Category: Making Disease

This category covers things that relate to how disease and illness take root in people. It is not intended to be a how to in terms of a set of instructions on the things that you need to do to make your life worse or to shorten it. The opposite might be closer to its goal; if these things make disease, NOT doing them will likely contribute to improved health outcomes.

Long Steady Distance / Low Calorie Diets, Cortisol and Brain Aging

Last summer Tony agreed with me that I was probably killing myself with all the cycling I was doing. Soon there after I wrote Shortening your life by too much exercise to capture what I call the finite beat hypothesis – the heart has the potential for a certain number of beats and once these beat occur the heart stops working. It is a theory that seemed to make sense to me at the time.

In September when I started working at SST it became evident that the volume of cycling that I was doing was slowing my muscle growth because of the high level of cortisol associated with exercising longer than 45 minutes. Once I dropped down to one cardio session per week my lean body mass started to increase. If cortisol can have that dramatic an impact on lean mass creation what impact does it have on other body tissues?

A devastating impact.

Stress hormone may speed up brain aging outlines the findings of a recent study on an elderly population. The goal of the study was to determine if there was a relationship between cortisol levels and hippocampus size and neural density. The hippocampus is a part of the brain that is implicated in memory and spatial awareness functioning. It has long been known that in most individuals, there is a decrease in hippocampus size as they grow older and, as a consequence, ones performance on memory and spatial awareness tasks decreases with age. However, this new study indicates that the degree of deterioration is related to cortisol levels such that those individuals who have higher levels of cortisol show greater impairment and the size of their hippocampus is reduced when compared to those individuals who have lower cortisol levels.

What are the practical implications of this finding?

If you want to keep your brain functioning at a high level for the duration of your life you need to decrease the amount of stress you experience. This doesn’t just mean psychological or mental stress, it also means physiological stress.

Steady state cardio sessions that last more than 45 minutes have been shown to increase cortisol levels as have intense resistance and strength training sessions of the same length. Limit the length of these to less than 45 minutes and if you can’t, make sure you consume some simple sugars during the sessions to mitigate the bodies natural cortisol release in response to a drop in blood sugar level.

Very low calorie diets or eating behaviours that include not eating for more than 4 hours in a row should be avoided as they will cause a release of cortisol.

You should eat within 20 minutes of waking to help lower the level of cortisol in your body – cortisol is very high in the morning because you have not been eating. The sooner it is reduced, the sooner the negative aspects of cortisol will be eliminated.

Remember that cortisol is a wasting hormone that causes your body to consume itself to maintain functioning. When cortisol levels are high very little of your body will grow and we now know that this includes your brain. If you want to maintain a high quality of life into your senior years you need to avoid activities that promote cortisol release when you are younger.

Acidosis – What’s Eating You?

Alkalize or die outlines the negative consequence of acidosis (having too high an acid level) on the body.

Acidosis is the basic foundation of all disease. We need to understand the simple process of alkalizing our body and the important role a properly alkalized body plays in restoring and maintaining our overall health. Our glands and organs function properly in exact proportion to the amount of alkaline and acid levels in our system.

Have you ever been so upset with someone or something that you get an upset stomach? All negative emotions create an acidic environment. Have you ever heard anyone say you are letting your problems “eat away at you” or “get the best of you”?

Fear is the underlining cause of most disease. It will undermine your life and your health. Fear causes anger. Anger causes hate. Hate will consume you with continual suffering. Love and understanding cleanse and heal the body creating an alkaline environment within you.

Worth the read because it explains what happens to most of the main organs when acid levels increase and it offers some solutions on how to lower pH level. Not a big surprise that exercise and eating vegetables are on the list of things that make you more healthy.

Be Careful What You Read – Comment On An Editorial Conclusion

The skinny on fat by The Telegram is an editorial comment that is based on a study released by the American Institute for Cancer Research. The full report is available at http://www.dietandcancerreport.org/?p=ER if you want to read it. It is an average read and confirms a lot of what people have been saying about cancer and environmental influences. It contains a really nice break down on the impact of specific environmental influences on specific cancer rates. It is worth checking out.

