Hey guys!
So it seems a lot of the health advice today is along the lines of "Use DISCIPLINE! Run ultramarathons NOW!!", which, for those living under a rock, doesn't seem to work that well. Were it not for the miracles of modern medicine, the average lifespan would be going down big time right now. Most adults are overweight, and at least 1/3 of American adults are downright obese. Considering obesity is correlated with pretty much every awful chronic disease out there, things are looking bleak. What the hell happened?
Many people will be very quick to blame people's lack of mental toughness. After all, in the good old days, weren't overweight people a rarity? Kids played outside back then. We walked to school too. Uphill. Both ways. In the snow. Fighting hungry wolves all the way. People today are just lazy, am I right? The other angle often used is genetics. "I look at a piece of cake and I gain 5lbs! I was born with a slow metabolism!".
As it turns out, both angles are wrong, or at best, form small pieces of the puzzle. People didn't change that much in the last few decades. There hasn't been a major genetic shift that suddenly turned everyone into fat storing machines. If people didn't change, what did? Their environment.
- Most jobs used to be physically demanding. Most jobs now involve sitting for hours at a time. People came home and rested, jogging was almost categorized as a mental illness.
- Most food used to be unprocessed. Chances are most of what you ate was home cooked. Before the 1950s-1960s, organic food was just food. Mcdonald's used beef tallow for its fries, not hydrogenated vegetable oil.
- Most forms of entertainment involved going out to meet people, or moving a bit. Television wasn't as powerful to addict you as video games are now, and no one had the opportunity to go on Call Of Duty marathons at 3 in the morning.
- Artificial light was hard to come by. At night you slept, because that's all you could do.
Well... a few decades later, the kids who played outside are now fat. They didn't realize their environment was changing them. Discipline is a limited resource, and when you're sitting home after being an office drone for a full week, resisting those cookies in the pantry and going out for a quick jog isn't easy.
Solving the problem becomes easy when you know the root cause. To change back to a healthier life, you need to focus on building an environment that makes you healthy despite the discipline you may or may not have.
Since I'm lazy, here are 4 lazy small changes that add up and push you towards a better life.
1 - Turn off lights at night, install dimmers in your house and apps like F.lux on your laptop/desktop/phone. Sunlight and artificial light contain blue light, which blocks the production of melatonin in the body. No melatonin = no sleep. Turns out the body is very sensitive to blue light, so staring at your phone at 2 in the morning might be related to your chronic insomnia.
2 - Get rid of your chairs, get a low table and sit on the ground more. Sitting for extended periods of time is pretty terrible for one's health, especially on a typical chair. Postural muscles get weaker and the brain gets sluggish. Sitting on the ground immediately requires more effort, and you also have to work more to stand up or sit down. You'll move more without thinking about it. If people ask, say it's Japanese.
3 - Get a squatty potty. Turns out the body isn't made to poop at a weird angle with your butt high in the air like modern toilets make it do. I could give a bunch of arguments for this one, but this hilarious video does it much better than me:
4 - Get a house plant, and/or plant a few trees. People surrounded by nature are more relaxed, more focused and more productive. Simply having a plant on your desk will make you more productive. Old studies by NASA also showed that indoor plants help remove a lot of pollutants from the air. Outside, trees help filter small particles floating around. Turns out even car brakes emit small metal particles that ruin your health long term. Trees help catch these particles, on top of all the cool stuff they do (house squirrels, bring shade, look awesome, ...). If you can't look at your average plant without killing it, consider acquiring a sansevieria (mother-in-law's tongue). It needs very little light, water or space, and it's a great air filter (seriously, NASA tested it).
Will those 4 steps bring you straight to abs-ville? Probably not, but they're a start. People who decide to change their lives NOW and get super healthy and go to the gym 5x a week starting January 1st usually fail miserably. Small, easy, achievable, constant steps are what works. Less glamorous for sure, but it's about getting results lazily, not working hard to fail.
Cheers!