Find optimal health and fitness in the details

I can’t believe that no one expressed this sentiment before the early part of the 20th century, but at that time the American architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe looked around and remarked, “God is in the details.”

Now I’ve read a ton and experienced enough in the early part of the 21st century, to state that something else can be found in the details, too.

Optimal health and fitness.

Before I make my case for that, let me be clear about what you might call the converse: Following generalities can greatly improve your state of health and fitness if it’s far less than optimal. If you’re a 35-year-old overweight and sedentary male who’s been diagnosed with metabolic syndrome, for instance, and you do not want to become a type 2 diabetic before you turn 40, following your GP’s general suggestion “to eat less, exercise more, not smoke, and drink alcohol in moderation” should certainly keep that from happening.

In fact, following that general set of instructions has been shown in multiple studies to add years to the lives of middle-aged adults who had not done so before.

But if you’re in great shape and 35, able to keep up with the guys at the gym who are 25, and want to be able to do so when you’re 45 — or even older — you need to think like Garbiñe Muguruza Blanco, the winner of the women’s singles title at the 2017 Wimbledon Championships. When asked what change in her approach led to such a breakthrough victory, she said: “There are a lot of things that aren’t [individually] so important. But put together they make everything work.”

One thing you need to “make everything work” and take your health and fitness to a higher level is to recognize the link between optimal rest and optimal functioning. One example of this can be found in a study that determined sufficient sleep reduced sugar consumption.

Published earlier this year in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, this study took 21 subjects and counseled them on how to increase their current sleep time by 90 minutes. Establishing a relaxing pre-sleep routine, keeping a set bedtime, not eating too little or too much before bedtime, and avoiding caffeine after midday were the chief suggestions.

Another 21 subjects served as the control group, so they received no counseling. They did, however, do what the counseled group did for seven straight days: keep a diary detailing how long they slept and how much they ate.

To aid in the interpretation of this information, all subjects wore motion-sensor monitors to pinpoint when exactly they fell asleep once in bed and how much bedtime they actually spent sleeping.

From this, the researchers learned that 18 of the 21 counseled on how to get more sleep actually did so, but none hit the targeted 90-minute mark. The subject who experienced the greatest increase averaged 80 minutes for the seven days and the lowest of the 18 averaged 52 minutes. As expected, there were no statistically significant changes in the sleep habits of the control group.

There were statistically significant changes, however, when the food journals of the counseled group and the control group were compared.

Not only did the counseled group consume an average of 10 fewer grams of added sugars per day, their overall intake of carbohydrates was lower as well. The researchers attributed these changes to the increased amount of sleep.

While this cutback in carbs may not seem significant, please remember that ingesting about 100 extra calories a day, the approximate equivalent of a single homemade cookie — the type you might eat to be polite when offered to you by a co-worker during a coffee break — creates a 20 pound weight increase in the 20 years after high school graduation.

Moreover, prior to this study a 2015 meta-analysis of studies comprising nearly 500,000 adults found that adequate sleep allows the body to better handle carbohydrates and regulate blood sugar levels. In fact, getting an inadequate amount of sleep was strongly linked to an increased risk in developing type 2 diabetes.

That’s because a sleep-deprived body secretes less insulin. But a sleep-deprived body also does something else: produces more cortisol.

Talk about a double whammy. Not only does the hormone cortisol adrenalize the body, making sleeping all the more difficult, but it also makes the reduced amount of insulin secreted even less effective.

While insufficient sleep may not be so deleterious that it totally negates a GP’s general suggestion “to eat less, exercise more, don’t smoke, and drink alcohol in moderation” as a way to avoid type 2 diabetes, it certainly makes the effort more rigorous. In other words, the sleep-deprived individual who’s a physical mess and hoping to avoid type 2 diabetes would need to eat even less and exercise even more than the well-rested individual to make a similar amount of progress.