naturally to us as breathing underwater, even if you fully understand the promise it holds.

But it only takes a few short weeks of discomfort to get this ball rolling. In the context of the rest of your life, these few weeks are well worth it. If done responsibly with the philosophy of Life Efficiency gradually reshaping your spending habits, the risks are small and the potential rewards spectacular.

7. Invest in the Greater Good

As outlined in the previous section, the journey toward free creative expression is a central characteristic of an Efficient Life. This journey marks the life-changing transformation from chasing happiness through consumption to finding lasting purpose in creative expression.

Once this transformation takes hold, we get to enjoy another feature of an Efficient Life: its large productive surpluses.

Creating without immediate reward

While the rest of the world consumes as much (or even more) than they create, those maximizing Life Efficiency will naturally create much more than they consume. The reason is simple: inspired creation is a reward in itself, thereby increasing productive output and reducing the desire to consume.

And that’s where the final test of an Efficient Life emerges: The world rarely offers immediate rewards for truly purposeful work. Instead, it pays those who can satisfy the engineered consumer desires of the masses, often through meaningless “bullshit” jobs.

Thus, truly inspiring work will rarely earn you a large salary. It might even earn no salary at all, implying that the market places no value on your work.

Of course, the market could be right, but if you’re truly inspired by what you are doing, that’s highly unlikely. The far more likely scenario is that the value you are creating targets a long-term problem/opportunity instead of providing the short-term instant-pleasure fixes most consumers demand.

So, don’t be discouraged by a lack of immediate recognition for your efforts. As long as your creative endeavors do not feel like work, you’re on the right track toward a truly Efficient Life.

Practical matters

Of course, we all need to earn a decent living, so it’s important to approach the journey to creative freedom responsibly (Section 6).

Also, keep in mind that, although rare, meaningful well-paying jobs do exist and are well worth searching for. If you ever get the opportunity to earn a good living doing work you would happily do for free, grab it with both hands.

Invest time, money, or both

If the surplus value you create is not being recognized financially, rest assured that your creative time is not being wasted. Your work can only feel truly meaningful if you know deep down that it adds real value to the world. And such work is far more valuable than any high-paying “bullshit” job.

But if you keep delivering real value to society year after year, it is highly likely that the rewards will come. Your growing skill level, social capital, and creative portfolio will keep increasing the likelihood of a breakthrough.

When that time comes (or if you are lucky enough to already have a well-paying and truly meaningful job), you enter that glorious realm where you can freely direct both your time and money. Investing in funds aligned with your values is one possibility, but financial investments in your own creative initiatives offer a far more exciting prospect.

I see this as the ultimate reward offered by a truly Efficient Life, both to the individual and broader society. When you reach the point where you are the master of your own time, and you have full control over a sizable fund to finance your inspiring creative endeavors, Life Efficiency shines at its brightest.

Final Thoughts

There are many intricate connections between the actions covered in the seven sections above. As you steadily progress toward greater Life Efficiency, you will enjoy how they naturally flow into each other, binding together into a self-sustaining whole.

All the actions described in this article are implemented in my own life, and I can honestly say the rewards have been tremendous. This experience gives me hope that Life Efficiency can grow organically on the simple fact that it makes people’s lives (a lot) better.

From such organic growth in Life Efficiency, a more sustainable and equitable society will follow as a natural side-effect. We will simultaneously reduce our negative impacts by curbing wasteful consumption and accelerate our progress on key global challenges through our growing creative surpluses. In other words, Life Efficiency can help us build a healthier world out of millions of happier lives.

Today, all this remains little more than a hypothesis, proven only in a couple of cases. But it has the potential to make a real difference in the world. So, if you found this interesting, please share our new Life Efficiency calculator. It will be very interesting to see where this adventure leads.

Schalk June 1, 2022

2.6 - Self Mastery diet, exercise, health, personal development, sleep

Your Health: A Big Picture View

A healthy lifestyle goes far beyond losing weight and feeling good; it’s about building a bright future for you and your planet.

Modern society seems determined to ruin our health. We’re surrounded by addictive and convenient junk food, our car-centered cities discourage natural movement, stress from overwhelm and complexity often makes us self-destruct, and artificial light and late-night entertainment disrupt our sleep.

Carving out a lasting healthy lifestyle in this environment is no easy task. But the good news is that, once your healthy lifestyle is established, it becomes self-sustaining. It’s the transition phase that presents the real challenge.

Making the transition to a holistic healthy lifestyle requires a deep desire. And there’s no better way to cultivate that desire than to understand the big picture of healthy living — how it improves every aspect of life and makes the world a better place.

In this article, I’ll paint this big-picture view around the four pillars so health: diet, exercise, stress, and sleep.

Diet

Eat less …

For you: What if you could enjoy 50 years of accumulated skills, wealth, and wisdom from a biologically 30-year-old body? With everything we’re learning about longevity, this is becoming possible. And there’s still no better-known method to stay healthier for longer than a mildly reduced calorie intake.

For the world: Gross food inequality is one of the most embarrassing failures of our global society. In fact, the rich world spends as much trying to lose weight as would be needed to eradicate world hunger. Every rich-world citizen who chooses to consume less food helps right this grave wrong.

… mostly plants …

For you: Healthy plant-based foods work hand-in-hand with reduced calorie intake to maximize healthy lifespan, all while saving you money. And don’t worry, when you use meat as a seasoning instead of a staple, you can get all the enjoyment with none of the drawbacks.

For the planet: Animal products stand for 18% of global calories but take up 77% of global agricultural land and emit 60% of agricultural greenhouse gases. Animal cruelty is also a major concern. Indeed, eating mostly plants is one of the best things you can do for your planet.

… with no added sugar

For you: Sugar screws up our brains’ pleasure sensors, making sweet things taste mediocre and anything without tons of sugar taste bland. Quitting sugar fixes this miscalibration, making natural sweet things like fruit much tastier and the occasional sugary treat a truly magical experience.

For the planet: Sugar is one of the chief agents of the Instant Pleasure Industry responsible for millions of premature deaths worldwide (see Problem 2 here). Everyone who manages to quit sugar takes away a little power from the Instant Pleasure Industry, limiting its ability to harm others.

Exercise

Move intelligently …

For you: Walking or cycling everywhere you need to go is a shortcut to financial freedom and a treasure trove of creativity. All those daily steps will add many healthy and energetic years to your life to enjoy your growing wealth and blossoming creativity.

For the planet: Cities built for cars instead of people are among the greatest inefficiencies in our world (see Problem 8 here). Everyone who chooses self-propulsion (or at least public transport) helps shift us towards human-centered cities.

… and stretch/lift with purpose

For you: Yoga is one of the most powerful anchors for morning and evening routines and all their well-known benefits. Four minutes of daily strength training can make you proud every time you look in the mirror. Both will boost your mental health.

For the planet: In a world of overwhelm and depression, a few simple movements anyone can do in their living room can provide precious stability. Every grounded and confident individual brings some much-needed calm to our anxiety-generating world.

Stress

Get hot, get cold …

For you: Moderate heat or cold stress offers a natural way to activate the body’s defenses for securing a long and healthy life. And as an added bonus, this miracle anti-aging treatment saves big on heating and cooling bills.

For the planet: Our perfectly climate-controlled indoor environments not only shorten our lives, they also harm our economies and our planet. Everyone who turns down the thermostat or takes a cold shower helps with the immensely important megaproject that is the global energy transition.

… and push your boundaries

For you: Stress can be terrible if it is imposed upon you, but it becomes healthy and exciting when you’re striving toward something great. Hence, a proper understanding of eustress and distress offers an invaluable compass to discover your best life.

For the planet: If we’re reactive, our long list of global problems can stress us out to no end. But if we’re proactive, initiatives to solve these challenges offer some of the purest forms of meaning we can ever experience in life.

Sleep

Get sufficient shut-eye …

For you: Sleep is one of the healthiest forms of relaxation out there. Make it into art by designing the perfect sleeping environment with soothing materials, sounds, and smells. Then, indulge to your heart’s content.

For the planet: A tired mind makes bad decisions. Billions of tired minds make a bad world. Everyone who escapes all the hazards of the global sleep deprivation epidemic makes our world a little bit better.

… perhaps twice a day

For you: Do you often fall into an afternoon slump, suffering through the last few working hours without getting anything meaningful done? Try a siesta. It takes all that pointless suffering and molds it into a revitalized evening that feels like a brand new day.

For the planet: Most knowledge workers today can do more in 5 hours of deep work than 8 hours of increasingly unfocused work. Adding another deep work session after a revitalizing siesta can really move the needle. Every brave siesta pioneer can help nudge society toward this far more efficient model.

The Big Picture

Much like John ‘Hannibal’ Smith from the A-Team, I love it when a plan comes together. And a carefully designed healthy lifestyle surely ranks among the most satisfying of plans. Once you reach this point where all aspects of your healthy lifestyle come together seamlessly, you’re set for life.

A smart, healthy lifestyle brings together a set of compounding and mutually reinforcing co-benefits extending far beyond weight loss. You’ll gain energy, creativity, and motivation to get big things done, save money and increase your earning capacity to build more wealth, and add many healthy years to your life to enjoy the resulting growth.

And never lose sight of the long list of large societal benefits. We’re at our best when we work toward something bigger than ourselves. Tap into that source of motivation and you’ll be rightfully rewarded.

Schalk May 6, 2022

2.3 - Diet & Nutrition diet, food, health, nutrition, personal development

A Hero’s Journey: Building Your Healthy Diet in a World Awash With Empty Calories

Ten levels to vanquishing the legions of unhealthy temptations that surround us every day

Building a healthy diet in today’s world is a true hero’s journey — an epic battle past legions of sugary, fatty, and salty temptations to the ultimate prize of a long life enjoyed in optimal health.

Sometimes, especially when life gets us down, resisting these temptations can feel impossible. There are setbacks, as there must be in any good adventure. But if we pick ourselves up and persevere, the experience will upgrade our physical environment and our habits, taking our diet to the next level.

Having been on this journey for over a decade now, it was interesting to look back through all the levels that shaped the near-perfect diet I enjoy today. Interestingly, I found a nice round total of ten.

But before we start this epic level-up journey, we need to understand the SAD place most folks will need to start from.

Level 0: Standard American Diet (SAD)

Every hero’s journey involves a powerful villain that pushes the hero to their limit. In this case, it’s the SAD (a.k.a. the Western diet).

The SAD is a prominent member of an incredibly destructive league of supervillains I like to call the Instant Pleasure Industry — a multi-trillion dollar behemoth whose business model relies on addicting us to carefully engineered dopamine hits with little or no regard for the associated health, productivity, and sustainability problems.

All the refined sugars, saturated fats, and excess salts inside the colorful packets of empty calories lining the prime real estate in your local supermarket work on this principle. They were purpose-built to send our primitive food cravings into overdrive with disastrous results:

Millions of deaths from obesity are just one of the serious consequences of the SAD | Our World in Data

Research finds that poor diet is linked to almost half of all deaths from heart disease, stroke, and diabetes in America. My estimate of the global damages caused by all these highly processed foods comes to $6.4 trillion. It’s truly one of the most harmful elements in our society.

Our mission is simple: “level up” and vanquish this villain.

