Exercise is good for you. Everybody knows that.
We at Nysteia think it is too - but we suggest you should be smart about it, and you should know exactly why you are doing.
Broadly, there are two types of exercise - cardio and strength training (using weights or the weight of the body for resistance).
Both types of exercises are great for your health, no question about it. Millions of books and internet articles have been written about cardio and strength exercise. They talk about all the good reasons why you should exercise - some of the excellent reasons are cardiovascular health, strong healthy muscles, stamina, better digestion…… and, let’s not deny what most people want from exercise - a better physique!
If you ever go to any popular neighbourhood gym, you will see many overweight people on the cardio machines and on the weight machines. And most people know that the energy expended after 20 minutes of very high-intensity cardio is about 200 calories. If you have ever exercised for 20 minutes at a very high-intensity of cardiovascular exertion, you know how demanding and difficult this is.
And after all of that effort, and near death experience, the amount of energy that you expended is about the same as a single Subway cookie (the white chocolate chip macadamia nut cookie to be specific).
So if you are on an exercise machine thinking you are doing much to address your overweight body without first addressing the way you meet, we are sorry to tell you that you have believed one of the great lies of the modern world.
Exercise is very beneficial to weight loss, and is vitally important to living a longer, happy, healthy life. You just have to understand how it fits in to the overall scheme of things.
First, you have to commence a daily routine of intermittent fasting, eating your first meal as late as possible in the day.
Once you do that, you can then implement exercise intelligently into your daily routine, and it will make biological sense to do so.
Your cardio exercise should be done as early in the morning as possible, with the purpose of clearing out residual carbohydrates stored in your body. The intensity with which you do cardio exercise should be no more than the level which you would find it uncomfortable to maintain a normal conversation with someone.
After 30 minutes of this kind of exercise, you should have a light sweat and your heart rate should be around 110 to 130 bpm (depending on your age - if you are under 50, aim for the 130 mark, if you are over 50 with no recent exercise exposure aim for the 110 mark).
After 30 minutes of this level of cardiovascular exercise, you should not be so exhausted that you just want to die. You should feel pretty good at the end of it, and even quite refreshed.
At this level of cardiovascular exercise, you will receive all of the health benefits of the exercise, without physically taxing your body to an unnecessary level. We say unnecessary because it is simply not a requirement of long life to expose a normal human body to drastic levels of cardiovascular exertion. It might be something you do if you want to physically challenge your body, and if that’s your thing, good for you! It’s just not going to help you live longer, or add anything to your health - and that is what we are all about.
Having exercised like this for 30 minutes first thing in the morning, and having adopted the Nysteia eating philosophy of daily intermittent fasting, then the 200 calories that you would have expended with this exercise will really mean something to your body and health.
Firstly, your body expends approximately 60 to 80 calories per hour at rest, simply staying alive. Prior to exercising, the last meal that you had would have been around 7pm the previous evening. Assuming that you commenced your morning workout at around 6am, you would have been in a fasted state for 11 hours, and your body would have catabolised most of the carbohydrates consumed the previous day.
With the 30 minutes cardio exercise in the morning, that 200 calories expended during exercise gives you a fasting boost of around three hours equivalent fasting time. Let’s assume that you have your first meal at 1pm that afternoon. Remembering that you have not eaten since 7 PM the previous evening, that means you have been fasting for 18 hours continuously. Add to that the cardio exercise boost of three equivalent fasting hours, and your body biologically has been fasting for 21 hours.
This means that your body’s autophagy process will be activated at a higher rate between the hours of 8 AM to 1 PM every day, with all of the health benefits associated with that. This is the reason that cardio exercise is so important for you, and why you should do it.
Strength training with weights or body exercises is also very important. A normal person does not require to train weights under extremely strenuous conditions, many times a week. The cult of bodybuilding, and the associated multi-billion dollar supplements industry, has created and fostered absolutely perverse and ultimately unhealthy attitudes to muscle growth.
In the Nysteia philosophy, training with weights is a natural promotion and extension of how you can extend your body’s lifespan.
How does a muscle grow with weights training? Not many people understand this simple point.
Fundamentally (and very simplistically), the muscle that is being trained by the repetition of any exercise (for example a bicep curl) is being slightly torn and “worn away” at the fibre level of the muscle.
When the person then eats protein after training, the body uses the amino acids from the protein to repair the muscle damage caused by the exercise. And because the body is smart, when you exercise a particular muscle over a long period of time, when the body repairs that muscle, it makes that muscle stronger.
So your muscles do not become stronger and bigger when you lift weights. They become so after you eat properly, such that the exercise muscles can be replenished with the required nutrients, and prepare themselves for what they assume are changed survival circumstances.
Remember, your body does not know that it is the 21st century. It still thinks it is living in a cave during an ice age. It is going to react to particular stimuli in the predictable way that evolution has predisposed it to react to those stimuli. Muscles which are constantly worked are deemed by the body necessary for survival, and as such these muscles will be supported and prioritised with the required nutrients being directed towards them.
When you have a body which is daily at an increased level of autophagy, you have an opportunity to ensure that your muscularity is also at peak condition. Your body will be tuned over time to direct nutrients to rebuild and replenish the autophagically catabolised matter.
Strength training at a moderate level of exertion, using very simple “compound” exercises, twice per week, combined with the Nysteia eating and food principles, is the complementary component to your cardio routine.
It’s not exactly politically correct to say this: but have you ever seen a really fat person puffing and sweating on a machine like a treadmill or an exercise bike, and putting so much effort into the exercise for as long as that poor person can keep it up, that you think this person might just well have a heart attack?
A simple question to ask is, “why is this person exercising like this?”. Seriously, what are they trying to achieve? What possible benefits could a person who is seriously overweight derive from subjecting themselves to an intense blast of cardio activity?
It’s not exactly politically correct to say this: but have you ever seen a really fat person doing bicep curls? What the hell are they doing?
The simple truth is that they don’t know what they are doing when it comes to exercise, and very few people deeply understand the purpose of exercise as a part of a total philosophical approach to their life.
At Nysteia, our highest values are for you to live a happy, healthy, longer life and have a body which is aesthetically pleasing to you. Everything that we are about, and all of the advice that we give you, is focused upon these values.
So, when we advocate the benefits of exercise, it is not with the view for you (for example) to run a 42km Olympic marathon - you may well want to do that, but it has nothing to do with living a happy healthy longer life. It is to do with you participating in an unusual physical activity, in this case marathon running, and attempting to achieve some type of personal goal within that physical activity. And if that is your thing, good for you!
Nysteia is a complete technology for your life. If you want to engage in certain sports, competitive physical activities, or even certain artistic or professional activities which require specific physical attributes unusual to that activity (maybe you want to be a professional Sumo wrestler, for example), then you are making a decision which may require you to think about deviating from the advice that we give you.
Someone who competes in long-distance cycling races, such as the Tour de France, may have a requirement of their body to have a particular ability to have a burst of energy in the final 100 metres of a 50 km bike race. That particular ability might be really important to that person, but it has absolutely nothing to do with their biological survival and well-being.
Nysteia is a philosophy and life technology designed to give you the best chance of living a healthy happy longer life, as long as you are living your life like a relatively “normal” person. If you are participating in extraordinary or specialised physical activities or sports, then you would likely have specialised eating and exercise routines which would be the common practices of your fraternity. Nysteia is for everyone, and we think it is the best way to live, but if you have specialised requirements because of your particular life activities or specific body composition, then you should combine what works for you from Nysteia with further research in your particular areas of interest.