Except they are even sneakier than what this song suggests. They plan to get us in our sleep!
Apologies for today’s late entry, I usually try to have a new post up each Monday morning (GMT) but I had good friends over, one in particular who came all the way from Japan where he now lives. He also introduced me to Shochu, which I discovered very early this morning (or very late on Sunday night if you prefer) tastes even better in black coffee.
Today I thought I would give you a brief, but easily testable revolutionary change in lifestyle that may well add several hours to your day with a simple change to your eating habits.
Until my early 30s, I generally always required 8 hours of sleep or more and often I still felt quite tired most of the time. Around this time I attended a seminar where some of the evils of dairy products were discussed alongside several other dietary factors.
In brief, the main points were:
- Avoid all dairy products
- Do not mix proteins (meat) and carbohydrates (rice, potatoes, pastas) in one meal
- Eliminate sugar and salt as much as possible
- Eliminate alcohol
They also recommended that you do not do all 4 things at the same time or you would get psychologically depressed. Such advice of course only applies to weaker species of humans so I went home and promptly told myself I would follow all 4 rules obsessively for a month, just to see if there was any change.
There was, and it was drastic. Some 7 years later I still gain from the benefits and have experimented enough to know what works best for me.Invariably the results will vary with different people, but the part that generally seems to make the biggest difference is the dairy.
Eliminating ALL dairy from your diet is harder than you think. It means reading ingredients and avoiding anything with whey in it as well as the more obvious things like chocolate, biscuits, any cheese, ice cream and most biscuits and cakes. If you then decide to also do the other things, I can guarantee 2 things:
1. You WILL get depressed at meal-times. I know I did. And at first the effort required to keep to this monastic diet will seem overbearing. If you persevere though, you will discover that…
2. It doesn’t last. And your added energy will improve you overall energy levels so much you will not be able to be depressed for long.
The first thing that happens when you completely cut out dairy is that your body tries to get rid of the built-up waste you have in your body from years of milk consumption. You will begin to eject mucus from every orifice in your body. So much so in some cases that you will think you have some kind of weird flu without a fever.
Secondly, your body will become more energy efficient, and soon you will realise you have a lot more energy than before. If you go the extra step and combine this with regular aerobic exercise to add more oxygen to your blood-stream, you will literally start being psychologically happier. All great stuff. But it gets better.
For me personally the main benefit was that I gained an average of 4 hours in every day. I required a LOT less sleep than before and was still able to do everything I needed. I can now go long periods with only 3 or 4 hours sleep per night, although after some time this does catch up with me, but if all other factors are healthy, it will take a couple of months before I feel the effects.
In general if I have 5 hours of sleep I am fine, with an occasional 8 or 10 hours thrown in once a month seems to be optimal.
If you take all the other steps as gospel too, you need a couple of warning tips. Avoiding alcohol completely in the UK is quite difficult from a social point of view, but I was never much of a drinker, so this was actually the least of my worries. After 3 months of not touching a single drop I decided to try an experiment and had a cherry inside a chocolate (also breaking the dairy rule) that had a bit of liquid brandy in the centre. This little drop of alcohol was enough to make my head spin.
After another 3 months of no alcohol ( I did this complete abstinence even before due to my karate training, or sometimes just as an exercise in will-power) I had a craving for a beer (an exceedingly rare event for me) and decided to try one. I literally did not have a chance to finish the whole glass before I had to make a hasty retreat into the rest-rooms of the local restaurant in question before I were suddenly overtaken by a most undignified accident.
The consumption of dairy however, I found to be the main culprit in the over-taxation of my body’s energy resources. I strognly suggest you cut it out completely from your diet for a month and see if you too gain 4 hours of time in each one of your days.
Not sure I buy this, at least for myself. I don’t eat much dairy to begin with, but there have been long stretches of time where I’ve not had any and I rarely, if ever, drink alcohol. Maybe that’s the reason, but I’ve never noticed an appreciable difference in the amount of sleep I’ve needed or my energy levels. Maybe I’m just awesome all the time.