Level 1: Fruit Bowl

The first level in any adventure should always be a bit of a gimme. This adventure is no different with the first level only requiring that you have a bowl of fruit in your house at all times (and eat it before it goes bad). Make it past level 1, and you’re already in a better place than 88% of Americans!

Ideally, you’d also convince your boss to sponsor a fruit basket at work. Any reasonable employer will understand that the savings from reduced absenteeism will far outweigh the cost of a regular basket of fruit.

Be careful of fruit juices though. Those with added sugar are an especially big no-no. Rather get your hands on some freshly squeezed juice (with pulp) and drink it with a fiber-rich meal so it doesn’t spike your blood sugar.

Level 2: Clean Home

The next level presents a substantially bigger challenge: Keep the SAD out of your home. Sometimes it feels impossible, but remember; it only takes a few seconds of intense bravery to resist the allure of the empty-calorie aisle at your local supermarket or the junk-food drive-through on your daily commute.

Human behavior is heavily influenced by the local environment. And your home is the one part of your environment over which you have genuine control. So, if you can be brave for a minute or two each week, your home will become SAD-free, giving you and your family a guaranteed health boost.

Level 3: Craving Busters

Once you manage to clear level 2 on a regular basis, you’ll likely experience the SAD’s dark mind-control magic dragging you to your car to buy some junk food to satisfy some irresistible craving. That’s what level 3 is about.

The best weapon against the SAD’s mind tricks is a good craving buster. These are healthy, high-volume-low-calorie foods/fluids you can indulge in with no adverse effects. In fact, I recommend setting a rule that you must eat a craving buster every time you find yourself on any kind of snack hunt.

Aside from the fruit in level 1, my premier craving buster is a bowl of peeled carrots in some water front-and-center in the fridge. Whenever I find myself mindlessly staring into the fridge, this bright orange display is the first thing I see. And since it’s zero effort to grab one of these ready-peeled snacks, it usually happens naturally.

Fluids are also very effective craving busters. My favorites are rooibos tea (if it’s cold) or water (if it’s hot) with either a slice of lemon or some chia seeds blended in. The green smoothy we’ll get to later also works well.

Much like level 2, level 3 plays out in just a few seconds at that moment when the craving hits. If you manage to wolf down your chosen craving buster right away, the craving will probably vanish soon. SAD cravings can be persistent though, so you might need to tough it out for a few reps.

Level 4: Home-Made Meals

The great escape from ultra-processed foods in levels 2 & 3 brings our adventure to level 4: replacing all this junk with healthier alternatives. This level is a tough one because the SAD is just as convenient as it is addictive.

Preparing whole-food meals at home is your best bet for passing this level, even if you think you hate cooking. If you do it right, homemade meals really take very little time and skill.

Breakfast is a great place to start. If you make sure you have some (unsweetened) yogurt, seeds, nuts, and berries at hand, mixing them into a healthy and tasty breakfast is a surprisingly quick and rewarding job.

Preparing a daily warm meal can be impractical, but if you cook in bulk and freeze your portions, the time spent per portion can drop below 10 minutes. Here are some ideas. You might also be able to find some local diners serving genuinely healthy food that could save you those 10 minutes at a fair price.

There are many other quick and healthy recipes out there (like my favorite salad). Finding the ones that work for you will take some time and effort, but once that effort is invested, your new healthy and practical diet will stay with you for the rest of your (considerably longer) life.

Level 5: Nutrient Density

Up to this point, we’ve been fending off the SAD with all our might. But level 5 marks the point where we transition from defense to attack.

This level is all about nutrient-dense superfoods. For example, leafy greens like kale and spinach are some of the most nutrient-dense things out there. They can be tough to swallow though, especially if all those SAD treats are still fresh in your memory. That’s where a green smoothie can help. It tastes quite OK and, like the warm meals from level 4, your green smoothie can also be made in bulk and frozen for maximum convenience.

The hilarious but highly effective solution that keeps my defrosted green drink fresh for a week in the fridge

You can also find various powders and teas that will shower you with a range of additional nutrients. Three of my favorites are amla powder (with breakfast), chlorella powder (with my green smoothie), and matcha tea with oat & almond milk (as a substitute for morning coffee).

Level 6: Little or No Meat

The world eats too much meat, leading to a host of health conditions, serious environmental problems, and some disturbing animal cruelty concerns. Level 6 is about addressing these issues.

Although vegetarianism will get you some serious bonus points on this level, reducing meat to a minimum also counts as a pass. For example, meat still makes up a little under 5% of my calories, and it plays a major role in helping me eat loads of veggies. This “meat as a vegetable dressing” philosophy is a great strategy for painlessly clearing level 6 (with a bonus health boost).

Level 7: Banishing Sugar

If level 6 wasn’t intimidating enough, let me introduce you to level 7: giving up everything with added sugar. Luckily, quitting sugar may well turn out to be easier than you expect (it was for me, at least).

Refined sugar is the SAD’s weapon of mass destruction. It works by warping our perception of sweetness so that nothing tastes good without loads of added sugar that destroys our health in a dizzying number of ways.

But the good news is that it doesn’t take very long to reset this broken system to its natural state. Do this, and you’ll discover that naturally sweet foods like fruits become truly delicious, while the occasional sweet treat on a special occasion turns into a magical experience.

Level 8: Time-Restricted Eating

Level 8 happens within an 8-hour eating window. It took me a long time to properly commit to time-restricted eating. But the evidence presented by well-known longevity expert, David Sinclair, finally got me to take the plunge.

Like the sugar cleanse in the previous level, this one also turned out to be significantly easier than feared. My body quickly adjusted to the new eating pattern of unlimited whole foods in the morning and fasting for the rest of the day (although you can also have your eating window in the evening).

Cravings outside my eating window are rare and usually easily handled with one of the fluid craving busters from level 3. In short, there’s no good reason to skip level 8.

Level 9: Home-Grown Meals

Our penultimate level is a fun one: growing some of your own food. Once you start looking, you’ll find some interesting options that require very little time and even less skill.

I got my start with sprouting broccoli seeds for my salad. This requires nothing but a simple little container with holes in the lid (available online) and a few seconds to rinse it with clean water every day.

Recently, I also started to play with hydroponics. It also takes almost no effort, although my lettuce did have a small aphid problem. Of course, you can also go the traditional gardening route if you have sufficiently green fingers.

Hydroponic lettuce and basil (back) and broccoli sprouts (front)

Overall, it’s fun to be able to harvest my own lettuce and sprouts for my salad. I’ll definitely be expanding my little hydroponic garden over the next couple of years to score some bonus points on this level.

Level 10: Holistic Wellbeing

The boss level must always be the most difficult, and this adventure is no exception. Level 10 requires such a degree of life mastery that emotional food cravings become a thing of the past. The key step is removing chronic frustrations and stressors from your life. And since these issues are normally deeply ingrained, this will most likely be a long-term project.

Next time you get a serious food craving, stop to think about where it’s coming from. Then invest a little more introspection to discover what you might do to remove that trigger. With some patience and bravery, this exercise could end up improving your life far beyond just a better diet.

Final Thoughts

Epic journeys always take time and never play out without setbacks. So, stay the course and don’t be disheartened when you fail to clear a level on the first (or the fifth) attempt. With the right mindset, every (good or bad) experience becomes a valuable guide for informing your next move.

Also, you can take genuine pride in your heroic quest for a lasting healthy diet. Not only does it involve overcoming great obstacles, but it also benefits those you love and society at large. Everyone who breaks their dependency on the SAD weakens its economic might, reducing its power to harm others.

The very best of luck on your healthy diet adventure, and I sincerely hope that you and everyone you care about manage to slay the SAD!

Schalk April 2, 2022

2.6 - Self Mastery diet, exercise, health, longevity, personal development

A Proven Longevity Lifestyle to Fight the Disease of Aging

How to (enjoyably) mimic adversity for a long and healthy life

Historical gains in life expectancy came mainly from sharply reducing infectious diseases and infant mortality. Future gains could initially come from a growing culture of healthy living, followed by breakthrough treatments for aging. (Image created by Janet Cloete)

I’d love to see the 22nd century. That means I need to reach the ripe old age of 116 (and have enough marbles left to enjoy the achievement). At first glance, this might seem unrealistic, but the more I learn about health and longevity, the more optimistic I become about my chances.

Harvard professor David Sinclair’s Lifespan podcast was the latest in a long line of learning. Much of the lifestyle advice he offers will sound very familiar, but there are plenty of insightful explanations about why these lifestyles work. Speaking from experience, such an improved understanding really helps to motivate positive action.

So, let’s dive straight in, starting with the most important thing I learned from David Sinclair.

How to Think About Aging

Aging is the fundamental disease

Sinclair makes a strong case that aging is the foundational reason behind most serious degenerative diseases plaguing society today. Moreover, we can slow this root-cause disease considerably, and we’re working hard to stop and even reverse it in the future.

Aging is caused by something called ex-differentiation, where cells struggle to read our genetic code and forget their function. It’s easy to imagine how such confused and malfunctioning cells can cause everything from heart disease to cancer to Alzheimer’s disease.

Thus, these degenerative diseases are just symptoms of the underlying disease of aging. And we’re now starting to understand how to ramp up the body’s natural defenses against this fundamental disease.

Adversity memetics

A key theme running through all the recommendations in the podcast is the importance of making our bodies think we’re in a state of adversity. The different ways we can do this are called “adversity mimetics,” i.e., ways to mimic adversity without really experiencing it.

Such perceived states of adversity activate the body’s natural defenses to fight the disease of aging. Science has identified three primary defense pathways: mTOR (which responds to low amino acids) and AMPK and Sirtuins (which respond to low energy or glucose levels).

There’s an understandable evolutionary explanation behind these findings: We were frequently hungry, exhausted, cold, and exposed to pathogens across 99.9% of our evolutionary history. Our bodies had to learn to survive under these harsh conditions, and we evolved multiple potent repair mechanisms that get triggered by these states.

Today, science and fossil fuels have given all of us rich folks a totally different world — one that’s all about comfort and abundance. Unfortunately, this environment turns off the body’s defenses and tells it to grow instead of repairing itself. In the long run, this creates many problems.

The challenge of maintaining a healthy lifestyle

Obviously, it’s much more fun (at least in the short term) to live in a state of comfort than a state of adversity. But unfortunately, the near-irresistible allure of our modern comforts is the core reason behind the global degenerative disease epidemic.

And that’s where the idea of adversity mimetics starts to make practical sense: We don’t actually have to experience serious adversity to get the benefits. Thus, the trick is to mimic adversity as enjoyably as possible.

So, from this adversity mimicking mindset, let’s take a quick tour through David Sinclair’s lifestyle recommendations for maximizing lifespan. Following that, I’ll chime in with some of my own research and experience on making healthy living as natural and enjoyable as possible.

Lifestyle Recommendations

Diet

Sorry carnivores, but the central longevity diet recommendation is to eat plants. The rich protein in meat is exactly the kind of abundance mimetic you want to avoid if you want to slow aging. Since our bodies need to work harder to get sustenance from plants, vegetarianism is a good adversity mimetic.

A little bit of unprocessed meat is fine, especially fish. For example, the Mediterranean diet gets several mentions as a very healthy alternative. Furthermore, Sinclair frequently echos the well-known recommendation of dropping sugar from the diet. Sugar totally deactivates the body’s protective mechanisms and causes many other health problems.

