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Today’s Question: METs and Meaningful Exercise

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Today’s question of the day comes from Sue K. in Dallas (emphasis mine) –

…a friend told me her trainer insists that all of her exercise be tracked by METs, and that if anyone doesn’t do it that way, they’re framing their entire approach to exercise wrong. When I asked her to define for me what a MET actually was, she wasn’t sure, but said they were something related to units of exercise. I’m just coming back to the workout and exercise game after 20 years of sedentary life, have things changed and I’ve totally missed out on something here?…

Sue, in a nutshell, of course the answer is no, you don’t have to frame your thinking about exercise around the concept of METs to “do it the right way”. METs do have their place in describing physical activity; for instance, you may see METs listed on various pieces of exercise equipment in a gym, though as described, the trainer’s admonition doesn’t hold water.

So Just What is a MET?

A bit of background is in order here. We all understand that muscle cells consume oxygen as they generate the energy to contract, more calories are burned as you burn more oxygen (we as humans burn approximately 5 calories of energy to consume 1 liter of oxygen).

One MET is defined as the amount of oxygen consumed while at rest; it’s roughly 3.5 ml of O2 per kg of body weight, per minute. METs are measures of metabolic cost, and have been tabulated as the ratio of metabolic rate (expressed as the rate of energy consumption) against a given physical activity – for example, walking, running, resistance exercise, housework, they’ve even calculated the METs required for sex.

More practically, one MET is for practical purposes the amount of energy produced relative to your body mass at rest; reading this blurb on your computer requires one MET of energy at rest.

The Master MET List: The Compendium of Physical Activity

The powers that be have compiled a fairly comprehensive list of the METs required to complete a host of different physical activities – it’s posted in The Compendium of Physical Activity, most recently updated in 2011. There are several apps that list the various MET values for different activities as well.

Here’s a sample list from the Compendium –

METs and Exercise for Most of Us

In defense of the (reported) trainer’s comment above, you could reasonably argue that if you know the particular MET value for a given physical activity, how long that activity is performed, and some basic metrics about the person performing the activity, you can estimate the caloric burn (consumption) that person should experience as a result.

That said, while I used the concept of METs in roughly developing rehabilitation plans for severely compromised patients (strokes, massive cardiac events, brain injuries, etc.), I’ve never framed exercise goals in terms of METs for anyone at anytime otherwise.

Why not? There are a host of reasons, though most importantly two in particular.

One, the concept of using METs to track exercise often tends to be framed in the context of “calories in, calories out” (and its kissing cousin – “a calorie is a calorie is a calorie”), which as we now understand, particularly in the context of someone above their ideal body weight and metabolically compromised, probably doesn’t hold water and can lead one down the wrong path.

And two, for most of us, tracking METs, really tracking your METs for both exercise and all activities during a given day, can end up being a handful (to say the least), and can smack of (at least in some contexts) compulsive behaviors and orthorexia. It’s critical to remember that for almost everyone, your food plan determines 80% of your body composition, with exercise (again, for most of us) impacting roughly 10%.

Your approach to activity simply doesn’t have to be that complicated; move, move, move (at aerobic levels of exertion) + lift heavy things occasionally + sprint now and again wins the day for just about everyone.

A Quick Comment on Oysters and a Nifty Guide to Southern Oysters

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This past week a client asked a couple of great questions about oysters and she also shared with me a recent resource worth passing on here.

Recognizing that oysters aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, I have to confess that I grew up watching my grandfather sit on his dock (Colorado River mouth in the Gulf of Mexico, just south of Matagorda, Texas), shucking a bushel of oysters for dinner, and slurping the occasional one right out the freshly opened shell.

It wasn’t until some years later while in medical school in San Antonio that I truly learned to appreciate raw oysters; we had a wonderful place just down the street from our apartment that trucked fresh oysters in the shell up from the Gulf Coast every single day, and shucked them right before you enjoyed them at the old-fashioned wooden bar.

Eating raw seafood of course carries some risks (vibrio parahaemolyticus and norovius, we’re thinking about you two in particular); there are dozens of tasty ways to cook your oysters as well, most of which preserve oysters’ impressive nutritional offerings.

Ounce for ounce, oysters have an amazingly dense nutritional profile, offering up nutritious protein and fat (including omega-3s), vitamins D, C, and A, several B-vitamins, and a nifty collection of minerals, including selenium, magnesium, iodine, copper, phosphorus, and zinc.

