Prefatory note: We take an occasional side trip around here to discuss something off-topic, but important. In this post, we’ll talk about why taking care of ourselves should be our top priority. Even if we’re healthy today, things can change as we get older. The lesson is to take care of ourselves as best we can every day – it’ll help with our peace of mind, quality of life, and finances. Indeed, taking care is a huge financial investment in yourself, in addition to all the other benefits of being healthy. It should be front-and-center in everyone’s financial plan.

Good health is everything. Remember the days when you were in perfect health, free to focus your attention on the important things in your life? When you jumped out of bed, full of energy and in a good mood, ready to take on the day? When you never thought about your health, because there was nothing to think about? For many of us, those days are a distant memory. But this can change – many chronic health problems are avoidable, and often reversible, if we just develop some good habits and put in the effort.

Priority One

When you have a health problem, either short-term or chronic, the worry, along with the health effects, drains your energy, prevents you from fully enjoying life, and robs you of peace of mind. It also monopolizes your attention, so friends, family, work, hobbies, travel, all take a back seat. Plus it can be expensive.

So doing all you can to maintain good health should be priority #1 for all of us. But even though we all know this, it’s still difficult. Look around. Smoking, drinking too much, no exercise, chronic stress, not enough sleep, poor diet. All of us fall prey to these, either on occasion or all the time, primarily due to bad habits and addiction.

It’s astonishing how powerful habits are and how they affect our lives, both good and bad. We are what we repeat day after day. If you want to lead a good life, you must develop good habits. For more, read The Power of Habits by Charles Duhigg.

Stop Doing This

To start, if you smoke, do everything in your power to stop. We all know that smoking is terrible for us; quitting is by far the best one thing you can do to improve your health.

One or Two, On Occasion

As for drinking alcohol, an occasional drink or two won’t cause much harm. It’s heavy daily drinking and/or binge drinking that will catch up with you. I’ve noticed that as I get older, alcohol has more and more of a negative effect on me. Of course, it’s fun at the time. I still enjoy that mellow, no-anxiety feeling when I’ve had a couple of cocktails (that’s the dopamine talking, we’ll talk about this below). And the social aspects of drinking – meeting friends for happy hour, wine during a dinner party, or beers at a barbecue – are also pleasant. These days, I try to limit my drinking to one or two during the occasional social event.

For me, the lousy after-effects of drinking now far outweigh the fun from the previous night. If I have more than two drinks and/or really tie one on (which, honestly, never happens these days), I feel anxious and stressed the next day – rumination, mental chatter, fear and worry that absolutely ruins my day – and it takes a couple of days to get back to normal. Definitely not worth it. The cause? Alcohol releases the “feel good” neurotransmitters GABA and dopamine, and the brain has receptors for them. Keep in mind that your brain (and body) chemistry is exceedingly complex and very sensitive to change. One little change causes a whole cascade of other changes to keep the body and brain in dynamic equilibrium.

Flooding Your Brain

What do we do when we drink? We flood the brain – this incredibly sensitive system – with a large amount of dopamine and GABA, and we feel relaxed and at ease with the world – for a time. But as we flood the receptors in our brain with these neurotransmitters, the brain fights back by reducing the number of receptors, trying to maintain balance. In response, your body secretes less and less dopamine and more glutamate and other stimulants (to counter the increased GABA). So your mood begins to deteriorate over time, certainly the day after drinking but even during periods between drinking. The process is reversible – stop drinking so much, receptors increase, and feel-good neurotransmitters also increase. But it takes time – somewhere in the 1 to 2 month range. So, try a little experiment where you stop drinking (or limit yourself to one or two drinks on occasion) for 30 days – I guarantee it will improve your mood.

