10 Incredible lessons From 2020 That Will Transform Your Physical Health | Ronan Oliveira

Here's a question that I have for you. What was the impact that 2020 had on your physical health? Was it positive? Was it negative? Was it neutral? Let me know in the comments below. Because this year was incredibly challenging for all of us, and it was devastating for a lot of us. I know it. You know it. But right now, we are in this unique spot that we can hang on to the good, the lessons that we learned. And I put together a list of health habits. These are habits that we either learned them already and we want to keep them, or we wish we had. And it's time to develop them now to get ready to thrive in this new next way of life that we're gonna encounter going forward. Let's get started. The first batch of habits and lessons is about eating habits. And the number one here is that 2020 requested us to cook our food more often. This is a habit that we seem to be learning already. And there is this brand of baking goods, for example. They saw their sales raising this year by 2000%. There was a marketing firm who realized in a survey that more than half of the Americans now cook more at home. And it's wonderful because when you go outside, more often than not, you have very oversized meals. And all these meals, they are optimized for taste, which is great, but it uses ingredients that sometimes you don't want to bring to your body in a consistent basis. And when you cook, you can control what is it that you're bringing to feed your body, to nurture your body. And if you haven't started it yet, focus on learning how to cook at least one source of protein and at least three types of vegetables. Because this is a strong foundation for a meal that is nutritious, that can be really good for your body in a really delicious meal as well. The second habit is about having a meal schedule. Before, when we are going to the office, it was clear in the day, the moment that you sit in and eat. But right now, the food is all around and people are all around, even if you don't go to the office. Before, you had your partner that came home, your kids that came home. And now everything is mixed, and we start munching, and we never stop. I have this friend who came to me and said, man, this year I started this habit of the one meal a day. I said, okay, tell me more. He said, I wake up and I start munching on food, and I don't stop until the time I go to bed. And this is a reality that happened to a Lot of us. And this leads to a lot of mindless eating. One of the ways of addressing this is through an intermittent fasting practice. Whether you fast for 12 hours a day, for 16 hours a day, this gives you a concrete schedule. And not only that, it also maintains that consistent throughout the days. And so that also regulates your circadian rhythm. And then the benefits go beyond only satiation and start to improve other areas of your health as well. The next habit or lesson learned is about manipulating your home environment to find out what foods are more accessible and what foods are less accessible. Before you know, if you had the cookies or the M&Ms. In the kitchen counter, you. You only see them when you come back from the office, and that's fine. But right now you are working from home and family is at home, and those things are there calling your name all the time. And some of these foods, you don't want to have them anymore, but sometimes just mindless eat them because they are there available. There is one technique that I called adjust en adios. It works like this. You get a weekend or a Saturday, for example. Then you go around your house and first you find out what are the foods that you want to bring more to your nutrition. Maybe the fruit, maybe the nuts. And you leave them. You adjust their position. You know, you bring from inside of the fridge or from the cupboard to this bowl on top of the kitchen counter. And then you get the ones that are visible or easily accessible and you don't want to have them in a great quantity anymore very often, and you put them on top of the cupboard. Maybe it's the cookies, right? And then there are some foods that you don't want to have them anymore, or at least not at home. You know, maybe the soft drinks or the M&MS. Or whatever it is. These are the foods that you say, adios, thank you. You gave me a lot of good experiences while you're here. Now I don't need you anymore and you don't belong to my home anymore. And get rid of them. It's a very useful thing to do on a weekend. That is a habit or a lesson that we learned on how to manipulate our environment to sustain healthier nutrition habits. The next batch of habits are about exercising. And the very first One is that 2020 told us that we need to find more intentional ways of walking, of moving our body in our lower intensity before we had more opportunities. Even if you drive to the office, you can walk to your car, from the parking lot to the office, there are more opportunities right now we need to be a bit more intentional. We know from research that people who are already very active and Maybe they take 10,000 steps in a day and now they are very low in activity. They take 2,5k steps a day. After two weeks, you see an increase in abdominal fat, you see increase in inflammation, you see a decrease on the ability of the body of digesting metabolizing sugar, and you see a decrease in the endothelial function. Endothelial function, Is that, is that the function of that inner layer of your blood vessels that control your circulation just by this decrease in level of activity? Right now we need to be more intentional. And so you play with what you have. If you can go outside and walk, you do this a couple of times. You go for walks while you have calls. For example, when you meet friends, instead of meeting friends to watch TV or have food, you will invite them for a walk. If you cannot go outside for a walk, then you can do movements at home. If you have a staircase, you use that. If you don't have, then it goes to the next lesson that you want to have a repertoire of home workouts. And this is something that exploded on YouTube and social media this year because everyone was looking for solutions of moving their bodies at home. But here's something very important. Not only you want to have ways of doing cardio at home, jumping jumping jacks or cycling or walking, running kind of things, but you want to have some strength training options. These are the ones that are easier when they are done in the gym and when you don't have access to the gym anymore, they're the first ones to be dropped. But they're perhaps the most important type of exercise that you have to do to keep your body fit and then healthy in the long term. And so look for home strength training protocols. And I already talked to you about in the previous video that we came up with a whole weekly scale and I have a seven day free home workout program that takes you through different techniques of strength training and uses bottles and broomsticks and things that you have at home if you want. If you don't know them yet, the link is in the description and go check it out. But there are many options. Make sure that you have at least a few home workouts that you can do. And with this comes the next lesson learned that is very worthy thinking and investing in some very basic exercise equipment at home. Because you can do a lot of things with your body weight, that's for sure. But hey, if this is becoming a trend, if you're no longer going to the gym as often. We want to have everything that we need, simple and cheap things that allow us to experience and to develop our bodies to the best version that they can be. And I'm talking about, you