Chapter from a book Start with yourself
In addition to regular exercise, what you eat, when you eat it, and how much of it also plays an absolutely irreplaceable role in health care. Again, this may sound like a completely obvious banality, but only a sensible combination of all three factors can lead to a healthy lifestyle.
A moderate but poor-quality diet is just as unhealthy for the body in the long term as overeating the best foods.
People like to find all sorts of excuses for their excess weight – from thyroid problems to hormones, genetics or various syndromes – but in ALL cases the basic laws of physics apply, i.e. you can't gain weight from air and water, and if someone gains weight, it simply means that they are simply taking in more calories than they are using, and the body is storing them as fat. Everything else is just an extension and an excuse – again, it's that easy! And if I have some health problem with poor processing of a specific food, I have to eat even less of it and adjust my diet accordingly.
I know people who would argue to their heart's content that they don't know what's making them fat, that they don't eat much, but you know that they have a two-liter bottle of cola in the fridge, which they can easily drink in a day. Such a large bottle of cola contains almost a thousand calories (73 sugar cubes, that's a quarter of a kilo), which is the equivalent of a nice portion of roast goose with cabbage and six dumplings. So that "poor guy", who eats exactly the same as you and doesn't know what's making his belly grow, in addition to all his meals, will have one extra goose in the form of a sweet drink during the day...
The exact same case is with nuts, which also look relatively innocent, but have a huge amount of calories. One hundred gram bag of nuts contains more than five hundred calories, so two small bags for the TV are just another goose or schnitzel with salad...
And for a beer in the evening? Each beer has two hundred calories, so five beers in a pub is just another hearty dinner in disguise.
But again, it's all about moderation - definitely not dogmatically following calorie charts for days, weighing your food, and not drinking any alcohol at all. Just choose a normal and balanced approach again, because you wouldn't be able to sustain complicated procedures for long anyway, and this unsustainable extreme of calorie counting would only lead you to return to your previous bad lifestyle sooner.
But I think the most important thing is not to lie to yourself, to look the truth in the eye and not make excuses that I don't know what's making me fat.
If I go to the pub in the evening for five beers, I don't have to have duck, and if I do, I might skip breakfast the next day and just have a vegetable salad for lunch. It's also a good idea to learn to drink only clean water and pass this habit on to your children.
People also often can't sleep and toss and turn all night and then they go to the doctor and instead of looking into what's wrong with their life, the doctor chooses the easiest solution. He prescribes pills again, this time for insomnia, and perhaps all he needs to do is look at what the patient has for dinner and what time it is...
It's clear that going to bed on a completely empty stomach is not convenient for anyone, but eating a heavy meal at eight o'clock in the evening - for example, red meat, which stays in the stomach for up to four hours and is digested in the small intestine for another six hours - is really energy-intensive, and the body cannot rest during such a process, let alone allow you to fall asleep peacefully.
However, everyone is different – for example, I found that I hardly need to eat dinner, and I've been doing this for over a year. In the morning, I feel much more rested, full of energy, I sleep better and look forward to breakfast.
Of course, I don't always stick to it, and when we go to a barbecue with friends in the evening or to a pub for a beer, I have a lighter lunch, as I already wrote.
In short, everything in moderation. Of course, you also need to adjust your food intake if you do physically demanding work, where the body naturally consumes much more energy - but again, don't worry, it will tell you for itself.
I think a very useful rule is 80/20 – that is, follow your rules eighty percent of the time and take the remaining twenty percent more freely and don't stress.
Countless books have been written about the difference between five hundred calories of sugar in a cola and five hundred calories of vegetables or quality meat, so I won't go into that in depth, but in addition to the types of calories your body takes in, the quality of the food itself is also very important.
Tons of books have also been written about the (lack of) quality of food from multinational chains, but people still eat it. But again, it's about some kind of balance and long-term sustainability.
In our family, we don't buy ready-made products or chemically processed foods full of "E" numbers and preservatives, but my wife tries to cook mainly with basic ingredients such as flour, butter, eggs, meat, milk or vegetables.
We have found that the body will tell you in this case too, and if you have really high-quality and nutritious foods, you will need much smaller amounts and more moderate portions. Rather than eating disgusting hormone-infused chicken five times a week, which is just full of water and salt, we only eat high-quality, home-raised beef twice a week.
Yes, it will take a lot more time to prepare – but again, it's like everything else – nothing is free, and what seems so, you pay for in the end much more, and here, unfortunately, in the form of your own ruined health. Everything accumulates in the body and one day it will catch up with you.
Don't forget that sugar is a real killer that is responsible for a huge number of health problems - from obesity, diabetes, tooth decay, liver and immune problems, inflammation in the body to cardiovascular problems - it is dangerous in that it creates addiction in the brain like a drug and also affects brain function.
Of course, you can sweeten your life from time to time – but carefully and very little by little.
Exercise is also essential for the healthy functioning of the body. That you don't have time for it? Most of the time, these are just excuses and more lies into your own pocket.
To start, just walking and maybe not taking the elevator is enough.
When our children were small and we took them to school and kindergarten about two kilometers away, there was no reason for us to drive. I know that children who live much closer to school usually drive to school, and their parents still drive them every day – someone once explained to me that it was a kind of "status", probably of better people, along with a car show...
We try to walk every day – at least a short evening walk of a few kilometers – and ride our bikes several times a week, even in winter, if there is no snow and it is well below zero.
In the Czech Republic, almost 20% of adults are obese, but more than 60% of adults are overweight – the third worst result among European countries. Our country has not yet reached the values of the United States, where more than 42% of adults are obese (often morbidly), but I think we are making good progress with the lifestyle that we are increasingly adopting from the West.
For example, when we see that the San Francisco City Hall has seriously hired a morbidly obese "obesity expert" who claims that "no one is obligated to be healthy" and how proud she is to be fat (i.e. "full-fledged"), we can only wonder if all this is really just another intention - for example, so that the pharma lobby can "treat" even more people...
And again, almost everyone knows what I have described, but how few people follow it and then are surprised that they have health problems and a worse life. They sit at home and curse the bad fate that has "given" them health, but again, they should look for the fault primarily in themselves.
And that there is no time to take care of your health? Again, it's just about personal priorities, what we prioritize, what we lie to ourselves, and what we tell ourselves we will change...
Here is another example from the book Start at Home.
Will you have the courage to read the book because it will reveal many truths about yourself that you don't want to know...?
You will best support my work buys books,
if you don't read, you can and otherwise....
