health

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How to Eat as Much as You Want and Never Get Fat

Feast on the right foods and your body will know when to stop.

Compiled from images by Pixabay and Dmitry Mishin

Let’s start with an unusual statement: Western culture has weaponized food for psychological torture.

This is no hyperbole. On the one hand, our culture idealizes overly thin bodies and, on the other, it surrounds us with foods purpose-built to make us overeat — the perfect recipe for food-induced misery.

Now, don’t get me wrong; we should certainly keep each other accountable to avoid obesity (which costs society a mind-boggling $2 trillion every year), but social pressures to be excessively thin have long been out of hand. Ironically, these pressures only make us gain more weight.

It’s high time we straighten out this twisted system. First, let’s ignore social conventions and define “fat” as the point where health risks become serious. That would be the “high” or “very high” risk bands in this calculator (orange and red areas in the figure below).

My Smart BMI positioning from eating as much whole food as I feel like.

Second, let’s replace all those sugary, fatty, and salty addictions with a healthy and varied whole-food diet. I’m confident that getting “fat” on such a diet will be very difficult, even if you give yourself complete freedom to eat as much as you feel like (sounds nice, doesn’t it?).

When diligently adhering to the following steps, you might even find it impossible to break out of that pretty green band in the figure above 🙂

  1. Stock your kitchen with all the right foods.
  2. Make sure you always pay the true cost of empty calories.
  3. Drink plenty of water and use it as an intelligent snack moderator.
  4. Use your toothbrush to help you stop when 80% full (Hara Hachi Bu).
  5. Find good reasons outside yourself to maintain your healthy diet.

So, if you’re currently at an unhealthy weight (or spending a huge amount of time, money, and energy maintaining your healthy weight), I challenge you to stay (or get) fat on this eat-as-much-as-you-want diet. Let me know if you manage to do it. I sure couldn’t!

Step 1: A Home Stocked with the Right Foods

The best weight-loss tool out there is not a gym membership or a smoothie maker; it’s a home that contains only filling, whole foods. By extension, this also means that you need to make almost all your food at home (which doesn’t need to cost you more than 15 minutes per day).

Below, you’ll find the four categories of whole foods you need to invite into your home. For optimal results, make sure that more than 80% of your calories come from these four categories, with at least 10% from each. Here are some handy links to calculate your calorie requirement and the calorie content of different foods. In addition, maximize variety by regularly eating from each item mentioned in the four titles below.

Nuts, Seeds, and Berries

Nuts and seeds have a bad reputation due to their high-fat content and energy density. But if you ensure they’re not doctored by those mad addictive food scientists (using all their refined sugar, saturated fat, and excessive salt), your body’s natural satiety response will keep you safe. Here’s an ideal breakfast to help get you started.

Cooked and Raw Veggies (at Least a Third Non-Starchy)

Vegetables, especially the non-starchy variety, are the best filling foods at our disposal simply because they contain so few calories per volume of food. That’s why this category will be your biggest challenge in meeting the “10% of calories” guideline. To pass this test, you’ll have to rely heavily on both cooked and raw non-starchy veggies, given that they only contain about 30 calories per 100 g of food.

Cooked veggies can be rather bland, but it doesn’t have to be that way. There are plenty of ways to spice up your cooked veggies. My favorite is to use a little meat as a vegetable dressing.

Raw veggies make surprisingly good snacks. Always have some carrots, cherry tomatoes, or peas readily available in places you’ll frequently see them. These guys can be surprisingly tasty, so snack away with reckless abandon! Also, turn the green salad (or just a few cucumber slices) into a staple next to your warm meals. Last but not least, establish a green smoothie habit.

Avocado and Other Fruit

If you experience withdrawal symptoms from kicking your refined sugar addiction, fruit is a great way to ease the pain. Its natural sweetness will see you safely through to the other side. Whole, pressed fruit juices are also allowed as long as they don’t contain any added sugar.

One special (and not particularly sweet) fruit deserves its own paragraph: the avocado. You’ll frequently see this unique fruit in lists of the world’s healthiest foods. Given its high-fat content in contrast to the high carbohydrate content in most other fruits, it’s perfect for balancing your macronutrient intake.

Non-Meat Proteins from Animals and Plants

Among animal products, this category puts the threshold at 7 g of protein per 100 calories. Eggs, fish, and some dairy products meet this criterion. Most cheeses do not due to their high saturated fat content. Also, for environmental reasons, please keep your total animal product intake (including meat) below 20% of your total calories.

From the plant-world, the threshold is lowered slightly to 5 g of protein per 100 calories. Many legumes qualify for this prestigious category (those that don’t can go to the vegetable category). You can also try protein-stacked algae like spirulina and chlorella. Although not counted in this category, the nuts and seeds we discussed earlier will also make sizable contributions to your plant protein intake.

Step 2: Pay the True Cost of Empty Calories

Getting at least 80% of your calories from the above-mentioned foods offers excellent protection against all those dangerous empty calories purpose-built for addiction. But you can go a step further: fix capitalism’s worst failure by ensuring you always pay the true cost of these junk foods.

The best way to do this is to include any purchase of empty calories in your charitable donations contract — a formal contract listing the unhealthy actions that will increase the amount you give to charity. A good place to start is to donate one hour’s wages every time you buy empty calories.

What qualifies as empty calories? Anything with lots of calories and few nutrients that you buy in pursuit of an addictive dopamine hit. Some are obvious, while others, like dark chocolate and cheese, are more debatable. Your conscience will tell you where to draw the line. Listen to it.

Another dangerous element deserving a prime spot on your charity contract is your main binge trigger(s). For me, this is eating in front of the TV. Such triggers can very easily corrupt your mind and your natural satiety responses, driving you to unnecessary self-destruction.

Step 3: Water and Snacking

Staying hydrated is an excellent way to control cravings. This dieting challenge has three water guidelines:

  1. Drink two glasses of water directly after waking up.
  2. Drink a glass of water before every snack.
  3. Always have a bottle of water within arm’s length.

Point 2 is an especially effective way of controlling excessive snacking. Often, mild dehydration is a contributor to unhelpful cravings, and snacking is something we do out of impulse. This rule automatically takes care of both these issues.

Step 4: Hara Hachi Bu

This age-old practice of stopping when you’re 80% full is one reason why Japanese people, particularly the residents of Okinawa, live such long lives. Make sure you control your portion sizes to meet this guideline, and if you still feel serious cravings when your plate is empty, go and brush your teeth. Getting the food taste out of your mouth is often all that’s needed to kill those pesky cravings.

On the rare occasion that your craving persists even when your mouth is minty fresh, feel free to enjoy a healthy snack preceded by a glass of water.

Step 5: Find Your External Motivation

The last rule in this eat-as-much-as-you-want diet challenge is to find some motivation outside of yourself for eating all the right foods. This article discusses a range of options, including correcting grave social injustices, saving the environment, protecting animal welfare, and securing the health of your loved ones.

To put this into action, print out a large picture representing your chosen external motivation and put it on your fridge door.

The Challenge in a Nutshell

So, are you up for it? Here’s a short rundown of the rules:

  1. Get 80% or more of your calories from the following food categories, at least 10% from each: nuts, seeds, and berries; cooked and raw veggies (at least a third non-starchy); avocado and other fruit; non-meat protein from animals and plants.
  2. For variety, consume foods from each of the food sub-categories mentioned above at least twice per week (vegans can skip the animal protein and use a threshold of 4 g per 100 calories).
  3. Include the purchase of any empty calories and engagement in any of your binge triggers in your charitable donations contract.
  4. Follow the water guidelines: 2 glasses first thing in the morning, 1 glass before any snack, and a water bottle always within reach.
  5. Once you reach 80% fullness, you can only eat more after you’ve brushed your teeth.
  6. Decorate your fridge door with a big picture symbolizing your chosen external motivation for healthy eating.

As long as you stick to these rules, you can eat as much as you feel like!

I’m really curious whether anyone can stay (or become) “fat” while adhering to these rules. Please let me know how you got on with this challenge!

