My Personal Regimen

If you read my last post, you might well wonder, who does this guy think he is to post about lifestyle, he's obviously an obese, aging, crock with problems!  Well I guess that is partly true, but its not the whole story. Take the weight issue, yes I am very overweight and it is something that I have struggled with for years now, but since I have started working seriously on changing my lifestyle I have managed to loose over a stone and half, and my weight is still dropping.  Indeed, I have managed to do this without any real struggle, and though I will no doubt tweak my current diet as I learn more, it is one that I could happily stick to for the rest of my life. I am also seeing improvements in several other areas of my file, including health and general well-being.

So in this post I am just going to lay out the regime I follow, without much in the way of explanation, and in subsequent posts I will discuss the details of why I have chosen its various components.

Starting with diet:  

I don't count calories or exclude and foods from my diet.  I do, however, practice something called, "intermittent fasting", or, "restricted eating".   I have devised my own personal restricted eating regime in which I divide the day into three period:

1)  Fasting.  I fast for at least 14 hours every day from when I finish my evening  meal.  I don't find this too difficult, especially as over half of that fast is spent asleep.

2) Fasting Mimicking. I break my fast with lunch with a low carbohydrate, moderate protein, nutrient dense meal.  From then until evening I avoid all carbs.

3) Eat what I like!  From evening until dinner (inclusively) I eat what I like.

I don't ban any foods from the eat what I like period, nor do I put any limit on the quantity.  I do, however, have some things I try to emphasize in this period, both general principles about the kind of food I eat, and specific ingredients I seek or avoid..  For example, I try to eat nutrient dense foods rather than empty carbs, and I aim to include oily fish several times a week, as many cruciferous vegetables as I can and a to include a lot of turmeric, whilst I aim to minimize trans-fatty acids.

I happily eat dairy, fish and meat, including red meat.

I also do occasional longer fasts, of two or three days duration.

I take a number of supplements:

Vitamin D3: one high dose tablet a day taken sublingually (under the tongue) to help absorption.

Vitamin B Complex: one high dose, prolonged release tablet per day.

Niacin (B3): in addition to the niacin in the B complex table, I take 500 mg of niacin twice a day.

Co-Factor Q10:  I take a 100mg capsule of Q10 sublingually twice a day.

St John's Wort:  I take two tablets of this a day.

Broccoli seeds/Sprouts: I either chew up a teaspoon of broccoli seeds, or a similar number of broccoli sprouts , every day.

I am also about to start including TMG (trimethylglycine), though I am still in the processes of making a final decision about that.

I also take some prescribed medications, a statin, montelucast and an asthma preventer, as well as having disprosalic and duvobet for my psoriasis (which I find I am not needing so much now).

 

In terms of exercise, Rather than having a set routine I am upping my general level of activity (for example by digging and weeding in the garden, and by walking regularly) and am working on building regular brief periods of high intensity exercise (such as  running on the spot as fast as possible for 10 seconds) into my daily routine. I do, however, have a set of stretches of strength building exercises to perform daily, these are small in number and focused on trying to correct a spinal curve, due to a pelvic tilt, that I have had for many years.

Where it comes to sustainability, and security, the principle thing I am doing at the moment is starting to farm our garden.  We are lucky to have a fairly large garden and I have put 2/3 of it over to food production.  We keep chickens for eggs and farm worms for compost.  Our garden is not so large that it would feed a family if conventionally gardened, but we are looking at new innovations, such black soldier fly farming, that can dramatically increase environmentally sustainable food production from small plots of land. It is not our aim to be fully self-sufficient under normal circumstances, 

These are the main points of the lifestyle changes I have been working on.  They many seem rather small and in significant, I am not taking any fancy medications or any supplements you can't buy for a modest price in the high street, but they are actually very carefully thought out as sustainable changes that can have a very significant impact on one's longevity, health and mental state.  In the next posts I will explain why I have decided to include each of these elements into my emerging lifestyle.