Eight powerful steps that will quietly transform your health
Many of us will have already quit our resolutions by Friday Jan 13th – but altering our habits doesn't need to be an ordeal
Most of us start January intent on making grand, sweeping improvements to our lives, but these dramatic resolutions rarely stick. Soon enough, we’re sliding back into old, easy habits and feeling hopeless about having “failed.”
But there are secrets to successfully creating lasting change – in small but powerful ways that will quietly transform your life and health. Here, Dr Rangan Chatterjee – bestselling author of Happy Mind, Happy Life, host of the Feel Better Live More podcast, and a practising GP for over 21 years – shares his wisdom and expertise.
Be kinder to yourself
By the end of January, up to 80 percent of New Year’s resolutions have failed, according to surveys, and one reason for this, says Chatterjee, is they’re driven by negative energy. “Because of the excess of December, people try to rebalance by depriving themselves of food, maybe by reducing calories. Or they punish themselves in the gym. They go to gruelling workouts – spinning, one hour, four times a week.” It’s unsustainable.
Instead of punishing yourself, try nurturing yourself, he says. “A daily reflection in the evening is one of the most important things you can do for your health.” Simply answer two questions: “What went well today?” And, “What’s one thing I can improve on tomorrow?”
“It’s a really gentle, compassionate way of reflecting on your life,” says Chatterjee. Instead of going full-pelt into a draconian new diet, “reflecting on your life each day, you’ll start to make changes. You’ll get a self-awareness and self-knowledge you didn’t have.”
Adapt your ambitions to the weather
Dr Chatterjee often encourages patients wanting to come off antidepressants at this time of year – “when it’s dark, cold, and miserable outside” – to wait until spring. “It’s lighter, the weather starts to change. Those things make a real difference.”
Likewise, it’s far harder to stick to your decision to run in the park every day when it’s freezing, wet, and grey. But, he says, in mid-March “the birds start to sing, the days are longer. We actually want to get out.”
Plan for your motivation to drop
Use two important rules of behaviour-change to your advantage, says Dr Chatterjee: first, make it easy; and second, stick that new behaviour onto an existing habit. These rules are critical to success because, he says: “We think motivation is enough to sustain these new changes and it isn’t. The scientific research shows us that motivation goes up, and motivation goes down.”
So if the new habit is a palaver (e.g. spin class four times a week), at times when your motivation slumps – tough day, ghastly weather, low energy – you’re more likely to find yourself sitting on the sofa than the exercise bicycle.
But, if the new habit slots seamlessly into your day, it’s hard to fail. Dr Chatterjee’s trick is to do a timed five-minute strength workout in his pyjamas while he brews his coffee every morning – i.e. the new habit is tacked onto an existing one. (You might choose yoga, dancing, or skipping, though as we lose muscle mass from our thirties onwards, strength training is important.)
Making coffee is the natural “trigger”. No need to find gym gear (or go to the gym). He has a kettlebell and a dumbbell lying around in the kitchen. Then it’s easy to pick up a dumbbell on sight and do ten bicep curls, he says. “It builds momentum.” He rejected his wife’s suggestion that he put them away. “Babe, listen, if we put them in a cupboard, they ain’t ever getting used!”
Know that a minute will make a difference
The World Health Organisation calls stress “the health epidemic of the 21st century”. Dr Chatterjee once suggested meditation to a menopausal patient who was prone to worrying, explaining that meditation helps us to “pause, switch off and connect with ourselves”. It also prompts what he calls “The Ripple Effect” – a change that leads to other positive changes in the rest of the day.
However, the woman insisted she did not have any time for meditation, not even five minutes. He then asked if she could spare just one minute. “By starting with one minute, it was so easy to do, she did it every day,” he says. “And then she started to increase it of her own accord. Six weeks later she was meditating for 15 minutes a day.”
So how to begin? You could try one minute with an app like Calm, Headspace or Insight Timer, he says. Or, you could simply breathe mindfully and consciously for one minute. “One of my favourite breaths is the 3-4-5 breath that I wrote about in my first book The 4 Pillar Plan,” he says.
“You breathe in for three seconds, hold for four seconds and breathe out for five seconds. This can really help to switch off the body's stress response and activate the relaxation response.”
Or listen to a song you find relaxing with your headphones on and eyes closed for one minute. “It doesn’t actually matter what you do. The benefit comes from actually doing something.”
