Jillian Michaels’ 12-hour rule: A guide to healthier headspace | Big Think

Jillian Michaels’ 12-hour rule: A guide to healthier headspace

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Getting older is inevitable. But with diet, exercise, and some insight into how the human body works, you can do your best to keep your body from aging prematurely.

Meal timing, combined with 12 hours of fasting, can actually do more for your body than you might realize. Did you know stress can literally alter your DNA? And did you know that biological ways to combat the stress can even be passed down to your kids?

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JILLIAN MICHAELS:

Jillian Michaels is a fitness expert and wellness coach with over 20 years experience, and is a New York Times bestselling author of numerous books including Master Your Metabolism, Unlimited: How to Build an Exceptional Life, and her most recent

The 6 Keys: Unlock Your Genetic Potential for Ageless Strength, Health, and Beauty. Jillian's passion for fitness training originates from 17 years of martial arts practice in Muay Thai and Akarui-Do, in which she holds a black belt. Her first comprehensive 90-day weight loss system, Jillian Michaels Body Revolution, is available in retail stores across North America, and JILLIAN MICHAELS BODYSHRED, an intense group fitness class based on Jillian's highly-effective 3-2-1 interval system, is taught worldwide.

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TRANSCRIPT:

JILLIAN MICHAELS: Aging is a subject matter that for no good reason seems to be shrouded in all kinds of mystery. And the reality is that there is nothing in our genes that tells us to age or tells us to die. So we naturally have to ask then why do we? And it appears that there are six hallmarks of aging, six body processes that are responsible for how we age and they can work for us or they can work against us. And how we live is what determines the outcome of those results.

So the first key, this is kind of how we've listed them, myself and my cool author Myatt Murphy who is fantastic, is stress, stress adaptation. So when we think of stress we often think stress is evil, stress is the devil, it's so bad, but in reality stress is designed to make us stronger, whether it's emotionally or physically, like we can be literal here. Somebody has osteoporosis or osteopenia, their bone density is becoming compromised with old age. Well, why do we recommend working out, in particular with weights? The idea is that stress is an injury, we're injuring the muscles, we're enjoying the bones, stress with regard to fitness in this particular case, and it creates these little micro fissures in the bone. Well of the body, we jump to our second key, which is inflammation, has an inflammatory response, sends in bone cells and says all right whoa we've got to heal this, we've got to get all this back together. The bone remodels and becomes more dense. So again, stress when properly managed, be it emotional or physical, is designed to either make you wiser, smarter, stronger, more depth, more empathy or your bones become more dense, your muscles become leaner and stronger.

And when you look at all of the amazing things that our body does to adapt to stress you see that it's there to make you better. The second being inflammation. So without inflammation you couldn't cure the common cold. However, when information becomes chronic, just like stress you've got this little army of white blood cells are like we've got to go to war with somebody, well when the key of inflammation becomes ongoing and chronic it starts to attack healthy tissue. This is when you get into issues like rheumatoid arthritis, for example, a perfect example. Another big one is metabolism.

We're looking at a body process in particular called autophagy. So autophagy is really where our body goes in and culls dead cells. It's like the garbage trucks come in, they break down the old and they rebuild the new. When we're eating constantly, so food timing is very important, and not only that but how much we eat is very important. So when we consume food we've got to break it down, we oxidize the food, which creates oxidative stress. So okay the less food we eat, within reason we're not trying to starve ourselves, but we also don't want to eat too much food and we put this in a place of what I call calorie restriction. So calorie surplus you're at a healthy weight and you're eating more than you burn in a day, that's too much food we need to restrict that and match calories in with calories out so it's the simple law of thermodynamics. And unless you have weight to lose we don't want to get...

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