Good morning friends,
I hope everyone is settling into the new year. It's not even the middle of the month yet, so you better not be slipping on your health and fitness goals already!!!!
So this post is going to be about fitness. Prior to this out had been all about nutrition - and with that basically just all about intermittent fasting. As a related side note, I'm well into this IF protocol experiment and so far it's going well. I can say that eating within the time alloted hours each day is actually really good for me psychologically. I don't have to be a slave to my food, eating every 2 hours etc. I just start eating at 10am and as long as my caloric intake is met by 6pm, I'm setting zero parameters beyond that. It's actually really satisfying. There have admittedly been 2 days where the hunger got to be rough after 6pm and this was my own fault as I did not effectively reach my caloric goal for the day. In these 2 cases, I allowed myself to eat after the end time to prevent an all our binge fest! And much to my shock and disappointment, eating after the end time did not make me turn into a Gremlin! Secretly, I was hoping it would!!!!
So to get back on focus here so this doesn't turn into another nutrition post, I'll digress for now. But will be doing a post soon on the IF protocol and how it is going.
With regards to today, step back for a second and close your eyes. Imagine 2 things while your eyes are closed. First picture a yoga studio while a class is in session. Imagine the atmosphere in the class. Think about the participants in this class. Focus your attention there. What does the average person in that class look like? Now that you have that in mind, imagine a heavyweight bodybuilder. His or her primary goal is symmetry in every aspect of the body. But the other primary focus is muscle hypertrophy or muscle size in other words.
When picturing both of these fitness themed trades, let's call them, at first glance they would seem to be conflicting forces of nature right? To effectively encourage hypertrophy of your muscles, it requires picking up lots of heavy shit and putting it back down then repeating and repeating again and then once you've done that, you repeat it some more. The mentality that it takes for this sort of aggressive behavior seems absolutely counterintuitive to the zen like approach of sitting quietly and meditating then going through a series of stretches and movements known as a flow. Even that word is tranquil. It makes me think of waterfalls and nature and it calms me to think of that.
But what if I told you that you could combine the two approaches and it would encourage hypertrophy and even body fat reduction (which can be used as an optical illusion to make you seem even more buff than you actually are!!!). Does that sound like something you'd be interested in?..... Good, let's dive into this than.
First a disclaimer, if hypertrophy isn't your goal this article could still give you some insight on how yoga can be beneficial for you just in general if enjoy lifting weights as well so feel free to keep reading!!!!
As I mentioned earlier, hypertrophy is simply the increase in cell size in a particular organ. In this case, we are talking about skeletal muscle as the organ. We all know how that aspect of training works. You lift heavy, eat lots of protein and lots of calories overall, get plenty of sleep to encourage overnight musculature repair and boom, you've got muscle growth. Of course, it's a very demanding overall practice to actually complete that pattern but that is the jist of how it works.
Now how exactly can sitting through a boring yoga class slowly moving from pose to pose help foster an environment of getting those gainz as the bros at my gym would say? Well there are a few areas in which adding this practice to your routine can help you get swole. We will begin with the area that seems most obvious, stretching out the muscles. Now this is an important factor for multiple reasons. Here let me explain......
First, injury prevention. Nothing can derail your quest in the gym faster than an injury. I know this fact to be true first hand as I have had a multitude of injuries over the years that stemmed primarily from not taking the appropriate steps to ensure my body was primed for the carnage that was about to take place. I'd simply go in, hit the weights and go home. Not taking any time to focus on pampering my muscles along the way and the repeated compounding of lifting session upon lifting session with no effort to lengthen those muscles I had just compressed with heavy weight did nothing to set me up for success. And for those sins I've begun to reap the rewards through various injuries. So had I simply added a yoga class or two to the mix each week along the way, I may have prevented some of the unnecessary pain I've since had to endure. Now I have to stress, yoga isn't the only means to the end in this situation to help prevent injury. Sports massage therapy is another way, active warmup before workouts and stretch cool downs including foam rolling etc are also effective strategies. As the old and gross saying goes, "There is more than 1 way to skin a cat!" Although I'd really prefer not skinning any cats regardless of method. But that's just me! So in short, to allow your gains train to keep on rolling, injury free, implement some or all of the above and check your ego at the door to allow you to lift smart!
OK, great it can maybe help prevent injury but as I explained, there are other ways to do that so what else can encourage a person wanting to gain strength and size to go sit through a yoga class? How about myofascial release, a term you may have heard at some point recently? What exactly is the fascia? It's a dense webbing of tissue that covers our entire musculature system in the body. It's very durable and strong which is why we are able to move as freely as we do. But over time and without proper care, it can become a tangled mess causing muscles to fire incorrectly during certain movements or it can limit our range of motion. For example, in say an ass to grass squat, this requires an intense level of range of motion and it means that everything from the muscles in our neck all the way down to our ankles all need to work together to ensure proper form and alignment throughout the movement. One of the key components to ensure the team inside the body is all moving in the same direction towards the same goal is to have a well taken care of fascia. The method of holding said movements that are encouraged and completed during a yoga class are a very effective way to keep the fascia open, strong and ready to go. The more effective your fascia works the more weight you can potentially lift in the gym as well as the aforementioned range of motion which also plays a huge role in muscle growth. So boom, getting bendy in a yoga class can do wonders on the muscle growth goal in the weight room.
Are there any other aspects that yoga can help with regarding muscle growth? Absolutely, and it is probably one you had not thought about. Hormonal balance in the body. To encourage muscle growth, the body needs to be in alignment physically which is what we touched on above but just as important, our hormones need to be in alignment as well. There are a lot of things in play inside our bodies that can help or hinder our progress towards muscle hypertrophy and simply our overall health as well.
The major players in this internal dance of hormones are growth hormone hGH, cortisol, Testosterone and estrogen. This post is not going to go too deep down the rabbit hole with regards to these hormones. The major overview point is they are all important. There are some simple things to know though. Growth hormone and Testosterone are considered anabolic players which means they work in our metabolism to encourage growth and repair of cells as opposed to cortisol which is linked with the opposite effect known as catabolism which tears down our already built up cells or in other words it makes our bodies eat itself like a zombie would feast on brains. That is the high level of what those hormones do so as you can see, keeping cortisol in check to allow Testosterone and hGH to flourish in its role of encouraging cell growth is a good thing right?
One of the major functions in our bodies that tells cortisol to come out full force is stress. This is a term that can have various meanings. Day to day stress is something we all know very well. Screaming babies, deadlines at work, homework assignments that are due tomorrow that you haven't started yet or just sitting in gridlock traffic that's making you late to an appointment are all external stresses that encourage cortisol production in the body. There are also internal stressers as well. In fact one that we have talked about a lot today, lifting heavy at the gym. This causes muscle damage at the cellular level and the body doesn't know that the damage created is one we are doing on purpose so that intense grueling workout you just completed is actually causing internal stress which also can foster cortisol release rather than suppress it when you over train. So to help mitigate this, doing things to calm the mind and body both from the internal and external stresses can help do just that and suppress that zombie muscle eating hormone. That's where yoga comes into play!!!
We've already touched on how yoga can help the muscles themselves with gaining size, but it can also help calm the brain through intense breathing, the calming flow of the workout progression in a yoga class and the meditative aspects of it as well. At the end of almost every yoga class there is a time of complete meditation to calm the body in all aspects which can encourage cortisol balance in the body and thus allow you to reap the benefits of the other anabolic hormones in your body when you step into the battle field of the weight room.
