This is part 1 of a 3 part series which will focus on the often neglected but most important aspect of being an Uber driver which is your health.
I have been meaning to write about this topic for a while and coincidentally I have recently noticed a lot of chatter online about the declining health of rideshare drivers which prompted me to finally get pen to paper… or fingers to keyboard.
Since beginning my journey of becoming a private hire driver I have immersed myself in the whole game to learn and understand every aspect of it.
My life long passion though has always been health and fitness so I can talk on the matter with a bit of authority. I have a degree in health and fitness, I am a qualified gym instructor and sports massage therapist, have been in and out of gyms for over 20 years and have trained martial arts for over half my life so I know a thing or two about being in shape.
Why do so Many Rideshare Drivers Neglect their Health
I know it is very easy to neglect your health as an Uber driver as you knuckle down in your work to earn as much money as you can. The problem is, that a decline in health is never an overnight thing. It’s always an accumulation of bad health decisions which snowball over time into serious health issues which when they come apparent, are so far gone that it is extremely difficult or many times impossible to fully recover.
This subject is a really complex one with a plethora of reasons why people allow their health to decline. One of the main reasons people fail to keep their health in order I believe is education, or lack off.
Most people I encounter are oblivious to the fact that we travel around this world in this complex organism which is made up of millions of cells which individually have their own intricate systems which combine together to allow the human body to function and keep us alive. We take it for granted that we exist. Like it’s just a given. We are born. We live and then we die. Fair enough, that is one option to take but who wants to lay in an early grave and endure pain and suffering for years before that day comes.
Surely the goal is to live a healthy, wholesome life where we reach retirement age in tip top shape ready to enjoy the back end of our journey.
Call me crazy, but that has always been my ultimate goal, but unfortunately I find that im in the minority. The majority of people are tunnel visioned. They wake up, go to work and come home and they repeat this process for decades never jumping of the rat wheel they find themselves aimlessly running on.
Maybe they just don’t care about their health, maybe they just don’t realise the importance, maybe they have an idea of what they need to do but are creatures of habit and can never stick to a plan. Maybe they have given a health plan a few attempts but have seen how hard it is and finally given up. Maybe though, with a bit of education they can have a simple framework to work with. A few basic principles that they can follow to give them a better chance of a healthy life.
I do get it though. Who doesn’t wants stacks of cash? Not that I’m saying you’ll be balling doing rideshare but there’s people out there putting serious hours in and making serious money. But what’s the point of redlining your body to earn all this money when after a few weeks your body is going to crash if you haven’t crashed your car already. Working 70 hours a week as an Uber driver is not sustainable. Yes it can be done now and then, if you have a goal you want to hit, but you can’t do it week in week out. I understand some people are workaholics and that’s all they know. But you need to find a balance.
Driving for uber or any other rideshare company is a marathon not a race. It’s the classic story of the hair and the turtle. I know it’s a cliche but it’s true.
You need to find the right balance that’s going to allow you to consistently earn the money you need to earn, that’s going to allow you the appropriate amount of sleep a night, that’s going to cause you a manageable amount of stress and is going to allow you to concentrate on your health and fitness. If you can tick all those boxes you will be in a good place. If occasionally you want to go hard to pay for the upcoming holiday or for a down payment for a new car, then by all means go for it with the understanding that it is only short term and you will soon be back to your realistic schedule.
When you work a typical 9-5 job you have your contracted hours and a fixed amount of money you will earn for those hours. As a private hire driver you have the freedom to work as many hours as you want, and the more hours you put in, the money you will make. This can be a blessing and a curse. You see, the allure of earning as much money as we can every week is a strong one, but we have to remind ourselves that it is not sustainable and in fact will cost us in the long run. There is no running away from it.
