The Wellness Scoop - Finding Healthy Routines with Dr Chatterjee

Episode Date: February 9, 2021

We talk to Dr Rangan Chatterjee on finding healthy habits, why we need to move away from quick fixes and why we need to look after ourselves as a whole; from finding a healthy weight and stopping yo-yo dieting to the role of sleep and bedtime routines, moving our bodies, morning rituals, getting outside and the impact of stress. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit BetterHelp.com today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P.com. Hi everyone and welcome to the Deliciously Ella podcast with me, Matthew Mills, and my wife and business partner, Ella Mills. Hi guys, hope you're all doing well this week. We have had a very busy week, a very exciting week, a very delicious week. I know we keep talking about these chocolate bars, but they literally, I think they're the most exciting that's ever happened. When I was little, my dream was to make chocolate bars. Whose childhood dream isn't that? And so for that to become a reality is just amazing. We'll share more next week about when and where you'll be able to find them but um we've been spending a lot of

time in our factory making them for you guys and it's just an absolute dream come true and we've had two questions for you guys that we're going to take this week any questions please always get in touch podcast at deliciouslyella.com and the first one is tips for working from home successfully gosh that's a great question I think that it's been a bit of an experiment throughout the various lockdowns we've had in the UK to try and find the best ways but I suppose my one common theme I've thought has worked best is to try and as much as you possibly can separate where you work from where you kind of live and so not bringing my laptop into bed or onto the sofa where I watch tv but just trying to have a bit of a divide between the two and then also for me just marking the end of the day so I've been trying to

actually put on kind of normal clothes each day and feel like I'm going to work when I sit down at my desk but then when I finish the day I put on gym shorts or my pajamas day and feel like I'm going to work when I sit down at my desk. But then when I finished the day, I put on gym shorts or my pajamas. And I feel like that is my true switch off point. So just trying to find the ways that just as you would in a normal day, if you're commuting or something, to find the ways where you can truly bookend the day has been really helpful for me. Yeah, absolutely. And then we've been kind of really trying to reclaim our mornings as well. Typically, the girls tend to wake up seven, seven thirty ish when we're lucky. And so we try and get up about an hour or so before that. And then we get a little bit of time together, have a coffee together. I've been trying to get a workout in a mat as well. And that I think has made a massive difference.

I think sometimes really hard to feel that kind of get up and go motivation when you're not stepping foot outside your house and there's something about that that gives me a lot of motivation and I so appreciate finding that it's really hard and it's one of those things when you're really busy taking the time to exercise or to make a healthy meal feels really difficult but it actually I always find at least for me that's the time that I need it most and it's the same with how I eat I've had a really really busy week this week and yesterday I literally didn't feel like I had more than 30 seconds at a time but just chopping up some sweet potato some tofu put it in the oven had it with some pesto that I already had in the fridge it was the simplest meal ever it took literally one

minute but it gave me loads of energy and made me feel really good and it's it's so worth doing even when it's as simple as that so that would be my biggest recommendation and this question I absolutely loved which is in the age of quick fixes what does wellness mean to you yeah another great question I think that we are at Delicious Ciel anti-quick fixes. And throughout my life, I've never felt, whether it was in education or when I was playing sport, anything that promises some kind of quick fix, cramming in a revision or something before exam to try and do a crash diet. I just don't feel like they work. And I think that everything that we do at Delicious Yellow is very much about the long term.

I think genuine wellness is about the long term. It's not about doing something in January or doing something for a week or for a specific one-off event. I think it's about something that you just implement into every day that becomes habitual and then becomes really enjoyable. And I think that everything that I have learned in running our business at Delicious Yellow now for the last five years has just absolutely reinforced that belief that there is no such thing as a quick fix it's about just doing the right thing every day if you possibly can and if not as much as you possibly can and then the accumulation of all of that adds up hopefully into something good. I think it's also in that embracing simplicity

because I think as we've seen the health and wellness space develop over the last 10 years or so certainly when I first started Delicious Cielo all the way back in 2012 this was so unusual and and not something that people kind of really focused on it was seen as quite niche and as it's come into the mainstream that has come with quite a lot of quick fixes but also a lot of kind of slightly weirder slightly wackier slightly more out there things and I think it's very easy to get sucked into the idea that wellness is these more expensive more complicated practices and actually it doesn't need to be that and I think definitely the busier I've got and juggling motherhood and now two babies and still breastfeeding one of those babies alongside running a business together and running that

from home and all the relative complications that come with all of that. I've never had less time, but I've never needed more energy. And it's really reinforced the idea that it's not an hour long practice. It's not a complicated thing. It's not an expensive thing. It's trying to find five minutes, maybe just before you go to sleep at night for a very quick meditation, or it's a 10 minute stretch when you wake up in the morning. So it really is those simple, simple things like going for a walk. But actually, if you keep doing that day in day out, it adds up and it makes the world of difference. Just like I was I was saying my lunch literally the most basic thing two sweet potatoes and some tofu mixed with some pesto and some spinach leaves it doesn't get more simple than that but it gave me lots of energy and that to

