As for my weight, I currently weigh 4 pounds more than when I went on the diet. I got gyped off, everyone lost weight but me! I’ve put on 4-6 lbs in the last month on RRARF, so when I was doing lowish-carb paleo my weight did dropped by about  4-6 lbs from the start of the diet, and my body composition changed a lot for the better though, the waist is still a couple inches smaller and because I was hammering the kettlebells I quite a few pounds on my upper body. My high water mark for weight was 190 lbs, about three years ago when I only hiked in the summer and spent the winters being lazy and eating junk food.

With the first day of summer I’m not longer doing RRARF, but I’m doing high-carb paleo with lots of physical activity. My ideal meal right now is steamed kale, 2 cups of sweet potatoes mashed in butter and spices, and a grilled grass-fed bison steak. I rode around Burnaby mountain on Saturday, and just died on the bike – my cardio was really rusty after just 4 weeks of breaktime. Recovery was beautiful though, I went hiking the next day and the legs fully fresh. I used to have pretty dead legs the next day after hammering the hills on Burnaby. It’s just under a 3 hour ride, but I ride it pretty intensely. Hiked some North Shore woods on Sunday for 3 hours, then another bike ride around the Sea Wall for a few hours yesterday. I want to hit the kettlebells, but I’ve converted my home gym into a bike shop, and still need to spend tomorrow evening wrenching on my bike to get it rideable for summer. The plan is to spend a week or two riding across British Columbia, following the Kettle Valley Rail and detouring along the way to see different remote valleys via backcountry logging roads. Then I’m going to ride Seven Summits in Rossland, I’ve been thinking about that track for so long, that I can’t wait to get on it again.

I’ve been in a state of mild overtraining before, and found that I needed several weeks of complete rest to start to feel really fresh again. Usually these periods of rest are put off until the rainy season in the fall. This summer though I’m really looking forward to doing some bike touring – strapping all my gear to my mountain bike and winding my way across British Columbia primarily following old rail lines and logging roads. Going on a journey like this is not something I want to enter into in an overtrained state.

The obstreperous Matt Stone wrote a post entitled The Catecholamine Honeymoon, which got me really thinking about overtraining and food intake and adrenal hormones. He iterates through different ways of achieving an adrenal hormone buzz: eating low-carb, rigourous exercise, intermittent fasting, and caloric restriction. Last winter I embarked on all four of those items to some degree or another, and I felt like superman! In the spring, when my bottomless energy began to wane, I wondered why – I had thoughts like, “Maybe I should go back to eating junk food, so I can experience the energy of eating clean again”. Looking at those lifestyle changes from an adrenal perspective though, it makes sense that I was overly relying on those hormones to provide my energy and sense of well being.

Matt Stone puts forth an interesting hypothesis in a comment on his own article, “I believe that catecholamines and insulin have a tendency, in a well-functioning person, to exist on an axis. When insulin levels rise, catecholamines fall – which is why you tend to feel sleepy and relaxed after a big meal. A few hours later, insulin levels fall and catecholamines rise, not to liberate glucose from muscle tissue per se, but to liberate fat from fat cells for energy. So, drop insulin and catecholamines rise. Spike insulin and catecholamines fall. That’s why it’s important to have a bit of both.”

For those who have been over-relying on the catecholamines, Stone offers his RRARF protocol (Rest, Recovery and Aggressive Re-feeding). It’s a really simple strategy: eat as much good quality, whole foods as you can, tending to lean towards a high-carbohydrate diet while doing no exercise. You don’t overeat, so that you feel stuffed, but if you feel even the least bit hungry, go ahead and have a nice big meal.

