Why weight regain is so common + Is gluose impairing your immunity

For this post I have got a 2 parter. Couple of interesting questions:

1. Why do we regain weight so easily especially if we were formerly fat?
2. Is glucose (sugar) weakening our immune system?

The first question is a direct result this Mark Sisson post, so I have basically just simplified the message.

Ever wondered why it’s easier for a formerly fat person to regain the lost weight, especially when they were fat as kids? The answer as usual lies in our bio chemistry or how we got fat in the first place. There are 2 ways to get fat:

a.      Hypertrophy – Your existing fat cells get bigger.

b.      Hyperplasia – Entirely new fat cells are created.

To paint a very simple picture, vast majority of fat cells are created in early childhood and adolescence. During early infancy and between ages of 9-13 appear to be crucial stages for creation of new fat cells, so after that age you are pretty much stuck with number of fat cells your body has made. Now weight loss doesn’t remove these fat cells but rather pulls fat from existing ones, leaving empty cells behind. If you had 35% body fat and after a drastic lifestyle change involving diet and exercise you got it down to 15%, you still have same number of fat cells.

So, now you have 2 people who have exactly the same weight and body fat %, let’s say 20%. Individual A was a fat kid and a teenager and Individual B was lean all along.  Individual A is a lot better now at age 35 and has an active lifestyle whereas Individual B is your typical desk jockey, makes his living by pressing keys on computer. They both are at same body fat % and both are serious now about maintaining their body fat %. The formerly fat person will always be at a disadvantage compared to the formerly lean person when it comes to maintaining weight. Not fair right?

To understand what’s going on, you will need to understand how Leptin hormone behaves. Our fat cells secrete leptin hormone and remember that body stores energy as fat. So leptin in a sense is an indicator of how much energy is stored in the body.  So, if you have eaten a meal of good quality fats and moderate proteins (like you mostly should), once you have had enough to eat, your body or fat cells will start releasing leptin to let the brain know that we have had enough.  ‘Hunting has been good’ so to say. Now the amount of leptin that is released depends on the fat mass % as well size of fat cells.

Individual A who has 20% body fat (formerly obese) has way more fat cells that are relatively empty compared to Individual B who also has 20% body fat but has relatively fewer fat cells that are fuller. So what ends up happening is that Individual A is releasing far less leptin compared to Individual B. So your brain is thinking you don't have enough energy saved. This stacks up the odds against formerly fat by increasing their appetite, making them less active and the fat cells have a ‘fat memory’ that are just dying to store fat when it becomes available. Phew. It’s like growing up in bad neighbourhood and you are at a huge economic disadvantage for rest of your life.   

Vitamin C and Glucose, brothers from same mother

Could a sugar spike be weakening your immune system as well? Well, the answer is looking like a yes.

I remember listening to Mark Sisson and him mentioning that he clearly remembers couple of instances when he fell sick and that sick day was preceded by consuming higher than usual carbs. I am not dying to repro the experiment by gorging on sugar but I would love to see some anecdotal evidence.

It’s to do with relationship between glucose and Vitamin C at cellular level. If you don’t care about what is happening at cellular level, short story is that higher the levels of circulating glucose in the blood, the more difficult it is for Vitamin C to get into the cells and the more difficult it is to create immune cells. If you do care about cellular level details, read on.

Vitamin C is made naturally in nearly all living animals with notable exceptions being humans and primates. In mammals, the glucose is extracted from glycogen (stored sugar) and liver transforms it into vitamin C. Humans unfortunately lack an enzyme which is necessary for synthesis of Vitamin C and so we must get it from diet.

Vitamin C is important for building collagen (think bones, connective tissue) and promoting strong immune function. It turns out that Vitamin C and glucose may be competing for same receptors on the cells. They have very similar chemical structure and both rely on insulin signalling to get into the cell. This receptor is called Glut-1 and glucose has higher affinity to this receptor.  So this means that if your meal has generated excessive levels of glucose, then Vitamin C may not be able to get into the cells. So what you say?