me is what wellness is it's just the tiny things you do and together it creates a big picture it's not about weird and wacky it's's just simple everyday things. And actually, that leads me on very beautifully to our episode today. And for anyone who is needing more motivation, more focus, more inspiration with their health, and moving away from quick fixes, I think this episode actually is going to really resonate with you. So our guest today, Dr. Rangan Chatterjee, I think is one of the most progressive, eloquent people working within this health and wellness space. I really, really admire his work and his approach. He's very balanced. I think he creates a very achievable way of looking at your health, but still really

pushing the boundaries. And today we're going to be talking to him about this, about creating a positive relationship with the way we eat and our overall health from stress to sleep, emotional eating, and so much more. So welcome, Dr. Chachadri, thank you so much for joining us today. So Rangan, first of all congratulations on the new book. First off, how are you and how has the lockdown been for you? Yeah I'm not too bad actually, thanks for asking. Times are pretty tough aren't they for all of us at the moment. And I'm not doing too bad. I'm not doing too bad at all, actually, because I've done a lot of reflection over 2020. I think like many of us, we were forced to put pause on our life. And I really feel I've got

a greater sense of what's important for me. How am I living my life? How do I define success to myself? Not what is society's definition of success. What does success mean like to me? And I've really realized that actually spending time with my wife and my kids, feeling as though I've got time to have a bit of solitude each day where I get to gather my own thoughts. These are the things that really make me feel happy and calm and peaceful. And those are things that I've really tried to block out in my day. No matter how busy I get, I try my best to block out these things. And so that's quite a long-winded answer to your question, but I'm doing all right, actually, despite everything that's going on out there. I actually feel pretty good and grounded

these days. That's great to hear has it's been this kind of enormous social experiment hasn't it just keeping everyone apart and getting out of our normal day-to-day routines and I'm I'm the exact same I found things about the the way I think I was kind of living pre-pandemic to now um the definite changes that I want to implement ongoing. I think most people have found this and I think that you're right, having some sense of space each day where you have the opportunity to think or do an activity that you really enjoy. It's amazing what a difference to your quality of life that can make. Yeah, absolutely. And I think we've both found, although sometimes the motivation hasn't always been there, there has sometimes felt like a little bit more space to kind of implement some of those sort of healthier habits

like maybe a tiny bit of meditation and things into your day because you're perhaps not doing anything in the evening maybe after your kids have gone to bed definitely in our case have you found that and that you've kind of started to maybe implement a bit more of the kinds of things you talk about having that little bit more kind of headspace. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if I think back to the first lockdown in the UK, so what was that March, April time in 2020? Yeah. And of course, we had great weather at the time, which certainly helps everyone, I'm sure. But we did as a family, we went for a walk every day. We'd go for a walk, maybe an hour's walk in nature. And it became a new daily practice

because I think at that time, we were only permitted to do that from recollection. And so never did a day go by where we missed it because it was like, we could only go out once a day together as a family. So let's get out there. And it was such a wonderful experience. It was such a wonderful bonding experience together, the four of us. And I thought, why didn't it take this for us to have this as a daily habit? Wouldn't this be a lovely habit to have all the time? And it's something that I must say has by and large stayed since that very first lockdown, even when things opened up last summer. It is pretty much something we were doing every day. And something I've heard from patients and also members of the public who I interact with, a lot of people, because they were no longer commuting, they suddenly thought, oh, I've got time for like a 20 minute walk before I open

my laptop at 9am. And a lot of people have been saying that this is so awesome because in the past with that commute time, they didn't feel as though they had time or space to engage in those kind of activities. But lockdowns have taught them that actually without the commute I can actually do that and my real hope is that you know as we develop over the next few months as things hopefully start to change a little bit more like the way we used to live life I guess of course I don't think anyone wants it necessarily to go back exactly the way it was but certainly a bit more normality or what we consider normal you know i really hope that each and every single one of us in our own lives because they're all different everyone's experiencing this in different ways my real

hope is that we can all go oh how can i bring a little bit of that into my day-to-day life yeah i totally agree i think it's been fascinating to see what kind of societal changes, social changes, work changes that are enacted over the next or kind of whenever at least our lockdown in the UK ends and the vaccine is rolled out and at least we have the option of returning to what it was before. How much of this stuff really sticks and how much of it is just kind of a reversion back to the norm that we had before. I know it's, you know, we're recording this in January and lots of people have kind of New Year's resolutions. And I think after this whole situation that we've been through, people are saying, oh, I'm never going to go

back to what I was doing before. And obviously my sincere hope is that all these best bits are able to be properly enacted. But I hope it's not just a kind of a resolution that can sometimes be pretty short lived, but and don't stick. So we'll have to see. And on that, and this idea of being able to find a bit more time for ourselves, and kind of looking after ourselves every day, your big focus in your new book and your work at the moment is this idea of, I guess, looking after yourself every single day and moving away from kind of quick fixes and things like yo-yo dieting and the idea that, you know, looking after yourself

