Maggie's Farm

The universality and popularity of general fitness programs is partly because they have nothing to do with physical talent. 

Your genetics do determine many of your physical capabilities at advanced levels, but rarely at ordinary levels. Short people can be fine basketball players, for example - but not at a college level. Long-limbed people can do good bench presses and deadlifts, although not as readily as compact people. Everybody can run, swim, and do bench presses. Most people are physically effective but not blessed with special talents. That is why general fitness is popular - anybody can engage in it.

Besides your physique/physical structure, genes determine your ratio of fast-twitch to slow-twitch muscle fibers, your neuromuscular connections, your brain-neuromuscular responses, eye-hand coordination, your aggressiveness and energy, lung volume, etc.

Not to mention non-genetic factors like drive, training, and practice.

The point I wish to make is that, as with musical talent or intellectual horsepower, everybody has a level at which they can best perform, and few people ever reach those levels. In fitness, your only competitor needs to be yourself from last month.

Of course, we all have varying degrees of competitiveness, but that should never be any obstacle. Not one of our readers will play in the NFL, the NBA, or in the US Open. Or, for that matter, perform in the NYC Ballet. 

My advice, to be able to engage in the fullness of life, is to get out and move hard every day with weights, calisthenics, cardio, etc - and to do a lousy job of it if need be because there are no grades. Giving it your all is all that is required. 

High- fat diets have no correlation with arterial disease. Being overweight definitely does, but dietary fat does not make you fat.

"...  the conclusion of a massive new study published in Lancet that followed 135,335 people in 18 countries on five continents. The study found that consumption of fat was associated with a lower risk of mortality, while consumption of carbohydrates was associated with a higher risk. It found that the kind of fat didn't matter when it came to heart disease, and that saturated fat consumption was inversely related to strokes.

The researchers say, ever so politely, that "dietary guidelines should be reconsidered in light of these findings.""

Want to be fit and trim, attractive, high-energy, light on your feet, and signaling that you have your act together? 

You know the popular approaches:

- Low-carb Atkins-like plan. This means fats, protein, and non-root vegetables and greens, with nuts and berries to complete the nutrition. This makes physiologic sense because it trains your body to burn your fat for energy instead of the carbs you shovel into it normally.

- Small but ordinary meals. Eg, a hard-boiled egg and coffee for breakfast, half a sandwich for lunch, a couple of slices of cheese for a snack, and a half-portion of supper.  This is a sustainable approach for most people, but it still might not work for you. It works great as a maintenance program for me, but I do not need to lose any fat and I do not have a voracious appetite. By the way, eating "until full" is disgusting and has nothing to do with nutrition. It's just a measure of how much you have stretched your stomach or ignore satiety signals. Normal people eat until satisfied, not until full. "Stuffed" is for the Thanksgiving turkey, or on Thanksgiving.

- Keep a nutrition calendar. Write down everything you put in your mouth. It's even more effective if you include Why you ate that donut. Bored? Tempted by flavor? Anxious? etc. Best idea: When those things happen, do something else as a diversion. If you are overweight, your subjective appetite is a liar because your body is lazy and doesn't want the hassle of burning your fat. 

- Exercise is basically useless for fat-burning in any ordinary time frame unless combined with a nutrition program of caloric or carb restriction. However, this is not an argument for a sedentary life. Furthermore, intense exercisers should have a small dose of carbs/sugar before a session to be most effective at pushing the effort.

I have written about the "False Hunger" of the overweight in the past. Paradoxically, the people who least need food experience hunger more than fit people, and consume food more avidly. I think it's usually an effect of being overweight, not a cause, but everybody is different.

Often forgotten: Fruit and fruit juices do not really belong on any fat-burning program. A glass of OJ or apple juice is the same as a Coke. The Big Fruit industry somehow convinced people that there was something "healthy" about fruit.  There is not. Fruit is dessert, a treat. Neither do cereals or grains, except minimally, belong on a fat-burning plan.

