The Secret to Health and Happiness...kinda
Prahlad Jani has had no food or drink since 1940...or so he says. For over 70 years, the Indian sadhu has been sustained solely on spiritual sustenance from Amba. He left his village in Rajasthan at the age of seven and went to live in the jungle where he underwent a religious experience and became a devotee of the Hindu goddess. Multiple tests and investigations have been done to assess the validity of his claim, and none have been able to refute it. Jani is a follower of “Inedia” also called breatharianism, a belief that the human body can be sustained on prana alone, the life force of the Hindu religion. Jani is 88 years old now and has lived as a hermit in a cave in a rainforest near the Gujarati temple of Ambaji since the 1970’s, waking at 4 each morning and spending most of his time meditating.
Bizarre diets for both spiritual and health reasons are a dime a dozen these days--everything from the cabbage soup diet or endless cans of baby food to the plant-based Bible diet. Some take it a step further, Jainists don’t even eat root vegetables because it kills the plant, a belief similar to the Fruitarian diet which only allows the reproductive parts of plants to be consumed so no harm is done to the organism as a whole; made famous by the eccentric tech mogul, Steve Jobs. Extremes have also been used around the globe to promote weight loss--eating cotton balls soaked in fruit juice, wearing blue-tinted glasses to make food look less appealing, and even ear stapling to reduce appetite.
The battle used to be finding enough food to eat, now it’s like the fight is about figuring out what not to eat. Food has evolved from being mere sustenance; it’s become our reward, our stress relief, our comfort--food can be your best friend--and for some of us, our greatest enemy.
Nutrition was a topic for me that was all-too personal--a demon that has haunted me for years. My battle against food and my own body began in high school. Lettering in four sports, I was used to eating as much as I could to perform at my best--but the moment I slowed down, I filled out. I also became vegetarian senior year for ethical reasons, and not knowing anything about nutrition, doubled down on carbs and empty calories to fill my appetite. I was overweight going into college, living off of slim-fast shakes and protein bars that I thought were healthy but also drinking heavily and late-night-binging on weekends. I abused my body to the point that I developed a dangerous eating disorder--what calories I didn’t purge, I stored. I even ran a marathon just shy of a Boston-qualifying time, training at 50 miles a week but offsetting hard workouts with gorging on entire pizzas--I was the heaviest I had ever been crossing the finish line.
I became convinced that carbs were the enemy and decided that as much as my heart told me not to eat animals, my body required meat to stay lean. I left the veg-world and cut out carbs plummeting my body into ketosis and dropping an astonishing 18 pounds in a month from diet alone. But the weight never stayed off fully, I yo-yo-ed back and forth for years, relapsing with my eating disorder and gaining and losing as stress and depression ebbed and flowed. I always wondered, “I try so hard--why is this happening to me?” I didn’t eat donuts or cheeseburgers, or drink sodas like so many others I knew--so why was it so hard? Little did I know, my life was a collection of textbook dieting mistakes.
Avoiding the “What-the-hell” effect
“It’s not just with food, it’s every day of our lives in modern society,” our manager and strength training coach at Title, Curtis Fikes told me. “You miss a day working out, or a few, you have a bad day eating and you throw it all away after that.”
A lack of impulse control leads to a few bad decisions, and it’s all downhill from there--you think to yourself “meh, I’ve already screwed up might as well have a cheat day.” Pretty soon that cheat day turns into a cheat week, then month, then before you know it, you’re in a real jam. And in life, there is no reset button.
Depression was also a contributing factor in my weight gain, then when I realized that I had gained weight, it sent me into even further depression causing even more depression eating--you can see how easily the downward spiral begins.
It was just like the studies I had seen on drug addiction, when your environment is leaving you emotionally unfulfilled, you will turn to addiction despite the negative side-effects. When the source is the cause and the cause is the source, it can seem like an almost insurmountable issue to overcome.
