Playing Catch Up, Part Two: The Munchies

Posted by lando on Dec 12, 2013 in Workout Of The Day | 0 comments

We learned a few weeks ago about catching up on sleep. Better said we learned that we can’t in fact “catch up” on sleep. The damage we do to our sleep cycle, our recovery, our brain function, and other stuff is already done by depriving our body of needed rest. If you missed or forget what I’m talking about just read the article here.

The drive to “catch up” is part of our nature. We push and push and push our limits, sometimes way past them, to points where we know we are treating our body and soul way worse than they deserve. To ease our minds we convince ourselves we can catch up or make up for our bad decisions by over doing it with good. With sleep, we may go to bed late all week and have a late night out on Friday, so we promise ourselves we will get 8+ hours of sleep Saturday and Sunday. This eases our mind during the bad nights, stringing us along like a bad date, giving us false hope that maybe he/she is the one only to be left at the doorstep with puckered, frostbit lips.

Unfortunately it doesn’t work this way. There is no catching up. Essentially we must think of it as each day being the start of a new race. The race before is over, the results already posted, so all we can do is race the one in front of us. Good or bad sleep can only affect what is ahead of us. We can’t make up for what is behind us.

Nutrition is no different. No amount of perfect eating or 2 and 3 a days at the gym will make up for the ice cream binge, the fried food frenzy, the 64 oz big gulp soda. While righting the ship with dedication to a good diet or hard work in the gym is certainly good, just like dedicating time to getting good nights of sleep is better than not, it doesn’t make up for past indiscretions in just one or two days. Sad I know. I used to live by the 1 mile per cheat mentality. Pint of Ben and Jerrys? Mile. Side of cheescake? Another mile. Put that all on top of a pizza? 3 miles. All burned off. Good to go for the next day. Except I still woke up feeling like I had been abducted and probed by aliens, didn’t fit into the pants I wore just 2 days before, and couldn’t for the life of me get my pee to be anything but goldenrod yellow.

I could talk for many many many pages about how food affects us, and honestly I know many of you will tune me out. Food affects so many aspects of what we do that it is too hard to streamline it into just calories and pounds and fat on our waistline. Sleep, mood, productivity, water absorption, and even sex are all affected by the food we eat. While not necessarily unalterable, many of the things that a poor diet affect, or even just a poor couple of days of nutrition affect, take time to reverse. This is why we can’t play the game of “catch up”.

Take anemia, or iron deficiency, for example. Anemia can make you feel tired, be distracted, render you physically unable to perform, can mess with sleep (it never ends!), alter your moods, among other things. In general a diet that is of low quality will lead to iron deficiency, since quality meat, poultry, fish, and vegetables are the best sources of iron we can get. I say quality because many additives and cooking methods like deep frying mess with the iron and our ability to absorb it. So even though you are eating chicken, deep frying it in crap oil kind of misses the point. Iron deficiency causes a slew of problems, one of them maintaining healthy ph balance in the stomach. Too much stomach acid can cause acid reflux, esophagus issues, and ulcers. The first two can develop in only a few days.

To turn this into a vicious cycle, too much stomach acid can also slow or even hinder the absorption process of the iron you intake! So eating a diet that is low in iron can cause you to have elevated acid levels in the stomach, then even if you start eating a quality balanced diet that contains enough iron that iron might not be fully absorbed which could be the solution to the original problem. Someone suffering this cycle would need to eat a lot of alkaline foods, like leafy greens, to even get back to balanced.

This is just one example of how your diet affects your bodily functions. Let’s think about how the common diet high in refined sugar has lasting affects on the body. Glucose (sugar) is toxic to the blood, insulin helps take it out. A slew of issues can occur, some of them altering life and death, all from this one aspect of diet. Insulin resistance, which affects our energy levels and ability to process sugar, is one path high sugar diets lead us down. Type II diabetes can occur when the body stops reacting to and/or producing insulin at the right time, greatly affecting the pancreas and liver and the life cycle in general (aka we die sooner). Hypertension, heart problems, hyperglycemia, all are directly related to a diet abusively high in sugar for long periods of time.

Now that you are all significantly depressed, do not fret. While just like sleep you cannot play catch up or make up for your past (at least not in 1 or 2 days), there is no time like the present to right the ship! No you haven’t riddled yourself with so much stomach acid that you are doomed to a life of lethargy and avoiding Mexican food. No you aren’t already at the exit of Diabetes Drive with no chance of a u-turn. But why wait for the next stop on the bus? Why avoid those taco dinners any longer? You can’t work that spare tire off in one sitting, or one session, but you bet just 5-7 days will start to show a difference. Part of the reason you see such drastic changes at the beginning of a strict Paleo cycle is you lose so much water weight, water your body is swollen with from the crap you ate. Imagine what 14 days, 21 days, an entire month of good eats will do to your body both in and out.

Your health and wellness is a process, the body a system that is built through many processes and much work. I mean we all sat in our mother’s stomach for 9 or so months just to come out at barely 7 pounds! All that time for just 7 pounds, think of what goes into making a full size, crossfitting, fire breathing, paleo smashing animal!? Do not accept that you were just “born this way” or “you just have these problems” if your health isn’t up to snuff. Our bodies are beautiful, amazing machines that no amount of technology can recreate. While we all come in different shapes, sizes, and colors, we were made to persevere and thrive, and if some or much of us wasn’t then there is no better treatment for sickness than good diet and sleep. Treating your body right yields good results. Treating it wrong yields bad results. The good might take more time to get rid of the bad, but trust me it will happen.

Time to set the GPS to DestromiNation and put the pedal to the metal.

FRIDAY

Strength 1: Snatch
Find a 1rm Snatch in 30 minutes

Strength 2: Clean and Jerk
Find a 1rm Clean and Jerk in 20 minutes

SkWAT Team: 5×5 heavy barbell good mornings