Have you ever tried out a new diet or health fat or turned yourself into a bit of a guinea pig to find out what's not agreeing with you? I personally have done so many experiments on myself in the name of good health, from eliminating certain foods through to pricking my fingers to test my blood glucose levels multiple times a day. Pretty nerdy, I know. Now, one man who takes health a little more seriously than most is
Michael Moseley. He's a best selling author and BBC broadcaster who regularly puts his own body on the line in
the name of science. Recently you may have spotted him on SBS's Australia's Health Revolution, where he swaps his usual health routines for a typical Australian diet, take away pies and all interest in his BBC series Eat Fast and Lived Longer resulted in the health book that most of us have probably heard of or seen on the shelves, The Fast Diet, and his latest book focuses on the diet you can't miss these days, Keto the Fast eight hundred kto now being a fellow human guinea pig, I
have been a fan of Michael's work for many years. And I even learned when I spoke to Michael that the very expensive but clever exercise bike ione called Carol was inspired by Michael's research. So I had a lot of questions for Michael. I wanted to know how does one of the world's most famous health journalists think about his own health, And what is Michael's routine when it comes to sleep these days, and how can simple things like standing on one leg and enjoying time in nature
have huge benefits for all of us. My name is doctor Amantha Imber. I'm an organizational psychologist and the founder of behavioral science consultancy Inventium, And this is how I work a show about how to help you do your best work. So Michael regularly puts his own body on the line to experiment with in the name of health research. I wanted to know what other things that Michael thinks about before diving in to any of these experiments.
Well, one of the things I do is I consult with my wife, Claire, who's a gippy and who I've been married to for over thirty years, and so we discuss it whether this thing is really stupid? Is it potentially dangerous and is it reversible. So most of the time she's kind of happy for me to do so there have been a few tricky episodes. There was an occasion when I was doing a film on parasites, and as part of that I had agreed to infest myself
with very parasites, so headlines she was okay about. She was not keen on pubic lice, which I passed on. But the third one, which we discussed a bit, was infesting myself with tapeworm because there was a risk that I would infect her as well, which she obviously wasn't very keen on, but it was a very small risk. So she agreed in the name of science, to let me go ahead if you like. But that's one of
the first things I think about. I mean, obviously I think about things like, is there a point to this? Why am I doing that? What is this going to illustrate? And this is some sort of scientific principle, because I don't just do it because you know, for the hell of it, if you like, it has to have a reason.
How much science or evidence does there have to be behind something for you to try something out?
Quite a lot, so I spend my time talking extensively to scientists anyway, so I wouldn't be in did in doing something where it was plainly a little bit bonkers. And so yeah, no, for me, it has to be something which I'm not sure it's necessarily going to work, but where I'm pretty sure that it will come up with an interesting result.
And so what does that look like practically, like how much science or evidence is enough for you to take something on board.
I think if there are sort of published papers, if I have talked to leading experts in the field quite often. For example, in the parasite film, the professor who was going to help me get infected, he had himself infected himself a tape one, but he hadn't told his wife. And I don't know if you know anything about the life cycle of the tapewe, but what happens is it grows inside your gut, then sheds cysts which come out
of your bottom. And in his case, the first thing his wife knew about it is they're driving along the motorway in one of these crawls out of his trows leg.
Oh god.
Yeah, So there was a scientific reason for the experiment, because there's quite a lot of evidence that investing yourself with worms is a good way of manipulating your immune system. So we were looking at that I suffer from hay fever, and we showed that when I had the worm inside me, the HATI kind of went away and I didn't respond
to pollen. So he was part of a wider group look here, I think called drugs from Bugs, and the idea there is can we develop drugs or other insights into the immune system by deliberately infesting volunteers with different things, And so that was kind of the purpose of the experiment, and he was a kind of leading expert, so I was comfortable. I was also comfortable because he'd done it himself.
Out of everything that you have trialed on yourself, what has surprised you the most.
