Activity/Exercise/Diet/Nutrition


(charlie3) #1

I said in another thread I would start a thread where diet and activity get equal weight. Now I have to go shoping (salmon, whipping cream, eggs, radishes, Crystal Light lemon flavor, cauliflower…). I’ll post some of what I’m doing and thinking about this evening.


(Ellen ) #2

I’m looking forward to this thread Charlie. The month of November I have not exercised. Started back with cardio and some weights 3 days ago and now gained 1lb. I don’t believe it is muscle gain in 3 days and of course it may come back down eventually. Can’t wait to hear from you and others regarding this topic.


(squirrel-kissing paper tamer) #3

I walked 5 miles one day out of the blue this summer and had a 9 lb scale gain the next day. It went away within a few days. I assume it was inflammation from sore muscles, and water retention.


(charlie3) #4

I got serious about diet and exercise 20 months ago. (25 years ago I was a hobby lifter for 10 years and have a very nice basement gym waiting patiently for me to get interested again.) For the last 10 months in I’ve been in retirement mode, not working, so I can obsess on diet and exercise as much as I want, a really really unfair advantage. That has included a lot of research. I’ve decided, all things considered, it’s best for me to eat low carb even if that means slower fitness progress, assuming that’s even a tradeoff. That means 40 net carbs, whole food. I need the extra net carbs to avoid diet fatique. I’ve ditched 30 lbs of fat to 13%, added 10+ lbs of muscle.

Another thing that might slow gains is I do more cardio than is fashionable lately. All summer it was 2 hours walking daily. Recently it’s 2x1 hour sessions daily on a schwinn airdyne at 70% max heart rate, which is at the low end of moderate intensity. What I like about the airdyne is it’s even less wearing than walking and it burns a prodigious amount of calories compared to the effort. (Early models, used, go for $200 or less and will fit on the back seat of a mid sized sedan.) I do another 2 hours a week of lifting, usually intense.

Starting goal was to be as fit as possiblle with zero health impact and look the part which means lower than average body fat, more than average muscle, not unusual in the days before tractors and electricity, even for a 70 year old. I have zero tolerance for overuse, overtraining, inury, etc.


(Ellen ) #5

My water intake today has definitely increased so that makes so much sense.


(Ellen ) #6

I’m 64y/o Charlie, looking at retirement fairly soon. My hope is I am as fit as you by next summer. I actually may work past retirement if I am. I love this keto woe and I know the importance of exercise or even just moving. It’s the "sweet spot " I’m chasing where this woe and exercise result in a svelte body! Lol.


(Edith) #7

I recently started trying HIIT a la Ted Naiman. He mentioned in a podcast that he only exercises about 20 minutes a day doing body weight exercises, each exercise to failure.

He likes to do it every day, but I started with every other day. I tend to get over zealous and then hurt myself so I’m starting out slow. In between strength training days, I’m doing my walks with some jogging and sprint intervals.

It’s only been a week, but over the course of the week I already noticed improvement in my “sprints.” I put that in quotes because my sprint is someone else’s jog. :laughing:


#8

I do slow burn training (a la Fred Hahn, a master teacher of Super Slow who went on to design his own approach in the 1990s, and I’ve simplified it by eliminating situps and leg lifts) once a week for about 30 minutes - and am currently on a little break. It’s amazingly efficient and intense at just once a week (though you can do twice a week once you’re adapted well). Hahn is a longtime LCHF/keto educator, and he and Dr. Michael Eades believe that 99% of recomp is dietary, however the 1% of high intensity slow lifting is a force multiplier.

Funny thing though is with high stress, pushing muscles to failure can temporarily really increase stress as you do it, though it feels great afterwards. So, I give myself breaks in training as needed.

Every day I walk around in the wildish back garden where I live, and try to soak in at least 5 minutes of sun on my closed eyes. There is much life in the garden!

I really enjoy powerwalking on a flat hike & bike trail, but where I’m currently located that’s not really in the cards - so I do an IF fast instead lolol.


#9

Thanks for starting this thread! I have no doubt that food is more important for overall health, but I find movement/exercise a more powerful lever for me personally. When I’m moving enough, everything else seems to work out well (or at least better!): I’m happier and feel good about myself, so it’s easier to make good decisions about food.

I’m experimenting with OMAD this fall and winter, and I’m doing several 6-week online programs (kettlebells in Oct and early November, now steel mace). I’m loving them! The instructions are super clear and the mobility work is as good as the workout portions.


(charlie3) #10

My approach right now tries to be and artful mix of low, medium, and high intenstiy work. All my high intensity is during thosee 2 hours per week of lifting. The Airdyne is easy enough that I don’t dread the session and feel good both during and after. An odd thing I’m noticing is I’m a bit stronger for the seccond ride of the day than the first. Right now 70-75% of max heart rate is comfortable. If that ease rises to 75-80% I may cap it there.