Aim for a quarter-of-an-hour’s more sleep
We’re sleeping up to two hours less than we were 60 years ago, according to scientists at Oxford University. “Even 15 minutes more a day, if you’re not getting enough, will make a difference,” says Dr Chatterjee. Not sleeping well has multiple negative effects.
“We lack energy. Our focus is poor. We have less empathy the day after sleep deprivation.” It means our relationships suffer, and he says, “it’s very hard to have good health if you have fractured relationships.” You also eat more (usually sugary carbs, for a quick energy hit). “If you have reduced your sleep, you eat on average 22 per cent more calories the following day.”
So over five days of sleep deprivation you may eat the equivalent of an extra day’s calories.
Some of his patients have lost weight simply by improving their sleep. But how to do it? One tip is to ban coffee after midday. If we treat ourselves to a latte at lunchtime, he says, for many of us, “at midnight, a quarter of that caffeine is still going around our brain.”
And get natural light as early in the morning as possible. “It helps to set your circadian rhythm,” and thus helps you sleep well at night. A brightly lit room isn’t nearly as effective as going outside, even on overcast days. But no need for a massive trek – put on a fleece, have your coffee in the garden.
Eat more ‘real’ food
There’s no one right diet for everyone. However, says Dr Chatterjee, “we should be aiming to eat more whole food or real food. The sort of food your grandparents used to eat. Meat, if you eat meat, fish if you eat fish, vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds.”
There are three main benefits to eating more whole foods. First, “you’ll feel less hungry naturally.” Second, “you’ll be less tempted to eat these highly processed foods that have been engineered by the food industry to be irresistible – it’s very hard to overeat a roast meal. It’s very easy to overeat pizza, fries, crisps.”
Third, when you eat high-nutrient, real food, he says, “your body automatically starts to manage your weight for you.” This is “the set point,” the weight your body thinks you should be at. Eating lots of highly processed foods pushes the set point upwards.
This is because it silences signals from our satiety hormone, leptin, which – broadly – sees how much fat we’re carrying and tells the body, “You don’t need to eat any more.” (Ultra-processed foods also cause a lot of insulin to be released, which also interferes with the signal from leptin.) It can take time to change, he says, but a slow, sustained approach works. Eating real food puts your body back in touch with leptin’s signals.
Eat within a 12-hour window
One rule that is almost universally beneficial, says Dr Chatterjee, is to eat all of your food within a 12-hour daily window. “Fifty years ago pretty much everyone would have been doing this naturally.”
You might breakfast at 8am, and finish dinner by 8pm. The goal is to remove the “snacking on the sofa in front of Netflix” element that finds you scratching at the bottom of the biscuit tin at midnight – and means that many of us are grazing over a daily timespan of 15 hours.
He cites Prof Satchin Panda of The Salk Institute in California (who put intermittent fasting on the map) whose research shows, “when we eat all of our food within a particular window it can have benefits for weight loss, blood-sugar control, immune-system function and digestive complaints.”
Some people could benefit from trying a 10-hour window – but 12 is great. “It makes a huge difference. It helps set your circadian rhythm. It can help with weight loss. Many of my patients with IBS symptoms find that compressing your eating window is very effective.”
Quick, quick, slow – vary your walking pace
We’ve hugely undervalued walking, says Dr Chatterjee. “We think only intense stuff in a gym works. Nonsense!” This uniquely human movement is excellent for our health – “about as good as it gets.” A leisurely walk around the block each day is fantastic. But, “if you start to increase the pace of your walking, within your ability, that will make a massive difference.”
It’s best to vary the intensity of our exercise – and thus, our heart-rate zone (the corresponding range of speed at which our heart beats) – so a slow walk might put you in “zone zero”. A bit quicker, you push yourself into “zone one”.
“There are additional benefits when we start to change our heart rate,” he says. “Think of your body as having five gears, like a car. You want to be moving in all of these gears.”
Those who only ever hit it hard in the gym are missing a trick. “A lot of the benefits for our health and our cardiovascular system come from zones one to two exercise.” Walk as much as you can, and experiment with gears – “Slow walking, medium walking, fast walking. Play around.”
Rangan Chatterjee’s podcast, Feel Better, Live More, is available on all major podcast platforms