The Inconvenient Truth about Health

Take the stairs instead of the escalator or lift!

Walk 10,000 steps a day!

Make a tuna salad instead of buying a burger!

These are some of the common health hacks you hear? Over the years I have realised convenience is a distractor to our health and wellbeing. Fast food can be delivered to your door just about where ever you are. You can rent a electric bike or scooter instead of walking. All these little things provide convenience however limit the opportunities move our body and increasing our propensity to make poorer food choices. Both of which drive weight gain and poor health outcomes. So what can you do about it? In this episode of me&my health up we tackle the inconvenient truth about health, and what you can do about it.

About me&my Health Up & Host

me&my Health Up seeks to enhance and enlighten the wellbeing of others. Host Anthony Hartcher is the CEO of me&my wellness which provides holistic health solutions using food is medicine, combined with a holistic, balanced, lifestyle approach. Anthony holds three bachelor's degrees in Complementary Medicine; Nutrition and Dietetic Medicine; and Chemical Engineering.

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Any information, advice, opinions or statements within it do not constitute medical, health care or other professional advice, and are provided for general information purposes only. All care is taken in the preparation of the information in this Podcast. [Connected Wellness Pty Ltd] operating under the brand of “me&my health up”..click here for more

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Transcript

Anthony Hartcher: 0:02

Welcome to another episode of me and my health up. I'm your host, Anthony Hartcher. I'm a clinical nutritionist and lifestyle medicine specialist. The purpose of this podcast is to enhance and enlighten your well being. And today, I'm going to be doing that for you. I'm going to be talking about the inconvenient truth about health. Yes, it's an unusual sort of topic. But it's sort of very profound once you hear me talk about it, and then you realize the inconvenience around health. So it's going to be covering topics such as we're going to be talking about the ice bars, or these popular trends, these old traditional practices that have become very modern phenomena or popularity. And it's because the science is catching up to these traditional ways of being healthy, essentially. So we're going to be looking at time restrictive feeding, or some people call it intermittent fasting. It's that 16 and eight sort of diets or the five and two diets, we're going to be talking about nasal breathing, we're going to be talking about saunas. And we're going to be talking about just ways to be holistically healthy, and ways to overcome this inconvenience of health. So let me get into the topic. So if we think about it, when we go to create new habits, there's an element of inconvenience about going to create that new healthy habit, such as you want to go and do more exercise, essentially, well, you've got to find the space in your calendar, you've got to then actually go to a location and do it, you need to find some inspiration to do that exercise, you might not want to do it. And there's an element of ease about convenience, ie not doing exercise isn't there lying in bed sleeping in not getting up. To do the exercise, it requires a bit of effort. And with anything changed around health, creating a new habit requires some element of habit. And with habits, it's hard to break old habits. And then you need to create the new habit, which requires this element of inconvenience. Because you've got to change your old ways of doing things such as making time to exercise, finding the time to eat healthy, rather than the ease of convenience of takeaway. So cooking versus takeaway, there's an element you may perceive. And again, this is all perceptions around inconvenience, because it can be convenient in many ways, depending on the way you look at it. And I'll certainly explain this perception that people may have, for example, around exercise. So the perception they may have with exercise is it needs to be vigorous it needs to be you need to be out of breath, you need to do certain amount of time, you know, needs to be an hour workout. Otherwise, it's again, this is all perceptions based on what other people are doing. Or what you may have read a headline in a newspaper article that said that so many minutes, this intensity will help with weight loss. And so again, it's all these accumulated perceptions over time through what our friends are doing, or what we've heard about what we've read. And it doesn't necessarily mean it's true. So it's important that you really look at it objectively, as opposed to just that perception around exercise. So you know, there's a formal definition around exercise, and then there's recommendations around exercise, but the most important thing to do is actually, to start, I always recommend to start small, rather than go full on into it, because that can be very hard to sustain. Whereas it's very easy to find a small amount of time and to fit it in. And what