Blaming Oneself

Work out whenever it's convenient--just make sure that you don't eat a large or heavy meal within two hours of exercising. Don't train when you're hungry, either. And perhaps I should presage my unique insights into some vast tome of science and research that others have overlooked, or only I can understand and interpret for you. In fact, we will eventually get to a vast tome of science and research, but I want to start with sense rather than science; I want to make the case that on the basis of sense and your own personal experience, you probably already know there are fundamental truths about diet and health. I will gladly ice this cake with a bounty of corroborating science, but let's be clear: sense - your sense - is the cake. Let's consider, for starters, the fact that we are a species - and that you already know a thing or two about the feeding of any species. You know a thing or two about feeding species if you have a dog, or cat, or horse, or fish; Then, there is the second thing: your own life experience. Think about when you have felt the best. Think about the people you know who are the most vital. Or, in contrast, think about how routinely people you care about have developed terrible health problems, from heart attacks to cancer, strokes to autoimmune diseases. It is, perhaps, the closest view of the earliest stages of life ever captured on video. In a color-enhanced version, vibrant splashes of greens, blues, and reds burst into green specks. It looks like a moon. In the final seconds, some dots coalesce in the center into an elongated S. That's the fish embryo. Life is beginning and it's captured on YouTube. According to the December 2008 issue of Science magazine, researchers in Germany made the movie with a new kind of microscope that allows them to magnify and film cells without killing or altering the fish. The investigators played the movie backward to try to figure out which cells turned into what body part.

They tracked some 16,000 embryonic cells during their first day of development. There is also a 55-second version with Mozart's Symphony No. Eat a protein or complex carbohydrate snack 30 to 45 minutes before your workout so you have some fuel for your body, or you may feel weak and shaky afterward. Good snacks include: After working out, remember to continue hydrating. Also, replenish fuel supplies with complex carbohydrates, and consume proteins to help with muscle building and repair. Nutritional Supplements Multivitamins. I recommend a good-quality multivitamin--pharmacy grade (USP) is the best, good manufacturing process (GMP) is acceptable--as insurance that you're getting all the nutrients you need for your health. This is especially important today, as the body may be more challenged by the production of less foods that are nutrient dense, and by an increase in environmental toxins. Systemic enzymes. Not to be confused with digestive enzymes, systemic enzymes have long been touted in European studies as beneficial for a variety of general health reasons. Bad things happen even to people who do everything right, but they happen far more often to people who, for whatever reasons, do not. I want to start out making a very different case than, I believe, any other article about diet and health you've ever read. I do not want to argue that I have found the tree that matters most, that my tree matters more than everyone else's tree, and that I understood this most important tree better than anyone else. I do not want to argue that arguments for ever other tree are misleading, misguided, and maybe even disingenuous. Many, maybe even most articles about diet start out with some claim about truth. They say, or insinuate they are sharing rarefied knowledge; The best of the breed live up to such claims. But even then, the lens tends to be the author's own lens - a particular patch of truth.

So, yes, good articles about diet and health tell the truth. But many authors who have contributed the best insights to our understanding of nutrition and health have done so based on their own work. There are so many minidocumentaries on the Web devoted to baby making. There is one of a sperm being injected into an egg, a fertility procedure called intracytoplasmic sperm injection, or ICSI for short. There are plenty of home videos, too. The BBC posted a few clips from a television show about conception. The show goes back and forth from images inside the birth canal (sperm chasing an egg) to a couple apparently trying to make a baby (two bellies touching). The only scenes of reproductive organs are shot from the inside of them. There is scary music in the background and a narrator, who sounds like a British Don Pardo (the famed radio and television announcer), says things such as: Inside the vagina, the sperm face the first of many mortal dangers. The walls of a woman's vagina are coated in acid . Soon enough, there will be no images of conception, pregnancy, and delivery left to the imagination. When a child asks the inevitable, How are babies born? Specifically, they're known to reduce the inflammation and muscle strain that often accompany intense exercise. Other supplements. Digestive enzymes, probiotics, and omega fatty acids are other supplements that many of my patients take for general health. While it's certainly not necessary to do a fitness assessment before you begin an exercise program, I encourage you to do so for a couple of reasons. First, I think it's important to know what your baseline fitness level is (many people aren't even aware of what their resting pulse rate is) because it gives you important information about your health and connects you to your body. Second, if you're new to exercise and find it difficult in the beginning, having concrete, objective evidence of your physical fitness progress will serve to motivate you (although chances are, after a few sessions, you'll already look and feel better). Heart rate. Knowing your resting heart rate gives you a snapshot of your overall heath.