Now, go forth bros and lady bros. Add a yoga class or 2 to the training mix each week and after a period of correction from the years of tangling abuse you've done to your body, you will start to notice drastic improvements in all the areas touched on in this post and subsequently your gains train will begin rolling down the tracks like a freight train!!!!!
Cheers!!!!!
Shawn
Monday, January 11, 2016
Monday, January 4, 2016
Should You Trust Me To Give You Nutrition Advice?
Hello friends!
Can you believe it is already 2016?? Dang, how time flies. Now that January is upon us and the holidays are over we can get back to real life. And for a lot of people that means setting those New Years goals to create the "new year - new you". I've set goals like this many times in my life. Most of the time they failed. But I get the why behind it so if that is you, than do you and kick ass this year with those goals. I mean hell, I started my fasting protocol experiment on the 1st so how can I judge anyone else that started a plan or goal, right? OK, I digress as this post isn't about the pros and cons of resolutions. However they do play a role in what I'm going to talk about today.
How many of you have heard the term or seen the hash tag used called Fit Fam? I have used this very phrase or hash tag more times than I can count. For those of you that haven't heard or used it, it's just a phrase signifying that if you are apart of this modern day fitness revolution than you are part of the family. As in, we are all on this journey together. I love that idea. I wholeheartedly support that campaign and movement. I admit that I get carried away when I start hash tagging a billion things up which is why I mostly limit my use of them to Instagram.
Hey look, I went off on another tangent! Apparently I have shiny object syndrome this morning while writing and I'm too lazy to make this into a drafted version and edit it down so you get to come along for the ride! Lucky you!
Now, as for today's blog and what it's about, we are going to be digging into the downsides of the fitness craze and delve into how the obsession for getting healthy can actually be very unhealthy. Plus I'm going to throw some shade on those nutrition coaches that do not have the educational chops to be giving nutrition advice, especially those that do so under the guise of slanging products or recruiting people into their ponzi schemes.
In fact let's start with the shade and work backwards! If you are a "nutrition coach" and you approach a potential client to discuss nutrition counseling with them and in that first conversation start suggesting products and supplements to sell them because you "know they work" then you are part of the problem, not the solution. Now I want to stress, I'm not saying (for the most part) that these product sellers don't have the best interest of the client at heart. But with the level of science needed to fully understand someone's nutritional needs, especially those that are severely overweight and potentially could have life threatening underlying conditions, simply tossing the idea of a quick fix out through expensive and usually unnecessary supplements is a recipe for disaster.
The real bad guys in my opinion are these quick fix pyramid style supplement companies themselves. They entrust getting their products sold by average people with no formal education or science/dietetics background through a tiered recruitment style scam. A lot of times these new clients turned coaches have been extremely sedentary and through the motivation and support of the team they become very active and in a lot of cases see dramatic results. But here is the kicker, it is not simply these magic and expensive supplements that you are taking but rather it's the fact that you cleaned up your nutritional intake overall and got up off your butt and started working out. The end result is that YES you lost some weight and feel more energetic which are both awesome successes. And for that aspect, getting tons of people up and more active, I applaud the idea. But that, in my opinion, is where it should end. A large support group sharing recipes, encouraging healthier habits and coming together to get sweaty and move to lose some weight. That is AWESOME, FANTASTIC, I'M ALL FOR IT AND LOVE IT! However..............
Here is where it crosses over into the next focus of the blog today. Obsession, disordered eating habits or even a diagnosed eating disorder, bad self image even though healthier and addiction to the healthy lifestyle. Yes, you read that correctly. ADDICTION TO THE HEALTHY LIFESTYLE.
But how can the pursuit of health be a bad thing? The reality is that it very easily can be a bad thing. The old saying of too much of a good thing is bad comes to mind. As we strive for becoming healthier, it can create a monster within that can lead to all sorts of ugliness.
One growing condition through this fit fam is a disorder called Orthorexia Nervosa. It was defined in 1996 as literally meaning fixation on righteous eating, in other words it is the hipster version of an eating disorder! The idea is centered on being obsessed with clean eating to a point of creating an isolation pattern with the patient due to being so fixated on eating healthy that things like eating with friends and family become impossible due to not being able to allow themselves the freedom to eat certain things for fear of messing up their diets. I want to stress that orthorexia is not officially recognized by the American Psychological Association as a true eating disorder and thus it falls under the more general disordered eating habits side of things but there are genuine symptoms that can be analyzed and diagnosed to at least give the patient an understanding of what they are dealing with. On the NEDA (National Eating Disorder Association) website there is a checklist of symptoms that if a person checks them off can self diagnose and then seek professional help from a credentialed counselor. To see the checklist, here is the link:
https://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/orthorexia-nervosa
Another issue that the fit fam movement can encourage is in fact a widely known and clinically diagnosed eating disorder called anorexia nervosa. The simple clinical definition of this disorder is inadequate caloric intake causing extreme rapid weight loss. This is a condition I've seen multiple times when working with clients and been fortunate enough to catch it early on before it escalated into a full blown situation. Now, I don't want to dive too deep into this rabbit hole because I am not a trained psychological counselor.
Lastly, I want to touch on the obsessive compulsive behaviors that the fit fam and healthy lifestyle movement can encourage. Unfortunately, this a much larger societal issue stemming from perceived levels of beauty rather than what is truly a healthy way to live. The idea that to be sexy or look good you must be thin as a woman and ripped as a dude is what we are told. This in most people's minds triggers the idea then that to be healthy is the same thing. This couldn't be further from the truth. The reality is that if you took blood samples and analyzed the true health of the majority of obsessive fitness people you'd see things such as low Testosterone, suppressed thyroid function, imbalanced hormones, blood sugar being out of whack and a host of other internal issues so while they have that rocking 6 pack or their ass looks epic in those new jeans, they are far from optimal on the inside. And as much fun as enjoying the outside is, it's the insides that truly define our health.
So how does this all tie in with my rant at the beginning. From the standpoint of community, encouragement, support and the like, the entire fit fam movement is a HUGE success. Never has it been easier to get started on a life changing transformation with more information at our fingertips than ever before. The advent of social media has made networking to find a support peer group so easy to do that there is literally no excuse to not get out there. But with all the information comes even more misinformation. And that is one of my major points while on this soap box rant.
Because anyone can take an online course that takes a weekend to complete or even a few months to complete and then call themselves a nutrition coach, you as a consumer of nutrition advice need to be hyper vigilant about who you get your counseling from. Ask the nutrition coach about their knowledge of things like biochemistry, organic chemistry, anatomy, chemical interactions in the body and bioavailability of nutrients in various forms. Ask them about there motives as a coach. Are they looking to sell a specific brand of products? Are they genuinely able to create a specific plan targeted to YOUR specific health needs or does your plan look suspiciously similar to the person with a completely different body type than you?
Being vigilant and careful like that will help you find a nutrition coach that will help you to cultivate genuinely healthy habits, both physically and psychologically, that will lead to a true transformation both inside and out. If, when talking to the "coach", it feels like a generic response that could be for anyone or it feels like a sells pitch right off the bat I suggest you run away and quickly. With the issues I mentioned above plus the simple fact that you are entrusting your overall health and wellbeing to this person and the reality that in most cases a "nutrition coach" does not have the true science and understanding of the human body to safely coach you through some of these more extreme situations, it is up to you as the consumer to research the person you take your nutrition advice from. The bottom line is, having these folks with good intentions around to encourage and support healthy lifestyles is fantastic but my personal opinion is to keep that encouragement on the surface level.
