Living well…  So you can read that a couple of different ways.  This blog will hopefully speak to both interpretations of that phrase.  We hope to point readers to ways to improve their quality of life, through better health, even into (hopefully) old age.

To clarify this up front.  The information provided will be either vetted through my direct personal experience or observation, or will make obvious sense.  That said, much of this is going to be cutting edge science so keep that in mind as you peruse through the site.

My one main effort at contributing “my” work on this blog will be this article. Here, I will attempt to summarize/synthesize/condense the content of this blog into one read. Then, if you want to take a deeper dive into some subject area, well, all the information is tagged for your convenience. Again, unless specifically noted, none of this is my original thought process.

There are a few levers we can pull in the effort to enhance our health and work toward getting our healthspan to line up with our life span. In a perfect world, we would go into our last days mobile, lucid, and pain-free – and then simply die in our sleep. This as opposed to living out the “sick aging phenotype” described in “The Barbell Prescription.” We all see this everyday. People to are in chronic pain, overweight, chronically ill, and taking a lot of medications. The levers that we can easily reach are:

• Nutrition
• Strength Training & Metabolic Conditioning
• Sleep
• Stress Management
• Social Support & Sense of Purpose
• Nutrition can be straightforward or incredibly complicated, depending on your view of things or how you choose to approach it. For me, I am currently convinced that our health largely rises or falls based on how we manage our insulin production. There are many in-depth posts regarding insulin resistance on this blog page, but I will summarize a couple of things here.
• Insulin is a fat storage hormone. Excess calories consumed in the presence of insulin, will be converted to, and stored as, fat. Absent insulin, our bodies tend to metabolize calories in other ways. To the degree we efficiently dispose of and otherwise use insulin, our bio-markers tend to improve. Two very effective ways of getting good at dealing with insulin and its effects, are eating a ketogenic diet and/or some type of fasting. Both of these approaches can have a dramatic effect on our insulin production, and by extension, our insulin sensitivity.  When applied over long periods of time, these approaches can have the desirable effect of lowering our average insulin, lowering our insulin variability, and lowering our glycogen levels. Also, both the ketogenic diet and fasting may have anti-cancer effects.
• Exercise. As we age, preservation of muscle mass becomes critical to withstanding illness and preventing injury. The most efficient method of building and maintaining muscle mass is lifting heavy weight. Conversely, many popular aerobic activities have a catabolic and inflammatory effect on the body. The beauty of weight training is that it can be scaled precisely to your specific ability in both intensity and duration – most other exercises cannot. This scalability makes weight training some of the safest exercise that a person can undertake. And, again, the results are precisely that which we are trying to achieve in terms of maintaining wellness.
• Sleep is a fantastic place to make some headway because, who doesn’t like a good night’s sleep? The things we need to do to get enough, good sleep are pretty well documented and very low cost. Failure to get enough good sleep (for even one night) results in the stress hormone cortisol being released which tends to interfere with a number of metabolic functions, not the least of which is fat burning.
• Stress management tends to be the most neglected, of all these levers.  We can get tips on stress management all over the place, but there does not seem to be a consensus on best practices. That said, there appears to be good evidence that shows that engaging in daily breathing exercises a few times a day can have a positive impact on our stress levels, and (more importantly) bio-markers such as blood pressure.
• Social support and sense of purpose. I have seen first-hand what happens to people who retire and then spend most of that retirement on a couch. As you can imagine, nothing good comes of this. These folks typically experience a long, steady decline in health. The sense I get is that many of us now understand the importance of remaining engaged with family and friends in meaningful ways.

So, those are the things, in a nutshell, we need to manage to improve our health.  For me, the two easiest have been the nutrition and sleep.  On the nutrition side, allow me to offer this.  Cut out all refined sugar; Restrict the intake of refined carbs as much as reasonable (the more you restrict, the more radical the weight loss) – instead, eat whole, unprocessed food.  Then, do what you can to put some time in between meals.  If you do these things, you should see your belly shrink and your weight decrease.

More to follow…