Health and Good Choices

Having a continuous supply of good choices is the key to happiness. Good choices are more plentiful if you are healthy.  How should we become and stay healthy? For advice on health issues, seek out professionals. I’m certainly an amateur.  I will restrict myself to two which are common to everyone, eating and exercise, where I think I can add value. The following are my thoughts after considerable reading and my own experience.

Like everything else I’ve been writing, having a system is better than having a goal.  An effective system is something you design to be easy and permanent.  To me, ‘easy’  means that I don’t have to remember or plan things.  After a while it just happens, and once I have a system, I can optimize it to be more effective and/or easy.

Eating

My doctors have been telling me for a few decades that I should lose weight.  I assumed that it would be difficult and distracting to make any progress.  And, I love to eat. Working in New Orleans early in my career was the delicious reason I gained at least 50 pounds.  So, I didn’t pay much attention to my doctors.  My wife got the same advice.  Then, our doctors started saying we would have to go on statins and drugs for diabetes if something didn’t change fairly rapidly.  So, we created a system of rules for eating.  In retrospect, this was not very painful and I wish we had done so earlier.  We have each lost the equivalent in weight to a small child in the past year, and still have more to go, but since we have a system, we know we will continue to lose it slowly.  

Human bodies have evolved to tell us when we aren’t getting enough air, when we have an injury, when something is hot, when we need to rest, etc.  But, a human body in modern society is exposed to quantities and types of food that it is not evolved to handle.  It’s not our fault.  Our instincts in matters of food are products of millenia of perpetual or at least periodic scarcity.  Our distant ancestors literally spent all day just hunting and gathering enough food.  They regularly went days or months without sufficient food.  Now that we have virtually unlimited supplies of calories, salts, sugars, and fats our bodies literally don’t know how to handle them.  We have to use our minds to educate and train ourselves on how much, what, and when we should eat.  These following things seem obvious, but are simultaneously hard to remember when the time comes to select food and eat.  I’m blaming my hungry ancestors who didn’t evolve to provide my body with a standard feature that tells me to stop eating because I have already stored enough calories.

Calories

“If you don’t measure it, you can’t improve it”  is definitely true when trying to lose weight.  Glancing at a tablespoon of peanut butter and a tablespoon of yogurt, would you guess that the peanut butter has more calories?  Yes? Would you guess it has almost 10 times more calories?  Well, it isn't obvious to me.  So, the first step in our system was to get an app for our phones into which we record everything we eat.  I tend to put in the numbers for the day after dinner.  My wife puts in the numbers during and after each meal.  The app will tell you how many calories your body needs for your age and weight, and how many calories you can take in in order to lose a certain amount of weight per week.  One pound of weight loss per week seems to be the default suggestion. These criteria will determine your daily calorie limit.  There are many of these apps available for free.  Try using a few. 

The primary weakness in this system is estimating the quantity of food and finding it in the app database.  But, you need not be equally careful about everything on your plate.  I found out that the rice and  beans in my mexican dish are low enough in calories that it doesn’t matter if I get the quantities or recipe wrong.  However, the difference in a hamburger with cheese and bacon and a one with tomato, mustard, and onions is huge.  The exact size of a salad makes little differnce.  The amount and type of salad dressing is significant.  So, just focus more on the calorie-packed items. You can safely ignore the calories in your tiny side salad or serving of green beans, if you are in a hurry.

Note that as you lose weight, you carry around less weight and need less food to power your sleeker body.  For me, the 30 pounds I have lost means I now need to consume 200 calories (~7%) less to maintain the new weight.  It definitely feels better for my feet and back not to be carrying around that extra weight.

And, regarding weight loss.  It isn’t linear.  My first 15 pounds was gone in couple of months.  Then, I plateaued.  Then, without changing anything, I lost another 5 pounds.  Then, nothing.  Then, another 2 pounds, etc.  I don’t really understand why.  I assume it was my body learning how to consume body fat and I was building muscle at the same time.  Sometimes our weight would go up. It didn’t help that the scale we used for most of this time was highly variable, e.g. if you leaned forward you weighed 5 pounds less.   Our new scale was less expensive and works great.  It is mentally much healthier to wait a week or month between measurements and not to worry about a few pounds up or down every day.  We stick to our system and get healthier by eating better and exercising, even when we are not losing weight.

