Most people in the world and even most corporations have good intentions. When people give advice or companies sell their products, they hope that you’ll benefit from what they’re offering you. Causing you harm is neither their objective nor in their interest. Yet, often a health tip taken out of context, or a poor-quality product, can cause great harm.
Our lives are inundated with information overload. It is critical to be extremely cautious about matters pertaining to health in these times. You must learn to carefully consider several options for any lifestyle change or medical treatment, even when advised by professionals.
This is the reason I am not going to be too prescriptive about anything in this book. I intend to provide you with information backed by science and data, but most importantly, I will help you find what can actually work for you by laying the foundations of goal setting, tracking, and metric-based self-experimentation. Instead of throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks, I’ll give you solid starting points with an eye toward the 80/20 rule. We just need to zero in on the 20 percent of changes that will bring you the best outcomes.
Let me begin by telling you a little about my own health journey and how it motivated me to write this book.
My Story
“The writing is on the wall,” my doctor told me when he started me on 81 milligrams of aspirin one evening in Fremont, California.
It was 2005 and my prognosis was grim.
My cholesterol was high, particularly the low-density and very low-density lipoproteins (LDL and VLDL, respectively).
My high-density lipoprotein (HDL, the “good” cholesterol) was low, and my triglycerides were off the charts. I was not obese but not in shape either, and I complained of noticing a skipped heartbeat once in a while.
I have a family history of cardiovascular diseases—hypertension, arrhythmia, diabetes, and stroke. Being on triglyceride- and cholesterol-lowering medication wasn’t really helping, and I was on a path that looked destined to lead to either diabetes first and then cardiovascular problems, or the other way around.
My lifestyle wasn’t helping either. I was working from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. at a Silicon Valley tech startup, even working most Saturdays and eating a lot of processed and not particularly healthy foods. My daily exercise was limited to a walk after lunch with a few colleagues.
And while I was not sick at the time, the “writing on the wall” the doctor had mentioned was something I knew was very real.
I knew I had to do something about it but had neither the time, motivation, or knowledge at that juncture. I was a sitting duck waiting for things to happen to me.
Even without any dramatic symptoms, I was often lethargic. Some days I would wake up listless, drag myself to the office, and have barely enough energy to slog through the day’s work. I was sometimes irritated and on a short fuse. While this wasn’t the case every day, I was getting used to a boring and colorless new normal of dull headaches and general malaise.
My half-yearly health checkups would remind me of the slow-moving train wreck I was creeping toward. My numbers deteriorated over the years or at best hovered south of normal levels even after medication.
I was not in control and felt helpless. I felt like a driver heading up an icy hill, spinning my wheels but sliding back.
Fast-forward 16 years, and things look very different. My cholesterol has come down significantly, my triglycerides are in normal range, I’m in great shape, and many times doctors have given my heart a clean report. Most days I’m full of energy, the day shines bright, and I’m ready to take on whatever comes my way.
Of course, there are some “down” days when things go wrong or I don’t feel particularly great, but those days are rare, and most importantly, I am not only able to understand why they happen but also able to control them.
And here’s the kicker: I overcame the downward trend in my health without any medication.
So, what really happened in the past 16 years so that instead of going downhill, I feel I’m in my prime? How did I get the snow chains on my sliding, slipping car on ice?
There wasn’t one particular thing I did or one remarkable event that reshaped my life. I went through a gradual change. I made changes incrementally and improved things iteratively through trial, error, and self-experimentation.
Making a lifestyle change is a daunting task, and many people fail because they try to do too much too quickly or spend their energy and time in pursuit of a new health fad, only to hit a wall and get frustrated.
With my 20/20 hindsight, I could have achieved this in much less time had I known earlier what I know now. I wasted a lot of time on efforts that seemingly made sense but weren’t truly beneficial to my condition in the long run. Improvements didn’t come until I found a handful of things that finally clicked for me and gave me relatively quick results.
The things that mattered most—my 20 percent—were the key, and even among them, the handful of actions that really resonated with my body and mind made the whole difference in the end.
I am going to share all of that learning in this book and hope it will help you as it helped me.
The Tyranny of Overspecialization
In quest of better health, I did a lot of research on health, wellness, lifestyle, diet, exercise, and general self-improvement. I read countless books and research papers on health and physiology and watched documentaries, YouTube videos, TED Talks, and much more. I discussed health matters with friends, doctors, people at work, and acquaintances online. I did all this not out of curiosity but because my life depended on it.