Let's say you are pudgy or fat and want to commit to a 6-7 day per week serious fitness program (something like the programs we recommend on Maggie's - not simply walking, aerobic swimming, or an hour trudging on a treadmill) to both lose fat and to get into fighting shape in general - high-energy, strong, trim, athletic, and fully-functional for life.

You have competing goals, fat loss and strength-building, which makes it complicated.  So what sort of nutritional plan do you need for our programs of weights, calisthenics, HIIT, etc? 

As readers know, fat loss is 90% nutritional under ordinary conditions. For sedentary people (less than 5-8 hrs/wk of strenuous physical activity), we recommend a low carb diet - lots of filler vegetables and greens, meat and fat. But if you are committing to an arduous daily exercise program too, you will need some amount of daily carbs and extra protein to sustain your exercise and to build/repair muscles happily damaged by exertion.

Nobody writes about this, but I have the correct advice.

For overweight serious exercisers only, use the scale as your guide. If you lose 2-4 lbs/month in your program, that's fine.  If you lose much more than that, up your carbs and dietary volume a bit.  If you lose less, lower your carbs and volume.  

The reason is that too-rapid weight loss will interfere with your fitness and strength-building goals. If you want both, you have to balance these goals. You have to consider that, if you are doing weight training (which everybody ought to do), a male can actually gain 1/4 lb/month in muscle in the beginning months while losing fat at the same time.

I'd recommend as a starting point for overweight daily hard-exercisers a carb intake of mostly one fruit and a bowl of oatmeal daily, and allow for one or two light beers too, or a glass of wine, for sanity. No dessert, bread, potato, pasta, rice, etc. Then get on the scale after one month of the program and feed yourself accordingly. Never get on the scale more often than twice a month - preferably once monthly. And always at the same time of day.

nb: For relatively in-shape exercisers, the recommendations would be entirely different.

Again, a Christmas book only for those who wish to continue or to update their secondary or college educations:  Campbell's Biology.  

It is the current basic text, and it guarantees a thorough grounding in the basics. If you shop around on line, you can find it for much less than the list price. 

A magnificent book, clear and easy to read if you recall some basic biochem.  If you took college bio ten years ago, you know almost nothing.

Alzheimer's is such a common occurrence in ageing that it might be considered a normal variant like hypertension. It used to be called plain "senility."

What factors are associated with increased risk?

- Age (obviously) 
- Family history, mainly maternal history, of dementia. The genetic components may be necessary but insufficient predispositions. 
- Overweight
- Being female
- Lack of daily exercise
- A wrong diet: The researchers generally recommend a diet which includes daily wine, berries, olive oil, and leafy greens but is low in sweets, dairy, non-berry fruit, and other carbs.

nb:  Correlation does not mean causation. These things just represent the current knowledge. Also, medical researchers never include "Bad luck" as a disease risk factor, but it is usually a major one in most ailments. 

Human joints in general are delicate structures.  Part of the reason is because we were not entirely designed to walk upright, but part of the reason is because we were not designed to live as long as we do or to be as heavy as many of us are. You can argue that our bodies were designed to live around 40 years - long enough to breed asap and raise some little ones like the other great apes.

While muscles respond well to stress, joints do not.  The worst thing you can do to your hips and knees is to be overweight.  That is why, in the UK and many other European nations, if you are overweight they will leave you a cripple and tell you it's your own fault. Government medicine will buy you a 12-Euro cane. In Euroland today you see people with canes, walkers, and wheelchairs who would be playing tennis and hiking in the US.

How Overweight Causes Knee Problems

 Study links obesity to rise in knee dislocations

Similar issues apply to hips and lower back. Nothing but trouble. Shoulders can wear out too, but that's a separate topic with different causes.

A friend emailed this photo of his foot this week. Ouch. It's the classic presentation. Fortunately, Gout is easily treated these days.