I think possibly the tapeworm experience, just because it was quite bizarre and out there. And more recently I did a film for a DDA series for SBS called The Australian Health Australia's Health Revolution with Dr Michael Mosley and still available on SBS on demand, and the idea was I would go and find eight people in Australia and try to help them reverse pre diabetes and diabetes. And as part of that, I also agreed to put myself on a sort of junk food diet for a couple
of weeks and see what that did to me. And I had everything measured before and afterwards, and I was surprised by how quickly my health deteriorated, so that within two weeks I'd put on about three kilos, but my blood pressure had also sowed, and my blood sugars had moved into sort of pre diabetic nearly diabetic range. So I was surprised that such a short period on junk
food did that. And then I put myself on my own sort of you know, fasty andred keito diet and I managed to reverse it all in about two weeks. But it did show, you know, this was not an extreme diet, but we're exploring the impact that junk food has on your body. And incidentally, the eight people who took part in the dabetes reverse experiment, they did extremely well on the diet that I was helping them with.
So the series went out on SBS and did really remarkably well, and I was grateful for the opportunity to do it. But as I said, I think it was discovering what junk food does to you and also mentally. And I started the snoring. I was sleeping badly, and I started to crave this stuff and he got super hungry. So all of those things are things I've written about before, but not something I'd ever done seriously before.
Oh my goodness. And for those that are not familiar, can you explain what the fast eight hundred kto diet is?
A few years ago I read a book called The First eight hundred and the idea there was a rapid weight loss diet in three stages. It's actually been the most popular diet in Australia and New Zealand for the
last years. So the idea there is that you start on a kind of rapid weight loss diet where you're eight or nine hundred carriers a day, and then he moved to intermittent fasting, and then he moved to a med training style dit what I call the way of life, and this one the fast Under kito, you start on broadly a kito diet, so it's very low car but
also low calorie. And what is impressive about kito diet is that when you're in kytosis, that suppresses your hunger hormones, particularly a hunger hormone called grellin, so within a remarkably short period of time and you stop feeling hungry.
Now, you host a podcast called Just One Thing with the BBC where you cover I guess they're little health hack, simple things that can make us healthier, and I'd love to know what are some of the things that have stuck with you that you've researched for that podcast.
The idea of Just One Thing is that each week I undertake just one thing, something which is relatively easy to fit into your life, and I get a volunteer to give it a go, and I also interview an expert. So these have included things like going out for a brisk early morning walk to reset your internal clock with the light, particularly going out in green spaces that's been shown to be very good for mood but also for your immune system. Cold showers every morning. That was fairly brutal,
but it's certainly quick. Singing loudly. You can combine the singing loudly with the being in the cold show, because there is a lot of evidence showing that singing out loud, particularly in a quir but just kind of doing it by yourself has you know, leads to improvements in mental health, but also again in your immune system, in your physical
well being. Getting some potted plants into the house, getting those are psychologically beneficial seeing those sort of little green darlings there, but also particularly in an office space where you have sealed units, and if you can get sort of five or six potted plants in the avancy, is
that improves productivity and helps to clean the air. NASA did an experiment with potted plants back in the eighties and showed that it was very good at kind of removing or reducing the CO two content of the air and carbon monoxide and also some of the gases that get produced by everyday household products. Plants seem to be wonderfully able to remove some of these things. So those
are just some of the things I believe. In Australia, you can also download the podcast and listen to it, so it's proved enormously popular, I have to say, some of like ten million downloads in the UK loan. So there's obviously something. There's something about the idea of just one thing which obviously grabs people, and it's a sort of small good board, but you don't have to do all of them, and in the quite a few of them I tried, and they didn't really do anything for me.
Having a warm bath before going to bed that was recommended to me by a sleeping and leading sleep expert, you know, it really didn't help me sleep very much. And if I was going to have a warm bath in the evening and a cold show in the morning, I was going to get really super clean. So I decided it was going to be one or the other, and I'd stick with the cold sharp as I find that gives me a real boost. Wow.
So can we maybe go through a typical day in the life of Michael Moseley because I like and let's make it one of your best days, because obviously, for all of us that you know that have habits, some days they kind of they're there and they're not. So tell me what happens from the moment you wake up and what time do you wake up?
Normally around seven in the morning, and then open the curtains and sometimes I wake Claire sometimes she is awake anyway, and I sort of breathe in the light. I do some deep breathing. There's a next size called four two four, where you breathe within through your nose for four, hold it for two, breathe out for four, and do that for a minute to so and it just kind of resets everything. Often we will then do a program of seven exercises, which is it's called a seven minute workout.