However, I soon realized that in today’s world of hyperspecialization, there is no dearth of specialized advice. In fact there are far too many specialists, and with that excess comes the risk of what in mathematics is known as a local maximum—a state of hyperoptimization of a certain aspect or factor at the expense of other things.
I read numerous books on diet trends. Some writers advocated Atkins or Paleo diets, while others touted the miracles of veganism. Some spoke about how carbohydrates broadly are a problem, while others narrowed the issue down to grains. Some books focused on breathing as a miracle cure and claimed that “overbreathing” is the real toxin. And some blamed all our health problems on the use of industrial chemicals in food and its packaging, while others pointed the finger at excesses of the food industry and overuse of hormones, food additives, fertilizers, or pesticides.
Each expert also suggested a different methodology for monitoring health. Some talked about skin health, some about nails or hair, some recommended elaborate blood tests, some focused solely on gut health, and some saw everything through the prism of telomere length—the condition of the part of our DNA that naturally shortens with replication. Some just picked an organ, like the liver, and attributed all human ailments to some kind of malfunction of that organ.
I am not disagreeing with any of these experts. In fact, they may all be correct in their own way. They are experts, after all.
Humans are highly complex organisms, and perhaps each expert’s advice is applicable to some extent for some people.
But it’s extremely hard to read and understand all these trends and then apply them to your life in a balanced way. By the time you find what works for you and finally drum up the discipline and motivation to incorporate it into your life, it may be too late.
On the other hand, yes, you can do it! I’m a living example. Ultimately I landed on the right combination for me, though it took me about 15 years to do it.
Not everyone has the time and motivation to follow this path. And if you’re seeking health advice from books, those experts’ tomes are highly specialized. They usually start with a lot of background and theory on why this particular thing they’re talking about is so important. A typical health book gradually builds a case by quoting credible cutting-edge research. The author then tries to bolster the hypothesis by describing case studies, and finally provides some actionable advice. For the average reader searching for an approach that works, finding the solution by reading specialized health books can be a long slog through too many back alleys that sometimes lead to dead ends.
Another drawback of hyper-specialization is that the experts’ conclusions often conflict, and many generally accepted tenets change over time. For instance, you may have read about the ill effects of sugar and the idea that eating too much carbohydrate is bad. While this is widely accepted as true, you may also have read that eating fruit, even in large quantities, is okay—although most fruits are loaded with fructose, a kind of sugar. And while we’ve long been told of the harmful effects of eating too much fat, many sources, such as those who propound Paleo or ketogenic (keto) diets, now claim that eating more fat as opposed to carbohydrates is a better choice for managing cardiovascular health.
They Mean No Harm—They Just Want Your Clicks
Another big problem in the health-advice field is that articles published online are written to attract eyeballs and therefore tend to exaggerate their findings. You may have seen an article, as I did, a few years ago about flossing your teeth.
In 2015 the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) removed flossing from its recommendations. This spawned a number of articles in mainstream media. The Los Angeles Times reported with the headline “Haven’t flossed lately? Don’t feel too bad: Evidence for the benefits of flossing is ‘weak, very unreliable.’ ” (1-1)
I was traveling to the UK at the time this news came out and was amused to read the article in The Guardian: “In Britain we’ve long known about the futility of floss, and now Americans have brushed up on their science, too. As a health measure, it simply doesn’t work.” (1-2)
Standing ovation for puns and clever headlines, but take a seat; there is some truth to be unearthed. Note that even though HHS indeed dropped its recommendation of flossing, a clarification was posted in 2016 in an American Dental Association (ADA) publication: “The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services sent a statement that called flossing ‘an important oral hygiene practice’ and said that the guidelines’ lack of mentioning it did not imply otherwise.”
Unfortunately, most people read only the headline and maybe the first few lines of any article. If you’re able to click through the L.A. Times piece, you’ll find that toward the end, the National Institutes of Health dentist Tim Iafolla said that Americans should still floss. “ ‘It’s low risk, low cost,’ he said. ‘We know there’s a possibility that [flossing] works, so we feel comfortable telling people to go ahead and do it.’ ”
But since most people don’t read to the end, they would have missed this important recommendation. Even fewer actually go on to dig deeper and try to find out what scientists had to say about this in some respected scientific journal beyond the headlines.
