Nowadays you often get a simple advice on social media which is supposed to be the magic bullet for weight loss or any kind of health related topic. And this sticks very well, after all we love the idea of simple fixes to important problems. And on the other end of the spectrum we arrive at very comprehensive health plans covering exact meals, timings, specific exercises and schedules. This can be tempting for the start if you are really motivated, after all you don’t need to learn and understand much but just follow a monkey plan. But everyone who tried this will agree that such a tight corset will eventually but unsustainable and what often happens for us perfectionist humans – once we split from the plan slightly we just trash it completely. Both approaches – the magic bullet and the comprehensive strict corset are not sustainable for 99% of the population which incl. definitely me and most likely also you. And yes also new drugs like Ozempic are not a magic bullet but can be a powerful tool – we will cover that more in the future.

I agree however with one thing – if you dial in the right basic habits, it can be like magic.

After wandering through the various magic bullets, diets, programs, exercises and so on over the last 20 years, I step by step came up with a framework for myself on how to become and sustain healthy. This was not an intentional work but an unintentional outcome of many many hours of reading, listening and experimenting. And as I am convinced that this framework is not the perfect and full truth, after all there is still a lot of research to do. I am convinced that it is a very solid and well researched and pracically proven (not only be me) basis to build a healthy live on. And as research will progress the framework can be tweaked and adjusted.

The framework exists out of four pillars – Nutrition, Activity, Exercise, Sleep – and is complemented by two transversal dimensions – Supplements and Measurement/ Motivation. Here is a very short summary of the most important aspects. I will cover details and the research behind it in later blog posts but here is a short and sweet full rundown:

The Pillars:

1. Nutrition:
   • The basics of nutrition come down very simple – the details can be mind blowing complex, controversial and often practically irrelevant.
   • Basics:
     • Always focus on protein first! Get your daily amount of high quality protein in. Ideally animal protein. Ideally with every meal, Ideally start your meal with it.
     • If you happen to be veggie or vegan, be mindful that you need to be more specific and probably get more overall protein in to reach the same effect as with animal protein.
     • If we talk about good quality animal protein, target around 1.6 gram per kilogram of your total target weight. Example: If your target weight is 80kg, target around 128g or protein every day.
     • Fill up the rest of your meals with high quality, minimal processes whole foods. For the basics do not worry about carbs vs. fats. Just stick to whole minimal processed foods.
     • Don’t drink calories
     • Important: Don’t be religious about it. Why is this important?:
       • There is no exact science behind 1.6g protein – ball-parking it will be great.
       • Always shoot for 80/20 – Perfection is your worst enemy, consistency is your biggest friend. Be consistent but allow your self the occasional *fill in your favourite fast food, sweet treat, cocktail* and make sure your fully enjoy and appreciate it when you have it.
       • Unless you have a history of drinking problems, there is no reason never to drink a glass of wine anymore. Yes it has calories, but yes it also tastes damn good, and in the end we still ant to enjoy live!
   • Advanced, details:
     • Well there is so much to say about different benefits of more carbs vs. more fats vs no carbs. Saturated fats vs. mono- and polyunsaturated fats. The effects on our metabolism, the advantages for certain type of Sports and recovery. Effects of fruit suggar on our liver. Importance or irrelevance of dietary fibre. Different types of diets, keto, paloe, veggie, vegan, carnivore, not even starting about the endless types of short and long term fasting. I will sooner or later write separate blogs about these topics, the latest in research and my personal practical experience. But for now…
     • …let me emphasise again, as it is so important: Dial in the basics above and stick consistently to them, then the rest are in best case nice tools to tweaks for your specific needs and in worst case just noise.
       
2. Activity:
   • You might be wondering why I differentiate Activity and Exercise. Let me start here with my personal experience which triggered this differentiation for me:
   • I have been going to the gym for the past 10-15 years. Sometimes more consistent, multiple times per week, sometimes less. But I always did a few times per week exercise. However the rest of the time I was pretty sedentary. Driving to work, office job, driving home. Besides the gym I did not move a lot. When I started measuring my daily steps I had an average of 4.000 – 5.000 steps per day. What was the effect?:
     
     Well, on the positive side, luckily I could maintain my muscle mass quite ok over the years. But on the negative side I was not able to loose a significant amount of weight and keep it off. It felt like every 1h spend in the Gym was Sisyphus work.
     