You can find free apps almost everywhere. And that combines doing press up squats and you know, the plank, all sorts of different things and it's all over in seven minutes. But it's a very good workout. It's aerobic, but it's also a strength building exercise. Then often go out for a kind of walk with the dog. Claire, depending on how busy is she is, will come with me, and that's the early morning walk. Can we go out for about twenty minutes, come back, probably have breakfast by now
it's about eight thirty. So I practice something called time restricted eating, where I tried to prolong my overnight fast, so I have breakfast by eight thirty, often something like the scrambled egg and smoked salmon and some homemade soaercrat which I like, and that is all super low car if you're interested in that sort of thing, which I guess I am, and then I kind of go after work, I assuming I'm not filming, I go off and do my sort of zoom calls or my emails, and then
about eleven we'll meet for coffee. I try not to have coffee straight off, because if you get up first in the morning, you don't really need coffee. With your coodzol levels really high, you don't need further stimulants. And I also know that caffeine really raises my blood pressure. I kind of tested myself and within half an hour of drinking coffee, my blood pressure goes up by at
least ten to twenty points. So clearly you know, I like the flavor, but I really don't need my blood pressure being pushed up.
And so what's your time, like your optimal time for having a cup of coffee? Then, given what's happening with our cords, our levels, the first thing in the morning.
About nara an hour after you wake up, No sooner than hour after you wake up, if you can delay it a bit even better.
And do you have a cutoff for when it's just too late in the day to have caffeine.
Yeah, generally about eleven thirty. The half life of caffeine in your body varies enormously from person to person. So some people can drink caffeine and you know, two hours later it's kind of cleared the system. Other people can drink caffeine and twelve to fourteen hours later it's still there. You probably know which type you are because caffeine will
keep you awake. You can also have yourself genetically tested, which I have, and I'm a sort of fast metabolizer, but I'm also extremely sensitive to caffeine and that's why my blood pressure shoots up, but then I get rid of it fairly fast.
Ah. Is that like the worst of both worlds?
Oh, the best of both worlds? Absolutely. So Caffeine is a kind of, you know, the world's most popular drug, but it needs to be handled carefully as well.
And so you're having a cup of coffee and I noticed that you're sort of getting straight into your your emails and zoom. At work? What chronotype are you? When do you do your best thinking work?
Oh, in the morning. So I'm definitely a lark. Claire is more of an owl. So if you go to a party, I want to go home and go to bed by sort of eleven eleven thirty, where she will quite happily stay until two or three. But she kind of has slowly over time accommodated to me, so she kind of gets up to save time and broadly goes to bed at same time, but probably sits up reading for a while. Well, I zonk over. So no, I'm undoubtedly a luck.
Okay, excellent. I feel like I'm a lark as well. And I'm thinking, oh, I would never stay at a party till eleven thirty. I was that one last night and went home at nine, and that was quite late. So what's happening. So you've had You've done some work, You've had a coffee. What are your routines that of around the middle of the day.
So at the middle of the day, I get up and I kind of walk around, stroll, have a chat with Claire Wring someone. I try to get up and knot sit down. I have working a standing desk, which I sometimes use sometimes not depending And so you know, we then have lunch about one o'clock, and that again tends to be kind of left over from supper, So that might often be some fish or some vegetable soup or something like that. So it's normally kind of quite a light lunch, and we don't spend a lot of
time putting it together. It's an assembly of stuff. Claire is a very very good cook, and she writes all the recipes for our books, so I don't always defer to her, but generally when I'm cooking, I say, well, do you think this will go with this? And she goes, yes, no, why don't you try that? So she's very inventive. She's not a great one for sort of doing stuff from recipe books. She's very much a case of throwing flavors together and foods together and things like that.
What are you then doing after the lunch?
You?
Are you a believer in naps or are you to straight back into work? What does that look like?
No? I find that napping just makes me feel tired. Claire leg snap. She finds that if she has a twenty minute nap that sets her up for the day, whereas if I have it, it just makes me feel woozy. So again, there's quite a lot of research around that. I'm showing that some people do benefit from naps, other people don't, and you very quickly discover which you are.