on a day-to-day basis isn't a diet. It's about kind of nourishing yourself, kind of mind, body, soul. And I'd love to start with that and most straightforwardly, why diets don't work and why, again, I think really importantly, they're such a negative thing for our mental health and the need we have for kind of moving this conversation around eating well and looking after ourselves away from an idea of dieting and deprivation and restriction to something that we look forward to and that is a positive in our lives. Yeah, I think that's a great point, Ella. Look, this new book is seemingly from the title about weight loss. It's called Feel Great, Lose Weight. And it's really interesting that I didn't need to write a book on weight loss. There was no real forces upon me to write a book on weight loss. It's a divisive area. I didn't need to touch it or go near it because my whole approach for the last four or five years, certainly in public, but for 20 years with my patients has been about promoting health and wellbeing first, promoting simple, small things that we can do each day to help build up our self-esteem, our physical health,

our mental health. And if someone has the goal of weight loss, then that comes along as a side effect. But the reason I wrote it is that as a doctor, I felt really strongly that actually, just because a lot of the time we do weight loss wrong or in an unhelpful and unsustainable way, it doesn't mean that we can't help people try to achieve that goal if that's what they have. There's this real clash at the moment. There's a growing rise in terms of the body positivity movement. I think a lot of that is brilliant. Not shaming people for their weight, not discriminating against them, absolutely, I'm all for that. That is absolutely something we should all be supporting. But there's a sort of narrative out there whereby we should also not be telling people or helping people to lose any excess weight. And

as a medical doctor, it doesn't really sit that well with me because there are adverse health consequences if you're carrying large amounts of excess weight on your body. That has been shown over and over again. So I don't think the two things are mutually exclusive. I think we can be compassionate to people, empathize with people, understand that their weight is not their identity, but at the same time, help them lose some of that excess weight if that is their goal. So, you asked me, why do diets not work? And one of the key messages in the book is to say, look, for most people, most diets don't tend to work in the long term. And look, I get it. Some people, they go on a quick fix diet, it helps to recalibrate things for them. And they're able to turn some of those short-term changes into long-term changes. And I'm

absolutely not trying to invalidate those individual experiences. But from what I've seen in my practice is that time and time again, these diets don't work beyond January for two main reasons. Number one, they put people on a regime of deprivation and restriction. And that can work for a few weeks. That can work in January. People can drop a dress size, they can lose a bit of weight. But I often see those same people in March when they come back in to see me. And not only have they gone back to their previous weight, they're a little bit heavier, but that's not the issue. The worst effect is that their self-esteem has gone. They feel like they are failures. It's the only industry where we don't blame the diet, we blame ourselves.

And many patients that I've seen are better off not having gone on that diet in the first place because they've damaged how they feel about themselves and it reinforces this negative belief that they're not good enough and that they can't stick to anything at all. So that's reason number one. But reason number two is that most typical diet plans, and again not all of them, but most of them tend to focus on your diet, what you're eating. And the truth is, is that what you eat is just one small component of what we need to focus on if we're trying to improve our health and lose excess weight, if that's what we want to do. And I'll give you a prime example, stress, for example. We know that stress plays a huge role in our health behaviors. In 2020, I think this was

played out in public. Last year, many of us were talking about weight gain during the lockdowns or weight gain during the pandemic. There were all kinds of terms, weren't there, in the media? What was it? The Corona Stone? The Quarantine 15? If you look at the science it suggests that 80 percent of us change our eating behavior in response to stress 45 percent of us eat more 35 percent of us eat less so let's think about that that means almost half the population in response to stress will eat more so if that's somebody who's listening to this podcast right now, if that's the reason behind them changing their eating behavior, is it a new diet book they need in January? Or actually, is it better help at managing that stress? And I want to help people

find what is the right thing for them to be focusing on. And the best way for me to put it is, we used to eat to fill a hole in our stomachs. Now we often eat to fill a hole in our hearts. You know, when we're lonely, we eat. When we're bored, we eat. When we're stressed out, we eat. When the kid's bedtime's gone on too long, we eat. And that's okay. I'm saying to people, let's not beat ourselves up about this, but let's be honest about it. And there's this really lovely exercise in the book that's called the freedom exercise. And it goes beyond food. But if we just think about food for a second, and let's say you're craving something sweet at 9pm in the evening on your sofa, the telly's on and you're

like, I just fancy some biscuits or some ice cream. So this freedom exercise is also what I call the three Fs. Feel, feed and find. So the first step is feel. When you get that craving, just take a quick pause and either write it down or just have a think. What are you really feeling? Is it hunger for food or is it hunger for something else? Just tap into that. Is it that you really are hungry or have you had a bad day? Have you been on Zooms all day and not gone out for a walk yet? Or have you just had a row with your partner? Or has it been a long and tiring evening with the kids and this is your little reward to yourself? And whatever it is, just note it and then go ahead