I'm talking about is this whole thing of when there's a choice between taking the escalator or walking up the stairs, then walk up the stairs, that's exercise, okay, and the more you sort of look for these opportunities in your day, such as, can I walk to this meeting? Or take an Uber? Can I actually then you might think I productivity, it's more productive to jump in and move or to get to the meeting. But you might also wanting to be upskilling in a certain area or learn more about something else. And so therefore, it could take a half an hour walk to get to that meeting, but you could be listening to a podcast or listening to a webinar that will also be upskilling you during that walk to that meeting. Or you could just take that 30 minutes to really reflect on what you want to get out of that meeting and prepare yourself mentally for that meeting. So therefore it's productive. Then you might be saying, Oh, but I could squeeze something else in And, but then you might be limiting your productivity by trying to do too much and then not do everything really well, it can be a matter of actually pulling back a bit and doing things really well that ends up increasing your productivity. So with the exercise, it is around finding little bits of time to do something, move the body essentially. And it could be whilst you're watching TV, you could decide to, in the breaks, do some squats, or in between the Netflix rolling from one episode to another is actually say, in between episodes, I'm going to do a minute of squats or a minute of push ups or minutes of sit ups. And so this is going to be all the cumulative leash, all this little bits are all going to add up in your day to then you found you've automatically done 30 minutes of exercise, which is what is recommended, for example, well, you might not get to 30 minutes, but 20 minutes, or 15 minutes is better than nothing thinking that you need to find an hour in your day to exercise properly in terms of what you perceive as proper exercise. So what I really want to say is, you can make it convenient, rather than perceive it as an inconvenient task by breaking it down into smaller incremental bits or bytes. And it's the same as you know, I mentioned the time restricted feeding, like 16. And he got to do 16 and ate all the evidence between, like, so what is 16 at night, so it's 16 hours resting your digestive system is not fasting. And then the other eight hours is your eating window, right. And there's a lot of research coming out in the 16 and eight and it's benefits, there's certainly health benefits to it. However, starting out, you might find it difficult to do 16 and eight, so why not start at 12 and do 12 and 12, and then incrementally build up to the 16 on A's. Or you might find that your sweet spot is 14 and 10. So that you're resting your digestive system fasting for 14 hours and then eating within a 10 hour time window. That may be your sweet spot. Okay, as you know, the research is done on a certain population, which may be irrelevant to you in terms of your age bracket, your health goals. And yeah, so you just need to, I guess, find what works for you essentially. And you can make it convenient. So by having flexibility around time, restrictive feeding will enable you to socialize better. So if you're strict around the 16th and A's, it can become very antisocial as you're invited to a brunch, and typically you don't eat before 12pm, then you're going to go and everyone else is eating and enjoying the meal and it looks great. And you're starving yourself sipping on your water. I mean, is that healthy, really, it's quite restrictive, it's not social. And so you really got to look at things holistically and make things convenient for you. And you'll find the more you look. For the convenience, you'll find that it's just like thinking that everything healthy is inconvenient, like I don't want to have a cold shower like so this whole hot cold contrast therapy, sort of where the ice baths get to essentially being exposed to cold being exposed to cold, or certainly the contrast between cold and hot has been shown to improve our circulation. And so that can be good for detoxification, it can be good for healing recovery. It can be really good to I guess de stress in a sense. So it sort of does, it shocks the body, the body needs to respond and it can get out of that stuck state. So it can be helpful in terms of relaxing, can be helpful for exposure to cold also helps with increasing our brown fat so our brown fat is our good fat just like we have good cholesterol and bad cholesterol. We like to label things don't we are brown fat contains mitochondria. And so mitochondria, essentially the powerhouse that produces energy and so this brown fat is consuming calories essentially to keep you warm. So babies have a lot of brown fat because they're essentially at a young age they their body can't shiver and that's you know, as we get older our body can the muscles we have muscles that can Shiva and produce heat, right. So thermogenesis we can create heat. But we also have this brown fat certainly around our neck and our upper body where our vital organs are such as our heart