One interesting novelty he mentioned is the idea of xenohormesis: plants that experienced adversity contain more anti-aging benefits. A good example is organic produce that does not benefit from all the pesticides and herbicides that make the lives of regular crops much more comfortable. Eating these plants, especially ones rich in color, could transfer some of these beneficial adversity compounds to us.

In a later episode about brain health, Sinclair also emphasizes the importance of B-vitamins and Omega 3 fatty acids that are more challenging to get from a plant-based diet. The Mediterranean diet naturally offers these nutrients, but vegetarians may need to take special care in this area.

Fasting

It’s easy to understand how fasting mimics adversity. If the body thinks that times are tough and there’s not enough food around, it will obviously be motivated to hunker down and protect itself.

There are many different ways to fast. Multi-day fasts offer a valuable deep cleanse, but they are very difficult to complete. Still, making this sacrifice every once in a while can be worth it because it supercharges a crucial process called autophagy: the recycling of old and potentially toxic cells.

For day-to-day use, Sinclair advocates for time-restricted feeding, where you restrict your food intake to a window of fewer than 8 hours each day. He eats in the evening, but the morning can work just as well.

Crucially, we must ensure that we get adequate nutrition with our fasting. Time-restricted feasting on junk food will do more harm than good.

Exercise

Physical exertion from exercise is a great way to mimic adversity. The 10000-step per day rule is a useful target, but 7000 steps already provide substantial benefits. It’s particularly important to move after a meal to remove the glucose from your bloodstream and make new blood vessels.

Gentle exercise like walking is a good place to start, but we also need vigorous exercise that gets the heart rate up. Sinclair recommends that you get yourself out of breath to the point where you cannot speak in full sentences for about 75 minutes per week (spread over several days). This powerful adversity memetic activates the body’s defenses and makes more energy-generating mitochondria.

Weight training is also essential, especially when it comes to keeping the muscles strong in older age. Adequate muscle mass is particularly important for older folks to protect against bone fractures caused by falling, especially hip breaks that are often a death sentence.

Hot and cold

Purposeful exposure to uncomfortable temperatures is another great way to mimic adversity within our air-conditioned world. Hot and cold both work, albeit through different mechanisms. Cold activates the production of brown fat, which appears to be much better for us than our standard white fat, whereas heat builds HSPs (heat shock proteins) that do good things to our bodies, similar to exercise.

Regular heat and cold exposure can easily be built into any modern lifestyle. For example, you can take cold or very hot showers, save energy by doing less heating or cooling of your home, and spend more time outside in natural temperatures (being careful to avoid sunburn, which significantly shortens lifespan). A cold sleeping room is also recommended.

Saunas and ice baths are the next steps, but the simple do-it-yourself-at-home guidelines above will give you most of the benefits.

Sleep

The importance of sleep gets some airtime in the podcast episode about brain health. Although not clearly linked to adversity, sleep is well known to be a state of bodily repair.

It’s been thoroughly proven that a lack of sleep accelerates aging, especially in the brain. The plaque buildup responsible for dementia is a core problem here, and cleaning out these dangerous wastes is an essential function of the repair states offered by sleep and all the other protective mechanisms that respond to perceived adversity.

How to Enjoy Mimicking Adversity

Now we get to the real trick: mimicking adversity in an enjoyable manner. That’s the point where this podcast beautifully tied into my fascination with the art and science of optimal lifestyle design.

Hedonic adaptation

The first key concept to grasp is the way our happiness levels quickly adapt to almost any environment. Say someone invents a magic pill that staves off any adverse effects of junk food and sedentary living. Obviously, such a pill would fly off the shelves, and millions of people will use it to waste away their days gorging on chocolates, chips, and ice cream in front of Netflix.

Aside from the socio-environmental disaster that will result from such unchecked food consumption, this scenario will also cause a mental health crisis. Thanks to hedonic adaptation, the happiness boost from a pure hedonic lifestyle will quickly fade. And now that we’re conditioned that peak sensory experience is normal, it will become exceedingly hard to find any joy in life.

No, to really enjoy life, pleasure should be varied, intermittent, and earned — a philosophy that gels perfectly with healthy living. In addition, we can safely rely on hedonic adaptation to keep our basic happiness levels constant in the environment of mild discomfort needed to mimic adversity.

Diet

Healthy eating habits are all about healing the brain’s broken reward system. All the addictive junk food society surrounds us with has totally desensitized us to sweetness. But here’s the good news: Heal this miscalibration, and you’ll get the same pleasure from a good apple as you currently get from chocolate.

Indeed, once your senses are correctly calibrated, mimicking adversity via a sugar-free plant-dominated diet is no sacrifice whatsoever. Quite the opposite: it creates loads of headroom for peak sensory experiences from the occasional luxurious indulgence.

Of course, the time needed for hedonic adaptation to adjust from the Standard Americal Diet (SAD) to something like the Mediterranean diet will be tough. But rest assured that it gets much easier on the other side.

Fasting

I’ve been quite hesitant to join the fasting craze thus far. Although I usually ate within a 10–12 hour window, I frequently snacked outside this window to keep hunger from distracting me from my work.

Inspired by this podcast, I decided to restrict my eating to the time between breakfast (around 7:30) and my siesta (around 14:00). As Sinclair promised, my body quickly adapted to supply me with a constant stream of energy throughout the 17+ hour daily fast to maintain high productivity and focus without strong hunger pangs. The occasional evening food craving is easily handled with some lemon-infused Rooibos tea.

Overall, restricting my eating to a 7-hour window proved easier than I thought. The freedom to eat as much as I want within that period is also quite enjoyable, and my body naturally wants to stop eating by the end. However, I should reemphasize the importance of healthy food here. If you eat junk, it will be easy to eat way too much in seven hours of unrestricted feasting.

Exercise

While I’m a bit of a noob when it comes to fasting, I’m a veteran at making daily exercise as easy and natural as breathing. Lifelong fitness is all about creating the right environment. And the shortest route to the perfect fitness environment is to select your home in the right location, granting easy access to nature and safe options to walk/cycle wherever you need to go.

But even if your home is currently positioned in a bland concrete jungle that makes it impossible to go anywhere without a car, all is not lost. With a few simple skills and a couple of easy habits integrated into a good morning routine, daily exercise will come more easily.

Hot and cold

Over here in Norway, being cold is quite easily done. Sadly, most people compensate by heating their homes to a balmy 23 °C, wasting loads of energy just to shave years off their lives.

Like all other adversity memetics, cold can be fun. For example, my winters are spent working under a cozy duvet at an indoor temperature of 15-17 °C, punctuated by regular walks and ski trips in the frozen outdoors. In summer, I take regular swims in the cold lakes close to my home.

Following the podcast, I also started turning the shower up really hot. When summer rolls around, I plan to give cold showers a try. This burst of cold should be quite refreshing after the 150 m elevation gain cycling back from the office or after a high-tempo rollerblade trip.

So, if you live somewhere that regularly gets uncomfortably hot or cold, quit complaining and use it as a free tool to boost your health and longevity. If it’s hot, sweat a little and then jump in a cold shower to cool off. If it’s cold, let it be and heat up under some cozy blankets and the occasional hot shower.

Sleep

Getting enough sleep is all about prioritization. Know this: If you try to get more out of the day by cutting back on sleep, you’re shooting yourself in the foot. A well-rested brain can get way more out of 17 waking hours than a sleep-deprived brain can get out of 19. Furthermore, chronic sleep deprivation causes a dizzying array of health and performance problems.

Build your life around sleep and not the other way around. Truly, life becomes much richer when experienced through a well-rested body and mind.

An Alluring Ageless Future

The podcast dedicates plenty of time to anti-aging supplements, drugs, and treatments. Sinclair is open about the fact that scientific evidence for the benefits (and safety) of these treatments in humans is still emerging. I’m not yet convinced and prefer to stick to lifestyle design for the time being.

That being said, anti-aging research is progressing at breakneck speed. There’s also loads of self-experimentation going on with many different methods. Thus, millions of minds and hundreds of billions of dollars are being thrown at the problem of aging, driving some real progress.

Another promising development is our growing ability to accurately, practically, and affordably measure the true biological age of various parts of our bodies. Imagine you had a little device that could prick your finger every morning and tell you your exact biological age. Such information would allow you to experiment intelligently with all sorts of lifestyle and biomedical interventions to figure out the best way to bring that number down.

Based on all these rapid developments, David Sinclair firmly believes that aging is curable in the long run. It’s impossible to tell when this cure will arrive, but progress seems to be accelerating. Thus, another big reason to maintain a healthy lifestyle is to stick around long enough to benefit from these advances.

Apparently, we can currently expect about 30% of extra life expectancy from scientific progress for every one year of life expectancy we win via healthy lifestyles. This number is expected to continue increasing, and eventually, it might reach a point where we no longer age (and older people can even age backward).

Yes, it sure sounds like science fiction today, but it could well be the new normal a few decades down the line. I will certainly do all I can to make sure I’m around to experience that new reality. Who knows, perhaps I even get to see a couple more centuries after the 22nd!

Schalk March 3, 2022

2.6 - Self Mastery happiness, health, personal development, productivity, self mastery

The World’s Toughest Challenge

One guy’s quest to do everything right, consistently.

It’s no exaggeration to call self-mastery “the world’s toughest challenge.” People have been trying forever, but no one seems able to get it right.

When I say “self-mastery,” I mean it in a very practical sense: the ability to consistently do what we know to be right (and not do what we know to be wrong). There are many other philosophical and spiritual interpretations (which may help with the practical side of things), but this challenge is all about real-world, measurable actions.

Taking super easy actions consistently is super hard

If you think about it, there’s nothing physically stopping us from doing the right things all the time. In fact, most right actions are very easy: Get out of bed, go for a jog, say a kind word. Neither is there anything physically forcing us to do things like buying that chocolate we know we shouldn’t.

But we all know from experience that taking these seemingly very easy actions (and inactions) on a consistent basis is near-impossible. Indeed, if self-mastery was easy, we’d all be rich, fit, and very proud of ourselves.

The problem is that every human comes with a set of millennia-old instincts to chase pleasure and avoid discomfort. These instincts have become badly outdated in today’s high-tech world, but they continue to shape our lives. That’s why we keep making counter-productive choices like browsing social media instead of working on a career-boosting project or vegetating in front of the TV instead of raking in all the proven benefits of exercise.

Challenge accepted

I’ve been on a quest to tame these primitive instincts for over a decade now. It was a bumpy ride, to say the least, but over the years I’ve managed to put together an internal and external environment that makes healthy and productive actions come naturally. And now, I finally feel this environment is strong enough to be tested publically.

That’s why, with the start of 2022, I’m formally embarking on the World’s Toughest Challenge (WTC).

The WTC Scorecard

Every month, I’ll give myself a score out of 10 in each of ten clearly defined metrics. Although the long-term goal is no less than perfection, I’d be very happy with cracking 90% on a regular basis during 2022.

The ten metrics are categorized into three themes: health, happiness, and productivity. Let’s break them down.

Health

Health is the basic enabler of everything I hold dear in life, making it my top priority. There are four fundamental pillars of health that also represent the metrics in this theme.

