That changed about a week and a half ago. I learned something substantial that I could have and maybe should have blogged about, but by then I was out of the habit of getting up every morning and blogging before work. I was no longer relying on my blog to help me make good decisions day-in and day-out. I had managed to fill that time with other things, like watering my garden (which is not doing well, by the way. Aphids? Perhaps. I am not happy about that.), cleaning the kitchen, going to work a little earlier. Nothing earth shattering, but all pleasant little things to do in the morning to get my day started on a good note. In the back of my head I felt like I needed to write a blog post, but for some reason, I wasn't finding the time in the mornings.
This morning I got up early to go for a hard-push 24 mile bike ride. I wanted to hit the road early so there would be very little traffic and I could get a feel for how long it takes me to ride 24 miles without obstacles. Half way through breakfast it started pouring down rain. I was going to ride my 24 miles in the country yesterday. I picked my route, loaded the car, drove the 45 minutes to the starting point of my route, got my bike out of the car, loaded my snacks, etc... into my bike, locked the car, set the time on my watch, and mounted my bike just to realize that I was wearing my sneakers and I had forgotten to bring my bike shoes. I have clip-less pedals on my bike, I need my bike shoes, I cannot ride my bike without them. It was already late enough in the day that going home, getting my shoes, and coming back out was not an option. I thought about riding close to home but the traffic here is heavy late in the day, so I decided to flip my Saturday and Sunday exercise and lift weights on Saturday and get up early Sunday morning and ride out from home; just to be met with heavy thundershowers this morning. I checked the weather forecast and it was predicting rain all day. So I changed plans again and decided to put up a long overdue blog post, clean the bathrooms and kitchen (yes, they need it), and go to the gym with Jack this afternoon. Now I sit down to blog and guess what? Blue sky. *Sigh* I'm going to finish this blog post and see what the weather looks like. Perhaps I'll go for a bike ride after all. The kitchen floor can wait one more week, can't it?
What happened a week and a half ago that was so important that it warranted a blog post, you ask? I was working out with Joshua and he asked me, again, how much protein I eat. I answered like I usually do and I said, "Enough." In my mind, I was eating enough protein. Through my years and years of reading about healthy diets and through my few years of being a vegan and learning how to get protein from non-meat sources I had come to the conclusion that as long as I eat a wide variety of foods, eat a balanced diet, and have protein with every meal, I am getting enough protein. In fact, I was being pretty stubborn about that, and not really paying attention to the messages coming at me that were saying that I might want to rethink my theory on the issue. I am no longer vegan, but one of the things I love about having been vegan for a while is that it completely changed the way I cook and eat. I cook a much wider variety of food and I get protein from a lot of different sources. I eat chicken and fish now. I also eat eggs and dairy. I don't eat beef or pork. I don't eat beef because of the tremendous amount of resources (water, land, grain, etc...) it takes to raise cows for beef and the destruction we are causing our planet (draining US aquifers and cutting down South American rain forests) so that humans can eat their daily hamburgers. I don't eat pork...I don't know why...I just sort of lump pigs in with cows, I guess. I try to buy poultry that is raised without antibiotics and other bad stuff that they do to chickens these days. One of these days I will take it to the next step and find a local, truly free-range poultry farm to buy my chicken from. Anyway...at this point my protein sources include poultry, eggs, Greek yogurt, aged cheddar, nuts (almonds, walnuts and macadamia nuts), tofu, tempeh, beans of all types, humus (OK - that's a bean), mushrooms, quinoa, etc... I stopped eating wheat, so I am no longer using wheat gluten as a protein source.
I was confident that when I added poultry, eggs, Greek yogurt, and fish back into my diet I was getting plenty of protein. I wasn't worried about it even a little bit. I was just going on about my merry way. In fact, it did seem pretty merry. I am exercising so much that I was able to get kind of lazy about my diet and not gain weight, particularly since I stopped eating wheat. So many of the high-calorie empty foods have wheat in them, that once I stopped eating wheat I could pretty much eat whatever I wanted and maintain my weight.
