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metabolic flexibility

Inquiring Minds Want to Know: Older Bolder Links, Reads, Podcasts, Recipes, and More 19 February 2020

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Top of the Fold This Week: Aging Well and Alzheimer’s News

Does exercise and fitness really make people happier than having money?

Adults over 55 are happier than millennials.

The NYT describes a pharmacologic failure treating Alzheimer’s. Perhaps they need to read the next article below.

Attia on Alzheimer’s disease and glucose metabolism.

A Southerner’s secrets to a long and fulfilling marriage.

Other News and Tidbits That Caught My Eye This Week

MedScape weighs in on boosting sex with foods (free account required).

Another MedScape piece on the growing trend of more and more turning to “direct primary care”, a symptom of the extraordinary pathology deeply embedded today in the health care delivery system (free account required).

A deep dive on Inuit genetics and ketosis.

Brown fat is associated with improved cardiometabolic markers.

Is America becoming an indoor nation?

Later to bed linked with obesity for kids under 6.

Podcasts Worth Your Time

NBT interviews Simon Marshall, PhD on Getting Motivated.

Sisson dishes on metabolic flexibility on the Genius Life.

Food, Glorious Food

How to make salsa out of anything.

Interesting link-fest on bon appetit’s Taco Nation. And hell no, of course it’s not all primal, paleo, or keto – but it’s a festival of ideas to tinker with and incorporate into your meal plan…

Milk and Health.

Everything you need to know about dark chocolate dipped strawberries.

Beating the February (Winter) Blahs

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It’s gray. It’s cold and windy. There’s snow in the forecast (dammit, there even is here in the DFW metro area today). The flurry of the holiday season has come and gone, as has the shiny gloss on the New Year.

Beginning in particular for our own family roughly two decades ago living in northern Utah and later Montana, we always found the month of February long, cold, and dreary, and often reached the peak of the winter blahs this month.

In Montana especially, while we were running an equestrian operation and show barn (along with my medical practice), starting and ending every day with barn chores in the dark cold dampened enthusiasm of our crew (the entire family comprised “the crew”) mightily.

February in particular was always a challenge for us, if only we’d known then what the past few years have taught to fight back with…

Whole foods, cooked at home. After the flood of indulgent treats tempting you all holiday season (and perhaps the weeks following), now’s the time to dial things back and embrace the better food options that abound – we’re talking nutrient-dense, whole foods, quality proteins, and good fats. Innovate with recipes and reach for a few different ingredients that are novel and interesting.

Sleep, sleep, sleep. Most of us have room to further optimize and improve our sleep habits and hygiene. Short days and lack of true daylight exposure can wreak havoc on your sleep cycle; be intentional and dial this one in.

Move all day. Granted, moving all day during the winter for those in winter climes can be a challenge – some days it’s simply impossible to take that quick walk outside around the office, shop, or school. Intention matters, small burst of movement and activity add up, and incorporating micro-workouts can really help.

Fitness matters (go ahead, change the routine, and grab some new gear). Several clients this year have had particular difficulty keeping their fitness and workout routines in play during Q4.19 and Q1.20. There are a number of ways to address this one – it may be time for a new class, a winter gym membership, or perhaps my favorite – a new home program DVD/subscription or new equipment (heavier kettlebells for us this year).

Update your winter wardrobe. It’s unbelievably easier to be active in winter (and the shoulder seasons too if you live up north) if you update your winter / cold weather gear. Today’s tech fabrics make layering up to meet whatever weather challenge is on the docket today a piece of cake, and you can tailor your updated wardrobe to suit your fashion sense and activity demands with endless options.

Gain strength in numbers. Genuine fellowship is vital for all of us year round, but having a workout buddy, group, club, or even a gym squad can make a world of difference when the winter blahs drain your daily motivation to keep things moving.

Implement a news and social media fast. The world will keep spinning without you updating your social feeds and seeing who said what in the news today. More on this topic to come, and by the way, turn the damned TV off to.

