Friday, June 22, 2012

Grounding, Reconnecting, and Transitions


 "Both the Hopis and Mayans recognize that we are approaching the end of a World Age... In both cases, however, the Hopi and Mayan elders do not prophesy that everything will come to an end. Rather, this is a time of transition from one World Age into another. The message they give concerns our making a choice of how we enter the future ahead. Our moving through with either resistance or acceptance will determine whether the transition will happen with cataclysmic changes or gradual peace and tranquility. "
— Joseph Robert Jochmans



I am no believer in doomsday myths or non-native sensationalism surrounding the purported end of the world in 2012.  However, in my own life, I've noticed a huge shift taking place within my mind, my body, and my essence of what I would call spirit.  As a good Greener, as those of us who attended The Evergreen State College are called, I experienced a college life that blended my scientific observations with a creative flow that felt compelled by the stirrings of my soul.  When studying plants, fungi, and lichen, I did more than jot down a few observations to satisfy the scientific requirements at hand.  I immersed myself into the subject at hand, observing far more than physical details such as size, growing media, and color.  I sat in the environment and listened.  I felt the rain misting over my being and heard the droplets percolate deep within the ground as simultaneous ones fell from the massive trees above me.  I observed the many varieties of plants growing within the area, and looked for signs of animals that might have passed by.  I inhaled the smell of the damp and the moss and all the life and death that a damp Northwest climate brings.


I felt in tune with my surroundings in the Northwest.  I tried to experience my time there in three-dimensional quality:  sight, smell, taste, touch, and intuition.


During the end of my teens and my early 20s, my life was more moved by my depth of feeling of what was right and what was wrong for me.  For us.  We made decisions not by practicality, but by how things felt.  Intuition and an inner knowledge is as close as I can get to describing the process. As my Grandmother suggested to me, I walked within beauty.  I let beauty be my guide.


When we knew the time was right to move back to New Mexico, we drifted in on the ease of good timing.  We believed everything would work out, and so it did.  


As time went on, a career was rooted and I began to feel the first pangs of dissatisfaction. The job wasn't what I wanted, but how do I turn back and start over?  Maybe I should wait another year. Maybe two.  Maybe I should pay off my car.  Maybe we should see if I can get another job.  It's too expensive to go to school. It's too expensive to add an addition.  Maybe we should see if I get a raise.  Maybe we should find a new house.  


The fire settled that.  We got a new house. We had some funds.  But as quickly as they came into our life, they were gone.  A new home.  A baby.  Then another.  Back to my job to earn more money.  More time passes.  I struggle to remember my connection to the Earth, to the inner stirrings of my own soul.  I grew tired, foggy, clouded with habit and the exhaustion of being a hardworking Mama.


Until April of 2012.  


Suddenly, I woke up.


My habits needed to be dropped.  Change had to occur.  I no longer felt powerful, intuitive, sexy.  I felt worn down, run out, and gross.  I felt fat.  I still had plenty of physical energy, but it was my mind and my soul that was left without ignition.  My creative interests had all but fallen by the wayside.  My athletic interests were falling prey to excuse after excuse, and I no longer recognized myself in the mirror.


But I woke up on April 22, 2012.


I decided at that moment to adopt a Paleo diet template, to completely eliminate all grains and legumes from my diet, and to banish beer from my glass.  Within a week, I'd lost 7 pounds.  By 3 weeks I'd lost 12.  I suddenly had a desire to sit on the edge of the canyon outside my door at work.  I would slip down and just observe.  The ants crawling along the rocks, the lichen, the swaying of the trees, the ravens circling overhead, and the nuthatches crawling up the few remaining Ponderosas.


I began to feel the spark of intuition and power creeping back into my day.  A walk out to a favorite old Indian cave place reminded me of my regular cave walks that grounded me to my place, my Los Alamos.  


As I walked amongst the caves and the cliffs jutting red and skyward above me, I wondered what it must have been like to live there, and then, I realized.  I did.  I do.  I live here. 



Thursday, June 14, 2012

What the Heck is a Keto-Adapted Athlete?