The average adult's resting heart rate is between 60 and 100, and usually will decrease as you become more fit. A lower heart rate means your heart doesn't have to work as hard, and studies on people with heart disease have shown that as heart rates climb up over 70 bpm, their risk of cardiovascular death increases. This is not just understandable, but commendable. We all owe them a debt of gratitude. They are outnumbered 100 to 1 by bad articles about diet and health (or at least weight) that also claim to be offering up truth, but aren't. So, there are articles that tell lies. To me, what's been missing to date is the WHOLE truth, and that's what's different this time. I am doing all I can to not look through any one lens, but every lens, and to see and describe the big picture, viewed only that way. This article is unique in its devotion not just to the truth and nothing but the truth, but, to the best of my ability to share it, the whole truth. The big picture. It is my contention that the one and only way through the dark wood of modern epidemiology to a better medical fate - to more years in life, and more life in years - involves that perennially elusive view: the forest through the trees. I want to argue that there is a forest and that it matters more than any one tree (even mine, assuming I have a tree). As BettyAnn Holtzmann Kevles points out in Naked to the Bone, we have become a visual society. The images feed a curiosity about childbirth and reassure (sometimes falsely) those who have already begun the journey. There is something about keeping an eye on every step of the process that makes parents-to-be feel like good parents already, or at least that everything is going to be okay. They can, if they so desire, choose among a litter of embryos and then monitor the growth ever step of the way and experience the glee of seeing the white flicker on the ultrasound, the first image of the fetal heartbeat. And yet, there is another kind of birth image that is popular today and that has nothing to do with diagnosing defects or monitoring the baby, but it has had an enormous impact on the way we perceive childbirth. The recent spate of birth-themed movies, many of them comedies no less, could be considered a cultural response to the current obsession with conception and birth. In 2007, both Juno and Knocked Up came out, two films focusing on unplanned pregnancy. Baby Mama, released in 2008, was probably a first for a comedy about surrogacy.

A single career-driven fertility clinic failure hires a trashy, immature surrogate, and the two of them move in together. The odd couple goes twenty-first century--female and lots of baby obsessions. You can get your resting heart rate information from your family physician or a blood pressure monitor, or you can just take your pulse by placing the pads of your index and middle fingers on your opposite wrist, while the palm side of your wrist is face up, near the base of the thumb. Count the number of beats for 15 seconds and multiply that number by four to get your resting heart rate in beats per minute. You'll get the most accurate reading first thing in the morning, before getting out of bed. Blood pressure. Your blood pressure is vital health information to know since high blood pressure leads to heart attacks and strokes, as well as other medical problems. You can contact your family physician for this information, or you can use a public or home blood pressure monitor. Your weight is an easy thing to measure and a direct reflection of your fitness level. If you're overweight, you'll see your weight drop as you engage in HIIT. Since muscle weighs more than fat, however, weight alone is not always a good early measure of progress, as your muscle mass will increase as well. The way you look and feel will ultimately be the best reflection of your investment in this fitness program. I want to argue that you have been talked into missing the forest for the trees, and to add insult to injury, you've probably had to pay for the privilege of being befuddled and confused about the basic care and feeding of your own body and our own species. Seeing the forest through the trees, however, is just a matter of perspective, not persuasion. I don't want to, or need to, talk you into anything. Just because the truth can be overlooked doesn't mean it isn't obvious. The truth, famously, can set us free. Free from predatory profiteering. Free from manipulation and exploitation. Free from wayward forays into pointless endeavors .