In closing I will say that as I'm still in my schooling and working towards my degree, I fall into the category of surface level advice giver. This post is not intended to be a pat on the back to say I'm better than anyone else because I absolutely am not. This is just a bit of advice to all of you to be careful who you get nutrition insight and information from. Including if you get it from me.
Happy 2016 to everyone who reads this and I hope you like the content that I'm providing. As always feel free to leave comments on here or my social media and if you do enjoy the blog than hit the subscribe button and tell your friends about it.
Can you believe it is already 2016?? Dang, how time flies. Now that January is upon us and the holidays are over we can get back to real life. And for a lot of people that means setting those New Years goals to create the "new year - new you". I've set goals like this many times in my life. Most of the time they failed. But I get the why behind it so if that is you, than do you and kick ass this year with those goals. I mean hell, I started my fasting protocol experiment on the 1st so how can I judge anyone else that started a plan or goal, right? OK, I digress as this post isn't about the pros and cons of resolutions. However they do play a role in what I'm going to talk about today.
How many of you have heard the term or seen the hash tag used called Fit Fam? I have used this very phrase or hash tag more times than I can count. For those of you that haven't heard or used it, it's just a phrase signifying that if you are apart of this modern day fitness revolution than you are part of the family. As in, we are all on this journey together. I love that idea. I wholeheartedly support that campaign and movement. I admit that I get carried away when I start hash tagging a billion things up which is why I mostly limit my use of them to Instagram.
Hey look, I went off on another tangent! Apparently I have shiny object syndrome this morning while writing and I'm too lazy to make this into a drafted version and edit it down so you get to come along for the ride! Lucky you!
Now, as for today's blog and what it's about, we are going to be digging into the downsides of the fitness craze and delve into how the obsession for getting healthy can actually be very unhealthy. Plus I'm going to throw some shade on those nutrition coaches that do not have the educational chops to be giving nutrition advice, especially those that do so under the guise of slanging products or recruiting people into their ponzi schemes.
In fact let's start with the shade and work backwards! If you are a "nutrition coach" and you approach a potential client to discuss nutrition counseling with them and in that first conversation start suggesting products and supplements to sell them because you "know they work" then you are part of the problem, not the solution. Now I want to stress, I'm not saying (for the most part) that these product sellers don't have the best interest of the client at heart. But with the level of science needed to fully understand someone's nutritional needs, especially those that are severely overweight and potentially could have life threatening underlying conditions, simply tossing the idea of a quick fix out through expensive and usually unnecessary supplements is a recipe for disaster.
The real bad guys in my opinion are these quick fix pyramid style supplement companies themselves. They entrust getting their products sold by average people with no formal education or science/dietetics background through a tiered recruitment style scam. A lot of times these new clients turned coaches have been extremely sedentary and through the motivation and support of the team they become very active and in a lot of cases see dramatic results. But here is the kicker, it is not simply these magic and expensive supplements that you are taking but rather it's the fact that you cleaned up your nutritional intake overall and got up off your butt and started working out. The end result is that YES you lost some weight and feel more energetic which are both awesome successes. And for that aspect, getting tons of people up and more active, I applaud the idea. But that, in my opinion, is where it should end. A large support group sharing recipes, encouraging healthier habits and coming together to get sweaty and move to lose some weight. That is AWESOME, FANTASTIC, I'M ALL FOR IT AND LOVE IT! However..............
Here is where it crosses over into the next focus of the blog today. Obsession, disordered eating habits or even a diagnosed eating disorder, bad self image even though healthier and addiction to the healthy lifestyle. Yes, you read that correctly. ADDICTION TO THE HEALTHY LIFESTYLE.
But how can the pursuit of health be a bad thing? The reality is that it very easily can be a bad thing. The old saying of too much of a good thing is bad comes to mind. As we strive for becoming healthier, it can create a monster within that can lead to all sorts of ugliness.
One growing condition through this fit fam is a disorder called Orthorexia Nervosa. It was defined in 1996 as literally meaning fixation on righteous eating, in other words it is the hipster version of an eating disorder! The idea is centered on being obsessed with clean eating to a point of creating an isolation pattern with the patient due to being so fixated on eating healthy that things like eating with friends and family become impossible due to not being able to allow themselves the freedom to eat certain things for fear of messing up their diets. I want to stress that orthorexia is not officially recognized by the American Psychological Association as a true eating disorder and thus it falls under the more general disordered eating habits side of things but there are genuine symptoms that can be analyzed and diagnosed to at least give the patient an understanding of what they are dealing with. On the NEDA (National Eating Disorder Association) website there is a checklist of symptoms that if a person checks them off can self diagnose and then seek professional help from a credentialed counselor. To see the checklist, here is the link:
https://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/orthorexia-nervosa
Another issue that the fit fam movement can encourage is in fact a widely known and clinically diagnosed eating disorder called anorexia nervosa. The simple clinical definition of this disorder is inadequate caloric intake causing extreme rapid weight loss. This is a condition I've seen multiple times when working with clients and been fortunate enough to catch it early on before it escalated into a full blown situation. Now, I don't want to dive too deep into this rabbit hole because I am not a trained psychological counselor.
Lastly, I want to touch on the obsessive compulsive behaviors that the fit fam and healthy lifestyle movement can encourage. Unfortunately, this a much larger societal issue stemming from perceived levels of beauty rather than what is truly a healthy way to live. The idea that to be sexy or look good you must be thin as a woman and ripped as a dude is what we are told. This in most people's minds triggers the idea then that to be healthy is the same thing. This couldn't be further from the truth. The reality is that if you took blood samples and analyzed the true health of the majority of obsessive fitness people you'd see things such as low Testosterone, suppressed thyroid function, imbalanced hormones, blood sugar being out of whack and a host of other internal issues so while they have that rocking 6 pack or their ass looks epic in those new jeans, they are far from optimal on the inside. And as much fun as enjoying the outside is, it's the insides that truly define our health.
So how does this all tie in with my rant at the beginning. From the standpoint of community, encouragement, support and the like, the entire fit fam movement is a HUGE success. Never has it been easier to get started on a life changing transformation with more information at our fingertips than ever before. The advent of social media has made networking to find a support peer group so easy to do that there is literally no excuse to not get out there. But with all the information comes even more misinformation. And that is one of my major points while on this soap box rant.
Because anyone can take an online course that takes a weekend to complete or even a few months to complete and then call themselves a nutrition coach, you as a consumer of nutrition advice need to be hyper vigilant about who you get your counseling from. Ask the nutrition coach about their knowledge of things like biochemistry, organic chemistry, anatomy, chemical interactions in the body and bioavailability of nutrients in various forms. Ask them about there motives as a coach. Are they looking to sell a specific brand of products? Are they genuinely able to create a specific plan targeted to YOUR specific health needs or does your plan look suspiciously similar to the person with a completely different body type than you?
Being vigilant and careful like that will help you find a nutrition coach that will help you to cultivate genuinely healthy habits, both physically and psychologically, that will lead to a true transformation both inside and out. If, when talking to the "coach", it feels like a generic response that could be for anyone or it feels like a sells pitch right off the bat I suggest you run away and quickly. With the issues I mentioned above plus the simple fact that you are entrusting your overall health and wellbeing to this person and the reality that in most cases a "nutrition coach" does not have the true science and understanding of the human body to safely coach you through some of these more extreme situations, it is up to you as the consumer to research the person you take your nutrition advice from. The bottom line is, having these folks with good intentions around to encourage and support healthy lifestyles is fantastic but my personal opinion is to keep that encouragement on the surface level.
