Proper Fueling
The fitness industry is notorious for being at the center of harmful practices regarding weight and body composition. Often times, the things that seem too good to be true are just that. Fast fixes and trendy workouts have historically come with a slew of side effects or counterproductive outcomes.
While I feel confident that the industry is moving toward sustainability and true well being, capitalism continues to center the sexy thing- whatever grabs attention regardless of bodily implications. That being said, I continue to explore ways to peel my clients and my practice away from the myths that pop fitness have cultivated. Instead, my purpose is to lean in to the simplicity of self-awareness as well as the agency of self-determination in my personal and my client’s programs.
The Myth of Calories in/Calories out
I’ll start by (hopefully) debunking the toxicity of this one- energy balance. Myths, like conspiracies, proliferate because there may be even a nugget of truth within. Yes, consumption without utilization yields surplus. The urge to reduce nuanced functions in the body is a capitalist tactic to simultaneously commodify and maximize profits off of our inadvertent ignorance. It’s predatory and, when weaponized against humans simply trying to live better, harmful to success.
Instead of focusing on calories out/calories in, a high level understanding of nutrient function can be a powerful resource in your toolbox for planning fuel practices. This doesn’t have to be complicated. The quality of those calories-in matter more than the quantity- something we’ll discuss a bit more shortly.
In fact, the body has safeguards in place for lean-time energy management. Like a squirrel gathering nuts in for the lean winter months, the body will likely retain more of it’s energy sources when it’s uncertain that it’ll be fed fully and properly. Metabolism is suppressed and resources are used as efficiently (and minimally) as possible. This is diminishing returns.
Eat food with joy when you can, that returns in dividends simply because the body can appreciate and accept the associate state of mind.
Nutrient Timing & Quality
Nothing hard is ever successfully accomplished all at once. Success, instead, comes from first putting one foot in front of another. Our desire for change mixed with the easily accessible, generic content on the internet makes for a melting pot of high expectations paired with low effort output. It’s an equation for failure. The Cliff’s Notes summary of Nutrient Timing and Quality is as follows: Eat food, eat a bit of all kinds of foods, and try not to over eat.
Nutrient Timing
When we don’t eat, our metabolism is suppressed. When that happens, we break down and assimilate food stuff much slower than we would otherwise. Our bodies are smart and economical with resources. The body identifies lean time and behaves as such. It’s goal is to best assist operations with the resources it has and, without sufficient resources, the body goes into “saving mode”. Eat food that’s the message. More on timing to follow.
Nutrient Quality
Fats, proteins, and fibers digest slower than sugars. Please note, sugars are efficient and easy sources of energy- eat those. To avoid the negative experiences associated with frequent and intense spikes in blood sugars, eat sugars with fats, proteins, and fibers. Juices, smoothies, and easy-to-grab snacks tend to lack most, if not all, of those things. As a result, your sugar spikes. When sugar spikes fast, insulin spikes fast, too. Without a readily available use for those sugars, they get stored in the liver, the muscles, and the adipose (fat tissues).
There’s an interesting stigma around fruits but, for general populations, fruits are sugary with quality micronutrients that assist most all of the body’s processes. Vegetables are typically high in fiber and lower in sugars, but are still considered carbs, they’re just more likely to flatten that spike. A bit of toast with butter? a fat on a carb. Berries in yogurt? A fat, protein, and carb. Quality nutrients, no matter their composition, will win out of poor quality, highly manufactured foods- aim for those :)
Fasting 101
To end on a buzz-word, I’ll leave you with a brief note on intermittent fasting (time restricted eating). Intermittent fasting does not mean eating less. Fasting is eating your food within a restricted window, not restricting your intake. Folks that starve themselves until 1pm, eat a sandwich, have a salad for lunch, and snack on a handful of Oreos by 8pm aren’t going to reap the same rewards that someone who’s fueling properly will. For the person who fasts until 10am, eats 2-3 full meals within the window, and stops eating at 6pm? they’ll be nourished enough for the fast that they won’t end up on an insufficiency binge.
Fasting has shown to reduce inflammatory factors on the body which, in turn, increases what I’ll call “vitality” or a climate for “longevity”. You might be familiar with the unpleasant feeling of going to bed on an overly-full stomach or getting so hangry late in the morning that you develop a hypo-glycemic headache. You fast fully nourished like a squirrel with it’s nuts in the winter, so that the lean window does not lead to depleted resources.
All of this said, behavior change is hard. Identifying, vetting, and implementing change can be uncharted territory. When in doubt, reach out! Try a few things, hit up your friendly neighborhood wellbeing professional, and prioritize the things that feel great and empowered. Life’s too short to do otherwise.
