I may increase this list some day with new things that I have learned or old things that I can remember.
I may increase this list some day with new things that I have learned or old things that I can remember.
The ketogenic diet is VERY health building, or I should say that the ketogenic diet frees your inner healing capacity to heal other things rather than fight off the encroaching insulin resistance assault that you are doing to yourself by eating so many carbohydrates. People who insist upon continuing to eat a high carb or junk food diet are very un likely to be able to heal themselves when cancer or heart disease, etc. knocks on their door.
Notice that most reports talk about weight loss, but other ailments also get healed and a lot of pharmaceutical drugs get dumped.
I eat about 96% meat (fish, raw eggs, beef, liver, other beef organs, DIY milk kefir, etc., but also some blueberries) for about 2 or 3 years now. Amber O'Hearn, a famous carnivore thinker and speaker at carnivore conferences, calls herself a lipovore, meaning she is a carnivore that eats a lot of fat. She has been a carnivore for about 8 years, and she is looking very healthy. I am a paleolithic ketogenic lipovore, and my health keeps on getting better and better.
There is definitely a "too little" and a "too much" when it comes to intense exercise. See the section about Hormesis. Build gradually, but don't be afraid of a little pain, especially sore muscles and exhaustion. Build your determination so that you celebrate when you get to an authentic failure, when you simply can't push or pull any longer. Sometimes when I "fail" doing push-ups, my arms are so tired and so weak that I have to roll over on my side and use my elbows to get up, while chuckling to myself at what a victory that was. Don't feel guilty about very long rest periods during the day. The point of HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training, the best way to exercise) is that you can put everything into your exercise. Easy cardio is better than nothing, but it does not qualify as intense exercise. Intensity is the secret. Intense exercise is insanely good for one's willpower, about on par with cold showers. Dr. Peter Attia, MD on Joe Rogan. Peter tells us in this podcast that intense exercise is the single best 'drug' for health and longevity.
I actually spend very little time exercising. I would guess that perhaps 20 minutes per day, scattered all across the day. But those 20 minutes are down right heroic, like 100 push-ups in less than 5 minutes. The rest of the time I am resting. Without adequate recovery, lots of people fail to progress. I can't tell you how many young people I've seen on YouTube or Reddit who complain that they aren't getting the gains that they were hoping for, when they do 100 push-ups (or more) every day. Duh! Because they aren't giving themselves time to recover. If your muscles still hurt, then rest. This isn't rocket science. It IS being excessively yang, pushing one's self too hard and not allowing for recovery, which is an inherently yin or parasympathetic process. No one should do intensity on the same muscle group day after day after day. Every other day is quite sufficient.
I was born in 1945, and I fast for 23 hours (and do intense exercise) every single day (called OMAD or One Meal A Day). Fasting has been great for my health; it reduces my inflammation, so I know it as one of those fact thingies. I've been doing OMAD, extended fasting, and intermittent fasting for years. There are numerous different kinds of fasting, intermittent fasting (skipping breakfast) being the most popular. Although intermittent fasting is where people should start, it still has a plethora of benefits, like weight loss, clarified thinking, energy, autophagy, apoptosis, etc.
I love it when I feel the blood vessels on my scalp contract in the cold water, and then relax when I turn it on to hot. I can't prove it, but I know it as a certainty that cold to hot to cold to hot, repeat several times, is keeping my blood vessels young.
You can build courage. No one starts out courageous. Even Wim Hof admits that he dislikes ice baths. He says this openly and without shame or reservation.
Why would this be so? Remember the Paleo principle. We evolved on the high plains (5500 feet above sea level) of equatorial East Africa. Higher altitude and "equatorial" means more UVB, the ultraviolet light rays that make vitamin D3 on your skin. To make as much vitamin D3 as our genes were selected for, we need as much sunlight as our ancestors to get what is optimal for us. But we all live in houses and wear cloths and probably don't live at 5500 feet above sea level or in the tropics. Some of us even avoid the sunshine because medical doctors said that it causes skin cancer.
