Cheat sheet: 3 simple steps to wellness

Most people on the standard Western diet eat up to 10 times a day. Their diets consist mainly of carbohydrates and sugar (plus a huge dose of additives, colours, flavours, stabilizers, preservatives etc.), and there are few healthy habits and set routines.

The end result of all this disordered, poor eating is that you may be perpetually hungry, and suffer from a host of allergies and other ailments, including obesity, hayfever, dry itchy eyes and acne.

If this all sounds familiar, you’re not alone. It sure is real familiar to me!

Breaking down what’s wrong

Eating a high carbohydrate, high sugar diet will keep you being always hungry, with rollercoasting blood sugar levels being a huge part of the problem. Your blood sugar spikes after a high carb / high sugar meal, then plummets a little while later, leaving you exhausting and hungry, looking around for your next sugar “fix”.

Also, if you’re basing your diet on carbohydrates and sugar, you’re almost certainly not getting enough healthy fats. This can lead to dry skin and eyes, eczema and allergies, and digestive difficulties.

The long term result of all this is you keep eating, keep feeling hungry, and keep trashing your blood sugar, leading eventually to obesity, diabetes and a host of other problems.

Solving your own personal sugar crisis

Fixing all this is not complicated, but it is hard. Eat more foods with healthy fats, end your reliance and addiction on carbs and sugars, and reduce and habitualize healthy eating patterns.

Below we overview the 3 simple steps of the Fit, Fed and Fasted program.

STEP 1 – Start a FUN EXERCISE PROGRAM

A healthy, sensible exercise program can really help with your mindset as well as your fitness.

This doesn’t mean rushing in to sign up at the nearest gym! However it does mean finding an exercise that works for you and your lifestyle, is affordable and is fun.

Walking and swimming are great options, as is lifting weights. Do whatever you prefer – this is your life and your choice.

STEP 2 – Rebalance your diet

Meat and fish should be central to your diet, and provide the vast majority of calories. In fact, the fewer non-animal foods you eat, the healthier you will be. Your blood sugar will settle, and your hunger will become controlled without all the carbs and sugar sending your blood sugar spiralling.

STEP 3 – Reframe your eating window

Getting your eating under control involves reducing when you eat in a 24 hour period. It may – if you choose – also mean reducing how many meals you have in the course of an entire week.

You’ll also need to habitualize where and how you eat, quitting snacking behaviours that undermine your wellbeing.

These three steps are straightforward and easy to understand. They’re affordable and manageable for just about anyone.

Yes, you can do it! Over the coming posts, we’ll delve into how to take these steps, and discuss some common problems and pitfalls along the way.

Goal weight: What’s yours?

Are goal weights just fantasy? Do they even make sense from a health perspective?

Everyone who has ever struggled with being overweight has a perfect weight they’d like to be.

For me, being a tall woman with a large frame, my goal weight is around 65 kgs /145 pounds.

Despite the fact that, as an adult I’ve never been that weight, I still have the idea firmly stuck in my head that if only I can reach that weight, everything will be roses, I’ll be perfect, my life will be incredible.

All thanks to a number on a scale.

It doesn’t make sense when you think about it logically. Thinking about it logically, what really makes sense is a) not allowing yourself to get obese in the first place and b) if you are obese, eating well, including fasting in your lifestyle, and heading in the right direction for health.

In other words, it doesn’t really matter how slowly you lose weight. It also doesn’t really matter whether you reach a “goal” or not. What matters is that, this time next year, you’d doing better and feeling better than you are right now.

Having an unattainable goal weight stuck in your head might just be making you miserable. That’s not the key to long life or happiness at all. Time and again, when we interview centenarians, they say “being content” was key to their long life. They all seem to be genuinely happy, thankful people.

So stop fixating on your “goal weight” that may or may not happen. Instead, think of some ways that you can make your life better in a genuine way, that may not have anything at all to do with weight. Go for daily walks with a friend or loved one, volunteer at a charity, write and share something useful and positive, fast for a few days and focus on your own wellbeing and spirituality while you do so.

It doesn’t matter how you make your own life better. Everyone’s version of happiness is different. Just like everyone’s goal weight. Which might or might not ever happen.

So smile. Be content. Be happy. Enjoy the sun when it shines.

Life is too short for numbers on a scale anyway!

Motivation: What’s yours?

Weight loss is a great motivator. Let’s face it: everyone wants to wear nice clothes and look good in a swimsuit. We all want to look lean and healthy. Nobody wants to look overweight and unwell.

However, while weight loss can be a great motivation, it helps to see the bigger picture of why weight loss can be a great idea.

Truth is – and we all know it – being overweight is unhealthy. While that might not be a huge problem when you’re younger, years of being overweight stacks up on your body balance sheet, doing years of damage over time. While it might not affect you too much in your twenties and thirties, by the time you hit your thirties, forties and fifties, you’re staring down the barrel of heart disease, diabetes, cancer and more.

That’s not fun at all.