I do not believe, however, the author of the Telegram editorial article took the time to read anything OTHER than the summary of the report. It wouldn’t normally be a big deal but they drew a conclusion that I wasn’t able to find in the report:

But whatever mysteries remain, the study stresses there’s no question that fat fuels cancer rates, to the point that the AICR believes poor diet causes as much cancer as smoking.

The study does not stress that there is no question that fat fuels cancer rates. The study doesn’t say much about fat at all. It reports a lot of findings about BEING fat, or over-weight as determined by BMI, as it relates to cancer but it doesn’t make any statements about actual fat. There is a very good reason for that – no one eats a diet of just fat.

The cited report is an epidemiological and meta analysis study that correlates dietary factors to the incident rates of various cancers. It is NOT a experiemental study that controls any dietary variables. These types of studies have a good track record in science but cannot be used to draw any causal conclusions as the author of the editorial has done.

I think this is an important point to make for a number of reasons:

  1. It is irresponsible for an author to attribute their claim to another person or group
  2. It is irresponsible to report feelings as facts
  3. Misinformation is rarely helpful because it moves one away from facts

In a more general sense, unprocessed fat is NOT harmful to an individual when consumed in the right combination with other macro-nutrients. Eating fat with high glycemic index carbohydrates will result in greater fat storage but eating it with protein will not. For example, eating a large steak with a salad will result in less fat storage potential than eating a small muffin with butter. The stake may have more fat calories than the muffin and butter combination, but since it and the salad do not contain any carbohydrates that rapidly increase blood sugar, there is a lower chance that the body will go into fat storage mode.

I don’t blame the author for drawing the conclusion that they do because fat = bad is something that has been said so often that it understood to be a fact. However, to attribute this understanding to the World Cancer Research Fund International and the American Institute for Cancer Research is just wrong. They haven’t made that claim in their report and it is unlikely that they will ever make this claim. Their conclusion is that being OVERLY fat WILL increase your likelihood for developing certain types of cancers.

Shortening Your Life By Too Much Exercise?

I was hanging out with Tony and I mentioned that I figured I was going to die young from a heart attack. Tony agreed so quickly that it kind of scared me. “You think I’m right?” He says “yeah. There’s a cost to all the adaptation that you are forcing your body to go through.” We riff off of that for a while before the conversation returns to something I don’t recall because I was too busy thinking about my rapidly approaching death.

He’s right, there is a cost to adapting to the physical stress I put my body under. Any environmental change forces the body to maintain homeostasis or adjust and create a new stasis, both of these responses require energy. Anytime your body liberates energy from food (digestion and absorption) and anytime it utilizes energy for biological functions, a chemical reaction occurs that gives off pollution in the form of free radicals and other chemicals. We can conclude that anything a person does to increase the amount of energy they use will increase the amount of pollution that is released within the body.

The inverse is also true, anything you do that lowers the amount of energy you utilize will decrease the amount of pollution that is released. The significance of this comes to light when we consider the claims of health practitioners that participating in frequent exercise will increase your health and will increase life expectancy. If their claim is true, exercise must do something to the body that causes it to eventually use less energy as a consequence to having performed the exercise than it uses directly to perform the exercise. Most people experience this benefit as a lowering of the resting heart rate.

Finite Beat Life – I’m not sure about the science behind the belief that the hearts life span is measured in beats vs. age – once it beats that predetermined number of times, it stops working. If this is the case, you should try to lower the amount of work that the heart does. You can either do less work or, you can make the heart stronger so it does more work per beat.

For example, I have a resting heart rate of about 48 beats per minute (BPM). The average resting heart rate is about 72 BPM. At rest, my heart beats 24 fewer times than an average persons – every 2 minutes my heart is saving 1 minute worth of work. My math may be a little off, but that is a saving of about 33%. At rest, I am using 33% less energy because I have trained my heart to work more efficiently. To me, that’s a huge saving of beats; given that most of my day is spent in a resting type state.