Be at Ease with the World, Part 1 – Exercise

As for exercise, just make sure you move as much as possible during the day. There’s no need to go crazy and spend hours at the gym – a morning or evening walk is a great start. I finally settled on swimming. It’s a nice workout, easy on the body, and is a good combination of cardio and resistance training. The main reason I swim, though, is because it improves my mood for many hours afterward – all is right with the world after a good swim (for me, at least a 20 to 30 minute swim). Your brain secretes endorphins (a naturally-occurring opioid) during exercise and leaves you feeling relaxed and at ease with the world. It’s an addictive feeling and so keeps me at it. I like to walk and hike, too. The point is to find something that you enjoy, makes you feel good, and is easy on the body. I’ve tried many things to help alleviate anxiety and improve my mood – meditation, for example – but the only thing that works for me is to physically tire myself out (in a good way) by swimming every day.

Be at Ease with the World, Part 2 – Sleep

Get plenty of sleep, at least 8 to 9 hours every night, preferably between 10 pm and 7 am. Sleep is vital to good physical and mental health. Just think about how you feel after a night or two of bad sleep – irritable, worried and anxious, with mental chatter and rumination, fuzzy-headed, tired, and mildly depressed – and how good you feel once you get a good night’s sleep. REM and slow-wave sleep are the mechanisms by which we form long-term memories, sooth our nervous system, and de-stress. A re-boot of our system, in essence. It’s also the time that cellular junk, like amyloid plaque, is cleared out of our brains, lowering our risk of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. Whole books have been written about the benefits of good sleep, but I think we all know that good sleep is key to good physical and mental health. For more on the incredible benefits of sleep, read Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker. And I hate to be a kill joy, but know that alcohol will absolutely wreck your sleep, especially if you tie one on and/or drink right before bedtime. If you do, drink in moderation and relatively early in the evening (i.e., Happy Hour, from 5 to 6 pm) – this will give your body time to process the alcohol before you hit the hay.

Be at Ease with the World, Part 3 – Identify (Then Alleviate) the Root Cause of Your Stress

If you’re chronically stressed – unending job stress, a bad relationship, family problems, or money worries, for example – then you need to address its root cause. Don’t just try to abate the symptoms by, say, meditating or doing yoga. These will help, but the stress will continue to break you down physically and mentally until you correct the root cause and make structural changes to alleviate it. More on this here.

Be at Ease with the World, Part 4 – Other Considerations (Brain Chemicals)

We’ll focus on two types: the “Future-Dominated” chemical dopamine and the suite of “Here-and-Now” chemicals. They are on opposite ends of a see saw – too much dopamine and the “Here-and-Now” chemicals decline, and vice versa. Like all things in life, the key is balance.

Dopamine makes you desire things you don’t have – it’s a future-oriented, planning-and-anticipation chemical, full of endless promise. It makes you want more, more, more and it’s never satisfied if you let it run wild. Dopamine is the source of drive and motivation – without it you wouldn’t get out of bed. But once you get what you want, dopamine turns off (its job is done, after all) and you’ll feel let down unless you’re able to cultivate and transition to the “Here-and-Now” chemicals (the main ones are serotonin, endorphins, and oxytocin). Think about love or lust for “the one” that quickly wears off once you’re together, that perfect job you worked so hard to get but after a month you’re bored and looking for a way out, or the new home or car that was finally going to make your life complete, only to feel buyer’s remorse afterward. That’s dopamine leaving the scene, and you need to transition to the “Here-and-Now” chemicals, or you’ll be miserable, let down, and confused, looking for the next big thing that for sure (this time!) will make you happy.

The “Here-and-Now” chemicals are oriented to the things in front of you, right now. They make you feel calm, at ease with the world, content, and connected to the people, places, and things around you. There’s a problem, however: (1) when dopamine is too high, the “Here-and-Now” chemicals fall off a cliff; and (2) today, we are wildly over-stimulated, and our caveman brains cannot handle it. Our brains are flooded with dopamine all day every day from, among other things: smart phone scrolling; Internet surfing; social media; constant music or podcasts; television; video games; adult stuff on the Internet; overwork; sugar; junk food; news; gambling; active stock trading; shopping; casual sex; caffeine; booze; pot; any and all other recreational drugs. Because our brains are constantly flooded with dopamine, we’re never in the “Here-and-Now” and have a hard time feeling calm, content, at ease with the world, and connected.

