Archive for January, 2012

 

The Woes of the 5-Day Reset

January 9th, 2012 | Uncategorized | 0 Comments

If you’re in the middle of the 5-day reset and thinking, “What the heck am I doing?”, don’t worry, that’s normal. In fact, it would be even more normal to be cursing the day you heard of the idea. Les and I have had to rein our diet back in many times in the last 4 years, and every time we do a reset it’s hard, no matter how many times we’ve done it before. I just did one in November to help make sure my system would do ok with lots of traveling during the holidays and eating out, and I was miserable for that 5 days. I felt like I had the flu (I almost cancelled lessons, which I do maybe twice a year), but I did great with restaurant food during the holidays, which is a real blessing.

If you think about it, pulling all the carbs out of your diet is like going caffein free or quitting smoking. The reset really affects your energy because it drastically cuts your calories and you operate on much lower blood sugar. But, that’s the point – it teaches you what your baseline is. Part of what makes it hard, though, is that you don’t really feel your baseline until day 5. The days prior to it, what you feel is your body recalibrating, and that’s messy. Your body has a lot to process to transition down into a lower gear.

When I was about 13, I changed barns, and moved back to riding with a trainer that knew me and knew my horse. But my first lesson back with her, my horse wouldn’t go. He was incredibly sluggish, and the trainer was really frustrated with me. She kept telling me to squeeze and cluck and make him go,”Leg, leg, leg, leg!” and I kept telling her that I was. Finally we crashed through a jump. My horse flat out didn’t pick up his feet. Just went right through the poles like they weren’t even there. My trainer was furious. She told me to get down, scolded me for having no work ethic, took the horse by the reins, and sent me home. She didn’t even want me to stay to untack him.

Well the next day she rode the horse by herself and found out that I wasn’t kidding – the horse absolutely wouldn’t go. And guess why… At the previous barn, he was being fed straight alfalfa. At her barn, she was only feeding orchard grass. When she picked him up, she didn’t inquire at the old barn about what he had been eating, so pulled him off all his hot food cold turkey. The result was basically what you feel in a 5-day reset – low energy.

Low energy isn’t necessarily a bad thing for a person or a horse, though. As it turned out, most of my hot Thoroughbred’s problems (like spooking and rearing) were caused by being on a diet that had him high as a kite. While straight orchard grass wasn’t the answer, it did give us an idea of his baseline and allow us to increase his carbs methodically. We increased the carbs to match his workload, and didn’t give him any more. Just a few months later, I took second in a class of 35 riders, almost all of whom were trainers. That wouldn’t have been possible if we hadn’t gained a better understanding of how his food was affecting his performance.

While you’re on the 5-day reset, you’re eating low energy food, but just like my Thoroughbred, at least you won’t be spooking at nonsense any more. While you will probably still feel hinky for the first few days, and maybe even crankier than usual, if you make it through the 5 days, you’ll get an idea of what it feels like to have what you need and nothing more.

There is a similar idea for cleaning house. If you want to get rid of your clutter, pack everything from one room, or even your whole house, in moving boxes, and put it in your garage. Each time you need something, make yourself go out to the garage and get it. The act of having to go to the garage will help you determine what you need and what you don’t need. After a month, or whatever timeline feels right, donate anything still left in the garage to charity without opening the boxes. You’ll be left with only what you need and use.

One thing you may experience during the 5-day reset is confusion about needing more food. A lot of people mistake feeling sick with feeling hungry. If your gut flora is out of balance, you experience a gnawing feeling when you don’t have enough food in your stomach. I still get confused about what’s hunger and what’s flora imbalance. If you feel weird between meals, try taking a probiotic supplement, eating a product with natural probios like kefir or real sauerkraut, or try drinking some nettle tea. I really like taking oregano oil for gnawing “hunger” pains, but I’m not sure I would take that without some guidance. If one of the above suggestions changes your gnawing hunger feeling, chances are your flora balance could use a little TLC. Something to note – if you’ve had your appendix out, you are significantly more likely to have flora balance problems.

