First things first, Chris Sandel mentioned in the last post is doing?a series on RRARF that you guys might be interested in… http://www.seven-health.com/blog/
To find out more about RRARF, which stands for Rehabilitative Rest and Aggressive Re-Feeding, please read DIET RECOVERY!!!
Now let’s get down to bidniss. After doing my book review of Rachel Cosgrove’s The Female Body Breakthrough, I was immediately contacted by Paula Owens and asked if I would review her book as well. Well of course I will! Send me that badboy and I’ll review it right away. And so I am.
Anyway, this is not some big promo for Paula Owens and her book. Like with the Cosgrove book I call ?em like I see ?em and am not in the business of making friends or creating alliances. Here is my most honest and level-headed review of Paula Owens and her Power of 4, which refers to the power of nutrition, lifestyle, exercise, and supplements.
Overall, the book gives the reader more or less the right information. Right away I could tell that Owens has been highly influenced by Diana Schwarzbein, Paul Chek, Charles Poliquin and others that are?pretty knowledgeable. These authors all generally believe that health is something that is hormonally determined, and that the best way to optimize the hormonal environment is through quality nutrition, a low-stress lifestyle with the right attitude, ‘smart? exercise meaning a preference for resistance training over endurance exercise, and supplements if needed.
With a foundation like that, the information in the book is more or less solid and can only stray so far from guidelines of the highest importance.
Of course the book has a pronounced low-carb bias due to such influences, which in the modern world probably does tend to outperform high-carb diets knowing that your average American receives 1,100 daily calories from a combined total of refined sweeteners and white flour. A low-carb diet eliminates this catastrophic problem, and is automatically superior ? especially in the short-term. But there were definitely some one-liners in there about ‘too many carbohydrates? as if carbohydrates were somehow the enemy. If I’ve discovered anything about carbohydrates it’s that shunning carbohydrates in general simply can’t compete with replacing ?bad? carbohydrates with ?good? carbohydrates ? which I view as more of an antidote to the problems caused by excess refined carbohydrate consumption.
But Owens is still clearly not an extremist by any stretch, and doesn’t deserve to be raked over any coals for her low-carb bias as it is VERY slight.
Rather, Owens should be truly commended for her excellent exercise information. Owens has several personal training certificates and it’s more than obvious that this is her area of expertise. Just as with Cosgrove, the exercise segment is by far the highlight. Some quotes from her chapter on reducing ?LSD,? or long, slow, distance training, are truly legendary. For creating an optimal hormonal environment for both physique enhancement, metabolism, and functional longevity, I couldn’t agree more that short, hard training and resistance exercise and avoidance of LSD is the ticket. Paula’s ripped female figure is strong testimony to that.
p. 193
“One must exercise for long duration and often in order to burn any amount of fat with LSD. This is how long distance runners maintain their slim physiques. However, when a runner sustains an injury and is unable to train their metabolism spirals down. This leads to increased body fat over time.”
This has been my response to endurance exercise time and time and time and time and time again. Only when it exceeds 20 hours per week is the calorie burn so high that fat has no choice but to leave your body. This exercise is very hard on the body, it causes muscle loss and a huge drop in metabolism (sends my basal temp. to the low-96’s), and results in a higher ratio of body fat to lean mass the MOMENT that you stop doing it ? which you likely will due to injury, illness, or burnout.
p. 197
“LSD exercise is problematic because it causes cortisol to rise unopposed by the growth-promoting hormones, testosterone and growth hormone. This creates a physical stress response to your entire body. Prolonged release of cortisol, whether from long-term physical mental, or emotional stress, or the wrong kind of exercise, atrophies your muscles, nerves and brain cells. This may explain why standard aerobic exercise is not effective for optimal body composition and why marathon runners exhibit frail bodies devoid of muscle. The duration – not the intensity – of the exercise is the most significant issue in regards to cortisol. Chronic over-secretion of cortisol causes a weakened immune system, a decrease in lean muscle, hair loss, thinning skin, infertility, inability to grow nails and a decrease in concentration and memory. Excess cortisol kills brain cells, including those in the hippocampus, where the brain processes emotions. Excessive cortisol production can also deplete serotonin levels causing depression.”
