Stack Ranking My 7 Foundational Health Habits

All right, in today's episode, I am going to stack rank my 7 foundational health habits. Now, I've said this a lot of times, and I'm gonna say it again: building consistency with these 7 foundational health habits is going to be the key to you feeling and looking great. And yes, whilst each habit individually is going to play a part in that, that isn't really the secret to them. Their power is in how they literally rebuild you as a human being, almost like an operating system reset. You can forget about being someone who is tired and anxious and is prone to skipping workouts and eating foods you know are bad for you. If you can nail these foundational health habits, they are going to turn you into someone who at the core is strong, capable, and disciplined. And you're going to find yourself to be someone who is able to make the right choices in life going forward. The right choices not only with your training and your nutrition, but also in all areas of your life. Now, having said all of that, these 7 habits are not created equally. Some are even more foundational than others. So today I'm going to stack rank them in order from 1 to 7 and in order of importance and impact. So drum roll at the top of the list, undoubtedly sleep. So I often will call all of my foundational health habits, or I will refer to them as the base of my pyramid. But actually, when I think about it, sleep could easily be the base of my pyramid, and the other 6 habits could sit on top of sleep. And that's because when I have bad sleep, my life really, really quickly starts to fall apart. I get drawn to skipping training sessions, I walk less, I overeat, I don't think as clearly, and my mood is just always going to be lower, and I'm more anxious and irritable.. And here's a good example of that. I usually sleep over 7 hours per night. And last year I went on a camping trip and I got 2 consecutive nights of sleep that was really low quality and was under 5 hours per night. And I found the 2 weeks after that camping trip really, really hard. And it goes to show just how a breakdown of sleep can quickly cause things to go off track. And there's just an overwhelming amount of evidence now that sleep has a huge impact not only on your physical health, but also on your cognitive and your emotional health. And there is evidence that for every 5% decrease in REM sleep, which is your high-quality sleep, there's a staggering 13% rise in the probability of death. And I'll put that study in the show notes. But look here, sleep is everything. You have to nail it and you have to make it a non-negotiable in your life. I work harder on this habit than any of my other habits., and that's why it easily sits as number 1 for me. So that's number 1, sleep. Number 2, and it was a kind of close second, is alcohol. Now, I'll start with the obvious. Alcohol is undoubtedly bad. It's literally a poison. And there is evidence that drinking more than 5 drinks per week is associated with a shorter life expectancy. And in fact, even a casual drinker, somebody that just drinks a couple of drinks per night, that can actually lead to a 4 to 5 years shorter life expectancy. And that's over 5% of your life. And I'll put that study in the show notes too, because it also links to all sorts of diseases and cancer, etc., etc. So outside of the actual evidence though, my own experience with alcohol is it's been a bit of a roller coaster and I eventually had to cut it out of my life. Now, similar to sleep, when I would drink, everything would predictively go off the rails and I just found it much, much harder to make the right choices in life after a night of having a few drinks. Now, the other really clear data point for me was the relationship between drinking and the stats in my healthware. So I wear a Whoop, the new Whoop MG band, and when I would drink even just a couple of nights— sorry, a couple of drinks in an evening, when I would wake up, my metrics on my Whoop would be utterly in the tank. I would always wake up to red recovery, a very high resting heart rate, a massively reduced heart rate variability. And my sleep was— my quality of sleep, the amount of sleep I got was probably okay, but the quality of my sleep was also really, really poor. I would have most of my sleep in light sleep and it was just a gigantic eye-opener for me because it's not like Whoop knew that I was drinking. I didn't fill it out in my journal or anything like that. It was literally I would drink, Whoop stats would be terrible. And it really was probably the first time that I had my eyes opened to the negative of alcohol. And that's why alcohol, whilst it's a close second to sleep, it sits as number 2 for me. It was incredibly important and actually I had to abstain from it entirely to be able to kind of move forward in life. So yeah, alcohol number 2. But actually, before we jump into number 3 and we go further down the list, I just kind of want to say that if you can nail both sleep and alcohol, you are going to be 80% there. And it's the 80/20 principle where 80% of the results comes from 20% of the things you do. And most of the benefits you'll see from