Remember our friends White Blood Cells? If you think hard enough about what you were taught one school day in your biology class, white blood cells are used to fight pathogens. Levels of Vitamin C in WBCs may be tens of times higher compared to other cells and they need 50 times more Vitamin C inside the cell than in the blood plasma to handle the oxidative stress – that is ingesting these pathogenic bacteria and virus.

It doesn’t stop here. Glucose and Vitamin C also seem to have opposite effect on creation of new immune cells or raw material for new white blood cells. If the immune system is under attack, it needs to quickly produce new white blood cells.  If blood glucose is high enough, it will reduce the amount of new immune cells being formed.

Credit: Dr David Jockers has a great article on this topic.

Excessive light at work place and reducing eye strain

Before I get to the meat of this post, which is about protecting your eyes and reducing eye strain at the work place a slight digression.

While I am a big advocate of ancestral\primal style of eating, I am also a big fan of using modern technologies to deal with modern stressors. It reminds me of a Mark Sisson quip “Primal living is not about living in the dark or hunting your neighbors pets.” In my mind, there is absolutely no conflict between eating a whole food based diet which feels very natural on one hand but supplementing this diet with eating wild salmon from a can, wearing blue blockers in the evening while watching TV or eating highest quality supplements I can find (because even the best modern food is no longer as nutrient dense). The outside world has evolved at a much faster rate than our genes and now there is a massive mismatch between the environments in which our genes were cooked and what is actually out there. We no longer live in jungles and caves and no longer need to protect ourselves from tigers. On the other hand, most of us spend majority of our times cooped indoors, breathing artificial air all day long and exposed to excessive amount of fluorescent light. Since I am a software developer by trade, I get the added bonus of staring at a computer screen all day long and the computer screen staring back at me. You can see how we have traded one set of stressors (jungle and tiger) for another. I will do everything in my power to prevent macular degeneration of my eyes and keep them healthy for as long as I can – whether it’s eating whole foods or getting enough sleep or using right shades of light. So as far as I am concerned there is no contradiction here - eating ancestrally but relying on 21^st century inventions.

Back to lighting and eye strain.

My focus here is not to talk about the health and nutrition aspects of eye care but rather alleviating external lighting conditions. And the problem ironically is not lack of it but excess of it. Excess of high-energy, blue light, UV and artificial light. I have no doubt and science proves it that artificial high-energy blue light is damaging our eye muscles. What has made this problem obvious to me in my work environment is that I have just moved into this building.  In the previous building my workstation was next to a large window. So as I would stand and work at my work station, I could see as far as eyes could see, towards the sky and Pacific Ocean just outside. (I am not kidding, the previous building is next to Wellington waterfront). And then next day I found myself cooped up in a horribly designed buildings with so much fluorescent white light that it feels like you are in torture chamber. It’s like building designers wanted to make sure that people don’t doze off at work and made the environment super bright. I think they did a pretty good job. And then there is also the light from 2 computer monitors.

What a view

Now some may call me a delicate flower but here is what The Vision Council has to say about it and I quote– “Nearly 70% of American adults experience some form of digital eye strain due to prolonged  used to electronic devices. Some of the common symptoms are headache, dry eye,   blurred vision and eye strain.”  In my case, the excessive fluorescent lighting was making this bad situation worse. Check, check, check and check for me.

There is a strong connection between amount of light you are exposed to and circadian rhythms.  You see, you want lots of natural bright light in the day as you are active and post sun set, light should gradually fade away. Try wearing blue blockers in the night for a few weeks as you watch TV or read something on your tablet to feel the difference and this will translate to good sleep. Too much light towards the end of the day inhibits melatonin production, that’s the sleep hormone. It’s our bio-chemistry people, I am not making this stuff up. While we have naturally evolved to bright light during the day, this was light from the sun and not this junk fluorescent light we are exposed to from our computers, tube lights and other electronic devices.

So the point is that I knew I was struggling with this brightness and my eyes were feeling the strain which means brain was stressed too. Remember, it’s the brain really which does the processing behind the scenes. There are 2 white fluorescent tube light directly above my head and another pair a few feet apart.  I got rid of one of the tube lights from the pair directly above my head and I was hoping this would help the situation. It seemed to help the first day but I couldn’t tell the difference a few days later.

