Also - there are SO MANY fad diets out there and while I'm no expert, it's pretty clear that fad diets are often unhealthy over the long term. I mean, our bodies haven't changed much in thousands of years, so why are we constantly inventing new diets? (So healthy living "experts" can sell you more stuff while you keep getting fatter and fatter (see Wikipedia's list of diets here and cringe a bit.) Many of these diets do offer something to learn about healthy living but following them verbatim is a recipe for disaster, with the exception of the rules below.
(I Should Call My Diet the ANTI FAD DIET... or the ANTI JUICE CLEANSE)
Adena's 10 Guiding Principles to a Healthy Life
Feel Strong. Feel Satisfied. Feel Fueled. Feel Hydrated. Feel Awake. Feel Alive. Feel Connected. Feel Level. Feel Love. Feel Balanced.
1. Build Strength (Feel Strong)
For $99/month (at my introductory rate now of $30/mo) I have membership to unlimited hot yoga classes. If I go as much as I should that comes down to $8 per class, which isn't bad if I consistently attend classes (and as I'm attending with a friend this makes it much more likely I'll do that.) Yoga is a great practice for building strength over time. My plan for the first six months of this journey is to attend yoga 3x per week minimum for 60-90 minutes per class. (*this week I did not go and I'm ashamed of this but next week I'm back on the yogawagon.) After six months and gaining strength I will introduce additional weight lifting to my routine.
And while it sucks to fall on my face frequently in class when everyone else is floating majestically through their sweaty asanas, at the end of the class I feel amazing. The best part is feeling each individual muscle that you worked out and remembering - yup - that's the move that did it. Don't push yourself too hard though. You'll find me rockin' child's pose during a good 15% of the class.
Did you know? Muscle tissue burns seven to 10 calories daily per pound. Fat burns just two to three calories daily per pound. So replacing a pound of fat with a pound of muscle helps you burn an additional four to six more calories each day (source).
2. No Added Sugar (Feel Satisfied)
Sugar isn't poison, added, refined sugar is. You know, not the sugars in your fruits and veggies, but processed, added sugar that has made us Americans fat. I was walking around the mall yesterday and saw a young child who was obese, and it made me so sad. It seems ridiculous to me that excess sugar is legal to be fed to children yet it is really child abuse (when I grew up I was fed a high-sugar diet, but this is before it seems the medical community knew better with their promotion of low-fat BS.) While it's possible this child has a medical condition causing her to gain weight, looking at her mother it was more likely that she was just being fed a diet of too much food and too much sugar.
Even so, for a long time I thought that "everything in moderation" was the right way to diet. But you know what happens when you eat sugar? Basically, fructose impedes the body's ability to use leptin which is "the satiation hormone" that tells us we're full. So we keep eating. And eating. And eating. For people who don't eat a lot of sugar and are not insulin resistant (pre-diabetic) - which many of us are (esp those of us with PCOS) - they don't understand this addiction. What is most amazing though is how easy it is to break out of this cycle of addition. But it requires you to go cold turkey. Today. Right now. No more candy bar for lunch because you forgot to bring food to the office. No more fast food dinners. No more ordering desserts when out to eat. It's an addiction. You eat sugar and your body throws out insulin that takes glucose out of your bloodstream, causing you to crave MORE SUGAR (here is an awesome write-up on what happens after you eat sugar, yikes.) And high sugar consumption causes (or at least contributed to getting) Diabetes over the long run (source).
When you eat a lot of sugar (even if you don't eat snickers bars for meal replacements chances are you're eating wayyy too much sugar in everything from ketchup to beer to bread (even whole wheat breads) to low-fat dressing) it's REALLY HARD to quit because of the cravings. To stop you must not only quit cold turkey but also have a plan in place for what to eat at all times and how to get a reasonable amount of healthy carbs so your body stays energized (see #3.)
ps: limit alcohol consumption to wine and make sure to count it towards your carbs. Try to exercise before a night out to balance for a glass or two of wine if needed.
Did you know? Sugar is EIGHT TIMES more addictive than cocaine, and Americans are consuming 152 pounds of sugar a year, most in processed foods and sweetened drinks (source).
3. Carb Your Exercise (Feel Fueled)
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While you shouldn't eat added sugar, carbs are not the enemy. They serve an important purpose - to provide energy. There are different types of carbs and they are not all created equal. High protein low carbohydrate diets (everything from Atkins to moderate fat, low carb ketogenic diets) tell you reduce your carb intake to almost 0. This indeed is a recipe for weight loss, but it's NOT SUSTAINABLE. I definitely recommend trying a ketogenic diet out with the help of a medically supervised clinic (like JumpstartMD if you're in The Bay Area) as it's very interesting to learn how your body feels without sugar on such a strict diet, and you will lose weight which will be motivating on its own. However, it's not a long-term solution. It's more an experiment to learn how your body reacts when you remove most carbs from your diet.
