Free The Animal

I actually gave you a hint in the title of my previous post, Cold, Wet, Hungry, and Running For Your Life. Also, this is not the first time, and since I wrote fairly extensively on it before, I’m going to cover what I did differently and what I did on ocassions when this didn’t work. In a nutshell, it’s the cold water, again. However, the gym has in the last few months managed to keep the water at a steady 40 degrees rather than the 50 it used to be. Let me tell you: huge difference and it took quite a while to adapt to spending minutes at that temperature. So, the fast began around 1:30 PM, after a pretty big breakfast and lunch. To the left is self explanatory. To the right is leftover sauerkraut, which was Alexander Valley fresh sauerkraut (not caned), which is simply awesome, even uncooked. I had made this in the crock pot a couple of days earlier, with about 3 pounds of pork sparerib, an onion, and lots of caraway seeds. All the pork was gone, but not all the kraut and broth, so I used it with some uncured, gluten free polish sausage….

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So, did any of you come up with some tweaks after yesterday’s read? I’ve receive one email with some good ideas. That was really a good refresher for me, but I’m not going to tell you what I did yet. The reason is that I still have 9 hours to go on my 30-hr fast, a workout early this afternoon, followed by a “secret” technique, and I’m already down 5 full pounds from where I was when I began the fast. I want to see where I end up. Then I’ll post.

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I haven’t talked much about this in a while, but on the heals of yesterday’s post on fasting, Andy left a comment referencing a post by Rusty Moore of Fitness Black Book. Fasted Workouts and Fasted Cardio vs EPOC – For Fat Loss For the longest time, I didn’t understand why I had more energy after fasting. I have my most productive hardcore workouts after fasting for 5-18 hours. If I ate anything in that 4-5 hour window before training, the workouts just weren’t as intense. Ori Hofmekler explained where this “hidden” energy source came from…the Sympathetic Nervous System (SNS). Go over and read more about the SNS. As readers know, I have been working out fasted (18-30 hours) for a bit more than a year, now. I can’t imagine doing it any other way. As an added benefit, take a cold plunge or sit in a totally cold bathtub after the workout, for as long as you can stand (in the summer, I somtimes remain in the 50ish degree water for 10 minutes). Then, don’t eat until you’re actually hungry, which, for me, is usually a couple of hours after the workout.

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Two articles on fasting in today’s LA Times, and both are very good in large part. Running on empty: the pros and cons of fasting “There is something kind of magical about starvation,” says Dr. Marc Hellerstein, a professor of endocrinology, metabolism and nutrition at UC Berkeley, who studies fasting. Adds Mark P. Mattson, chief of the laboratory of neurosciences at the National Institute on Aging: “In normal health subjects, moderate fasting — maybe one day a week or cutting back on calories a couple of days a week — will have health benefits for most anybody.” Mattson is among the leading researchers on the effects of calorie restriction and the brain. [...] “We’ve been finding that putting an animal on a reduced-calorie diet for a couple of weeks dramatically slows cell proliferation rates,” Hellerstein says. “This is the case in pretty much every tissue you look at: prostate, skin, colon, liver, lymphocytes.” Intermittent fasting and calorie restriction have also been shown in animals to reduce cognitive decline in diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease, Mattson says. [...] Among 448 people surveyed, intermittent fasting was associated with more than a 40% reduction in heart disease risk. Fasting was…

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This is the best fast in a while. My last meal was left-over braised short ribs yesterday at 2 pm, and here it is the following day at nearly noon (22 hours in) and I haven’t experienced even the slightest bit of hunger. I’ll work out at 4, and dinner will be around 6 or 7. By the way, here was the braised short ribs. This one took a while. Initial prep was about 15 minutes to preheat the over to 300 and then brown the ribs nicely in the covered pot I’d be using (I used leaf lard). Once browned, I removed the meat, deglazed with some red wine, place the meat back in, then added enough beef stock to just cover the meat. I also tossed in a vegetable bullion cube and some garlic. Then it cooks for three whole hours in the oven. At the 2:15 mark, add your vegetables (onion, carrot and celery in this case) so they only cook for 45 minutes. Otherwise, they’ll be mush. Once done, I put everything on a cookie sheet, covered with foil, and in the oven to warm (140) while I reduced the sauce. This took a whole hour…

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