health

running-573762_1920
Schalk
, , ,
0

Season 1 Summary: Fitness

Image by skeeze from Pixabay.

We built our modern world to limit physical effort to a bare minimum. Back in the old days, when food was scarce, this was a good idea. But today, this inactivity is one of the leading killers out there. 

So, how do we get ourselves to move more in a world so meticulously designed for sedentary living? You guessed it: we build an environment to make movement automatic.

Automating movement

Here are the four best avenues to fully automated daily motion:

  • Personal transportation. Many short car trips can be made by muscle power instead of fossil power. The coming of age of electric bicycles makes this transition much easier. 
  • Sport and nature. Finding sources of movement you genuinely enjoy (or even crave) is great for automation. Sport and nature are the two foremost candidates in this category.  
  • Work. Even though most of us spend our working lives at a desk, there are several simple habits that can permanently incorporate regular motion into your job. 
  • Morning and evening routines. Movement is great for switching on the body in the morning and relaxing the mind at night. As part of a set routine, it quickly becomes automatic. 

If these sources of automated movement still look too intimidating, there are several useful fitness tools that can help get you going. 

Fitness toolkit

  • Ideally located home. A location close to some green spaces where car ownership is unnecessary all but guarantees healthy fitness levels. If at all possible, this is my top fitness recommendation. 
  • Equipment. Spend wisely to not end up with a basement full of fitness gizmos gathering dust. The quality of the equipment you buy should be proportional to how much you will use it. 
  • Technology. Keep it very clean and simple. Start with Google Fit, add a fitness band if you can genuinely use the features, and join Strava for great motivation if you regularly cover long distances. 
  • Friends and family. Movement and socializing play well together 🙂 Actively look to bring more motion to your socializing. There are tons of possibilities! 

All these tools can then be deployed to construct an ideal environment that guarantees lifelong fitness.

Fitness environment

Here is the 1-2-3 to lifelong fitness:

  1. Build easy fitness habits. 
    • There are countless opportunities for free movement in our daily lives. 
    • Most of these are very easy and quickly become lasting habits when given a chance. 
  2. Create a fit home. 
    • The location of your home is a crucial fitness consideration.
    • Simple changes in and around the house can encourage movement and discourage stagnation. 
  3. Make movement desirable. 
    • One of the primary motivations for getting fit is to build a body that makes movement fun. 
    • Use the previous two tips to reach this tipping point and then capitalize on sports and socializing to take it to the next level. 

Life just gets so much better when experienced through a fit and able body. Put in the effort to make fitness automatic. It’s totally worth it!

fruit-2305192_1920
Schalk
, , ,
0

Season 1 Summary: Nutrition

Image by silviarita from Pixabay.

Nutrition is a strange subject area. On the one hand, it can be very simple. We all have a reasonably good idea of what we should put in our bodies and what we shouldn’t. But, on the other hand, actually following through on this simple advice is really tough. Hence, the global obesity epidemic. 

The mission of the Supermorning Nutrition chapter was to automate healthy eating. And it all starts with some food groups that are not only healthy but also tasty, convenient, and affordable. 

Five groups of superfoods

Here they are in all their glory:

These guys can give you all the nutrients (and enjoyment) you need from food. But making them a permanent part of your life requires some proactive action.

Making super the new normal

Here are some proven guidelines for making these superfoods a permanent part of your life:

  • Nuts, seeds, and berries: Buy your seeds in bulk and select packs of mixed nuts and mixed frozen berries. Together with some yogurt, they create the perfect breakfast.  
  • Raw green veggies: These green nutrient bombs taste rather bland, but things like a green drink and smart combinations with other tasty foods can make them regulars in your diet.
  • Cooked veggies, mushrooms, and beans: Here, we focus on the “meat as a vegetable dressing” idea. This will give you very tasty cooked meals with a huge amount of vegetables. 
  • Fish and eggs: The convenience of smoked and canned omega-3 fish and scrambled eggs or omelets can make these high-quality protein sources regulars in your diet. 
  • Avocado (and other fruit): Here we discussed the fine art of avocado ripeness management together with several ways to make fruit consumption even easier. 