Many of these things are engineered to be additive. Regarding behavioral drivers of dopamine: occasional, unpredictable rewards do the trick – it’s the power of “maybe”. Maybe I have an important email so I better check my phone; maybe someone liked my Facebook post, better check; maybe I’ll enjoy this one last Tik-Tok video; maybe I’ll find the perfect thing shopping; maybe I’ll win this time, one more pull on the slot machine; maybe the world is on fire, better keep scrolling the news; maybe I’ll find the perfect mate, better keep scrolling this dating site. It’s why sites are designed with an infinite scroll – there’s always something hanging off the bottom of the page, prompting you to think “maybe” and keep scrolling. Regarding chemical drivers of dopamine (to a certain extent, booze, and a much greater extent drugs such as opioids), it’s the chemical itself that opens the dopamine flood gates.

The smart phone thing has gotten insane – go anywhere in public and look around, everyone is constantly staring at their phone, scrolling. When you see this kind of mass behavior, it’s an addiction. This keeps us from the here-and-now, and like too much of any addictive substance will leave us feeling crummy. Think about how you feel after a day of laying on the couch binging Netflix, eating Cheetos, and scrolling through social media – my guess is lousy. Now think of that day where you helped your friend re-roof his house: it may have been cold, and it was hard work, but he bought burritos for lunch, and the music was playing, and the work went well and after you were done you were tired in a good way and you had a beer up on the roof and watched the sun go down and you felt, well, really good.

Like everything in life, we need balance. We need dopamine to get us out of bed in the morning and motivate us to do hard things to make a better future, but we also need just as much or more of the here-and-now stuff. So, not to nag but do your best to moderate and/or eliminate all those dopamine-flooding activities I listed above and add many of the following activities that will allow your “Here-and-Now” chemicals to recover and rebalance.

Some “Here-and-Now” suggestions: exercise every day; throw your smart phone in your drawer and only use it for emergencies; turn off all screens except for maybe a t.v. show or a movie at night for a little down time; eat an animal-based diet – avoid refined sugar, refined carbs, and seed oils; drink on occasion and in moderation; avoid drugs; get out in nature; read a book in a quiet room; stare into a bonfire at night; turn off the news; write; get 8 hours of sleep every night, from 10 pm to 6 am; meditate; cook; better yet, cook with friends; find a community (church; Cross-Fit; hobby, hiking, birding, or cycling group; volunteer group; be a regular at a local bar or restaurant; a tennis or golf club; etc.); travel, near or far; learn a hobby and work with your hands on something creative; spend time with family and friends; help others as best you can. Basically, anything that does not involve sitting, scrolling, or a screen – live in the analog world as best you can. This will lower your dopamine and the “Here-and-Now” chemicals will kick in and allow you to appreciate and be content with who you are, where you are, with the people you’re with.

Some say that we all need work and career to drive our dopamine and therefore motivation and drive, and without work we’d all be on the couch, bored. That work gives us purpose. Maybe, for some. For the small percent that love what they do and it’s not too stressful, then yes. But what about those of us that have a boring job of drudgery, clock-watching all day, or those with more interesting jobs but they come with chronic, unrelenting stress that erodes our mental and physical health over time? That doesn’t sound like a fair trade to me. Once we realize how our brain chemistry works, I think we can build a reasonable life of joy and contentment without full-time work.

