Health Priorities 2025

I can already hear the words “but I don’t cook.” I see four answers to this situation – one: get over it and learn to cook, two: get into a relationship with someone who does cook, three: sign up with a subscription fresh meal plan like Factor or Meal Pro, or four: go out to eat for all your meals at restaurants that specialize in preparing fresh healthy foods.  I prefer choice number one, but I like the chance to be creative in the kitchen. Not everyone likes kitchens – too many memories of failed casseroles past I guess. Choice two works if you are good at creating win-win relationships. I have not tried choice three, but a few of my patients have and they say it has worked quite well for them. Choice four would sound good to me if I had the time and made at least triple my current income. So if health is of interest to you, make your choice. There are no healthy, quick, and convenient foods that will sustain your body long term. Sorry. (Fresh fruit is healthy, but it cannot sustain you.)

Health priority number two – movement. I heard an excellent perspective from a longevity researcher the other day. She said that if we could put exercise in a pill, it would be the most powerful longevity drug ever invented. That kind of says it all. Exercise is that important. The big point I want to make about exercise is that we are talking about a lot more than going to the yoga studio or gym once or twice a week. There are many kinds of exercise and all of them are important in their own ways.

Back in 2008, I wrote a similar article about health priorities and I started with walking. Back then the prevailing advice was to get in 10,000 steps per day. This advice was basically made up without any real research behind it. Since then the research has happened and there are some robust real world answers in terms of outcomes with heart disease and diabetes. The many different studies are coming in with the magic number being about 7000 to 8000 steps per day to get the big improvements in health. Back then I told everyone to get a pedometer. These days step counting is much more sophisticated and gets done with health rings and watches. Even your phone will count your steps if you always carry it with you. So walking is a super important part of your daily health regime. It does not need to be all at once. In fact there are advantages to walking just being normal moving around during the day as you do your daily stuff. That said there is some fabulous research that alternating fast walking for 3 minutes with slow walking for 3 minutes for one half an hour every day does amazing things for your blood pressure.

Another critical factor in getting in the exercise you need requires pushing your limits. The body is very lazy, which is a good thing in an environment of lack. When calories are hard to come by, the body that adapts to that situation by chucking any unnecessary energy-using tissue comes out the winner and survives. That means that unless you demand your body do more than it is capable of doing, it wastes away. Use it or lose it is the basic rule of the body. If you don’t tell your body that you absolutely need all your muscle tissue, it will eat it up and use it for energy. (Interestingly this does not happen if you are on a Keto diet.) Your body will turn muscle into sugar and burn it, unless you tell it you need that muscle to survive by asking it to do more than it is able to do. What does that look like? That means lifting, pushing, and pulling things to the point that your muscles reach failure. This is most easily done in a gym using weights. I do this every Wednesday and Saturday. Only two to three times a week is necessary to convince the body that we need that muscle tissue. I use 13 different weight machines, and the work-to-failure part of my workout only takes 30 minutes. I also do 20 minutes of cardio, 10 minutes of steam room, and 10 minutes in the spa.

Cardio is another type of exercise we need fairly regularly – 2 to 3 times a week. Quite a bit of research has been done in this area and there is a lot of nuance here that I won’t go over today. If you have a busy lifestyle and want to get the most bang for your buck, the research says that interval training is the best for the least amount of time. What that looks like is four or five short bursts of very high intensity cardio. Basically, you want to go for it as fast as you physically can for 30 to 60 seconds. It does not matter whether you are running, bicycling, rowing, elliptical training, or whatever as long as you are fully weight bearing. Unfortunately, that means swimming is out. Over the years lots of different protocols have been taught, but the research has shown that the rest period between bursts does not matter, you get the same results. So you could go fast for 30 seconds then slow for 2 minutes then back to fast, or you could go fast one time several times a day. The goal is about 5 high speed sessions in a day 2 to 3 times a week.

The fourth type of exercise that is vital is balance. While this is less of a need when you are under 30, as the years start to add up it becomes more and more critical. The consequences of falls are the number one cause of death in older folks. (The typical consequence of a fall is being bed ridden for a time and developing pneumonia while stuck in bed.) The nerves that are for balance are different than all the other nerves in the body. Most nerves are always there, protected by special insulation. Balance nerves are bare wires that come and go with use. If you don’t challenge the balance system regularly, those nerves go away and along with them go your balance. Those nerves mostly go to stabilizer muscles which also work differently than regular muscles. Stabilizer muscles only hold things still. If you move, they let go. These muscles are in many places in the body, but the ones we work with the most are the low back stabilizers. They are the most common cause of that low back pain that goes across the low back. We use Foundation Exercises to address this weakness.

The last super important health priority for today is sleep.

A few hours after you fall asleep your body starts producing growth hormone to signal your body to kick into repair mode. Repair mode takes 4 to 6 hours. So right off the bat you can see that you need at least 7 to 9 hours of good quality sleep every night. The night typically starts off with a few hours of deep sleep during which all the experiences from the day are processed and shuttled into long term storage. After that, the night is spent in bouts of light sleep and dream sleep. Exactly what dream sleep does is still not completely understood, but experiments on soldiers have shown that if they do not get their dream sleep they go insane. The government has been experimenting on soldiers for decades in hopes of creating a soldier that does not need sleep. Without our daily 8 hours of good quality sleep, our hormones go wacky, our metabolism tanks, we gain all sorts of weight, lose our ability to think critically, and we are generally miserable to be around. So don’t skip on your sleep.

Back in my 2008 article  –

Ellen

We survived! All the preparations for my mother’s 95th birthday worked out well and a whole crew of folks arrived to celebrate. Actually she had three birthdays, one Sunday with her church friends, one Wednesday with four generations of us family types, and one Thursday with her local garden club friends.