For example, see the article (in references below) from the ADA (1-3). The headline is much simpler and a plain statement of fact: “The Medical Benefit of Daily Flossing Called into Question.” You’ll find the ADA’s article to be a balanced description of the facts, and if you read the full text, you’ll see that it ends with a simple recommendation: “In this case, while the average benefit is small and the quality of the evidence is very low (meaning the true average benefit could be higher or lower), given that periodontal disease is estimated to affect half of all Americans, even a small benefit may be helpful.”
Whoa—read that again: “the average benefit is small” (there still is benefit!) and “the quality of evidence is low.” Get that? The quality of evidence is low, not the quality of the benefits.
Low quality of evidence could also mean that any evidence against flossing is also not entirely accurate. So, do you realize what happened here? There is a huge difference between this and the “futility” of flossing that the Guardian claimed.
It would be sad if someone just skimmed through these articles or headlines and tossed out their floss.
I cited the above example to highlight that we are living in a time when, in most cases, you have to balance your understanding across several sources before accepting a fact, particularly in matters that are health related. These articles were published on highly reputable and well-known news outlets. Just imagine the amount of misinformation on run-of-the-mill fake news sites (and they number in the millions).
I know this is hard, as there is far too much information floating around, tugging at you from all directions. The facts, however, are almost always highly nuanced.
If you are on any social media platform like Facebook or WhatsApp, I won’t even try to address the amount of misinformation floating around there.
Even if you don’t buy this book or read it any further, please take it from me that most of the health-related advice on social media platforms is either completely fake or selectively true but peppered with falsehoods intended by someone to drive some agenda. Very rarely will you find any sane health advice on social media. For your own benefit, it’s better just to filter out any such posts or stories.
I hope in this book you’ll find very balanced views that make sense because they are grounded either in scientific fact or in very informed opinion when science has not yet pronounced a judgment.
Why Is It So Hard to Stay Healthy?
Everyone knows that eating healthy, taking in lots of vegetables and fruits, exercising regularly, and sleeping well is good for you, yet most people fail to adhere to these simple guidelines.
Why?
The reason is simple. Lifestyle change doesn’t come from just knowing what is right to do but from also knowing exactly how to achieve it.
Another big reason why most people are struggling today to make meaningful lifestyle changes is because the world is actually rigged against them.
Now, I don’t mean to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but there are some facts you can’t ignore.
The world we are living in today is saturated with information and products, particularly food products that are all designed to draw your attention and also get you hooked on them. Unfortunately, you can no longer trust the powers that decide what goes into our food supplies to decide what’s good for you and what’s not.
Yes, there are agencies such as the FDA and USDA in the United States that broadly have a charter to regulate the food industry, but they intervene only in extreme cases. Their general guidelines can’t stop the food industry from stuffing your cookies with loads of sugar, palm oil, canola oil, high fructose corn syrup, fats, salt, artificial flavors, preservatives, and so on. As long as it’s legal and as long as the label covers it, it’s fair game.
United in Uniqueness
I believe that everyone is different and that when it comes to better health, there is no single, complete formula that can work for everyone. A certain specialized diet or fitness program may work for someone, and they will swear by it and produce blogs, videos, and books about it. But when you try it, it may not work for you. Is it because those people are fraudsters selling snake oil?
Not necessarily. They may just be different from you. Perhaps their bodies simply react differently to the changes they swear by.
On the other extreme are some basic healthy-living principles that are so simple that they’re easily overlooked in the cacophony of emerging new fads.
It is therefore very important that you first adopt these common and universally applicable lifestyle changes. Once you’re on the way to better health, you can then try to apply specialized advice for added, incremental benefit.
After reading this book in its entirety, you may find a handful of takeaways, or even several dozen, that will help you over a period of time. But perhaps more importantly, you will come out armed with a set of tools to apply the lifestyle changes, try them scientifically, and measure the impact of your actions. Using this toolkit, you can see how well you’re progressing toward your goals and decide what is best for your situation.
References
1-1. The Guardian Article https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/aug/03/dentists-great-flossing-yarn
1-2. LA Times Article https://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-floss-benefits-unproven-20160802-snap-story.html
1-3. ADA Publication https://www.ada.org/en/publications/ada-news/2016-archive/august/association-responds-to-news-story-challenging-benefits-of-dental-floss-use#