During my summer holidays, I read an interesting book called The Blue Zones: 9 lessons for living longer from the people who’ve lived the longest by Dan Buettner.
Buettner travelled to five geographical areas around the world where people lived healthy lives for the longest time. These five areas included Sardinia in Italy, Okinawa in Japan, Nicoya in Costa Rica, and the seventh-day adventist (SDA) population in Loma Linda, California.
Throughout the book, Buettner identified several essential lifestyle habits that could explain some of their excellent health and longevity outcomes. This included things such as how people connect, how they move, how they eat, and the outlook on life that they have. Let’s break down each of these habits in more detail:
1. Prioritise the connections that you have with others.
A deep sense of belonging does seem to be especially important to people that reach 100 in the blue zones. Over 98% of those identified and interviewed said they were active participants in a faith-based community.
The denomination you are a part of doesn’t seem to matter much. However, certain faiths, such as SDA, recommend that their believers adopt a healthy lifestyle.
Attending religious services once a week can add four to fourteen years to your life. Of course, belonging is still possible without religion. Still, achieving the same level of community, regular gatherings, and belonging in non-faith-based groups can be tricky.
Being active in social circles that support healthy living is also really important. Smoking, loneliness, inactivity, unhealthy eating and weight gain are more likely if a number of your friends are also going through this.
Fortunately, happiness, connectedness and movement can also be contagious if your friends live in specific ways and you associate with them regularly. Therefore, the people closest to you can impact your long-term health and happiness, whether you want them to or not.
Finally, people that live to 100 all tend to put their families first and have strong relationships with their partners, children, grandchildren or great-grandchildren. By prioritising a close and connected relationship with your children and grandchildren, they are more likely to care for you once you are older and need their love and support. In addition, living with younger generations makes the children less likely to be sick or die young.
You can live, on average, three years longer by having a life partner. It can significantly benefit males, who are more likely to become isolated or engage in healthy behaviours such as a poor diet or substance abuse issues. For females, having a life partner can also be helpful if you have a good-quality relationship. However, single women do better than those in long-term relationships with abusive or controlling partners.
Most people that live to 100 in the blue zones are not regular gym goers or marathon runners. Instead, they make moving, particularly walking, a normal part of their daily life. It may be their work on their farms and gardens, or visiting friends and families. However, regular movement does seem to help people stay healthier for longer.
Beans, soy, lentils and vegetables are crucial elements of the diets of people that live to 100 in the blue zones. They don’t tend to go on strict or regimented diets but don’t eat much processed or junk food either. They usually only eat small amounts of meat about once a week.
People living to 100 in the blue zones don’t tend to overeat too much and maintain a healthy weight. One way they do this is by aiming to eat until they are about 80% full rather than 100%. This can be the difference between gaining or maintaining weight over time.
Finally, an occasional red wine doesn’t prevent someone from reaching 100. On the contrary, it can lead to more longevity for people than those who abstain entirely. If you ever do drink alcohol, aim for no more than one or two glasses at a time, and try to do this only at times when you are socialising with friends or family if you want to so that you also get the benefits of connection and belonging.
4. Find and strengthen your sense of purpose, even after you have retired.
Those who lived the longest continued to feel that they had meaning and purpose in their everyday lives. The Japanese call it their “ikigai”, and the Costa Ricans call it their “plan de vida”. It gave the people in each country a good sense of their main reasons for waking up each day.
Knowing what feels meaningful to you or gives you purpose can add up to seven years of life expectancy.
Finally, people who lived to 100 in blue zones knew how to downshift, relax, and process their stress whenever it was building up for them. Conversely, people who do not learn how to effectively manage or reduce their stress when it arises are much more likely to experience more inflammation and chronic diseases over time.
Some of the strategies those in the blue zone use are:
Taking a few moments each day to remember their ancestors and be grateful for what they have done
Praying to God daily for the things that they are thankful for and the things they hope for
Taking daily naps
Trying to stop working by a specific time each day and socialise and connect with friends and family over food or a drink.
Spending time out in nature
Some of the secrets of longer living in the blue zones are probably genetically based. However, not all of it is. Therefore, adopting some of the above tips and strategies could add a decade or so of good years to your life.
Are there any changes you could make that wouldn’t be too challenging for you to make? If so, would there be any downsides to doing this? Conversely, what could be the potential benefits?
No matter your age, there is still time left to make some of the changes that you would like to in your life. If you do, I’d love to hear about how it goes.
It’s quite strange. Yesterday, I managed to finish off the last thing on my to-do list for the week. For the first time in a long time, I had nothing that I had to do. Sure, there are some things that I would like to do in the future. However, nothing required me to take any steps towards them until Friday next week. This is definitely the first time that this has been the case in 2021. I’m not even sure if I reached this point at all in 2020.
I feel lighter to have all of these items gone. They are no longer hanging over my head or telling me that I shouldn’t be relaxing when I am. But I also feel a bit lost. Today, I have already done my morning meditation, journaling, Elevate brain training and Duolingo French language training. I then did my daily weight training, hips and balance exercises, and went outside and walked 10,000 steps. I shopped for the food I needed at the local supermarket, meal prepped for the next few days, and cleaned up my place.
I then tried to relax and watch some TV and a movie, but both of these activities already felt boring. One of my friend’s said that he had clocked Netflix because of this pandemic. I haven’t, but the returns of these activities are definitely diminishing.
My brain told me that I would feel amazing, no longer having anything that I needed to do. But I do not. So now, having just eaten half a salad and a tasty Magnum ice cream, I find myself here at the computer putting down my thoughts into words.
Exactly how I feel now is why I tell my clients not just to live their lives by their goals. Sure, having things to aim for is great. So is hitting these targets and crossing these items off our to-do lists. It gives us a nice little surge of dopamine and fires up the reward pathways in our brain when we achieve something. And our brains feel good for a temporary moment until we start searching for the next target to hit.
But it is never-ending and generally always future-focused. We think, once I have achieved this, then I will be happy. But then we meet this goal, and our brain says, “great… what’s next?” We begin looking again to the future for the imaginary thing that will make us happy and satisfied forever once we achieve it.
Unfortunately, the long-term rewards of this future goal are mostly a mirage. Our brains telling us that it will satisfy us forever helps us not give up pursuing the goal. However, once we have achieved it, the reward is fleeting and less satisfying than we imagined beforehand. This is because dopamine is more about desire than reward.
Imagine if we were forever satisfied after achieving a goal. I doubt that our ancestors would have lasted long enough to reproduce. A slightly unsatisfied person, always craving for more and an ideal future that never comes. Those humans are the ones that will keep moving, growing, meeting and breeding. And now, here we are…
As I have already said, a goal is set for the future. You want to lose weight, buy a house, run a marathon, or climb Mount Everest. As an extension of this, you are saying that you lack something in the present when you set a goal. You are heavier than you want to be. You don’t have the house that you want to be in. You haven’t run the marathon this year, and you are yet to climb the tallest mountain in the world.
Values are different to goals. Values are followed in the present. They are guiding principles for life. You are either living by them at the moment, or you are not.
By clarifying why you want to achieve your specific goals, you can determine if you are living by these values in the present or not. Let’s take the first example. You might want to lose weight because you value looking attractive, but I want to lose weight because I value being healthy. I have lost weight through not eating much, not exercising and taking diet pills. The goal has been achieved, and if it was you, you might even live by your values. But I am not. Deep down, I would know that I am not healthy, and even if I have lost some weight, I would feel inconsistent rather than consistent with what is most important to me.
You might want to climb Mount Everest because your husband is too and you value doing things together, whereas I am training for it because I value pushing myself to reach my potential. We both head off on the expedition, and we can’t climb beyond base camp because our guide says that the weather is too bad for the next few weeks. Because I am unable to live by my value, I feel disappointed and unhappy. Because you are still consistent with yours, you are happy and don’t mind getting to enjoy your downtime in Nepal with the love of your life.
What Do You Want Your Legacy to Be?
This question needs to be asked more often, in my opinion. I’m not too sure how many people could answer this clearly and succinctly. But if we aren’t clear on what principles or values are most important to us, how are we meant to decide if we are on the right path or not? How will we know if what we are doing is time well spent or just a waste of time?
Imagine that you have lived your whole life and have recently died. Someone really close to you has decided to bury you, and they are deciding what will be written on your gravestone. What would you want them to write?
If you aren’t sure what you would want your legacy to be about, this question can often help. Even though I would prefer to be cremated instead of buried, the main thought that pops into my head when I think of this exercise is:
“Here lies Damon…He tried his best”
Maybe that is cliched or lame, but it highlights that a core value in my life is around effort. I care much less about how much I manage to achieve in my life. I want to know that I gave things a proper go and put in the effort required. That I focused on the process of what I am doing, which is within my control, rather than the outcome, which is often outside of it.
Your 80th Birthday Party
If thinking about after your own death is too morbid an exercise for you, this thought experiment may be more appealing. Imagine that it is your 80th birthday party, and all of your closest family and friend’s are there to celebrate the life you have had so far. Someone close to you stands up and tells everyone in the crowd about the person you have been from now until your 80th birthday. What would you want to hear them say about you? I’d love to hear my partner’s daughter stand up and say:
“Even though I wasn’t convinced about Damon initially, he’s turned out to be a pretty cool role model as a father figure for me. He’s consistently been there for me and tried his best to be emotionally supportive and understand me and what I was going through. Damon’s always wanted the best for me in life, and I could feel this. But he also didn’t care if I won things or where I came as long as I was willing to try and give new things a go. Damon was always willing to do things for me and be there when I needed him to help or listen. But he also didn’t do things for me if he knew that it would be better for me to give something a go and learn how to do it myself. Damon encouraged me to explore the world and not be held back by fear. He also offered a safe space with mum to come back to when I needed comfort, care and support. I’m glad that Damon came into my life, and I am happy about the person I am today partly because of the role that he has played. Above all, I feel loved for who I am by Damon, no matter what, and that is a pretty cool thing to have. So thank you, and happy 80th birthday!”
Your answer to this question should help you clarify what values are most important to you or what you would like your legacy to be about. Based on the above passage, I want to be a good role model as a father, present, supportive, understanding, encouraging, helpful, loving and unconditional. Many people think of their legacy in terms of work, but is that really what you value most in this life?
In her excellent post and subsequent book, Bronnie Ware shared her top five regrets of people who were dying. Having worked as a palliative care nurse for several years, Bronnie identified them as:
I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
I wish I hadn’t worked so hard
I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends
I wish that I had let myself be happier.