Putting these ideas in place takes a bit of effort and experimentation. But once it’s up and running, you’ll have yourself a lifelong zero-compromise healthy diet 🙂 

Healthy, tasty, convenient, and affordable. It sounds like the perfect happy ending! But sadly, this story also has some bad guys who do their best to make us fat, sick and addicted.  

Four food villains

Here are the bad guys in the nutrition story:

It is possible to keep these villains at bay. But this does not happen by itself. We need to take the time to construct some super-powerful defenses. 

Building the fortress

Our healthy eating fortress has four layers of defense:

  • Refuse to pay for self-destruction: Trading time, effort, vitality, and life expectancy for fleeting endorphin highs is a truly terrible deal. Realizing this on a deep level is a great first layer of defense.  
  • Healthier snacking: Sometimes really tasty treats can have some longer-term benefits. For these rare occasions, choosing healthier alternatives makes all the sense in the world. 
  • Home-made meals: Taking care of your health becomes a lot easier when you take direct control of what goes into your body. Home-made food also makes overeating much less likely. 
  • Whole foods: Buying more whole produce is a great way to keep self-destruct foods out of your life. Getting into the habit of reading food labels can also add many good years to your life. 

Making change stick

This chapter conveniently coincided with the end of the year, so I framed this as a New Year’s resolution. But you certainly don’t need to wait until the end of the year for making healthy nutrition permanent:

  1. Understand why diets have such a high failure rate.
  2. Intelligently shape your environment.
  3. Intelligently shape your habits.

It takes some time and effort, but lifelong healthy eating habits are possible. Setting this up will add many years to your life and much life to your years 🙂

Schalk
, ,
0

How Evolved are You?

The second Supermorning chapter talked a lot about the primitive emotions that make it so hard to consistently do the things we know are good and healthy. If we’re serious about building a sustainable and equitable global society, we really need to get ourselves to the next level. 

Realizing the grand importance of this personal evolutionary journey makes it a lot easier to make the required mental upgrade. 

Let’s see how this works. 

Our basic primitive emotions

Thanks to the incredible technological and social progress over the last 0.1% of human history, we’re all cavemen stuck in the future. 

Most of our natural emotional responses are well equipped for keeping us alive on the savanna, but less so for keeping us happy and healthy in our amazing modern world of material abundance. 

This is the fundamental driver behind all the most pressing problems the world faces today. 

The first step: Forward-thinking emotions

Most of our primitive emotions drive us towards instant pleasure and away from instant pain. This worked fine for 99.9% of our evolutionary history but falls well short today. 

What we need for individual success in today’s world are emotions that drive us towards long-term pleasure and away from long-term pain. 

Such emotions would ensure perfect healthy eating and exercise habits, financial responsibility, and high productivity. All these things bring bucketloads of long-term pleasure and greatly reduce the chances of experiencing long-term pain. We all know this. But, thanks to our primitive emotions, we just cannot get ourselves to follow through. 

This blog has talked a lot about creating environments where healthy actions happen automatically. In reality, this is just a smart way to trick our primitive short-term emotions into prioritizing our longer-term health, security, and happiness. 

And the very cool thing is that, once you start experiencing the benefits of long-term thinking, you get emotionally involved.

At this point, your emotions start to naturally gravitate towards these long-term benefits. This is the point where your life can really start taking off. It’s also a big reason why there is the 1% and the 99%.  

The second step: Global-thinking emotions

But there is another step. In today’s complex and interconnected world, we not only need to think about our own long-term future but also about that of society. 

A happy, healthy, and productive society makes everyone’s lives better. But there are far too many ways in which we can harm society by pursuing individual gain. 

Climate change and other environmental issues epitomize this point. Those causing the damage are often very different from those feeling it. In the short-term, this does not impact those of us with environmentally destructive lifestyles. But, sooner or later, we’ll pay a very high price. 

This crucial next step of our evolution gets much easier when we understand that a sustainable lifestyle can be synonymous with happiness, health, wealth, and productivity. 

