Sustainable Balance can now be found at:
www.sustainablebalance.ca
Well, although I told myself I would put up a few posts over the past year or so, grad school got the better of me and I never got around to it. I'm now going to finish the story from where I left off: Discovering evolutionary health and fitness ideas, and beginning to incorporate them.
I met some people during this time who also suffered from what I was starting to call "IBS" (irritable bowel syndrome), and the concept of gluten-free diets was introduced to me. Gluten - basically a protein present in some grains - was apparently quite allergenic to some people (celiacs) and resulted in several different symptoms ranging from an IBS symptoms to migraines to arthritis. Being something of a scientist, I wanted to test my own sensitivity to gluten. On the blog "Mark's Daily Apple" (by my now-hero, Mark Sisson), I found a post called "Why Grains are Unhealthy". It blew my mind that something so ingrained (ugh) and encouraged in our society could actually be causing health problems. I'll let you read the link for the details, but essentially the gluten, lectins, and phytates present in ALL grains (ESPECIALLY WHOLE GRAINS) makes them essentially pointless to consume. The only thing they're good for is providing your body with a smash of glucose along with allergens and anti-nutrients. Awesome. Mark also created a graph called the "Carbohydrate Curve", which was fairly in-line with what I already thought about carbohydrates: if you're going to limit one macronutrient, this is the one (my thoughts on this have changed somewhat as I don't think it applies to everyone uniformly, but for me it still pretty much does). Obviously, hefty portions of protein were part of his prescription. Mark also encouraged the consumption of natural fats for most of your energy, and the idea of becoming a "fat burner" (having a dominantly fat burning metabolism) as opposed to getting hooked on blasts of sugar every 2-3 hours. He also encouraged the consumption of heat-stable saturated fatty acids, and recommended limiting your polyunsaturated fat intake due to their propensity for becoming oxidized by relatively small amounts of heat and light (oxidized fats = bad). Industrial vegetable oils were thus eliminated as well (canola, corn, soybean, etc.) as he explained that they were responsible for a lot of body inflammation, and their introduction into indigenous cultures worldwide always preceded a rise in heart disease and obesity (along with the introduction of refined foods, of course).
So, as I was pretty low-carb already, I bought right into ditching grains entirely. I don't even know why I was hanging on (tastiness of some things, probably). Out went the toast, pizza, wraps, pitas, pasta, oatmeal, granola bars, cereal, corn products...and as it turned out: almost anything processed at all. My intake of meat, eggs, nuts, veggies, and fruits was already pretty high, but I increased the overall fat content by cooking in butter and my new favourite: coconut oil. I was slathering that stuff on! Then...interesting things started to happen. The first thing I noticed is that I started to sleep more soundly. I would sleep through the night (amazing for me), and wake up easily feeling pretty good. I would eat a big breakfast of bacon and eggs with veggies (no toast...maybe a bit of fruit), and then, to my amazement (after a while) EASILY MAKE IT TO LUNCH WITH NO HUNGER! At first I kept cramming down my mid-morning snacks (nuts and fruits) out of habit, before I realized I just didn't want it anymore! By lunch, I would be...hungry, but not starving. It was a light hunger, with no accompanying irritability or weakness, and it typically didn't happen for 4-5 hours after breakfast (breakfast at 7, hungry around noon). Then it was usually a salad with meat of some kind, and I would cruise until 4-5 pm, maybe have some nuts, then eat dinner at 6-7 (meat and veggies in coconut oil or butter). No more late-night snacking necessary, I was fine! My appetite was totally in control. I added up the calories (I now realize this is mostly pointless) and was well under maintenance calories, but felt no real hunger! I leaned out bigtime on this, all while not even working out that much (I was super busy with school, and pretty sick of working out at this time in my life). I felt great! Mark had written some posts about "intermittent fasting" (infrequent, short fasts usually not lasting longer than 24 hours) and their potential health benefits, so I decided to give it a shot.