This list highlights that my life was imbalanced before I had my stroke in January. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, I was separated from my partner and her daughter back in Vanuatu on March 20th, 2020. I could not see any of my friends or colleagues back there and did not say a proper goodbye to them. Thanks to the months of lockdowns in Melbourne, I could not do many things I enjoyed or see my friends and family here in Australia that I wanted to either. I was working too much for too long each day, spending too much time on my phone and watching TV, and wasn’t eating as healthily or being as active as I wanted to be.
What about you?
How Much of the Day Are You Spending in the Way that You Want?
For this exercise, draw a pie chart of what a typical workday looks like for you and another pie chart for what a typical day off looks like. It doesn’t matter what time you go to bed or get out of bed or start and finish work, because the whole pie represents 24 hours.
When you are drawing your two pie charts, think about:
How much time are you just in the moment vs trying to do things for a better future?
How much are you socialising and connecting with others, including family and friends?
How much time are you spending inside vs outside in nature?
How much are you dedicating towards being physically fit or exercising?
How much time are you resting, sleeping and relaxing?
How much are you dedicating towards doing creative or fun vs passive hobbies?
How much time are you working and doing tasks related to work?
Above is an example pie chart that I drew up in less than five minutes, so it really doesn’t have to take a long time. For some people, their workdays and non-workdays are very similar. For others, their weekend’s are spent very differently. There are no right or wrong answers. The key is to draw down what is typical for you.
Now that these pie charts have been drawn up, reflect and ask yourself:
Are there things that you would like to do more of?
Are there things that you would like to do less of?
What’s making it hard or stopping you from making these changes?
Once you have identified what you want to change and why the most important thing is getting out there and starting. Behavioural change is hard, especially at the start. But as Zig Ziglar says, “no one just walks around and finds themselves atop Mount Everest“. If you try something new and get stuck, my next blog post will give you a few tips and tricks to overcome these barriers.
The best thing about living by our values instead of just chasing after goals is that this can happen at any chosen moment. It doesn’t have to be New Years Day, and it doesn’t have to take a long time. I want to be more creative and present and connect more with those I care most about starting now. I don’t want work, focusing on the future or distractions on my phone or TV to get in the way.
You require open-heart surgery to fix something that could otherwise severely impact your quality of life or kill you prematurely.
I’m guessing that you would have a pretty similar hierarchy to most people of who you would try to book for the surgery:
The best heart surgeon in the world
The best heart surgeon in your area/state/country
A fully qualified heart surgeon with lots of experience doing the procedure you need
A registered heart surgeon with some experience doing the operation you need
A fully qualified surgeon with lots of successful heart operations
A fully trained surgeon with some successful heart operations
A supervised heart surgeon intern with some successful heart operations
A fully qualified surgeon who has performed successful surgeries
A registered medical doctor (such as your General Practitioner) with some surgical experience
A fully qualified nurse with some surgical experience
Notice that everyone else who is unqualified to perform surgeries is not on the list, regardless of how highly they think of themselves or how much they care about hearts or surgery. Suppose an unqualified person has some experience completing surgeries or comes highly recommended by someone. Even in that case, there is still no way I would risk myself or someone that I love going under the knife with them.
Now let’s compare this to if you have a mental health issue and want additional support:
Imagine that you are a top athlete and want to improve the mental side of your game.
What would your hierarchy look like for who you’d see to help improve your psychological health and overall performance?
For me, it would look like this:
The best Sports Psychologist in the world
One of the best Sports Psychologists in your area/state/country
A fully qualified Sports Psychologist
A recommended and fully qualified Psychiatrist with some experience successfully helping top athletes
A recommended and fully qualified Psychologist with some experience successfully helping top athletes
A fully supervised Sports Psychology intern with some experience helping top athletes
A fully qualified Psychiatrist
A fully qualified Psychologist
A fully qualified Psychiatric or Mental Health Nurse
A fully qualified Social Worker
Someone who has completed a Master’s Program in Counselling at an accredited university
Notice again that I do not put anyone on my list who is not a fully qualified and registered mental health professional, regardless of how much they love sports or mental health. Like surgery, I believe that if you are going to pay for mental health support, try to obtain it from fully qualified people.
A fully qualified Psychiatrist has studied at University for at least 12 years, including a complete medical degree and then a four-year residency in Psychiatry. A Psychologist has completed at least a Doctorate or a PhD in the USA. In Australia, they need to study mental health for at least six years before becoming a Psychologist. Both Psychiatrists and Psychologists must also be registered each year with a regulatory body, have professional indemnity insurance, continue to abide by their respective code of ethics and provide empirically supported treatment. They must also continue their professional development and keep a logbook of everything they have learned and the supervision they have sought.
As a Psychologist, if treatment is not effectively helping someone, you cannot continue treating them indefinitely. Because of our ethical code of practice, if someone is not getting any better, we need to refer them to another mental health professional who can hopefully help them more. We’re also not allowed to use testimonials or make unsubstantiated claims about how much we can help you. If these marketing strategies are not banned, someone can use them to persuade you unfairly.
A person working in the mental health field without any qualifications or protected titles does not have these limitations. They can practice unscientifically and unethically. They can continue charging you to see them regardless of the harm they are causing you. They can breach your confidentiality and tell others that they see you. They don’t have to get any professional supervision or do any continued professional development. They also don’t have to keep any notes or records of your sessions together or keep them in a secure and locked place for the next seven years. And they can make up fake testimonials saying how exceptional their services are and how much they help people just like you.
A Difficult Lesson to Learn
In 2017, the Adelaide Crows Football Club was one of the strongest teams in the AFL. They were hoping to win the club’s first premiership in 19 years. But, unfortunately, they lost to Richmond by 48 points in the Grand Final.
After their loss, the football department questioned the players’ mental fortitude. The department told them that they must improve the mental aspect of their game and build resilience to win it all in 2018.
Hoping to gain a mental edge over the rest of the league in preparation for the 2018 season, they decided to head off on an experimental preseason camp involving knives, blindfolds, army gear and the removal of personal phones for the duration of the four-day camp. Run by Collective Mind, a consultancy group of two people who are self-proclaimed Executive Coaches and Trainers.
Since this camp, things have only gone downhill for Adelaide. As of July 4th, 2020, head coach Don Pyke, head of football Brett Burton, senior assistant coach Scott Camporeale and eight of the best 22 players from 2017 left the club.
Eddie Betts left Adelaide to head back to Carlton in 2019 and said in February 2020, “that (camp) was one of the main reasons it was so hard to enjoy footy.”
Mitch McGovern was another player who left the crows. Furthermore, his manager said, “the reasons Mitch left the Crows was because of the camp and the Adelaide football department, and that’s it.”
After finishing minor premiers in 2017, Adelaide dropped to 12th in 2018. In 2019, they won fewer games but finished 11th. They then lost 13 games to start the season and finished last in 2020. This year they improved slightly again and finished 15th out of 18. Collective Minds do not blame themselves for this decline, even though they credit themselves for Adelaide’s first place at the end of the regular season in 2017. Perhaps this drop from first to last in three years was just a coincidence.
I first wrote this Facebook post back on June 26th 2018:
Dear Adelaide Crows,
If you want to get the mental edge over other AFL teams, why would you choose a company run by two individuals who do not even have an undergraduate degree in psychology?
There are 92 endorsed sport and exercise psychologists in Australia, 322 health psychologists, 513 organisational psychologists, 615 clinical neuropsychologists and over 8,000 clinical psychologists. Generally speaking, there are over 29,000 registered psychologists in Australia in 2018, and 1,469 psychologists in South Australia alone.
Psychologists… are held accountable by the Australian Health Practitioners Regulation Agency. Not all psychologists are amazing, but it is a nice way to monitor psychologists’ behaviours and ensure a certain level of quality control.
Let’s hope that other professional teams, sporting clubs, organisations, businesses and individuals learn from this experience and try to seek support from people that are adequately qualified in whatever services they are offering.”
More than three years later, I still think that hiring people without even a Bachelor’s degree in a mental health field can be pretty dangerous if you want them to improve the mental side of your game.
But Have we Learnt Our Lesson?
It sure doesn’t look like it.
I enjoyed reading ‘The Resilience Project: Finding Happiness through Gratitude, Empathy and Mindfulness’ by Hugh van Cuylenberg. My brother first read it and said he loved it and found it an emotional read. He recommended that I check it out.
The author was a great storyteller, and it was nice to see someone talk about the benefits of gratitude, empathy and mindfulness. Van Cuylenberg calls these three components GEM and says that they are the key to resilience and finding happiness.
I’ve never seen him run a presentation to a group before, but Hugh is a compelling public speaker. He is a qualified teacher who has previously worked in schools as a teacher and has a Master’s degree in education. Hugh has some skills in how to craft and portray an engaging message.
His Resilience Project website says that he has worked with the Australian Cricket Team, Australian Netball Team, Australian Women’s Soccer and Rugby teams, National Rugby League, and ten Australian Football League teams. He highlights that he works closely with the Port Adelaide Football team and has worked individually with Steve Smith and Dustin Martin.
He is not working with these teams or individuals on how to best teach others. Or how to give effective presentations.
He is talking to them about improving their mental health or ‘resilience’. And he has zero mental health degrees, as far as I can see.
He has mentioned reading some of the work by Dr Martin Seligman on Positive Psychology and the benefits of GEM. But doing some personal reading on topics is not the same as passing examinations and observations year after year and meeting all of the requirements to be fully qualified and endorsed as a practising mental health specialist.
Remember, there are over 100 specialised sports psychiatrists and sports psychologists in Australia and 29,000 psychologists. They are all much more qualified to provide practical mental health support to these teams and athletes. Yet, these athletes and teams overlook this expertise and go with someone with no formal training in mental health. And they are not alone.
The resilience project claims that they have worked with 500 workplaces, 1000 schools, and over one million Australians. Yet, interestingly, none of the 14 Resilience Project employees indicates that they have an undergraduate or postgraduate degree in mental health.
The #1 player in the world
Ben Crowe calls himself the Director of Mojo Crowe and a Mindset Coach. He has a Bachelor of Arts degree majoring in Creative Writing and has studied sports management for three years. He convinced Ash Barty, the current #1 female tennis player globally, to be her mindset coach. She seems happy with their working relationship so far.
With his previous experience as a director of sports marketing at NIKE in the Asia Pacific, Ben is well experienced and suited to working with athletes as the co-founder of his company Unscriptd.com. He says that he helps athletes share and market themselves to the world.
