Steady Insulin Levels are the Key to Health and Performance

by Roy Wallach and Robert Forster, PT

By now, most of us realize that exercise is crucial to good heath. However, your workouts are only half the battle to achieve great results; food is the other. Just like with your workouts, a science-based approach to what you put in your body - and when you put it in - has a great impact on your ability to achieve your health and athletic goals. Our approach to health and fitness involves guided exercise and a simple, "close to the earth" diet. Both are designed for one singular goal: metabolic efficiency - making you a "Better Butter Burner". In previous articles, we have discussed the importance of precision heart rate training to develop your fat-burning metabolism, and now it's time to dial in your diet to further serve this goal.

All of us - but athletes in particular - need to alter our relationship with food to view daily nutrition as the source of our energy, and associate food with health, and not with disease. In recent decades, we have been told more about what not to eat, rather than how to eat healthily. Our relationship with food has gradually morphed as the food supply that has been created for public consumption has been exposed as a nutritionally corrupted version of what nature provides. Common foods and dietary habits have absorbed most of the public's attention for being unhealthy and having the potential for doing damage to our bodies, overshadowing the capacity for natural foods to help keep us healthy and make us stronger, leaner, and more resistant to disease.

Indeed, most of the foods in the grocery store have been processed by food producers to such a degree that they have little resemblance to, or the nutritional value of, their natural food sources. Based on extensive and costly research, the food industry works hard to get consumers hooked on their products with addictive combinations of salt, sugar, and fat, as opposed to working to maintain the nutritional integrity that nature already provided. Regardless of how unhealthy our food becomes, from the farming to the processing of food items, we see continued chemical manipulation to make food more attractive to our eyes and our tongues. 

What's worse is that at the same time, medical and health experts have unintentionally played into this era in which laboratory food is perceived as better than what comes from nature by incorrectly labeling healthy foods, like eggs and butter, as health killers. A basic concept of healthy nutrition is to "eat close to the ground" as much as possible, namely eating unadulterated and unprocessed foods; it's rare to find a food that comes out of the ground with unhealthy proportions of sugar, salt, and fat to be damaging to our bodies.

"'Our bodies have evolved to run,' said Forster by telephone from London, where he was working with the U.S. Olympic Track and Field team. 'Our tree-dwelling ancestors had shorter legs, longer arms and shorter feet. The body actually changed to be effective at running. But we lost our ability to co-opt that economy of motion.'

Forster said the current physical capacity of the average Western civilian is about 10 percent of what is possible.

'Some people can run 100 miles in a day,' he said."

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