HOW THIS DIARY CAN HELP YOU LIVE BETTER ...FOR LONGER
Tried everything to lead a healthier life – but can’t succeed? Now you really can, with this free wellness journal devised by top TV doctors. Each day note your diet, sleep and exercise... and you’ll be amazed how it really could transform your life
Over the past decade, the two of us have presented hundreds of hours of television about health and wellbeing. Our programmes have covered everything from alcohol intake to ‘vampire’ facials, weight loss, fitness training, vitamins and medication such as antidepressants.
There’s virtually no topic we haven’t examined. We’ve interviewed experts from every field of medicine, and written articles and books. Most of it has been aimed at empowering you to make the best decisions about your health.
Alongside broadcasting, we’re both qualified doctors. Chris has been working for the NHS since 2002 and is a scientist at UCL, studying viruses. Xand has been an academic for the past decade and works for humanitarian causes. But the truth is that, like everyone else, we sometimes struggle to follow our own advice.
We’re both 41 now, and somehow our knowledge and training doesn’t protect us from the same downward spiral that affects almost everyone.
We weigh too much — it’s just by a few pounds, but we’re still ‘officially’ overweight, according to the NHS BMI calculator.
We’re also not quite as fit as we should be. We both ran the London Marathon four years ago (in a passable four hours, 24 minutes), but since then have done virtually no significant exercise. Mentally, we still feel like we should be able to perform as we did when we were athletes at university, but physically it’s a different story.
It’s hard to pinpoint the moment when things began to slide. But suddenly years had passed without purposeful exercise.
We’ve
also both got children and lead busy, sometimes chaotic, lives so on any given evening — despite being doctors, scientists and health communicators — we’re as tempted to binge on food or Tv as anyone.
It has been said that as a nation we’re living longer than ever, but the fact is, we’re not living very well. Many of us wake up aching and carry discomfort through the day.
And more of us take an increasing number of pills with names we can’t pronounce, for reasons we don’t quite understand. We studied diet
and lifestyle factors for television work and as doctors; we know there is no single magic bullet that will help, but rather lots of individual changes combined.
That’s why today in the Mail we’re launching our Good Health for Life Wellness Journal (and our handy, 12-page companion guide in Weekend magazine). The brilliant 28- day planner will give you a structure and a checklist of things to do every day to help improve your health and wellbeing.
This 32-page journal, which forms part of the Good Health for Life series running in the Mail all this month, aims to give you control over your ‘ healthspan’ — the number of years you have a good quality of life.
While doctors and drugs can make a difference to specific problems, the most common life-limiting diseases (type 2 diabetes, heart failure, lung disease, obesity and many cancers) are avoidable or improved if you adopt a lifestyle that gives your body the best chance to protect itself and heal.
That’s where our Wellness Journal comes in. We’ve used evidence and our own experience to bring together the changes that will make a difference to how well you live in one checklist.
These alterations will improve your strength, sleep, fitness and mood — and because you’re going to be combining them, each one should make the others easier.
You can break the cycle of bad habits — overeating, lack of exercise, drinking too much, too much screen time and so on.
By the end of the month some of your new good habits will have become so routine, you won’t even think about them.
They’re changes most of us need to make, and we are going to be completing the Wellness Journal alongside you — if you’re reading this then you’ll be in the same vicious cycle that we’re in.
The cycle probably starts with weight gain caused by eating too much, especially processed food. This makes exercise and activity difficult, so you become weak and unfit. Decreasing strength means you get injured doing everyday things.
Perhaps you’re also nursing injuries from accidents, work or sport — an Achilles tendon that twinges; a shoulder that makes brushing your hair uncomfortable. (In Chris’s case, bending down to pick up his two-year-old daughter, Lyra, who’s just 12kg, is painful for his knees and back.)
The weight gain, general aches and big meals mean you don’t sleep well. Bad sleep, possibly combined with snoring, means you’re tired, and your ability to resist poorquality food is low.
The physical problems lead to mental health problems; unhappiness and stress; and a sense that you don’t have control over your life.
And so you self-medicate with Tv, more food, and alcohol, which leads to further weight gain, pain, stress, and less movement.
The end result of this cycle is inflammation throughout your body — a state similar to having a
constant infection. Inflammation is probably the ultimate cause of your health problems.
It’s linked to a range of conditions, including high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, strokes, dementia, osteoporosis, cancer and heart attacks.
What about pills? Medication doesn’t offer much hope of a solution, even if it feels like that’s all that’s available.
The number of over-65s taking five or more medicines a day has quadrupled in the past two decades, to 49 per cent. There are also more than a million of us taking eight or more drugs daily. (Only one in 13 adults does not take any at all.)