Learning Behavior Change
Being healthy and cultivating a long, full life can feel like a Sisyphean feat in the world that we’re living in. The world in which we’ve readily become “Human Resources” for a productivity driven, output hungry, insatiable machine. Not only is our work-life harmony more like a cacophony- what little free time we do have is consumed with advertisements and low-hanging, low-quality gratification. Everyone is trying to sell you something and, even if they don’t make the sale, they’re profited off of monopolizing your limited attention resources.
Key Takeaways
Our brains categorize and connect experiences, filtering only a few into long-term memory. Skills improve through repetition, making habit change most effective with a simple, specific approach.
SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Timely) prevent aimlessness and resource waste. Breaking goals into smaller, manageable steps increases success while filtering out distractions.
Behavior change follows stages from awareness to action, requiring consistency and resilience. Planning for setbacks and reframing failure as discovery strengthens long-term growth.
Background
Each year, we’re provided a small handful of “change moments”- holidays or key moments to get excited about “beginning again”. The New Year, a birthday, a new semester, Mondays- all examples of the “start” that we crave when we’ve decided that we’re ready to make a change (just not ready enough to do it right then). Inevitably, if we do step up to the “start”, we do so ready to capitalize on the collective enthusiasm to carry us through the perceived “finish line”.
So often, though, the wave fizzles out and we’re left to paddle onward. Without some form of planning and preparation, our compass malfunctions. If we haven’t charted the course, we’re left to paddle aimlessly, hoping to catch the next wave going in the “right direction”. The energy lost in the confusion could have been a valuable resource on the path to achievement. All of that to say this: behavior change is a series of skills practices until they become automated.
We perform best at tasks that we don’t have to think so hard about. We love a “path of least resistance”, especially in our society. That’s why we’re so easily sold on quick-fixes which, in turn, leave us jaded about the whole journey anyway. So let’s, for a moment, reframe the behavior change process as a skills practice.
How Memories are Made
When experience events, our senses perceive a handful of tidbits about the environment. From that initial encounter, we retain a smaller handful of tidbits that we then either synthesize or toss away. From short-term memory, the elite few get to stick around in the long-term memory, ready for recall at a moment’s notice.
Our brains can store so much information the way that it does because it categorizes elements of experience and connects them through relationships. The more we feed any given category, the better established it’s complexities become in our understanding. We build new skills that are considered procedural memory- we get better at them the more we do them. Though it might feel defeating to practice the habit at it’s outset, the demonstrated process of “learning until expertise” is undeniable. As a result, changing behaviors requires the simplest and most specific approach possible so as to leave no margin for error.
Getting SMART
This is why SMART goals are such a pervasive part of organizational development. Goals need to have specificity, there needs to be some sort of measure of success. They need to be achievable, relevant to the big picture, and set to be timely with deadline. The whole of my twenties was saturated with nonspecific goals that left me adrift over and over again. Setting goals without SMART-support is a resource-drain- it’s the well-intentioned friend offering to help without really intending to help, ya know? It’s that well-intentioned friend that’ll reach out while your floundering to offer support- “just let me know what I can do”.
We can set ourselves up for better success by taking big goals and making them small and by taking the small goals and making them smaller. When we get granular on our goals and values-in-action, we provide ourselves an exponentially larger toolbox of small steps to pull from. Getting miniscule means that, within the grains, you’ll be better prepared for challenges before they’ve come up, as well.
The practice of getting SMART, though, takes focus, patience, and resilience. The noise of commercials and gurus, along with the typical drags of the workday, distract and numb us from turning in. So getting SMART also involves finding and filtering out the noise that keeps you from accomplishing what you set out to do.
Learning to Love Learning
Most coaching certifying bodies that I’ve seen leverage the Transtheoretical Model of Behavior Change (TTM) framework. TTM is a model of behavior change that follows stages of change from “pre-contemplation” (no awareness or intention to change) all the way through “action” and involves both “maintenance” and “relapse” phases of making change.
We don’t know what we don’t know until we do. Once we’re irrevocably aware of the circumstances that need a shift, our inertia (precontemplation) is enlivened with potential energy (contemplation). The vigor of what comes next is big and daunting. Preparation is fun! But when you’re unsure where to start, seeking resources to inform and educate your path is your strength. While the internet may be bad for many things, it’s certainly a great way to access any bit of known knowledge at super speed. This is where coaches come in- they assist with the planning process if your process isn’t cutting it for you. Once you’ve got your prepped list, you’re ready to take action.
Practice makes permanence and those actions need to happen regularly and with fluidity to adjust as necessary in order for a behavior to really stick. If not, we lose steam quickly and revert to our former pathways. This consistency is a learned skill all the same. As such, it’s important to plan for relapse with grace and purpose instead of letting it snag you. Reframing “loss of direction” or “falling off the wagon” as “discovering doesn’t work” is one way to begin to break the cycle.
