Sleep, part 2

I’ll start with a confession.  I have really struggled to put together an evening routine.  Morning routine:  no problem.  Evening rolls around and I’m like, “Routine?  Is that even a thing?”  But, knowing the benefits, I keep working on it and I’m making a bit of progress.

(The benefits are:  I feel more prepared for the next day, I fall asleep faster, and I sleep better.  Also, my teeth are brushed.)

 

What kind of stuff goes into a bedtime routine?  Surprisingly, best results come from starting up to 8 hours before bed.  (OK, so it’s not like we just stop doing stuff at 2; we just tick off a couple things then.)  Around eight hours before bed, we might want to stop with the caffeine.  While it is probably better for us not to have nicotine ever, if we are users, we want to try to stop using around the same time.

 

Around an hour before bed, we want to turn off the tv, shut down the screens, and stop working.  This supports our melatonin production by limiting our exposure to blue light and also helps us turn down the stress.

 

If possible, a half hour before bed we can dim the lights further.  When we are in an environment that is about candlelight-bright, we stimulate dim-light melatonin onset, which in turn helps us to have an uninterrupted night of sleep.  Then we can take a hot shower to relax our bodies further.

 

When we turn in, we will sleep best in a cool, dark, quiet room.  This may require interventions like a sleep mask, ear plugs, a noise machine, or the like.  Preparation helps.

Sleep, Part 1

We can’t be well without sleep.  There’s a reason sleep deprivation is a torture.  Some of us might want to have words with the current culture about this, because there is a lot of pressure out there to do All The Things even at the expense of sleep.

While there are certainly times when we’re not going to get enough (like, say, when we have a new baby), we can strive to get our seven to nine hours.  I realize this may mean terrible sacrifices, like waiting a whole day to watch the next episode of that awesome show or putting away the phone at bed time, but when we wake up with actual energy, we might find it worth it.

 

When we get enough sleep, our bodies and our brains work better.  Sleep time is when our tissues repair themselves from our workouts so we wake up stronger.  It’s also the time when we consolidate the things we learn during the day.  Our brains do housework while we’re unconscious (isn’t that nice of them?) and we don’t really want to get in the way of them taking out the garbage.

 

Tomorrow:  bed time routines!

Monday Workout: Coordinate!

When we do compound exercises like the lunge to overhead press, we have to work all of our body parts together.  Sometimes it may feel like we have too many to coordinate, but we’ll get it with practice.  Three rounds.

 

jacks	30
(lunge to) overhead press	20
curls	10
kb swings	30
kb twist	20
kb 8x	10
woodchoppers	30
flies	20
scissors	10

 

Thursday List: 5

One way to eat healthy food is to choose what’s in season.  Here are five September veggies to try:

 

1.     artichokes

2.     eggplant

3.     ginger

4.     sunchokes

5.     sweet potatoes

Nutrition, part 2

Food is one of the joys of life, in my opinion.  It’s also necessary!  Choosing foods that are both good for us and fun to eat helps us live a happy life.

So how do we do that?

 

In general, we want to choose foods that are close to how they occur in nature.  Eating an apple is going to be better for us than eating an apple pie.  And sour apple candy isn’t even food and may not have any actual relationship with apples.  This principle means that whole grains are better for us than processed grains, that fresh veggies are on the whole better than canned, that fresh fruit is better than jam, etc.

 

However, we also want to consider that food is more than just fuel for our bodies.  Food is part of our culture and our social interactions.  When we’re considering apple pie, we may need to remember that our grandpa baked it with love and we get to hear him tell stories while we eat it.  That feeds us, too.  If we get so hung up on eating the “right” things, we may skip going out with friends and that’s not good for us either.

 

Most of the time, we want to choose real food, minimally processed, and cooked in ways that are good for us.  Sometimes, not so much.

 

Or, as my personal guru, Cookie Monster, says:  “Healthy food makes me a healthy dude” and “Cookies are a sometimes food.”  

Nutrition, Part 1

A third pillar of wellness is nutrition.  We can’t be well without proper fuel.  Today I’m going to go over macronutrients and tomorrow I’m going to talk about actual food.

There are three macronutrients:  protein, carbohydrates, and fats.  When we eat food, we’re ingesting some combination of these three.

 

Protein is crucial for building and rebuilding our bodies.  If we don’t get enough protein in our diets, we have trouble healing from injury.  Those of us who would like to change our body compositions toward more lean tissue also need protein in order to do that.  Vegetarians and vegans need to be careful to ensure that they are getting good sources of protein because most non-animal proteins don’t have all the essential amino acids we need to get from our diets, but it’s not that complicated.

 

Carbohydrates get a bad rap these days and a lot of them don’t deserve it.  Unless we have celiac disease or a gluten sensitivity, there is no reason to avoid our friends the whole grains.  Carbohydrates are a good source of energy for us.  Also:  veggies!  We love veggies!  Quality matters in carbs, though.  There’s a big difference between getting carbs from vegetables and whole grains and from a box of donuts.  When in doubt, choose the carbs with more fiber.

 

Fat is also essential for our bodies to function.  It is a dense source of calories, which is important when we are doing lots of exercise.  Quality matters here, too.  In general, the best fats for us are the ones that are liquid at room temperature.  Those are the unsaturated fats.  Saturated fats are solid at room temperature.  Focusing on getting our fats from healthy whole food sources like nuts and seeds, oily fish, and the like is a good way to get what we need without overdoing it.

 

We don’t sit down to a nice plate of protein, carbs, and fat, though.  We eat food.  I’ll talk about that tomorrow.

Monday Workout: Balance Mood

Apparently, I’m in a balance kind of mood.  We’re working balance directly with the one-leg exercises and indirectly with the shoulder tap pushup, the quadruped lateral raise, and the plank.  Three rounds.

 

step up (to back lunge)	30
1 leg deadlift	20
1 leg db pass	10
db kick	30
good morning	20
shoulder tap pushup	10
squat to leg lift	30
quadruped lateral raise	20
plank	10