My #1 Tips For Diet, Exercise, and Sleep

Trying to improve your health and wellness can be overwhelming.

It was not too long ago that if you wanted to improve your health and wellness one of the roadblocks you would run into is access to information. If you didn’t go to the library and do some hardcore research you were out of luck. You were basically limited to what you read in a magazine or saw on TV.

Today we have the opposite problem.

Today information is abundant. Not only do you have information coming at you from all angles, but the details and evidence provided is endless.

Like so many things, humans tend to solve one problem only to create another one in the process.

With so much information at our fingertips and the ability for anyone to disseminate that information in some pretty convincing ways it can leave us overwhelmed, frustrated, and confused.

One “expert” can give you advice that seems completely legitimate and valid and then the next “expert” in the very next social media post can say the complete opposite and sound just as convincing as the previous person!

With no clear answers for anything anymore it leaves a lot of people frustrated and makes them less motivated to even start, so they end up doing nothing at all.

If you find yourself resonating with these statements, fear not because this post will give you some concrete tips that universally apply to everyone and will have the biggest impact on moving you closer towards your goal.

Diet

First let’s start with everyone’s favorite topic…diet!

There are more opinions out there about how to construct your diet than just about anything else.

Paleo, Primal, Keto, Vegan, Vegetarian, Carnivore, Mediterranean, Gluten Free, High Carb Low Fat, High Fat Low Carb, Pro-Metabolic, Intermittent Fasting…and many many more all claim to be the best diet.

Almost all diets have one thing in common, they almost all remove or severely limit something from your diet and the result is a caloric deficit or a reduction of some type of inflammation which results in weight loss and improved health.

That is all good, but then how do you decide which diet to choose?

My tip then when it comes to diet is to not label your diet and instead eat as many whole foods that you enjoy and tolerate.

Sexy, right?

Of course not! It is the boring stuff that is the most effective!

Let me explain.

All of the diets that I listed above can work and may work great for you…in this moment. Rarely though does someone adopt a diet and it continues to work for them for the rest of their life. If it works now that is great but it doesn’t mean that it will work next month, next year, or next decade.

When it stops working people become frustrated yet they continue to go back to the diet that worked in the past leading to further frustration. They try harder and harder and go to more extreme versions of their diet, restricting more and more. Eventually the diet that once benefited their health can become detrimental to their health.

So instead of pigeon holing yourself into a diet, I think it’s better to adopt the one characteristic most of them have in common…they all put a focus on whole food consumption. Instead of dictating which whole foods you should and should not consume, I think it is better to just let you decide which ones to consume…as long as it is a whole food it is fair game.

The best part about this tip….I am going to let you eat as much as you want of those whole foods!!!!

Crazy, right?

It may sound crazy but actually by eating as many whole foods as you like you will crowd out everything else because you will be too full for the donut, pizza, cookie, bag of chips, etc. The other benefit is that since whole foods are not as calorically dense as these other foods you will be full but consuming less calories!

And finally…I am not telling you that you can’t eat certain foods!

Want a banana? Awesome, go eat it!

Want a steak? Great, get a ribeye!

Want to eat a big ass salad? Pile it on!

Want to eat breakfast? Have a massive egg omelet.

Want to have pizza and cake for your birthday? Me too!

The last one might surprise you. You are telling me I can have pizza and cake?

Yes you can! You just can’t have it everyday.

Remember I said eat mostly whole foods, not exclusively whole foods. The occasional birthday celebration is not going to hurt you if the rest of the time you are eating whole foods.

Doesn’t this diet seem much more fun than one that has restrictive ridgid rules?

I think so.

And by removing the rigidity, removing the restrictive mindset, and removing the labeling of the diet it allows you to continuously evolve the way you eat with much more freedom and less mental anguish.

Exercise

Next let’s talk about my #1 tip when it comes to exercise.

This one is going to be equally as sexy as my tip around diet.

Move your body throughout the day!

While everyone out there is touting the best strength training routine, the next HIIT training protocol, the optimal heart rate zones, the best time of day to train, the next fitness class, the next crazy fitness gadget or tracker we lose sight of the biggest problem most people face today…being sedentary.

