Lifestyle Change: Challenges and Solutions - Part 2

 

Photo Credit: https://www.ozassignments.com/preventing-health-threads-through-lifestyle-change-for-students/

In case if you have missed my earlier article, I encourage you to read Part 1 to get the full story and flow. In Part 1, I discussed about some of the internal factors like time, company, and motivation which are in our control to bring some lifestyle changes. In Part 2, we will discuss about Shareable factors.

Shareable Factors:

Shareable factors are those that we can control partially but there is some influence externally, so we need to make conscious efforts to overcome some of these challenges that pushes us to comfort zone and not to consider healthy lifestyle choices. Let us see some of them.

Convenience

Tim Wu a law professor at Columbia wrote an article in NYTimes about The Tyranny of Convenience in which he talks about 2 waves of convenience and mentions “If the first convenience revolution promised to make life and work easier for you, the second promised to make it easier to be you” Convenience is not all bad as it takes away repeated tasks like washing clothes, dishes and provide us leisure time for doing interesting tasks with its first wave of efficient choices, describes the author. Second wave brings mass personalisation with curated products for individuals with one-click, one-stop shop solutions, plug-and-play experiences says the author. As he rightly cautions “the idea of convenience as liberation could be intoxicating” as it takes away the struggle and human experience of life by making everything easy and slowly enslaving us to choose easiest options. Most successful stories have always been of the people who challenged themselves, navigated through inconvenient paths, experienced the struggle to build resilience and get ready to face difficult situations. Straight line for a heartbeat means death we need those ups and downs in the beat to be alive and Life without those ebbs and flows is not fulfilling. 

We find it very challenging to walk a mile to drop our kids to school as we are so used to the convenience of car, we find it difficult to buy fresh food and cook ourselves as pizza can be ordered at the convenience of couch, we find it very difficult to read a book at the convenience of endless scrolling, that too we never go beyond headlines as we are so used to shorts and quick bites. We shouldn’t take easiest choices always but challenge ourselves with inconvenient choices and especially teach our kids, leading by example, the importance of struggle and survival instinct which is essential these days as they face harshest of climatic conditions every year.

Food plays an important role in building healthy lifestyle however as we have seen earlier in Part 1, as the countries becoming wealthier the population are adapting more convenient food choices as in the case with USA, 86% of the chronic diseases (NCD) that can be attributed to Standard American Diet (SAD) which is high in cholesterol, saturated fat with animal protein (Meat, Egg and Dairy). As per WHO, “People are now consuming more foods high in energy, fats, free sugars and salt/sodium, and many people do not eat enough fruit, vegetables and other dietary fibre such as whole grains.” In this BBC Video, it was shown how UK transitioned from more of whole foods in 1980 to Ultra processed convenient foods in 2000 and how the Diabetes almost tripled in same period. As of 2000, whole of UK population get 57% of calories from Ultra Processed Food (UPF), that rate is high in Children at 64%, Teens even higher at 68% and worst of all 1 in 5 people get 80% of their caloric intake from UPF.

Most people are opting for the convenient food in high quantities which is ultra-processed and has high risk of chronic diseases (NCD) but not meeting the daily standards of fibre available in fruit, veg & wholegrain as low as 1 in 10 in UK and in US meeting daily Fibre limit that can prevent and reverse chronic diseases. A doctor in the UK tested on himself eating ultra-processed food for 4 weeks and the results are worrying with increasing weight, BMI and fat putting him in obese category and more shockingly the brain has formed new connections craving for more of junk food high in salt and sugar increasing hunger hormone by 30% and decreasing the hormone activity that tells the brain to stop eating.

Unfortunately, as the author says in his article, convenience meant conformity and embracing inconvenience may sound odd and instead of being default lifestyle choices we give them names like hobbies, passion, calling etc., In my personal experience, I am odd man out in my friend circle not having a car and following plant-based diet, I am called too strict sometimes and out of the normal! But in my view, we need to be conscious about inconvenient choices and if it is going to add value to our life, it is worth the struggle initially. Instead of wasting time sitting in couch doing endless scrolling, can we read a book by walking to library? Instead of feeling lazy about ordering food online, can we walk to farmers market to get fresh food and cook? Instead of spending time online in Facebook and Instagram, can we spend time with family and friends by walking to a park ? We need to make these little inconvenient but fulfilling choices one at a time to move towards better lifestyle. Most important aspect to get around convenience is to acknowledge first and take small steps consciously one at a time to face the inconvenient truths about our lifestyle. What once upon a time used to be a lifestyle with healthy eating, regular exercise with walking, playing, gardening, or growing our own food has now become too difficult in this new normal of convenience and we need to have passion these days to exercise or cook regularly. It is sometimes better to circle back to the roots and keep it simple to get back to the healthy lifestyle. The by product or result of the convenience is disconnection, lets understand that next.

Disconnected

One of the most undesirable effects of industrialization is commodifying everything from food to all things we buy by pushing us towards consumerism with convenient options. Take food for example, we normally give more importance to convenience, affordability, and taste than the health, nutrition, and sustainability aspect, distancing ourselves from the whole process of farm to table. We have innate nature to love animals and can’t see them suffer in pain in front of our eyes, but we somehow  create a separation in our brain to treat some animals as “someone”, our pets and yet others as “something” to eat, wear or entertain. We see it as product, commodity disconnected from the whole experience that a sentient being undergo and paying for it so that someone else can do the job for us to end a life against their will. We visit farms and show our kids happy cows grazing, cute little piggies, chickens, and ducks playing and yet eating a hotdog, ham burger, beef burger at the same time without telling our kids on how our food is coming to our plate. We sometimes don’t see the bigger picture and impact of our food and lifestyle choices have as a wholistic view not only with ethical and animal cruelty reasons, but also to our health, health of the humanity, economy, and environment.

