Survival of the Fittest

Today is National Carrot Day. Slather some carrots with peanut butter. Or slather your entire body with carrots (in the form of Yes To Carrots body butter). But whatever you do, avoid carrots' archenemy, celery.

Depending on how drunk on Vitamin A you get, you can even sing this catchy ditty, which perhaps overstates the role of carrots in history. (If the guys from the FreeCreditReport.com commercials were carrots, this is what they'd sound like.) 

I've long been a fan of John Berardi, PhD, CSCS, nutrition educator and founder of Precision Nutrition. Even though he's Canadian (I jest ... long-held rugby grudge), he is brilliant at what he does -- which is convert junk-food junkies to health-food junkies without all the pain and suffering most people envision accompanies such a process.

How does he do it? By approaching eating as something pleasurable, even when it supports your health, not detracts from it. (In a nutshell, often literally: Healthy can and should be delicious.)

Berardi's principles of "gourmet nutrition":

• It must taste great.
• It must contain lean, complete protein.
• It must be low in sugar and processed carbohydrates.
• It must prioritize healthy fats over bad fats.
• It must control calorie intake and density.
• It must include, fresh, natural, additive-free ingredients.
• It must offer carbs only if you "deserve" them.
• It must distinguish between "post-workout" and "anytime."

I've borrowed/stolen the following recipe for Roasted Squash and Turkey Soup; for the other four Berardi recently published -- Almond Olive Tapenade, Beef and Veggie Fettucine, Texas Thin-Crust Pizza and a Tropical Smoothie -- check out this link.

And for yet more gourmet nutrition recipes, including Berardi's Popeye Fruit Smoothie, Eggs Benedict, Chicken Pesto Pizza, Coconut Cauliflower Mash, Spaghetti Squash Pasta and Peanut Crunch Bars, click here.

For now, however, back to the soup.

Roasted Squash and Turkey Soup

Servings: 4 large or 8 small

Prep time: 10 minutes
Cooking time: 40 minutes

Prelude: Squash has recently become known as one of the healthiest veggies and its benefits include high fiber and a good profile of antioxidants.  In this soup we pair the butternut variety with a host of spices and turkey to create an awesome flavor blend that you're sure to enjoy.

Ingredients:
Soup Base
1 tablespoon coconut oil or butter
5 cups butternut squash (peeled and rough chopped)
1 cup onion (rough chopped)
1 tablespoon ginger root (grated or chopped)
1 tablespoon fresh garlic (minced)
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon cumin
½ teaspoon nutmeg
5 cups vegetable stock
1 cup water

Soup Garnish
1 lb 10 oz (740 g) ground turkey
2 teaspoons salt
½ teaspoon pepper
Olive oil cooking spray
¼ cup cilantro (chopped)

Instructions:
Soup Base
Preheat a large pot on medium-high heat.  Add 1 tablespoon of oil and then the squash and sauté until lightly browned.

Add onion, ginger, garlic, cinnamon, cumin, nutmeg and 2 tablespoons of stock, and sauté for 2 minutes more, stirring constantly.

Add the remaining vegetable stock and water to the pot and bring to a boil.  Cover, reduce the heat and simmer until squash is soft (approximately 30 minutes). **Tip: You can prep the garnish while the base is cooking.

Let mixture cool for a few minutes. Puree with a blender or food processor until smooth and then pour back into the pot.  Remove from heat.

Soup Garnish
Season the turkey with salt and pepper.

Preheat a large nonstick frying pan on medium heat.  Lightly coat with spray and sauté turkey until lightly browned and completely cooked. Remove from the pan and set aside.  ** Tip: Sauté in smaller batches and re-spray the pan if needed.

Add the cooked turkey and chopped cilantro to the soup base. Reheat and serve immediately or portion the soup into storage containers. **Tip: To maintain the tenderness of the meat avoid bringing the soup to a boil after the meat has been added.

To read Experience Life articles where Berardi has chimed in, check out the following:

• "Pick Your Protein Powder": A popular nutritional supplement among fitness-minded people, protein powders come in many formulations. Here's how to decide which ones are likely to suit you best. 
• "More Than Enough": You're working out regularly, and you feel great. So why is your waistline expanding? Here's how to properly fuel your new body.
• "Eating On the Go": Nutrition tips for fueling your workouts.
  

Wil Fleming, CSCS, IYCA, co-owner and director of sport performance at Force Fitness and Performance (www.beforcefit.com) in Bloomington, Ind., has been using Robert Dos Remedios's new, super-fantastic book, Cardio Strength Training: Torch Fat, Build Muscle, and Get Stronger Faster, to create some pretty amazing complexes of his own. In this video, he demonstrates his latest -- with, it should be noted, impeccable form, so if you give this a go, make sure you do the same. (Warning: Not for beginning lifters.)

Using a barbell and a clean grip, do four rounds of the following, resting a minute to a minute and a half after you've completed each round. Use a weight for which you can complete all the exercises without pausing to adjust poundage in between. Afterward, lie on the ground and gasp for air.