I'm not going to go into detail on intermittent fasting, since its already been done by several more reputable authors, so I'll just provide a few links: 1. The Myriad Benefits of Intermittent Fasting, by Mark Sisson 2. Eat, Stop, Eat, by Brad Pilon (amazing book for the scientifically minded, and for the layman), and 3. Martin Berkhan's entire blog, Leangains. These guys basically all recommend a simple prescription for optimal health: Lots of good food, strength training, and the occasional short-term fast.
With my new-found energy, I wanted to get back into strength training, but balked at the idea of spending up to 10 hours a week in the gym, and being exhausted and starving all the time. Luckily, Mark Sisson also had some ideas for fitness training. His "Fitness Pyramid" involved a base of TONS of low-intensity exercise (this was exercise? Walking, light biking...exercise?), with a bit of QUALITY strength training, and at the top was the all-out effort that comes with sprint sets. So - I set up my new fitness "regimen" - two or three (third was optional!) total body strength training sessions (lasting about 40 mins each), and one "sprint day", where instead of traditional sprint sets, I played ultimate frisbee and sprinted my ass off.
Within 2 months, I was breaking all my old strength records (while weighing about 25 lbs less than before), running faster and jumping higher while playing ultimate, and almost never feeling overly exhausted or hungry. I felt and looked fantastic. I've been tinkering with the fitness routine for a couple of years now, and have it pretty minimalistic, but highly effective. I'm training about 2 hours a week now (training HARD, but not super often), and getting lots of light aerobic activity (I LOVE HIKING). Eating mostly fat for energy, lots of plants and animals, and little-to no grains or sugar (I'm pretty healed up now, so the odd bit doesn't kill me). I basically follow Martin Berkan's Leangains protocol (training fasted, eating in a somewhat flexible 8-hour window), am very strong for my weight, and keep seeing gains. Training doesn't take over my life anymore, and either does food. Granted, I train HARD and eat LOTS, but I feel very in control now. I listen to my body, and I know when I need to eat, or back off, or give 110%. And when I fall off the rails (ditch workouts, eat some crap) its so easy to get right back on. CLICK! I barely even think about it anymore...its natural. What I love about this is feeling as though my body is as optimized as I can get it without devoting all my free time. This allows me to stay fit and strong and healthy while having the time to explore more interesting topics such as science, psychology, philosophy,
There's more to this lifestyle. Optimizing sleep is important, as is getting sufficient sunlight (a lot of unfiltered too - no sunglasses or sunscreen). Its all part of the "primal/paleo" way of life. This isn't JUST a diet, its realizing that our bodies aren't designed for chronic stress (stress = too much exercise, shitty food, low-quality sleep, overwork), but for ACUTE stress followed by recovery periods. Now, in the modern world (where I'm something of a workaholic) this isn't always possible, so I have some methods of dealing with chronic stress that I've been using to stay somewhat primal in the modern world. I got through an intense graduate degree in engineering while holding to these principles, and feeling pretty good the whole time while working TONS under stressful deadlines.
That's the next post! Designing your regime. No excuses.
Friday, February 10, 2012
Sunday, January 30, 2011
Time to get started, again!
Sustainable Balance can now be found at:
www.sustainablebalance.ca
Hey readers (do I have any? haha),
www.sustainablebalance.ca
Hey readers (do I have any? haha),
Well, more than 7 months later I'm back at it. I've had the healthiest times of my life over the past while, and have been ridiculously busy with grad school and other commitments that have kept me from writing this blog despite really wanting to. No more messing around.
To start, I will continue the story of how I came to the level of health and fitness that I'm at now from where it left off: re-introducing meat into my diet and beginning to really focus on strength training.