and our lungs. And we can increase the ratio of white fat to brown fat by half Being exposure to cold. Now, this is a whole thing, we want to be conveniently warm all the time. So we go from air conditioning to air conditioning, and we go from a house that is air conditioned or is heated, and then we jump into a car that's heated, then we go to an office that's heated. And so our body doesn't actually experience these contrasts. Whereas from a primitive sense, in terms of where we come from, we were exposed to the elements all the time, and our body was constantly having to adjust and generate heat. And when you generate heat, when your body has to generate heat is burning calories. And so it's actually good to have some exposure to cold. And it doesn't need to be extreme, you don't need to jump into an ice bath. If we talk about starting incrementally small and making it more convenient as opposed to inconvenience, ie having to fill a tub with ice and then add some water and then jump in it, you know, there's a quite a degree or increased degree of inconvenience, but we can find ease in health by starting small and that can be just going for a brisk walk at a colder part of the day with less on so les les is essentially right. So therefore we are exposed to cold our body is feeling it, it needs to adapt, it needs to generate some heat. And so it is good to be cold for certain periods of time, obviously not extended periods of time and become hypothermic. So you know, these short periods such as a half an hour walk, you know, exposure to the cold is going to be helpful, and it's not going to be too inconvenient. There's always an element of perceiving convenience, because you have to make effort, right, it's a whole lot easier to stay warm layer up and to be cozy. And so there's always going to be that element a little bit of inconvenience. And you got to make some effort in order to create change, if you want to create healthy change effort is required. And there's going to be an element of discomfort. So yeah, that's the hot cold. I've been doing five degree ice baths, so to speak on the ice bath, but it's a five degree bath, essentially. And then contrasting that jumping from that, you know, for a period of time, we've been doing around five, six minutes into a hot bath, which is somewhere between 35 and 42 degrees. And I've really found that applying that contrast therapy, at least once a week has really helped it relaxes me actually I find it very relaxing. And I feel great afterwards. I mean, I do feel cold because my core body temperature has dropped. But there's an element of feeling more mentally alert, more clarity. And I think it's it's really improved that increased circulation that your body's experienced that parasympathetic states been switched on. So the body has been doing some more digestion, I always feel that I'm making lots of digestive sounds when I'm doing this therapy. And yeah, my mind just really slows down it does, it slows, you know, the heart rates, it really slows your breathing down. So that can be really good to do that for a period given our lives are so busy, we generally have an elevated heart rate, we don't have great circulation, because we're so stressed and all our blood supplies around our vital organs as opposed to getting out to the extremities. And if you're not exercising, then it's really not getting out to the extremities. So now we can have obviously pooling of waste products produced by ourselves in these areas and you know, you get swelling, you don't get good thermal control of these areas, you know, in order to reduce that swelling to you know, help the body detoxify, get out the toxins, we need to get that circulation through exercise, and hot and cold therapy can be one way of doing that as well. And the other one that I also came across on a podcast I did with Paul pool loss, and we spoke about lifestyle optimization hacks, he mentioned nasal breathing, and he's found it's really helped with his condition of narcolepsy. So narcolepsy is a really extreme condition where sleep is really challenged to the extreme and he's had to find ways to improve your sleep. And one of the ways is through nasal breathing. And so I was listening to he's talking about nasal breathing and the importance and I've since read a book on nasal breathing and really understood what I started to get an understanding of how we've ended up predominantly being mouth breathers and how we're not designed to mouth breathe. We're actually designed to breathe through our nasal passage and the benefits a huge actually utilizing the nasal passage for breathing. So, you know in terms of what I found and through the practice of nasal breathing, is my heart rate is lowered. And certainly the science supports lowered heart rate lowered blood pressure. I'm sleeping better at night, that's a big one more energized. And yeah, I feel more alert during the day. So nasal breathing, good practice that I'm applying every night at the moment, but I've done it for about a week, yes, I'm taping my mouth, and it forces me to breathe through my nose uncomfortable to begin with. Again, there's an element of inconvenience, an