A Nifty Guide to Southern Oysters

From the good folks over at Garden and Gun, here’s a link to their Guide to Southern Oysters, a very useful reference covering favored oyster variants from Maryland down through the Gulf.

Image via the linked post at Garden and Gun.

the Older Bolder Feast Salad Sunday 13 January: Homemade Catalina Dressing

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I’d venture that if you’re like most of us, if you’ll take the time to truly remember and be absolutely honest about it, you’ll have certain foods that graced your childhood table that seem to be indelibly etched into your memory. (There’s some genuine physiology at play there – taste is critically dependent upon the sense of smell, and certain smells are often tightly bound to unique memories…).

One of those remembered foods for me, as strange as it might seem, was the bright red bottle of Catalina salad dressing, probably a Kraft product and no doubt made in part with the cheapest seed oil available on the market at the time. The dressing was tomatoey, slightly sweet, and dominated by a burst of mouth-puckering acidity.

To be honest, I have no idea why that particular flavor combination resonated so persistently for me; we in reality weren’t big salad eaters in my early childhood. I do seem to recall the family or friends occasionally shaking up a version (in a mason or mayonnaise jar of course) which was based on a can of tomato soup.

Especially while our kids were still at home, no one in my own family adopted my taste for this dressing; despite their disinterest I’ve kept an eye out for a recipe with the same tang and rich tomatoey goodness that I’ve held out as the ideal from days gone past.

We’ve revisited several recipes for Homemade Catalina Dressing over the years, most of which were close but not the one I was looking for. This one is probably the closest I found, and is based on the unsweetened version of the ketchup posted a week ago.

There’s a nice burst of acidity from the red wine vinegar, and of course the spices can be dialed up to suit you. It keeps a bit longer if you use the onion powder by the way, and allows you to shake it up in a jar just like your Mom may have done back in the day.

Two other notes; one, as with just about every recipe we post, adding a small amount of the sweetener of your choice is optional. As our palate has changed over the past few years, we do without and relish the other flavors. And two, using a full-flavored, good extra virgin olive oil here can overpower the tomato flavors – I like to use avocado oil for half or two thirds of the oil…

1/3 c Older Bolder Ketchup No. 1
1/3 c red wine vinegar
1/2-1 tsp onion powder or 1/4 c finely chopped onion
1/2-1 tsp paprika
1/2 tsp Worcestershire sauce
2/3 c oil of choice
Salt and pepper to taste

Optional: honey/maple syrup to taste (start with just a tsp!)

This one couldn’t be easier. Combine all ingredients in your trusty blender, a jar, or a bowl. Then blend / shake / whisk until combine and emulsified. Adjust seasonings and mix one final time. Keeps in the fridge (note comment about the onion flavor above) for at least a week.

Enjoy.

Inquiring Minds Want to Know (Older Bolder Links, Reads, and More) 12 January 2019

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Top of the Fold, Older Bolder Reads This Week

The study regarding dietary fiber and it’s benefits (reviews and meta-analyses) published this week in the Lancet (overview here) has been used to beat up on the low carb/keto/Paleo/Primal crowds, however those critics might want to re-read the disclaimer (the paragraph beginning with “Commenting on the implications and limitations of the study…” More to come when I can get my hands on the actual study (it’s behind an expensive paywall).

More evidence keto (probably executed and applied) is here to stay: Bon Appetit via epicurious is writing about it…

The Weight I Carry – a fascinating (yet somewhat misguided, given the tone of hopelessness) read via The Atlantic by someone carrying extra pounds most of their life.

With the APA issuing guidelines on traditional masculinity this week, the feedback has been all over the place, exemplified by this piece in the NYT and this one from National Review. With all the stunningly problematic behavioral pathology in the general population, the APA’s position is most interesting here…

Other Topics That Caught My Eye This Week

Are Positive Thinking, and Marriage, Keys to a Healthy Older Life?

The anti-doping police tag a 90-year old performance cyclist; impressive, and shameful.

The case for not replying to your emails.

What motivates us at work?

Our Recipes from the Week

Homemade Everyday Ketchup (Ketchup No. 1)

Spicy Turmeric Coconut Milk

Texas Quiche with Sweet Potato Hashbrown Crust

the Older Bolder Life Friday Feast 11 January: Texas Quiche with Sweet Potato Hashbrown Crust

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Now and again we get a hankering for a great quiche, though like many of you, we stopped cooking traditionally-crusted quiches at home several years as we became more Primally/Paleo aligned with our nutrition plan.