Once you really get into this, your primitive emotions also catch on. Doing good for society then becomes a strong emotional driving force behind the intelligent design of a happy, healthy, wealthy, and productive life. 

When you reach this point, you’ve arrived at the next stage of human evolution 🙂 The future of our planet depends on how quickly the majority of us can reach this point. 

Schalk
, , , ,
0

Recap: Saving the World

Sustainability is the core motivation behind this blog. Over a decade ago, I started playing with a simple idea: a sustainable life can also be a happy, healthy, wealthy, and productive one. 

Today, I consider this idea to be 100% proven. Indeed, we can all save the world by building better lives.  

This week’s posts explained this big claim in a bit more detail.

The checklist

  • Why you should care about the environment. 
    • Nature delivers twice as much value to our lives as all human activity combined. 
    • Our continued destruction of nature threatens to cut off or even reverse these free services, making our lives deeply uncomfortable. 
  • Save the world by looking after yourself. 
    • Food production is the single largest impact on our environment. It’s also one of the core ways in which we destroy our own health. 
    • Displacing the typical excessive meat-rich diet with a moderate plant-rich diet is a great way to help yourself and your planet. 
  • Save the world by building wealth.
    • Consumption can only directly address basic human needs like food, shelter, and security. 
    • Satisfying higher human needs like love, esteem, and self-actualization is much better achieved by saving and investing than by spending. 
  •  Save the world by embracing your creativity.
    • A creative life automatically crowds out consumerism and offers a direct route to esteem and self-actualization. 
    • Both consumption and creation tend to develop self-strengthening feedback loops.

So, there you have it. A sustainable life is not some painful sacrifice we must make to save the planet. It’s a proven pathway to happiness, health, wealth, and self-actualization. 

In my view, spreading this simple message is the single most promising pathway to a sustainable and just society. 

Schalk
, , ,
0

Save the World by Looking After Yourself

Yesterday’s post gave a quick primer on the importance of looking after our environment. It ended with a rather obvious finding: we need to reduce our material consumption. 

It also made a less obvious point: reduced consumption can genuinely improve our lives. 

Today’s post shows how a more sustainable life can boost your health and longevity. 

Excessive animal-rich diets

Producing food for nearly 8 billion humans is our single biggest impact on our planet. Agriculture is the leading cause behind the three most badly breached planetary boundaries discussed yesterday and is also a major contributor to climate change. 

To make matters worse, the rich world consumes about 50% more food than the recommended daily allowance of about 2300 kcal. Food waste explains some of this excess, but the main reason is that we simply eat too much, creating the extremely costly global obesity epidemic. 

There’s no point in sugar-coating things: Consuming a typical animal-product-rich diet of excessive calories is unethical. It simultaneously destroys our health, our welfare systems, and our planet. 

Image credit: Our World in Data

Moderate plant-rich diets

The solution is straightforward: eat less and rely more on plant-based foods. Not only will this help save the world, but it will also add many healthy years to your life. 

Of course, the major obstacle comes from our primitive food cravings that demand instant pleasure regardless of whether it destroys ourselves, our society, and our planet. 

This is where a healthy environment comes to the rescue. If you want to do your part, but continue to struggle with these irrational cravings, please build yourself such an environment. 

Mobility by muscle power

Another way of boosting health by saving the planet is by moving yourself around using muscle instead of fossil power. 

As discussed earlier, making the most of this great benefit will require a home in a strategically selected location. Walking/cycling needs to be convenient and safe, and, ideally, nature should be close by. 

Such a location also brings enormous financial benefits, which is where we’ll pick things up tomorrow. 

Schalk
, , ,
0

Recap: Personal Relationships

People have been trying to discover the secrets to great personal relationships forever. You can find thousands of books on the topic and millions of articles online. 

But maybe it doesn’t need to be so complicated…

The checklist

When people say relationships are complicated, they’re often recounting their experiences with maintaining troublesome relationships, possibly several of them at once. 