element of lack of ease, but I thought I'd give it a go. And I've tried it one night, and you got to stick with it, you got to be consistent with any change in order to reap the benefits. So I did start seeing benefits within the first few days. And it probably encouraged me to keep going. But I've now beyond seven days of taping my mouth at night. Now I don't really know this the inconvenience of taping the mouth. Initially, it was really horrible to begin with. But now I'm just in the routine of doing it. And I finding just my sleeps really improved. I am getting better in terms of in I'm not 100% Nasal breather at the moment, because I've had a cold, so it makes it harder. But I'm certainly getting more into my conscious thinking of needing to constantly switch back to nasal breathing. And again, with any change of behavior, it is you'll switch back to autopilot, which is your subconscious way of what you did previously. And you need to obviously bring it to your conscious mind of our hypercar slip, slip back into mouth breathing, so get back to nasal breathing. And it's the same with creating any new habit is you will have elements where you slipped back to the old but it's just getting back on track. And that's the most important thing is getting back on track as soon as possible. And so the other point about this, the inconvenient truth around health is that in time it becomes with ease because it becomes habitual. And we start realizing the benefits. And a reinforces that behavior and wanting to keep doing it. So Nasal Breathing is something I want to keep at Right, I've only seven days in, I'm not there yet. And I realized, you know, it can take anywhere up to a month to break an old habit or to create a new one. And so I'm willing to stick with it. Because I'm seeing the benefits, I'm feeling the benefits. And so it's really important to stick with change. But again, back to it, make it less inconvenient by starting small, small increments, you could just do maybe a practice during the day where you tape your mouth for 20 minutes, and then just practice 20 minutes, that might be an easier way to start. And that 20 minute practice can be your mindfulness time because you're focused on nasal breathing. And that's a form of mindfulness is where we just draw our attention to the breath. And that's what you will be doing focusing on nasal breathing, you won't have the ability to breathe through the mouth because it's taped. So yeah, so just start small. And by taping, you're maybe just too hard to comprehend this whole taping my mouth for a tire night is just too difficult and worrying about or what happens if I stopped breathing, and all that sort of things. And those sorts of thoughts could come into your thinking. But certainly, your body does know that it can breathe through the nose, and so will when it has to that I found there just starting small I mean, I was able to go straight into it. But you know, you might need to start smaller with some maybe some daytime practices, or it could be you just close your mouth and be focused on the mouth closed and focus on breathing through the nose. You don't need to take your mouse so to speak. So that can be another great practice. What else we've been trying out saunas, and again, with the saunas, it's finding the time, it's then sticking with it, because you do you feel quite agitated when your body gets really hot and is trying to cool itself. And it's struggling to cool itself. And again, it's sort of sticking through this element of inconvenience in order to get to the benefits. But if you focus on the experience and what you're feeling, as opposed to focusing your attention to the inconvenience and the hardship, then that can make it easier as well. So it can bring much more ease to what you're applying. And that's what I found with being in the five degree pool was if I just focused on my breathing, or just focused on what my body's feeling as opposed to you know, watching the clock countdown, or just noticed that my mind slowed down and how great it is when your mind slows down. It's not racing and yeah, so really connecting with your senses really embracing the moment I find and it can really lessen the, the hardship or the inconvenience of that healthy change. And that's what I found was soreness was just really sitting through that moments or moments or minutes of discomfort. And your body does find a way to sort of find some balance with the change. And so you'll start sweating, obviously. And once you find your breakout with sweat, then you find it a bit easier, then it gets inconvenient again. But again, it's just a matter of going at your own pace, listening to your body, but the sitting with it for a period and not just giving up. And I think it's the same with time restricted feeding, is initially you'll find it a bit challenging, and you'll get hungry, and you'll think I really want to eat. But if you then just focus on a task that you really enjoy, it will take your mind off how your stomach's feeling. And certainly, I've been reading another book on longevity. And that element of feeling hungry is actually good for us, obviously not for