Diet

I’m more prone to emotional eating than most, so the quality of my diet is very closely linked to the quality of my life. Today, my diet is perfect on most days, although I still stumble on the rare occasion when stress and temptation team up against me.

I’ve been tracking the quality of my diet along with many other metrics for an entire decade. Thus, I can easily access my score out of ten for this metric. Any junk food or excess subtracts points, although there is one exception: I don’t lose points for accepting unhealthy (and delicious) food from a friendly host if I apply moderation and don’t feel stuffed afterward.

Exercise and nature

Thanks to the ideal location of my home, exercise and access to nature are the least of my worries. Both happen spontaneously on a daily basis (unless the weather is truly terrible).

My daily tracking uses an exercise metric linked to the number of steps per day, as recorded by my fitness band. I add 1000 steps for every 2 km of cycling, ice skating, rollerblading, or cross country skiing, and 500 steps for a yoga or weights session.

The window of perfection is a monthly average of 10000–15000 steps per day, earning 10/10. Every deviation of 1000 steps from this range loses one point.

Sleep, naps, bookend routines

It took me far too long to give sleep the priority it deserves. But today, my life is rightfully built around sleep instead of the other way around. I also maintain a daily napping habit that boosts my productivity by exploiting the least productive time of the day for sleep.

Here, I’ll target an ideal 6.5–7.5 hours of actual sleep. The average amount of sleep I get each day accounts for 7 out of the 10 points, with every hour out of the range subtracting one point. Then, there is one point for a daily nap and another point each for consistent morning and evening routines.

I also lose points for inconsistency, measured by the standard deviation in the hours of sleep opportunity I give myself each day. If 1.96x the standard deviation is smaller than 1 hour (which means that I stayed within about an hour from the average on more than 95% of the days), there is no penalty. However, I lose a point for every hour this standard deviation statistic increases beyond 1.

Stress and motivation

Whenever I’m stressed or down on motivation, I get this almost irresistible urge to binge-watch and binge-eat. The upside of this unhealthy tendency is that it makes stress and motivation quite easy to track.

Over the years, I’ve picked up many little techniques to manage stress and maintain high motivation (e.g., these seven healthy pleasures). When applied consistently, they successfully keep self-destructive behavior at bay.

Thus, this metric tracks any days with junk food or junk media. Consuming junk every day in the month would give me zero points whereas no junk days would give me a perfect ten. As with my diet, special occasions like birthday celebrations and Christmas dinners are exempted, as long as I don’t feel uncomfortably stuffed afterward.

Happiness

What is the meaning of life? Well, everyone will have their opinion, but I don’t think it’s any more complicated than doing good and having a good time doing it. Here are the three ways I want to add meaning to my life.

Spontaneity and flow

The basic idea here is to simply get out of my own way. Inhibition has always been an issue for me, mainly due to a stuttering problem. Even though my stutter ended up making major positive contributions to my life, it still sours my experience from time to time.

It’s not that I want to become robotically perfect at everything I do. Instead, I need to master the art of enjoying my imperfect, authentically human creative experience to the point where I lose track of time. Such a spontaneous flow state really is pure happiness.

This metric, which will probably be my toughest test, will be equally split between speaking and other forms of creative expression. A daily rating out of 5 for each category will be added up and averaged to get a score out of 10 for the month.

Relationships

As an introvert, I don’t need many relationships, but I need the few I have to be in a good place. Luckily, this happens pretty easily when I stick to the bucket-filling philosophy.

Thanks to this simple idea, I’m in a good spot in this metric. Relationships are hard to quantify, though, so this will just be a purely subjective metric of how I feel I handled the day’s social interactions.

Mindfulness and equanimity

I’ve struggled for a long time to integrate meditation and mindfulness practices into my life. Luckily, something clicked during 2021, and now I find myself spontaneously returning to meditate day after day.

Another aspect of mindfulness I’ve found very valuable is the concept of equanimity — remaining calm and centered regardless of any turbulence in my outer or inner world. It’s an idea closely aligned to living in a beautiful state (as opposed to a suffering state).

I use the Calm app for meditation, particularly the Daily Calm and Daily Trip sessions by Tamara and Jeff (the latter is especially big on the equanimity idea). Calm tracks my meditation practice automatically, and the fraction of days where I meditate represents half of my score in this category. The other half comes from a subjective daily equanimity score.

Productivity

One of the things I’m most grateful for is the incredibly interesting time we’re living in. And my focus areas in the field of sustainable development contain enough interesting work to fill many lifetimes.

Working hours

I work a lot — about 3500 hours per year. Over time, I’ve learned that working double the normal amount can be sustainable, but only if most of it doesn’t feel like work. After semi-retiring in 2019, this ideal has become increasingly real — hence the high number of working hours.

My experience shows that 10 hours per day (weekends included) is a good target to strive for. I can do a lot more on good days, but this usually ends in a slump soon after, even if the work was fun.

RescueTime tracks my working hours automatically and gives me the possibility to add offline meetings manually, making it easy to keep track of this metric. Each hour of deviation from an average in the range of 9–11 hours per day will subtract one point from this metric.

Deep, strategic work

Clocking many working hours is one thing, but doing something genuinely useful with all these hours is something completely different. Here, I want to avoid three classic traps: 1) getting hooked by urgent instead of important tasks, 2) losing efficiency through frequent distractions, and 3) getting stuck in a loop of reacting to problems instead of proactively executing a strategy.

My score in this category will start with 5 points every day and subtract one point for falling into any of the three traps outlined above. An additional point will be subtracted if I did not manage any truly deep work and if any of the traps I fell in were easily preventable.

Workload and proactiveness

Overwhelm is enemy #1 for any productive individual. The more productive you are, the more work you attract. Initially, it feels great to be valued in this way, but burnout soon follows. It took years of painful experiences, but now I’ve fully accepted that the word “no” is central to my career.

Aside from avoiding overwhelm, the stress from deadlines in collaborative projects is another common problem to be avoided. Routinely delivering well before the deadline avoids stress, ensures high quality, and makes project managers give you free rein to shape the work as you please.

This metric will be a subjective measure split halfway between whether I feel pressure from overwhelm or deadlines at the end of each day.

Closing Thoughts

I firmly believe it’s possible to live a perfect life day after day, month after month, year after year. I doubt that anyone has ever done it — it’s the toughest challenge in the world after all — but it must be possible.

This journey will be very revealing. I’m curious to learn what it will take to reach perfection, whether perfection will feel like it’s worth it, and how this exercise will affect my rate of growth.

Let’s see how it goes!

Results Thus Far

January 2022: 93%

February 2022: 96%

Schalk February 3, 2022

2.3 - Diet & Nutrition diet, food, health, healthy foods, nutrition, top 10

The Top 10 Healthiest Foods as Identified by 10 Nutritionists

A top 10 list distilled from the insight of highly-rated experts

The internet is full of top 10 healthy foods lists. So, what makes this one special? Well, it has a novel spin: paying ten highly-rated nutritionists and dietitians on Upwork for listing their top 10 healthiest foods. I also asked for good reasons and scientific references to back up their selections.

It turned out to be a fascinating exercise, bringing several new health-enhancing foods into my diet. I hope you learn as much from reading this article as I learned writing it!

So, without further ado, here are the top 10 healthiest foods identified by qualified nutritionists and dietitians.

1. Legumes (10 Votes)

My money was on berries or leafy greens to top the list, but legumes emerged as the surprise winner. Every one of the ten experts included it in their lists of healthy foods.

Benefits: There were a host of reasons behind legumes topping the list. Most nutritionists pointed out that legumes are an excellent source of plant protein and rich in soluble and insoluble fiber to regulate appetite. They’re also great prebiotics for a healthy gut and better immunity while containing very little saturated fat. Prevention of cardiovascular disease also got two mentions. One nutritionist even pointed out that legumes have good potential for making agriculture more sustainable.

Nutrients. Here are all the nutrients explicitly mentioned by the nutritionists in order of popularity: protein, fiber, iron, potassium, magnesium, folate, polyphenols and isoflavonoids (phytochemicals with antioxidant properties), B-vitamins, zinc, and calcium (especially chickpeas).

Recommendations. Lentils were the most commonly mentioned legume, followed by chickpeas, beans, and edamame/soy. Chickpeas proved to be especially easy to include in my diet. I found them surprisingly tasty just on their own, and they have become a staple in my evening salad. They get even better when roasted with some spices, but I’m admittedly too lazy for that. Also, it was easy to add large amounts of all the other legumes mentioned by the nutritionists to the chili con carne I often have for lunch.

Frequency: You can eat legumes as often as you feel like, although one nutritionist recommended once per day. Only soy came with a stricter recommendation of twice per week.

Science: Here are some scientific studies on legumes listed by the nutritionists, explaining how polyphenol-rich lentils promote health, chickpeas and hummus are packed with nutrients, legumes offer great phytochemical variety and excellent nutritional variety in general, lentils enhance colonic function, dried beans offer solid nutritional value, and legumes have good potential for more sustainable agriculture.

2. Berries (9 Votes)

Even though they did not take the expected top spot, berries came in a close second, with only one expert omitting them from their list.

Benefits: Almost every nutritionist mentioned the antioxidant properties of berries that serve to protect healthy cells from damage by free radicals. Phytonutrients and flavanoids got several mentions for their protection against degenerative diseases. Brain health (prevention of dementia and better cognitive function) and anti-inflammatory properties got two nods each, and four other benefits were mentioned once: heart health and blood pressure, slower aging, reductions in bad cholesterol, and easing of urinary tract infections.

Nutrients: Unsurprisingly, antioxidants topped the list, followed by vitamin C, fiber, vitamin K, potassium, calcium, and manganese.

Recommendations: Blueberries got the most votes, followed by strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, cherries, and cranberries. All these are very easy to eat, benefitting from the berry magic of being sweet while containing surprisingly little sugar. From my experience, berries are at their best at breakfast time, but nutritionists also recommend them for smoothies and general snacks.

Frequency: Like legumes, berries can be eaten at will, although one nutritionist recommended about 80 g per day.

Science: Here are some papers showing how blueberries are a nutritional powerhouse with many health benefits including improved blood pressure, reduced obesity, and slower cognitive decline with age. Strawberries also offer many benefits, counteracting a wide range of diseases, while various other berries also offer many healthy compounds with an impressive range of benefits,

2. Nuts (9 Votes)

In joint second place, we have another natural wonder offering a unique (and tasty) package of health benefits. Next to legumes and berries, nuts complete a top three of amazing nutritional diversity.

Benefits: The big selling point of nuts is their high content of healthy unsaturated fats complemented by plenty of plant protein. Half of the nutritionists also pointed out that nuts are a source of omega 3 fatty acids with a good balance relative to omega 6. These properties mean that nuts can help lower cholesterol, benefiting heart health. However, one nutritionist pointed out that the body absorbed a relatively low fraction of the omega 3 in nuts, so it should not be the sole source. Despite their high energy content, two nutritionists mentioned that nuts actually help with satiety and weight management. They can also reduce inflammation and lower cancer risk.

Nutrients: Omega 3 was the top nutrient pointed out by the nutritionists, followed by selenium, iron, fiber, vitamin E, antioxidants, calcium, potassium, and magnesium. One nutritionist also pointed out that the healthy fats in nuts help with the absorption of vitamins A, D, E, and K.