Tube light  not very from from my monitor and a lot closer to my eyes when I stand and work

Let there be light, yep let's put lots of them together

I didn’t want to wear my awesome blue blockers at work. I mean who wants to look like a superhero or a rock star at work.  Besides these completely block the blue colour. So I needed right tool for the right job. When you need a laptop, a tablet or smartphone won’t do and while you can talk into your 9” 3G iPad, I prefer a smartphone in that situation.

A bit too cool for work place

Since most of us don’t get to work outside under the blue sky or work in intelligently designed building which smartly lets outside light come in, what are our options? You can try convincing your boss to install CoeLux. Yep they have found a way to mimic sunlight using LED. In fact they are so good that it convinces your brain and eye that it is sunlight. However it costs $61, 000 so it could be a while before you get one of these.

LED or sun light, you decide

So began my search for blue-blocker-like-glasses that I could wear at work. I wanted something functional and fashionable. It should block the excessive white-blue light hitting my eyes and should look good.

 

Enters www.gunnars.com . If I had million dollars and millions of hours at my disposal, the research would culminate with glasses like they sell.

Quoting www.gunnars.com : “GUNNAR offers the only patented computer eyeglasses and optical lens technology solution, recommended by doctors, to protect and enhance your vision. In addition, custom tints and premium coatings block high-energy, artificial blue light, UV and glare to protect your vision. The result – improved clarity, focus and performance designed to meet demanding visual needs of a digital generation…”.  Just look at them.

I finally settled on the Phenom style of Computer glasses.

 

My experience so far with the glasses:

1.   They have dimmed the brightness around me just enough. It’s like f.lux is running in the background.

2.  They are doing a pretty good job of blocking blue spectrum without blocking the blue colour entirely, so it’s not a compromise.

So essentially it meets the functional requirements.

3.  Wifey tells me they look good too.

4.   I can attest to the good quality and they just fit perfectly.

Phenom in real world

Now these are not cheap and glasses alone cost me $99. If you are not in the U.S, the shipping will cost another $40, so it adds up. But the big question is how much are my eyes worth to me?

Talking of right tool for the right job:

50 Glucose Readings

At some point during last year I understood the dangers of eating foods that spike blood glucose levels. I knew in theory that fat and proteins don’t spike your blood sugar and refined carbs and sugary foods do. So I decided to put the theory to test and watch the effects of food I eat on my blood sugar in real time. So I took nearly 50 readings using a glucometer over the course of a week. It was a regular work week and I tried to keep everything as normal as I could.

Talking of glucometer, it’s one of the most effective tools at our disposal. Add to the fact that it’s so inexpensive, anything that can give you instant feedback on the food you have just eaten and how it affects your blood sugar is priceless. For example, everyone tolerates carbs to a different degree. An insulin sensitive person should be able to clear out the blood glucose a lot more effectively compared to a person who is insulin resistant. A leaner person who is insulin sensitive may have even higher carb tolerance and they may be able to get away with higher levels of carbs. A person who already has some degree of insulin resistance may not have the luxury of eating over 100 grams of carbs in a day barring a very active lifestyle.  It also helped me decide how I can smartly use starches like sweet potato or rice after a heavy training session to get some quick energy without causing a glucose\insulin spike.

Even 2 days worth of data will be invaluable and more importantly it's unique to you. And it's not something you have to do every single week. Even once in 3 months or 6 months or even a year may suffice.

One of the hallmarks of eating whole foods ancestral style is that your blood sugar remains in a very tight range, just like how body likes to keep it in. Because you will be consuming large amounts of vegetables, salads, healthy fats and high quality proteins.  Eating refined foods and sugar foods on the other hand will generate massive amounts of glucose and body responds by spiking insulin production. High blood sugar damages proteins and fats in the flood causing Advanced Glycation End products – AGE. See how ironic that is, it AGEs you. High blood sugar is also a proxy for high insulin and this incessant insulin spike meal after meal over the years will make you insulin resistant bit by bit, first making you pre-diabetic and eventually resulting in full blown Type-2 Diabetes.

Couple of points to keep in mind as you read the table.

