Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #172 BITESIZE | Why You Should Change Your Lifestyle With The Seasons | Dallas Hartwig

Episode Date: April 8, 2021

How we eat, sleep and exercise in January should be different to how we do those things in July. We intuitively know this, but have we lost touch with the natural rhythms and cycles of our lives? Feel Better Live More Bitesize is my new weekly podcast for your mind, body and heart. Each week I’ll be featuring inspirational stories and practical tips from some of my former guests. Today’s clip is from episode 102 of the podcast with nutritionist and author, Dallas Hartwig. In this clip he explains why, instead of sticking to the same habits and behaviours year-round, we can learn to live more in sync with the seasons, which has benefits for our health and our happiness. Dallas believe that we are becoming more and more disconnected from our natural cycles, and that this is at the core of the modern-day stress epidemic and most chronic disease. Dallas gives some great practical tips we can follow to live more in harmony with the seasons. He believes that listening to our own bodies is key – we intuitively know what is good for us if we just take the time to listen. Show notes and the full podcast are available at drchatterjee.com/102 Follow me on instagram.com/drchatterjee Follow me on facebook.com/DrChatterjee Follow me on twitter.com/drchatterjeeuk DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to constitute or be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or other qualified health care provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website. 

Today's Bite Size episode is brought to you by AG1, a science-driven daily health drink with over 70 essential nutrients to support your overall health. It includes vitamin C and zinc, which helps support a healthy immune system, something that is really important at this time of year. It also contains prebiotics and digestive enzymes that help support your gut health. It's really tasty and has been in my own life for over five years. Until the end of January, AG1 are giving a limited time offer. Usually they offer my listeners a one-year supply of vitamin D and K2 and five free travel packs with their first order. But until the end of January, they are doubling the five free travel packs to

10. And these packs are perfect for keeping in your backpack, office, or car. If you want to take advantage of this limited time offer, all you have to do is go to drinkag1.com forward slash live more. Welcome to Feel Better, Live More. Bite size your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 102 of the podcast with the brilliant author and my close friend, Dallas Hartwig. His last book, The Four Seasons Solution, was one of my favorite reads of 2020. And in this clip, he explains why instead of sticking to the same habits and behaviors all the year round, we can learn to live more in sync with the seasons, which has benefits

for our health and our happiness. I think the thesis you're putting out there is going to be very, very new for a lot of people. I think a lot of these concepts people will literally not have thought about. And I think the main theme that I feel is coming up for me that I want to start off talking to you about is this whole idea of, I guess, monotone in our lives. You know, the choices we make have to be the same on January the 1st as they do on August the 31st. Whether it's the gym routine we do, whether it's our food choices. And you make a beautiful case of how we should be changing our habits and our behaviors through the seasons. We evolved in a very dynamic world, in a world where the length of day changed

incrementally over the course of a year, and it got longer and it got shorter. And the temperatures changed and our food availability changed and the way we moved in response to our food availability and the temperatures changed. And the way we slept changed. So all of these things were expanding and contracting over all of these timelines. And once we kind of got to the agricultural revolution and started to stabilize our food supply, and then we started to stay in one place and we started the process of civilization and urbanization and things sort of started to get more concretized and less dynamic. We started to lose and we started to dishonor those natural rhythms. And that continued on through the industrial revolution where we

basically mechanized things. So we sort of outsourced a lot of our physical movement. And so this whole process and then going farther with the technological and digital revolutions, we've progressively outsourced more and more of these things and fit them into neat and tidy boxes. So they were good for efficiency or they were good for productivity, but they weren't good for our biology. Our departure from those natural rhythms is at the core of the chronic stress epidemic, which as we know, and you've written and spoken about extensively, is at the core of the chronic stress epidemic which as we know and you've written and spoken about extensively is at the core of virtually all chronic disease yeah i mean i really love this idea because fundamentally what you're talking about is

us getting more in tune with ourselves for sure and listening to our bodies what i'm offering people is a way to think about the natural intuitions and yearnings and ebbs and flows that are in us, whether or not we feel them or are in us, whether or not we acknowledge them and act on them. They are there. You made the case, I think, that we're living in like an endless summer. Yeah. We're basically eating as if it's summer 12 months a year. Right. And how different diets might do better at different parts of the year. So to be quite specific, then what does a summer diet or what might a summer diet look like for someone as

