I had literally written 1,500 words on the standard American diet and why it sucks and who is to blame when it came to me: this is dumb, get to the point your flowery bastard. So here we go.
Food:
- Eat whole, natural foods that can be easily identified as "food." That means lots of meats and lots of vegetables. Base every meal around these, the two most nutrient dense and valuable sources of food we have.
- Fat is not bad. In fact, fat is awesome, and its the most likely explanation for why we got here in the first place. Our ginormous brain, the one that allowed us to invent Sour Patch Kids and the McDouble, is largely due to an evolutionary diet that included tons and tons of nutritionally dense fat. Marrow. Organs. Yes, even other brains, allowed us to build our brains. Good fats from EVOO, butter, grass fed beef, cold water fish, avocados, and the like are the body's preferred source of energy, and a body that is adapted to deriving its energy from fat is a body that is more able to burn the fat it has already stored. Oh, and that's another thing - if our body didn't like fat, why would it store energy for later in a fatty form?
- Excluding the aforementioned vegetables, carbohydrates (sweets, refined grains, and fruits) are largely unnecessary and often deleterious to health. There is nothing that fruit gives us that veggies can't give us without the damaging sugars. Gluten from wheat, rye, barley is implicated in about 190 human diseases and I firmly believe, if nothing else, that it is really bad for me and is generally to be avoided. Starches like sweet potatoes, rice, and white potatoes have their use in restoring muscle glycogen for the very active among us. Other than that, the only reason to eat dense carbs is that you like them, which is fine, unless your goal is burning fat.
- Intermittent fasting can be beneficial for fat loss and general health, and three meals a day is arbitrary. We certainly didn't evolve over millions of years eating at defined intervals everyday. We progressed as a species eating a lot when we had a lot, and not at all when we had nothing. That's one argument for the body's super-efficient fat-storing procedure - we had pressing reasons to store our energy for later. Digestion is an intense, demanding process, one that consumes a great deal of calories itself. After a meal a great deal of the body's resources are consumed by the digestive process. As a result, digestion, though very important to our health, does divert resources from other bodily repair processes. By eating 3 meals a day (or six small meals, as was long recommended for weight loss) we are constantly digesting something, with no break. There are any number of fasting protocols - one 24 hour fast per week, only eating in an 8 hour window (skipping breakfast, eating lunch and dinner, generally my preference), or even eating in a 6 hour window (eating late lunch and dinner) - and all give the body a respite from the rigors of digestion and a chance to restore other tissues. There is also some evidence that fasting helps primates live longer and decreases the incidence of diseases as we age.
Sleep:
This one's pretty simple: sleep more. Sleep a lot. Sleep is awesome. In modern life, this is probably the most unappreciated facet of health. In the negotiation of life, we often take, and take, and take from our sleep - to get things done for work or for our kids, to watch the tv show we couldn't get to before, and sometimes just because we don't like going to bed. The problem with this is that sleep is truly one of the body's miracle drugs. Not only do our brain and tissues repair and recharge during sleep, but this is also when the body bathes in its highest levels of powerful hormones like human growth hormone and testosterone. These hormones burn fat and build muscle - very good things. Shortened or low quality sleep we don't get as strong of a hormone response, and thus we get lesser results. In fact, it is very possible that a person who is doing everything right except for their sleep may not get any results at all. We are generally told that we should get 6-8 hours per night for optimum health, and many people struggle to get the 6. However, in reality our general recommendations should probably be 8-10 hours per night, with flexibility based upon the time of year - in summer, when it's light more, sleep less. In winter, when it's dark more, sleep more.
Exercise:
In short, more is not more. Ok, there's an exception - walking. Walking is great for the mind and body, and instituting more walking into one's life is one of the easiest and most effective health changes any person can make. I try to walk at least an hour a day, in addition to any other purposely movement Exercise has long been portrayed as the cure-all for fat loss and health, when it very much is not. Exercise is a stress, a stress designed help your body cope with more stress. Take lifting weights, for instance: an intense weight-training session actually makes the utilized muscles weaker, in the short term. You have damaged them and it will take time for your body to repair and reinforce. The purpose of it all is that when the recovery process is complete, the muscles will be capable of better handling future stress. But even beneficial stress is still stress, and there comes a point where the detriment outweighs the benefit - oh hey there chronic cardio. Chronic, steady state cardio (jogging, ellipticals, stair climbers, etc.) of more than 20 minutes in duration has long been cast in the role as "fat burner," and it is true that this prolonged exercise is burning calories while you're exercising. The prolonged nature is also producing stress hormones like cortisol - which promotes fat storage - because the body itself, namely the sympathetic nervous system (fight or flight) doesn't know that the chronic exercise is just for fun. All the body knows is that it's having to do something really unpleasant for a really long time and likely running from something, so it has to engage the mechanisms to protect itself. Not only that, steady state cardio burns little to no calories after the exercise is complete and is really good at making you really hungry.
So what should the goal of exercise be, then? To me, you're looking for exercise that:
1. is intense enough to provoke an adaptation, while short enough that it doesn't overload the stress system.
2. burns calories during and after the actual exercise
3. is an efficient use of time
So what meets these requirements?
1. Weight training. Lifting heavy weights is not only provides an intense workout during the act, it also provides the most long term metabolic benefits. Damaging and rebuilding muscle means that your body will be burning more calories than normal for days after the actual workout. Muscle also has a high metabolic cost, which means that your body will burn more calories, require more calories, and can tolerate more calories. All good things in maintaining or losing body fat.
2. High Intensity Interval Training (aka Burst Training): these short "sprints" punctuated by rest can be running, stationary bike, rowing machine, or airdyne machine. The goal is to do a series of balls to the wall work, rest, go balls to the wall, rest. And balls to the wall doesn't mean try harder than normal, it means go as hard as you can. As a fatty, I generally do intervals on the stationary bike of 20 seconds of madness followed by about 80 seconds of rest, and repeat. If you don't feel like shit at the end you didn't do it right. In a very short amount of time you not only get a hell of a workout, you create an oxygen debt that your body has to repay for several hours afterward, which equals burning more calories long after you've left the gym. In fact, one of the most humbling things in the world is the tabata protocol: 20 seconds of all out work, 10 seconds of rest, then repeat for 8 sets. Yes, less than 5 minutes of work and it makes you seriously rearrange your live priorities.
And did I mention walking? Walking is about the second best thing you can do for yourself. The first? Sleep. Duh.
*jogging is also hell on the knees, killer on the feet (plantar fasciitis anybody?), and usually undertaken in sneakers that our feet, ankles, calves, and knees were not designed to utilize. Oh, and those who chronically job are more likely to have thickened heart walls and the bad things that you would expect to arise from thickened heart walls.
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