The rule is broadly no more than twenty minutes to half an hour, and ideally no more than you know, no later than three o'clock in the afternoon, otherwise it will remove your sleep drive. So in the afternoon kind of more work. And then often we'll go for another walk at about sort of four in the afternoon or something like that, and occasionally that will be a run instead.
It sort of depends, but I like to do several walks a day, and they're typically twenty minutes twenty five minutes half an hour each, so that's kind of a brisk walk and we chat or if I'm just listening to a podcast like yours, or I'm listening to music, then I try to go along at a pace of about one hundred paces a minute. Brisk walking is where you get most of the benefits, you know, and you kind of admire that you and stuff like that, but you should be a little bit breathless.
How are you monitoring how fast you're going? I mean, I imagine now you probably know, but how did you figure that out? Initially?
The easiest thing is to download music from Spotify or something like that. You choose a beat, so you choose something which has a beat of one hundred and ten beat per minute one hundred and twenty if you're going staying live, staying in live ha ha ha ha. You know, and things like Spotify will tell you what the beat is. You can't kind of listen to it and work it out yourself, but the music drives you and you're just trying to keep going to the beat.
Excellent. Now, what's happening around dinner time? What time are you eating?
Normally about seven? We used to eat later, but as I said, I'm kind of interested in time restricted eating. So we try to aim eat at seven and have finished eating by eight and then not eat anything after that. So that finish eating by eight, not eating again next morning till say eight thirty nine. That gives you a
sort of twelve to thirteen hour fasting window. And there's a lot of research now showing that extending your overnight fast gives you all sorts of health benefits and also gives your gut a bit of a downtime and helps improve sleep. It also reduces inflammation. There's a lot of research on the carried out I love it in Australia but also in the States. Salt Constitute and I've been
looking at this since twenty twelve, so I committed to that. So, yeah, we normally eat about seven thirty and it's normally a sort of fish, sometimes a vegetarian thing with plenty of veggies and not very much in the way of starch, and then maybe a bit of yogurt with some fruit for dessert or something like that. So it's kind of what I described as a sort of Mediterranean style. Plenty of olive oil, plenty of oily, healthy fats, plenty of veg, not too much starch.
And you've written a lot about sleep, So what does your I guess your wind down routine look like.
So broadly speaking, I'm heading to bed about sort of ten ten fifteen. You know, you brush the teeth, you get yourself mentally prepared. I like to read for about sort of forty minutes before I keel over, And that's kind of it pretty much.
What else are you doing in the evening to make sure you get a good night's sleep, or even what if you tried, but maybe you don't do religiously like you mentioned hot baths, but that obviously didn't work for you, that.
Didn't work for me at all. I mean you know, down years, I made a lot of programs about sleep. So I've tried lots of things, and most of them were just ludicrous. There are loads and loads loads of over the counter supplements, and to be honest, there's almost no research for any any of them work, and certainly in my experience, none of them work, and if they work at all, the remarkably ineffectual. There are lots of crazy ones, like eating two kiwi. There was a study
at of Singapore suggested my magnesium supplement a week. There's loads of loads, as I said, of crazy stuff out there on the internet, and I would have said, pretty well, none of them work. It's all about going to bed at the same time, getting up at the same time,
establishing a routine, practicing breathing exercises. If you kind of find go to sleep, because if you do these breathing exercises and this kind of arranging them, then you'll find that that really slows your heart, and that it's the slowing of the heart which triggers sleep along with the drop in core temperature. That's kind of why hot bars work. Was when you get out in the hot bath, you have to have it about forty men before you go to bed, because then your body temperature drops, your core
temperature drops, and that kind of induces sleep. That's for thought behind the hot bath. It's not really the relaxation, it's a change in core temperature which seems to be doing it. I wrote a book called Faster Sleep in which I go into the science of it and the various things and if you're a kind of chronic in some of it, we know most of them. What it is called sleep hygiene. Most people who have any problems
with sleep know what those things consist of. Basically dark room, cool room, you know, regular going to bed, working up. And to be frank, they don't really work, or they work in a very marginal way with some people. But to be honest, it's kind of the best that people can offer at the moment. The things which really work, and I write about and Fast Asleep are probably things like sleep restriction therapy, where you actually restrict the amount of time you spend in bed, and by doing that
you kind of reset your clock. Because what you've got to do is you've got to persuade your brain. You god teach your brain that the bed is for sleep and for sex and for nothing else. That's why you shouldn't have any entertainment it And people who drift into insomnia, they basically have got out of the habit of falling asleep sleep with the very natural process. So sometimes you have to reboot, and the best way to reboot is through sleep restriction therapy. But it's quite tough.