The truth is that your mental barriers are half the battle, so if the task of drastically changing your diet seems too daunting, my advice is to try to change your environment first while gradually working on your eating habits. Practice self-love--healthy activities that make your body feel good, exercise (I highly recommend boxing ;), fresh air, meditation, and soothing rituals like baths with essential oils. Surround yourself by positive people and try to recognize and correct negative thoughts. Get your mind right, and then pretty soon your body will be ready to follow.
Every Body is Different
Empathy is a rare and unique field of vision--I was found lacking, for as many times as I was struggling to drop even two pounds, I never really thought of how others have spent their lives desperately trying to gain.
“I had to eat over 4000 calories a day just to gain weight, when I was actively working out,” said my co-worker Christina Griggs, an ex-semi-pro basketball player who struggles with being underweight. “You have to eat a disgusting amount of food--I had to drink protein shakes with and in between every meal, wake up every day and eat a half a package of turkey bacon and Hawaiian bread rolls, Krispy Kremes with steak in between--I wanted to eat healthy but you get so desperate to gain that you will do anything.”
For men (and women) looking to build mass--body-builders and lifters, etc.-- the road to gaining is a little different--increasing caloric intake more than caloric output. “Isn’t there a chance you could accidentally get a gut doing that?” I asked Coach Curtis. “That’s called eating dirty, you gain muscle but you might get a lot of fat along with it.” Curtis recommends lean proteins to gain, fish like salmon and cod and eating a hearty breakfast at the start of the day. As a Title trainer and professional strongman, Curtis burns almost 2000 calories a day. “After a really intense workout, your glycogen stores are extremely low,” he explained. “I’ll eat quick carbs to replenish them--pixie sticks, gummy bears, a dozen donuts--everything they tell you not to eat.” He told me that this can only be done after extreme physical exertion. Curtis’s situation is different from most, say for instance if someone my size with my metabolism tried to eat the same things, I would be on the road to morbid obesity in no time.
A lot of factors contribute to the way that your body stores and processes food--your metabolism changes over time, as you get older or change your habits and some studies link chemically altered foods like artificial sweeteners to metabolic dysfunction. Also overactive or underactive thyroids and insulin resistance can mess with your metabolic process. Not to mention other factors that can’t be be changed, like your genetic predisposition to certain foods.
In a nutshell, it’s all just way too complicated to be stuffed into a “one-size-fits-all” nutrition plan.
For example, certain races have greater levels of lactose intolerance, like Asian cultures that traditionally did not raise cattle for dairy. Our co-owner Michelle Bender told me that even your blood type could determine your dietary bent. Type A blood types are descended from gatherers versus O types which are descended from hunter societies and need a protein-rich diet. Michelle herself is type B and eats meat, but finds that chicken gives her indigestion and makes her bloat even though it is traditionally flouted as the healthier alternative .
Our marketing manager Cameron English is type O, but she has been vegan for almost a year. She went straight from eating meat to being fully vegan, a dramatic change--especially considering she was in her ninth month of pregnancy. “I was borderline for contracting gestational diabetes and my blood pressure was all off,” she explained. “I started craving superfoods like chickpeas and avocados--when I switched, everything improved.” Her background is partly Native American, and spirituality was also a contributing factor in making the switch. “I was reading up on it, how the domestic animals that we eat like pigs and cows aren’t natural to the earth--Africans and Cherokees lived a mostly plant-based diet and didn’t get sick,” she said. “The leafy green vegetables give you a lot of iron, legumes, you just learn food combining to get nutrients like calcium and magnesium. It felt so good, I had so much energy--I wanted my kids to feel that way too so now I raise them vegan too.” Her nine year old son has gotten involved in the lifestyle, and developed a passion for vegan baking, “He makes cobblers, donuts, cheesecakes, he even made his own vegan sloppy joes,” she told me. “He inspires me to learn more--I get on pinterest and find ways to cook his favorite things vegan.”
