This is absolutely at the foundation. Would add to that get regular sleep and enough of it.

At some level our bodies are like machines. Feed it crappy fuel (food) and don’t give it good maintenance (exercise and sleep) and it won’t run well.

i would also add actively minimizing stress.

those are actually the 4 pillars of health: eat right, exercise, get enough sleep, minimize stress

Congrats, we have rewritten the OP blog post...

yup. we have indeed. it’s a tweet instead of a blogpost.

This really is so much of it! I started this journey a couple of years ago. A few more steps I've found since:

- Clean the spaces you are in, bedroom, kitchen, office, living room, etc - Learn to communicate with an open heart. The book "Nonviolent Communication" is a great resource. - Be careful of your thoughts. Don't even joke negatively about yourself. It really does affect you even if you're not aware.

Made me feel like an idiot when I saw how well this works. Physician have been banging this drum for decades. Exercise, drink enough water and eat clean.

I feel like most health problems (diabetes, high blood pressure, cholesterol) tend be a result of an individual’s diet.

Heart disease kills ~650,000 people per year in the US, and is largely preventable with proper diet and exercise.

You can add heart disease to that list too.

The old meme is true.

Eat well, get some sun, drink water. You are like a houseplant with more complex emotions.

90% of the time when I’m feelint crabby it’s because I’m hungry or dehydrated. Moving also always helps.

Although exercising and eating well are very important for our well being, they're not enough. The most fundamental thing is having the right mindset:

Some beliefs are so destructive that no amount of exercise will alleviate their effect. For instance, some people are what I call blamers. They believe that their misery is because of life, others, society... They refuse to accept what life has given them (whether their look, family...). They honestly believe that their misery is result of external consequences. No amount of exercise will fix that. Contrast that to those who are always grateful. Always glad with what they got. Happiness for these is simple.

I think this suggests a false dichotomy, although I'm sure that's not what you meant to write.

Quick thought experiment: would you tell a physically abused child, to their face, "Do you honestly believe your misery is a result of external consequences? Be grateful for what you do have."

Some people habitually blame things that they caused themselves on others. Others commit the converse and blame things other people did on themselves. I don't think either of these facilitates your mental health.

If you are an adult, almost certainly things happened to you that weren't your fault, but that are your responsibility. That's life. Life is the process of dealing with those things, and then you die. It sucks, but it's worth it. Am I out of platitudes yet?

All these habits are founded on a desire to be better, which in turn needs to be rooted, at least partly, in compassion for yourself. If you don't want to be better, because you don't think you deserve it, because you have had that beaten into you, why would you exercise or eat better? And the only way you're guaranteed to have compassion for you when you need it is to learn how to generate it yourself. You're not going to exercise or eat clean or anything healthy sustainably if you're sustaining it by abusing yourself verbally or emotionally. So don't do that.

You say that, but I've actually seen people with that exact mindset start to make progress when I've helped them keep a consistent workout schedule and designed an appropriate training regimen for them. All of a sudden, they're 3 months in and they feel good, their body doesn't hurt anymore, they're stronger, they look better, their cardiovascular fitness has noticeably improved, and they realized that THEY did that. They put in the work, consistently, and changed things they had previously been blaming on their genetics and parents.

So, for some, it can help.

> ...when I've helped them keep a consistent workout schedule and designed an appropriate training regimen for them.

This is a significant, non-scalable investment of time and effort in the well-being of another. It wouldn't surprise me if such experiences were in extremely short supply in those people's lives. From my experience, there's a significant chunk of the population for which this sort of investment is a required component for their on-going sense of self-worth.

I'm not sure why, but my experience is that tech culture is particularly prone to an almost axiomatic rejection of this aspect of human interaction and well-being, and often exhibits significant prejudice towards those for whom this external requirement for well-being manifests.

Agreed on having the right mindset. Dalai Lama's "The book of Joy" is a good one talking about the perspectives that would help you navigate through difficult time and emotions.

Some examples:

* treating all human beings as a whole, which allows people to share happiness on other people's achievement - this kind of resonates with the theory of Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, where it argues that the goal of all humans is to maximize the chance that the entire gene pool will continue to exist

* reduce sense of one's own identity - which helps people during hard times by thinking about how small one single person is compared to the entire race, maybe even the entire universe

And of course, there's the advocate around being grateful, being compassionate, do more meditation etc.

All good things! I would also say that STRESS KILLS. It has real physical harm to the body. I love working in high-stress situations but it has taken a long time to learn how to make stressful situations not stress me out. Finally, find meaning in the things you do even if they are not 'meaningful things'.

There a physiological reason for that. Look at the resource requirements for the brain relative to the rest of the body.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain#Metabolism

As mental health deteriorates the consumption of resources required by the brain can fall out of rhythm to the detriment of the rest of the body.

I found the motto “sleep right, eat right, excercise right” (in that order) to be true.

Why the 'right' after exercise? My impression is that not doing it at all is both more common and more harmful than doing it in a mediocre way.

I've seen many people do a slightly wrong thing once and throw their bodies out of whack for days or weeks, if not longer, when weights are involved. With cardio, you can pretty much do what you want with cycling without too much risk of injury (aside from falling or collisions) so long as you don't overdo it. But with cardio in general (running, swimming, cycling), people often get too excited and start off wrong, or have wrong form in running, and either injure themselves or exhaust themselves and drop out.

No matter what the exercise is, ease in, find a trainer (you don't need one for long depending on what you're doing), and be smart.

Bad form can cause injuries which may leave you worse off than before.

After college, my body was awful, but I switched to this code and my body & mind improved.

Though, I wouldn't say it was the only "code to living a good life". After a problematic job, I'd also add work/life balance, on top ofrelationships (friends and family) and your faith.

Can confirm, since the lockdown I've been cycling a lot more and I feel amazing after I cycle. I feel like cycling also does wonders for the mind, I can think a lot more clearly after and my mood improves significantly.

Sounds like there are a lot of things you're taking for granted.

Ultimately we all have to figure our own ways. I am 44 and after reading my share of self-help books, YouTube videos, teachings from gurus and whatnot - this is where I have arrived. Lot of things have have been left out on purpose.

It's all about sticking to fundamentals and laying good foundations. As you said, the rest tends to take care of itself if you get your sleep, exercise, and nutrition right.

Sleep at least 6 hours every day to see the positive effects of those two things compound dramatically

I feel like 6 hours is really not enough to be healthy. 6 hours for me and I feel pretty rough. Multiple days in a row and I'm a zombie.

Worked until some time in my early 20s. Ate an astounding quantity of junk food, often got 6 or fewer hours of sleep days in a row. Looked great, felt pretty good, almost never even got the sniffles.

Go figure, at some point your body stops being able to find something (I still have no idea what) to do with an extra 2-2.5k calories a day of crap, 6hrs a night of sleep starts to leave you dragging after one night of it, and you can't live like that anymore (well, you can, but it'll be... very bad).

Yeah, as we get older, taking care of ourselves becomes more of an imperative. You can drive a car with 10,000 miles pretty aggressively, skip maintenance, etc. and it'll probably still drive great.

Doing the same with a car at 80,000 miles is outright dangerous. But if taken care of properly, older cars can drive just as great as newer ones, and sometimes a well-maintained older car can drive even better than a neglected newer car.

+ good sleep + meditation

I mostly focus on the drinking.