     At one point I did a complete change and I will never forget the sudden drastic change which happened: When I moved to another country, I did not have a Gym available immediately and on the other hand I learned about „rucking“ (basically a brisk walk with weight on your back – will get more into this in another post). So I started walking every day – I started with 8.000 steps / day – 10.000/ day – 12.000/ day. Which is significantly more than I was doing before. nd what was the effect?:
     
     My weight started dropping – and dropping – and dropping. I lost 20kg in 4 month before my weight was finally plateauing – which I was expecting to happen basically every week since I started. And still today when I think about this it is hard to grasp what a drastic change I went through, especially in these 4 month.
     
     Thinking back about this now it totally makes sense. You have more or less 16h every day where you are active. Spending 1h of this doing exercise and then 15h more or less inactive does not need much more explanation why this is not effective. When you ramp up your general activity however during the full 16h, this has an enormous effect on your overall health!
     
   • What is the bottom line here: Exercise is important but if your don’t get enough daily general activity in, the Exercise will be a Sisyphus work. I will in a separate post write about how general activity will even amplify the exercise effects.
     
3. Exercise:
   • Basics: If you buy a house, do you just have a look from the outside on how it looks? Usually not! You might even (you should!) get an expert to evaluate the structure of the building – usually the most severe damage which devalue a house are not even immediately visible. You can easily repaint a building but a corrupt structure can be a total loss.
     
     Well, our body is kind of similar. A new hair cut and wearing some shiny closes are easy fixes. But the most important we have is the structure of our body. Without a solid, healthy, strong structure the rest does not matter. And what is our structure: Well if we stretch the building comparison a bit more, we have the material structure: bricks, isolation, roof tails, windows, etc. and we have the facility tech: pipes, electro cables, heating system, ventilation system, etc. In our body the structure is: Bones, muscles and joints. The facility tech is our cardiovascular system, our mitochondria, etc. (I know every biologist might scream now of this oversimplification).
   • Why is exercise now so important: To be able to perform your daily activity, you need all of these structural elements. But daily activity is not enough to prevent our structure from decaying over time as we age. If you want to live a healthy and vital long live and be able to be a kick ass grandpa/ grandma – exercise is crutial important.
   • In order to build a strong structure and maintain it you need to be specific. We will in future blog posts go into more detail, but in a nutshell here is a good ballpark basis:
     • 2-3 times per week 45min of full body strength training – main target, muscles, bones, joints
     • 2-3 times per week 1h of zone 2 cardio exercise – main target, cardiovascular health
     • 1-2 times per week of all out zone 5 cardio (e.g. HIIT)
   • These are just some very general guidelines, and depending on your specific starting point and goal this can look very different. If you are an athlete and you are training for a specific goal to run a marathon or Ironman triathlon, you will be much more specific and much higher volume. But if your goal is „just“ to become the best version of yourself this is a great starting point.
   • Important: Consistency is by far the most important here. Be consistent. Be consistent. Be consistent.
     
4. Sleep:
   • Well no health advice would be complete without sleep. The public saying „you can sleep when you are dead“ could not be further away from good advice. It should be more „you will be dead soon when you don’t sleep“.
   • We need sleep for various purposes. Our body will initiate several processes to recover physically from the day but also mentally to process what we experienced, to manifest new connections in the brain (learning). Getting enough quality sleep is crucial to enable and facilitate these processes.
   • In order to get enough quality sleep it is most important to be consistent. Establish a good routine which allows you to wind down, sleep well without disturbance and wake up refreshed.
   • There are various strategies which can help you to achieve this depending on your personal needs: Avoid blue light in the evening, cooling down the room, trying sauna before sleep, making it completely dark when sleeping, not eating 2h before going to bed are just a few you can try out for yourself. We will cover more specifics in the future and also which modern tools can help you track your sleep quality and improve it.

