Fix your health 90%

Yup, 90% only.

How many of us lost time, energy, money in confusion and information overload?
I am surely guilty to this phenomenon.

I have spent the last 6 years obsessing over the functions of the human body and its biochemistry. It surely is a magnificient machine. The body is magical when it comes to functionality. The complexity of the body bewilders me. I don't think even now I know enough about it. I am still obsessing on the details and specifics. This rabbit hole never ends (applies to all rabbit holes actually).

A little backstory.

It was 2015. For the first time I thought about health and fitness in my life.

A friend of mine approached me with teary eyes as her to-be mother-in-law was not ok with her obesity and that was her grounds to reject a love marraige. That sounded silly to me. What if she added weight post marraige like many of us do? Will the marriage be rejected? As a problem solver, it sounded like a complex and a compelling challenge to take on and help her out. I had the intent but had no clue what to do.

Me being me, I started with my unwavering creative confidence and told my friend, "hey, dude, if we solve wicked problems for a living using design why can't we design our own bodies?" I sounded like a punch line behind an Indian auto. On a hingsight there was lot of truth in that statement. We could design our bodies.

Our journey to health started that day. I read as many books I could in a week. I listened to many talks in YouTube. I realised Carbohydrate (cutely called as Carb) is the common villan among everyone in the diet world. So we decided to let go of carbs and decided to do Paleo.

My friend was a vegeterian. She doesn't take even eggs. So Paleo was an uphill journey. At that time we lived in Bangalore together as a team for a project, so I did what I could to enable good cooking. We had a blast in the process. I used my Facebook to feel a little accountable and get the needed dopamine + seratonin.

My life was filled with omlets, cauli-rice, Broccoli rice, roasted chicken, paneer and curd. I made my friend eat my amazing Omlets (atleast i thought so). She loved it 😍 Every non-vegetarian feels that achievement when the vegetarian friends convert 😅. It was an interesting phase. It took us 6 months and we both lost about 15-16 kgs each. That was a big deal.

We winded up Bangalore and came back to base. The experience left me with extreme satisfaction and a ton of questions. I intuitively felt Paleo was not the right direction for the human body. I started following my curiosity and it took me to places where I never dreamt of going.

I lost 26.2 kgs at my max in 8 months. This was absolute fun. I understood so much about the human body by now. I wanted to stop here and wind down the experiemnts. Little did I know I will enter the next phase of my experiment.

By now I had a bunch of friends who got inspired and wanted to get healthy. I didn't have a concrete plan around how to help them. Doing it yourself is onething. Teaching someone is whole another thing.

As a cognitive scientist I know for a fact that complexity will not work. I devised a plan based on a bunch of simple rules. A few of them tried and they started seeing results. Some of them took off to start their own weight loss companies but some of them are still blaming it on genetics, hormones, time and still staying where they are.

But one friend pinged me and asked about weight loss post 40 with perimenoupause. I was just 41 when that question came to me. I had no clue how to answer that so I decided to do one last experiment post 40. This is how the P9669 started. I am still figuring it out. When I do i will let you know. For now, rest is history.

Here is everything you must know about staying healthy and fit

1. Eat less and eat when you are hungry. If you don't know what is less then surrender to numbers. Do not eat more than 15o gms at a time.
2. Move more. Again if you don't know what is the right number stick to 14000 steps in a day. That happens when you walk an hour every morning and evening.
3. Sleep well. Every body is different. So sleep when you feel sleepy and wake up without alarm. This will show you how much sleep you need. Mine is 6 hr 43 mins to be precise. I measured it over a period of 2 years using IOT.
4. Stay away from all preservatives and chemicals. Anything edible that can stay on shelf for more than a week cannot stay there without preservatives and chemicals.
5. Remove refined from your dictionary. All things polished, looking great are not good for you. White rice, white flour, white sugar, refined oils etc fall into this category.
6. As knowledge workers we hardly go out in the sun so our vitamin D sucks. No wonder you get grey hair very early in life. Take a sun bath everyday between 11 am and 3 pm.
7. Our diet lacks Vit B12 big time. It actually comes from water and a special type of algae. When cows and fish consume that water and when we eat the cows and fish we seem to be getting B12. If you are vegetarian, you will suck with B12 as well.
8. Have a variety of fruits and veggies. A rainbow everyday is a great way to remember the variety. Pick and choose all colors to consume everyday.
9. Check your body parameters every 6 months once. Just check your blood picture, organ profile, vitamin panel, hormone profile twice a year.
10. Above all hourly once breathe deeply. 10 deep breathes (diaphram breathing) goes a long way.

This should take care of your health 90% (including physical, mental, emotional and spritual health). I really mean it. You don't need any specific diets or regimen for health. All profound things sound simple and your health is not an exception.

Is the remaining 10% bugging you in back of your head? If yes, i am not suprised. It bugged me too.

The remaining 10% comes from your personalized view of your body in context. We all have specifics and it is important to pay attention to specifics.

It could be the current ailments, it could be your gut microbiome, it could be the medication you are taking that causes complications in the body. Can you beleive that your microbiome is responsible for almost everything health?

For that 10% you could go and reverse your diseases, re-engineer your microbiota and fix all the deficiencies one by one. When you do this you enter into complexity.

My simple rule to enter complexity is, to do all things simple for atleast 90 days before I even think about the complex rabbit hole. The reason I stick to this rule is our human brain get excited about learning new things and challenges. It forgets the goal of health and it starts focusing on learning. This is what happens when you are excited about cohort courses, books, blogs and you start hoarding them without any action.

Action >> Knowledge

Act now and own your health.

🥂 to simplicity!