and have it. And that's fine. The second F is feed. Now that you've identified the emotion, okay, stress, you can go, ah, how does the food that I'm choosing feed that emotion? How does it feed that feeling? Ah, when I'm stressed and I have some ice cream, I feel better. Okay, great. Go and have the ice cream. But you just, little by little, you're building up a bit of awareness now in terms of what's really going on. And the third F is find. Now that you know the feeling, now that you know how food feeds that feeling, now can you find a non-food behavior to feed that feeling? So if it is stress, for example, it could be,

actually, you know what, I've not moved my body today. Maybe I'll go on YouTube and do a five or 10 minute yoga flow. Or maybe I need to nourish myself and run myself a bath tonight. Or maybe I can go see my partner actually and have a cuddle. Whatever it is, there's all kinds of options in the book. But the point I'm trying to make is, if we understand the root cause of our behavior, we can be kinder to ourselves and go, ah, that's what the issue is. I don't need to punish myself on a three-week detox diet. What I can do is, bit by bit, I can help understand that behavior. And that game, that exercise, yes, you can apply to food, but you can apply it to alcohol. You can

apply it to social media. If someone's it to alcohol. You can apply it to social media. If someone's listening to this and they are spending more time than they wish on Instagram, let's say, then you can go through those three Fs and just find out what it is you're craving. Are you lonely? Are you finding the lockdowns hard? Are you not having any meaningful conversations with your family or your friends? And are you seeking that connection online? That's okay. But let's at least try and start and have that compassionate conversation with ourselves so that we can understand what our behaviors are. I love how you look at it all at such a kind of 360 approach because I think

traditionally so many of us have looked at things in isolation so we want to feel stronger so we look at our exercise we want to feel kind of healthier so that we look at what's on our plate but we so often do it in quite a kind of isolationist approach and we don't look at it as a 360 so we don't kind of address our stress levels or our relationships or the way we're sleeping and we single it out and it's part of the reason why these things can often be kind of quite unsuccessful. I completely agree it's it's something I've always been drawn to is this rounded approach and what I love about these rounded holistic 360 degree approaches is that they take the pressure off us a little bit because

actually it helps us be less perfect in each area. It means actually maybe we don't need the perfect diet or the perfect workout regime, but we do need to start paying attention to each of these areas. And another prime example of this, particularly at this time of year, is our sleep. For all aspects of our health and well-being, sleep is important. But if we think about weight loss for just one second, a lot of people don't realize just how important sleep is. So the science suggests that if you are sleeping about five and a half hours a night compared to eight hours a night, on average, you will eat 22% more calories the following day. So over five days of not sleeping well, you're going to be consuming a whole extra day's worth of calories just from not sleeping. And why

is that? Well, sleeping or not sleeping, I should say, changes your biology. There's two hormones called leptin and ghrelin to do with satiety and to do with hunger. And basically when you haven't slept well, you feel hungrier and you never feel full, which is clearly not the best combination if you're trying to actually reduce or control how much you're eating. But it's not just that. The day after you haven't slept, you're less able to resist temptation. And so any changes you're trying to bring in are much, much harder when you haven't slept well. We all know that feeling when we haven't slept well. We know what our relationships are like. Are we patient with our partners, with our children, with our work colleagues when we haven't slept well? No, we know that impact in terms of how we behave, but often we don't think about that impact in terms of what we're eating.

And I can remember so many patients, I mean, one in particular always springs to mind, this 44-year-old lady who was trying to improve her health, her energy and lose weight for years. And every January, she'd go on a new diet and she'd have a bit of success. And then she'd fall off the wagon. She'd feel like a failure. And I remember seeing her and I said to her, look, I'm not sure your diet is where we should be putting our attention really. I think your diet's not bad actually, but the fact that you're only sleeping five hours a night, I think it's making everything else in your life a lot more difficult. So I helped her address her sleep and it was game changing. Over the next few months, she lost two stone in a very slow and sustainable way. That change has continued now for over three years and it was all done by addressing her sleep. And the great thing about

sleep is that there are so many easy wins out there for sleep that we're often not thinking about. I may have said this when I was on your show last time, but the reason I'm so passionate about sleep is that for most of us, if we're not sleeping well, we're likely to be doing something in our lifestyles that we don't realize is impacting our ability to sleep at night. There are primary sleep disorders which require treatment. I get that. But honestly, for most of us, it's not that. For most of us, there's just a few little tweaks that we can make. And I do cover them all, but one at this time of year, which I think is not spoken about enough. We're recording this in January in the UK. It's cold. It's dark. We need to get outside, right? Getting 20 minutes or so of light, natural light in the morning or

even at lunchtime, we know will impact your sleep quality at night. Yes, what you do just before bed can be really important, but a good night's sleep starts the minute you wake up. You can do things in the morning that impact you in the evening. And so I know depending on where people are listening to this, where they live, there's all kinds of different restrictions in place in the UK and around the world. But if you are able to get outside for 20 minutes in the morning or even at lunchtime, you will find that that will increase your ability to sleep at night. Stop sitting on your aeroplane points and get big savings so you can be somewhere you actually want to be, like on a beach. Right now you can save up to 25% in Aeroplan points when you book a trip to one of 180 plus Air Canada destinations worldwide. So stop sitting on your