While the 5-day reset is about showing you what you need, weeks 2 and 3 (Stage 2), are about showing you what you use. Feed yourself what you need and what you think you might use that day. If you get more than you are using, you should be able to tell because you’ll have more energy than you can spend in a day. A good rule of thumb is that you should end the day with 10% energy left over. You need that 10% for recovery and for emergencies. If you spend everything you have every day, then you’ll be miserable if something random happens. Guard that 10% so you can handle a surprise phone call from a needy relative with dignity, or give hubby a foot massage if he’s had a bad day. If you go a few days with something left over in a row, you’ll find yourself being more creative and more social, and feeling more like yourself. It can be hard to not give everything you have every day, but if you think about it, you’re not giving everything you have overall if you don’t make a policy of saving that 10% on a daily basis.

More on the Athlete’s Diet

January 4th, 2012 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Thank you everyone who was interested in Les and my crazy diet. While we did not originally go on this diet by choice, it’s been really great for us and given us a lot more control over how we feel. For those of you who would like to give it a try, here is an outline for how you can take it for a test drive for a month and change the way you think and feel about food and about life.

There are 2 key points to this diet 1) carbs are directly proportionate to the workload, meaning exercise, like they would be in a horse, and 2) attitude is the barometer for food choices.

Since this article is getting really long, I’ll put this up top… Here is a 4 week plan for going to the grocery store. Don’t over think it! Instead of thinking about what you can’t eat, think about what you can eat.
Week 1 – Prepare yourself to only walk 2 aisles in the grocery store. Go to the store and buy meat, fish, and green vegetables. I would get a roast to slice for emergency snacks, a chicken to roast, and whatever else you like. If you can, go natural or organic.
Weeks 2 and 3 – Buy meat and green vegetables again plus Quinoa, sweet potatoes, and other potatoes, and various kinds of rice in small quantity from the bulk section. Grab plain yogurt and nuts. Ask yourself what your stress levels are. If they are low, proceed to week 4, if not, stay on the week 2 diet until you’re feeling more like yourself.
Week 4 – Drop meat quantity back down to a more normal portion size. Pick up cheese, lentils, beans, and some fun Bob’s Red Mill flours like sorghum and teff. You might pick up honey, carob (check that there is no barley in it) and gluten free pasta as well.

So how do we decide what to eat within the diet? Well, the first thing you need to do is be able to register the feedback your body is giving you. To set yourself up to do that, that I recommend doing a 5-day reset – eat only meat and green vegetables for 5 days. It’s a difficult 5 days because it is a total reset, but it’s worth it!

“Stage 1″ Foods – The 5-day Reset, or foods for stressful times
So which meats should you eat? That depends a little on your genetics and your symptoms. For your first attempt at the 5-day reset, I would eat any meat you want, so long as it is a plain meat seasoned only with salt and pepper (ie., not salami, bacon, or lunch meat, which has sugar, etc). You’ll probably need a little more quantity than you normally would since you aren’t taking in any carbs. Maybe 1/3 or even 1/2lb of meat per meal with a serving of vegetables that is about the size of the vegetable plus carb you would normally put on your plate. The amount of vegetables would be about 1/3 to 1/2 a bag of peas. You might need less if your activity level is lower. Here are the few exceptions to the green vegetable rule – bell peppers, onions, garlic, beets, and carrots. Coconut flakes and coconut milk are a great snack during this stage.

You’ll probably loose 5lbs in those 5 days, which can be a blessing or a curse depending on where you’re at in your life. If you aren’t looking to lose weight, you’ll have to make a concerted effort to get enough calories in, but I wouldn’t stress too much because the 5-day reset will likely make your absorption better and you should be able to pick the weight back up quickly. At the end of the 5 days, you should feel really refreshed, whether you wanted to lose the weight or not. Also, if your’e really looking to make a profound change, if you stick to meat and green vegetables for 2 weeks, you’ll have a super reset, but most people aren’t willing to stay on it that long.