There’s now strong evidence to suggest that, while most people won’t develop Type 2 diabetes until they hit mid life, the cause of that diabetes has been their lifestyle for the last decades of poor habits and overweight / obesity. Your body has needed more and more insulin to deal with the sugar hits being thrown at it from our high carbohydrate, high sugar processed diet, until diabetes is the inevitable result.

Likewise, heart disease and cancer are also the result of insult after insult to our bodies – feeding ourselves poor quality food and generally ignoring what our bodies need while giving ourselves lots of what we don’t need.

Wanting to look better is a great motivator, but wanting to be better in all respects – well, that’s a terrific motivator.

Think about some reasons why you might want to lose weight permanently and write them down. Here are a few suggestions:

Look better in all clothing – and in no clothing! 🙂
Lower risk of heart disease, cancer and diabetes. Who doesn’t want that!
Able to move better, with less pain and discomfort. I found when I switched to a keto / carnivore diet I stopped feeling achey and sore in the mornings.
Able to keep up with younger family members and children as they rush about. If you have young children you’ll know exactly what I mean!
Able to achieve fitness goals, and travel goals. If you have plans to travel, you’ll want to be fit and well. Fitness goals can often involve adventure travel (hiking, paragliding, diving, swimming.)
Learn to enjoy food again. By putting food in its rightful place as a part rather than the centre of your life, you’ll learn to enjoy tastes and textures more fully.
Be able to afford great quality food and drink. Fasting and reducing quantity enables you to afford quality instead.
Be able to buy – and wear – the nicest clothing. Fashionable clothing is often only made for leaner bodies. That’s not fair, but its the way things are. Losing weight means you’ll be able to shop in a wider variety of clothing stores and enjoy a wider variety of clothing.

What else can you think of?

Looking to our ancestors for lifestyle evidence

Asking the big question: What is the natural human diet?

There is a lot of debate about what the correct / natural human diet is. This isn’t surprising, because humans live all across the world in everything from ice and snow (the Inuit) through the Africa and Australian deserts. We’re very adaptable, and clearly very flexible with our diet.

Until very recently with the development of supplements that enabled the arrival of the modern vegan diet in 1944 (which is not even a blip on the scale of human history), no human society on earth has evolved or subsisted on a completely animal-free diet. All societies and cultures consume and use animal products to greater or lesser extents, and the vast majority consume animals as a significant part of their diet.

Furthermore, as more than 90% of human history predates agriculture and the advent of farming, humans developed as hunter-gatherers, and I believe it is safe to say our bodies and brains naturally evolved and are suited to this lifestyle.

Farming is very recent to humanity. Agriculture is believed to have been developed about 10000 years ago in the area that is now Israel and Syria. China is believed to have developed rice cultivation approximately 6000 years ago. By comparison, anatomically modern humans have been hunter-gatherers for at least 200,000 years. Some societies around the world never developed agriculture and are still hunter-gatherers.

WHAT DO HUNTER-GATHERERS EAT?

Hunter-gatherers eat by consuming wild animals and plants, and do not generally have a fixed meal routine (i.e. three meals a day, eating a standard number of calories every day).

Their nutrition is very seasonal, their food is local, and there are often significant differences between the periods of feast (particularly in spring and summer) and famine (in autumn and winter).

Contrary to common beliefs, archaeological and modern evidence suggests human hunter-gatherers were and are, for the most part, well nourished and well fed, rather than starving.

Typical foods for human hunter-gatherers include large game animals, seafood, nuts, eggs, fruits and insects.

WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM ALL THIS?

We can learn the following from all this:

Physiologically speaking, human bodies are primarily “designed” for hunting and gathering, as for more than 90% of our history this is exactly what we were doing.
All human societies included animal products in their diet. Typical animal foods included big game, seafood, eggs and insects.
Some human societies, such as the Inuit, consume virtually no plant-based foods yet remain completely healthy, which indicates that plant-based foods do not have to be the core of the human diet.
Hunting and gathering included irregular eating, periods of fasting (no eating) and no set meal schedule.
Food was seasonal, local and unprocessed. Fruits in particular would have been available only seasonally.
The foods of farming (bread, cereal crops, grains, processed sugars and refined oils) came much later on and much more recently.
All hunter-gatherer societies included significant movement in their lfestyles, but none needed to go to a gym to keep fit and well!

21 April: Hello world

Fit, Fed and Fasted is my online log of my adventures with fasting and the keto-carnivore diet, and today is Day 1 of my first fast.

My goal for this fast is to manage 4 days. It’s Tuesday and I want to try for four days, but if I can’t manager that (which is likely), I’ll stop at whatever point I have to.

I want to note how I manage, what the difficulties are, and how I get around them. I’ll document weight loss and inches lost (f any), and how I feel generally, as well as how my body responds.

What will the blog cover?

My health approach has two main prongs of fasting and a low carbohydrate diet. So the title of this blog is a play n words of those two points 🙂

IF you run a blog with similar themes, please comment. I’d love to learn from what you’re doing 🙂