I just listened to a podcast interview of Mark Sisson, the author of The Primal Blueprint, and the host of Mark's Daily Apple. The interview was fascinating for me, because as I commit more and more to trying to become as close to ketogenic as I can, while still allowing myself the choice to have a beer on a special occasion, I have been constantly wondering how I will learn and adapt to ketosis and training for events at the same time.  So far, because I'm still in the very early stages of transition, and I've had a couple "cheat" days, where I've consumed more carbohydrates at a time than I allow otherwise, I do not think that I've been truly "ketogenic" for periods longer than 5 days in the past 7 weeks that I've been on a paleo diet template.

That said, I've noticed that I feel lighter and faster while running, and even on a day when I did a 5.5 mile trail run, I never felt like I was running on carb-empty.  I felt fine, great, actually.  But as I go through this process, and actually get back on my bike for more than 8 miles, I am sure that I will start to experience the various ups and downs of low-carb eating and how that may impact what I'm used to with regards to cycling, running, and swimming.  Swimming, so far, seems only improved.  I can sprint in the pool and feel relaxed, fueled, and fast (relatively, some people's warm-up speeds are my fast).  Running, well, I just don't run long enough right now to feel anything but good.  Although, I have noticed a difference in the way my muscles react during and after running, and it seems to be changing, and it's difficult to describe.

But cycling...that is a whole different ball game. Cycling leads to bonking.  I've bonked hard before, and it isn't pretty.  There is nothing worse than being 25 miles from home during a mountain bike and feeling like only an act of god will bring you home. So, I need to go bike. Long.  Without a pocket full of gels, but with something.  What?  That is my question.  Apples?  Dates?  Nuts?  A hard-boiled egg?  Nothing?

This is one aspect of the paleo-sphere that I'm super interested in -- fueling for the endurance athlete.  There is very little written on the subject that I've been able to find that answers the questions I have.  But I'm sure there is information tucked in places I haven't found yet.  Information like the following excerpt from the interview I linked to above:

Mark Sisson: It’s entirely possible to be a keto-adapted endurance athlete. I touched upon this briefly in my Paleo FX talk. One of the things about being keto-adapted is that it’s really a commitment. And once you’re keto-adapted and once you’ve made the necessary dietary changes, and some of the training changes to increase mitochondrial biogenesis and increase what we call the metabolic machinery that’s involved in using ketones and ramping up fat metabolism, you can go long periods of time at a very high output and not have to depend on glycogen stores or an exogenous feeding of glucose. It takes a little bit longer to do this, it takes months of training. But there are a number of athletes that are doing this now, including two of the guys who basically wrote the book on ketosis: that’s Stephen Phinney and Jeff Volek.  Both of them are athletes in their own rights. One is an Olympic lifter and the other one cycles, century rides. And they do this completely ketogenic. The problem comes when you think you’re going to be a ketogenic athlete and then you start to slide into, “Well, maybe I’ll have 100 grams of carbs, maybe 120 grams of carbs. Because what that does is… the cutoff is about 60 to 70 grams of carbs a day for an athlete. And once you get past that, then you shut off the ketosis. And the danger zone is when you’ve turned off ketosis but you haven’t supplied enough glucose to take over that new fuel partitioning. So the idea is that you’re either going to be a sugar-burning athlete taking in 300 to 400 grams of carbs a day  and training for the Spartan races, or you’re going to be 100% keto and keep the carbs at less than 70 a day. And in that middle ground lies epic failure for a lot of people. For most people, I would say. So you kind of have to pick and choose where you want to be. And if you’re willing to be on the side of that keto-adapted athlete, there is the possibility that you could drop the weight and the possibility that you’ll probably perform even better than if you were just depending on carbohydrate and glucose.

Abel James: So how much time would he have to give himself before a race to get adapted?

