Update Your Lifestyle

Update Your Lifestyle. It is a wonderful time to be alive. All the cushiness and comfort—we are so far ahead of survival mode—all at our fingertips. And if you feel stuck, just click on the encyclopedic, overwhelming amount of helpful, life-guiding information. Despite our progress, we find ourselves in crisis—overweight, unhealthy, dissatisfied and frayed.

We have overdeveloped in hedonism—maximized comfort, leisure and pleasure while avoiding discomfort at all costs. And we are paying the price.   

Update Your Lifestyle: Being out of Shape and Aging at the Same Time is Deadly

To our own determent, movement, any appreciable amount of activity, has been culturalized out of our daily routine. This is especially bad as we age. Being out of shape and aging at the same time is deadly. As we age, the biological processes that keep us disease free, vibrant and resilient dull and become less robust. Weight gain, stiffness, and never-ending joint and back pain are symptoms of your changing biology. Pain is information. You could say, Nature is sending you a message.

In the book Lifespan: Why We Age and Why We Don’t Have to, David Sinclair, PhD, aging researcher and professor of genetics at Harvard University, writes, “there is nothing more dangerous to us than age. If hepatitis, kidney disease or melanoma did the sorts of things to us that aging does, we would put those diseases on a list of the deadliest illness in the world. Instead, scientists call what happens to us a ‘loss of resilience,’ and we generally have accepted it as part of the human condition.”

Don’t accept aging as just the way it goes. Update your lifestyle!

As we age, the idea to update your lifestyle becomes an imperative, a life-or-death choice. After age 30 or 40 (everyone ages differently), our entire physiology—from metabolism to immunity—slows down and inactivity accelerates this decline. Being victims of our own success is no way to go through life. We cannot continue living with reckless abandon.    

Three millennia of causal evidence shows our marshmallow soft, overmedicated, under-muscled and over-nourished lifestyle is the cause of our current health crisis, including our deplorable state of aging.

The evidence is overwhelming. Medical researchers have confirmed the cause of over 35 chronic conditions is inactivity.

Most people know they are not living their best life. Maybe you too have tried to improve. That’s a noble effort. You need to break through and permanently update your lifestyle.

Begin by Noticing

First, recognize where the trouble and confusion start. If the mind is in control, that’s not good. The mind is attracted to quick-fixes, extreme diets, hacks and supplements that promise a ‘one pill’ antidote. Pause, slow down, take an eagle’s nest view. Notice mind patterns, the appeal of a quick-fix.

Also, notice how unappealing a consistent (long-term) exercise habit sounds. Similarly, eating whole foods, avoiding sugar and creating balanced nutrition feels ugh…, the same way. Ruminating on the amount of effort swells and usurps the mind, and not in a good way. But the infomercial offers relief (at least for the mind). “The juicer diet will solve your problems.” Now that sounds good, so much easier. Marketer’s pull you in with hype and promise. All you have to do is buy the juicer and your problems are solved!!!

Notice. Beware. You Can Only See This If You Want To See It

Go slow to go fast. The idea is not to jump right into tactics like diet and exercise. Take time to assess. Realign and plan. Imagine the next third of your life. What do you want to be doing in the future? Flyfishing with strength, vigor and stamina? Wilderness flyfishing? Visualize. Then make a serious effort to plan, to invest and live that future. The plan serves as your anchor—your fixed state of mind for the rest of your life. Each daily choice is evaluated and filtered through your plan. Slowing down, assessing, realigning and planning gives you clarity and fuels your sustained effort. You can’t help but be successful.

There is no blame here. Never beat yourself up for your situation. Just notice. This is our culture, what envelopes and conditions us, our environment. If you want something else, different or more; you’ll have to apply Olympic effort to not follow the crowd, to truly be yourself and not a mass culture clone locked into ‘herd behavior.’

Recognize Resistance

As you begin to make effort, you will encounter blocks from within. Rationalizing why you should not do it, procrastination and even victimhood; the antithesis of effort. In the book The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles, author Steven Pressfield explains resistance as an unseen dark force that can only be felt. It justifies reasons not to make an effort to change. It distracts us and justifies all our excuses as good and necessary. Resistance (the voice in your head), Pressfield says, “will tell you anything to keep you from doing your work.”

Notice, resistance only opposes in one direction, from lower to higher. It engages when you pursue improvement: education, an entrepreneurial venture, spiritual advancement or, in our case, an effort to update your lifestyle.

Before you read any habit books or self-improvement books, read Pressfield’s War of Art book.

I heard Bruce Springsteen say that the hunger and desire to grow, improve and get better has to be greater than the fear and resistance. That’s how you do anything. You can also read it in Bruce’s book, Born to Run.

Hunger to push past the resistance. That’s as true as it gets. It’s how I left the herd and updated my lifestyle. Start pushing and good habits, better nutrition and your own creative ideas will come of their own accord.

Update Your Lifestyle: From Maverick to Master

Exercise and nutrition are enough. Master these two updates and you will soar.

A master doesn’t think about exercise or lifestyle. It’s automatic, built in. They just do it. It occurs without thought or mind involvement. Same with diet and every other upward, personal improvement movement.

How does one become a master? The same banal way you eat an elephant, one piece at a time. Consistently, overtime you build this new animal that seemingly runs at the top of their game on autopilot. Like any master, from athlete to artist, it looks easy and effortless. That’s because the effort has been mastered and is running in the background while you focus on more complex things.

Masters have tamed the distracting, unproductive, incessantly busy ‘mouse in the wheel’ mind.

If you learned to ride a bike or drive a stick-shift car, you have tamed the mind, too. The skill to ride a bike and drive a stick-shift is running in the background while you cruise, drink your beverage of choice and listen to entertainment. But it wasn’t like that on day one of learning. You were anxious and unsettled, gripping with muscles fully contracted. Each time out, you got better, more relaxed. Until you mastered the skill.

