The most important retirement plan besides the 401 K
The two most important plans for a great retirement are a robust 401k and robust accrued health. You don’t want to be arthritic bed-bound when you retire, do you? You want to travel the world with the love of your life, run with your grandchildren, play golf with friends, etc.
Just like the concept of compounded returns and dollar cost averaging in financial investment, you must invest in your health every day to get that compounded return.
So, what can we do for robust accrued health?
Follow a healthy lifestyle which constitutes the following-
One who SEES well retires well (Sleep, Eat, Exercise, and Socialize well)
Sleep well:
Sleep at least 7–8 hours daily to recharge your body at night (don’t partially charge your phone overnight, only to run out of battery by noon). Not only that, but chronic sleep deprivation is associated with every known medical problem (diabetes, hypertension, stroke, accelerated aging, etc.)
One can know the difference between healthy and unhealthy choices but still be unable to choose the right one. A tired lack-of-sleep mind tends to pick the latter.
Eat well:
Eat good food, avoid bad food, and give your body a break from eating.
“We become what we eat.”
Eat good food
Good food: We know vegetables, fruits, nuts, olive oil, and fatty fish are the best. I want to focus more on vegetables and fruits because, as per CDC, Only 1 in 10 Adults Get Enough fresh Fruits or leafy Vegetables, and this has the most impact on your health with a slight change in your daily habit. Federal guidelines recommend that adults eat at least 1½ to 2 cups per day of fruit and 2 to 3 cups of vegetables as part of a healthy eating pattern.
Fresh leafy vegetables are laden with antioxidants, good fibers, and nitrates.
Antioxidants: The act of breathing is living, but the side-effect of breathing (and oxygen) is its byproduct, oxidative radicals, which damage cellular proteins and cause aging. To negate this, the intake of adequate antioxidants is crucial.
Fiber: Adequate intake of fiber is important not only for good bowel function but also for maintaining a healthy gut microbiome, the absence of which is linked to multiple health and mental problems.
Nitrates are required for a healthy blood vessel system, but sadly, our body produces them less as we grow older. That is why it is all so important to maintain this supply exogenously.
Why only “1 in 10 adults get enough fresh fruits or leafy vegetables”? Primarily because of friction and cognitive willpower.
To decrease friction, make it easy to adopt: One easy life hack is to blend 1 cup of fruits and 2–3 cups of vegetables in a blender and drink it every day. Do this in the 1st half of the day when you have a higher level of willpower.
A simple, easy-to-make green smoothie recipe that I follow is spring mix + honey yogurt + ice (+/- berries). Here is a link to another recipe for “green goddess.”
One extra benefit of blending: Do you see herbivores like cows and giraffes chewing all day? You are a human that created blenders and a rocket ship to Mars; unlike herbivores, you just have to blend it for a minute. Blending massively increases the surface area and the digestion index (beneficial nutrients get more readily absorbed into your body).
Avoid bad food.
The most commonly abused substance is not cocaine, alcohol, or marijuana, but bad food. We constantly overindulge in it despite knowing its negative ramifications.
Poor dietary habit is the most common cause of premature death, accelerated aging, immunosuppression, diabetes, hypertension, and atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease.
What is bad food? It can be categorized into a diet high in sodium, high glycemic index, red meat, processed food, and a high AGE diet.
Bad food tastes good and is highly addictive. It is the greatest irony of human evolution — we are programmed in such a way that unhealthy foods taste good to us. Why? During much of human history, we have survived in a resource-poor state, where there was an evolutionary advantage to favor highly nutritious food. This changed because of the industrial and technological revolution, which brought a massive uptick in productivity into a new era of food abundance.
High Sodium (Na) diet:
I always say to my patients you don’t swell with water, but you swell with Chinese and Cheesecake factory.
A high-sodium diet causes not only the hanging bags below your eyes but also all of your organs and their cells to swell within. It has been linked to various medical problems and premature death.
High intake of red meat and processed food:
— Red meat is high in saturated fat, which can increase your blood cholesterol levels, specifically low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol, and increases risk of developing chronic diseases such as heart disease, diabetes, and certain types of cancer (e.g., colorectal cancer).