Thanks to Alta Cloete.

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What 10 Years of Green Smoothies Taught Me About the Art of Healthy Eating

Let’s take willpower out of the equation…

Image by NatureFriend from Pixabay.

Spinach, kale, celery, cucumber, apple, ginger, and turmeric.

This is the rather intimidating list of ingredients I’ve been ingesting in the form of a green smoothie almost every day for the last 10 years.

To understand the magnitude of this achievement, we need a quick rewind to my childhood. There, we find a well-meaning mother struggling to get her stubborn son to eat even the tiniest serving of veggies, let alone green things like kale and spinach. The best she could manage was some well-disguised carrots and potatoes in meat-centered casseroles and the occasional bribe for eating a few slices of cucumber on the side.

So, imagine her surprise when I started eating (or drinking) spinach, kale, and celery on a daily basis! But this was a special time — the start of my healthy living transformation — and I was highly motivated to change (a serious cancer scare can do that to you). When The World’s Healthiest Foods showed me that spinach was the most nutrient-dense thing on the planet, I knew I had to find a way to get more green stuff into my body.

Still, despite this surge of motivation, there were two serious obstacles in my way: 1) eating these bland greens was no fun whatsoever, and 2) making a daily smoothy (and cleaning up afterward) was even less fun.

The process of overcoming these obstacles gave me the key to lifelong healthy eating in a world filled with addictive empty-calorie treats (and inspired one delighted mom to adopt the green smoothie habit herself).

Today, I’d like to share this key with you.

Pain-Free Healthy Eating

Humans have strong instincts to chase instant pleasure and avoid instant pain. These are the instincts so shamelessly exploited by food companies to create the ultra-addictive treats that fuel our global obesity epidemic.

Here’s the rub: If you’re expecting yourself to consistently accept instant pain and forego all pleasure in the name of healthy eating, you’re deluding yourself. You might last a week, a month if you’re extremely motivated, but sooner or later, you’ll cave. And when you do, you’re likely to binge away all the progress you’ve made in no time flat.

No, healthy eating should not be painful. In fact, we should do everything in our power to make it as pleasurable as possible! It was this realization that started my lifelong green smoothie habit.

After learning about the health benefits of spinach, I tried several ways to prepare it and hated them all. Cooked spinach is just deeply unpleasant unless drowned in an unholy amount of cheese. Following many failed attempts, I finally happened upon the idea of a green smoothie.

What attracted me to this idea was the inclusion of apples and any kind of fruit juice. I liked several fruit juices and did not mind the occasional apple, so I thought to give this a try. At first, my ratios were rather lopsided towards apples and orange juice, but it worked: I found the resulting green smoothie quite tolerable, even mildly pleasant at times.

Over the years, I’ve gradually increased the spinach and kale fraction, reduced the orange juice, and switched to more expensive pressed juice with pulp. But this transition has been so gradual that it never threatened my commitment to my daily green smoothie.

More importantly, this philosophy soon flowed over to my other meals. For breakfast, I’ve come up with a genuinely delicious mix of nuts, seeds, and berries. For lunch, I use the meat as a vegetable dressing philosophy to bring great pleasure to the consumption of copious quantities of cooked veggies. And, for dinner, I mostly indulge in my favorite fruit, the avocado, on some seed-sprinkled crackers with a delightful bit of smoked salmon on top.

Because they are delicious, these ultra-healthy meals work with my natural instincts instead of against them. The result? Lifelong healthy eating habits without having to waste any of my preciously limited willpower reserves.

Effort Minimization

Our desire to avoid instant pain extends beyond our aversion to tasteless healthy food. Indeed, our food not only needs to be tasty; it also needs to be effortless.

This is a major challenge when it comes to green smoothies. The process of chopping up vegetables, blending them, and cleaning up afterward is no fun whatsoever. I soon realized that expecting myself to repeat this process every couple of days was never going to happen.

So, I decided to explore economies of scale. First, I bought a large smoothie maker and some freezer containers. Then, like any good engineer, I proceeded to optimize the process. I bought enough ingredients for two months of green smoothies, chopped them all up, arranged them in six piles for easy blending, blended one after the other, stored the product in the freezer containers, and cleaned up.

Soon, I had this workflow optimized to the point that it took less than 40 minutes to make 2 months’ worth of green smoothies. In other words, each smoothie costs me about 40 seconds, which is a price my lazy instincts are willing to pay for lifelong health.

Again, this philosophy soon spread to the rest of my eating regimen. For breakfast, I optimized the workflow so I could combine 16 healthy and delicious ingredients in a mere 2 minutes. For lunch, I followed the same bulk-prep-and-freeze strategy as with the green drink, creating ultra-convenient daily hot lunches for a mere 5 minutes a pop. For dinner, I developed a solid system for reliable avocado ripening and learned a few simple alternative recipes for some variation.

Overall, I spend an average of 10 minutes per day preparing my deeply enjoyable healthy meals. More importantly, the need for willpower is concentrated into a single session per month. On all the other days, the willpower requirement is zero.

To Sum Up

If you want to enjoy a (substantially longer and more rewarding) lifetime of healthy food, you must:

  1. Make your healthy foods as desirable as possible. Putting healthy food into your body should require no willpower whatsoever.
  2. Make healthy eating effortless. Concentrate your food preparation in large batches to restrict willpower requirements to once or twice per month.

Setting this up takes a bit of time, but you will enjoy rich returns for the rest of your life. I sure hope you give it a go!

Thanks to Alta Cloete.

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How Food Became Capitalism’s Greatest Failure

The origins of our global obesity and chronic disease epidemics

Image by Steve Buissinne from Pixabay.

Capitalism: that ingenious system for mobilizing people to create value and advance our civilization. Without it, most of us would still be peasants slaving away on subsistence farms. But capitalism has its problems, mainly 1) extreme wealth disparities and 2) huge externalities (costs to society not reflected in the selling price of goods and services).

Most countries have the first issue under reasonable control via tax brackets that take a much larger fraction of income from high earners. For example, in the US, the top 1% pays a 6x higher tax rate than the bottom 50%, contributing 38.5% of total income tax revenue.

It’s the second point that really drives me up the wall — not only because of its terrible effects on society but also because it’s theoretically so simple to fix.

I used to think that climate change was the worst consequence of our failure to fix capitalism. Now, I think it’s addictive food. Here’s why…

Our Primitive Food Cravings

Humans evolved over 200 millennia in a harsh world of great scarcity. Feeding ourselves in this environment required tremendous effort, sacrifice, and risk. That’s where our enormous food cravings come from — those with the strongest drive to face these daily ordeals were the ones who survived.

Then, over the last century or so, everything changed. Science, fossil fuels, and capitalism joined forces to produce an abundance of food that could be conveniently collected in supermarkets with almost no risk or effort.

At first, this was great. The fraction of the population that needed to work in agriculture dropped from more than half to only a few percent, freeing up a tremendous amount of human potential for pursuing higher purposes.

Image source.

But before long, it became clear that we had a serious problem: Our primitive food cravings caused us to gorge ourselves on this newfound abundance. And the result looked like this:

Image source.

It’s hard to fully comprehend the power of these primitive cravings. Just think about it: Being obese sucks! Every physical action gets harder, self-esteem plummets, productivity declines, food and medical costs rise, and life expectancy drops. And yet, despite all these huge incentives to maintain a healthy weight, the trends keep marching relentlessly upwards.

This is not natural. Humans may have strong food cravings, but we have similarly strong drives to survive, improve our lives, and be accepted and respected by the tribe. Something’s seriously wrong here.

How Capitalism Corrupted Food

Raw capitalism cares only about profit. Whatever happens to the customer and society after the sale is made is of no consequence.

In the food industry, this creates a massive incentive to design products that send our primitive food cravings into overdrive. Yes, highly addictive food may be terrible for individual and societal health, but it’s great for profits.