opposed to a winter diet? Right. Well, let me zoom out and then I'll zoom back in. Sure. to a winter diet. Right. Well, let me zoom out and then I'll zoom back in. Sure. Chronic summer would entail a lifestyle that is long days. So light exposure for many hours a day with a relatively short amount of darkness, which is what we get in the summertime. It would entail a lot of movement that's either kind of general movement or an excessive focus on what we call cardiovascular exercise, whether it's running or cycling or triathlons or whatever, with a relative lack of higher intensity and strength-based training. And chronic summer would also entail a lot of very stimulating and very fractured, fragmented, distracting social connections. So social media would be a great example of a summer

type social connection where it is relatively superficial, relatively filtered and controlled, but we can have it with dozens or hundreds or thousands of people. That's sort of the digitized version of going on a road trip and meeting a ton of people, but only few of which would ever become long-term serious close friends. But then to the summer dietary piece of it, the relationship between food choice and season becomes really important because in for virtually all of our evolutionary history, different foods were available at different times of year. And so we developed parallel patterns of changing circadian rhythms at certain times of year with different food availability. And we obviously know that in the spring and summer and fall, we have a lot more plant matter, a lot more fruits and vegetables available. And that, of course, progresses throughout that time. And in the winter,

there's a lot less of that available fresh. Now, in the globalized world, that's changed radically. But for virtually all of our evolutionary history, the summer was a time for lots of carbohydrate-rich fruits and vegetables. It tends to be heavier on the carbohydrate, not carbohydrate as a problematic recommendations where we skewed ourselves into a summer kind of paradigm of low-fat foods, lots of carbohydrate, and then we do that year-round for decades. And it's no wonder then that when we corral ourselves into not just one seasonal kind of eating, but also when we progressively industrialize and refine that and we take the nutrients out of that by making it progressively more processed food it's no wonder then the chronic diseases skyrocket over the last few decades and that's clearly not the only factor but it is a major factor so these diets might work at a particular part of the year so that recommendation they do work at a particular time of the year they should because they always have

but not forever you say we exercise in highly contrived ways what do you mean by that you know this is this is where we'll compare and contrast the word movement and exercise right because exercise we typically think of as very deliberate uh an attempt to move our bodies in a specific way for a specific outcome. It's by definition a contrived experience. Movement is just living. Movement is being human in the world that's three-dimensional, that requires us to move to get food and move to interact with other people and to explore our world and to get resources and to just be a human is a moving experience. So the exercise piece really is an attempt to kind of differentiate everyday, all the time movement, just moving through the world from the movement that we do for a specific,

you know, physiological adaptation or for weight loss or for muscle building or whatever. And that's not to say those things are not valuable because they are. I think we make the mistake that exercise is all that matters. And so when we exercise, we do it using a lot of machines with a fixed plane of movement, or we do highly repetitious movement, or we do a very prescribed type of movement for a certain time and a certain heart rate for a certain duration. And often we do that multiple days a week, sometimes for months or years on end with a lot of routine. And the healthiest kind of movement is three-dimensional and unpredictable because that's how the world

works. So I would like to encourage people to introduce more general movement into their lives. And it can be small things like walking to the supermarket to get groceries if you live two kilometers away and putting food in bags or in a backpack and carrying it home, which is not something people would typically choose to do because it sounds like more work, right? And so much of our modern civilized world, especially during the time of the transition of the industrial revolution was removing physical movement, removing actual work done, right? Calories expended in work. The effort has been removed from everything to the extent that we have to convince ourselves to expend effort in the form of exercise instead of keeping things the way they've always been, which is doing movement,

which partially reduces or eliminates the need for structured exercise. You think about the way the world used to be where we would climb things, pull things, carry things. We would certainly cover long distances distances on foot either foraging or migrating or hunting particularly in the summer absolutely movement we would do in the winter would be much shorter much more intense and smaller in total volume so you start to see a natural expansion contraction cycle in our movement across the course of a season as well. Yeah. So, to make it super clear for people, I guess, to take the extremes of the heart of summer and the depths of winter, just to really try and make the points, are you saying that during the wintertime when it's darker, which is being shorter types of movement, more in,

