Ric has recently gone super
health-nut on my ass which is great, but sort of weird since I’ve always been
the one forcing vegetables and supplements down his throat. He’s been totally
engrossed in Brendan Brazier’s THRIVE books and now I’m enduring daily 20
minute lectures on the virtues of whole food eating, ironman training, chia seeds, hemp and maca powder, goji berries, muscle regeneration and how this
links to biological as opposed to chronological age and (right this very
moment) “needing to make these energy bars a lot bigger...cause they sort of look
like dog turds”(see below).
After quite a lot of prodding,
I’ve started reading Brazier’s “Vegan Nutrition Guide to Optimal Performance in Sports and Life” which seems to be more of an introductory guide
to health and nutrition than his “Thrive Fitness” book which is focused much
more on hardcore fitness and endurance training. The former book features a
12-week whole foods meal plan, over 100 wheat-, gluten- and soy-free recipes,
exercise-specific recipes for pre-workout snacks, energy gels, sport drinks and
recovery foods. Brazier “is a professional Ironman triathlete and creator of
VEGA, an award-winning whole food, plant-based, nutritional product line.”
I haven’t gotten very far into
the book but the little of what I’ve read has already struck a (very “doh”,
that’s so obvious, why didn’t I ever think of that) chord with me. For example, Brazier provides quite a comprehensive exposition on stress and, more particularly, nutritional stress which he defines as “stress created by food
because of its unhealthy properties...nutritional stress is much more than just
unhealthy food. Not eating the right foods can cause nutritional stress: Not
eating enough natural, unprocessed foods rich in vitamins, minerals, enzymes,
high-quality protein, fibre, essential fatty acids, antioxidants, and good
bacteria (probiotics) is a major source of stress on our bodies...overtime
these eating habits wear down the body’s endocrine system, the glandular system
that secretes hormones into the bloodstream to regulate bodily functions, and,
in turn, our organs’ ability to function efficiently...often shrugged off as
part of the aging process, symptoms such as these are not natural in a
middle-aged persons: they are a direct result of stress, most of it
nutritional. The slowing rate at which the body regenerates at a cellular level
is biological aging: the speed at which that transpires, however, depends on
diet.”
This might all sound a bit
scientific but essentially what it comes down to is that eating shit food causes stress on the body because it is so
difficult to digest and/or because it constitutes eating empty calories. This in
turn causes our adrenal glands to release cortisol. Cortisol (which is only
meant to be secreted in life or death situations) eventually “eats away” at the
body by breaking down muscle tissue. As Brazier more eloquently puts it: “if stress, and therefore cortisol, remains
elevated, several problems arise to hamper our body’s smooth functioning. One
is that the body shifts fuel sources. Instead of burning fat as fuel, a
stressed person’s system will burn carbohydrates in the form of sugar, and the
body begins to store the body fat instead of using it for energy.”
I’ve always known that stress isn’t
good for you but have attributed the notion of “stress” to external or
psychological sources as opposed to physiological or nutritional sources, which
again, now seems so obvious (doh!). Brazier goes a lot more in depth with the
concept of stress and the different kinds of (complementary, uncomplementary
and productive) stresses we should aim for and those we should avoid. The book
also seems to make the whole “airy-fairy” notion of fitness and health a lot
more tangible. So far, what I’ve gleaned from the book is that if we take care
of the nutritional sources of stress (i.e. our poor eating habits), which
Brazier submits accounts for close to 50% of all stress experienced, then the
battle against poor health will be half won since this is one of the major
sources of stress we actually have some control over.
I’ll do an ex-“post”-facto,
once I’ve read the book.
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