So when Joshua said, "How much protein do you eat?" and I said, "Enough," I thought that would be the end of that. You see, in my mind Joshua and I have competing goals, in a way. He is my personal trainer and with him my goal is to increase my muscle mass/lower my % of body fat. I am also training for the triathlon in August, which is requiring a lot of endurance training. Joshua has been concerned that all of the endurance training is sapping the nutrients that I need for the strength training to be effective. I was ignoring his concerns. Last Tuesday he wasn't satisfied with, "Enough." He asked me how much I weighed and I told him 153 pounds and he thought for a second and told me I ought to be eating at least 150 grams of protein a day. Now, I've never counted grams of protein before and I did not have any idea how many grams I was eating, but I knew that 150 grams was a lot and was way more than I was eating. I was incredulous. 150 grams a day? That's a lot!! How am I going to eat 150 grams of protein a day and not get fat? Joshua basically said that with the amount of exercising I was doing, my body required that much protein to stay healthy and strong. No way, I said.
So I left the gym last Tuesday morning on a mission to learn more about protein and how much protein is enough. I asked people I know that are serious about exercise. I researched it on the Internet. I talked it through with my husband. I have more research to do and I will do it, what I'd like is a really good book on nutrition, but what I have learned already had floored me. By George, I think Joshua may be right. Website after website after website said that people that exercise as much as I do, let's call those people athletes, should eat 1 gram of protein per day for every pound of body weight. Other website calculate how much protein you should eat per pound of lean body mass. Even the most conservative of those calculations puts me at 115 grams a day. I did find websites that supported my actual average daily consumption of protein of about 60 grams a day, for a 150 pound average female that did not exercise at all, that is. From my research I learned that my balanced diet was perfect for someone living an average life that did not include any vigorous exercise. I exercise vigorously for an hour 5 days a week and for at least a couple of hours on the 6th day, if not more. That requires more protein.
I haven't read all I need to read about protein yet, but I read enough to get a better understanding of the roles that all of the amino acids play in repairing muscle tissue, tendons, ligaments, skin cells, etc... Crap. I realized that I really am hurting myself by not eating enough protein.
So on day one (it will be two weeks on this coming Tuesday) I added up my projected (and normal) protein intake for the day. 55 - 60 grams was the answer. I did a quick inventory of the food in the house and changed what I packed for my work day and got it up to 100 grams pretty easily. Beyond 100 grams required some planning and more cooking. More cooking of chicken to be specific. For almost two weeks, now, I have been eating at least 120 - 130 grams of protein a day. A typical day of protein looks like this:
- 2 whole eggs and 2 egg whites: 18 grams of protein
- 1 ounce cheddar cheese on eggs: 6 grams of protein
- 8 ounces Greek yogurt: 23 grams of protein
- 1/4 cup walnuts: 4 grams of protein
- 1/4 cup almonds: 8 grams of protein
- 1/4 cup macadamia nuts: 3 grams of protein
- 8 ounces of chicken breast: 50 grams of protein
- 2 ounces aged cheddar for snack: 12 grams of protein
Gone are my lazy, glorious days of eating whatever I want and maintaining my weight. All of those protein sources have calories in them. All of a sudden, if I am going to eat that much protein and still get the other essential macro-nutrients my body requires (namely carbs, the fats have themselves covered in the above list, between the nuts, avocados, olive oil, and occasional fish that I eat, I think I am OK on oil), I need to watch what I eat again. Obviously, I'm not hungry, I'm not starving myself, I'm not trying to lose weight, but I have to make sure I eat the right foods so that I get the protein I need and don't gain weight.
This led me down a brand new path, a brand new thought process. I realized that I needed to get serious about this. Some people may find this thought somewhat amusing. I know my trainer did. When I came back the following Tuesday and told him that I realized I needed to get serious about this, that I needed to transition from being an "accidental athlete" to a "serious athlete" his response was, "You swam 1500 meters, rode your bike 24 miles, and ran 5 miles last weekend. I couldn't do that. Most people would call that serious." Hmmm...yeah....I guess he has a point.
