Eat your WEEties Episode 2, Pt. I

I'm a taurus. Taurus' traits include stubbornness, stubbornness, stubbornness and loyalty (which is a form of stubbornness). I was also born in the year of the pig, which tends to be a very stubborn year. On a stubborn scale of 1 to 10 I'm about an 11,000. So I'm the worst person for taking advice, especially advice I didn't ask for. My first response is, Oh yeah, and what do you know? and then, out loud, excuses for why I'm different. I could never work with a coach.

In the few cases where I have followed advice, it's been very, very, very slow in coming. In general, I won't adopt a new theory until a hippie, a friend, an athlete, a scientist, a rock star, a major media magazine, and compelling anecdotal evidence agree. That's how it worked when I took up yoga. It took my friend Shane telling me it helped him sleep, seeing every hippie in the world carrying around a yoga mat, Gordo Byrn, Joe Friel, Madonna, and Shape magazine, plus an anecdote I heard on Ironman Talk to get me to pick up yoga. (A guy came to a swim clinic and the coaches told him there was nothing he could improve on until he improved his shoulder flexibility. This guy was about as flexible as a 2x4. A year later he came back after getting into yoga, he hadn't set foot in a pool all year. With zero training he took something ridiculous like 20 seconds off his 100m time. It was all thanks to yoga.) So now I do yoga 2 or 3 times a week, and I think that's why I haven't been injured: the hippie, the friend, the athlete, the scientist, the rock star, the major media magazine, and compelling anecdotal evidence were right.

And then there's nutrition. I'm ferociously defensive and closed-minded about nutrition. It comes from a decade of Big-Mac-eating Americans and mystery-meat-eating Spaniards telling me that not eating meat is "bad for you." I have been known to stop speaking to people for months because they took issue with my eating habits and wouldn't drop it. At first I read everything I could about nutrition, both vegetarian and carnivorous. Then I grabbed my soap box and went to take on the world. I got in so many bitter arguments about it that I resolved to never talk nutrition with a carnivore again. The other outcome of that phase was that I became addicted to reading nutrition books.

I don't know everything... but sometimes I think I do. I definitely would not even consider adjusting my eating habits unless a hippie, a friend, an athlete, a scientist, a rock star, a major media magazine, and compelling anecdotal evidence agree. No way, because I know more than any hippie, any friend, any athlete, any rock star, any magazine, any compelling anecdotal evidence, and any scientist alone.

The journey to whole foods

I lived for nearly 4 years in a place where the 60's and new age have gone to compost in peace. Freshman year in college my roommate didn't come home for a week because she'd been living in a tree. Really, in a tree. I can't make this stuff up. There was a fairly large percentage of the student population who didn't own a pair of shoes, white kids with dreadlocks were everywhere, and the west side of town had purposely been lain out to make it a pain in the ass to drive (to encourage cycling). Oh, and there was a lot of pot. There were hippies (the original ones) who had been living in a tent community in the woods behind campus since the Viet Nam War! Hippies and whole foods go hand-in-hand, and I certainly got a solid dose of both when I was in college. And still I was resistant to changing my eating habits. I mean, for every scientist you can find to say that an all-organic hippie diet is healthy, you can find another to say that it isn't. I'd read every book on sports nutrition I could find in the Santa Cruz public library, and they all said that white flour and other such familiar items had their place in a healthy diet. Best of all, these were things that I could find at Safeway, and for half the price than the Hippie Mart (which had nothing but bicycle parking anyway).

But still, I'm not deaf, and when I started working at a gym right across the street from a Hippie Mart, opinions started to get through my Claire Knows All filter and into my thick skull.

A hippie: Check!
Well, I think you'd be hard pressed to find a hippie that DIDN'T think that whole foods are an integral part of a well-balanced diet. But hippies on soap boxes annoy me, especially since a hippie is far more likely to be ON a soap box than using its contents. I don't feel I should have to listen to people who smell bad. So for a long time I was staunchly resistant to the idea of natural foods simply so I'd have a point of contention with the self-righteous hippies.