Learning can reliably be disappointing- that’s what makes the successes so sweet. Taking steps to facilitate growth and change in your life is the highest form of self-regard. You’ve got to look out for your future self, even just a little bit, in order to realize the vision of who that future self is to you, ya know?
The Power of Protein
In this age of information, it’s not hard to find research that corroborates any belief. Influencers and capitalism dictate which content you’re more likely to see and fund which research you’ll be fed. As a result, nutrition- something quite simple in it’s foundation- becomes overwhelmingly complicated.
For most people, the complexities of nutrient timing aren’t nearly as relevant as nutrient quality and quantity. As you embark on your personal health journey, it’s important to tune out the nonspecific cacophony and tune into the basics.
Protein is pivotal in recovery/regeneration, glucose regulation, and ultimately makes up most of our structure-stuff, so it’s worth investigating a bit more.
As Building Blocks
There’s a reason we consume animal tissues in order to intake and assimilate protein. We are a network of collagen fibers. Fascia encapsulates the muscles and holds us together inside the skin. Fascia proliferates as it stretches and moves. Muscle is replenished and rebuilt stronger with adequate protein intake. The skin, the largest organ on the human body, depends on this sinewy protein to keep it all together.
As we age, our mechanisms for protein synthesis diminish. This results in the dread sagging skin and muscle wasting of old age. Proper functioning of both of these responsibilities is directly correlated to positive outcomes pertaining to longevity.
As Blood Sugar Support
Healthy muscle tissue not only contributes to over all strength and functional movement, it also serves as storage for glycogen. High muscle volume assists with blood sugar regulation.
When we intake carbs, the liver and the muscle tissue are the primary store-houses of any resultant free-circulating glucose. Our bodies tap into these reserves during physical activity to varying degrees dependent on the specific type of physical activity. When we’re relatively inactive, the stored glycogen goes unused. When we’re inactive and also continue to intake disproportionate amounts of carbs, what remains to be store is taken up by the cells that are associated with fat tissue.
It is important to me to qualify the mechanisms in action here because this one specific process gets all sorts of warped and distorted across platforms. Adequate protein intake not only typically blunts glucose spikes, it also supports musculoskeletal health which, in turn, aids in sugars regulation. That’s it. Please, for the love of God, eat carbs, they’re fuel. Just keep in mind the physiology that processes and stores the carbs, and use them to your advantage :)
Major Take-Aways
Much of our fast-and-easy food stuff is devoid of fiber and choc full of carbs. While carbs are essential to our health and operations, too much without enough of the other stuff can distort our energy management systems. Prioritizing protein intake benefits our regeneration and sugar regulation. Protein intake is generally recommended to be thereabouts 0.75g/kg of body weight. If you, like me, live within the imperial system, you’d take thereabouts half of your weight in pounds and remove a quarter of that. That’s it.
From there, you can identify plant, animal, and supplemental sources of protein to fill in the amount. Keep in mind that plant and animal-based proteins come with the added benefit of fibers, vitamins, minerals, and all the goodness that wholefoods have to offer. When investing in protein supplementation, do your research- some sources make you gassy, some are bulked up with non-protein content, and some may just be downright nasty tasting.
A high level understanding of protein (or really any nutritional building block) is likely to yield results for most normal people. You may find that you have increased satiety (feeling of fullness), that your body compositions shifts a bit, or that your energy levels change. If you’re looking for specific guidance for how much and how often re: performance goals or condition management, please reach out to a Registered Dietitian. Nutritionists (like me) are qualified to educate and inform, not prescribe or diagnose. Make smart choices, and make choices in favor of your future self, y’all :)
A Beginner’s Guide to Running
Success is much easier to attain when given the proper tools in preparation. Running has a relatively low barrier to entry compared to other forms of physical activity- grab some shoes and get goin. IT is an easy skill to train no matter where you are in the world- it won’t take up space in your luggage. Running is a moving meditation that can be both individual and social- there are many health markers that benefit from the act of running.
The physiological value of the sport is undeniable but still, running can get a bad rap. The high impact of running can lead to skeletal-muscular issues, lack of knowledge around ventilatory thresholds can lead to overexertion, and highly competitive folks may find comparison the thief of joy.
I’ve always been someone who ran, but I’ve only recently dubbed myself a runner. For years, I would embark on an annual (semiannual at best) run in the hopes that one of them would be the one to make me fall in love. I’m not sure why I persisted, but at some point, it worked. Through self study and errors made, I felt the invaluable gift of accomplishment become a motivator to keep going. Since then, I’ve become a run coach and gotten certified in nutrition for endurance sports to support the athletes that I work with.