building these 7 habits in your life will come from sleep and alcohol. And importantly, when they're sorted, it's just going to become exponentially easier to get the others in a good place. So number 1, sleep. Number 2, alcohol. The 2 most important habits that I track and stick to. Number 3 is steps. Now steps are super underrated and I used to underrate them. I've gone from not caring about them much at all to now them being a really important metric that I track every day. Now why is that? Well, for a start, I just think they're the ultimate baseline of activity and most people are generally not active enough.. And steps is a form of exercise that is underrated because actually it's a really solid exercise. There's an awful lot going on when you're walking. There's a lot going on with stability. You're moving your whole body. You've got balance, you've got your hips moving. It's a great full body exercise, even if it is fairly low to mid-level kind of intensity. Now you can obviously up the ante a little bit. You can add in terrain, you could add an incline, you can wear a weighted vest.. And actually you can get fairly close to zone 2 cardio if you do those things. Probably have to do most of those things. And you're generally just getting a good full body workout. And it's actually not uncommon to see people attribute their entire weight loss to just building a habit of walking. They didn't change much else. They just said, right, today, from today, I'm going to walk 10,000 steps per day. And the weight seems to just drip off. And Steps is kind of magic in that way. There's something about steps that transforms you into an active person, and you then just start to notice all types of results in your health and how you look. Now, the other thing about steps is it's great for quality of mind. It's great for clearing your head. It's an incredible idea generator, and it improves your mood. And there's a great quote from a guy called Dan Goh that said, you're always a 15-minute walk away from a better mind., and I find that to be so true. The other thing I'll do in the show notes is I'm gonna link to a video from a guy called Thomas Deleur, and the, the video is titled 5 Reasons Walking Is the King of Fat Loss. And in this video, he goes through a study where he shows that individuals that were walking about 6K steps per day had a 40% lower risk of all-cause mortality compared to those walking 3,500 steps per day. And the risk reduction increased with higher step counts. So once you got up to 11,000 steps per day, you were at a 53% lower risk of all-cause mortality. So steps is really fundamentally linked to healthspan and living longer. And that's why for me, steps is pretty high up on the list at number 3. Number 4, whole foods. So hopefully this is just another really obvious one. When I eat a day or two of exclusively whole foods, I feel like an entirely different person. I feel sharper in my mind. I feel and look leaner in the mirror. I think like things just have a habit of sort of tightening up and I have a ton more energy. Now, if I contrast that to when I get stuck eating sugary processed foods, the opposite is true. I get tired and sluggish. I'm bloated. I get bad digestion and I don't think as clearly.. And it's literally a night and day comparison over the period of just a few days. But actually, if you extend that time period out to a much longer period, we're talking months and years, whole foods make a massive difference. They help you maintain a better body weight. Like you tend to just eat fewer calories on a whole calorie, sorry, on a whole food diet. And you're going to live longer and you're going to have less disease. And there is a lot of evidence around the fact that populations that eat 90 to 100% whole food diets, they have the highest life expectancies and lowest disease rates in the world. These are the blue, blue zone populations. And I'll put that study in the show notes as well. So again, it's easy to see how whole foods will help you look and feel better and live longer. And that's why it's pretty high up on the list. And it's number 4 for me. Number 5 for me is protein. So I hate to see protein so low because I'm a big advocate of a high protein diet. And I think most people underestimate and actually under-eat protein. But it also, I guess, goes to show how important sleep, alcohol, walking, and whole foods are. The protein has to come below those 4. Now, why is protein important? Well, building and keeping muscle has to be an important goal of yours, and it's literally the key to being a metabolically healthy and capable— sorry, capable person, not only now, but it's also a highly predictive metric of the quality of your life as you age and how long you're going to live. And the reason is that protein is important is because it's the building block for building muscle. So if you eat low amounts of protein, you are literally going to be blocked from gaining muscle. And actually, you're going to lose muscle quite quickly as you age. Now, the other thing about protein is it's great for appetite. So you're going to find that the more protein you eat, the less your appetite, and you're going to