Satiation

A natural observation is that if you constrain your food intake you will be more hungry.  However, you can limit this dramatically by eating foods that are more filling (create more satiation) per calorie.  I find that I now avoid certain foods if they give me lots of calories but leave me hungry later.  I also consider eating much less of something delicious and calorific if I know that I could have something healthy later that would satisfy my hunger (see Snacking, below).  Also, I find that many times I finish eating and then gradually feel much more full over the next hour or so, to the point where I know I should have stopped earlier.   But, how to know which foods are which?

There has been some research into this and I’m sure it is less than perfectly scientific because it is based on people’s feelings.  But, it may be a good place to start.  Look for foods high in protein, fiber, and volume.  Fats are calorie dense and low in satiation. In other words, fatty foods will leave you more hungry for the same calories, so try to limit them. A banana will leave you more than twice as full as the same calories worth of potato chips.  An orange is supposedly 40% better than a banana.  It is quite physically impossible to eat too many calories when eating certain foods.  For example, 35 oranges is one day’s worth of calories, as are 20 cans of black beans, or 10 cups of brown rice!  In terms of calories, these are each the same as 1.7 bags of potato chips, one 12 oz pizza, or 23 Tim Tams!   So, if you cook a huge chicken breast, a huge side of beans and rice, a bunch of salsa on top, you probably can’t physically consume it all in one meal, but will easily stay under your calorie limit.  Or, you could try to restrain yourself to a few slices of pizza and be hungry while exceeding your calorie limit.  

Do some research on yourself and pay attention to your experience with different foods.  Compare and choose foods that meet your calorie limits that are sufficiently both tasty and filling. 

Snacking

My hunger level changes with the time of day, activity level, and type of activity. It also changes with what I have recently eaten and the smells and sights around me.  So, it is impossible to precisely match my meal size, type, and timing to my appetite.  I need to know that I can snack whenever I want.  That way, I can err on the side of eating less and if I eat too little, I know I’m not going to go hungry.  Sometimes if I’m hungry, but know I can get a snack anytime I like, I will get distracted for a while and forget that I was hungry.  If that snack wasn’t available, I might keep fixating on being hungry.

So, in my system I have snack foods.  These have to be tasty and immediately available.  I experimented with meal replacement drinks, but they were not very satisfying.  I’m currently going for dried fruits and nuts.  I can eat about 1.5 ounces of pistachios and 7 slices of dried mango and feel very satisfied for only 400 calories.  I will often have a Power Bowl which is a healthy mix of foods but at 320 calories, not a full meal for me, so I add a snack of nuts and dried fruit.  Salsa, particularly bean and corn salsa, is something else I enjoy.  It is low in calories itself, but high in calories if eaten with chips.  On the other hand, crispbread is nice and crunchy and has few calories, making it a good substitute.

Always have healthy snacks ready at hand.  Never bring unhealthy ones into your house.  I have much more willpower at the grocery store than I do at home when I’m hungry.

Sugar and Salt

I have found that I have gotten used to having less sugar and salt.  My mother cooked with plenty of salt.  It took a year to get used to my wife’s cooking which is very low salt, but I did.  You can do it too.

Leave salt out of the recipe. You get more than enough in any kind of processed or canned food.  And put a nice sea salt grinder on the table, adding a bit when you like.  Crunching a just bit of sea or kosher salt on a forkful of food will yield a nice, bright flavor.   

