My first article is about some of my most recent insights into transforming and improving your health. Today advice in relation to health and fitness is incessant. When navigating ‘alternative’ approaches to dealing with health issues the amount of information and noise is overwhelming.
Articles declaring what the latest superfood is, social media influencers selling all varieties of supplements and promises that the latest program will make you ripped, healthy and stop you aging. It’s incredibly difficult to navigate for myself never mind someone who hasn’t spent the best part of a decade studying and experimenting with things. The issue with the majority of content and advice to day is that it’s too specific. Everyone is trying to sell a solution to your problem but in reality you end up trying something random for a few weeks, don’t notice much difference and move on to the next thing.
Our society and culture wants to be told exactly what to do; explicit guidance and instructions. This won’t work. You need to understand the ‘why’ when you try something new for your health so you are empowered to move forward on your own. You need to be able to assess sales pitches and social media ads for yourself to decide whether something is worth your investment. You then need to apply a mindset and approach to giving that particular intervention time to work (or not). I’ve distilled down my learnings over the last ten years into six principles. I use these to frame the journey that I’ve been on and how I filter certain suggestions, products or programs as worthwhile or not. They also provide a framework for you to develop your resilience and mindset when embarking on a health transformation and keep you centred on the challenge ahead.
My six principles for transforming your health are:
1. Take responsibility and ownership
2. Subtraction beats addition
3. Change who you are
4. Embrace experimentation
5. Consistency and Patience
6. Be vocal and seek out others
I’ll provide an overview of each here and delve deeper in future articles. You need to understand the why these are so important before we get into the nitty gritty of diets, biohacks and potential approaches.
Take Responsibility and Ownership
Step number one is accepting complete and total ownership for your situation. I don’t mean blame yourself but embrace the fact that you have control of how your body functions and that whatever you’re currently struggling with quite probably has been self-inflicted (even without you realising). I completely acknowledge that that some people are dealt bad hands in life. Genetically, their upbringing or where they’re born. But the reality is, no matter what happens to us it is completely up to us how we respond to challenges that define our success in life. I was incredibly lucky that my mother pushed me to own my diagnosis as soon as I had received it. She encourage me to research, question things and accept that maybe the life I had been leading was not helping my body at all.
Do not outsource control of your health or body; it’s far too important. You should listen to doctors, parents and the relevant experts but always take decisions for yourself.
Subtraction Beats Addition
Minimalism. Marie Condo. NOFAP. A few examples of efforts to simplify and streamline our lives from mountains of ‘stuff’ and temptations. The biggest impacts I made to my health were always when I removed elements from my life. This could be diet, stress, work or general habits and behaviours. The ability to recognise and stop doing things that are harmful to your mind and body is incredibly difficult and challenging. It takes discipline and will test willpower, relationships and at times your sanity! Identifying habits, behaviours beliefs that are ultimately contributing to health problems and then learning how to remove these and replace them with productive and effective practices is critical to success.
Stop being obsessed with what you can add to your life or health. The biggest leaps forward come from removing those things that have got us to where we are today.
Change who you are
The most challenging part of sustained health changes is addressing how you and others perceive you. By accepting responsibility and ownership for the circumstances you find yourself in you’ve already recognised that elements of your life you had built for yourself are destructive. But these damaging behaviours are not clear to us; they’ve been ingrained and enabled by who we define ourselves as. It’s our fundamental identity. And our identities have been built up over the course of our lives to be ‘us’. But what if being ourselves means that we are unhealthy, sick and in pain? That we’re relegated to lives of pain and anguish simply due to the beliefs we’ve built. I was a sports jock growing up and as I shifted into adult life this meant my lifestyle revolved around sports, the gym and boozing. At university I survived on a diet of bread of bread, past and beer (like most other students). It took years of denial and struggle to recognise that boozing heavily every weekend and eating crap may well have had a horrendous impact on my health. Leaving these things behind meant leaving that persona in my past. It meant letting friendships drift apart and finding other ways to socialise and build my confidence. If you truly want to transform your health you’ll need to accept that changing your identity and ‘who you are’ is the longest and most painful part of the process. But once you do, pieces of the puzzle will begin to fall into place.
