MRE, no questions answered

I have been eating lots of these recently:

What do the numbers mean??

I do not like this fact.

I do not eat most of the things that come in this Meal, Ready-to-Eat package.  And I definitely am not interested in heating any of it up with the neato water-activated heater that is in every package.

It took me a few days, but taste-wise I learned to go the vegetarian route, meals which can be easily acquired through trading, like candy trades among children on Halloween.  Yes, I was the one who would give you a king-size Snickers for a measly Chunky.  No one is surprised I didn't pursue a degree in business.

I ate the peanut M&Ms that were in here, same with the crackers:

Not so bad!

I don't know how these are made, but my veterinarian friend tells me they are regularly inspected for food safety.  By veterinarians.

I seriously crave fresh veggies.

The urban (field?) legend is that each MRE, if you ate the whole thing, is approximately 2000 calories.  There is nothing on the outside package that verifies this, and I haven't saved enough wrappers to do the math on the individual packages of food.  I am not able to run or exercise as before, so I am excessively wary of anything that has 2000 calories in it- not a problem, it's easy to give the more delicious contents of these meals away (refer to the aforementioned Chunky Situation of 1988). 

NUMBER 13!!!! MREs you taunt me with your enigmatic code...

I do admire the creative MRE menus that I see, and I love the condiment packages: moist towelette, toilet paper, sugar, instant coffee, salt, maybe a packet of hot sauce.  MREs from years ago included a teeny bottle of Tabasco sauce, a cute thing that always made me smile.  It's gone, but so are the Charms candy, an improvement now that I see Skittles and Peanut M&Ms instead.

I know there are some MRE aficionados out there...tell me, which one is your favorite??

Fridge fess up...part of the overhaul!

I thought I'd take a big step in our friendship and open up my refrigerator to you, from top to bottom.  As you know I am undertaking a training/everything overhaul because of my pace dropping so precipitously.  I think I might as well take some advice on my fridgie-fridge and see how I can improve my running by doing better with the foods I eat, too:

3 types of coffee creamer and skim milk on the top shelf, good priorities in this house!

Cottage cheese, eggs from our hens, blueberries, choc pudding, greek yogurt

Sugar free Red Bull, Spicy V8, Sprite...could be worse

Apples, string cheese, cauliflower, broccoli...

Cilantro, grapes, limes, sandwich thins (love em)

Yep, we bought cartons just for our own eggs...people receive them better this way

TWO pounds of butter, nutella, mustard, PB, salsa, key lime juice

Relish, jalapenos, pickled okra, garlic, applesauce, more mustard, more salsa...

Water filter, low sodium soy sauce, raspberry jelly, salad dressing, balsamic vinegar

2 types of ketchup, BBQ sauce, maple syrup, choc syrup, rice vinegar, more mustard

Yes, I store a lot of food in the pantry (pasta, soups, grains, cereals, nuts, chocolate etc) but I'd like to know, how does my food stack up?  Is this a good start for a healthy running diet?  My junk food taste is more savory than sweet (hence all the salsa and chips) but I won't lie to you, those 2 pounds of butter are going to end up in cookies this weekend.  I don't think my fridge is that bad but I admit, we do share a lot of produce with the hens and we eat elsewhere for lunch everyday since we are at work.  Also I was on a big hotdog kick while studying hence the crazy variety of condiments for two people.

Because we eat at work or out for lunch every day, we don't eat a lot of meat or fish at home, and if we do, I buy just what we are going to cook for that particular meal.  With only the two of us, stuff often goes bad before we can use it so it often goes to the hens instead of into my tummy.

Maybe next I'll share the pantry with you but I'm too short to get good pictures without dragging furniture into the kitchen, easier to wait til D is home, eh?

PowerBar Energy Blasts winner

Cecil Vermule...
...send me your address to realworldrunner [at] gmail [dot] com

Super!! Enjoy!!

I will also send you a PM :)

Giveaway: PowerBar Energy Blasts Chews

Last week I wrote a little piece on my thoughts about these chewy wonders.  If you haven't tried em, I've got some at home (lots and lots!) for you to try for free, and I'll even send them to your door direct from lovely El Paso, TX! 

I promise...they'll be in unopened bags (unlike these fellas)

 If you'd like me to send you these delicious chewy pals, tell me something below about how you fuel for exercise and thanks to a random number generator, you might find yourself with an excess of PowerBar chewies in assorted flavors to try out.  I hope you like them as much as I do!

Expires 10pm mountain time (midnight eastern) on June 13.  You won't receive them in time for Father's Day in case you are thinking of parlaying these into a cheap gift for pop.  Of course, I do know some fathers who might really like to receive a big pile of gummy energy chews...not mine, otherwise he'd be receiving these too :)

Enjoy!

Best foods for runners: Midsummer resolution

Kale- don't love it but I should.  Thx wiki for the pic.

A weekend full of Grand China Buffet and El Taco Tote left me feeling bloated and sluggish this morning, so I did what anyone would: drank a bucket of coffee and searched the web for "best foods for runners" and was consequently overwhelmed with the lists I found, and their disparity from what's getting into my belly (no frijoles refritos? wha??): 

22/29?  Not so bad!