Plan ahead for bumps in the road, and remember how easy it is to recover. Personally I find it most challenging to be compliant with a keto/Primally-focused nutrition plan, the food plan that makes me feel the very best month-in and month-out, during the holiday and immediate-post holiday window.

I’m a HUGE believer in the value of being metabolically flexible, and while that does allow the occasional indulgence without disrupting your health and fitness dramatically, there’s a big difference on what I could and what I really should eat.

Those who thought it was difficult to break your initial carb-dependency need to be particularly cautious of wandering too far off the healthy path (whatever that might be for you). At least getting back on the wagon can always be done, and now you know how to best make that work for you.

Be pro-active when that runny nose and scratchy throat show up. And finally, it’s cold and flu season – even being mindful of exposures there are times when exposure is simply out of your control. Be damned proactive when the first sign of symptoms start or when you’ve had a known, significant exposure.

Hang in there; spring isn’t that far off…

Question of the Week: Living a Demanding Life

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In response to yesterday’s post briefly explaining my absence from the blog here on the Older Bolder Life for a few weeks, reader Paul offered this comment / question –

And there in lies the rub. How do advise your clients who live demanding lives and want to remain healthy? I am on tour for 3 months with an outdoor show and I can tell you the diet is the first thing to go.

Upon seeing Paul’s comment early this morning, my initial response was “what a great question”, and it resonates very well with commentary I hear literally almost daily from friends, clients, and family. After thinking about it for a minute, I thought it worthy to respond in a bit more detail, channeling (at least attempting to anyway) what I’d say to Paul if we were sitting in the coffee shop (or a drift boat on the river) enjoying a break and a cup of hot coffee. During that hypothetical conversation I’d offer up the following points…

Real Life Happens (Almost Every Damned Day) In Ways We Hadn’t Planned For

Most of us, at the least the people that I run with and help through Older Bolder, have to work for a living to pay bills, buy groceries, keep a roof over the family’s head, and educate the occasional offspring. Work tasks often vacuum up huge chunks of time as well as physical, emotional, and cognitive resources we’d prefer to spend in other places, doing other things.

I get that point, and understand damn well that real life rarely proceeds according to the plans we’ve laid out – whether it’s for the day, week, year or whatever time frame you’d care to define. (Working in medicine, it was absolutely guaranteed that urgencies and emergencies would interrupt every single day – it wasn’t a matter of would it happen, it was just a matter of when).

Some changes in the daily life game are more or less voluntary, like my excursion into the world of a commercial kitchen laid out yesterday; many (perhaps most) bumps along life’s scheduling road are simply out of our control.

One of, and by no means the only one, the key points to be made here responding to Paul’s comment is this – there will always be daily challenges and obstructions to living the healthiest lifestyle we can. Some days (weeks, or even months) we win the battle, some days it’s a draw, and some days we get hit below the belt and stumble. It happens, and will happen again to all of us.

How we prepare for, and respond to those eventualities, is where we all have, at least in my humble opinion, the greatest opportunity – and like most things in life, making the most out of those opportunities requires sharpening a few skills…

Hone the Art Being Brutally Objective About Yourself

As I shared yesterday, I got into a bit of trouble physically last quarter because I really wanted to learn the ins and outs of working in an upscale, busy, creative commercial kitchen. Of the many lessons I learned, one was this – there’s a reason you don’t see a lot of 60+ year olds in busy restaurant kitchens. The work is fast, even furious at times, and often amazing physical. As much as a I really really wanted to dive in and do that, given the bundle of other business and family responsibilities I have on my plate (as do we all), it took me a while to listen to my wife and objectively measure the pros and cons of my little adventure.

Like most humans walking the planet today, I had developed a bit of a blind spot that allowed me to wander down a path that ultimately wasn’t the best one for me now, and like most of us, there was a price to be paid. Being objective about things we need to face up to in our lives can be damned hard – things like am I over-working, overweight, eating or drinking the wrong things, under or over active, and so on so forth.

