Silence

"Silence is a true friend who never betrays."
Confucius
Photography by Trifon Marchovski

193 Reps 2x16 kg Jerk 10 min Trifon Marchovski

Perfect Health Diet in a Nutshell

Ok, it is time to have a look at the "perfect health diet" created by a husband-and-wife team Paul Jaminet, Ph.D. and Shou-Ching Shih Jaminet, Ph.D. Paul was an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center and Shou-Ching is a molecular biologist and cancer researcher at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School, and Director of BIDMC's Multi-Gene Transcriptional Profiling Core. The "perfect health diet" is currently among my favorite ways to look at nutrition. It steps solid on the paleo idea, adds various layers of cultural wisdom, reads thoroughly through the modern scientific research, and uses stable reference. I must say that the authors have all the reasons to call their diet: " Perfect Health Diet ". They believe that: " Disease, premature aging, and impaired health have four primary causes: malnutrition, food toxicity, evolutionary discordant lifestyles, and chronic infections by bacteria, viruses, fungi, and protozoa. ".
The book bites strongly on the evolutionary perspective; takes an interesting look at fasting which as a self nourishing act reveals valuable macro-nutrient relationships; uses breast milk as an indisputable formula nature has presented for the infant; and tops all of that with the idea of pleasure and feel good, taste great orientation. This fusion between paleo, science and ancestral diets appreciates the intellect of the intermittent fasting, and the power of fermentation as a manifest of our connection with the invisible world. The book draws an excellent picture of the role of macro-nutrients ( carbs, proteins, fats ), micro-nutrients ( vitamins and minerals ), toxins, and supplements. The authors talk about ketogenic diet, coconut oil, and what is most interesting to me, invent the concept of "safe starches". "Safe starches" idea is saying that if carbohydrates exist they shouldn't be ignored. Glucose ( from an external source ) has its meaning and should be brought to use in the most non-toxic way, which is through " safe starches" such as white rice ( white because it has the least amount of natural toxins the plant uses to protect itself ), potatoes, sweet potatoes, and taro ( most of their toxins are thrown away during cooking ). I like the "safe starches" approach because it allows people to transition better from a chaotic high carb eating to a more restricted fat burning paleo regimen. It is admirable that the book does not forget to acknowledge the benefits of slow cooking, which gives the possibility to extract nutrients further, especially minerals and fatty acids by making a bone broth for instance. Although it focuses mainly on nutrition the book also speaks about the importance of circadian rhythm, sunlight, exercise, meditation, and sleep.

Here is the "perfect health diet" in a nutshell:

where the authors recommend:

"About 3 pounds [1.4 kg] of plant foods per day, including:

About 1 pound [0.45 kg] of safe starches, such as white rice, potatoes, sweet potatoes, and taro;

About 1 pound [0.45 kg] of sugary in-ground vegetables (such as beets or carrots), fruits, and berries;

Low-calorie vegetables to taste, including fermented vegetables and green leafy vegetables.

One-half to one pound [0.25 to 0.5 kg] per day of meat or fish, which should include organ meats, and should be drawn primarily from:

ruminants (beef, lamb, goat);

birds (especially duck and wild or naturally raised birds);

Shellfish and freshwater and marine fish.

Low omega-6 fats and oils from animal or tropical plant sources, to taste. Good sources include:

butter, sour cream, beef tallow, duck fat;

coconut milk or oil

palm oil, palm kernel oil, olive oil, avocado oil, macadamia nut butter, almond butter, cashew butter

Acids to taste, especially citric acid (lemon juice, lime juice, orange juice, grapefruit juice), lactic acid from fermented or pickled vegetables, vinegars, tannic acids from wine, and tomatoes.

Broths or stocks made from animal bones and joints.

Snacks or desserts from our pleasure foods: fruits and berries, nuts, alcohol, chocolate, cream, and fructose-free sweeteners like dextrose or rice syrup.

By weight, the diet works out to about 3/4 plant foods, 1/4 animal foods. By calories, it works out to about 600 carb calories, primarily from starches; around 300 protein calories; and fats supply a majority (50-60%) of daily calories.

In the shadow of the apple are foods forbidden because of their high toxin content. Notably:

Do not eat cereal grains — wheat, barley, oats, corn — or foods made from them — bread, pasta, breakfast cereals, oatmeal. The exception is white rice, which we count among our “safe starches.” Rice noodles, rice crackers, and the like are fine, as are gluten-free foods made from a mix of rice flour, potato starch, and tapioca starch.

