Hippocrates said “Diseases which arise from repletion are cured by depletion; and those that arise from depletion are cured by repletion; and in general, diseases are cured by their contraries.”
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health strategies
A January 2020 report by New York University Rory Meyers College of Nursing said,
“Developing a better understanding of patterns of physical activity, and the individual factors related to these patterns, could inform targeted interventions to increase physical activity,"
"Since a greater variety of activities was associated with meeting exercise guidelines, mixing up your workouts to vary the type of exercise could be beneficial."
"There are several scheduling and social barriers that could explain why this pattern of shorter, frequent activity may be more attainable for women as compared to men. For instance, research shows that women have less leisure time, reporting an average of 13.2 hours of household labor per week compared to 6.6 hours for men,"
"When encouraging their patients to exercise, clinicians should not just ask about frequency, but also what types of physical activities their patients do. They may even suggest engaging in a variety of activities."
"The ultimate goal is to develop targeted interventions to help people stick to their exercise plans and lower their disease risk."
A January 2020 study by the University of Otago found that for some, certain types of diet and fasting can be, “healthful, beneficial ways to eat". The researchers said, “This work supports the idea that there isn't a single 'right' diet - there are a range of options that may suit different people and be effective. In this study, people were given dietary guidelines at the start and then continued with their diets in the real world while living normally. About half of the participants were still following their diets after a year and had experienced improvements in markers of health.”
"Like the Mediterranean diet, intermittent fasting and paleo diets can also be valid healthy eating approaches - the best diet is the one that includes healthy foods and suits the individual."
“Our participants could follow the [Mediterranean] diet's guidelines more closely than the fasting and paleo diets and were more likely to stay with it after the year, as our retention rates showed."
The more you do it, the more you’re likely to continue doing it.
A January 2020 study by the California Polytechnic State University found that,
“People who maintained their successful weight loss the longest reported greater frequency and repetition in healthy eating choices.”
“Healthier choices also became more automatic the longer people continued to make those choices. These findings are encouraging for those working at weight loss maintenance. Over time, weight loss maintenance may become easier, requiring less intentional effort."
A fascinating January 2020 study by Technische Universitat Dresden found that, “… completed intentions are sometimes not deactivated immediately, but continue to affect people. For instance, when implementing new intentions."
It appears that when completing a task that has been long delayed, the brain occasionally does not deactivate.
The researchers said, “Often, intentions seem to be deactivated as soon as they are completed … However, this deactivation does not always work perfectly like switching the light on and off. In some cases, connections between a stimulus and a completed action have to be dissolved step by step until the event or stimulus no longer trigger the retrieval of the completed intention."
As part of a broader health strategy, it would be interesting to design goals that utilize this feature (bug?) in the system. Perhaps we could add items to our “to-do” list that it would be useful to keep activated in the brain, even when they have been done.
The current Western Medicine theory of disease, germ theory, is that “microorganisms known as pathogens or "germs" can lead to disease” (Wikipedia).
Unani Tibb medicine agrees that microorganisms exist but suggests that it is the imbalance of temperament that provides an altered environment in which these microorganisms are able to exist and proliferate.
A temperament becomes imbalanced when elements of life, such as air quality, stress, food, drink, sleep, rest and activity patterns, and exercise are imbalanced.
So embedded is the germ theory in modern culture that we often discount causative factors outside this theory (or, indeed, understand that it is one of many theories of disease).
A January 2020 study by the University of Virginia said that,
"We've shown that dopamine signaling in the brain governs circadian biology and leads to consumption of energy-dense foods between meals and during odd hours,"
"We evolved under pressures we no longer have … It is natural for our bodies as organisms to want to consume as much as possible, to store fat, because the body doesn't know when the next meal is coming.”
"But, of course, food is now abundant, and our next meal is as close as the kitchen, or the nearest fast-food drive-through, or right here on our desk. Often, these foods are high in fats, sugars, and therefore calories, and that's why they taste good. It's easy to overconsume, and, over time, this takes a toll on our health."
