Can I improve my health span? Initial entry

 

Can I improve my health span?


My goal in starting this blog is to share ideas about a better health span with other people who have an interest in this topic. Please participate by putting your ideas and questions in the Post a Comment section below the entry and share this with your friends as well.

For a variety of reasons, I have tried to learn more about how, when and what I eat can affect my overall health, especially as I age. Some of you will have read my blog entries on vitamin D, and ivermectin in COVID-19 (https://vitamindcovid.blogspot.com/2020/05/vitamin-d-covid-19-and-me.html), but eating in general is quite a bit more complicated and there is a dearth of answers for many questions. Various observations have led me to question whether my usual diet will result in me living the best or even a good life for the next 25 years; I’ve often said that I would like to live to be 100 and I’d like to be able to enjoy these remaining years. After this introductory blog entry, I plan to write more detailed entries on the information that I have gleaned. Having said that I still want to enjoy food and drink with friends and family, which means that I am not planning to give up ice cream or beer anytime soon. Some of the topics I plan to address are-

1. Is my diet appropriate/optimal for living well for the next 25 years?

2. Should controlling my blood insulin and glucose levels guide lifestyle?

3. What proportions of my macronutrients should be protein, carbohydrate and fat?

4. Can periodic fasting improve my health?

Where am I now? I am eating a bit more fat and a bit less carbohydrate than a year ago, but I am not even close to the ketogenic diet or even the low-carb, high-fat diet promoted by some people. Susie and I tried intermittent fasting for a couple of weeks by fasting for 16 hours and eating in an 8-hour window between 11 AM and 7 PM. While we did not want to lose weight, we did; this caused us to re-evaluate what we were doing. Our goal is to improve/maintain our health without losing weight; the only suggestion I could find was to fast for 24+ hours every once in while. The new plan is try fasting for 24 hours once every two weeks.

When I read my first articles on fasting, I was very skeptical, especially about my ability to fast for any length of time because I like to eat. Surprise! It was quite a lot easier than I thought it would be. Once I made the commitment to trying fasting, I quit thinking about food and how hungry I was. I can only suggest that my previous desire for snacks was mostly psychological and not physiological. Quite accidentally, we ended up walking close to 30 km during our first 24-hour fast without becoming inordinately tired.

In my subsequent entries on eating, I plan to provide some references so that you can see some of the sources of my information but it’s not going to be exhaustive.

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