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Learning to Fish

  By admin • January 8, 2014 Blogroll

If you sign up for almost anything, take it on earnestly, and diligently follow the rules, you will almost always see great results. What you are about to take on over the next four weeks is a structure around which to eat, train, and recover, and as long as you stick to it, the change WILL come for you. If you hunker down for the four weeks, you’ll get, in essence, a fish. But the real victory will be to LEARN to fish.

One thing this may mean is changing your relationship to food, especially carbohydrates. You see, carbohydrates are a drug. Your body reacts to them like it reacts to a drug, and carbs are just as hard to quit. A lot of us have emotional connections to certain foods, or go to food in times of stress or as a reward for good behavior. To our mind, that cookie is a treat for getting through a tough day at the office; to our body, it’s just more sugar in the blood and wood on the fire. Because that’s what food is, after all: fuel.

When you get those cravings in the beginning (and you WILL get them), just remember: it’s only fuel. That cookie won’t actually make you feel better. Sticking with the program and seeing results will. When you see food as an energy source (albeit a delicious one!), you can change your relationship to it. And when you change your relationship to food you’ve learned how to fish. That result will last a lot longer.

So say it with me, all together now: “FOOD IS FUEL!

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Workout Requirement

Exercise changes you EVERY DAY for the next month?   What?  That usually gets your attention!  The idea here is that you start to relate to yourself as something that is designed to move since your long-term health is dependent on not being sedentary.  No, we would NEVER ask you to go full intensity every day– so understanding the difference between a workout and active recovery will be essential for your overall health.

Active recovery is really to just get the blood flowing. Don’t go for exhaustion, go for warmth and then stretch afterward.

Active Recovery Movements 

  • A *slow* *easy* stint on the rower or exercise bike
  • light jog
  • yoga or other stretching
  • light swim
  • extra mobility work
  • biking
  • Pick a handful of body weight movements

 

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Let’s Talk Fish Oil

  By admin • January 7, 2014 Blogroll, Supplements

So, you are registered for the challenge and want to get ready — let’s talk about Fish Oil.

We all have seen the extra large bottle of Fish Oil on the shelf at Costco. Don’t Buy It!

$7 for a Gigantic bottle of fish oil would be awesome, but when it comes to Fish Oil, you get what you pay for.

All high quality, also referred to as ‘pharmaceutical grade’,  producers of fish oil supplements have their products tested by IFOS to prove their quality. If a company doesn’t have their product tested, then most likely it’s not very good quality and you won’t receive all the benefits that Fish Oil has to offer!

Many companies misrepresent the amount of  EPA/DHA in their products and currently there is no regulation of it.

What you should know about the benefits of Omega-3

Some things you may know about omega-3 already is that it is important for muscle and tissue recovery, but what you may not know is that it is critical for brain, heart, and cardiovascular health as well.

Omega-3 fatty acids are very powerful anti-inflammatory chemicals that help to maintain tissue and vascular health.  While omega-6 is necessary in our diet, our omega-6 account is way over-funded.  In an ideal world, the ratio of omega-3 to omega-6 in our diet would be 1-1 or 1-2. This is how it would look if you were a hunter/gatherer, eating the meat and fat of range fed or wild animals and whatever fruit and vegetables you could find growing wild. The world that we currently occupy of highly processed food, a predominance of vegetable fats and industrially raised sources of meat has our ratios look more like 1:20 or 1:40 omega-3 to omega-6. Just so you know, this is bad.  It is highly inflammatory and a major cause of heart disease as well as a host of other metabolic diseases.

There are many ways to rectify the situation.  Cutting out the industrial middle-man in your food chain and buying grass-fed or honest-to-goodness free-range meats as well as reducing or eliminating your intake of vegetable oils is a start.  The next step is supplementing with an omega-3 supplement.  There are many sources, but there is no source better than fish oil. Flax oil will provide some omega-3, but in the form of ALA (alpha-linoleic acid).  The trouble with that is, you want EPA (eicosapentaneoic acid) and DHA (docosahexanoeic acid).  ALA can be converted in the body to EPA and DHA, but the efficiency is very poor.  A decent vegetarian source is algae oil, but there is no comparison to the quantity that you will get from high quality fish oil.  Eating plenty of cold water fish is also a good idea, but you’ll want to make sure that your fish is safe and from a good, healthy source before eating a whole bunch of it.

The next question is “how much?”

As a general rule, take at least 4000 mg of a combination of EPA and DHA — read the label carefully.  The number on the front of the bottle may be how much fish oil there is and not how much EPA and DHA.  If you really want to dial it in, visit the fish oil calculator to determine what dosage you want to take.

The-Benefits-of-Fish-Oil-Infographic1