I suspect, however, this may be a “season-of-life” thing. We’re all very dopamine driven when young. When we’re starting out, our minds are in a state of suspense about how things will work out and if we have what it takes to succeed. This anxiety drives us to alleviate this suspense, and we work hard at school and while building our careers, and we need dopamine to do these hard things to better our future: attract a mate, raise kids, make some money and get ahead. This is all dopamine driven. I was dopamine driven when I was younger, no doubt. But it came with a cost. I wasn’t able to relax and enjoy myself in the downtime – restless, always something on my mind to worry about (almost always work related), never ending to-do lists to whittle down, rushing through the quiet moments in life to get back to work to help quell the anxiety, reluctant to try new things, sometimes in the here-and-now but not very often and not for very long. The “halo-effect” of my job was large – it’s how I’m wired – and I’d feel the pull of work even on the weekends and the occasional day off during the work week. I now recognize that relaxed feeling that sets in after the first few days of a vacation as dopamine leaving the scene, allowing room for my “Here-and-Now” chemicals to rebalance.

I’m much less dopamine driven now that I’m older, now that I feel like I’ve finished the race and I know that things more-or-less worked out fine, with F-You money snowballing, not dependent on a job or earned income, and not worrying about what others think. It feels like my life is transitioning into “vacation” mode, where I’m much less future-driven, more relaxed and content, and can actually enjoy the here and now. If I have a lazy day, I don’t feel like the day was a missed opportunity, or that I should have been more productive, so long as I have a nice routine of the above “Here-and-Now” activities during the day. A morning swim followed by a soak in the hot tub at the local gym sets a nice stage for the rest of the day, dominated by the here-and-now.

Ignore the Conventional Wisdom – Eat an Animal-Based Diet of Meat, Fish, Eggs, Some Tubers, Some Fruits and Berries, Honey on Occasion, and Carefully Prepared Plant Foods; Drop Refined Sugar, Refined Carbs, Ultra-Processed Foods, and Seed Oils

And finally, there’s diet. The bottom line is this: avoid metabolic syndrome and its big brother, Type II diabetes. Why? In a myriad of ways, these are the root cause of the diseases of civilization – see below. How? Avoid refined sugar, refined carbs, and seed oils (i.e., vegetable oils such as canola oil). In other words, ultra-processed foods, which usually contain all three. If it’s in a bag or box, has a bar code on it, and was made in an industrial plant, leave it alone. If your great-grandparents ate it, it’s OK.

Read the book Nourishing Diets by Sally Fallon – a summary of the resulting “Wise Traditions Diet” is located here. It’s interesting as it covers the traditional diets of select native cultures around the world, circa the 1930s, before contact with western culture. These traditional ways of food preparation and eating were the end result of thousands of generations of trial-and-error, and it worked. By all accounts, these traditional societies were robust, resilient, and healthy. They primarily ate a nose-to-tail, animal-based diet, and when they ate plant-based foods, they were careful to prepare them via soaking, sprouting, germinating, boiling, cooking with animal fat, and fermenting, among other techniques, to help detoxify the plant and seed foods and make their nutrients more bio-available. But there has been a break in the chain of this ancestral knowledge in the past two generations, primarily due to the rise of corporate food companies and advertising after World War II. We eat way too much refined sugar, refined carbs, seed oils, and ultra-processed foods these days, and this book helps to re-establish that link to the traditional ways of eating.

The bottom line is this: reduce or eliminate refined sugar, refined carbs such as flour, and seed oils from your diet. Eat whole, 1-ingredient foods like meat, poultry, fish, seafood, eggs, some fruits and berries, honey on occasion, some tubers such as Stokes purple potatoes, avocados, olives, olive oil, and animal fats such as tallow, lard, bacon fat, and duck fat. Animal foods are perfect for human health: nutrient-dense, bio-available, and they don’t contain toxins or anti-nutrients. Plants, however, are loaded with them. They can’t run away so they defend themselves from insects and animals (and humans) via chemical warfare that has evolved over hundreds of millions of years. If you eat plant foods, they should be carefully prepared, such as fermenting (pickles, sauerkraut, kimchi, etc.) or thoroughly cooking them in animal fat, which helps pre-digest and detoxify them.

