Fitness

A place to talk about fitness and health on Farcaster.

2 years ago ai became overweight and metabolically unhealthy due to covid and parenthood.

Today all my biomarkers are optimal range, my cardio fitness is in the 80th percentile in my age group, dead hang close to 80 seconds, and deadlift 1.5x body weight.

I want to share some things I learned in the last 2 years.

For me personally, a healthy diet was the most important tool to lose weight. But to improve my biomakers and feel energetic every day, exercise and sleep have been far more potent.

This is probably the single most important lesson.

For example, when I was eating extremely clean but exercised not nearly as much as today, my cholesterol was OK but not optimal.

Today I eat a lot more saturated fat via red meat but also do a lot more cardio, my LDL cholesterol is actually much lower.

Now, this might look like a lot of time commitment, but when I first started I’d do maybe 30 minutes a day, 3 days a week. Then over the next 2 years, slowly worked my way up to this. 

Otherwise, it’s simply not sustainable.

On diet, I eat mostly healthy. 

A lot of beans, nuts, seeds, berries, veggies, olive oil, and lean meat.

Minimize saturated fat, sugar, and highly processed foods.

But I will cheat 1-2 times a week for the aforementioned reason, ie, empirically diet isn’t *that* important when you are metabolically healthy.

I’ve A/B tested my biomarkers on specific foods. For example I used a continuous glucose monitor and saw that my glucose doesn’t spike as much from fruits and beans, as from grains.

But the specifics highly depends on the individual, which is also why I find the diet debates on the Internet to be unproductive.

On sleep,

I go to bed around 9pm (partly this is due to my daughter’s schedule). 

Avoid work and cellphone 1 hour before. Avoid food and liquid 3 hours before. 

Take some magnesium and ashwagandha (this industry is stressful!)

Room temperature around 65F.

Don’t wear fancy gadgets as they give me anxiety.

I don’t actually know if these things make a real impact on my sleep. I don’t have many ways to objectively measure them and I rarely have problem sleeping anyway. 

These are just some things I’ve found on YouTube that have strong scientific evidence.

On supplements,

I just take the usual suspects, omega 3, vitamin D, psyllium husk. These are such low risk and have strong evidence.

But on balance, from my research supplements seem overrated. They can help of course, but they are far less important than diet, exercise, and sleep.

Other than that, for emotional heath sometimes I do sauna or meditate. But frankly none of these tricks matter as much as physical proximity to my family (including my parents and my in laws). I have a big family living with me or within 10min of drive. This stuff is so underrated.

That’s all. 

My goal is to be in the 95 percentile for cardio fitness a year from now and continue to improve on strength (don’t have good genes so not aiming for any absolute goal.)

My daily exercise routine today:

Between 5-7am, before breakfast:

First, 7 sets of weight lifting, split between pull-ups, bench press, squats, and deadlift. This lasts 20-25min.

Then, 45-55 minutes of zone 2 cardio (125-135 bpm).

Then 4 minutes of zone 5 (>90% of max heart rate).

For a total of 1-1.5 hours.