If Barty were working with him in this regard, that would be entirely appropriate and possibly very helpful. Regarding her mental health or ‘mindset’, I don’t see how his education or qualifications relate to this. But he does say that he works with Dylan Alcott, Stephanie Gilmore, the Australian Cricket Team, Richmond Football Club, leaders at Macquarie Bank, and the World Health Organisation. So again, she’s not alone. These individuals and companies have enough money to hire the best professionals in an area. How do people think that the best person to teach about mindset is someone without mental health training?
Conclusion
There is a need for more mental health funding and education to increase access. 75–95% of people in lower to middle-income countries cannot access specialised mental health services.
Until we can have more qualified mental health specialists, there will be a role for life coaches, counsellors, and psychotherapists.
However, the public needs to be well informed about the differences between the education and regulations required to work in each profession. Twelve years of study after high school for Psychiatry. At least six years for Psychology. A personal coach, counsellor, or psychotherapist may have no formal mental health education or qualifications at all.
As ‘life coach’, ‘counsellor’ and ‘therapist’ are unprotected titles in Australia, you could open up your own business or practice tomorrow and start treating and managing mental health or ‘mindset’ or ‘resilience’ problems. You could also start working with some top athletes and teams if you are a great self-promoter and they are uninformed enough to hire you.
I know it seems like an extreme comparison, but would you allow yourself to be operated on by someone who wasn’t qualified or didn’t go through a long and formal education process to develop and maintain their skills? If not, why should your mental health treatment and support be taken any less seriously?
If there are no psychiatrists, psychologists, mental health nurses or social workers available in your area, see if you can access any of these individuals online. If you still can’t and need mental health support, unregulated professions like life coaches, therapists, or counsellors might help. I would make sure you know how long they have studied first and hope they practice ethically and scientifically.
When I was 18, I graduated from high school in Virginia in mid-2004. After a fantastic road trip across the USA, I returned to Australia and needed to find some work until I could attend University in February 2005.
My first job after I returned was walking around and doorknocking at people’s houses, trying to sell the residents a subscription to daily delivered newspapers. I lasted two hours, sold zero subscriptions, and made zero dollars before deciding that the job was not for me. I really feel for anyone who does this type of work. Basically, no one wants a stranger trying to sell them things at their front door.
After applying for a few other jobs, I worked as an assistant manager at Hungry Jacks, a fast-food restaurant. It did not pay well and required sometimes working 11 hours straight without a break from 3:30pm to 2:30am.
Fast food work is not glamorous. It was hot working out the back. The oil from the fryers clogged up my pores, and minor burns were not out of the ordinary.
It can also be a lot of pressure and stress. Cars turning up to buy something in the drive-thru needed to be given all of their order in under 2.5 minutes. The recommended time for in-restaurant orders was even faster.
Eventually, I began turning up to work late a few too many times, especially to morning shifts. I was 18 years old for most of my time at Hungry Jack’s and enjoyed going out with my friends and having some drinks.
After one shift where I slept through my alarm by a few hours, the two store managers called me into a room and asked me not to come back to work anymore. I was shocked, but I also understood why they didn’t want me to work there. I wasn’t really trying to learn the things I needed to and had been coming in later and later.
Here are the five main things I learned from being fired:
1. It doesn’t matter how intelligent you are if you don’t put in the work
One of my favourite personality assessments I recommend to many people is the IPIP-NEO or the five-factor personality model. It is available to be taken for free online and compares your answers to other people of your gender, age and country across five factors and thirty facets.
Conscientiousness is the most crucial factor for determining how successful someone will be at work out of the five personality factors. This finding is independent of intelligence. This means that even if you do not have a high IQ, you can still do really well at work if you apply yourself consistently. Having high self-efficacy and belief in your ability to get things done, being orderly, self-disciplined, dutiful, striving to achieve something and thinking things through before acting can help you be more conscientious and perform better at work.
2. A growth mindset is far better than a fixed mindset
I definitely had more of a fixed mindset in high school than a growth mindset. I didn’t see the point in practising things or working hard to get better at something. Instead, I thought that how good I was at something was as good as I could ever be and tried to only do things that came naturally to me.
I excelled at math until year 10, and then finally, my natural aptitude for the subject couldn’t take me much further. My grades in the subject quickly plummeted. I went from receiving A+ on tests in year 9 to nearly failing my Maths Method exam and obtaining an E+ at the end of Semester One in year 11.
At Hungry Jack’s, I again tried to stick to what I enjoyed or found easy. However, after months of working there, I still didn’t know how to set up the broiler properly, preferring to stick to salad prep or changing the oil in the fryers. Once the store managers realised this, I could only do broiler set-up. I think I stopped turning up in the mornings shortly after this.
If I had instead realised that my performance could indeed get better with more practice and more effort, I might not have been late so much and kept my job.
3. It is hard to motivate yourself to do things that you don’t enjoy
For the six months I worked at Hungry Jack’s, I really didn’t enjoy going to work. I would dread getting up early in the morning for a shift. I would also count down the clock at work until I finally could go home.
I compare this to working as a Clinical Psychologist. The feeling is entirely different. Some days I still can’t be bothered going to work, but I enjoy the process of being there and helping others as much as I can in the time that we have together.
We can’t always find things that we love doing. But if you hate what you do for a job or where you are working, it can really get you down. I’ve had a few undesirable jobs with difficult managers, and they nearly drove me crazy after only a few months.
If you are in one of these situations and can look for other opportunities, please do. Then if you have a chance to move to another job that you think might be better, go for it. If you still feel stuck, compare what you would lose by leaving to what you would lose by staying. Taking a risk can be scary, but ask yourself what you usually regret more: what you decide to do? Or what you want to do but do not?
4. Try to find a job that suits you, not what other people tell you to do
Out of the 10+ jobs I did from 14- to 28-years-old, my favourite job by far was night-fill at a Woolworth’s Supermarket. I would mostly work from 9pm to 2am or 10pm to 3am, with a 10pm to 6am Saturday night shift that paid double-time. It was a decent workout, with lots of walking and carrying boxes. It also led to a lot of reflection time while working, as the store was generally quiet until midnight and then closed after that until 6am. Once it was closed, we could play our iPods and listen to music and not have to engage with anyone at all.
For a casual job, it paid really well. But it also allowed me to do everything else I wanted in my life. I could see my friends and family as often as I wanted to, play lots of sport, and go to all the university classes that I needed to during the day. It also suited my delayed sleep schedule and helped me save enough to travel around the world for eight months after finishing my Honours degree in 2008.
Other people may have hated the exercise or the timing of the shifts at the supermarket, but I loved it, unlike the job I had at Hungry Jack’s. The more you understand yourself, your personality, and your strengths and weaknesses, the easier it will be to know what type of job is right for you.
5. Education is much more important than I realised it was back when I was in school
None of the 10+ jobs I did before I completed my Doctoral degree required a university degree. Many paid minimum wage, including working at a fast-food Tex-Mex restaurant in the USA and as a bartender in the UK.
Comparing how much I was paid in some of these jobs, it would have taken me over 20 hours to make as much as possible in one hour of private practice psychology work in Australia. The difference in pay between working as a clinical psychologist in the USA and the minimum wage is even more extreme.
I agree that schools could have a bit of an overhaul and teach more about mental health and life skills. However, it doesn’t mean that doing well in school and getting a good education doesn’t help give you a more financially secure future.
Sure, there are high school and college dropouts that have more money than I could ever make. But, unfortunately, these are the exceptions rather than the rule. If you don’t believe me, check out the ten points that this article makes on the benefits of obtaining a bachelor’s degree. Not only are you likely to make more money, but you could have higher self-esteem and better job satisfaction too.
Conclusion
Being fired for the first time just before starting my university career may have been a blessing in disguise. It helped me to take my university studies more seriously, taught me that if I wanted to get anywhere, I needed to work hard at it and that I also needed to try to find the right job for me if I was going to do well and stick at it for a long time.
According to the Oxford dictionary, a paradox is a noun that has two meanings:
1. A seemingly absurd or contradictory statement or proposition which when investigated may prove to be well founded or true.
2. A person or thing that combines contradictory features or qualities.
I love paradoxes because they are sometimes funny and usually also quite insightful. Listening to the audiobook version of the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu was like listening to one paradox after another. This was especially surprising to me because it is an ancient book of wisdom. So a great paradox is much more than just a cliche, even though it can appear like that over time.
Below is a list of some of my favourites, starting with one from the Tao Te Ching:
“New beginnings are often disguised as painful endings” – Lao Tzu
2. “Who you are speaks so loudly I can’t hear what you’re saying.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
3. “I’d rather be hated for who I am, than be loved for who I am not” – Kurt Cobain
4. “I refuse to join any club that would have me for a member.” – Groucho Marx
5. “You know what the issue is with this world? Everyone wants a magical solution to their problem, and everyone refuses to believe in magic.” – Alice in Wonderland
6. “I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.” – Socrates
7. “Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.” – Rumi
8. “We judge ourselves by our intentions and others by their behaviours.” – Stephen Covey
9. “If you don’t risk anything you risk everything.” – Mark Zuckerberg
10. “The more we do, the more we can do; the more busy we are, the more leisure we have.” – William Hazlitt
11. “Only you can take responsibility for your happiness…but you can’t do it alone. It’s the great paradox of being human.” – Simon Sinek
12. “If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done?” – George Carlin
13. “Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty.” – Frank Herbert
14. “Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one’s mistakes.” – Oscar Wilde
15. “Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.” ―Mahatma Gandhi
16. “He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears.”― Michel de Montaigne
17. “A lot of people never use their initiative because no-one told them to.” – Banksy
18. “If someone doesn’t value evidence, what evidence are you going to provide to prove that they should value it? If someone doesn’t value logic, what logical argument could you provide to show the importance of logic?” ― Sam Harris
19. “Let go of certainty. The opposite isn’t uncertainty. It’s openness, curiosity and a willingness to embrace paradox, rather than choose up sides. The ultimate challenge is to accept ourselves exactly as we are, but never stop trying to learn and grow.” ― Tony Schwartz
20. “If you don’t get what you want, you suffer; if you get what you don’t want, you suffer; even when you get exactly what you want, you still suffer because you can’t hold onto it forever. Your mind is your predicament. It wants to be free of change. Free of pain, free of the obligations of life and death. But change is law and no amount of pretending will alter that reality.” – Socrates
When I think about how to best help someone, I am reminded of what psychiatrist Irvin Yalom found when he asked 20 clients what was most beneficial to them about their time in therapy (Yalom & Leszcz, 2005). The average client had spent an average of 16 months in therapy, and was just about to finish up.