There’s a reason why traditional cultures very carefully prepared grains, seeds, and plants by soaking, sprouting, fermenting, boiling, and/or cooking in animal fat. These preparation methods were the end result of thousands of generations of trial-and-error to detoxify these foods and make the nutrients more bio-available. If you eat bread, eat traditional, long-fermented sourdough. If you have a drink, make it a dry red wine or a vodka and club soda with lemon; beer on occasion. Eat as much as you like until you’re satisfied without worrying about calories. Avoid seed oils. Don’t be afraid of fat, even saturated fat. Always remember that we’ve evolved over the last two million years to eat animal fat, not Skittles.

One other nuance – eat organic fruits and 100% grass fed, pasture-raised animals as best you can. This is not some yuppy thing – it’s about eating nutrient-dense whole foods and avoiding fruits sprayed with chemicals. The soil at organic farms has lots of natural minerals and nutrients. Those nutrients go from the soil to plant to you, or soil to grass to cow to you. It’s also why seafood is such a nutrient-dense food, with all the minerals in the sea. A 100% grass fed, pasture-raised ribeye might look similar to a ribeye from an industrial farm, but the pasture-raised will be much more nutrient dense.

It’s About Blood Sugar and Insulin

Why avoid refined sugar and refined carbs? When you eat or, especially, drink, sugar or refined carbs, your body instantly converts it to glucose which then floods your bloodstream. In response, your pancreas secretes insulin to lower your blood sugar, because blood sugar is toxic to your tissues and cells at high concentrations. Some glucose is burned by your cells and tissues for fuel, the rest is converted to triglycerides (a type of fat) by your liver and sent out to circulate in your bloodstream. What isn’t used for fuel is stored in your fat cells via the effects of insulin, making your fat cells fatter. (Hint: This makes you fat.)

Different Sensitivities

We all have different sensitivities to the effects of sugar and refined carbs, which is why two people can eat the same way, and one will gain weight while the other remains thin. Our own sensitivity changes over time too, which is why many of us gain weight as we age, going from college-thin to 30 pounds overweight by age 40. But know that the cascade of health effects described below will happen to all of us, even if we’re lucky enough to remain thin over the years.

Sugar and Refined Carbs – Cascading Health Effects

So, eating sugar and refined carbs will spike your blood sugar. For most of us, we do this for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and between meal snacks. Day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year – and it will eventually catch up with us. In summary, here’s what happens:

