PACE yourself

Okay the way I see it the holiday weekend is behind us and summer has officially begun. I have decided that today is the beginning of a big experiment and I am entering it on my blog to make it official (I just read that if you start an exercise program writing about it on your blog keeps you dedicated, we shall see). Anyway here is the experiment and what I am basing it on.

I just finished reading Dr. Al Sears book called “The Doctor’s Heart Cure” and I found it very believable and based on pretty sound scientific studies. Chapter 7 of said book is dedicated to the PACE exercise program and several of my health gurus are standing firmly behind this technique of losing weight and making your heart truly resilient. What, you ask, is PACE and what claims can they legitimately make. I will happily explain why I think it makes sense and you can then choose to read the book yourself or try your own experiment. By the way, Al Sears now has a book published that is only about PACE for a hefty $37.95 plus shipping.

PACE stands for “progressively accelerating cardiopulmonary exertion” and it gradually challenges your heart, lungs, and blood vessels to build their strength. It involves doing short bursts of exercise with a resting phase between each burst much as you would if you were predator or prey. “In the wild creatures must be able to accelerate to 100 percent capacity in a single heartbeat. Humans have lost this ability to accelerate somewhat recently.” That makes perfect sense to me as does the fact that if you constantly exercise at a certain level your heart adjusts to that level and it is no longer increasing the capacity of your heart, lungs and blood vessels. I know this from my running days. After I have been running for 3-4 minutes I am no longer putting any stress on my heart and it feels kind of like coasting to me. I actually get bored as there is no challenge and I think the PACE method will be anything but boring.

I have purchased a heart monitor from Target as I can never seem to take my pulse when I am exercising and this will automatically do it for me for only $34.95 at the mere 3-8 second touch of a button. I think the hardest part will be decreasing the time I exercise as I have always believed that an hour was about right. It requires no special clothes or equipment but if you have an elliptical machine, exercycle, or stairstepper those will serve you very well. I will use the exercycle and a jump rope as I have both in my possession.

In theory, eventually one only has to exercise for less than 20 minutes a day to achieve maximum health but you do it by doing a little more each week, increasing your acceleration rate (training your body to respond faster to increased activity) and increasing the intensity of each active phase. You also increase the challenge by changing the duration of the exercise, not making it longer but shorter and more intense.

As I am fairly fit and used to working out I am going to start at Week 3 and 4. As an example week 3 should be as follows:

Exercise for 9 minutes at intensity level 3 (using a scale of 1-10 where 1-2 is a leisurely pace and 10 is full throttle). Rest for 2 minutes. Exercise for 9 minutes at intensity level 4.

I have certain character flaws (my spousal unit affectionately refers to as “being a Carver”) that cause me to overdo, so I am guessing that I will start with intensity level 5 or 6 but I don’t think this matters the point is to reach your target heart rate for the 9 minutes and for my age this ranges from 119-145. I think it is reasonable to maintain about 140 for the intense period. The resting phase of exercise (which might involve walking) should result in your heart rate returning to a more normal 72 beats a minute plus or minus. That will be a problem for me as my heart rate does not readily return to normal after exercise and I know this indicates some tendency toward heart disease and it is my one real goal. I want to reach a point where my heart rate will quickly return to normal which is something this program promises.

I am not going on record with my weight or even saying that is a goal. However, if this program results in my jeans becoming baggy I will share that with you and I will also let you know how I do with intensity and duration. I will track my pulse rate and method I choose for intense phases.

I am up for the challenge, so join me on my adventure and I’ll see you next week.

The Raw Debate

I woke up this morning around 4:30 with “un” on my mind, unpasteurized, unhomogenized “raw” milk. It was not, as you might suspect, a hunger issue but an important issue that I really feel the need to share.

I was at a funeral in December and somehow (I always manage to spew forth) I mentioned my consumption of raw milk. A young man who was at least 30 years my junior proceeded to expound upon the dangers of unpasteurized milk. He knew all of this because his grandfather had told him about all the people who got Tuberculosis years ago from “bad” milk. It struck me at that moment that no matter the depth of my experience, no matter the level of my knowledge, there will always be the people whose lips have never and will never touch raw milk who know more than I do. That is just pure cow dung.