eat less overall. Um, and then the other thing, you're going to find that when you prioritize protein as part of a meal, it kind of has this magical way of cleaning up your diet. So if you start with a piece of protein like some egg, uh, some meat, and then put things around it, your meal is going to be much healthier and better for you than if you start with something like bread or pasta or potatoes. So I would encourage you, start your meals with protein. It's going to ensure that you, you start to eat more protein and get enough protein per day, but it also has this logical way of also cleaning up your diet. So for all of those reasons, protein is number 5 for me out of the 7 foundational health habits. All right, we're getting down on the list now. Number 6 is water. So even slight levels of dehydration can make you feel fatigued and give you brain fog. But when you're well hydrated, you're just generally going to feel sharper, you're going to make better decisions, and you're going to be clearer-headed. There's also a case that when you're well hydrated, you're going to perform better in the gym. So you're going to get more bang for buck for every hour you spend in the gym. And even though we're not trying to win the Olympics here, every little bit helps, right? So staying hydrated is basically going to mean that you feel sharper, you're going to have less brain fog, and you're going to perform better in the gym. And that's why it's really important to make sure that you drink enough water and that you're well hydrated throughout the day. Last and bottom of the list, number 7, number 7, sorry, is caffeine. And again, it's one of those I hate to see last, but one of them had to be last. And I guess there's just no two ways about it. The other 6 are more powerful than caffeine. Having said that, I still care a lot about caffeine as a foundational health habit. And the main reason caffeine is in there is because of the relationship it has with sleep. And it's proven to interfere with the quality of your sleep, which, as I explained early on in the video, is super important to how you feel and your health. Now, caffeine has a quarter-life of 10 to 12 hours. And what that means is that if you have a coffee, let's say at midday, you can still expect about a quarter of it to be in your system at midnight. So it's kind of like just nailing quarter of a coffee and then going straight to bed, which isn't smart. Most of us wouldn't actually do that, but actually inadvertently, most of us are doing that. If we're having coffee at 1 or 2 or 3 p.m. in the afternoon. And there's a lot of evidence that drinking just one dose of caffeine in the evening can decrease the amount of deep sleep by 20%. And to put that into perspective, you would have to age 15 years to get that type of degraded degradation of sleep. So the main reason that caffeine is at the bottom of the list, though, is that it doesn't actually seem to impact me much personally. And I think that probably is just because of my personal tolerance, either that I've built up to caffeine, or maybe I think some people are more tolerant of caffeine than others. Having said that, I like to have it on there because of how important sleep is, and it holds me accountable for respecting caffeine. I just don't want to be somebody that is just casually drinking coffee at 4 or 5 PM in the afternoon because I know that actually down the line it is ultimately going to affect my sleep, even if I have a pretty good tolerance. So that's caffeine, number 7. And that is the 7 foundational health habits. And I'll give you a quick summary of them. And the other thing I'll do as well is I'll let you know what my own goals are with each of the habits as well, to give you a sense that if you do want to experiment and start tackling any of these habits for your own, it will give you a little bit of a sense of what to aim for. So number 1, top of the list is sleep, and I go for 7 hours. Per night. Number 2 is alcohol, and I abstain from it entirely. But if you're going to try and do alcohol yourself, you might want to put some limits in if you're already drinking. But I think really the best is just to get it out of your life entirely. Number 3 is steps, and I walk 10,000 steps per day. Number 4 is whole foods, and I aim for 80% of my foods per day to come from whole foods. Number 5, protein, and I'm aiming for 150 grams of protein per day. Number 6 is water, so I aim to drink 3 liters of water per day. And number 7, at the bottom, bottom is caffeine, and I aim for 2 cups per day, always before midday. And they are the 7 habits in order, in terms of my order of prioritization. And the goals I set for myself. And I'll just wrap up with saying that if you're, if you're starting your journey with foundational health habits, I would really encourage you to look at sleep and alcohol first and super get those nailed. Because if you can figure out these, you're going to feel and look a hell of a lot better in fairly short order, actually. And you will find that all of the other habits become much easier to tackle if you have those two in place. I hope you found that useful and see you in the next episode.