1. Body likes to keep blood glucose in a very tight range. For example, it should normally be between 4.4-6.6 mmol/L before a meal. 2 hours after eating it should be less than 7.8 mmol\L. If you eat a massive dessert on top a regular modern meal, your blood sugar may spike to 11 or 12 mmol\L and body will galvanize chief hormone player insulin to deal with this situation and bring blood sugar levels back in the normal range. If post your meal you don’t wander too far away from the ideal range, I hope you can see how that’s a good thing.


2. What I mean by Lag in the third column is that how much have passed since this activity. Here are 2 entries from the table:
My blood glucose levels were 5.2 mmol\L 1 hour 10 minutes later after lunch of chicken broth and a bit of cream. And 2 hours and 5 minutes later, levels were at 5.7.

Date    Time        Lag         Reading       Notes
23rd     15 20      1h 10m     5.2               Chicken broth, cream
23rd     16 15      2h 5m       5.7               Having green tea with jasmine

Here are the 50 readings from the week and chart view.

Date    Time        Lag         Reading        Notes
21st     22 20       1h            6.2                 Gym night   
22nd    09 00       1h            5.6                 After bulletproof coffee
            10 55       1h            5.2                 After cream and lamb curry breakfast
            13 55       1h            5.2                 Big breakfast at cc, steak, eggs, bacon, sausages

23rd      7 51        0h           6.5                 After getting up
             9 55        0h           5.8                 Before breakfast
           11 20        1h 13m   4.8                 Bulletproof coffee at 9
           13 24        3h 17m   4.8                 Did swimming
           15 20        1h 10m   5.2                 Chicken broth, cream
           16 15        2h 5m     5.7                 Having green tea with jasmine
           19 40                       4.3                 Had MCT oil ten minutes ago
           20 40                       6.2                 Gym
           22 43      1h             6.1                 Steak, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, bit of rice

24th    07 48                      6.2                 Just woke up
          10 24      0h             5.6                 Before breakfast
          12 10      1h 30m     5.6                 Eggs, avocado, bacon, mushroom, spinach
          13 40      3h             5.6
          16 00      1h             5.5                 Had subway salad with Salmon
          18 00      3h             4.3
           21 27     1h 12m     4.7                 Had beef burgers, few spoons of  ice cream
           22 27     2h 12m     6.3

25th    07 25                       6                    Just woke up
           09 35                       5.1                 Had bulletproof coffee an hour ago
           11 30      1h 37m     5.3                 Usual breakfast eggs, bacon
           15 22      2h             5.5                 Lunch - salad, liver, paneer
           19 15      3h             5.3                 Had almond butter, butter, dark chocolate
           22 25      1h 30m     6.2                 chicken, broccoli, Brussels sprout, Kumara

26th    07 33                       6.1                 Just woke up
           09 40      0h             5.6                 Bulletproof coffee at 8
           11 30      1h 50m     5.5                 Usual breakfast
           13 00      3h 20m     4.5                 Just had a short walk
           18 00                       4.9                 Had apple at 4
           22 12     1h 20m      4.6                 Gym, kumara, rice, veggies, chicken, broth


27th    07 43                       6.1                 Just woke up
           11 30     1h 40m      4.8                 Usual breakfast
           15 58     1h 30         5.8                 Mixed Salad, okra, beef curry
            22 10    2h              5.7                 Mixed salad, fish, kumara

28th     07 00                      5.8                 Woke up at 06 45
            11 40    2h 20m      5.5                 Usual breakfast
            16 20    1h 40m      5.6                 Mixed salad, steak, chick peas
             09 50   20m           7.6                 Salmon can, rice, lamb curry, kumara

Observations from the week long glucose readings:

1. My glucose levels go down after bulletproof coffee. Alternatively what I have not shown here is that my ketone levels go up. It’s the magic of MCT oil in the bulletproof coffee and it’s pretty clear from the cognitive boost I feel. Look at what happened on 23rd before I went to the gym – my glucose levels dropped from 5.7 to 4.3. I was playing around with MCT oil as a pre workout.

