2021 December - Anaerobics: Destruction & Reconstruction, Breath, & Food Rules

Anaerobics: Destruction & Reconstruction by Mark Baker

A new age of authorship has just dawned - anyone can now write and publish a book online. There will be a deluge of books. Many horribly written, some phenomenal in their own respects, some providing very worthwhile unique perspectives on familiar topics, and the rest a complete waste of space & time. This particular book falls into that 3rd bucket by providing worthwhile unique perspectives. I highly recommend it if you are interested in an un-sugar-coated explanation of what you should do to live a healthy & independent lifestyle. The editing isn’t perfect, but the content more than makes up for it. Warning: some might find the book a little too abrasive.

A few of my fav quotes:

  • Health is the most important asset you have but it’s an invisible asset, only becoming apparent when you start losing it. 

  • The gifts of youth are time and health - wisdom is when you no longer take either for granted.

  • The most powerful thing you can do to improve your health is to eliminate the things which are bad for you, then add in the things which are good for you.

  • I propose that most of the problems of human health come from being too domesticated not wild enough. We’ve swapped ecological stress for chronic manmade stress.

  • The point is that the human body is an adaptive organism, but it doesn't just adapt to stress, it must have stress. That is the reason for resistance training; progressive overload creating a systemically stronger body. Systems that require stress to improve, die in the absence of stress.

  • The modern environment is such a reversal of our evolutionary landscape that in every slim person an overweight person is waiting to burst out.

  • Nutritionists mistook what being omnivorous meant, leading to recommendations that the dinner plate should be mixed, when what it really meant is that variation comes over time not at every sitting.

  • Getting rid of things that harm is better than taking something to counteract that harm. As an example, we benefit more from taking out the junk food in our diet than adding multivitamin tablets or so-called ‘superfoods’.

  • vegetable oils are the piss of Satan.

  • Being healthy doesn’t guarantee that you’ll live a long life, only that you’ll have less chance of being a half-dead marshmallow for twenty years before the reaper comes calling.

  • The single most important quality to retain as an older person, is the ability to generate and tolerate extremes.

  • Good health is the functioning of all systems; ill health only needs one thing to go wrong 

  • The way you achieve something determines the nature of what you've achieved.

  • Modernity should protect you from acute harm but not turn you into a domesticated animal.

  • There is no freedom without health. There is no health without wildness. There is no wildness if you are domesticated.

  • Technology and modern life doesn't change our nature, only what we are capable of doing according to our nature.

Breath by James Nestor

This book taught me the impact and power of breathing mechanics on our overall health. Some of this material overlaps with my clinical work (and reinforced it!), and it is written in a way that makes it very accessible for the general public. It synthesizes “old” knowledge/traditions with “modern” scientific perspectives to provide you with simple actionable steps to a healthier breathing habit. Here are a few distillations on the perfect breathing technique:

  1. Keep your mouth closed - unless you are in high states of physical exertion

  2. Breathe through your nose

  3. Exhale completely - most of us do not experience anything close to a full exhalation

  4. Chew your food - soft foods lead to narrower mandibles (jaws) and could contribute to situations where your tongue rests on the floor of your mouth versus the natural “upward” resting position.

  5. Breath Cadence - breathe in for 5.5 seconds, breathe out for 5.5 seconds. This leads to 5.5 breaths per minute. It takes a while to get to this consistency of breathing, but it might be completely worth the effort!

Food Rules by Michael Pollan

I enjoyed the simplicity of this very short and easy read. It is a memorable summary of Pollan’s previous book, “In Defense of Food,” which provides & explains all the research applied to this book. It contains 64 VERY concise rules divided into 3 categories:

  1. What should I eat

  2. What kind of food should I eat?

  3. How should I eat?

Overall, I agree with >90% of the book. My only reservations are concerning his statements regarding eating red meat. While it has been customary to denigrate the consumption of red meats the research points more toward processed red meats as the culprit. Here are some of my favorite quotes:

  • Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

  • People who get off the Western diet see dramatic improvements in their health.

  • Not only can processing remove nutrients and add toxic chemicals, but it makes food more readily absorbable, which can be a problem for our insulin and fat metabolism.

  • Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food. (I came to this exact conclusion after reading a number of books on food & nutrition!)

  • Avoid food products containing ingredients that no ordinary human would keep in the pantry.

  • Labels list ingredients by weight, and any product that has more sugar than other ingredients has too much sugar.

  • To say “I’m hungry” in French you say “J’ai faim”—“I have hunger”—and when you are finished, you do not say that you are full, but “Je n’ai plus faim”—“I have no more hunger.” That is a completely different way of thinking about satiety. So: Ask yourself not, Am I full? but, Is my hunger gone? That moment will arrive several bites sooner.

  • “The banquet is in the first bite.”

  • One researcher found that simply switching from a twelve-inch to a ten-inch dinner plate caused people to reduce their consumption by 22 percent.

  • “After lunch, sleep awhile; after dinner, walk a mile.” - I’ve come across similar adages in other cultures.

  • Do all your eating at a table.

  • Some people follow a so-called S policy: “no snacks, no seconds, no sweets—except on days that begin with the letter S.”

Jason Boddu