However, for the long term, we need carbs. We don't need as many as dietary guidelines tell you and we don't need as little as crazy ketogenic diets tell you. Ultimately you need as many carbs as it takes for your body to feel fueled. If you do under 30 grams a day (12-15 grams on crazytown Atkins) after a few days your body will go into ketosis and your body will burn fat instead of carbs (woohoo). BUT it's very difficult to maintain this over the long term and it's not healthy if you're working out at all. I strive for a moderate 50-100 grams per day, with 50 on the days I don't exercise and 100 on the days I do for at least 30 minutes.
Make sure along with your carbs you're getting FIBER. That means no fruit juices but instead whole fruit (ideally with skin on.) If you're doing serious body building i.e. CrossFit then you're going to need a lot more carbs and things like oats, bran muffins and sweet potatoes are ok, however for the rest of us I'd steer clear of any starchy veggies with the exception of a small side dish once or twice a week.
One trick I've learned is to eat half servings of carbs. I.e. Quinoa is a great carb but one serving of it is 20 grams of carbs (over 33% of my daily intake.) If I have 50% of that then that's just 10 grams of carbs and I still get the "feel full" effect from the balanced grain. You should (and I plan to) play around with cutting different foods from your diet to figure out how your body reacts to them. Hardcore Paleo folks would say that Quinoa is not paleo and it also can cause "leaky gut" (ew) so it's worth experimenting with and without it in your diet.
[[Leaky Gut is a very fascinating topic regarding health that I plan to cover in another article soon, but here's a good place to start if you're interested in the arguments why grains and dairy can contribute to long-term health problems to make a decision for yourself. Apparently dairy is designed to create leaky gut but it's not actually good for us as adults. More on leaky gut at another time, kids.)
Did you know? Having one banana a day won't kill you but it definitely packs on the carbs, so try to pick small bananas (a small banana has 23 grams of carbs while a large banana has 31. That's a difference of 8 carbs which is a lot if you're trying to eat under 50-70 a day, and you will still get your 'nana fix regardless of size.)
4. Drink ENOUGH Glasses of Water a Day (Feel Hydrated)
Hey, I agree with the experts. Drinking water is a must and something I AM TERRIBLE AT DOING. If I exercise I can chug back a gallon of ice cold water no problem. However, not all water is created equal (oh shit.) But before we get into that, let's just be clear that drinking water is sooooo important to getting healthy. I've lived a life of chronic dehydration which has severely impeded my focus, mood, and life. (Yes, not drinking enough water can mimic depression symptoms.)
Yes, let's all agree that we need to drink lots of water to be healthy (here's why.)
How much water do you need per day? I figured the whole 8 glasses a day thing was totes wrong given we're all different sizes and stuff, so I did a little investigation. This useful chart and formula tells you exactly how much water you really need. Basically multiply your weight by 2/3. This is how much you should drink if you sit on your ass all day. For every 30 minutes of working out you should add 12 oz of water. So assuming I'm being lazy at 170lbs I need 113 ounces per day of water. That's 14 glasses of water a day without exercise! This chart says instead of 2/3 you should drink 1/2 your body weight in water per day. That's still 85 oz per day. So for a woman who weighs 170lbs, I should be drinking 10 to 14 glasses of water per day (when I'm normally drinking 0-2, so here's a big area of improvement I'll be working towards!) It turns out the daunting 8 glasses a day isn't even enough water.
The biggest problem with drinking a healthy amount of water is how much -- uh -- disruption is causes your normal daily life (oh but this TMI is helpful for those of us chronically dehydrated.) But it's SO IMPORTANT to be healthy. Even though the whole 'drink eight glasses of water per day' research was funded by (you guessed it) water bottle companies (oy gavult) water is still a man's best friend.
Is there anything else we need to know about water? There's a bunch of research out there on types of water (tap, filtered, bottled, et al) and even whether it's healthy to drink water ice cold or at room temperature (the jury's still out on that one, though my acupuncturist is adamantly against cold liquids at all because they're supposedly bad for digestion. But other research has disproven that.)
Did you know? The 8 glasses rule likely originated from a misinterpretation of an outdated recommendation from 1945 when the Food and Nutrition Board suggested that a person consume one millimeter of water per each calorie of food consumed (with an average diet of 1900 calories per day then you'd need 1900 ml, approx 64 hours, based on this model. But it didn't take into consideration the water content in other liquids and food we consume (source).
5. Get Eight Hours of Sleep (Feel Awake)
So I'm a bit of an insomniac. While some people can thrive on as little as five hours of sleep, I definitely need my full eight, to the minute. It's really remarkable how if I fall asleep at 11pm (on a good day) my eyes will fling open at 7 on the dot. The problem is most days I don't get eight hours of sleep. My mind is racing when I try to hit the hay of all the things I didn't get done for the day. I'm trying in my exhaustion to finish a project for work or to get something done on my mile-long list of personal to-dos or admittedly watching a never-ended series of YouTube videos (what? primates are fascinating.)
