Wednesday, June 25, 2014

Skora Summer Sale


Tuesday, June 24, 2014

Why Are Fat People Hungry

Weight loss is a terrible goal when simply living, eating and playing in a healthy-ancestral way has the side benefit of a 'nice' body.  A body that suits your pheno-type.  But some people are into solving symptoms like 'losing weight' instead of 'identifying why they need to lose weight.'
I always ask the question 'why are fat people (those who store excess adipose tissue) hungry'?  
I weigh 157 pounds with ~6% body fat.  Let's round up to 10lbs of fat, that's 35,000 dietary calories of energy.  That is enough stored energy to run every second i'm awake for 10days, and I am a pretty small dude.  Yet people with 5, 10, 50, 100lbs of fat on their body need to eat 3 times a day (plus snacks) to maintain their sedentary lives to keep from being hungry?  That's hard to swallow.  

If you're curious,... it's metabolic derangement, that is why fat people get hungry.  with all that stored potential energy on board, one can not burn the stored fat in your adipose tissue if you're producing insulin.  One produces insulin in response to simple carbohydrate intake.  

Consuming simple, refined carbohydrates is like spraying ether in your old lawn mower.  In stead of priming the carburetor to get the REAL fuel from the tank into the engine, you spray something that is burned easily, quickly and then gone. You can keep an engine running by constantly spraying a bit off this fluid into the carburetor, leaving your full tank untouched.  the revs go high and then conk out - like you at 3pm at work looking for a snack, or a carbohydrate-dependent marathoner at mile 20.  


Weight loss clients should be asking, how can I access the fuel in my tank rather than storing more and more. I highly recommend Dr Davis's Wheat Belly which explains how the stored visceral (belly) fat becomes it's own organ secreting hormones contributing to the derangement of needing constant short term fueling.  

Shouldn't I just exercise to get rid of fat?  Exercise has been proven to increase appetite. Making yourself hungrier makes weight loss difficult. The only way exercise causes you to lose stored fat is because high intensity exercise squashes the insulin response from the carbs you've eaten allowing access to some fat.  You have to over come the simple sugars, then suppress the insulin, THEN burn stored fat in that order.  Again, you are squashing a symptom.  

Shouldn't I eat less to get rid of fat?  This is a tough question, you may trick your body into tapping into stored fat after you've beaten the strong urges to eat.  Once this happens you will be surprisingly sated.  This is temporary as soon the stored fat soluble vitamins will be depleted and you will achieve a new hunger, that of micro-nutrient depletion.  This is why calorie restrictive diets typically fail and the dieter regains the weight in spades.  Calorie restriction typically accompanies micro-nutrient restriction, which is bad and beyond the scope of this post.  
  1. Lower carb consumption - plot your macro-nutrients in a web based food log like livestrong.com\myplate and tinker with what foods to cut to reduce high "glycemic load" foods.
  2. Change the timing of your carb consumption - never eat carbs for breakfast, try to continue your sleep-fast into mid day.  Eat energy dense foods early bacon, eggs, sausage, avocado, nuts and raise carb intake as the day goes on.  Workout on an empty stomach, dive right into your fat reserves.  
  3. Both - lifestyle changes give you lifestyle benefits. I kick off my athlete's fat burning metabolism with a weekend fast, no food for 24-36 hours.  It's easier than you think.  Check out Perfect Health Diet, or Warrior Diet for why.
It's not just for you and 'how you look', a carb-dependent, heavy person is starving inside.  Your kids will be born wired to think the world is short on food and posses a thrifty gene epigenetic expression. 

For a crash course in molecular biology to see what's happening inside the cells, Dr McGuff says it all (the entire video is good, but I've ffwd it to the relevant portion):

Monday, June 23, 2014

The Problem of Paleo Diet Arguements

Excepts taken from Chris Kresser's Interview of Mat Lalonde (from here)

Mat Lalonde PHd Chemical and Chemical Biology:

Invalid Inference 1: Our Paleolithic ancestors ate Paleo this way and they were free of disease