"This lights-on-all-the-time, eat-at-any-time lifestyle recasts eating patterns and affects how the body utilizes energy … It alters metabolism - as our study shows - and leads to obesity, which causes disease. We're learning that when we eat is just as important as how much we eat. A calorie is not just a calorie. Calories consumed between meals or at odd hours become stored as fat, and that is the recipe for poor health."
An April 2017 study by Division of Mathematics, Science, and Health Careers; Department of Science, Manchester Community College, Manchester, CT concluded, in part, that, “resistance training … was more effective than endurance training.”
An August 2019 study of women weight trainers, by Florida State University said,
“For far too long, people have been led to believe that eating before bed causes metabolic disturbances and will make them gain fat … However, the data simply does not support this when the food we choose to eat before bed is protein-based and small in size."
"In women who weight train, there are no differences in overnight local belly fat metabolism or whole-body fat burn whether you eat protein in the form of a protein shake during the day post-workout or at night presleep,"
"So, essentially, you can eat protein before bed and not disturb fat metabolism."
"There are such bad misconceptions about eating at night, that it will 'make me gain weight' or 'slow my metabolism,' …The research suggests that really only holds true if you're eating a ton of calories and they are carbohydrate- and/or fat-laden. There are so many potential beneficial effects of eating protein at night, and it will be extremely important to take all of this science to the community to try to change the outlook of these dietary habits."
A September 2019 study by Stanford University looked at strategies for encouraging healthy eating. The noted that, "Most strategies to date have focused on getting people to avoid unhealthy foods, in the hope that the promise of health motivates them to eat better …The problem is, that doesn't actually motivate most people to approach healthy foods."
Focusing on taste and flavour is a “…radically different from our current cultural approach to healthy eating which, by focusing on health to the neglect of taste, inadvertently instils the mindset that healthy eating is tasteless and depriving … And yet in retrospect it's like, of course, why haven't we been focusing on making healthy foods more delicious and indulgent all along?"
"This taste-forward approach isn't a trick … It's about leveraging the fundamental insight that our experiences with vegetables and other healthy foods are not objective or fixed but can transformed by changing how they are prepared and how they are described."
A September 2019 study by Harvard Medical School looked at what, “role high fructose in the diet plays in terms of insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome."
"Fructose makes the liver accumulate fat. It acts almost like adding more fat to the diet. This contrasts the effect of adding more glucose to the diet, which promotes the liver's ability to burn fat, and therefore actually makes for a healthier metabolism."
"The most important takeaway of this study is that high fructose in the diet is bad."
"It's not bad because it's more calories, but because it has effects on liver metabolism to make it worse at burning fat. As a result, adding fructose to the diet makes the liver store more fat, and this is bad for the liver and bad for whole body metabolism."
"Surprisingly, when you switch the sugar in the diet from fructose to glucose, even though they're both equally caloric, the glucose doesn't have that effect. In fact, if anything, overall metabolism is somewhat better than if they just were on plain high-fat diet."
In our experience, many health strategies should begin with elimination not supplementation or addition.
Often, it’s not doing more healthy things (like exercise), taking supplements or herbal medicine, or eating more nutritious food. It’s about reducing or eliminating the unhealthy things (actions, things) first and before.
It’s possible that a supplement or herbal medicine that appears to be appropriate, added to an imbalanced body, can make things worse. The elimination of unhealthy actions and things may well eliminate or reduce the problem to such an extent that specific supplements and herbal medicines, for example, are no longer necessary.
Breaking old (bad) habits [eliminating] is often harder than making new (good) ones.
It’s often surprising to find people willing to spend money on doing new (good) things rather than saving money by stopping doing old (bad) things.
More powerful than behavioural change, identity change can impact more quickly and effectively. Saying, with conviction and sincerity, “I used to be a smoker”, even as you hold your cigarette, is one elimination strategy. It’s eliminating two statements, “I am a smoker” and, “I smoke” [identity, behaviour] with one statement.