Your Diet: The Benefits of a Cheat Meal

The Rapid PT program relies on a Paleo-like diet to ensure that a person improves their PT performance. But, for many people, changing their diet to avoid energy-dense, disease-causing modern foods can be hard. The idea that they will never eat a Papa John's pizza, McDonald's hamburger, or a Butterfinger ever again is just too much to bare.

But, determined to improve their health, they commit themselves to a new way of eating. Soon, the extra weight comes off and they start to feel fantastic!

However, within a couple of months some find that the new diet makes it more difficult to resist those delicious energy-dense, disease-causing foods. These formerly committed dieters start to indulge more and more in these unhealthful foods.

Predictably, as they revert to their old ways of eating, they start to experience all the negative effects they were hoping to avoid (fat weight gain, indigestion, bloating, insatiable hunger, low energy). Very quickly, they rebound: They end up right back where they started, often with a couple of extra pounds for their troubles.

If you have fallen victim to this kind of yo-yoing in the past then one way you can stop this problem is by enjoying a single cheat meal once a week. This meal, which allows you to eat whatever you want, can be used to help sustain your diet changes for the rest of your life.

Satisfy Your Unhealthy Cravings

The beauty of a cheat meal is that you get to indulge your unhealthy cravings once a week. As amazing as it seems, sometimes you need to take a break from foods like grilled steaks, broiled seafood, roasted chicken, steamed vegetables, and freshly cooked white rice. When that happens, push your cravings off until your weekly cheat meal. When that meal comes around, satisfy one of those cravings.

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Saturated Fat and Heart Disease: The Folly of the Fat Tax

On October 5, 2011, The Week reported that Denmark was the first country to create a “fat tax,” which adds a tax to foods that are more than 2.3 percent saturated fat (by weight). Above this point, customers will be charged the equivalent of $1.29 per pound of saturated fat. Ironically, this tax isn’t designed to prevent obesity (Denmark is below-average when it comes to obesity), it attempts to increase average life expectancy for Danes by three years over a ten year period by reducing deaths from coronary heart disease (CHD) and cancer. 

I honestly believe that the Danish government has the best of intentions for its citizens with the passage of this law. Unfortunately, they are using the controversial Diet-Heart Hypothesis to guide their decision. This theory tries to argue that dietary saturated fat and cholesterol cause CHD. While this theory has been treated as fact for several decades, it is not very well supported.

This post has been moved to my Mayo's Mind blog. Please follow the link below to read the rest of this post.

Saturated Fat and Heart Disease: The Folly of the Fat Tax

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Primal Blueprint: Seven Lessons for Optimal Health

Because the Rapid PT program is a synthesis of the Paleo/Primal/Traditional communities, I will be talking about other diet/lifestyle programs from time to time. In this post, I want to quickly talk about Mark Sisson's Primal Blueprint, which is one of the more popular diet and lifestyle programs available. Despite the fact that he is still a bit carb-phobic (something that the Paleo community is slowly moving beyond), his book and web site are HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

Mark's Seven Lessons

I'm not going to cover his program in great detail because he's already done that here. However, recently Mark has released his seven lessons for obtaining optimal health, which is a good summary of his approach to Paleo. These lessons are:

• Lesson One: Lifelong Health Starts Here
• Lesson Two: How Agriculture Ruined Your Health (and What to Do About It)

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Quick Running Tip: Pre-Run Drink

While reading Keep on Running, (1) I came across something interesting about using a pre-run drink to boost performance for middle distance runs (which are around 1 mile long). Consuming a carbohydrate/protein drink (e.g., Gatorade and BCAAs) before a 1.5-mile run could boost the amount of adenosine triphosphate (ATP) that your body can generate during your run, as well as making you more alert and engaged, both of which can decrease your run times.

(Normally, I wouldn't advise that anyone consume a drink that contains sugar [which is a highly processed food]. But some times, improved physical performance runs against Paleo dieting philosophy. So, while preparing for your PT test, use this drink only to improve your run. Please don't consume sugar drinks as a part of your everyday diet.)