For me I’ve been eating my normal paleo diet (buffalo heart stew this week, my fourth heart and I was stoked to finally cook it in such a way that the meat is tender and palatable), and then because I already find that level of cooking and eating to be a chore at times, I’ve gone the lazy and slightly sub-optimal route of throwing on top of that mix as many bowls of cereal as I can (organic milk, no-sugar corn puffs or puffed rice, and blueberries). This has been working out to about 6-8 bowls of cereal a day. I’ve also recently discovered the TCM channel (Turner Classic Movies), which plays nothing but commercial-free old movies, so that’s been my outlet instead of mountain biking.

Body temperature is an indicator of your basal metabolism. 36.5 to 36.8 C is regarded as a good, healthy range. In theory, you can raise your metabolism through a period of over-nourishing – which makes sense, since there are so many people out there today who under-nourish day-after-day and year-after-year and have lowered metabolisms (either through dieting, or eating “healthy” low-fat crap, or sugar and refined carbs which are high-calorie but are an overall nutrient drain on the body to digest). Measuring my body temperature in the mornings, when it’s at the lowest, I’m a full degree below optimal the moment, holding pretty steady in the 35 to 35.5 C temperatures upon waking. Stone claims that many can see marked improvements in body temperature after only 30 days of following RRARF.

I’ve been on the diet for a week now though, and I’ve already learned a couple interesting things.

The first is that I can tolerate a high-load of carbohydrates. This macronutrient was taking the brunt of the blame last fall, when I was eating a craptacular SAD diet last year, and experiencing low energy and brain fog. For me, it does appear to only be the sugar and refined carbohydrates which are the trouble makers. I was also reticent to indulge in high-quality carbohydrate sources in the winter, as it was no easy picnic to wean myself away from sugar and refined carbs – I was deathly afraid of backslipping. Refined sugar is a mighty bitch of a drug! After 6 months though, eating healthy has become set and locked in, and junk food cravings are a non-issue.
I had assumed that I still had a lingering sugar addiction because I still had fruit cravings, but since I’ve started really packing back the mainly glucose carbs (corn, rice, potatos, yams), my fruit cravings have disappeared.

The second, and more interesting, is that I’m realizing that I had more hesitation about eating food than I was sub-consciously aware of. I’ve never counted calories, nor shied away from high-calorie foods, so I figured I was always eating all that my body required by more-or-less eating to appetite. But the more I learned about nutrition and food, the more I was sub-consciously coming to fear food. Don’t eat too many plants because their anti-nutrients (phytates and lectins), don’t eat too many animals because the animals don’t enjoy it and it can have a higher cost of production, don’t overeat because you’ve become more aware of body composition by following people who focus on weight training, don’t eat too much because it’s expensive and don’t eat refined foods because they are the primary causitive agents of degenerative disease. OK, I’m still not eating very little junk food, but it’s clear that since I’ve been able to really pack back the food and it feels really good, that I’ve been chronically undereating these last few months.

It’s liberating to take the view that, when on RRARF, that if I haven’t eaten to appetite and comfortably beyond, then I’m not following the diet properly. The license to eat as much as I want, and then some, is great! Sure I may have had a big bowl of stew for dinner, and followed that up with three bowls of cereal. But the cereal was really tasty, and I’m not stuffed yet, so I fire up a fourth bowl and dig in – yum, yum! I would have thought that if I increased my daily caloric intake by 50-100% I would have a perpetual feeling of bloatedness and a feeling of being stuffed and lethargic. But such has not been the case. I can pack back a big meal, and in three hours while I might not feel any pressing need to eat, I can still put back yet another large meal. My digestion seems to have stepped up to the task of processing more food beautifully. Sleep has definitely improved, I’ve had some really great, long deep sleeps in the last week.

I don’t know how much longer I’ll be on RRARF though right now. Summer is just around the corner, and I’m going to have to get out there and enjoy it. However, I will be trying to stick to the maxim, “There is no such thing as overtraining, only undereating” this summer. Perhaps once the rainy season arrives in the fall I’ll give RRARF a 30+ day shake and make a more concerted attempt at seeing if I can raise my body temperature and my basal metabolism back towards the positive a bit more.