2.      My glucose levels are almost the same – before and after the breakfast. Typical breakfast here means pastured eggs done in butter typically accompanied with wild bacon. So it was pretty much all proteins and fats, almost negligible carbs which explains almost no fluctuation in blood glucose levels.

3.      Consuming a typical dinner of veggies with some meat AND starches with it after a gym session doesn’t move the glucose levels a lot. This tells me that my muscles are glycogen depleted and take up most of the glucose that’s generated from sweet potato or rice. On 28th however I didn’t go to the gym and decided to have starches along with my dinner which I typically don’t do. 20 minutes after the meal, glucose had already elevated to 7.3 and that’s when I ran out of the glucose strips. I suspect it peaked at around 8 or so before it started dropping.

 

Shawn Stevenson Story

I recently learnt about Shawn Stevenson on Living La Vida Low Carb Show and his story of recovery from a degenerative bone and spine disease is pretty amazing.

Below is a summary verbatim in Shawn's own words from the podcast:

He was an athletic scholar , kind of performing at a high level for his school. At age of 16, he was doing a time trial for 200 metres when he broke his hip. This kind of phenomenon is reserved for 90 years old. The trainers managed to get him back on the track at the time but no one really asked the question "Why did this happen at all?". But it all came full circle when he was 20 and was diagnosed with degenerative bone disease.  -  his spine  was degenerating. The doctor shows him MRI scan of his back and tells him "you have spine of an 8 year old." Unfortunately the condition couldn't be cured and can only be managed. Shawn remembers asking the doctor "Does this have anything to do with what I am eating?". Doctor replied that this condition has nothing to do with what you put in your mouth but put these pills in your mouth anyways because they will help him deal with the pain. 2.5 year later, Shawn was sick and tired of being sick and tired and something moved in his consciousness. He took a decision that he will be in charge of his health and not focus on negativity.

Trivia - Decision derives from a Latin word which means to cut away (think incision), so he decided to cut away any thought of he is not going to be healed.

He put a plan into play and it worked in 3 phases:
1. Movement: Body needs to move to heal itself. Doctors were just recommending him bed rest and more bed rest. He came upon a study of horses , all of whom had broken a bone or two. So they were being supplemented with calcium to increase their bone density. The horses were divided into 2 groups: one were given calcium only and the second group was given calcium and were encouraged to move. The group which moved ended up with much higher bone density and the other group had negligible impact.

2. Body requires raw material to build itself: Just like if a house porch is broken, you will need raw materials to build it. Shawn asked an interesting question to himself : what is my spine actually made of ? He started to understand some big misnomers in convential medicine like doctors recommend calcium supplements to increase bone density but such individual end up with 33% higher chance of dying due to cardio vascular diseases. Shocker?  This is because of calcification - this is an end product (See my explanation below) Another one of the big end product is silica and Shawn was eating Papa Johns and chinese food every day. He realized he was deficient in silica, magnesium, vitamin C and sulphur. Vitamin C and sulphur through a process called Biological Transmutation, they create new tissues!!! So he stopped eating fast food, started cooking at home and using whole foods.
In 30 days, his pain vanished.

3. Sleep: As he was healing, his sleeping patterns changed. His circadian rhythms kicked in and he naturally started to go to bed earlier and started getting up earlier. Benefits of sleep have already been covered in a previous post.

So for Shawn, food was his medicine. And he went a step further and took supplements for his special situation when food wouldn't suffice. I tend to support this view as well that we can't entire rely on the food alone to get all micronutrients we need to thrive. Almost everyone is deficient in Vitamin D3 and Magnesium and it's nearly impossible to get enough of these from the diet.

To understand what Shawn means by calcium supplementation increasing the risk of cardiovascular diseases - When certain supplements like calcium are taken without their co factors or activators, they don't quite work like they should. For example in this case, you reason that Calcium is an essential raw material for bone formation so you supplement with  Calcium hoping it will increase your bone density but how do you know it's going to stick on your bones and teeth and not end in your arteries. If calcium ends in your arteries, you end up with calcified arteries and now you are a higher risk of death due to cardio vascular diseases. The correct protocol is to have Vitamin D3, Vitamin K2 and Calcium together because they work synergistically. K2 acts like an activator for Calcium and Vitamin D3 and ensures that  calcium should end up on our bones and teeth and not in our arteries.