Transversal Dimensions:

1. Supplements:
   • If you are a healthy individual and take care of a well balanced diet, you don’t necessarily need supplements. There are however a few very useful and depending on your personal situation very important supplements which can improve your health or just help with achieving some of the basics above easier. I will mention a few here without going into much detail:
   • Protein: Getting enough quality protein in can be a challenge on some days or at least not be super convenient to bring eggs or chicken breast along. A very useful tool are Protein supplements. Whey Protein powder would be the most typical and best source where you can get around 25g protein with 150 kcal. Personally I like to mix this in a bowl of low fat greek joghurt or quark for breakfast. A true protein power start in the day. But there are also some good protein bars out there where you can 20g protein per 200 kcal. But don’t overdo it, in the end these are highly processed foods.
   • Minerals: The water we drink today is usually not very rich in minerals as we would find it in the nature. Minerals on the other hand are essential for a lot of our body functions. Especially when you experience some type of cravings or feel not 100% sharp I highly recommend you try to supplement with a full source of minerals mixed in water. Especially if you sweat a lot in the summer, do exercise or try any kind of fasting regime, supplement with minerals and you will most likely feel much better.
   • Vitamins: You can get good vitamins if you have a well balanced diet with various fresh mixed veggies and fruits, ideally organically grown, minimally processed. But lets be honest, how many days are we able to get that? If you are like me and you cannot make sure you get this each and every day, I recommend supplementing with a good multi vitamin which serves like a safety net.
   • Vitamin D: I separate this especially because of the unique importance of Vitamin D for our immune system and the personal specific need. If you live in a place where you get plenty of sunshine every day for many hours and you actually use it out doors, then your need will probably be minimal. But if you are like most people in the western world spending most time indoors, and maybe even living in the far north where you have very dark winters – you want to at least check your Vitamin D levels once in a while and adjust with a supplement.
   • There are many more supplements and even some drugs with proven or potential benefits to discuss: Omega 3 fatty accids, Metformin, Rapamycin, NMN, resveratrol, etc. etc. We will go into some of them in the future. But again, if you don’t cover the basics consistently you should not be allowed to think about these details.
     
2. Measurement & Motivation:
   • The last dimension is about measuring and motivation. We want to track input (e.g. nutrition, activity, exercise) and track outcome (e.g. weight, blood markers, strength). The combination of these two can help to keep motivation up.
   • Tracking means we are tracking what we are consuming or doing and the outcomes which are important to us. Ideally some of this is temporary. But it can be very useful depending on your starting point.
   • For example: If you have no idea how many calories your are consuming on a daily basis, how many ballpark calories a chicken breast or a rib eye steak has, or if you think you are doing everything correct but your weight simply does not change – Start with tracking what you consume and most of the time this will be very insightful. Over time as your learn to ballpark more accurately you don’t need to continue this each and every day.
   • My recommendation for a basic start is to track:
     • Daily protein intake
     • Daily total calorie intake
     • Daily activity – steps/ day (tip: set a min step goal per day, your avg will naturally be higher)
     • Which outcome do we want to track?
       • I will focus here on some metrics which are easy to track on a daily basis. There are other useful and important measure to track like blood markers but we will go into them in a separate post.
       • Daily weight
         • Yes my recommendation is to measure daily – at the same time in the same condition (e.g. morning after wake up and morning toilet). This is important to get as many data point as meaningful possible to be able to differentiate noise from signal.
         • However you will not use the daily measurement to make any conclusions! This is a learning process and take some time, but you will get there.
         • The measurement you will use to make conclusions is the weekly average weight – as long as this is moving in the right direction, you are on the right track.
       • Daily sleep quality and duration
         • This is kind of input and outcome at the same time
         • You need daily quality sleep to improve your health
         • On the other hand in my experience, the better your health will be the better you sleep
         • Bottom line: Start tracking your sleep duration and quality. There are plenty of good devices out there.
       • Cardiovascular health
         • This is one of the most important outcomes. In the end there are far too many avoidable deaths from heart attacks and this is a risk we can dramatically reduce with our health framework.
         • Blood pressure, resting heart rate, heart rate variability, pulse wave velocity, ECG, etc. there are plenty of metrics which can be consitently measured by modern affordable smart devices.
         • We will go into some device recommendation in the future
       • Lean Mass and Strenght
         • Your structure is important and to get a notion on how good your structure is you should measure your lean mass and your strength.
         • Most smart scales today offer some kind of lean mass measurement. These might not be as accurate as a gold standard measurement you get at your health center but they are a good enough proxy to measure changes in your lean mass.

To summarise again: Focus on the basics. Be consistent. Don’t be religious. Measure and adjust.

Wow, this post got longer than expected but in the end I wanted to give you a good solid overview on the Framework and the basics around it. Feel free to start experimenting for yourself and reach out if you have any comments, I appreciate any feedback.