They talk pretty fast, so I’ve included a transcript of the article below. After listening to this, I had to go cook up a big batch of eggs!

Audio Transcript

Jimmy Moore: I’m thinking of doing an experiment. For one week, just eat ten dozen eggs that whole week. Just to see what would happen to my cholesterol levels, and have it run … just for fun and as an experiment (laughs).

Mike Eades: Well I could tell you what would probably happen. Your LDL might go up a little bit, but your HDL would probably go up a lot. Your triglycerides would go down and LDL particle size would go up. There was an interesting study that came out about, oh I dunno, fifteen, eh, eighteen years ago, well not that long, probably fifteen years ago I guess, published in Southern Medical Journal. A case report of this elderly guy, this 88-year old guy who was in a nursing home. He ate twenty-four eggs a day, and that was his diet!

Jimmy Moore: Two dozen a day … wow!

Mike Eades: And he had the eggs brought in to him, and I think he’d boil them or soft boil them and he ate these 24 eggs a day. They published it because, he was fine. He had no cholesterol problems, he had no problems whatsoever, and the tone of the article was that he ate these eggs, that was in addition to the regular nursing home fare, which is usually pretty high in carbs. That can’t be, an eighty-eight year old guy can’t eat all those eggs, plus regular nursing home fare. So I wrote the researcher, and I said, “hey, did the guy, you know, eat regular nursing home fare? because that’s what is suggested in the article”, I said, “because I can’t imagine a guy eat twenty-four eggs plus that”. He wrote back and said, “No, actually we went and checked with the nursing home staff and you’re right, he didn’t eat anything but the eggs.” And so then it all made sense, because if you eat the egg, you got protein and you got fat, and that’s what we were designed to eat.

Jimmy Moore: That’s right.

Mike Eades: So if you want to find out what happened, you can go read that study, and find out what happens to somebody who did it for a long time.

Jimmy Moore: Wow, that’s amazing.

Mary Dan Eades: It’s a shame that eggs have gotten the rap that they’ve gotten, because they are such a perfect little protein source and good fat, and they’re inexpensive, when you get right down to it. If you ate those two dozen eggs a day, which I can’t imagine many people that could eat two dozen eggs a day. But if you did eat two dozen eggs a day, and what are you paying?

Jimmy Moore (doing math out loud): Two, three dollars, four dollars?

Mary Dan Eades: 6 bucks? It’s a very cheap source of good quality protein.

Jimmy Moore (laughing): Yup, I’m definitely going to do that experiment now then.

Ingredients

• 4-6 small to medium yams, or you can try it with sweet potatoes – or both!
• 3-6 eggs, or 3-6 tbsps coconut oil.
• 1-2 cups shredded coconut
• “breakfast spices”: cinnamon, allspice, nutmeg.
• Additional treats: coconut milk, almond flour, coconut flour, pecans, almonds, walnuts, blueberries, apple slices, turkey meat, bacon.

Preparation

Chop up the yams, then steam them for 20-30 minutes – the more chopped up they are, the faster they steam. Transfer yams to a mixing bowl and mash them up – I just use a fork for this. Add a bunch of eggs, maybe 3 or 4, but use more if you have lots of dry ingredients that you’ll be using as additional treats. You can also substitute with coconut oil for a more tropical flavour. Stir in the shredded coconut – use lots as it’s essential for giving the dish texture. If you get shredded coconut in the cooking section at a grocery store, it can be a bit pricey, but if you can find it in bulk packages, it’s really cheap.

Spices should start with a base of a large dose of cinnamon – this has an insulin-sensitivity boosting effect to work in conjunction with the high glucose content of the yams. You can also add allspice and nutmeg to taste. Nutmeg is pretty good, but it can be toxic to the liver in large doses, so don’t add more than one or two tablespoons. If you’re adding meat to the dish, you might want to use turmeric, pepper and ginger instead of allspice and nutmeg.