My doctor said I should cut out all sweets.  From what I have read, our bodies convert excess sugars into fat.  We aren’t built to repeatedly consume lots of sugar and this is why we have problems with obesity and diabetes.  I find it really difficult to limit the amounts of sweets I eat, so I just built into my eating system that  I don’t eat sweets anymore.  Yes, I loved  to have a few Tim Tams every night.  But, it simply isn’t in my system now.  I have successfully reprogrammed myself to not crave sugary foods.  I don’t feel too bad or left out when someone offers me a piece of cake.  I just tell them it looks delicious, but I don’t eat that.  I would rather have some fruit and nuts, anyway.

Fruit does contain significant sugar, but apparently if it is taken with all the normal fiber in fruit, then it will absorb into your system more slowly and also make you more full than if you just had a sugary dessert. We are lucky that there is fresh fruit available year round.  One way to have a sweet and special dessert is to saute some fruit, for example sliced peaches or a couple sliced bananas in a small amount of butter.  Top with some whipped cream.  Three peaches, a teaspoon of butter, and some canned whipped cream is about 300 calories. Much more luxurious and filling than three Tim Tams.  And, if the fruit is very nice and ripe, just eat the fruit, and save half the calories!

Intermittent Fasting

I used to get a headache and feel very queasy when I missed a meal.  I absolutely needed something to eat for breakfast, “the most important meal of the day”, or I could hardly drive to work.  Skip lunch?  No, I will be useless until dinner.

This really can’t make sense.  In the past, humans missed many meals.  If they missed a meal and then didn’t have enough energy to catch or find another meal, would have quickly died.  Our bodies are actually built to survive nicely eating food every few days.  In fact, a normal person can go a month or maybe two without food.  

If fasting isn’t bad for us, is it actually good for us?  There is evidence that fasting switches off insulin production and our bodies use the process of autophagy to break down old, damaged cells to get energy and continue building new cells. Mice fed a certain amount of calories in a period of eight hours per day were healthier and slimmer than those fed the same calories throughout the entire day.  Fasting apparently increases a key nerve growth factor and lowers the risk of various brain diseases such as Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis and Alzheimer’s in animals.  

After my doctor encouraged my interest in  fasting, we came up with a system. My wife and I typically exercise in the morning and eat our first meal about 2pm.  We also have no problem finding a seat in a restaurant at that time.  That is usually our ‘big’ meal.  Then we eat dinner about 7pm.  Then, I often have a snack about 9pm.  Compressing eating into an 8 hour or less window means we have a 16 hour fast.  I try to time my snack so that I’m not hungry when I go to sleep around midnight.  I wake up without being hungry and can exercise or do some physical or mental work without any issues.  Previously, I would have been ill if I went sailing in the morning and didn’t eat until 2pm.  Now, I don’t have any problems doing that.  Once I sit down to eat the first meal of the day, I am very hungry.  Bonus:  the food tastes even better.

I have read about fasting a one or two days a week.  I think I will try this it at some point, but I doubt I can make it part of a permanent system with other people eating around me.   At some time I learned my great uncle, after his wife died, for 20 years ate only one very large meal a day--a breakfast of a dozen eggs, 1/2 pound of bacon, and a large bowl of oatmeal. He lived to be 85 and never went to the doctor. How did he do this? At one point I thought it much have been the oatmeal. Now, I wonder if it was his 23 hour fast every day. Plus, he didn't have a care and walked everywhere.

Eating Out

One of the pleasures in retired life is being able to afford to eat out, where other people cook the food, serve it to you, and do the dishes.  When we eat out, that is definitely our big meal of the day, especially because in the US,  the portion size is large.  We often either split a meal at lunch or  bring some home with us for dinner the next day.  Restaurant food frequently contains more fat or sugar than we use at home. Some foods that we loved before we no longer eat once we found out they contained massive calories, and there were other delicious dishes with reasonable calories.  Salad with a protein or splitting a steak and a salad are favorite meals out. 

Study the menu and check out the calories of to order before leaving home.