The top four categories of responses they gave consisted of:
4. Self-understanding: learning more about thoughts, feelings, the self, and their origins
3. Cohesiveness: being understood, accepted and connected with a sense of belonging
2. Catharsis: expressing feelings and getting things out in the open
1. Interpersonal input: learning more about one’s impression and impact on others
Out of the 60 individual statements that the clients could endorse, they most often endorsed statements about therapy helping them to:
Trust other people more
See and experience the benefits of revealing embarrassing things and taking other emotional risks.
Learn how they come across to other people and the impression they make on others
Learn how to more effectively express positive and negative feelings, including towards others
Be honestly told what other people think of them
Be able to say what is bothering them instead of holding it in
Discover previously unknown parts of themselves and accept things about themselves or their past that were previously difficult to accept.
If you look at the above lists, you will notice that most of the highly endorsed benefits of therapy are difficult to obtain individually outside of greater self-understanding and awareness.
IF YOU ARE DISSATISFIED WITH SOME OF THE RELATIONSHIPS IN YOUR LIFE
Many of the true benefits of therapy are the result of taking emotional risks and being honest about things that are really bothering you or you are concerned or unsure about. The rest of the benefits come from the acceptance, understanding, feedback and connection that the therapist gives back to client, as well as the quality of the therapeutic relationship they have together. If it is group therapy rather than individual therapy, the other group members can provide many of the benefits that the therapist might in individual therapy.
Because the quality of the relationships in our lives has such a large impact on how happy and healthy we are and become, it makes sense that many of the key benefits of therapy are also relational. If you would like to improve the quality of your relationships, making the investment in therapy could potentially be well worth it for you in the long run.
IF YOU WANT TO LEARN MORE ABOUT YOURSELF
If you are 100% satisfied with how all the key relationships in your life are going, and you feel like all of your needs are being met in these relationships, then it may be less important for you to undergo person-to-person therapy.
Self-awareness and understanding and more internal cohesiveness and acceptance can also be developed through reading books or taking online courses. Or, as I have previously mentioned, can also be developed by taking personality assessments that help you to answer the question “who am I?”, including the five-factor personality model.
Once you have a good sense of who you are, it is then important to ask yourself “what’s most important to me?” This can be done by taking the VIA character strengths survey, or doing any form of values clarification exercise, such as the ones I outlined in the article ‘what values do you try to live your life by?‘ and ‘three steps to an improved life‘.
Firstly, it asks if you understand what an intrinsic value is. Once you know that it is something that you value not for what it can give you, like money, but in and of itself, you are ready to take the quiz.
The quiz then asks you about a bunch of different values, and then gets you to say if it is an intrinsic value to you or not, and if it is, how important it is to you.
Once you have answered all of the questions, it asks you to pick your top seven values in order.
For me, my most important values were as follows:
That I show courage in the face of difficult challenges
That I am grateful for what I have
That I achieve my full potential
That I experience a sense of meaning and purpose in my life
That I feel connected to other people
That I have agency and can make choices for myself
That the way I behave is consistent with my values
You are then asked to reflect on each value and see how you might be able to create more of what you value in the world.
I already ask myself the question “what am I being motivated by here – my fears or my values?” when I am feeling unsure or uncertain about what to do.
A similar question that I heard about in the book I was listening to yesterday called ‘Four Thousand Weeks‘ by Oliver Burkeman was “does this decision help to enlarge my life or diminish it?” Sometimes our brain wants us to do what feels least scary or most comfortable. However, the author recommends choosing the option that is scary or uncomfortable but is likely to enlarge your life over one that is comfortable but is likely to diminish your life over time.
What Are You Likely to Regret More?
Joseph Campbell says that the hero’s journey begins when the main character is called to action by something unexpected at the end of the first act of any good story. The second act of the story begins when the hero answers the call to action and goes off on the adventure, not entirely sure how things will turn out but willing to face whatever challenges may come. Hopefully, they continue to keep learning and growing and eventually prevail and succeed. Or they can choose to not answer the call, stay where it is safe and familiar, and not get to experience the adventures and challenges that may await.
What would you rather? What do you think you would regret the most in the long run?
If you have tried my sleeping tips from the prior article and your sleep is still problematic, there are several things that you can do.
The safest option is to go and see your medical doctor or GP and get a referral to a Sleep Physician. They will be able to do a more comprehensive sleep study with you and see if you have any underlying sleep conditions impacting your sleep and feel. You may have to do a polysomnography (PSG) or sleep study to rule out conditions like sleep apnea, restless legs syndrome, periodic limb movement disorder, delayed sleep phase disorder, narcolepsy or idiopathic hypersomnia.
If it’s unlikely that you have any of the above sleep disorders, you may have insomnia. As many as 33% of people have sleep problems, and between six to ten percent have serious enough sleep concerns to warrant a diagnosis of chronic insomnia. Once you have had it for a few months, it may not get better on its own without treatment or applying the right strategies to your sleep.
Everyone will tell you what they think is the solution to sleep problems, from earplugs to eye masks, comfy pillows, new beds and weighted blankets. However, there are still only five strategies with enough evidence to be empirically supported insomnia strategies by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM). If you think you have insomnia and want to improve your sleep, please try one of these five strategies: Cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia (CBT-I), sleep restriction, stimulus control, progressive muscle relaxation, and paradoxical intention.
STRATEGY 1: COGNITIVE BEHAVIOURAL THERAPY FOR INSOMNIA
CBT-I consists of four main components. Psychoeducation, sleep scheduling, relaxation techniques and cognitive techniques. Together, these four components target all three underlying sleep mechanisms. CBT-I has sleep scheduling to improve homeostatic pressure and circadian rhythms. It encourages people to get morning sunlight and remain off bright screens before bed to strengthen circadian rhythms. It also teaches relaxation strategies to help people learn how to relax and reduce their arousal levels. Finally, CBT-I teaches cognitive strategies to help people to challenge their unhelpful beliefs about sleep and further reduce their arousal levels.
If you want to try CBT-I, you can check out my Udemy course ‘Improve Your Sleep with CBT for Insomnia’. I’ve also seen the positive results published on other online CBT-I courses such as Sleepio or Somryst. CBT-I Coach tries to teach some of these strategies at no cost, including what times are best for you to go to bed and wake up if you do sleep restriction. If you’d prefer in-person CBT-I, you can search on the internet and see if there are any psychologists or behavioural sleep medicine specialists who specialise in CBT-I.
Sleep restriction is a strategy that increases homeostatic pressure by reducing your time in bed each night to only the amount of time you are sleeping. It also helps to strengthen your circadian rhythms by improving the regularity of when you go to bed at night and rise from bed in the morning, seven days a week. However, it is important that you set your sleep times at the right time for your body clock to be the most effective. Morning people would better choose earlier to bed and rise times, whereas evening people will need to stay up later and get up later.
Sleep restriction can increase distress and arousal levels initially. It can be especially difficult for people with chronic insomnia, who are already worried about not getting enough sleep and the consequences they will feel and face during the day. This can make it very hard for people to initially try and even harder to fall asleep or remain asleep at night. Once they sleep better, their arousal levels can drop significantly, as the individual can begin seeing how effective this strategy is.
Sleep restriction instructions are as follows:
Determine your average total sleep time over the past 1-2 weeks. If it is less than five hours per night, say it is five hours.
Add 30 minutes to this amount. The total is your new time in bed prescription. Only spend this time in bed every night for the next two weeks.
Figure out when you would like to wake up seven days a week. It is your rise time or time to get up each morning. Set the alarm to help you wake up at this time. When the alarm goes off, get out of bed and try not to sleep again until the next night.
Minus your time in bed allocation from your rise time to figure out your bedtime. For example, if you wake up at 6 am and are meant to be in bed for 6 hours and 30 minutes every night, aim to go to bed around 11:30 pm.
For sleep restriction to be maximally effective, bedtime should be approximate rather than absolute. For example, if it is 11:15 pm and you notice many sleepiness signs, go to bed rather than wait until 11:30 pm. On the other hand, if it is 11:30 pm and you are wide awake, wait up a little until you feel a bit sleepier. Then go to bed.
Once you have your bedtime, rise time and time in bed prescription, track your sleep for the next two weeks using a sleep diary or activity tracker. Then figure out your sleep efficiency, which is the percentage of your time in bed spent sleeping.
If your sleep efficiency for the next two weeks is under 85%, cut your bedtime by a further 15 minutes each night. If it is between 85-90%, keep your time in bed prescription as it is.
If it is above 90%, extend your time in bed by 15 minutes each night.
Keep tracking for another two weeks and repeat until your sleep efficiency is between 85-90% regularly.
Stimulus control is a strategy that ensures that your homeostatic pressure is high enough when you are going to sleep by encouraging you to get up at the same time every morning, seven days a week, no matter how well you have slept. By not napping during the day, your homeostatic pressure also remains high. Not going to bed until you feel sleepy means that you won’t go to bed until your brain and body are ready for sleep, which reduces how much time you spend in bed awake. Being out of bed whenever you can’t sleep for 20 minutes also means that you’ll never spend excessive time in bed awake each night.
Stimulus control also helps to strengthen your circadian rhythm with the regular rising time in the mornings and only going to bed when you feel sleepy. Stimulus control is better than sleep restriction if you strictly follow both of the rules as they are written. Stimulus control helps you to find out when your brain and body most want you to go to sleep, as opposed to going to sleep at the same time every night.
Like sleep restriction, stimulus control can also initially increase distress and arousal levels, especially for people with chronic insomnia. People with insomnia tend to already be worried about not getting enough sleep and the potential consequences they will feel and face during the day if they do not get enough sleep or have to be out of bed during their usual time in bed. This can make it very hard for people to initially try stimulus control and even harder for them to fall asleep or remain asleep at night.
Once you begin sleeping better through stimulus control, your arousal levels can drop significantly, as you can begin seeing how effective this strategy is. It also means that you will no longer have to get out of bed after 20 minutes of being awake if you fall asleep regularly within this time, which will likely reduce your worries further. The better you sleep at night and the less tired you feel during the day, the less you will feel the need to sleep in longer in the morning or nap during the day. So, the more effective stimulus control becomes as a strategy, the lower your arousal levels.
