Health and fitness misconceptions

By Pete Ryan 

 

Listen to any advert or guru and health and fitness is easy and fast. 4 weeks to a 6-pack, eat what you like and get thin, just 5 minutes a day…these are just a few of the myths that surround the health and fitness industry.  In truth health and fitness are a long, slow, on going process that you can begin at any age, but need to be continued throughout your life to be effective.

I will look at just a few of the common myths and walk you through why they are wrong and what the reality truly is.

Let’s look at one that specifically affects the vegan or plant based arena. It is the ex-vegan. The story usually goes like this:

I went vegan, I became very ill. I usually had a lot of soul searching, then I ate meat.   In most cases that first bite was amazing and suddenly they felt well and full of vigour.

So, that is the scenario. Think about that story for a moment. I am a clinical nutritionist, but you do not need to have any formal training to see the flaw in this argument. You are arguing you developed a serious deficiency due to a diet, then you cured a major deficiency with one bite of meat, immediately. This is not a deficiency, look up the treatment of scurvy or any other deficiency based disease and see that not only does recovery take a long time, but you also suffer lasting issues.  What they are describing is a psychological issue, not a nutritional condition. For some reason they have convinced themselves that they need meat and so exhibit symptoms. I am not saying you cannot suffer deficiencies on a vegan diet, that is possible eating any diet, but if you get immediate relief then the issue was not a nutritional issue, it was a psychological one.  I have worked with people who suffer from many eating disorders; binge eating, inappropriate food choices, and many other food -centred issues.  I always insist these people also work with the relevant mental health care worker as the issue is very deeply joined to early life trauma and other issues as it is to simply poor food choices. Let me reemphasise, you can suffer real dietary issues on any diet, including a vegan diet, but immediate relief of symptoms after a bite is a red flag that there are deeper issues involved.

What I would finally say about this is that anyone who has a concern, whatever their diet, should go and seek some form of help. Firstly consult a nutritional expert with some experience and if necessary seek counselling from a trained professional as these can really help you understand the condition.

Let’s move on from there to the “Reach your goal in X weeks”. We are talking diet challenges, mass gaining contests etc etc. These are all not ways to achieve long term success.  I haven’t got the exact percentages to hand, but it is over 90% failure rates for diet success over time, muscle building cannot even be done that quickly without heavy usage of “supplements” (steroids, HGH, insulin, SARMS or whatever the new flavour of the month is). Your actual goal is to build a new lifestyle, one where you are naturally leaner &/or one that adds to your muscle mass over time. You can diet hard and lose weight (and lose a lot of muscle along with the fat), but this will not stay off unless you adopt a new way of eating and living. You will not build muscle without spending years in the gym. Look at the extreme, Mr Olympia is usually a guy in his mid-30s, they have trained hard for decades and taken heavy doses of drugs. So, they are the genetic elite (in terms of muscle building potential) and they still took decades WITH drugs! Many people see this as a bad thing, but really it is actually a good thing, it means that we can continue to build our bodies, slowly for decades, so in 20 years time you can look better than you do now! Imagine I promised you a pill that would slowly improve you every month for the next 20 years…how much would you pay for that?  Well, I am offering you the “iron pill”, lift for the next 20 years, in a safe, progressive manner and you will look better in 20 years than you do right now!

Let’s briefly touch on the 5 minutes a day gadgets. Do not waste your time.  You can get fit and toned up using weights, using bodyweight exercises, using kettlebells or even odd objects.  The only rules are that the exercises are progressive over time.  So, they get heavier, you use a harder or novel variations, plus you need avoid anything that causes injury or injury type pain (you want the lactic acid burn feeling and the feeling you are working hard, but not injury type pain, these are very different).  Follow that and you will succeed in improving over decades, not just months and years.

If you need help getting started pop over to https://payhip.com/veganbodybuilding and download “An introduction to vegan fitness and health” (it is by donation, so give anything you like to help us build the site) and feel free to use the resources below.

Website http://www.veganbodybuilding.org/

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Adding for fat loss

By Pete Ryan

Fat loss is often focussed on deprivation.  You will often see the gurus online touting this and that, and usually these people will suggest things like:

• Giving up carbs
• Cutting out fat
• Removing treat foods

How about we turn this idea on its head and see where that journey will lead us? Most people who want to lose fat have a few related issues. They do not eat well and they do not move enough.  If we look at these dual issues and consider our problems from the viewpoint of adding things then we can develop a very interesting approach to dealing with these issues.

Let’s look at 2 scenarios and how we approach them…and the probable result:

Scenario 1

You come to me and I say you will no longer eat treats, junk food or desserts. You will cut all sugar from drinks and only eat whole food stuff from now on; you would also limit yourself to 2,000Kcal (or less) per day.  Would that work?  Well, technically yes, IF you did that, then you would most likely lose weight…but would many people stick to it? Research suggests that most people will not be able to maintain the discipline necessary to keep this up over the long term, so they will fail and return to their old eating habits.  They may lose weight for a while, but eventually the fat will be regained and maybe they’d even develop more as they rebound from the caloric deprivation back to surplus calories.

Scenario 2

Suppose a person comes to me and I say they can continue doing exactly what they do now, but add some vegetables (focus mainly on green leafy vegetables), have them with as many meals as they can and try to eat those first.  I suspect most people could do that, they would also be filling themselves up with bulky greens and so not have so much room for everything else.  So, after a week or two they may well find that they have lost fat, and also that they have started to feel better too.  So, now  suggest that they add a 10 minute walk after each meal. No crazy workouts, just a walk at a pace that is just above their normal walking pace, but not exhausting.  Most people could do that as well.  Pop on an audio book or podcast and take a brisk stroll for a few minutes after most meals.  No need to become a zealot, but if you have 10 minutes, briskly stroll around the block, through a park or whatever is nearby, even on a treadmill while watching a TV programme if you prefer that. I can see people managing those things without too much trouble.