I have personally consumed raw milk both from cows and goats for three years and not one bad thing has happened. My lips have not fallen off, I have not gone blind, my lungs remain uninfected with the tuberculin virus, in fact, I may have a stronger immune system than I ever did before. Raw milk in my opinion is the only milk to drink providing it is from cows, goats, sheep, yaks, camels etc who have never been given an artificial big pharma pill or vaccination.

Did you know that many people (not all) with lactose intolerance find that if milk is unadulterated, unpasteurized and whole they can consume it with gusto and experience no tummy cramps and runny diarrhea? Did you know that pasteurization kills off all of the natural enzymes and vitamins that Mother Nature intended us to consume and we are left with this worthless liquid that has everything that was good for the human body removed? We don’t even absorb calcium as we should from dead milk due to the destruction of phosphatase in the process of cooking it.

Did the young man who knew all about the badness of raw milk know that tuberculosis didn’t come from the cow’s raw milk? Sanitation at the time was extremely poor everywhere and lack of clean hands and clean environment very likely spread that disease not the lowly cow and her lovely nectar.

Friends we have been very misled by the powers that be and it is time to arm yourself with knowledge. Read Ron Schmid’s “The Untold Story of Milk”, read Mercola’s “Total Health”, buy “Nourishing Traditions” by Sally Fallon and Mary Enig and cook from it while you educate yourself. Insist by using the almighty dollar that we get the cow back in the grassy pastures living the good life and being milked under the best of sanitary conditions. Contact me if you have a desire to see for yourself the farms where cows are born and raised in pristine situations and milked with kindness and by caring people who let them live their lives out even when they are no longer useful. I will happily introduce you to these good stewards of the earth.

There is a plethora of reputable data out there to prove unequivocally that raw milk is not the devil’s drink and may, in fact, have very divine origins. Now go, drink raw and get healthy!

On the roll again

This feels good! Many will not be familiar with my previous blogs due to a malfunction on Blog.com but believe me they are there and I enjoyed composing my thoughts in that way. I feel very positive about wordpress and its ability to let the world (well maybe just my friends) read what I have to share with them.

Today, I think that perspiration is on my mind. Summer is coming and the sun’s natural heat is everywhere you go. Today in Minnesota, for instance, it is going to be 86 degrees and it is only the 10th of May. Will I apply the antiperspirant that Proctor and Gamble advertise frequently or perhaps some other secret to dryness. Categorically the answer is NO!

First of all let me say that I am a faithful follower of Joe Mercola’s site but only because the advice I have followed from that site has proven over and over to be correct. So imagine my surprise when the topic of deodorants and antiperspirants was discussed. Joe Mercola said something preposterous like “you don’t need to use those products”. I had for sometime disliked putting those chemicals on my skin as I was familiar with the aluminum hazards of anti-perspirants and to be honest, I have a mother with Alzheimer’s Disease and I know the association of excess aluminum in the brain tissue of that disease’s victims. Why would I want to absorb a metal with known negative affects on the human body? To smell nice that’s why.

It was with great trepidation that I went out of the house the first time with nothing under my arms but bare flesh. I did take the chlorophyll pills that Mercola recommended if you were concerned about body odor but otherwise I was without chemicals to dry and deodorize my pits. I kept my arms close to my body that day and at the end of the day I felt there was some odor but it was no worse than the smell emitted from a pit that has had some awful artificial deodorant fragrance of “spring” or “sport” taped over it every morning.

I felt not only relief but some irritation at the end of that day that for years I had been fooled by everything I read and heard in to thinking that my body required a band aid to be okay. Amazingly not one doctor ever told me I didn’t need such perfumed nonsense or that if I eat the right food for my body it won’t emit toxic wastes that smell.

To be succinct and I am usually anything but, I am and have been sporting unadorned pits for two years now. Do I occasionally have some body odor? Yes. Did I occasionally have body odor when I still had my dirty little “Secret”? Yes. The difference is that now if I have a highly stressful situation to cope with I will dust a teaspoon of baking soda under my arms to neutralize smells and go happily on my way to, you guessed it, work (the stressful place where I worry about smell as my pits are in someone’s face almost all day).