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Micro wisdom delivered to your ears every morning in voice notes ranging from 3 to 15 minutes long. Wisdom on how to live a healthier and more fulfilling life. Every podcast will ground you in the present moment to ensure you know what's important, the here and now.
Good morning, good morning everybody. How are you doing today? So this podcast is launching first on a Thursday, so hopefully your week's gone well or you've made some progress. I know I'm speaking to some people who've had, operations for injuries and stuff like this and you know progress for them is very small versus progress for someone who's fully fit and healthy so remember that. Any step forward is good because more than likely if you weren't taking any small steps forward, the likelihood is you were probably taking little steps backwards.
Speaker 1:That's typically how it with our health because, if we ignore it, it kind of mounts up to net. So I want to quickly cover a study on, mindfulness and does it help you stick to your diet. I know I a of people with mindfulness blah blah blah, but it's important that we actually realize why this works and you know what the results are. So, you know people say trust your gut right, but do you even know your gut's telling you to start with? Are you hungry?
Speaker 1:Are you craving? Are you bored? Are you anxious? Are you depressed? You know once you start eating do you know when you've had enough?
Speaker 1:Do you can you even rationalize, you know, the amount of energy and nutrients you've eaten and that should be enough for the for the for a meal or do you have to go on and eat 2,000 calories? You know? And, this research looked at what was called interoception. So basically tuning into your body signals and understanding what they mean and then aligning your behaviors accordingly. So this new study basically went to two questions asked, answered sorry.
Speaker 1:The first one is can mindfulness program improve interoceptive awareness in people with hypertension, so high blood pressure? And this program was created by Eric Lox, so PhD, and the study lead author, right. And the second one was can the mindfulness program improve how well people stick to a DASH diet, which is a low fat low sodium eating pattern that's been shown to help reduce blood pressure in people with hypertension, right. So how does the study work? Two zero one adults hypertension, average age of 60, fifty nine percent were female, eighty one percent white and extremely well educated, with seventy three percent of them having a bachelor's, or graduate degree.
Speaker 1:So half of them were assigned eight week mindfulness intervention, right, so forty five minutes a day, six days a week and they attended thirty hours of group training sessions. The other half was as a control group. They were given basically a brochure, with a bit of information. And here's what the study found, right? Six months after the program began, participants in the mindfulness group showed significant gains in interoceptive awareness.
Speaker 1:The biggest improvements were in self regulation, attention regulation, emotional awareness, and body listening, which is important, So they were able to stick to this kind of difficult diet really, low fat, low low salt. That's, you know, quite hard for people to stick to. You don't have to stick to it unless your doctors tell you that but, they didn't track their weight unfortunately to see if their weight was impacted but all I said you know if you'd put in that much work into mindfulness you're gonna get results aren't you? A quote I love is know read the book of yourself. You can read as many books as you want but if you can't read the book of yourself what's the point?
Speaker 1:Know there's only really one more important there's only one important book out there and that's yourself. And you know there's a lot of authors out there that mash together a lot of ancient wisdom, modern wisdom and, you know, pass it on as their own, and they're really occupied with reading and reading, and there's some people out there that, you know, say the answers aren't in the books. You know, a really famous philosopher called, Judi Krishnamurti was like this, you know, he he never read many things, but he came out in his talks with wisdom that has been said through many centuries, many millennia, and you start thinking, well, maybe there is tapping into this kind of, awareness of oneself that brings about a certain clarity of thought, which when explained in whatever age you're in, it actually makes sense in every age, you know? So if you're, you know, the answer for you could be, you know, for the first thing is to know that what is your energy intake, what is your calorie intake, you know, how much energy are you putting in your body every day, and how much energy does your body actually need.
Speaker 1:The energy you get from food comes from the nutrients, so protein, carbohydrates, fat, and technically alcohol, right? So that's where your energy comes from. So whatever nutrients you're eating are gonna give you energy. The macronutrients obviously have different, ways of working. You know, carbohydrate is our primary fuel source.
Speaker 1:You know, fats fats like help us optimize our hormone production and stuff. That is very important. But fats are higher, you know, more dense in calories than carbs. And you got protein, know, the building blocks. You know, but ultimately, we the energies will matters for if we're gonna be in a gain mode overall or in a loss mode.