Recommendations: Walnuts got the most direct mentions, followed by almonds, brazil nuts, pine nuts, and cashews. The nutritionists recommended nuts for early in the morning, which was good news for me since they’ve been a staple in my breakfast for many years. Nuts are also recommended for a healthy snack, although one should practice moderation due to their high energy content.

Frequency: The nutritionists recommended daily intake of nuts, again stressing the importance of small portions. One mentioned 30 g per day, but I must admit to eating more than twice that amount.

Science: The nutritionists added some scientific papers showing that nuts reduce the risk of heart disease, walnuts offer better antioxidant properties than fatty fish that reduce oxidative stress, and other nuts offer similar benefits. Furthermore, pistachios can aid in weight loss and help manage diabetes, and adding more nuts to the Mediterranean diet reduces waist circumference.

4. Dark Leafy Greens (8 Votes)

Leafy greens were one of my pre-game favorites for the win, so I was a little surprised that they missed out on the podium. But fourth spot after legumes, berries, and nuts is nothing to be ashamed of.

Benefits: Antioxidant properties, heart health, healthy blood pressure, and benefits to red blood cells were the most popular benefits among nutritionists. The high nutrient density of leafy greens and the diverse micronutrient profile also got a couple of votes. Furthermore, the nutritionists mentioned the benefits of low calories and glycemic index and the proven reduction in risk of degenerative disease.

Nutrients: Here is the rundown in order of popularity: calcium, vitamin K (that works well with vitamin D and calcium for bone health), folate, antioxidants, magnesium, vitamin C, iron, vitamin A, vitamin E, fiber, and potassium.

Recommendations: Kale was the most popular leafy green, closely followed by spinach. Swiss chard, mangold, and arugula also got one vote each. Before I learned to love salad, I took my dark leafy greens more like medicine than food, mainly via my trusty green smoothy. If you’re still struggling with your leafy greens, green smoothies and adventurous salads are your tickets to success. One nutritionist also recommended plenty of vitamin C in a salad with spinach since it helps with iron absorption.

Frequency: The recommendation is to eat dark leafy greens twice a day.

Science: Here are some papers showing how leafy greens reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease and slow the rate of cognitive decline with age, and how spinach prevents oxidative DNA damage again and again.

5. Fermented foods (7 Votes)

Rounding out the top five, we have another surprise (to me at least). I love my yogurt, but I didn’t expect seven out of ten nutritionists to recommend fermented foods.

Benefits: The superpower of fermented foods lies in their benefits to gut health, which is receiving plenty of attention nowadays via the gut-brain axis. They’re also good for bone health and a robust immune system for general disease prevention. It also helps that they’re highly versatile and delicious.

Nutrients: In order of popularity, nutrients mentioned around fermented foods include probiotics, calcium, protein, B-vitamins, and magnesium.

Recommendations: Unsurprisingly, Greek yogurt was the most popular in this category. However, something I had never even heard of before, kefir, came in second and soon became a staple in my diet. Kefir goes well with Greek yogurt in my breakfast, offering greater diversity in probiotic cultures. In addition, buttermilk, kimchi, Sauerkraut, and tempeh each got one mention. One nutritionist also recommended plenty of fiber with fermented foods to really make those gut bacteria jump for joy.

Frequency: Fermented foods can be consumed daily.

Science: The nutritionists recommending fermented foods were not so generous with scientific papers, but here are three resources they provided: a Harvard post on the role of probiotics in health, a paper on the general benefits of fermented foods, and a Harvard guide to yogurt.

6. Eggs (6 Votes)

After being falsely linked to high cholesterol and heart disease for decades, eggs are coming back in a big way. Their sixth place in this list confirms this resurgence.

Benefits: A complete protein profile was the first benefit pointed out by nutritionists. Even though eggs are of animal origin, the eggs from one laying hen provide about 10x more protein than the meat from one broiler chicken, making it substantially more efficient. Eggs are also good for bone, cell membrane, and brain health, and come with antioxidant properties, relatively few calories, and little saturated fats.

Nutrients: Here is the long list of egg nutrients in order of popularity: all essential amino acids (complete protein), vitamin D, B-vitamins, choline, HDL (good) cholesterol, calcium, selenium, potassium, lutein, zeaxanthin, omega 3, antioxidants, zinc, iron, magnesium, vitamin A, vitamin K, lycopene, and phospholipids.

Recommendations: The first important recommendation pointed out by the nutritionists is that the yolk contains most of the nutritional value in the egg, so don’t throw it away. Aside from that, eggs are commonly recommended as a good breakfast food, potentially aiding weight loss.

Frequency: Even though eggs are no longer seen as a dangerous food, the nutritionists still recommended a maximum of 2 per day, 3–4 days per week.

Science: Here are some egg-related papers: Eggs do not increase the risk of heart disease, increasing only good cholesterol. Furthermore, egg yolks are particularly nutritious, being an excellent source of choline which has multiple health benefits and lutein and zeaxanthin that help enhance eye function while also offering anti-inflammatory services.

6. Oats (6 Votes)

It’s amazing that something as seemingly bland as oats could grab a joint sixth place on this list. But as we’ll see in this section, there’s a lot going on behind that bland facade.

Benefits: The biggest benefit highlighted by the nutritionists is the ability of oats to stabilize blood sugar and improve satiety. This makes them well-suited for weight loss and lowering the risk of diabetes. Oats also come with plenty of gut-healthy fiber, and it lowers cholesterol for better heart health. Pure oats also gets the gluten-free label, although it could get contaminated with gluten during processing.

Nutrients: There is plenty of good stuff in oats, including fiber, antioxidants, B-vitamins, potassium, folate, manganese, phosphorous, magnesium, and zinc.

Recommendations: Generally considered a good breakfast food, oats play well with other healthy options like berries, fruit, nuts, and seeds. It’s important to select a minimally processed oat product since highly-processed instant oats lose the ability to regulate blood sugar. Nutritionists also recommend not heating oats to high temperatures, which reduces the nutritional value due to releases of the anti-nutrient, phytic acid. Rather soak for an hour or two. I soak my breakfast oats and seeds together overnight at virtually no inconvenience.

Frequency: Oats can be consumed daily, and some nutritionists even went as far as setting the minimum intake at 3x per week.

Science: Here are some papers showing how oats benefit patients with cardiovascular disease and diabetes, and lower LDL (bad) cholesterol. It also limits glucose spikes and offers several other potential health benefits.

8. Seeds (5 Votes)

As a big seed fan, I was a little disappointed that they only appeared in eighth position. Overall, seeds have much in common with nuts, but often come with more protein and fiber and less fat. If it were up to me, they would certainly be higher up on the list.

Benefits: Protein was the #1 reason nutritionists put seeds on their top 10 lists. Some, like chia and hemp, even offer the complete set of essential amino acids. Reason #2 came in the form of healthy unsaturated fats and omega 3 fatty acids. The nutritionists also pointed out that seeds come with antioxidant properties, help regulate blood sugar, lower cholesterol, control appetite for weight management, improve immunity, and help with the absorption of fat-soluble vitamins.

Nutrients: Although there are plenty more, the nutritionists pointed out complete proteins, healthy fats, omega 3, iron, calcium, fiber, and potassium as key nutrients from seeds.

Recommendations: Chia and flax seeds were the top recommendations, but I also like hemp, pumpkin, and sunflower seeds. I eat my seeds with breakfast, but the nutritionists also recommended them for smoothies, soups, salads, or added to water, milk, or protein shakes. Soaking for a couple of hours can aid in digestion, especially for flax seeds, while chia seeds give a very interesting texture to an oat breakfast when left to soak with the oats.

Frequency: Seeds can be consumed daily, although, like nuts, one should take care with portion sizes due to their high energy content.

Science: The nutritionists gave two papers on the wide range of health benefits of chia seeds that include high antioxidant capacity.

8. Fatty fish (5 Votes)

Next to eggs, fish offer another attractive source of animal protein. Fatty fish, rich in omega 3, is generally considered the pick of the bunch and deserves a spot on this list.

Benefits: The high-quality proteins and omega 3 fatty acids in these fish were the top benefits listed by nutritionists. Some of the mentioned benefits of omega 3 include better heart health, improved concentration and cognitive skills, improved nervous system health, and reduced arthritis symptoms. Two nutritionists also highlighted the high vitamin D content of these fish, which is particularly useful in regions will dark winters (vitamin D is mainly produced in the skin by exposure to sunlight). The healthy fats in fatty fish also assist in the absorption of vitamins A, D, E, and K.

Nutrients: Protein, omega 3, and vitamin D top the list, followed by selenium, vitamin A, calcium, niacin, potassium, and vitamin B12.

Recommendation: Salmon was recommended by every nutritionist that mentioned fatty fish. There is quite some debate about farmed vs. wild salmon. While wild salmon is healthier, farmed salmon is the only way to sustainably satisfy growing global demand. At least here in Norway, the salmon industry is very tightly regulated and produces fish that retain excellent health benefits. Sardines and mackerel also got a vote. Both offer similar health benefits to salmon at a considerably lower price point. I eat more mackerel than salmon nowadays, mainly because rising global demand has made salmon very expensive.

Frequency: Nutritionists recommend eating fatty fish 2–3 times per week.

Science: Here are some papers showing that omega 3 reduces inflammation, enhances metabolic health, and reduces depression, the selenium in fatty fish brings numerous benefits, salmon lowers the risk of heart disease, and eating fish can make you smarter.

10. Cruciferous veggies (4 Votes)

Kicking off a thrilling 4-way tie for tenth place, we have another famed sub-family of vegetables. It’s a little tricky because some of the leafy greens that took fourth spot are also part of the cruciferous family, so technically, this section is about cruciferous veggies that are not dark leafy greens.

Benefits: The high nutrient density of cruciferous veggies aid in immunity, bone health, eye health, cell communication, and blood sugar regulation. They also protect against degenerative disease and ensure better mental aging.

Nutrients: In order of popularity among nutritionists, the top nutrients in cruciferous veggies include vitamin C, calcium, vitamin K, phytonutrients and other antioxidants, folate, B vitamins, magnesium, potassium, vitamin A, soluble fiber, and something quite interesting called sulforaphane.

Recommendations: Broccoli is the obvious top pick in this category, followed by Brussels sprouts and something that was news to me: broccoli sprouts. Other popular examples are cabbage and cauliflower. Having never been a fan of broccoli, I had to get quite creative when I learned just how nutritious it is (unless it is overcooked). This mission led to the “meat as a vegetable dressing” philosophy that has served me well for many years. The sprouts are a much more recent addition to my diet, inspired by this top 10 exercise. I now sprout my broccoli seeds at home (which is surprisingly easy), mainly for use in salads.

Frequency: Cruciferous veggies can be eaten daily. One nutritionist recommended 80 g per day.

Science: Here are the papers showing how carotenoids in cruciferous veggies benefit eye health and how broccoli sprouts improve insulin resistance in diabetes patients and help prevent cancer through their high sulforaphane content.

10. Avocado (4 Votes)

The avo deserves a category of its own since it’s classified as a berry but boasts a totally different nutritional profile. It’s also one of my favorite foods, so I was relieved when it managed to squeak into the top 10.