In closing I will say that as I'm still in my schooling and working towards my degree, I fall into the category of surface level advice giver. This post is not intended to be a pat on the back to say I'm better than anyone else because I absolutely am not. This is just a bit of advice to all of you to be careful who you get nutrition insight and information from. Including if you get it from me.
Happy 2016 to everyone who reads this and I hope you like the content that I'm providing. As always feel free to leave comments on here or my social media and if you do enjoy the blog than hit the subscribe button and tell your friends about it.
Thursday, December 31, 2015
Intermittent Fasting: The Protocol
Happy New Years Eve friends!
So I want to start by saying a HUGE thanks to all of you that have read my blog thus far. The response had been great and I genuinely appreciate it. Especially as it is just the beginning and I'm still figuring out the best way to do this thing and finding my writing voice. So far I've had over 200 views and that is pretty cool. Heading into the new year, my goal is to put out one article every 2 weeks. Sometimes it may be more often and sometimes depending on externalities it may be less often. But that's my goal.
I realize I just posted the second article in the IF series yesterday but seeing as this protocol I'm doing regarding the topic begins arbitrarily tomorrow to start on the first day of the new year and will be running for 8 weeks through the end of February, I figured I'd just go ahead and post this protocol post to put it out there. Plus this will allow me to move on to start researching other topics since I'm sure you all are tired of reading about IF!!
OK for the protocol, we will be using the tried and true scientific method:
Ask a question: Can the addition of an intermittent fasting protocol to an already established HIIT style fitness program help maximize body weight reduction?
Background research: In creating the previous 2 blog posts, I researched more than 15 scientific journal articles and application articles through various sources, i.e. PubMed (various journals), Testosterone Nation website and others.
Construct a Hypothesis: If I add a daily 8 hour IF feeding window to my already established HIIT fitness protocol, then my overall body weight will be reduced by 5% over 8 weeks.
Let's dig into this testable guess. First, I'll explain a few things that are listed, the 8 hour feeding window is exactly that. I will allow caloric intake only during a predetermined 8 hour window each day. The other 16 hours will be set for digestion, recovery, sleep and essentially letting my guts take a rest. This time period will allow a resetting of blood glucose levels and improve insulin sensitivity. Also, considering the normal digestion period from putting food into your mouth to the small intestine breaking it all down and shuttling nutrients into the blood for use is anywhere from 3-8 hours depending on what you ate, this new period of nothing new coming in will encourage the body to be more efficient with energy expenditure. The idea is that since the body generally has high levels of stored energy through body fat, this gap in caloric intake will encourage the body to use this stored energy rather than relying on new nutrients being ingested. In simple terms, the hope is that limiting calories to be consumed during a smaller than normal window will encourage the body to burn all this flubber I have stored on my buns, hips and stomach!
The second aspect is the fitness plan. I used the acronym HIIT in the hypothesis above. What this means is High Intensity Interval Training. It is essentially a fitness protocol that includes short bursts of maximal exertion to jack the heart rate up followed by continued normal exertion throughout an entire workout. The plan that I'll be following is one that I used from the Muscle and Strength website, this is to prevent any biased situations seeing as I am a certified personal trainer (NASM). The program is a 5 day per week functional movement mixed training workout plan. There is a day for overall strength, a day for muscle endurance and hypertrophy, a day for overall power and a day for speed and agility. It will also include a day for stress reduction and flexibility through yoga. I have been doing this workout for a few weeks (not including the yoga day) and have a solid baseline. I've seen a reduction of overall bodyweight by 2% going from 255 lbs down to 250 lbs. So now I'll be adding the more target specific nutrition plan into the mix to see if, as guessed, I can drop an additional 13 lbs in 8 weeks.
I have compiled an Excel document that has my daily caloric goals including macronutrient breakdown and percentages. This is what I will use to ensure that I stay on track. I will do weight measurements every 2 weeks on Sundays using the scale at my gym for consistency.
Now is time to put up or shut up and get this experiment going. I'm looking forward to seeing where I end up at the end of 2 months.
If anyone is interested in getting more specifics or if you would like to implement a similar protocol feel free to reach out and let me know and we can discuss how to get your caloric goals etc.
Now go forth and make the last day of the year fantastic. Be safe and have fun and let's male 2016 our best year ever!!!!
Cheers,
Shawn
So I want to start by saying a HUGE thanks to all of you that have read my blog thus far. The response had been great and I genuinely appreciate it. Especially as it is just the beginning and I'm still figuring out the best way to do this thing and finding my writing voice. So far I've had over 200 views and that is pretty cool. Heading into the new year, my goal is to put out one article every 2 weeks. Sometimes it may be more often and sometimes depending on externalities it may be less often. But that's my goal.
I realize I just posted the second article in the IF series yesterday but seeing as this protocol I'm doing regarding the topic begins arbitrarily tomorrow to start on the first day of the new year and will be running for 8 weeks through the end of February, I figured I'd just go ahead and post this protocol post to put it out there. Plus this will allow me to move on to start researching other topics since I'm sure you all are tired of reading about IF!!
OK for the protocol, we will be using the tried and true scientific method:
Ask a question: Can the addition of an intermittent fasting protocol to an already established HIIT style fitness program help maximize body weight reduction?
Background research: In creating the previous 2 blog posts, I researched more than 15 scientific journal articles and application articles through various sources, i.e. PubMed (various journals), Testosterone Nation website and others.
Construct a Hypothesis: If I add a daily 8 hour IF feeding window to my already established HIIT fitness protocol, then my overall body weight will be reduced by 5% over 8 weeks.
Let's dig into this testable guess. First, I'll explain a few things that are listed, the 8 hour feeding window is exactly that. I will allow caloric intake only during a predetermined 8 hour window each day. The other 16 hours will be set for digestion, recovery, sleep and essentially letting my guts take a rest. This time period will allow a resetting of blood glucose levels and improve insulin sensitivity. Also, considering the normal digestion period from putting food into your mouth to the small intestine breaking it all down and shuttling nutrients into the blood for use is anywhere from 3-8 hours depending on what you ate, this new period of nothing new coming in will encourage the body to be more efficient with energy expenditure. The idea is that since the body generally has high levels of stored energy through body fat, this gap in caloric intake will encourage the body to use this stored energy rather than relying on new nutrients being ingested. In simple terms, the hope is that limiting calories to be consumed during a smaller than normal window will encourage the body to burn all this flubber I have stored on my buns, hips and stomach!
The second aspect is the fitness plan. I used the acronym HIIT in the hypothesis above. What this means is High Intensity Interval Training. It is essentially a fitness protocol that includes short bursts of maximal exertion to jack the heart rate up followed by continued normal exertion throughout an entire workout. The plan that I'll be following is one that I used from the Muscle and Strength website, this is to prevent any biased situations seeing as I am a certified personal trainer (NASM). The program is a 5 day per week functional movement mixed training workout plan. There is a day for overall strength, a day for muscle endurance and hypertrophy, a day for overall power and a day for speed and agility. It will also include a day for stress reduction and flexibility through yoga. I have been doing this workout for a few weeks (not including the yoga day) and have a solid baseline. I've seen a reduction of overall bodyweight by 2% going from 255 lbs down to 250 lbs. So now I'll be adding the more target specific nutrition plan into the mix to see if, as guessed, I can drop an additional 13 lbs in 8 weeks.