next trip and start saving on one. Don't miss out. Your chance to save in points ends February 23rd. Book at aircanada.com. Conditions apply. You're a podcast listener, and this is a podcast ad heard only in Canada. Reach great Canadian listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a pre-produced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience with Libsyn ads. Email bob at libsyn.com to learn more. That's B-O-B at L-I-B-S-Y-N dot com. So, Dr. Chastity, just to stay on sleep for a second, we've just released a big new update to our app which kind of consolidate our view on what holistic health and wellness is we have five pillars one eating

30 different types of plant-based food a week one drinking two liters of water certain amounts of mindfulness and exercise and then the fifth pillar that we have on there is sleep and getting eight hours sleep a night we did a fascinating podcast i would say probably 18 months ago or so with someone called matthew walker who leads an absolutely extraordinary sleep clinic in california and since we've launched this new product on our app people say yeah i think i could probably do 30 plant-based foods and yeah you know i can find the time for 10 minutes of mindfulness and yeah i can i can fit in 150 minutes of exercise but i think the thing that get the most pushback is that, oh my God, that's impossible for me. Oh, good luck. I would never be able to get eight hours sleep, which is the recommendation that we have on there.

You've talked about how that process really starts in the morning and getting out for 20 minutes in the morning. What do you think are the key things to do kind of later in the day, maybe when you finish your work or what time you should be eating or how long you before you go to sleep what may be a bedtime routine can look like for you just to give yourself the best chance to get that eight hours we understand it can sometimes be very difficult if you've got young kids we've been through that over the last couple of years or if you're particularly busy but what do you think are the best tools for the kind of later stage of the day to give yourself the best chances of trying to get that eight hours yeah i mean it's so interesting that about what people are saying yeah it seems to be one of those

things that we think you know we can compress everything but we just don't feel we've got enough time to sleep anymore what is frankly you, our birthright to sleep well every night, to recharge and recuperate and replenish our bodies. There's so much we could talk about, but let's think about that later part of the day. I just want to highlight that talking about sleep can get stressful for people because they hear me say that if you're not sleeping well, you're going to eat 22% more calories the next day. And I just want to say to everyone from the bottom of my heart, if you're not sleeping well, you're going to eat 22% more calories the next day. And I just want to say to everyone from the bottom of my heart, if you're not sleeping well at the moment, or you've got young kids, or you've got stresses and pressures in your life, that's okay, right? It's all right if that's the way it is at the moment.

But hopefully some of these small changes are things you can start to bring in over a period of days, weeks, months. You know, you don't have to become an amazing sleeper in the next two or three days or your health is going to suddenly deteriorate. It's more about these gentle, gradual changes that people can start to bring in. And you know, there are times in our life where we just can't. Young kids is a prime example. If you're living with young kids and you don't have parental help or you're unable to access that at the moment, you know what? You may be underslept for a while, for a few months, even for a few years. And if that is the way your life is, so be it at the moment. But these things can always be addressed when it's the right time for you. So I just want to make sure that I get that point across. I think it's so important. Yeah, I i totally agree it almost feels like the one that feels kind of most out of people's control they

feel like things kind of happen to them that just make it impossible they just can't do it and so and i totally agree i think the response that we've seen is that it all can almost create a kind of a deeper stress response to it which works as a negative rather than acting as a kind of a positive goal for people to try and get to. No, for sure. And so the first thing is you've got to make sleep a priority. There are so many things competing for our time. There's all kinds of things we could be doing instead of sleeping, listening to podcasts, listening to music, going on to Netflix, watching another box set. We've never had this many options.

If you don't start prioritizing your sleep, you're going to find that there is no time to sleep. So even that mindset of going, okay, you know what? Life's tough at the moment. I don't like the way the world is going at the moment, but you know what? I think I'm going to work on my sleep for the next few weeks. Even just thinking that sleep's now going to be a priority, that starts to make a difference. Now, once you get to that stage, there's a couple of things you can do. You could actually make an alarm for bedtime. This is something that I was discussing again with Matthew. I know Matthew well and he's coming out on my podcast next week, our part two conversation. And we were both talking about this bedtime alarm, that we have an alarm to wake us up in the morning, but we don't have an alarm

to remind us that, hey, it's now time to start winding down for sleep. Even if you ignore that alarm, you're still being triggered to go, ah, actually, you know what, maybe it's time to start winding down. So that's another tip that people might find useful. And then for people who do have kids on that theme, with your kids, they need a bedtime routine, don't they? We don't give them a load of sugar, put the music up, get them really pumped up and amped up before bed. We do the opposite. We lower our tone. We dim the lights. We soften how we speak. We read a story. And for some reason, we think as adults that we don't need that anymore. But we need to send our bodies a signal that, oh, the workday is over. Now I'm winding myself down for sleep.