Of course, to update your lifestyle is more complex. You have to push yourself into a level of discomfort. But the mechanism is the same. Once you get over the hump of the push, the new struggle, it too will operate in the background. You won’t have to think about it.

Change the Way You Look at Things and Things Change the Way They Look

To get there, don’t think discipline. Think of it more as a creative endeavor. Follow my creativity creed. Immerse all of yourself; character, knowledge and abilities to create a new updated personalized lifestyle. Embracing the effort as a creative endeavor brings new life with an imaginative energy that is free from laborious requirement, demand, or burden. Creativity is an opening, a soft energy. It is more about what you can do than what you must do. Not, “I must change my lifestyle.” But rather, “what I can create with my unique one-of-a-kind contribution.”

Action Items to Update Your Lifestyle

1-Exercise: the most significant update.  Aerobic exercise conditions your type-1 muscles with the goal of developing aerobic endurance—how long you can perform moderate exercise. Endurance is important because when you exercise in a specific way, you trigger precise growth pathways. Moderate, long and slow aerobic exercise is what sports physiologists call zone-2. You cruise—run, walk, hike, bike, swim, row or ruck—at a steady targeted heart rate of 60-65% of your maximum for thirty, forty, up to sixty minutes. This is the zone where you optimally burn fat, raise critical enzyme and hormone levels and grow new mitochondria; those cellular power plants, ‘energy organelles’ in muscle, heart and brain cells. The potency of zone-2 exercise can’t be overstated.

Besides increasing the quality and quantity of mitochondria, you initiate healing. The entire body (brain included) grows, repairs and heals. You gain the most endurance and overall health improvement from this slow, steady aerobic exercise. Speed is not important. Time and mileage are the crux of success. Slow, consistent exercise—over an extended period—weeks, months and years. This drives the deep, growth (chemical) pathways of mitochondria health, improved immune function and infrastructure growth of blood delivering capillaries and vessels. Sustained exercise equals sustained, long-term growth.

With extended, consistent effort, you transform your physiological self into the form of an athlete. Every athlete, marathoner, Tour de France and Olympic hopeful incorporates zone-2 training to build a solid base of aerobic capacity. They are going for gold-level performance. You are working toward what I call ‘wealth and fitness,’ becoming functionally younger. You’re in good company.

Add in resistance training (weight training) twice per week because you need to maintain and build type-2 muscle to address what is involuntarily lost through aging.

2-The second update is how you nourish yourself. Eat a little less, cut calories or fast. However, you do it, doesn’t matter. You don’t have to make a big production of it by not eating for a whole day. Wait an extra hour to break the overnight fast. Don’t eat breakfast as soon as you wake up. It’s easy to extend the morning fast. Do things to reduce caloric intake, even slightly is enough

What you are doing through exercise and fasting is kicking in ancient survival or longevity pathways through a natural biological process science calls hormesis.  

It’s the idea that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Small stresses, the application and engagement of muscle and fasting, reawaken our declining biological processes and systems, and force them to function like they are young again.

Hormesis reminds us of our biology, human biology, our lineage—that our genes didn’t evolve for a life of pampered comfort.

We have survival circuits for hunger and scarcity more so than abundance because primordial life was not easy. We are more adapted biologically for starvation. A little hunger will help your biological systems reduce inflammation and recycle old cells and invigorate new growth. In fact, fasting is known as the holy grail of longevity.  

Fasting is important for longevity. But what we eat is the emperor of fitness, vitality and longevity. Eat whole foods, prebiotics, probiotics and lots of plant-based foods. Stay away from the standard American diet (SAD). Avoid added sugar or ‘free sugar,’ as it is known, and increase the diversity of foods you eat.

For example, don’t just snack on peanuts. Mix in hazelnuts, pistachios, walnuts, almonds, macadamia nuts, sunflower seeds and pumpkins seeds (as a start). A diversity of foods contributes to the process of repopulating your gut with health-giving and immune system-promoting microbiome.

Start your day with a protein smoothie, the make your own, DIY kind where you add protein powder. Note: most grass-fed whey protein powder has little to zero carbs. Add diverse plant-based foods you don’t normally eat. You will be surprised how taste gets lost in the drink. Also, use protein-fortified, unsweetened yogurt. Don’t worry, the fruit will sweeten it just perfectly and this is what we want!!!

Seventy Percent of Immune Function is in the Gut

Way back when, Hippocrates (460–370 BC), the father of medicine, said, “All disease begins in the gut.” Now, finally, we are catching on! Trillions of microbes, 10 times more than your human cells, about 100 trillion microbes, call your body home and a good, diverse microbiome population in your gut promotes optimal health and longevity.

From Frontiers in Microbiology: “The mechanism leading to disease development has a crucial correlation with gut microbiota, metabolic products, and host immune response in humans.” 

In Summary: The forces of Nature cause our biological processes to decline with age. Inactivity speeds up this decline to the point of decay. We have endowed powers of our own. We can use the body to heal the body and push back on the decline. The effort involved seems simple, but considerable awareness and effort must prevail. You have to define what you want and then make it happen. Go after it using all of your resources, literally living your life as you craft it. When you make the effort, pain subsides. You lose the doughy look and your energy levels increase, to name a few benefits.

Our pampered, marshmallow soft modernity is great, but it doesn’t serve us well for staying strong, vital, and resilient into our later decades. We must push ourselves.

Note: The information herein is meant to be general guidance on fitness. It is not a substitute for consultations with healthcare professionals. In fact, professional consultations are required for success with exercise. Always have a physician approve your planned activity before making changes.

Categorized in: General Knowledge