There is tonne of food that work well in yam bakes to give it variety. It’s a good dish for helping clean out your cupboard – or just add whatever you like the most! Nuts are a good staple, you can place a bed of pecans on the top of the casserole dish for presentation, or just stir them into the yam bake. Walnuts, almonds, hazelnuts will also work well. The yams already create a sweet dish, but if going for a dessert or high energy food, you can chop up some fruit, apples, bananas, blueberries, or go the other direction and add some steamed veggies and meat – a layer of kale and turkey forms a crude “paleo sandwich”. Salmon or other types of fish go really well with yams. You can create additional bulk and flavour to the meal with almond flour or coconut flour.

Cooking

Finally, after everything is stirred together, transfer the ingredients into a casserole dish and cook  at 375 degrees for about 20 minutes – if you garnished with nuts, then watch the time, as pecans tend to start getting burnt at about 23 minutes.

After helping my friends Craig and Karen move on the weekend, I was pretty dog tired for a couple days. They’ve got a lot of stuff! Still wasn’t quite feeling 100% up to snuff, and after nearly a five week hiatus from regular lifting, I had that feels-like-maybe-I-should-puke sensation mid-workout. Let’s see if I can stay uninjured long enough to get back into the swing of things.

Also got my GymBoss interval timer, so I was able to time the workout more easily. Quite handy when doing the top-of-the-minute rep workouts.

New Gym, Weak Shoulders Workout

Getting two injuries in a row made me wanting to proceed with more information, so I ordered ”Secrets of the Shoulder” which has rave customer reviews, and “Resilient“, which gives you 19 drills for focusing on strengthing the weak links of the body from DragonDoor on DVD so I can work on my shoulder muscle flexibility and awareness, and also all around body flexibility – I don’t want to injure my knees or my hips like I’ve been tweaking my shoulders lately!

Earlier in the week, I also bought 12 feet by 8 feet of thick rubber mat from an old gym. This stuff weighs 130 lbs, so it’s really thick, and really does a good job of soaking up the sound of the workouts in the apartment, the only stuff that is noisy now is the jumping. It also works really well for workouts where you have to roll on your back. This makes the spare room a dedicated workout room, so it should make it really easy to maintain daily workouts in the 20-40 minute range. Below is my first workout for the room, and it’s naturally all squats and core work given I want to rest the shoulder.

I’ve been watching Steve Cotter’s Encyclopedia of Bodyweight Conditioning, which has a juicy 161 bodyweight exercises to work through. My first workout felt great, and I’m excited work my way through this series and really learn it so I have a really solid foundation of bodyweight workouts I can do.

Sore Shoulder Bodyweight Workout 1

40 reps of Hindu Squats. Using the rowing motion with the arms, a nice easy warm-up.

30 seconds on, 20 seconds off, 3 sets of Isometric leg raises, feet 12″ above the ground.

25 reps per side of Stationary lunges, without letting the dropping knee touch the ground.

30 reps of Lateral leg raises – the hands spread-eagled, drop legs to side, lift back with the obliques.

10 seconds per postion of two sets of Burning 4, where you hold the squat in four different positions, lowering, the raising, so a 70 second squat overall. This one is a killer for me, I have to do it again. I’d like to work up to be able to do it for at least 15 seconds.

30 on, 20 seconds off of four sets of Scissor kicks. I kept a pace of just under a rep per second.

40 times Plie squats, the “ballet dancer” squat. This one has a good stretching component in it, and opened up the hips a bit. I have to do more of these.

20 seconds on, 10 seconds off of 4 sets of Lateral scissor kicks. These got the core and the legs burning. Good high intensity workout, I just barely held it together for this one.

40 times Lateral squats. In preparation for learning The Pistol, I’m working on the squat strength in each leg individually.