Hone the art of being brutally objective about yourself, and find a partner, mentor, or friend who will pull alongside and steer you back to reality.

When Sh*t Happens, Flex and Pivot

When life throws those curve balls, sometimes we need to flex and / or pivot. For example, when I found my activity demands changing rapidly, and after struggling for a few weeks, I began to fiddle with my macros (upping carbs and good fats) in response. Flexing my macros and my eating schedule (I’m a long time time restricted feeding fan) made significant improvements; one of the most interesting parts of health and nutrition game is that sometimes we all have to run that N=1 experiment to see how we can make this human machine run optimally.

Sometimes we need to pivot; for sake of discussion here I’m using pivot to denote making a bigger change for our long term good. Sometimes making a pivot means leaving the good behind for the better ahead.

Metabolic Flexibility Still Wins the Day

At least from where I sit, the absolutely most critical thing anyone can (and really should) do to improve their health and function in life is to develop a robust ability to be metabolically flexible.

For sake of discussion here, let’s define that as developing the metabolic machinery (hello mitochondria!) to process multiple substrates to provide energy for our daily function, namely the fats we all so efficiently and amply store, and not just exist from one glucose spike to the next, stuffing our faces with fast-burning carbs every two hours every danged day.

Being metabolically flexible brings a host of benefits to the table, though I’d argue that top of the list is experiencing more even, sustained energy production, effortlessly by the way, which opens up a whole new world of ability to complete life tasks – actually doing things every day – which is what life is all about.

Developing metabolic flexibility is within the reach of just about every human on the planet, but you’ll have to be intentional about it, and be willing to spend a bit of time in nutritional ketosis.

Functional Fitness Still Matters

Another point I’d make to Paul in response to his question is so simple as to be in essence common sense – the point being that functional fitness really does matter.

All of us, regardless of age, need varied, interesting, and sustainable exercise that promotes strength, endurance, cardiovascular condition, and flexibility. What does that look like for you? YOU get to decide what your program looks like; and you don’t have to spend thousands on gyms, gear, or coaching to get it done, you just have to do it.

Functional fitness still matters, and always will; figure out how to make it a non-negotiable part of your day and week. (Think you don’t have time? How much screen time do you spend waste each day?)

Mind the S’s (Stress and Sleep)

Though it occasionally garners an eye roll from coaching clients, I’d gently remind Paul that many of us, due to the demands of the day, neglect managing stress and sleep. These are big topics, bigger than space and time allow for deep exploration here, but suffice it say that unmanaged stress and disordered or too little sleep can have profound impacts on health and wellness.

Two Final Thoughts…

Finally, I’d close my hypothetical chat with Paul with these two encouragements. One, life can, at times, be a bitch, throwing us curve ball after curve ball that we can’t hit. Relish the victories, dust yourself after the losses, and get back in the game. Sisson opines that we should strive for 80% compliance with a healthy lifestyle; I’d argue 90% or better is just as easy and still allows for that occasional stumble.

And two, always be exploring, learning, and testing. There’s a wealth of great free information available today at your fingertips, experts to query, and consultants to engage. Ask questions, experiment, make changes in your diet and routine, and pay damned close attention to what your body is telling you. It’s NEVER too late to make changes that will lead better health and rewarding function.

Git ‘er done.

Inquiring Minds Want to Know: Older Bolder Links, Reads, Recipes, and More 24 August 2019

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Head games: Phone breaks and mental depletion.
Orthorexia as a mental disorder? Perhaps it should be.

So only 12.2% of American adults are metabolically healthy? Impressive.
So maybe the magical “blue zones” aren’t everything we first thought?

The life of a very early morning riser.
From the trust me, I’m from the government file: Sleep at 82 degrees?

Hottest fitness craze: working out alone at home.
Another pitch for Tom Brady as an anti-aging poster boy.

Longevity secret of a 110-year old Montanan: Orange juice and raw liver.
Can I really save the world by pooping every other day?

