Vegetarian for all the Wrong Reasons

Gotta love family sometimes. Well, actually most of the time. They can provide great blog post fodder. This post is inspired by a dietary change my aunt is making. I heard through the grapevine the other night that my aunt is becoming a vegetarian. So I sent her an email asking why she would not be interested in achieving optimal health. Her response was fascinating. She is doing it for the planet. She is concerned about environmental issues so she will no longer eat meat. I must admit I was not expecting this response. I think this is a completely valid and outstanding reason to make a change. The only problem is she's making the wrong change. Woohoo, bullet time!

1. The feed used by big corporations to fatten cattle and chickens is absolutely horrible for the environment. This is what we can buy at the local grocery store. Cutting that out of your diet will certainly benefit the environment. However, we must make a very clear distinction between corporate meat (chicken, eggs, beef, etc) and properly raised meat (cage free chicken and eggs, grass fed beef.)
   
2. Corporate meat fed a diet of mainly corn feed loses it's nutritional benefits. There are limited vitamins and minerals due to the lack of vegetation in their diet. And the worst part is it becomes a source of bad fats (Omega-6) as opposed to good fats (Omega-3.) Grass fed beef is just as good a source of Omega-3 fatty acids as salmon! Feeding animals a corn based diet to fatten them up has a significant negative trickle down impact on the environment (for the sake of my sis I won't get into poop again.) Raising animals the way they are meant to be raised and and they way they existed for thousands of millions of years has tremendous trickle down environmental benefits.
   
3. The presence of GMOs (Genetically Modified Organism) in our food supply is frightening. These allow large corporations like Monsanto to produce more food product while manipulating the nutritional contents. The negative impact on the environment and human existence could be staggering.
   
4. Eating properly raised meat (eggs, raw milk, cage free chicken, grass fed beef) has amazing health benefits. Eggs (perhaps the world's most perfect food) contains the highest quality protein to build and repair our tissue along with heart disease preventing fats (choline.) Grass fed beef is a tremendous source of Omega-3 fatty acids.
5. Ok, time for full disclosure. Eating high quality meats is more expensive. I buy my eggs, chicken, and beef at Trader Joe's. The prices are very reasonable, especially for the beef, compared to other sources of grass fed beef. But people often make the argument that eating properly is simply too expensive. I agree that eating properly should not be as expensive as it is. There is no way that a box of pasta should cost a fraction of what it costs for some grass fed beef, but it does. My answer to that argument is if you need to cut back don't do so with your health. There are plenty of areas we all could save some money, your well being is not one of them.
   

Conclution:

Helping the environment is a great reason to make a personal change with your diet. To really make a significant environmental impact we need MORE people to eat properly raised meats, not less. If we all put our money into cage free eggs, chicken, and grass fed beef we can take a stand against corporatations that raise animals simply to make a dollar with no regard to our health or the health of our planet.

Bias in the Dictionary?

This may or may not have anything to do with fitness or nutrition but I learned something very interesting yesterday. One of my fellow trainers and I were talking yesterday. She's a Middle School health teacher and she was grading a quiz. I grabbed a copy of the quiz to take a look at it. One of the questions had to do with the definition of risk. The correct answer was, "risk is defined as the possibility of loss or injury." That didn't seem right to me so I had to look it up. Here is the official Webster's Dictionary definition of risk:

1 : possibility of loss or injury : peril
2 : someone or something that creates or suggests a hazard
3 a : the chance of loss or the perils to the subject matter of an insurance contract; also : the degree of probability of such loss b : a person or thing that is a specified hazard to an insurer c : an insurance hazard from a specified cause or source
4 : the chance that an investment (as a stock or commodity) will lose value

Now, I've heard people talk about bias even in the dictionary and I always thought they were quacks...until yesterday when I read the definition for risk. That definition focuses solely on the potential negative results from taking a risk. What about the positive outcomes from taking a risk?? In our society we all admire the risk takers but too often we shy away from taking a risk because of the potential negative outcomes. Truth is, I think in many instances not taking the chance on something and just maintaining the status quo is far more hazardous than any potential negative outcomes. A more appropriate definition might be "an action where the outcome is uncertain."

I never thought I would pen a dictionary rant. Everyone have a tremendous snowy Octobor weekend!!

Diet and Exercise Always Works

It's full disclosure time. I'm becoming much more of a liberal the older (and wiser) I become. I like Bill Maher (most of the time...he goes overboard on global warming though.) Which ever side of the political spectrum you are on this little rant should be something we should all be able to agree on. You don't need all the medicine being fed to you by the pharmaceutical companies. Proper Diet and Exercise is medicine. On that note, here's a good recent blog post from The Natural Sports Medicine blog. He sums it up very well. We evolved over millions of years to eat a certain diet of meats, veggies, and fruit. But for only the last 2 - 3 generations we have shifted toward a diet of fast food and processed foods. And we wonder why heart disease, autism, diabetes, and obesity are all on the rise. Anyway, if anyone is interested in reading about how our diet has contributed to human evolution check out The Paleo Diet by Loren Cordain. It provides an in-depth analysis of our ancestors diets and how that diet was essential to help us evolve into an intelligent species. But, due to the advances in agriculture (generations ago), and now corporate greed, we have gotten away from the diet we are genetically predisposed to and instead eat a diet of food our bodies mostly recognizes as poison.

