CHAPTER 7

Step 3—Plan Accordingly

THE BODY LOVES AND CRAVES consistency and predictability. So much so, in fact, that it will rebel in subtle ways if you force it to be out of sync with its natural rhythms. This is partly why traveling across multiple time zones and temporarily abandoning your usual routine can feel so difficult and uncomfortable. Your smart body will do everything it can to get you back on track quickly. One of the easiest ways of reducing unnecessary stress on your body and maintaining a balanced, homeostatic state is to keep a steady daily routine year-round to the best of your ability, including weekends and holidays. This demands that you plan your days well in advance.

Work obligations, social demands, and unexpected events have us all breaking this rule occasionally, but see if you can regulate at least the three aspects of your life that will have the biggest impact on your health: when you eat, when you exercise, and when you sleep. If you do, you will notice a difference in how you feel. It may also help you to stick to a routine and be better prepared for unforeseen challenges that can derail your new way of life under the Grain Brain Whole Life Plan.

So to that end, let me give you some guidance.

WHEN TO EAT

Calories cannot tell time, but the body can, and it will receive calories differently depending on a variety of factors, including—you guessed it—the time of day.

Each us has an internal system of biological clocks that help the body manage and control its circadian rhythm—your body’s sense of day and night. This rhythm is defined by the patterns of repeated activity that correlate with the twenty-four-hour solar day and include your sleep-wake cycle, the rise and fall of hormones, and changes in body temperature. Just recently we’ve discovered that when these clocks are not “on time”—when they’re not functioning properly—disordered eating and weight problems can result. It’s well documented, for example, that obese people often have disrupted circadian rhythms, triggering them to eat frequently and at irregular times, especially late at night. Obese people also often suffer from sleep apnea, which further disturbs their sleep rhythm. And, as you already know, sleep deprivation can impact the balance of those appetite hormones leptin and ghrelin, further exacerbating problems.

In Chapter 4, I gave you some parameters for intermittent fasting, suggesting that you skip breakfast once or twice a week and fast for seventy-two hours four times throughout the year. As an additional tip, I recommend that you eat more of your daily sum of calories before three p.m. and avoid eating a bounty of food at night. In fact, avoid eating anything within four hours of bedtime. (You can drink water and caffeine-free tea, but try not to drink anything within a half an hour of bedtime. Otherwise, you might have to get up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom.)

The power of eating lunch before three p.m., for example, was recently highlighted by researchers at Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Tufts University, and Spain’s University of Murcia, who conducted their study in the Spanish seaside town of Murcia. Spaniards make lunch their main meal of the day. To the researchers’ surprise, all things being equal, such as total calories eaten daily, levels of activity, and sleep quantity, those who ate lunch later in the day struggled more with weight loss. All of the participants—a total of 420 individuals—in the study were either overweight or obese. And all of them were put on the same five-month weight-loss program. But they didn’t eat lunch at the same time, and they didn’t experience the same weight loss. Half of them ate lunch before three p.m., and the other half ate after three p.m. Over the course of the twenty weeks, the early lunchers lost an average of twenty-two pounds, while the later lunchers shed only seventeen and at a slower clip.

We intuitively know that overeating toward the end of the day is not a good idea. That’s when we’re likely to be tired. Even our brains are tired of making decisions, so we cave in to a mindless feast at the dinner table with multiple portions of unhealthy food choices and dessert. This is especially the case when we’ve had a busy day, skipped lunch entirely, and grazed on nutrient-poor snacks and food products. And if it has been a very long time since we’ve eaten, and we haven’t taken in enough calories earlier in the day, it’s far too easy to gorge at dinner because the body will want to make up for those lost calories. It’s a biological and metabolic assault. I recommend the following to avoid this scenario and maximize your body’s energy needs:

Over the weekend, plan your upcoming week’s eating schedule and meals based on what’s on your calendar in terms of work and personal responsibilities. Use a journal for this planning (see here). Choose the one or two days you’ll skip breakfast. On those days, be sure to have a nutrient-dense lunch between 11:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m.

Create your grocery list based on the meals you plan to prepare. Don’t forget to include snacks. Take care of that shopping before the week begins. You don’t want to wake up Monday morning and be scrambling to find food to eat for breakfast or to pack for a lunch.

