There are thousands of health changes you can implement into your current lifestyle that can make major impacts to your overall health and well being, but how many of those changes can you do consistently throughout your life?  Most fads and diets don’t last, because the “quick fixes” are almost impossible to maintain over a long period of time. Not to mention, most “quick fixes” are generally not the healthiest of options to choose when trying to live a healthy life.

Implementing the 4 things below into your every day life will improve your overall health tremendously.  The 4 habits below aren’t flashy and don’t require any special diet. They aren’t associated with any magic pill or special formula, but if you are able to implement these 4 healthy habits 95% of the time, you will see beneficial changes in the long term.

1. Sleep- Sleep 7-9 hours per night

2. Hydration- Drink at least half of your bodyweight in ounces of water every day(more if you workout)

3. Food Timing- Eat during a 12 hour window or less throughout the normal daytime hours (ex. 7AM-7PM, 8AM-8PM, 9AM-9PM, 10AM-8PM, 12PM-8PM…)

4. Be active, or standing, more than sitting/stationary throughout the day, while you are awake

I picked these 4 habits, because most people have total control of these habits and each habit costs approximately zero dollars.  Most people have a job that starts around 8/9 and finishes around 4/5, which would allow them to do all of these habits fairly easy.  I think a lot of people, depending on how old you are, would say that these habits might make life boring.  If you want to go out and YOLO every night and drink till your hearts content, you can do that, but it can only last for so long.  I will do my best to explain why each of the 4 habits are important, but I will probably be saying a lot of information you have heard already at some point in your life, and I know life is not perfect, so I understand that implementing all 4 of these habits will be difficult in certain circumstances, but it never hurts to try.  Try them out for a month or 2 (or hell 6!) and see how you feel. See if you are sleeping better, feel more rested, more energized and if you’ve lost a few pounds in the process.

Sleep

It is recommended by many doctors and health specialists to sleep at least 7 to 9 hours every night. It has been shown in testing that the human body accomplishes most of its repairing and recovering from the hours of 10pm to 2am.

Water

Drink half your body weight in ounces of water on a daily basis.  If you are working out during the day and sweating quite a bit, it is suggested that you drink more than your body weight in ounces, in order to replenish the water lost from perspiration.

Food Timing

Eating within a certain amount of time during the day has been shown to promote weight loss and a healthy lifestyle.  Our body’s natural circadian rhythm is aligned with the natural circadian rhythm

Being Active

The jury is out on prolonged sitting, and it received a similar sentence as smoking did when scientists figured out smoke in your lungs probably wasn’t the best thing for your health.  Sitting looks pretty harmless, and I’m not saying you should NEVER SIT DOWN EVER AGAIN, but studies have found that prolonged sitting has detrimental affects on heart health and overall health in general.

Moral of the story, “buy/make a standing desk if you work in a sedentary environment.” You don’t have to stand all day. Just stand more than you sit and you will start to look better and feel better over time.

With that being said, the shoes you wear at work will have an affect on your quality of life while you stand at your desk. I recommend wearing minimalistic shoes or no shoes at all while standing at your desk. I give this recommendation because I know that I would not be able to stand for the majority of the day if I were wearing “good looking”/uncomfortable shoes.

Below is the typed out podcast with Dr Rhonda Patrick and Dr Satchin Panda.

Every living organism on the planet has an internal circadian clock.

All life on this planet evolved on a rotating earth, where for approximately they had 12 hours of light and 12 hours of darkness.  The changing environment put a tremendous pressure on them to come up with a timing mechanism so they can anticipate when it will be evening and when it will be morning.  So, they timed their activity and sleep. So that’s why almost every organism on this planet has an internal clock to help them anticipate time.  A diurnal organism that is active during the day time has to anticipate when the dusk or night is going to come so that they can make their way back to their cave or home or their hiding place.  And similar to going back to the cave before dark for shelter and safety, animals must wake up just before dawn so that they can go out and get the first grub.  That’s why we have a biological clock that tells us when it is time to go to sleep and when it is time to wake up.

For most people, we no that after we go to bed for 6 to 8 hours, we wake up.  Our cock tells us when it is going to be morning. Also, almost every organ in our body has a clock that tells the organ when to be at peak performance throughout the day and when to rest and rejuvenate

Babies are not automatically wired with a natural circadian rhythm.  But after 8-12 weeks, they start to.  Around 6 months is when the babies adapt to a normal circadian rhythm and is wired to the light and dark cycle, so hopefully the babies go to bed when they are suppose to.  Babies clocks aren’t synced up until about 4-6 months.

There are clocks in all of our organs.

Central Master Clock = Suprachiasmatic Nucleus (SCN) Composed of a hundred thousand neurons in humans. Really small.  If you remove that brain part in a hamster, it will not have any sense of time when to go to sleep and when to wake up. If you do a brain transplant of the SCN from one hamster to another, then the hamster that received the SCN will get all of the circadian rhythms back.

All organs that are driven by circadian rhythm or eating for that matter,(gut, liver and fat) have a feeding behavior, similarly as a muscle is driven when we run. If we damage our SCN, then we lose our SCN.

