Mark Sisson's Blog, page 76

Keto Angel Food Cake

For whatever reason, angel food cake seems to make its yearly debut during that time when warmer weather breaks. Is it the toppings – fresh berries, or a perfectly ripe peach? Is it those first rays of sunshine after a cold winter that make you want something pillowy soft and sweet? There could be a hundred reasons why angel food cake is a slice of spring on a plate.

Angel food cake may be something you considered a cheat, until now. Traditional angel food cake recipes call for a lot of sugar – since there’s no frosting, the cake has to be sweet on its own. This keto angel food cake recipe gives you all of the light, airy sweetness without the aftermath that comes with a sugary dessert.

And, it’s surprisingly easy to make. Proper whisking of the egg whites can be intimidating, but you won’t mess it up. The key is to stop whisking when you get “soft peaks.” You’ll know you’re there when you can make small rolling hills in your egg white mixture by slowly lifting your whisk out of the bowl.

Here’s how to do it.

Keto Angel Food Cake Recipe

Serves: 6

Time in the kitchen: 25 minutes, including 15 minutes bake time

Ingredients

1/2 cup almond flour
1/4 cup + 1 Tbsp. Lakanto powdered monkfruit 2:1 sweetener
3 Tbsp. coconut flour
pinch of salt
9 large egg whites
1 tsp. vanilla extract
3/4 tsp. cream of tartar
coconut whipped cream, chopped dark chocolate, or fresh berries (optional)

Directions

Prior to whisking up the egg whites, preheat your oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit and line a 8” cake pan with parchment paper. Mix the almond flour, granulated monk fruit sweetener, coconut flour and a pinch of salt in a small bowl and set aside.

Crack the egg whites in a clean, dry mixing bowl. Whisk vigorously with a whisk or hand mixer until the mixture becomes very frothy.

Add the cream of tartar and vanilla extract and continue whisking vigorously. You want to continue whisking until the egg whites become just slightly stiff and form soft peaks when you lift up the whisk.

Once the egg whites look white, instead of clear, and you can make peaks on the surface with your whisk, carefully fold the dry ingredients into the egg whites with a flexible spatula, adding the dry ingredients a little at a time until the batter is mixed. Do this gently to prevent the egg whites from collapsing.

Quickly pour the batter into the lined round pan and place it into the oven. Bake for 15-17 minutes, or until the cake begins to brown on top and the center feels firm. Remove the cake from the oven and allow it to cool.

Top your cake slices with dollops of coconut cream, chopped dark chocolate and fresh strawberries.

Tips For a Perfect Keto Angel Food Cake

The whisked egg whites are delicate, so gently (but quickly) fold in the dry ingredients and place the cake pan in the oven ASAP so the cake can rise properly.
The Lakanto powdered monkfruit brand sweetener is a bit sweeter than other brands, like Swerve confectioners sweetener. If you choose to swap Lakanto and instead use powdered Swerve, consider increasing the sweetener to ¼ cup + 3 Tbsp. up to ½ cup of powdered Swerve. You may find the amount in the recipe to be enough, depending on how sweet you like it. We prefer the Lakanto monkfruit sweetener since the aftertaste is barely noticeable.

Nutrition Information (? of cake, without toppings)

Calories: 100

Total Carbs: 4 grams

Net Carbs: 2 grams

Fat: 6 grams

Protein: 8 grams

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Weekly Link Love – Edition 77

Research of the Week

Outdoor transmission of coronavirus is very rare, according to new research.

Exercise increases superoxidate dismutase, an antioxidant that protects against advanced respiratory distress syndrome.

Oncology journal editors get a lot of non-research payments from industry.

Bearded dragon falls for the Müller-Lyer illusion.

New Primal Blueprint Podcasts

Episode 417: Cristina Curp: Host Elle Russ chats with Cristina Curp, a certified Nutritional Therapy Practitioner and a former chef with a BA in anthropology.

Episode 418: Connie Hartel: The Fit Farming Food Supermom Bodybuilder: Host Brad Kearns chats with Connie Hartel.

Primal Health Coach Radio, Episode 56: Laura and Erin chat with Dr. Cate Shanahan.

Media, Schmedia

Isolation is especially bad for the elderly.

Obesity is a very bad idea if you have coronavirus.

Interesting Blog Posts

What a lockdown exit strategy might look like.

Social Notes

Indeed.

What I’ve been up to.

Everything Else

Nice video overview of forest bathing.

Indonesia employs ghosts to enforce stay-at-home rules.

How’s the vaccine looking?

Why grocery store shelves are still emptying.

Things I’m Up to and Interested In

I hope this works: A new study is exploring high-EPA fish oil for coronavirus.

Is there no other way?: Dealing with budget shortfalls, a Berlin zoo may end up feeding the animals to each other.

Podcast I’m enjoying: A new one with Art Devany.

Slideshow I enjoyed: 30 years of holistic management.

Research I was pleased to see: Taking vitamin D every week improves aerobic performance in combat athletes.

Question I’m Asking

What are you going to change about your life after all this is over with?

Recipe Corner

Ever roast green beans?
Chicken poblano soup, Whole 30 compliant.

Time Capsule

One year ago (Apr 12– Apr 18)

13 Keto-Friendly Fiber Foods – How to get fiber on keto.
Dear Mark: What Breaks a Fast Follow-up– Answering questions on breaking fasts.

Comment of the Week

“I work full time from home and feel blessed every day. I intersperse microworkouts with work most days. When it’s not raining, I have sanity bike rides after work. It is so glorious to be outside. Life goes in for Mother Earth, she’s in full spring mode here in Chicago. My fav microworkout: walk down 6 flights of stairs, do a plank on the lawn (bunnies everywhere) and sprint up the stairs. Blessings to you!”

– Christopher gets it.

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Ask a Health Coach: Why Willpower Doesn’t Work, Primal-Inspired Workouts, and What to Eat for Breakfast

Hi folks, in this edition of Ask a Health Coach, Erin discusses why fasting might feel harder right now, why you need more than just a good workout plan, and what to eat when you’re sick of having eggs for breakfast every day. Keep your questions coming in the MDA Facebook Group or in the comments below.

Being home all day has been a real test to my willpower. Fasting is harder and I’m hungry all the time. Any tips for navigating this “new normal?” – Stephanie

I’m with you Stephanie. A lot of things feel out of our control right now and with so much uncertainty, just rolling with it might be your best bet for the next few weeks. Does that mean saying “screw it!” and scarfing down a few donuts every morning? Or grazing on chips and cookies throughout the day? No. But it does mean acknowledging your new routine, your new struggles, the fact that you’re under more stress than usual, and of course, the reality that you’re surrounded by food 24/7.

Usually when my clients talk about willpower, I find that they’re white-knuckling it through their day. Flat out resisting the temptation to eat with no strategies other than trying not to think about food. By definition, willpower is simply ignoring hunger. You’re choosing not to eat when your body is begging you to feed it!

Stress Triggers Sugar Cravings

Hunger is a biological survival mechanism triggered by our cells and driven by our brains. When you’re eating food, you’re feeding your cells. And when you’re resisting or restricting it, you’re starving your cells. Also keep in mind that extra stress puts you into fight-or-flight mode, making those donuts, muffins, leftover Easter candies look extra good. Your cells are craving sugar! And when you give in, you start the vicious cycle of sugar high, followed by sugar crash, followed by feeling hungry, hangry, and craving everything in sight.

Sure, you might just be bored or procrastinating on a looming deadline, but if you’re genuinely hungry, put a sheet of bacon in the oven, fry up a few eggs with butter, and sit down to a meal. Actually sit down — don’t check emails, do chores, or stand in front of the fridge with the door wide open. And when it comes to intermittent fasting, no one’s going to come knocking on your door and tell you you’re doing it wrong. There’s no fasting police. It doesn’t make you a bad person if you usually fast for 20 hours and now you’re fasting for 12. As a matter of fact, there’s research that proves that fasting for as few as 10 hours has solid benefits.

Finally, if you are working from home, make sure your setup isn’t at the kitchen table. I know a lot of people have limited space, but having a designated place to work that doesn’t involve you smelling your family members’ lunches or putting you at arm’s reach from the fridge will serve you well.

