Take Time for Health

New Year is a traditional time for reflecting on the year that’s gone and looking ahead with hope and aspiration.

This January, why not take a moment to review how you use your time.

Housework and family/pet commitments might dominate your week. Or caring. Or volunteering.

Sport can really take over if you let it (says the woman who had no social life for 30 years).

Work can take up 8 hours a day, 5 days a week.

— Many jobs involve a lot of sitting which shortens your life

—- and much artificial light that damages your eyesight

—— looking at screens with static, poor posture

——– sometimes with stress which is miserable.

Then there’s a commute which could take another hour or two out of your day and might include more sitting and more stress (unless you’re lucky enough to walk/cycle).

Leisure has never been more sedentary – hours of TV, computers, mobile ‘phones, gaming. More sitting, poor posture, screens.

To counter all of this you might invest some time doing sport or going to exercise classes or the gym. That takes time to travel, time to do, time to change and shower.

Underpinning Health is Food

Very little you do has a greater impact on your health than your eating habits. What you eat can give you energy or leave you lethargic, make you fat or make you slim, give you diabetes, heart disease and early death or keep you young and vibrantly healthy.

You might have spent time going to diet clubs. If it worked and you only needed to go once, well and good. Most dieters’ reality is going year after year and still not having the body they wanted (spoiler alert – the diet causes the weight regain, it is not the fault of the dieter.)

Of course lots of people just eat rubbish – sadly, they’ll pay dearly.

But you want better, so choose to ignore all the subliminal messages about you not having time to take care of yourself properly.

20 minutes to cook a meal from fresh ingredients is a very small percentage of your life for very big benefits. Make it a priority. Make it a habit. Make it an investment in you. And enjoy reaping the rewards of a more vibrantly healthy life.

Pea chorizo risotto sea bass

Not sure how? Book a consultation with me for only £49 and start your 2024 with real food.

Top tip: Spend a little time cooking your own food.

 

What Time to Eat?

I usually write about what to eat, but timing is important too.

Your body doesn’t just gear up to sleep when it’s dark and wake when it’s light; every part of it has control clocks.

Artificial light means we can eat from pre-dawn until midnight nowadays. Unfortunately, this disrupts our circadian rhythm and is bad for our health.

It’s best to eat during the day when levels of digestive enzymes are high and your liver and gut are ready to deal with food. In the evening, saliva production slows down.  Also, if anything enters the stomach, there’s more acid produced. Your gut slows down for nightly repairs – but repair is difficult if food is still passing through – it’s like trying to re-tarmac a road with traffic still flowing. It’s better to stop eating 2 or 3 hours before bed.

I’m in favour of working with your body, so Prof Satchin Panda’s research on Time Restricted Eating struck a chord. (Listen to Dr Rangan Chatterjee interviewing Prof Panda here.)  An 8-10 hour window has been found in the lab to protect against (and to improve existing) obesity, heart disease, diabetes, fatty liver disease, cholesterol and high blood sugar. Prof Panda recognises that we don’t have a choice when we get up; we have jobs to go to and children to take to school. But we can choose when we eat.

I like to try things out.  Initially it felt weird starting work early then having breakfast at 9:30am but months into my self-experiment, I feel great. After 7:30pm I don’t eat – that’s a 10h window. Even a 12h window gives benefits, say 7am to 7pm.  Give it a try and find out how you feel working with your body’s rhythms. (Check with your doctor about effects on medication.) There’s also a global study you can take part in via an app (mycircadianclock.org).

Top tip – Give Time Restricted Eating a try

Quote of the Month

Time is a created thing.

To say, ‘I don’t have time’ is like saying, ‘I don’t want to.’

Lao Tzu

One of the reasons that people give for eating processed food products instead of making real food from fresh is the time that it takes.  Keep an eye of the adverts you watch and you’ll find that a theme running through many of them is that you don’t have time for anything and the thing they’re selling will solve that problem.  We’ve swallowed the myth that we don’t have time to feed ourselves well.

Set yourself free from that.

You can always make time for what’s important to you.