Well, if you don’t eat dairy to begin with then obviously this will not apply to you. For myself, I was never consciously a big consumer of dairy, however the effect of completely cutting it out was dramatic. Another point to keep in mind is that dairy products are in a lot more than most people realise and in my experience reducing dairy intake a lot compared to completely cutting it out does not produce the same dramatic effect. I only noticed the huge difference because I was obsessive about making sure not a single molecule of dairy entered my system. I was also doing all the other stuff at the same time, but dairy is by far the biggest energy depletion device in my case. Alcohol makes little difference in those terms but then I am a very light drinker anyway, never having been fully drunk in my life (which makes me about as rare as a real live Martian here) but made a bigger difference for others. Different people seem to have different susceptibilities as well, but the benefits of no dairy took me about 3 weeks to notice and I know they have taken much longer for people who consumed it more for longer or who didn’t cut it out completely. Cutting it out completely is a drastic measure but the best way to really notice the effect on your system. Of course this also assumes you are not otherwise polluting your system with alternative crap like massive amounts of processed foods (including most grains) and sugars.
Ah yes…the old human lazyness excuse. 🙂 Personally I would rather have the 4 extra hours than a piece of cheesecake (which I don’t particularly like). I have no idea why you seem to think living without dairy is miserable. It really is not for me. Dairy products just aren’t something that important to me in terms of “needing” to eat them. And frankly, once I saw the difference in eating them or not, there’s just no question in my mind that avoiding dairy gives me a FAR superior quality of life. Of course…everyone is free to chose. From my point of view, I can see nothing qualitative superior to eating stuff that makes my body do extra work it doesn’t need to and makes me feel less well and less healthy than if I don’t eat it. Then again, some people chose to smoke…that’s a mystery to me too.
I don’t understand why anyone would WANT to do something like this to themselves, unless you’re a quantity over quality of life type of person. It sounds miserable, even despite its effects. I’m not SUPER fit, admittedly, but I’d rather eat that piece of cheesecake and feel fulfilled and indulged than worry about staving off the dairy devil lol.
I fail to see how wanting to enjoy an indulgence makes me lazy because I assure you I’m far from it. It’s one thing if the food makes you feel ill – that I understand. But food is one of the joys of life (for me at least) and cooking without dairy would be a tragic experience for my palette.
I don’t want to live forever, but I do want to enjoy my life. I don’t call that laziness. I call that a mere difference in priorities.
Well, your having a relatively strong opinion on something that you have seemingly taken no time at all to test for yourself as described is a common enough example of something I consider pretty synonymous with laziness. It’s easier, and costs nothing, to have opinions rather than to actually gain experience of something. Beyond that, I find it rather limiting to my imagination to think that removing one type of food from my diet would be a “tragic” experience for my palate! There are enough foods around that I can experience enough variety surely. Once again, personally, I find such lack of willingness to try a different approach just a continuation of that very lazy human nature. Or as a Latvian friend of mine puts it: “The human is the lazy animal”.
Interesting post, G. I’d be interested to see the effects of cutting out dairy on myself. I certainly find when I cut alcohol out of my diet that I sleep and function a lot better. I don’t have much dairy in my diet apart from milk with cereal for breakfast – I don’t drink tea or coffee so there’s nothing there, nor do I eat cheese or chocolate – all because they give me migranes. Cakes and biscuits I can do without because I don’t have a sweet tooth so in theory it should be relatively easy to go that final step. The only thing that would slightly concern me is how I would maintain a good level of calcium in my diet. Do you take supplements?
Milk actually drains calcium from the bones. The enzymes required to break milk down to make the calcium usable leach more calcium than they replace in the bones. Calcium is pretty much available in other food. Eat enough fruit and veg and some red meat and you’ll be fine. I don’t take any supplements. Never have actually and all things considered I’m pretty healthy, I think as long as you eat right you’re fine. Chimps don’t drink cow-milk and they seem happy. And if you look at one of my very first posts you will see…chimps beat humans at memory skills 🙂
yeah my dad will like this