Live Long and Well with Dr. Bobby
Let's explore how you can Live Long and Well with six evidence based pillars: exercise, good sleep, proper nutrition, mind-body activities, exposure to heat/cold, and social relationships. I am a physician scientist, Ironman Triathlete, and have a passion for helping others achieve their best self.
Live Long and Well with Dr. Bobby
#43 Small Changes, Big Impact
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Six surprisingly simple actions mighty meaningfully improve your sleep, eating habits, and overall well-being—and how you can easily test them for yourself.
We begin with two sleep-related tips. First, try lowering your bedroom temperature to under 70°F. In a small controlled trial, participants who slept on a cooling mattress fell asleep faster and reported better rest.
The second tip: go to bed at the same time every night. A study in adolescents showed that consistent sleep timing improves how quickly you fall asleep, total sleep duration, and overall sleep quality.
Then we dive into three food-focused techniques. Starting meals with protein may help you feel fuller, thanks to effects on hunger-regulating hormones like ghrelin and GLP-1, as explored in this review and systematic analysis.
Next, waiting 20 minutes before going for seconds may give your brain time to register fullness, supported by a study comparing fast and slow eaters.
The fourth tip? Just stand up. There’s no formal data yet, but being upright might affect how full your stomach feels mechanically—something I noticed during long flights when a quick walk dramatically reduced my appetite.
Finally, we explore the idea of non-food “snacks” throughout your day. Evidence shows that short bursts of movement as brief as 30 seconds to 5 minutes can improve fitness, particularly in sedentary individuals. Similarly, just five minutes of breathwork has been shown to elevate mood in randomized trials.
But here’s the key: try them for yourself. In Part 2 of the episode, I guide you through using an “N of 1” approach to test each strategy. Start by measuring a baseline (using wearables, a sleep journal, or a validated sleep questionnaire). Then try one of these approaches for a few days or a week. Reassess and see what happens.
Takeaways:
Sometimes, the most powerful health strategies aren’t the hardest—they’re just the ones you haven’t tried yet.
will a cold bedroom help me sleep? Can eating a bit then waiting 20 minutes before eating more help me eat less? How about doing just five minutes of focused breathing? Will that calm me? There's evidence to support some of these and, in all cases, testing whether they work in you is critical. Let's find out.
Speaker 1:Hi, I'm Dr Bobby Du Bois and welcome. To Live Long and Well, a podcast where we will talk about what you can do to live as long as possible and with as much energy and figure that you wish. Together, we will explore what practical and evidence-supported steps you can take. Come join me on this very important journey and I hope that you feel empowered along the way. I'm a physician, ironman, triathlete and have published several hundred scientific studies. I'm honored to be your guide. Welcome, dear listeners, whether you're in the US or anywhere of a number of other countries that seem to be enjoying the podcast. This is episode 43. Will these simple and quick approaches help you? Let's try and see.
Speaker 1:In my discussions, we often focus on what I might refer to as big changes. To live long and well Could be start a full exercise program or try to stop smoking, or build new social relationships or lose a whole bunch of weight. But the real question also is are there simple changes that you can do that might really help? So I came up with Dr Bobby's two darn easy criteria for simple changes. We must define what we mean by simple changes. Criterion one needs to be pretty darn easy to try it, something you can do quickly, easy, without a lot of time and without a lot of preparation. Criteria number two it needs to be pretty darn easy to assess whether it works for you.
Speaker 1:So for today we're going to divide our discussion into two parts. In part one I'll walk through what those simple approaches are. A couple go in the area of sleep, three go in the area of eating or weight control, and then we'll have one called the frequent snack technique. This is a teaser, has nothing to do with food. So some of the techniques and approaches I've talked about before, others are new. Some of them have a fair bit of evidence that supports they could work for you, but some don't. And that brings us to what will be part two. How do we test whether these simple changes, simple things to try whether they work in you? Now we've talked many different times about the N of one approach, and this will be a perfect way to apply it. If you would like a little more background on the N of 1 approach to testing in yourself, that would be episode number 27.
Speaker 1:So let's dive right on in. So the first couple deal with sleep. Simple approach number one try a cold bedroom. It's so simple it's hard to believe it works. The body naturally cools at night. It's a circadian rhythm thing. Ideally we don't want to fight the cooling process by having a warm bedroom. Does it relate to melatonin release? It could be, but what's the guidance? What's the simple approach?
Speaker 1:Set the temperature in your bedroom below 70 degrees or at 70 degrees, and there's evidence to support this. In a small controlled trial now they used a cooling mattress to achieve the cooling. But no reason to think that just a cool bedroom wouldn't do the same. And what do they find? That sleep onset, how quickly you fell asleep was significantly faster and how well you slept subjective sleep assessment was better. That was a small study. Here we have a larger observational study with about 34,000 people and about 4 million nights of sleep, and what they looked at was the temperature and for each degree things were warmer in the room. Your sleep efficiency went down, which is of the hours you're in bed. How many of those hours are you asleep? Also, for each degree that it was warmer, there was a shorter total sleep duration. So what's the call to action here? Give it a try. Set your bedroom temperature at 70 or below and C.
