The weeks between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day can be a nutritional and emotional disaster. It doesn’t have to be this way.
This class will focus on keeping weight gain in-check by looking at all the factors that cause unwanted flab to accumulate during this time of year.
You will leave with tools to help you make the best food and health choices during this holiday season.
No cost to IKSC members.
$15 drop-in fee for non-members.
Mark your calendars! The next nutrition class is Monday November 4th at 7p.m. This will cover strategies to avoid holiday weight gain. It has to do with more than what you eat.
Good reminder on these nutrition facts. Not much you haven’t heard from me before.
This is exactly what we use at IKSC to do large amounts of quality movements. He explains it a little differently than I would, but the point is that you pace sets and reps so you get quality work done. It is about building work capacity. He calls it “old-man strength.” I call it farm kid strong.
L-theanine: I’ve actually been using a ZMA product from Vitamin Shoppe that contains it for quite a while now. I do think it helps with sleep above just the ZMA itself.
Video of The Week: You hear lots of anti-meat propaganda these days. Understand that most of the new push is coinciding with large processed food companies pushing fake meat. Follow the money. It takes a little knowledge of physiology, a little knowledge of ecosystems, and a grown-up look at things like greenhouse gases to understand the whole picture. Diana Rodgers does an amazing job of explaining this.
The next lifestyle/nutrition class will be November 4th at 7p.m. I’ll be doing this class and it will focus on preventing holiday weight gain. I’ve done this one in the past and it’s always been one of the most productive ones.
This is an interesting new study that came out about military personnel stationed at different latitudes, their vitamin D levels, and depression. We don’t get enough natural sunlight in Idaho to absorb it naturally. I take 5,000iu all the time, and 10,000iu in the colder months. https://jissn.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12970-019-0308-5
I haven’t tried this exact deadlift program. I’ve done similar ones and they’ve worked. It looks to be a very doable program without much that can go wrong as long as you are patient with it and don’t overestimate your starting points. https://www.t-nation.com/training/simple-deadlift-program
Some of you have heard bits and pieces of this story from me over the years. Looks like Robb Wolf posted a good synopsis of the way our food system and nutritional guidelines got so incredibly screwed up.
You hear me discredit “cardio” in the traditional sense a lot. Mostly because what qualifies as such in the general fitness world is not low-level enough to really be good at training an aerobic base, and not truly lung-burning hard enough to benefit the upper end.
What usually qualifies as cardio in mainstream fitness realm is what is known in the sports strength and conditioning world as “the junk zone.” This is what you see in popular chain fitness franchises like F45, Orange Theory, or one of the various cycling classes. This is the zone that the perceived effort is medium-hard, makes you breath pretty hard, and sweat a bunch. This is where the uninformed usually say they’re “getting in a good workout,” but really all they’re accomplishing is burning some sugar, stimulating stress hormone, and training weak movement patterns.
In short, cardio should either be as strong and fast as you can do it for less than a minute, or easy enough you could do it all day if you had to. But, the reality is that it is important, even if you hate it.
Nothing good comes from high blood sugar and poor insulin-sensitivity. This is why literally every piece of nutrition advice I give is designed to enhance insulin-sensitivity. If you are insulin-resistant, every aspect of your performance is compromised.
“Insulin clearance is associated with physical fitness and metabolic health. Aging is associated with reduced metabolic clearance of insulin and hyperinsulinemia, reduced glucose effectiveness, and an increase in metabolic diseases…”
Meat is good for you. Eat it. Many of the studies that have suggested otherwise do not actually stand up to any kind of scrutiny. It has been a mantra for years, but when you really break it down, evidence to support health hazards associated with eating meat is so weak as to not even be taken seriously…and the methods used to gather that evidence are suspect at best.
Get out into the mountains this fall! This photo is of the S. Fork of Salmon River, about 12 miles north of Warm Lake.
Don’t forget about the special class at 7p.m. next Monday from Jenn’s Primal Health. The class will focus on how to make new habits stick: Read about it and sign up here. Cost: $10
Looks like what we do with the rower is catching on. I am toying with the idea of offering some class times that heavily emphasize the rower as a conditioning tool:
Here’s a good article unpacking the reasons why avoiding red meat is not advised.
Main points:
1) Evidence linking red meat eating and poor health is weak, conflicted, and/or non-existent.
2) Meat is the most nutrient dense thing you can eat.
3) Avoiding meat sets humans up for a variety of nutritional deficiencies. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10408398.2019.1657063?