The stimulus control instructions are as follows:
Only go to bed when sleepy,
Wake up at the same time every day,
Only use the bed/bedroom for sleep and sex,
Avoid naps during the day, and
Sit up or get out of bed if you cannot fall asleep within about 20 minutes of retiring to bed.
If you have to get up at night, do something calming or relaxing until you feel sleepy again, and then lie back in bed for sleep. Ideally, this activity during the night should not involve bright light, rigorous exercise or be too cognitively demanding.
Paradoxical intention is probably the least used strategy that is effective for chronic insomnia. This is because it is quite counter-intuitive and, therefore, a hard sell to patients that are already struggling with less sleep than they would like. It also doesn’t target circadian rhythms or sleep pressure directly. Paradoxical intention instead indirectly targets both of these sleep mechanisms by helping patients to take off all the pressure they put on themselves to sleep.
As long as the individual follows the recommended paradoxical intention instructions, it can reduce sleep effort, performance anxiety and hyper-arousal levels. This allows homeostatic pressure and circadian rhythms to work better for the individual, as long as they have been up for long enough during the day and are going to bed at the right time for their internal body clock.
The instructions for paradoxical intention are as follows:
Go to bed at your usual bedtime.
Lie down in bed with the lights off.
Don’t read or look at your phone or anything else.
Try to see if you can stay awake for “just a little bit longer” without doing anything to force yourself to stay awake.
If you are still awake, congratulate yourself for successfully achieving your goal. Then, don’t look at the time on the clock and keep focusing on staying awake for “a little bit longer”.
Keep this up all night if you have to. But, whatever you do, do not try and force yourself to sleep and keep trying to stay awake “just a little bit longer”.
Progressive muscle relaxation is a sleep strategy that predominantly reduces how much physical tension someone feels before bed. Spending much of the day stressed or worried can lead to physical tension, especially around the neck, shoulders and upper back area.
Progressive muscle relaxation can also reduce cognitive arousal levels by helping individuals focus on different parts of their bodies and become more aware of their feelings. It is, therefore, a much better cognitive strategy than either suppression or worry.
Progressive muscle relaxation really doesn’t help with someone’s homeostatic pressure or circadian rhythms. It is an intervention that specifically targets someone’s hyper-arousal, particularly any physical tension they feel. It can help people feel more relaxed and calmer; therefore, the other two sleep components can work effectively and help them sleep enough at the right times.
PMR instructions are as follows:
Tense the muscles in your arms, bringing your hands towards your shoulders to feel your biceps tighten. Then take a deep breath through your nose and down into your stomach. Then relax your arms as you breathe out the air through your mouth. Next, let your hands hang down by your side and give them a shake. Then repeat one more time by tensing, breathing and relaxing your arms.
Then tense the muscles in your face, including the ones in your forehead, nose, jaw and around your eyes. Notice the tension. Then take in a deep breath through your nose and into your belly. Relax all the muscles in your face as you breathe all the air out through your mouth. Let your facial muscles droop as your jaw hangs loose. Then repeat one more time.
Tense the muscles in your neck by bringing your shoulders up to your head. Hold this pose tight for a few seconds. Then take a deep breath through your nose into your stomach. Pause for a second or two. Then breathe all the air out through your mouth as you relax your neck and let your shoulders drop. Next, move your head around slowly in a circular motion if this helps you to relax your neck. Then repeat once more.
Tense the muscles in your stomach and back, bringing your abdomen closer to your spine. Hold this for a second, then take a deep breath into your belly while keeping your stomach and back tense. It may make it a little harder to breathe in as deeply as with the other muscle groups. Then breathe all the air out of your mouth as you slump down and push your belly out. Repeat one more time.
Tense the muscles in your buttocks and thighs, squeezing them tightly. Take a deep breath, pause, and relax these muscles as you breathe all the air out. Shift back and forth from left to right in your seat, then repeat.
Lastly, stretch out your legs and tense your calves and feet, bringing your toes back towards your body. Breathe in, pause, breathe out and relax your calves and feet. Shake out your legs, and then repeat one last time.
Based on what I have written above, trying CBT-I is good if you think all three underlying sleep mechanisms are an issue. CBT-I is also the most recommended if you currently have some beliefs about sleep that are unhelpful for you.
If your sleep pressure is not high enough at night when going to bed, but your arousal levels are okay, try sleep restriction. Try stimulus control if your circadian rhythms impact your sleep or if you spend lots of time awake in bed each night. Stimulus control can help to recondition your bed by feeling calm and sleepy and sleeping well over time, so it can be a helpful strategy in several ways.
If elevated arousal levels are your main issue, but you are doing okay otherwise, give progressive muscle relaxation a proper go. If you find that you are putting in too much effort to try to sleep at night and your pre-sleep arousal is too high, I would recommend trying paradoxical intention first.
No matter what you try, try it every night for at least a week, ideally two, before deciding if it is the right or wrong strategy. Both stimulus control and sleep restriction are difficult and anxiety-provoking initially. Still, they can have some of the largest improvements for you and your sleep if you stick to the instructions over time. Even a year after people have completed a course of CBT-I treatment, the best predictor of who continues to sleep well is individuals who still follow the sleep restriction and stimulus control rules.
Alongside nutrition and sleep, exercise is one of the three pillars of our health. Before coming up with a realistic and sustainable plan, let’s see what types of exercise are most recommended and how much we should try to do each day or each week.
Walking – is there anything to the 10,000 steps recommendation?
Historically, humans walked a lot. Often as much as 10 or 12 miles a day when we lived a hunter-gather lifestyle, hunting for animals, foraging for berries, and finding different resting areas. One thing that often set us apart from other animals was not our speed but our endurance and capacity to keep walking. This would eventually lead to an animal becoming completely exhausted, breaking down, and needing to give up. However, once we finally caught up to them, all we had to do was begin preparing our next meal.
The Japanese were the first to come up with the idea of doing 10,000 steps a day. I don’t think it was based on any science. It was more to do with the fact that it was a nice round number with five digits to aim for on the “Manpo-Kei” pedometer or step counter by Yasama Clock in Japan in 1965. My Japanese is non-existent, but the internet says that “Manpo-Kei” translates to “10,000 steps meter”, which seems to have stuck as the daily step target for many pedometers and activity trackers since then.
Some research suggests that 10,000 steps a day can improve heart and mental health and lower your risk of diabetes. However, if you have tried to do this daily, you have probably realised just how long it can take. For me, it can be about 90 minutes or eight kilometres of walking. For others, it can take up to two hours a day, which might not make it so sustainable or easy to do consistently.
Other research from Harvard suggests that walking an average of only 4,400 steps a day can have positive health benefits or lower a woman’s risk of dying. The control group did 2,700 steps a day, so increasing your step count by 1,700 steps a day might make a significant difference in your health.
If you are already walking 7,500 steps daily, you may not need to increase it further. Another study found that increasing your steps to 7,500 a day reduced your risk of dying, but increasing it beyond that did not. So averaging 7,500 steps a day is going to be my new target. If I do more or less, that’s okay, as long as the average is around that.
If you wanted to have 7,500 steps a day as a target, too, you could aim to do the majority of it in one block. However, some evidence suggests that regular movement throughout the day and not remaining in one position for too long is even better.
For example, my Oura Ring gives me an activity score (out of 100) daily. If I don’t move every hour while I am awake, it penalises me that day for my overall activity score. It also recommends achieving a calorie goal in terms of energy used through activity, meeting my activity goals on most days of the week, and occasionally giving myself a rest day where I don’t overdo it and allow my body to recover.
Is sitting killing us, and can standing desks help?
I find the public discussion over the last five or so years about the dangers of sitting interesting. Such studies have said that sitting for too long can increase the risk of excess weight around the waist, high blood pressure, high blood sugar, high cholesterol, poor posture, muscle weakness, and even an increased risk of heart attack or stroke.
A review of thirteen studies found that people who sit more than eight hours a day and do no physical activity outside of this have a similar risk of death to people who are obese or smoke regularly. However, further analysis of the more than one million people showed that 60 to 75 minutes of moderately intense exercise cancelled out the harmful effects of sitting for long periods each day. So, if you need to sit long hours at work each day, try to make sure that you also incorporate some time, either before, during or after work, to get moving and work up a sweat. It may be even more critical for you than for people on their feet more during their workday.
Many opposing arguments for sitting are pushed by the makers of standing desks. These companies say that if sitting all day while at work is the problem, then standing all day is the answer.
Standing desks do seem to improve the productivity of some workers. Those in a call centre with standing desks were found to be 45% more productive than those with sitting-only desks. Sit-stand desks can reduce upper back and neck pain by 54% after 4 weeks. Using a standing desk can reduce stress and fatigue after only 7 weeks. Furthermore, 87% of those using standing desks said they had more energy and vigour throughout the day. These levels reverted back to how they used to be when they returned to their old sitting desks. Using standing desks after lunch can even prevent your blood sugar from spiking as much.
Standing all day may help you burn slightly more calories than sitting, but not much. One study in the Journal of Physical Activity and Health found that the average person burned 80 calories an hour while sitting at a desk or 88 calories an hour while standing. So about 60 extra calories a day if you stand all day. If you instead sat all day and then went for a walk during your lunch break, you would burn 70 more calories than standing all day. I know I’d prefer the sitting and lunchtime walk. It will probably come with less low back, leg or foot pain. What do you think?
The importance of regular movement and breaks
My sister’s husband, Dr James Gillard, Osteopath, says that the problem isn’t sitting or standing. It is more the issue of remaining sedentary in one posture for too long each day. So, try to change into different poses once you feel uncomfortable and want to change. If you have a standing desk, hopefully, it is adaptable, where you can spend some time sitting and standing rather than doing only one of them all day long. And please, take regular breaks during the work day if you can. Stand or walk while talking on the phone. Head outside, get some fresh air and go to the park or for a walk at lunchtime. Grab a coffee for morning tea around the corner if you need to. Have a walking meeting with a colleague sometimes rather than just sitting at your desk if you can. Regularly taking breaks and moving throughout the day is the key.
Running in a race with thousands of other people can be pretty fun. I’ve done several of them over the years, ranging from 5km runs when I was younger to a few 10km fun runs with my brother, to the run for the Kids 15km race with my cousin, and three half marathons by myself. Finishing the half marathon at the Melbourne Marathon festival was terrific. Entering the field of the MCG and completing a lap around the field before finishing the race in front of a few thousand people was a big rush and exhilarating.