Hard and Soft Drinks

I enjoy a nice dark, heavy beer with my meal.  Or wheat beer, or maybe a margarita in the summer.   Alcohol has its own calories, but it also makes me tired and if I have two drinks, I’m not 100% for a few hours.  There have also been some alcoholism problems in my family, my Dad died of Parkinson’s, and I have had some liver enzyme anomalies.  So, I don’t drink much.  Since I like to think (maybe too much), and I like draft beer more than cans and bottles,  I have made a rule that I don’t drink at home, and only have one drink occasionally when out.  Everyone should have their own system that works for them.

Soft drinks are simply not worth the trouble.  Pure calories from sugar.  Many include caffeine and are thus physically addictive.  My wife still likes a Dr. Pepper about once a week. To me it is 150 calories, isn’t filling, and thus not worth it.  She enjoys the taste and sometimes needs the caffeine for a headache.  Before that, she drank the diet version.  She stopped drinking that because we read that it contributed to weight gain as it messed with insulin.  We still are not sure about that, but after stopping the diet drinks some of her autoimmune issues stopped or got much better.  We changed to unsweetened ice tea, which is very refreshing with almost no calories, but with caffeine.  This was sometimes giving me insomnia, since I don’t usually have caffeine.  So, now we normally drink water.  Zero calories, zero caffeine, no artificial ingredients.  And, we save about $7 each time we dine out. 

With the pandemic, I am currently missing my occasional pint of porter or stout.  I might have to break down and drink some from a bottle at home, but for now, I'm doing fine.

However you design your system, make sure you are able to sustain it indefinitely.  Make it simple.  Bring into your house only food that is part of your system.  Don’t rely on your intuition to judge whether something is too much to eat.  Use an app with a food database.  Pick foods that will fill you up without too many calories.  Don’t waste your calories on things that you don’t like or things that will leave you hungry in an hour.  Err on the light side and deal with occasional hunger by having a snack available that won’t drive you over your calorie limit.  Decide how much alcohol is right for you.  Don’t be a slave to caffeine or anything else. 

Exercise

If you can’t move (e.g. squat, kneel, climb, lift) or if you have little stamina, you will be physically unable to do many things. This, of course, removes many good choices and thus a measure of happiness from your life.  It happens to most people, if they live long enough, but it is worth the effort to delay the inevitable for a few more happy decades.

Many people I know have had knees and hips and shoulders replaced.  Some of these seem to be related to repetitive motion or impact injuries when they were young.  I ran some track in high school and learned my body doesn’t seem to like running, plus I had the wrong shoes and wasn’t coached in how to run well.  I definitely won't start running now. 

Walking is OK.  It’s much more fun when you do it with someone else.  I started walking on a treadmill while watching TV.  I decided that to get sufficient exercise to significantly affect my calorie output, I would have to walk for a couple of hours to burn 600 calories.  Then, I got a rowing machine, which was very difficult at first since it worked muscles in my hips that I guess had not been used enough, meaning I had to stop every 10 minutes and stretch to relieve the pain.  However, now I can burn about 600 calories in an hour without stopping.  Rowing is very aerobic, and is especially good for strengthening core muscles, arms and hands.  It stretches my legs and hip joints.  My wife prefers a stationary bike which burns about 600 calories in an hour also.  In the summer, we switch to water aerobics which burns half as many calories an hour, but we also either exercise longer or do other physical work.  We listen to a podcast or watch TV while exercising in order to occupy our minds and distract us, making exercise something to look forward to.  

Because we started eating better and exercising at the same time, it is hard to say which has had the most effect on our weight loss.  But we can tell the exercise is beneficial in and of itself in terms of  retaining or increasing stamina, strength, and flexibility.

To create a system for exercise, pick something that you can do that you enjoy doing.  Or, do something enjoyable while you exercise.  Pick something you will do every day.  Don’t skip days. If you can change your exercise routine to work on multiple muscle groups, that is better.  Something that increases your flexibility is even better. 

I hope that there are a couple of items in this article that were useful. If you have any suggestions, please include them in your comments.

Burney Waring is an almost-completely retired global consultant engineer, and Director of Retirement Testing at the Waring Retirement Laboratory.