Some of the neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and Dementia, the SCN is affected and sense of time is affected.

Light is what regulates the Master Clock or sets it.  We adapt to Sunset and Sunrise time changes.

Where is the light receptor that resets the clock, because there are many blind people that can reset their clock if you go from east coast to west coast. There are laboratory animals that are blind that can reset their circadian rhythm within 6 to 7 days.

Our clock is not exactly 24 hours.

There must be some light sensing molecule that must be present in blind people called Melanopsin.  Melanopsin is a type of photopigment belonging to a larger family of light-sensitive retinal proteins called opsin and encoded by the gene Opn4.   Every morning the first sight of light tells the Melanopsin cells sense light and tell the SCN that this is morning and its time to sync up.

If you’re not getting this bright light exposure, how does this affect the SCN?

You need almost 1000 LUX of Light to fully activate melonoxin. Melonophsin actually remembers how much previous light you were exposed to.  You need several minutes of bright light to reset the clock.  Melonpsin makes it very hard to sleep in a lighted room.  it is also connected to the part of the brain that promotes melatonin production.  So in the morning you need a signifanct amount of light, jolt of light, to suppress the melatonin production.

Humans that were exposed to around 10,000 LUX of light upon 30 minutes of waking, exposed to this amount of light for a number of hours, all day,  cortisol levels were measured at various points in the day(Cortisol is a hormone that is regulated by the circadian clock, and it peaks when we wake up, promotes alertness, and Melatoin is the opposite because it promotes sleep) The people that were exposed to the bright light had a decrease of about 20-25% in there cortisol levels during parts of the day when cortisol levels were not supposed to be high.

People exposed to bright light in the evening, when you’re in an extended period of light, are sending a wrong signal to the brain saying “this might be part of the day.” and that does not allow melatonin levels to build up, so we have trouble going to sleep. When this happens, we might wake up late in the day and this sends a signal to our body saying that this may be the morning, but at the same time we spend 90% of our time indoors. Many of the indoor environments have less than 1,000 LUX of light, and many places have less than 200-100 LUX of light.  We don’t get the very bright light that our body is designed to get, so our circadian rhythm is thrown off.

Jetlag

15-20% of the population in the US work shift work. Light management or lifestyle management has a huge impact on figuring out how best to schedule shift work, without compromised fitness and family life.  It’s not easy to for shift workers to work 3 days in one shift and 3 days in another shift. Light does half the job and the other half is done by food.

Cortisol is regulated by our circadian clock, but at the same time, we know that it’s a stress hormone, so if you have stress in the middle of the night, your cortisol levels will go up.  The master clock sends a signal to the body for when we should be eating, fasting and when its day time.

If we eat a lot of food late at night, that food still has to be metabolized and broken down and sorted out, and a lot of things that we don’t need for our body go to another conveyer belt to break down the food.  Not everything will happen at once. There is time for protein to be broken down, time for glucose to be made, time for nucleotide to be made and different hormones to be made.  When these clocks in our body start to breakdown, our metabolism is not as efficient anymore. There become a lot of by products laying around. The clocks in our body respond to food coming into the body, and at the same time when the food is coming in, if the kitchen is not ready, the food is not going to stay in the garage. Our body’s are built to react when food is eaten, so when the food comes in, these organs in our body are not turned on and ready to take in food at the money, so there is a traffic jam in our body when trying to process the energy that was just ingested.

The peripheral clocks have times when they are on and off, but they also respond to food. Food tells them when to time there activity.  So when we travel, our light time changes and our food time changes.

There is a Master regulating clock in the super kaiasmatic nucleus in the brain and how light is what sets that clock and regulates that clock and a bunch of other physiological process.  But there’s also other clocks in the liver, muscle and heart that also are regulated by when you take in food/eat. We are the most insulin sensitive in the early morning hours and insulin incentive in the late night hours.

Which genes are regulated by clock in different organs?  In the liver there might be 3000-5000 genes that turn on at certain times of the day and night.  The time when we eat tells our liver clock when to turn on the genes and when to turn off, and light exposure has very little impact(not no impact but little impact) on the cycling genes and liver.

We have discovered that almost every organ in our periphery outside our brain kind of follows when we eat. So it is very important in our daily lives that the first sight of bright light and the first bite of food determine how our body clocks work. Dr Panda is now working how this timing of eating and timing of light effects out health.

Findings from Dr Panda’s experiments:

Mice that don’t have a circadian clock because they lack that particular genome have various metabolic defects(obesity, diabetes, cardio vascular disease.. etc) People who do shift work for a very long time are highly likely to get these metabolic diseases. If we don’t have a good functioning clock then thats bad for us.

In normal circumstances, what are the conditions that can actually breakdown our clock?