Being able to bring your unconscious behaviours and habits to a conscious level will change your life. Why do you do the things you do? Question everything from how you sleep and breathe to what food makes you feel good or not.
Embrace experimentation (and be prepared to look stupid)
When you venture into the world of alternative health you will find you are bombarded with claims and promises from every angle. Meditation and breathing exercises will cure your arthritis. Go vegan and all your joints will heal. Depending on their perspective and specialism everyone will tell you that their ‘thing’ will work and is the key to curing whatever ails you. And they’re not necessarily wrong.
“Stop trying to borrow wisdom and think for yourself. Face your difficulties and think and think and think and solve your problems yourself. Suffering and difficulties provide opportunities to become better. Success is never giving up” – Taiichi Ohno
You need to find out works for you and how to apply it to your own situation. How did I find out whether fasting had any impact on my health? I tried it. Different versions; intermittent, extended multiple day fasts, water only fasts and some with black coffee over the course of months and years. And now it is a key part of my lifestyle that I use every day. Experiment with new techniques and see what the results are. Some will work and become standard operating procedure and some won’t. A good way to approach this is on a quarterly basis; pick an experiment to run over three months. This is long enough to see if it has any impact and short enough to write off any time and effort in doing so.
Consistency and Patience
I know. I’ve just told you that you need to experiment with different interventions and now I’m telling you to adopt zen like levels of patience. Well, yes. The best thing about the lessons and principles I’m writing about is that that contradict themselves constantly. But that’s the important; I’m trying to encourage you to be comfortable with nuance, grey areas and formulating your own pint of view.
One of my favourite quotations or butchered quote as is more probable is ‘most people over estimate what they can achieve in a year and underestimate what they can achieve in ten’. The reality is that true and meaningful changes to your health are achieved through small steps and changes, implemented consistently over time compound to give you truly unimaginable results. By all means, drop in some ‘hacks’ to help you along the way. Five day water fast to help heal your gut? Go for it. Attend a health retreat in Finland? By all means. Ultimately what will be most impactful and rewarding is being able to consistently apply the interventions you’ve found to give your body the best chance to heal. If you’ve ever broken a bone or had a sever injury you’ll know it can take months and years to heal properly. You’re chronic health issue is no different, you are injured. In a hypothetical full body cast of your own making. We have been conditioned for instant results and gratification. Sick? Take a pill. Hungry? Order takeout. Horny? Watch some porn. Most pharmaceutical interventions for chronic diseases take weeks and months to work and have to be continued for ever. We should treat our lifestyle changes with similar humility and patience.
Developing the discipline, consistently and implementing systems which give you the best chance to succeed is utterly critical for turning your health around. As one of my heroes Jock Willink says “discipline equals freedom”.
Be vocal and seek out others
Why I’m writing this blog and believe me it certainly doesn’t come naturally to me. I like to stew on problems, do my research and solve problems in my own head before engaging with others. One of the fantastic things about our modern world is how we can seek out and connect with anyone at any time. Spotify has years’ worth of content from experts. Facebook has endless groups in specific health topics. These are the places you are more likely to find insights and support than traditional channels. One of the biggest impacts on my health journey was when I joined a biohacking and health optimisation meetup in London. It provided an escape from my day to day life, new friendships and connections, stimulating my interest through left field topics and helped me to build momentum and be inspired.
Now what I don’t want you to do is start sharing random articles and infographics across Facebook and Instagram with every little tid-bit you pick up. Don’t be that person. There ss nothing worse than someone who has watched a documentary on something and suddenly decides it’ the be all and end all. By engaging with people in relation to your approach to health you have the responsibility of behaving in a measured and reasonable manner. Don’t recommend something until you’ve tried and tested it yourself. Don’t argue with people online who think slightly differently to you. Approach friendly people with care, interest and enthusiasm. Treat sceptics and naysayers as a chance to learn and ‘sharpen the blade’ of your own argument.
So there we have it. My first article and hopefully the start of many more to come.
The principles I outlined here should be used a guide as you embark on whatever challenging journey you are facing. I will be expanding on each of these in subsequent articles and providing tool sets, frameworks and specific steps to take. I look forward to sharing them with you!
Back yourself,
Alasdair
What are the key lessons you’ve learnt? Which principles resonated the most?