It's awful. I tried it in my twenties when I had insomnia and saw a couple of sleep doctors. But I tell you what, it worked.
Yeah. Absolutely, it was horrible.
But it absolutely worked and sort of re taught me how to sleep. I guess now you mentioned exercise, your seven minute exercise routine in the morning, and you've written a lot about exercise. Can you tell me why? Why the seven minute routine?
So the seven minute routine was developed by an next science physiologist in Texas. He's actually British, and he did it because he originally called it his hotel room workout. So it was intense of people who are busy on business and couldn't fit much else in. So the idea is you alternate your top half in the bottom half, so you're doing squats followed by press ups, followed by lundes followed by you know, get the up and down on a chair. And it was always intended to be
done using nothing but your body weight. But the reason it's so brilliant is because it is it combines resistance exercise with aerobic exercise. It is quite brutal. You well, you can push yourself as hard or as not hard as you want, but you basically just have a voice saying, okay, do this exercise, and it then gives you a kind of countdown thirty seconds, then you have a five to ten second break, and then you do the next one.
So it's quite tough. And has said what allows you to do is push yourself as hard as you want to do. But the joy is it's over in seven minutes. And for many of us, unless we love exercise, we're not going to find the time in the day to do it. And I find if I don't do it first in the morning, I'm never going to do it. I hate the gym. I am not somebody who ever gets any pleasure from running. I do it, but not because I for a single moment enjoy it, but simply
because I know it's good for me. I do enjoy a breastwalk. I do enjoy a hard cycle, and I do enjoy this workout sort of a little maybe, but I would never go down the gym. I just hate jim So. And again, I think a lot of the benefit of exercise comes from being outdoors, so you can also do this out in the park, but mainly, you know, for me, the pleasure comes from going through breastwalk in the woods with the dog or going for a run
through the woods. And because I'm in the woods, I can ignore the fact that my lungs really hurt, my legs hurting them and I'm not enjoying.
Myself now enjoy a bent aside. Is there a type of exercise that has been proven to be more beneficial and just a better bang for our back in terms of the time that we're dedicating to it.
The best bang for your buck is almost certainly a hit high intensity interval training and the seven minute workout sort of that if you push yourself, and this is based on you know, eighty years of research really, and it shows that what you do is you do short bursts of exercise followed by a recovery period and then another short burst. By short, I mean as little as fifteen to twenty seconds. So I did a film a
while ago called it was called The Truth Bad Excise. Yeah, And so as part of that they measured my aerobic fitness and also my blood blue coat levels. And then I was asked to do three bursts of twenty seconds with an interval in between. And I had to do that three times a week. And that sounds like nothing, but it was actually quite hard because you're pushing against considerable resistance. And that was enough to improve my aerobic x my aerobic fitness by about fifteen percent, and also
my blood sugar levels. And the expert who was doing it was said you would have to run for forty minutes a day, five days a week to get similar benefits. If you're just jogging, the intensity is what it's about. So that's kind of what I do.
Was I like, and I do it.
When I'm out for a jog. I will sprint up a hill. Hills are good because that's when you really push yourself and the benefit comes from getting your heart rate up. Also, what happens when you're going intensely is you're smashing the glycogen stores in your muscles and you're releasing signaling proteins which the next time you do that burst will actually lead proliferation of muscle tissue. So a lot of science behind HIT and in the fast and Akito.
I go into that because I find it utterly fascinating. And I started writing about HIT maybe nine years ago, and since then it's kind of taken off in a big way. But you can overdo it. So I'm at the sort of the more moderate end of HIT. I'm not doing sort of psycho workouts.
