How to Be Well: The 6 Keys to a Happy and Healthy Life

by Frank Lipman

All this can lower your personal “set point” for tolerating carbohydrates, so that your blood sugars don’t

fall back to normal within two hours of eating like they should. Instead, they stay elevated, going beyond what the cells can handle, and eventually this triggers chains of effects that lead to ins...

heart disease, diabetes, obesity, possibly Alzheimer’s disease, a...

Increase the amount of leafy and cruciferous vegetables at each meal, and dramatically or completely decrease complex carbs like starchy vegetables; grains, beans, and legumes; and “pseudo grains” like quinoa and buckwheat. Maximum two or three portions of these complex carbs per week.

Be more generous than you think you should be with “good” fats like avocados and EVOO.

Low-sugar fresh or frozen fruit only: fresh berries, citrus fruits, green apples, maximum two or three times a week.

Pay attention to the effects of starchy foods when you do eat them. Your tolerance can rise and fall depending on how much you exercised, how well you slept, how stressed you are, and so on. There’s

Carbohydrate intolerance means you are eating more carbs than your system can process efficiently.

Fasting initiates cellular repair processes like autophagy, which removes waste material from cells and helps dampen inflammation, slows down aging, and optimizes mitochondrial function, giving you greater protection against disease.

Intermittent fasting is not a promise of sudden weight loss; it’s about reeducating the hormones to return to more regulated functioning as part of a longer-term weight loss protocol. Done consistently, it can help blood glucose, blood pressure, and liver function markers to normalize.

Always leave at least twelve hours between dinner and breakfast to let your body direct energy toward healing and detoxifying overnight.

grains and beans are some of the newest culprits, probably due to lectins

It’s essential for focused mental performance, a stable mood, a strong immune system, a healthy stress response, proper cellular repair, and a healthy metabolism. It’s when your body does much of its disease-fighting maintenance work.

Good sleep is a result of a dance between quantity (getting enough), quality (ensuring phases of deep sleep occur), and timing (doing it in sync with your natural body clock).

These laws are governed by your circadian rhythm: the dominant internal clock that signals your body when to sleep, when to wake up, and when to eat.

The primary factor that influences it, however, is exposure to regular rhythms of light and dark over 24-hour cycles.

As melatonin rises, the alertness-promoting hormone cortisol dips to a low point, turning down your activity levels. Once it is fully dark, the pineal gland rhythmically secretes melatonin with the aim of keeping you asleep so that repair and restoration can occur.

The truth of the matter is that any blue-wave light will stimulate your circadian rhythm the wrong way.

Since the receptors in your eyes are photosensitive when you’re asleep, illumination from the street outside your windows, and glowing lights on alarm clocks, gadgets, and air-conditioners, all can disrupt your sleep rhythm.

Sleep may be pivotal to avoiding early mental decline. When you sleep, your brain protects itself from toxic proteins. Its glymphatic system flushes cerebrospinal fluid through the brain to remove proteins that accumulate between the cells as a byproduct of neurological processes during the day (it is the equivalent of the lymphatic system in the body).

You might feel a state of brain fog or have poor memory, or find your cognitive performance declines (if you’ve become absentminded after chronic sleep disruption, this may be why). Over time, this “trash buildup” of proteins in the brain can even contribute to dementia and Alzheimer’s.

Sleep (as well as its deeply restful counterpart, meditation) is not a luxury; it is an absolutely essential act of daily maintenance, and it is your ally in keeping your brain sharp and youthful. Don’t skimp on it!

These innocent-seeming habits reverse your body’s natural downturn toward sleep.

The goal is to be able to get good z’s without accessories and interventions.

At the end of the day, we evolved to lie down on bare ground, in the dark, without much on our mind, and sleep.

We’ve all been conditioned to be sensation junkies—“no pain, no gain.” Replace that old thinking with “work smarter, not harder.”

get to a class if you possibly can, because the community and culture of group movement is just as important as the practice itself.

What happens when this brilliantly designed machine stops moving? A lifestyle change of such epic proportions that it delivers a host of unwanted side effects.

The definition of strength, in simplest terms, is the ability to carry a load from point A to point B. (When you can do that with speed, it’s called power.)

Think of strength as physical integrity: the ability to handle everything life throws at you.

The book Starting Strength by Mark Rippetoe

includes an excellent primer for the deadlift.

Safer ways to get your cardiovascular training in at the gym and that use more of your body are a rowing machine or the angled, non-mechanized Jacob’s Ladder, which puts your body through a full range of motion while only moving as fast as you can move.

Or is it to be the best you: a curious and engaged human animal, free to move through the world in a way that makes you feel the most alive?

Something amazing happens when you let yourself play: More of your body wakes up.

You might enter the flow state—fully present in the moment. When you make physical contact with nature’s unpredictable terrain, you even have to face fear—this builds resilience against stress. Plus, as any kid knows, play is fun—and free!

It’s the modern polarity—we’re either underactive or overactive—but what would serve us best is to find the fusion of the two extremes and balance effort with rest.

Rest and recovery is a nonnegotiable part of any training protocol.

Light-intensity exercise promotes blood flow and helps clear the lactic acid byproduct of intense exercise, which, if not flushed out, will limit muscle tissues’ function and make your next training session harder. It can help prevent extreme soreness and ensure mobility is maintained.

One reason that foam rolling is so powerful is that it stimulates and smoothes a type of connective tissue that is rarely acknowledged by Western medicine: the fascia.

She calls foam rolling an essential self-care tool in a world where we are “overworked, overstressed, overfed, and overstimulated.”

Rolling your body out is effectively putting hydration and “juiciness,” which are qualities we associate with youthfulness, back into the fascia, and it also boosts lymphatic drainage to flush toxins.

Movement causes muscle tissue to produce proteins called myokines that have important disease-preventive and anti-inflammation functions.

We live with a sea of stressors that our ancestors could never have anticipated and that our bodies did not evolve to handle.

The mantra is Make progress—don’t get paralyzed by perfection!

Legumes It’s becoming common knowledge that conventional corn and soy products in the U.S. are almost all genetically engineered and of dubious safety—I

these foods due to their lectin content.) Another new and growing concern is arsenic found in rice.

I believe strongly you should also follow this principle and refuse to be a guinea pig in this billion-dollar unmonitored and unregulated experiment.

There’s another important reason to quit using antibacterial cleansing products on your face and body as well as in your home. The widespread adoption of these products correlates with a rise in allergies because they deprive us of natural immune-stimulating exposure to pathogens. Take sanitation too far and it can cause the much-needed diversity of flora in your microbiome to weaken.

Finally, but critically, stay boosted with supplementation as needed. When daily sunlight is not available, you will need a vitamin D₃ supplement. (D₃, aka cholecalciferol, is the type of vitamin D your body produces in response to sun exposure, while D₂, aka ergocalciferol, is a synthetic form—avoid it.) Look for a D₃ supplement that is combined with vitamin K₂, and take it with a meal that includes some healthy fat because vitamin D is fat-soluble and requires some fat to be absorbed.