I have compiled an Excel document that has my daily caloric goals including macronutrient breakdown and percentages. This is what I will use to ensure that I stay on track. I will do weight measurements every 2 weeks on Sundays using the scale at my gym for consistency.
Now is time to put up or shut up and get this experiment going. I'm looking forward to seeing where I end up at the end of 2 months.
If anyone is interested in getting more specifics or if you would like to implement a similar protocol feel free to reach out and let me know and we can discuss how to get your caloric goals etc.
Now go forth and make the last day of the year fantastic. Be safe and have fun and let's male 2016 our best year ever!!!!
Cheers,
Shawn
Wednesday, December 30, 2015
Intermittent Fasting, What Else is There to It?
Hello friends!
So now we are starting to wind down after the holiday hangover and switch into auto pilot to finish the year out. Then it is as if a little switch goes off in ALL of our brains that says based on this arbitrary date (January 1st!), we must now begin the annual reinvigorated reinvention into a new you! We are all guilty of it, maybe not every single year but multiple times in your life you have sat down and put pen to paper thus creating a list of goals that you were finally going to accomplish. Now answer this one question with a very important follow up question to yourself: Of all the New Years goals that you have laid out over the years, have you ever accomplished one of them? ........ WHY NOT?
OK enough self reflection for now. We can dive into a whole new blog article on why arbitrary goal setting doesn't work for the majority of us. So I digress back to the topic at hand. Intermittent fasting. To summarize the first post on the topic in case you didn't read it, following an intermittent fasting protocol can help you reset your circadian rhythms and create a more stable hormonal balance. The benefits of that are better sleep which leads to more energy thus allowing the body to train harder, repair more efficiently and then watch those GAINZ roll in baby!
So now let's talk about a few benefits and short comings of using an intermittent fasting protocol. The are definitely some of each. To start, let's look at the downsides. In case you get bored or fall asleep reading this, I'd much rather have you get through the downsides at least.
First, depending on the type of fasting you do, if your diet is already poor and you have deficiencies in certain nutrients, vitamins or minerals, a protocol like this can exacerbate that deficiency which systemically can then create other deficiencies and snowball you into a very messy situation health wise. According to an article from the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, it was noted that participants in an alternate day fasting protocol that began with protein or vitamin deficiencies showed a worsening of the deficiencies throughout the protocol which led to muscle tissue catabolism in some of the participants. In other words, like ANY nutritional approach that is focused on restrictive eating patterns there will be some sort of risk involved, especially if you're starting, like most people that do any dieting, in a poor nutritional health state. It is advised to get some blood work done before beginning any new nutritional protocol to see what areas of opportunity there are to shore things up or know what markers to keep an eye on. Seeing as the goal of any new dietary approach is to get you more fit and more healthy, it makes sense to minimize the damage as opposed to making it worse, right?
A second and in my opinion more obvious downside to fasting that was proven through experimentation was HUNGER. LOTS AND LOTS OF HUNGER! OK maybe not that bad but it is common sense to think if you skip an entire day of eating, especially when we live in a time where food has never been more abundant, the body may begin to freak out if there is nothing shoveled into our mouths. In multiple studies that I read from the British Journal of Sports Medicine, the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition and others, one commonality that cropped up was participants either admitting to cheating on the programmed study or in post study questionnaires stating that while not having cheated, the hunger pangs never subsided on the non-feeding days as they had hoped.
After completing a cycle of fasting, one of the major concerns that came out of these studies was the reality that there a very strong likelihood to begin binge eating. There are multiple studies that I will dive into deeper in another blog article that focus on the extreme addictions to foods such as simple sugars so it can cause someone who spent several weeks cleaning up their nutrition and implementing a fasting protocol to lose some weight only to end up worse off after its all said and done because of a binging episode.
Soooooooooo....... are you still with me too this point? Those are all the downsides that I'm going to talk about for now. If you want more info on those, start a conversation in the comments or message me offline or on other social media to chat about it. Now, let's talk about the benefits.
Why do most people aim to clean up their nutrition? For a small percentage it is to feel healthier. Also there are those that are already dialed in at the gym but want to see the muscle mass increase. Then there are the rest of us, those of us wanting to lose body fat. There are a multitude of things that intermittent fasting protocols can do but reducing body fat is its bread and butter.
Let's talk about why that is. Well its simple really, intermittent fasting is really just a pinpointed target specific version of a nutrition protocol that aims to create a caloric deficit. This is the most tried and true way to ensure weight loss. Now this also doesn't mean to starve yourself either. That's a whole other negative issue. What we are talking about here is a subtle cumulative caloric deficit by the end of each week that you follow this protocol. The minor downside to that statement is that, yes, there is planning that needs to be done ahead of time to get your caloric needs and then to adjust them as you go through the protocol. So that is where doing some research to learn how to do this or working with a trained specialist can benefit you.
So if caloric deficit is the goal, why not just eat less each day as opposed to the timed feeding window approach? Well that is a decision for you and ONLY you to make. But here is some sciency stuff to help with that decision. In one particular study that compared daily caloric restriction, daily feeding window fasting (8 hours on 16 off ), and alternate day fasting, overall visceral fat and total body weight was reduced in all the protocols but what set IF apart, both ADF and daily fasting, was the fasting insulin sensitivity. The study lasted 12 weeks and there was a reduction of between 20-31% in participants fasting insulin levels. What this means is that there is a possibility that if following a fasting protocol properly, that not only can you lose weight but your chance of getting type II diabetes lessens at a much faster rate than traditional caloric reduction diets. According to the research, for every kg of bodyweight lost, there is a 16% reduction of becoming diabetic.
As for the body fat reduction element, it is shown in multiple studies that minimizing the window in which calories are consumed forces the body into a state of efficiency that has to rely on what is readily available to create energy. We all have body fat on us and it can be argued that most of us have way too much body fat. But for me personally, I like to look at as I simply have a massive energy store and now that I'm going to do this n=1 fasting protocol, I'm primed for crazy success! What that is really saying though is I'm fat and I don't want to be anymore!
But what kind of success can I expect? Going back to the study I looked at in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, a fasting study that lasted 22 days showed a reduction of overall body weight between 2-3% and overall body FAT reduction between 3-5%. This study was paired with a 4 day per week low intensity weight training and 2 day per week steady state cardio training protocol.
Now, are there other benefits to fasting? According to several studies, there is in fact potential for other strong benefits on top of circadian biology corrections, improved insulin sensitivity and reduced chance of becoming diabetic and body fat reduction!
One study that jumped out at me focused on improved cardiovascular stress adaptation. Seeing as hypertension and heart disease is the public enemy number 1 in most first world countries, it makes sense to set ourselves up with the best possible tools to combat this disease. Currently being tested on rats which is a common method before getting approval to test on humans, IF protocols are showing highly positive results in reducing resting heart rates and lowering blood pressure markers which improve cardiovascular function. In simple terms these markers being improved make your heart function way more efficiently which going back to fitness training affords you the ability to train harder and become a more optimal version of yourself.
In closing, I've tried to lay out the good, the bad and the ugly with intermittent fasting for everyone reading this. Hopefully I've done just that and not created too much confusion. Now it's time for me to dive into that aforementioned n=1 experiment. The next post in a couple of days will lay out exactly what my question, hypothesis and experiment to test it all will be so stay tuned for that. While I'm going through the experiment, I'll be switching gears to focus on other topics so don't worry, if intermittent fasting isn't your thing, this blog will absolutely touch on a topic of interest for you at some point I'm sure!!
