Becoming a Lean, Mean Eating Machine - Part 3

Last blog we explored how to take the first step towards eating foods that help keep us strong, lean, and resilient by substituting heavily processed foods made with poor ingredients with more carefully processed foods containing more nutritious ingredients. Remember the goal is to recondition our taste buds and end up craving healthier food choices.

What we eat is life or death (our choice) by a thousand cuts. It's not so much the one time a month that we might eat a sugar rich desert or prime rib marbled with saturated fat that undermine our fitness, but the day in day out food ingested over and over again.

The next step is to substitute individual foods that are high in bad fats or simple carbs with foods rich in good fats and complex carbs. Try to substitute something new every week. Time goes by fast. In a matter of weeks, you'll start to see and feel changes.

Start with some of these substitutions (from >> to):

Whole dairy products >> low or no fat dairy products
Red meat >> fish, grilled skinless chicken or turkey
Tuna packed in oil >> tuna packed in water
Boxed cereals >> oatmeal (rolled or steel cut)
White rice >> brown rice
Desert with sugar >> fruit
Potato chips/tortilla chips >> raw carrots or celery, or a handful of almonds
Ice cream with sugar >> plain yogurt with fruit
White potato >> sweet potato or yam

You'll notice some common themes hinted at in this list. The first is a move away from protein sources that are high in saturated fats, especially corn fed red meat. The other is that the carbs of choice are vegetables and fruit, not carbs heavy in high fructose corn syrup and white sugar.

A couple of good references to look at with more ideas is Tom Venuto's (he's a body builder, but don't be put off by that -- knows his stuff) ebook "Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle" or Paul Goldberg and Matt Fitzgerald's "The Lean Look."

Another good way to adopt the substitution strategy is just to watch the space on your plate. More and more of the space should be taken up by vegetables and fruit. It's that simple.

What's your reward? Speed, endurance, clear thinking, strength, energy. A TOJ's pot at the end of the rainbow.


Spicy Oven Baked Sweet Potato Fries

3 to 4 Sweet Potatoes
3 TBs melted coconut oil
1/4 to 1/2 tsp. Chipotle Chili Powder or cayenne
salt to taste

To prepare the sweet potatoes wash and scrub them thoroughly. Cut in half and then into strips. For thinner fries cut those strips into halves again. Toss in melted coconut oil and sprinkle on chili power and salt.

Bake in preheated oven at 450 degrees. Turn with a spatula after 20 minutes and bake until crispy, about 30 to 45 minutes depending on the thickness of the potatoes.








Now we'll take a look at how to

The Centers for Disease Control just announced an alarming study that, if current trends continue, by 2050 as many as 1 of 3 Americans will have diabetes.

Food for Fitness

Emil Zatopek, the great Czech distance runner in the 1950's, once said, "If you come to think of it, you never see deer, dogs and rabbits worrying about their menus and yet they run much faster than humans." (This is from The Quotable Runner edited by Mark Will-Weber, a great book.)


He could have added neither do bears and elephants that are stronger than humans, nor kangaroos that jump further than humans, nor eagles that can see better than humans, nor whales that swim better than humans.


Yet we do. Right now this TOJ is reading a book entitled Power Eating by Susan Kleiner, which packed with references to studies, recommendations, recipes, do's and don'ts, lists, and eating plans. Wow, there's a lot to worry about -- nutrient timing, food combinations, right mix of carbs, fat and protein, hydrating not too much, not too little. You will not find an exercise magazine that doesn't have promise nutrition secrets inside the cover to make you better.


No doubt there's some truth among all those facts and opinions, but you have to be your own ultimate guide when it comes to deciding what you will eat and drink because we are all the same, but we are also different.
I found I felt weak and spacey on a vegetarian diet although Brendan Brazier has developed the endurance and strength to successively compete as an elite triathlete while eating a 100% vegan diet.


Science is uncovering as many mysteries and contradictions as it is certainties. For instance, check out the article by Gretchen Reynolds about "What Exercise Science Doesn't Know About Women" in which she reports a study that made a surprising discovery. The conventional training wisdom is that you can hasten recovery after a hard workout if you eat a mix of carbs and protein. However, the study discovered that is only true for males. Women, in fact, recover faster with straight carbs.


This TOJ likes to stay abreast of current thinking on these topics, but figures it's best to discover what's true for you. I appreciate all the hard work and time intelligent people put into finding some truths about food. But for most of us, nutrition will have a much bigger impact on our health than it will our performance, no matter what physical activities we prefer.


Another quote I really liked was by Don Kardong, an American marathon Olympian in the 1970's: "Without ice cream, there would be darkness and chaos." Now that's wisdom.

CINNAMON CHOCOLATE BANANA ICE CREAM

5 large frozen bananas broken into chunks

1/3 cup cocoa  or carob powder

1/4 C. agave nectar

1 teaspoon cinnamon

2 to 3 Tbs. water

Put all ingredients in a blender and blend into a thick cream adding water if needed. Serve immediately or place in freezer.

Surviving the Medicine Show

TOJs have a natural interest in health so that they can keep being TOJs. In the Information Age, separating the signal from the noise (that's the hip digital metaphor), or the truth from lies (old fashioned knowledge), ain't easy, especially when it comes to how to best maintain your health. There are a few reasons why this is so difficult:

1. The human body is very complicated. Modern science finds more and more to marvel at as it goes deeper and deeper into electro-chemical physical processes.

2. Each of us are more different from one another than science wants to admit. Complex factors like genetics, environment and age can make what is good for one person be poison to another.

3. Science is for sale. In the western world, scientific method is the accepted means by which truth is discovered. But we have also discovered that scientists are not above biases and skewing data (maybe even unconsciously) so their tainted conclusions are eventually rewarded with money, whether it's doctors selling their own concoctions to endowed chairs at prestigious universities.

4. A numbing barrage of advertising promises easy sleep, unbounded energy, four hour erections, etc. Much of it is not true.

So what's a TOJ to do, especially one like me who took a one too many shots to the head playing football and boxing causing my synapses to misfire here and there? I think you need to be skeptical, cautiously experimental, and open minded. What does that mean?

There's a good book by Robert Davis called The Healthy Skeptic: Cutting through the HYPE about Your Health. In addition to a hilarious (he didn't intend this) history of health scams through the centuries -everything from enemas, sexual deprivation, zany diets and food fetishes - he exposes some of the popular ones now like supplements, diet books, sunscreen mania and anti-aging doctors. After each chapter, he provides excellent sources for credible health information. Like him, you've got to dig for facts.

By cautiously experimental, I mean if something seems to have some encouraging evidence, and often it might be anecdotal, check it out yourself. Take glucosamine-chondroitin. I first heard about it from a neighbor and happened to mention it to my brother, who was a professional football player. He said he and other players he'd spoken with found it helped their battered bones. Academics have come out with recent studies that say it "probably" doesn't do anything. In my case it did, and it isn't the placebo effect (and if it were, so what?). I read about the pros and cons, got a reliable brand, varied the dosage, and gave it time to work. My knees feel better.

Finally, by open minded I mean you need to be curious about research and studies going on. I listen especially closely to people who are not being paid to endorse or recommend something. Health care consumes 16% of the country GDP. It's going up every year. The Boomers threaten to break the Medicare bank. Armies of researchers are looking for valid solutions to health problems. More than ever they will be making important discoveries, many of which will help TOJs, and I will discuss here.