This quote is pure genius, and after the Thanksgiving holiday I hope we get a chance to dive straight into the diametrically-opposed functions of cortisol and testosterone ? and how this is a prime determinant of how you age, your body composition, your immune system, athletic ability, and more. BTW Scott Abel’s blog post on holiday eating is out of this world. Read it HERE.
So yes, overall Paula’s book is great. The exercise segment is remarkable and spot on. Now time for some negative criticisms?
Owens continually comes up with various lists of things to do in each category. While I wouldn’t disagree with many of her bulleted items in terms of say, their validity, I think it is a huge error to give your average person multiple lists of almost jaw-dropping length to focus on for health. Her list on lifestyle, for example, would be much better if she picked the top 4 most important things for people to focus on. Instead, the list, I kid you not, contains over 50 To-do’s, and includes nebulous and distracting things like:
?Refrain from judgment? and ?Journal your thoughts.
Her list in the nutrition category is even longer and puts the same emphasis, due to the nature of her lengthy bulleted lists, on including ?more green drinks to create alkalinity? and eliminating ?refined sugar.? Clearly there needs to be a little more prioritization going on there.
Of course, most of her bulleted items aren’t even discussed in detail. Several things that you are supposed to do would require a book on why you should do that. Lists of ?do this, don’t do that? without any explanation or reasoning as to why doesn’t sit well with me, and I can’t see such things making any kind of impact on a real person in the real world. Rather it obscures the few basic things that really do make a difference with a bunch of nebulous, paranoid, distracting stuff that really doesn’t.
While Paula may have some powerful know how and knowledge that she is eager to share, her strategy for writing this book was not very well thought out. She shared far too much with too little to back it up.
There were also some unbelievably odd and off-base statements made here and there. They really threw me off. For example:
p. 40
?Reducing your intake of sugar and refined grains, which are omega-6 fatty acids, will result in decreased triglycerides.
What the huh?
p. 41
?Grain-fed beef, refined cereals and vegetable oils such as sunflower, safflower, corn and soybean are foods high in omega-6.
Grain-fed beef and refined cereals are not high in omega 6. In fact, by weight, walnuts (something Paula likes and advocates eating even though she is anti omega 6), contain 116 times more omega 6 than grain fed ground beef sirloin (90% lean). And refined cereals have a lot LESS omega 6 than unrefined cereals.
Conclusion:
Overall, I get a great vibe from Paula. There’s no question that if you are a woman (or man) living near the Phoenix area where Paula resides and looking for someone to help you improve your health and get a body that you never thought possible, Paula is the FIRST person to call. I have no doubts that her 21-Day Program is a great place for anyone to start when it comes to improving their health and body composition.
The book itself is full of great information, clouded by Mercola-fication of having 327 things to address when getting healthy instead of something more realistic, and just not that well written (typical of many great minds in the fitness field who attempt to write books).I would never discourage anyone from reading it though, as all of it is on the right track and there’s no doubt that the lives of many will be positively influenced by the gems that reside in The Power of 4. Thank you Paula, for putting it out into the world and overflowing with your passion for health. There are many in need of guidance out there, and I can only assume from what I know of you thus far’that you are one of the world’s best. Keep up the good work. And Paula, you are totally hot (like Gwyneth Paltrow without the macrobiotics-induced osteopenia). You don’t need your dog in the picture to make you look good :)? More from Paula at www.paulaowens.com
The Abel blog post you link to is, indeed, terrific. Eat the food AND enjoy the company.
Matt,
If I would have had that one paragraph about exercise tattooed on my forehead BEFORE I decided to run the Honolulu Marathon in 96 I might have
a. avoided the miscarriage/infertility issues I went through for four years after the marathon
b. been way healthier overall
c. had better hormone profiles then I do (although they are improving, esp cortisol and insulin IMO)
d. been way less pyshco than I was all those LSD years
And yeah, the dog is kind of scary but she is pretty.
xo
deb
That's cool. It's nice to see other people are finally coming around and understanding what we've all learned the hard way. Her book sounds good!