Speaker 1:And it doesn't really matter as well if you're so I I see a lot of people making this mistake, and then you see a lot of it online. They say something like, you know, actually, saw it in a group. He's saying something about wanted to know what time he ate his food, because he wanted to know if his weight loss was coming from when he was in ketosis or not. Right? Which means he thinks that, you know, that he's only he's only gonna lose net fat in ketosis whilst when he's not in ketosis, he's not.
Speaker 1:So the body, right, is always gaining and losing throughout the day. So you think of it as like maybe there's like maybe say you're going to the different state 30 times a day. So you get into a state of where there's low energy availability, your body's using your body fat for energy, and then you eat and then obviously that doesn't need to happen and then you got carbs coming in, your insulin goes up, shuttling this energy to the muscle cells, all good stuff, right? And you back and forth between these two zones each day. So it doesn't really matter if you're in one of the zones for super long or well, sometimes more times, but it's net, right?
Speaker 1:Like have I been utilizing more of my stored energy today or have I given my body enough energy that are net net and hasn't actually needed to, you know, it's dipped into it, but it's replaced it. Does that make sense? That's how it works. So remember I thought I'd raise that because it's important to know that because you can it's technically true that you're like in a fat burning state when you're like fasted and you're like doing some low intensity cardio whatever, know, the fat cells fat energy being used, but it doesn't actually matter in the grand scheme when total energy is considered considered. You know?
Speaker 1:If you are in a deficit all day then, great. But if you know, then you're not gonna lose that fat. It would be there'd be some going back in. Anyway, so mindfulness stuff. This is important stuff because obviously, a lot of you will have will know about the energy intake you're gonna be on.
Speaker 1:You will know your protein intake. You know your steps. Right? So it's not so much like, okay, you got the plan. It's basic.
Speaker 1:It's straightforward. It's super simple, but it's very powerful. And then you're like, okay. I've got the plan. What is stopping me executing this plan?
Speaker 1:And it's often, often, emotional eating, sometimes binge eating, sometimes secret eating, sometimes, it's really emotional, you know, regulating your, emotions. And I think, you know, we're going to talk about stoicism a lot, in the next challenge and I think when it comes to stoicism, it's not about hiding away from your emotions. It's about understanding them and then being able to respond. So you don't wanna feel like you're in not in control, you know. And one of the of the emotions they mention a lot is anger.
Speaker 1:You know, anger is an emotion that really takes over you if you let it. So if you lose yourself to anger, that's what we say, you're in a really dangerous zone of doing something that you cannot take back. And a story they say, right, from the ancient Roman times, is that the emperor Hadrian, well educated as he was, as influential as he was, he did have a temper. And he had one temper in the court, and then he stabbed a slave in the eye. And then he felt really bad about this.
Speaker 1:He said to the slave, like, I'm really sorry. Like, this you know, I'll do anything. What do want? I'm emperor. And he went, well, just want my eye back, mate.
Speaker 1:And as powerful of a man as he was, the most powerful man in the world at the time couldn't give him what he wanted, which is his eye back, and I was from anger. So there's emotions that are potentially more dangerous if we don't learn to manage them and why we're getting angry in the first place. There's a quote right that may be resonating with you in notice that no one makes you angry, make yourself angry. There's a truth to that. There's things in the world that you should get angry about, in my opinion.
Speaker 1:There's things that really do, okay, yeah, I guess I shouldn't react or respond in a really out of control way, where I can feel use this anger, feel about this injustice in a way that's gonna actually benefit what we need to happen here, right? But some people that say anger's good, anger's great, and they they feel alive when they're angry because it it it really stimulates like a lot of hormones essentially like your adrenaline's pumping, everything's going crazy and you feel maybe alive. Maybe that's what it is. I don't know. But it's important to like learn which where you are on the scale.
Speaker 1:Are you, you know, how much do you catastrophize for example, you know, that's really like catastrophizing is when you do this, so you basically take something and then you let your thoughts run away, right, and then it turns into something big. And then there's a worse behavior happens to it. So we know that thoughts can actually cause thoughts really cause a catastrophization of things. So thoughts are powerful because, obviously, they lead to potentially feelings and emotions, or they can make them worse. And if we don't recognize this pattern, this is what CBT is all about.
