Our daily habits have a profound compound effect in our lives. The question is, are they bringing you closer to health accumulation or taking you further away? I recommend evaluating the daily five – coffee, water, exercise, protein, and screen time.
1. Coffee Consumption
Most of us drink coffee on a daily basis, so we want to make sure it’s a beneficial daily habit. Rarely, do I find coffee by itself to be the issue holding a person back from experiencing improved health and body composition, it is what is being added to the coffee that is the issue.
Here are a few factors to consider when it comes to making your daily coffee habit a healthy one:
A. Buy coffee tested for mycotoxins
Depending on your source, some people will tell you to not worry about mycotoxins in your coffee because you’re likely getting them through other food sources anyways and the amount in coffee is negligible and won’t harm your health.
While it’s true that we could be getting mycotoxins from other foods, it’s still worth trying to reduce the overall toxin load on our bodies.
Drinking conventional coffee on occasion is not a big deal, it’s the compounding of our daily food intake or coffee intake that can take us closer to health and vitality or away from it.
The transporting of coffee beans in humid climates can create a mold rich environment and poor handling of the coffee beans at the roasting facility such as pouring water on coffee beans during the roasting process can lead to mold and mycotoxins.
Brands that test for mycotoxins:
B. Use creamer without vegetable oils
If you use a creamer, look for ones without vegetable oils (canola, soy, corn, sunflower, safflower oils), or artificial flavors and make sure it is organic, because otherwise these nut and grain- based creamers are going to be loaded with pesticides.
Vegetable oils are inflammatory, don’t let the term, vegetable or seed oils fool you into thinking that they are somehow healthy – that’s just marketing.
C. Use coffee with natural sweeteners
You can also add some honey, maple syrup or stevia if the dairy creamer by itself isn’t sweet enough. For more tips and a deeper analysis on coffee, check out our healthy coffee post.
2. Water Intake
A. Start your day with water
Each morning you wake up in a dehydrated state as your body has spent 7-9+ hours without water, if you get a reasonable night of sleep, that is. This is why I recommend starting your day with a tall glass of water (yes, even before coffee).
B. Benefits of hydration
Without optimal water intake, cell membranes lack structure and without proper structure, cell membranes are unable to communicate efficiently. Cell membranes also act as the gatekeepers to keep harmful elements from entering into the cell where they could disrupt your nucleus and DNA structure.
Without sufficient water, you cannot properly metabolize stored fats and carbohydrates to be used as energy sources.
Hydration isn’t just about water intake. It’s about reducing inflammation and the toxic burden in our bodies. You may have heard it said that, “the solution to pollution is dilution”.
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3. Daily Movement
A. Move it or lose it
The simple truth is: if you do not use your body parts, you will lose your body parts! Give yourself a goal, maybe it’s to be able to run a mile or get 10,000 steps in a day or to take a 15 min walk after dinner. Whatever it is, start to take steps towards it on a daily basis.
Besides a full on workout each day, here are some other ideas to incorporate daily movement into your day:
- Every hour stand up and then bend over and touch your toes 10 times.
- Take a break in the morning and afternoon to do a set of 10-20 standing pushups against the wall.
- Perform 25-50 jumping jacks before dinner.
- Go through a stretching routine each morning.
4. Protein
A. Importance of meat/protein
The first category of food in my food hierarchy is meat. Meat is 100%
digestible because there are no fibers, no lectins, no phytic acids, all these things are problematic for the body and create the need for more resources, more energy for digestion. Meat is also loaded with satiation and with amazing fatty acids if you get it from a good source.
When I say meat I’m talking about beef, some chicken turkey, bison, buffalo, halibut, salmon, shrimp, oysters, and eggs.
B. Protein helps with fat loss
Protein has the highest burning point in the body. What this means is that the body uses 20-30% of the calories in protein for digestion and absorption.
Contrast this with the 5-10% of calories used for digesting and absorbing carbohydrates and 0-3% of calories used to process fat.
Protein reduces the hunger hormone ghrelin while increasing the appetite-suppressing hormones, GLP-1, peptide YY and cholecystokinin.
One of the best ways to start out your day is with 30 grams of protein for breakfast. Check out this post for ideas on what 30 grams of protein looks like for breakfast.