10 Romanian Deadlifts
10 Bent-Over Rows
10 Hang Snatches
10 Shoulder Presses
10 Step-Ups (5 per leg)
10 Roll-Outs



A bit more about Wil:
He was an All-American hammer thrower at Indiana University, where he still holds the school record in the event. He was ranked in the top 10 in the United states from 2006 to 2008, and ultimately completed his career at the 2008 Olympic Trials. Prior to that, he lived and trained as a resident athlete at the United States Olympic Training Center as an Olympic Lifter.

I had the pleasure of completing one of Dos Remedios's killer circuit workouts alongside Wil at the Perform Better Summit in Long Beach, Calif., this past August. The man is *springy.*

If you give this workout a try, please share your experience in the comments!

If you look reeeaaally closely, you can see my speed-enhancing, strength-boosting Pure Power Mouthguard. Do performance mouthguards really work? Hey, I caught her, didn't I? (Photo credit: Dobson Images)

Athletes will do almost anything to get an edge, and lately, performance mouthguards from companies such as Makkar and UnderArmour have become become a topic of conversation around the Gatorade cooler.

But are these companies just fast-talkin'? 

Recently, The New York Times published a piece on performance mouthguards, with athletes, dentists and exercise physiologists supporting claims that these bite-sized bits of plastic can indeed boost performance, if only marginally. These four paragraphs sum up the case nicely:

[I]t isn't clear how much of an edge [these mouthguards] actually confer. A study sponsored by Makkar in 2008 at Rutgers University found that athletes wearing Pure Power Mouthguards could jump higher and perform better at their peak, but it did not find that their endurance was any better.

"There wasn't a huge difference," said Shawn Arent, an assistant professor in the department of exercise science at Rutgers who led the study. "It's not the greatest thing since sliced bread. It's not magic. But for an elite athlete who has been training for a long time, even a 3, 4 or 5 percent increase in performance is a hard thing to come by."

Similar research by Under Armour and Bite Tech with athletes at the Citadel, a military college, showed that using the mouth guards helped improve endurance and air flow.

Dena Garner, an assistant professor at the Citadel who has studied athletes using Bite Tech devices since 2005, said she thought some of her original findings were "a fluke." But "every time I've done lactate studies with this mouthpiece, I'm finding there is a difference," she said.

The UnderArmour performance mouthpieces fit only over your lower teeth and are made to reduce jaw-clenching, thus reducing the release of hormones that cause stress, fatigue and distraction.

The Makkar-made Pure Performance Mouthguard, or PPM, on the other hand, fits over your upper teeth (more like a conventional mouthguard) and is based on the principles of neuromuscular dentistry. The idea is, if you align your jaw in its ideal setting, you'll release tension, open up your airway and position the facial joints to work optimally, allowing for the recruitment of more muscles, creating a domino effect in the body. (For more on how the PPM works, see this November 2009 article in USA Today.)

In October, I paid a visit to Chad Boger, DDS, a neuromuscular dentist in Plymouth, Minn., to see what the hype was about. (In the interest of full disclosure, I'll tell you he agreed to outfit me with a PPM for free. And in fact, he's the one who alerted me to the existence of performance mouthwear about two years before I finally made my way in to see him.)

The process took two to three hours and began with an hour of TENS to the face, neck and shoulders to loosen the muscles. Then, we tested numerous sets of my jaw to find what increased performance and what didn't, based on strength and flexibility tests he administered there in the office. 

There is exactly one topic I've wanted to blog about for the past month. Or rather, there is one topic I've wanted to blog about next. And so all other post ideas keep accumulating, because I've had my mind set on clearing enough time and space to write about this one thing. Not shockingly, due to the holidays and an already-full workload, that time and space has not materialized.

Then, finally -- just now -- I remembered: I don't have to make things difficult for myself. Oh. Right.

The post "Chop Wood, Carry Water" from the beautiful Raptitude blog sums up nicely the idea of simplifying life, thoughts, and being in and of the moment. And that sometimes physical activity is just the thing to wrest your attention away from your mind (if that makes any sense).

Some highlights:

When the mind is not crowded
By imaginary things,
It is the best season of your life.

-Kabir

__________

When you are able to experience the concrete without the interference of imaginary things, it creates an effortless, lackless pleasure. We are very much drawn to it, whether we realize it or not. The pleasures people seek -- food, music, sex, movies, travel, drugs, sport -- all of them are so appealing because they have the power to wrest our attention from our mental preoccupations and hook it onto an actual, concrete sensation. They all achieve the same thing. They crystallize our attention. And they can do it because they are real. Sensations are exacting and unambiguous -- the opposite of the free-associating soup of unchecked thought.

__________

The simplest remedy I've ever heard ... is to remember to chop wood, carry water. In other words, when in doubt, put your attention on the physical. Where should your hands be? What should your body do about this? How should you spend your energy here, physically? Put it in motion.

A physical response gets the world turning again and brings you out of the realm of thought. Trying to fend of thoughts by thinking about them is something like trying to shoo flies away with other flies.