In another article I wrote about how do we live, how do we eat, how do we shop and how do we move has an impact on the natural finite resources and ecosystems as they are interconnected and how it all adds up to the overall carbon footprint and global warming. Monocrops like Soy and Corn grown majorly for animal feed (but not feeding hungry population) replacing diverse variety of crops and in profit making greed to increase yields, the chemicals and pesticides used in agricultural farms causing soil degradation, insect, bird, and pollinator population decline. Excessive fertilizers sprayed on plants and factory farm sewage are absorbed into water bodies and flowing to rivers causing algae blooms to grow rapidly obstructing photosynthesis resulting in “Ocean dead zones” affecting marine ecosystems. This ad “Hell of steak” puts this into perspective on what price we are paying with the damage it is causing to a wide range of ecosystems and affecting indigenous people to bring that steak into our plate.

Photo Credit:
https://toddthomas.net/2015/02/26/einstein-quote-on-
compassion/

To get better perspective and understand the interconnectedness of all living beings and ecosystems, we must first look at within to understand how connected and interdependent we are, as the awakening begins when we look inward on human biology. I wrote about this earlier mentioning about a book “The Biology of Belief” where the author talks about gut microbiome that hosts trillions of bacteria cells more than human cells and are living in symbiotic relationship with other organisms in our body. These bacteria in our stomach help digest our food and enable the absorption of vitamins and minerals that are essential for our survival, essentially, we are what they eat. 

Photo Credit: DoSomething.org Ian Somerhalder

Health and wellbeing of humans depends on food and environmental factors, unfortunately lot of us are unconsciously impacting the diversity of our gut microbiome with less fibre food like fruit & vegetables in turn starve and kill immune building good gut bacteria and on flipside cultivating more bad bacteria with meat, dairy and eggs that causes inflammation leading to chronic diseases. What we are doing to ourselves, is what we are doing to our environment with our actions daily, the food that is better for us is also better for the planet.

Why we are so disconnected? Are there any factors influencing us to be disconnected and make it difficult to understand the interconnectedness, the answer might be cognitive dissonance.

Cognitive Dissonance

Lifestyle changes can be very challenging if we don’t understand the cognitive dissonance and effectively deal with inconsistencies when we are at crossroads. As explained in this video, Cognitive Dissonance is state of uneasiness that happens when we have inconsistent beliefs or behaviours. It can be a new information that we have learned that may contradict with what we have learnt for long time, like what we learnt in chemistry about atoms and their physical attributes is now contradicting with quantum physics where when we go deeper into in quantum level there is nothing physical about it, it’s all energy and vibrations. Or when we have learned about a behaviour that has a conflict with the sense of who we are, for example we think that we are kind and animal lover petting dogs, cats etc., yet eating sausage for breakfast, egg for lunch and steak for dinner.

Human brain doesn’t like these conflicts and cognitive dissonance can cause lot of physical discomfort as we expect balance, clarity, and consistency in thought to make harmony and peace with life. These 2 videos explained few ways on how do we deal with these inconsistencies and reduce that conflict. 

Photo Credit:
https://appsychdiscovery.weebly.com/cognitive-dissonance.html

Let us see how a smoker uses various methods to reduce conflict that he is smoking which is a fact and also knowing that smoking kills. One method is changing one of the thoughts, like convincing himself that smoking is not that bad, and it is not unhealthy. This phenomenon is also called confirmation bias, when we think that smoking is not bad, we look for information, news that supplement our thoughts to reduce the inconsistencies. When we think that dietary cholesterol in the form of eggs is not as bad as saturated fat or trans-fat we look for science, views and news confirming our bias. We sometimes miss the openness and subjectivity of thought to different opinions and viewpoints and in those cases to rationalize their argument some use a  method with adding a thought to reduce inconsistency. This is something like smoker justifying that I smoke but I also eat fruits and vegetables and do lot of exercise to compensate. Another method is trivializing I know I smoke, and I don’t care, and it is not so important compared to other issues in my life. But the best of all is changing the behaviour, smoker acknowledging that smoking is bad and injurious to health and hence stop smoking.                                             

Photo Credit:
https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/cognitive-dissonance

When it comes to healthy lifestyle and especially healthy eating we must connect at various levels and deal with cognitive dissonance with conscious choices, if we are an animal lover, we must change the behaviour for better to love all animals not just few; if we are health conscious person go beyond our confirmation biases of meat is needed for protein, dairy milk is for calcium; if we are environmentalists and really do care about deforestation etc., we should connect with nature and change our behaviour towards eating more  sustainable foods that has less carbon foot print and cause less damage to our ecology; if we are concerned about our kids and next generations we must change our life styles with a behaviour towards consuming less and preserving more of our finite natural resources by being role model to them; if we are spiritual person there is no better place than looking inwards and understand our human biology on how we are living in harmony with other living beings inside our body for our sustenance and also dive deeper into quantum world to understand better on how we all are connected with cosmic energy beyond the materialistic view of physical person. As I wrote in my earlier article, if we understand the big picture and wholistic view of interconnectedness that exists in diverse ecosystems starting from single human cell to individual human being to the planetary level, we can break this cognitive dissonance and confirmation biases with a better clarity on who we are and be more authentic self.