— Processed food is low in essential nutrients (dietary fiber, nitrates, antioxidants, vitamins, and minerals), high in sodium, and high in unhealthy additives, preservatives, and artificial ingredients, which can have negative effects on your health in the long term.
— high in AGE (see below)
High AGE diet (less known but more common):
What is AGE? It stands for Advanced Glycation End-products. These are glycated proteins (protein molecules that have sugar attached to them). The consumption of dietary AGEs is associated with elevated levels of oxidant stress and inflammation, both of which have been connected to the recent rise in diabetes and cardiovascular disease epidemics (diabetes mellitus, a medical condition, is an endogenous high AGE state).
Where does dietary AGE come from? Food cooked for too long and/or at very high temperatures contains more AGE. E.g., more dietary AGE is found in fried red meat than poached chicken. Watch out for food cooked in oil, e.g., donuts, french fries, Kentucky fried chicken (protein and carbohydrates fried in oil), etc.
General dictum: Any food that gives you a post-food coma isn’t good for your health. It is highly inflammatory. What food can you think of that makes you feel sleepy after (e.g., a hearty lamb biryani meal)?
High glycemic index foods:
Some classic examples are - sugar, sugary foods, soft drinks, white bread, potatoes, white rice, etc.
High glycemic index food is the cause of abdominal obesity and metabolic syndrome X, which is associated with an increased risk of most age-related medical conditions such as diabetes, hypertension, stroke, and so on.
It is ok to indulge in those foods in small amounts or infrequently, but when you do it regularly, the bad habits compound too. They tend to reinforce each other to end up with an unhealthy cluster (bad food, bad sleep, lack of exercise).
Avoid smoking and consuming greater than 1–2 servings of alcohol per day.
Fasting :
When the cells are not eating, they are healing.
Japanese cell biologist Yoshinori Ohsumi won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2016 for his research on how cells recycle and renew their content by autophagy (digesting old cellular contents and making new ones). Fasting activates this cellular recycling and renewal process of autophagy, which helps slow the aging process and improves your general health, well-being, and also, intelligence. Fasting activates the brain cells to think more. Evolutionary-wise, when you are hungry, you get more creative on where to find food.
“Eat only when the sun is out.”
Don’t eat after 6 pm; eat the next day at 10 am or noon. This equates to 16–18 hours of fasting.
Exercise well:
Take the unique benefits of each form of exercise.
- Strength — Muscle strengthening exercises such as weight training, calisthenics, etc.
- Aerobics — for cardiovascular health.
- Yoga — for tendons, ligaments, and joints. All our life, we are impacting our joints and ligaments. Yoga does the reverse act and dis-impacts this tension. And it’s a great segway for meditation too.
Your body is like a house. You will need not just plumbing but also woodwork, brickwork, electricity, etc.
Add 15 min meditation to your daily routine: In all our waking life, our mind runs errands. Time to give your waking mind a break and give it a little space to reset and heal. (Meditation is essentially getting rid of all thoughts in your mind and focusing on taking deep-long breaths.) Meditation also gives your mind’s brake (like a car’s brake) practice. Anxiety (or rumination) happens when this brake doesn’t work well.
Socialize well:
Happiness experts recommend meaningful socialization at least once weekly. Humans evolved to be tribal because of the evolutionary benefit it brings (united we stand, divided we fall). Don’t fight against this billion-year evolutionary programming. Use it to your advantage!
One exciting aspect is combining socialization with exercise -e.g., tennis, badminton, biking with friends, etc. Want to add 10 yrs to your life - start playing tennis.
Lack of meaningful socialization and social support can lead to chronic stress (which is associated with increased risk of diabetes, hypertension, stroke, cancer, accelerated aging, etc.), and a myriad of mental health problems (e.g., anxiety with associated somatization, which can manifest in many forms such as tension headache, postprandial distress syndrome, chronic back pain, generalized pain syndrome, etc.)
These are the 4 pillars of good health that are needed — just a like a building needs 4 bases, you remove 1 base, and the whole building tumbles down.
Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change (preexisting conditions and genetics), the courage to change the things I can, and most importantly, the wisdom to know the difference.
You know the difference; why not start NOW?
Aging is an irreversible process, but it is a process with momentum that you can change. One who SEES well, ages slowly, and retires well.
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