We’re constantly being told to try new fad diets, eliminate or restrict certain foods from our dietary patterns, exercise more, buy new supplements, include trending wellness rituals and practises in our weekly routines - all in the name of improving our health. But what if it weren’t that complicated… Instead of implementing prescriptive diets and practises into your lifestyle, there are some really straight-forward, sustainable changes you can implement today to start living a healthier, more balanced lifestyle - without the need for a complete overhaul of your life. 

In reality, it’s the small, sustainable things you can do every day to better your health which make the most difference to your overall well being. It’s the things you can be consistent with, the things you actually enjoy, and which don’t leave you feeling restricted, deprived or obliged to miss out on the foods, activities and things in life which bring you joy. These are the changes which will improve your life and your health - in the long-term. They’re not band-aid solutions, they won’t leave you miserable and feeling like a prisoner trapped by your own health goals and objectives. Instead, they’ll leave you feeling energised, educated and empowered in the knowledge that you’re prioritising your health while still living life to the fullest, so you can feel and be your best self! Let’s get stuck into five changes you can make right away to start improving your health, nutrition and fitness - fast!

1.Prioritise quantity and quality of sleep.

The importance of sleep is often overlooked in favour of vigorous workout routines and strict nutrition guidelines when it comes to improving health, yet sleep is one of the key foundations of good health. Prioritising adequate good-quality sleep is one of the simplest, most effective things you can do to optimise your health.

Sleep supports cognitive function and focus, metabolism and digestion, improves workout performance, helps you make better food choices, improves hormone balance and production, reduces stress and improves mood, lowers your risk of health problems including cardiovascular disease, helps to maintain a healthy weight and supports immune system function - among many other things. As you can see, it’s evident that the benefits of getting enough sleep are endless and abundant.

The ability of sleep to help you make nutrition and food choices in line with your health goals and priorities is an important aspect to consider. Sleep regulates the production of your hunger and satiety hormones, leptin and ghrelin. If you’re not getting enough good-quality sleep, your body begins to produce more ghrelin (the “hunger hormone”), which encourages you to opt for more energy-dense, palatable, high-sugar or -fat foods, in order to get a quick hit of energy and calories to “compensate” for the inadequate sleep and energy you’re experiencing. At the same time as your hunger hormone production is increasing, your leptin production (the “satiety” hormone) decreases, meaning you’re likely to feel less satisfied and satiated after your meals. Combined, these hormone changes increase your appetite and likelihood of overeating, often contributing to weight gain and poor nutrition choices if the cycle continues for a period of time.

Sleep can also enhance your performance in your workouts, and reduce the perceived effort you experience during each session. This means, when you’re well-rested, the same workout will feel far less difficult than it would if you were operating on low-quality or inadequate sleep. As a result, you can push harder, and achieve better and more consistent results from your training. So essentially, sleeping enough will help you get more out of each session in the gym. It’s more important to prioritise quality in your workouts, as opposed to quantity, which means it’s actually more beneficial to hit snooze on your early morning alarm in favour of an extra hour of sleep if you haven’t had enough the night before, versus squeezing in a poor-quality workout and reducing the amount of sleep you’re getting.

As you can see, sleep can support your nutrition and fitness goals, as well as your general health and wellbeing. Prioritising adequate sleep is such a simple shift to make, yet it’s often overlooked or overcomplicated. So here are a few key tips to help you improve the quality and quantity of your sleep, in order to support your health:

• Go to bed at the same (or similar) time every night. Even on weekends! Setting up a regular, consistent sleep routine helps to ensure you’re getting an appropriate duration of sleep each and every night. Just one night of inadequate sleep can throw your entire body and hormones out of whack, and may take days to recover from. Making it a habit to sleep and rise at the same time each day also means your circadian rhythm is consistent and reliable, so you’ll find it easier to fall asleep quickly and stay asleep throughout the night, compared to if you’re constantly changing your bedtime.