Here are the 18 most addictive foods that emerged from all this profit-maximizing innovation:

  1. Pizza
  2. Chocolate
  3. Chips
  4. Cookies
  5. Ice cream
  6. French fries
  7. Cheeseburgers
  8. Soda (not diet)
  9. Cake
  10. Cheese
  11. Bacon
  12. Fried chicken
  13. Rolls (plain)
  14. Popcorn (buttered)
  15. Breakfast cereal
  16. Gummy candy
  17. Steak
  18. Muffins

Notice the common thread? High concentrations of refined sugar, saturated fat, and sodium. These are the elements that send our 200-millennia-old food cravings into a mindless frenzy. And capitalism has incentivized the food industry to exploit these binge-instincts to the max.

But the creation of these foods is not enough. No, to further boost profits, they must be made available in ways that maximize desire and stimulate impulse buying. Here, we have three main avenues:

  1. Supermarket checkout aisles lined with colorful addictive treats
  2. Fast food restaurants placed on popular routes
  3. Rapid food delivery services

That’s how we ended up in a world that surrounds us with easily accessible food designed for maximum addiction. It’s totally unnatural, and it’s the leading cause of the global obesity epidemic.

Where Are the Nutrients?

To make matters worse, another common theme in the list of addictive foods given above is their shamefully low micronutrient content.

The human body needs a wide range of vitamins and minerals to function optimally. A deficiency in any of these essential micronutrients can cause serious health issues.

Also, nutrient deficiency could be a big part of the reason why our food cravings are all out of whack. For example, this study found very encouraging effects of a high-nutrient-density diet on reducing food cravings.

So, to recap, unbridled capitalism incentivizes the industry to design food for overeating with no regard for nutritional value. This creates entire societies that are overfed and undernourished.

Excessive body mass from consuming too many calories is the most visible consequence of this sad situation. But nutrient deficiency is shortening and diluting billions of lives behind the scenes.

The Costs to Society

In 2014, obesity cost the world about $2 trillion per year, accounting for lost productivity, direct healthcare costs, and the cost of weight management. Given the trends shown above, this number is around $2.5 trillion today.

Image source.

We can add to that the cost of producing and distributing all the extra food required to keep about 2.5 billion people overweight. Reaching the obesity threshold requires about 20% more food intake than maintaining a healthy weight. 20% of the average American food expense for 2.5 billion people amounts to another $1.3 trillion.

The economic burden of broad micronutrient deficiency is unknown at present. As a rough estimate, we can note that the average employee takes about 10 sick days per year. In addition, many still come to work when they are sick. Thus, conservatively, illness costs us about 5% of GDP or $6.5 trillion per year. And that’s not even counting the long-term effects on degenerative diseases.

How much of this can be avoided by eradicating our broad micronutrient deficiency? That’s highly debatable, but my own experience shows that it can be brought to zero. Even if nutrient-dense diets can only halve this number, it still represents a massive win.

In comparison, our 37 billion tonnes of annual CO2 emissions costs us $1.85 trillion if we consider a fair CO2 cost of $50/tonne. This is less than half of what obesity costs us and probably less than a quarter of what we pay for letting capitalism freely create addictive nutrient-free food.

The Ridiculously Simple Solution

Like climate change, the fix to capitalism’s incredibly destructive food failure is straightforward: internalize these massive externalities.

In this case, the metric that should be used to update the prices of different foods is nutrient density. Food with little nutritional value and lots of calories (like our list above) should become more expensive, whereas food with lots of nutrients and fewer calories should get cheaper.

Yes, there is substantial uncertainty on how large these adjustments should be, but even if we take only half of the median scientific estimate, it will still have a hugely positive effect on consumer behavior.

But of course, we run into the same problem as we do with a CO2 tax: many powerful players will lose big when we make it more costly to keep destroying the health of billions with nutrient-free calorie-bombs. We might also see protests in the streets when chocolate doubles in price.

That’s why we shouldn’t expect empty-calorie sin-taxes anytime soon. But we still have our free will, so we can always fix capitalism for ourselves.

Create Your Own Economic Incentive

I believe that all those lucky enough to be born into prosperity have a moral obligation to give to charity. Blind luck at the lottery of birth is the single biggest reason why you’re living in material comfort today, and it’s only right to share some of this good fortune with those who were not as lucky.

Once you accept this moral responsibility, you can employ it as a powerful tool to build better habits. It’s simple: Draw up a formal contract with yourself, specifying how much you’ll give to charity whenever you buy empty calories. One hour’s wages is a good starting price point for these donations.

I’ve used this method for a long time to maximize the quality of my diet and control several other bad habits. It’s very simple and extremely effective.

Give it a try! You can always specify that your contract can be adjusted each month to avoid any risk of bankrupting yourself 🙂

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Low-Fat, Low-Carb, Vegan, Carnivore — The Unnecessary Extremes of Dieting

Why not keep things simple with a balanced diet of nutrient-dense whole foods?

Image compiled using photos by Nathan Dumlao, Victoria Shes, Siami Tan, and romanov.

We sure have a strange relationship with food. The world spends as much money on weight-loss products as it would cost to end world hunger. And yet, obesity trends look like this:

Image source.

In the Western world, being at a healthy weight now puts you in a shrinking minority group. Extrapolated trends from this source show that only 1 in 4 American adults are not overweight or obese.

We’ve become desperate to find quick fixes to this fundamental problem. And in our desperation, we do the typical human thing: turn to extremes.

Let’s look at three examples of this diet extremism, contrasted with the simple, balanced approach I use to maintain my ideal Smart BMI of 35/70 and never get sick.

Low-Carb or Low-Fat

We get almost all our calories from three macronutrients: carbs, fats, and protein. It’s hard to get more than 20% from protein, so the bulk of our calorie consumption must come from carbs and fats.

Major reductions in either carbs or fats (and the associated major increase in the other one) is a common theme in dieting. Low-fat diets recommend high consumption of many foods that low-carb diets avoid and vice versa.

This is all quite silly. Things that are forbidden in one type of diet become the staple of the other. Such restrictive diets severely cut down on the number of whole foods at our disposal, making it difficult to achieve healthy dietary variety in a practical, affordable, and enjoyable manner.

No, carbs are not the enemy, and neither are fats. The villains in this story are empty-calorie carbs and empty-calorie fats — all those nutrient-free treats purpose-built for addiction. Cutting these slow poisons from your life is the single best way to maintain a healthy weight. Do this, and you can freely enjoy a wide range of delicious whole-food carbs and fats.

Animal Products

Here, we also encounter a wide range of options, all the way from no animal products whatsoever to a totally carnivorous diet. It can also be a little less extreme, like vegetarian diets allowing eggs and milk and low-carb diets that recommend high meat consumption.

When talking about animal products, though, health is far from the only important consideration. We should also think long and hard about environmental impacts and animal welfare. In fact, it’s simply impossible for most world citizens to enjoy diets rich in animal products without serious environmental damage and the cruelty of factory farming.

These considerations tilt me towards low animal product consumption (especially meat). A little bit of meat can make your vegetable dishes truly delicious while providing high-quality proteins and B-vitamins, but it should be restricted to the bare minimum.

That’s why meat represents only 5% of my calorie intake, with another 10% coming from fish, eggs, and dairy. Aside from the valuable nutritional variety this provides, intelligent use of animal products in plant-rich dishes makes high vegetable consumption deeply enjoyable, securing long-term health.

Intermittent Fasting

Arguably the most popular dieting trend of recent years, intermittent fasting also attracts plenty of extremist views. Some plans impose severe restrictions on eating patterns, and some pundits even claim that when you eat is more important than what you eat.

This is complete nonsense. Obviously, binging on empty calories strictly within an 8-hour window is much unhealthier than eating a healthy, whole-food diet with no regard for fasting.

Herein lies my main gripe with all the intermittent fasting hype: The overwhelming importance given to meal timing diverts precious focus from much more important dietary considerations, such as nutrient density, variety, and moderation.

Yes, there is good evidence of the benefits of intermittent fasting, but it’s no magic bullet. That’s why I focus on nutritional quality and diversity first, adding a convenient 10–12-hour eating window as an afterthought. If I experience genuine hunger outside my eating window, I will eat something healthy, saving my limited willpower reserves for more important things.