We will be back with Michael in a moment where we'll be chatting about whether just imagining ourselves exercising is enough to actually gain some real health benefits. And if you're looking for more tips to improve the way that you work, I write a short fortnightly newsletter that contains three cool things that I've discovered that helped me work better, ranging from interesting research findings through to gadgets and software that I'm really loving. You can sign up for that
at Howiwork dot com. That's how I Work dot co. Now I think I've heard you say that imagining yourself exercising also works. Is the truth behind that.
Sort of It's one of the things we looked at in just one thing. It is something again that's been explored for at least eighty years, and what appears to happen, for example, is we got a young guy who's goalie and he wants to be scoring goals. He wanted to be in his local team. So what I advised him to do, who was to go out there into the
garden and imagine kicking a football and scoring goals. And the reason behind this is that it does seem to kind of train just thinking about it, but you have to kind of do it for a couple of minutes a day. Just thinking about it seems to prepare your muscles for the action when it happens. It's you know, just thinking about going for a run is not the same as going for a run, I can tell you that.
But it's mainly aimed at sports based activities. So again with tennis, if you visualize yourself hitting the ball, and it's even more effective if you go and to the tennis court and you visualize yourself is the ball without actually hitting the ball. There is some a reasonable amount of evidence that this can be affected.
And what about standing on one leg? Why should we try standing on one leg? More of it as we get older.
Sure, So we talked about erubic exercise, which is running, cycling, swimming where you get your heart and lungs going, and resistance exercises which press up squats which helped preserve your muscle. But the third form of exercises which really important is balance. And from the age of twenty five thirty onwards, if you don't work at it, you're going to lose it
very much use it or lose it scenario. And the second commonest cause of accidental death in the world after traffic accidents, is falling over and that obviously happens when you get older. But your sense of balance begins to go unless you work on it. And so the one legged regime is essentially a way of improving your sense
of balance. So I do it when I brush my teeth, but I brush my teeth a couple of minutes in the morning in the evening, and I stand one leg than the other leg, and that's how I kind of keep my balance going. It's also a good test of
life expectancy. Strangely enough, they did a study which would published in a medical journal where they got a whole bunch of fifty year olds and did a range of tests in them, including seeing how long they could stand on one leg with first their eyes open and then their eyes closed. And then they came back fifteen years to see who was still alive, and they found that it was the people who could stay on one leg for
longest who were more likely to be alive. It was the single best predictor of life expectancy of all the tests they run.
Do you remember how long they could stand for people that want to challenge themselves at home, because I do, after hearing that.
You should be able to manage thirty seconds with your eyes open. If you're over fifty, you'll find it challenging to do more than ten seconds with your eyes closed. You stand on one leg, basically you get somebody else to time you. You put your hands on your hips, You stand on with the matter with left or right leg. Make sure there's you know you can grab something, close your eyes. You will be astonished how quickly you fall over because without your eye operating, it's very difficult to
maintain balance, particularly with one leg. So the people who did spectacularly well, people who were doing under five seconds, they were the ones who were most likely not to be alive. Fifteen years later, whereas one who could do more than ten seconds were broadly better. These were fifty year olds. Young people should be able to do much better than that.
And how high do we have to lift our leg up?
Oh, it doesn't matter, just off the ground, just off the ground. The test is basically as soon as you shift your planted foot or as soon as you have to put your foot down, then the test is over.
Oh wow, okay, I'm definitely going to be trying out and timing myself after we've finished this interview. Now. In fast eight hundred kto there are a lot of different recipes designed by your wife, Claire. I'd love to know what are some of your go tos because I must say I've tried some and they're delicious. To know what are your go tos?