Watching sports is as good for you as working out? C’mon guys…
Is cost really the reason kids aren’t playing more sports?

Food, Glorious Food

How to pan roast lamb (video).
How to sauté mushrooms like a pro (video).

Getting kids to eat healthy from BulletProof.
More on the red meat sin tax.
Just say no to another fake butter.

Roasted Red Pepper Mayo
Cauliflower Rice Tabbouleh
Spicy Grilled Bacon (or Pork Belly) Skewers

Road Trip Food Update May 2019

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About nine months ago I wrote this post – Healthy Take From Home Road Trip Food Ideas for Summer 2018 – with a list of suggestions for healthy foods to take on the road when traveling. Having spent the past 54 weeks (quite happily and contentedly) in nutritional ketosis, I thought I’d offer a quick update with a few thoughts.

Metabolic Flexibility Rocks on the Road

Though you don’t hear everybody talking about it, count me among the die-hard fans of the concept of being metabolically flexible as you charge through the challenges daily life brings to hand.

Being metabolically flexible means, in this context while traveling, you’re not looking to eat every 2-3 hours, buying chips, sugary drinks (sports drinks and fruit juices still aren’t good choices, no matter how crafty their marketing), and crappy candy to “keep your energy up”.

Being metabolically flexible on the road means, when adequately hydrated, fasting comfortably if you need to stretch a day or travel outside your normal activity window in a day. For example, my wife and I hit the road on a 24-hour drive about 1pm yesterday and drove into the wee hours today to make our upcoming vacation schedule work; we had both fasted since dinner the evening before, and we were absolutely comfortable nibbling on keto snacks along the way, choosing to forgo a sit down meal to get on down the road.

Not fat-adapted or as metabolically flexible as you’d like to be? Stay with it, you’ll get there. (I can help you with the process too).

What About Foods for the Road?

Having spent a little over a year in the keto world, the list I posted here last year still stands. This particular trip to Montana (both of our kids live still live under the Big Sky), we have another 1/2 gallon of our favorite cold-brewed coffee on hand in the cooler, with some great cream to go along with it.

As suggested in last year’s post, we have cold-grilled salmon, some high quality German salami, several nifty cheeses, my go to keto snack trimmed radishes, some full-fat, whole milk, pastured yogurt, good dark chocolate, nuts, and unsweetened coconut chips.

Finally, I made a batch of these Spicy Southern Sausage and Cheese Balls – they’re great cold and will keep a week or so in the cooler/fridge.

After another fasted start this morning, we’re back on the road and will be in Missoula later today, stocking up at a wonderful grocer our daughter has found there, and getting ready for a week of fly fishing and hiking.

What are some of your favorites for the road?

Older Bolder 2019 Challenges: Four Thoughts on Getting Your Wellness Journey Started

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As part of the challenge series for 2019 that I introduced a few days ago, here are four thoughts on getting started on your journey to improve your health and fitness this year.

The Best Way to Get Started Improving Your Health: Start TODAY

This is a caveat well-learned from personal experience.

How many times have you said to yourself, or someone important in your life: “I’ll do it when…”

For those of us prone to procrastinate, putting a task off using “the when” ploy can be a stroke of genius – it’s ridiculously easy to set a target that’s so nebulous, so distant, so unlikely, or the final domino to fall in a complex, convoluted chain of events that you never have to step up, make a decision, and act.

I’ve been there, I’ve used this contrivance many a time, and heard so many versions of “the when” I should write a book about it (maybe I’ll get around to that when I get the current book finished).

A dear friend and mentor years ago stopped me right in my tracks after using “the when” ruse and verbally slapped me up the side of the head and said to just do it. He was right.

It’s time to start your health and wellness journey (or recovery) today. Just take the first step and start. You don’t have to leap, or cover huge ground. Tiny steps, coupled with a resolve to change and improve, count just as much.