I’ll also say that the goal of my talk at the Ancestral Health Symposium was to help people better justify why they’re using this dietary approach or lifestyle.  You know, I do realize that I ruffled some feathers because there are some folks who are coming out of field, and I’m coming out of field, but not that far, you know, chemistry and medicine aren’t that far off.  But there are some folks who are coming from different fields, and really all they’re grasping on is this evolutionary thing, and they don’t realize that all it is really at the end of the day is a great way to formulate hypotheses, and I was seeing a lot of mistakes made in the blogosphere, and I was afraid that it was going to prevent a lot of professionals from taking our movement seriously.  So that was the goal ultimately, and you know, it’s just so simple to ridicule the whole caveman argument that I wanted to go beyond that, I wanted to give people a little bit more to think about, so if you are on a paleo diet, or what I prefer to say actually, because there’s really no such thing as a paleo diet.  The foods aren’t available anymore.  You can try to mimic it.  That’s the best you can do.  But a diet that’s meat, vegetables, tubers, and fruits.  That’s what I call it.  Typical arguments for this will go like this:  Our ancestors and modern hunter-gatherers consumed a diet that was mostly devoid of grains, legumes, and dairy, and they were virtually free of diseases of civilization.  People then make the invalid inference that consuming a diet mostly devoid of grains, legumes, and dairy will thus allow us to be free of diseases of civilization.  

Invalid Inference 2: We haven’t evolved enough to thrive on modern agriculture

Mat Lalonde:  We evolved over millions of years without consuming the foods that became readily available only after the advent of agriculture.  Hence, we’re not adapted to these foods.  But this assumes that a species isn’t adapted to a food because it’s never consumed it.  And if you look at the evolutionary record, that’s incorrect.  There are plenty of examples throughout evolution where species discover novel sources of food and thrive on them.
You know, when you cooked plant matter or meat, it became more easily digestible so your gut could get a little bit smaller and you got better nutrition as a result.  If you look throughout history, you’ll see that food itself is a huge driver of evolution.  You know, the availability of food has driven some major adaptations.  And that’s another part where I didn’t ruffle some feathers, but I think I was misinterpreted during my seminar talk at AHS, where some people seemed to think that I was implying that adaptation was very quick.  And I didn’t say that.  I said that adaptation depended on time and pressure.  And if the pressure is very high, then it can be very quick.  So European herders becoming adapted to lactose, for example, would be a great example. 

Invalid Inference 3: We should live like our ancestors because we’re still genetically the same

Mat Lalonde:  We’ll lump this into genetics and epigenetics because the third thing I hear a lot is our genes are virtually identical to those of our Paleolithic ancestors so we should live like they did.  And this has to be the most ridiculous statement of them all because here is a group of people that claims to take an evolutionary approach to life, yet shows it does not understand evolution.  Human beings and chimps have virtually identical genomes to the tune of 99.5%.  The difference between a human being and a chimp is in gene expression in the epigenome.  Just because two species have similar genes does not mean that they will both thrive in similar environments or with similar food sources.  You know, one of the mechanisms through which adaptations arise is a change in gene expression.  It would be absurd to suggest the epigenome of modern humans is identical to that of our Paleolithic ancestors, given the substantial changes in environment and food that have occurred since that era.

What is the best scientifically backed argument for Paleo?

Mat Lalonde:  There has been insufficient time and evolutionally pressure for complete adaptation to seed consumption arise in homosapiens.  And I think about that today, and I’m like, well, you know, people might think that there could be complete adaptation.  Let’s say you were to take a population and give them only wheat to eat, but unfortunately I don’t think that’s the case, because all evolution cares about is getting to the next generation. And eating these foods will allow you to reach reproductive age.  There are certain types of insects that live only long enough to reproduce, and then they die off, and then the next generation takes over. That’s right, so the challenge right now is that we are trying to live for a very long time and very well and healthy, so we’re pushing the boundaries.
<<So that we’ve evolved some what might be called “shallow” adaptations or mutations, and some examples of this kind of rapid genetic change are the evolution of light skin in response to humans moving into northern climates or the changes in some genes or gene expression that regulate insulin metabolism in response to a higher carbohydrate diet.  But those are relatively simple mutations.  They’re not complex adaptations, which are characteristics that involve coordinated actions of many different genes together. >>
When you think about these two statements, what I like about it is that it’s pinpointing what think is a fact in that people who are adapted to grains and legumes or who not necessarily thrive, but survive on these foods are probably the minority.  Now, that’s very different than saying, well, nobody should eat this because we’ve never eaten these foods in the past.  And it is a very different statement, and it forces people to think about themselves, which is what you do all the time.  It’s like, OK, where do I sit on this spectrum?  What do I tolerate and what do I not tolerate?
 ________________________________________________________
It all goes back to a personal responsibility argument.  Robb Wolf always says, make changes and see how you look, feel, perform and rank in important disease markers.  In other words, keep an eye on the science, but I put a disproportionate weight into personal experience.



