Chapter Two

Last month, I published Chapter One: Here’s How To Start Getting Healthy. 

Getting healthy has been over-complicated by large businesses, the government, health gurus, etc. - a terrible disservice.

If you never read Chapter One (C1), check it out. If you’ve read it and are beginning to incorporate the basics, here’s Chapter Two (C2):

Chapter Two

Good health is progressive and C2 is a continuation of C1. 

We're building on 3 themes - Nutrition, Movement, and Rest.

You don’t need to do all of this stuff at once. You might start with only the movement section or only parts of the nutrition section. 

If you slip up, don’t sweat it - get up the next day and start again. 

Nutrition

In C1 you got the basics. Eat real foods, mostly protein - and limit garbage (bread, pasta, rice, cereal, alcohol, etc.). This is 80% of it. Fuel your body with the stuff it needs. Forget counting calories.

We also introduced eating windows or intermittent fasting. In C2, let’s move forward on this. 

The more time you spend not eating, the less time you will have to eat too much garbage. 

Also, when you don’t eat for longer periods, you give your body the chance to focus on healing itself. This is undervalued in our world.

The next step in intermittent fasting is to go from the 10 to 12 hour eating window outlined in C1 to an 8 hour eating window.

Eat from around noon to 8PM and then don’t eat from 8PM to noon. 8 hours of eating and 16 hours of fasting. If you can’t do this everyday, do it as many days as you can.

The thing I mentioned above about giving your body a chance to heal itself is called autophagy.

Autophagy is HUGE even though you don’t hear about it that much. It is one way your cells clean themselves and heal. 

Here are some links to learn more about autophagy:

This post from Healthline gives you a good idea what autophagy is and why it is important.

If you want to go deeper - This Series from Nature provides in depth knowledge on Autophagy. It is excellent!

Movement

If you followed C1, then maybe you’ve been walking 2 miles or more four days/week or so. If you want to kick that up, go for it! The more you walk, the better. If you want to jog some of those times instead, also great.

Now let’s add one more layer - You want to begin adding muscle resistance. Push ups are a great place to start.

You don’t have to do that many and you can do modified push ups to get started. Do push ups twice/week.

Here’s a video intro to progressing on push ups from JT for beginners through advanced. It’s great and I will write more about JT next week in a discussion about my influences.

Adding resistance exercises will help you burn fat. It will also inhibit muscle loss due to aging.

Muscle loss due to aging is called sarcopenia and it decreases lifespan and worsens quality of life over time. 

Like autophagy, sarcopenia is an important concept that you don’t hear enough about.

Wikipedia has an excellent entry on sarcopenia with a lot of information and links to research for those who would like to dig deeper.

Rest

I have little to add from C1 on rest except to say that it is a superpower. You want to begin listening to your body. If you are tired, rest. If your legs or arms hurt, wait another day or two before you walk or workout again. 

Better to rest a little too much than get injured.

If you have any questions, you can reply to this email newsletter, hit the Comments Section, or email me directly at [email protected].