Do not eat calorie-rich legumes. Peas and green beans are fine. Soy and peanuts should be absolutely excluded. Beans might be acceptable with suitable preparation, but we recommend avoiding them.

Do not eat foods with added sugar or high-fructose corn syrup. Do not drink anything that contains sugar: healthy drinks are water, tea, and coffee.

Polyunsaturated fats should be a small fraction of the diet (~4% of total calories). To achieve this, do not eat seed oils such as soybean oil, corn oil, safflower oil, sunflower oil, canola oil, or the like.

We highly recommend certain foods for their micronutrients. These include liver, kidney, egg yolks, seaweeds, shellfish, fermented vegetables, and bone broths."

You can look at the food plate translated in various other languages here.

I find the "perfect health diet" to work very well on the long run especially when people try to incorporate intermittent fasting on a daily basis ( skipping breakfast and starting to eat around mid afternoon ). Anyone doing this can learn to listen to his body in order to gradually adjust the amount of "safe starches" and become metabolically flexible. Being able to use primarily fatty acids as an energy source will give the freedom to adapt to a wide range of nutritional regimens including valuable extremes such as the ketogenic diet where fat and protein are the primary macro-nutrients and carbs are almost non-existent.

Here is a detailed conversation about the diet between Dr. Mercola and Paul Jaminet:

Persistence

"Knowing trees, I understand the meaning of patience.
Knowing grass, I can appreciate persistence."
Hal Borland
Photography: Trifon Marchovski

communication with the universe

201 Reps 32kg Kettlebell Swing Trifon Marchovski

Weston A. Price in a Nutshell

Dr. Weston Andrew Price was a dentist, who traveled the world studying the diets of various genuine cultures which were not affected by the western civilization. He documented and carefully compared the relationships between diet and dental health which turned to be his most important work:Nutrition and Physical Degeneration ( published in 1939 ).

His research serves as a truthful reference point to the modern human and his attempt to understand evolution and nutrition. Dr. Price could be really viewed as the "Charles Darwin of Nutrition". And while the paleo idea leads back to our divine roots: " if man made it, don't eat it ", Dr. Price's work represents the added layers of pleasure, human touch, creativity, and culture which brings us closer to modern society. He shows how adaptive and divers life could be. There isn't one answer, one way, one best diet. People can be healthy and vivid in various latitudes and longitudes as long as they are connected to nature. Based on the environment peoples' diets varied from almost all animal food to almost all plant food. It is easy to conclude that there are no truthful principles and anything goes. But this isn't the truth. There are common characteristics in the human - nature connection which needs to be noticed so we can understand our place better.

The first and largest disappointment for Dr. Price was that he couldn't find a truly vegan culture. No matter what the choice of food, or ratio between the macro-nutrients (carbs, proteins, fats),there was always an important animal source.The sacred foods of all cultures represented some sort of animal fat, rich in cholesterol and saturated fatty acids - eggs, fish eggs, butter, liver and so on. Another feature was that genuine people never ate lean meat. They would dry, cut, smoke, or ferment it and then combine it with saturated fat. The most common food was fish and shellfish. Although there were African agriculturists who ate over 90% percent plant food ( 10% came from insects and especially termites ), and the Eskimos who ate over 90% animal food, the healthiest cultures avoided the extremes. They followed the middle way.

Here is what Sally Fallon ( a co-founder of Weston A. Price Foundation ) says:

"Some had no plant foods
 Some had few animal foods
 Some had mostly cooked foods
 Some had large amounts of raw foods
 Some had milk products; some did not
 Some had grains; some did not
 Some had fruits; some did not"
The key points to remember about traditional cultures:
- people did not extract, refine, or denature their food in great extends; ( no refined sugar, salt, flour, vegetable oils, or any kind of refined fat );
- every diet contained animal food and cholesterol;
- people did not preserve their food through sanitation; people co-existed with microorganisms; they used fermentation, not refrigeration;
- people cooked to extract nutrients but part of their diet was always raw;
-people were physically active, barefoot grounded ( or wore leather shoes ) , and spend their day outdoors under the sun;
-people drank clean (non-chlorinated ) natural water from natural sources;
If I need to describe what Weston A. Price found out in a short burst, it would be: People were still fully connected to nature, they cherished fat as the most important source of life, vitality, and fertility, they ate moderate amounts of protein and varied the carbohydrates based on the season and the environment.