And it's actually never been more important because so many of us are working from home now and in front of screens. And, you know, our laptop can be our work device and our Netflix device. And therefore having this switch off, you know, we really need to start putting boundaries in. So if I share something that I do, hopefully there'll be some tips in there that people might find useful. An hour before bed, I put my laptop away. I shut it. I put it off. I don't do this all the time. I've also been on Netflix and YouTube in my beds before, right? I know I shouldn't, or I know it's not helping me, but I'm tempted as anyone else is. But by and large, when I'm sleeping well, the laptop goes off one hour before bed. And then in that hour, I will do only relaxing and restorative things. So I may read by a dim light.

I'm really getting into baths at the moment. You know, it must be the dark, cold nights. And I really feel like putting a candle on and just sitting in the bath for half an hour. It's enforced relaxation, right? Because in that bath, now, yes, you can take your phone in there. I'm not saying there's necessarily anything wrong with that. but you are nourishing yourself. You're switching off. There's only so many things you can do in the bath, you know, than if you're outside the bath, you get busy and, you know, so I think that could be useful for some people.

Eating, I think is important. Something I've noticed, because I've been tracking this over the last few months, if I eat within two hours of going to bed, and I mean a substantial meal, then actually, yes, I will still sleep, but my sleep quality is not as good. So that's something that I tracked and it's changed my behavior. Now I will not eat by and large within two hours of going to bed, or it might be a very small snack because I've seen the impact it has on my sleep quality. That's actually been one of the things that I've noticed just personally for me has been one of the best thing about having kids is we love to eat with the girls and so Skye typically has her dinner at kind of 5, 5.30 and we actually eat with her now so it's a decent chunk

of time before we go to bed and I actually think that that's been the most positive influence on my sleep is having that much time before my kind of last meal of the day and actually going to sleep. Oh, I love that. I love that. I mean, me too. We eat with our kids and typically that will be around half five, quarter to six. And then I try my best to be done then with foods. I mean, I don't always manage it, but the real key is the last hour, ideally before bed, needs to have a different flavor and tone to the rest of your day. There needs to be a signal to your body that, hey, you know what? I'm winding down now. You're getting prepared. You're setting yourself up for a good night's sleep. Think about an athlete. Before they go and perform at the 100-meter sprint, they're not just walking to the stadium and then they start running. They're warming up. They're

preparing their body. They're getting in the zone mentally. They're doing their stretches. They're doing their warm-ups. They're sending their body a signal, hey, you're about to compete. Let me get you in optimal state for competition. Why don't we flip that and go, well, how do we possibly think we can watch the 10 o'clock news, get scared about what's going on in the world, and then suddenly be able to just hit the deck and chill out and relax into a deep sleep? It's not going to happen. Just a bit of thought behind how we approach the evening is, I think, all that many people need. If people have got anxiety before they go to bed,

worrying thoughts are going around their head, there's a couple of things you can do. One of them is if you keep a journal next to your bed, if you just write out what you're worried about, for some people, that's all they need to do. The act of writing out what's going on in your brain literally and metaphorically gets it out of your brain and puts it out onto paper. Another useful exercise is just to play a simple gratitude game before you go to bed. If you're not feeling good, three things, four things, five things that you're grateful for, just note them down in the book. It's simple, it's free, but it's really, really effective. So yeah, hopefully there are some tips in there that some people might find useful.

Love it. I really liked what you said about the last hour of the day having a kind of different flavor to it. And do you do that first thing in the morning as well? Because I think, again, with so many of us working from home, I mean, we work from our living room. And so you can kind of roll out of bed, turn on your phone, and you can, sometimes I feel like I start working the second I wake up. And I'm not always sure that that's the best thing for kind of well-being. And I'm curious if you recommend or you do something different for that first hour or so as well. Yeah, I absolutely do. I'm really big on the first hour of the day and the last hour of the day because I know those are two things that if I put attention behind them, I can generally control them. I've got some degree

of autonomy over what happens. Whereas in the day, you know, with kids or with work, all kinds of things can happen that I might have to react to that I haven't planned. And so, yeah, I'm big on morning routines. Someone asked me the other day on my podcast, he said, how do you get so much done? You're married, you've got young kids, you release a book a year, a podcast a week, all this kind of stuff. And I didn't really know, really. I was thinking about it and I thought, well, the two big things I prioritize in my life when it comes to my health and wellbeing these days are sleep and solitude, kind of like the two S's. If I sleep well and I have solitude in the morning,