The Real Reason Behind Our Obesity Epidemic

Ready? Here it is in two parts:

  1. We’re equipped with powerful food cravings that evolved to keep us alive over 200 millennia of extreme scarcity (before we had access to unlimited food conveniently dispensed in supermarkets).
  2. Food companies quickly learned to send these cravings into overdrive with addictive empty-calorie treats to maximize profits. Product ranges designed for the latest dieting fad grow profits even more.

This is the fundamental problem each of us must overcome to maintain a healthy diet and a healthy body weight in our affluent modern society.

So, how do we do this? Simple: Make sure you spend your time in environments that are completely free of empty calories and ultra-processed foods. Most important: Never allow these purpose-built, ultra-addictive, nutrient-free, empty-calorie-bombs into your home.

Carving out such healthy environments among all the temptations in our modern world is no easy task, but it’s the only solution that attacks the very root of the problem. So, if you’ve tried the extreme solutions mentioned earlier without much success, maybe it’s time to permanently change your environment and uproot this problem once and for all.

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3 Delicious Recipes That Make a Little Meat Go a Long Way

Your healthy, tasty, practical, and economical path to flexitarianism

Meat is a contradiction. On the one hand, it delivers delicious flavor and important nutrients. But on the other, it brings serious environmental and animal welfare challenges.

This is the dilemma that flexitarianism seeks to address.

My favorite flexitarian philosophy is called meat as a vegetable dressing. This practice never serves meat as a dish by itself. Instead, a little bit of meat is strategically deployed to make vegetables truly delicious. The three recipes shared below are designed based on this principle.

As a bonus, these dishes also freeze well to ensure maximum practicality. I exploit this feature by preparing them in bulk over the weekend and freezing them in convenient containers for delicious, healthy, economical, and highly practical warm lunches during the week.

I hope you find them as useful and enjoyable as I do!

This traditional South African dish with Malayan origins really is the ideal vegetable dressing. It’s richly flavored and perfectly textured for making large amounts of veggies taste fantastic. Originally, it was meant to flavor rice, but in this version, we replace most of the rice with vegetables.

Bobotie contains a wide array of seasonings that can be adjusted to taste, depending on whether you like your food more spicy or fruity. The recipe given below leans to the fruity side.

You can further reduce the meat content by replacing some of the minced meat with vegetarian mince (mainly soy). I generally use a ratio of 2:1, but this can be adjusted to preference.

The recipe creates about 12 servings.

Ingredients

Meat, Dairy, Eggs:

  • 1 kg (2.2 lbs) mixed meat and vegetarian mince
  • 3 eggs
  • 1/2 cup milk

Vegetables:

  • 2 kg (4.4 lbs) of mixed chopped vegetables. For convenience, I use frozen bags containing chopped broccoli, carrots, baby corn, water chestnut, and parsnip, but most other vegetable mixes will also work well.
  • 2 large onions (chopped)

Seasoning & Other:

  • 2 tablespoons (tbsp) olive oil
  • Salt and pepper
  • 2 tbsp curry powder
  • 1 teaspoon (tsp) turmeric
  • 1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
  • 1/3 cup lemon juice
  • 1 cup chutney (mango or peach)
  • 1/2 cup brown vinegar
  • 1/2 cup apricot jam
  • 1 1/2 cups raisins
  • 250 g (9 oz) brown rice

Instructions

  1. Preheat the oven to 200 deg C (390 deg F).
  2. Spread the (unfrozen) vegetables on a baking tray, add a little oil and salt and pepper, and bake for 30 minutes.
  3. Meanwhile, heat the oil in a cooking pot or large frying pan, and sauté the chopped onions with the curry and turmeric.
  4. Add the mince, lemon juice, salt, and pepper, and cook for 15 minutes at medium heat with frequent stirring.
  5. Add the chutney, brown vinegar, and cayenne pepper and cook for another 10 minutes at medium heat with frequent stirring.
  6. Lastly, stir in the apricot jam and the raisins, and pour the mixture into a greased baking dish.
  7. Beat the egg and milk and pour over the dish.
  8. Take the vegetables out of the oven, insert the bobotie, and bake for 1 hour.
  9. Meanwhile, cook the brown rice.
  10. Enjoy a well-deserved plate of bobotie, veggies, and rice!

This recipe contains an impressive volume of mushrooms and additional mushroom cream sauce. So, if mushrooms are among your favorite veggies (even though they’re technically fungi), this is a good recipe for you.

You can use the same mix of meat (preferably pork or poultry) and veggie mince as with the bobotie to further reduce the meat content of this dish.

For an additional veg boost, try adding a green salad on the side, particularly one containing cucumber. The crunchy cucumber texture combines surprisingly well with the lasagne in the same bite.

The recipe creates about 12 servings.

Ingredients

Meat & Dairy:

  • 1 kg (2.2 lbs) mixed meat and vegetarian mince
  • 250 g (9 oz) chopped bacon
  • 450 g (1 lb) cheese (grated)
  • 2 cups of milk

Vegetables:

  • 2 large onions (chopped)
  • 5 garlic cloves (finely chopped)
  • 300 g (11 oz) tomato purée
  • 5 green bell peppers (chopped/sliced)
  • 1 kg (2.2 lbs) mushrooms (sliced)
  • 1 large eggplant (aubergine)

Seasoning & Other:

  • Lasagna sheets
  • 4 tbsp vegetable/olive oil
  • 75 g (3 oz) mushroom cream sauce powder
  • 75 g (3 oz) butter/margarine
  • Salt and pepper

Instructions

  1. Preheat the oven to 200 deg C (390 deg F).
  2. If not precooked, cook the lasagna sheets in water with a little olive oil and a pinch of salt.
  3. Heat a little oil in a cooking pot or large frying pan. Add the chopped onions, salt and pepper, and garlic. Cook for 15 minutes at medium heat with frequent stirring.
  4. Stir in the tomato purée, cook for 5 more minutes, and set aside.
  5. Heat a little oil in a large frying pan, sauté the bell peppers and bacon, and set aside.
  6. Next, sauté the mushrooms and eggplant, add pepper to taste, and set aside.
  7. Cook the mushroom cream sauce in 2 cups of milk and 1 cup of water.
  8. Use the butter to layer a large baking dish and then add the ingredients in layers as follows: lasagna sheets, mince mix, bacon and bell peppers mix, lasagna sheets, mince mix, mushroom and eggplant mix, mushroom sauce, and cheese.
  9. Bake for 45 minutes or until golden brown.
  10. Serve with a green salad (or just a few cucumber slices) and enjoy!

There’s chili con carne (chili with meat), and then there’s chili sin carne (chili without meat). Well, this is something in between. The goal is to retain just enough meat to keep it truly delicious.

The same mix of meat and veggie mince is recommended here. As with the previous two recipes, this one also yields about 12 portions.

Ingredients

Meat:

  • 1 kg (2.2 lbs) mixed meat and vegetarian mince

Vegetables:

  • 4 red onions (chopped)
  • 5 garlic cloves (finely chopped)
  • 1 kg (2.2 lbs) carrots (sliced)
  • 6 red bell peppers (sliced or chopped)
  • 100 g (4 oz) red chilies (finely chopped)
  • 300 g (11 oz) of tomato purée
  • 1 kg (2.2 lbs) canned chopped tomato
  • 2 kg (4.4 lbs) canned kidney beans

Seasoning & Other:

  • 2 tbsp olive oil
  • Cayenne pepper
  • Salt and pepper
  • 250 g (8 oz) brown rice

Instructions

  1. Heat the oil in a large cooking pot and cook the chopped onions and mince with frequent stirring until the mince turns brown.
  2. Add the chopped garlic, carrots, red bell pepper, chili, and cayenne pepper and let it simmer for 5 minutes.
  3. Stir in the tomato purée and chopped tomato and cook for 45 minutes at medium heat with regular stirring. A bit of water can be added if the mixture becomes too dry.
  4. Add the kidney beans and let it simmer for another 15 minutes.
  5. Meanwhile, cook the rice.
  6. Add salt and pepper or additional cayenne pepper to taste.
  7. Serve and enjoy!