I’ve been following Mark’s Daily Apple for 6 months, but I still have 30 pounds to lose. What’s the best workout for someone on a Primal diet? -Gerald

I love that you have a specific goal, Gerald. Determining your end point is so important for long-term success. It could be losing 30 pounds like you mentioned, or improving the way your joints feel, or being able to chase your kids around the yard without stopping to catch your breath.

Honestly, there are tons of workouts out there. Free ones too. In fact, I just Googled “workout plans for Primal diet” and came up with this, this, and this  in about 1.5 seconds. But it’s not just about picking a plan and following it. If it were that easy, everyone would do it.

Identify your Obstacles and Make a Plan to Get Past Them

Wellness is a journey. One that requires navigating obstacles and determining the path of least resistance. So, before you dive into your first set of squats, take some time to think about what barriers might stand in your way. Do you have the right exercise equipment at home to complete your workouts? Do you have the support of your family? Have you carved out time and space to exercise? You need to get real about what your obstacles are, so you can devise a plan to get past them and reach your goal. If you need a hand with this step, online health coaches and personal trainers can be a great resource.

A plan is just a plan. It’s two-dimensional. And things always come up. That’s why it’s crucial to have a strategy for all the ups, downs, and unexpected in-betweens that come with your individual journey.

I’m tired of eating eggs for breakfast every day. Got recommendations for changing things up? – Jeanine

You were probably in a nutrition rut before you started the eggs-for-breakfast routine. Let me guess: a light yogurt and banana before work, sandwich for lunch, instant oatmeal packets, cans of soup, take out… Somehow you got yourself out of that rut and into another one.

Listen, everyone likes the things they’re familiar with, and most people don’t like change. It’s a human truth. You were familiar with eggs. You liked them. You started making them every day. And now you’re completely sick of them. Totally understandable.

Step Out of Your Comfort Zone

I’m in the business of getting people out of their comfort zones, but I don’t do meal plans or recipes, simply because they’re too fussy. If I say, “how about venison patties and chopped up veggies” and you don’t happen to like those, what good does it do?” As a health coach, I supply my clients with a comprehensive list of supportive foods they should be eating. I provide the education, but I expect them to go out into the world and figure out what that looks like for them, so they don’t need me to tell them specifically what to eat at every meal.

Like I’m sure you are, I’m a big fan of protein-rich breakfasts since they’re known to keep you feeling satiated throughout the day. Remember that breakfast doesn’t have to look like a typical breakfast though. There are lots of great protein sources out there — everything from bone broth, beef, and bison to salmon, sardines, and sausage, just to name a few.

The post Ask a Health Coach: Why Willpower Doesn’t Work, Primal-Inspired Workouts, and What to Eat for Breakfast appeared first on Mark's Daily Apple.

6 Signs of an Unhealthy Gut, 7 Likely Causes & the Best Foods for Gut Health

When the ancient Greek father of medicine, Hippocrates, said “All disease begins in the gut,” he was probably right. Poor gut health has been linked to a broad range of diseases and health conditions, from depression to diabetes, cancer to obesity, and autism to autoimmune disease. Search the medical literature and you’ll probably find links between the gut and any illness you can imagine.

So—all the world’s health issues solved, right? Not exactly.

Gut health is one of those topics that gets more complicated the deeper you go. The more you read about gut bacteria, the less you realize you know and the less you realize anyone knows, even the researchers. It’s infinite onions, all the way down. The layers never stop, and exposing them eventually makes you want to cry. (Speaking of which, onions are actually a very good food for gut health).

All that said, the scientific community is honing in on the signs and symptoms of an unhealthy gut. We know how to heal an unhealthy gut, or at least improve gut health. An incredible amount of research has determined the best foods for gut health, and we know the worst foods for gut health. We understand that gut health comes down to supporting healthy gut bacteria and avoiding leaky gut. Top-down micromanagement might not work yet, but big-picture, bottom-up intervention does.

Gut Inflammation: Signs of an Unhealthy Gut

Some of the signs are obvious. Others are more pernicious. Not all of these will apply to someone with unhealthy gut bacteria or leaky gut, but some will.

Chronic Constipation, Bloating, and/or Diarrhea

Everyone gets a little constipated now and then. We’ve all had the runs, and we’ve all felt bloated after a particularly large meal. As long as these conditions are acute—as long as they’re brief and transient—they don’t indicate any serious gut inflammation. It’s when constipation or diarrhea or bloating endure and become chronic conditions that you should pay close attention. Chronic constipation, bloating, and diarrhea are signs of an unhealthy gut biome.

Obesity or Overweight

Although the connection hasn’t been established as causal, there is a consistent and significant association between obesity/overweight and poor gut health. If you are obese, you very likely have room to improve the health and function of your gut.

Food Intolerances and Allergies

If the integrity of your gut is compromised due to excessive gut inflammation or missing gut bacteria, undigested components of the foods we eat can slip past the intestinal barrier and into our bodies where they trigger an allergic reaction. This appears to be a necessary step in the development of a food allergy, and a 2011 review concluded that an overly leaky gut facilitates this transportation and leads to the inducement of allergy.

Depression and Anxiety

Researchers have long puzzled over observations that mental health conditions like depression and anxiety often present with common gastrointestinal complaints like constipation and diarrhea. It’s not just circumstantial: gut bacteria produce large amounts of neurotransmitters like serotonin, interact with neural pathways involved in anxiety and depression, and help form the gut-brain axis.

Animal studies show that replacing the gut bacteria of anxious mice with gut bacteria from fearless mice makes the anxious mice more brave, while giving bold mice bacteria from anxious mice makes them more anxious. In human subjects, a probiotic supplement (containing L. helveticus R0052 and Bifidobacterium longum R0175) reduces measures of anxiety and depression, and by some accounts, 35% of depressed patients have leaky gut.

Skin Problems (Eczema, Psoriasis)

In the last section, I told you about the gut-brain axis. There’s also a gut-skin axis: a constant interplay between the health of your gut and the health of your skin. People who have eczema are also likely to have leaky gut, while psoriasis patients show clear signs of unbalanced gut bacteria.

Autoimmune Disease

One of the world’s premier autoimmune disease researchers, Dr. Alessio Fasano, considers poor gut health a necessary pre-condition for all autoimmune diseases. It’s a similar situation to the allergy/intolerance issue: a leaky, inflamed gut allows outside proteins and other food components into the body, the immune system mounts an immune response to deal with the invaders, and this response gets out of hand and redirected toward the body’s own tissues.

Okay, so how does it all happen? Apart from food, which I’ll get to later on…

What Causes an Unhealthy Gut?

There are many potential causes of poor gut health.

Stress

Stress can directly induce leaky gut (PDF) and stress can take many forms, as we all know. Bad finances, marital strife, unemployment, too much exercise, lack of sleep, extended combat training, and chronic under-eating all qualify as significant stressors with the potential to cause leaky gut, especially chronically and in concert with one another.

Poor Sleep

Sleep is restorative, and restorative sleep means you’re lowering stress and improving gut health. If your circadian rhythm starts to shift, starts getting a little dysfunctional, your gut health soon follows.

Inadequate Dirt Exposure

Too sterile an environment causes too sterile a gut. We are made to spend time in nature, feet and hands getting dirty, exposed directly to the natural soil teeming with trillions of bacteria. We’re meant to eat produce directly from the ground, and nature didn’t intend for us to always wash it. (That said, if you didn’t grow it yourself, it’s best to wash your produce.) Exposure to healthy soil may even bestow upon us anti-anxiety gut bacteria—gut microbes that actually make us less anxious.

Not Enough Exercise (or Too Much)

Exercise has been shown to directly improve gut function, increasing the production of beneficial short cain fatty acids by gut bacteria. When you stop training, the gut benefits cease.

Just don’t do too much. An acute bout of intense training causes a transient rise in leaky gut that subsides and even improves several hours after the session. This is fine. This is normal. This is adaptive. But if you start stringing together intense training sessions without adequate rest, the exercise becomes a chronic stressor and the transient rise in leaky gut starts looking more permanent.

Too Many Antibiotics

Antibiotics are great at killing pathogenic bacteria attacking you, but they also tend to be indiscriminate. They do not distinguish between friendly bactieria and harmful bacteria in your gut biome. The broad spectrum antibiotics we commonly take also wipe out the bacteria living in our guts, leading to gut bacteria imbalances and poor gut function.

