April 18, 2013 update: The Tools I am Using

OK.  I sit here at my computer on this beautiful Thursday evening and I feel like I want to share what is going on with me so I will!  I ran 5 miles today on a treadmill and it was tough.  My typical problems are that I am extremely stiff, especially in my muscles that control my breathing.  The muscles that radiate from the diaphragm in my back and hips, and upward to my arms and shoulders are extremely tense and therefore I feel really tired.  I usually am able to run an 8:00 pace rather easily, but not today.  The interesting thing is that I felt really calm, but my body felt very tense and stiff.  I ended up running about an 8:15 pace and my heart rate was approximately 145.

So far this week I have run 15 miles and on my way to my first 30 mile week in a very long time.  I will definitely hit that goal.  The goal I really want to hit is to have running feel good again.  I feel that it will.

The way I will get there, I am not totally sure.  I am very motivated to feel better and to have my running feel good again.  I kind of use running as a barometer to check to see I am feeling in life.  Those two things really seems to correspond.  Some of the things I am doing to regain my superior health and happiness are as follows.

The biggest change I have made in the last couple of months is my diet.  As my health was getting worse over the last 2 years I was convinced that my diet needed to go more towards strict veganism.  I know a great ultra runner who is vegan and I have researched a lot on this topic and it seemed to me that this was the diet that was the healthiest diet.  Then I sort of randomly ordered a book from Amazon along with my chia seeds, hemp protein, etc., called "The Perfect Health Diet."  When it arrived at my house it sat on my bedroom floor for about a month until one evening I just picked it up and started reading it.  By the end of the first chapter I was absolutely blown away and very intrigued.  This book is by far the most compelling nutrition book I have ever read and anyone who reads it will have a very difficult time disputing it.  There are two main things that make this book so different and compelling.

Firstly, the story behind how the diet was arrived at is so very interesting and makes it so easy to trust.  Paul Jaminet and his wife, Shou-Ching Jaminet were both having some health problems in their 40's and Paul decided to take some time off from his job and devote what ended up being about 5 years to researching the human diet in order to try to improve his health.  And he did.  Secondly, every thing that is recommended by the book is very thoroughly backed up with a very astute and very well explained research.  Oh, and it should be mentioned that Paul was a an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and his wife 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. So in other words, they are both very smart!  So I decided to start using the Perfect Health Diet.

This was a very drastic change for me.  It meant I would now be eating meat, butter, cream, egg yolks, and even liver, all foods I have eaten none or very little over the past many years.  Once I started eating this diet I noticed immediately that I just felt a little bit better.  I also noticed that I was very satisfied after meals and I didn't seem to get hungry for a long time.  I have only been on this diet for a couple of months and I am excited by the initial results.  I will keep updating my progress with it on this blog.

Briefly some other tools I am using to improve my health are:  Chi Running,  the Buteyko breathing method, lots of stretching, and I am using every spare moment to research all areas of health. I am taking some supplements such as magnesium, and licorice root tea.  I will get more into these things and other tools that I discover and learn about as I make this journey.  

I should mention that the website to find out about "The Perfect Health Diet" is www.perfecthealthdiet.com .  

I should also mention that this blog is like a journal for me and may not be well written, there may be many spelling and grammatical errors, and it may even seem non-sequitur at times.  The idea is to convey my thoughts daily or many times each week and just write what comes to mind.  I will really appreciate feedback and interchange of ideas, but remember I ain't no writer.  Just sayin.

G