As a bonus fourth recipe, we have a quick and easy vegetable stew where a few pre-cooked meatballs add great taste. It’s very simple to make and a great way to load up on veggies when you’re not sure what to make for dinner.

As given, it yields about 6 portions.

Ingredients

Meat:

  • 450 g (1 lb) of pre-cooked meatballs

Vegetables:

  • 2 red onions (sliced or chopped)
  • 450 g (1 lb) carrots (sliced)
  • 2 red bell peppers (sliced or chopped)
  • 450 g (1 lb) green or asparagus beans (chopped in thirds)
  • 450 g (1 lb) small mushrooms (whole)

Seasoning & Other:

  • 2 tbsp vegetable/olive oil
  • 6 blocks vegetable broth
  • 250 g (9 oz) of barley rice
  • Salt and pepper

Instructions

  1. Add 1 liter of water to a large cooking pot, add the oil and bring to a boil.
  2. In the meantime, start chopping up the vegetables and add to the boiling pot in the following order: onions, carrots, bell peppers, beans, and mushrooms. Control the heat to keep a mild boil.
  3. Add the vegetable broth blocks and the barley rice and cook with occasional stirring for 20 minutes.
  4. Stir in the meatballs.
  5. Add salt and pepper to taste and enjoy!

Recipes and images created in collaboration with Janet Cloete.

Meat as a vegetable dressing
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The Ethically Conscious Meat Lover’s Dilemma and How to Solve It

Use the “meat as a vegetable dressing” philosophy to keep enjoying your food without all the environmental and animal welfare baggage.

Image by Janet Cloete.

I love meat.

There, I said it. I love the taste and the texture of choice cuts from dead animals cooked to perfection. I also appreciate the high-quality protein and other nutrients these dead animals bring to the table.

But at the same time, I love the environment and despise factory farming.

Yes, meat is an environmental nightmare, especially beef and lamb (see the graphic below). Pork and poultry are several times better but still much worse than most plant products.

Image source.

Factory farming is one of the great evils of our society, but it’s the only way to supply the growing global appetite for animal products. There is simply not enough land on Earth to give all our farm animals a good life in an environment closely resembling their natural habitat.

So, what can we do?

Flexitarianism and the 5% Rule

At the risk of further angering the world’s vegans, I don’t see a problem with killing and eating animals. This is how nature works — animals higher in the food chain kill and eat animals lower in the food chain. And the apex predator of planet Earth is a hairless ape called Homo sapiens.

But I have a major problem with forcing animals to live terrible and unnatural lives before they are killed. Even worse, we do this on such a grand scale that it causes serious and lasting damage to the environment.

The solution?

Well, it’s three-fold:

  1. Limit meat to 5% of your calorie intake. Add up the calories listed on the food labels of your weekly meat purchases and aim to get it below 5% of your calorie requirement for healthy weight.
  2. Restrict red meat to once-a-year special occasions. The bulk of the 5% mentioned above should come from pork and poultry.
  3. Only buy meat if you know and approve of its origin. If you’re not sure, write to the supplier (and drop them if they don’t answer). Factory farming cannot exist without consumers turning a blind eye. In addition, ethical animal products offer significant health benefits.

Following these three rules will limit your meat purchases and force you to buy more expensive products. That’s why you, as a flexitarian or ethical omnivore, need to be smart and extract maximum reward from minimal meat consumption. Let’s see what that looks like.

Meat as a Vegetable Dressing

Limitations stimulate creativity. You’ll experience this first-hand when you start working towards 5% meat consumption. In my case, this enforced creativity led me to the “meat as a vegetable dressing” concept.

As a child, I disliked vegetables almost as much as I liked meat. My mom had to resort to all kinds of trickery and bribery to get me to eat something green. I’m not sure if it’s related, but I was also a rather sickly child. In fact, I probably wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for modern medicine.

After a mercifully “mild case of cancer” in my early 20s, it finally dawned on me that I need more vegetables in my life. So, I started eating my veggies in the only way I ever found tolerable: next to meat.

Over the years, the environmental and ethical problems of meat consumption increasingly weighed on my conscience, and the vegetable-to-meat ratio steadily grew. To my great surprise, this required no sacrifice whatsoever. I could still enjoy meat every day and, with appropriate seasoning, the vegetables actually contributed to the culinary experience.

Today, meat is relegated to little more than a vegetable dressing. Its role is to make vegetables taste awesome, and it’s doing a fine job! My vegetable intake is now so high that I’m confident my 12-year streak of perfect health will continue indefinitely 🙂

Take It Slow

Following the “meat as a vegetable dressing” principle is easy: take your favorite meat dishes and gradually increase the vegetable-to-meat ratio. As this ratio increases, you can grow more liberal with the spices to really put some zing into your meaty vegetable dressing.

In other words, you don’t need to adhere to the 5% rule right away. Just commit to steadily approaching it over time.

And there’s no need to stop at 5% either. I’m currently just below this threshold and still plan further cuts. The reason? My meat-containing meals remain so delicious that I find it difficult to adhere to Hara Hachi Bu — the healthy Japanese eating habit of stopping when you’re 80% full.

Try it! You’ll be surprised at how far you can push this simple principle without sacrificing any culinary enjoyment. I certainly was!

Your planet thanks you 🙂

New motivation for healthy diet
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A New Dose of Motivation for Building Your Lifelong Healthy Diet

How your healthy eating habits make the world a better place

Image by Janet Cloete.

Diet. Lose weight. Be happy.

This is the simplistic idea behind the almost $300 billion global weight-management industry. And the more this philosophy fails to achieve results, the larger the industry grows.

Why is it so hard to eat healthy food and avoid excess? After all, we all know the tremendous benefits of a healthy diet.

Many people have tried to explain this enigma in many different ways: habits, environment, self-control, stress, nutrient deficiency, self-image, the diet industry itself…

There’s a pattern here: an intense focus on ourselves and the ways we fall victim to external forces. Maybe it’s time for a paradigm shift…

Forget About Yourself: Do It for Others

Rule 2 of Jordan Petersen’s 12 Rules for Life is to “treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping.”

This rule was inspired by remarkable psychological research that shows how we tend to take much better care of other people, or even our pets, than we take care of ourselves.

It’s ridiculous! How can we care more about our dogs than ourselves?

One explanation that carries an uncomfortable degree of truth is that, deep down, we don’t feel like we deserve our own care. We know all our deepest and darkest secrets, our pitiful insecurities, those thoroughly embarrassing thoughts and feelings in the depths of our being.

The more we neglect self-care, the worse this internal mess becomes and the less deserving we feel. Looking after others (including our pets) is much easier because this deep and dark stuff is hidden or non-existent.

After reading this chapter in Dr. Petersen’s book, I experienced one of those special lightbulb moments. It dawned on me that improving the well-being of those around me is an important driver behind the extremely healthy diet that makes sure I never get sick.

In the rest of this article, I want to share this motivation by clearly describing the hugely positive effect your healthy diet has on the world.

Address the World’s Worst Injustice

Life can be terribly unfair. In the rich world, issues like institutional racism and gender pay-gaps take the spotlight while we habitually ignore a much greater injustice: the vast inequality of opportunity within the human population as a whole.

Here’s a sobering stat for you: The obesity health burden and the cost of the extra calories we must produce to keep over 2 billion people overweight amounts to the combined income of the poorest half of the global population. Let that sink in: The top half spends as much on overeating (and its consequences) as the bottom half spends on their entire lives!

The lottery of birth: You had roughly equal chances of being born into a life like the top image (source) or a life like the bottom image (source).

If you’re reading this, it means you’ve won the lottery of birth. Maintaining a healthy, mainly plant-based diet without unhealthy excess is an excellent way to help those who were not as lucky.

Like any other commodity, food prices work on supply and demand. When those born into affluence moderate their consumption, prices reduce, making it easier for those less fortunate to buy the food they need.