It takes a lot of effort to make your heart stronger, but all in all, the amount of beats that are required to lower you resting heart rate to 48 BPM is probably equal to the amount of beats the you save because your heart rate is lower. Lets call it a wash. You are no better off from the finite beat perspective but you do have better overall health due to your more active state. There is a net gain and you are healthier.

However, it requires a lot less to maintain the fitness required to have a resting heart rate of 48 BPM – 3 X 30 minute working segments of working the heart at 150 BPM per week. That works out to be 13500 heart beats (150 X 90). 90 minutes of rest for an average heart = 6480 beats.

When we calculate the daily heart beats for a trained heart and an average heart we get 78300 for trained and 103680 for the untrained. That is a difference of 25380 beats per day. From a finite beats perspective, you are WAY better off having a trained heart because even with the work required to maintain its health, your heart will work about 25% less. This is all good provided your finite beat life is long.

Shortening your life by working out too much – Am I shortening my life by teaching 5 cycling classes and taking two 3 hour bike rides a week? Yes, absolutely. Sure, I’m aging at 2/3rds the rate when I’m at rest, but since I’m exercising 8.5 hours more than I need to maintain a lower rate, I’m created way more internal pollution and excess heart beats than I would if I just worked out at the maintenance level.

Too Much Liquid Diet, Not Enough Whole Food

At the end of April I set the goal of achieving my race weight of 168 pounds with a body fat percentage of about 8-9%. I hit this mark a few weeks before my first race at the end of May, but got a new job which took away from my training a little so that was the weight I competed at.

I rode lighter at the Summer Solstice – about 165 with a body fat percentage of around 8%. I felt strong and really enjoyed the increase acceleration that being lighter affords a rider, but it wasn’t the most comfortable race because I over did it with the liquid diet a little.

I eat a lot of oatmeal. I mix water, raw quick oats with whey protein powder and dextrose and drink it for breakfast, before working out or riding and a couple of other time throughout the day. My issue during the race was that I had eaten too much whey powder in the days leading up to the race and not enough whole food. At night I have a protein shake beside my bed that I’ll sip during the night to make sure there is a steady supply of protein during the night-time rebuilding phase.

My like consuming liquid meals because they do not tax the digestive system nearly as much and allow for gastric emptying to occur more quickly than it would with whole food; gastric emptying needs to occur before the bulk of the nutrients can be absorbed into the blood stream to refuel or repair the body. The problem was that I went for a cheaper quality whey powder because I was eating so much of it instead of buying my normal powder which is enriched with digestive enzymes. A decrease in the amount of available digestive enzymes when coupled with an increase in the amount of whey powder being consumed, lead to incomplete digestion of much of the protein. The consequence was a dramatic increase in gas. While this did not impact my riding to any degree, it was kind of uncomfortable and a little unpleasant for those around me.

The cure is simple, eat whole food and lay off the protein powder so I gorged on chicken, ribs and French fries the evening after the race and everything went back to normal. After taking a couple of days away from the protein powder my natural ability to digest and process whey protein has returned to normal so I’ve started eating it again, but less frequently. The issues are gone and the lesson has been learned. Having gas is not a natural state for the body and should be taken as an indication that something is going wrong.

4 Exercises I’ve Recently Added

Wide grip dead lifts on step – I have never done dead lifting before and needed to work on my technique before I could do them without scraping my shine bone. I found that by taking a wide grip and standing on a step I could get some distance between the bar and my shines. They really work my entire back and I feel them on my hamstrings immediately and my quads the next day. Doing them a couple of times a week over the last two months improved my form enough that I was able to lift 225 on Sunday with a shoulder width grip.