Begin Your Health Journey with The End in Mind

The same guy who provided the wake up call mentioned above offered another great piece of life advice – begin any life adventure with the end in mind. His analogy built around the reality that you might not be able to define precisely the path you’ll take, but you can capture a vision of your eventual destination.

A few days back I offered a few reminders about goal setting using the SMART approach in particular; framing your vision (setting goals) should be encouraging and fun. I encourage clients to develop big, longer term visions of how they’d like their lives to look down the road, and set concrete, attainable, SMART goals along the path to get there.

Begin your health journey with the end in mind.

Strive for Flexibility (And Not Just Metabolic Flexibility)

I truly love the concept of metabolic flexibility (in a nutshell, being able to effectively and efficiently utilizing different nutritional substrates to thrive in different situations).

It’s important to develop another form of flexibility on this health and wellness journey, a flexibility that recognizes and embraces the likely fact that you’ll need to use different approaches at different times along your way to achieve your optimal results.

What the heck does that mean? Probably the most common example I see in my coaching practice is very close to this actual story. Let’s say Lindy has decided it’s time to drop 65 pounds, and enthusiastically starts in on a Primally-aligned nutrition program, and the first 25 pounds seem to fly off by April Fool’s Day. Her weight loss slows in April, and by the end of May she’s only down another 7 pounds, and while her heartburn has resolved, she’s down two dress sizes, and feels great, she’s frustrated and even a little panicked about having stalled.

Her friend, who happens to be a health coach, looks over her diet, and finds she’s eating a bowl of fruit every day. Lindy agrees to cut fruit to once per week, and adds in a walking program that she loves, walking 30min a day initially, though by week four she’s walking an hour a day or more, sometimes out again for another walk in the evening with her husband on those long summer days.

By September first, Lindy’s weight loss now totals 58 pounds, though while being chased by a dog at the park, she stumbled off a curb and fractured a metatarsal in her left foot, ending her walking program for six weeks.

Encouraged by her friend, Lindy decided to give a run of nutritional ketosis a try, and coupled with an intermittent fasting trial, lost another 7 pounds effortlessly over the next six weeks waiting for her fracture to heal.

The point is simple – as your metabolism (and overall physiology) improves and changes, particularly if you’re starting from a point of genuine metabolic derangement (metabolic syndrome), you’ll likely need to change your approach to nutrition and activity multiple times along the way.

Learn, Learn, Learn (Get Good at Finding Nuggets and Filtering Noise)

Finally, and probably my favorite concept in the entire health and wellness universe right now, it is critical that you embrace the reality that you’ll be learning vital and useful information from this point forward as you take greater responsibility for your wellness and fitness.

There’s a literal flood of great information available at your fingertips today, much of it free for the taking, and you have the ability to access experts worldwide via digital communications easily.

Granted, there’s a lot of noise (generously put – less useful, even frankly misleading information) out there. Finding nuggets of useful information takes a bit of sifting, and filtering the noise can take some effort. Sorting the best information from the rest is a skill you’ll get better at with practice, though I’d encourage anyone wanting to improve their health and fitness to read widely and frequently.

You’re unique, your body and physiology are unique to you, and your challenge is to find the package of nutrition and conditioning that make you the best you can be this year.

Need help sorting it out? We can help you anytime.

It’s time to get started.

Keto Thursday: Pregame for Your Nutritional Ketosis Run

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By far and away the most common questions I’ve fielded this past summer and early fall have been related to folks wanting to jump on the keto bandwagon, most often in fact some version(s) of how do I get started, what’s the easiest way to get into keto, and do I really have to give up carbs?

My response typically focuses on review of several key points…

First Things First: Why Nutritional Ketosis?

First, I typically query why someone wants to give nutritional ketosis a spin. There are a host of great reasons to give NK a try – pursuit of greater metabolic flexibility, increased cognitive and/or physical performance, particularly in endurance-focused activities, or just overall improving your daily function (and quality of life).