• Establish a nighttime routine. Find a routine you can fall in love with, or enjoy - this way, you’re much more likely to be consistent with it! Whether this involves a seven-step skincare routine, a luxurious bubble bath before bed, or simply reading a few pages of your favourite book, figure out what you can implement consistently each night. If possible, try to avoid all devices and lights at least an hour before bed to help you wind down, and avoid interruptions to your circadian rhythm. By establishing a regular nighttime routine, this signals to your brain and body that it’s time to wind down and prepare for sleep each time you begin your routine. This makes it much easier to fall and stay asleep, and helps improve the quality of your sleep too.

• Start your day with exposure to natural light. As soon as you wake each morning, head outside and expose yourself to natural sunlight. This helps to regulate your circadian rhythm and wakes you up, naturally increasing healthy cortisol production. Your circadian rhythm operates like a clock, meaning your body recognises it’s time for sleep around 18 hours after it’s first exposed to natural light. By starting your day with sunlight, you’re actually preparing your body for sleep at the right time later on in the evening.

• Avoid caffeine in the afternoon and evening. Caffeine is a stimulant, and can disrupt sleep quality and quantity - even for those who believe it doesn’t affect them. If you’re consuming caffeine later in the day, this can make it more difficult to fall asleep, or it can impair your deep, restorative sleep, meaning you’re likely to wake up feeling less rested. In fact, one study found that consuming caffeine even 6 hours prior to bedtime reduced total sleep time by an hour, leading to inadequate sleep. The half-life of caffeine is around 5 hours, meaning it takes a long time to completely leave your system and stop affecting your body and sleep cycle. Ideally, this means you want to finish drinking coffee at around midday if possible, but at the very least you should avoid all caffeine in the afternoon and evening.

• Don’t workout too close to your bedtime. Exercise increases your production of the hormones adrenaline and cortisol, both of which interfere with your circadian rhythm and your ability to fall and stay asleep. If you’re training too close to your bedtime, you’ll find it much more difficult to fall asleep thanks to the presence of these hormones running rampant in your system. Instead, aim to finish your workout several hours before bed, leaving you enough time to wind down before bedtime in order to optimise the quality of your sleep.

2. Rest more

Another consequence of the continuous stream of health and nutrition advice we’re exposed to on social media and in society is that we’ve become accustomed to the idea that “doing” is always positive. We’ve come to equate rest with being lazy and unproductive, and we’ve been taught to champion the “girl boss”, or the hard worker who never has time to stop and relax. Even when we’re trying to fit rest into our endlessly busy lifestyles and routines, we’re told to do so with the mentality that “rest is productive”. But guess what? Not everything has to be productive! Rest is important to include in your routine simply because you deserve it.

But in addition to that fact, rest is also crucial for your health. In the same way that there is no light without darkness, there is no productivity without rest. There is no way to sustain performance, health, or function unless you’re giving your body enough time and space to rest and recover too.

Rest is critical for mental health, cognitive function, memory and concentration, immune system function, managing stress, improving mood, supporting metabolism and digestion, and allowing your body to repair and restore from the taxing nature of your daily activities and lifestyle. If you don’t allow yourself to rest, it’s like trying to drive your car on an empty fuel tank - you can only sustain your attempts for so long, until they become futile and eventually the car stops working altogether. This is what we refer to as “burn out”.

Humans are designed to operate in short bursts of energy, followed by regular and reliable breaks or periods of rest from work, physical activity, or emotional stress. These periods of rest are not a “waste of time” as you’ve probably been led to believe, but instead act to refresh you, allowing you to continue operating at full capacity and performing to the best of your ability across all arenas of life. During these periods of respite, your body’s natural healing processes are activated, allowing you to return to a state of homeostasis or “balance”. It is from this state that you’re able to feel and perform at your best.

