Low Hanging Fruit…And Veggies, And Legumes, And…

Instead of the usual 5-Shot Friday, today’s is an experimental post, which I may repeat depending on your feedback and interest: a deeper dive into a health and wellness area, with myself as the physician crash test dummy.

In particular, going vegan.

For the next 30 days, it"s good bye foodstuff from animals. Not just going vegetarian, lacto-ovo, or pescatarian – vegan. No animal proteins, and as soon as I can swing the transition, nary a bit of added fats or oils (even from vegetable sources like olives and coconuts).

I’m a physician provider on the Paleo Physicians Network, and have been following a Paleo diet for some time. I enjoy a regular weekend cheat day (á la Slow Carb diet from Tim Ferriss’ “The 4-Hour Body”), as well as cheat days that become cheat weekends, and occasional lapses into home meal Korean rice dishes and In-N-Out double-double with fries territory with the kids. (If you’re a patient of mine, you may have heard me refer to it as being “Paleoid,” since my own compliance hovers around 70%).

But when closely following the low carb guidelines, I was able to return to my high school bodyweight (190 lbs. at 6’2”) and suspend my single BP medication – using zero exercise. I routinely recommend a low carb diet (Paleo, Primal, Slow Carb, The New Sugarbusters, or Dr. Gundry’s Diet Evolution) to my patients seeking to lose weight, or to lower their blood sugar or cholesterol.

So Why The Experiment, And Why Should You Care?

After a fair amount of personal trial and error, I suspect that there may be a dietary option that is at least as healthy as Paleo/low carb diets, if not more so, for myself, my family, and my patients. And it’s generally good to have options, because we’re not one size fits all -- some of my patients who go Paleo drive their cholesterol numbers through the roof -- and I spend most of time advising other folks besides myself.

I can only hope that my experience informs you, motivates you to consider your options, and most importantly, stimulates you to take some kind of action. Good intentions are nice, but as the saying goes, “Talk is cheap, but whiskey costs money.”

I’m a crazy-busy family and sports medicine physician, wearing numerous administrative and consulting hats by day. By night, I struggle to find enough leftover energy to play Batman for my family and teenage kids. I don’t come from a star athlete background, but have been active with martial arts, weights, and calisthenics since college, and am struggling (there’s that word again) as I enter my 50s to keep some semblance of being active and capable.

Hello training injured, my old friend I’ve come to talk with you again…about my hypertension and kidney stones

If you’re busy as stink, juggling multiple responsibilities, and seeking to train smarter to stay vital, well, so am I.

No, Really. Why This Experiment NOW?

The other day, my teenage son was taking a break from homework, and sighed, “Dad, remember when we were younger, and you had lots of energy and could run around, and now you’re older and you’re tired all the time?”

Full stop, silence, sound in my head of a phonograph needle scraping sideways.

No, wait, dad, I’m kidding, he said, seeing the look on my face. Really, I’m just kidding.

Damage done. But more the last straw than the sole reason.

• It’s been nearly 2 weeks since I attended a training seminar of full-out grappling and self-defense sessions over 3 days. And I’m still limping: rehabbing a sprained thumb, swollen knee, dinged ribs, and bruises over about 30% of my body. I don’t even want to know what my kidney function looks like (yes, I do).

• Last week I couldn’t sleep until taking Aleve or Tylenol due to a weird, deep back/buttock sensation, like a stretched nerve, for no reason I could think of. The seminar was a week behind me, and the closest thing to trauma was walking around Knott’s Scary Farm with my kids the day before. I’m more flexible than most high school athletes, and regularly use a foam roller on my calves and hamstrings. “You’re just getting old,” my wife said.

• No one in my family has a history of kidney stones. It’s thankfully been years, but I’ve had painful trips to the ER twice for them.

• Lots of men in my family have high blood pressure. Mine is controlled with a single medication, but unless I run an hour a day, or get to under 190 lbs, I can’t seem to get off it. Less frequent running, rowing, clubbells, kettlebells, martial arts twice weekly, gymnastics work…all helped me get stronger and more enduring, but the BP continued to need the pills.

• Tore my calf doing front kicks in a Krav Maga class, about a month into it, and sprained my hand doing open palm strikes at another seminar. My 4th plus decade body ripped when subjected to stresses that were common a decade or two prior.

Not everything here can be fixed with diet. But the take home is This is no longer the same shizz, different day.

Unless you are highly in-tune with your situation, you will inevitably, like me, come up against the lane markers of life: those little raised rectangles on the freeway that make your tires go barump-barump-barump if you start drifting out of your lane. You think you’re on track, maybe you’re even still going in a straight line, but the road is starting to curve and the bumps are telling that it’s time to course correct.

The question is, what to you is a loud enough signal to change course?

Some signals barely count as noise, and are of no immediate consequence, like looking at the scale and you’ve gained a couple pounds.

Some signals are significant to others, but potentially ignorable: being told your BP or cholesterol numbers are borderline high, or that you look kind of tired lately.

Some signals are big frickin’ deal and a call to immediate action: you crashed the car, you embarrassed yourself in public, you had a tumor successfully removed.

Some signals are for others: you died, woke up in heaven, and wondered at the first inkling of a problem being the heart attack and the ground coming up to meet you.

The Title To This Post

…starts off with “Low Hanging Fruit,” because snagging the relatively easy stuff is a basic, sensible life strategy. There are a number of other Strategies, like, “Action on simple ideas is way more important than grand plans unrealized,” and “Baby steps are the smallest but they move the quickest,” but Low Hanging Fruit is a good one, because it implies there’s stuff right there in front of you, why are you ignoring the bounty in arm’s reach, just pick the easy fruit, already.

Changing how you eat isn’t easy, but as I alluded to in a prior post, there’s increasing evidence that eating mostly processed and industrially packaged foods is harming us in mind-boggling ways. You may not care about looking like a superhero, or doing the CrossFit Fran WOD faster than your friend Lisa, but nobody wants a stroke for Christmas, or to be too tired to do things with family, or to be in constant pain from being obese and grinding down their joints, or to be told by their doctor that they now have diabetes or cancer.

A whole-foods, plant-based diet, as the Forks Over Knives crew describes it, not only attacks the root cause of these all-too-common ailments, it improves recovery time in high intensity athletes (you bounce back quicker between hard workouts), and can sustain physically demanding and intense lifestyles. At a minimum, this makes it viable alternative to the low carb Paleo-type diets, which are often adopted by CrossFit and similar high-intensity athletes.

Halloween is right around the corner, then Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s. It should be an interesting transitional month, followed by an equally instructive 6-12 weeks. Numbers and stories to follow.

Chow (ciao), y’all.