know, a set of resistance bands. If you have a light, a medium and a heavy resistance band and a pull up bar, you can do all, all the big six exercises on strength training that allow you to work your full body. You know, you can do squats and deadlifts, you can do presses and pulls, verticals and horizontal movements and work your entire body only with that. And if you want to go a little bit extra, then you buy a few pairs of dumbbells, a light one, a medium one and a heavy one. And now you're super well equipped. Find a space in your home and make that your little home home gym and you see how your fitness is going to improve with this lesson that you learned in 2020. Now, there are two other habits or solutions that were developed because of this year. One of them is what I call micro workout. We've been disrupting this idea that there's a time for me to exercise. There's a time of the day that I go to the gym and I exercise for an hour and a half. Now we are at home and the entire time and the families together and things happen more organically and we are shifting towards having smaller routines, but they are more often they are sprinkled throughout the day. And micro workouts is what I call does exactly that. It works like this. It's a minute and a half workout. You have three movements. Imagine that you are working and after one hour and a half, you have an alarm clock that rings off every one hour and a half, two hours that it's time to move your body. Then you go to the pull up bar that you got that you just bought and put in the doorway and you do a form of pull up that you can do. If you can do bodyweight pull ups, you do that. If you need resistance bands to help you or someone to hold your feet to help you, you do that. And you do half of your maximum amount of pull ups. So if you can do five pull ups, you do two. For example, after that go straight to a form of push up that you can do. And if you can do full push ups, you do that. You can only do wall push ups or knee push ups. That's what you do. And you do half of your maximum as well. And then straight after that you go to a form of Squat that is challenging for you. If you can do pistol squats or at least partial pistol squats with one leg, you do that. If you can only do squats with both legs, then that's what your form is. And you do half as many as your maximum is. This will take more or less a minute and a half, super short, but takes your heart rate up to the 140, maybe 160s. And this generates this incredible blood flow throughout your body, increases your cognition and activates your immune system up to 30% more than the baseline. And we know how important it is to have our immune system working and ready nowadays. So this is a micro workout. It's a wonderful solution to keep you active and to keep you healthy to throughout the day in something that takes a very, very short amount of time. The next solution is a family workout. We saw from studies this year that parents who have kids at home and they are in lockdown, more than half of them started showing depressive symptoms because it's very hard environment to work and have kids at home. And one of the ways of engaging with your family is to have a way of family workout. It doesn't need to be something like, okay, strength training, we're gonna get fit and gonna get strong and lose weight, all these kind of things. It's just a way to move the body and engage with your family all at once in a different dynamic. There are many different workouts, activities that you can play with kids, that you can work out with your partner on YouTube. And I invite you to try a couple of them to see how you can work in this different dynamic and connect with your family in a way that you're also working with your body and everyone is having fun at the same time time. The next batch of lessons learned are about health in general. And the first one is to get more sunlight, to develop more vitamin D, to synthesize more vitamin D. We know that this is really important for our immune system. This got very clear to us in March this year when we saw in Sweden that the majority of the cases of cold were coming from Somali descendants. And they represent less than 1% of the whole Swedish population. But around half of the deaths were coming from this group of people. And this is a group of people who live in a country who has less access, less sunlight, exposure to sunlight throughout the year. And they also have darker skin. And this is a combination that leads to a lower level of vitamin D. And so some scientists started to look at that and started seeing the same pattern showing up around the world and people who had lower levels of vitamin D were more susceptible to coronavirus infection. And we don't have still the answer if vitamin D is the answer, because you are now doing the randomized control trials. But we know that vitamin D is a powerful mediator and regulator of your immune system system. So if you go out for a walk, do this under the sun. If you don't, if you cannot go out for a walk, but maybe have a balcony that you can, you know, instead of having coffee and reading a newspaper in your, in your living room, do this in the balcony, do this outside. Get more of sun exposure to increase your vitamin D levels. The next lesson learned that was wonderful that we want to keep going forward has to do with quitting addictions, especially when it comes to smoking. This year was the year that the smoking industry was foreseen to grow by 8% is a 56 billion industry. It's mind blowing. But instead of growing 8%, they decreased by 13%. We saw more people quitting smoking this year than we saw in the whole past decade. And this is amazing and not only something that will contribute to our health in general, but is also a mindset that we are quitting the addictions that we are quitting the things that are holding us back. Because we need a health that is more resilient to times going forward. And lastly, perhaps to me, the most beautiful and powerful lesson learning habit that we develop is seeking help. More often than in any of the past years, we have more people reaching out to health coaches, to trainers, or even to their friends to share workouts, to keep accountability. Because we know that we are very strong and powerful beings, that we have this body that is this piece of art from nature. But we also know that we a lot, we explore this, we are a lot stronger, we can use this better. When we are connected, when we seek for help, especially when times are challenging, we are allowing ourselves to reaching out to connect with other people and find that strength that comes in this combination, in the synergy between one another. We know that by being human beings, we are not the fastest species, we are not the strongest species, but we have this incredible gift that we are capable of adapting. So if there are lessons that 2020 asked us to learn, our main strength is observing them and learning from them, applying them going forward. Because this is how we evolved our species to the next era of life that we are about to face. So if you have other habits that you learned this year that were gifts for you after this challenge, let me know in the comments below that I really want to know. And if you are looking for other healthy habits to develop, I want you to watch this video right here. I made it with all the tools. 12 habits that I developed across the years that were the most powerful ones that helped me transform my body and my health. Let me know in the comments what were your learned lessons. If you have any questions, I'm looking forward to see what each one of you is commenting. I'll talk to you in the comment section and I'll see you in the next video.