But a small number of healthy and respectful relationships can be delightfully simple. Getting yours to this point must be one of the smartest moves in life 🙂

Schalk
, , ,
0

Building Nourishing Personal Relationships

So far this week, we’ve established that:

  1. Nourishing personal relationships are crucial for health and happiness,
  2. Quality is much more important than quantity,
  3. Quality relationships are characterized by good feelings, natural empathy, and complete trust. 

Today’s post will complete this little story with some ideas for building and maintaining nourishing relationships. 

Fill buckets (even if you don’t feel like it)

Smile, add humor, compliment, praise, give, express gratitude, listen, and validate.

These simple little tools are guaranteed to bring the best life-enhancing biochemical responses out of the relationship, both for you and the other person. 

And they’re especially important if you don’t feel like it. Remember that filling another bucket fills your own as well. If that other bucket is very dear to you, so much the better. 

Don’t empty buckets (even if they deserve it)

Do not sulk, scream, belittle, neglect, forget, gossip, or destructively criticize.

Sometimes the other person will tick you off, and you’ll feel like they deserve a good bucket dipping. 

Don’t.

Face up and calmly tell them what they did wrong and how it made you feel. Often, you’ll find they didn’t even realize they’re doing something wrong and would happily fix it. 

In the rare event that they were hurting you on purpose, it’s time for a sensible grown-up conversation. The longer you wait, the tougher it’s going to get.

Catch yourself when getting defensive

Any relationship will have times when you don’t see eye-to-eye. To ensure that these times are rare and undramatic, make sure to avoid arguments where one or both parties get defensive. 

Resolving any argument will require that one or, preferably, both parties make a change. A defensive attitude makes it all but impossible to accept such a responsibility to change. 

If you sense strong defensiveness, shift your objective from finding a solution to restoring both attitudes to a point where a solution is actually possible. Postpone the conversation if needed.

Value each other’s time

Relationships take time. There’s no argument that they are an essential priority, but there are many other priorities in life (including other relationships).

In my experience, building good relationships is a lot like building good habits: The number and quality of repetitions matter much more than the duration. 

Try to regularly spend relatively short periods together. And in these periods, be 100% there and 100% engaged. 

Try to avoid talking for hours on end, even if it still feels good. Politely ending the conversation when both parties are still enjoying it ensures that the next one will be even better. 

Be proactive

People often say that relationships are complicated. But perhaps it’s more accurate to say that relationships are complicated when things start going wrong. 

If both parties are in a good place, dedicated to bucket filling, determined to avoid defensiveness, and respectful of each other’s time, relationships become surprisingly simple. 

Proactively getting your closest relationships to this point can add many years to your life and much life to your years. 

Schalk
, , ,
0

How to Recognize a Good Personal Relationship

Nourishing personal relationships are vital for long term health and happiness. But bad relationships have the opposite effect, and average relationships crowd out the rest of life (yesterday’s post). 

Like so many other areas in life, a great guideline to follow in close personal relationships is quality over quantity. 

Today’s post asks a simple question: How can we recognize a quality relationship when we see one? 

Good vibrations

The first clear indicator of the quality of a relationship is the way it makes you feel when you think about the other person. 

Go ahead, think through the important people in your life. Those that bring a little smile to your face are probably those that are good for you. 

In more questionable territory are those that evoke a bland or negative response. You can certainly work on these relationships, but first, see if they do better in the next two criteria.

Coupled emotions

The next indicator is how much you feel for the other person. Does their happiness bring you joy? Do you become uneasy when they’re down, wanting to help in any way you can?

Think through the people in your life once more. Do those that made you feel good also do well in this test?

How about those that did not do so well? Maybe they just made you feel uneasy before because they’re currently going through a tough time and evoke some deep empathy within you. 

Trust

Finally, there’s your feeling of how safely you can rely on the other person. Do you trust that they will be there in times of need? Do you feel comfortable sharing personal stuff with them?

Take one last round through the people in your life. How do they fare in this category?

Based on our understanding of the effect that relationships have on health, the stress reduction potential of a few relationships rooted in deep trust can add many years to your life.

Where do you stand?

If you have a couple of relationships that do well in all three of these categories, you’re probably in a good spot. Cherish them. 

