Sleep
The old standard for adequate sleep was 6-8 hours a night. This has been updated to 7-9 because its not possible to get adequate rest from just 6 hours of sleep a night. Being sleep deprived measurably impairs memory, learning, mental alertness, immune system and cardiac function. Being sleep deprived also causes you to eat more calories on average as well as increasing risk of Alzheimer’s.
You also want to follow basic sleep hygiene as follows.
- Go to sleep and wake up at the same time daily to set your circadian rhythm, the body’s internal clock.
- Get rid of artificial lighting to assist natural melatonin production that signals your body to prepare for sleep.
- Use either red lighting or blue light blocking glasses if you have leading up to bed time
- Ideal sleep temperature is 65F and lighting is total darkness, use a sleep mask if necessary
- Wash your hands in face to opens up pores to help your body drop its core temperature by offloading heat to your extremities.
- Upon waking up, expose yourself to natural light as soon as possible, this will help flush melatonin out of your system and reinforce your circadian rhythm.
Diet
Choose a diet that contains your food preferences that you’ll be able to follow to maintain a healthy weight. A balanced whole food diet is ideal for most people and will be most effective in battling cravings due to lack of calories density. If carbohydrates are a big problem a keto diet can be effective but will require large consumption of low calorie vegetables for satiety to offset calorie density of high fat consumption. A carnivore diet with fruit can be effective for sensitive digestive system as meat is highly filling and digestible but somewhat boring way to eat.
Basic dieting rules
- Figure out your healthy weight and strive to achieve it, use BMI chart if you don’t know what’s ideal for you to get started. You can add about 10lbs to your BMI target if you’re highly lean and muscular.
- Get rid of processed foods, not only are they associated with greater all cause mortality but they’re engineered to stimulate appetite to make more sales and make you fat through overconsumption
- Avoid liquid calories including juices, these will also stimulate appetite and make you fat through overconsumption
- Aim for 0.8 gram of protein per pound of body weight unless significantly overweight, Proteins are highly filling which will help control calorie intake. This will generally be in 80-150 grams a day range.
- If you’re still having issues keeping bodyweight under control, perform once a week 24hr water fast
Exercise
At the very minimum, you want to be walking 30-60 minutes a day with a brisk pace. After a meal is a great time to help use up excess sugar in your blood to avoid falling asleep or just prior to mentally intensive tasks to retain focus. A more intense cardio sessions are also a good idea to include 1-2 times a week.
Weight lifting is essential to building and retaining muscle as well as increasing bone density. Compound exercises, ones that use multiple muscles, should make up the bulk of the workout as the allow you to use a bigger load which yield better results while training several muscles and saving time. A popular example routine would be a push/pull/legs where one day you’d be training chest and triceps with pushing exercises, one day pulling exercises which would train back and biceps and last day dedicated to training legs. 16-20 Sets of exercise is optimal per muscle group so a good workout could consist of 4-5 sets of 4 exercises, 8-12 repetitions per set.
For example
| Monday-Push | Wednesday-Pull | Friday-Legs |
| Chest Press | Rows | Leg Press |
| Incline Chest Press | Close Grips Rows | Leg Extensions |
| Flies | Pulldowns | Leg Curls |
| Weighted Dips | Bicep Curls | Calf Raises |