So I guess the first part of getting your health in order as a private hire driver is understanding and accepting the idea that this is a marathon not a race. If we can understand the fact that we have to find a consistent pace that is sustainable for a very long time, then we’re off to a great start. If we’ve put in a bunch of extra hours one week and earned a lot more money that we usually do, it is very easy to start thinking that you can do that every week. You just need to acknowledge the fact that it’s not going to happen every week for the reasons already discussed. You will burn the candle at both ends which will have a detrimental effect or your long term earnings and health. The problem with trying to sustain a crazy workload week in week out is that it becomes your sole focus. There is no room or energy for anything else so inevitably your health takes a back seat.
Unfortunately, health isn’t just one thing that you can do or take everyday to make you healthy. It is a combination of many things you do throughout your day that require time, effort and energy. You really do need a good balance because each aspect has a knock on effect to your overall health. If your going to maintain the right amount of air in three tyres and slowly allow the 4th tyre to go flat and continue to drive on it, you’ll then end up having further issues like damaging your suspension and compromising the safety of the whole vehicle. All four tyres need to be pumped to the same PSI for it to run smoothly.
In this series, I’m going to break down health into 3 elements. Diet, physical fitness and sleep.
Diet
The first aspect of health I will talk about is diet. The subject of diet is a minefield full of contradicting information, ideas and beliefs.
Most people are dogmatic in their approach to diet and believe that there method is the correct and only method, but that is a very narrow sighted way of thinking. As we have mentioned the body is a complex network of cells completely individual to each human being just like our fingerprints are. What works for you is not necessarily going to work for the next person. I mean the fact that there a people that can’t drink milk or will die if the ate a peanut highlights how different our bodies are. Going back to the car analogy, it’s the equivalent of you filling up a diesel car with petrol. Some people’s body are alkaline and others,acidic. Some people work well with carbs and others carbs are a real problem that cause chronic inflammation.
If we all had the necessary dietary knowledge the majority of disease in the western world would be eradicated. The problem is that we are not taught any of this in school. In fact, I wasn’t taught any of this at university so how do we expect your average Joe driving for Uber to have any understanding of the body’s dietary requirements.
You will have to have a keen interest in the subject to be able to delve into it and study in your free time. And let’s say you did go down the rabbit hole and found out a bunch of interesting information that you will implement into your diet. Then who’s to say that that is the correct approach for your body type.
You can see how complex the subject really is. It could take you a life time and a doctorate and you will still not have a full understanding on diet and the body. Even though I find the subject fascinating and continue to do my own study on the subject, I have realised, just like anything in life that you have to keep it simple. If you over complicate things and make them too hard and unachievable it will not work. If you set yourself a complex diet that requires too much planning and is full of restrictions, you will lose a bit of weight in the beginning but you will soon give up and put the weight back on again. It’s no different to working 70 hours one week and making a lot of money. You won’t be able to keep it up and then you’ll end up working less the following weeks to recover. Your diet has to simple and sustainable and require no effort.
What is a Good Diet For an Uber Driver?
The best diet is ultimately the one that you can stick to and the one right way is the method that works for you. Whatever that is you just need to follow a few basic principles.
I’m sure you’ve heard the term eating clean.
It basically means eating as much earth grown food as you can. More Whole foods such as vegetables, healthy proteins and fats.
For many years we were led to believe that fats make you fat but in fact healthy fats from avocados and coconut oil for example have many health benefits and are a great source of slow release energy.
Vegetables are jammed packed full of essential vitamins and minerals along with phytonutrients and are high in fibre. Fibre is important to maintain a healthy gut microbiome, keep you regular and is a great way of keeping you fuller for longer.
Protein is an important building block of muscle, bones, cartilage, blood and is responsible for repairing tissue.It also plays a vital role in enzyme and hormone production.
Carbohydrates aren’t the enemy that they are portrayed to be. It’s just that they are overused and make up too much of the western diet. If you are living a sedentary life, driving 10 hours a day and not exercising, then eating too many carbs can be a problem. If you live an active life, work out most days and use carbs as fuel and recovery then carbs can be your friend. If you stick to the idea of earning your carbs then you’ll be on the right track.