About 5 Minutes at the Gym...

This post is inspired by a post from Mike Robertson from last week. After reading this post I realized I have a great opportunity to add to the list of typical mistakes made at a big gym. And, even better, try to do something about it. So here are just a few of the things I'm watching people do as I write this:

• Right now there are nine people doing steady state cardio. Three are on treadmills, one on a bike, 6 on eliptical machines. (Yup, a 10th joined the crowd.) All of whom are overweight. (here comes an 11th.) This is such a big part of the fitness culture that we are trying to change. People associate fitness with cario. They think they are going to become skinny if they spend 45 minutes walking on a treadmill or pedalling slowly on a bike. (12th on her way.) What these people need is metabolic resistence training. Working with weights will result in EPOC (excess post exercise oxygen consumption.) What that means is lifting weights will result in an elevated metabolism for up to 48 hours post workout (as compared to about three minutes of elevated metabolism after 45 minutes of slow state cardio.) People always say they stay in the "fat burning zone" but truth is they are in the "stay fat zone."
  
• There is a class going on in the dreaded aerobics room. Just a few problems I saw in the 3 seconds I spent walking by the room:
  

1. The instructor was setting the group up to perform seated bicep curls. Why are they doing bicep curls? Why are they seated? These people need to be on their feet performing full body mulit joint exercises.
   
2. They were using teeny tiny weights. So they were wasting their time doing a useless exercise and building no strength because they weren't using enough weight.
3. The tempo was 3 seconds up, 1 second down. Tempo is important. The concentric portion of the exercise should be performed with power (speed!) The eccentric portion should be slow. Think of a chin up. You want to power your body over the bar as fast as you can then lower yourself slowly. That is how you build strength and power that is useful over the course of your life.
4. Needless to say (should I say that) all the people in the class are women. Here is a great article about training women.
5. They were doing crunches. Like 50 of them. All that is going to do is lead to back pain.
   

• Four people have used the trunk extension and trunk flexion machines in the last five minutes. Once again, back pain waiting to happen. 80% of the population either has back pain or has a disk problem but has yet to feel the symptoms. There is no need to excacerbate the problem with an exercise that isn't all that useful anyway. Try a plank first. Then move to some chops and lifts. You will feel a stronger core and alleviate back pain.
  
• And here's something I didn't see one person doing. Nobody has done a posterior chain exercise. No deadlifts, no pull ups, no rows. These should be the foundation of your program. Also, I haven't seen anyone on a foam roller.
  

That's it for today. I'm going to head over and talk to some folks still walking on the treadmills now.

Food Preparation

I think the one big key to having good eating habits is preparing food for the week on the weekend. Nobody wants to come home past 8:00 and prepare dinner. So in those instances people will often go for takeout or another quick and easy (and nutritionally lacking) alternative. Here is a blog post with a few really good preparation tips to help you eat a better diet by always having something ready.

Oh, and I'm pretty sure one game playoffs in baseball are the coolest thing in all of sports. I couldn't have cared less who won the game Tuesday night when the Tigers played the Twins for the division title but that was an outstanding sports event.

Turkish Get Up

In August I attended an FMS workshop in Boston. While there Gray Cook spoke briefly about the Turkish Get Up as a great assessment tool along with being a great corrective exercise. I was sold so I bought a DVD which came with a little manual. I finally had a chance to dig in last week. Learning this exercise is really going to be a challenge. It is best performed with a Kettlebell. The Kettlebell puts the body off balance just enough to promote complete body control through each part of the movement. Hopefully over the next few weeks I'll have a chance to practice this exercise so I can pass it along. Check out the above video and give it a try for yourself. It is a great exercise to add to your program as a corrective exercise, warm-up, even a full body strength exercise. Good luck!

Time for a New List

So this will be a little cheesy but here are my goals for the next 12 months:

1. Eliminate all credit card debt. I don't have a whole lot but I have some.
2. Read for 1 hour a day, every day. I have a growing pile of exercise/nutrition books that I want to get through.
3. Become the greatest Corrective Exercise expert around (you know, in the world.) That is becoming my little niche...and I like it.
4. Take one day per week and devote all my revenue for that day to professional development. That includes buying books, DVD's, attending seminars, etc.

That's it. Short, simple, perhaps attainable.