After addressing the major causes of poor gut health, is there anything you should avoid eating? Are there foods you should focus on eating to improve your gut health?

What Are the Worst Foods for Gut Health?

The worst foods for gut health are no surprise to regular readers of this site, but that doesn’t make them any less important to avoid.

Refined Carbohydrates

When we eat refined carbs like grains or sugar, glucose is immediately released into the digestive tract, increasing the concentration of carbohydrate available to your gut biome. This concentrated influx of dense carbohydrate into the gut produces an inflammatory microbial population that increases production of bacterial endotoxin and increases leaky gut. Meanwhile, the lack of prebiotic fiber means your beneficial gut bacteria have no food to consume.

Gluten

Gluten, a protein found in wheat, barley, and rye, causes your body to release zonulin—a chemical messenger that tells your intestinal junctions to open up. Many people can handle this increase in zonulin, but if you’re already suffering from poor gut health or are sensitive to gluten, the zonulin response may be strong enough to trigger leaky gut.

What Are the Best Foods for Gut Health?

Fermentable fiber
Chocolate
Berries
Red wine
Skin, bones, and broth
Fermented foods
Resistant starch
Meat
Pistachios
Onions, garlic, and leeks

Fermentable fiber

Without food, your gut bacteria suffers. And the best food for your gut bacteria is fermentable fiber, found in many different plants. Asparagus, carrots, Jerusalem artichokes, and alliums like garlic and onions are your best bet.

Chocolate

Besides being delicious, high-cacao dark chocolate is an excellent source of prebiotic fiber (fiber your gut bacteria can consume) and prebiotic polyphenols (plant compounds that also feed your gut bacteria).

Berries

Name a berry and it’s been shown to improve gut health. Strawberries feed the gut biome and improve the gut function of diabetic mice. Blackberries restore gut health and trigger neuroprotective effects. Eating blueberries leads to compositional changes to the gut bacteria linked to improved metabolic health. And black raspberries have been shown to cause “anti-inflammatory” bacterial profiles in the gut.

Red wine

Although too much alcohol can have a detrimental effect on gut health, moderate amounts of red wine polyphenols may have prebiotic effects on the gut bacteria.

Skin, bones, and broth

Skin, bones, and broth offer gut health benefits in a number of ways. First, they provide “animal fiber,” collagenous and gristly substrate that our gut bacteria can digest and prosper on. Next, they offer ample amounts of gelatin, which can help repair damaged gut lining. In a pinch, collagen can fill the gap.

Fermented foods

This is an obvious one, but it’s incredibly important and more complex than you probably think. First of all, fermented foods like yogurt, sauerkraut, pickles, kefir, and dozens of other varieties seed our guts directly with beneficial probiotic bacteria. That has real benefits—though they don’t “form colonies” and you do have to continually eat fermented foods for the full benefit. Some fermented foods also have the ability to “train” your resident bacteria to digest new compounds. One example is fermented milk: in one study it didn’t colonize the gut but led to increased microbial expression of carbohydrate metabolizing enzymes in the existing bacteria.

Resistant starch

Resistant starch isn’t like other starches. Our stomach acid and digestive enzymes cannot break it down, but our gut bacteria can digest it. Multiple studies indicate that resistant starch consumption generally leads to an increase in “beneficial” colonic bacteria and a reduction in “pathogenic” colonic bacteria, including a boost to bifidobacteria and a decrease in firmicutes and a huge boost to butyrate production. The best sources of resistant starch are green (unripe) bananas and raw potato starch.

Meat

Meat usually doesn’t pop up on these lists, but that’s a huge mistake. Red meat especially provides ample B-vitamins required for energy generation and general physiological maintenance, including gut function. It’s a nutrient-dense “safe” food for even damaged guts who need to be careful about the plant foods they eat. And if you’re eating a significant amount of meat, you’ll have less room to eat the refined carbs and refined sugar that really cause gut issues.

Pistachios

Pistachios are the most potent nut for improving gut health. Other nuts like almonds are good too, but pistachios produce  a biome richer in butyrate-secreting bacteria which is extremely beneficial to several body systems.

Onions, garlic, and leeks

Onions, garlic, leeks, and other members of the allium family offer concentrated doses of fructo-oligosaccharides, some of the best-studied and most beneficial fermentable prebiotic fibers in the plant kingdom. Plus, they’re delicious, and humans have been eating them for thousands of years (if not longer).

Some people will react poorly to some of the foods listed in the “Best” section. If your gut health is compromised and your gut bacteria dysfunctional, you may very well have trouble consuming fermentable fiber, resistant starch, berries, and other fibrous foods without bloating, gas, stomach pain, constipation, and diarrhea. Please read my article on FODMAPs to understand how to work around this issue and maintain your gut health.

Thanks for reading, everyone. If you have any questions about gut health or the info contained in this post, let me know down below!

 

References

Bell DS. Changes seen in gut bacteria content and distribution with obesity: causation or association?. Postgrad Med. 2015;127(8):863-8.
Tordesillas L, Gómez-casado C, Garrido-arandia M, et al. Transport of Pru p 3 across gastrointestinal epithelium – an essential step towards the induction of food allergy?. Clin Exp Allergy. 2013;43(12):1374-83.
Perrier C, Corthésy B. Gut permeability and food allergies. Clin Exp Allergy. 2011;41(1):20-8.
Foster JA, Mcvey neufeld KA. Gut-brain axis: how the microbiome influences anxiety and depression. Trends Neurosci. 2013;36(5):305-12.
Hidalgo-cantabrana C, Gómez J, Delgado S, et al. Gut microbiota dysbiosis in a cohort of patients with psoriasis. Br J Dermatol. 2019;181(6):1287-1295.
Allen JM, Mailing LJ, Niemiro GM, et al. Exercise Alters Gut Microbiota Composition and Function in Lean and Obese Humans. Med Sci Sports Exerc. 2018;50(4):747-757.
Petersen C, Wankhade UD, Bharat D, et al. Dietary supplementation with strawberry induces marked changes in the composition and functional potential of the gut microbiome in diabetic mice. J Nutr Biochem. 2019;66:63-69.
Marques C, Fernandes I, Meireles M, et al. Gut microbiota modulation accounts for the neuroprotective properties of anthocyanins. Sci Rep. 2018;8(1):11341.
Lee S, Keirsey KI, Kirkland R, Grunewald ZI, Fischer JG, De la serre CB. Blueberry Supplementation Influences the Gut Microbiota, Inflammation, and Insulin Resistance in High-Fat-Diet-Fed Rats. J Nutr. 2018;148(2):209-219.
Pan P, Lam V, Salzman N, et al. Black Raspberries and Their Anthocyanin and Fiber Fractions Alter the Composition and Diversity of Gut Microbiota in F-344 Rats. Nutr Cancer. 2017;69(6):943-951.
Mcnulty NP, Yatsunenko T, Hsiao A, et al. The impact of a consortium of fermented milk strains on the gut microbiome of gnotobiotic mice and monozygotic twins. Sci Transl Med. 2011;3(106):106ra106.
Haenen D, Zhang J, Souza da silva C, et al. A diet high in resistant starch modulates microbiota composition, SCFA concentrations, and gene expression in pig intestine. J Nutr. 2013;143(3):274-83.
Martínez I, Kim J, Duffy PR, Schlegel VL, Walter J. Resistant starches types 2 and 4 have differential effects on the composition of the fecal microbiota in human subjects. PLoS ONE. 2010;5(11):e15046.
Liu Z, Lin X, Huang G, Zhang W, Rao P, Ni L. Prebiotic effects of almonds and almond skins on intestinal microbiota in healthy adult humans. Anaerobe. 2014;26:1-6.
Ukhanova M, Wang X, Baer DJ, Novotny JA, Fredborg M, Mai V. Effects of almond and pistachio consumption on gut microbiota composition in a randomised cross-over human feeding study. Br J Nutr. 2014;111(12):2146-52.
Gibson GR. Dietary modulation of the human gut microflora using prebiotics. Br J Nutr. 1998;80(4):S209-12.

 

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When Is The Best Time to Eat Carbs?

