Book Review: The Thrive Diet

A few weeks ago I read The Thrive Diet by Brendan Brazier. It took me all of 3 hours. Not to say I read fast. The time spent reading just flew by because so much of what the book talks about, I've believed for some time. I just wasn't implementing it all. So for the last 2 weeks I've been applying what I learned from the book and implementing what I already knew and have to say I'm hooked. At first I only committed to eat this way until after IMAZ. But as I write this blog I realize I'm probably going to eat this way from now on. Bottom line is not only do I feel better, but my training has gotten better as well.

The book in a nutshell is Brazier's contribution to the nutrition side of training, racing and recovery. Normally when I read books about nutrition, especially about training related nutrition, I come away more than a little disappointed. Having been a vegetarian for more than 20 years, I get a little disturbed with what I consider largely as misinformation about athletes choosing a completely vegetable based diet. Unfortunately, it is its vegetable based nature that is probably why Brazier's book isn't discussed and considered as a serious option for optimal eating, training, and racing more.

Brazier takes time to explain that eating in the majority of North American culture is not for function but other emotional and social reasons. This is why the typical diet is one of excess in quantity and lacking in actual nutrition. He points out that eating less is an option when the body has the proper nutrition to fuel its activity and recovery. Brazier explains a lower caloric intake is actually beneficial to an endurance athlete in particular because when higher nutrient sources are used in easily digestible forms, the body has more energy available for recovery and performance. It is his opinion that it is because of improper nutrition that people find themselves craving things like sugar and fat in excess which then throws the body out of balance. Over time the accumulated stresses of training and racing loads along with suboptimal eating patterns combine to set up a vicious cycle of poor eating, impaired or interrupted training and recovery, and a lower overall quality of life that many simply call burn out. Prolonged, the state of imbalance caused by faulty eating and the resultant stresses sets up a cycle leading to illness, premature aging and increased body fat. The accumulated stresses Brazier links to poor eating become more and more noticeable to the athlete as they begin limit the ability to train consistently and recover adequately. Though personally I find his tendency to lump the myriad of consequences of poor eating under the singular umbrella he refers to as "stress," I found his knowledge on the subject of nutrition and its effects on health and athletic recovery very sound.

Essentially Brazier looks at food as fuel, some fuels burning cleaner and more efficiently in the body than others and thus take less energy to digest fully while creating less waste, or in Braziers language, stress in the body. He is careful to state that training and racing are also forms of stress placed on the body noting that some stresses are beneficial for growth and development. What Brazier attempts to do with the Thrive Diet is to have our food support that growth by taking the wasteful and stressful aspects food can have on our bodies out of the equation of nutrition and performance. This in his words leads to not only a stronger, leaner body capable of racing better, but a person who is healthier and happier overall and more likely to reach and experience their true potential.

While the Thrive Diet in practice is not complex, it is vegan and largely raw, and it does run counter to what most Americans would consider a balanced meal. And overall it is probably lower in calories. But after following just a couple of the guidelines in the diet closely for the last couple of weeks a few things stand out.

The cover of Brazier's book claims by following this way of eating you will be leaner (have a lower body fat percentage), while increasing lean muscle mass, sleep more restfully, experience increased energy, and have a stronger immune system. From my experience over the last few weeks, I can honestly say Brazier's claims have all been on the mark. I have lost about 5 pounds and definitely look more muscular. But what is most amazing to me has been the recovery time I've seen. Workouts that would have left me using the railing in my house to get up and down the stairs for about 24 hours because my legs were so trashed are now a thing of the past. I am also getting by on far less sleep and still feeling rested. Daily runs are also looking more and more possible which would be a huge boost to my future overall fitness I'm sure. And all I'm doing is adhering more strongly to the notion that the more nutrients in my diet the better. I'm drinking several glasses of organic fruit and vegetable juice a day along with a protein smoothie. I have also lowered the consumption of Soy where possible. I have found I need to be more conscious of the quality and amount of beneficial fat in my diet and I'm looking into sources to include this. But to say I've seen a dramatic transformation in just 3 weeks would be an understatement. If you are serious about your triathlon performance, and just the overall quality of you experience of your life in general, I highly suggest you give Thrive a look.

Book Review: The Warrior Diet by Ori Hofmekler

I finished reading The Warrior Diet by Ori Hofmekler about 3 weeks ago. So I've had some time to try it out. To be honest, while a good deal of the book is devoted to the diet, a good 1/4 of the book talks about working out. In this context the book details not so much a diet or eating program but a way of living and thinking.