I'm a different person. I'm a happier human. I'm a better dad. I'm a better husband. I'm a better doctor. I'm a better son. I'm a better everything when I've had time to myself. So what does that look like for me? Well, since I had kids and my son's 10 now, my daughter's eight, so I've had time to myself. So what does that look like for me? Well, since I had kids and my son's 10 now, my daughter's eight, so I've been a dad for over 10 years now, they've always got up early. So I figured out early on that I need to get up even earlier if I'm going to have time to myself. So I get up at five each morning, which is just what works for me. I'm not saying anyone else has to do that. That's what works for me in my lifestyle. So what I do is I come downstairs, I go into the living room. First

thing I do is I meditate now. So I'll meditate for about 10 or 15 minutes. And again, just to be clear, I never used to do that long. I used to do two minutes or three minutes. I have been building up to this over a number of years. So if someone has never meditated before, I certainly wouldn't recommend that you jump into 15 or 20 minutes a day unless you really want to because it can be harder to form a habit when you make it that difficult. But for me, I'm up to about 15 minutes a day now. So I do 15 minutes of meditation. Then I come into the kitchen and I make myself a coffee. When I make my coffee, I weigh out the coffee and I put it in the cafeteria and I put a timer on for five minutes, which is how long

that coffee takes to brew the way I like it. In those five minutes, I don't go on my phone or my emails. I'll do a quick workout. It could be with a dumbbell that I have in my kitchen. It could be body weight. It could be some breathing movements, whatever I fancy, but I do it in my pajamas. I don't get changed. I don't make it complicated for me to do it. So I do some meditation. I do some movements. And then with my coffee, which is now freshly brewed, I'll sit there and I've got a few books kicking around. They're positive books. And I'll pick a book and I'll read a few pages or even a chapter. And that can take maybe 20 minutes, half an hour of my morning. I just feel like a million dollars when I've done that. I feel I've nourished myself. I've moved my body.

I've had a bit of calm. And Ella, the days when I feel I'm too busy, when I think, you know what? I don't have time today. I'm going to just crack on with the emails, get back to people, try and get ahead before the kids get up. Because I do that from time to time, but almost always I pay for it later. Later on in the day, I've been less productive. I've been a bit more ratty. I've reacted more to things that are going on. I've been less calm. When I don't do my routine, that's not a failure, right? And that really is the kind of compassionate approach that I talk about in the new book as well. It's about being kind to yourself. I don't need to beat myself up and go, oh, I'm a failure because I had ice cream in front of the TV one night or because I missed my morning routine. No, it's like, oh, I thought that would get me more time. I thought it would get me ahead, but actually

it didn't. And you do that enough times, you go, I'm a better person when I do my morning routine. So I agree with you, that first hour of the day is so, so important. Even, you know, let's take the pressure off people. Even the first half hour, even the first 15 minutes. I think I mentioned this last time I was on your podcast, but in my book on stress, I mentioned morning routines and I mentioned the three M's of a morning routine, mindfulness, movement, and mindset. And if anyone's just looking to create a morning routine, even if you just want it to be five or 10 minutes, have a bit of mindfulness. That could be meditation. It could be mindfulness. It could be breath work. Have a bit of mindfulness. That could be meditation. It could be mindfulness. It could

be breath work. Have a bit of movement. It could be yoga. It could be intervals. It could be dancing in your kitchen. It could be whatever you want. And mindset is just something positive to put you in the right frame of mind for the day. I can tell you with myself, with so many of my patients, it is life-changing. And what it does, it helps to make you more bulletproof and more resilient to the stresses that will come up later in the day. Not if they come up, they will come up. So I feel it's a way that I give myself a shot of calm each morning, which makes me interact with the world in a much more compassionate and calm way. I really love it. And it's something that I can absolutely, just from my personal experience as well, completely attest to. I've been trying to go to bed early enough to where

I can get my eight hours and I wake up very, very early, same kind of time that you do. And trying to do some movement in the morning, for me, completely feels like it sets the right behaviors and the right mindset for me to approach the day. And work has obviously been incredibly stressful over the last year or so, trying to navigate all of the bumps that have arisen as a result of this pandemic, this whole situation. question on what we were talking about that it's definitely something that I see a lot from people and I'm sure you see literally every second of every day which is this question of you know I've been getting these really healthy habits I'm feeling really good and then you kind of for want of a better word fall off the wagon and people seem to find it really hard to get back to them and it feels like a nice way to sum it up by giving any kind of tips that you have or you've found really helpful in terms of implementing these

positive things in the long term. And it's not about necessarily doing them every single day, because as you say, that's not always possible, but about how you do it on a day to day basis and make it kind of a seamless part of your life. Yeah, I mean, there's two things that come to mind with that question, Ella. The first of all, there's this all or nothing mindset that many of us get into, which is, you know, when we're on, we're following everything, we're following the plan, you know, things are going great. But if we miss a couple of days, we go, ah, you know what, screw it. It's not working for me. I'm just going to go back to what I was doing before. That's really, really common. And there's several reasons why that could be. One thing we really need to think about is how we feel about ourselves.

What's our relationship like with ourselves? Because a lot of health change, a lot of weight loss actually is not about food, but it's about our self-esteem and how we feel about ourselves. And I mean, this is quite deep, but there's a section that I wrote about as obesity as a symptom. I just want to touch on it because I know from the messages I've received on Instagram since the book came out, how impactful this has been for people because you don't normally see this in a book on weight loss. And we know from some really good research that having what are called ACEs, adverse childhood experiences, is strongly correlated with obesity and being overweight later on in life. So this could be physical abuse, emotional abuse, you know, these adverse childhood experiences.

