Not only is the amount of light important, but different types of lighting help you to wake up and to go to sleep:
Wake up to bright light; it matches your cortisol surge in the morning and helps wake you. If you can get out in the sunlight first thing in the morning, that’s awesome. If not, consider wide-spectrum bright lighting for the first thirty to sixty minutes after you wake in the morning.
Use red-orange light before you go to sleep, especially if you suffer from insomnia. One to two hours before bedtime, wear red-orange glasses or turn your bedroom into a red-light room. Red light simulates sunset and bedtime for humans and stimulates your brain to produce melatonin and put you to sleep.
Avoid white-background TV or computer screens one to two hours before going to bed as white light tells your primitive brain to wake up.
activities, and all the rest of the structures that accompany cohesive group living. Without that social structure, we might as well be sitting alone on a desert island where we will quietly burn out in a matter of years.
Psychologists have long used the term emotional intelligence as shorthand for the ability to handle interpersonal relationships empathetically; emotional intelligence is widely believed to be one of the keys to professional and personal success. Here, we use “emotional intelligence” to mean the sum total of everything in our lives that relates to our relationships with others, our relationship with our own emotions, and our ability to communicate. If we can harness the power of our emotions, we can use them to facilitate problem solving, communication, and—perhaps most important for our health—our connections to other people.
Our thoughts and emotions have powerful effects on our physiology. You may not be able to
“think yourself thin,” but you can certainly “think yourself sick.” In fact, there’s an entire legitimate field of science, known as psychoneuroimmunology, that studies how our thoughts influence our health, our immune systems, and our resistance to disease. What we think about—what we focus on and put our energy into—affects our blood pressure, our heart rate, the amount of hormones we release in our body, even our cholesterol levels!
A big part of what we’re calling emotional intelligence is how we relate to and interact with others. It’s hardly an accident that people in successful marriages live longer than singles. The University of North Carolina Alumni Heart Study found that having a partner during middle age is protective against premature death. Other research has shown that married people have a lower risk of developing cardiovascular disease.
The key, of course, to the “marriage advantage”—or, more correctly, the relationship advantage
—is the quality and character of that relationship. All sorts of health benefits accrue to people in strong, generally healthy relationships, but a stressful marriage confers no benefits at all. “When we divide good marriages from bad ones,” says author and historian Stephanie Coontz, “we learn that it is the relationship, not the institution, that is key.” (For the record, Steven has been happily married for twenty-eight years and Jonny is in a long-term committed relationship.) In fact, for people who don’t have many relationships, or whose relationships are weak, the risk of dying prematurely is between two and four times greater than for those who have strong social bonds; this is true regardless of race, age, physical health, smoking, alcohol use, physical activity, socioeconomic status, and even obesity.
We think a good case can be made that the health benefits of any successful relationship have a lot to do with the attention paid to something or someone outside ourselves. And there’s some ingenious research that supports this theory. Back in the 1970s a Harvard psychologist named Ellen Langer gave all of the residents of a nursing home a plant. Half the residents were told that the plant would be taken care of by the nursing home staff, and the other half were told that the plant was their responsibility. The people who took care of the plant themselves had fewer doctor visits, better medical outcomes, better blood tests, and higher scores on virtually every measure of well-being that the researchers were able to come up with. Simply taking care of a plant improved their health significantly in measurable ways. And that’s just a plant! Imagine what might happen when you take care of other people, volunteer, get involved in a charity or a shelter, or do anything else that takes the attention off yourself and contributes to the welfare of others.
“Human beings are not meant to live solitary lives,” says John Rowe, the former chair of the
MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Aging. “Talking, touch, and relating to others are essential to our well-being.”
So what’s the takeaway? We think it’s clear: Every single study of healthy people shows that the No. 1 thing about them is that they’re connected to others. They have friends—and we’re not talking about Facebook “likes”; we’re talking about real-life, face-to-face people whom they interact with and care about. Healthy people have relationships, and they care about things and put energy into things that make a difference to other people. Scientists would love to study healthy one-hundred-year-olds who live in isolation, but there’s just one problem: They don’t exist.
Some people defy every other “rule” of healthy living: They don’t eat well. They smoke. They don’t exercise. They take lousy care of their bodies. Yet by some miracle of the genetic lottery, they seem to live long and prosper.
But it’s almost impossible to do that in isolation, to live long and well without connections to family or a spouse, or to social groups, or to a community, or to a religious institution, or to some other social entity that gives life meaning and purpose.
We’ve spent most of our adult lives studying people, and the more we learn, the more profound respect we have for how little we know. We’ve both changed what we believe about food and exercise many times in our combined fifty-five years of experience in the health field. But there’s one belief that we have both held, independently and consistently, for all of our professional lives: People want to contribute.
They want to make a difference. They want to have meaningful lives. They want it to matter that they were here. They want to do good.
Whether we’re conscious of it nor not, whether we express it or not, whether we’re successful at it or not, the truth is that the desire to contribute and make a difference to other people is at the core of what it means to be human. It’s what makes life both fulfilling and beautiful. It’s what the people of Okinawa call ikigai—a reason for being, a purpose.
If we had one overall health strategy to leave you with—a strategy that makes everything else you’ve learned in this book worthwhile—it would be this: Find your purpose.
And live in accordance with it, every single day. We hope this book has given you the tools to do just that.
Enjoy the journey.
Jonny and Steven
CHAPTER 10
Smart Recipes
H
ERE YOU’LL FIND MORE THAN fifty recipes that form much of our Smart Fat Solution Thirty-Day Plan. Steven, a trained chef and fellow-certified nutritionist, developed and fine-tuned all these recipes exclusively for this book (you can find additional recipes on our website at www.SmartFat.com). We hope these recipes will also inspire you to come up with your own variations; feel free to experiment and change flavors and ingredients, or prepare them with a cooking technique that works for you. (Just note that the preparation time, serving information, and, most importantly, nutritional content for each dish corresponds to the recipe as printed here.)Before you get cooking, however, we’d like for you to do a little housecleaning—specifically, in your fridge and kitchen cabinets (and don’t forget that junk drawer where you stash the leftover pieces of Halloween candy!). You know what to throw out—from dumb fats to sugary carbs and processed foods, we’ve armed you with loads of info on what not to eat and what not to put in your shopping cart.
You also need to know what you should have on hand to help you set up a truly smart kitchen.
You’ll find tips and suggestions on various ingredients within the recipes themselves, but let’s focus on some that will allow you to put together a smart fat meal or snack with ease.