• You get fat;
• So long as you have high concentrations of insulin in your bloodstream, your body cannot release and burn your stored fat for fuel, so you’ll remain fat;
• Because you can’t burn your stored fat for fuel, your cells and tissues will be starved of fuel once the glucose in your bloodstream is depleted, and, in response, your brain will trick you into eating sugar and/or refined carbs in order to provide quick fuel to your cells. It tricks you by inducing intense hunger and cravings for carbs, with constant, intrusive thoughts of carb-rich foods. If you find yourself ravenously hungry and binging on bowls of cereal or bags of potato chips, your circulating insulin level is too high;
• Eating too much sugar and refined carbs will result in chronic, elevated levels of circulating insulin in your bloodstream, which in and of itself causes a whole host of health problems;
• Your liver will work harder and harder to process the repeated glucose and fructose floods (sugar is equal parts glucose and fructose – while glucose is used as fuel throughout the body, fructose is not, and only your liver can process it); your liver converts part of the glucose and fructose to triglycerides (a type of fat) and sends it out into your bloodstream to be stored in your fat cells. If the liver is overloaded with glucose and fructose for too long, over time the triglycerides will build up in your liver and you’ll develop fatty liver;
• Your liver and muscle cells, and eventually fat cells, will over time become resistant to the effects of insulin due to the non-stop floods of blood sugar and insulin, and you’ll become insulin resistant;
• It will now take more and more insulin to keep your blood sugar at normal levels (if your doctor doesn’t test for fasting insulin, the insulin resistance will be hidden for some time – your fasting blood glucose may be normal but what you don’t see is the ever-higher levels of insulin to make it so);
• Because of this, your body will be less able to deal with blood sugar, and you’ll become glucose intolerant;
• Your pancreas will have to pump out more and more insulin to try and control blood sugar, leading to a vicious cycle of higher circulating insulin levels and more insulin resistance and glucose intolerance;
• You’ll develop what’s called metabolic syndrome – the result is insulin resistance and glucose intolerance, and resulting high circulating insulin levels, high blood pressure, low HDL cholesterol, high triglycerides, fatty liver, and your LDL particles (the little protein balloons that carry around cholesterol in the bloodstream) will likely be small, dense, and oxidized, all of which can cause all kinds of problems, especially heart and artery related;
• Metabolic syndrome is also associated with chronic inflammation, another terrible health condition that has wide-ranging effects;
• Over time, the fatty liver will send fat to the pancreas in an attempt to get rid of some of it. This fat in your pancreas will hamper its ability to produce insulin and you will lose control of your blood glucose – you’re now at the upper end of the metabolic syndrome spectrum, also known as Type II diabetes;
• For a whole host of reasons, metabolic syndrome and Type II diabetes are the likely cause of most chronic diseases of civilization, including: obesity, heart disease, arteriosclerosis, high blood pressure, stroke, chronic inflammation, autoimmune disorders, many types of cancer, and even dementia – not to mention the typical health effects of the diabetes itself, such as eye, kidney, and nerve damage, and poor circulation in the extremities that can lead to amputation of toes (these are all the result of small blood vessel damage);
• The further along you are on the metabolic syndrome spectrum (with Type II diabetes at the upper end of the spectrum), the higher your risk for developing these diseases of civilization.

A Common, Underlying Cause

It’s important to understand that obesity does not cause these diseases of civilization, it is a disease of civilization. It develops alongside these diseases. And while the timing may be different – for example, you may become obese and later develop Type II diabetes – these diseases of civilization develop in parallel with one another because they all have the same underlying cause. Namely, the metabolic disorders that develop when we eat too much sugar and refined carbs.

Keep an Eye on These Two

Total cholesterol and even LDL cholesterol levels are weak predictors of heart disease risk. The best predictor is your triglyceride to HDL cholesterol ratio – the lower the triglycerides and higher the HDL, the better:

• triglyceride/HDL ratio less than 1, you’re a rock star;
• between 1 and 1.5, you’re doing well;
• between 1.5 and 3, keep an eye on things;
• greater than 3 and you need to make changes.

Some examples: triglyceride of 60 mg/dL and HDL of 60 mg/dL, the ratio is 1 – a good thing. Triglyceride of 200 mg/dL and HDL of 40 mg/dL, the ratio is 5 – a bad thing. A ratio of 1.5 or lower is a good indication your LDL particles are the large, fluffy, healthy kind, and not the small, dense, dangerous variety.

And the only things that affect triglyceride and HDL cholesterol levels are sugar and refined carbs – fat, including saturated fat, does not. So, eating too much sugar and refined carbs will increase your triglycerides and lower HDL, thereby increasing your risk of heart disease.

Common Predictors

High triglycerides and low HDL cholesterol are also good indicators that you’re somewhere on the high end of the metabolic syndrome spectrum, and you likely have chronically elevated insulin levels and corresponding development of insulin resistance and glucose intolerance, your LDL particles are small and dense, and you likely have chronic inflammation and oxidative stress. All of these are increased risk factors for the chronic diseases of civilization listed above. So, pay attention to the following items that are available either at home or during routine physicals and blood tests:

• Your weight and waist circumference. If you’re gaining weight and growing around the waist, it means you’ve been chronically spiking your blood sugar and your insulin levels are too high. The goal is a height-to-waist ratio of 0.5 or less; for example, if you’re 65 inches tall with a 32 waist (measured at the belly button), your ratio is 0.49.
• Blood pressure;
• Hemoglobin A1C (a blood sugar test);
• Fasting insulin (this is not a normal blood test ordered by doctors, but should be);
• Triglycerides; and
• HDL cholesterol.

