Hello folks, and welcome to another edition of the Hack your Gut podcast! In today’s episode, I go over how I’ve developed my personal, optimized lifestyle.
My health has improved tremendously over the last decade, and it all comes down to building a lifestyle that works for me. I started as a 220lbs 20-something night owl with pre-diabetes and major family history of heart disease. Now, I’m a 185lbs 43-year old early bird with no underlying health issues.
I spent my 20s following the conventional wisdom that just didn’t work for me. I exercised 5 times a week, tried to control calorie intake, and paid little attention to circadian rhythms. As a result, I wasn’t all that healthy.
It was a long road, full of twists and turns. The real magic happened over the last 2-3 years as I’ve really prioritized gut health, circadian rhythms, and expanded my diet. Oh yeah, I also saved myself about $200/month in supplements.
Without further ado, here is the outline for today’s podcast.
How I developed my optimized, individualized lifestyle
- My approach to measuring lifestyle change
- The best way to build a healthy lifestyle is to treat your life like a science experiment. Here we discuss how to do that and what to measure.
- My health before taking lifestyle seriously
- Overall, my health was poor before I developed a healthy lifestyle. I was overweight, a night owl, and prediabetic. Fortunately, I got in to the evolutionary approach to health which taught me the importance of my environment.
- My venture into Paleo, 16:8 eating, and circadian rhythms
- Back in 2010, I got clued in to the Paleo diet and the benefits of not eating every 3 hours. Over time, I began learning about circadian rhythms and how our environment impacts our physiology.
- From night owl to early bird
- Genetically, I’m a night owl, as is most of my family(Duh!). But I learned that being a night owl, even if it’s in your genes, is not healthy. Here I discuss the trappings of being a night owl and how I started to convert to an early bird. (Note: Check out this blog for my progress during the first 18 months of Circadian Retraining)
- Maintenance of early bird chronotype
- While shifting to an early bird took a little time, it yielded excellent results. Over the course of months, I saw great improvement in sleep and heart rate variability that continue to improve. Here I discuss the time course for improvements in switching to an early bird.
- Major recent changes…
- Recently, I’ve identified how some things affect my sleep, centering around alcohol, coffee, and moderate physical activity. Not only has this taught me how these specific things affect my sleep, it’s allowed me to identify how to drink alcohol, and coffee, without negatively impacting my sleep.
On to the show…
I hope you enjoy this episode and use it to help develop your own personalized, optimized lifestyle.
