Honest Health Truths I Wish I Knew Earlier | by Joe Holder
For the next 30 days I am attempting to write one brief article daily on health/wellness + assorted musings. Today is Day 5 +6. Day 1–4 can be found below.
5 Simple-Ass Ways to Make Physical Activity Stick (Day 1)
8 to be exact
1.) You don’t have to eat “healthy” all the time.
Your body has something I like to call “metabolic flexibility.” Essentially, the body naturally wants to survive, so it’ll use whatever you give it to the best of its abilities and to not promote disease. We occasionally see that the body, at least in the short term, can handle junk food quite well, especially when paired with physical activity. One of my favorite studies was when scientists gave cyclists who rode for 90 minutes a fast food meal vs a group that got “healthy” protein shake — the junk food had no real negative impact on their metabolic markers or even their performance. The caveat here, though, is the short term time frame which was only tracked for a day or so.
I coin this the “shitty food paradox” — fast food won’t kill you immediately and in some cases might even be helpful to keep the body going, but down the line it will likely lead to issues. There is a bit of an inversion for this as “healthy” food won’t cure you immediately and you might even feel worse in short term if you’re changing your eating habits from processed foods to whole foods, but down the line it will likely improve your health overall.
So, if you want to enjoy life a little bit, please realize you don’t have to eat what’s colloquially termed “healthy” all the time but you should definitely eat good for you foods more often than not.
2.) Dieting is one of the hardest things you’ll do
Diets are not forever. Think of them as short term periods that help you improve your health for whatever reason you are choosing to do it (more energy, lose weight, etc). After that goal is reached you can then entertain a much more flexible eating strategy.
I never really had to diet in my life until I was returning from injury in college with the goal of getting back in optimal shape. It was wildly hard and gave me much more empathy for individuals who struggle with maintaining a long term restrictive eating practice. We often just chalk it up to willpower, but when we live in a society that literally creates foods with flavor profiles that are hard to resist, it goes a bit deeper than that.
Best advice I can give? Set up your environment for best results, this is “healthy by design”. The only way I got through a short term restrictive diet was making sure that the (majority) of my eating decisions were under my control. This makes moments of temptation much easier to handle and have you eat foods that “nature” for the most part intended.
3.) You can look good but feel like shit
Fitness has been an aesthetics obsessed culture, instead of a health promoting one. We often confuse that signs of exemplary health has as low-body fat and aesthetics, instead of more important quality bio-markers and healthspan. Low-body fat can be hard to maintain and can result in a negative relationship with food where you think every time you eat, it’s only earned through exercise. This typically leads to a slightly chronic negative energy imbalance — you always eat a little less than you burn which can lead to long-term issues, especially in women.
Much research has began exploring this phenomenon, “low energy availability”, and how this can impact athletes.
Health is not just about looking good but making sure you feel better as well.
4.) There’s no such thing as a “healthy” food
Health is the state of the individual, not the “basis” or definition of the food.
Whole foods are all composed of nutrients and contingent upon the person they will lead to health or lack thereof. The issue isn’t with fruit, the issue is likely all fruits may not work for everyone especially if you are relatively sedentary so the sugar content in the fruit will not make sense for you to consume. However, that doesn’t mean to say a recreational athlete should not consume fruit because of the blanket menace of “sugar”.
This logic can then apply to various foods like how individuals with IBS or digestive issues should stay away from certain types of vegetables. Does that make the vegetable “bad”? No, it just does not match for that person’s respective health. Should everyone limit carbohydrates? Not quite but if you are prediabetic or overweight it might be a good idea too.
Of course there are general rules everyone should follow, the below an excerpt from 2018 Healthcare journal which provided a straightforward heuristic on eating strategies
So, before you go about demonizing or promoting any food, realize that this is strongly contingent upon the individual.