Knowledge is power, so I’ve compiled a high level list of tools that have helped me to experience success via increased skill- it’s a positive feedback loop. I hope that a bit of a leg up can encourage that sense of personal accomplishment for y’all who may be interested in developing the skill.
“Precovery” and Nutrient Timing
Run prep doesn’t begin after you’ve laced up and hit the road. Sleep quality, nutrient strategies, and allostatic (stress) load lay down the groundwork for the run experience well before you’ve thrown on a pair of shoes and shorts. Establishing a solid routine and setting expectations relevant to these factors is base-line for successful skills development.
Precovery for amateur running does not have to be a big to-do. Instead, keep the basics in mind: fuel properly, rest plenty, and reduce stress load. You can find specifics about threshold training across the internet, but, unless you’re in it for sport-specific training, those details can muddy the water when the intention is to begin.
Nutritionally, carbs are faster acting energy, fats are highly concentrated energy. Eat a balanced diet including nourishing fats, fiber/veggies, and protein. Each of these nutrients act as building blocks to your body and it’s system operations. Give your body some time to digest the foods it’s consumed or intentionally consume easier to digest options (smoothies versus full fruits) so that you don’t end up cramping up in the run itself.
On-The-Run
Just start! running is different from walking in that running includes going airborne intermittently between steps. For a moment, on a run, you’re flying. Pace doesn’t matter, time doesn’t matter. Instead, move within a context that feels sustainable- just go and grow from there.
Your body will tell you when you need to slow down or if it’s time to speed up, you just need to read the signs. Without getting too in-depth about the details, our body leverages the resources it has to begin and maintain motion. At high speeds, the body will deplete fast-acting/fast-replenishing energy sources (carbs). At lower, longer-duration speed, the body can lean into it’s more concentrated sources (fats).
Your heart rate and breath rate are vital indicators for the systems at play and how your resources are being managed. Information on Ventilatory Threshold metrics can be found across the internet but, again, as a newbie to the sport, that information is likely to complicate something that can be identified innately.
Keep it simple, signs of excess will show up as extreme breathlessness, cramping, nausea, and painful pounding heart rate. Listen to the body and let go of expectations, your runs will improve with practice, not by force. Be present and enjoy the dialogue between body and mind.
Afterwards
When the distance and the pace don’t matter as much, the act of running is the joy itself. You’ve gotten up and gotten it done- the rest is details. After your run be sure to refuel by giving the body adequate nutritional value (whole, un-processed foods will do). Exercise is an appetite suppressant as the body shunts resources away from the visceral core and out towards the working extremities- so be mindful of how soon before/after your consuming foods keeping an eye on the time it will take to digest the foods. In the immediate hours following a run, hydration and nutrition not only support recovery, but can act as the precovery for the next bout of physical activity.
Movement should be a gift, not a punishment- our bodies feel our intentions and, much like a child, can sense when the vibes are off. As a result, the body responds accordingly, our self image can either subdue or contribute that stress load. Stress layered onto stress suppresses immune function and recovery initiatives. Love your body, enjoy the ride, take off the expectations, and allow yourself to just try a few times.
Breathe Better, Live Better
How Breath Works
Breath serves as the perpetual dance between Oxygen and CO2- these two opposite forces balance pH levels in the blood, support brain functioning, metabolic processes, and nervous system regulation.
As with all opposite forces, the balance comes from the conflicting qualities that contribute to homeostasis. With the breath, Oxygen serves as the energizer- it builds heat and lightness (getting light headed). In contrast, CO2 is a depressant, it cools and grounds.
When the body senses too much CO2 building up in the blood stream, it will signal the respiratory diaphragm to contract which, in turns, triggers and intake of air into the lungs. Once in the lungs, Oxygen reaches the vast surface area of capillaries and alveoli, teeming with vessels and capillaries, to shuttle Oxygen into the blood.
Thought CO2 gets a bad rap, it’s active participation in our everyday health should be celebrated. Because CO2 is a depressant, it down-shifts an accelerated nervous system by relaxing the smooth muscle tissues like those within the heart. In addition, an increased CO2 build up within a breath cycle may support more efficient Oxygen reuptake- this is how breathwork works!
5-minute Practice
Box breathing is arguably the easiest breath practice to follow. It regulates the nervous system through equal in breaths and out breaths with equal retention in between.
Set a timer for 5-minutes and, if possible, pull up a metronome app. Using common time, close your eyes and let the rhythm guide your pace as you breathe in for 4-counts, hold for 4-counts, breathe out for 4-counts, and hold for 4-counts.
If you feel your mind wander or you notice you’ve dozed off, realign and return. The process is the destination.