The Corner Barbell Press and Push Press. I love these for two reasons. First, my right side is a little stronger than my left so working each in isolation is helping to close the strength gap between them. Second, they really work the obliques and lower back. The truth is, I don’t enjoy doing side bends at all so doing these helps me work these muscles without doing any extra sets. I’m really happy with the results.

Single arm dumbbell press for the same reasons as the corner barbell press. With both of these exercises, I find myself spending more time working and less time resting – each set takes about twice as long to do, but I need less time between sets because one half of the body is recovering while you work the other side. Overall, I think I’m getting a lot more out of my time at the gym and time passes a lot faster when I’m lifting vs. waiting between sets.

ISO legs press shrugs. I LOVE this exercise! One of my favorites right now. The movement of the machine allows me to use really heavy weights while isolating each side of my body. It is ideal for doing drop sets, cheat reps and pause reps. My traps have seen great improvement over the last 3 months since I started doing these.

Finding Control With Food – Eating Disorders

For a very long time I had an unhealthy relationship with food. Since I’m feeling much better about it now I’m going to be honest with myself and explain how and why it was messed up.

My relationship with disordered eating stems from a control issue that I didn’t realize I had. I’m not sure where it came from but I think it has something to do with me moving from Ireland when I was 9 and it was aggravated to problem status when a really close friend was killed by a drunk driver when I was 22.

The death of loved one is pretty hard and particularly so when they are only 21. The seemingly normal and predictable world came undone when I was 22, calling many of my world view rules into question. Natalie was a really nice girl. Liking everyone, she engaged everything with a passion for fun and happiness. I don’t think anyone deserves to die that young and least of all someone who just seemed to light up the world with their presence. It was really sad. Apart from all the grief that her death brought to her friends and family, the world continues to suffers because it goes without her joy forever. It’s really hard not to cry when I think this deeply about it because she had that old soul wisdom that seemed to cut through the unimportant stuff and leave you seeing only the silver lining. I’ve not met anyone who could do this before or since. She had a gift and I wish the world still had her in it.

But it doesn’t and the day she died was the beginning of the end to my control issue. Unfortunately, like most issues, I was years away from seeing it. I needed to hit a bottom before it became visible and I was able to make enough sense of things to move past it.

In the days immediately following her death, I spend a lot of time in my own head. In between bouts of intense pain, I ran through many of my understandings about the world trying to pull something together that allowed me to make sense of what I was feeling and what had happened. First off, I realized that no one was answering my prayers. Secondly, I realized that all the compulsive behavioural patterns that I had developed to safe guard my life from suffering were ineffective. Third, my belief that the world looked after the good and punished the bad was eliminated completely. I was alone and powerless to prevent my death. The understanding of the world that I had been nurturing was wrong. I had no control over anything.

Over the next few years, life recreated itself around me. I had been burned but I went on living because that’s what human beings do. However, things were different. Having lost the sense of control that I had about the world, the rules I created were based on the assumption that I could be killed at any instant. While that is true, it isn’t very likely. It’s so improbable as to be wrong from any practical perspective; logically I knew this but my life experience had shown me something very different. This single cognitive distortion manifest itself all over the new world view rules that I created. I started to do a lot of things that were hurting my chance of living a long time because I believed that there was a great chance that I would be dead well before the consequence came back to haunt me. I took up smoking, skipping a lot of classes, stopped working out and started going to raves. I didn’t want to die, I just didn’t think I was going to live that long regardless of what I did.

I became addicted to nicotine during this period of time. This was my first experience with addiction and my first conscious experiences with changing my physiological / emotional state with chemicals. Before the smoking, I got drunk when I drank alcohol, I got full when I ate food and I got tired when I worked out. I hadn’t noticed any emotional change in response to doing these things but with nicotine there was a big difference, the dose frequency. I was smoking about 15 cigarettes a day which loosely equates to about 450 dose per day (I’m basing this on the assumption that I took 30 pulls per cigarette). While I am not sure exactly how nicotine impacts the body, it, like most drugs, stimulates neural activity in the body and brain. Over time and repeated exposure to the drug, the body will adapt to the new internal environment that you are creating. As a consequence, normal function will come to depend upon the presence of the drug. When your body makes this adjustment, you learn very quickly just how chemicals can change your emotional state. The negative emotional state that nicotine withdrawal creates disappears INSTANTLY when you inhale the smoke. It happens so quickly that it’s almost impossible NOT to make the connection that smoking makes you feel better (of course it does, it make you feel normal).