The basic premise of the book is similar to what I've heard about the Paleo Diet. Basically if you aren't familiar with that particular viewpoint, it works something like this. Modern society, with its abundant food and all of the chemicals that go into creating and cultivating it, has basically stripped humans of the diet they were intended to eat. By having an endless, readily available, and highly synthetic food supply, we have created many of the health issues we now experience like diabetes, heart disease, obesity, and cancer. By moving to a diet that emulates the foods and portions that our ancestors ate we can eliminate many of the ills we suffer. In this regard the Paleo Diet and The Warrior Diet agree. Where they differ in small detail is the types of foods that are eaten. Where they differ in larger detail is the size, timing and spacing of meals.

The Warrior Diet advocates what the author Ori Hofmekler (a sort of latter day renaissance man, being an author, former soldier, a painter, and a scientist) calls the "Warrior Cycle." The cycle is made up of an "undereating phase" where minimal calories are consumed in the form of fresh organic fruit and vegetable juices, some nuts such as raw, organic almonds, fresh water, poached or boiled eggs, whey or milk protein shakes. The goal is to simply sustain and not to satisfy your body's hunger until the evening meal.

The evening meal is what is called the "overeating phase." During this phase, you are allowed to eat as much as you can until you are full. But there are some caveats about what to eat and in what order that are pretty detailed. Too detailed to describe or explain adequately on my blog. But the basic gist of this approach is to consume most of your calories during the overeating phase prior to retiring.

The reason Hofmekler gives for this constant cycling from undereating to overeating is that this is probably the way our ancestors ate when they awoke each morning confronted with the task of finding food. Throughout the day they ate enough to sustain their hunt and feasted at night when they caught their prey. Hofmekler posits it is the cycle of eating that allowed their bodies to remain lean and their systems to purge the toxins of eating and living from their systems more frequently and easily. He makes a strong case for the toxic build up seen in people living modern societies being caused by the practice eating large meals throughout the day which do not allow our bodies time to cleanse themselves. Couple this with the advent of readily available processed foods in super sized portions and the current obesity epidemic becomes completely understandable when viewed through Hofmekler's eyes.

I tried the diet for about a week. I found it doable but difficult. Especially for an active triathlete. After 3 days I was so hungry no amount of juice, fruit and nuts was going to sustain me until dinner. I will admit Ori does advise more food during the undereating phase for active people and professional athletes. But even with this in mind, I was not able to train at pre diet levels. I just found the choices presented in the diet's undereating phase too limited for me to sustain the level of training I was accustomed to. What surprised me was that while I had no problems with the hunger portion of the day, by day 5 I had lost my desire to train. To me this was a sign of nutrient imbalance. This is not to say Hofmekler's claims of clarity and more energy were wrong. I had plenty of that. What I lacked was desire to go outside and work out. I also lacked the desire to work out inside. So I knew something for me was amiss nutritionally. I wound up after a week of eating more in the "spirit" of The Warrior Diet than in actual hard core practice by keeping the food I consumed during the day on the lighter and rawer side. But I didn't restrict my caloric intake in any way going back to a more intuitive consumption pattern which I felt was already working for me.

I also found it somewhat hard to consume the lions share of my calories in one meal. Eating so many calories at one time not only started to make me nauseous, but also tended to make it hard for me to sleep unless I had my main meal earlier in the evening. To be fair, this could have contributed to training lethargy I experienced. But I also found having such a large meal earlier, due to the prep time necessary, also conflicted with the timing of my evening workouts. In theory, I think The Warrior Diet offers some insights which are worth considering in anyone's fitness journey. I would recommend the book on the soundness of some of Hofmeklers diet insights alone. However, in practice for my training requirements, I found the way of the warrior not so much my personal cup of tea.

If you want to see some of my personal thoughts on eating click here.

Book Review: Total Immersion by Terry Laughlin

My copy of Total Immersion (TI) is actually pretty worn. I will probably have to buy another one soon. But that makes sense given the fact that I've probably had the book for almost 10 years. Taking this into account, I'm sure some folks would wonder why I'm taking the time to write about a book this old. I'm writing about it because I sat down recently and read it again. For the third time, I think. I heard somewhere that the number three is magical to our subconscious. A friend of mine swears that if you want to really learn something, you should either read an authoritative source three times or find three varied sources and read them all simultaneously. Maybe he's right because I'm really coming to appreciate what Terry Laughlin is trying to say in this book.

The basic premise of the book is that swimming, due to water's being 1000 times more dense than air is a hugely difficult medium to move through. Because of this generating more force in order to move faster through the water is a poor strategy. To illustrate his point he uses the equation "V = SL + SR," where V is velocity, SL is stroke length and SR is the stroke rate. From the equation, one can also derive that increasing velocity by favoring either stroke length or stroke rate is essentially a "zero sum" game. This means that as you increase your stroke rate to achieve more speed, your stroke length gets shorter. In essence, as your arms move faster requiring greater and greater amounts of energy to move shorter and shorter distances. Ultimately, even if you could achieve super stroke rate you would run out of gas. For triathletes in particular, this strategy would potentially have devastating results in that valuable energy necessary for the bike and the run would have been expended in the swim where time gains are really minimal.