While entertaining our adult daughter from Montana over the holidays, she and my wife asked for a quiche dinner one evening. After doing a bit of digging, and consulting with our friend Chef Libby in Austin, I adapted one of our favorite quiche recipes using a spiced, sweet potato hashbrown-inspired crust and a Texas-style sausage, mushroom, onion, and pepper filling.

Quiches are wonderfully malleable creations, in that you can fiddle with the filling ingredients to your heart’s content – changing the protein(s), vegetables, and cheese to suit your (family’s) tastes and what’s available in the fridge at the time.

Note this recipe makes two quiches in 9-inch, deep dish pie plates or one bigger quiche in a deeper quiche pan. We usually make two and hold one in the fridge for a day or two.

SP Crust
2-3 sweet potatoes, grated
2 tbsp AO/EVOO
Optional: 2 tsp cumin
Optional: 2 tsp chile powder
Optional: 1 tsp salt

Quiche Filling
8 eggs
1 can full fat coconut milk
2 tsp cumin
1 tsp good salt

1 lb good sausage, browned, crumbled (see comment above)
1/2 sweet or yellow onion, diced
1/2 cup sliced mushrooms
7-ounce can chopped green chiles (or more)
1-2 jalapeno (or other) chiles, stemmed, seeded, diced
2 cups Monterrey Jack or Pepper Jack cheese, grated (maybe more)
Optional: 1 tbsp pickled jalapenos with juice, chopped small

Preheat oven to 350.

Combine the crust ingredients and pat into 2 deep 9-inch pie plates; we find the crust releases easier if you lightly coat the plates first with either avocado or extra virgin olive oil. Bake the crusts for 20-30 minutes until the sweet potatoes begin to brown. Remove from oven and set aside.

Meanwhile, sauté the sausage until browned, breaking it up as you go; when nearly done, add the onion, mushrooms, and chiles and sauté until softened.

While the sausage is sizzling, combine the eggs, coconut milk, cumin, and salt in a blender or by hand using a whisk.

Now sprinkle 1/4 of the cheese into each pie plate, then divide the sausage and pepper mixture between the two. Top with the remaining cheese, and divide the egg mixture between the two plates. Place on a baking sheet, and bake for 50-60 minutes until the quiche is set and a knife inserted in the middle comes out clean (may need more time if your pie plates are particularly deep).

Allow to cool 15 minutes before slicing; cool completely before covering and storing in the fridge.

Enjoy.

My Personal Nutritional Ketosis Report Card 10 January: Through Week 36

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It’s been a few months since I shared my personal perspectives while engaging with a run of nutritional ketosis; my last update was here (15 August 2018), and here’s my post outlining why I wanted to give NK a run.

My Nutritional Ketosis Report Card at Week 36

Once again, for the most part, I’m pleased as punch overall after spending now slightly over eight months in nutritional ketosis, though for at least two weeks (one over the holidays), I’m sure I was drifting in and out of NK during the week.

My schedule is for the most part the same as I outlined in the 15 August post linked above, save for altering my walking routine due to a fairly impressive plantar fasciitis and calcaneal stress fracture (dammit).

A Closer Look at a Few Metrics

As noted in my last personal NK update, I have continued tracking a fairly close estimation of my macronutrients –

Up until starting my NK run, I’d lost 100 pounds without tracking a single calorie consumed over the 15 months window we’d been eating a fairly compliant LC/MP/HF diet around our camp, though of note been in a weight loss stall for several months (Dec-Feb).

I did however, principally at first as a learning tool, and later in part due to my medical training induced affinity for objective data, track a fairly specific diary of my daily carb intake (net carbs), which from the get go were always under 100 per day, and most often under 60 gm/day.

Again, largely as a matter of intellectual curiosity, when starting my NK run, I decided to track, as closely as possible, daily intake of carbs, protein, and fat, and to calculate my total caloric intake and deficit against my estimated BMR (adjusted for activity), as well as the percentages of carb / protein / fat contributions to my total calories.