If your weight is increasing and your waistline is expanding, your blood pressure is creeping up, your A1C is rising, your fasting insulin is elevated, and your triglycerides are high while HDL cholesterol is low, then you’re on the wrong path. Do yourself a favor and eliminate, or at least significantly reduce, sugar and refined carbs from your diet.

My Experience

When I reduced refined sugar and refined carbs from my diet and started eating animal based, I lost about 25 pounds with almost no effort, hunger, or an increase in exercise. I’m down to my college weight today, more-or-less. I did have a problem maintaining my electrolyte balance with very low carb: low insulin signals the kidneys to excrete sodium and, along with it, water. In most cases, the body will adapt to this, but for some, me included, we can’t quite get our electrolytes to balance, and we tend to have muscle cramping, a “heavy” heartbeat, in particular when trying to sleep, sleep disturbances, and generally feeling crummy. But I was able to fix these problems by adding in some fruit, mostly apples, pears, and berries, occasional honey, and Stokes purple potatoes to my diet. For more, see Dr. Paul Saladino here: https://www.paulsaladinomd.co/

While my blood pressure and fasting glucose were always normal up until I went animal based, I really improved my triglyceride and HDL numbers. Also, I’m sure my circulating insulin levels were too high when I was gaining weight (too much insulin, after all, is the reason we gain weight and grow around the waist), but I never did get an insulin test back then. The much-improved triglyceride and HDL numbers tell me that I’m on the lower end of the metabolic syndrome spectrum, reducing my risk of developing the chronic diseases of civilization that go along with metabolic syndrome and Type II diabetes.

The Lesson

The thing to remember is this: when you reduce or eliminate refined sugar and refined carbs from your diet, you’re no longer routinely spiking your blood sugar and insulin, and therefore avoiding the cascade of health effects that start with blood sugar spikes. When you avoid these foods and drinks and lose weight, you’re heading back down the metabolic syndrome spectrum – away from Type II diabetes and towards a much healthier state. Your body will revert back to its factory settings – a normal, healthy state – and you’ll most likely shed most of the weight you’ve put on over the years.

What you eat should be in line with our hunter-gatherer ancestors: meat, fish, eggs, animal fat, some tubers, some fruit and berries, honey on occasion, carefully prepared seeds and plants, and spring water. It’s what we’ve eaten over 99.99% of human evolution and is the end result of 2.5 million years of evolutionary trial-and-error as humans. Our bodies simply haven’t evolved to eat, say, Skittles, which only burst onto the evolutionary scene in 1974. It’s these blasts of blood sugar, and the subsequent cascade of health effects, that make us both fat and sick. The incidence of chronic diseases is remarkably low to non-existent in hunter-gatherer societies that still eat their traditional diet. It’s only when sugar and refined carbs are introduced that these diseases begin to emerge.

So, a simple recap:

1. Quit smoking if you do;
2. Limit alcohol to one or two carb-friendly drinks on occasion, and in the early evening;
3. Take your medicine – exercise every day, hard enough to wear yourself out and release the feel-good neurotransmitters that set your mind at ease;
4. Sleep 8 to 9 hours a night, every night;
5. Address the root cause of chronic stress, and make structural changes to alleviate it;
6. Cultivate the “Here-and-Now” brain chemicals, and balance it against dopamine;
7. Eliminate sugar, refined carbs, ultra-processed foods, and seed oils from your diet;
8. Eat organic, pasture-raised, nutrient-rich, 1-ingredient, whole foods – mostly animal products.

You’ll very likely regain your health if you build daily habits around these eight rules. Think of it as an investment in yourself that will pay massive dividends over the years.