And I share the case of one of my patients who, you know, I saw maybe late teens, early twenties, and she'd be trying to lose weight for a number of years. And she was really, really struggling. It was really, really getting her down. And as I got to spend time with her and really trying to understand her life, it was quite clear to me that there was something else going on. And it turned out that at the age of 16, she was in an abusive relationship. And we started to unpick that. I referred her to a therapist. And in some of her therapy sessions, it turned out that what happened with her is at the age of 16, she was in an abusive relationship and she didn't

want to ever be in an abusive relationship again. So her strategy to do that, to avoid being in danger again, was to put on weight. Because if she would put on weight, in her mind, she thought, I'm not going to be attractive to men anymore and therefore I won't be in an abusive relationship. And it was only by understanding that and starting to tackle that, did she actually regain control over her life and her health. And actually over the next few years, she did lose weight. She lost all the weight that she wants to. She regained her energy and her self-confidence, but that was the root cause for her. And that is actually going on a lot out there and it's not being spoken about enough.

I've had two messages in the last two days on Instagram for people sending me a message saying, Dr. Tashi, thank you for writing that section. I have buried this from my childhood. I can now see what's happened and why I can never stick to anything because I just want to punish myself and beat myself up and I don't feel that I'm worth doing something about. And a few people said now they're going to get help and get therapy. And it makes me so happy because you need to take a holistic view. For many patients, more than we would think, there is some deep emotional stuff going on. And we don't want to be bullying them or making them feel bad that they can't stick to something

because there's something else going on. So I know that was a slight tangent, but I really think, Heather and Matt, it's important to share that because there will be somebody listening to this right now who that will have impacted. And I really want to get that message across. But for some of us, it's not even to that extreme. For some of us, we have a bit of poor self-esteem and we want to beat ourselves up if we haven't stuck to a plan. It's like, oh, you know what? I'm not worth it. So therefore, yeah, I'm going to have the ice cream. I'm going to screw the plan and forget it. So that's one component to my answer. The other component to my answer is, look, when it comes to habits, when it comes

to forming new habits, there are a couple of really good rules that the science shows us work, but we often ignore them. So rule number one is make it easy. If you make something easy to do, you will do it. And this has to do with something called the motivation wave. So motivation comes up and motivation goes down. If your motivation is high, like at the start of January, you will do something if it's hard to do, like spinning three, four times a week. At the start of January, people will do that because their motivation is sky high. But when the real world kicks in and stress and life gets in the way, if something is really hard to do, you won't do it. So this is why you need to understand motivation. You need to understand

that we should be making our habits and our behaviors at the bottom of the motivation wave, not for the top of the motivation wave. That is why I always say make it easy. That's why I say if you want to start meditation, maybe don't start with 15 or 20 minutes, maybe start with two minutes or five minutes. Because on those days where you don't feel you've got time, you won't do it. And business get this. Many people are shopping on Amazon these days. A lot of people don't realize that when Amazon moved to one-click ordering several years back, estimates say their profits went up by $300 million a year from that one change. And that's because in the past, you had to click on one screen, go to the next screen, confirm your order, go to the next screen, put in your card details, put in your expiry date. Every single step you

take is a reason to back out and not do that behavior. So Amazon understand this, Netflix understand this, YouTube understand this, YouTube understand this. They make things that they want you to do really, really easy. But when we talk about health change, we think it's got to be really hard and really difficult. And as I was mentioning before about my little movement practice that I do whilst my coffee brews each morning, I've probably not missed a day for about three years. And that's not because I'm motivated. It's because I make coffee each day. And that's rule number two. Rule number two is where are you going to put that habit? Stick it on to an existing habit,

because then you piggyback it on the back of that. So my coffee making is not a negotiable habit. I don't need my PA to remind me at 5.30 to make a coffee for myself. I don't need a Google calendar notification to remind me. It's inbuilt. I'm going to do that. So if I can stick on a behavior that I want to that, it's much more likely it's going to stick. So I feel like I'm in a really long-winded answer to your question, Ella. But for people who struggle with habit formation, I would say, think about those two things. Have you made it easy enough? And have you stuck it onto the right part of your day? Yeah, I absolutely love that. I think that's exactly right. And just a massive thank you for everything you've shared today. I think,

especially whilst life is quite unusual, all of these tips feel kind of more important than ever and just really brilliant, brilliant, brilliant food for thought. Yeah, you're an utter inspiration. Thank you so, so much for coming on. We really appreciate it. We'll pop the details for Dr. Chastity's book, well, all his books, including the new one in the show notes for anyone who wants to find out a little bit more. And otherwise, just wishing you a lovely Tuesday, a fantastic week, and we'll be back again next week. Thanks, guys. Bye.

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