When mice are given high fat diet or unhealthy food, the food itself breaks down their clock, and mice don’t have a good metabolic rhythm, so the mice eats all day and night. People have always thought that it is what labs were feeding the mice in labs is what was causing the metabolic deficiencies, but what Dr Panda and his team have learned is that the mice are eating so sporadically that it might help or hurt them. So he took 2 groups of mice, completely identical, no genes were changed, no drugs were given, and one group of mice ate a high fat diet, eating 45-60% of their food from fat any time during the day.(This would be equivalent of humans getting there calories of fat and sugar from cheese, nachos, ice-cream etc. or the western diet) The other group of mice got the same number of calories and same type of food, but these mice had to eat all of there food between 8 to 12 hours at night time. Some experiments were done at 8, 10 and 12 hours.  There’s over Eleven thousand papers around the world saying a high fat diet causes obesity. Surprisingly, the mice who ate between 8-12 hours did not become obese, diabetic and had normal liver function and normal cholesterol levels etc. In other experiments the mice were exposed to a high fructose diet, high carb diet, high sucrose diet and all kinds of other diets and not limiting them to on how much they can eat, but rather limit them on the time they have to eat during the day (8-12 Hours), and in most cases it was seen that the time-restricted eating had huge beneficial impact, even when the mice ate a standard diet. Mice usually eat 70% of their diet at night time and a little but during the day time, but if there time window for eating is restricted to 12 hours or less, they’re fat mass goes down and their muscle mass goes up.  The BLUF is that when what and how much food mice ate during the experiments were kept constant and the only variable that changed was the time restriction of eating, huge beneficial impacts were seen, which correlates very well with the very robust clock in the liver and other metabolic organs.  Why this is so important is 2 things: 1) many of us have little to no control over what and how much food we eat, when we leave our home.  The only thing we really have control over is when we eat during the day and the window of time we allow ourselves to eat.  2) It also doesn’t take away the idea that nutrition doesn’t matter. The mice that ate a “normal/healthy” diet were much healthier than the mice that ate the high fat diet.  Because the high fed fed mice don’t completely become normal like the mice that eat a normal diet during the time-restricted eating diet. To have better health, you still have to change the quality of food and how much food you eat, but timing becomes much easier to balance.

Mice that were fed a high fat diet were fed the same amount of hours. when liver can process food the best and regulate blood sugar, and when they are able to oxidize fat.

Mice that were fed a normal chow diet, gained more muscle mass during a time-restricted diet.

During long periods of fasting(12-16 hours) your body uses protein as energy and it is converted to glucose.  Lean mass increased and fat mass decreased.

Nicoteinideriboside

Animals that were fed during a 9 hour period had improved overall endurance.

Protein, Fats and Carbohydrates

Eating a well balanced diet is very important, because your body has specific needs, such as protein synthesis, that must be accomplished in order for your body to perform and think at a high level at work or on the athletic field.

Lemon Water

Drink hot water with lemon to start off your day!

Lemon water boosts your immune system, contains vitamin C, potassium, aids digestion, reduces inflammation, balances pH Levels and a lot more! It’s a good, simple habit to squeeze some lemon juice in your water in the morning and throughout the day to give your H2O a little flavor and reap some quality health benefits. I like waking up in the mornings and having a cup of warm water with Lemon Juice and Himalain Pink Salt every morning. I’ll discuss the benefits of Himalania Pink Salt in a later post, but check out the two links below if you want more in depth information regarding the benefits of Lemon in hot and cold water.

11 Benefits of Lemon Water You Didn’t Know About

11 Benefits of Lemon Water You Didn’t Know About

Benefits of Lemon Water

http://www.livestrong.com/article/111175-benefits-lemon-water/

Why You Should Drink Warm Water & Lemon

http://www.mindbodygreen.com/0-4769/Why-You-Should-Drink-Warm-Water-Lemon.html

Red Wine

Here are some really good articles on the effects of wine on the body.   I’ve copy and pasted the big take-aways from the first article that should be understood regarding wine or any alcohol.

To drink or not to drink: Should you raise a glass to your health?

http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/04/21/alcohol.health.drinking/index.html

Researchers say there is no one-size-fits-all approach to determining whether alcohol is more likely to help or hurt a person’s health.

“Not everyone gets the heart benefits from moderate drinking,” said Zakhari, who, not surprisingly, warned against relying on alcohol as a means to protect the heart

“The problem of the data on alcohol and the heart is that it’s observational,” Mosca said. “You can’t do clinical trials. Our data is limited and you can’t draw definitive, causative links. People who drink and people who drink wine have different habits than those who do not. Those factor, may account for the protective effect.”

Drinking alcohol isn’t a magic bullet and there are better ways to improve health.

“If you want to drink, drink moderately,” Zakhari said. “Drink it because you enjoy it, not because you want to be healthy. If you want to be healthy, eat fruits and vegetables and exercise. Take a baby aspirin a day and you will be fine.”

There’s no advice on drinking that applies to society as a whole, except that heavy drinking is harmful, said Klatsky.

“Most people don’t drink for health,” Klatsky said. “The advice needs to be individualized.”

Health Effects of Wine

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_effects_of_wine

Red wine and resveratrol: Good for your heart?

http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/heart-disease/in-depth/red-wine/ART-20048281?pg=1

How Red Wine Helps the Heart

http://www.webmd.com/heart-disease/news/20100621/how-red-wine-helps-the-heart