Very few of us need to move to do our job today. That means we can sit easily for 8 hours a day. Then we have another 8 hours in the day where we are sleeping. Then we have a commute to and from work for another hour. Then we take some time to chill out in front of the TV at night for another 1-2 hours. If this sounds like a pattern you fall into you are sitting on your butt for way more than half of the 24 hours in your day!

Our bodies were designed to move, we evolved having to forage for pretty much everything we needed on a daily basis.

Today, at best, people spend 1 hour exercising and don’t move their body the rest of the day. Unfortunately even if you do exercise for an hour but do nothing else, you would still be considered sedentary.

To combat this first we need to realize how much time you are sedentary. Most phones and fitness trackers can detect movement and you can use them to see how much sedentary time you have per day. If you are sedentary for 8 or more hours a day that is a sign you need to move more.

However it is not just total sedentary time that matters, we also want to break up prolonged periods of sedentary time.

What do I mean?

It’s possible to hit only 7 hours of sedentary time in a day but have all of those hours come consecutively, meaning you were on your butt 7 hours straight. That means you just bookended your day with a bunch of movement. Now don’t get me wrong, that’s better than not moving but instead of putting all your movement in 2 blocks of your day it’s best to spread that movement out throughout the day.

Ultimately the modality or how you break up your sedentary time doesn’t matter. You can walk, do some body weight exercises, use bands or a kettlebell, you can ride a bike, do a few yoga poses, do jumping jacks, it really doesn’t matter. I think walking is the most accessible to most people most of the time, but it doesn’t really matter what you do…do whatever you enjoy, and whatever fits into your life will work.

Sleep

Now let’s talk about the hardest one to address, sleep.

Sleep is difficult because I can’t point to one single intervention that MOST people would benefit from. Some people struggle with falling asleep, some people struggle with staying asleep, some have inconsistent sleep times, some have dysregulated sleep environments, some are suffering due to electronic usage.

However I think most people really could improve their sleep, regardless of where they are struggling by having a wind down period before going to sleep.

Here is why…

So many people are “ON” from the time they wake up to the time they go to bed. They don’t take any time to settle down before going to bed. That can result in not being able to fall asleep, and it will also cause people to wake up and have a hard time falling asleep.

So what do I mean by having a wind down period?

All this really involves is taking about 30 minutes to an hour to turn off the electronics, get off the phone, and settle yourself before you hop into bed. You want to start to downregulate your body. This means no intense movement, no significant food or fluid intake, very little stimulating content, and allowing yourself to decompress from your hectic day.

Intense movement, significant food and fluid intake and stimulating content (from electronics, or even books), will heighten your nervous system making it unlikely you will get a good night’s sleep.

Decompressing from your day will help you keep your mind from ruminating on whatever you have done or not done during your day.

All too often I see people up at night thinking about something that happened the previous day.

By decompressing from your day you get most of that out of your head. My favorite way to do that is to write things down. A few sentences about your day is all you need. To take things a step further you can write down what you need to get done the next day. This may take 3-5 minutes and doesn’t need to be anything formal, you can even throw away the paper you wrote it down on immediately after you are done. If however you want to make it more formal and start a journal, go for it!

There you have it, my top tips to improve your diet, exercise, and sleep.

If you have finished reading this post and are saying “Ryan, I am already doing these things and still struggling!”, I ask you to do this….ask yourself how consistently are you doing these things?

Are you doing these things 80% of the time, or is it more like 50% of the time?

Be honest.

These tips are so foundational that I insist people are consistent with them 80% of the time or more. Of course there is a lot more you can do to improve your health outside of these tips, but in my opinion it is pointless to move on to anything else until you have a strong foundation.

If you are consistent with these 3 tips then no worries, sign up for my newsletter using the form below because each week I share all kinds of information you can put to good use to reach your health and wellness goals. Sometimes they are basic like today’s post but other times they are more advanced deep dives, there is something for everyone I promise! What are you waiting for?