Perhaps it causes skin cancer to sickly Westerners who eat junk food and party all night, but if it causes skin cancer for healthy people we would have never existed. In fact our grandparents would never have seen the light of day. But, as usual, medical doctors don't think holistically or along evolutionary lines, and they seem painfully fond of standards that keep people coming back to them and paying their medical bills on time.
But how do we know what is optimal to take? Because some scientists were good enough to travel to Kenya and test the blood levels of Maasai people. You know, those smashingly handsome young men who jump up and down in their ceremonies. Their blood levels were around 46 nano-grams per milliliter or 115 nmol/L . The US medical recommendations is above 20 ng/mL, and most people don't even get that high. For us to have as much as our Maasai friends, young people need to supplement at least 10,000 IUs per day.
I take 30,000 IUs per day. Older people don't absorb as well; I have had no problems with this level since I started in March 2020 at 50,000 IUs per day. I also take vitamin K2.
The sun is a natural opiate via POMC (a gene) which releases B-endorpin into our blood stream. We are designed by Mother Nature to be addicted to the sun. If you do not get it naturally you’ll seek it artificially. Artificial will never be as good as natural.
Sunbathing should NEVER extend to burning.
However, don't get too excited about breathing exercises. There is a too much, just like the hormesis perspective says. Don't do your own thing and do more than the teacher instructs. 4 second box breathing may seem mild and safe, but if it helps the US Navy SEALS, then it must be powerful. Don't force breathing exercises. Don't get too enthusiastic about them. Do them with extreme gentleness and calmness to your body/mind. It is definitely not a hormetically wise practice where pushing yourself helps with "gains" of some kind. But it doesn't have to be intense. Health is not only about getting to be a hardcase and suffering. This is more like you relaxing into your parasympathetic nervous system. But it is extremely powerful. Meditation and sleep are also not tough guy stuff, but without them, we are either dead or seriously out-of-balance.
I did not have the nerve strength (or whatever) to do Wim Hof (or Tummo) breathing for very long. I don't suppose that 35 socially isolated LSD trips and 8 shock treatments in the late 1960's had anything to do with that weakness. It is a well-known fact that breathing exercises can blow a person apart from the inside out. People who promote breathing exercises don't seem to mention that very often, sort of like doctors don't mention that there can be vaccine damage with any vaccine.
However, I can do simple 4 second box breathing for 10 minutes without apparent sleep disturbances or irritability issues. I hope to strengthen my nervous system to the point that I can continue with my Wim Hof breathing, which I like very much. Wim Hof breathing promotes long exhale holds, and exhale holds is where all of the magic happens. I held my exhale hold for 4 minutes once. Hopefully I can get back that.
Breathing is an arena with a lot of possibilities for health improvement. There is Butayko breathing method. There is also the simple practice of making sure that you do not breathe through your mouth, especially at night. Take a 1.5 inch piece of surgical tape and stick it perpendicular to your mouth so as to make sure that you don't mouth breathe at night. This is not only very health generating, but it is safe AND helps you to realize that something as simple as proper breathing can make a world of difference with your health.
Meditation does not have to be done sitting in just exactly some way. Any position is fine; keeping your back straight is finer still. I think that we inherit a lot of meditation rules from the distant pass from cultures where they used meditation to keep teenage boys orderly, and as we all know, this is not a natural thing for teenage boys. I know; I used to be one. So in order to develop some discipline in their teenage boys, instead of encouraging them to play football or forcing them to join the military, they develop strict rules about meditation and encouraged their boys to be taught by strict monks. But it gets down to meditation slowing the mind; not sitting in an uncomfortable position for long periods of time. I meditate whenever I can't sleep, in my sleeping position in my bed; hopefully my back is straight. But I do get in some pretty long meditations that way.
But wait!!! Gary Craig was not finished. He developed a practice of simply TALKING to his inner healing vitality or his inner healer, who he rightly decides is female. I talk about 'Her', but I never thought to talk WITH Her. What a brilliant contribution to health building! In 1000 years, this will be the main healing practice and everything else will be secondary.
Perhaps I could apply it to my hatred of con med. I'm probably going to get sick from that kind of hatred.
There are many, many more practices that I could mention here, and I will.