over soda, it is a net gain. When you pick a side of fries instead of vegetables, it is a net loss. Even seemingly positive choices can turn into a net loss if you are not careful about everything that goes into a particular dish.
The same thing occurs with drinks. Coffee by itself is good for you. Each sip you take is a net gain for your health. However, if you add cream and a few packets of sugar, each sip becomes a net loss. Or look at any of the packaged “green tea” drinks in a supermarket. In most cases, the added sweeteners and preservatives turn it into a much less healthy drink than real green tea.
You can modify many choices to ensure they are a net gain. One of my favorite meals is the hickory-grilled salmon at a local restaurant. While it sounds healthy, I eventually realized the tasty barbecue sauce covering my filet of salmon was almost pure sugar.
After studying the nutritional content of common barbecue sauces, I found it is essentially pancake syrup for meat. I could have told myself that the benefit of eating salmon outweighed the downside of the sugary sauce. But the only way to make this a clear net gain was to order my salmon without the barbecue sauce. A few months after making this switch, I learned to enjoy the actual taste of fresh salmon without the overpowering sauce.
There are a few good and bad ingredients in most meals. No matter how hard you try, you will eat some foods that are not ideal. But do a little accounting in your head. Ask yourself if what you are about to eat is a net gain, based on what you know about all the ingredients. If you develop a habit of asking this question, you will make better decisions in the moment.
Sitting is the most underrated health threat of modern times. This subtle epidemic is eroding our health. On a global level, inactivity now kills more people than smoking.
Sitting more than six hours a day greatly increases your risk of an early death. No matter how much you exercise, eat well, avoid smoking, or add other healthy habits, excessive sitting will cause problems. Every hour you spend on your rear end — in a car, watching television, attending a meeting, or at your computer — saps your energy and ruins your health.
Sitting also makes you fat. Over the span of the last two decades, while exercise rates stayed the same, time spent sitting increased, and obesity rates doubled. One leading diabetes researcher claims that sitting for extended periods poses a health risk as “insidious” as smoking or overexposure to sunlight. He contends that physicians need to view exposure to sitting just like a skin cancer expert views exposure to direct sunlight.
“Sitting disease” takes a toll in the moment. As soon as you sit down, electrical activity in your leg muscles shuts off. The number of calories you burn drops to one per minute. Enzyme production, which helps break down fat, drops by 90 percent.
After two hours of sitting, your good cholesterol drops by 20 percent. Perhaps this explains why people with desk jobs have twice the rate of cardiovascular disease. Or as another diabetes researcher put it, even two hours of exercise will not compensate for spending 22 hours sitting on your rear end.
Yet for many people, sitting for several hours a day is inevitable. The key is to stand, stretch, and increase activity as much as possible. Get up and move around while you’re watching television. Walk to someone’s office instead of calling them.
Simply standing in place increases your energy more than sitting. Walking increases energy levels by about 150 percent. Taking the stairs instead of the elevator increases energy by more than 200 percent. Instead of viewing a long walk as something you don’t have time for, think of it as an opportunity to get in some extra activity that will make you healthier.
Missing sleep can change the trajectory of an entire week. On a recent Tuesday evening, our dog woke me up in the middle of a stormy night. She whimpered and howled for at least an hour until the rain subsided. I finally fell back to sleep at 3 a.m., only to hear my alarm blaring just two hours later.
That morning, it took me longer to get out of bed. By the time I compensated with coffee, I was running behind, so I postponed my morning workout. Once I was at the office, I needed to get through countless emails, so I responded to all of them quickly, with little thought. It took extra effort to focus my dry and tired eyes on the glare of the computer screen. While on conference calls, my mindset was to get through them as quickly as possible rather than being helpful or proactive. This cycle continued throughout the week as I struggled to catch up.
You are simply a different person when you operate on insufficient sleep. And it shows. Your friends, colleagues, and loved ones can see it, even when you are too sleepless to realize your own condition. One study found that losing 90 minutes of sleep reduces daytime alertness by nearly one-third. If you consider all the things that demand your attention in a day, reducing alertness by one-third is consequential.
An extra hour of sleep could be just as essential as an additional hour of work or even another hour of physical activity. If you do not get enough sleep, it can lead to a cascade of negative events. You achieve less at work, skip regular exercise, and have poorer interactions with your loved ones.
However, if you get an additional hour of sleep, it can make the difference between a miserable day and a good one. A small adjustment, even 15 or 30 minutes, could make or break your next day. While it may seem like skipping sleep is the only way you can get other things done, doing so comes at a cost.
What Counts More Than Calories
Reading a nutritional label and focusing on calories alone will lead you astray. While 9 percent of people read nutritional labels regularly, just 1 percent read beyond the headline of total calories.
Instead of focusing on total calories, another simple way to screen all the options you see in a day is to look at the ratio of carbs to protein. Set a goal of eating foods that have a ratio of one gram of carbs for every one gram of protein. I started doing this several years ago, and it is a great shortcut when scanning items in a grocery store or restaurant. Almost every nutritional