Now go forth with your day, finish the year strong and let's dive into 2016 head on and ready to kick ass! At least for the first couple of weeks, anyway!
Cheers,
Shawn
So now we are starting to wind down after the holiday hangover and switch into auto pilot to finish the year out. Then it is as if a little switch goes off in ALL of our brains that says based on this arbitrary date (January 1st!), we must now begin the annual reinvigorated reinvention into a new you! We are all guilty of it, maybe not every single year but multiple times in your life you have sat down and put pen to paper thus creating a list of goals that you were finally going to accomplish. Now answer this one question with a very important follow up question to yourself: Of all the New Years goals that you have laid out over the years, have you ever accomplished one of them? ........ WHY NOT?
OK enough self reflection for now. We can dive into a whole new blog article on why arbitrary goal setting doesn't work for the majority of us. So I digress back to the topic at hand. Intermittent fasting. To summarize the first post on the topic in case you didn't read it, following an intermittent fasting protocol can help you reset your circadian rhythms and create a more stable hormonal balance. The benefits of that are better sleep which leads to more energy thus allowing the body to train harder, repair more efficiently and then watch those GAINZ roll in baby!
So now let's talk about a few benefits and short comings of using an intermittent fasting protocol. The are definitely some of each. To start, let's look at the downsides. In case you get bored or fall asleep reading this, I'd much rather have you get through the downsides at least.
First, depending on the type of fasting you do, if your diet is already poor and you have deficiencies in certain nutrients, vitamins or minerals, a protocol like this can exacerbate that deficiency which systemically can then create other deficiencies and snowball you into a very messy situation health wise. According to an article from the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, it was noted that participants in an alternate day fasting protocol that began with protein or vitamin deficiencies showed a worsening of the deficiencies throughout the protocol which led to muscle tissue catabolism in some of the participants. In other words, like ANY nutritional approach that is focused on restrictive eating patterns there will be some sort of risk involved, especially if you're starting, like most people that do any dieting, in a poor nutritional health state. It is advised to get some blood work done before beginning any new nutritional protocol to see what areas of opportunity there are to shore things up or know what markers to keep an eye on. Seeing as the goal of any new dietary approach is to get you more fit and more healthy, it makes sense to minimize the damage as opposed to making it worse, right?
A second and in my opinion more obvious downside to fasting that was proven through experimentation was HUNGER. LOTS AND LOTS OF HUNGER! OK maybe not that bad but it is common sense to think if you skip an entire day of eating, especially when we live in a time where food has never been more abundant, the body may begin to freak out if there is nothing shoveled into our mouths. In multiple studies that I read from the British Journal of Sports Medicine, the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition and others, one commonality that cropped up was participants either admitting to cheating on the programmed study or in post study questionnaires stating that while not having cheated, the hunger pangs never subsided on the non-feeding days as they had hoped.
After completing a cycle of fasting, one of the major concerns that came out of these studies was the reality that there a very strong likelihood to begin binge eating. There are multiple studies that I will dive into deeper in another blog article that focus on the extreme addictions to foods such as simple sugars so it can cause someone who spent several weeks cleaning up their nutrition and implementing a fasting protocol to lose some weight only to end up worse off after its all said and done because of a binging episode.
Soooooooooo....... are you still with me too this point? Those are all the downsides that I'm going to talk about for now. If you want more info on those, start a conversation in the comments or message me offline or on other social media to chat about it. Now, let's talk about the benefits.
Why do most people aim to clean up their nutrition? For a small percentage it is to feel healthier. Also there are those that are already dialed in at the gym but want to see the muscle mass increase. Then there are the rest of us, those of us wanting to lose body fat. There are a multitude of things that intermittent fasting protocols can do but reducing body fat is its bread and butter.
Let's talk about why that is. Well its simple really, intermittent fasting is really just a pinpointed target specific version of a nutrition protocol that aims to create a caloric deficit. This is the most tried and true way to ensure weight loss. Now this also doesn't mean to starve yourself either. That's a whole other negative issue. What we are talking about here is a subtle cumulative caloric deficit by the end of each week that you follow this protocol. The minor downside to that statement is that, yes, there is planning that needs to be done ahead of time to get your caloric needs and then to adjust them as you go through the protocol. So that is where doing some research to learn how to do this or working with a trained specialist can benefit you.
So if caloric deficit is the goal, why not just eat less each day as opposed to the timed feeding window approach? Well that is a decision for you and ONLY you to make. But here is some sciency stuff to help with that decision. In one particular study that compared daily caloric restriction, daily feeding window fasting (8 hours on 16 off ), and alternate day fasting, overall visceral fat and total body weight was reduced in all the protocols but what set IF apart, both ADF and daily fasting, was the fasting insulin sensitivity. The study lasted 12 weeks and there was a reduction of between 20-31% in participants fasting insulin levels. What this means is that there is a possibility that if following a fasting protocol properly, that not only can you lose weight but your chance of getting type II diabetes lessens at a much faster rate than traditional caloric reduction diets. According to the research, for every kg of bodyweight lost, there is a 16% reduction of becoming diabetic.
As for the body fat reduction element, it is shown in multiple studies that minimizing the window in which calories are consumed forces the body into a state of efficiency that has to rely on what is readily available to create energy. We all have body fat on us and it can be argued that most of us have way too much body fat. But for me personally, I like to look at as I simply have a massive energy store and now that I'm going to do this n=1 fasting protocol, I'm primed for crazy success! What that is really saying though is I'm fat and I don't want to be anymore!
But what kind of success can I expect? Going back to the study I looked at in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, a fasting study that lasted 22 days showed a reduction of overall body weight between 2-3% and overall body FAT reduction between 3-5%. This study was paired with a 4 day per week low intensity weight training and 2 day per week steady state cardio training protocol.
Now, are there other benefits to fasting? According to several studies, there is in fact potential for other strong benefits on top of circadian biology corrections, improved insulin sensitivity and reduced chance of becoming diabetic and body fat reduction!
One study that jumped out at me focused on improved cardiovascular stress adaptation. Seeing as hypertension and heart disease is the public enemy number 1 in most first world countries, it makes sense to set ourselves up with the best possible tools to combat this disease. Currently being tested on rats which is a common method before getting approval to test on humans, IF protocols are showing highly positive results in reducing resting heart rates and lowering blood pressure markers which improve cardiovascular function. In simple terms these markers being improved make your heart function way more efficiently which going back to fitness training affords you the ability to train harder and become a more optimal version of yourself.
In closing, I've tried to lay out the good, the bad and the ugly with intermittent fasting for everyone reading this. Hopefully I've done just that and not created too much confusion. Now it's time for me to dive into that aforementioned n=1 experiment. The next post in a couple of days will lay out exactly what my question, hypothesis and experiment to test it all will be so stay tuned for that. While I'm going through the experiment, I'll be switching gears to focus on other topics so don't worry, if intermittent fasting isn't your thing, this blog will absolutely touch on a topic of interest for you at some point I'm sure!!
Now go forth with your day, finish the year strong and let's dive into 2016 head on and ready to kick ass! At least for the first couple of weeks, anyway!
Cheers,
Shawn
Thursday, December 24, 2015
Intermittent fasting: Myth or Magic??
Good day Friends!
It appears that the Jolly Ol’ Fat Man will be sneaking down your chimneys at some point
tonight. So make sure to leave out some eggnog and cookies. Definitely keep the
rum or whiskey in the nog to a minimum as this dude has to travel the world and
doing so tipsy does not sound pleasant!