Someone who made you feel uneasy in the first test but did well in the other two tests may well also be good for you. Helping them through their troubles should be a nourishing experience.

However, if that person seems to constantly be in crisis, keeping you in a constant state of distress, you may need to make some tough choices… 

And what if you feel you don’t have enough good relationships in your life? Try asking yourself how you need to change to do well in these simple tests if they were applied to you. 

As an additional help, tomorrow’s post will share a few proven ways to sustain nourishing personal relationships. 

Schalk
, , ,
0

How Many Personal Relationships Do We Need?

Yesterday’s post established the great benefits of personal relationships, even in today’s world, where they have little direct practical value. 

The natural follow-up question then becomes: How many relationships do we need to be happy and healthy?

After all, personal relationships take plenty of time, energy, and compromise. Trying to maintain too many doesn’t work either. 

How can we find the right balance?

Follow your heart

As corny as it sounds, the best advice seems to be to listen to your feelings. 

First, accept that there are serious health risks involved in persistent relationship-related stress, either from loneliness or from unhealthy relationships. 

Then, simply listen to what your body is trying to tell you, and invest the time and effort required to avoid chronic exposure to these damaging stress hormones. 

Another food analogy

It’s not been so long since I compared information with food. Well, now it’s time to foodify relationships. 

Relationships are essential to our long-term wellbeing, just like food. Sure, the amount each person needs to be healthy varies over a much broader range, but we all need it. 

Thus, relationship starvation (loneliness) is very dangerous and should be avoided (some helpful tips). 

But not all relationships are good. Just like we binge on empty calories for all sorts of strange reasons, we also stay in damaging relationships for all sorts of strange reasons. 

Empty relationships should be avoided (some tips) just as urgently as empty calories. 

And then there is quantity. If we stuff ourselves with too many average relationships, there will soon be little space for the rest of life. 

Average relationships are a lot like filler carbs. Use them sparingly. 

Do you have a healthy relationship diet?

So, how did your relationships hold up in this analogy?

Are there signs of starvation? Do you have an empty relationship problem? Or perhaps your life is stuffed with too many average relationships?

If you could answer “no” to all these questions, you’re probably in a good place, relationship-wise.

If not, there’s some work to do. And since relationships could be just as crucial for health and happiness as diet, best get started. 

Schalk
, , ,
0

Why Do We Need Close Relationships?

This week, we’ll talk about something that humanity has wrestled with for millennia: how to build and maintain healthy close relationships. 

And things are not getting any simpler now that such relationships have become optional…  

What’s the use?

Few people would argue that maintaining close personal relationships takes plenty of time and sacrifice. And for millennia, this price simply had to be paid for survival.

Indeed, in the old days, surviving alone was almost impossible. Without the protection and cooperation of the tribe, individual humans were pretty much defenseless against nature. 

But no more. In today’s world, survival doesn’t depend on close personal connections. Simply render some useful service to society and you can buy all the sustenance and protection you need. 

As a result, the nature of close relationships is changing. Many more people are choosing to live alone and stay single, but interestingly, this is not causing greater loneliness. 

And just as well, because healthy personal relationships are crucial for a long and happy life.

The benefits of relationships

There is good evidence that high-quality relationships are important for health and longevity. 

Studies suggest that stress from perceived loneliness could be the most important factor. But there are also other factors like improved health habits and reduced depression risk.  

Loneliness could be just as dangerous as smoking. Although the evidence is not as clear yet, it is clear enough to encourage anyone who regularly feels lonely to make the effort to improve their relationships. 

As an added bonus, regular social interaction also seems to make us happier. This effect is not huge, but it’s significant. 

On the other hand, as we all know intuitively, bad relationships can have the opposite effect. Quality is indeed more important than quantity. 

The takeaway

This evidence points to a simple recommendation for a long and happy life:

Avoid bad hormones from loneliness or unhealthy relationships and get plenty of good hormones from healthy relationships. 

The rest of the week will look at ways to follow this simple advice in our busy modern lives. 

«‹ 4 5 6 7 8 ›»