Mark: I mean, I think it’s a three to four month adaptation period. And during that time you have to ramp up your long-slow distance and if you’re doing trail running if you’re doing a little metabolic conditioning stuff you have to be very careful about how you do it and not go into the anaerobic zone too much. Now you can go anaerobic once in a while and come back down. I’m pretty much a keto-adapted athlete and I’ll play two hours of ultimate Frisbee on the weekend, and I’ll do a lot of sprints, but because I have a lot of time to rest in-between, the way you do in soccer, I don’t feel like I’m depleting glycogen I just feel like I’m burning fat and I’m able to completely do anaerobic, ATP-type sprints and recover very, very quickly and easily. I’m usually the kind of guy that, at the end of a two–hour game, I’m out –performing everybody because, you know, they’re all toasted. They’re all out of juice.

Abel: Now, what about carb cycling? That’s something that you used to do a lot of, I imagine, but you probably don’t anymore?

Mark: Well, I don’t do any carb cycling at all. I used to be…I didn’t even call it carb cycling, I was just at I carb a loaded every day of my life. I had 1,000 grams of carbs just about every day of my life for 15 or 20 years. And that’s because I was training as hard as I was. In my running days, that meant 100 to 110 miles a week, in my Triathlon days it was 50 miles of running and 250 miles of cycling and 25,000 meters of swimming. Plus anything else you had to do in the weight room and other things, too.

So, in those days, I just slammed down the carbs willy-nilly, a-la-Michael Phelps at 12,000 calories a day (which I think is a bit of an over-estimate). In terms of carb-cycling now, if you were a sugar-burning athlete, and I don’t mean to use the term disparagingly, but if you’re an athlete who has chosen to continue to rely on glycogen stores, then it seems that the best way to manage weight an fuel-partitioning is to do an appropriate amount of carbs, not an excessive amount of carbs. So if you’re a guy who’s doing one hard work-out a day, it’s probably appropriate that you take in 250 to 350, maybe 400 grams, but not much more than 400 grams of carbs per day. NOT 700 or 1,000 or 1,200. And in that regard, you can maintain that appropriate amount of carbohydrate intake and continue to train the way you do and, hopefully, in the process, ramp up your fat-burning machinery a little bit. You won’t be doing much with ketones, but you’ll be ramping up your fat-burning ability.
Then there’s another group of athletes who are trying to do what we call ‘train low, race high’. So they train on low glycogen stores, and they try to ramp up their fat metabolism. Again, they’re still not really taking full advantage of their keto-adaptation. But they’re training at low glycogen, and then, days before either a really hard work-out—maybe one that’s going to have massive amounts of intervals in it—or the day of a race, they’ll carb-up. They’ll fill their glycogen stores up. And, again, these are all choices, and I don’t purport to have the answer. Because if I did, I’d be coaching a world-class team of athletes. These are choices, and we’re still trying to work out the variables that give you the best possible outcome for that choice.

_____________________________________
Another good source of information about metabolism and ketosis is found here on Dr. Michael Eade's site, and which I found truly informative.

I'm new to all this, but I'm eager to learn as much as I possibly can.  The researcher in me is hungry for information, and I plan to sift through as much as I can.

 

Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Living A Cliff-Side Life

Paleo Diet, Primal Diet, the Caveman Diet, all these are synonymous with a growing trend in health through diet. Most healing modalities stress diet as the primary source of health and healing, but in this day and age of the "Standard American Diet" or SAD, healthful living seems to move further and further away from many peoples' grasp. Why is there such a disconnect between modern medicine and the health of Americans and other Westerners? How have we made such profound advances in technology and medicine, only to be failing at a fundamental level?  Diabetes and autoimmune disorders seem to be rampant and increasing. The interconnection between a failure to help people to recover from diabetes and other autoimmune dysfunctions leads to the ever-skyrocketing costs of insurance and medical care.

How did we end up at this point?

What if simple dietary changes and other simple, inexpensive therapies could reverse these conditions and lead people back to a life of health and abundance?

These are the kinds of things I intend to explore with this blog.

I'm learning about and implementing paleo diet principals into my own life and seeing profound change. If such change can happen so quickly, how might it help people who are really ill?

My curiosity is also piqued by wondering how paleo principals and cooking might affect overall health when living and training at altitude.

Join me in exploring this lifestyle and diet approach, and how it can be used to improve health and performance.  This is a new road for me, and I'm very curious about the sorts of challenges and intriguing things I will discover.

Welcome!