So to address this zero sum problem, Laughlin attempts to shift the reader's perspective by advising three important things:

1) Look at the body as a vessel (like a ship) moving through water creating as little drag as possible.

2) Look at swimming as a technique sport more in the way people think about golf and tennis as opposed to looking at it as a strength sport like running or cycling.

3) Because swimming is a technique or skill-based sport, just like golf and tennis, these skills can be taught.

The rest of the insights in the book, as well as the drills provided, do support these three tenets. My personal experience however, after my first reading was not as promising. When I first read this book, I was working out with two very good friends and we had all started doing triathlons at about the same time. For a while we all did the drills but instead of seeing our swim times decrease, we all saw our times in races stay the same while our times in the pool were a lot slower. By the end of the season both of my friends had abandoned the book altogether. I kept using the book on and off and was a regular at a masters swim group. This would be my routine until I stopped racing five years ago.

At some point during the five years away from triathlon training and racing I read the book again and used it to structure my workouts. Total Immersion places a lot of emphasis on counting your strokes so most of the actual swim sets are structured around how many strokes you take and not how long it takes you to get from one end of the pool to another. Because of this element I sort of stopped timing myself altogether and shortened my time in the pool to about 30 minutes. This is specifically how I swam until spring of 2006.

In spring of 2006, I had planned to start racing but didn't because of a severely pulled hamstring. My rehab for this injury consisted of weekly rolfing and acupuncture treatments along with short sessions (about 30 minutes) of cycling and swimming. Because of the pain in my leg, I was forced to swim even slower and by and large all I could really manage to do were some of the basic TI drills. It was then I read the book for the third and final time.

For some reason reading the book the last time and spending all of that slow, focused time in the water I saw something I missed completely. For Total Immersion to work the way Laughlin envisions, you have to be able to completely connect with how your body is positioned in the water at each moment during the stroke cycle and make subtle adjustments to your position on the fly. This really isn't explicitly pointed out in the book at all. Even here for all of Laughlin's talk of looking at swimming in a different light, I think his falling back on using the term "feel for the water" while accurate does not convey the state of mind necessary for the drills to work properly.

Over the years as I've used these drills so many people have come up to me to ask why they aren't getting any faster or to say the drills are boring. Some have been to the TI seminars, enlisted TI coaches, and used the videos. What I also find telling is there aren't many people I've run into that come out of the water in that first wave that credit TI for this. Part of the fault for this I believe is Laughlin's in being unable to communicate what is really necessary for the drills to work the way people want. But part of the fault is also our society's. By and large our society is interested in quick solutions. That is why we buy our stuff on Amazon and our food at McDonalds. It is fast. We have it and we move on.

Terry Laughlin is exactly right when he says Total Immersion is like Yoga or Tai Chi. These are more than just workouts or stress relievers. They are both practices which are deeply spiritual in essence and require a commitment to a different way of seeing and living in order to integrate them fully and successfully into one's life. When you look at the numbers of people who actually study and understand Tai Chi or Yoga, you can understand why Total Immersion doesn't seem to work for large numbers of people.

The drills in Laughlin's book are really just a series of dots he leaves you to connect to create your own perfect stroke. The book is sort of like "connect the dots" meets a "coloring book" of effective swimming. If you were to go to a Tai Chi class taught by a master, you will be shown a small series of movements which are a blueprint on how to move your body from one point in space to another. Each week this is repeated until you master this series and a new series can be introduced. In my own experience with Tai Chi, my teacher taught a form consisting of only 39 postures. Within each posture I was shown no more than 3 movements. Each week I practiced the 3 new movements and added them to what had come before. It was almost 18 months before I had learned all 39 postures. It was at this point my teacher said, "Now you understand the basic movements, create your own Tai Chi form."

Total Immersion for me was no different. After the third reading I decided to give TI the same commitment I gave Tai Chi and now give my Yoga practice. First I mastered all the drills. I noticed which ones made me faster in the water and which ones didn't. I focused on my body in the water and how it moved there. Once I mastered the drills I found made me faster, then I refined them. Now the majority of my practices focus on two objectives. The sensation of sliding through water and counting my strokes. I work out either 30 or 45 minutes depending on what I feel like doing. My workouts consist of anywhere from 60% to 75% drill work. I swim sets no longer than 300 meters at once. And now I am faster in the water. This year I lopped 3 minutes off my 800 meter open water swim time. So the bottom line is Total Immersion does work, but for it to do so you have to be willing to change how you relate to swimming, how you relate to the water, and how you relate to yourself. In this respect, Total Immersion isn't just the title of a book, it speaks to the level of commitment you have to be willing to give in order to change everything for the better.