Is This Book for Me?
Let me address the $64,000 question up front.
Fast and Low may also be useful to you if you have delved into understanding healthy living but are daunted by the choices of different methodologies and practices, such as specialized diets and complex workouts.
Specifically, this book may help you if you are looking to shed some weight, gain muscle, improve your blood work numbers, feel energized, or in general get more out of your day, and do all this by starting small and slowly working your way up, following a step-by-step, scientific approach.
Fast and Low may not be for you if you are looking for a deep dive into any one of the several topics it discusses. I do provide scientific background and references, but I did not intend to explore any one health trend in depth in this book. In fact, my first draft was much longer than the current book, but I consciously worked on removing content that can be referenced through outside sources in order to focus mainly on actions and how-tos.
This book also does not debate the merits of various health trends, nor does it take sides with polarized stances (such as veganism versus keto diets). Instead, it presents the best practices and benefits of several different prevailing viewpoints.
What’s in the Book?
I am an engineer and all my life have been driven by scientific approaches to everything, be it in work or life in general. In this book you will find a set of scientific principles that will help you make meaningful and permanent lifestyle changes.
Whenever you embark on a journey to achieve something new or make any change in your life, you start with a goal, a purpose. As an engineer, I like to define my goals in numbers. A numerical goal gives you the ability to measure and know exactly how far away you are from your end objective at any time. It enables you to know whether you’re making any progress toward your goal and whether the healthy actions you’re taking are working for you.
For example, if your goal is to lose weight, saying “I want to lose weight” and saying “I want to lose 30 pounds in three months” are two very different goal definitions toward a similar objective. The former is certainly a goal, but the latter, while keeping the same objective, makes it measurable.
While this is an extreme example, in the book I will explain how you can draft almost all your goals in numeric terms. Then I’ll give you tools to measure and monitor them with minimal effort.
Goal definition is just the first step. You must take concrete actions to achieve your goals. Again, I would like all my actions to be measurable. In the book I will also provide a simple way to define and measure your actions toward your goals.
“Is that it?” you may ask. “Define measurable goals and measurable actions and you’re done?”
Not quite.
Another big theme of this book is that every human being is unique and different from every other.
In nature, almost no two things are exactly alike. No two trees in a large forest are identical in all their branches and leaves. Even a simple snowflake, one among the countless snowflakes in nature, is unique in its form. Just reflect for a second that with the unimaginable complexity of human life forms, how uniquely different you may be from any other person who ever existed (or ever will exist).
It’s not just your fingerprints, your retinal structure, or your dental imprint. Every single cell in your body is distinct and different from those of any other person in all of human history! This difference, encoded in your DNA, makes you a unique individual in the known universe.
This realization is important, because when it comes to health decisions and choices, it is vital to understand that what works for one person may or may not work for others.
More specifically, what works for some people may or may not work for you.
After you’ve set your measurable goals and measurable actions, I’ll describe a process of self-experimentation by which you can measure the effects of your chosen actions in a scientific manner. This will enable you to focus on the actions that advance you toward your goals and not pursue the ones that do not have any major impact. The guidance and techniques in this book work especially well if you are willing to experiment and, in the process, learn what health improvement strategies are the most suitable for you.
Starting Points
After prolonged self-experimentation and extensive study, I have learned that for most health and fitness goals there are just a handful of simple and commonsense things that one must be aware of and try out.
The Pareto principle, named after the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, states that for many events, roughly 80 percent of the effects come from 20 percent of the causes.
In this book I’ll share the roughly 20 percent of strategies that can potentially have profound positive effects on your health.
If the title of the book wasn’t a giveaway, I am going to focus on diet and diet-related habits, specifically intermittent Fasting and a Low-carb diet, though I’ll also touch on other cornerstones of health, including exercise, meditation, and sleep. However, all these will come together in a measurable metric-based framework based on easy self-experimentation.
Chances are that you either already know about and are practicing a low-carb diet or have at least heard about it. You may also have heard of or even practiced intermittent fasting. And you very likely know at least some of the benefits of exercise, good sleep, and mental relaxation.
