Exercise

Hire a personal trainer to start you off with your new lifestyle.

Find exercises that you enjoy, wherever possible.

Workout on a daily basis. Remember, it’s a choice of lifestyle not a temporary solution to an immediate health issue.

Hydrate before you work out, with salt, water, and electrolytes. Drink half your body weight in pounds in ounces. For example, if you weigh 200 pounds, drink 100 ounces or 3 litres. If you’re educated regarding the deuterium-depleted water controversy, the proponents of this approach wouldn’t agree on consuming this amount of water that isn’t deuterium-depleted.

In addition, check your bioimpedance to assess your total body water content, as well as your intracellular and extracellular fluid content.

Salt is essential, especially if you have Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome
(POTS). Use salt that’s rich in mineral diversity, such as New Earth Organics, Crucial 4 Icelandic Flake Salt, or Redman’s Real Salt. Salt prevents muscle cramps and headaches, increases cardiac output, improves endurance, and replaces some of the electrolytes that have been lost.

Aim for cardio three times per week and high-intensity interval training three times per week.

Walk for between thirty and sixty minutes per day. If you’re a dog owner, maintaining your pet’s exercise routine can really help!

Lift weights between three and five times per week, for approximately thirty to forty-five minutes per day.

To gain muscle mass, use heavier weights in your routines. For toning of existing muscle, do less weight, but more reps.

Don’t be consistently sleep deprived, since this increases your caloric intake the next day by as much as 440 calories.

Turn your bedroom into a sleep sanctuary. Enhance sleep by wearing glasses that block blue light after 6 pm. Limit your screen time with devices such as TVs or IPads, unplug your router, and turn off your cell phone.

Find the best sleep aids from any number of combinations, from materials such as melatonin, glycine, magnesium, inositol, Gaba, or CBD. There are many different possibilities.

Define your top values in life in a hierarchal fashion by asking yourself the questions
“what do I spend most of my time doing, what do I spend my money on, what do I talk about the most, what do my surroundings demonstrate what I love the most, how do I spend my energy and what energizes me the most, what do I think about the most, what inspires me the most?”

Most people have their highest values within one or two of the following seven areas.

• Career enhancement
• Knowledge and education
• Health and well-being
• Relationships and family
• Financial well-being
• Spiritual goals
• Social enhancement

Then compile a list of the top twenty benefits of daily exercise to your top one or two values columns.

If you can link all the benefits of exercise and a good meal plan to your highest values, it will be much easier for you to continue this change in lifestyle. i.e., ask yourself “by going to the gym and eating correctly every day, how will I be even more successful at what I most enjoy doing and what I love the most?”

You have to set your priorities and values, get up early to work out, link exercise and diet to your highest values, jettison low priority activities, such as endless Netflix and Instagram engagement, be honest with yourself, and don’t entertain a fantasy of achieving huge gains without significant effort. Nobody is going to do this for you and there’s no one to blame if you don’t achieve your intended results. This begins and ends with you and your effort.

Protein and food in general

Hire a nutritionist that’s highly skilled in providing an eight-day diet analysis using a cronometer in order to estimate where you may be macro or micronutrient deficient or over-fed, protein deficient, and whether you’re metabolically optimized.

In addition, ensure that your nutritionist is skilled in providing an anti-inflammatory approach and is knowledgeable regarding all the various food reaction subtypes. The list these days is rather long, but includes histamine, oxalates, salicylates, lectins, fodmaps, and sulfates, for example. For the most part, using a traditionally trained dietician following Canada’s Food Guide won’t help you to achieve the subtlety that’s often needed to attain your nutritional health goals.

Be quite prepared to analyze, through functional medicine laboratories, how metabolically repleted you are, the health of your cell membranes, and how functional your mitochondria and peroxisomes are in their specialized task of making both ATP and adequate fats for cell function. The biomarkers found in traditional laboratories are far from adequate when it comes down to analyzing these subtle variations.

Eat organic, whole, and nutritious food all of the time.

Don’t eat or snack after you slow down your activities for the day. Have supper no later than 6 pm and don’t snack at night. If you do, the calories contained in those snacks will immediately be deposited into storage, meaning into fat tissue.

Avoid snacking during the day, unless it’s part of your nutritional plan and you have hypoglycemic tendencies. If you’ve excluded sleep apnoea as the cause, use a Freestyle Libre blood glucose monitor if you suspect low blood sugars. This is particularly important if you wake up in the middle of the night with some or all of the following symptoms:

• Fast heartbeat
• Shaking
• Sweating
• Nervousness or anxiety
• Irritability or confusion
• Dizziness
• Hunger

Stop eating processed or packaged food.

Eat between 1 and 1.25 grams of protein per pound of lean body weight. This helps with hunger and weight loss.

A minimum of 30 to 50 grams of protein per meal is recommended, which means a minimum of six ounces of chicken, fish, or red meat. That’s for breakfast, lunch, and supper combined. In addition to essential fats, this will get you off the carbohydrate and sugar rollercoaster.

Substitute with a good quality animal protein powder, such as Designs for Health PurePaleo beef protein. Don’t substitute with a rice or pea protein, primarily due to contamination with heavy metals, glyphosate, and issues with histamine.

A lack of protein, as well as good quality essential fats, is the main reason why you lose muscle mass as you age. This also influences overeating and feeling hungry at the end of the day.

Eliminate all junk food and nutritiously-deficient food from your pantry and from your fridge. Don’t hesitate and simply throw it out!

Starting the day with a high carbohydrate and sugar-laden meal will spike your insulin and blood sugar levels and these will never quite settle down throughout the day. It won’t make any difference how ‘organic’ the meal is supposed to be, or if it was bought at a health food store. You’ll be playing catch-up all day, with feelings of hunger and cravings. Eating a protein-dense meal in the morning, after you’ve woken in a catabolic state, will help to regulate your blood sugar levels for twenty-four hours and prevent any further breakdown of muscle tissue for energy requirements.

Eat consciously. Food transformation to energy and information requires the cooperation of the vagus nerve, which is the main parasympathetic nerve in the body. Parasympathetic dominance enhances rest, relaxation, healing, and digestion.

• Eat in a quiet, settled, and comfortable environment.
• Never eat when you’re upset.
• Always sit down to eat.
• Eat only when you feel hungry.
• Minimize the consumption of ice-cold foods and beverages.
• Finish chewing and swallowing what’s in your mouth before taking another bite.
• Eat more slowly and at a comfortable pace, always remaining conscious of the process.
• Listen to your appetite, by digesting the previous meal before starting the next one.
• Don’t overeat, always leaving a third of your stomach empty to aid digestion.
• Eat freshly prepared foods. Lightly-cooked foods are preferable to raw or over-cooked food..
• Sit quietly for a few minutes after finishing your meal. Focus your attention on the sensations in your body.
• Go for a short walk after your meals to aid your digestion.

References

Read my blogs on Intermittent Fasting Part One

Read my blog on the Ketogenic Diet

Read my blog on the Qualities of a Successful Patient

Read The Obesity Code and The Diabetes Code by Jason Fung

Read The Obesity Fix by James DiNicolantonio

Contact the Hoffman Centre for a consultation at www.drbrucehoffman.com or Justine Stenger for a nutritional workup.

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