Benefits: Aside from being delicious and highly versatile, the most popular benefits of avocados come from their healthy fats and cholesterol-lowering fiber content. They also boast antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, and anti-cancer properties. Another interesting benefit of avocados is that they assist in nutrient uptake, making the foods eaten with them more nutritious (especially the greens in salads).

Nutrients: Here is the nutrient rundown in order of popularity: monounsaturated fats, soluble and insoluble fiber, potassium, vitamin E, vitamin K, B-vitamins, folate and folic acid, carotenoids (antioxidants), vitamin D, and calcium.

Recommendations: Avocados can be used in a variety of dishes. I used to take a pure convenience route and eat almost all my avo crushed on some whole-wheat crackers, but since I learned about the benefits avos have on nutrient absorption, I now eat most of my avos in salads.

Frequency: Avocados can be eaten daily, but moderation should be applied due to their high energy content. The nutritionists recommended one avo per day only for very active people.

Science: Here are some studies showing that avos can increase HDL (good) cholesterol, are associated with an overall better diet and health outcomes, and enhance nutrient uptake from salads.

10. Tomato (4 Votes)

Another food that deserves a category of its own, the tomato is technically a fruit that commonly gets treated as a vegetable. It comes with unique nutritional advantages that got four nutritionists to include it on their lists.

Benefits: The main reason nutritionists like tomatoes is because of something called lycopene. This magic nutrient brings all sorts of benefits in terms of immunity, degenerative disease prevention, and even protection against UV damage. It’s also rich in potassium that helps offset the harmful effects of sodium that’s all too abundant in modern diets.

Nutrients: Although tomatoes contain many nutrients, the nutritionists only mentioned fiber, lycopene, and potassium.

Recommendations: Tomato is very versatile both in raw and cooked meals. I’ve long disliked raw tomatoes (mainly due to the texture), but cherry tomatoes in salads soon fixed that. Luckily, the nutritionists say that canned tomato is also healthy, so I use plenty of that in my cooked meals.

Frequency: Tomatoes can be eaten daily. One nutritionist recommended 80 g per day.

Science: Here are some studies showing how tomatoes and lycopene benefit heart health (possibly by platelet anti-aggregation), are important for preventing heart attacks, and inhibit prostate cancer and cancer in general.

10. Other veggies (4 Votes)

Rounding out the list, we have an array of vegetables other than dark leafy greens, cruciferous veggies, and tomatoes.

Benefits: The big over-arching benefits of vegetables are their high nutrient density and fiber content, making them essential for general health. There is solid evidence that vegetables, in general, prevent a range of diseases, improve immunity, and offer antioxidant services.

Nutrients: In order of popularity, the nutritionists listed fiber, vitamin C, iron, folate, beta-carotene converted to vitamin A, antioxidants, vitamin E, and potassium.

Recommendations: Two of the general vegetable votes went to sweet potatoes, which is a healthier alternative to regular potatoes. It’s a good idea to make this substitution (at least partly). Other veggies mentioned explicitly include pumpkin, carrots, capsicum, onion, beets, and red bell peppers. If you don’t like veggies, I strongly recommend dedicating some time to research and experimentation aimed solely at making them taste great. It is possible! For example, mastering the art of baked sweet potato and vegetable soup (in addition to the meat as a vegetable dressing idea mentioned earlier) significantly boosted my vegetable intake.

Frequency: Vegetables can be eaten daily.

Science: The veggie papers supplied by nutritionists say that beta-carotene in foods like carrots and sweet potatoes is an important source of vitamin A, purple-fleshed sweet potatoes may be effective against cancer, sweet potatoes offer a potential remedy for vitamin A deficiency in Sub-Saharan Africa, onion compounds can lower blood pressure, onions are rich in dietary flavonoids with good antioxidant properties, and allium vegetables like onion and garlic can reduce cancer risk.

Honorable Mentions

Several interesting foods just missed out on the extended top 10:

Quinoa (3 votes): Complete protein packing a wide range of nutrients
Sea veggies (2 votes): Rare source of iodine often lacking in our diets
Garlic (2 votes): Medicinal ingredient in naturopathic practices
Meat (2 votes): High-quality protein and source of B-vitamins
Fruit (2 votes): Tasty source of many essential vitamins
Olive oil (2 votes): Generally viewed as the healthiest oil option
Matcha (1 vote): An alternative to coffee with many health benefits
Whole grains (1 vote): Affordable and fiber-rich healthy staples
Dark chocolate (1 vote): An antioxidant-rich treat
Turmeric (1 vote): A highly concentrated antioxidant source

Final Thoughts

One of the most fundamental personal growth projects anyone can undertake is to seamlessly integrate a healthy diet into their life. This article gives a helpful list of ingredients, but the real mission is to combine them in a tasty, practical, and affordable manner (knowing that the ideal solution will differ from person to person and place to place).

You don’t need to be a dietitian to accomplish this mission. You just need to be motivated enough to keep trying different options until you find a system that clicks. Like many things in life, getting started is challenging, but once you get into it, experimenting with different culinary solutions becomes fun!

Lastly, if you think the Upwork nutritionists missed an important food or got the order completely wrong, do let me know in the comments. I’m always looking for new insights to improve my own diet.

Thanks for reading!

Schalk January 14, 2022

2.3 - Diet & Nutrition food, health, nutrition, personal development

I Paid Five Nutritionists to Critique My Diet

And it turned out to be a great investment!

How much would you pay to have an extra healthy year added to your life?

Thinking about it, I would happily drop tens of thousands of dollars for 365 days of extra quality time on Earth. And that makes me wonder: Why did it take me so long to hire experts to optimize my diet?

Well, it’s better late than never, I suppose. In this article, I’d like to share my recent experience from hiring five nutritionists and dieticians on Upwork to critique my diet and suggest improvements.

Overall, it was a positive experience that I can happily recommend. I plan to repeat this exercise once every two years for the foreseeable future.

Why Hire Five Nutritionists on Upwork?

There were two main reasons behind this move:

Many aspects of nutrition remain highly disputed today, which means it’s a good idea to get multiple expert opinions.
Everyone is unique, so it’s better to get experts to focus on your specific situation than to rely on generalized guidelines from the internet.

Upwork makes it easy to get multiple opinions from qualified experts at a reasonable price. I paid about $300 in total for my five nutritional recommendations, with prices ranging from $15 to $100. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the more costly experts gave the most valuable feedback (the two freelancers I would hire again are Michelle and Brenda).

But it’s important to also consider the time consumed by this exercise. I spent about 10 hours writing a document to describe my current diet, interacting with the experts, and deciding which changes to make based on their feedback. Putting a reasonable value on my time would bring the total cost to about $800 (still totally worth it).

The Process

Hiring on Upwork is quite convenient. You simply create a profile, post a job with a decent description of what you want, and wait for freelancers to apply. If you already know some good candidates (like the two experts I recommended earlier), you can invite them directly.

You will probably receive far more applications than you need, and selecting the right freelancers can feel intimidating. Luckily, if you go into the exercise knowing that you’ll make several hires, much of this pressure falls away.

I should also mention the importance of putting some effort into the job description. After all, if you don’t formulate the right question, you’ll never get the right answer. You can find my attempt at posing a good question in the appendix below this article.

How the Upwork Experts Improved My Diet

As you can see in the appendix, my diet was already quite healthy before my Upwork experiment — a wide variety of whole foods with almost no sugar or other empty calories. My biggest problem was the occasional emotional eating binge during stressful, frustrating, or overwhelming times (although I restrict the binging to relatively healthy foods).

After the five Upwork experts gave their feedback, I took several months to try different strategies. Eventually, I settled on the following changes:

1. Rebalancing Macronutrients

It turns out the nutritionists and dieticians I hired were not big fans of low-carb diets. Hence, the main recommendation was to replace some of my fat intake with complex carbs and a little more protein.

Legumes were mentioned several times, given that they are protein-rich complex carbs. Thus, the first major change I made was a big boost in my consumption of beans, lentils, and chickpeas. Beans and lentils now form the bulk of the chili con carne I often have for lunch, while chickpeas became a staple in my new evening salad and the occasional snack.

I also increased the amount of whole-grain carbs in my lunches (mainly rice, pasta, quinoa, and barley). My favorite whole-wheat crackers also got an expanded role, adding some crunch to my breakfast and evening salad.

In exchange for all these extra carbs, I reduced my intake of meat and nuts. The result is a more balanced mix of carbs and fat, resulting in about 45% of my calories from carbs, 35% from fats, and 20% from proteins.

2. Correcting Micronutrient Deficiencies

The experts found a deficiency in calcium and a mild vitamin B12 shortage. Cheese received several votes, although one expert pointed out that it should not be eaten with meat (like I was doing in my lasagne) because the calcium in cheese blocks the absorption of iron from meat.

In response to these recommendations, I now eat plenty of feta cheese with my evening salad and no more cheese on my lasagne. I also started using kefir in my breakfast, which is an excellent source of calcium.

For vitamin B12, I take a teaspoon of chlorella powder (which contains over 2000% of the recommended daily B12 per 100 g) with my daily green smoothie.

3. Tweaking Macronutrient Timing

Several experts recommended more protein at dinnertime. The feta cheese and chickpeas in my evening salad cater to this recommendation on four days of the week.

On the other evenings, I eat a rather strange omelet involving two eggs mixed with half a leek (chopped) with a filling of canned mackerel in tomato sauce (a healthy favorite here in Norway) and some cucumber on the side. This surprisingly tasty concoction has plenty of protein and also packs vitamin D, which helps with the dark Norwegian winters and calcium absorption.

4. Snacking and Calorie Cycling

To my great relief, the experts didn’t have a problem with my occasional healthy food binges. One even pointed out that this behavior has a name: calorie cycling. Usually, calorie cycling is a diet strategy where caloric intake is restricted on some days and unrestricted on others, but I seem to follow such a cycle without ever restricting calories.

Snacking was one area where there was little agreement. Some experts wanted me to stick to three meals, while others insisted that healthy snacking is perfectly fine. However, there was good agreement that high-protein snacks are best for curbing cravings.

After some experimentation, I came up with a snacking regimen that works quite well. My first craving of the day is quenched with a green smoothy, a teaspoon of chlorella, and an apple. Further cravings pull forward my main meals as required, and any remaining cravings are satisfied with high protein snacks, mainly chickpeas, walnuts, or eggs.

5. Cutting Out and Cutting Back

Although my diet contains very few unhealthy elements, some experts still suggested that I cut back on meat (especially the little bit of bacon in my lasagne) and avoid butter. These heavy sources of saturated fat are linked to a range of degenerative diseases.

Thus, I dutifully cut out the bacon and replaced half of my meat intake with more veggie mince and legumes. I also completely dropped butter in exchange for more olive oil.

6. General Health Guidelines

In addition to some solid nutritional recommendations, several experts also threw in a couple of broader health tips to help meet my longevity and craving management goals.

First, the good old idea of mindful eating made a few appearances. I always try to eat mindfully and gratefully, but it was good to get a reminder.

The importance of sleep also got several mentions. Chronic sleep deprivation or an irregular sleep pattern can induce overeating and create cravings for unhealthy foods.

Meditation also came up as a mode of stress management, motivating me to finally establish a fixed meditation regimen. (I can warmly recommend the Daily Calm and Daily Trip on the Calm meditation app.)

