Author: steve

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My high fat diet PLUS yoga PLUS allergies

I am in day 20 of my high fat diet, which aims for 70% fat, 20% protein, and 10% carbs.

My body seems to have adapted to the lack of carbs, so I am not feeling as run down, although I’ve been doing only yoga the past 10 days. I switched from Insanity to yoga because I tweaked my back, but I liked the yoga so much, and my back was feeling so good, that I decided to stick with yoga for a few weeks. I haven’t done that before and have been wanting to give it a shot, so now’s a good a time as any, right?

I’ve always liked yoga, and I am really thankful that  Tony Horton got me into it during P90X. It seems like a great way to stay in shape, although I do feel the need to add some cardio. I will do that once I feel my back is in really good shape. Honestly, my back hasn’t felt this great in years, so I don’t want to do anything to mess it up.

As for the high fat diet, I am again feeling like it’s a mixed bag of pluses and minuses.

First of all, I continue to struggle to stay under 2000 calories, which was not a problem on my high-protein diet. For some reason, when eating high fat, I end up in the 2200 to 2400 calorie area almost every day.

Not that there’s anything too wrong with that. I burn enough to still be able to see negative net calories on that regimen, but I’d always read that fat is far more filling and satisfying than carbs and protein, and I am just not finding that to be the case.

Also, I am feeling some of those same episodes of “hitting the wall” after a high-fat meal. I had previously attributed that phenomenon to too much carbohydrate, but now I wonder what the real cause is.

For example, as I write this, I feel somewhat sleepy. Well, I had a good 7.5 hours of sleep last night, and it’s still morning. However, about a half-hour ago I had a heavy cream latte that had about 20 grams of fat in it. So, yes, I wonder what is causing the sleepiness.

Honestly, it could be allergies. While my mountain cedar sensitivity is severely diminished during this period of no-grain eating, it’s been raining a lot here, and mold still seems to have a pretty strong negative effect on my body.

Aside from all that, I feel great. My energy level is fine, my strength is great, and I haven’t had any problem sticking to the diet. When I go out to eat, I usually have a salad with some protein in it, which is usually what I had to eat when I dined out before anyway.

Today’s Super Bowl party at a friend’s house may prove challenging — not sure what to expect for food there — but I can always eat nothing, and maybe that will keep me under 2000 calories for at least one day.

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Ouch, I tweaked my back. Now what?

I tweaked my back last Wednesday, right at the end of the workout. During the last move, rep 2 of 4. Tweak. DAMMIT!

I don’t really know if “tweak” has any medical validity — perhaps my friend Donna can chime in on that — but I use it to talk about an injury that seems minor, one that’s not debilitating, but which does cause me some concern.

So what did that tweak do to my workout routine?

Well, when it comes to my back, I always choose to err on the side of caution, and I was headed into my recovery week anyway, so the timing was almost perfect.

The injury occurred, by the way, during a jump up from wide pushups. Do 4 pushups with wide hands and feet, then jump the feet forward, standing to a squat.

I felt it in my left side, lower back, at the rear point of the hip. A twinge of pain. I am actually accustomed to minor pain in the same area, but on the right side. Been there for years. This left side, though, is new pain, and it was a pretty sharp, so I quit right there. I probably should have put some ice on it, but I didn’t.

The injury felt better the next morning, but only by about 50%, so I swapped the heavier planned workout for a lighter yoga workout — #1 and #5 from Ultimate Power Yoga, which put a lot of emphasis on the lower back.

I did that same yoga routine the next two days, then took Sunday off.

Then, on Monday, I did Rodney Yee Total Body Workout from his Power Yoga Collection. Yesterday it was back to #1 and #5 from Ultimate Power Yoga, and today will be Patience Yoga from Tony Horton’s One on One collection.

Can I tell you something? My back feels great! Seriously, not this good in quite some time.

In fact, my back feels so good, I am going to continue this yoga routine through the next few weeks, just to see what happens. Yeah, I know, I was in the middle of my Insanity with weekends off program, but I like to roll with the flow. I’ll sprinkle some Insanity or other cardio workouts into the mix starting next week.