Speaker 1:Right? So there was an interesting podcast listened to by the best jujitsu guy of all time in Nagi. His name is Hodja Gracie, and he says that before his fights, he practiced so much going into a thoughtless state. Okay, so he didn't think about the fight, didn't think about the environment, was in nothing, he tried to minimize thoughts and just go blank into like a black blankness. And people ask him is it because he in that state, his his adrenaline wasn't pumping as much because thoughts are causing that.
Speaker 1:Right? Remember this. He's thinking about fighting, your adrenaline starts pumping, you start sweating, your muscles get tense, you start getting nervous. Yeah? So he knew before the fight, there's nothing more he can do, so he must remain calm even around the chaos of a of a competition.
Speaker 1:And he said that's the main thing he did. He was in the waiting for a fight. You'd be you just wouldn't be thinking about anything. Anything that came in, he would try and he would shuttle it away calmly, and he would remain in a in a really calm state. And it's the same thing when it comes to catastrophizing.
Speaker 1:Say you overeat or you have a meal out and you've eaten three course and you wanted just one meal, you've maybe had a night out, you know, you've got to remember, you can leave those thoughts can just go crazy and then they can make you feel worse and then when you make you feel worse and you get stress response and you want to eat more food to soothe that and then you feel worse again and it keeps going. So when it comes to catastrophizing, notice that many there's some key thoughts that can make them worse, and actually, you just need to be an observer. You observe these thoughts without wanting to change them in a sense or saying they're good or bad. You simply just look at them and you might see the root of where those thoughts come from. Some of you might find that they've gone back to someone saying to you in Slimming World twenty years ago in a weekly check-in, and that's still in the back of your head.
Speaker 1:It's one of those, you know, main thoughts that come through all the time. It might be that something your husband or partner said to you or an ex boyfriend has said to you or an ex girlfriend, whatever, or something happens. There's there's there's some things that you will be made aware of in those moments if you're not judging yourself and you're just looking that will have an moment. You'll have an insight into this, and the insight will change everything for you. And that's important to realize.
Speaker 1:But you must be in in this zone of calmness and stillness to see. And this is, again, reading the book yourself. You read the book yourself. You find the new chapters. You find the new links back to the past.
Speaker 1:You find the new moments between a and b, and boosh, things change. You know, moments are very powerful or insights, whatever you wanna call them. One all of you would have had this more than likely is riding a bike. Riding a bike is hard when you first start. You've got no clue.
Speaker 1:But then all of a sudden, you have a breakthrough. You get how it works, and you start cycling. And then you start practicing, practicing, practicing, but then once the wheels go off, you just end. And then once you're in, you never lose it. All of you know could ride a bike, you know, maybe not as good as when you're younger, but it's you've had that insight into how it works and it's done.
Speaker 1:And there's many things. You have insights into how things work, and then there's no need to relearn. It just you get it. Right? You all have everyone has this in whatever domain they work in as well.
Speaker 1:You have an insight, it changes your brain forever, and you act from a you act in a different way. Okay? So how many insights you know, it's not all about collecting as many as you can, but how many insights are you gonna have when you read the book yourself? I'll tell you a lot. So another thing the author said in his study was that self awareness, improves nutrition even when you they're not really focusing on nutrition all the time.
Speaker 1:It's like that the self awareness was the triggering mechanism, right? And these are offers have got credentials in medicine, psychiatry, epidemiology, multiple areas of human development, mindfulness training, nutrition coaching, right? So, you know, tell people to be self aware as as much as they can. Even just saying that to you today, you're gonna have an improved, diet today. Think about that.
Speaker 1:What think I do is podcast anyway. Do know what mean? It's it's it's to it's to remind you daily in the mornings, ideally, of these things. You go ahead for the day, and you're gonna be self aware today of nutrition. You're gonna remember the story of Hadrian and anger.