In this book I’m sharing a step-by-step methodology that can make it easier for you to incorporate these lifestyle changes and to stick to your health plans, once you’ve figured out what is working for you.
Given any problem, there may be many ways to solve it. However, not all solutions are optimal or effective.
As a general rule in life, if you’re facing something challenging and the solution seems either too hard or too time consuming, take a step back and have another look at the problem. There may be a simpler solution available, or if you take another step back, you may even be able to redefine or reframe the problem.
Before committing to an arduous challenge, I often say this to myself: Are you picking up a sledgehammer to break down the wall in front of you? Look around—there may be a door somewhere.
Finding an optimal solution to a problem or a better way forward may not be as easy as it sounds. In his celebrated book Principles, Ray Dalio writes, “If you work hard and creatively, you can have anything you want but not everything you want. Maturity is the ability to reject good alternatives in order to pursue even better ones.”
This principle and the benefit of finding the right solution works in all aspects of human life but can be life altering when it comes to choosing the right health strategies.
The methods explained in this book may help you pursue better alternatives when it comes to healthy choices. I’m hoping to lead you to that door in the wall following a step-by-step, scientific methodology.
What’s Not in This Book?
There are no medicines, herbal remedies or magic potions suggested here.
While I do talk about a lot of common ailments related to lifestyle and metabolic disorders, I focus only on lifestyle changes to address these problems.
Wherever I suggest any lifestyle change, like altering your diet, fasting, exercising, or taking a nutritional supplement, please make sure you understand the possible ramifications of that change for your health.
If you are seeing a doctor for any health problem or suspect that you may have an ailment, please speak with your health-care provider before making any changes.
How Can You Make the Most out of This Book?
To help you keep tabs on key aspects of your baseline health—the number of times you eat and the amount of carbs you eat, how much exercise you perform, or other actions you may take—I provide a free mobile app that lets you very easily track these things.
Tracking is everywhere. There are a multitude of devices and smartphones with very advanced sensors that track almost every aspect of our lives. You may already be using a fitness tracker or smartwatch that tracks your activities, steps, sleep, exercise, heart rate, and much more.
When it comes to diet, you will also find a number of apps on the market that enable you to log what you eat, the number of calories, grams of fat, and so on. I’ve tried a number of these apps for diet tracking but have found most of them to be very hard to use. These apps are trying to do a lot of things, and because of that, they end up becoming quite complex and clunky.
After a lot of experimentation, I found that an app that relies on human capability to make some judgments about the content of food and then offers a simple way to track can be much more efficient.
The companion app that I provide with this book gives you a simple interface to very quickly and efficiently log your health-related metrics. In fact, it should take you only a few seconds to log in each meal, and a few more seconds to add daily actions or update the goal metrics. I have been using the principles behind this app for about two years, and I continue to apply improvements to make the app even simpler and more usable on a regular basis. The link to the apps appears at the end of this introduction.
I understand that your life is extremely busy and adding another tracker or app may seem challenging, but if you just try this app for a few minutes, you’ll see how easy it is to use.
I’ve designed the app to have several layers of functionality that you can use as you get more familiar with the concepts behind those functions. The app also enables you to track your fasting schedule, if you’re planning to do or are already doing intermittent fasting. With the app, you can create targets for both carbs and fasts and track them very easily.
As you get more familiar with the app, you may also use comprehensive Goal and Action tracking, which is an advanced concept but very powerful if you’re looking to find out which actions, foods, or other tactics work best for you. I discuss these topics in depth in the book with regard to goals, actions, and self-experimentation.
I must add that it is not required to use the app to get all the benefits from this book. However, I highly recommend the use of this free app. If you use it for a couple of weeks, you’ll begin to see the full benefits, including the psychological benefits of such tracking.
The app’s user interface is carefully designed to help you achieve your health goals using simple techniques of positive visual reinforcement.
Also, since the app is freely available on both the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, anyone can use the app even without purchasing this book.
I sincerely hope that you will find this book and the app useful and this will help you live a healthier and fuller life. I would love to hear from you. You can share your feedback and insights with me and other readers in an Amazon book review or write to me at feedback@fastandlow.app
Are you ready to begin the journey toward better health?
Let’s get started.