There are so many potential topics that I could have started this
blog with but literally from the second that I decided to do this, I knew
exactly where I wanted to start. Intermittent fasting. Why? Honestly, I do
not have a solid answer for that. It just jumped into my brain as a topic that
would make for some good research to kick this whole thing off with. Self-admittedly,
I have tried various approaches to using intermittent fasting (IF) in the past
with a modicum of positive results so diving deeper into the science of it all
was definitely fun to see the WHY on the results.
As a disclaimer, right off the bat, I got a little carried away
with reviewing articles and found a lot of avenues that this article could have
gone down. With that in mind and the fact that I will be pairing this subject
matter with an n=1 experiment using an IF protocol, I have decided to turn this
into a series of posts that will conclude with a findings from my own hands on
experience of it all.
Now, where to start? How about the beginning. What exactly is
intermittent fasting? It is a nutrition protocol that is designed to create a
caloric deficit by restricting calories during a predetermined period of time.
There are several different window sizes that this feeding period could
encompass. A lot of the articles that I read while researching this topic had
an alternate day feeding window(ADF). This approach is designed to have a 24
hour ad libitum feeding window that means essentially eat as much as you want
for the time period and then drop to a 20% or less caloric intake the following
24 hours and repeat. Another popular approach follows similar feeding
parameters on the fasting days but it does not alternate every day, rather you
eat ad lib for 5 days out of the week and 2 of the days you follow the 20% or
less calories. This fasting protocol is called creatively enough, 5/2 IF.
The methodology that I will be implementing in my personal experiment will be
to do a daily feeding window between 6-10 hours and fasting the remaining hours
of each day. I will be experimenting with adding a re-feed day towards the end
of the week where I will eat ad lib for 24 hours.
One thing that I want to stress is that one of the major drawbacks
to re-feeding days as well as one of the biggest struggles that was seen in the
majority of the studies that I researched was the idea that an ad lib re-feed
was an excuse to eat whatever garbage you wanted and that is not the case at
all. All it actually means is that there is no set window of time to consume
your calories. You still want to ensure that a daily caloric goal is met and
not hyper-exceeded and if you want to be extra careful with it, a pre-determined
goal for each macro-nutrient (Lipid, Protein, Carbohydrates) can be established
as well.
The idea of intermittent fasting somewhat goes against the fitness
model norm which is to eat micro meals every couple of hours to, as it is
incorrectly assumed, keep the metabolism fired up. The reality is when it
comes to metabolism and how the body processes food, every time a new meal or
snack is ingested the body releases insulin to counter the rise in blood sugar.
If you process carbohydrates just fine and are completely healthy then great, eat your 6 small
meals but just know that you are not burning more body fat by "stoking the
fires" of your metabolism. But for a large percentage of the population,
having a constant stream of insulin being released into the body can actually
do more harm than good when it comes to insulin sensitivity in the long run.
Another factor that plays into a benefit of eating in a small
window as opposed to simply feeding periodically throughout the entire day is
centered on circadian biology. I am sure everyone reading this has heard of
circadian rhythms. This is our body maximizing and regulating our hormones
throughout the day to essentially set us up for the highest level of success
for an assumed task during optimal periods. These tasks range from needing to
be jolted awake in the morning by such hormones as cortisol and growth
hormones, knowing when to have the most energy to do daily work tasks through shots of
periodic adrenalin, knowing when to eat and
digest food, giving us the feeling of being full through the releases of
leptin and ghrelin and knowing when to naturally wind
down to get to sleep for the night with the release of melatonin. Unfortunately,
in modern society, we have all but shunned the body’s ability to put us
in the right place at the right time by using
annoying alarm clocks, slamming gallons of coffee, eating garbage food at any
chance we can and since we live in the first world, that is very readily
available and then binge watching Netflix TV shows all night and not getting
the adequate amount of sleep. All of the above is a recipe for disaster when it
comes to hormonal balance and how those hormones being out of whack can lead to
obesity, diabetes, heart problems, cardiovascular issues and so on.
Now, exactly how does the circadian rhythm work inside our bodies?
It is primarily regulated by the suprachiasmatic nuclei of the hypothalamus.
But there are also other regulatory "clocks" throughout the
body, such as the liver and feeding the body is the main trigger queue for hormonal
regulation throughout the body. It is hypothesized that kicking these triggers
out of whack can do some damage to the body. The idea that things such as
overnight shift work, where people stay up overnight and sleep during the day
have a higher risk of diabetes and coronary heart issues so that is what
ultimately led to digging into this idea further for a lot of researchers.
To take this circadian thing a step further, there are studies
that show the trillions of tiny little critters that crawl around on us and
inside us, especially in our small intestine - known as the microbiota - that have similar lifestyles
to us humans, including a circadian rhythm. I mean, it is bad enough that
these little critters mooch off of us their entire lives but then they have to
copy our circadian patterns as well!?! RUDE! Just kidding, it is actually a
reality of millions of years of symbiotic evolution that has gotten our
crawlies to sort of follow our lead. These crawlies do so many things in our
bodies such as synthesize nutrients, trigger enzymatic reactions to facilitate
the creation of key vitamins, ensure we poop on a regular basis and we all know
how important that is! I mean, going full circle to the beginning of the
article, imagine if Santa Claus had some sort of gastrointestinal distress from
his gut crawlies acting a fool. Can you imagine the mess that would be made
with a cranky tummy paired with literally millions of cookies and glasses of
milk!!?!?! No thank you!
Now, how does all this circadian garbage tie in with IF? Well,
there are studies coming out now that are showing if using an IF protocol and
keeping the feeding window from essentially mid to late morning through the
early evening and letting our hormones sort of take care of everything else, we
can basically reset our circadian time clocks which will
in turn get our hormones back into alignment, help us sleep better which leads
to proper overnight bodily repair and thus making us more rested and ready to
take the external stresses of the day the following day which makes us more
productive and leads to more energy to do things such as go for a jog, hit the
gym and then repeating it all the next day. That run-on sentence was a
calculated grammatical error for the sake of proving the point that tomorrow is
built on the actions of today and the day after tomorrow is built on the
actions of tomorrow. So by working to fix tomorrow with sounds decisions today,
your body becomes a well-oiled machine!
Ok, so this first post is not the end all be all of intermittent
fasting. It is essentially by design to basically wet your whistle! I
will be writing a follow up post in the next week with even more science
relating to the ways in which intermittent fasting is both good and bad plus I
will explain what I have found in both cases. I will then do a 3rd pre-emptive
post that will go over my protocol that I plan to follow for 12 weeks to put my
money where my fasted mouth is before moving on to other topics. Lastly, after
my experiment is all wrapped up, I will conclude with my hands-on findings. I
appreciate each and every one of you that takes the time to read these posts. I
am doing this blog simply to share the stuff that fascinates me about
nutrition, fitness and the human body and hopefully it keeps your interest
along the way as well!
Cheers, happy holidays, merry Christmas, and happy Festivus for
the Rest of Us or whatever you celebrate!!