There are so many reasons why it's important to get our sleep (here are six of them.) The more you exercise during the day the more likely you are to be properly exhausted at night. Do all the things that you need to do in order to fall asleep on time each night and create a routine (I'm so bad at this.) Here are seven useful tips on how to get to bed earlier each night.
Did you know? When you're resting, your body doesn't need to work as hard or pump as much blood, so these systems slow down. Blood pressure needs to dip at night so your cardiac muscle and circulatory system have time to relax and repair (source).
6. Get the Heart Pumping (Feel Alive)
When I discussed exercising with my mother, who frequently complains about her inability to lose weight, she noted how she didn't mind exercising, she just didn't like the feeling of her heart beating fast or being exhausted. Yes, this is the same mother who raised me to think that I was incapable of any sort of athletic activity (I never trained long enough to build up stamina, that was the real problem, and I thought that the whole heart racing thing was bad and due to genetics.) My father was not any better, for he was obese my entire life and criticized my weight without sharing the science behind living a healthy life.
For "cardio," do whatever you love that gets your heart racing. This can be dancing (go to a club, avoid the bar, and shake your ass off) or biking or jumping up and down on a trampoline. Just do whatever it takes to get moving for at least 30 minutes a day (or walk for an hour a day.) I'm going to try my best to hit 30 minutes of cardio a day starting tomorrow with 30 minutes of cycling on my bike after work every single day this week.
Did you know? Any level of physical activity is probably a return to normal values. The statistical average of physical activity in Western societies isis so much below the levels normal for our genetic background that sedentary lifestyle in combination with excess food intake has surpassed smoking as the number one cause of death in the United States! (source)
7. Find What Drives You (Feel Connected)
Being healthy is so much more than eating right and working out. It's your mental state as well. Take time to understand what centers you. Spend time in nature (go for a walk outside if the weather is nice.) Spend time with friends who make you laugh. Nurture what the hippies call your inner spirit. The more connected you feel, the easier it will be to keep up with the rest of the 10 steps.
Did you know? Laughter is great medicine. It relaxes your muscles for up to 45 minutes. It boosts the immune system by decreasing stress hormones and increases immune and infection-fighting antibodies, improving your resistance to disease. It triggers endorphins which make you feel good and temporarily relieve pain. It also protects the heart by improving the function of blood vessels and increasing blood flow (source).
8. Eat Frequent, Smaller Meals (Feel Level)
Just like you should be constantly drinking water throughout the day, you should also be constantly grazing on food that is high protein, moderate fat and lower carb. Grazing diets are also fad diets, but in a lot of ways they're healthy if you can maintain them and break them out into mini meals with at least 90 minute gaps in between food intake (see did you know below for why.) I find portioning out a certain number of almonds per day to have at my desk and putting them into little piles of 5 lets me eat them when I start to feel remotely hungry (after I force myself to down a cup of water to see if I was just dehydrated.)
Being a grazer also helps you feel less guilty for not eating full meals (I don't know about you but I suffer from major guilt of "why aren't you cleaning your plate? There are children starving in AFRICA") and learning to eat when I wasn't even hungry anymore. Instead you should eat when you're hungry, but not a typical American full meal. Even if you go out to eat you can get an appetizer or small salad for your meal - or order a meat dish and split it or take a good portion of it home for more meals. The good news here is that eating actually gets cheaper! Score!
Did you know? The intestines need to be fasted for at least 90 minutes at a time in order for routine cleansing waves to occur. (source)
9. Love Deeply and Enthusiastically (Feel Love)
Love is also a secret ingredient to a healthy life. Love doesn't have to be limited to a partner. You can love a family member or even a close friend. Love is about that feeling when you're willing to give anything for another person's happiness. This I believe is the best feeling of being human.
When I'm unhealthy and eating poorly, the last thing I am thinking of is making someone else happy. I'm often caught up in selfish, self-defeating behaviors.
Did you know? Love is proven to lower blood pressure and decrease stress levels. And, should you be in love with a significant other, you can also benefit from research that having sex at least once a week increases your levels of IgA, the antibody that fights illness and keeps us healthy (source).
10. Time is Not Your Enemy (Feel Patient)
The final guiding principal to living a health life is patience. After all -- losing .5 to 1lb a week is not going to result in an overnight success. But people who are patient are generally less stressed and more able to maintain any habit changes they make. I have to remind myself this every single morning.
In a world of instant gratification it's so challenging to be truly patient. Take time to slow down and focus on super short-term goals (i.e. this week I will lose at least .05 lbs and hit 167lbs.) The more you focus on tiny achievable short-term goals that together make up a much longer term goal, the more likely you are to stick with it! So join me in this pact for patience and here's to a healthy rest of our lives!
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