“Stage 2″ Foods – Foods that are safe when life is a little harry, but not quite crazy
After the 5-day reset, you can’t start reintroducing foods in proportion to your exercise. Start with plain (unsweetened) yogurt, nuts, seeds, brown rice, quinoa, sweet potatoes, and other potatoes. Most people better with goat dairy than cow dairy, but it’s hard to find. After you eat a Stage 2 food, ie., that is something other than a meat or green vegetable, notice how your attitude is. If your mind starts going off on some tangent, you either ate too many carbs for the amount of exercise you got, or the food just doesn’t match with your system.

Because the goal of this diet is to help you figure out the emotional impact of the foods you eat, try to keep the variables simple. 2 foods in a meal, maybe 3. As soon as you start making things like stir fry, which has a lot of ingredients, even though they are good ones, you reduce your ability to match up the foods with how you feel. It might sound really boring to eat only 2 foods in a meal, but the palate changes after the 5 day reset and a simple meal like green beans and back ribs is amazing. While you’re still figuring out your Stage 2 foods, try eating the food by itself right after exercise. Most of these foods you’ll probably be fine with so long as you eat them in proportion to your activity level.

“Stage 3″ Foods – Foods for when life is, or might as well be, a vacation
After you have figured out what stage 2 foods you can eat figured out, you can add in honey, fruit, cheese, squash, lentils, beans, various grains, carob, unsweetened cocoa, processed foods like pasta, and combination foods like bread, and baked goods. Processed foods to me means a food that has changed shape – for example, rice pasta doesn’t look anything like rice, and is harder to digest than regular rice. Combination foods are foods that are what they are by way of multiple ingredients. For example, a muffin might be 6 ingredients- baking soda, tartar, honey, butter, eggs, and at least one kind of flour. Combination foods are really complicated foods, so you should only eat them when you’re in a great mood and pretty sure you’re going to feel great no matter what you eat, because sometimes the ingredients work together like a Red Bull and Vodka – you’re mixing uppers and downers. Not a problem if that’s what you plan to do, but not the best when all you want is to have a steady baseline.

“Party” Foods – Foods you’ll pay the price for
Generally speaking, milk and sugar will get just about anyone… A pasta sauce that has sugar in it won’t kill you, nor will a splash of milk in your tea, but a steamed milk from Starbucks and an iced pastry could be termed “off the wagon”. Corn and wheat are challenging for many people because they are so refined, but some people do ok with them. Coffee and alcohol are not in your best interest most of the time, of course. There are many amazing teas that can take the place of coffee.

Alright, so in review, stick to meat and green vegetables for 5 days. For about 10 days after that, eat Stage 2 foods. You should stay on Stage 2 foods indefinitely if your are feeling stressed at all, lest you poison some of your Stage 3 foods! Only enjoy the Stage 3 foods when you can truly enjoy them. Stage 1 foods are the best choice when life is crazy. Stage 2 foods are acceptable most of the time. Stage 3 foods are foods to eat when life is awesome. Here’s why…

Emotional State is Sticky
Be forewarned – the emotional state you are in when you eat a food is sticky! For example, I was in a phase where I really liked to eat beet chips on the way home from the barn at one point, and it happened to be during a time when the barn was really stressful. Consequently, I now experience stress when I eat the beet chips – my body associates them with stress and prepares for a stressful day. So, whenever I eat those beet chips now, I start to feel cranky, which is a real shame because they are delicious! The sagest advice is to not do anything else when you eat (no tv, computer, driving, etc), just eat, but of course that can be challenging in our modern world. You can sometimes undo an emotional association by eating a problem food when you are in a great state, like on vacation. On our honeymoon I reintroduced lentils, and have been great with them ever since. I felt grumpy the first time or two I ate them, but then my body let the pattern go.

