How Good Timing Affects Your Health

Figuring out what we need to do for good health can get pretty complicated, but here are a few, easy-to-implement tips that pay big dividends for not so much effort.

• If you’re still trying to lose the Freshman Fifteen after all these years, you’re more likely to get the job done if you start the day with a high-fat breakfast.

Scramble eggs in plenty of butter, for instance. Maybe add a small steak. Top it off with a few cups of coffee, and you’re good to go.

The fat tells your body all’s well with the world, and it doesn’t have to hoard fat ‘just in case.’ Well, who knew?

• Our pituitary glands produce human growth hormone (HGH), which, once you’re all grown up, quits with the growing and switches to slow down the aging process–among many its terrific tricks. But we produce less and less of this wonder juice as we get older.

One way to encourage our pituitaries to pump it up is exercise. But there are a couple of thing you need to know so you don’t waste all that effort.

After exercise, eat a low-carb meal within a couple of hours. That increases insulin sensitivity–which reverberates positively throughout your body. Name a body part, any body part, and it gets blessed in this deal.

Whatever you do, though, don’t eat or drink anything sugary (or, a whole lot worse, with high fructose corn syrup) within two hours after exercising. Carbs stomp all over the HGH your exercise produces, which kind of defeats the purpose.

So you exercise yourself into a lather, then gulp down some Gatorade, you kill your exercise results. And that’s not all! Beside high fructose corn syrup, the king of inflammation and destroyer of HGH, Gatorade contains bromine, which zaps your thyroid hormone, and vegetable oil, another inflammation villain. Some good stuff that is.

Same with Mountain Dew.

Speaking of exercise, interval training boosts HGH. Slogging it out with aerobics doesn’t. Now, is that good news or what?

• Your pituitary gland also produces HGH while you sleep. As I said, HGH enhances just about everything that’s good. However, our bodies can’t produce HGH and shoot out insulin to handle carbs at the same time. What does this mean to you? Don’t go messing around with a good thing by eating carbs before you go to bed.

As far as our bodies are concerned, revving up insulin to handle carbs takes priority over producing growth hormone. Eating carbs before bed means you lose at least some of the growth hormone you could have had.

If you must eat before going to bed just to get through the night, make it a small protein with saturated fat. Some cheddar cheese, for instance.

• Finally, starting at 10pm, wherever you live, your adrenal glands start the overnight renewal of the endocrine system, the better to keep all the parts marching in the same direction.

You should cooperate with this rehab process by being in bed no later than10pm. Otherwise, you’re dragging things down at the same time your body’s trying to build them up. And you wonder why you’re tired?

People with exhausted adrenals drag through the day in a fog, then just as bed time arrives, they get a “second wind.” Perhaps the best energy they’ve had all day, so they roar into some kind of whirling dervish routine of productivity. While they conquer mountains, their poor adrenals take a thumping, and further down the slippery slope they go.

If at all possible, be in bed by 10pm.

Little things. Good timing. Makes a big health difference.