If you really want to geek out on Vitamin K2 and how it took us 62 years to understand it's role as an activator, check out this article from Chris Masterjohn.
On the trail of elusive X-factor

Shawn Stevenson has a pretty popular podcast called The Model Health Show

Here is TEDx talk by Shawn Stevenson and like me you will end up  becoming a big fan of cacao, the mother of chocolate. That's raw cacao and not your Cadbury's or Lindt milk chocolate.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uV2ynZ1VcnE

My favourite sleeping well techniques or sleep hacks (Update2)

There are a few essentials pillars which are needed to build and maintain the structure of healthy and thriving body and brain. In computer talk, you have to have good hardware and software. No matter how good the software is, it’s not going to be as awesome on lousy piece of hardware.  And it’s a lot easier to fix the hardware – that is the physical aspects of our body and brain. Once you have a great working hardware or an energetic body and brain, then you have the energy to bring it on and go after what you really want in life.

To my mind, these are nutrient dense foods, sleep, stress and exercise. I would rate sleep nearly as high as eating a nutrient dense diet, if not higher and unfortunately it’s often sacrificed. An hour of extra browsing in the night or watching Netflix, we all do it. What I have learnt over the last year is that sleep is absolutely non-negotiable if you want to get anywhere close to your peak performance – whether that’s at work or in the gym or just feeling great. Both the quantity and quality of sleep matter. I like to get around 8 hours of sleep and for most people the range is somewhere between 7-9 hours. It’s better to err on the side of sleeping more than sleeping less. You know you have slept well when you can wake up naturally without an alarm clock and you feel refreshed.  

So why should you care about sleep? It's the most deeply anabolic state. That's just a fancy way of saying that this is when your body is healing, growing and recovering. Just about everything else we do during a day is catabolic (muscle wasting, tearing up tissues). Activities like mindful meditation and deep sleep are deeply anabolic. Think about this: When you walk out of a gym training session 1 hour later, you are in a much worse state than when you walked in. Yep, you heard that right. Your inflammatory markers will all be high. But if you give your body time to recover from this acute stress with good diet followed by good quality and long sleep, you will not only be better off but stronger too. So you build muscles not in the gym but later when you are recovering, especially in the deep sleep phase of the sleep.  The key is to train and then recover like hell and it's nearly impossible without adequate and quality sleep.  Everyone needs adequate and quality sleep but you may need it even more if you like to train in the gym or have generally a busy and hectic lifestyle.

3 important things happen in sleep:

1.      Auto immune repair: In the deep-sleep phase of the sleep your body, brain and immune system work together to repair themselves. In fact immune system is learning about the stuff that has happened during the day to it and is figuring out which foods are friends and which are not or if mistakes were made in identifying harmless things as harmful and that could have triggered an auto immune reaction. So, deep sleep part of the sleep is absolutely critical.

2.  Mental cognition: Another important activity that goes on in sleep is re-arranging of memory like putting the books in the library back in order. Memories get organized, categorised. This stuff is not as important as the first part and unfortunately if you don’t get enough sleep or do not get enough quality sleep, the first part is given precedence over second part because it’s more relevant for survival and so it will steal time from the phase during which we dream. So, you may not feel as sharp or fluid the next day. It’s the difference between flash drive and hard drive, information is there but there is too much seek time.

3. Hormonal reset: Hormones are reset. Think of it like a computer reboot (I simplify of course).  For example, a good sleep makes you insulin sensitive and conversely a bad one would make you insulin resistant. Think about that for a second – if you want to lose excess weight, you should try to get really good sleep of 7-9 hours.

So here are a few tricks I have learnt to improve the quality of my sleep.

1. Timing matters – That’s true for both when you sleep and when you eat your evening meal.

Some of us are night owls but most of us should be asleep before 11 pm. I usually call it a day around 9 30 pm and hope to be asleep by 10 pm. If I try sleeping an hour later and even though I did get 8 hours of sleep, something still feels off. I track my sleep and I can see that I have had less deep sleep. So timing matters and as a basic rule of thumb, the earlier we sleep after the sunset, the better it is. It’s just how brain is hard wired and this is what we may have done for millions of years.