If you really want to earn your own respect, use some of the savings from buying less food (less meat in particular) to directly address the terrible injustice of inequality of opportunity. This charity is my favorite.

Combat Climate Change

Agriculture is responsible for a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions. And well over half of these originate from animal products (mostly meat), despite delivering only 17% of global calories.

Image source.

Cutting your food intake (and especially your meat consumption) is a great way to help the world combat climate change. In addition, this action will make a large contribution to addressing gross global inequality because the poor suffer disproportionately from climate change.

Mitigate Other Environmental Problems

As shown below, humanity’s three biggest breaches of planetary boundaries are phosphorus and nitrogen flows and genetic diversity. Agriculture plays a prime role in all three.

Image source.

Phosphorus and nitrogen pollution originates mainly from industrial fertilizers (without which we simply cannot feed the world). The vast land areas used for agriculture, combined with widespread pesticide and herbicide use, threatens many species, reducing natural diversity.

You can help address all these grave environmental problems by adopting a healthy plant-dominated diet. Countless human and animal lives stand to benefit from your healthy eating habits.

Improve Animal Welfare

If the world had less than a billion people, we could all enjoy products from ethically sound free-range and pasture-raised animals. But we’re quickly heading to 10 billion, and, in this reality, factory farming is the only way to supply the world’s ravenous appetite for animal products.

Imagine living your life in these cages in this shed (source).

Humans killing and eating animals is not the problem. That’s how nature works — the apex predator kills and eats animals lower in the food chain. The real problem is the miserable lives we force these animals to lead before they are killed.

One of the many salient points Yuval Noah Harari makes in Sapiens is that we can measure our progress as stewards of the Earth by the combined well-being of all sentient beings. By this measure, we’re doing an absolutely appalling job, mainly due to factory farming.

No, you don’t need to become a vegan. But please reduce your meat intake to a bare minimum so we can stop torturing animals on factory farms.

Strengthen Our Welfare Systems

Did you know that 90% of the gargantuan healthcare expenditure of the United States is due to chronic diseases? And the primary recommendations for reducing this terrible human and economic cost is the adoption of simple healthy lifestyle choices, such as a healthy diet.

Image source.

Our poor diet choices are not only driving up society’s healthcare burden; it’s also eroding our ability to carry it. Unhealthy people simply cannot be as productive as healthy people (e.g., obesity is a strong predictor of long-term sick leave). In this way, poor diet choices shrink the tax base.

Thus, your healthy diet can make a great contribution to the social welfare systems that secure the livelihoods of your family and countrymen. Healthy eating habits reduce your likelihood of depleting these systems and increase your ability to support them.

Set a Healthy Example

Humans are social creatures. We’ll go to great lengths to fit into our peer groups, especially those we look up to. And it doesn’t matter so much what this peer group says; it matters more what they do.

Peer groups come in various sizes. For example, an obese parent indirectly communicates to their children, colleagues, social circle, and the broader community that unhealthy eating habits are OK.

Please be aware of the signals your diet choices are sending out, especially to those who look up to you. If you maintain a healthy diet, you significantly increase the chances that they will too.

A Picture on the Fridge

You don’t have to agree with all the arguments I made in the previous sections, but hopefully one or two of them struck a chord. Focus on those and internalize them into your value system.

Better yet, get on the internet and find a striking image that embodies the one that resonated most with you. Print out a big copy and stick it on your fridge door at eye level. Then, see what happens.

The aim of this picture is not to guilt-trip you into starving yourself — only to avoid unhealthy excesses (excess meat in particular). In fact, this picture should motivate you to give your body all the nutrients (and calories) it needs to create great value for society.

If you manage to reach the point where you can truly feel how your healthy diet benefits the lives of others, your eating habits automatically improve. Your valuation of yourself will soon follow suit, allowing you to accept that you thoroughly deserve the self-care provided by a healthy diet.

Once you reach this point, it’s mission accomplished: healthy eating habits for the remainder of your substantially longer and more fulfilling life 🙂

Sleep test
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Are You a Skilled Sleeper?

Take this test to discover how good you are at this critical life skill.

Image designed by Janet Cloete.

When I say “healthy lifestyle,” what pops into your mind? A kale smoothie? Sweaty people in a gym? A Buddhist monk in the lotus position?

These things are all good, but science is discovering that sleep also belongs right at the top of the healthy lifestyle hierarchy. Chronic sleep deprivation is shortening and diluting our lives as much as smoking and obesity.

Indeed, sleep is one of the most important skills to master for anyone who desires a long and prosperous life. Let’s see how skilled you are.

The Chronic Sleep Deprivation Test

We’ll start with two simple questions to determine whether you’re handicapping yourself with chronic sleep deprivation. Each question counts for 7 sleep deprivation points.

How many days in an average week do you wake up to the sound of an alarm?

The purpose of an alarm clock is to yank you out of sleep before your mind is rested and ready to awaken. Thus, every time you wake up with an alarm, you’re depriving yourself of the sleep you naturally require.

How many days in an average week do you feel sleepy before lunch or feel like you need caffeine to get through the day?

There’s nothing wrong with the occasional cup of coffee. It might even have some benefits. However, if you’re using coffee to mask your chronic sleep deprivation, it’s having a seriously detrimental effect on your health.

For those who don’t drink coffee, you can easily identify chronic sleep deprivation by frequent bouts of sleepiness before lunch. If you’re well-rested, you won’t be able to fall asleep before noon, even if you tried.

The verdict

So, what is your score? If you totaled more than 9 out of the possible 14 sleep deprivation points, urgent action is required. On the other hand, if you scored less than 4 out of 14, you’re probably enjoying a well-rested life. Those falling in the 4–9 range still have some work to do.

The next test will help you direct this work to all the right places.

The Sleep Opportunity Test

Sleep opportunity consists of two main factors: time in bed and sleep hygiene. A skilled sleeper focuses on both factors to give their mind and body every opportunity for sound sleep.

The seven questions below are designed to help you identify the areas where you can gain the most sleep opportunity. We’ll be working with bigger numbers here, so please keep a calculator close by.

Do you go to bed early enough?

The number of hours you spend in bed is the most important element of sleep opportunity. But we need to draw an important distinction here: weekend binge sleeping until noon is not a sign of good sleep opportunity. In fact, it indicates a serious lack of sleep opportunity during the week.

So, let’s formalize things:

  • Start by defining your desired rise time. This is the time in the morning by which you must be out of bed to complete your morning routine in a stress-free manner. We’ll use 6:30 as an example.
  • Now, estimate your average bedtime (accounting for both the week and the weekend). If you do some reading before dozing off, your bedtime starts when you switch off your light. For example, it might be 23:30.
  • Now calculate the number of hours between your average bedtime and your desired rise time. If you take regular naps, you can add your average nap time to this total. In this example, it’s 7 hours.
  • Multiply by 4 to calculate your points for this question. For example, 7 hours times 4 gives 28 points.

Does your bedroom create the perfect sleep environment?

There are four main elements to the perfect sleep environment. Let’s give each of them some points:

  • Sound. If your bedroom is completely quiet or filled only with sounds of your choosing (e.g., some white noise), give yourself 2 points. The occasional disturbance from neighbors or your partner scores 1 point, and constant distracting noise gives zero points.
  • Comfort. If you deeply enjoy the comfort of your bed, go ahead and award yourself 2 points. Comfort that is OK but not perfect earns you 1 point. If you frequently wake up with aches and pains, give yourself a zero.
  • Light. Perfect darkness earns you 2 points. If you’re sometimes aware of some faint light, give yourself a 1. Clearly distracting light earns a zero.
  • Temperature. If you sleep comfortably under your sheets for the whole night, give yourself a 2. Any mild discomfort downgrades this to a 1. You get a zero if you frequently wake up from being too hot or cold.

Now, add up these four categories to get your score out of 8. When you have that number, multiply it by 2 to calculate your sleep opportunity points. For example, if you scored 5 out of 8, you would earn 5 x 2 = 10 points.