Speaker 1:For this technique and for the next that I'll talk about, I have an episode number three on sleep, and more details are there if you're interested. Okay, simple approach. Number two related to sleep. Aim to go to bed at a similar time each night. That is surprisingly important.
Speaker 1:Now, some might argue that it isn't the time you go to bed. That needs to be uniform and similar, but it's the wake-up time For me. I wake up the same time, about five in the morning. So whether I go to bed at nine in the evening, 10, 11, or midnight, I'm still gonna wake up at the same time. So unless I go to bed close to nine for me, I'm not gonna get the desired close to eight hours of sleep. Now there's evidence to support this. They did a study in 46 adolescents and they had them go to sleep at the same time each night what's called sleep regularity and that was associated with longer sleep duration, shorter time to fall asleep and that overall, greater sleep efficiency. So there's some evidence to support it. Of course, as we'll talk later, you need to test it in yourself. What's the action item? Go to bed at the same time for a week or so and see what happens.
Speaker 1:All right, now we're going to switch gears. Talk about eating weight control. Simple approach number three Begin your meal with protein or have a protein-forward meal, meaning a significant part of your meal is protein. There's some studies that suggest that protein intake may improve satiety or how hungry you feel in the short term. Now I'm not talking about long-term weight loss and the studies are quite mixed about whether protein-heavy meals lead to long-term weight loss versus a more typical meal. What I'm really talking about is the immediate sense of fullness. Protein may help with the hormone ghrelin, which says to your body I'm still hungry, and the GLP-1 hormone, which is also something our body produces. Those may go up with protein intake. Now there are others who say fat makes them full. Again, these are all testable, but there's some studies to suggest that protein intake helps you to feel fuller. It does for me, maybe it will for you.
Speaker 1:So what's the action item? Try to eat. One serving of protein Could be 20 grams of protein. 25 grams of protein at the very beginning of the meal or as a pre-meal snack. So maybe you'll have a little bit of tuna or part of a chicken breast, maybe 10 minutes before you eat. See if that helps you, or have your protein at the beginning of the meal, not later into the meal. Quick tip number four wait 20 minutes before you eat more.
Speaker 1:So there was a really interesting study. They had two groups. One ate quickly, so whatever they were going to eat, they ate it pretty quickly, six minutes, ate it in about six minutes. The other group ate more slowly, 24 minutes. So a significant difference between the two groups. What did they find? The group that ate more slowly had a sense of greater fullness over the time period, suggesting that it may take a bit of time for your brain to realize huh, maybe I'm not hungry anymore, maybe I don't need to eat more. So that's the science, or the evidence.
Speaker 1:I'll give you my unscientific personal experience that if I get interrupted while I'm eating now, I may feel like, oh, I'm so hungry I really just want to wolf down the food that's in front of me. But if I get interrupted, maybe for 10, 15 minutes. I got to go deal with a phone call, I got to deal with somebody at the front door. When I come back to the table, I don't feel a need to eat anymore. Somehow that's a relatively small amount of food made me feel full if I gave it enough time.
Speaker 1:So what's the approach you might try? Action item fill your plate about half of the usual amount. So whatever you think you're going to eat, just put half of it on the plate. Maybe put half on one plate, put half on another plate. Eat that first amount of food. Wait 20 minutes, go for a walk, see how you feel. Then come back and see after 20 minutes if you still wish to eat more. And if you do, by all means you can have some more of your food. But you may find, as I have over and over again, that after that 20 minutes I actually come back and I don't want to eat the additional food. Okay, quick tip number five Stand up and see if you're still hungry.
Speaker 1:Now, there's no scientific evidence here, but I have a theory. But first, before I tell you the theory, let me tell you how I came across this. So when I'm on an airplane, I guess I'm stressed out, I always bring snacks with me and I always tend to eat an awful lot. I bring a lot of snacks and I kind of go through them and by the time I'm all done with it, you know, 15, 20, 30 minutes later it's like, hmm, maybe I ate too much. Well, at one point I ate some snacks and decided, oh, I need to get up, stretch my legs, get to the bathroom. Some snacks. And decided, oh, I need to get up, stretch my legs, get to the bathroom. Now I hadn't really eaten very much yet, but I had eaten some. What did I find? When I was vertical, almost immediately I didn't feel hungry anymore, went to the bathroom, came back, sat down, decided, no, I'll just put the snacks I have away.