I also learned about the importance of the waist-to-hip ratio and blood pressure as measures of general health. I’m now the proud owner of a blood pressure kit and a dedicated ribbon for waist and hip measurements.

How I’ll Structure My Next Diet Evaluation

I’ve learned several useful things that promise to make my next diet evaluation simpler and more efficient.

Give more details about my general health. This includes age, gender, weight, height, activity level, blood pressure, waist-to-hip ratio, and any existing health complications. Several nutritionists asked for this information after accepting the job.

Go for quality over quantity. Next time, I’ll probably go for three or four more expensive experts, preferring qualified dieticians. As mentioned earlier, the time required to complete this exercise turned out to be more costly than the direct payments to the freelancers.

Properly analyze the results. Taking a few hours to compile the recommendations of different experts into an actionable plan was a very valuable exercise. I only managed to work myself up to do it several months after receiving the recommendations, so I’ll need to do better next time.

Ask questions after the analysis. The freelancers were happy to answer a few follow-up questions after delivering their reports. However, some important questions only came up after my belated analysis of the results. Next time, I’ll analyze right away and ask any questions that come up.

Final Thoughts

Overall, I’m very happy I went through this experiment. I rather arrogantly believed that my diet was already close to perfection, but the nutritionists I hired pointed out several important issues. After integrating their suggestions into my life, I’m confident that I got tens of thousands of dollars worth of healthy life years in exchange for my $300 in direct payments and 10 hours of productive time spent on this exercise.

So, why not hire your own nutritional team on Upwork? I’d be hard-pressed to name a better investment in your long-term health.

— Appendix —

Description Attached to My Upwork Job Posting

Goals

My diet is already in a good place. It helps me stay at a healthy weight with ~13% body fat and makes sure I never get sick. Still, I would like to get a professional opinion on how my diet can be made even better. With this in mind, please suggest improvements to the diet described in this document with the aim of reaching the following two goals:

Maximize my healthy lifespan (I’m currently 36)
Minimize any emotional food cravings and their effects on my health

The second point is sometimes applicable when my life gets a little stressful. It happens about five days per month on average, although it’s pretty irregular. In the past, stress used to drive me to the occasional ice cream or chocolate binge, but luckily I’ve managed to eliminate this behavior from my life. Nowadays, when I’m plagued by cravings, I just eat my healthy breakfast, lunch, and dinner in close succession and snack on healthy foods as required afterward. I never try to resist or suppress my emotional food cravings because doing so drains my willpower and distracts me from my work. When I overeat one day, it’s natural to eat less the next day, so I stay at a healthy weight.

Breakfast

I enjoy a big breakfast that provides almost half of my daily calories. It consists of the following ingredients:

200 g plain Greek yogurt
80 g seeds: hemp, flax, sunflower, pumpkin
100 g assorted nut mix: peanuts, almonds, cashew, hazelnuts, raisins, and a small amount of sweetened papaya
150 g frozen berries: blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, black- and red currents
50 g granola and 30 g All-Bran
10 g of amla powder

Sometimes, I’m not all that hungry in the morning (about twice per week). On those days, I eat two eggs scrambled with one chopped-up tomato seasoned with some salt and pepper.

Lunch

On weekdays, I eat frozen lunches cooked in bulk once per month. My three main lunch dishes combine to give me the following ingredients from a typical meal:

80 g pork mince
40 g veggie mince, mainly soy protein
10 g bacon
400 g of a wide range of vegetables: carrots, broccoli, mushrooms, onions (red and white), bell peppers (green and red), eggplant, baby corn, water chestnut, turnip, tomato (canned), beans (canned), lentils (canned), chili, garlic
50 g brown rice or whole wheat lasagne
20 g cheese
30 ml milk
5 g butter and olive oil
5 g seasoning: salt, pepper, curry, turmeric, cayenne pepper, brown vinegar, lemon juice
20 g raisins and apricot jam
100 g cucumber on the side

On weekends, I usually have fish for lunch. About half of the time, this is an omelet with two eggs and a 170 g can of mackerel in tomato sauce with 200 g of cucumber on the side. I use about 10 g of butter and olive oil in the pan for the omelet. The other half is either 1) 250 g salmon baked with 200 g canned beetroot and eaten with 100 g barley rice and mango chutney or 2) 250 g pollock fillets in a whole-wheat crust with 400 g mixed vegetables (carrots, broccoli, baby corn, water chestnut, turnip).

Dinner

My staple dinner is one medium-sized crushed avocado on some seed-sprinkled gluten-free crackers (40 g) with 20 g of cold-smoked salmon on top, seasoned with salt and pepper. This applies to most days of the week, but I occasionally make some baked sweet potato or just have some fresh fruit.

Snacks

On an average day, I would eat an apple, a banana, three carrots, and three cherry tomatoes as snacks. About three days a week, I need a little more, and I make one cup (250 ml) of something similar to my breakfast containing chia, flax, and hemp seeds, the same nut mix, granola and All-Bran, fresh blueberries, and almond milk.

I almost never eat any empty calories and don’t use sugar. The only time I eat something clearly unhealthy is when we have some cake or dessert on a special occasion. When I occasionally need to take snacks to a social event, I usually opt for chocolate- and yogurt-covered nuts.

Liquids

I drink plenty of water: two glasses directly after getting up, a glass before every snack, and some sips from the water bottle that’s always by my side throughout the day. In addition, I drink one or two cups of Rooibos tea with a slice of lemon each day.

Another healthy staple of mine is a green smoothie containing spinach, kale, cucumber, celery, apple, ginger, and orange juice. This is made once every three months and frozen in containers for convenient daily consumption. I drink about 100 ml per day with another 100 ml of orange juice. The orange juice is pressed (not from concentrate) with pulp and no added sugar.

Meal timing

Breakfast is my only meal with a fixed time: 7:30–2 hours after I get up. Before breakfast, I have two glasses of water and one cup of tea. The rest of the day, I eat as I get hungry. Lunch can be as early as 10:00 or as late as 13:00, with dinner spanning an even wider range. I try to avoid eating after 19:00, but I still snack after 19:00 about twice a week. This flexible meal timing ensures that I don’t spend any willpower on food and just eat whenever my body wants to.

If I have a stressful day that leads to food cravings, I would typically eat quite a lot in the first part of the day. Overeating late in the day disrupts my sleep, which I value very highly, so this rarely happens.

Schalk January 9, 2022

2.3 - Diet & Nutrition diet, food, health, recipe

The Salad That Did the Impossible

It got me to eat salad almost every day!

The miracle-working salad in my nicest chipped bowl.

I’ve been riding the healthy-eating train for years, but salads never quite made it on board. Sure, I enjoy a couple of cucumber slices on the side, but making a full salad always seemed like more effort than it’s worth.

Then, one fine day, a slew of nutritional advice from several experts got me to change my ways. I had to address a deficiency in calcium, add more complex carbs and protein to my dinners, and try out a new superfood in the form of home-grown broccoli sprouts.

The salad that emerged from these recommendations turned out to be a real treat, and I have no problems motivating myself to make it time and time again. Thus, I deemed it worthy of its very own article.

Ingredients

My miracle-working salad is a complete meal offering a balanced mix of macro and micronutrients. Here’s a list of everything it contains:

A big handful of shredded kale
Half a handful of broccoli sprouts
Five sliced cherry tomatoes
One medium-sized avocado
40 g of crushed whole-grain crackers
80 g of canned chickpeas
40 g of feta cheese (I use a local garlic-flavored brand)
A dash of seeds (I use a mix of chia, flax, and hemp)
Olive oil, salt, and pepper to taste

Instructions

It’s not much more complicated than just tossing everything into a bowl, but there are a couple of subtleties.

Put the shredded kale in a bowl and mix in the broccoli sprouts. Dispersing the sprouts evenly is a skill by itself and needs a bit of practice.
Slice the cherry tomatoes in quarters and add to the bowl.
Cube the avocado and add it on top.
Crush the crackers over the bowl for a bit of crunch. You could also use croutons, but I like my Scandinavian “knekkebrød.”
Add the chickpeas, feta cheese, and seeds.
Use some of the oil from the feta cheese and add olive oil if needed.
Season with salt and pepper to taste.

The whole process takes about ten minutes. Granted, this is more than nothing, but this salad is a meal by itself, so you don’t need to bother with making anything else.

Pro Tips

Three of the ingredients require some smart management to maximize convenience and taste. Let’s take a look.

Broccoli sprouts

It took me a while to work up the courage to get started in home sprouting. But once I got going, it was a breeze.

Broccoli seeds and sprouting kits are available cheaply from many online health food stores. Once your kit arrives, all you need to do is to put in the seeds and rinse with water every morning and evening. If you have a solid morning and evening routine, this is virtually no extra effort.

The sprouting cycle conveniently spans one week, and the sprouts can last long enough in the fridge (in an airtight plastic container) that you always have some available.

Avocado

Always having a ripe and unblemished avocado at hand is something of an art form. It all starts with buying your avocados when they are still rock hard to ensure you don’t get any of those nasty brown bruises. Then, let them ripen at room temperature. Once they become slightly soft, move them to the fridge where they will last for up to one full week.

If you’re a big avo fan like me, you’ll want to make sure you always have a solid supply of ripening avocadoes in the fruit bowl and ripe avocados in the fridge. Once you get into the avo-ripening rhythm, you’ll never be lacking a good avocado again.

Seeds

A container with premixed seeds is essential for maximum convenience. As explained in a previous breakfast article, I buy my seeds in bulk to make large-scale seed mixes, so my seed mix is always available.

But this only works for a large seed consumer. If you don’t use seeds in other meals, the best is to look for a packet of premixed seeds or buy some smaller packets of different seeds to mix in a convenient container.

Enjoy!

I’ll sure be enjoying this salad for years to come. Perhaps you’ll be too!

Schalk January 1, 2022

2.5 - Mental Health & Happiness gratitude, happiness, mental health

The “Big Five” Reasons to be Grateful Every Day

You enjoy much greater fortune than you might think!

Created by Janet Cloete using images from Gabrielle Henderson and Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Gratitude. If you’ve ever done any reading on happiness, it was probably one of the first topics you encountered. Yes, the gratitude-happiness link is clear, but being grateful is easier said than done.

If you ask the internet for things to be grateful for, you’ll end up with lists like this top hit filled with cute trivialities like “cake” and “blowing bubbles.” There’s nothing wrong with that, but there’s not much right with it either. Such lists are simply too superficial to have a lasting positive impact.

The “Big Five” list that follows does away with all the superficial trivialities. Instead, each item contains a profound truth, powerful enough to emerge as gratitude at the right times. Each section also features some concrete examples and inspiring films to drive these truths home.

Ready? Here we go.

1. Winning at the Lottery of Birth

If you’re reading this, it’s highly likely that you were a big winner at the lottery of birth. In other words, you were born into a family and a society that gave you a fair shot at building a decent life.

Simple illustration of the lottery of birth from the Gates Foundation Goalkeepers 2019 report.

Even today, a surprisingly small fraction of the global population enjoys this privilege. For example, if you’re an average developed world citizen living on $20000/year, there are about 17 people below you on the global income scale for every one person above you. (To find your position on the income mountain, please follow the instructions at the bottom of this article.)

The global income distribution from Gapminder.