Oh? For me? You know, for breakfast, I often have as I said, I like eggs, I like fish. I've had to go at the keito pancakes, which I never thought I'd enjoy. But there's one there quito pancokes with yogurt berries, and that's made with almonds and cream, cheese and eggs. And it doesn't sounds that it should work, but it works brilliantly, brilliantly well. I also like the sort of the butcher. When it comes to main courses,
I'm a fan of fish these days. Never used to like fish before, but there's a kind of thaie salmon dish which is fab and I'd really like anything frankly with chicken in it as well. I've tried to go more vegetarian, and there are vegetarian options, but the main
thing is you've got to keep up your protein. What I'm recommending is that you need to be consuming at least fifty grams of protein a day, preferably more like seventy, and that it's harder to do on a quito sort of vegetarian diet because you know, things like meat, eggs, fish, they all have high percentage of protein. Vegetables sadly not nuts not bad, but if you're a vegan then you're kinda have to use tofu or temper as a substitute,
and that's obviously goes extremely well with most of the recipes. Anyway. Tofis are very very flexible, and the great thing about those two is they're also very high in protein, whereas a lot of the things you get in a Bigan diet are not rich in protein. I did a film recently with a Veigan and her protein was terrible. She was extremely of weight, and unfortunately, as I explained in the Fast hundred Kita book, protein is one of the
major drivers of hunger. You need protein. People worry about carbs, they worry about fat, that actually they should worry about protein because protein is totally essential because you need it not so much for fuel, but for replacing your red blood cells, your white blood cells, for muscle, for growth, all sorts of things. And as I said, it is probably well it is the primary braver of hunger. If you're not being eating enough protein, you're going to get starving hungry.
I feel like I've got the opposite problem to the Vegan. I ate a lot of protein, and I do that because I do weight training four times a week. But in your latest book, you say that you can eat too much protein. What does that look like? How do I know if I'm eating too much?
Michael, broadly speaking, anything between you know, if you're a bloke like me, I'm eighty kilos, so anything between seventy and one hundred and twenty one hundred and fifty grams of protein. If I was working out, if I was a weightlifter, of I was doing what you're doing it you'd probably be up to two hundred grams. Broadly speaking, the rule is that you want to be aiming for around twenty percent of your calories in the form of protein.
So if you're consuming two thousand caalories a day, then you are four hundred grams to be in the form of protein. There are sorry four hundred calories in the form protein. There are four calories in every grammar protein. Therefore, you want one hundred grams of protein. I do kind of go into the calculations, but twenty percent is probably optimal.
You can go up to thirty percent beyond that, and most of the studies suggest, certainly the animal studies suggest that what that does is it activates the sort of go go mode, which is kind of nice. You've got rapid cell turnover. You're suppressing your appetite, but at the same time it's also pushing you on the path towards cancer, heart disease, and also rapid aging, and those are all
associated with go go mode. Because humans basically have two pathways, we can go down go go mode or repair and Unfortunately, very high levels of protein push you towards really go go, And if you want a short, sweet life, then that's probably the way to go. But if you actually want to lead along in healthy life, then that probably not
the way to go. And the healthiest art on the planet is the Mediterranean diet, without doubt, full of oily fish, nuts, legumes, and that's broadly twenty percent protein, forty percent fat, forty percent carbs.
Now, I would imagine as a health journalist you would be sent a lot of the latest health tech and apps and all those kinds of things. I'd love to know what over the last few years you've tried and actually found quite useful.
I had a sort of bit activity monitor for a while which I got into. It also measured my sleep, which I kind of found a bit interesting. But the reality is I lost it about six months ago and I never felt the need to replace it. So the answer was I quite enjoyed it for about three months. And there is a danger with some of these wearables that you get obsessed by them. I was talking to a friend who's a sleep specialist, and he says, people come into and see them now and they say, look
my fitbit tells me, I didn't. I'm not getting enough sleep, And he said, but how do you actually feel? And they go, But there's a name for it. It's called orthosomnia. Basically, apparently it's a thing that people no longer prepared to listen to their own bodies. Best indicating whether you had good night sleep is how do you feel next day? Do you feel sleepy? Do you feel how do you feel eric Wall? Do you feel hungry? If you feel none of those things, then you probably have a good
night sleep. And whatever your fitbit says, it's utually irrelevant.
And for all the health tech that's out there, because I imagine I know that I get served a lot of ads when I'm browsing on the internet or on social media for various health devices, how do I, given I'm not a trained medical doctor, how do I evaluate whether any of these devices are actually going to improve my life and my health.
