Hi everyone, and welcome to week four! We've covered slowing down, choosing something big, and building systems. This week we're in my kitchen, because the two allies Ingrid and I are relying on most are our physiology and our psychology, and both of them run on what you feed them. I'll walk you through what's actually on our counter, why each thing is there, and the two small changes I want you to make this week.
Watch time = 5 minutes.
These videos were filmed over the summer, so the countdowns you hear won't match today's date.
Fuel and Heal
Every hero needs allies. Ingrid and I have chosen two: our physiology and our psychology. Body and brain. Everything we are doing between now and Antarctica comes down to keeping those two allies supplied, and that means fuelling and healing.
Here is what is actually on our counter, and why.
Water first. Hydration underpins everything else. The largest meta-analysis, pooling 33 studies, found that losing more than about 2% of your body mass in water measurably impairs attention, executive function and motor coordination. The effect is real and it is small. So no, mild thirst is not destroying your thinking. But when you are training hard in summer heat, 2% arrives faster than you would guess, and attention is exactly what you need on hour four of a walk or your work day.
Carbohydrate you can grab. Fruit and vegetables do double duty because they carry both fuel and the phytochemicals that come with whole plants. When you juice citrus yourself and keep the pulp, you keep the fibre, which slows how fast the sugar reaches your bloodstream and blunts the glucose spike you would get from the processed version. Root vegetables are the staple for a lot of endurance athletes I know. Sweet potato, olive oil, salt, pepper, oven is a great example of an easy recipe we do all the time.
Protein, because repair is critical. You need amino acids to rebuild the muscle you broke down that morning, and you need them to make neurotransmitters, since your dopamine comes from tyrosine and your serotonin from tryptophan, both of which arrive on your plate. The research on how much has converged: for people training hard, the benefit to muscle protein synthesis flattens out somewhere around 1.6 grams per kilogram of body weight per day. For us that looks like eggs, Greek yogurt, cottage cheese, fish, chicken, quinoa, hemp hearts and chia.
Fats. Olive oil and avocado are rich in monounsaturated fat, which is omega-9 rather than omega-3. Olive oil is genuinely anti-inflammatory, and the reason is its polyphenols, particularly oleocanthal, rather than anything about its fatty acids. The omega-3 on my counter is the chia, and even there the fat is ALA, which your body converts to the EPA and DHA it actually needs at a rate under 10%. If omega-3 is your goal, cold water fatty fish is a great option.
Eat the rainbow. Different plant families carry different chemistry, and two groups on my counter have been studied specifically. Deep-orange vegetables like sweet potato, carrots, squash and red peppers are rich in carotenoids, and both dietary intake and blood concentrations of carotenoids track with lower cardiovascular risk across large prospective cohorts. The broader pattern is better established still: every additional 200 grams a day of fruit and vegetables is associated with roughly 8 to 16% lower risk of coronary heart disease. Cruciferous vegetables, so broccoli, kale, cabbage and cauliflower, carry glucosinolates, which your gut converts into isothiocyanates including sulforaphane. Those compounds are under active investigation for cancer prevention.
Of course people who eat more vegetables differ from people who don't in many ways. Remember that the benefit appears to travel with the food rather than with the compound. When beta-carotene was isolated into a supplement and tested in large randomized trials, it did not reduce cancer, and in smokers it increased lung cancer enough that one of the trials was stopped early. Eat real food, make it yourself, eat it with those you love. Don’t worry so much about the details.
Coffee and tea. The polyphenols in coffee and tea are compounds with demonstrated health benefits, and large cohort studies consistently show coffee drinkers doing well rather than badly. Caffeine itself is one of the best-evidenced performance aids we have. Use it in the morning and move to herbal tea in the afternoon, because caffeine's half-life of roughly five hours means an afternoon coffee is still circulating at bedtime.
And hot sauce. Non-negotiable in this house.
None of this is complicated. It takes a little effort and a little time, and it repays you in energy you can feel and health you can see.
Your 1% this week: Pick one fuelling change: when I sit down at my desk, I will put a full water bottle beside me. Then pick one healing act: when Thursday evening comes, I will eat some extra vegetables with dinner. Micro wins this week around fuelling and healing.
Fuel yourself a little better. Give your body what it needs to repair. Those two things bring the goal closer.
Disclosure: Living Fuel is a sponsor of my participation in the Great World Race. I use their protein because I like it, and you should know about the relationship either way.