Additional Read: “No Food is Healthy. Not Even Kale” via Washington Post
5.) Control your mornings and your evenings is the secret sauce
Slow down. Don’t stop…but slow down. Taking the time to ease in and out of the day is a strategy I wish I discovered sooner. Running yourself ragged as a badge of honor is absolutely MIND boggling. Staying in bed to the last moment possible and then just hopping into bed at the end of the day after you’ve likely been staring at your phone aint it.
While I am blessed to now have the luxury of time and a little more control over my days, this is advice anyone can use. Repetitive routines seem to reduce anxiety research suggests so having a routine that gets you mentally and physically prepared for the day and then prepared for sleep can work wonders. This is not me musing of from reason and “science” but also experience as I have seen the benefits first hand. This is why I made routines for Exercise Snacks that can both help get you energized for the day and calm for bed.
My best morning tip? Start your day slow, hydrate, and move the body but calm the mind.
Best evening tips? Avoid bright lights, reflect on your day accordingly, and release the tension that has accumulated over the course of the day.
Work that into any sort of routine that is best for you. Swish
6.) Operate in cycles, not absolutes
Within sport performance, there is the concept of periodization. There is a lot of different literature on this , but it’s scheduling your training in specific cycles to meet benchmarks that will then mold into each other to produce the overall goal. Basically, you create a schedule for the athlete to train so you peak at the proper time. It is impossible for the athlete to be in peak condition ALL the time, but instead you need to focus on the RIGHT time.
This same principle applies to our own practices. I touched upon this in my GQ article about understanding the difference between health and performance, but the concept is simple: it’s wildly draining to think you have to be perfect all the time when it comes to your health. In no other area of our lives do we think if we are not perfect, then nothing even if good will have beneficial payoffs.
I see this all the time when people are confused that I drink (I’m partial to red wine). I just have restraint to stop for long periods of time like when I am training for a marathon or when I know it would likely be a good practice to refrain from alcohol.
Everything around us operates in cycles to create equilibrium. We can do the same with our health.
7.) Workouts are not the most important component of your wellness routine
This might have hit me when I began to spend more time outside of the gym as my primary workplace about 2–3 years ago. When the gym is your immediate proximal environment, you think it’s super easy to work out when that’s not the case for most people. While most don’t live their life in athleisure and, instead, sit at a desk is, even though inactive, it’s still wildly tiring. Workouts, for the most part, take the LEAST amount of time and can also be the hardest to partake in for some from a motivation perspective.
The majority of your wellness practices then will likely be around stress reduction, sleep, diet, and emotional/mental health. So why do we focus so strongly on physical activity, especially within gym walls or standard workouts? For sure, make sure you train, but most research suggests that workouts are good for weight maintenance and underlying health of metabolic markers, but not distinctly for weight loss. So be active but regardless if that comes naturally to you or seems to be a bit more difficult there are other ways to augment and improve your health overall that does not rely on fitness as the singular wellness strategy.
8.) Enjoy It
Being around high achievers, a weird sentiment that I kept hearing come up was the fact many FORGOT the things they did. Like wildly notable events and achievements. I do believe you shouldn’t rest on your laurels but when I dove deeper into why this was occurring many told me it was because they were so “go go go” they couldn’t focus on the “now now now”. I call this a bit of the dopamine/serotonin conundrum, those two being two key neurotransmitters in the brain that are responsible for our feelings of motivation while also being able to enjoy the here and now. Basically, don’t be so dopamine heavy (motivation, forward driven) that you fall out of love and forget the serotonin moments (here and now).
Living a life of the constant “what’s next” is no life to live at all for the only true thing we can forecast is death. Not to be somber or melodramatic but death can be the ultimate teacher, the gentle reminder that’s not to weigh on our minds but lightly let us know it is indeed ok to stop and smell the roses amongst all the chaos of striving. For me, that is getting closer to liberation.
As always, thanks for reading
Did this help or did you find this interesting? Keep up with me on Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube for more.