Beyond the great debate about how many carbs we should be eating, there is another question you might be wondering about: When is the best time of day to eat carbs?

Today we’re going to dig into the data and see if we can get some answers. Before we do, though, I want to make something clear. The types and amounts of food you are eating are much more important than nutrient timing when it comes to health, body composition, and even athletic performance.

Before worrying about nutrient timing, you should:

Eliminate the “big three”—grains, excess sugars, and offensive vegetable and seed oils
Consume an appropriate amount of food for your goals and activity level—neither too much nor too little
Ensure that you are getting enough micronutrients via diverse, nutrient-dense foods, plus supplementation when necessary

I’d also say that macronutrients—the relative amounts of carbs, protein, and fat you’re eating—comes before nutrient timing in the hierarchy of “likely to matter.” A Keto Reset is probably going to impact your health and body composition more than changing the timing of your carb intake.

Still, I know many of you are self-experimenters and optimizers. You like to explore ways to squeeze a little more “edge” out of your diet and lifestyle. For some of you, nutrient timing might be the key to resolving a nagging issue that hasn’t been fixed by diet and lifestyle changes. If this is something you’re curious about, read on.

The Best Time to Eat Carbs: Why Would Carb Timing Matter?

The growing field of “chrononutrition” investigates how food timing affects overall health. I’m sure you know that many bodily systems operate according to biological clocks. Sleep, immune system activity, and body temperature are all governed by circadian (~24-hour) clocks, for example. Disruption to our normal biological clocks negatively impacts health.

Metabolism operates according to circadian rhythms, too. On a basic level, we are meant to sleep when it’s dark, move and eat when it’s light. Insulin sensitivity and beta cell activity (the cells in the pancreas that produce insulin) are highest in the morning. Research shows that glucose tolerance—the body’s ability to clear glucose from the bloodstream after a meal—goes down if your sleep is poor or under conditions of circadian misalignment. There also seems to be a link between eating later at night, weight gain, impaired fat oxidation, and other negative health outcomes.

Taken together, this has led some researchers to suggest that we should eat most of our food earlier in the day to entrain, or align, our circadian rhythms. Doing so, they argue, could improve glycemic control (glucose regulation) and insulin sensitivity. It might also regulate appetite hormones and cortisol, and have downstream effects on body composition.

Carb Timing for Glycemic Control and Insulin Sensitivity

A number of studies seem to suggest that eating later is associated with impaired glucose tolerance and/or insulin sensitivity. On the other hand, both may be improved with early time restricted feeding (eTRF). This is where you eat in a compressed window, say 8 or 10 hours, and that window is shifted toward the morning. A typical eTRF schedule might entail eating all one’s food between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m.

Most of these studies focus on food timing generally, not nutrient timing per se. For example, in this study, men with type 2 diabetes ate all their calories in a 9-hour window. In one phase, they ate from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. (eTRF). In the other, they ate from 12 p.m. to 9 p.m. Both schedules improved glucose tolerance, but only eTRF decreased fasting glucose.

A handful of studies do specifically look at carb timing:

Healthy volunteers kept three-day food diaries. Those who ate relatively more of their food, and more carbs specifically, in the morning were also more insulin sensitive than late eaters. (Eating more fat in the evening was also correlated with poorer insulin sensitivity. It’s not clear how much these effects were driven by total caloric intake.)
In another interesting study, researchers assigned men to eat two different diets for four weeks. They either ate most of their carbs before 1:30 p.m. and most of their fat after, or vice versa, in a cross-over design. For men who started out normal glucose control, carb timing didn’t matter. However, among men with high fasting glucose or impaired glucose tolerance, eating carbs at night led to unfavorable changes on several makers of glucose tolerance.
In contrast, in this study, men followed a hypocaloric diet for eight weeks. Participants who were assigned to eat most of their carbs at lunch instead of dinner ended up with higher fasting glucose and insulin, and poorer insulin resistance.

Does type of carb matter?

Maybe. Researchers compared low-GI (glycemic index) and high-GI meals with most of the calories loaded into either the morning or the evening. Participants had the highest postprandial glucose (glucose after a meal) and insulin in the high-GI + evening eating condition. It didn’t matter when participants ate low-GI carbs. (Participants also consumed 302 grams of carbohydrate per day. Diets consisted of bran cereal, low-fat fruit yogurt, “fruit loaf,” and a Mars bar, among other things. It’s not clear exactly how these findings apply to Primal eaters.)

Conclusion: More research is needed in this area, but the available evidence points to morning carb consumption being favorable for glycemic control, perhaps especially among people who already struggle in this area.

Carb timing for athletes

As you know, I’m a big fan of athletes using fat for fuel. It’s an efficient, cleaner burning, more abundant source of energy. Once you become fat-adapted, it’s amazing what you can do as a fat-burner. As I detail in Primal Endurance, low-carb and keto diets work tremendously well for endurance athletes and even for hard-core strength athletes.

That said, there is no denying the ergogenic effect of carbs – carbs’ effect on stamina, physical performance and recovery. When you’re fat-adapted and running mainly on fat (and maybe ketones), adding some carbs to the mix can be like rocket fuel. I’m a fan of the “train low, race high” strategy for endurance athletes. Conduct most of your training using a low-carb approach, but add carbs strategically for your highest-intensity training sessions and races. You don’t need a lot, maybe 60-100 grams per hour.

Targeted Carbs: Should You Eat Carbs Before a Workout?

One strategy I’ve talked about before is targeting your carb intake around workouts. There are two rationales here. One is the aforementioned ergogenic effect — giving your workouts a boost. The second is that when you exercise, a glucose transporter in muscle cells called GLUT4 moves to the surface of the cell. This facilitates the transport of glucose into the cells without insulin.

Intense exercise also depletes glycogen, so there is a window after exercise in which ingested carbs are more likely to go to replenish glycogen. This is what I mean when I talk about the “glycogen suitcases being open” after exercise.

Thus, it makes sense to time your carb intake around exercise, especially hard and/or long bouts. In the keto world, this strategy is called “targeted keto.” The same principle applies for low-carb-but-not-keto folks. It’s not because you need the carbs for workouts—most of us do just fine without any special carb loading—but that’s when the body is most ready to use or store them.

Does Eating Carbs in the Evening Help You Build Muscle?

In the world of muscle gains, there are a handful of approaches that involve backloading carbs into the evening following a workout. Bill Lagakos does an excellent job unpacking them in a two part blog series here and here. Briefly, the logic behind carb backloading is that you don’t want to eat carbs when you’re more insulin sensitive in the morning because they’ll get stored as fat (oversimplifying here). Instead, wait until later in the day when insulin sensitivity decreases, then use exercise to push carbs into muscle instead of fat.

There’s no real evidence that this works, beyond anecdotal evidence from people who enjoy eating carbs at night. If you have body fat to lose, I think the evidence favors shifting calories and carbs toward the morning.

For the average person looking to gain strength and functional fitness, carb timing is not a great concern. For fitness competitors or people trying to push their physical limits, it might start to matter.

If you’re looking to gain lean muscle, you might find that ingesting a small amount of carbohydrate—25 to 30 grams—before hitting the gym can be beneficial. Contrary to popular belief, however, post-workout carbs do not seem to enhance muscle synthesis or recovery to a meaningful degree, especially not when protein needs are covered.

Bottom line: Carb timing isn’t important for muscle building except maybe for elite competitors and high-performers.

Timing Carbs for Weight Loss: What Does the Science Say?

In recent years, some people have claimed that eating carbs at night actually supports weight loss. In fact, this is one of the rationales offered for the aforementioned carb backloading. However, the studies they typically cite as evidence for this assertion have methodological problems that I can’t overlook.

Those studies are also at odds with a larger number of studies linking weight loss to eating more of your calories earlier in the day. Mechanistically, eating late delays the onset of the overnight fast, interfering with fat-burning and potentially with switching on ketosis. Eating later can also be associated with eating more, period.

Unfortunately for the purposes of this post, studies that look at meal timing and weight loss don’t examine nutrient timing, with one exception. In this study, researchers compared two diets, one prioritizing carbs at lunch and protein at dinner, and the other vice versa. Participants lost equal amounts of fat on each, but the group who ate most of their carbs at dinner also lost more lean tissue—not what you want! (This was also the study that showed poorer glycemic control with lunchtime carbs, in contrast to most other studies.)

