Low-Hanging Fruit: Physical and Mental Health

Who doesn’t love the Pareto principle? 80/20, or 80% of the consequences come from 20% of the causes.  Finding the 20% always gets me excited. For example, a 15-minute meditation in the morning translates to a positive, clear mindset the whole day. Carving out a half-day at work to fix a process translates to efficient projects for the rest of the year.

Low-hanging fruit and easy wins are the best! Especially when it comes to the important things in life that one really has to take care of, like diet and exercise. Those determine the baseline quality of your life. You want to keep your physical and mental health in tiptop shape but you also want it to be low-maintenance because you have a lot of other things to worry about.

A couple of my life obsessions are productivity and health. Combining the two, I’d like to share my best health hacks and habits from several years of personal study of what works and what doesn’t. I'm still learning as I go along, happily collecting tips. I hope you pick up something useful here too. Note that I'm not a doctor and I'm not claiming to be one. This is for general health.  The key to maintaining them are REWARDS, as I will explain below. There has to be a reward for everything, otherwise, I can't be bothered.

Diet - main principle is to FEEL GOOD.

1. Drop food that "fight" your body like dairy and bread.

Observe how eating certain food make you feel.  If eating a certain item makes you feel any degree of discomfort in your body, drop it. I always feel a slight discomfort eating anything with dairy so I dropped it.  Chances are you might be feeling this too. 
90 to 100% of East Asians are lactose-intolerant in some degree. For most of us, drinking cow's milk will cause some discomfort (however slight) and this means your body doesn't like it. Don't fight your body. Drop cow's milk.  There are plenty of great plant-based milk that you can drink and use for baking. My favorite is oat milk because it's the most sustainably-made milk in the market apparently. Also - animal cruelty reasons. I was shocked at the cruelty of the process of getting cow's milk from cow to table. I can't in good conscience drink that milk.
As for bread, first, it has dairy (milk and butter), second, it has eggs and gluten/wheat. For most people, if you don't take a food-allergy test, you won't know that you are allergic to gluten/wheat and will keep on eating it.  I just noticed that I feel slightly uncomfortable and heavy after eating bread, like it was fighting my body. I experimented and ate gluten-free bread and it was great for me after. 

Another reason why I generally avoid milk and gluten is that I observed that almost all people who share the results of their expensive food intolerance tests always say that the top food items that they are intolerant to are milk and wheat. Someday I'll get around to doing this test, but in the meantime, I'll just follow the crowd, it works for me, anyway.

2. Ease out your liking for sugar, then drop sugar.

Sugar will kill you. I need not say more given all the studies. We shouldn't be eating it. I don't think the right approach is to be told to just drop it though, because sugar is hard to drop just like that. Sugar tastes great.

I discovered that the trick to make it easy to avoid is to learn to not appreciate the taste of sugar in the first place.

Like love begets love, sugar begets sugar. The more you eat it, the more you want it. The trick is to lose your taste for sugar, then it's easy to avoid. Ease it out by only having sugar once or twice a week. Eventually you will get to that point where you're like "ick, it's unnaturally sweet".  

The only exception for me is fruits/natural sugar. Those don't give me a sugar high/addiction and eating them feels nice for me.  

3. Make your meals around whole foods. Eat simple things.

Vegetables beget vegetables, fruits beget fruits.

These are what we should be eating the most.  The opposite of my sugar tip, my tip for this is to learn to love the taste of vegetables and fruits. The way to develop a habit is the reward loop: cue, action, reward. For veggies and fruits, the reward portion is a feeling that it's pure food; it's human food; it's food that was naturally made for you and that your body responds well to. How to arrive at this point: just make it a point to introduce veggies to most meals and try to eat a fruit a day to develop this palate. Then you'll get to make it a habit once you have the palate for it. Once you have a palate for simple things/simple food, it feels icky to have food with junk, preservatives and artificial ingredients.

That's it. Three basic easy-win diet principles for life.  Bonus information: not to be arrogant but I have to give my basis for why I can give out diet recommendations. All my health stats are good and I am disciplined when it comes to food. I'm a pescatarian and for some weeks in a year, a vegetarian. Also I do intermittent fasting quarterly because it feels amazing. That's for another post.

Exercise - main principle is to feel STRONG and BALANCED.

1. Terribly unpopular tip, please know that consumerism is against my life principles, but this has been SO easily reliable and the low-hanging fruit and easy key to my regular exercise: get yourself an Apple Watch and observe the Activity rings. 

It has been scientifically engineered by good old Apple to motivate people to exercise. You get lovely, positive notifications when you met your calorie goals, your exercise minutes goals, when you stand for 1 minute every hour. The notifications make me feel loved and accomplished! The goals are always on my wrist and they motivate me every day to work out.

2. Work out in the morning. 

The start to a workout is always the hardest, but it feels amazing during and after. A tip that always always works is to do a workout in the morning so that it's automatically in your morning routine and you already feel accomplished as you are starting your day. This feeling of accomplishment radiates through the day and helps you tackle everything with a positive, can-do mindset. Domino effect. Exercise in the morning makes everything better. That's why Charles Duhigg in his book The Power of Habit said that exercise is a keystone habit.

3. Aim for 30 minutes of cardio every day and a number of push-ups a day.  

The rest -- weight-training, yoga, whatever, are obviously great but cardio should be your bread and butter, the priority. This is basic for general heart and overall health. Push-ups, on the other hand, is the fastest way to transform and improve your bearing and posture, and it strengthens your whole body too.

Mental health - main principle is to have MENTAL SPACE.

1. Meditate every morning.

Put this as part of your morning routine and it's another easy but huge win for the day. Another keystone habit and even a five-minute daily meditation is very beneficial. It's toothbrushing for the mind. I needn't say more, again, because the studies about meditation's benefits are all overwhelming. Daily meditation personally transformed my mind for the better -- I don't know anyone who wasn't helped by a meditation habit, and I can say it's a part of who I am.

2. Use Microsoft's To-Do app.

This has been lifechanging during the pandemic as I am working from home, and I'm very grateful for this discovery.  
My definition of work well-being is when one feels accomplished every day and has a manageable task to do for tomorrow. I have been greatly helped by Microsoft's To-Do app -- I recommend this app because work laptops are usually Windows laptops, so this is what's available on your work laptop. There is a Today section -- put a reasonable and manageable list of tasks to do there (or select from your Flagged emails), those tasks which will make you feel good if you finish them that day, and which you're kinda sure you can do/finish. Don't try to be a superhero here because you'll just feel demotivated if you set tasks that are too ambitious for you, but make sure you at least do what you need to deliver that day.

Tick them off as you go along. There is a lovely ding! sound for each tick, which I LOVE. A Pavlovian mechanism for me to relish doing work tasks, if you will. At the end of the day, I see the tasks that I've accomplished, and whether I finish all of them or not, I set the Today portion to empty. I put the remaining tasks for tomorrow or defer them in another section. I feel that I did something that counts that day, and I don't strain or pressure myself. This is magic for my wellbeing.

3. Establish a wind-down routine after work.

My favorite. After work I switch from white light to yellow light. I put my laptop away from sight. We cook and have a relaxing dinner, work out of my way, out of my thoughts, notifications on my phone are off, I have a cozy cup of tea. I make sure to do only things I like. Even personal chores, nope. Those are bunched for lunchtime or on the weekends. This time is completely for me, for fun.

That's it for now, just a general overview. Might do a deep-dive into specifics in the future and update this list as I learn more.

Have a happy, healthy, mindful week ahead, reader.