I totally agree though that another list of things "to do" is just about the last thing I need?.The people around me already feel that I need some kind of an intervention cause I've become so focused on my health "routines". Too much of anything will become unhealthy?.
Thankfully for me the Buddhists think that "the greater the neurosis, the greater the enlightenment…." lol
Has anybody else noticed that long, steady-state cardio and soymilk are fairly ubiquitous in our culture? Just something I've been noticing recently.
Lisa,
have you been reading Pema Chodron?
AaronF-
Astute observation. During the peak of my hiking prime (think 20 mile days carrying 50 pounds and 5,000 vertical gain), my typical breakfast was fruit and cereal covered with tons of soymilk and downed with a quart of orange juice. 2nd breakfast was 3 PBJ's :)
Tezza-
The more time I spend with ol' Scott, the more of a badass I realize that he is. I think I'll go to British Columbia this summer and stalk him.
BTW Paula e-mailed me this to kind of clarify her reasoning for having such extensive lists. Thought it was worth mentioning here in her defense…
"Awesome. I really appreciate you taking time to, not only read my book, but also to post a review on your Blog. So grateful. I love your honesty as well. I wouldn’t want anything other than your honest opinion.
A couple of things, just to clarify, not only to I have numerous personal training certifications, I do hold a Masters Degree in Holistic Nutrition.
Regarding the endless bullet points, in what you call my ‘to-do? list, I am not sure if you read the Chapter 1-2 on Goal Setting and Winning Formulas, but what I suggest the reader do is to select two Winning Formulas each and every week from my Winning Formula Lists for each of the four Powers: Nutrition, Lifestyle, Exercise and Supplements. The next week they add two more Winning Formulas (goals).
I have found from my 30 years in the industry, that giving smaller changes, i.e. baby steps, creates long term change overtime. The majority of people can handle 2 changes a week. For example: this week my two are—I will drink the appropriate number of ounces of water for my body weight and eat a quality protein source for breakfast. Next week, I continue these plus I add two more, i.e. 2-5 minutes of solitude with deep breathing and 30 minutes of daily exercise."
AND…
"OMG?..thank you again?..that is a major TYPO on page 40. Myself, nor my editor, have not noticed this. Eeeeek."
Nice and honest review.
I read her book a while ago and found it very informative/useful. I like that she takes a different approach to health in being more positive/thoughtful then all about the numbers.
One book that I thought had a lot of problems was "Digestive Wellness" by Elizabeth Lipski. I fould Matt's E-Book on digestion to be much better, and about 300 pages shorter.
I think the all have flaws, it's just important that people don't pick up a book about health or wellness and treat it as their new bible.
Nice review as usual. Crazy Typo! Sadly most of us learned about LSD the hard way. People I deal with are always shocked when I tell them to steer clear of cardio for weight loss. Cardio can be good for healthy people if kept to a about 30-40 minutes max every now and then.
Matt it would also be great to see your view on Adiponectin http://tinyurl.com/34vb8zo after hearing so much about Leptin recently it seems to be a key player as well. Have been reading into it but not sure I understand it to a full extent….
Scott Abel's article is crazy good! Time to eat the food over the next few months.
One thing about the extensive bullet points…if you treat them as a list to skim over and keep in the back of your mind, they can be useful. Matt, I'm sure that you have received questions like "can I eat this (insert food here)…" because the particular food wasn't mentioned specifically by name in one of your writings? I think lists like that make nice references, but not something that should be memorized and blindly followed.
But in support of your point on this, I used to buy lots of various books on health, nutrition, herbs, Eastern medicine, etc. I was getting these books, reading them and then putting all this stuff into practice. It got to the point where I stepped back and looked at what I was doing. I was getting up in the AM, doing certain morning movements, there were pre-meal rituals for better digestion, breathing exercises before bed, ways to prepare food, etc. I thought, if I keep going like this, I won't have time for anything else besides all this crap that I'm doing in the name of good health. Then if you look at the super-centenarians, most of those folks spend very little time obsessing about their health. Very telling.
Chris-
Right now the research on adiponectin is very new, very speculative, and very confusing. I'm interested in it, but have yet to take away and clearcut ism's about it.