Finally, a big one is to drink more water. I cant stress this enough. Water keeps every cell in you body hydrated from your muscles to your brain. It gives you energy and keeps your alert and has been proven to help you lose weight by increasing your basal metabolic rate and keeping you fuller for longer. I advise drivers to have a bottle of water in the car at all times and should look to drink at a minimum 1 Ltr of water a day but ideally 2 Ltr’s.
Obviously the downside to this is that you will next an extra couple of toilet breaks but the positives clearly outweigh the negatives. If anything, these extra toilet breaks will also force you out of the car to move your legs and get your blood circulating as you go too and from the toilet.
Things to avoid are fast food and pre packaged food as they are usually highly processed and high in saturated fats, sugar and salt. The easiest way to reduce your calorie intake is cutting out liquid calories like juices and sodas as they are very high in sugar.
Now these are all very basic principles that we can follow. Eat clean food, cut out or reduce processed/fast food, cut out sugar and drink loads of water. But even these are hard to follow, especially as a private hire driver. Trying to find a well balanced healthy meal on the go day in day is very difficult.
Intermittent Fasting for Drivers
Around 2016 I discovered intermittent fasting which I continue to do this day. Following an IF protocol allowed me to simplify my diet even further which has meant that I have been able to easily stick to it for over 3 years.
I’m not particularly strict with my diet but I’ve religiously stuck to a specific window of eating for the last few years, and it has completely transformed my body and the way I think about food.
The basic principle is that you eat and drink all your calories in an 8 hour window and fast for the remaining 16 hours, hence why this protocol is commonly referred to as the 16/8 method.
After a few months of experimenting with how long I should fast and what time I should break the fast, I finally settled for having breakfast at 11am and having my last meal no later than 7pm. It is a very simple way of controlling your calorie intake as you are only eating within an 8 hour window.
But breakfast is the most important meal of the day we were told.
I can confidently tell you that this is not the case and that we have more than enough energy stored in our body to get us through the morning. Why would you want to add more fuel that your going to have to burn off when you can burn the fuel you already have stored up.
It’s completely counterproductive especially when your looking to get lean by burning those excess stored calories.
Stopping your calorie consumption at a certain time every night is another great way of controlling excess calorie consumption from late night binging. When your driving through the night or sitting on the couch in front of the TV, there’s only one thing your going to binge on and it’s not going to be a salad. It’s going to be refined carbohydrates, sugars and hydrogenated fats found in chips, cookies, sweets and cakes.
We are all guilty of this for many reasons.
Boredom, habit, cravings etc…
If you stick with time restricted eating, I assure you that you will have more energy, feel less hungry, have your cravings under control along with a whole host of positive health benefits that intermittent fasting will bring.
One branch of intermittent fasting which is what I follow is Time Restricted Eating which focuses more on when you eat and not necessarily what you eat.
Recurring naturally on a 24 hour cycle, every cell in the human body follows a circadian rhythm which governs when a cell is most metabolically active, when hormones are produced, when repair process are activated and more.
What are the Benefits of Time Restricted Eating
Restricting food to a certain time period of 8-12 hours allows the body to self repair itself overnight leading to many health benefits.
- Improved sleep
- Improved brain function and lower risk of dementia
- Stronger cardiovascular system
- Improved heart health
- Better management of blood sugar levels and lower risk of developing diabetes
- Improved control over appetite hormones including leptin and ghrelin
- Improved lean muscle mass
- Reduced inflammation
- Reduced risk of cancer
Studies have found that mice fed a high fat, high sugar diet gained 21% more body weight than mice on the same diet who were strictly fed their calories within a 9 hour window.
These studies have been replicated countless of times on mice and show the importance of only consuming calories within a certain window.
The reason I believe private hire drivers should follow some type of time restricted eating is because erratic late night eating patterns common in drivers who work through the night has also been shown to have serious health implications.
Random eating patterns shown in shift workers indicates a large percentage that suffer highly with gastrointestinal problems, cardiovascular disease, obesity and diabetes.
So much so that the number one killer among firefighters isn’t actually fighting fire but cardiovascular diseases as a result of their eating patterns.