This was the summer of 2004. For my diet, I was eating eggs+black beans and oatmeal/cereal for breakfast, tuna/turkey sandwiches for lunch, and chicken stir-fries for dinner with lots and lots of nuts and fruits for snacks. I was trying to eat as much as humanly possible for weight gain. In regards to my strength training, I started off with a simple 3 or 4 day split focusing only on the upper body (those mirror muscles yo!). Day 1 was chest and back. Day 2 was arms and shoulders. Days 3 and 4 would be the same as 1 and 2, respectively. If I didn't have time for day 4 (typically Friday, and some weekends I would leave town on Fridays and miss it), I would combine days 3 and 4 into one workout on day 3. For legs I figured biking would be good enough, so I committed to commuting around town almost entirely on a heavy-ish mountain bike. I saw huge results that summer. I went from a skinny, vegetarian, 140 pound waif (and virgin! haha) to a nicely proportioned, lean, muscular, 170 pound athlete (and, um, well you get the point)! It was great! I remember feeling awesome when I would go play sports like football (ones involving upper body strength). I could feel the new power within me, and it felt like each workout was a huge improvement upon the last. My confidence in everything I did was through the roof which was something I had never experienced. People I was meeting were looking at me in a way I had never felt. This was the summer that I became addicted to strength training (and the diet that typically accompanies it).
After that summer, I started to notice a plateau in my strength training. I HATED IT. I figured: "Well, if working out 3-4 days a week got me this far, why not shoot for 5-6?". I incorporated leg-based moves like squats and deadlifts into my training regime (I was told they would help me bust through the plateau) for my Days 5 and 6 (there was some rearrangement in the order, however). Now I was in the gym 1.5-2 hours a day (sometimes twice), 6 days a week along with playing sports up to 3x a week with friends (and dominating much more than I ever used to, it was sweet in that way). I started feeling hungry and exhausted all the time if I wasn't exercising! I compensated for this with a hugely increased intake of caffeine and food! I was pounding protein shakes halfway between my 2 hour workouts. Around this time I fell in love with 'The Abs Diet' promoted by Men's Health (I had purchased myself a subscription by this time). It promoted eating several smaller, protein packed meals throughout the day with a suggestion of 6 meals a day. Following this, and with all my training, I got up to almost 190 pounds by the time I was 20. Mostly chest and shoulders, I was noticeably big at this point, it was crazy. I loved it. I had never thought of myself as strong and powerful, and now couldn't stand the idea of being anything less than as big as I could possibly be. This is where "fitness" started to diverge quite rapidly from "health".
Along with my inflated muscles (and ego), I started becoming quite anxious all the time. I started suffering from inexplicable insomnia (I was so tired, but could NOT relax). My heart would be pounding SO LOUDLY in my eardrums at night that I would often get up and check the halls for people stomping around, only to realize that it was coming from inside of me! I was always starving, and almost every night I would wake up (if I could sleep that is) and need to go eat a snack before I could get back to sleep. A few times my dreams would involve hunger, and be so lucid that I would be in a dream state where I was just so ridiculously hungry that I would be devouring everything in sight (even some weird things, but I won't go there). When I woke up from these dreams my stomach would be aching with hunger (despite a monster bedtime snack) which would drive me to eat at crazy hours of the night. It got to the point where I assumed that this was normal for an "elite athlete" such as myself, and I would prepare food in advance for my nighttime awakenings. I literally would put plates of nuts, cheese, fruits, meats, etc. directly on my bedside table so I could wake up and just reach over and chomp away without having to open my eyes.
I definitely looked super buff (like, for real, I was bulging) during these days, and was putting up decent weight, but I was SO NERVOUS to not have food around (I actually carried nuts around with me at all times for like 3 years 'just in case', no joke). If I ever skipped a meal, I felt like HELL! My stomach would ROAR! I would be weak, and my mind would stop working until I got some food! Again, I chalked this up to being within the upper echelon of fitness, and figured it was normal 'for guys like me'. I was sleeping so poorly that I was taking up to 3 short naps a day. At night to relax, I would smoke copious amounts of marijuana just to get my mind to cool off and coax myself into sleeping. Though I also used these nights to eat an extraordinary amount of food (being high definitely helped, hahah - whole pizzas to myself!). To help me sleep, I sought out sleeping pills and took lots of melatonin in an effort to just get a good nights sleep. The doc gave me valium, and I took it more or less in secret for half a year. Sometimes I would avoid social situations just so I could stay home, blaze weed, and take valium, "for my health". I haven't mentioned the digestive issues I was having throughout these times, but perhaps you can imagine....the sheer volume was disgusting. Solids AND gases (and sometimes liquids!). Enough said.
