Uncover the ancient elixir that’s been hiding in plain sight, powering both mind and muscles through an unexpected journey from indulgence to discipline

This is an exciting story to tell because it’s so profound, and at the same time, something that’s been under my nose for as long as I can remember. So, let’s dive right in. There’s quite a backstory.

This also relates substantially to the section on Anthony Colpo in my last post.

Since we’re already past the pay line and into the member area, I can cut right to the chase. I’m talking about whole milk—what, a sports energy drink, pre-workout meal, post-workout meal, all in one? No way. Bear with me now to get this out of the way: If you have a problem with milk, such as being lactose intolerant or whatever, you have my sympathies. But please understand that your limitation in that area has zero to do with anyone else and does not in the slightest bit detract from their success with it.

Too often—and this applies to not just milk but any kind of food where a substantial number of folks have intolerances or outright allergies—they kind of like to twist it, to sort of imply that they’re the normal ones and everyone else is abnormal because they just don’t want to admit that they have a natural shortcoming. Well, we all have natural shortcomings compared to other people. Some people are smarter than us, or more physically capable, or taller. We’re all different and unique in many ways. One way to have a measure of success in life is to explore those areas where you have a little bit of an advantage over everyone else, or at least many people, and that kind of paves the way for you. The same goes for them—they may be less than you in some areas but more than you in others. So, they should be focusing on those areas where they’re better off. If everyone did that, then we could have a sort of harmonious free trade and division of labor, so to speak.

Okay, moving right along. It’s important to know that I’ve been a moderate to heavy milk drinker all my life. I’ve never had a digestion issue with it at all, so I guess I have whatever enzyme it is that allows me to digest it. On the other hand, milk can be a downside for a lot of folks because it’s a pretty energy-dense drink, and you’re drinking a lot of calories. It can get out of hand in terms of packing on weight—consider that mammal’s milk, typically cow or goat milk, which is the most common for people to drink, is meant to take a calf and grow it exclusively. Its purpose is not only to produce skin and bones but also to add lean and fat to a body. That’s why it should be treated with care.

Let’s get the backstory. Like I said, I’m always alright with milk. When I was also drinking a lot of alcohol—on a daily basis—milk was my go-to recovery. At a point when I had consumed so much alcohol— and I’m not talking about being falling-down drunk, I’m talking about chronic steady drinking where you’re just always at a slight buzz almost 24/7—you know, you wake up, and you’re drinking, right? In my case, alcohol was always a great writing motivator for that because it’s like the old Hemingway saying, “Write drunk, edit sober.” And it’s true; if you are a professional writer, a stream of consciousness which is slightly inebriated produces your best work, at least for some of us. Then you’ve got to go back and edit when you’re in a totally sober frame of mind, and you produce some good stuff. But the downside to that is obvious.

At a point 18 months ago, I quit the boozing. But before that, what would happen is I’d get to a point where I just wouldn’t feel good. My stomach would be a mess. I’d feel weak and tired, no energy, no motivation. Well, I went to milk—sometimes with a little orange juice as well—but milk was the primary thing. It’s energy-dense but also nutritionally dense. Whatever you may be lacking in terms of micronutrition—you’ve got your trace vitamins and minerals and everything—remember, milk is designed to be complete nutrition for a young calf, and its biochemical makeup is not altogether that much different from human mothers’ milk, so it’s a close analog. So, if you’ve depleted yourself through drinking too much too often, I found that it was a great recovery drink. So much so that even after just a couple of hours after a pint or two of milk, I was ready to go with the alcohol again—that’s how profound it was.

Now, let’s fast forward to those 18 months ago when I dropped the booze. What did I do at the same time? I largely dropped drinking milk. I think it was just occasionally that I drank it, but then I know for sure that when I hit the gym in July and wanted to really lean out, I dropped milk entirely. So, it’s been about eight months or so that I hadn’t had a drop. Now, fast-forward to now, high intermediate to advanced gym rat. So, I’m going through a program now that I’m at the final phase of, that is very taxing in terms of making gains in a high-volume workout setting five times a week. Plus, as I’ve already mentioned in my last post, having Anthony Colpo from Australia up here and learning some stuff from him and being motivated to do more and more—we’ve introduced walking 2.5 km to the gym and back, and the cardio that goes along with that, plus scaling an incline for about half a kilometer, and so on. He’s got me doing Tabata squats at the end of the workout three times a week. Combine that all, and just last week, I was starting to feel really run down. It wasn’t just typical difficulty that you overcome and then you’re at a new plateau and you keep going from there. I felt like I was on a declining trend where you have a recovery, but it’s less of a recovery than you had before, and then you have a new low, and you have a new recovery that’s less than before, and then a new low. So, you’re on a downward trajectory.