What about your sleep consistency?

Consistency is often the first thing you read in sleep hygiene articles. We’ll quantify consistency as the number of days in the average week you get out of bed within 30 minutes of your desired rise time defined earlier.

So, think back over your previous week. Start with 7 points and subtract one point for every day that you got up more than 30 minutes before or after your targeted rise time.

Now take the resulting number and multiply it by 2. For example, if you got up within 30 minutes of your desired rise time 4 times in the past week, your score would be 4 x 2 = 8 points.

Do you practice healthy eating for healthy sleep?

Poor eating habits, both in terms of quality and quantity, can negatively affect your sleep, both in terms of quality and quantity. In my case, this factor was significantly more important than sleep consistency.

So, think back over your previous week. How many days could you genuinely feel proud of your healthy eating habits? Give yourself a point for each of those days. Then multiply the number by 2 to get your score.

Is your sleep compromised by coffee or alcohol?

Drinking coffee and alcohol in the afternoon or evening can seriously disrupt your sleep. Coffee will make it difficult to fall asleep and alcohol will result in poor sleep quality.

So, let’s put some numbers on it:

  • If you never drink coffee after lunch and only have an occasional light drink at special events, you can award yourself a perfect 10.
  • A habitual glass of wine with dinner or coffee after lunch scores a 5.
  • Signs of addiction to either alcohol or coffee score a zero.

Feel free to interpolate if you fall somewhere between these three points. This time there’s no added math. Just add your score to the previous ones.

Can you go to bed with a good conscience?

What we’re looking for here is that tired-but-satisfied feeling you get after a day of doing all the good you can reasonably expect of yourself. This mental state is great for high-quality sleep.

So, how many days in the past week have given you this special feeling? Give yourself a point for each of those days and tally up your score for this category.

Do you practice a wind-down ritual?

Taking 30–60 minutes at the end of the day to decouple from all your screens and just wind down can increase your sleep quality. It helps to have a fixed ritual containing typical things like yoga, journaling, and reading.

Do you practice such a ritual? If so, how many days in the past week did you complete your wind-down routine. Each day earns you a point.

Let’s do the math

If you add up all these numbers, you’ll get your score out of 100. Here are the results achieved by our fictitious example character:

  • Sleep duration: 7 hours times 4 = 28 points.
  • Bedroom score: 5 points times 2 = 10 points.
  • Eating habits: 4 good days per week times 2 = 8 points.
  • Sleep consistency: 4 consistent days times 2 = 8 points.
  • Coffee and alcohol: a habitual cup of coffee after lunch = 5 points.
  • Good conscience: 5 good days per week = 5 points.
  • Evening ritual: no ritual yet = 0 points.

After all this math, this person scores 64 out of 100 (64%).

What does your score mean?

Here are three categories for interpreting your score:

  • Over 90%. Your mind and body certainly can’t complain that they don’t get enough sleep opportunity. If you’re a 90% sleeper, but still scored high in the earlier Chronic Sleep Deprivation Test, please consult a sleep specialist to see if there is a medical reason for your poor sleep.
  • 70–90%. This is OK, but you can do better. Go back over your scores for each question, see where you lost the most points, and take action.
  • Below 70%. If you’re in this category (like our example above), you’re handing yourself a serious handicap in life. Make improved sleep opportunity a priority and see what happens.

Sleep well!

Compared to nutrition, exercise, and stress, excellent sleep opportunity is a relatively simple health habit to implement. Not only that; it’s also vitally important for your long-term health and performance! Thus, better sleep is an excellent 80/20 lifestyle hack.

So, let’s all stop handicapping ourselves with chronic sleep deprivation and give ourselves the opportunity to make the world a better place 🙂

Sleep Blueprint
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A 5-Part Blueprint for Sound Sleep

Let’s build the foundation of human health and performance.

What is the most foundational piece of advice you can think of? The single element that augments all other aspects of personal growth?

To me, it’s straightforward: get enough sleep.

It took more than a decade of active personal development before I finally understood this, and another couple of years to implement it properly. Today’s article will share the sleep blueprint that emerged after all this time:

  1. Build a deeply internalized understanding of the vital role of sleep in human health and performance.
  2. Construct an environment where you have no choice other than to wake up at a consistent hour (weekends included).
  3. Learn to thrive in that environment by designing your rhythm for natural awakening without an alarm clock.
  4. Accept that you cannot force your mind to sleep, but you can give it the perfect sleep opportunity.
  5. If at all possible, earn the freedom to take an afternoon nap whenever your body and mind desire it.

Let’s take a closer look at each of these five steps.

Understand the Importance of Sleep

As recently as 2014, I was still confidently heading in the wrong direction, experimenting with complex polyphasic sleep patterns designed to severely restrict my sleep duration in the name of increased productivity.

I kept this up for almost a year before finally caving to everyone telling me how tired I looked. Knowing what I now know, that was one of the stupidest things I’ve ever done.

Since then, I’ve learned much more about sleep. As my understanding grew, so did my respect. Initially, sleep was a waste of time that should be minimized by, in the words of Arnold Schwarzenegger, sleeping faster. Then, it became a moderately important health priority after diet and exercise. Today, I view it as the very foundation of human health and performance.

Giving sleep the priority it deserves is tough in today’s world with all its early morning demands and late-night digital temptations. You’ll need plenty of motivation to master this challenge. And this motivation can only come from a deep intrinsic understanding of the importance of sleep.

There’s no better path to this understanding than Matthew Walker’s book pictured below. As stated on the cover, it’s “startling, vital, a life raft.”

For the short version, see my summary of all the serious problems caused by our global sleep deprivation epidemic.

Build an Environment for Sleep Consistency

Consistency is the number one recommendation for healthy sleep. But it’s also the hardest, particularly when it comes to weekends.

In today’s world, the norm is alarm-induced sleep deprivation in the week, followed by binge-sleeping to lunch over the weekend. This inconsistency is not only bad for sleep efficiency; it’s very unhealthy too. As the scientific studies in Prof. Walker’s book repeatedly found, catch-up sleep cannot repair the damage done by prior sleep deprivation.

Breaking this pattern requires a strong environmental trigger. And the best trigger I know is an accountability buddy — someone you care about who will be waiting for your call every day shortly after your chosen wake-up time.

My parents are my accountability buddies. For the past three years, we’ve talked for 15 minutes at 6:30 every morning. We’re yet to miss a single session! And best of all, our relationship has never been better, despite the 11000 km physical divide.

If you have someone in your life who you know you should be spending more time with (but never seem to get to), this is your chance.

Ditch That Alarm Clock

The purpose of an alarm clock is to yank your mind out of sleep before it is ready to wake up naturally. It’s the blaring symbol of our global sleep deprivation epidemic.

The path to an alarm-free life is paved with sleep opportunity. And sleep opportunity consists of sufficient time in bed and excellent sleep hygiene.

In my experience, the most important components of sleep opportunity are the following (in order of priority):

  1. Sufficient time in bed. This is the foundation.
  2. A dark, quiet, comfortable, and cool sleeping environment.
  3. Healthy eating habits.
  4. That tired-but-satisfied feeling after a productive day.
  5. Consistent sleep duration (weekends included).

In addition, you must condition your mind to wake up naturally at the right time. This requires a dedicated wake-up ritual for getting your circadian rhythm back in sync. For me, a funky dance routine stimulating all five senses does the trick 🙂

Learn to Fall Asleep Gracefully

Without the massive sleep pressure created by serious sleep deprivation, falling asleep can be difficult. If we’re not careful, this can turn into a major obstacle on the path to healthy sleep.

It sure is frustrating when you’ve given your mind every opportunity to sleep and it simply refuses to take it. For those times, you need a plan. Mine covers the following contingencies:

  1. A running mind full of unorganized thoughts. In this case, a journaling session is needed to unload and organize things before sleep can come.
  2. An inspired mind chasing a creative idea. I tend to let my mind run in these cases because it often comes up with something genuinely valuable. The aim is to condense the idea into a single phrase that can be written down so that my mind can relax in the knowledge that the idea is safe.
  3. A mind that is simply not ready to sleep. In this case, I just add some relaxing elements to my evening routine, most often a session in my massage chair or reading some silly comic books.

