Easy-Peasy Exercise and Eating – Stay Trim, Strong, and Healthy

After failing, since age 26, to find an exercise-and-eating method that worked well and that I could keep up, because I never actually quit trying, not long ago I stumbled across a combo that works for me: (Exercise = X3Bar stretchy bands 15 minutes is the main part.)

Eating: Turns out that fast-converting carbs are my nemesis. Once I have more than about 30-50 grams of “fast carbs” like breads, potato, sweets, then I have the “gobbles” for the rest of the day. Further, these carbs make me feel bad, and I grew fatter and fatter from 40 up through almost 75 years old. (Picture to the left is me at age 40.)

Not because of any real wisdom but really through accident, I found a “gradient” of changing things that made each step easy, and yet it took me in just a handful of months to a low-carb diet largely free of processed foods and fast foods, a daily intermittent-fasting schedule of eating within an 8-hour window, and 14 days during the month when I fasted completely (no food, no juice, no broth),

Seen in retrospect, it’s become clear why this sequence worked —

THE HIDDEN “FOOD” THAT DOOMS YOU TO BEING FAT

a) First, get OFF the fast-carb roller-coaster. You will NEVER be healthy eating todays high-carb diet. The invention of agriculture was destructive to individual humans, but elongated the survival of the species. But, the body body wasn’t originally designed on such a diet. Recent changes from big agriculture and big business have made carb-heavy foods even more addictive and more damaging. So the first step is — how to cut the foods that have you addicted and ruin your health?

The answer is to find low-carb veggies and clean protein, and TANK UP all day long. After some number of days, your urges to gobble grains and sweets will diminish, and (by avoiding processed foods) you’ll avoid poisons which trigger over-eating (like MSG) and hidden sugar.

Don’t be afraid of eating fat. The energy from fat will keep you feeling satisfied, and you’re replacing sugar/grains with fat as your main energy source. Just make sure they are the clean and healthy fats. There’s lots of lies in food marketing. For example, Canola Oil is a manufacturing byproduct, Crisco is harmful, “vegetable” oils are mostly bad for you, as are most commercial salad dressings with soybean oil, and as is margerine, and any “low-fat” imitation fat.

If it’s a fat without manufacturing, it’s probably OK: olive oil, coconut oil, avocado oil, and butter are all pretty good for you. Others aren’t. They were made up to make money for their makers, not for your health.

You want to get your carbs UNDER 40 grams a day. To calculate, here’s a free tool: https://cronometer.com/

Use it till you got this down. Note: three normal corn tortillas are about 45 grams of carbs. But you can tank up on salads, soups (without potato or grains), and stir-fries of the right ingredients. All leafy greens and the sulphur veggies, and many others. So for example: huge salad with seeds and healthy salad dressing, curry made with cauliflower and spinich or other greens and coconut oil, soup made with chicken carcass and all the healthy veggies you want. All these will fill you up with high nutrition and satiety, without addictive, fast-converting carbs. All the steaks and chicken and pork you want, avoiding additives as much as possible.

THE EASY WAY TO DROP WEIGHT WHILE EATING TONS OF FOOD

b) As your compulsive urge to over-eat fades away, choose an eating window for every day. Instead of eating all day and all night, eat ONLY within a 6-hour to 8-hour window. Eat TONS so you cannot be hungry. And in a surprisingly short time, you’ll find it’s actually easy to only eat within this window, which is MUCH closer to how we ate over 100,000 years, and for which the body was originally designed.

If you have to, you may need to start with a longer window (eg: 10 or 12 hours) and then when that’s comfortable, narrow it down.

LIVE LONGER, AVOID ALZHEIMERS, KEEP YOUR IMMUNE HEALTHY

c) When the 6-hour or 8-hour window becomes easy — probably a matter of some weeks since you began this … Try a ONE day fast.

I discovered that it wasn’t a big deal. Seemed weird, but I wasn’t particularly hungry. To make it really easy, start your day with “Bulletproof Coffee” (look it up), which is black coffee with butter, or MCT oil or coconut oil added in. This gives your body some fat, producing satiety.

And once you can do a one-day fast, then you can do another one. My first step was to fast one day on the first and 16th of each month. After a couple months of this — easy peasy — you can add another day or two. Once this was comfortable, I thought to try a 3-day fast. Holy cow! It wasn’t all that troublesome.

Now at this point, your body is already making your immune stronger, and autophagy is starting to kick in, which recycles dead and damaged cells, and the study above suggests you’re getting some protection from Alzheimers.

You just keep adding some more fast days. I finally got to a 3-day fast on the first and 16th, then three one-day fasts in each two-week period. And … it’s bloody easy, energy goes up, sleep gets better.

EXERCISE FOR BETTER STRENGTH, ENERGY, AND SLEEP

d) Now, I combined this with an exercise plan. I do not know if this is essential or not, but that’s what I did. I purchased the X3Bar system, which is heavy duty bands and a short routine of 4 whole-body exercises most days, takes 15 minutes, and takes your muscles to exhaustion in a clever manner, with super-low chance of any injury.

Now, because my work is sedentary, I found that a couple more very short exercise periods kept me awake better. I added a walk up the hill behind my house in the morning, and when that became comfortable after a month or two, then I began short bursts (sprints), and now it’s a couple blocks of hill sprints. I wear minimal clothing, because low cold strengthens the immune system, and the impact of the sprinting is good for bone density. And this takes under 10 minutes.

And then I added a brief kettlebell session in later afternoon, kettlebell swings and presses just enough to make me breath heavy.

That’s it. I dropped 70 pounds fairly quickly, got stronger, sleep better and my mood seemed to improve as well.