However, running by myself, just for the sake of it, is never something I have particularly enjoyed. I struggled for years to get into a good routine with running. I loved listening to Haruki Murakami’s book What I Talk About When I Talk About Running and even hoped that one day I would feel the same way about it. I never did, though. After several years of trying and failing, I eventually stopped trying to run in 2017.
1.35 million Australians do run for fun and exercise. If you do it regularly, it can significantly improve your health and reduce your risk of death. It reduces the risk of obesity, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, type 2 diabetes, heart disease and cancer. It can also improve your balance, metabolism, heart function and aerobic endurance.
Even running for 50 minutes a week can give you all these benefits, with benefits not improving or decreasing if you run more than this. Which makes it great news if you don’t have heaps of time on your hands and want to incorporate it into your life. If you think you could enjoy running for 50 minutes a week, either in one go or across a few, please talk to your doctor to see if it is suitable for you to get started straight away or slowly build up to it. I’ve spoken to a few people who tried the Couch to 5km program and enjoyed the benefits of getting into a good routine and feeling fitter. I think I may need to reconsider my earlier running retirement.
There are some risks of injury or overuse with running, so try to avoid uneven or hard surfaces if you can, and wear appropriate and well-fitted footwear. Also, try not to suddenly increase the pace and duration of your running, like I did with attempting to run long races with little preparation. Instead, slowly build up your speed and distance over time, and don’t feel you need to run for more than 50 minutes a week. Running can be a healthy pastime that you can do consistently for many years.
If you’re like me and don’t love the idea of running alone, see if there are any running groups in your area. If you really hate it, see if there is another exciting sport you can do that can give you similar benefits and more enjoyment and rewards. The less your exercise routine seems like hard work, and the more it feels like fun, the more likely you are to stick to it.
What are the alternatives to running?
If you look at the complete list of sports worldwide, there are over 800. If you look at the list of international sports federations and recognised sports, there are over 200. It may be that your area has a lot less, but I wonder how much you have looked to see what is available to you. Your sports experience may be what you were exposed to in school. If you weren’t the most athletic, competitive or extroverted child, you might have bad memories of times that seemed to turn you off sport for life.
If you are in school, there are plenty of times when you have to participate in sports that, for whatever reason, are not your thing. Please do not let those negative experiences put you off all sports or exercise for life.
If you are not as active as you would like to be, having training or a game to turn up to at the same time each week is an excellent way to get fit. It may also be fun and introduce you to new friends.
If you are unsure but want to explore the idea further, please check out this list to see if there is anything that looks interesting to you and may be worth trying. Then see on the internet, Facebook, or Meetup if a group exists in your area. Or at your local sports stadium or university. Most of the time, there will be groups, teams, and classes that would love a newcomer to join them.
I currently have a pool in my apartment complex and want to get into a routine of swimming 1km, or about 30 minutes, once a week. Swimming has many benefits if you enjoy it or have a pool nearby that you can use when you need it.
Unlike running or walking, Swimming is more of a full-body workout. Swimming can lower your stress levels, reduce anxiety and depression, and improve your sleep patterns, even after a light swim. It can burn double the amount of calories as walking. Only 30 minutes a week can reduce the risk of heart disease, stroke and type 2 diabetes. It supports the body and requires much less pounding on the body than running on pavement. It can increase your energy levels and doesn’t leave you all sweaty at the end of the workout.
Cycling
I currently don’t own a car and use a bike to get to and from work four times a week. As it takes approximately 30 minutes each way, I am already getting enough exercise time each week through cycling. Anything I do outside of this with Running or Swimming is a bonus. I also find it much easier and faster to ride down to the local shops whenever I need anything from the supermarket.
Like Swimming and running, regular cycling has a lot of potential benefits. It can increase your cardiovascular fitness and reduce your risk of heart disease. It can increase muscle strength, flexibility and mobility, especially in your legs. It can decrease your stress levels. It can strengthen your bones and improve your posture and coordination. It can also reduce your body fat levels.
There are some risks of injury, especially if you are riding on roads or unstable trails or tracks. However, I’d still much prefer to ride than run. If I ride as part of my commute to and from work, it saves me money by not having to pay for public transport. It also saves me time, as it is much faster than walking and public transport. If I can be less stressed and healthier while also saving money and freeing up more time, that seems a pretty good deal.
HIIT
The one thing I am not adequately doing in terms of cardiovascular fitness, even though it is recommended frequently these days, is High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT). I’ve done a two-week trial of F45 before and didn’t mind it. It was definitely a challenging workout. I’ve never tried Cross Fit, but I’ve heard similar things from the devoted fans who love it and go consistently.
To do HIIT properly, the aim is to do a repeated exercise at nearly your maximum for short intervals of about 20 to 30 seconds, followed by extended periods of rest, usually at a ratio of 2:1 or 3:1. So if you sprint for 20 seconds, rest for 40 or 60 seconds, and then sprint for 20 seconds again. Allowing your body to somewhat recover before beginning the next high-intensity interval is essential in HIIT. It will enable your body to get used to the two extremes and improve cardiovascular conditioning. I’ve done little bits of it before, but definitely not exactly like I described to you then. I think I will need to talk to an expert on exercise to see how useful it would be for me to include HIIT regularly in my life.
With HIIT, you can burn a lot of calories in a short period. It can raise your metabolism for hours after a HIIT workout. It can help you to lose body fat and waist circumference. You can gain muscle in the trunk and the legs. It can improve your oxygen consumption. It can reduce your blood pressure and heart rate. Some studies suggest that it improves your heart health more than other forms of cardiovascular exercise. It can lower your blood sugar. Finally, it can improve your anaerobic and aerobic performance, so you can move quickly and for extended periods, depending on your needs.
If you want to give HIIT a go, please speak to a doctor or exercise physiologist first, especially if you haven’t done much exercise lately.
Strength training
The last thing I want to do is utilise the gym in my apartment complex and have a weights workout 2 times a week, for about 30 minutes each time. Even though I am already doing enough cardiovascular training, I tend to view strength training as something that needs to be incorporated into a healthy lifestyle. Even though some of these activities, including Swimming and Cycling, can help maintain muscle mass.
For many reasons, going to the gym and improving or maintaining muscle mass is positive. One of the main ones males often focus on is wanting to be buff or ripped and look good. While it is true that having more muscle can look and feel better, many other health benefits are less superficial. Strength training can help prevent posture and movement issues and maintain your capacity to do the things you need to do in your life. Maintaining muscle mass can help prevent osteoporosis and broken bones by strengthening your bones. It can also increase your metabolism, even when you are not working out, which reduces your risk of fat and weight gain over time.
When an article in JAMA Psychiatry reviewed 33 clinical trials on strength training in over 1,800 people, they found that people who did strength training two or more days a week had significantly reduced depression severity. So even if you don’t get physically stronger, it can still give you mood benefits, so you don’t have to lift super heavy or hard.
If you want to gain muscle or get stronger, doing each set to fatigue is probably the best advice I have been given and one that seemed to have the best results for me. To do this, lift (or pull) the weight for as many repetitions as possible until you struggle to do the entire movement. Then try for one more repetition. If you cannot do it, you are too fatigued, and your muscles will likely grow over time. If you decide to lift this way, make sure you lift with a spotter or a personal trainer, who can assist you at the end of each set when you become fatigued. Otherwise, stopping before you get to this point is much safer.
A 2017 meta-analysis of 16 studies also found that resistance training can significantly improve anxiety in individuals with and without physical or mental illnesses. So, the mental health benefits of resistance training can be potentially even more prominent and faster than cardiovascular exercise.
If you want to give resistance training a go, please talk to your doctor first and see a gym instructor, personal trainer or exercise physiologist. All these experts could help if you need more guidance and support on how to establish a good weight routine, how often to go, and what you can do.
Unlike nutrition, I will not give a grade for each sport or type of exercise or tell you that you need to do these things. Instead, I have aimed to highlight that whatever movement and exercise you incorporate into your life will probably be better than none.
If you want to focus on walking, see if you can begin counting your steps. Most smartphones have a step counter built into them now. This isn’t too bad as long as you bring your phone on your walks.
I like listening to music, a podcast, or audiobook when walking. It is terrific to do this if you are unmotivated. Listening to something you want to do alongside walking can be considered temptation bundling, making it a little easier to go. For example, people who could only listen to a story when they were at the gym were more likely to go to the gym. If you give yourself a similar rule, you might begin looking forward to your walks or workouts rather than dreading them.
Once you count your steps for a week, if you are under 7,500 steps a week, see if you can increase your step count slowly each week until you get up to 7,500 steps a day. If you are already doing this, keep up the excellent work and don’t feel you need to do anything extra.
If you want to focus on sitting less, you could buy a sit-stand desk or take more regular breaks during a work day and ensure you get away from your desk and outside during your lunch break. Or exercise an hour a day if you have to sit for 8 hours.
If you want to see the benefits of running, aim for 50 minutes a week. If it’s Swimming, aim for 30 minutes a week. If it’s HIIT, try 30 minutes weekly to begin with. If it’s cycling, 30 minutes once a week would be an excellent start too. Finally, if you are going to do strength training, see if you can do two weekly sessions to see the full benefits.
If you want to lose weight, please remember that nutrition, and not exercise, is the best way to do this. The type, amount, and timing of when you eat and drink are more important for how much weight and fat you lose than how active you are.
Altogether, if you are doing 30 minutes of moderately intense exercise five times a week, you are likely to be reasonably healthy from an exercise point of view. In addition, you are probably also helping your mental health, stamina and mobility.
You don’t need to become addicted to the gym or your smartwatch to become healthier. Instead, move a little more, sit a little less, get your heart rate up a few times a week, and see if you notice any of its benefits.
I am definitely not a nutrition expert. Especially when you look at my behaviours or what I eat and drink daily.
I remember several years back when I tried to track my food and drink intake using My Fitness Pal’s phone application. They have a feature where you can share your diary with friends and family or make it available so they can see it too. I did this and had my cousin Shannyn see my diary. Let’s just say that she was slightly shocked at my diet. She was also not afraid to tell me this.
After this, I did not want to share my food and drink diary with anyone else.
I don’t believe my actions are based too highly on a lack of knowledge. By now, I have read a lot and have a general sense of what is considered healthy or unhealthy habits.
However, in terms of what specific actions I should take, I’m unsure exactly what to do. There are a lot of competing diets and rules out there. I don’t just want something to help me lose weight until my BMI is back in a healthy range of between 20 and 25 kg/m2. I want sensible and not too complicated or restrictive guidelines for how to eat to maintain a sustainable and healthy lifestyle.