over extended periods of time, and we're starving ourselves. But certainly, elements of the day of sitting with hunger is really good. It actually switches on our longevity genes are really good for longevity to have these periods of feeling hungry. And just the more you do it, I find it doesn't become uncomfortable. We're just so used to being always chasing pleasure in terms of feeling at ease. And you know why we shouldn't have any struggle. But if you accept the struggle as part of complimentary opposites with pleasure, and Dr. Demartini also spoke about this on more recent episode of me and my health AF is we have these complimentary opposites and they exist in everything, we can't avoid them. They're everywhere, such as you know, sad and happy pain and pleasure. There's opposites with everything we do, you know, hardship and ease or convenience, ease versus inconvenience and hardship. There's always a complimentary opposite, just like a magnet, he always has a north and south pole. There's always opposites. And the more we embrace these opposites in life, and not just seeking one side one sided, and thinking that life is just one sided. It's just all this should always be pleasure, than we're only going to let ourselves down because we can't have pleasure without pain. I mean, how can there's there's no relativity, if we don't know what pleasure is, if we haven't had some sort of suffering, it's the same as happiness, if you don't have moments of feeling down, then how do you know you're actually happy, you know, if you're permanently happy, then that would be boring, because it just be normal. It's the cycles that we we enjoy and this cycles of life. So yeah, embracing that. There's two sides to everything is also something that I've learned recently, and I've really got into Dr. John Demartini, is work around his method and way of training the mind to think more objectively as opposed to subjectively and work in that higher level of thinking, which is in that prefrontal cortex, our executive function of the brain versus in that primitive amygdala, which is that more instinctual, impulsive, primal Center, which is our fight or flight or freeze center in terms of what we may do as a result of that being switched on. And typically, you know, if you look around, we live too much into that primal area of the brain, that system, one that black or white thinking that prey predator impulse instinct. And, as opposed to then getting out of that, and into their higher level of thinking, which is looking at things more objectively, and looking at things as being balanced. And Dr. Demartini refers to that higher level of thinking as the gratitude center, that prefrontal cortex, if we operate more into that level of thinking, we have a more balanced perspective on life and we can be can be more grateful for everything in our life, otherwise, we can't be grateful because we're if we're always looking for pleasure, there's always some pain somewhere around it. And he mentions that it's meant to be that way, because everything's perfectly balanced. The Yin and the Yang is an Eastern philosophy and that Eastern philosophy of Yin and Yang is that there's always Yin within Yang, Han Yang within yin and it's in the dynamic state, it's in a constant moving state of flux. So it's always changing between yin and yang, night and day, cold hot. So these complement Free opposites exists all around us in our environment and in our emotions and in our actions. And so yeah, we need to embrace both sides of life, both sides of ourselves. And there's more fulfillment in that. So yeah, if you want more certainly go to the episode with Dr. Demartini, Episode 111. And that was a great episode where we talk about these complimentary opposites and in embracing both sides of life. And essentially, he talks about how to rewire your brain to a healthy mindset, which is what I'm assisting to do in this episode is essentially helping you find more convenience, in the supposedly inconvenience, healthy ways of living. So I just want to finish off on cooking and take away food is another one where I see a lot of people just going for that ease of convenience, because it's quick, easy, there's no washing up, no cleaning. And there's just only difficulty and more effort required to cook. And obviously, with cooking, you got the preparing the whole thing of washing up afterwards. But you can make this an experience. And as I said before, embracing the experience, as opposed to seeing as as a means to an end. So if we're always looking for the finish line, we're going to miss the journey. And life's all about the journey. If we were just interested in the finishing line, that's us in a grave. That's the finish line. So we'd need to embrace the journey. And so you could really embrace the cooking experience by making it a family experience. If you have a family, getting everyone involved. Everyone's set a task and working together as a team to create something special. And bringing creativity bring in new recipes, new ideas have theme nights such as new cultures and you can really make it fun. By taking away the perception of it's just difficult and requires