No matter how much we try to find out which foods are universally healthy or not, the truth of the matter is that nutritional studies are always inherently unreliable. "In an ideal world," said British physician and epidemiologist Ben Goldacre, "I would take the next 1,000 children born in Oxford Hospital, randomize them into two different groups, and have half of them eat nothing but fresh fruit and vegetables for the rest of their lives, and half eat nothing but bacon and fried chicken. Then I'd measure who gets the most cancer, heart disease, who dies the soonest, who has the worst wrinkles, who's the most clever, and so on." In the real world, all information we know about nutrition is observational or a study of short term results and not life-long effects.
So with so many different voices touting different ideas and unreliable information--cutting through all of the “chatter” can seem almost impossible. The confusion can make you want to give up altogether, but when the fight is for your very life--the search is always worth the hassle.
Not all “Fads” are Bad
Probably the most ridiculed modern diet trend is the gluten-free craze, hated by chefs and beer & pizza-lovers alike--and a head-scratcher for lay-people everywhere. But a trend that has been picked up and propagated by Hollywood actually started for very legitimate reasons, for people who have gluten-allergies (also referred to as “celiac” about one in 133 people have it) and to help some people with autoimmune diseases.
Kendra Poszywak is a member at Title boxing and a tenth grade teacher who went gluten-free to help with chronic migraines and headaches. She has fourteen different headaches and seven different migraines that affect different parts of her skull and face. She had done everything to help try to alleviate the pain--even getting a daith piercing which is thought to break up a nerve cluster and alleviate migraine pain if done correctly-- but it proved ineffective. She had friends who were gluten-free who swore by the diet as a way to alleviate headaches. After she made the switch, the headaches were still there but finally her migraines were gone. The one time she tried reintroducing gluten into her diet, she had a migraine for two days.
Another “buzz” diet these days is plant-based, or vegan meaning absolutely no animal products, even foods containing products like eggs, gelatin, and honey-- that means no marshmallows, no ranch dressing, not even milk chocolate. The diet that I adopted out of ethical reasons is now being picked up by millions for health reasons, especially as new research has linked processed meats and dairy to cancer, heart disease, and diabetes.
David Bailey was probably the last person I ever expected to go vegan. A Title regular, he is in there every day knocking the stuffing out of his bag, with his white bristle mustache and dry humor--to be perfectly honest, I was half-surprised he didn’t dismiss the whole thing as “hippie crap” when he was encouraged by Cameron to try it.
“I heard about it and thought what the hell, I’ll give it a try--I guess it was either do it or pussy out,” he shrugged. “I’m kinda lazy--or at least I was until Title held me accountable--so I stuck with it.”
“But I ain’t grazing,” he added huffily, “Or eating broccoli or cauliflower.”
He said that there were some up’s and downs making the transition and skepticism about supplements--but with good advice and support from trainers and staff he has stuck with it and is coming up on his first month 100% veggie. “For now I feel great, I think about how clean my blood probably is, my energy level has soared naturally--I can’t see me going back.”
Our head trainer Kelvin Garcia made the switch to a vegan diet (and eliminated processed sugar, caffeine and alcohol) but his stint with veganism was temporary, a religious fast to find mental clarity and spiritual guidance. “The first day or two was really tough, second week I felt great, but by the third week I had picked up running with the team (Ragnar Run training) and my own workouts, and that was just too much on that diet,” he said, “I did it for just shy of a month--I found the spiritual guidance I needed, I woke up every morning and prayed, but my schedule wouldn’t wouldn’t let me keep going--I didn’t even have 45 minutes in my day to cook myself a meal.”
Even our owners Michelle and Kris Bender are proponents of religious fasting. They often go through periods of fasting on the Daniel diet, a biblical vegan diet inspired by Daniel’s rejection of the rich foods that the King of Babylon set before him. Michelle also occasionally switches to a liquid diet, i.e. tons of water, juicing and soups. “I woke up at four a.m. every day, I didn’t even set an alarm,” Michelle told me about her time spent on a liquid fast. “I could remember everything, every single name, every detail of my day. As a woman, everything changes on a diet like that, your periods change, your skin, your mood--everything.”
