Metabolic disorders like obesity, and diabetes, don’t exist in nature. It’s only been through the introduction of modern eating and lifestyle patterns that we have the frightening obesity statistics seen across the world today. All kinds of scientific fields are putting together a picture of what humans can do to lead a strong, happy, and healthy lifestyle, and often it involves trying to replicate the behavior of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Here are 9 Paleolithic habits that can help you lose weight, and keep it off.
1. Get Up Early
Naturally occurring sleep patterns are better for your health. If you go camping, and try to sleep in until noon, you’ll fail. As insolated as we are in our modern lives, the moment we step back into the natural world, our brains are fully capable of shifting back into hunter-gatherer mode. Hundreds of genes involved in metabolism are directly affected by the rising and falling of the sun. However biology aside, waking up with the sun allows for your first meal to come earlier. Lunch comes earlier than normal, followed by an earlier than normal dinner, simply because you started eating at 6:30 rather than 8. This is important because…
2. Go To Bed Early
This can contribute to diabetes and other metabolic disorders. When the sun goes down, we lose our biggest source of blue light. Cells in our eyes regulate metabolism through the perception of light, and when the sun goes, the blue light goes; and when the blue light goes, the brain tells our bodies to go to sleep. The Sleep Hormone Melatonin is produced, and melatonin stops the production of insulin. So no sun means melatonin production starts, and when melatonin starts, insulin production stops – in other words, without the sun, we can’t metabolize carbs and sugars.
3. Don’t Buy The Foods You’re Not Supposed To Eat
Sugar and carbohydrate-dense foods are more or less the primary culprits of America’s obesity epidemic. If you are having a hard time resisting cravings, remember you are the gatekeeper to your kitchen. Junk food won’t magically appear in your pantry if you don’t put it there.
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4. Rewire Your Brain To Crave Healthy Food
If you resist cravings long enough, they will go away. When you feel the craving for sugary foods, there’s a lot of science to suggest (and even confirm in some cases,) that it’s actually the bacteria living in your gut which experience the craving. Many bacteria species can only eat simple sugars like glucose, sucrose, dextrose, and lactose, and if you deprive them of these sugary pleasures, they diminish. Pick a food you like – almonds, brussel sprouts, and every time you get a craving for sugar, eat your substitute instead. Within a week or two, the sugar-loving microbes will be gone.
5. Exercise
Exercise is beneficial in more ways than can be enumerated, so find something that is at least partially-bearable, and start sweating! At this point, there’s too much information out there to avoid the reality that life used to hard and full of physical movement, and now for many Americans it isn’t. Increasing your heart rate above 170 beats per minute for a mere fifteen minutes every day is a good enough start to gain many of the hormetic benefits.
6. Restrict Your Eating Window
A breakthrough in the modern ethos of dietary interventions, time-restricted eating can offer a glimmer of hope to someone who just can’t manage to implement a strategy to protect themselves from metabolic disorders. When you eat, could be just as important as what you eat; and if you can manage to squeeze all of your eating into an 8 hour window, leaving a 16 hour gap between your last meal of the day and first meal of the next day, you’re giving yourself a much better chance to avoid developing type-2 diabetes for example.
7. Find A Source Of Inspiration And Abuse It
Daniel Kahneman details how willpower is actually a finite mental resource in his famous book, Thinking Fast and Slow, and that expending large amounts of mental effort weaken one’s resolve. This is perfectly natural and should not be viewed as weakness. Instead, recognize that you only have so much willpower, inspiration, and discipline in the tank before you have to take a break. Treat sources of inspiration like food and drink; feast on them in order to replenish your store of willpower and determination.
8. Take Your Lunch Break Walking
If you work in an environment where you get an hour for lunch, bring it with you in a backpack and spend it walking around your building – eating as you go. For better results, go to an area rich in foliage, as our brains react positively to the color green, increasing the capacity for exertion.
9. Avoid Working Night Shifts
Denmark has classified nighttime shift work as a carcinogen – a cancer causing agent. This is because it interferes with all the biological processes we evolved over millions of years to be active during the day and sleepy at night. Nighttime shift workers are far more likely to succumb to cravings for cigarettes and alcohol, and overwhelmingly choose carbohydrate-dense meals to healthier alternative – partly because their body is trying against itself to stay awake, and partly because healthy options don’t tend to be available at 1 o’clock in the morning.