In high-income countries such as the UK, pharmaceuticals are so overused that some estimates put adverse drug reactions in the top five causes of death.
While there’s no doubt that when they are given to thousands of people, drugs do save a few lives, most of those we use to treat lifestyle conditions don’t deal with the root cause of the problem.
Most of our health problems stem from that vicious cycle of inactivity and overeating. The pills may make it worse with side-effects.
It takes 30 seconds for a doctor to prescribe pills, but 30 minutes to talk through an alternative solution. (If you’re on longterm medication, don’t stop taking it, but do go and have a chat with your prescriber. We’ve put more information about how to reduce your medication intake in the companion guide in today’s Weekend magazine).
The problem is that, even though most of us understand what’s good and bad for us, we can’t seem to break the cycle.
Once or twice a year, the two of us try to do something about it: Xand reduces his intake of refined carbs (such as cake), while Chris starts a regimen of morning pressups, with a plan to do a 5k run. It goes well for a few weeks or months, but we quickly slip back into old habits on holiday. We believe it’s really hard to interrupt this cycle for two reasons — temptation and also confusion.
Temptation. This is the big one. You’re not lazy, but all of us are bad at offsetting short-term pleasure for long term gain. And the short term pleasure has become so pleasurable. Box sets available on demand. Food delivered to the house. Social media. Phones. Games. Nowadays we use screens for just leisure (TV and social media) for around four hours per day on average in the UK — a staggering amount of time to spend sitting still. We live in an environment that makes us — almost forces us to — work, travel, eat, shop and socialise in a way that leaves us overweight, unfit, unhappy and often lonely. Things aren’t tempting because you’re weak, they’re tempting because they are made as available and as cheap as possible.
MAKING you unwell is a multi-billionpound industry, with the smartest people in the world trying to get you to buy their products, such as sugary drinks, cake, alcohol and gambling apps. This is causing an epidemic of undernutrition, obesity and environmental damage. So when resisting temptation, it may be helpful to turn your focus outward and change the way you think about these companies. You’re not making choices about these products — you’re being manipulated. The drug, food and tech companies don’t care if you’re ill. They provide useful services, but you need to work hard to avoid the damage that results from these, which can be physical, mental and financial. You have to be the one to care about your own health. But you need a plan; progress without a structure is impossible. And that’s
where our Good Health for Life Wellness Journal will help, by giving you the motivation to avoid temptation. Each simple but effective change it inspires supports the others.
The first step is to set goals so that you stay focused. A physical goal is a simple start — the NHS ‘couch to 5k’ weekly fitness programme is a great option.
Or you might pick a weight goal, or an aim to reduce the number of medications you take.
Then we focus on a daily 12-point checklist to help you improve seven main areas — diet and weight; fitness; strength; pain and medication; sleep; mood and stress; and bad habits.
We can’t remove temptation, but we can help you understand it, tackle it, and put yourself in charge.
Hand in hand with temptation, the second big problem that prevents many of us from changing is confusion. There are so many diet and exercise plans and health tips out there. Which should you choose? Low carb or intermittent fasting? Zumba or running? Is red wine good or bad?
Our Good Health for Life Wellness Journal is your ally. The checklist requires specific changes; it will push you to eat the right things, as well as measure your strength movements and time spent on fitness.
We believe it will work best if you start slow but make all the changes at once. You can’t do exercise effectively or eat well if you stay up until 2am bingeing on box sets.
The journal packages together what we call a ‘bundle’ of care, a well-known concept in medicine. ‘Bundles’ were developed after it was realised that changing single things in medical care (such as cleaning skin before inserting a line to prevent infection) was much less effective than a package of small changes (such as combining the skin cleaning with protective drapes and an equipment trolley with everything located together).
The same is true in your own life. Ditching the morning snack is great, but it isn’t going to make a big dent in the 5lb you might want to shed.
Combining a change in snacking habits with other small changes enables that vicious cycle to become virtuous — each change makes the others easier. Better sleep makes healthy eating simpler. You lose weight. Exercise is less painful, and so on.
There is one final thing you’ll need that we can’t give you — a decision you must make yourself. You have to choose to be a slightly different person. You’ll need to become, for example, someone who always uses stairs, someone who doesn’t watch TV in bed, someone who doesn’t eat office cake.
We’ve written the best journal we can, but you’ll need to find your own path to the waterfall — the more you personalise your Wellness Journal, the more you’ll have ownership and feel empowered by it.
The two of us will be talking about the Wellness Journal — and our own progress! — on Twitter, so join the conversation at #goodhealthforlife.
ChriS is an infection doctor at UCLh in London and does research at UCL on viruses. Xand trained in public health at harvard, and has worked around the world in humanitarian emergencies.