Will-
That's another side point. My goal is to help people get some results with the minimal amount of effort, time, and thought. Many other health authors and bloggers seem to think that the average Joe is just as obsessed as they are, and that making their lives revolve completely around health stuff is perfectly acceptable. No it ain't.
TGraham-
Digestive Wellness, lol. You mean eating white rice and vegetables didn't cure you of all your digestive troubles? Hope to do some improvements and really good added content on the 180 Digestion book next year.
Interesting post at Daily Lipid today:
http://blog.cholesterol-and-health.com/2010/11/sweet-truth-about-liver-and-egg-yolks.html
Thanks Undertow, stellar post, I shared on FB.
Nice to know that the stuff I am eating is helping my liver function better :)
Off topic, but here are some ideas for improving your health:
Ray Peat smoothy
1 cup frozen orange juice
1/2 cup milk
1/2 cup coffee
2 tablespoon sucrose
2 tablespoon powdered gelatine
WAPF smoothy
1 cup raw grass-fed x-factor butter
1/2 cup cod liver oil
1/2 cow brain
1/2 cup traditional bone broth
2 tablespoon kidney beans, soaked overnight and boiled for 8 hours
1 tablespoon homemade Sauerkraut
enjoy!
Thank you very much, Undertow. I forget to re-subscribe to Chris Masterjohn's blog after my past computer crashed a few months ago. He seems that he have posted some really interesting posts recently, and I have to spend time with them. I haven't read them all, but I find the fatty liver, honey, and fermented soy posts very useful.
"My goal is to help people get some results with the minimal amount of effort, time, and thought. Many other health authors and bloggers seem to think that the average Joe is just as obsessed as they are, and that making their lives revolve completely around health stuff is perfectly acceptable. No it ain't. "
Matt, I appreciate this SO much about you. You see, I feel like my whole life has been taken over completely by all those health regimes that people have recommended to me. It includes so many things my day is literally taken over by health tasks. I get up early in the morning and my days are filled with health stuff. The demands are so high I don't know who can cope with it? The Buteyko work is like that too. I "have to" sit and meditate for about 3 hours per day right now. It's so tough. I feel like I don't have a life. If I only enjoyed meditation…..but I don't….
It struck me as a little bit excessive the other day when I realize I haven't had ice cream in over ten years now. And I'm still far from healthy…..The sacrifices that I do in the name of health definitely effect my entire life experience. But I'm still too much of a sugar addict to dare enter that slippery slope.
I'm all for stalking Scott Abel. I think it's hilarious that he gets a food circular and circles what he's going to buy. That's what I used to do with the JCPenny toy catalog when I was a kid. My parents just laughed, which is maybe why I'm still buying toys to this day. I've noticed this puritanical relationship with food at Thanksgiving. Ironic since it was the Puritans who invented the holiday. They also invented hot buttered rum. Go figure.
Smoothy anonymous. I love it. I will take your meme and run with it.
Burn the Fat Smoothy
1 scoop Extra Massive Whey Protein
1 scoop of soy protein
4 egg whites
a can of tuna
a grilled chicken breast
a cup of oatmeal
a pinch of stevia
Blend and consume at three hour intervals.
Weight Watchers Smoothy
a cup of fat free yogurt sweetened with aspertame
a Skinny Cow
a 100 calorie bag of snackwells
a couple of carrot sticks
1/2 cup of strawberries
Blend and remember to check off 2 of your "5 a day" on your journal!
The 180 Smoothy
Put the bass in the bassomatic and press "start."
Now that's good bass.
I thought of another one:
The Whole Foods Smoothy
1 packet of Tara's Whey vanilla
1 $6 piece of out of season fruit flown in from South America
1 copy of the Gaiam catalog.
Blend and start believing that magnets will fix your medical problems.
OMG. I hadn't checked the comments on this post for a while and I come back and there's "smoothy" hilarity. Unbelievable. Reminds me of an ancient thread here where I made fun of guy, calling him powdered food man (PFM). My contribution…
The Mercola "Smoothy"…
Banana flavored Miracle Whey
Raw eggs
Coconut milk
Organic Psyllium fiber
Chia seeds
Flax seeds
Pumpkin seeds
Sesame seeds
Sunflower seeds
Water
Oh crap, that's not actually a joke but really what he eats for breakfast. It took him 30 years to come up with that formula. It only takes me 5 minutes to figure out what to eat for breakfast, and depends primarily on what's in the fridge.