Bottom line: When it comes to weight loss, there’s not enough data to convince me that carb timing seems very important.

Carbs Before Bed and Sleep Quality

Theoretically, carb intake at night could positively affect sleep by increasing tryptophan production, which is a precursor of serotonin, which in turn promotes sleep. It makes sense. No empirical research directly supports this hypothesis, though. Still, experts recommend you try adding some carbs at night if you’re struggling with sleep, especially on a low-carb diet.

There are plenty of studies looking at the relationship between macronutrients and sleep. However, they look at dietary composition as a whole, not nutrient timing. A single small study found that eating a high-GI meal four hours before bed improved sleep onset, compared to a lower-GI meal, and also compared to eating that same high-GI meal eaten one hour before bed. That’s all we have data-wise, besides anecdotes.

Conclusion: Anecdotal evidence aside, there’s no proof that timing carbs at night help your sleep. It probably doesn’t hurt to try.

So Where Does This Leave Us?

Well first, it leaves us asking for more studies that systematically investigate carb timing. I specifically want to see more studies looking at carb timing in a low-carb population. As usual, the studies I cited here involved a standard high-carb paradigm. If you read the reports and see what researchers are feeding their participants… well, let’s just say you Primal folks wouldn’t volunteer for these studies.

This always leaves me wondering how well any of these findings apply to us fat-adapted folks. We can’t know for sure.

Let’s summarize the findings we have, though. First, for entraining your circadian rhythm, improving glycemic control, and losing weight, the available data altogether point to the benefits of eating more of your carbs earlier in the day.

You might wonder how this fits with intermittent fasting. First of all, I.F., doesn’t have to mean skipping breakfast. Many people skip breakfast largely out of convenience. If it works for you, great. Nothing I’ve said suggests that it’s bad for you. That said, if you’re still struggling with glucose tolerance, or you have a few stubborn pounds of body fat you’d like to lose, loading more of your calories and carbs earlier in the day seems to be a worthwhile experiment, as I’ve said before.

It makes sense to target carbs around exercise, but it’s generally not necessary for athletic performance. Most weekend warriors can get by just fine without any special carb timing strategy. People looking to gain muscle may want to ingest a small amount of pre-workout carbs, and endurance athletes should be open to using carbs around heavy training and races. I still think becoming fat-adapted should be every athlete’s first priority.

Finally, maybe experiment with some extra nighttime carbs if you’re a low-carb eater whose sleep is suffering.

But Don’t Sweat It

Nothing I’ve seen suggests that carb timing is more important than the amount and quality of food you eat. Once you dial in those higher-priority goals, by all means go ahead and try being more intentional about your carb timing if you want.

It might make a difference if you’re at the top of your performance game looking to squeeze out a few more drops, or if you have lingering health issues. Otherwise, I’d consider it just another variable you can experiment with if you want, but don’t sweat it if you have bigger things to worry about.

 

More related posts from Mark’s Daily Apple

Dear Mark: Glycogen

Should You Sleep-Low to Boost Performance?

Additional references

Challet, E. (2019). The circadian regulation of food intake. Nature Reviews Endocrinology, 15(7), 393–405.

Oda, H. (2015). Chrononutrition. Journal of Nutritional Science and Vitaminology, 61 Suppl, S92-94.

Oike, H., Oishi, K., & Kobori, M. (2014). Nutrients, Clock Genes, and Chrononutrition. Current Nutrition Reports, 3(3), 204–212.

Qian, J., Dalla Man, C., Morris, C. J., Cobelli, C., & Scheer, F. A. J. L. (2018). Differential effects of the circadian system and circadian misalignment on insulin sensitivity and insulin secretion in humans. Diabetes, Obesity and Metabolism, 20(10), 2481–2485.

Wefers, J., van Moorsel, D., Hansen, J., Connell, N. J., Havekes, B., Hoeks, J., van Marken Lichtenbelt, W. D., Duez, H., Phielix, E., Kalsbeek, A., Boekschoten, M. V., Hooiveld, G. J., Hesselink, M. K. C., Kersten, S., Staels, B., Scheer, F. A. J. L., & Schrauwen, P. (2018). Circadian misalignment induces fatty acid metabolism gene profiles and compromises insulin sensitivity in human skeletal muscle. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 115(30), 7789–7794.

Zilberter, T., & Zilberter, E. Y. (2014). Breakfast: To Skip or Not to Skip? Frontiers in Public Health, 2. Retrieved from https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2014.00059/full.

The post When Is The Best Time to Eat Carbs? appeared first on Mark's Daily Apple.

How to Improve Running Form: Introductory And Advanced Running Drills (With Video)

The idea that technique is essential for the simple act of running is finally starting to catch on. By maintaining a balanced center of gravity and maintaining a strong foot, you generate maximum propulsive force and minimize impact trauma with each stride. This allows you to transform from a rookie sloppy jogger to someone who looks and feels like an athlete. In this article, we dive into why we pay attention to running technique, with videos on how to improve running form with a few simple drills.

Runners and joggers of all ability levels jumped into the conversion around a post I wrote about proper running technique. I noticed quite a few comments and questions on the video along these lines:

Is trying to run like a deer — springing along with active feet — necessary and appropriate for a jogger?
Are these technique tips just the domain of sprinters?
Will I get “tired” trying to maintain the correct form as described for an entire marathon? Or should I just shuffle along to save energy?

Here is the deal. Executing proper technique is critical at all speeds and durations, for a two main reasons. First, you minimize impact trauma and obtain the best return on investment for whatever energy you muster to make forward progress. This applies whether you are running a marathon in two hours (like the superhuman Eulid Kipchoge), or four hours, or jog/walk for six hours.

Second, if you activate strong feet, you maximize the spring-like potential of the Achilles tendon, making that 26.2 mile journey much less arduous and far more enjoyable. Same for a 100-mile journey! Watch how Zach Bitter’s feet remain active and snappy for nearly 12 hours at his American record track run. Granted, the visual is completely different depending on how much impact force you generate with each stride.

Another example is Usain Bolt, who was discovered to generate over 1,000 pounds at impact, while a casual jogger might impact the ground at forces of only 1.5-3x bodyweight. The jogger’s stride pattern will be a scaled down version of Bolt’s powerful stride down the track lane, where he covered nine feet, eight inches (2.95 meters) per stride!

We have a natural inclination to try and advance the body forward while running. However, correct technique entails applying force directly into the ground upon each stride, allowing the spring-like effect of a proper landing to propel us forward naturally. This is akin to the high jumper’s challenge: instead of following the natural inclination to try and jump right over the bar and into the pit, correct technique entails jumping straight up into the air and allowing the angular momentum from the curved approach to catapult the jumper up and over the bar. That’s how you jump two feet over your own head like the legendary Stefan Holm.

How to Improve Running Form: 3 Steps to Untraining Bad Habits and Retraining Proper Form

Christopher Smith is the greatest Speedgolfer of all-time, renowned PGA teaching professional, and an expert in advanced motor learning methods for athletic performance. He asserts that the following three elements give you the best chance of unwinding, modifying, and improving dysfunctional habit patterns and ingraining new ones:

Slow Down: Execute the desired technique corrections at a slower speed and/or less load than normal. Your mind/body system will be better able to feel the modifications at a lesser speed, creating your own personal internal model.
Eliminate pressure, anxiety, and stress (and the accompanying expectations), so you can practice new motions without fear of failure.
Cognitive engagement and brain assimilation: This is where drills are so valuable. Drills help hard-wire good technique into your central nervous system. The technical term for this is “myelinate”—encasing your nerve endings in a protective coating so they become adept at firing in the correct pattern repeatedly. Sloppy, repetitive training of old habits will simply reinforce the old habits.

Improved Running Form is Yours to Keep

What’s difficult for many runners is to reprogram the neural patterns that you are familiar with for something new. Retraining new movements feels awkward and unnatural at first, until your body realizes that the new way is much more safe and efficient.

For these reasons, I emphasized the point on the video that there is no turning back once you learn good technique. Even when you are innocently jogging for warm up, you need to maintain that strong foot so your brain will remember when it’s time to speed up. So when you are out there running, turn down the earbuds and concentrate on new movement patterns until they become automatic.