Sun is the father

"If Nature is the mother, then Sun is the father" Photography by Trifon Marchovski

The Paleo Diet in a Nutshell

The paleo idea is the most profound paradigm human species have come up with scientifically. It is so because it realizes how restricted we are in understanding life. It follows nature instead of telling it what's right and wrong. It goes all the way back to the paleo era when there was no agriculture and no separation between humans and nature. It was still an unified network where everybody stood in place. Hunter gatherers were arguably the happiest people in human evolution. There was no property, no chronic disease, no wars. There was lots of free time, abundance, movement, communication, curiosity, and exploration. From nutritional side of view there were plants and animals. So that's it. This is what it means to hunt and gather. This is the paleo diet.



Well, let me bring you back to 21st century. Things are not that simple any more, are they? Plants are not the same, animals are not the same. We managed to mess up everything real quick. Add to this the powerful idea of "pleasure" and we have a whole different ball game.
A great deal of good contemporary diets step on the pristine paleo platform, then take "pleasure" in consideration, add all the social, and cultural layers and create mixtures of what might work on the long run. And this is what " diet in a nutshell" series is all about.
The first stop is the paleo diet itself. It calls for vegetables as your main source of carbohydrates. What about fruits you might ask. Well, fruits today are not the same as they were during the paleo period. They are a lot sweeter and contain higher fructose levels. Fruits back then would be very close to most vegetables now. In this respect berries are still very similar to the paleo fruits. For this matter fruits should be eaten in moderation, especially if they are high in sugars. Honey is also a paleo carb which was not easy to find and get, but when the chance presented itself it was eaten excessively. There were no starches except tubers which were eaten rarely. Wild grass and its seeds were really the last resort because of the high content of toxins. So there were no cereals. There were no fruit juices or vegetable juices either. This is the paleo answer on juicing. The only way to cleanse and detoxify was fasting. So the majority of the carbs were vegetables and fruits.
What about fats? There were no extracted or isolated oils. Vegetable fats were taken primarily from nuts which were time consuming to collect and break. Most of the fat though was mixed together with protein which came from animals. Good resources were the animal's inner organs (especially the liver and the brain ), as well as fatty cuts of meat, fish, shellfish and eggs. The closest choice nowadays to the wild game is the grass fed beef. Pork and chicken (and other birds) are accepted but they are not an absolute paleo food. On the other hand wild fish and shellfish is a truthful paleo fat and protein example. There was no milk, cheese, butter or any other dairy product. It was quite a challenge to milk a wild animal.
Eggs are a wonderful and nutritious paleo food but similar to honey it was hard to find, so they were consumed occasionally.
Water was not chlorinated or disinfected, nor was any food. Combining meals wasn't an issue either. Vegetables mix with meat very well although I would assume that when pray was killed our ancestors did not go: " I think this steak needs some steamed asparagus" or "I am missing a sweet potato for crying out loud", they just ate what was present.
So this is it - "Paleo Diet in a Nutshell" - plants and animals. 

Mercury Dental Fillings

Discover more about mercury and how you can get this toxic, bioaccumulative substance from your dentist through our infographic "Mercury Dental Fillings: By the Numbers." Visit our infographic page for the high-res version.

Family

How toilet posture affects your health

"You don't have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body." Walter M Miller Jr. Photography by Trifon Marchovski

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1960 - Abebe Bikila 2.15.16.2 - Marathon - Rome Olympics - Barefoot Running at Its Finest

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Do it with ease!

Do it with ease!