Here are some tools to help keep you on track when things start to seem a little blurry. It can be difficult to separate the effects of external stressors, like work and family life, from the impacts of the foods we eat. Sometimes we’re too tired to expend the brain power to decide what to grab out of our pantry. These tools are a great crutch.

Muscle Testing
To muscle test yourself, just make a circle by touching your thumb and index finger together. Do it on both hands, interlock them, and try to pull them apart. They will be harder to pull apart if you are thinking about a food that is good for you and easier to pull apart if you are thinking about a food that is bad for you. What is good for you changes from hour to hour, so you have to test the food when you are planning to eat it. Here are some other ways to muscle test yourself – article and video.

Blood Type
If you know your blood type, that will give you a good place to start, though you can make yourself sensitive to things you should, by virtue of your blood type, be able to eat. I’m AB+ and I can’t eat some of the things on my list because I ate them when I had Candida and my body learned to attack that food. That said, blood type food research will get you started.

QiFood
QiFood is an iPhone app that allows you to look up what a food does from a Traditional Chinese Medicine stand point. For example, coconut milk is nourishes nourishes blood, nourishes yin, and nourishes jing. This app is simple enough that you an probably figure out how to benefit from it with only a Google’s-worth of TCM knowledge.

Carb cultures
There is a theory that most people are descended from 1 of 3 carb cultures – wheat, rice, or corn. Chances are, 2 of the 3 won’t work super well for you, so as you’re test driving Stage 2 foods, keep this in mind. It’s a good idea to keep as much variation in your carbs as possible. Try experimenting with ancient grains like amaranth or using coconut flour or a nut flour in place of a grain.

Heart Rate
Take your pulse before you eat a questionable food. If your heart rate seems rapid after eating, your body may be feeling a little distressed and that particular food may not be the best food for you. Heartrates normally go up some after eating, but a pulse that feels rapid should be “food for thought”.

Attitude
Common attitude changes after eating a food that is not ideal at that time would be crankiness, impatience, irritability, or festering. If your brain starts running away with you, you probably ate the wrong food for that situation.

Rainbow
Try to eat all the colors of the rainbow every day. You can also try eating all 6 tastes every day – sweet, sour, salty, pungent, bitter, and astringent. Google these categories for food ideas. Deekpak Chopra has great ideas for this.

Symptoms
Try googling “elimination diet” for any symptoms you want to get rid of, like a headache, dry skin, or stomach bloating. There is an elimination diet for just about everything! The diet we described above is a good start, but for some things, like headaches, you might want to eliminate red meat.

You Are What you Eat
After you are done with the 5-day reset, try to add in more “living” foods. Like the saying, “you are what you eat” implies, it is best to eat foods that are alive…not dead. You can bring your foods back to life by soaking and sprouting, which are easily done. A quick Google will give you ideas.

Nuts
Most nuts and seeds have a lot of rancid oil and mold in them. If you can find refrigerated nuts, they are a better bet. Alternatively, you can try sprouting and see if that helps.

Mountain Rose Herbs
Mountain Rose Herbs is a great website to get herbs and tea from. Nettle has a ton of vitamins and minerals in it. Nettle capsules or nettle tea are really good for allergies, both food allergies and environmental allergies. If you have phlegm in the morning or get nauseous on an empty stomach (which you probably will during the 5-day reset), nettle really helps. Ginger is great for digestion if you are a cold/damp type person. Cinnamon warms you from the inside out, also, but doesn’t have the digestive benefits of ginger. Pue-erh tea is often called the “happy drunk” tea, so it’s great for mornings and unfun meetings. Green rooibos is an awesome herbal tea with antioxidants that tastes almost like a real tea. If you are going to have real tea and don’t want the caffein, if you pre-steep the tea for 30 seconds, dump that steeping out, and resteep, you keep most of the antioxidants and lose 80% of the caffein.

…and I will follow with some recipes in a few days :) You don’t really need recipes to eat meat and green vegetables, though, so you might as well get started with your 5-day reset!