I woke up the other morning and I felt knackered. I just wanted to stay in bed. I didn’t know why I felt like this as in the previous few weeks, I’d had quite a lot of energy. Enough to do a half-marathon. Was it something to do with veganism. I checked Rich Roll’s book and yes he does mention that vegans can be iron deficient and vitamin B12 deficient if not monitored. Doh! I quickly did some more research: Iron deficiency From this article by the Mayo Clinic: Initially, iron deficiency anemia can be so mild that it goes unnoticed. But as the body becomes more deficient in iron and anemia worsens, the signs and symptoms intensify. Iron deficiency anemia signs and symptoms may include: Extreme fatigue Weakness Pale skin Chest pain, fast heartbeat or shortness of breath Headache, dizziness or lightheadedness Cold hands and feet Inflammation or soreness …[Read More]
Body
How to go from couch potato to half-marathon in 52 days
Between Zach being born at the end of December 2019 and the end of April 2020, I did zero cardio. I went to the gym once or twice before lockdown but that was just to do some weights. I caught Covid in March, and, throughout April, I did zero exercise. Come the 1st of May, I decided to get running again. Little runs, regularly, with a few longer runs rolled in. 52 days later, I did a half-marathon (13.1 miles), admittedly not very quickly at all (2hrs 26min) but still a half-mara. If you haven’t run in ages, here’s how you can do the same. You can do it! Get the Strava app Strava is free with a paid-for premium option. The free option is good enough for most people and you simply use it to track your runs. Lace up, hit record on the app, and get moving. Don’t …[Read More]
Rich Roll’s book Finding Ultra: Rejecting Middle Age, Becoming One of the World’s Fittest Men, and Discovering Myself
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]