The Healthy Eating Pyramid
Nutrition Australia first introduced their Healthy Eating Pyramid back in 1980. When I was in school, I remember it being in all of the school textbooks and on posters around the place. Of course, the pyramid has evolved over the years. The one I remember the most looked like this one from 1982:
My father was a physical education teacher and took on the food pyramid’s advice. So we would eat cereal and toast for breakfast, sandwiches for lunch, and often pasta or rice with dinner. However, some of the most recommended diets now, including the low carb, high fat (LCHF) diet, the slow carb diet, Atkins diet and the ketogenic diet, all recommend staying away from the things at the bottom of the pyramid (apart from vegetables), especially bread, cereals, rice and pasta.
The most recent pyramid in 2015 has shifted to accommodate the learning that has taken place worldwide since 1982. Unfortunately, over these 33 years, the average waistline has continued to expand, and the percentage of people that are overweight and obese has continued to climb:
Grains have shifted higher up the pyramid, and sugar has come out altogether. There are now some extra parts at the bottom about choosing water rather than any other drink, enjoying herbs and spices, and being active daily. The section at the bottom has also increased for vegetables and shrunk for fruit, indicating that we want to prioritise vegetables more in our nutrition than fruit. Finally, margarine is no longer mentioned at the top, but rather eating healthy fats. It doesn’t tell you what they are, but Nutrition Australia says that some fats are more nutritious than others. These unnamed fats are considered okay in small doses.
The Australian Guide to Healthy Eating
Similar to the food pyramid, but slightly different. The Australian Guide to Healthy Eating shows the recommended nutritious foods that the average Australian should eat. One of the most noticeable differences is putting the food in a circle rather than a pyramid. This makes it easier to think about how much of your plate should have the five recommended food groups:
It recommends a similar portion size of grains to vegetables, which is more in line with the older pyramid from 1982 than the latest one from 2015. It also shows specific oils that some people may consider unhealthy, including canola spray and margarine. It does recommend water as the main drink. Still, it is more realistic than the pyramid by showing that people sometimes eat and drink unhealthily, including alcohol, sugary, deep-fried, or fatty foods. Therefore, it recommends having these things occasionally and in small amounts. I’m not sure why chickpeas and red kidney beans have to be in two different food groups, but they are.
The Star System in Australian Supermarkets
The Health Star Rating System is an interesting intervention with the right intention. The aim is to help educate the Australian public about the healthiness of different foods in the supermarket so that consumers can make healthy choices for their shopping carts and homes. I’ve found myself looking at the star ratings for various products and being influenced by what is written when deciding what to buy.
With cereals, for example, there is a lot of variety. All-Bran Original tastes dull, but with a five-star health rating, it suddenly seems more appealing than the two-star Crunchy Nut Clusters or the 1.5-star Crispix cereal. More sugar and less fibre and protein generally mean fewer stars for the cereal, which makes sense and seems pretty straightforward.
A more contentious area is the oils and fats. From various things that I have read and heard, there is a big difference in how healthy or recommended certain oils are from others. For example, some experts and diets say that butter is healthy. In the Bulletproof Diet, people even add it to their morning coffee. Yet it obtains the worst star rating of 0.5/5 because it is high in saturated fat. Another oil that people have told me to cook before is coconut oil. It also receives a 0.5/5 health star rating. On the other hand, with all its chemicals, margarine gets a score of 4.5/5. I’ve even seen 5-star vegetable oils, even though some experts have told me to stay clear of these oils as much as possible.
Comparing the star rating between one type of food and another is also contentious. For example, Up-and-Go drinks receive 4.5 stars out of 5, even though they have 28.7 grams of carbs, 15.8 grams of added sugar, sunflower and canola oil. But, then, foods such as smoked salmon receive 2/5 stars, even though they only contain salmon and salt and have healthy omega-3 fats and zero sugar or carbs. However, because of the higher amount of saturated fat, salmon is penalised and considered a poorer health decision. This might lead to some people choosing the highly processed Up and Go instead of the smoked salmon.
Another problematic issue with the Health Star Rating System is that it is not compulsory. Because of this, star ratings are currently only posted on 31% of eligible foods in Australian supermarkets. Suppose people use this as a guide to what is healthy or unhealthy in determining their choices at the supermarket. In that case, they are left in the dark with 69% of the eligible products.
An even bigger issue is that big corporations are gaming the star system to trick the public into thinking that their products are healthier than they are. For example, if vegetable oils obtain a five-star rating, does this mean they are one of the most beneficial food options?
It shouldn’t mean this, but how is the consumer to know? The food pyramid says to avoid foods with added salt and sugar and only consume healthy fats in moderation. It’s debatable if vegetable oils and margarine are healthy fats. Still, the Health Star Rating System says nothing about this or how people should only eat them in moderation.
I’m guessing that if someone consumed all their food in deep-fried vegetable oil, they wouldn’t remain healthy for very long. So how does a use sparingly (or not at all) food obtain a five-star health rating? Is it helpful if the system doesn’t give better ratings to the foods that we’d be better to eat more often?
Other health books I have read advise steering clear of as many packaged foods as possible and trying to eat things without an ingredient list. So, vegetables, fruit, meat, unsalted nuts, and eggs. As soon as the product has items in the ingredients list where you aren’t sure what they are, maybe it’s not the healthiest choice.
Is it helpful to recommend that people count the calories they eat?
The average American is recommended to consume 2000 calories daily to maintain a healthy weight. On the back of all packaged foods in the USA, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) requires a specific nutrition label. Here is an example of the latest nutrition label:
As you can see, 2,000 calories a day is used for general nutrition advice. Furthermore, in some countries and states, fast food and chain restaurants must state how many calories their products have in them. It is done to help educate people about how many calories their food has. By doing this, people hopefully do not go too far above the 2,000 calories a day recommendation.
A large Double Whopper with Cheese Meal from Burger King is 1,530 calories. After eating this, a person has only 470 calories they can consume for the rest of the day without going on their daily recommended limit. A large Cheese Lovers pizza from Pizza Hut in Australia contains 9909kj, well over the recommended 8700kj per day that the Australian Government recommends for people to consume daily. I don’t know about you, but I’ve definitely eaten a large pizza on a few occasions. I might think twice about doing this if I know it will put me over my recommended daily calorie intake. So, forcing fast-food restaurants to post the calorie content of their food might help some people not overindulge in one sitting and unknowingly gain weight over time.
All Calories Are Not Equal
A big issue with calorie counting is assuming that the only thing that matters to our overall health is how many calories we consume daily. It’s just not true. Drinks like Diet Coke and Pepsi Max have zero calories, but that doesn’t mean they are healthy. They contain several artificial ingredients, including colour (Caramel E150d), sweeteners (Aspartame, Acesulfame K), flavourings, acids (Phosphoric and Citric Acid), a preservative (Potassium Sorbate) and Phenylalanine. If you only look at the zero calories, then people should be able to drink as much of this each day as they want without it being an issue. But I’m not sure if a healthy person would want to knowingly ingest lots of these ingredients daily.
When it comes to being healthy, there are more important things than just how many calories we consume. A Diabetes Victoria website describes a deep-fried battered fish, two potato cakes, and twenty chips from a takeaway shop (1053 calories). They compare it to a skim latte for a snack, hummus and salad sandwich and a medium apple for lunch, a handful of almonds for an afternoon snack, and baked fish with sweet potato wedges for dinner. These snacks and meals equal 1075 calories, only 22 more than the fish and chips. They would also pack 24g less fat, 21g less saturated fat, 319mg less sodium, and 16g more fibre. The second option is more nutritious, with fewer things that could contribute to inflammation. Even though there are more carbohydrates across the two snacks and two meals than the one meal of fish and chips, they are spread out over more time, leading to less of a blood sugar spike and subsequent crash.
Calorie Density
A different way of thinking about food and calories is what the weight loss and healthy eating app Noom do. They still encourage recording all the foods, drinks and calories you consume daily. However, they also try to document how calorie-dense your food is. Your food or drink then receives a colour score based on its density.
Suppose you eat something low in density, such as vegetables or a salad without dressing; it receives a green score. With green foods, you can eat plenty of these and feel fuller for longer without worrying too much about going over your daily calorie goal.
Essentially, the more water a particular food has, the less calorie density it is likely to have. So, a grape is considered a green food, whereas a raisin, or dried grape, is a red food. Chicken breast and eggs are both medium or yellow foods with lots of nutrients. Still, a moderate number of calories compared to their weight. Many nuts, especially walnuts, are nutrient-rich but very high in calories. Therefore, they receive a red colour. There are no good or bad foods, but if you want to keep your calories low while also feeling satisfied and full, having more low-density or green foods in your meals and snacks is the way to go. Or at least that is what Noom says.
Intermittent fasting can help without cutting down on how many calories you consume daily
Some interesting recent studies have also begun to see the potential health and fat loss benefits of intermittent fasting. The book ‘Life in the Fasting Lane: How to Make Intermittent Fasting a Lifestyle—and Reap the Benefits of Weight Loss and Better Health’ by Dr Jason Fung, Eve Mayer, and Megan Ramos describes the potential health benefits. It also details how to practice it for those who want to learn more.
Intermittent fasting is another example of how there are other things to consider apart from how many calories we should consume every day. Eating and not eating at different times also affects our health and body composition. For example, healthy males, who frequented the gym, found that eight weeks of feeding (between 1pm and 9pm only) reduced fat mass but not overall muscle mass. The comparison group consumed the same calories but ate between 8am and 9pm (Moro et al., 2016).
A review article looking at intermittent fasting studies between 2000 and 2018 found similar results. Fat mass was significantly reduced in participants who underwent an intermittent fasting protocol (Ganesan, Habboush & Sultan, 2018). The review also found that some biochemical markers reduced significantly, whilst other changes were inconsistent. Therefore, intermittent fasting may be worth trying if you aim to reduce your overall fat mass without losing too much strength or weight.
Both low-fat and low-carbohydrate diets can produce positive short-term results
An interesting meta-analysis reviewed randomised controlled trials of diets in overweight and obese adults (BMJ, 2020). The reviewers found that both low-carbohydrate and low-fat diets produced similar benefits in weight loss and reduced blood pressure at six months. Compared to a usual diet, low-carbohydrate diets resulted in 4.63kg of weight loss at six months, and low-fat diets resulted in 4.37kg of weight loss. Atkins produced the most prominent weight loss of 5.5kg after six months of all the popular diets. Not surprisingly, dietary advice without substantial behavioural changes led to no weight loss after six months. Moderate macronutrient diets, such as DASH or Meditteranean, led to about 3kg weight loss and slightly improved blood pressure after six months. However, it was not as effective as either low-fat or low-carb diets.
