Rich Roll is an ultra endurance athlete who also has a very popular podcast. He’s an advocate of a vegan, plant-based diet and healthy living and known as one of the fittest men on the planet, with a host of endurance accomplishments. It wasn’t always this way. In Finding Ultra, Roll is searingly honest and tells us his life story from shy high school swim star to being a swim star at Stanford. At Stanford, he discovered alcohol and how it could help him with his shyness, and from there it was a steady decline into addiction. He tells of one of his lowest points, where he was drunk during his graduation from law school and in his drunken haze, he decided to collect his degree on stage in bare feet, much to his parents’ horror. With the help of AA and rehab, Roll gets sober but is eating horrendous …[Read More]
I went vegan for a week. Here’s what happened
I’ve been looking for lifestyle experiments that last a week. Ideas so far are daily meditation, daily ice-cold showers. And I’ve recently had this nagging feeling that I should try veganism. I couldn’t imagine doing it for a month (as I did when I stopped drinking alcohol for a month), so I decided to become vegan for a week. Now I LOVE meat (ribeye steaks, all forms of pork, fish, shellfish etc) and I love dairy products (all forms of cheese, eggs, milk, butter, mayonnaise etc), but Angelique is always trying to get me to cut down on my red meat and animal fats. She says it’s bad for my cholesterol. I’ve always resisted trying veganism because I love the food groups that it cuts out. However, it’s well documented that there are health benefits to eating a more plant-based diet and cutting back on animal fats. Devotees of veganism …[Read More]
Vegan experiment – where can I get my protein from?
I’ve always thought that the best place to get protein from is meat: steak, lamb, chicken, eggs, fish. And I’ve always wondered where vegans get their protein from and especially vegan athletes. I found this article on the net which shows how much protein there is per 100g of food stuffs. Here’s a screenshot from the article: Credit for screenshots: It’s very clear from the above that plant protein as a category has a lot less protein per 100g than meat and dairy does as a category. How much protein does a person need? From articles I found, a sedentary man needs around 54g per day and a runner might need around 75g. A weights guy might need 120g a day. From the table above, you might get all you need to get for running from 200g of steak (smaller than a normal steak of around 285g). To compare that …[Read More]
I took cold showers for 7 days. Here’s what I found
I’ve heard about a lot of benefits to taking regular cold showers and ice bath therapy. Sportspeople swear by ice baths to speed up recovery after intense workouts. Wim Hof has popularised cold therapy with incredible feats of swimming in ice and climbing mountains like Kilimanjaro without a top on. Purported benefits of cold showers include: Improved discipline and mental toughness Boost to immune system Boost to mental state and positivity Invigorating wakeup and start to the day It’s amazing that something so simple has the power to give immense benefits like these. So let’s give it a go! Day 1 I always take a shower first thing and this morning, I hopped in and had a nice hot shower. It wasn’t until about a minute in that I realised that I was supposed to start the cold showers today! Doh. So I decided to do what programmes recommend which …[Read More]
Getting a Covid-19 antibody test
Even though I was pretty sure that I had coronavirus back in March, I still wanted confirmation of that by test. Up until now, the tests for antibodies have had some bad press for not being too accurate, but there is a test centre in Hammersmith which uses South Korean tests which have high specificity and high sensitivity, as opposed to tests that have high specificity but low sensitivity. Here’s a screenshot of the test compared to other tests (taken from the Corona Test Centre’s website): The antibodies they are looking out for are IgM and IgG. IgM are produced around the time of the infection and during recovery, but tail off some time after the event. IgG are also produced around the time of infection and they stay around quite a lot longer than IgM after the event. Here’s a screenshot from the Corona Test Centre website of the …[Read More]