let's say, potentially more intense kinds of movements like for example hits training high intensity interval training um lifting things potentially um in very very short bursts whereas in the summer to contrast from that and i get these are two extremes there's a lot of variation in between and we've got to figure it out for ourselves but in the summer we can do more of the kind of longer aerobic sort of less intense but maybe longer duration activities a hundred percent the body is one beautiful complex interrelated system and if we forget how all the pieces fit together we lose the ability to make the most well-informed choices and this is not me saying i know how you should live on any given day of a 365 day year.

This is me saying, you know how you need to live because it's in you, that truth, that wisdom, that intuition is already in you, but you need to learn how to find it and learn how to trust it because we've taught ourselves that it's not valuable. We've taught ourselves, or we have been taught in the context of culture, that it's not real. It's not true. And I'm saying, actually, it's the most true thing around. We know what we need for our own bodies, yet caffeine, sugar, alcohol, too much artificial light in the evenings. When we have all these artificial stimuli in our lives, is it possible for us to tune into what our bodies really want or is literally the first step

to find a bit of quiet time right to find a bit of time to internally reflect and actually listen to your body yeah i mean i think you're absolutely right that there's no way to sense what is deeply hidden in us and i don't mean hidden in a, it's not, it's not something that we are supposed to kind of spend a lot of time seeking, but it's hidden in the sense that we are not used to listening to it because we have, we're given all these prescriptions, right? The government tells us how we're supposed to eat, how we're supposed to put our plate together. And we teach children this in elementary school. This is how you're supposed to eat. Instead of saying, which is what I do with my son, who's now six, I teach him, how does it feel? Do you want more food? Are you already feeling satisfied? And to redirect him to notice what he's feeling in his own body, because the government doesn't

know how much he should eat at any given meal. He knows. So I'm really trying to kind of play up those pieces and food's kind of an easy one. But if we don't start that process with our children and validate their own experience by the time they're adults like you and I, they've largely lost touch with that. And then we have to do the hard or perhaps even harder work

of going back and finding that which was lost a long time ago. Yeah, I mean, so much to reflect on there um dallas look how i like to end a lot of these conversations is i love to leave listeners with some actionable tips things that they can think about applying into their own life immediately to start improving the way that they feel. Are there some simple, actionable things that people can think about doing in their own lives? Certainly.

The more you shop at your local market or farmer's market and choose foods that are available locally, the healthier you're going to be, hands down. I write extensively about connection in the book and connection interpersonally, but connection intrapersonally, connection to and within yourself, connection to the place. And that is not only the place where you live, but the place where you're from. So it's a sense of roots, of home, of where you're from, and then connection to a sense of purpose. If you don't already have a practice of stillness, institute one.

And that can be something incredibly small and easy to squeeze into your life, such as a three or five minute meditation. It can be reading poetry. It can be going for a walk without a podcast or music or something on. Stillness doesn't have to be stationary. Stillness is a feeling. It's an attitude. It's a way of approaching, a way of moving through the world. But that will open the door then to more self-awareness and more honour and acknowledging and valuing yourself, which then allows you to bring your best self forward into the world for family and colleagues and patients and everybody. family and colleagues and patients and everybody. Hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip. Please do spread the love by sharing this episode with your friends and family.

And if you want more, why not go back and listen to the full conversation with my guest. And if you enjoyed this episode, I think you will really enjoy my new bite-sized Friday email. It's called the Friday Five. And each week I share things that I do not share on social media. It contains five short doses of positivity, articles or books that I'm reading,

quotes that I'm thinking about, exciting research I've come across, and so much more. I really think you're going to love it. The goal is for it to be a small yet powerful dose of feel good to get you ready for the weekend. You can sign up for it at drchastity.com forward slash Friday five. I hope you have a wonderful weekend. Make sure you have pressed subscribe and I'll be back next week with my long form conversation on Wednesday and the latest episode of Bite Science next Friday.