Is it more important to have a balanced diet or a regular schedule?

There is no absolute priority between the two. The essence is a synergistic relationship that affects each other. Which one is more important depends entirely on your current life status and health shortcomings. Don’t be misled by black-and-white debates online. When it comes to health benefits, it’s never a multiple-choice question.

If you often attend fitness forums, you must have seen the saying that "three points of weight loss depends on exercise and seven points depends on eating." Many people directly put the weight of "eating" to the highest level, thinking that as long as the calories are accurate and the protein, carbohydrate, and fat ratio is accurate enough, even if you stay up late every day, you will not delay building muscle and fat. I met Akai, a blogger who makes fitness content in the past two years. When I was cleaning up for the season last year, chicken breasts were weighed by grams, brown rice was steamed in advance, packaged and frozen in the refrigerator. Even the broccoli I ate was measured with food scales. The dietary standards can be directly used as a textbook template. But at that time, he had to catch up on daily updates, cut videos until two or three o'clock every day, get up and do strength training after five hours of sleep. He persisted for two months, but his body fat rate did not drop to the target value. The uric acid in the physical examination soared to 580, and one-third of the bangs on his forehead fell off. He went to the nutrition department, and the doctor's first sentence was "Adjust your work and rest first, otherwise it will be useless no matter how standard you eat."

Why? To put it bluntly, your metabolic system follows the circadian rhythm. If your work and rest are disordered for a long time, leptin secretion will decrease and ghrelin will increase. Even if you know intellectually that you need to eat enough vegetable protein, you will physically be tempted to eat high-sugar and oily foods. Insulin sensitivity will also decrease, and the utilization rate of the nutrients you eat will be greatly reduced. Protein cannot be synthesized into muscles, and all excess calories will be piled up as visceral fat. No matter how balanced you eat, it will be half the effort with half the effort.

On the other hand, my mother’s generation, which believes in “getting enough sleep is better than anything else”, is prone to failure in diet. My mother has been going to bed at ten o'clock and going to bed at six o'clock for almost ten years. She has a regular schedule that can be used as a human alarm clock. She can always manage to eat. She eats plain porridge with pickled radish, and occasionally stir-fries with less oil and salt. She said that "lighter food is good for the body." Last year, she was diagnosed with anemia and low bone density during a physical examination. The doctor said that her intake of high-quality protein and calcium was seriously insufficient. No matter how regular her schedule was, her body did not have enough raw materials to repair damaged cells, so problems would still arise.

This principle is actually not difficult to understand. You think of your body as a small supermarket opened in the community. Your work and rest are fixed opening and closing times, and your food is what you buy. If you open the door at random times, you may open it this morning and open it tomorrow afternoon. If regular customers don’t know the time and don’t come, no matter how good the goods are, they will lose their hands. ； But if all you buy are defective products, no matter how punctual the opening is, no one will come to buy, and the business will still fail.

I have talked about this topic with a general practitioner I am familiar with before. He said that in clinical practice, patients are rarely asked to choose one from the other. Most of the time, priorities are adjusted based on the patient's actual situation. For example, if you meet students who are finishing their studies or people on the Internet who are working on projects, it is true that they have stayed up late in the past month or two, so they must first prioritize a balanced diet. Don’t just eat instant noodles with cola, and supplement with more high-quality protein, B vitamins and Omega3, which can minimize the metabolic damage caused by staying up late. ； If you pay attention to your meals on weekdays and eat enough meat and vegetables, but your sleep time fluctuates by three or four hours, and you go to bed at 12 o'clock on weekdays and stay up until 4 o'clock on weekends, then the benefits of adjusting your work and rest first will definitely be higher - don't believe it, I was like this in the past few years.

Of course, some people say, what should I do if I can’t take care of both of them? The advice he gave was also very practical: Don’t set yourself “both want and need” goals right from the beginning, and change whichever one is easier to change first. For example, if you work overtime until ten o'clock every day and have no energy to cook at all, then fix your bedtime first. Even if you don't eat well, it is better than having day and night reversed. ； If you live in a place where there are many takeaway options and you can easily buy light snacks and home-cooked meals, then first change the habit of eating fried skewers and milk tea. Even if you don't get enough sleep for the time being, you can stabilize your blood sugar first.

To be honest, when we struggle with this issue, we essentially want to find the "most cost-effective way to maintain health", but there is never a standard answer to health, and there is no need to argue. Make up for whatever you're lacking, and do whatever you can do first. It's better than standing still and wondering "which one is more important." After all, what we want is to be comfortable, not to beat the online debate contestants, right?