You will hear me harp on magnesium, vitamin D and zinc as being three things you should supplement with. We just don’t get enough from foods we eat and in the case of vitamin D, we just don’t live in a part of the world where we get enough sunlight. A good way to get these is by supplementing with 5-10,000iu of vitamin D3 per day, and then taking a product called “ZMA” which has zinc and magnesium. https://www.ergo-log.com/magnesium-rich-diet-reduces-mortality-risk.html
Strength training improves mood. I’ve found this to be the case even more when it involves movements that use your whole body through a full range-of-motion. One of the guidelines I use when programming at IKSC is that the movements we use for training should use everything from your fingertips to toes, while incorporating the breath and always leading with the eyes. https://www.ergo-log.com/stop-worrying-go-and-start-strength-training.html
This next link has a good section on the new scare about chicken and cancer. Mark makes a good point (one I often make about beef), is that they aren’t factoring in what people are eating with the chicken.
This is one of the reasons it is important to know the mechanisms and the physiology of what’s going on, not just look at stats. Case in point: Ever go to a BBQ restaurant and see an obese and unhealthy person just eating a pound of brisket or smoked turkey? No, it is usually slathered in sugary sauce, and by caloric content, the carb-load side dishes vastly outweigh the meat. https://www.marksdailyapple.com/does-chicken-cause-cancer-should-you-neuter-dog-collagen-and-skipping-dinner/
Video of The Week:
One comment on the video: Note that she makes reference to Mediterranean Diet. The issue I have with that particular popular diet is that it does not limit palette options, and really, turns into the same old “everything in moderation” thing that has been proven over and over to be a failure for a nutritional strategy. What it ends up being is whatever people want it to be.
Also note, that at about 11:50 she makes a note that any variation of the Mediterranean Diet that failed to include red meat DID NOT improve symptoms of depression.
This is the podcast that some social media sources are filtering and removing comparing beef to plant proteins, and boy can I see why after listening. I stay abreast of this topic, but even I learned quite a bit about the absolute statistical gymnastics that must be performed in order to vilify beef as a food source with regards to environmental impact…I should add that the person being interviewed on the podcast was heavily involved in the research that came up with these stats. Follow the money, people. https://sustainabledish.com/podcasts/sustainable-dish-episode-78-beyond-burger-vs-real-burgers-with-sara-place-2/
Video of The Week:
Art DeVany. This is the book and person that started me down the ancestral nutrition and health rabbithole almost 10 years ago. It’s really all right there. There we’ve dived into the minutia of it, but the nuts and bolts of optimal nutrition is all right here.
Show this photo next time someone talks about environment or sustainability issues when it comes to beef. This is where a lot of beef comes from, even if they might spend some of their lives in feedlots. Notice they are still bunched up, and crowd together whether they have 1,000,000 acres to roam or 5 acres. That’s what herd animals do for protection.
They are at about 6200ft eating natural grasses. Nothing else will grow here, and cattle grazing in the region helps to minimize the impact of the occasional brush fire. There is very little water, which comes from natural springs, a few creeks and rainfall. This area is about 40 miles from the nearest paved road only accessible by horse, a substantial 4×4 or ATV, the kinds of places people that order “Impossible Burgers” never set foot on.
Obviously, these cows are not destroying the environment, and you’ll find deer, elk, antelope (the hillside here is called Antelope Ridge) coyotes, hawks, eagles, snakes, etc. The photo with the GPS coordinates is for reference and was not far from here.
Nearest town is Triangle, Idaho, and this is on public land that you and I can both use for recreation.
I don’t know who “noom” is, but this graphic is great. Please give them props for it. I would add that the trend chart should be for months or even years, and not just a matter of weeks:
This article is brings up the use of a paleo diet for MS, but understand that it also seems to help with other autoimmune conditions, such as eczema, thyroid conditions, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, etc.
Years ago I started recommending this nutritional strategy for body comp and strength -which it works great for- but people with some of these problems told me about improvements in these conditions, so I didn’t argue with them. Good to see the idea is now widely accepted.
Here’s a good article on one of the programs a few of you are on for the squat and deadlift (including me). We modify it a little, and put a few IKSC touches on it, but here is the basic outline of 5/3/1. https://www.t-nation.com/workouts/531-how-to-build-pure-strength
Video of The Week:
Another one by Dave Feldman. I was lucky to be there for this lecture. Takeaway point is that your cholesterol readings can change daily, so your reading from a blood draw every several months may not tell you as much as your doctor says it does.
The next nutrition class will be Monday August 5th at 7pm. We will focus on sleep and chronic stressors, and how they impact recovery, performance, and nutrition choices. Hope you can make it.
Video of The Week: Most of you have heard me talk about “metabolic flexibility” and how the goal is not to be “keto” but to be able to switch between burning fat and ketones to glucose at will. Robb Wolf explains this well.
A paleo diet will help you lose excess fat and improve health markers. In order for it to work, you must eat things that align as close as possible with what would have been available in a pre-agricultural society, which means no “paleo” cookies, gluten free treats, nut butters, etc. http://www.ergo-log.com/paleo-diet-perfect-weight-loss-diet.html