I think you'd have to work out why you're doing them. So the things I have, and I know the reason why I have them is I have a home blood pressure monitor, and that's because I'm sixty four. I have a family history of heart disease and stroke and I have had two close friends recently who have died from undiagnosed hypertension. So it's really important that you know what your blood pressure is and you can go and see a doctor, but you know, not always reliable because you know,
you get this what's called white coat hypertension. So you can buy these kits, they're pretty good, they're very cheap, and probably buy it for less thirty dollars and just regularly check on your blood pressure see what it's doing. And you might discover, like me, that when you drink coffee your blood pressure goes crazy, or it might be the it goes up and down at certain times of day and night. So broadly I try and keep my blood pressure in the sort of healthy range. Recently it
crept up. I put myself on the fast under Kyto and knock ten points of it. Now for every five points you can reduce blood pressure by it knocks reduce your chance of heart attack and stroke by about twenty percent. It's that big, and it's that big a number. If you're going to look at one number, that would be
the most critical one your blood pressure. And around half of all Australian's adults have either high potentsional or in the hypertensive range and don't know it, And it is one of the things you can do to me about particularly if you know you've got it and it has no symptoms, so you can be hypertensive and be totally unaware of it until you have a massive stroke or a massive heart attack or something like that. So measuring
my blood pressure is hugely important. I also have a blood sugar measuring kit because ten years ago I had type two diabetes. Got rid of it by inventing a five to two came across intimate and fasting lost ten kilos. Have broadly been kept it off ever since, and that reversed my diabetes, but I'm well aware that it could creep back up, so I prick my finger every few months to just check my blood sugars in the decent range, and once a year I get an HBO one see
test done. But I found it very useful recently because I've been I have been doing it losing some weight with the fascet amnikito, and I was surprised by how rapidly my blood sugar's improved. Blood sugar is really really important. Was again about a third of Australians over the age of twenty have either pre diabetes or type two diabetes and most of them don't know it, and so if you don't do anything about it, then so those that's another really important number to go on. And to be honest,
that's it. But tape measure is very low tech. Other alternative which are measuring your waist, and I would have said those were by far the three best things you can have. Everything else is kind of geeky and probably quite fun, but at this moment in time, holy unlable. I got sent to a watch which bost measure my blood pressure. I compared it to the cuff and it was just crazy. It was so inaccurate. I can't imagine
how they got the rights to sell it. So yeah, and the other thing I'm using at the moment is key sticks urine sticks. That's just because I'm doing this experiment on myself, putting myself into kytosis. Super helpful if you kind of want to do the Fast Day Underquito program, because you see the color change and that's very motivating. Also, time tells you again you can get breathalysers, you can
get blood things. They're not very accurate, They're incredibly expensive and the keto strips cost about ten cents a strip, So why would you bother with the other stuff?
Now, Michael, for people that want to consume more of what you're producing at the moment, what is the best way for listeners to do that?
Okay, there are various ways. One is I'm on Twitter under Dr Michael Mosley. I'm also on Instagram again under Dr Michael Mosley Official, I think I'm there. And Claire if you're interested in recipes, Claire regularly post recipes under doctor Claire Bailey, and her name is obviously on the book along with mine, and so those are kind of the best ways of following it. If you want to watch teleprogram then it is SBS. They I'm sure an awful lot of programs with me in it, and SBS
on Demand has a load of stuff. And obviously, as you're well aware, loads of books I have. Between me and Claire, we produced kind of ten books on the whole range of different subjects. So if you're interested in COVID, you're interested in sleep, you're interested in losing weight, you're interested in Tape two diabetes, I've probably reaten the book about.
It amazing and I've probably read it. Michael. It's just been an absolute pleasure getting to spend this time with you after reading and watching so much of what you've brought into the world. So a huge thank you from me. You've certainly made me a lot smarter when it comes to help, so.
Thank you, Thank you very much, pleasure.
Hello there, That is it for today's show. If you have not hit subscribe or follow to How I Work, you might want to do so because next week I'm sharing a real the interesting interview about life admin, so we'll be turning the tables from work act to looking at how can we actually be more productive just with all those things that build up in our life. How I Work is produced by Inventium with production support from
Dead Set Studios. The producers for this episode were Liam Ridan and Jenna Koda, and thank you to mart Nimba, who does the audio mix for every episode and makes everything sound so much better than it would have otherwise. See you next time.