Five Fundamental Practices for Living a Healthy Life

The online arena is abuzz with health hacks, touting new-fangled ways to improve our well-being. But do we really need to pay heed or are the fundamentals of maintaining sound health enough?

With the constant outpouring of wellness information that floods our feeds these days, it’s natural for even the health conscious among us to fret about not doing enough for our minds and bodies. Cold plunges, hot yoga, One-Meal-a-Day and 17 supplements crowding your nightstand – the more we ‘follow’, the further uphill the finish line gets pushed. Does it really need to be so complicated?

‘Well-being’, loosely defined, is the state of feeling healthy, happy and comfortable in everyday life. Sounds fairly straightforward. But health gurus born of social media prescribe the most outlandish solutions to problems that can be fixed with the simplest tweaks in our everyday routines. What your mum or grandma would probably advise, without the heavy costs, marketing or patents. While health fads and buzzwords could help you in the last lap of the well-being marathon, we turn to them first, without even trying out the basics. Let’s get down to the brass tacks of healthy living, categorised into five fundamental parameters.

NUTRITION KNOWLEDGE – FOOD

In our mind-boggling era of AI and outer space escapades, the adage ‘you are what you eat’ has stood the test of time. Food is the fuel that can either nourish and nurture or start a slow burn to disease.

It’s taken us some time to understand that how the body responds to food is much more complex than calorie-in-calorie-out but also far simpler than putting every element of your meal onto a kitchen scale before you eat.

Ditch The Diets

Women, especially, are known to quickly jump onto fad diet bandwagons. From the Grapefruit Diet that was all the rage as early as the 1930s, to Cabbage Soup in the ‘50s, Atkins in the ‘70s, South Beach in the 2000s and the more recent Paleo, Keto and Whole30 trends; Hollywood starlets have endorsed these extreme food habits to slip into their red-carpet robes. Besides being unpleasant (okra water, anyone?), these diets strip our bodies of essential nutrients and fibre and, according to the British Dietetic Association, may lead to loss of muscle and body fluid, malnutrition and health risks.

Intentional Plating

The Harvard School of Public Health’s Healthy Eating Plate is a guide to balanced meals. It recommends that half your plate should be filled with colourful vegetables, of which around one-third should be fruit; a quarter full with grains (like whole wheat, barley, quinoa, oats and brown rice); another quarter with protein powered by poultry, fish, eggs, beans and nuts; and lastly, an intuitive amount of water and fats like good-for-you oils, walnuts and avocado. Remember that low-fat does not necessarily translate to healthy.

The Protein Push

The Prom Queen of the decade – protein – deserves special mention here. Between 0.8gm and 1.6gm of protein per kilogram of body weight, depending on your lifestyle, is the standard according to the researchers at Stanford Medicine. However, they advise steering clear of ‘protein-maxxing’, a viral social media trend where people consume excessively high amounts of protein at every meal and snack, often relying on ultra-processed, protein-fortified products. The researchers believe that although important to hold onto muscle, protein has become one of the most heavily marketed products of our time. They caution that filling up on meats, cheese and protein shakes leaves lesser scope for fibre and nutrients from plant-based foods to wield their antioxidant magic to reduce inflammation and prevent cancer and chronic diseases. This is also what your expensive gut-health supplement is largely based on.

Consistency beats trends. A reasonably balanced diet adhered to 80% of the time outruns a rigorous one that you can’t stand after three weeks.

FREE AND EASY

• Steer clear of opening packages to feed yourself whenever possible.
• Eat the rainbow – diverse colours and textures on your plate on most days.
• Be mindful of getting enough protein but get non-negotiable about fibre.
• Sensible portion control goes a long way, whether or not you want to lose weight.

LIVING THE CHUG LIFE – HYDRATION

There’s a reason water is so imperative to life: 60% of the adult body’s weight is water, essential for major anatomical functions.

Hyped Up

One of the most natural and free resources on the planet, water hasn’t been spared from being pedalled as alkaline (with a pH above seven), hydrogen (with an added molecule of hydrogen gas) or structured (with rearranged clusters of water molecules, similar to water found in glacier melt or untouched springs). None of which lead to better hydration, much like the futility of an electrolyte drink if you aren’t into endurance training.

Recently, people have even been hooking themselves up to intravenous drips in the name of IV hydration therapy which claims to bypass the digestive system and deliver hydration straight to the veins. But all this excessive fluid may stress the kidneys and heart. U.S. News & World Report’s online health archives caution that wellness IV bars (those walk-in clinics that deliver intravenous fluids, vitamins and minerals directly into your bloodstream) are not always strictly regulated and their benefits over oral hydration and vitamin supplements in normally healthy adults remains up for debate.