Breaking through a weight loss stall is another worthy, and common, reason, as is dealing with a challenging health or metabolic issue (classically you might think of a seizure disorder here, though keto is commonly brought into the discussion for example when talking about T2DM, pre-dementia states, and even adjunctive treatment for some malignancies).

On the other hand, pursuit of “ketosis” to simply jump on the latest dietary fad bandwagon doesn’t seem to play well over the long haul, at least in my experience.

Pregame for Nutritional Ketosis: Take an Honest Snapshot of Where You Stand Metabolically

Honest self-appraisal, for most of us at least, isn’t the easiest task to accomplish, though this point is pretty straightforward. At the extremes, contrast the 40-year old, overweight, sedentary, desk-bound, over-stressed office worker, languishing on the standard American diet (SAD), crashing and burning multiple times a day, stumbling from one carbohydrate bomb to the next with the 40-year old who’s been eating primally or following a Paleo-ish eating plan, consuming moderate amounts of protein and less than 100 grams of carbs per day, walking 40 minutes 5 days a week, and getting enough sleep to truly rest and repair every day.

While anything is possible, I’d argue simply that the SAD guy above isn’t ready to launch a genuine nutritional ketosis run no matter how strongly he might want to; he could grind it out, but would likely suffer from the ‘keto flu’ (not a big fan of that term by the way) and would be at high risk to fail within the first three weeks. His road would be a danged bumpy one, and could be smoothed significantly with a pre-keto adjustment period (more below).

On the other hand, our guy eating Primally will likely make the transition into NK with relative ease…

Pregame for Nutritional Ketosis: Do a Bit of Housecleaning First

From a post on a similar topic I shared back in June –

Stepping into nutritional ketosis is a relative piece of cake if you’ve done some preliminary diet “housekeeping” to begin with. The most important dietary housekeeping is sorta’ve along the lines of cleaning the most obnoxious things out of your house – one, getting rid of grains and heavily processed carbs, including sugar in all its forms is one, and the second essential dumping the toxic, industrial-processed seed oils that are commonly stocked in pantry and restaurant around the world.

The other bit of housekeeping that I often recommend is to take a thoughtful, honest look at the amount and quality of protein one is eating prior to starting a nutritional ketosis run. Many of us are simply eating too much protein, and too much protein from less-desirable sources (i.e. CAFO beef, pork, and chicken).

Pregame for Nutritional Ketosis: Put on Your Thinking – and Listening – Cap

Two points here. One, be prepared to learn some new concepts. Nutritional ketosis is a fascinating tool (among many) to optimize your health and function, though as with all concepts that are swept to fad stardom, there is a tremendous amount of noise and misinformation in the keto arena these days.

Looking for a great read to kick off the learning process? Consider The Keto Reset Diet by Sisson and Kearns, or Primal Fat Burner by Nora Gedgaugdas to mention a couple. Find a mentor or trusted coach (and yes, we can help you with a customized coaching program here…).

Second, your physiology and metabolism are unique to you alone; your optimal path to and in nutritional ketosis will likely be different than any one you know or read, and will require some thoughtful attention to what your body is telling you. Listen well, and don’t hesitate to make rational, thoughtful adjustments along the way.

Pregame for Nutritional Ketosis: Commit to Give Nutritional Ketosis a Fair Trial

I’ve shared this before –

No matter how you’ve been eating before, truly starting nutritional ketosis will cause your body to make some adjustments as you preprogram your metabolic machinery. I agree wholeheartedly with those who suggest you make at minimum a 6 week commitment to the process, promising yourself you’ll wade through whatever adjustments come your way. And as your body adapts to fat-burning, there are several breakthrough windows that are exciting to watch and feel – though for most that’s territory that occurs in week three and beyond.

Frankly, I’m typically encouraging most of my clients to make a 12 week or more commitment to their NK trial, particularly if they’re over 40 and have been or are ‘metabolically challenged’. And, to be fair, NK doesn’t work for everybody.

There are several other minor points to consider when thinking about an NK run, we’ll come back and revisit on another day.