Rest is also essential for reducing and managing stress - another key pillar of overall health and well being. Stress wreaks havoc on your body, both physically and emotionally, if left unaddressed for a period of time. While some stress is unavoidable and natural, any long-term stressors can suppress your immune system function, increase inflammation, send your hormones out of balance, and increase your risk of disease or health complications. When you’re stressed, your body’s “fight or flight” sympathetic nervous system is activated, causing your body to increase your heart rate, slow your digestion, and produce more of its stress hormone, cortisol. While experiencing these physical symptoms in the short-term is natural and healthy, any chronic or prolonged stress can result in abnormally high cortisol production, which can increase your body’s tendency to store fat, and interfere with your general health. High cortisol can impair sleep, prevent your body’s physical recovery, and have negative consequences on your mood, emotional and mental health, cognitive function, immune system and more. 

Rest, however, activates your parasympathetic nervous system - which is the opposite of this “fight or flight” sympathetic state. It has the opposite effect on your body, enhancing your “rest and digest” functions, and helping to bring your body back into a state of homeostasis, from which your hormones can rebalance, your mood and immune system can be restored, and your general health can improve. It’s essentially the “yang” to the sympathetic nervous system’s “yin” - and without balance, you cannot experience harmony or optimal health.

Rest is crucial in reducing stress and restoring your body to a state of balance and health, both physically and mentally. So whether you consider rest “productive” or not, it’s absolutely essential for your general wellbeing, and should be a foundational pillar when looking to improve your health. Rest can look different for everyone - for some people, it may involve taking an afternoon nap, while for others it will look like taking a rest day from the gym, or taking time away from work to spend with family and friends. However it looks for you, including regular rest into your weekly routine is a non-negotiable strategy which will effectively optimise your health.

3. Include more variety in your diet.

Contrary to the belief that the more you can eliminate from your diet the better - be it sugar, dairy, carbs, fats, or any of the other numerous foods and food groups we’re told are “unhealthy” - it’s actually the more you can add to your diet which benefits your health!

Dietary variety is extremely beneficial for your gut health, helping to feed different strains of bacteria to support a diverse, thriving microbiome. Some of the flow-on effects of a diverse gut microbiome include improved mental health and mood, better digestion and immune system function, and reduced risk of malnutrition or nutrient deficiencies. Aim to include as many different varieties of food in your regular diet as possible, and enjoy the benefits it offers to your health.

Similarly, increasing the diversity of plant-based foods you consume is another excellent way to improve your health. Each different colour of fruit and vegetable contains different antioxidants and nutrients, meaning you’re helping to fill more nutritional gaps and prevent deficiencies in line with the number of different colourful plant-based foods you’re eating. Plant-based foods are often rich in fibre and important nutrients and minerals - particularly when they’re whole foods. As such, they’re amongst the most nutrient-dense, health-supporting things you can eat.

Foods like lentils, beans, fruits and veggies, tempeh and tofu all have unique health benefits. They improve gut health and digestion, and nourish your body in a way that often can’t be matched by animal products or processed foods. So including them in abundance in your diet is a simple and easy way to know you’re looking after your body, and nourishing it with the most nutrient-dense, health promoting foods available to you.

This doesn’t mean you have to become vegan or vegetarian. It simply means you should include more diversity in your diet, in particular plant-based foods. It’s an easy strategy to help you prioritise and enhance your health over the long-term.

4. Focus on inclusion rather than exclusion.

Notice how we just discussed what you can eat more of, instead of what to cut out, avoid or eat less of? This inclusion over exclusion approach to health and nutrition is a really effective strategy in supporting optimal health and well being. Instead of limiting or restricting your food choices, spend some time observing and noticing which foods make you feel your best. What leaves you feeling energised, nourished, satisfied and satiated? These foods are ones which you should prioritise and include in abundance.

However, you can also include foods which aren’t necessarily the most nutrient-dense options available to you. By allowing yourself to eat and enjoy all foods as you like, you’re working towards improving your relationship with food. With the knowledge that you have permission to give your body whatever foods it feels called to in the moment, without the need to feel guilty for your food choices or to compensate for them later on, you’re much less likely to get stuck in binge-restrict cycles, or to find yourself struggling with disordered eating or obsessive thoughts around food. This is a really critical aspect of good health, and one you shouldn’t underestimate.