Identify which meals and snacks you can take with you for lunch when you’re away from home.

The more you plan your eating habits, from when you eat to what you eat, the more you can have effortless control over sticking with the plan and reaping its health rewards. The same is true when it comes to exercise.

WHEN TO EXERCISE

The body might be physically stronger in the late afternoon and early evening due to a peak in body temperature and certain hormones like testosterone, but that doesn’t mean you have to engage in physical activity at that time. You should schedule your exercise when it works best for you. It’s far more important to do the exercise than to worry about the “best” time of day for your body to be active. Some people enjoy an early morning jog, while others prefer to end their day with exercise.

Keep in mind, though, that an hour daily spent working out hard won’t erase the effects of sitting down for the rest of the day. A growing body of research is revealing that it’s entirely possible to get plenty of physical activity and still suffer increased risk of disease and death—just like smoking harms no matter how much you engage in other, healthier lifestyle habits. So many of us barely move an inch to go from home to car to office chair, and back again to sit on the couch and watch TV. It behooves all of us to work more movement into our day, no matter what kind of job we have. Get creative with turning to-do’s that could be done without much effort into tasks that require physical movement. Take the stairs. Park far away from the building you plan to enter. Use a headset to walk and talk on your phone so you’re getting up from your desk. Take a twenty-minute walk during your lunch break. Build more opportunities to be active during your day. Some additional tips:

When you map out your upcoming meals for the week, plan your exercise time as well. Also plan what kind of exercise you will do, using a journal for this planning (see here). Remember, the minimum is twenty minutes of cardio six days a week with weight-bearing exercises three or four times a week. Build in extra time for stretching, too. Decide which days you’ll engage in vigorous exercise and which will be less intense (see the sample plan below). On that seventh day of “rest” (which doesn’t need to be a Sunday), plan to do something low-key, like going for a leisure walk with a friend or taking a meditative yoga class. A day of rest doesn’t mean you stay totally inactive on your derriere all day.

If you suffer from sleep disorders or have a hard time falling asleep at night, try to break a sweat outdoors in the early morning hours. Exposure to daylight (say, during a morning bike ride, jog, or drive to an exercise class) soon after waking effectively reboots your circadian rhythm. Morning exercise has also been shown to reduce blood pressure throughout the day and cause an additional 25 percent dip at night, which further correlates with better sleep.

Here is a sample exercise plan for someone who already has a baseline level of fitness and is hoping to gain more strength and fitness with higher-intensity workouts and longer stretches of moderate activity throughout the week. Note that Sunday doesn’t have to be the “off” day of rest—here, it’s Wednesday. Plan those longer workouts on days when you have more time, which for many is over the weekend.

Monday: Midday brisk walk (twenty to thirty minutes); weight training and stretching at the gym after work (twenty minutes)

Tuesday: fifty-minute indoor cycling class in the morning, plus ten minutes of stretching

Wednesday: Crazy busy day: thirty minutes of brisk walking anytime during the day, and fifteen minutes of weight-bearing exercises and light stretching while dinner is cooking

Thursday: Elliptical machine (thirty minutes) in the morning, plus ten minutes of stretching

Friday: Vinyasa flow yoga class at six p.m.

Saturday: Weekend Warrior Power Walking Group at nine-thirty a.m. (ninety minutes)

Sunday: Elliptical machine (forty minutes), plus weight-bearing exercises and stretching (twenty minutes)

The more specific you are with your formal exercise plan during the week, the more likely you are to stick to it.

WHEN TO SLEEP

Remember, the body—and especially the brain—revitalizes itself during sleep. While we used to think that there was a magic number of hours the body needed to sleep, new science has overturned that myth. Everyone has different sleep needs. How much do you require to function optimally? Find out:

Determine an ideal wake-up time given your morning duties.

Set your morning alarm for that time every day.

Go to bed eight to nine hours prior to that time until you wake up before your alarm. The number of hours of sleep you get that night is your ideal number.

Some additional reminders:

Use the strategies I outlined in Chapter 6 to prepare for sleep and make the most of it.