Perform drills as often as possible—at least a few of them every time you run. The following drills require you to exaggerate various elements of good technique so that they flow beautifully when you put everything together and start running. These are very challenging moves that our master filmmaker Brian McAndrew and I have segmented into an “Intermediate” video and “Advanced” video. That’s right, there are no easy drills! These running drills are especially valuable if you’re a beginner – you’ll train proper form from the get-go, before you’ve taken on habits that don’t do you any favors.

Focus on Quality Over Quantity for Effective Running Drills

It’s of paramount importance that you execute the drills perfectly from start to finish. If you experience even the slightest bit of fatigue causing your form to waver, stop the drill, jog it out and end the workout. For example, notice on the advanced video’s bicycle drill how I land straight up and down every time, balanced over my center of gravity just like when running. Hey man, that’s the beauty of having multiple takes on the set! In real life, it’s easy to over or under rotate on the bicycle move such that you land with your spine angled backward, behind your center of gravity (too early) or with spine angled forward, in front of your center of gravity (too late)—particularly when you get tired or distracted (e.g., while jabbering into the lavalier mic to make a video.) When this happens, you will feel a jarring sensation in your legs or spine that is not pleasant and potentially injurious.

Please enjoy each video a couple times at home to really study the impact positions and technique tips before you go out and attempt them. I’ve added a few more helpful comments for each drill as follows:

Running Form Drills – Intermediate Drills To Improve Technique and Protect Against Injury

Hopping
High heel, high toe
High knees

Hopping

This is the bread and butter of the running drill world! It’s not that strenuous and very scalable as you get fitter. Once you get some experience, you can try to get those extra few inches of knee height and work those hip flexors; this is a muscle group that gets so terribly compromised when you sit at a desk for hours. When I’m feeling my best, I’ll try to hold the high knee position for an extra beat to enhance the degree of difficulty.

High Heel, High Toe (aka Buttkickers)

Don’t worry about forward progress, just focus on getting the heels up to your butt. You can easily do this drill in place at your cubicle. Did you know that one of the greatest human running machines of all time, Walter George, did a bunch of his training running in place while working at a print shop? This old-time legend destroyed the world record in the mile in 1886 with a stunning 4:12, in a match race that was witnessed by 30,000 screaming fans betting heavily on the outcome. This time held as the world standard for an astonishing 30 years.

High Knees

Stand tall throughout and notice the huge penalty when your bodyweight collapses even a smidge into the ground, instead of preserving the spring potential of the Achilles.

Advanced Running Form Drills – Advanced Drills To Improve Technique and Protect Against Injury

One-legged sprint
Bicycle
Hamstring kickouts
Backwards sprinting

One-legged Sprint

Keep that dead leg ramrod-straight and try to get the toe to gently brush along the ground. It’s easy to lose focus and have the dead leg start to participate unwittingly with a little knee bend, then a little more knee bend. The drill really does wonders when the leg is completely straight.

Bicycle

Start gently with miniature pedal revolutions until you get the hang of it. Go ahead and skip a few potential takeoffs to make sure that every single takeoff is executed perfectly and landed perfectly. Oh boy, is it fun when you can get into the rhythm of taking off on opposite legs with no break. A stint of these is as tough as blasting a real live 10-20 second sprint.

Hamstring Kickouts

Here’s another drill that is really scalable. You can start without even leaving the ground and executing the motion while walking as demonstrated. Your hamstrings are often the last muscle group to become really resilient and adapted to sprinting. Okay, the calves get a vote, too (That’s why you’ve got to watch the calf stretch/heal plantar fasciitis video).

As with the hip flexors, your hamstrings get traumatized by sitting in a chair all day. When asked to become a prominent source of power for the running human weekend warrior, it’s no wonder the hammy strains and tears are one of the most common athletic injuries. I enthusiastically recommend doing a few kickouts at the end of every single workout you conduct to keep them strong and flexible! I also do them at airport gates and rental car check-in counters to keep the hammies happy.

Backwards Sprinting

Who knew that putting the engine in reverse could be the single best trigger for optimal sprinting technique? Just shift back into drive and carry on with the same technique attributes in place: high knee, high heel, and dorsiflexed foot.

We talk so much about the importance of sprinting in the Primal Blueprint, and these drills can stand alone as an effective sprint workout before you even unleash your first proper sprint. Truth be told, I required several days of recovery after filming because we were out there for quite a bit longer than my average sprint session. All in tireless devotion to bring you some awesome drills that will spice up your sprint workouts, improve your technique, and help you become more resilient against injury.

You can pick and choose your favorite drills and intersperse them into workouts frequently, or go through the complete cycle once in a while for an excellent high intensity workout. You can even choose a few to work on for a few minutes here and there as microworkouts.

Enjoy these drills and make up some new ones if you wish! Don’t overdo it at one session to the point of technique breakdown, but do a sampling of them every time you finish a run workout or have a break at the gate before your connecting flight. Thanks for reading, and let me know if you notice changes in your running efficiency.

The post How to Improve Running Form: Introductory And Advanced Running Drills (With Video) appeared first on Mark's Daily Apple.

How to Improve Running Form: Intermediate And Advanced Running Drills (With Video)

The idea that technique is essential for the simple act of running is finally starting to catch on. By maintaining a balanced center of gravity and maintaining a strong foot, you generate maximum propulsive force and minimize impact trauma with each stride. This allows you to transform from a rookie sloppy jogger to someone who looks and feels like an athlete. In this article, we dive into why we pay attention to running technique, with videos on how to improve running form with a few simple drills.

Runners and joggers of all ability levels jumped into the conversion around a post I wrote about proper running technique. I noticed quite a few comments and questions on the video along these lines:

Is trying to run like a deer — springing along with active feet — necessary and appropriate for a jogger?
Are these technique tips just the domain of sprinters?
Will I get “tired” trying to maintain the correct form as described for an entire marathon? Or should I just shuffle along to save energy?

Here is the deal. Executing proper technique is critical at all speeds and durations, for a two main reasons. First, you minimize impact trauma and obtain the best return on investment for whatever energy you muster to make forward progress. This applies whether you are running a marathon in two hours (like the superhuman Eulid Kipchoge), or four hours, or jog/walk for six hours.

Second, if you activate strong feet, you maximize the spring-like potential of the Achilles tendon, making that 26.2 mile journey much less arduous and far more enjoyable. Same for a 100-mile journey! Watch how Zach Bitter’s feet remain active and snappy for nearly 12 hours at his American record track run. Granted, the visual is completely different depending on how much impact force you generate with each stride.

Another example is Usain Bolt, who was discovered to generate over 1,000 pounds at impact, while a casual jogger might impact the ground at forces of only 1.5-3x bodyweight. The jogger’s stride pattern will be a scaled down version of Bolt’s powerful stride down the track lane, where he covered nine feet, eight inches (2.95 meters) per stride!

We have a natural inclination to try and advance the body forward while running. However, correct technique entails applying force directly into the ground upon each stride, allowing the spring-like effect of a proper landing to propel us forward naturally. This is akin to the high jumper’s challenge: instead of following the natural inclination to try and jump right over the bar and into the pit, correct technique entails jumping straight up into the air and allowing the angular momentum from the curved approach to catapult the jumper up and over the bar. That’s how you jump two feet over your own head like the legendary Stefan Holm.

How to Improve Running Form: 3 Steps to Untraining Bad Habits and Retraining Proper Form

Christopher Smith is the greatest Speedgolfer of all-time, renowned PGA teaching professional, and an expert in advanced motor learning methods for athletic performance. He asserts that the following three elements give you the best chance of unwinding, modifying, and improving dysfunctional habit patterns and ingraining new ones:

Slow Down: Execute the desired technique corrections at a slower speed and/or less load than normal. Your mind/body system will be better able to feel the modifications at a lesser speed, creating your own personal internal model.
Eliminate pressure, anxiety, and stress (and the accompanying expectations), so you can practice new motions without fear of failure.
Cognitive engagement and brain assimilation: This is where drills are so valuable. Drills help hard-wire good technique into your central nervous system. The technical term for this is “myelinate”—encasing your nerve endings in a protective coating so they become adept at firing in the correct pattern repeatedly. Sloppy, repetitive training of old habits will simply reinforce the old habits.