Interestingly, the way you think about and approach food has just as much impact on your health as the type of food you decide to eat. Your psychological approach to food can affect your digestive health, bloating, absorption of nutrients, gut health, emotional and mental wellbeing, the list goes on. If you can approach food from a place of abundance, adopting an inclusion approach to your diet and acknowledging that no foods or food groups are off-limits to you, you’re much more likely to get more out of the foods you eat - whatever they may be!

Your relationship with food is a really important aspect of health, and one that should be prioritised by anyone looking to improve or optimise their health.

5. Consider your relationships.

While we acknowledge that personal relationships can play an important role in our lives, we often overlook the influence they have on our health - both physical and mental. Various studies have proven that quantity and quality social relationships affect mortality and disease risk, health behaviours, stress, sleep and immune function.

Many studies have shown that people with social support from family, friends and their community are healthier, happier and live longer, while a lack of connections is associated with depression, cognitive decline and increased risk of health conditions and mortality. Loneliness, in particular, can have dramatic health consequences, including disrupted sleep, elevated blood pressure, increased production of cortisol, poor immune function and reduced contentment or happiness.

Having rich, fulfilling, supportive relationships in your life - both platonic and romantic - has been shown to reduce mortality risk in those with existing medical conditions including coronary artery disease, and may even extend the length of your life. However an absence or lack of connection can increase the risk or progression of diseases and other health conditions, as well as slow natural healing, compromise immune function and increase inflammation. 

Positive, strong relationships can also influence your health-promoting behaviours and lifestyle habits, with those who are surrounded by people engaging in healthful behaviours like regular exercise, eating nutritionally balanced diets, and seeking medical care more likely to engage in similar positive behaviours. On the other hand, if you’re surrounded by people who smoke, abuse drugs, drink excessively or eat extremely unhealthily, you’re more likely to mimic these patterns. Your social ties influence your health behaviours, both subconsciously and consciously, so the people around you play a significant role in the habits you go on to have yourself.

The emotional and mental health benefits of relationships are extensive too, with those who have strong relationships in their lives having much lower rates of anxiety and depression, higher self esteem and empathy. Feeling emotionally supported within your relationships can indirectly improve your health too, by reducing stress and enhancing your sense of meaning and purpose in life, as well as lowering stress hormones, heart rate and blood pressure - all of which can benefit your health. Generally, positive relationships leave you feeling happier, more positive and content, improving your social, emotional and physical wellbeing.

Evidently, your relationships play a pivotal role in your mental and physical health, so it’s worthwhile taking the time to evaluate and assess the quality and quantity of people you love and trust in your life - and those you feel loved by too. Ask yourself: are the connections you have reliable, mutual and positive? Or are the people in your life self-serving, greedy and untrustworthy? Do you have people you feel you could turn to in the good and the bad times for support? Do you leave interactions with friends and family feeling happier, and more positive than beforehand?

Be honest with yourself when evaluating the relationships you have in your life, and if you notice there’s room for improvement or your connections are lacking, take the time to invest in this area of your life. Not only will it benefit your happiness and sense of purpose, it will also vastly improve your health if you’re surrounded by uplifting, strong, lasting connections.

There you have it, five effective, powerful ways to improve your health - which probably weren’t the strategies you were expecting! While we fixate on micromanaging our nutrition and exercise so much of the time, in truth health doesn’t have to be complicated or difficult. Small changes you can sustain over the long-term, and which bring you joy and contentment in different areas of your life will benefit both your mental and physical health, far more so than any unsustainable or unenjoyable diets, exercise regimes, supplements or “wellness hacks” which leave you feeling restricted, deprived or controlled. Invest in the pillars of your life and health which matter, and enjoy the difference they make in optimising and elevating your health.

Reach out to the ETPHD team or a trusted health professional and ask for the help you deserve!