This went on for about 4 years - until early 2009. There would be times where things weren't so bad (typically during times where I couldn't work out as much), but I would always "get back into it" by starting up these ridiculous training and eating schedules. I noticed as I got older that I couldn't keep the fat off the way I used to, and so I started in late 2009 I started really avoiding carbohydrates in an effort to stay lean while still eating huge amounts quite frequently. This was a guy who used to routinely eat a pound of grapes in front of the TV at night, who now was trying to eat no more than 1/2 a cup of berries at a time (for carbs anyway, the protein was still getting pounded back! - and plus I would sometimes completely binge on carbs - whole pizzas!). I started noticing that I wasn't starving every 2 hours anymore, and it freaked me out! I would compulsively eat with the same schedule I had for years, but I was never hungry anymore. I reduced my food intake as a result, but kept working out just as much. My lifting really suffered - I was getting weaker! I lost quite a bit of weight during this time - went down below 170! I definitely got leaner, but I was skinny and weak again! I was losing muscle in order to stay lean - I didn't understand what was happening to me. I was still really struggling with my sleeping whenever I would "go hard in the gym", and found that I wasn't recovering from my workouts, but guilt kept me from EVER skipping a workout even if I had barely slept and was still sore as fuck from a workout two days before. Guilt also kept me from EVER skipping a meal (or eating less at a meal) since "my metabolism would slow down" and I would "lose even more muscle!!!".
It was unsustainable. I was sleeping horribly. I was always recovering from workouts. If I ever went out drinking (and stayed up late and had fun, you know), I would feel the results for an entire week. My digestive system was crying out in pain every time I ate, but I didn't know how to NOT eat. I thought in order to be as healthy and strong as possible, I had to work out like crazy every day and eat huge amounts of protein (and everything else) to sustain myself, or I would get skinny and weak and be back where I started. I was completely confused. Everything I believed to be "healthy" was starting to kill me. That's actually how I felt.
During this "low-carb awakening" (haha), I started reading tons of blogs and stuff online. I was paying a ton of money for all sorts of supplements I thought would re-invigorate me and let me continue working out and eating as much as I thought I needed too (I was still suffering from massive guilt if I missed a workout or meal, no matter how I was feeling). Looking back now, it was all so stupid. One blog I found starting talking about evolutionary fitness and health (designing modern fitness routines around the lifestyles of our ancestors), and started talking about the dangers of overtraining and training improperly, and the benefits of "INTERMITTENT FASTING". FASTING? What?! How could NOT EATING ever be healthy? I was always so fucking hungry that I brushed this all off as craziness. The blog posted a recipe from another blog called "Marks Daily Apple". I clicked the link, and stayed up all night reading the entire site from top to bottom. This was late 2009, and I felt like a huge fucking light bulb had gone on in my head and I realized what was really to blame for all the health problems I was experiencing: IT WAS ME! I was doing it to myself. I didn't realize the degree of stress I had been putting on myself for over 5 years. "Fitness" and "health" had diverged so completely for me that I no longer had a handle on EITHER! This was a big revolution for me, and I started asking questions.
The first ones (and ones I'm trying to answer) were "Is it possible to be super fit and super healthy? What does that even mean? Is there such thing as a sustainable balance?"
Well, that's all for now. More to come (not 7 months this time, I promise!).