A friend: Check!
I've talked about my friend Lorraine before. She's the one who's twice my age, older than my parents, and does the 100 milers. She works as a personal trainer and got a nutrition certification a few years ago (from ISSA or something, nothing that would get a paper published in a science journal, but enough to let her legally give nutrition advice). Lorraine won't eat processed foods, or potatoes, or starchy vegetables. She buys funny foods that I can't even pronounce and says they have vitamins I need that I've never even heard of. But Lorraine's had her own long-standing issues with food, so I don't feel like I should feel pressured to go down that road. Pass the pasta, please.

Well make that two friends: Check!
My friend Alyce loves to cook and experiment with new organic recipes. She MAKES her own challah bread every Friday, from scratch. Her husband, Russ, was always a pretty pudgy guy. Alright, Russ was fat. In 2003 he suffered an inoperable herniated disk in his spine that means that ever since then he has to spend most of his time in a Lazy-Boy recliner. Still, even though he spends some 12 hours a day in that recliner, once he started eating Alyce's whole grain, corn-syrup-and-hydrogenated-fat-free home cooking, he started losing weight. He must have lost 50 lb over the past several years sitting in that damn chair! (And Alyce lost her pregnancy weight in about two seconds flat as well.)

A celebrity: Check!
Well Madonna eats a completely macrobiotic diet. Gwenith Paltrow swears by whole grains, as does Sarah Jessica Parker (but aging has not treated her well, so she's probably not a good example). Beyonce eats tons of green vegetables and avoids red meat. Moby's a vegan. Fiona Apple's a vegan. Lindsey Lohan's on coke, and she looks like shit. And, well, look at Paul Newman! He's 400 years old and still looks good on those salad dressing bottles!

A major media magazine: Check!
Back when I used to read magazines, Shape was always telling me I had to eat whole grains. There were all those pictures of things with brown rice in them that were supposed to look yummy (that is, if you're not a rice racist). Then US Weekly hopped on (one of those celebrities I can't remember). It seemed like everyone was telling me to eat whole grains on all sides, and that processed foods were bad. Then ads started picking up on it and every product seemed to want to boast of its whole grains. I wasn't going to fall for that fad diet thing, though. I'd seen the same thing with the "Low Carb" craze. And anyway, I'm an athlete. I can eat whatever I want. I need simple carbohydrates before, after, and during my workouts. I mean, I don't even LIKE Twinkies, so I'm safe, right?

An athlete: Check!
There was this one woman at the gym that I worked at who lived for powerlifting. Absolutely everything she did in her day revolved around putting up more weight. She used to talk all the time about the importance of eating whole foods and used to supplement all kinds of green foods and shakes and powders and all manner of pills. You could not hold a conversation with her that did not turn to powerlifting in 20 seconds or less. Since she was the manager of the personal training department, any trainer who worked under her who was NOT a powerlifter was considered second class and got fewer clients. As you can imagine, we did not get along, and just like the hippies, I held on for dear life to any point of contention. I mean, the woman insisted on running her water through magnets before drinking it. She was clearly nuts.

But I still love reading nutrition books. The problem is that there wasn't a single book I could trust. Every single one of them insisted that the last book I read was bullshit, and so was the one before that. On top of that, I'd read Marion Nestle's "Food Politics", and I knew full well that I couldn't even turn to the FDA for help. I'd become so jaded by the whole thing that I hadn't read a nutrition book for years. I don't like chocolate, so I'm sure my diet of white pasta and fake "whole wheat" bread was fine.

Then Bree Wee published this post about nutrition books she loves. And I was all ready to continue not caring, until she said,

"So, I gave up the sugar... except for the gels... I rarely used sports drinks and then in Canada my coach got me back on them at a training camp for Ironman. (did I tell you after this book I dropped to 125 pounds, not dieting, just ditching sugar?) Anyways, he got me on the darn sports drinks and I went back up, gained 6 pounds for Ironman, threw up all over my bike during Ironman from "sports drink", so I quit sports drinks again!"