Saturday, June 14, 2014

A Surprising Personal Best

Been running for almost 5years now, in the early development of my running performance I am used to getting a new 'PR' (personal records) every race.  I noticed a trend of 10% improvement every 6months.
Note: when calculating % of time, use minutes not fractional hours.  For example, 10% of of 1.5 hours (90minues) is 9mins.
This is not sustainable indefinitely obviously.   The 10% figure will degrade and reverse over time.  But understanding the race specific work needed to improve a specific race distance takes specific training. No one gets faster without targeted effort.

Brings me to my situation, early 2013 we moved to Boulder.  I knew that in the mountains less pressure = less oxygen, any run out the door was hundreds or thousands feet of elevation change.  I was reacquainted with double digit-minute / mile times!  The only 6-min/mile times I'd seen were occasional asphalt downhill efforts.  May days of holding 6min pace for mile repeats seemed gone.

Now we are in Boulder and it seems the town gets very excited for the nation's ~2nd largest 10km race called the Bolder Boulder.  All of my runs this year are slogs uphill and careful descents, with occasional 7min pace downhills.  The day before the race, we came home early from a rained out camping trip and I said "if the Bolder Boulder isn't sold out, I will run it."

I jogged the 4miles from home to Pearl Street Mall and waited in line to see the registration was open.  I saw they were asking for seeding times.  Feverishly I search ath-links.com in line, I found a 10km race in Richmond in 2012.  That race has 16 feet of elevation change and it's at sea level!  I wondered if I could even repeat that performance at 5,500'!  The registration person put me in corral 'AB' (3rd fastest), the cut off time for 'AA' was 41:00 - missed by three seconds, ugh.  I knew I'd need people faster than me surrounding me to suck me in.

Split toe action
In the morning, I was trying to decide which shoes to wear.  I remembered all my speed work I used to do in my Born2Run Road shoes.  Fond memories of moving fast in these shoes that offer some medium-firm cushioning, but allowing toes to splay for longitudinal arch suspension in my stride.

I toe (split toe that is) the line and take off and was able to hang with all my fellow corral runners I picked runners to catch and pass my pass-to-was passed ratio was 50:1.  I was happy to fly by a group of 'A'-corral'ers dressed like superheroes.

Done already??
I was moving my legs at a pace I really hadn't tried since 2012.  I refused to look at my watch, not wanting to know my pace.  It buzzed every mile but did not look.

The entire race besides staying in a groove of breathing, I focussed on relaxing any muscle I didn't need.  Were my shoulders tight?  Yes? Why? relave them! and move on to the next muscle group.  Hands relaxed? No?.... etc.

At the mean 10% grade hill to enter the stadium I danced around another runner's puke and thought "their gut biome cannot process beans, they need to cut out legumes..." I crossed the finish line and was handed a "Sub-40minute badge along with my medal."  My heart soared (and sored a little too, haha).  I passed two more people puking with the thought: "I wish I'd worked hard enough to puke".  As a long distance runner I am SURE I had plenty of gas in the tank, it took 2-3 deep breaths to get heart rate down.  No soreness, tightness or other signs of fatigue as I drank my post race beer(s).

I cannot remember the last time I was pleasantly surprised by a race.  7th in my age group.

Inspired:  Now I'm interested in leaving my ultra-marathon shuffle and actually specifically training for a 10km.  Also I want to fly to Richmond to re-try that 2012 race!  I will bring these good luck charms.

Splits:
1    6:22
2    6:32
3    6:32
4    6:39
5    6:14
6    6:32
0.2 7:06

Note: this is a subject for another post, but less than 1% of the runners in those first few corral took any water or sports drinks.  

Friday, June 13, 2014

Coolest fact I learned in the past 12 months

It all started when I read Scott Jurek's Eat and Run, he mentioned he's a vegetarian since animal's eat plants therefore instead of eating animals, eat the plants and cut out the middle man.

This resonated with me since my little daughter was just born.  I thought, my daughter eats breast milk why eat that when she can eat my wife's diet and cut out the middle man, right?

But WAIT, a newborn lacks the gut microbiome to process the diet of an adult, she CAN'T eat what my wife eats (obvious-fugging-ly).  As humans can not process the cow's diet due to lack of gut biome and the ruminant fermenting tank of an extra stomach.