Gout occurs more commonly in those who eat a lot of meat, drink a lot of beer, or are overweight. Diagnosis of gout may be confirmed by seeing the crystals in joint fluid or tophus. Blood uric acid levels may be normal during an attack.

It's high school bio, but it's easy to forget even these big ones. When I took Gross Anatomy, they injected the arteries with red plastic and the veins with blue. That was a big help because arteries and veins in cadavers collapse and turn brown otherwise.

Everybody ought to know the major muscle groups too, but that's easy.

Is consumer access to genetic testing, without a doctor's involvement, beneficial or harmful for patients? 

Crazy question.  Of course people should have that info if they want to pay for it. Facts are facts.

There are several reasons why calories- in and calories- burned equations are too simple for the complexity of animal physiology. For one thing, the calories in protein are handled differently from those in fat or in  carbohydrates. Another reason is that our metabolism adapts to our nutritional intake as best it is able to.

Other than hibernating animals, few animals are adapted to handle the sort of abundance that humans have remarkably produced with brains capable of entirely changing the planet's surface and modifying nutritional sources for its own purposes. Humans are nutritional outliers, and it is not "natural." In a sense, humans are not natural animals because of the extent to which they remake nature for their convenience.

One example:  What Does It Mean to Be Fat-Adapted?

It means you have trained your body to adapt to a plentiful flow of fresh carbs and sugars (sugar is carbs and vice-versa) so it takes the burden off using fat as a fuel. Intake trains the body that way. Thus what we term the "False Hunger" of overweight people. Human physiology will never adapt to modern abundance of food because fatness tends to kill or disable people after child-bearing years.

Among other reasons, Fat Adaptation is one of the reasons heavy people feel more hunger and end up consuming food more avidly and in higher volume than trim people.  In fact, overweight people have zero dietary energy requirements and minimal nutritional requirements despite subjective hunger.

40 percent of US cancers linked to excess weight

Everybody knows that having a belly is the major risk factor for heart and cardiovascular disease, diabetes, arthritis, and dozens of other nasty ailments, but the association of overweight with at least 13 cancers is not so well known. 

Being heavy may be one of the greatest risk factors for a large variety of cancers. There are many theories about why this might be. Breast and prostate cancers are high on the list.

It is worth thinking about, even though we all must accept that the odds are, now that we can handle most infectious diseases, that we will die either of cancer or cardiovascular disease sooner or later. But why rush it?

Physical (and mental) fitness begin slowly going downhill after age 30-35 and accelerate thereafter. Deconditioning by avoiding strenuous exertion makes it worse.  I am a skeptic about mental exercise, but not about the role of exercise in slowing natural physical decline.

How To Prevent Muscle Loss And Why You Should Care begins:

 A variety of social forces extradited muscle from respectable mainstream health. Muscularity once suggested physical labor and therefore a lower class station. More recently body builders hijacked the mesomorphic, minting steroid-fueled Rodin caricatures that were anything but a model of health.

Muscle also has been perceived as anti-intellectual. In the organ kingdom, it is the antithesis of the exalted brain, as in brain or brawn. It is our brain that distinguishes us from the great apes. Even within the muscle category one finds a hierarchy. Cardiac muscle appeared to carry none of skeletal muscle’s stigma. Academics might have jogged, meatheads pumped iron...

Skeletal muscles, and the bones to which they attach (muscle stress is what keeps bones strong), undergo continual alteration and renovation. They are both adaptive: they respond to lack of stress by weakening or atrophying, and to stress by becoming more robust. This occurs regardless of age. Those 80 year-old women I see lifting weights in the gym are doing a smart thing. Weights are good for females.

There is also growing evidence that regular intense physical exertion is good for maintaining mental functioning. It's definitely good for mental health.

Then he became one. Dr. Dennis Charney studied resilience in the face of trauma, then was shot by a pissed-off former employee.

A good story. He survived. Yes, he had always worked out and lifted weights. 

From the 1977 Massachusetts Medical Society's Annual Oration, Dr. James Tullis on diseases in Biblical times.