Intermittent Fasting

Now is the time of year to make those resolutions. As a follow-up to #1, the best ways of keeping yourself healthy for life are avoiding tobacco, drinking alcohol only in moderation, aiming for 30 minutes a day of moderate to rigorous exercise, maintaining a healthy weight and diet (mostly plant based), and controlling your stress levels.

I think the thing I talk with most people about from those is weight and diet control. There are billions of opinions on this and nothing works for everybody, but something I've become more interested in lately has been the idea of intermittent fasting. I don't believe in it's power to directly lead to weight loss, but I do feel like it helps reset your expectations of your body and how it should function throughout the day with or without food. It's been shown to be about as effective as reducing your calories and probably a little less monotonous.

I'll say that the rule of 3's from wilderness medicine is that you can survive 3 minutes without air, 3 hours without shelter, 3 days without water, and 3 weeks without food. It's a generalization, but telling that food is so low down on the list.

This is a good challenge to give yourself.

Here is a good short article talking about how intermittent fasting improves diabetes and heart health.

And here is a longer one about how it gives you super powers - I like this one better.

Let me know if you have any questions about whether this would be right for you

Multivitamins

If you can get the lid off, you probably don't need them When I ask people if they are taking any vitamins, herbs or supplements, many people will say they are taking a multivitamin. When I ask them why they take it, I get a quizzical look most of the time. I think this is something that resonates from childhood and parental advice of the idea that we need vitamins to help our body develop. I'm not pediatrician so I can't speak to the effects on the developing child, but I will say that most non-pregnant adults without major medical conditions do not need extra vitamins. You'll be impressed by these labels promising 120%, 300%, 1200% of your daily dose of vitamin whatever it is, but the truth is that for most of these vitamins, if you take more than your daily dose your body needs, the rest just ends up in your urine. You are literally peeing money away in this case. There's been a new trendy vitamin every decade or so for the last 40-50 years; First it...

Kidney Stones

I've written about this previously , but it's often hard to explain to people what a 10 is on the "1-10" pain scale if they haven't been in that spot before. For women who have had children, they generally know what a 10 is, but for men it's a little harder. When I was a medical student on my psychiatry rotation, we had a patient calmly sitting there saying his pain level was at a 10 and our resident, who was an ex-military sniper with a large skull tattoo on his forearm and a crosshair through the eye, calmly leaned forward and asked, "so if I lit you on fire and ran you over with my truck, you could not be in more pain than you are now, correct?" The patient changed his answer. Getting to the point, a kidney stone is about the close I can come to describing a 10/10 pain to people who haven't gone through childbirth. The fundamental issue is similar - your body is trying to move a big solid thing through an opening that was not really desig...

NSAIDs

Advil and Motrin are ibuprofen, then you have Aleve (naproxen). Those are the over-the-counter ones. Prescriptions are Mobic (meloxicam), nabumetone, indomethacin, Toradol (ketorolac), diclofenac, Lodine, and the list goes on. All of these medications are in a class called non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs). I'm giving you this list because there is mounting evidence that these medications a) don't work as well as we'd thought and b) have some very serious long term side effects we're finding out more about. NSAID's act by reducing the amount of prostaglandins you make in order to reduce inflammation. However, prostaglandins have a ton of other effects and are involved in the maintenance of just about AIDs and also stronger if they are taken every day and/or around-the-clock. every other organ system that you have. The effect is stronger with higher doses of NS NSAID's work best and are best indicated for times when something is r...

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