So, let us look at these two scenarios.  One will lead to extreme deprivation and most probably lead to failure, while the other is very easy to implement and kickstarts the fat burning process without any sense of deprivation at all.  The mindset is different when you add compared to when you subtract things.  People feel better when they have more, the fact that having more will mean they actually consume less and burn more calories doesn’t matter.  The fact is that having more will allow treats and indulgences, but will still often result in fat loss and improved health. This means that for some of the population, this method may be the key to success.  Remember, you do not have to stop there, continue to add things that will improve health, add foods you haven’t tried before, add things like a new activity to your lifestyle.  All of these changes, small as they are, soon add up.

This approach will not work for everybody, some people have a single slice of cake, then uncontrollably eat the whole cake! If you suffer from addictive tendencies, then this method may not work for you.  Know yourself, if you are an average person with some fat to lose, consider this method as an option.  Make slow, calculated changes over time.  Spend a few months eking out the pound or two lost by adding in greens, the pound or two lost by adding in a ten minute walk. Keep the fat loss going over a few months and you will look like a new person and not have to have given up on any food you enjoy.  You will find that naturally you will eat some things less, but that is all, with the added bonus that you can have that piece of pie or slice of pizza.

It is a good method to begin the process of fat loss for most people, so consider adding things to your diet and lifestyle, not taking things away when you begin the fat loss process.

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The three pillars of health and fitness (pt 3)

By Pete Ryan

Part 3  Recovery

(This is part 1 of a 3 part series about achieving optimal health find parts 2 and 3 at the bottom of this article)

So far we have covered nutrition and exercise in the last two articles, so this post we will examine recovery.  This might be the most nebulous of the 3 pillars.  With nutrition you can monitor weight, fat levels and muscle mass and get some idea of what to do with your diet, with exercise you are either getting stronger, or not getting stronger.  However recovery is affected by your whole life.  If you have a stressful day, you will need extra recovery, if you sleep badly, or do not reach the right levels of sleep, you will not be recovered, illness affects the bodies ability to recover.  The list goes on. Recovery is the thing that will vary most from day to day.  Most days you will know roughly how much to eat that coming day, you will have an idea of about the amount of exercise you should do, but you have no idea how much recovery you will need as things vary so much.

The number one recovery option is sleep.  Sleep is the bedrock of all recovery, why do you think in those military ‘hell weeks’, they stop the solders sleeping? They want to see how they deal with being unable to recover, so they get then to do physical things.  Things many of you could do if fresh, but get them to do it repeatedly as the recovery reserves dwindle. You see some of the toughest, fitness humans on earth slowly fail one by one and only the very few actually survive the week.  This is due to lack of recovery above all, I can virtually guarantee that if I gave them adequate sleep between each day they would survive the ordeal much more easily.

There are two aspects to sleep, duration and depth. Both of these will vary for person to person to person, but generally 7 or 8 hours of sleep works for most people. Depth of sleep is a bit more difficult, you need a whole separate article just to cover the different levels of sleep, needless to say you should wake up ready to take on the day without stimulants, everyone can feel a bit tired at some point throughout the day now again, but mostly you should be able to function without stimulants throughout a normal day.

Assuming you have sleep in place then there are some other modalities that can aid recovery, but remember, none of these can replace sleep as the number one recovery tool.

Massage, both self myofascial release and going to get a massage is a great way to improve recovery. As a massage therapist I rate massage as a powerful way to aid recovery, but benefits do depend both on those doing the massage and how your body responds.  Like anything massage isn’t for everyone, but for those it does help, it is a great way to encourage recovery and relieve muscle soreness.

Stretching, yoga and other similar modalities can help tight muscles loosen and so aid recovery, they may also improve exercise by allowing the body to get into better positions during exercise.

Electrical stimulation has been sold to many as a way to speed recovery, but I am not certain the science is there to prove that is effective?  If you feel it helps, then give it a try, but if it doesn’t do anything for you then forget about it.

Meditation has been used for centuries to focus the mind and aid recovery. How well it works depends upon the individual and how practiced that individual is at meditating. This can be used for a few minutes using an app on your phone, or continued for hours.  If this helps you then include it into your daily routines, but if it doesn’t then use the time doing other things.

Things that can affect recovery are stress, poor nutrition, health issues, over training, excessive systemic inflammation, and many other factors.

You can get some ideas about to incorporate self myofascial release into your own exercise by popping over to https://payhip.com/veganbodybuilding and downloading the book called “Self myofascial release”. 

Putting it all together

The secret of achieving the best health and fitness results is to get your nutrition, exercise and recovery into balance.  Like actual balancing, this is not a static process, things will wobble one way or the other and you will only ever achieve a momentary second of perfect balance before things change again and more small tweaks need to be made.  So, some evenings you may need an early night, or an extra snack, while other days you may need to drop a workout or add high intensity methods to keep reaping benefits.  The secret is to learn your own body and to try out new things so you can achieve the most benefits from your health and fitness lifestyle.  You can learn more by reading “An introduction to vegan fitness and health” over at https://payhip.com/veganbodybuilding and if you need any further advice feel free to contact me below.

Good luck with your health and fitness journey!

Part 1 - Nutrition can be found here

Part 2 - Exercise can be found here