Thanks for reading,
G
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
Time to get started
Sustainable Balance can now be found at:
www.sustainablebalance.ca
I've definitely been finding it tricky to get going on this blog. At this point, I figured the best way to get going is to just get going. So this first post will be me trying to describe some sort of mission statement (I like things that sound epic) and reason for creating this blog. As I've said in my 'About me' section, I'd like to share my experiences in attaining a better, sustainable lifestyle that just flows! Topics I will be discussing, in any order on any given day, will be things like the following:
For my first post, I've decided to lay out my thoughts on health and nutrition/fitness. I've always found myself interested in attaining the best health possible. I think this stems from watching family members suffer through health problems, and also hearing from my mother about how my grandfather dropped dead at age 50 (long before I was born) of a heart attack despite being a doctor, and never smoking a day in his life (in Brantford, he was one of the first doctors to openly oppose tobacco smoking). My uncles on my mother's side also have struggled with their health, and in different ways. One of them is quite obese, and has been in and out of the hospital for various problems my entire existence (granted, this uncle is adopted, but still). The other, of whom I bear a striking resemblance, has been on blood pressure/cholesterol medication since his mid-2o's. He has always smirked that its only a matter of time until I'd be in his shoes. I'm here to prove him wrong.
As a kid, I ate what pretty much all north american kids ate. Breakfast cereals, granola bars, bread, pasta, bagels, cookies, donuts...along with meat, eggs, and fruits and vegetables, but these were rarely the centrepiece of my diet. I did eat a ton of fruit whenever I got the chance, but generally candy/pop was a much easier way to get my sugar fix, so I went with that. I was never a super-athletic kid, but never the last picked either. Just sort of physically mediocre, but nothing embarrassing. I was thin, but with a nice layer around the midsection and butt that I never managed to get rid off until I was quite a bit older.
In my mid-teens, I quit gym class (I think after grade 10), and became quite sedentary after that. By 16, I was completely out-of-shape. Again, not hugely fat exactly, but soft and weak. I looked fine with my shirt on (for a skinny, malnourished 16 year old), but was pretty tentative to take it off. I was eating cereal/toast/granola bars for breakfast most days, followed up by pizza at lunch, chips and pop in the afternoon, and usually a fairly decent meal prepared at home for dinner (probably my saving grace). I remember being tired a LOT, being sore for days after exercising, always being famished at meals, and quite often constipated! (Caring is sharing friends!).
I began to work out, and saw an improvement in energy levels and body composition. It was mostly running, but also some resistance training (pushups and bicep curls getting most of my attention). I didn't change my diet at all (why would I? haha) and plateaued fairly quickly while still not being happy with the situation. I began researching nutrition as a hobby, and as I had moved to Victoria, BC by then, became involved with some hippies that lead me to believe that going vegetarian would vault me into the upper echelon of health, fitness, and longevity.
I did that for 2 years! Until I was 19. Did some more resistance training (added chinups to the mix, as I was then actually capable of completing one!), and kept up with the running of about an hour 3x a week. I became super light (at 6'2", I was about 140 lbs), but still had that soft stuff around the midsection, and still was tired a lot! I took a look at my diet and compared it to how I used to eat. I was eating: Breakfast cereals, bread, bagels, soy milk, fruits and vegetables, occasionally eggs, but NO MEAT. I was eating nuts and beans quite often for protein, but found I could never eat enough to be satisfied. Also lots of the usual stuff like pasta, granola bars, muffins, cookies, pizza, etc...BEER!
It wasn't that different from eating a junk-food diet, except with no meat, and more nuts/beans. I ate more or less the same amount of fruits and vegetables (which was a respectable amount, or so I thought at the time). Despite exercising and eating well (or so I thought), I was gassy and bloated a TON, tired a LOT, depressed quite often, and still skinny and weak! I made the decision that hippies were stupid, and decided to start pumping some iron and eating meat again. This began my bodybuilding phase (I now realize that's what it was) that lasted about four or five years.
I'll save that for the next post, as I now have work to do, but those were the years where I definitely went a little overboard in the name of health while simultaneously destroying it at regular intervals. Haha - I can't WAIT to rant about that!
Until next time,
G
www.sustainablebalance.ca
I've definitely been finding it tricky to get going on this blog. At this point, I figured the best way to get going is to just get going. So this first post will be me trying to describe some sort of mission statement (I like things that sound epic) and reason for creating this blog. As I've said in my 'About me' section, I'd like to share my experiences in attaining a better, sustainable lifestyle that just flows! Topics I will be discussing, in any order on any given day, will be things like the following:
- Health
- Nutrition
- Fitness
- Food/Cooking
- Agricultural practices
- Ecology
- Sustainable Energy (I find this is mostly engineering related stuff)
- General Science (Most disciplines)
- Metascience (haha, sometimes...)