Some extreme diet changes, whether short-term or long-term can be beneficial, when they are done for the right reasons and with proper guidance and support. Just be careful and do your research first with whatever diet you undertake, and don’t ever expect an overnight miracle.
Listen to Yourself
Your body is your greatest natural indicator of what to do, if you feel bad--something is wrong. Granted, some foods can be deceiving, junk foods like McDonald’s burgers contain high levels of sodium and sugar which trick your brain into thinking dehydration is hunger and also release a burst of feel-good chemicals like dopamine. The trick is to recognize the long-term effects of quick processed food, make small changes and note the way it makes you feel after a few weeks. Look at yourself as a scientist; experiment, test hypothesis and track your results.
Listen to your stomach when it is saying “I’m hungry,” but also eat slowly so that you can hear when it lets you know “Ok, I’m full.” I will never forget the hunger pains of three days of eating nothing but celery and carrots, but I’ll also never forget the disgustingly uncomfortable feeling of drinking a large milkshake and binging on a full order of chili cheese fries. Both had warning flags where my body was telling me, “this is wrong.”
They say that nothing ever tastes as good as healthy feels--but, healthy food also tastes pretty darn good. There is a world of, wonderful food out there--natural ingredients and nutrient rich vegetables, grains, fruits, nuts, and meat (yes, even meat). We are blessed to live in an age of abundance and selection, the only difficulty comes in knowing what to choose and avoiding modern perils like pesticides and preservatives.
What seems like an almost horror story--the up’s and down’s of my dietary battles--thankfully, it has a happy ending. After years of struggling, an invaluable present presented itself in my life--I learned to cook. I started in fine-dining, and ended up working in every kind of kitchen imaginable all over the world; even a trendy vegan restaurant in Melbourne, Australia.
Now that I had the skill set, I had the confidence to go back vegetarian. I started gradually this time, watching my carb and sugar intake and eating copious amounts of leafy greens and nuts to accommodate my protein needs. When I finally felt nutritionally stable, I decided to muster the courage to take it a step further and eliminate animal products altogether and this time, I did it right.
I’m still not there yet, but I’m the fittest I’ve been in years. My energy levels have soared, my volatile mood swings have stabilized, my acid reflux and indigestion have all but disappeared (in spite of the harrowing amount of spice that I eat), and I have lost five pounds and increased my athletic performance ten fold.
I want to sit here and tell you that this is the miracle diet, that it is the best way to live a human existence because I do truly believe that, but that fact is that what worked for me might not work for you. It is a dramatic lifestyle change, and many people, just like our trainer Kelvin Garcia, are simply unable to be sustained on plants alone long term; and let’s be honest, not everyone has the ability, time or energy to make cashew cheese every week.
Rather than trying to jump straight into an extreme diet that you could ultimately fail at and become frustrated, start gradually--and find what works for you.
Call to Action
During the month of September, Title Boxing Clarksville will be asking our family members to bring the difficult conversation of nutrition to the table. We are kicking the month off right with a healthy-food-potluck and round-table discussion and Q&A with one of our members, Arielle Lewis, a certified dietitian on Saturday at 2 p.m. We will be giving out food journals at the front desk for you to track your daily consumption--talk to your trainers after class and get involved--the most dedicated members will win a prize at the end of the month! And if you are interested in shifting toward a plant-based diet or reducing your meat intake, Cameron and myself will be hosting a vegan cooking class at the Tree of Life Organic Market and Wellness later in the month and handing out a meal plan of some of our favorite plant-based recipes so stay tuned.
Ultimately, the choice is individual, but whatever you decide to do, we encourage all of you to practice mindfulness with what you put in your body, create a fervor within yourself for nutritional information (and take nothing at face value--do as much independent research as possible from reliable sources), but most of all---practice self-forgiveness, because hey...at the end of the day, we’re all only human.
Article by Kirsten Hall
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