The goal: Think (or overthink, anyway) less. Live the moment more. 

(Photo credit: silverlinedwinnebago)

The topic of poop -- and what your poo says about you -- keeps cropping up in the fitness blog arena. (Who else has seen the posts in support of toilet steps like this one from Renew Life, for instance?)

When I first noticed this phenomenon, I thought, There is no way I will ever blog about poop. Ever.

Well ... crap. Here I am blogging about poop. But(t) this article by naturopathic physician Bryan P. Walsh was too good to let slide by, especially for those of us who care about how our interior gut health affects our ability to gain muscle and lose fat. And according to Walsh, that connection is huge.

He covers everything from nutrient absorption and the proper levels of hydrochloric acid in the stomach to chronic inflammation and how intestinal infections can impact testosterone production.

I won't be able to do it justice, so please check out the full article (free) at TMuscle.com, and as always, watch out for the somewhat racy photos there: "From Pie Hole to Poop Chute." 

I especially could have used this handy how-to video from Picker Produce on Halloween night, when my friend Pam (partially pictured above in her flight attendant costume, drinking milk and eating cookies while attempting to open a pomegranate) mangled the fruit in a savage attempt to harvest its seeds.

Check out a better way below.

It seems that every few months, an article appears disparaging the value of exercise for weight loss. The latest is "Why Doesn't Exercise Lead to Weight Loss?" from the Health section of the The New York Times.

The article posits that because a study of 58 obese subjects who did 12 weeks of aerobic exercise at 70 percent of their max heart rate (i.e., steady-state cardio) -- without changing their diets -- resulted in, on average, just a seven-pound weight loss over that time period, exercise doesn't play much of a role in weight loss. (Never mind that an unmonitored diet means the tendency to disproportionately increase food intake once you start exercising was also unmonitored.) 

Writer Gretchen Reynolds also points to a study on the "afterburn effect" -- the tendency for the body to burn an elevated number of calories for hours after a workout -- that concluded afterburn was a bust. Yet strangely, the type of exercise used in the study was relatively low-intensity -- an hourlong cycle at just 55 percent of aerobic capacity.

What makes this strange -- and noteworthy -- is that it's usually high-intensity activities that are thought to trigger the afterburn effect.

As someone working for a publication that strives to provide both depth and breadth of information, this sort of half-picture presentation is disturbing to me. When did journalists set exercise up as the antidote to terrible eating habits? The kind of thing that maybe we shouldn't bother with if we aren't seeing dramatic weight loss no matter what we're eating and drinking? When did we stop differentiating between different intensity levels of exercise? Between cardio and weightlifting, and their many subsets?

Perhaps, rather than renouncing the role exercise -- that vague catchall -- plays in weight loss, we should focus on the synergy that occurs when you make specific lifestyle and exercise choices. Rather than make sweeping generalizations and dismissals, let's dig into the details about what type of exercise has what type of effect, and the impact eating nutrient-dense foods has in supporting our fitness goals, regardless of how much and in what ways we're moving. The devil -- and devil dog -- is in these details.  

There are a huge number of places to get great fitness information, on the web and otherwise -- and most of the people providing said information work in the trenches of the fitness industry, so they're witnessing firsthand what works (and doesn't). A few of my favorite sources that have covered the topic of fat loss (I'm positive I'm overlooking quite a few -- my apologies!): Alwyn Cosgrove, Leigh Peele, Mike Roussell, Robert Dos Remedios, Sara Cheatham, Michael Boyle, Josh Hillis, Jason C. Brown, Pamela MacElree and Craig Ballantyne.

The last time this happened -- August 9, to be exact, when Time published the hysteria-inducing article "Why Exercise Won't Make You Thin" -- a number of reliable fitness experts crafted thoughtful rebuttals. My favorite was by Tom Venuto, author of The Body Fat Solution.

I think it applies nicely to this more recent article, as well -- take a few minutes to read it, and see what conclusions you draw about the role exercise plays in weight loss: "Why Time Magazine Owes the Fitness Industry a Big Fat Apology."

UPDATE: To read a response from Pilar Gerasimo, editor in chief of Experience Life, click here.

(photo credit: LAYeiser)

This May interview with Eric Cressey on unstable-surface training (UST) planted the seed for this November article for Experience Life. The gist? If you have healthy ankles and you're still doing squats on wiggly surfaces such as wobble boards or BOSU balance trainers, you might be doing yourself a disservice.

"While there appear to be considerable injury rehabilitation and prevention benefits to UST for people dealing with existing neuromuscular shortcomings, there's little data available to support the assertion that UST can favorably impact a healthy, trained athlete's performance," says Eric Cressey, MA, CSCS, founder of Cressey Performance training center in Boston. In fact, Cressey says, doing UST can actually de-power healthy athletes.

So what can you do to improve your balance? Simply put, you need to challenge your stability while your lower body remains in contact with solid ground. This includes training techniques ranging from single-leg work and asymmetrical loading to applying destabilizing forces while attempting to remain stable.

Read the full article for exercise ideas.

(Photo credit: Kizzlexy.)