Compelling Anecdotal Evidence: CHECK!
Wow, 6 lb from just sports drinks? Maybe this sugar book (Sugar Blues) was worth looking into... I love books that make blanket statements like "[insert staple of human diet] is poison". I love to see how they try to defend it and I love to pretend that I'm smarter than the PhD who wrote it as I tear apart every argument while I read.

So before I went to Florida I picked up Sugar Blues (William Dufty), and since it was cheap and not very long, I picked up another book from Bree's list, The Thrive Diet by Brendan Brazier, a professional Ironman.

Sugar Blues

By the time I got home from Florida, I'd finished Sugar Blues. The thesis was that sugar is more than just empty calories, it is a drug and a poison, responsible for way more deaths and diseases than we could imagine. It was more of an anecdotal collection of observations than scientific, and since it was published in the 1970s, some of the statements Dufty were pretty ludicris. It's not the smoking that causes cancer, it's the sugar content in the cigarettes. It's not the sun that causes skin cancer, it's sugar. And yet every time I was ready to chuckle and chuck the book in the garbage can, he would come up with something that resembled things I'd seen with my own eyes. Diabetics who had managed to get off insulin through proper diet, children who had been diagnosed as ADHD who calmed down when sugar was taken out of their diets...

Perhaps if I hadn't eaten so much sugar on my 20
mile run on Sunday, I wouldn't have had such an
embarrassing sunglasses burn.

Another friend: Deepika. One of my best friends in Spain was Deepika. In South Africa she had been a successful television director. The way she said it, she'd worked hard and partied hard and by the time she was 30 she had literally worn out her adrenal glands. Now, I'm sure that that's an oversimplification and I don't quite understand the diet connection, but now she can't have sugar, wheat, bread, potatoes, or a lot of kinds of fruit. It's not just high GI (glycemic index) foods, we're talking about whole wheat, or low GI things with sugar in it (peanutbutter, etc); they all affected her. If she has more than the tiniest dose of these things, her skin breaks out in a psoriasis-like rash that takes weeks to go away, she gets woozy and irritable, she looses all her energy, and she turns into (what she thinks is) a raging bitch. Once she was upset for days because she thought that her boyfriend had broken up with her. When she finally got up the nerve to talk to him, he didn't even know they'd fought. The last thing they did before the "fight" was eat ice cream. I never would have believed her if I hadn't lived with her for a summer and seen first had how severely a piece of pizza or a bowl of brown rice affected her. So I thought that maybe this Dufty guy deserved at least a listen.

Thrive Diet

High from reading Sugar Blues I moved on to the Thrive Diet that very night. The thesis (as best as I can describe it) is that your wellbeing, or "biological age" is affected by stress levels in the body. This stress can be mental stress (work), physical stress (training), or environmental stress (pollution, diet, etc), all of which the body has to deal with in addition to its normal functions. The less stress your diet puts on your body, the quicker you'll recover and the stronger you'll become. The general rule of thumb is to eat a diet rich in foods that have an alkalinizing effect on the body (i.e. fruits and veggies), and minimize the foods that have an acidic effect on the body (i.e. pretty much everything else). He suggests doing the raw vegan thing.

I had never, ever read a nutrition book that made so much sense and jived so well with what I already knew/had found to be true. And here was a practical application for all that information coming out about foods that lower the pH of the body. Here was something that put the roll of anti-oxidants into perspective higher than the molecular level. Here was a book written by an athlete, for athletes saying that I didn't have to go hunting down squirrels and neighbors' cats in the back yard so I could live off wild game. (I could go on and on about the Paleo Diet, but I won't).

Alright, alright, I'll try it. I decided to try this hippie raw, whole food, sugar free thing for 2 weeks. For the remaining 2 weeks of my training cycle I'd throw as much volume at myself as my schedule permitted, and see how my body reacted. If I was dead by the end of the two weeks, I would decide it was all crap and go back to eating like a normal human being.

Coming up next: Results of the experiment and the responses to this week's poll about nutrition.