Speaker 1:You're gonna think about catastrophizing and thoughts. You're gonna think about being the observer without judging, and you're gonna see that this calm, tranquil being is gonna be able to see connections and things in the past in the right moments and have moments that change the way you behave forever. And you're realize that it's emotional regulation. You're responding not reacting. And a few quotes to finish off with guys.
Speaker 1:Back ancient philosophy, Socrates. So some quotes for you about these things like that was said a long time ago. Again, they didn't know about calories at this point, but some men or some people live to eat and drink. I eat and drink to live. Okay?
Speaker 1:Important distinction. Sometimes we I can think a lot of people needed to balance both here. Some people are in I eat to drink and live. I eat to I eat I live to eat, sorry. I live to eat.
Speaker 1:I love food. That's fine. Don't make it the only thing all the time. Like, we eat every day, get over at the bed. Do know what mean?
Speaker 1:It's nice to have nice food, but we're more than just, like, smashing our faces with pleasurable foods. Do know I mean? Like, there's we need to think sometimes about the fuel from the food. Well, how we wanna perform. That has to come into the context as well, not just super pleasurable stuff.
Speaker 1:I like some I eat some basic foods, day to day, and I'm I'm not trying to get a Michelin star taste from them. I'm like, it's high in fiber. It's high high in protein. It's good energy for for example, oats. I like it.
Speaker 1:It makes me feel good. I'm using it for fuel as opposed to this is the best thing I've ever tasted in my life. Okay. Appetite is the best seasoning. Yeah?
Speaker 1:So that's a good one. So if you feel a bit hungry, and you don't snack and stuff, that's really what's what's gonna make your food taste great. Think of the favorite food you ever eat. Think of the favorite snack or whatever. Now think of eating 10 times the serving sizes you usually have for that.
Speaker 1:Do you now like it? So say now you like chocolate. Okay? I'm gonna force you. I'm not gonna actually do it.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna force you to eat 10 chocolate bars in a row. Now is that length of chocolate bar nice? You go in as horrible as pain. Exactly. So sometimes the best thing we can do for our taste buds is really really to not overly excite them, not give them too much.
Speaker 1:Just hold back a bit, think it tastes well, leave it there. You wake up the next day, oh, that was lovely, and instead of, oh my god, I feel like I've hit the being hit by a bus. That's what I feel like after I eat Indian food because I eat a lot of I love it. So I eat a lot of the the breads and the and the the sauces and stuff. Yeah?
Speaker 1:Let's have a look here. It is impossible to live pleasurably without living wisely, well, and justly, and impossible to live wisely, well and justly without living pleasurably. That's Epicurus. So Epicurus was all about pleasure. So it's interesting right around the same time.
Speaker 1:So he believed that to live wisely would to be is to make sure you have pleasure, but not too much. It's interesting. Yeah? So you you think about, okay, what do get pleasure in? But what's the moderation in pleasure?
Speaker 1:Really? Don't take it too far. So there's a link to it. It's not it's not about abstaining like a monk. Right?
Speaker 1:Obviously. Nothing can nourish the human body unless it participates in some sweetness. Aristotle, again, same lesson. Don't deprive. This is key, know, don't deprive yourself of stuff.
Speaker 1:And I mention this all the time. I'm not an advocate of just clean eating all the time. You know, you need to have the things you really love in life. And if that's a glass of wine with your friends or a certain meal, just do it. Okay.
Speaker 1:And the last one, this is from the Roman area guys. Way to keep healthy is to know one's own constitution, to understand what is good for it and what is bad, and to exercise moderation regarding all at one's physical needs. Again, bang on. Basically, the way to keep healthy is to know the book yourself, to understand what is good and what is bad in a sense like obviously taking anything to extreme goes to the bad. Know, nutrients, dense foods, good, and moderation in one's physical needs.
Speaker 1:You know, don't overdo things, overextend yourself. And that's why one of the weeks on the challenge is about, like, what's the minimum dose we need of exercise for your heart health, for this type of thing, for that type of thing. Anyway, I hope that podcast is useful. Mindfulness, that's the task for today. Be aware.
Speaker 1:Be self aware, and watch your emotions. Maybe journal at the same time. Keep a journal diary of your food today so you can see if you can learn anything new. But other than that, have a good day. Speak to you all soon.