(And, yes, I am still on my high-fat diet, but I’ll write more on that in a few days.)

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Staying fit by varying your workouts

Sure, sure, Tony Horton and his P90X program have made “muscle confusion” a buzzphrase, but the fact is, as Tony readily acknowledges, that the idea of muscle confusion has been around for years.

For example, in P90X we do 3 weeks of varied workouts, a week of recovery, 3 more weeks of different workouts — same muscles, different moves –, a week of recovery, and 3 weeks of workouts that mix the 2 sets of moves.

Why is it so important? I mean, I’m not a bodybuilder, so why do I need to worry about muscle confusion?

Well, I figure it this way: If I am going to put the time into being fit, why not go ahead and get fit the best, most efficient way I can? And, let’s face it, running every day is not my style. Too boring.

Plus, I want to be generally fit. If my goal were to run fast 10k races, I would run. But I don’t need to be able to fun faster than the rest of the world, I just want to lower my fat level and have an overall stronger body.

So I’ll cross-train and keep my muscles confused.

I have told the story before of the distance runner who used to fail the fitness test when I was in the Air Force, because the fitness test was done on a stationary bike. Once he added bicycling to his distance running, he was able to pass the test.

Beyond just engaging in different cross-training activities, though, the principle of muscle confusion also tells us to switch it up by working our muscles differently.

I use muscle soreness as a test. If I get to the point where I notice I am not sore (or not as sore) as I should be, that’s a reminder to switch it up. I tend to do the same routines for 3 or 4 weeks, then take a week of recovery, then change things up for another 3 or 4 weeks.

Switching up a routine to create muscle confusion can be as simple as reversing the order of the moves.

For example, try doing Steve’s Chest and Back for 3 or 4 weeks as part of your workout plan, then, after your recovery week, keep it in your plan, but reverse the order of the moves. You’ll feel it!

Muscle confusion is the basis for cross-training, and it’s the reason I engage in resistance training, do aerobics, and practice yoga. It takes a lot of different kinds of activity to build a body, and, for me, anyway, doing the same thing all the time is too tedious.

So, relieve the tedium and reach your general fitness goals by varying your workouts on your way to a better body!

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High fat diet – Day 8

It’s day 8 of my high-fat diet, which consists of 70% of calories from fat, 20% from protein, and 10% from carbs. See more here at my original post on the subject.

How do I feel?

Hmmmmmm…. Mixed bag.

I feel great in that my allergies are not bothering me at all right now, at a time when they should really be flaring up along with everyone else’s, with the mountain cedar hitting San Antonio quite forcefully. I attribute my allergy resistance to the lack of grains in this current eating plan, because I noticed this same phenomenon during my 6-month hiatus from grains back in 2010.

However, while the allergies are held at bay — and that is great, lemme tell ya — I do feel a bit run down.

According to the experts I trust on the subject, this is a normal reaction as my body adjusts from running on carbs to running on fat. The adjustment period lasts around two weeks.

It’s this adjustment period that has always foiled me in the past when I tried to eat low-carb.

However, the difference this time is that I am also eating low (but enough) protein and focusing on getting enough fat for fuel. I have to say, I feel so much better on low-carb this time than I have in the past. I am not even tempted to give up yet, and, in fact, I’m very interested to see what will happen with my body after the transition.

Experiments like this are fun for me! Everyone’s body is different. Some people can handle a lot of carbs. I’m not one of those people, so I’ve been trying to eat low-carb for years, but it never worked out for me. This time it may.

I’ll keep you updated on my progress. Now I gotta go do Pure Cardio and Cardio Abs.

 

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I’m giving high-fat eating a shot

I started a high fat diet on Tuesday.

High fat, of course, implies low-carb, and I’ve always been intrigued by the low carb lifestyle. It’s a lifestyle, not a diet, because once you go low carb, you gotta stay low carb.

Well, to be fair, low-carb is not necessarily a lifestyle, per se. There are plenty of people who cycle low-carbs with high carbs or do intermittent keto runs, like my friend Rob Gioia. But my body does not respond well to that.

