Part Three: Improving Our Physical Condition
Hopefully the previous section will have helped us to calm and control our thoughts a little, and in doing so begin to feel more positive emotionally. Some other useful changes that we can make are in our physical health and well-being. Becoming physically "healthier" can also have a positive effect on our mental state, as well as making us feel less tired and generally giving us more energy to do what we want with our lives as and when we get some free time.
Areas such as fitness and nutrition are extremely well researched and documented fields, and how seriously each of us get into this will be determined by how much spare time we have, and also how strongly we feel that we might need to make improvements. So in this section we're going to go over some basic ideas at first, and then suggest further information in the links below for anyone who wants to find out a bit more. We'll try to give advice that will be relevant to most people, but everyone's individual circumstances are different and you may find that if you are already engaged in sports and fitness activities then you will already be working at a more intensive level than anything we suggest here. On the other hand, some of you may have specific medical or personal needs that mean you have to follow a less demanding program. The key is to do a little research and to find the methods most suitable for you.
1. Better Nutrition
First of all, many of us would probably agree that we don't always eat especially healthily. This may sometimes be by personal choice, but it can also be due to a lack of time and opportunity in our daily lives. Often the unhealthy food is simply cheaper and more convenient to prepare. And while it is possible to achieve impressive results in our health and appearance very quickly if we choose to make immediate and significant changes to our everyday diets, it can also be difficult to "keep up to" a radical new diet over the long-term, especially if we have busy personal or professional lives. So for now we're just going to suggest a few simple changes that can be made, because even only doing one or two of them, some of the time, is likely to give some degree of positive outcome.
One major concern for all of us is the highly-processed nature of modern convenience foods. Even apparently harmless bread and cereal-based foodstuffs have their perceived taste "improved" by the addition of large amounts of extra sugars and salts. Excess consumption of sugar and salt can lead to a variety of health issues, so it's helpful to try and eat less of these sorts of foods if we can. Here are some relatively easy ways to do this:
- Eat fresh, unprocessed foods as an alternative to sugary artificial snacks. For example find some kinds of fruit you like and try to have those as your "sweets" after and between mealtimes.
- Have your larger meals earlier in the day if possible. Try to have a substantial meal for breakfast and lunchtime, and then work the calories away through your usual activities and (when possible) some light exercise as you go through the day. We appreciate that this might be difficult if you are especially busy at work, but try to avoid having your bigger meals late in the day, as you usually won't have time to digest and process them sufficiently before going to sleep.
- While there are many websites online with suggestions for supposedly "carbohydrate-free", or "fat-free" diets, we don't think that going this far is really necessary. Likewise, it's still ok to have occasional unhealthy foods in moderation. The most important thing is to try and migrate away from highly-processed foods with large amounts of sugar, salt and fat, and instead move towards using healthier, plant-based fundamentals for our diets.
- Examples of this could include using unprocessed rice and cereals for a basic carbohydrate or "starch" intake, and pulses and nuts as a protein source. The good thing is that if we start using cereal, rice, pulses, nuts, fruit etc as the basic ingredients of our nutrition, then we can still add modest servings of meat, fish and sugary desserts as a treat, possibly even as (a smaller) part of every meal we have.
For more detailed guidance on healthy eating, see:
- NHS – 8 tips for healthy eating
- Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health – Processed Foods and Health
- Nutrition.gov – Basic Nutrition
2. Light Exercise
The amount of exercise we can do will obviously vary from person to person, both in terms of our physical ability, but also our life circumstances and how much free time we have to spare. A common mistake can be to make a commitment to a high-intensity, time-demanding "workout regime", either at a registered gym or elsewhere, and then to become depressed and demotivated if and when we have other things come up in our lives and fail to keep up with our new routine. There are options for more intensive training listed below, but first we'll just suggest some simple and less demanding exercise possibilities that most of us should be able to incorporate into our daily lives. Again what we can and should do in terms of exercise will vary from person to person — if you have any pre-existing medical conditions, or are just not quite sure what you can and can't do, then please seek some specialist advice before you begin.
- First of all it is very important to get at least some light aerobic exercise on a regular basis. This is to help us "burn through" any excess food we have taken in during the day, to reduce extra body weight, and for our heart and lungs to get a gentle aerobic workout.
- The basic recommendation for most people is to try and do around thirty minutes of light exercise per day on as many days as possible. Examples of this could include jogging, fast walking, cycling or swimming. Now obviously this will not always be possible for those of us that are busy with work and/or family commitments, so just try and do what you can, when you can.
- One way would be to walk or cycle part of your daily work commute, or maybe even to fit a half hour walk (or perhaps even a jog or a swim) into your lunch break. Whatever you're able to do, if you can do it semi-regularly you should notice at least some physical improvement pretty quickly.
- If your mobility is limited, even gentle movement counts — chair-based exercises, short walks, or simply moving more throughout the day can all contribute. The key is to find something sustainable for your own situation.
For general exercise guidelines, see:
3. Intense Exercise
In addition to the basic aerobic exercise described above we suggest also adding some more intensive anaerobic activity, such as Sprint Interval Training (SIT). Assuming you have been following the above dietary and light exercise suggestions, the good news is that you may only need to do a relatively small amount of high-intensity exercise to be able to gain a significant improvement in your overall fitness. The idea of this more intense training is to give our cardiovascular system a short, but more vigorous workout to stimulate it more comprehensively and to help remove any potentially unhealthy byproducts that may have accumulated in our bodies after eating.
We can do this by adding brief "speeded up" sections to our basic aerobic jog/walk/cycle light exercises outside, or by using something like an exercise bike or even running or dancing on the spot while indoors:
- Start by gently beginning your usual light exercise routine (walking, cycling etc) for a couple of minutes.
- Now do the same thing, but at a much increased speed and intensity (i.e. start running/pedalling/swimming as fast as you can), for around twenty seconds or so.
- Then slow back down to doing the usual exercise at your usual speed for a couple more minutes.
- Now do the twenty seconds of high intensity again, before going back again to the slower light exercise.
- Repeat this process around four or five times as comfortable. Make sure to have a few minutes of the slower movement at the end of the exercise session to give yourself a chance to "warm down".
Even if you only do these more intense exercise bursts once or twice a week you should still notice a significant improvement in your physical health and overall feelings of well-being. Any and every bit of extra exercise can be of help.
For more information on interval training, see:
- Mayo Clinic – Interval Training
- Harvard Health – HIIT Workouts: A Guide
- Lifehacker – Sprint Interval Training vs HIIT
We all have our own personal preferences about the best ways to go about doing this, but just a few basic changes to our daily nutrition and activity can make a real difference, especially if they end up becoming semi-regular in our lives. Hopefully the ideas in this section will help us start to feel a little healthier physically, in addition to the progress we already made with our inner thoughts and emotions in the previous section.