Finish-off with a hip flexor stretch and a hamstring stretch. Took a little over thirty minutes, and was a fairly moderate intensity workout.

The first day I got my set, I lifted the bells a lot. Then, I lifted them a lot more. The next day I was pretty sore, but it was all good sore. The day after, I brought a one pood bell in to work to show to some folks, and strained my shoulder muscles doing presses. High-rep, high-weight presses without warming up first, while still quite sore from the previous day, not a good idea.

The sore shoulder muscles turned into a stiff neck, and I had a pretty broken up sleep that night. Neck was so stiff and sore, I couldn’t find a comfortable position on the pillow to sleep in. It really hurt. If I get the idea to overdo it with the kettlebells in the future, or to lift them casually in a “fun” manner, I hope to come back here and read this message for myself: it really hurt!

Yesterday, I got some gear to aid in the recovery. The best purchase was a couple of heat packs. Pop them in the microwave for a couple minutes, and you’ve got twenty minutes of heat to soak into the muscles and relax them. I should have gotten these a long time ago, as they’ll be great even when I’ve got just a bit of regular muscle sorenss. I bought some “Let Go Liniment” from Gaia Garden, which is a rub of infused oils of juniper and pokeroot in olive oil, tinctures of cramp bark and lobelia, and essential oils of ginger and black pepper. I also got some more Bone, Flesh and Cartilage tincture to aide the body in any healing. I’m not sure if this is necessary, as I don’t know if I caused any damage that requires significant healing, or if I’ve just made the shoulder muscles very cranky. I can use my injured shoulder without pain, but it certainly doesn’t want to try lifting anything heavy right now. However, I was out of the stuff, and it’s something I like to have around the house, as I do seem to be injury prone these last couple years.

I had massage therapy today, which was great, and really helped loosen up the shoulder so that it’s starting to feel more normal. The neck is still sore and weak, but at least it’s not complaining while at rest anymore. Hopefully I’ll be all mended in a few days, and nothing is torn or seriously damaged that’ll put me out for longer than that. The book Natural Flexibility has some good advice on sussing out if you’re ready to start easing back into fitness or not: you do a series of moves where you lightly engage a body part, 10 seconds lightly at first, then 30 seconds at a time with increasing pressure. With the shoulder this involves pressing and pulling with the hands together in various positions. If the pain feels less during these moves, then your good to go. Otherwise you need to hold back for longer. If the pain gets worse, then it’s probably quite serious and you should see a doctor. I’m definitely going to go at least a week without using the bells. The break will do me good, as I’ve been going at it three times a week for nine weeks in a row, and the body could use a chance to catch up.

But hopefully I will remember to respect the kettlebells in the future. They’re loads of fun to workout with, but they’re not something for just playing around with.

Why lift the kettlebells? Why not just weights? Kettlebells have several advantages over barbells and dumbells. Kettlebell lifts are fluid, dynamic movements and demand that your body maintain a technical form throughtout the movement. Rather than workout a single muscle group in isolation, kettlebells train you to mobilize whole sets of muscles in rapidly changing succession. This builds a very functional fitness, and develops the central nervous system much more than weight training.

The functional aspect of kettlebell training can dramatically improve your posture. By training your hip muscles to be flexible and powerful, it will give your spine a solid foundation to rest on, which has done wonders for my lower back. The dynamic movements done with kettlebells are a full body workout, every muscle in the body can be used in many moves. This is physically very demanding and kettlebell workouts have a higher caloric burn than almost any other form of exercise. This rewards you with excellent metabolic conditioning and does wonders for leaning out your physique.

Kettlebell lifting requires proper training. When moving heavy weights through dynamic movements, you can seriously injure yourself. Unlike a typical weight training injury where you might just have an arm or leg injury and be out for a few weeks, a kettlebell injury can be a spine injury which could result in permanent effects. While this sounds quite scary, correctly done kettlebell workouts will train the muscles and movements to improve your posture, improve how you lift anything, and give you long lasting back and spine health. Many people with back injuries take up kettlebell lifting and have great success at overcoming stubborn back problems. In training you will work with lighter weights usually for a few weeks until you can do every repitition as a perfect repitition, then gradually start incorporating heavier weights into your routine.