Let me explain why high-fat / low-carb is a lifestyle for me.

The primary benefit of low carb living, if you are trying to lose fat, is that it puts your body into a state of ketosis, which depletes your body’s stored glycogen and forces it to burn fat for fuel.

To get to ketosis, you need to consume 50 grams or less of carbohydrate per day. That’s do-able, but the body takes a good 2 weeks to get accustomed to this new way of eating (which is really just an old way of eating, but you can read the book for the specifics).

All that is fine, but the problem, and the reason low-carb is a lifestyle, is that if, after you are into ketosis, you splurge on carbs just one time, you pretty much reset the clock on the glycogen stores, and it’s a week or two before your body is burning fat again.

Okay, well, I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.

So this new way of eating was brought on by a well-researched book, The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Living.

I’ve read Protein Power, which is the definitive book concerning the power of low-carb living and science behind it.

I’ve also read Good Calories Bad Calories, which is the definitive book concerning the politics behind the U.S. goverment’s push for low-fat regimens.

Both of those books are well-researched and include a lot of impressive data. So when one of the authors of Protein Power, Dr. Michael Eades, said that the recently published The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Living was the book he wished he’d written, well, of course, I had to buy it.

The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Living is a quick read compared to those other two, and provides a lot of the science you might want to know about the low-carb lifestyle.

I’ll stop there, because this is not a book review. Read the book.

I’m in day 4 of a high-fat diet because of that book. I also happen to be in week 3 of my Insanity with weekends off program.

According to the authors, it’s not a good idea to engage in high-level fitness activities while transitioning to the high-fat lifestyle, but I ain’t stoppin’ and everything seems to be fine so far. I guess I’m fit enough that Insanity is not that much of a stretch for my body.

Plus, I learned 2 things from that book that I had not picked up from other low-carb books, and those 2 things might be helping me out. Maybe the info was there in the other books, but I missed it.

  1. You gotta add salt. Low-carb diets cause salt to pass out of your body rather quickly, so you must be sure to consume salt. Low salt puts you at risk for all kinds of things, like soreness, fatigue, um, death. You know, bad things. Read the book Salt for more on that.
  2. You gotta add fat. Lots of fat. That’s why I call this a high-fat diet, rather than a low-carb diet. I’m in the 70%-of-my-calories-from-fat range.

When I read concept #1, about the salt, that made a lot of sense to me. If you buy into the paleo theory, which claims that our bodies have not evolved to the point where we can healthily consume all these grains/carbs that we eat, because they are relatively recent additions to our diet — and I do buy into that way of thinking — then the salt thing makes sense.

Doctors tell us not to eat a lot of salt — it’s bad for us. But … but … we like salt. Seems to me that fits with paleo theory. Our ancient ancestors, who survived mostly on fat and protein, needed a lot more salt on their paleo / low-carb diets, than modern humans do on their high-carb diets.

So from paleo days it is natural for us to like salt, but on our modern high-carb diet, salt causes health problems.

So, that clicked with me. Paleo diet = low carb = more salt.

As for #2 above, combining low-carb with high-fat, as opposed to high-protein, eating, wow, that is a no-brainer. I feel like an idiot for not seeing it before, but I am a product of my society. I’ve been told for so long that fat is bad, it’s hard to wrap my mind around the fact that it is not.

Yeah, if you’re going to cut carbs, you have to get energy from somewhere, and fat is the way to go, because the body does not efficiently turn protein into fuel.

So, to the point: I’m in day 4 of a high-fat diet, which is 2000 calories a day, with 70% of calories from fat, 10% from carbs, and 20% from protein. And I feel great!

This lifestyle is not for everyone. My fasting blood-sugar hovers right around 110 (which is the cusp of normal/high), so I’ve always gravitated toward low-carb. I have noticed that I get that “sugar coma” feeling even after consuming only 20 carbs at a meal, and … I really don’t like that feeling, even though it passes fairly quickly.

So I thought I’d give this high-fat thing a try for at least 3 months. So far, so good, but it’s early. I’ll keep you posted.