Advanced and personal kettlebell case study

When facing an endurance event of any kind and specifically high intensity strength endurance event there is a dilemma how to spread your energy to get the best result. There are two major strategies depending on your genetic predisposition ( the amount of fast twitch muscle fibers vs slow twitch muscle fibers you have in the working muscle), your nervous system type, and your ability to tolerate lactic acid accumulation, and pain.
The first strategy is to ease into it and accelerate throughout the event. It is suitable for athletes who possess predominantly slow twitch muscle fibers, who can afford the patience to hold back and unveil the energy potential gradually. The downside of this approach is the risk of accumulating too much deficit in the first half and not being able to catch up in the second half. The upside is that you get to finish strong at the end which has a powerful psychological aspect and also gives you the position of control and chance to win when the battle among the competition is tight. The biggest biochemical benefit is that it’s much easier to stay within your anaerobic threshold (a delicate intensity that  allows the muscle to use primarily aerobic respiration to generate atp while being on the edge of switching to a rapid anaerobic fermentation ). In other words the usage of energy is efficient and economical. This counts not only in times of competition but most importantly during training. Being economical will save a lot of pain and resources and will make you a better athlete on the long run.
The second strategy is the opposite of the first one but not exactly. It means that you start at a higher intensity so you can get an advantage in the first half and then trying to hold on to the lead. The biggest upside is that you are in front almost through the whole time which can be quite a booster. The biggest downside is that you are going to pay back biochemically for accumulating lactic acid too early, and crossing over your anaerobic threshold way before the final stretch. It is very painful. Especially at the end. The worst thing is that if you do it often enough your body will get rid of the pain by mimicking failure prematurely. Together with the fact that fermentation is the most inefficient pathway to generate energy makes me not recommend this in training. But we shouldn't throw this approach away so fast and here is why. You can try to get the best of both strategies. The reason this is possible is because our body uses the creatine phosphate energy system in an alactic regime. It gives phosphates to regenerate atp without generating lactic acid, and without dropping Ph values ( increasing acidity ). This only happens for about 30 seconds when the pool gets exhausted and the body shifts toward glycolysis ( which produces lactic acid and rises acidity ).  So the mastery is to get the first 20 seconds more intense and then ease into a comfortable pace in order to transition gradually into glycolysis and aerobic respiration. Well, it is easily said than done and my personal case study is no exception.
I did two peak performance efforts with the two strategies in mind where the projected goal was to reach 80 reps ( plus or minus two reps ). In the first attempt I consciously hold back at the beginning and I mentally accelerate every minute, finishing with an attack the last 30 seconds ( switching to anaerobic fermentation ). I say “mentally accelerate” because this is what’s happening inside my head. What you are going to see is mostly an equal number of repetitions inside every minute ( but the mind effort is far from equal ).
I carefully listen to my heart rhythm and slow down every time I feel I am going to go out of my anaerobic threshold ( I don’t use a device for that but my intuition). I use the clock to pace myself, and I look to fit 4 reps every 30 seconds.
Although I decided to miss a couple of reps just to make sure I am inside anaerobic threshold, I was really pleased with the result. There was no excessive pain and everything went smooth, even pleasant.



The second approach got me arguably an extra repetition ( the time expired during fixation, which won’t be accepted by any judge ) and I will choose it in terms of achievement but the pain was excruciating.



So was that half rep worthed? I say NO.
In an absolute form the result of the second attempt is better but the price was much higher. Practically both efforts amount to 78 repetitions. The big difference is how the effort was perceived. The first was pleasant, the second a nightmare. So my advice to you is to be smart and master to do whatever it is with ease.

Chi Running

The Truth About Factory Farms

The mass production of America's food comes with a hefty price. Find out the environmental, animal, and human impact of raising over 99 percent of US farm animals in factory farms in this infographic, "The Truth About Factory Farms." Use the embed code to share it on your website or visit our infographic page for the high-res version.

<img src="http://media.mercola.com/assets/images/infographic/truth-about-factory-farms.jpg" alt="The Truth About Factory Farms" border="0" style="max-width:100%; min-width:300px; margin: 0 auto 20px auto; display:block;"><p style="max-width:800px; min-width:300px; margin:0 auto; text-align:center;">The mass production of America's food comes with a hefty price. Find out the environmental, animal, and human impact of raising over 99 percent of US farm animals in factory farms in this infographic,"<a href="http://www.mercola.com/infographics/truth-about-factory-farms.htm">The Truth About Factory Farms.</a>" Visit our infographic page for the high-res version.</p>

Run

From QuoteoftheDay

"We run, not because we think it is doing us good, but because we enjoy it and cannot help ourselves...The more restricted our society and work become, the more necessary it will be to find some outlet for this craving for freedom. No one can say, 'You must not run faster than this, or jump higher than that.' The human spirit is indomitable." 

-Sir Roger Bannister, first runner to run a sub-4 minute mile