There is also a mountain of evidence connecting shift work with all kinds of cancers. The World Health Organisation has even gone as far as to classify shift work as carcinogenic stating: “shift work that involves circadian disruption is probably carcinogenic to humans”.
This should be a real eye opener to any private hire driver working through the night.
How an Uber Driver Can Benefit from Intermittent Fasting
Let’s take the scenario of a fictional driver I’m going to call Bob who works night shifts.
Bob starts his shift at 7 pm and finishes at 4 Am. Half way through his shift bob stops at a McDonald to use the toilet and get something quick to eat. Bob picks up a Big Mac, fries and a Coke to wash it all down. The time is 12 midnight and bob is stuffing his face with more than half his daily calorie allowance and all of his daily fat allowance in 1 sitting. To make the matter worse, bob is forcing his body to process these calories when it’s digestive enzymes and metabolism are at their lowest. His body is also using vital resources to digest food when it should instead be repairing damaged cells and fighting of disease. Bob then gets back in his car and drives for another 4 hours before he calls it a night. 4 am and bob is now at home but he cant fall asleep straight away. He does what he habitually does every day and goes straight to the fridge or the biscuit tin to have a rewarding snack after a hard nights work. His body has just finished processing the food from a few hours ago and then bob decides to ramp it all up again because he wanted a few minutes of mouth pleasure before bed. Bob eventually false asleep at 5am and wakes up 6 hours later at 11am. Bob goes straight for the kettle and makes a tea with sugar and soon after has some toast and jam. He then proceeds to snack all day and doesn’t have a big meal before he starts his shift. This is a typical day for bob which has led to him putting on a considerable amount of weight since he started as private hire driver. Bob is also finding that he gets short of breath easily, his energy levels are low, he is constantly feeling tired and his lower back is chronically in pain. These are just obvious issues that bob is picking up on. Who knows the minefield he would uncover if he went and got his blood work done.
Now if bob followed some form of intermittent fasting he’d be a much healthier, happier and leaner private hire driver and all he would have to do is change one thing. The time he ate his food.
If we take the same scenario, bob starts his shift as usual at 7 pm. An hour before he heads out to start his shift, bob sits down with his family to have a home cooked meal. This is the last thing bob will eat till tomorrow so he eats a good amount of food till he’s full. Bob works from 7 pm to 4 am and doesn’t eat or drink anything apart from water. Because Bobs body has adapted to the Intermittent fasting his body is now using fats as fuel which means he no longer gets sugar cravings while driving. He no longer has that nagging hunger pang of food being continuously on his his mind and he isn’t feeling the large dips in energy he used to. In fact he is full on energy and fully focused while he is driving. At 4 am when bob gets home he is no longer snacking. He goes straight to bed and has a great night sleep. Bob wakes up at 11 am and drinks 2 glasses of water and has a black coffee and porridge at 12. Between his breakfast at 12 and his dinner 6, bob has a healthy lunch and rarely snacks in between.
In the first scenario, bob has no control over his food intake. He is consuming food for 18 hours a day unconsciously controlled by habit and food cravings. His daily calorie intake greatly outweighs his energy expenditure forcing his body to store the excess energy as fat. His digestive system is always working which In turn doesn’t allow the body clock to tick to its own beat as it is designed to do.
In the second scenario Bob is the captain of his own ship. He controls what he eats and when. This has drastically reduced his calorie intake and topped the balance in his favour. Bobs calorie intake is now lower than his expenditure meaning that he now in a calorie deficit and losing weight. He is now greatly reduced the amount of hours he is consuming calories from 18 hours to 6. Bob now instead fasts for 18 hours a day and allows his body to function optimally.
With some basic knowledge and understanding of how the body works and a simple framework in the form of intermittent fasting, Bob has transformed his health. He is no longer an overweight Uber driver who is always tired. He is now slim, healthy and full of energy. Bob has managed to turn his health around and feels great for it, but he still gets a sore back now and then and wants to address his physical conditioning and fitness.
Read part 2 where we delve into an effective training regime for a busy private hire driver.