Be strict about going to bed and getting up at the same time every day, 365 days a year. Don’t shift your sleep habits on weekends or holidays or while on vacation.

Aim to be asleep before eleven p.m. The hours between eleven p.m. and two a.m. are critical for health. This is when your body’s powers of rejuvenation are at their peak.

A DAY IN THE LIFE

I’ve been mentioning the use of journals throughout the book. I can’t think of a better way to plan and track your daily life than to keep a few journals for various purposes. This automatically holds you accountable to your intentions and goals. Here’s a summary of the three main journals I recommend:

Food journal: This is where you keep a running tab of not only what you eat, but also what you plan to eat—your meals and snacks throughout the week. On the weekend, look ahead at the upcoming week and map out your daily menu, then write down exactly what you eat each day and see how close you come to living up to your plans. Note which foods and ingredients you like or dislike, writing down your favorite meals and recipes. Add details like which foods make you feel extra good and which others may be problematic for your unique physiology. If you tweak a recipe to your liking, record that.

Exercise journal: This is where you maintain your plans for exercise and record what you do in fact accomplish each day. Track your minutes of cardio, strength training, and stretching. List which muscle groups you work and what type of cardio workout you do. If you experience any pain or soreness, jot that down. See if you can find patterns in the exercises you choose and how your body feels, as this can help you tailor the right exercise regimen for your body. Over the course of a week, make sure you’re mixing up your routines, going hard on some days and lighter on others.

General journal: This is where you document your thoughts, feelings, ideas, wishes, goals, and notes of gratitude. Don’t hesitate to record your worries and anxieties, as writing those down can have the effect of reducing their psychological impact on you.

It doesn’t matter what type of books you use for journaling. You can buy inexpensive spiral-bound notebooks for your food and exercise journals and splurge on a leather-bound diary for your general journal. Keep a journal by your bedside for early morning and evening writing, and take small, convenient notebooks with you wherever you go to jot down notes throughout the day. Do what works for you and keeps you on track.

Below is a daily checklist followed by a sample daily schedule.

Your Daily Checklist

Get up and go to bed at the same time daily.

Take your supplements, including your prebiotics and probiotics. See here for your cheat sheet about which supplements to take, how much, and when.

Unless you’re skipping breakfast, which I encourage you to do at least once a week, make sure you’re getting a little protein in the morning. Remember that eggs are a perfect way to start the day.

Do cardio exercise for a minimum of twenty minutes, with stretching before and after. Every other day, do weight-bearing exercises (see www.DrPerlmutter.com for videos). See here for information about timing your exercise.

Do one small thing to clean up your physical environment (see here).

Eat lunch before three p.m.

Drink water throughout the day.

Take a ten-minute distraction-free timeout in the a.m. and p.m. to check in with yourself, maybe do some deep breathing (see here), write in a journal, or read an inspiring quote or passage from a book. If you’d like to try meditation, go to www.how-to-meditate.org/breathing-meditations.

Plan dinner so that it’s not within four hours of bedtime.

Try to be in bed with the lights out before eleven p.m.

Sample Daily Schedule

6:30 a.m.	Wake up!
6:30–6:45 a.m.	Morning deep-breathing exercise and journal writing
7:00–7:45 a.m.	Exercise (e.g., stationary bike, weight training, and stretching)
7:45–8:15 a.m.	Bathing and grooming
8:15 a.m.	Prepare breakfast and bagged lunch
8:45 a.m.	Out the door for work
12:30 p.m.	Lunch and 20-minute walk
4:00–4:15 p.m.	Snack and a few minutes of self-reflection
5:30 p.m.	Leave work
6:30 p.m.	Supper with kids
7:30–8:00 p.m.	Personal downtime
9:30 p.m.	Cutoff time for electronics, prepare for bed
10:30 p.m.	Lights out!

While there are plenty of apps out there to help you map out your day and send reminders to your phone through texts, there is nothing wrong with using an old-fashioned daily planner. Do what works for you. Get as detailed as you like, but understand that everything in your life should revolve around your eating, exercising, and sleeping patterns. Be consistent, even selfish, with those routines, and your whole body will reap tremendous health benefits. I hate to be cliché, but it’s true: Timing is everything.