As for meal timing, it’s common sense to get done 3 or so hours before you really want to fall asleep. You don’t really want to be digesting a steak, as awesome as it is, as you are really trying to go to sleep.

No coffee after 2 pm: Seriously, no coffee after 2 pm, not even BulletProof coffee. Caffeine has a half-life of around 6 hours and so you will have still have plenty of it in your system around 10 pm if you have it late. 

2.  Cut down the lights- In my opinion there is way too much light in our lives especially in the second part of the day. Start turning down the lights 2 hours before you want to hit the bed. 

3.  F.lux: It will be naïve to think we won’t use our laptops and other gadgets in the evening. Well, just install f.lux on all the machines and devices you can. F.lux tracks the sun movement for your part of the world and will change the wavelength of the light being emanated from the device you are working on. Next point explain why this matters.

4.  Blue blockers: I have myself been guilty of watching Netflix shows right up to the point I want to sleep and in spite of nearly dark room, there is still way too much light coming off the TV. And f.lux is not available on all the devices we are consuming from. Well, that’s when blue blockers come in really handy – they basically block the blue spectrum part of the light. Blue light basically messes up with hormones like melatonin which help you go to sleep. Before electricity flooded our lives with light, for tens of thousands of years, all we had as a source of light was fire - be it from a fireplace or candles. There is a reason why fire feels so soothing in the night and it’s essentially red spectrum light with longer wavelengths.  I have 2 versions of blue blockers, ones that I can wear on top of my regular glasses or a Sports model (if I am still wearing contact lenses or when I don’t need to wear my glasses like when I am reading). These can be bought from here.

5. Raw Honey – Brain uses liver glycogen (that’s sugar stored as glycogen in the liver) over muscle glycogen when we are sleep. Remember brains still pretty active while we are asleep (no rest for the wicked) and always needs a little bit of glucose for functioning. For me, especially on the days I work out, I will have a small spoon of raw unprocessed honey last thing before I go to bed. Since honey is mostly fructose, it will go to the liver where it will get metabolized as glycogen and brain should have a bit more glycogen available if it needs it. If you are someone who is trying to lose weight, use your common sense and this option may not work for you. And if it’s not raw unprocessed honey, then don’t bother.



Raw Comb Honey

This is also one of the reasons why I don’t mind a bit of starchy foods like sweet potato or white rice  in the night as they are easily digestible and brain can use this glucose because mostly my next proper meal with proteins-fats-carbs is not until 16 hours later (because most days it’s just BulletProof coffee in morning).

6.  Magnesium – Almost everyone is under nourished in this extremely vital element.  Magnesium is used in over 300 enzymatic processes, including all of those involved in ATP production.  It’s also vital for proper transcription of DNA and RNA. It’s also needed to enhance cognition and increase memory AND promote relaxation and improve quality sleep. Both Mark and Dave recommend chelated forms of magnesium, that is those ending in –ate. Here are best forms of magnesium as recommended by Mark and Dave.
BulletProof Exec – Forms: Citrate, malate, glycinate, threonate, or orotate                                    

Marks Daily Apple - Forms: citrate, glycinate, or taurate                     The 2 brands I have been consuming are Active Magnesium and MagTech.

                             

7.      Track your sleep – No, you don’t have to spend 100 bucks on a gimmicky device and it’s easier than you think it is. I am assuming of course that you have an iOS device like an iPhone or iPod touch or an Android device. Well, look no further than Sleep Cycle app. Start this app before you go to sleep, put it next to your pillow and it will your smartphone’s sensor to track your sleep. I am amazed how well this works. Without fail, put your phone in the flight mode. The worst thing you can do it sleep right next to a wifi mobile device, right next to your brain and you are aiming for good sleep.  Here is my chart from one of the nights and look at the amount of deep sleep that takes place in the first 3-5 hours of the sleep.

If you still aren't convinced about the importance of sleep listen to Dr. Kirk Parsley on The Importance of Sleep. By the end of the video you will realize that sleep is more important than you think it is. A lot more important.