more effort. You can really embrace that experience. So it's bonding. So you know, you can tick many boxes, you bond the family, you know, you could do with flatmates, you bring your flatmates together, you say this have a theme night, let's you know it could be an Italian night and you really embrace the Italian culture, you might watch an Italian movie, you cook some Italian food, and drink some Italian wine or whatever. But you can really make it fun. And it doesn't need to be seen as inconvenient, because that whole element of embracing the experience is that you're bringing in other elements of wellness, you've got social connection, you've got working together as a team to a common goal, which really Bond's people together. You're creating the food cooking out so you know what goes in it. It's not just cheap ingredients, and lots of fats and salts and sugars, you can really control what goes in it. And you can embrace your area of creativity. And you know, you can challenge yourself in terms of coming up with creative new recipes that you like so and you can also try new different foods. So the other challenge I give my clients is to buy a new vegetable, bring that new vegetable home and create a meal around at site, the box challenge that you you see on Master Chef is challenge yourself with something new, it could be a new cut of meat or it could be a different type of me too, could be a different type of vegetable could be a different type of grain and then create something around it. So engage that higher level of thinking that creative center of your brain, that executive area, as opposed to the impulsive amygdala, which is that ease convenience or pleasure and seeking, you know, takeaway and we know take away food pride, heavily processed food is not great for us. And so if we see the cooking experience as a fun experience, as opposed to an inconvenience, and I mentioned at the start of this episode, it's all based on perception. Because you can make it a really convenient experience such that you're having fun, you're socializing, you're eating healthy Lee together, you're having some laughs That meal will sit really well because you're embracing the whole experience. So you're, you switch on your parasympathetic state, which is your rest and digest state. And so you digest that food, you feel great afterwards, and you've had fun. So it can be just doing this a couple of times a week or you know, then that's better than not doing it at all or just seeing every meal is such an inconvenience. I just don't have the time. Well make it a fun experience and you're always looking for more happiness and fun. So really it, embrace it see it in another perspective. And I hoping you've got that perspective from me from what I've just shared. So that's really what I really wanted to share today is that, yes, health or making healthy changes can be perceived as an inconvenience, there is obviously an element of inconvenience, because it's a change of routine. But that change, if you make it small, can be an easy way to ease into it, and then allow it to grow incrementally build on that change. So as I mentioned, in terms of those incidental chances are doing exercise throughout the day, embracing them doing more of that, and building on that, and then you'll start to feel the benefits, and then you'll want to do it more. And then it just becomes something that you perceive so much benefit from that it becomes part of what you do, it becomes part of your identity, and it becomes easier to do. And so I regularly do these ice baths at least once a week, I'm regularly doing sauna at least once a week, I regularly embrace different types of exercises, you know, resistance training, cardio, training, more stretching, and you know, mobility training. So I have that good mix throughout the week. I do it the way I like doing it. And again, you need to experiment and explore and find what resonates for you and your body and your goals. Again, you know what works for me, you're completely unique and different. So don't think you know I need to try it because Anthony says so Anthony's just sharing health principles to get you to think more healthy, and to act and do more healthier things and see it as a, I guess, a shift in paradigm in terms of the way you see it. So I hope that was helpful. And I really appreciate you tuning in each week for another episode of Man my health app, I've got some great up and coming episodes. So continue to stay tuned in and please provide feedback. Please share the episode with others that you think could benefit from this information that struggling you know, that person may be struggling to get started or always sees help being healthy as inconvenience or a struggle. This shift of perspective may help them so yeah, please share it with them. Leave a review that will really help it get out to more people and join the me and my health up tribe on Facebook. I'll have the link in the show notes. So go and join the tribe. I'll share healthy tips and advice and updates as to what's dropping and even previews of what's dropping ahead of time. So yeah, really appreciate you tuning in. So thank you