This lesson stuck. I realized that I could bring stuff into my body that would not just make me feel good, but which would change the way I felt emotionally. Hmmmm, that was good because this was the first time since Natalie had died that I felt I had some control over something. What else did I have easy access to that I could use to change my emotional state? Well, food. I could buy a chocolate bar for 50 cents, eat it in 20 seconds and change my blood chemistry in such a way as to experience a physiological reward. That was fun so I did it, a lot.

If you’ve eaten a pound of chocolate, or even just a half pound (about 3 chocolate bars), you may have noticed that logical thinking about what you’re doing begins to disappear. The more you do it, the less you need to eat before your thinking is impaired. You find yourself in the zone and the chocolate stops being chocolate and starts being just something you are consuming because it makes you feel a particular way. I’ve spoken to some gamblers about the sensation of betting chips on poker and they describe it in very much the same way, over time, the chips stop being money and start being the fuel that drives the positive sensations of gambling. The more you do it, the better you get at finding the reward. Once you acquire that level of skill you can are free to use the food to evoke that emotional state for the reward or escape. I was about 25 now and this is about 3 years after Natalie died.

Things get foggy here and I’m a little disappointed about that because I don’t have a lot of memories from this period of my life but I didn’t do anything worth remembering. I was basically spinning my wheels until I learned some computer skills and got a job working for an IT company. I was living with my folks at the time to save money to pay off some student loans, so my eating habits had returned to normal. There were still times when I would over eat but they were on special occasions or when I would stay at my girl friends, so it didn’t impact my life at all. My body was changing though and my once iron stomach was starting to have difficulty digesting some of the meals I was eating. In hindsight, I think it was the quantity of food that I was eating in these meals because I am still able to eat smaller amounts of these food now without any difficulty. The IT boom was in full swing and when I got a promotion to manager I moved out. This was a few months after I got my first mountain bike and started riding.

I moved in with Tony and Beth again (2nd time) and we shared a 3 bedroom townhouse in Burlington. This was a fun time because I was making a lot of money and I was very good at my job. I felt like I was on my way again, that life had returned to normal after the death curve ball from 6 years ago.

But things weren’t back to normal. My relationship with food was deteriorating as I was starting to over eat more frequently and suffering indigestion more often. There were a couple of meals a week that didn’t get processed. To me it was normal to get sick when you are feeling sick. It never occurred to me that it wasn’t normal to feel sick so often. I figured it would pass on its own and I didn’t alter my eating habits.

It wasn’t the stereotypical binging and purging that you see on “The Intervention”. The purging wasn’t a conscious “hey, I need to get rid of this meal” thought, it was a “I will feel better if I throw this up” thought. And it was true, I always did feel better. I viewed the over eating as me just having a big appetite. Since I wasn’t gaining any weight, I was healthy. No one said anything to me for a long time, they didn’t have any reason to. It wasn’t as if I was sick or had a problem. 8 chocolate bars here, an extra large pizza there, 65 doughnut bites on the couch while playing Madden on the PS2, whatever. It was just food and I was hungry, and sometimes I ate too much.

Tony was the first to ask me about it. I remember him saying “do you think it’s normal to get sick as much as you do?” I said “yeah, I guess. It must be because causes it’s happening.” Then it was my girl friend’s roommate. Her comment about “getting that checked out because it ISN’T normal for someone who is healthy to get sick very often” didn’t immediately change anything and of course, I didn’t bother getting it checked out.