Unfortunately, at 12 months, most weight loss benefits diminished across all diets, including low-carb, low-fat or moderate macronutrient diets (BMJ, 2020). Only the Meditteranean Diet maintained the cardiovascular benefits by 12 months, which puts it as the top eating plan if you want to improve your heart health in the long run.
If You Want to Lose Weight
At www.dietdoctor.com, they provide 18 tips that can help people lose weight. They also back up their recommendations with scientific evidence and rank them in importance. I don’t agree with all of their advice. Still, they tell you how strong the evidence they are using is. Below are my modified tips; based on their recommendations. You might find some of these tips helpful if you apply them to your life. However, please talk to a qualified Dietician before taking on any significant changes in your diet to see if they are right for you. If you have also suffered from any eating disorder-type behaviours, please seek assistance from a GP or psychologist who can support you on your health journey.
My top 7 weight loss tips
Avoid eating foods or drinking beverages high in sugar, and minimise your intake of highly processed or deep-fried carbohydrates.
Eat when hungry, and don’t feel that you need to eat if you are not feeling hungry.
Eat real food or foods without an ingredient list.
Eat as many vegetables or salads as you want to, assuming you go easy on the sauces and dressings.
Measure your progress wisely.
Be persistent by choosing a sustainable eating plan for yourself and stick to it as much as possible. If you have a meal where you do not, get back to the plan after that, not the next day or the following Monday.
Avoid beer and other alcohol as much as possible.
**Exercise is positive for your heart, health, mood and sleep. It is not a super effective weight-loss strategy, but it is beneficial in many other ways.
So many different rules and recommendation
If you can’t tell by now, knowing what to consume as part of a healthy and nutritious diet is tricky. Some organisations or Governments will recommend certain things. But, at the same time, other experts will tell you to avoid all that and suggest something different altogether.
I could potentially test out all the different variables and see which one is the best fit for me. Fortunately, US News & World Report have released their Best Diets Overall 2022, which ranks 40 popular diets for me. They look at which eating plans are the healthiest, which ones are easiest to follow, which ones lead to the fastest weight loss, which ones are the best for long-term weight loss, and which eating plans are the best overall:
Best Diets for Healthy Eating in 2022
Mediterranean Diet = 4.8/5
DASH Diet = 4.7/5
The Flexitarian Diet = 4.7/5
MIND Diet = 4.6/5
TLC Diet = 4.4/5
Easiest Diets to Follow in 2022
Mediterranean Diet = 3.7/5
The Flexitarian Diet = 3.4/5
The Fertility Diet = 3.3/5
MIND Diet = 3.3/5
WW (weight watchers) Diet = 3.3/5
Best Fast Weight-Loss Diets in 2022
Atkins Diet = 3.9/5
HMR Program = 3.8/5
OPTAVIA = 3.8/5
Biggest Loser Diet = 3.7/5
Keto Diet = 3.7/5
Best Long-term Weight-Loss Diets in 2022
The Flexitarian Diet = 3.5/5
Volumetrics Diet = 3.5/5
WW (weight-watchers) Diet = 3.5/5
Vegan Diet = 3.4/5
Mayo Clinic Diet = 3.2/5
The Best Diets Overall in 2022
Mediterranean Diet = 4.2/5
DASH Diet = 4.0/5
The Flexitarian Diet = 4.0/5
MIND Diet = 3.8/5
Mayo Clinic Diet = 3.7/5
TLC Diet = 3.7/5
Volumetrics Diet = 3.7/5
WW (weight watchers) Diet = 3.7/5
Vegetarian Diet = 3.6/5
Ornish Diet = 3.5/5
I want a sustainable diet to help me lose weight initially and keep my body mass index in the healthy range for the rest of my life. The Flexitarian Diet, therefore, seems like the best option for me. However, with the best overall diet score of 4.2/5, the Meditteranean Diet also seems like a good choice.
If I wanted to lose weight as fast as possible, I might choose The Atkins Diet. However, The Flexitarian Diet achieves a better long-term weight loss score than the Atkins Diet. The Atkins Diet’s overall score is also 2.2/5, which is 34th out of 40. Much worse than the 4.0/5 score and 2nd overall for the Flexitarian Diet.
Interestingly, the things I have been hearing the most about regarding eating plans are not at the top of the list. For example, the Ketogenic Diet comes in 5th for best fast weight loss but is nowhere near the top-recommended diets (37th best eating plan out of 40). Neither is the Paleo Diet (30th best eating plan overall) or Intermittent Fasting (27th best eating plan). Jordan Peterson’s diet of only eating meat doesn’t even rank. Still, the AIP Diet, which also claims to target autoimmune diseases, is the 35th best-ranked eating plan overall.
Which nutritional recommendations do you think will work best for you and be possible for you to stick to long-term?
What guidelines work best for you to change your nutrition and eating habits? Are they any of the diets listed in the US News & World Report rankings? Or the 2015 food pyramid? Or the Australian Guide to Healthy Eating? Or the Health Star Rating System? Or Calorie Counting or using the data provided on Nutritional Labels? Or whatever the expert you see suggests is best for you? I’d love to hear how people try to approach their nutrition in a healthy, effective and sustainable way.
“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.” — Isaac Asimov
The Longevity Project
Over 1,500 of the most promising and brightest boys and girls were recruited in 1921 by Lewis Terman. Unfortunately, he died in 1956, but the study continued for decades afterwards. All participants were born around 1910 and studied for 80 years or until they died. It was then possible to figure out who lived the longest and why.
Although each child was potentially gifted, not all lived long and happy lives. Fortunately, analysis of this extensive data has taken place for over twenty years at The University of California in Riverside.
The study’s significant findings are summarised in the 2011 book “The Longevity Project: Surprising Discoveries for Health and Long-Life from the Landmark Eight-Decade Study” by Howard Friedman and Leslie Martin. I listened to this audiobook recently and was quite surprised with some of its key results:
1. Living honestly is essential.
“A key part of one of the healthy paths is called ‘The High Road.’ Such an individual has good friends, meaningful work and a happy, responsible marriage. The thoughtful planning and perseverance that such people invest in their careers and relationships promote long life naturally and automatically, even when challenges arise.”
2. Please do NOT send your children to school earlier than their peers.
“Starting formal schooling at a very early age was not a great idea for most. Children need unstructured playtime, and they need to get along with their peers; starting young seemed to alienate them.”
3. Illness is NOT random.
“Those that live longer are often healthier throughout their years and (managed to) avoid serious ailments altogether.”
“Those who are healthier tend to be happier, and those who are happier tend to be healthier.”
“It’s never too late to choose a healthier path. The first step is to throw away the lists and stop worrying about worrying.”
“Thinking of making changes as taking ‘steps’ is a grand strategy. You can’t change major things about yourself overnight. But making small changes, and repeating those steps, can eventually create that path to a longer life.”
4. Good marriages lead to better health, especially for men.
“Marriage is only health-promoting for men who are well-suited to marriage and have a good marriage. For others, it is more complicated.”
“Women who stayed single, were widowed or got divorced often thrived more than women who were married to troublesome husbands.”
“Men who stayed divorced were at high risk for premature mortality.”
5. Divorce during childhood predicts early death in adulthood.
“The strongest social predictor is parental divorce, as it often pushes the child into many unhealthy directions, including heavier drinking and smoking, less education, lower career achievements and a greater risk of later divorce themselves.”
6. Follow the long-term recommendations that are right for you.
“The long-lived did not find the secret to health in broccoli, medical tests, vitamins or jogging. Rather they were individuals with certain constellations of habits and patterns of living. Their personalities, career trajectories and social lives proved highly relevant to their long-term health, often in ways we did not expect.”
“You need to make changes that will be sustainable in the long term. We say, if you don’t like jogging, don’t jog! Instead, begin doing things that you enjoy and can keep up, like a walk at lunchtime with a friend or vigorous gardening.”
“The usual piecemeal suggestions of relax, eat vegetables, lose weight and get married are lifesaving for some, but neither effective nor economical for many.”
“Some of the minutiae of what people think will help us lead long, healthy lives, such as worrying about the ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids in the foods we eat, actually are red herrings, distracting us from the major pathways. When we recognise our long-term healthy and unhealthy patterns, we can begin to maximise the healthy patterns.”
7. Conscientiousness is the most critical personality factor for longevity.
“Conscientiousness is very important. Unconscientious boys, even bright ones, are more likely to grow up to have poor marriages, smoke more, drink more, achieve less education, be relatively unsuccessful at work, and die younger.”
“Conscientious people stay healthier and live longer for three reasons:
First, they do more things to protect their health.
Secondly, they are biologically predisposed to be healthier, and
Lastly, they end up in more beneficial situations and relationships.”
8. Working hard can be helpful for you.
“Those who worked the hardest often lived the longest…especially if they were involved in meaningful careers and were dedicated to things and people beyond themselves.”
“It was clear that working hard to overcome adversity or biting off more than you can chew — and then chewing it — does not generally pose a health risk. Striving to accomplish your goals, setting new aims when milestones are reached, and staying engaged and productive is what those heading to a long life tend to do. The long-lived didn’t shy away from hard work; the opposite seemed true.”
9. Resilience is protective for health.
“Depending on the circumstances, a traumatic event such as parental divorce could contribute to a longer life if the child learned to be resilient.”
“Resilience is important, and can be achieved via a sense of personal accomplishment, the strength of character and maturity.”
“Combat veterans are less likely to live long lives, but surprisingly the psychological stress of war itself is not necessarily a major health threat. Rather, it is a cascade of unhealthy patterns that sometimes follows. Those who find meaning in a traumatic experience and can reestablish a sense of security about the world usually return to a healthy pathway.”
10. Human connection is essential.
“Having pets can improve well-being, but they do not help people live longer and are not a substitute for friends.”
“People who feel loved and cared for report a better sense of well-being.”
“The clearest health benefit of social relationships comes from being involved with and helping others.”
“It is important to be well-integrated into your community.”
“Connecting with and helping others is more important than obsessing over a rigorous exercise program.”
“The groups you associate with often determine the type of person you become — healthy or unhealthy.”
Damon Ashworth Psychology 
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