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2009/11/14/what-i-eat-for-breakfast.aspx
Ha! Yes, that is so sad, that it took him so long to come up with that. I think that would be a good way to round up all the crap you shouldn't eat out of your kitchen. Throw it and the blender in the garbage.
I was thinking we should organize some kind of egg exchange with the weightlifting/body building crowd. When I did BFFM I ate dozens of egg whites a week and no yolk. There are lots of people here who eat raw yolk but throw out the whites. This could save the chickens of the world a lot of hassle.
Throw the shake and the blender in the garbage. This is pretty good advice. Mercola is basically processing processed food for breakfast. Double processed!
As for the chickens, unbelievable that they would be so cruel to produce both a white and a yolk in the same egg. It's like making everyone watch both the O'Reilly Factor and Bill Maher. I don't really like either so I eat potatoes and watch Napolean Dynamite repetively.
I recently saw all such punditry called "strong opinion porn" online. I think that's actually a wonderfully accurate statement.
The prescription to eat potatoes and watch Napoleon Dynamite could not fail to heal. For me a good starchy meal goes particularly well with the David Lynch version of Dune. "He who controls the (money) spice, controls the Universe!"
"Muad'dib", "My own name is a killing word…"
– '84 Dune, one of the best movies ever!
"Mercola-fication." Hahahahaha.
And the smoothies, haha…Gosh, brings me back. I'm so glad my Mercola smoothie phase didn't last long. Ew. Those were so gritty.
How about an Aajonus Wonderplanitz smoothie
1 cup RAW UNSALTED butter
1/2 cup RAW coconut oil not heated above 94.124?F
2 whole RAW eggs
2 ounces of RAW high liver (aged one year)
2 ounces of RAW moldy berries
2 ounces of RAW unfiltered honey
2 ounces of RAW bovine excrement
The shake detoxes mercury if you use strawberries, and antibiotics if you use blueberries. Be careful, the detox could be too strong, which could cause your genitals to rot.
The diarrhoea and vomiting after gulping it down are healthy signs of detoxification.
If you substitute the berries with RAW medicinal clay, it acts as a mineral supplement. If you use RAW UNSALTED cheese, it will soak up toxins like a sponge.
dDurianrider smoothie:
30 bananas
1 durian
1 lb dates
1 quart sugar cane juice
3 quarts orange juice
And don't forget your B12 shot.
Someone should come up with a David Wolfe smoothy, I guess goji berries, royal jelly, bee pollen, and some other expensive "super foods"…
Ah, smoothie satire is incredible. That's sounds really purifying Hans. I think I remember seeing that recipe in Recipe for Living Free of Disease. Just don't combine avocado and orange juice in the smoothie or you will run around trying to hump everything – even if you are a celibate monk living in Encinitas.
And it's pretty clear what the base is for the David Wolfe "smoothy." He refers to his middle name as "avocado." That, some cacao, blue green algae, 47 Chinese herbs, fiddlehead ferns, and sprouted barley seeds and you should be good to live to a million.
Riles: Usul has called a big one. Again it is the legend."
Speaking of David "Avocado" Wolfe, I can't forget this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUIimYiMGaw
100% pure comedy, especially in the beginning.
Holy crap dude. That tops even Gabriel Cousins's finest moments. I love the part where Cassar is obsessing over his veins and says that it's a sign of being clean. Wow, Jay Cutler must be like the cleanest dude on earth! Thanks for that. It's stuff like that which keeps me going.
Hans-
Saw this today and thought of you. I love to watch confused fruitarians try to figure out things like why they are freezing cold all the time and have a more "manageable" sex drive while eating an uber low-fat diet and running ultra-endurance races. Hmmm, that's a mystery. I'm sure it has nothing to do with low leptin levels from your 3% body fat!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpwAl8Kwuxo&feature=player_embedded#!