- Philosophy
- Music
- etc...
For my first post, I've decided to lay out my thoughts on health and nutrition/fitness. I've always found myself interested in attaining the best health possible. I think this stems from watching family members suffer through health problems, and also hearing from my mother about how my grandfather dropped dead at age 50 (long before I was born) of a heart attack despite being a doctor, and never smoking a day in his life (in Brantford, he was one of the first doctors to openly oppose tobacco smoking). My uncles on my mother's side also have struggled with their health, and in different ways. One of them is quite obese, and has been in and out of the hospital for various problems my entire existence (granted, this uncle is adopted, but still). The other, of whom I bear a striking resemblance, has been on blood pressure/cholesterol medication since his mid-2o's. He has always smirked that its only a matter of time until I'd be in his shoes. I'm here to prove him wrong.
As a kid, I ate what pretty much all north american kids ate. Breakfast cereals, granola bars, bread, pasta, bagels, cookies, donuts...along with meat, eggs, and fruits and vegetables, but these were rarely the centrepiece of my diet. I did eat a ton of fruit whenever I got the chance, but generally candy/pop was a much easier way to get my sugar fix, so I went with that. I was never a super-athletic kid, but never the last picked either. Just sort of physically mediocre, but nothing embarrassing. I was thin, but with a nice layer around the midsection and butt that I never managed to get rid off until I was quite a bit older.
In my mid-teens, I quit gym class (I think after grade 10), and became quite sedentary after that. By 16, I was completely out-of-shape. Again, not hugely fat exactly, but soft and weak. I looked fine with my shirt on (for a skinny, malnourished 16 year old), but was pretty tentative to take it off. I was eating cereal/toast/granola bars for breakfast most days, followed up by pizza at lunch, chips and pop in the afternoon, and usually a fairly decent meal prepared at home for dinner (probably my saving grace). I remember being tired a LOT, being sore for days after exercising, always being famished at meals, and quite often constipated! (Caring is sharing friends!).
I began to work out, and saw an improvement in energy levels and body composition. It was mostly running, but also some resistance training (pushups and bicep curls getting most of my attention). I didn't change my diet at all (why would I? haha) and plateaued fairly quickly while still not being happy with the situation. I began researching nutrition as a hobby, and as I had moved to Victoria, BC by then, became involved with some hippies that lead me to believe that going vegetarian would vault me into the upper echelon of health, fitness, and longevity.
I did that for 2 years! Until I was 19. Did some more resistance training (added chinups to the mix, as I was then actually capable of completing one!), and kept up with the running of about an hour 3x a week. I became super light (at 6'2", I was about 140 lbs), but still had that soft stuff around the midsection, and still was tired a lot! I took a look at my diet and compared it to how I used to eat. I was eating: Breakfast cereals, bread, bagels, soy milk, fruits and vegetables, occasionally eggs, but NO MEAT. I was eating nuts and beans quite often for protein, but found I could never eat enough to be satisfied. Also lots of the usual stuff like pasta, granola bars, muffins, cookies, pizza, etc...BEER!
It wasn't that different from eating a junk-food diet, except with no meat, and more nuts/beans. I ate more or less the same amount of fruits and vegetables (which was a respectable amount, or so I thought at the time). Despite exercising and eating well (or so I thought), I was gassy and bloated a TON, tired a LOT, depressed quite often, and still skinny and weak! I made the decision that hippies were stupid, and decided to start pumping some iron and eating meat again. This began my bodybuilding phase (I now realize that's what it was) that lasted about four or five years.
I'll save that for the next post, as I now have work to do, but those were the years where I definitely went a little overboard in the name of health while simultaneously destroying it at regular intervals. Haha - I can't WAIT to rant about that!
Until next time,
G
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