C. Protein recipes
Protein Berry Oatmeal
- Sprouted oats (I recommend One Degree sprouted oats)
- Goat Whey Protein Powder (or protein powder of your choice)
- Berries
- Cinnamon
Mix protein powder in oatmeal. Top with berries and cinnamon.
Fiesta Quinoa Bowl
Ingredients
1 cup of cooked quinoa – 8 grams of protein 1/2 cup of black beans – 7.3 grams of protein 2 eggs – 14 grams of protein
Half of an avocado – 1.5 grams of protein Salsa to taste
Directions
Cook quinoa according to instructions on package. Cook eggs over easy and combine with black beans, half of an avocado, and salsa.
Green Goodness Smoothie
- 1/2 avocado
- 1/2 banana
- 1/2 cup frozen cauli-rice
- 2 cups spinach
- 1 cup unsweetened almond, hemp, or coconut milk
- 1 TBSP collagen
- 1 TBSP ground chia seed
- 2 scoops Vanilla Goat Whey
- Ice optional
Add all ingredients to a high-speed blender except the Goat Whey. Blend until smooth, then add the Goat Whey and blend for another 10 seconds.
5. Limit screen time
A. Phone addiction
If you find yourself first thing in the morning grabbing your phone, going through your emails, text messages, social media accounts, surfing the Internet looking for those pings, those little blue thumbs, there’s a good chance that you’re addicted to your phone.
One study that I looked at demonstrated that we as industrialized humans, check our phones an upwards of about 150 times a day, that’s basically every 10 to 12 minutes we’re swiping, we’re clicking, we’re checking our phone, we’re seeing what’s going on and ninety percent of the time nothing’s going on. Does this seem excessive? It sounds like this is an addictive response of our body.
B. Phones and our emotional state
A 2016 study showed that as cell phone use goes up, sleep deprivation, anxiety, stress, and depression goes up.
There’s another study in 2012 on teenagers showing that as cell phone use increased, depression, suicide risk factors, and suicide rates also went up.
A 2017 study demonstrated that phone use was directly correlated with academic performance. The stronger the phone addiction, the weaker the academic performance.
In another study they put students in a room, half of them had their phones in airplane mode face down to the right of them.
While the other half didn’t have their phones in the room. And guess what? The students who had their phones in the room upside down in airplane mode scored like 25% less compared to the students who didn’t have their phones in the room.
That’s because our brain sees the phone and it knows that there’s information, things are happening in that phone, through that phone and it draws our attention, our energy, our willpower, our cognitive capacity away from us and to our phone even if it is in airplane mode.
I mention these studies, to underscore the point that it is a big deal if we have our phone sitting at the dinner table or while spending time with our kids.
Literally, we have energy being drawn to our phone, as opposed to being drawn to our wife, to our husband, to our kids, to our friends. When our energy is drawn to our phone, we’re not going to be as creative or be as thoughtful.
We’re not going to be able to hear with listening ears what others are saying. To our children it can appear that we are an in-demand person, always on-call and that at any moment, we may have to get into the Batmobile and go out and save the world.
C. Smart phones deplete willpower:
All the back and forth on our cell phones, the microdecisions we have to make as we scroll through social media is depleting our willpower.
It makes us incapable of making the decisions we want to about food, about exercise, about relationships, about sleep. The decisions we should make in home and finances.
Our capacity to do what we want and know to do is diminishing whenever we surf, scroll, and swipe.
I’ve seen so many kids, so many adults whose lives are just being devoured by the smartphone, devoured by social media. Their time, it’s just gone. Their wellbeing is gone.
They’re socially anxious, they’re socially awkward in real life, because all they know to do is to text people or like things and follow things and share things.
They don’t actually know how to speak their mind or articulate their thoughts, or they’re just yelling at people behind a computer screen.
I just had a testimony of a young guy who had been dealing with depression, and intense mental and emotional issues, and he decided to give his phone a break. He realized that he would rather have his emotional wellbeing and his life back, then be connected 24/7.
He gave up social media and literally within a couple of weeks, his emotional state changed. He wasn’t depressed anymore. In fact, he wanted to go running every day and get to the home projects he’d been putting off. He got his motivation back!
Try limiting your screen time each day or go on a phone or social media fast for a few days or weeks and see what happens!