Paul Jaminet's Perfect Health Diet then mentions ALL mammals eat the SAME macronutrient ratio ~20% carbs, 65% fat, and 15% protein by calories.  But ruminant animals 'eat' grass or (in the case of a giraffe) Acacia leaves, where's the protein and fats. 

The bottom line of this disconnect is that eating and ingesting are VERY different.  A ruminant animal eats - through the mouth plants.  These chewed plants enter a fermentation tank (stomach) where a biome of microrganisms who double in count every minute devour these stomach contents.  When the quantity of these gut animals reach a critical mass they are then sent to the stomach-digestive tract that more resembles an omnivores (or carnivores) for final processing and finally absorbed into the blood stream.  The final ratio of these microbes + plants is 20% carbs, 65% fat, and 15% protein by calories.  See the pattern?  

Assuming you have an omnivores short digestive tract and no ruminant stomach and can subsist from plants alone is flawed logic and needs careful supplementation just to survive.  I love vegetarians and vegans that feel they're making ethical decisions, but the logic of physics is not fact-based.  

Obey your biology and you'll be fine.

Thursday, June 5, 2014

Hear me on PrimalRunGeek PodCast

From the Link:

http://primalrungeek.com/primal/primal-run-geek-episode-3-0/

Geoff's Description is here:

Primal Run Geek, Episode 3.0

Episode 3 and the first time, and likely not the last, that we’ve managed to surpass our self-imposed 1 hour time limit…but only by the tiniest of 5 minutes. Geoff and Bill talk about mental training, theSageBurner 25k and DirtFest among other things. We are then joined by Mark Lofquist, a primal recreational athlete from Boulder, CO who runs the Paleo Runners blog as well as moderates an active Barefoot and Minimalist Runners group on Facebook and a related Strava group. Mark is self taught in regards to his passion for primal living and is full of great information and is just an all around fun guy to chat with.
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For those that aren’t already aware of the great DC Rainmaker site for endurance and fitness related gear reviews, definitely check it out.
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Wednesday, June 4, 2014

Running Camp

A 'camp' to get better at running?  It worked for me when I was young, sent to soccer camps every summer.  I came back to the real-world with new-found interest and enthusiasm about my sport.  I am SURE a running camp would do the same thing for me in my adulthood.  I am sad these two dates conflict with races I have planned.  But this camp is in my future.

When the book "The Cool Impossible" came out by my former running coach, Eric Orton, I was very excited to read it.  Eric and I worked together in what I love to call my couch-to-50-miler goals back in 2010.  

Apart from 100s of important training tips, The Cool Impossible describes what it would be like to attend a running camp in Jackson Hole, WY.  I just saw a wonderful post from here, advertising a training camp at "Eric's Place".

I think this is the ideal running-vacation and I can only imagine the tips/tricks and feedback you'd receive on your running.

The following is Pasted from Gearminded.com :

Jackson Hole Run Camp With Eric Orton
Jackson Hole Mountain Resort (JHMR) is pleased to team up with world-renowned running coach Eric Orton and the Teton Resorts to host the first Eric Orton Jackson Hole Run Camp.  This multiday running camp based out of Teton Village combines mountain amenities, world class terrain, and a personalized approach to trail running and training to create an unforgettable experience.
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This mountain running academy, set in the majestic Teton Mountain Range, provides every participant the opportunity to train, learn, explore, and discover what is possible with personalized coaching by Eric Orton, the Born To Run coach, and author of The Cool Impossible.  Eric’s creative and unique coaching format will challenge every camper, allowing them to achieve at their own level of ability, within a fun, inclusive group and team environment.  Lodging and spa options, as well as group meals which are provided by the Teton Mountain Lodge and Hotel Terra, round out the three-day camp to create a rejuvenating experience.
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“I am looking forward to offering this one of a kind experience in the Tetons this summer,” Orton states, and goes on to note “mountains were made to be explored, and the goal of this camp is to become an explorer of your running, of your goals, of what is possible. This is the natural gift from the mountain and the ultimate reward from this camp.”
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Eric Orton Jackson Hole Run Camp Details: 
Dates: August 13 -18, September 10-14, 2014
Cost: $899, to book, click here 
Lodging: Book with Hotel Terra or Teton Mountain Lodge, and save 25% off published rates
Who it’s for: This camp’s itinerary is designed for experienced runners of all levels who are able to comfortably run 2-3 hours, minimum, upon arrival.  Camp participants will be limited, so book now