Improved Running Form is Yours to Keep

What’s difficult for many runners is to reprogram the neural patterns that you are familiar with for something new. Retraining new movements feels awkward and unnatural at first, until your body realizes that the new way is much more safe and efficient.

For these reasons, I emphasized the point on the video that there is no turning back once you learn good technique. Even when you are innocently jogging for warm up, you need to maintain that strong foot so your brain will remember when it’s time to speed up. So when you are out there running, turn down the earbuds and concentrate on new movement patterns until they become automatic.

Perform drills as often as possible—at least a few of them every time you run. The following drills require you to exaggerate various elements of good technique so that they flow beautifully when you put everything together and start running. These are very challenging moves that our master filmmaker Brian McAndrew and I have segmented into an “Intermediate” video and “Advanced” video. That’s right, there are no easy drills! These running drills are especially valuable if you’re a beginner – you’ll train proper form from the get-go, before you’ve taken on habits that don’t do you any favors.

Focus on Quality Over Quantity for Effective Running Drills

It’s of paramount importance that you execute the drills perfectly from start to finish. If you experience even the slightest bit of fatigue causing your form to waver, stop the drill, jog it out and end the workout. For example, notice on the advanced video’s bicycle drill how I land straight up and down every time, balanced over my center of gravity just like when running. Hey man, that’s the beauty of having multiple takes on the set! In real life, it’s easy to over or under rotate on the bicycle move such that you land with your spine angled backward, behind your center of gravity (too early) or with spine angled forward, in front of your center of gravity (too late)—particularly when you get tired or distracted (e.g., while jabbering into the lavalier mic to make a video.) When this happens, you will feel a jarring sensation in your legs or spine that is not pleasant and potentially injurious.

Please enjoy each video a couple times at home to really study the impact positions and technique tips before you go out and attempt them. I’ve added a few more helpful comments for each drill as follows:

Running Form Drills – Intermediate Drills To Improve Technique and Protect Against Injury

Hopping
High heel, high toe
High knees

Hopping

This is the bread and butter of the running drill world! It’s not that strenuous and very scalable as you get fitter. Once you get some experience, you can try to get those extra few inches of knee height and work those hip flexors; this is a muscle group that gets so terribly compromised when you sit at a desk for hours. When I’m feeling my best, I’ll try to hold the high knee position for an extra beat to enhance the degree of difficulty.

High Heel, High Toe (aka Buttkickers)

Don’t worry about forward progress, just focus on getting the heels up to your butt. You can easily do this drill in place at your cubicle. Did you know that one of the greatest human running machines of all time, Walter George, did a bunch of his training running in place while working at a print shop? This old-time legend destroyed the world record in the mile in 1886 with a stunning 4:12, in a match race that was witnessed by 30,000 screaming fans betting heavily on the outcome. This time held as the world standard for an astonishing 30 years.

High Knees

Stand tall throughout and notice the huge penalty when your bodyweight collapses even a smidge into the ground, instead of preserving the spring potential of the Achilles.

Advanced Running Form Drills – Advanced Drills To Improve Technique and Protect Against Injury

One-legged sprint
Bicycle
Hamstring kickouts
Backwards sprinting

One-legged Sprint

Keep that dead leg ramrod-straight and try to get the toe to gently brush along the ground. It’s easy to lose focus and have the dead leg start to participate unwittingly with a little knee bend, then a little more knee bend. The drill really does wonders when the leg is completely straight.

Bicycle

Start gently with miniature pedal revolutions until you get the hang of it. Go ahead and skip a few potential takeoffs to make sure that every single takeoff is executed perfectly and landed perfectly. Oh boy, is it fun when you can get into the rhythm of taking off on opposite legs with no break. A stint of these is as tough as blasting a real live 10-20 second sprint.

Hamstring Kickouts

Here’s another drill that is really scalable. You can start without even leaving the ground and executing the motion while walking as demonstrated. Your hamstrings are often the last muscle group to become really resilient and adapted to sprinting. Okay, the calves get a vote, too (That’s why you’ve got to watch the calf stretch/heal plantar fasciitis video).

As with the hip flexors, your hamstrings get traumatized by sitting in a chair all day. When asked to become a prominent source of power for the running human weekend warrior, it’s no wonder the hammy strains and tears are one of the most common athletic injuries. I enthusiastically recommend doing a few kickouts at the end of every single workout you conduct to keep them strong and flexible! I also do them at airport gates and rental car check-in counters to keep the hammies happy.

Backwards Sprinting

Who knew that putting the engine in reverse could be the single best trigger for optimal sprinting technique? Just shift back into drive and carry on with the same technique attributes in place: high knee, high heel, and dorsiflexed foot.

We talk so much about the importance of sprinting in the Primal Blueprint, and these drills can stand alone as an effective sprint workout before you even unleash your first proper sprint. Truth be told, I required several days of recovery after filming because we were out there for quite a bit longer than my average sprint session. All in tireless devotion to bring you some awesome drills that will spice up your sprint workouts, improve your technique, and help you become more resilient against injury.

You can pick and choose your favorite drills and intersperse them into workouts frequently, or go through the complete cycle once in a while for an excellent high intensity workout. You can even choose a few to work on for a few minutes here and there as microworkouts.

Enjoy these drills and make up some new ones if you wish! Don’t overdo it at one session to the point of technique breakdown, but do a sampling of them every time you finish a run workout or have a break at the gate before your connecting flight. Thanks for reading, and let me know if you notice changes in your running efficiency.

The post How to Improve Running Form: Intermediate And Advanced Running Drills (With Video) appeared first on Mark's Daily Apple.

Almond Flour Banana Bread Recipe

Most people decide to make banana bread once they find a few overripe bananas on the countertop. After you try this easy almond flour banana bread recipe, we suspect you’ll buy a few more bananas than you can eat — just as an excuse to make a loaf.

There’s a good chance you’ve tried a grain-free banana bread recipe or two and found that it was too dry, too dense, it crumbled to pieces, or it lacked the flavor of the banana bread that you grew up with. The solution? The perfect blend of almond flour, coconut flour, and tapioca starch creates a batter that bakes into a soft loaf, holds together for effortless slicing, and tastes like warm and cozy banana bread from your childhood.

Keep in Mind When Making Banana Bread

Ripe bananas make for perfect banana bread. The riper the banana, the sweeter the bread. For this recipe, we used fairly ripe bananas and found that about 6 tablespoons of coconut sugar were plenty for a sweet bread. If you’re not sure, you can taste the batter prior to adding the eggs to adjust the sweetness to your liking. Feel free to add in cinnamon, or swap out the walnuts for a different nut like pecans.

Almond Flour Banana Bread Recipe

Servings: 10

Time in the kitchen: (45 minutes, including 35 minutes bake time)

Ingredients

1 slightly overfilled cup mashed ripe bananas (about 2 large bananas)
1/4 cup softened/slightly melted salted butter
1/4 cup smooth almond butter
1 tsp. vanilla extract
3/4 cup fine almond flour
1/4 cup + 2 tbsp. coconut sugar, granulated monk fruit sweetener or Swerve
1/4 cup tapioca starch
1 tbsp coconut flour
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp baking powder
3 large eggs
1/2 cup walnut pieces

Directions

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Mash the bananas in a large bowl. Add in the butter, almond butter and vanilla and mash them in with the banana.

Add the almond flour, sweetener, tapioca starch, coconut flour, baking soda and baking powder and mix. Add the eggs and mix until well combined. Fold in about 1/2 of a cup of chopped walnuts.

Line a loaf pan with parchment paper. Loaf pans vary in size but we used a 9”x5”. Pour the batter into the loaf pan and place the remaining walnut pieces on top.

Baking times will vary based on the size of your loaf pan, but aim for 30-35 minutes, or until the bread is golden on top and feels fairly firm to the touch. Allow the bread to cool before slicing.

If you have extra bananas, this almond flour banana bread recipe easily doubles and freezes well by the slice or by the loaf.