Please note this point about tracking data: I still don’t recommend that most folks I work with track their intake as obsessively as I have been; it’s simply not necessary to make nutritional ketosis work for most. If you’re a data nut like me, go for it. Over the 36 weeks in NK thus far, the rolling averages of my intake and macronutrient accounting include –

Daily Carb Grams: 22.9 (91.4 calories)
Daily Protein Grams: 81.5 (326 calories)
Daily Fat Grams: 122.9 (1106.1 calories)

Average Total Calories per Day: 1525
Average Calorie Deficit per Day: –1565.7

Average Carbs as Percent of Total Calories per Day: 6.0%
Average Protein as Percent of Total Calories per Day: 21.4%
Average Fat as Percent of Total Calories per Day: 72.5%

Of note, without any conscious effort on my part, the trend of eating less protein and less calories overall continued most weeks, and several weeks I’ve dropped my carb grams to less than 20 g/day just to mix things up a bit, with no change in cognition, energy levels, exercise tolerance, hunger, or satiety.

Weight loss during my 36 week run now totals 59 pounds, fairly consistent with what I noted previously.

My Nutritional Ketosis Week 36 Bottom Line: Let’s Make It a Year

Overall I’ve been extraordinarily pleased with the results of my NK trial, especially in the context of my daily ability to engage with my life tasks, consistently and impressively improve my personal fitness, and chip away at the primary goals I originally outlined.

At this point, barring any unforeseen changes, I plan to ride the keto train to complete a full year in nutritional ketosis. Another report to follow in April.

the Older Bolder Life Snack Wednesday 9 January: Spicy Turmeric Coconut Milk (Tea)

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A friend offered us a mug of this delicious Spicy Turmeric Coconut Milk (she likes to call it a tea) one evening a few months ago. Like us she’s a big fan of spicy, full-flavored foods, and enjoys using whole spices when available (she grated fresh turmeric and ginger root for our milk/tea that evening). Her version was outstanding, and we’ve been making it regularly since.

There are dozens and dozens, if not hundreds, of different variations of golden milk floating about, my bent is to encourage you to find one that you like, and consume it liberally. Don’t be afraid to experiment, and don’t forget the black pepper to fully activate the benefits of turmeric too.

As our palate has changed over the past several years, we find overly sweet foods and drinks almost off-putting now; if using freshly grated turmeric and ginger, we often don’t use any honey, molasses, or maple syrup at all in our golden milk (though as a child of the South, a tiny bit of molasses does make this recipe more interesting).

I hadn’t intended to spend time here this morning going over the impressive list of health benefits that turmeric (and ginger) bring to the table; we’ll come back to turmeric in particular at some point down the road and talk about details.

2 cups full-fat coconut milk
1/2 – 1 tsp ground turmeric (or 2-4 tsp freshly grated)
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp ground ginger (or 1 tsp freshly grated)
1/4 tsp vanilla extract
1/8 tsp freshly grated nutmeg
1/8 tsp ground cloves
1/8 tsp freshly ground black pepper

Optional
Honey, maple syrup, blackstrap molasses to taste (start with 1 tsp!)
Pinch of salt
Pinch of cayenne pepper

Combine all ingredients (save for the sweetener if using) in a small saucepan over medium heat, adding a small volume of filtered water if desired if you find the consistency too thick for your tastes. Bring to a gentle boil, remove from heat and let steep at least 5-6 minutes.

If you used grated turmeric and / or ginger, filter through a fine-meshed sieve into a pre-warmed mug, sweeten if desired, and go to it.

Enjoy.

Inspirational Quotes of the Day Tuesday 8 January: Goals

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Some inspirational thoughts and quotes about goals from a wide range of sources. If you’ve not laid out your goals for 2019, there’s still time to lay them out and get rolling…

A goal without a plan is just a wish. – Antonine de Saint-Exupery

You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream. – CS Lewis

Picture yourself in your mind’s eye as having already achieved your goal. See yourself doing the things you will be doing when you’ve reached your goal. – Earl Nightingale

Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; nothing on earth can help a man with the wrong mental attitude. – Thomas Jefferson

The problem with not having a goal is that you can spend you life running up and down the field and never score. – Bill Copeland

A goal properly set is halfway reached. – Zig Ziglar

The tragedy in life doesn’t lie in not reaching your goal. The tragedy lies in having no goal to reach. – Benjamin Mays

A goal should scare you a little, and excite you a lot. – Dr. Joe Vitale

Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishment. – Jim Rohn

A goal is a dream with a deadline. – Napoleon Hill