I think the personal trainers look for ways to save the customere time, ie. HIIT. I think lots of lower intensity needs to be there for health. If you look into it you’ll find elite endurance atheletes mostly do easy workouts and occaisional high intensity. I believe the same applies to the rest of us at our lower performance level.

If low carb means lower energy I’m not noticing.


#11

I’m trying to get a good career job going and will be getting a gym membership. I’m doing a lot with one kettlebell, a pair of dumbbells, and a weight vest right now.

I’m hoping to find a gym that allows Olympic lifting like cleans or snatch and deadlift. Some gyms are funny about not allowing those lifts. I’d rather not have to join a CrossFit gym in order to do those.


(charlie3) #12

What I observe is the most common mistake with exercise is long run overtraining. Competitive athelets over train deliberately, seasonally. It’s called contest peaking. But it assumes a compensatory period of equally deliberate under training for a comparable time, which could be weeks or months. People who don’t have a competition discipline fall into peaking and don’t get around to the recovery phase and end up burned out or injured. I’m trying to limit my training volume, intensity, and frequency to what is sustainable without long layoffs.


(charlie3) #13

Ẁhen I started on the airdyne 20 months ago I noticed I was breathing easy, heart rate reflected the breathing but my quads were on fire, the limit on what I could do. My perception was the muscles weren’t getting enough oxygen because there wasn’t enough vascular system in the muscles to deliver the blood. To this day blood supply is incresing, a slow process. This issue has not seemed to be an inflluence on resistance training.


(charlie3) #14

And I think they are inseparable. For health bad diet will defeat exercise and the reverse is also true. Which begs the question, what to do and how much. I’ve learned to measure activity/exercise in calories. I’ve been looking for a study of calories burned in various occupations, particularly from the historical past. What was normal for us before any modern conveniences?


(Edith) #15

I pulled my hamstring back in June. It took a long time to heal. So, while it was healing I did strength training using body weight and walking. Before the injury I was using a low intensity training method for running along with the strength training. I’m planning on slowly getting back into running.

I noticed when I do my intervals of walk - jog - run - that my gait is much smoother running than jogging. I have to work on my jogging form.


(Ellen ) #16

I bet you look great @VirginiaEdie. I’ve seen you post on other threads about your daily exercise. Strength gains are so important. Did you exercise before keto?


#17

I’ve been reading a book about archeological digs in the UK and the author makes a rather passionate plea for a different understanding of our past: that hunter-gatherer wasn’t one passing stage but rather the default mode of being a human on this planet. I’ve been in the ancestral diet world for long enough that this isn’t a new idea for me but it was interesting to hear it from the perspective of an archeologist. Our biology evolved to maximize our survival in the world, and that required a lot of physical work! Not non-stop movement, of course, and I’m sure there were plenty of lazy afternoons by the fire - but our lives and the lives of our children literally depended on our level of physical fitness.

Whenever I hear someone make a snide comment about “cave men” I want to invite that person to fend for himself and his family in the wild for a few months and then come back (or not, probably) and tell us all if he still feels himself superior to his ancestors.


#18

@cooked, have you seen this thread? Seems like what you were missing on the forum :slight_smile:


(Edith) #19

Thanks for the complement. I’ve always been an exerciser one way or another. My husband has a saying, “It doesn’t matter what the exercise is, as long as you keep moving.”

There have been periods over the decades where I exercised more than others, but for the most part exercise has been there to some extent. Also, I try not to be a hypocrite. If I’m encouraging my children to be active and do sports, I shouldn’t be sitting on my duff all the time.

Keto has been a great help, because even with exercising pretty regularly and watching what I ate, I was still starting to gain weight. I once complained to my husband that I getting ready to accept the fact that I was going to be a chubby old lady like the rest of the women in my family, and how unfair that was because I exercised and they didn’t. :joy:


(charlie3) #20

I’ve been tracking food from the start on crono. One of the diet goals was to get 100% of everything with no suppliiments. I do that with a big daily salad with home made olive oil dressing and a dinner of ground chuck and salmon. Add to that half a dozen eggs and 2 large mugs of ice coffee with heavy cream. I’m trying to show a chrono report on the forum and having troubles with that. Will try again tomorrow.

In the mean time, after 20 months I’m fit enough to burn 40% of daily calories with activity, now interested to see if that’s sustainable and healthy. Most of those calories are burned on an Airdyne so upper and lower body working together. I’m weary at bed time, sleep well but not feeling remotely overtrained. I’m not increasing muscle mass, as I’d dearly like, probably because of so much cardio, but my cardio continues to improve and that should be a priority when you’re 70 (turning 71 this month).