My point was this, I was taking exercise seriously, but I wasn't taking the ramifications of that much exercise seriously. The fact of the matter is that that much exercise has an impact on every aspect of my life.
This is difficult for me. For some reason I have a hard time "getting serious" about this. I have a hard time researching exercise physiology. I have a hard time treating my body as if it is the body of a serious athlete. I have a hard time converting my whole way of thinking to how to optimize my body's ability to perform, recover, heal, etc... I enjoy the anecdotal stories about how people's lives have been transformed by exercise. I enjoy reading books like "Younger Next Year" that are written for lay-people (non-athletes) and are designed to motivate you to get off your butt and move. I liked the slightly technical writing in "Younger Next Year," "Thinner This Year," and "Wheat Belly." I learned a lot from those books. They helped me make big, basic changes to my lifestyle. But when I take the next step and start reading books written by and for athletes, I balk. My head spins. I dig my heals in. I get frustrated and bored. I feel like I am in way over my head. I think, "This is not me. They are not talking to me." Yet, they are... Oh my... What a transition. This is a hard one.
I am now convinced that I was not eating enough protein and my goal, now, is to eat at least 120 grams of protein a day while I am in training, which may just be for the rest of my life. Since I have started to eat more protein I have noticed some significant improvements.
- My run time has improved. I ran 5 miles in 50 minutes last Wednesday. I was pumped about that!! That was one of my long-term goals and I reached it on Wednesday. In fact, I didn't just run it, I ran it and had energy left at the end. When I passed the four mile mark I had 9 minutes left. I knew I could do it, so I turned it up and ran the last mile full out. I was able to run the last mile of a 5 mile run in 9 minutes. Wow!! That's huge. A year ago it took me an hour to jog-walk four miles. That's improvement.
- I look younger. Really, I do. Even Jack has noticed it. I would say I look about 5 years younger. I looked in the mirror the other day as I was getting ready for work and was shocked by the face that was looking back at me. The gaunt, kind of haggard look was gone and my face seemed fuller, my skin seemed tauter, and the dark circles under my eyes were much less pronounced. I looked much healthier, all of a sudden.
- My elbows, which have been bothering me for a couple of months, are starting to heal. I knew it was a tendon problem, because it wasn't the joints that were hurting, but the area on the inside of my arms right above and below my elbows. I've been stretching those areas, avoiding exercises that hurt, etc..., but they weren't getting better. All of a sudden, things that used to hurt (and they are odd little motions) don't hurt as much anymore. After reading the role amino acids play in tendon and ligament health, I am not surprised.
- I'm in a better mood. In fact, I have way more energy. I feel great.
Perhaps you noticed in the preceding paragraphs about protein that I sort of mentioned the fact that I have achieved two significant milestones. I did my first big brick last weekend. I swam 1500 meters, I rode my bike 24 miles, and I ran 5 miles, back-to-back-to-back. I did it!!! I also ran my first 50 minute 5 miles!! Those were two of my four fitness goals for this year. My first one was to be able to do 12 push-ups from my toes, with good form. I knocked that out months ago. My final one is to be able to do a pull up. I hope to get there by the end of the year. But with three of my four goals attained, I feel like I need to set new goals. The first thing that comes to mind is improving my times on my swim/bike/run legs prior to the August 17th tri. What comes after that? I don't really know.
There is a 200 mile bike ride through the Flint Hills of Kansas over the Memorial Day weekend that sounds like a lot of fun. I think I want to do that next year. Ruth and I are starting to talk about doing a half marathon next spring and a full marathon next fall. That does not sound like fun...but it is starting feel doable and like something I may just try to do. There is a lot to think about.
The mental transitions from being a non-active person to being a serious athlete is every bit as difficult as the physical transition. Perhaps it is more difficult, because it is a lot more subtle. I can do this. I will do this. I am doing this! But sometimes it is not easy.
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