How I’ve Ended Up Thinking About Healthspan
This is the messy center of the whole healthspan thing for me – the parts that stuck after the podcasts stopped sounding new and the experiments started repeating themselves. What’s here is simply what I’ve found workable over time.
Overall Approach
You are what you eat. You can’t out exercise a bad diet. Etc. Lots of advice, but what should you actually do?
The goal here is not for short term weight management, but rather for a sustainable, enjoyable approach for the next 50+ years. Thus no absolute restrictions or expensive ingredients. Instead, a set of principles.
Mediterranean diet
This is a lower carb, higher protein approach, cycled over two weeks.
It is NOT a ketogenic diet. Keto is too hard to get right, and too risky if you don’t (eg your lipid profile will go haywire).
Key Principles
- Don’t count our measure calories
- Reduce carbs – generally avoid ‘anything white’. ie pick recipes without pasta, rice, bread, grains, potatoes
- Additional protein intake via supplementation. It is hard to get to 2.2mg of protein per kg of body weight. Have two protein shakes per day. See Protein page.
- Eat some servings of fermented foods to boost gut biome (yoghurt, Kefir, Sauerkraut and kimchi)
- Lots of Vegetables (esp cruciferous such as broccoli and cauliflower), beans, lentils. Avocados. And more beans and legumes.
- Fruit, but no more than 2-3 serves per day (too much sugar)
- Oily fish, esp salmon
- Some purely vegetarian meals
- Healthy snacks – tree nuts, fruit
- Hydration – 2.5+l of water
- Break all the rules once or twice over a two week period. Eat anything. Eat too much.
- The only strongly suggested exception is drinking sugar drinks. Whether this is a can of soft drink or fruit juice, just don’t. Empty calories, lots of additives
- Consider fasting one day per fortnight
- Consider Intermittent fasting, where you consume all your calories in a 6 (ideal) to 8 hour window each day (a relatively straightforward way to manage your weight and total calories)
- Have your last meal a few hours before bedtime
- Eat until you are 80% full then stop
- No snacking after dinner
- Minimal alcohol