Carbohydrates Can Improve ATP Production

Cells use ATP when they need energy. As such, ATP is often equated to currency: Energy is "spent" when enzymes transform ATP into adenosine diphosphate (ADP); energy is "saved" when primary fuels like glycogen or fatty acids are used to transform ADP back into ATP.

The authors of Keep on Running argue that when fatty acids are present in the blood the human body prefers to use fatty acids instead of glycogen (the stored form of glucose) to make ATP. Unfortunately, compared to glycogen, fatty acids require 10% more oxygen to produce the same amount of ATP. Fatty acids are also metabolized at half the rate of glycogen.

What does all of this mean for your 1.5-mile run performance? During your run, if you are already using all of the oxygen possible (max VO2), then using fatty acids to create ATP, instead of glycogen, will result in a slower average pace.

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Quick Running Tip: Lift Heavy Weights

Believe it or not, lifting heavy weights can help bring down your run times. Heavy weight lifting:

• Improves your resistance to fatigue, allowing you to run at a faster pace for longer time. (1)
• Increases the number of blood vessels supplying oxygen to and removing carbon dioxide and lactic acid from your skeletal muscles. (2)
• It improves vascularization (enlarging blood vessels), which also helps your skeletal muscles get additional oxygen and dispose of more carbon dioxide and lactic acid. (2)
• Increases your ATP, phosphocreatine, and glycogen levels, all of which improves power (aka, speed) in shorter distances. (2) 

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Quick Running Tip: Train for Your Pace

It seems obvious: If you currently run the 1.5-mile in 13 minutes, and you want to run it in 11 minutes, then you need to increase your running pace. Of course, as most of us know, it is very difficult to simply run faster. To decrease your 1.5-mile run time, you need to allow your body time to adapt to a faster pace. Running too fast, too quickly, can cause you to run out of energy (or air, depending on your level of fitness), ultimately resulting in a slower run.

One fairly simple technique that can lower your run time is to identify a quicker time and then train for that pace. The trick is only to run at this quicker pace for as long as you can sustain it. When you run out of gas, immediately slow down to finish your run at a more comfortable pace. On the next training day, try to maintain this faster pace for a bit longer. Doing this should drop your run time considerably.

The Basics

• You should run 1.5-miles 5 days a week.  
• Run even on days that you are following a weight-lifting or Tabata training routine. 
• Only run once per day, for no more than 30 minutes. You don't want to overtrain.
• If you stop making progress on your run times, then reduce your running to 2 days per week for two weeks. Run at your natural pace during this downtime. After these two weeks, go back to your 5-days-per-week training routine.

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NutritionData: Always Know What's in Your Meals

In my Rapid PT diet and lifestyle guidelines, I talk about the importance of controlling sugar and omega-6 fat intake, as well as making sure that you don't accidentally overeat. This is incredibly difficult if you don't know what's in your food. So, while I was testing out those guidelines I had looked for a place that would tell me everything about the food I was eating.

Most of the sites I came across were only concerned with calories, which didn't give me data on my micro-nutrient intake. Then I stumbled across the amazing web site NutritionData.com. This site has a huge searchable database filled with typical food items like fruit, meat, and vegetables. It also has a pretty sizable list of junk and fast food items.

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The "Healthy" Western Diet and Lifestyle: A Recipe for Disease

Officially, the West's current idea of a "healthy" diet consists of:

• Reducing a person's intake of meats, high-fat dairy, and foods high in salt, sugar, cholesterol, and oils/fats (especially saturated fat). (1, 2, 3, 4)
• Consuming more foods that are filled mostly with whole grains, legumes, vegetables, and fruit. (1, 2, 3, 4)

Unfortunately, while following this advice may increase a person's intake of some nutrient-dense foods (e.g., vegetables and fruit), it still exposes them to the modern foods likely to produce disease (wheat, soy, and high-omega-6 fats/oils). (5) But, I've already talked about this before.

This post is about the how each westernized country idealizes diet and lifestyle. While doing research for another post, I found a European Food Information Council page that tries to reconcile all the different food-based dietary guidelines found throughout Europe. When I got to the individual guides themselves, I couldn't help but be impressed by how much time and effort went into making them (well, except for Hungry, who seemed to do its guide with MS Paint).

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