Kettlebells aren’t only unparalled in their capabilities as a fitness tool, they are really fun to workout with! The dynamic movements of a kettlebell will have you in complete focus of the individual repitition. Your mind won’t have any spare cycles to become bored when you’re swinging fifty pounds around. I’ve always found doing sit-ups and crunches a pretty boring part of a workout, and tend to skip those exercises. With the kettlebell swings, it’s such a joy to heft the bell to chest height, then hike-pass it between the legs, that you don’t even notice at the time that you’re also getting one hell of an ab-workout, all the while also getting a great leg and butt workout.

I’ve been taking kettlebell lessons three days a week for the last ten weeks (monday/wednesday/friday at 6:15 am). These classes are taught by Russian Kettlebell Certified (RKC) trainer Steve McMinn. Steve is an awesome trainer. He ensures our saftey by keeping a vigilant eye on the class to ensure to catch and correct our form as soon as we stray to poor form for even one repitition. For me, when I started out, never having ever done any kind of weight training before, I had terrible form (really terrible actually, most other people brand new to the sport seem to learn a bit quicker). It tooks weeks of corrections for me to learn to keep a straight back and keep the shoulders securely in the shoulder sockets. But every time I did a wrong repitition, the mistake was caught by Steve. We are always encouraged to slow-down and re-do the movement with good form. We were drilled in the mantra of “Reps mean nothing, only perfect form counts.”, and my technique was transformed so that today my muscle memory is becoming honed so that it feels unnatural to use bad form. On top of Steve’s great attention to detail in mastering the techniques, he’s also a really easy going guy, so the classes are fun and relaxed. Pretty much the perfect environment for learning kettlebells … except the 6:15 a.m. start.

Yesterday I purchased my own set of kettlebells, from local distributor Canadian Kettlebells. I now own one 12 kg bell, two 16 kg bells, and two 24 kg bells. Ten weeks ago, when I started with the bells, I was lifting only the 8 kg and the 12 kg bells, and was feeling brutalized by those lighter bells. When I started moving up to the 16 kg bell, I felt quite a bit of muscle soreness in my low back. I took it slowly though, and adjusted to the weight over time. A month later I went through the same process with the 24 kg bell. Today I can heft the 16 kg bell around with ease, and my back responds to this once daughnting weight with joy – no pain or soreness, just solid muscle and tendon satisfaction in hips and back. I’ve also packed on a lot of muscle, I barely recognize my arms or shoulder from just a couple months ago. I haven’t lost any weight, but I haven’t gained any either, and I’m certainly packing around a lot more muscle than I used to have. I do wear my belt one notch shorter than I used to and even that is starting to feel loose around the waist!

I took some photos of me and my new kettlebell set, which I’ve posted in a set on Flikcr. For some more inspirational watching on the wonders of kettlebells, check out these ones on YouTube: Kettlebell basics with Steve Cotter (the first kettlebell video I ever watched), Amber Dornfeld: Queen of Kettlebells, or just about any of the videos posted on the Dragon Door channel. Now get out there and lift, and feel good!

Recently I switched to a paleolithic diet – which is doing wonders for my health, physique, mood and energy levels. Given that in British Columbia it’s fairly easy to acquire buffalo meat, this has become a staple in my diet, and I’m no longer eating grains (not that the “Wheat” handle came from grains in the first place, it was just taken from a funny moment in Woody Allen’s “Love and Death”), so I’ve also taken to using “Buffalo” as a handle (or “buffalo360″ when someone else has already registered just “buffalo”). So I’ve renamed my blog from “Blog of Wheat” to “Blog of Buffalo”.