Nutrition Information (1/10 of loaf, made with natural sweetener):

Calories: 212

Total Carbs: 12 grams

Net Carbs: 9 grams

Fat: 16 grams

Protein: 6 grams

Nutrition Information (1/10 of loaf, made with coconut sugar):

Calories: 245

Total Carbs: 21 grams

Net Carbs: 18 grams

Fat: 16 grams

Protein: 6 grams

The post Almond Flour Banana Bread Recipe appeared first on Mark's Daily Apple.

Weekly Link Love – Edition 76

Research of the Week

An IL-6 inhibitor shows benefit in slowing down the coronavirus cytokine storm.

Researchers laying the groundwork for a meat tax.

Mice “pre-loaded” with corn oil experience an “extended course of lung injury” after being exposed to endotoxin.

Peter Attia (and colleagues) wonders if we’re missing a readily available treatment option.

How the lockdowns are affecting the earth’s seismic activity.

New Primal Blueprint Podcasts

Episode 416: Debbie Mirza: Host Elle Russ chats with Debbie Mirza, an expert on covert narcissists.

Primal Health Coach Radio, Episode 54: Laura and Erin chat with Darren Cash, who brings an analytical mind to his health coaching.

Primal Health Coach Radio, Episode 55: Laura and Erin chat with Robert Notter, who wants you to understand that your thoughts create your life.

Media, Schmedia

Coronavirus may “reactivate” down the line.

Researchers sifted through sewage to determine that Massachusetts could actually have upwards of 100,000 coronavirus cases.

Interesting Blog Posts

What’s the deal with our dental issues?

What we can learn about metabolic syndrome from the current situation.

Social Notes

How to stay occupied.

Everything Else

The FDA approves direct oxygenation of the blood for coronavirus patients.

A new antibody tests gives results in 10 to 15 minutes.

Olive tree map.

The beginnings of an accent.

The loss of taste and sense of smell are early symptoms of coronavirus.

Things I’m Up to and Interested In

Video I found interesting: Could nitric oxide be used to fight the disease?

Question I found interesting: Could statins worsen coronavirus outcomes?

Stat that makes me wonder: Back in January, Wisconsin serious flu rates were up 3x the previous year.

This would be good to know: A new study examines how early coronavirus got to California.

This is a powerful story I’d never heard: The Calusa, who ruled South Florida for hundreds of years without ever farming—just fishing.

Question I’m Asking

How many of you had or knew someone who had a really bad cold or flu-like illness late last year and early this year?

Recipe Corner

Need some thiamin? Try this spicy pork and asparagus stir fry.
Got an Instant Pot? Make some carrot soup.

Time Capsule

One year ago (Apr 5– Apr 11)

CBD Oil: How Should You Take It? – If you’re going to try it, what’s the best way?
The Best 17 Keto-Vegan-Paleo Recipes– They’re real, and they’re spectacular.

Comment of the Week

“Uncanny valley: I live in an ultra-progressive city with one of the highest rates of vegetarianism in the country. And yet, when the coronavirus panic-buying on groceries began, the meat counters and frozen meat sections were empty, and the Beyond and Morningstar “products” were plentiful. That plant-based diet is really catching on …”

– I’ve noticed the same thing, Margaret.

The post Weekly Link Love – Edition 76 appeared first on Mark's Daily Apple.

What Your Relationship with Food Says About You

Measuring. Counting. Depriving. IIFYM (If It Fits Your Macros). Labeling as good or bad. Cheat day. Diet. Guilt-free. I could go on and on. I’m so over all the ways we inadvertently sabotage ourselves. Maybe you are too. Maybe you’re so sick of being stuck on what you think you should be doing, that you’ve lost sight of what your body actually needs you to do.

It’s not your fault though.

Your beliefs, your background, your moral compass, and your social circles all play a role. In fact, there’s a direct correlation between how you talk about food and your relationship to it. Tell me if any of these statements sound familiar:

“Carbs are evil.”

“I deserve this dessert.”

“I’m too lazy to make breakfast.”

“I’m fasting today to make up for yesterday.”

“I only eat junk food when I’m stressed.”

“I didn’t want to waste it.”

“I was bored.”

“I was bad today.”

In my health coaching practice, I hear things like this all the time. And when I dig deeper, which I always do, these statements are quickly followed a good amount of defending, venting, guilt, shame, fear, and comparing their behaviors to that of others.

When you’re born, you have the innate ability to get your needs met in a healthy way. But somewhere down the line things change. You might have been teased as a kid and used food to self-soothe. Or you were rewarded with a treat for getting good grades. Or you just wanted to fit in, so you followed the low-fat, raw diet, sugar-free, or keto crowd to feel a sense of belonging. At some point you probably developed a belief about food that may or may not be serving you right now.

There’s new research coming out of the UK that expands on what I see with my clients. A study from Aston University is the first to suggest that your relationship with food could be influenced by your online peers. In the study, 369 college students were asked to report their BMI and consumption of fruit, vegetables, calorically-dense snacks, and sugary drinks. In addition, they were asked to estimate how often they thought their Facebook peers consumed them.

Researchers found that participants ate extra portions of food in the fruit and veg category as well as the calorie-dense and sugary-drink category when they thought their social circles were doing the same.

All of that to say, your eating habits and perceptions of certain foods may be influenced by things beyond the conscious mind. That’s why I always start by understanding my clients’ current belief systems and coping strategies so that I can help them create an effortless relationship with food, based on my 5-step action plan below.

Keep in mind that health coaching isn’t the same as therapy, so if you find yourself in a complicated relationship with food, I highly recommend you reach out to someone who specializes in disordered eating. 

How to have an effortless relationship with food

It may seem like our thoughts about food just happen to us. There are things you can do to change the way you interact with food:

Shift your mindset
Find healthier ways to cope
Limit temptation
Always answer hunger with a meal
Work with a pro


Shift your mindset. I can’t tell you how often I hear, “I’m doing keto” or “I’m not eating bread right now,” or “we’re on the egg diet!” People love to shout their dietary preferences from the rooftops, but there’s a difference between having the mentality that you’re on a diet and choosing foods that work for your body. Take a minute to look at your mindset around food. Are you dieting or nourishing yourself with foods that make you feel satiated, energized, and strong? And try to let go of the need to be perfect. Where you are is exactly where you need to be.
Find healthy ways to cope. A lot of my clients use food to check out, numb their feelings, or reward or punish themselves. Think about what emotion you’re experiencing and look for non-food ways to cope with it. If your go-to thought is “when I’m upset, I need a pint of ice cream,” or “everything feels so scary right now, where’s the wine?”, brainstorm other things that capture that same sense of peace and calm. It could be journaling, taking a few deep breaths, going for a long walk, or connecting with a friend in a social-distancing-appropriate way.
Limit temptation. Can’t control yourself when there are chips or cookies or nuts in the house? Don’t buy them. Fill your fridge with foods that make you feel good and skip the ones that don’t. Also, limit your interactions with social media accounts that trigger compulsive or unhealthy behaviours. If your feed is full of raw food fanatics or carnivore crusaders and the constant barrage of dinner pics, food-shaming, and non-supportive comments has you feeling bad or obsessive, remember that you always have the choice to unfollow them. You have different needs than your friends (that includes online friends), and their relationship with food doesn’t have to dictate yours.
Always answer hunger with a meal. Constantly thinking about food is a good sign that you’re not eating enough of it. Sure, everything would be so much easier if you weren’t hungry all the time. But being hungry all the time is an indicator that you need to eat more — including more satisfying foods. I encourage my clients to choose full-on meals when they feel hungry instead of grazing on healthy snacks throughout the day. So, ditch the quick low-fat yogurt and banana routine and opt for a satiating sit-down meal of eggs, avocado, and bacon.
Work with a pro. If you’re struggling to break down some of your limiting beliefs or behaviors around food, don’t hesitate to work with a specialist or a certified health coach like one from the Primal Health Coach Institute community. Personally, I’ve helped hundreds of men and women improve their relationships with food through strategies that eliminate the all-or-nothing mentality. Instead of talking about choices that are good or bad, which can make you feel like you’re a good or bad person when you eat them, we focus on the concept of supportive foods — foods that literally support your body, your brain, your emotions, and your mood.

As a health coach, it’s not my job to change you. It is, however, my job to give you the tools so you can help make changes for yourself. Everyone has stories and beliefs based on things that have happened over the course of their lifetime, but with this 5-step action plan, you can start reinventing your relationship with food right now.

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