The Detox Ditch

Speaking of how water flushes out toxins from the body, a.k.a ‘detoxes’, let’s turn to this buzzword that health-focussed social media is rife with. Harvard Health states that the word originally referred to a medical procedure to rid the body of dangerous, often life-threatening, levels of alcohol, drugs or poisons. Today, self-proclaimed health coaches are great proponents of at-home intestinal cleansing, extreme liquid fasts and laxative teas that border on danger, causing nutrient deficiencies, electrolyte imbalances and other health risks. You already own the most sophisticated detox system on earth – it comprises your liver and kidneys, which can do their job perfectly well with adequate amounts of water.

FREE AND EASY

• As per the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, the recommended daily fluid intake for adult females is 2.7 litres, and 3.7 litres for adult males, considering environmental heat, perspiration, body size and activity.
• Chug on hydrating fluids like herbal teas, infused waters, seltzers or just good old water to keep your sparkle on. Remember why the fruit juice and energy drink got cancelled (extreme sugar and caffeine spikes) and avoid them.
• Hydrate before you hit the desk. Dehydration can significantly reduce brain volume, negatively affecting performance on cognitive tasks, according to the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

CALLING IT A DAY – SLEEP

What you do during sleeping hours directly impacts how your waking hours unfold, in terms of how you look, think and feel. You may be diligent with your facials and never skip your nightly beauty routine, but a good night’s rest surpasses the best of beauty rituals.

The Sleep Irony

As per sleepfoundation.org, sleep is essential for nearly every aspect of health, supporting brain function, emotional well-being, physical recovery and immune system function. When and why we started tracking sleep scores on costly gizmos, building complex nighttime routines, mouth taping and adhering to strict 90-minute sleep blocks to wake up at the end of a sleep cycle, is arguable.

What these peculiar habits may end up doing, according to sleepfoundation.org, is leading to orthosomnia – anxiety generated from an unhealthy obsession to achieve the perfect night’s sleep. Ironically, self-diagnosis of sleep disorders from sleep tracker data and excessive focus on improving said data can keep you awake at night.

Going out on a limb and an Instagram reel about how to ace sleeping prowess overlooks the potential dangers of these fads. Mouth taping, which is touted to encourage nasal breathing, can lead to suffocation and worsened sleep disorders, according to the Canada-based London Health Sciences Centre. Negative feedback (which could be inaccurate) from watches, rings, smartphone apps and mattress monitors has shown to feed anxieties and influence mood and alertness, say the folks at Harvard Medical School.

Sleep Wins

The NIH prescribes seven to nine hours of uninterrupted sleep every night for adults. It also suggests that sleep dictates how your body handles fat. Not sleeping enough can lead to higher levels of leptin and ghrelin (the hunger hormones that will push you towards the snack cupboard), decreased ability to process sugar, (hello, muffin top) and decreased physical activity (try asking a foggy brain to lace up and head out to exercise).

FREE AND EASY

• To build a healthy sleep schedule, try hitting the bed half an hour earlier every day till you reach your desired lights-out time.
• Having a wind-down ritual, like dimming the lights closer to bedtime or a warm shower, as well as keeping the room cooler and darker helps ready the body to fall asleep quicker.
• Designate the bedroom to be a no-phone, no-television zone; these are sleep stealers.
• If poor sleep is a long-term issue, you need medical advice, not another sleep-aid gadget.

WE LIKE TO MOVE IT – EXERCISE

Trampoline workouts need a bouncy contrivance at your disposal, aerial silk workouts will have you flailing mid-air and goat yoga (yes, it’s a thing, we promise) will have baby goats clamber over you while you’re in Downward Dog. Don’t let these seemingly bizarre exercise fads send you back to the deceptive comforts of your couch.

Unnecessary Ideals

Two years into the ‘75 Hard’ challenge going viral, we’re still seeing fit bod aspirants prepping for it. It entails following a set of rigid rules for 75 days to toughen up your physical and mental capabilities – two 45-minute workouts, strict dieting, drinking 3.8l of water and reading 10 pages of nonfiction, daily, among other things. The New York Times spoke to a fitness expert who found the trend to be ‘extremely unsustainable’ and ‘quite possibly the worst way to set good habits, injure yourself and create completely unrealistic expectations around exercise’.

And despite

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