Speaker 1:Now, why does this work? Could it be and again, this is all theory that the way your stomach feels full meaning, kind of a mechanical thing, there's a lot in my stomach is affected by being vertical versus horizontal, versus lying down. It may distend part of the stomach in a little bit different ways. Who knows? It works for me. So action item for you Before you're assuming that you're still hungry while you're sitting down and eating, get up, walk around, see if it makes a difference.
Speaker 1:Again, that's the beauty of quick tips they're quick and easy to see. All right, the final quick tip, number six add healthy, non-food snacks to your day. Now, what do I mean by that? A snack isn't a meal. It isn't you're going to sit down and eat a full meal. You're just going to have a little bit to eat. You can apply the concept of a snack to other things. Now. Many of you have apps on your phone that remind you when to stand, you know every hour or something. It'll say stand up, that is a snack. It might be a walk around for one or two minutes or five minutes. That's a snack.
Speaker 1:There's evidence that even short bursts of exercise can improve fitness in people who are not getting much exercise, and in these studies it was sort of 30 seconds of exercise up to five minutes of exercise, and there was really 10 randomized control trials that were summarized. Again, for this study and the others I'll have links in the show notes. It's been shown in good studies that five minutes of breath work. Just breathing in certain ways can improve your mood. There was a randomized control trial that showed just that. So maybe the action item here is try some non-food snacks Five minutes of quick exercise at some point during the day, five minutes of breath work at some point in the day.
Speaker 1:You can even randomize it, meaning different times a day. You just randomly flip a coin and it will tell you what snack you should do. Find out, give it a try. It could be fun for you. All right, that's part one. Those are the six quick or simple things you might try.
Speaker 1:Well, now we get to the all-important part too. You've got to test whether it works in you. Now, as I mentioned at the outset, there is some evidence to support the six simple approaches and, on average, for many of them, the evidence says they work. But the average response isn't necessarily going to be your experience. Maybe you'll get less benefit. Maybe you'll get more benefit and sometimes, like my idea about standing up and feeling fuller there's, frankly, no real evidence to support it. There's, frankly, no real evidence to support it. But the beauty of the quick approaches I've suggested for sleep and eating is that they are easily testable in our N of 1 approach.
Speaker 1:If you want more detail on this, episode 27 walks you through this and a lot more. So what's the approach? In brief, figure out what it is you're trying to focus on. It might be your sleep, it might be your eating. It might be calories you're eating at a given meal. So step one measure a baseline. So if it's your sleep, you're going to measure some aspect of sleep. You might have an Oura ring, you might have a Fitbit, you might have an Apple Watch.
Speaker 1:Quantitatively, you can look at your sleep. You might not have one of those. You could just do something as simple as figuring out on a piece of paper how many hours of sleep did I get last night? How difficult was it for me to fall asleep? Did I wake up a bunch? Do I feel rested in the morning? Or, if you want to do it more formally, there's a questionnaire called the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index. You can answer some questions, get a number. So you're going to measure a baseline and obviously, for weight, that's not very hard. It might be your bedroom scale, it might be just how many calories you ate at a given meal. So step one measure a baseline.
Speaker 1:Step two try one of the six simple approaches and then, step three re-measure using the same approach. The beauty about these sleep interventions and these interventions about how much you eat at a given meal. You can answer this test within days or a week or so. It doesn't take a month or two or three to figure out whether a cold bedroom helps you sleep or whether waiting 20 minutes allows you not to eat the second half of that plate of food. Okay, some final thoughts.
Speaker 1:Many health and longevity approaches may seem daunting. They may seem too big, too difficult, take too much willpower. Here I've talked about six simple things you can try. If they work, great. If they don't, you really haven't invested too much in trying them out. Could this all be a placebo, dr Bobby, that none of these things really work, even though there's evidence to support them? Perhaps Episode 28,.
Speaker 1:I talk a lot about the placebo effect. But if the goal is to sleep better or not eat as much as you might have otherwise, what difference does it make how or why it works? Maybe it's real science, real evidence, really making changes in who you are and how you are conducting your life, or sleeping or eating. Or maybe it's really just a placebo-driven behavior change. But if it works and it continues, so be it. So I'm not here saying that these are these remarkable changes that will forever make you a different person. No, they may really work, they may not work, it may be a placebo, it may be something else, but if they help you, that's wonderful.
Speaker 1:Well, let's end with a couple of action items. First, choose one of the six simple tips, measure your baseline, try it and see what happens. Action item two let me know what happens for you. I'd love to look at that, hear about that and then I can share it back with all of you listeners. Again, if you enjoy what I do, please tell your friends, your colleagues. It's wonderful when more folks can find benefits. So, on our journey to live long and well, sometimes key steps might actually be pretty simple. If you want to continue this journey or want to receive my newsletter on practical and scientific ways to improve your health and longevity, please visit me at drbobbilivelongandwellcom. That's, doctor, as in D-R Bobby, live long and well dot com.