I was trying to figure out what to do with it, and just off the top of my head, I grabbed a pint of milk down the street, went home, and had this pint of milk. I could not believe it—within 30 minutes, I started feeling better. Overnight soreness in my muscles went away, just this general fatigue went away to be replaced by a sort of bright “let’s get to it” feeling. I said, there’s something here.

But there’s another element, first. Shortly after I began the intense gym routine, I wanted to come up with a pre-workout meal that would have me maintaining energy levels in the gym. I achieved that by several different means: chopped-up apple and orange with a couple of heaping tablespoons of low-fat yogurt; all mixed up, sometimes with a drizzle of honey on top—that was good. Also good was to skip the yogurt and just drizzle honey on the apple and the orange. Another one was a plain baked potato. I would throw the potato in the microwave an hour before the gym for like four minutes, so it would be a baked potato, and then let it just sit there so it would be pretty much room temperature, a little warm. I’d chop it up and eat it, skin and all. I use gold potatoes, which are easy for choking the skin down, maybe with a little salt on it—that worked as good to sustain energy for your workout as a pre-workout meal. Then I would also have the variation where I’d chop up the potato and mix it with a couple of those heaping teaspoons of low-fat yogurt, maybe sprinkle some cayenne on it for a little spice, salt, and pepper, whatever. That worked well too.

But here’s the problem with all of those pre-workout meals: I had the energy, but I’d feel real hunger pretty quick into the workout, halfway through, and especially at the end. Plus, there is the element of having to digest food—it’s not a liquid, it’s solid food—so there’s just a little bit of unsettling because you’re moving around and burping up a little bit. So that part was unpleasant as well because you want to eat right before you work out so that you’re getting all the advantages of that energy it’s providing, but then you have that digestion issue, or at least I did.

So now, back to my experience with the mental and energy uplift from that single pint of milk. I had this idea: What if I get a quart of milk, or in my case, a liter—it’s very similar. So a pint or 500 mL is half of a quart or liter, respectively. About the same volume. I’m drinking 500 mL before my workout and then 500 mL of whole milk, regular whole milk, at the end of my workout. And it’s blowing my mind. First of all, I go into that gym not only with a great mental attitude, not only with all this energy that I have throughout the workout, I also have zero issue with that digestion of food, nor do I feel hungry. That’s perhaps the most curious thing about it—just a single pint or half-liter (500 mL) of whole milk before the workout.

Remarkably astounding!

Even if I’m doing the Tabata squats at the end, and even though I’ve done a 2 1/2 km walk to get to the gym and then do a 2 1/2 km walk to get back home, plus going half a kilometer up a hill ascending 100 or 200 m and back down, when I get home, I’m still not hungry. Amazing. And then I have the post-workout meal, and that’s the other 500 mL of milk.

And then, I’m done with milk for the day. So now the question is, okay, well, but milk isn’t particularly high in protein. No, it’s not. But here, I’ll tell you this: for all these months I’ve been working out, I have a protein drink post-workout. That’s a portion of dairy, but did I ever feel the uplift that I get from drinking whole milk? Not even close. In fact, I never even noticed any difference from it. I was getting 30 g of quality whey protein post-workout, that’s it.

So now, just to sum this up and make it pretty quick for you, what I’ve done is I’m drinking half a liter before the workout, half a liter after the workout, and then I’m in no rush to eat. I’m just not very hungry. But, you know, when I start feeling hungry an hour or two later, then I make a regular meal. And I target protein, and I target carbohydrates, typically in the form of a potato or white rice for my main carb source, or a couple of slices of whole-grain bread. And I use multigrain bread. Why do I use multigrain bread? Because whole grains have one good property about them, and that is they have a significant amount of trace minerals.

So, a couple of slices of multigrain whole-grain bread every day really gives you some headroom in terms of getting trace minerals. And I doubt that you need to supplement. Typically, you see the nine-grain and twelve-grain breads. So if you do a nutritional analysis on those, you’ll see there’s quite an array of trace minerals. That’s a great way to get them. It’s very easy, and even for you low-carb folks, a couple of slices of bread are not going to kill your carb numbers for the day. Don’t worry about it. Don’t fret so much.

Okay, well, that’s about it for this one. Go ahead and try it. Some of you gym folks give it a try. Stick to that program long enough so that you see whether it works for you or not. If it doesn’t, well, it doesn’t. But it certainly does for me, and I wouldn’t be putting it out there if it didn’t. Have a good one.