One often overlooked asset that you badly need in order to be productive (or sometimes just to be) is your body. If you get ill or die, your performance may drop dramatically.

Maybe one of the reasons so many people neglect their health is because it takes quite a long time to collect enough damage and notice that something is wrong. One can lead a sedentary life, eat too much bad food or overeat, smoke cigarettes, and nothing bad happens overnight. Now, imagine that you are 20 years old and in rather good shape. Add 15 more years and the very next day your teeth and skin are bad, you can’t breath after climbing the stairs up to the 3rd floor, and you find it difficult to bend and tie your shoe laces. I’m sure anyone would panic in this situation. Usually, this happens very gradually. It would take, let say, ten or twenty years and every day you lose just a tiny bit from your health.

The care for your health is definitely a Q2 activity. It is important, but it doesn’t seem urgent.

With reference to evolution, humans need to move a lot. It’s not natural to be sedentary for long periods of time. Frequent and regular physical exercise boosts the immune system, and helps prevent diseases such as heart disease, cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, and obesity. It also improves mental health and helps prevent depression and insomnia. Exercise has been shown to improve cognitive functioning.

At the same time, excessive body weight is associated with various cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, obstructive sleep apnea, certain types of cancer, and osteoarthritis. As a result, it reduces life expectancy.

It is not only the matter of life expectancy that is at stake here but also the quality of life. It feels great to have your full range of motion, to be able to climb a flight of stairs, or to run to catch the bus with ease. These are some of the things that most of us were able to do at some time in our lives. Personally, I’ve found that it’s so much easier to learn to ski, to ice skate, or to discover a new skill once you are in good shape. Being physically fit also allows me to enjoy some outdoor sports like mountain biking for example. Some people may think that the flexibility and the joy of movement and sports is a childhood hallmark, but that’s not true. Sports are not only for professionals either.

If nutrition and physical activity have profound effects on human health, then, why are they so often overlooked? I mean, what is more important that you and your health?

Now, go and put some physical activity on your calendar. Thirty minutes of brisk walking, 5 days a week is a good start. You can also go to work on foot or by riding a bicycle. There are lots of physical activities that you can do aside from what I have already mentioned. I’ll cover some of my workouts and results in a future post so stay tuned.

Related posts:

1. Weight Up, Weight Down

I’m 185 cm tall and up to my twentieth year I’ve never weighed more than 86 kg. Then in the last six months of my compulsory military service, which were very boring, I started to gain weight. My unit was carrying out a sentry service and there weren’t much things to do except taking charge of the posts or resting. After my discharge from the army I went up by another 2-3 kg. That’s when I decided I should take countermeasures. I restricted my food intake and also bought myself a bicycle. I was thinking about using it for transportation for some time anyway. This turned out to be enough and I was again at 86 kg in just few months. I enjoyed my bike through the summer and part of the autumn but when the temperatures fell bellow zero grades centigrade I left it at home.

There’s little room for outdoor physical activity in the big city during the winter and there are a lot of holidays as well. Quite often the days from 24 Dec to 1 Jan are non-working and we just stay at home and eat these delicious dishes prepared around the Christmas and New Year celebrations. That’s how I woke up at 103 kg on the 1st of January 2003. It was time for more drastic measures.

At first I severely restricted my food intake. I didn’t change what I was eating at all – just the quantities. I replaced the big pizza with a small one, 3 slices of bread with 1 slice and so on. Strangely (at least it was strange for me back then) these measures almost didn’t help so I included some physical activities. Mostly cardio like jogging, biking and only occasional push-ups or pull-ups… With a lot of effort I managed to go down to about 91 kg but the mirror wasn’t happy. Having the knowledge I acquired since then I think that’s because I lost too much muscle mass together with the fat by not eating enough and doing mainly cardio exercises. And the worst thing – after the summer was gone and I lifted the food restriction and abandoned exercises I regained my weight up to 100 kg in just few months.

At the beginning of 2006 as I was at my 99 kg mark again I finally realized that I don’t really know what I’m doing. It was about time to sit and do some serious research about how does the human metabolism work. I had spent years studying computer systems and at the same time I knew very little about how does my body work. Okay, perhaps nobody knows exactly all the aspects of how does the human body work. It’s a stunningly complex system and there’s a lot of controversy about what’s good for your health and what’s not. But anyway I had to look at the available knowledge and try to take some educated decisions about what to do next.

After about a month of research I decided to stick with Low Carb, High Fat diet (LCHF) and Resistance Training. This turned out to be an excellent choice so far. Two years and a half have passed – I eat mostly LCHF, most of the time I don’t watch my calories, unfortunately I don’t exercise very regularly – and I weigh 87 kg and my body fat is about 15% on average. I got a cholesterol profile about a year ago and the results were excellent. So I highly recommend this way of eating and training to everyone.

In later posts I’ll get into more details, and show you what I did to lose weight and what were the exact results.

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1. A Healthy Mind in a Healthy Body

Although I really try to stick to the training plan I devised myself in order to prepare for the 100 km tour around Vitosha, I don’t always have the time for a proper ride. Quite often I have to substitute the cross country outing for loops at the nearby (West) park or even for the cross trainer session. But despite these obstacles I was glad to find out that my fitness level is good enough. Together with my brother Dave we covered 48 km and climbed 700 m in 02:50 h. We kept a moderate pace – according to the heart rate monitor my average heart rate for the whole exercise was 142 bpm. Not bad for so early in May.

I remember some of my rides several years ago, I’d go for 20 km with 300-400 meters climbing, and I’d be exhausted. It used to take me very long time to recover. Now I’m fitter even though I didn’t exercised much in the winter. I think this might be partially due to the low carb, high fat diet. I’ll cover low carb, high fat diet in more details in a future post.

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1. 100 km around Vitosha

100 km around Vitosha is a cross-country hiking and biking tour around Vitosha mountain. The official site of the event is http://vitosha100km.hit.bg/. There you can find detailed map of the route, altitude profile, gps tracks (provided by my friend and colleague Nikolay Denev), gallery and the results from the previous year.

When I’ve heard about the tour for the very first time I found it very appealing so I decided I should take part in it. Unfortunately I didn’t pay attention and missed the 2006 tour. I had to wait for the next one in 2007. I’ve tried to keep sober view on the fact that this is a 100 km tour with quite a few hills to ascend and it ain’t gonna be easy, especially if you try to keep pace. Yet I underestimated the effort.

Me, my brother Dave and my friend Niki have never taken part in such a race so we decided to ride together and to try to complete it in 8 to 8:30 hours, having in mind that the best times from 2006 were just above 5 hours. It eventually took us 10:30 hours and I personally have never before felt so exhausted in my entire life. I think the main problem was that we didn’t know the terrain well so we tried to keep our average speed too high. Later it turned out (as you can see on the altitude profile) that almost all the climbing is in the first 50 km. Well, if we knew that we would have ridden at a lower speed and would have preserved our glycogen reserves so we wouldn’t have hit the wall so early.

Here is the distribution of finish times from the 2007 tour:

The green point is where we wanted to be, the yellow point is the median result and the red point is were we actually finished.

Well, we didn’t perform very well but this has only motivated me to try harder this year. Moreover I’ve never been good at endurance sports and I’m very curious as to how far I could go if I try. On the other hand 3 months are not that long period and with my extremely busy schedule I don’t expect miracles.

Watch this blog for updates

Related posts:

1. Rudopia 2007
2. First Real Ride of the Season
3. It’s time for TED 2008