Here’s another way to put it: Your chances of being born into abject poverty (less than $1.9/day) were much higher than your chances of being born into an average Western family. Please take a moment to process the prospect of living on $1.9/day (i.e., one Starbucks coffee).

Putting it into practice

So, how can we cultivate a habit of gratitude for winning the lottery of birth? Simple: Become mindful of all the privileges we enjoy thanks to being born toward the right of the figure above.

The best place to start is to make a habit of giving thanks before enjoying the good things in your life. A quick meal prayer is a good example, even if you’re not religious. Simply start the meal with “I’m grateful for this nutritious meal, and my heart goes out to all those less fortunate.”

You can replace “this nutritious meal” in the sentence above with anything else that may be relevant. For example, “my comfortable home” works well whenever you enter your house.

Some inspiration

Graphs like the ones above may give an intellectual understanding, but their effect will be limited before we experience the facts on a deep emotional level. Luckily, there are many stirring stories to help those of us who won the lottery of birth appreciate our incredibly good fortune. I’d like to recommend a film called Tsotsi from my country of birth, South Africa.

2. A Lot More Time

Time is our one truly non-renewable resource. Essentially everything else we value can be regained after being lost or carelessly wasted. But we can never get back the hour that just passed.

That’s why the steady gain in global life expectancy is so wonderful: It gives us more of this most precious of resources. And our progress over the last century has been nothing short of miraculous. Thanks to the relentless march of technology, we’ve all but conquered the elements, famines, and infectious diseases that took billions of lives across history.

Here’s some more perspective: about 90% of the people who ever lived were born before 1900 (source). These 100 billion people had less than 30 years (on average) to spend on this planet. Incredibly, those reading this article can reasonably expect to triple this historical life expectancy.

Putting it into practice

There are plenty of good moments to practice gratitude for your precious gift of extra time:

Your birthday
Whenever you benefit from modern medical science
Your child’s birthday (historically, half of all children died)
When buying an abundance of nutritious food at the supermarket
When bad weather rages harmlessly outside your comfortable home

Some inspiration

There are many good stories about life during the 99.9% of human history before science and fossil fuels ignited the technological revolution. My pick is The Physician — an eye-opening look at living conditions and medical “science” in the Middle Ages.

3. Never Having to Take a Life

For the vast majority of human history, it was “kill or be killed.” Mortal threats were everywhere in the form of other humans, animals, and nature. Today, we’ve successfully tamed animals and nature (at least over here in the rich world), but human threats remain.

Luckily, these are also declining steadily. Data from 2017 shows that about 80 people die from lifestyle diseases for every one person who dies from violence (homicides, conflict, and terrorism).

Lifestyle diseases dominate the global death count (source).

It’s been a whole lifetime since the last major war that killed about 50 million people. Since then, serious conflicts have been much less deadly and war casualties have all but disappeared in the West.

Thanks to all this progress, developed world citizens today are highly unlikely to ever experience the pain and trauma of war or other deadly violence — a historically unprecedented privilege.

Putting it into practice

Even though violence is only a minor cause of death nowadays, it always makes big headlines. So, instead of letting the news fill you with anxiety, why not turn it into a trigger to express gratitude for your peaceful life? Prosperity is the best antidote to violence, and you can create prosperity much more effectively from a place of gratitude than a place of anxiety.

Gratitude for peace also works beautifully when you’re enjoying a peaceful vista or taking a stroll in an environment where you feel completely safe.

Here’s a handy phrase to try: “I’m grateful for my place in this peaceful corner of the world in the most peaceful time in history.”

Some inspiration

As mentioned earlier, World War II literally ended a lifetime ago. That’s great, but it is also dangerous because the current generation lacks a deep emotional understanding of just how terrible war is.

Hollywood can help us remember via titles like 1917, Hacksaw Ridge, and Unbroken. But the D-Day scene from Saving Private Ryan gets my vote as the most powerful depiction of the horrors of war.

4. The Freedom to Earn True Freedom

Humanity has been fighting and dying for freedom throughout the ages, and for good reason. Before fossil fuels gave us abundant cheap energy, outright oppression was the only way for a small group of elites to enjoy decent living standards. And so they oppressed with great enthusiasm.

Today, it’s a different story. The average American consumes as much useful energy as can be produced by 147 slaves working 24/7. That’s why we get to enjoy a level of affluence exceeding that of ancient kings in many ways.

We didn’t abolish slavery because we suddenly grew a conscience. No, we only abolished it when it became inferior to oil-powered mechanization. Graph source.

Still, far too many people remain slaves of consumerism, working jobs they hate to keep up with the Joneses. But this is only a psychological trap and not the result of direct oppression. Any rich-world citizen who denounces consumerism can attain true freedom relatively early in life. I’ve done it, and it’s one of the things I’m most grateful for.

Putting it into practice

True freedom is when you get to use your time and energy for whatever inspires you most. Until recently, this was a complete impossibility, but we’re lucky enough to live in a time when efficient technology and markets open this ultimate privilege to all those who won at the lottery of birth.

The best time to express gratitude for the freedom to earn true freedom is when you’re buying or using labor-saving products and services. Many purchases fall in this category. As do your home appliances (unpacking the dishwasher is much more fun from a place of gratitude).

If you like numbers, take a few minutes to calculate how many hours you need to work to earn the money required to buy basic food and shelter. In my case, it’s a mere 30 minutes a day. And since I’m no slave to consumerism, most of the rest of the day is mine to invest/enjoy with complete freedom. The more I think about it, the more grateful I become!

Some inspiration

We should never take our modern freedoms for granted. This not only includes freedom from slavery, but many others like the right to vote and freedom of expression, religion, and sexual orientation. My pick for remembering these precious freedoms is 12 Years a Slave.

5. Living the Most Interesting Time in History

There are still countless things wrong with the world, but no one can deny that we’ve come a hell of a long way. Today, we stand on the cusp of what may well go down as the most interesting time in human history. And it’s a true privilege to be part of it.

To be more specific, here are a few of the historically unique achievements we should tick off this century:

Eradicate poverty and ensure material prosperity for all
Achieve this abundance in a sustainable manner
Eliminate all soul-killing or dangerous jobs via automation
Learn to be genuinely happy with our material abundance
Make all the best knowledge freely available to all
Safely peak the global population while living well past 100
Restore the natural world and learn to enjoy it sustainably
Maximize the human experience with virtual and augmented reality

Of course, we can also screw things up entirely. But I’m confident that we’ll pull it off in the end. We already have almost all the technology we need to sustainably give everyone a fair shot at life. Our only real challenge is scaling and deploying this technology (and its bounty) in a fair and efficient manner. The natural human drive toward progress will take care of the rest.

Putting it into practice

I’ve been studying our great 21st-century sustainability challenge for more than a decade. Yes, it gives me the occasional sleepless night, but overall, I’m super excited to be part of it.

If you also experience the occasional bout of anxiety about our collective future, try expressing gratitude for being part of this special time in history. For example, if you stress about climate change, try saying something like “I’m grateful to witness the historically unique global transition to a sustainable society and the opportunity to play my part.”

Some inspiration

The 21st century will see humanity’s transformation from individualistic, short-sighted greed to collective, high-tech prosperity. To get in the mood, let’s look back at another culturally transformative period in history, the Renaissance, with the fun flick, Shakespeare in Love.

Closing Thoughts

We all know that habitual gratitude is essential for lasting happiness. But gratitude is not exactly the easiest habit to cultivate, mainly because we’re so good at taking things for granted.

This article listed the Big Five things all rich-world citizens can be super grateful for. With the help of some concrete examples and a few inspirational films, the Big Five can help cultivate a deep, emotional understanding of how blessed we truly are.

Such a well-informed attitude of gratitude not only increases happiness; it also creates the right mindset for extending these privileges to the billions of people who are not as fortunate. And yes, making such valuable contributions to the lives of others only brings further happiness.

So, let’s all be more grateful and make a big success of the 21st century!

Appendix: Finding Your Place on the Mountain

The instructions below will help you find out which part of the global income mountain you grew up on. Of course, you can also find your current position on the mountain by considering your own income today.

Start by asking your parents to estimate your monthly (after-tax) household income around the time you were 10 years old. Then divide that number by the number of people in your household and by 30 (number of days in the average month) to get your daily living budget.

If you live in the US, adjust that number to 2011 Dollars from the year you were 10. For example, if you lived on $25/day in 1990, this inflation calculator adjusts the number to $43/day in 2011 Dollars. Then, jump straight to the final paragraph.

Those outside the US also need to adjust for currency and purchasing power. A purchasing power adjustment becomes particularly important for those who grew up in developing countries with low living costs (like me). You can use data from this source to do the conversion.

For example, when I was 10 in 1994, our family of four had an after-tax income of about 6300 South African Rand per month. This means I lived on about 6300/4/30 = R53/day.

The PPP data conversion source gives a factor of 1.89 for 1994, meaning that R1.89 had about the same purchasing power as $1.00. Thus, my R53/day becomes $28/day. When adjusting for inflation, this grows to $43/day.

Now, I can go to the interactive graph, adjust the slider at the bottom to the correct year (1994 in this example), and hover over the correct number on the x-axis ($43/day in this example) to see my percentile. As shown below, I was lucky enough to grow up in the 94th percentile.

My position on the global income mountain at age 10.

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About Schalk

Posts by Schalk Cloete:

Save money, the economy, and the environment all at once

1. Air Flow Management

Action steps

2. Solar Radiation Management

Action steps

3. Improved Insulation

Action steps

4. Thermally Regulated Living Spaces

Action steps

5. Smart Showering

Action steps

6. Hot Water Tank

Action steps

7. Smart Washing and Drying

Action steps

8. LEDs and Energy Saving Mode

Action steps

9. Smart Cooking

Action steps

10. Efficient Appliances

Action steps

Final Thoughts

Finding health and happiness in a smaller ecological footprint

1. Remember: The Best Things in Life are Free

Prioritize relationships

Get into nature

Read a book

Sleep

Create

Subtract before you add

2. Develop a Deep Interest in Your Family’s Health

The four pillars

A self-sustaining interest

Efficient Living promotes health

3. Forget About the Joneses

4. Location, Location, Location

Car-free living

Access to nature

Family

Inspiration

Peer pressure

Broaden your horizons

5. Purposefully Approach Financial Freedom

Wealth and financial freedom

Automate saving and investment

Pathways to financial freedom

Efficient Living promotes wealth

6. Free Creative Expression

The virtuous cycle

Claiming creative freedom

Taking the first step

7. Invest in the Greater Good

Creating without immediate reward

Practical matters

Invest time, money, or both

Final Thoughts

A healthy lifestyle goes far beyond losing weight and feeling good; it’s about building a bright future for you and your planet.

Diet

Eat less …

… mostly plants …

… with no added sugar

Exercise

Move intelligently …

… and stretch/lift with purpose

Stress

Get hot, get cold …

… and push your boundaries

Sleep

Get sufficient shut-eye …

… perhaps twice a day

The Big Picture

Ten levels to vanquishing the legions of unhealthy temptations that surround us every day

Level 0: Standard American Diet (SAD)

Level 1: Fruit Bowl

Level 2: Clean Home

Level 3: Craving Busters

Level 4: Home-Made Meals

Level 5: Nutrient Density