Shawn
FOR MORE INFO CHECK OUT THE FOLLOWING LINKS AND/OR ARTICLES:
Patterson, R., Laughlin, G., Lacroix, A., Hartman, S., Natarajan, L., Senger, C., . . . Gallo, L. (n.d.). Intermittent Fasting and Human Metabolic Health. Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, 115(08), 1203-1212. doi:August 2015
Leproult, R., & Cauter, E. (n.d.). Role of Sleep and Sleep Loss in Hormonal Release and Metabolism. Pediatric Neuroendocrinology Endocrine Development, 11-21. Retrieved December 24, 2015, from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3065172/
Barnosky, A., Hoddy, K., Unterman, T., & Varady, K. (n.d.). Intermittent fasting vs daily calorie restriction for type 2 diabetes prevention: A review of human findings. Translational Research, 302-311. Retrieved December 23, 2015, from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24993615
Bowden, PhD, J. (n.d.). Jonny Bowden | The Nutrition Mythbuster – “Eat Every Three Hours”: Oh, Really? Retrieved December 24, 2015, from http://jonnybowden.com/eat-every-three-hours/
Circadian Rhythms Fact Sheet. (n.d.). Retrieved December 24, 2015, from https://www.nigms.nih.gov/Education/Pages/Factsheet_CircadianRhythms.aspx
Tuesday, December 22, 2015
What the heck is this blog even about?
Howdy everyone! My name is Shawn. I'm nobody of great importance (YET!!!!), so I want to start by saying thank you for even giving this little slice of the interwebs a sniff of your attention.
So why am I doing this blog at all? Well in short, curiosity. I'm going to school for a Bachelor's of Science in human nutrition and with each passing semester, I walk away with more questions than answers. That fact is not due to a lack of knowledgeable professors, in fact it is quite the opposite. There is simply so much to learn about the human body and how everything we consume breaks down to essentially turn into a new version of ourself. And it is absolutely for better or for worse.
I plan to create posts on here that begin to answer or at least dig into some of those questions I have come up with. I absolutely have to stress that I'm no expert and all I'm trying to do with this blog is share the insight I gain from doing research. It will be primarily analytical in nature but what sort of scientist would I be without some hands on experimentation. So along the way I'll present some good ol fashioned n=1 testing. This will be done primarily to refute or to confirm the analytical findings.
I'm certain that you like most people, myself included, feel lost in the sauce when it come to the good and bad of human nutrition. Hopefully after I dig into a bit of the science and chew on it for awhile I'll be able to digest it and create a shareable recipe of understanding to help you to grasp a bit more about how food interacts with everything you do.
Now, fad diets come along several times a year and major ones come out every few years. We've all seem them, heard about them, had friends talk about them relentlessly (bacon, anyone!?!?!) and so on. 9 times out of 10 there is some half baked science that the diet is centered around. And more often than not, the nutritional protocol involves making whatever "expert" that is promoting it very wealthy by having to buy certain foods, supplements or books and other products. Some of these plans work, some work only in the short term, while others fail all together and can cause serious health problems. So..... the million dollar question is - how can we know when to jump on the "gravy train" or when to pump the breaks and say, "Nah, I'll skip the all mashed potatoes and gravy diet fad!"?
The answer is not simple because as I mentioned, most of these fad diets have some semblance of science to back them up. And so to the lay person with no background in biochemistry and human nutrition, no time to become intimately familiar with these advanced science topics and just simply want that ultimate missing link to regaining their health, it is easy to be persuaded and overwhelmed by all the bells and whistles of that mashed potatoes and gravy (MPG) diet.
If the purveyors of the MPG fad wheeled out a truckload of obscure research with at best, fringe results, but promised you'd finally be able to lose all that stubborn tummy fat and they had the "science" to prove it and then they put out long tedious articles with all sorts of big fancy doctory sounding words, then hell, give me a plate of them taters!! But wait!!!!! How could that same average person from above know the data was obscure and fringe or if it had been properly vetted by a group of scientific peers to give it any type of credibility?
Luckily, for you, there are nerds like me! I, without question, do not have all the answers and it could even be argued that I don't have ANY of the answers. But what I do have is a thirst for learning about all this whacky stuff and I am lucky there are forums like this blog space that afford me a place to babble on and share what I find.
So that is what I'm going to do. I hope to keep the articles fun and engaging but to justify the hours I will spend doing research for each post, I have to have some boring science parts too. I'll do my best to keep those to a minimum and for those that are as nerdy as I am and want to dig into what I find, I will always have a citations section at the end of each article with all of the sources I used to get my info from.
I hope you come along with me on this nerdy journey and always feel free to reach out with comments, questions and differing opinions on here or my other social media platforms that you may follow me on.
Cheers, homies and homiettes!
Shawn
So why am I doing this blog at all? Well in short, curiosity. I'm going to school for a Bachelor's of Science in human nutrition and with each passing semester, I walk away with more questions than answers. That fact is not due to a lack of knowledgeable professors, in fact it is quite the opposite. There is simply so much to learn about the human body and how everything we consume breaks down to essentially turn into a new version of ourself. And it is absolutely for better or for worse.
I plan to create posts on here that begin to answer or at least dig into some of those questions I have come up with. I absolutely have to stress that I'm no expert and all I'm trying to do with this blog is share the insight I gain from doing research. It will be primarily analytical in nature but what sort of scientist would I be without some hands on experimentation. So along the way I'll present some good ol fashioned n=1 testing. This will be done primarily to refute or to confirm the analytical findings.
I'm certain that you like most people, myself included, feel lost in the sauce when it come to the good and bad of human nutrition. Hopefully after I dig into a bit of the science and chew on it for awhile I'll be able to digest it and create a shareable recipe of understanding to help you to grasp a bit more about how food interacts with everything you do.
Now, fad diets come along several times a year and major ones come out every few years. We've all seem them, heard about them, had friends talk about them relentlessly (bacon, anyone!?!?!) and so on. 9 times out of 10 there is some half baked science that the diet is centered around. And more often than not, the nutritional protocol involves making whatever "expert" that is promoting it very wealthy by having to buy certain foods, supplements or books and other products. Some of these plans work, some work only in the short term, while others fail all together and can cause serious health problems. So..... the million dollar question is - how can we know when to jump on the "gravy train" or when to pump the breaks and say, "Nah, I'll skip the all mashed potatoes and gravy diet fad!"?
The answer is not simple because as I mentioned, most of these fad diets have some semblance of science to back them up. And so to the lay person with no background in biochemistry and human nutrition, no time to become intimately familiar with these advanced science topics and just simply want that ultimate missing link to regaining their health, it is easy to be persuaded and overwhelmed by all the bells and whistles of that mashed potatoes and gravy (MPG) diet.
If the purveyors of the MPG fad wheeled out a truckload of obscure research with at best, fringe results, but promised you'd finally be able to lose all that stubborn tummy fat and they had the "science" to prove it and then they put out long tedious articles with all sorts of big fancy doctory sounding words, then hell, give me a plate of them taters!! But wait!!!!! How could that same average person from above know the data was obscure and fringe or if it had been properly vetted by a group of scientific peers to give it any type of credibility?
Luckily, for you, there are nerds like me! I, without question, do not have all the answers and it could even be argued that I don't have ANY of the answers. But what I do have is a thirst for learning about all this whacky stuff and I am lucky there are forums like this blog space that afford me a place to babble on and share what I find.
So that is what I'm going to do. I hope to keep the articles fun and engaging but to justify the hours I will spend doing research for each post, I have to have some boring science parts too. I'll do my best to keep those to a minimum and for those that are as nerdy as I am and want to dig into what I find, I will always have a citations section at the end of each article with all of the sources I used to get my info from.
I hope you come along with me on this nerdy journey and always feel free to reach out with comments, questions and differing opinions on here or my other social media platforms that you may follow me on.
Cheers, homies and homiettes!
Shawn
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