It began to change though, I started being more aware of what and how I was eating. I started to notice that once I began eating sugary high fat foods, a sensation gripped me that wasn’t there before. It was a drive or compulsion to keep eating. The only things I can compare it to are the drive to have sex or the drive to have a cigarette. Eating was the only thing I could do to make the thoughts go away so I kept eating. Maybe Tony was right, maybe there was something wrong with what I was doing.

Tony and Beth bought there first house and I moved out. I lived between my folks and my girl friends place. This meant that I wasn’t feeding myself anymore, so my diet improved. I was back to the gorging occasionally and didn’t get sick nearly as often. I also worked a lot and didn’t have the chance to lose myself in food.

A few months later I moved in with my friend Deb to be closer to work. My eating habits remained fairly good, but I was starting to gain some weight because I had been spending more time working and less time riding my bike. I decided to try the Atkins low carb diet because I had friends who had lost a lot of weight with it. It was fairly successful with a drop of about 12 pounds in 3 weeks. But the biggest thing I noticed was that my desire to eat sugar disappeared after about a week – I knew I was going without something, the diet wasn’t completely effortless but I wasn’t hungry. Again, the feeling was something like day 7 of quitting smoking – you physically don’t need anything but you are going without something that you find rewarding. The switch had been thrown and the light had gone on, I had drawn a connection between eating sugar and my drive to keep eating sugar. I did what most people do in a situation like this, I went over board. I developed a fear of carbohydrates and took deliberate steps to eat less of them.

Another stint living with Tony and Beth and then back to my folks place to regroup and figure out what I was going to do next. My IT management job had come to an end so I got a job with GoodLife Fitness Clubs and my issues with eating just seemed to disappear. Well, that isn’t exactly true. I still like to over eat occasionally but I work out a lot so I have a lot of opportunity to burn off the excess. I consider the whole thing history because I don’t get sick very often anymore.
Looking back, my disordered relationship with food was a behaviour learned in the time following Natalie’s death. It seems almost too simple to say it, but I was trying to find something to control. The predictable satisfaction of binging and my ability to prevent weight gain gave me these things. Over time, experience provided me with more information and I’ve modified my understanding. As I’ve grown past it I now try to control my eating habits and my fitness, not my mood and my weight.

And I’m really happy that it is behind me now.

Diabetes May Be Even Bigger Threat Than Feared

Diabetes May Be Even Bigger Threat Than Feared

THURSDAY, March 1 (HealthDay News) — By last year, the number of people with diabetes in Ontario, Canada, had already surpassed the rate predicted for 2030 by the World Health Organization. The news is bad enough for Canada, but augurs even more ill for the world, which can now expect many more people to succumb to this chronic disease than originally anticipated, researchers report.

Great job Canada, we’re 27 years ahead of schedule! This isn’t a good thing, given that in most instances diabetes is a preventable disease.

The relationship between obesity and diabetes is as real as the relationship between obesity and a lack of exercise. People are choosing to engage in a lifestyle that leads to their eventual illness. While I am always going to advocate for more physical activity, people can eliminate a lot of the diabetes risk by changing their eating habits to lower their body fat level.

Is bulking up to gain muscle a good idea?

Bulking and cutting are bodybuilding terms that describe the deliberate over-eating and under-eating to increase and decrease body weight with the goal of increasing muscle building ability during the bulking phase. This pattern is widely accept in the body building community as the best long term way to add muscle mass.

Christian Thibaudeau tells the truth about bulking as he tries to answers the question is bulking up to gain muscle a good idea? He puts forward a convincing case for going against the flow and draws the following conclusions:

  1. Bulking up won’t lead to any more muscle growth than ingesting an ideal amount of nutrients. You can’t force your body to grow muscle by feeding it more and more.
  2. By bulking up you’re actually reducing the amount of time per year where you can add muscle because you have to diet for a longer period of time to remove the gained fat.
  3. Bulking up will, over time, improve your body’s capacity to store fat and reduce its capacity to lose it.