Whatever you do, don’t actively try falling asleep. Instead, create sleep opportunity, stick to your plan, and let sleep come on its own accord.

Also, if you consistently do everything right and still cannot get enough sleep, please consult a sleep specialist. Sleep disorders are all too common and need to be treated carefully.

Bring Back the Siesta

If you want to put the cherry on top of your sleep mastery, earn the freedom to nap during your natural afternoon energy dip. As described earlier, this is the way human biology wants to sleep. But sadly, our 9–5 work culture is totally incompatible with this natural sleep rhythm.

Enter asynchronous remote work. Asynchronous communication combined with remote work can restore this napping freedom to millions of office workers. If this opportunity pops up anywhere in your vicinity, grab it with both hands.

For those lucky enough to enjoy this freedom already, here’s the napping strategy that works for me:

  1. Only attempt the nap if you really feel that afternoon energy dip.
  2. Start with something ultra-relaxing like a massage or a warm shower.
  3. Find your natural nap length through open experimentation.
  4. If sleep doesn’t come, just enjoy this time of complete relaxation. If relaxation doesn’t come, get up to work on whatever kept it away.

The afternoon energy dip is not useful for much other than a natural siesta. Honor your biology. Use the dip as nature intended.

Build Your Foundation

To master sleep is to construct your foundation for long-term health and productivity. Our chronic sleep deprivation epidemic is the cause of far too many shaky foundations in our complex, modern world.

Please invest the time to build your foundation. You might be surprised at all the wonderful things you can construct on such a solid base 🙂

Images in this article were custom-made by Janet Cloete.

Sleep stats
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My Data-Driven Review of Classic Sleep Advice

The causes and effects of a good night’s sleep

Image by Janet Cloete.

Sleep is the foundation of human health and performance. It keeps us healthy, emotionally stable, intelligent, creative, attractive, and accident-free.

As the world slowly catches on to this foundational truth, the internet is filling up with sleep advice. But there’s a problem: very little of this advice is backed by any quantified proof.

That’s why I decided to quantify the effects of various lifestyle choices on my sleep quality. My daily choices are recorded on my Graph of Life, and my sleep quality is quantified via Sleep Cycle.

Let’s see what the data has to say.

The Results

I performed an analysis of the statistical correlations between the wide range of lifestyle metrics I collect on a daily basis and my sleep quality. The five most important correlations are given below, together with two obvious requirements for high sleep quality: duration and consistency.

The correlation of sleep quality with different lifestyle metrics from the day before (causes) and the day after (effects), compared with the impact of sleep duration and consistency (dashed lines).

Let’s take a look at each of the factors in turn.

Time in bed

The dashed green line shows the high correlation of sleep quality with the amount of time spent in bed. This one is obvious: I only sleep when in bed, so enough time in bed is a prerequisite for high sleep quality.

Consistency

One of the first things you’ll see in any sleep hygiene article is the need to maintain a consistent sleep schedule (even on weekends). I quantified this metric by comparing the standard deviation of my sleep duration to my average sleep quality over each week.

As shown by the orange line, sleep consistency is about half as important as sleep duration. Interestingly, the correlation of sleep duration (0.40) with consistency is even higher than sleep quality (0.33). This means that poor consistency strongly reduces the time I spend in bed.

It makes good sense: With all the demands of modern life, consistency is the only way to make enough time for good quality sleep.

Eating habits

I’ve previously established that eating habits are the single biggest factor in the quality of my day. For this reason, I was not overly surprised when it again emerged as the winner in this case.

The graph shows that good eating habits are even more important than consistency when it comes to sleep quality. Delving a little deeper, I saw that this effect was split equally between two factors:

  1. Time in bed (correlation = 0.28). My eating habits are a good indication of my general level of discipline on any given day. Poorer discipline often means that I get in bed too late, giving me fewer hours to sleep.
  2. Sleep efficiency (correlation = 0.26). The ratio of sleep quality to time in bed also reduces substantially with poor eating habits, resulting in less restoration for every hour spent in bed.

We can also see that a good night’s sleep causes better eating habits the following day. It’s well-known that an underslept mind leads to more food cravings as well as cravings for the wrong kinds of food (see the “obesity and diabetes” section in this article).

Checklist

My checklist is a direct indication of the number of things I did right on a particular day. Many of my checklist items are recurring productive and healthy actions, keeping me firmly on the straight and narrow.

The graph shows that ticking many items off my checklist is both a cause and an effect of high sleep quality. It’s easy to imagine how a good night’s sleep would improve my ability to get things done the next day, but I was a little surprised that this was also such a significant cause of good sleep.

But there is a logical explanation, and it looks quite similar to the one given above for the effect of eating habits:

  1. Time in bed (correlation = 0.23). Like eating habits, my checklist is a good indicator of discipline, which affects my sleep duration.
  2. Sleep efficiency (correlation = 0.23). A productive day seems to make each hour of sleep more restorative. This must be related to that tired-but-satisfied feeling typical at the end of a successful day. It’s easy to imagine this pleasant feeling leading to better sleep.

Work

The effects of work on sleep can be interpreted similarly to the effects of my checklist discussed above. However, the correlations are considerably smaller. This is because my checklist is a more holistic indicator of whether I did the right things during the day than my work performance.

Even though the correlations are smaller, they clearly show that prioritizing sleep is good for productivity. This confirms that sleeping less in pursuit of greater productivity is a terrible idea.

Excercise

Regular exercise is sometimes recommended as a sleep aid, but the graph shows that this was not the case for me. In fact, this is the only statistically insignificant (p > 0.05) correlation in this analysis, implying that the little blue bar in the graph could just be random.

However, a good night’s sleep helps me exercise the following day. This is also no surprise given that physical performance improves significantly with sleep (see the “motor memory” section in the aforementioned article).

Energy

The relationships between my energy levels and sleep quality look similar to the correlations with exercise: High energy levels are an effect of good sleep quality rather than a cause.

It makes sense that a well-rested body and mind will feel more energetic. The correlations are stronger than those of exercise because my subjective energy score includes both mental and physical aspects.

Other important factors

Sleep quality also depends on several other factors that I could not quantify due to a lack of data. Let’s take a quick run-through:

  • Wind-down routine. This is something I’ve only started doing recently and I don’t yet have data for it. My feeling is that this does help a bit, but it doesn’t perform miracles. Next year, I’ll have the data to confirm.
  • Smoking and alcohol. Both of these are said to be bad for sleep. I don’t smoke and very rarely drink, so I lack the data to quantify this.
  • Coffee. No coffee after lunch is another commonly listed sleep hygiene guideline. I’m a (caffeine-free) tea-person, so no data here either.
  • Bed and pillow. Another obvious bit of advice is to maximize the comfort of your bed. Some years ago, I often woke too early with neck pain. Luckily, this was quickly fixed with a fancy memory foam pillow.
  • Light and temperature. A cool and dark room is another common piece of sleep advice. Over here in Norway, both light and temperature vary greatly over the seasons, but I see no clear drop in my sleep quality during summer months. I do use a sleep mask in summer, but I make no attempt to control the temperature in my room.
  • Noise. Sleeping in a noisy environment is tough. Luckily, I live in a quiet neighborhood with few disturbances. There is a bit of noise from neighbors on rare occasions, so I can still collect some data next year.
  • Scents. I have some lavender pillow mist I remember to use every once in a while, but I don’t collect data for it. I doubt that the effect is significant, but I still plan to investigate this properly next year.

The Takeaway

Start with the big two: duration and consistency. After that, my experience shows that good eating habits and a productive day are the next two best inducers of a good night’s sleep.

Otherwise, there is a range of additional factors whose influence I’m yet to calculate. Most of these are obvious, such as a cool, dark, and quiet room with a comfortable bed. Others, like a wind-down routine and aromatherapy, will be interesting to investigate further in the future.

Sweet dreams!

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