Eat, Move, Sleep

Eat, Move, Sleep shows you that living a long and healthy life is not the result of massive lifestyle changes, but of lots of small habits, which improve the way you sleep, eat and exercise and, if combined, add a whole lot to your health.

If you’re like most people, you’ll not exercise for a while, then feel bad and start setting really ambitious goals, like going to the gym 5 times a week. Even if you’re one of those rare types, who can pull off these kinds of sudden habit changes, there’s still a chance it’s the wrong thing to do.

Here’s why: If you sit for six hours a day, even working out for two hours afterwards won’t reverse the health damage you’ve done. The consequences are similar to those from smoking.

Exercise isn’t about the total amount of sweat you produce each week, your body only cares about not being inactive for a long stretch of time. Ever. The National Institutes of Health looked at 240,000 peoples’ movement behavior, finding out sitting for most of your time increases your mortality rate by 50%.

The solution is wonderfully simple: Don’t sit for longer than an hour. That’s it. Don’t pile 6-8 hours of sitting around on top of watching TV, eating your meals and sitting in the bus, train or your car (we do sit a lot, don’t we?). Walk to the house five blocks away, take the stairs, not the elevator and just get up a few times at work to move around.

Note: Specifically for this purpose, I recently got an activity tracker, and I’m super grateful for it. If I sit for too long, it vibrates and tells me to move (should be a requirement for every writer).

There are illegal drugs, like cocaine and heroin, legal (and socially accepted) drugs, like tobacco and alcohol and then, there’s sugar, which, according to Tom, is the worst one. Not only because it’s not even considered a drug, but because it’s part of everyone’s daily food intake. How much sugar do you think you eat each year? Remembering it is actually quite simple: it’s your own weight in pure, white, refined sugar. Imagine building a statue of yourself, purely made from sugar, and then eating that, one bite a day – every year. There are 3 reasons why added sugar is the devil in disguise: Eating it releases dopamine, which gives you a “high” feeling and makes it addictive. The more you eat, the more you want. You build a tolerance, meaning you have to eat more each time, in order to get that dopamine hit again. What should you do? Treat sugar like it’s an actual,…