I'm not doing too poorly on purchasing these recommended foods, but let's be honest, partaking of them is a different story.  I have a pretty substantial quinoa collection that I'm not eating too often because it tastes awful.  Why does the entire internet think quinoa is so transcendentally nutty and wonderful?  Yes it's as salubrious as beets (thanks Calvin and Hobbes) but it tastes like metallic yet flavorless and chewy warm fish eggs to me (no offense to fish eggs, I love you my salty sushi sprinkles). 

Evidence!  Some healthy food was removed from this picture at some point!

I still need to reconcile which foods are best vs what I like to eat best, but for lunch I ate a sweet potato with cottage cheese and cilantro, which seems to jive with a few of the internet lists and my tastebuds.  In any case, a step away from the Chinese buffet in any direction has got to be a good move :)

It's no secret, my running has been suffering as it loses out (on purpose) to more pressing things. The part of that I can control is what I eat in order to properly fuel myself (bye bye GCB and the Tote) and I hope to further clean up my food act a bit this summer.

Any thoughts on your favorite nutritious yet delicious foods?  Quite clearly I also need quinoa recipe suggestions :)

Product review: PowerBar Energy Blasts

Off day today for me- no running (well, maybe I'll go for an evening run if time allows, no promises though!) as tomorrow is a big day in my career and I have lots of prep to do for it.  Exciting stuff, I'll share after the big day :)

For now, let's talk about sweets!  My favorite type of candy has always been on the "chewy" end of the lickies-and-chewies spectrum...those big bins of candy at bulk stores?  I love me some cola bottles, cinnamon bears, peachy penguins, green apple frogs...really anything made by The Happy World of Haribo is at the top of my list, so it's no small wonder that I prefer gummy-type exercise sweets over gels.  My local grocery store stocks Power Bar Energy Blast Gel-Filled Chews.  I usually find them on sale for $1.00 per bag, and in three flavors each with a different level of caffeine:

Raspberry is my favorite and even has some vit C

So what is the big selling point here?  How are these better than a handful of jellybeans?  PowerBar touts their proprietary C2 Max energy blend...which is just a 2:1 glucose:fructose (fruit sugar, honey, corn syrup) sugar ratio.  These monosaccharides are very similar (in fact, glucose + fructose = sucrose, aka table sugar) but the reason they are included in this proportion in these Power Bar Energy Blasts is all based on these guys and their time-trial of cyclists:

 

Currell and Jeukendrup reminded me that the transporters that take nutrients from your intestine to blood stream come in many different permutations.  In a very simplified manner, when there's a lot of glucose to be put into the blood (ie, after a meal), the glucose transporter (SGLT1) can get backed up with glucose traffic.  When glucose and fructose are combined, the fructose uses its own separate transporter (GLUT5) which is off limits to glucose, and everyone can get out of the intestinal lining and into the blood more efficiently via the backdoor from the intestinal cells into the bloodstream (GLUT2).  This is especially important in exercise as we need energy more quickly and don't want to wait for glucose to file out.

The researchers determined that a ratio of 2:1 glucose:fructose (1.2g to 0.6g) was more effective (an 8% decrease in the amount of time it took the cyclists to complete their cycling time trial as compared to 1.8g of straight glucose (which showed a 10% improvement over the placebo group who just had water without carbohydrate).  The scientists also indicated that the ingestion of the glucose:fructose blend staved off the body's need to use liver glycogen stores, allowing for these stores to be accessed later in the time trial.

So this is maybe how PowerBar formulated the 2:1 C2 Max blend.  I am glad to see there is real science behind it.  Do I personally need a perfect monosaccharide blend?  Nah, I am not nearly on that end of the performance curve.  In my "research" (sample size: me) I do notice that after having some gels or candies after about an hour into a marathon or century cycling event that I perk up a bit.  I also feel more energized after having regular foods, too, like a few graham crackers, or sips of carbohydrate beverage, so I know there's something to it and it's not particular to fancy lab-created food blends- in my case, it's probably a combination of the added glucose/fructose and a placebo effect.

I like a chewy candy while I run.  It fights boredom and doesn't gag me like some of the gels which seem more like a dentist's fluoridated sealant paste.  It's also easy for me to unwrap a few packages of gummies pre-race and put them in a small sandwich baggie and tuck into my sports bra or shorts pocket which doesn't cause the same level of underboob chafe as the scratchy edges of the gel packs.  Plus, it's easy to share a few chewy candies with a stranger, don't get me wrong, I love people and all, but I'm not letting all y'all have a quick suckle on a shared PowerBar Gel as you run past.

I'll continue to buy this type of stuff for my longer runs and races.  On the road bike I can pretty much dig into leftover Kung Pao chicken and not suffer tummy trouble.

Does anyone know more about this fructose/glucose nonsense?  What's your favorite pick-me-up during a run?  I'd love a diagram or at least an interpretive dance of the intestinal luminal cotransporters...

Carbs + protein for optimal recovery...lit review

Inspired by an old red hot seeking refuge under the couch.  10s of thousands of glucose!

I ran 8 miles in 66 minutes today at the gym, which is just fine by me, but I didn't have a chance to eat afterwards and I spent my whole work day feeling like doodoo causing me to buy ice cream on the way home today.  I just really needed to re-up my glycogen I guess.

Glycogen is the fuel for our skeletal muscles.  It's made and stored by the liver, and is our body's preferred storage form of fuel.  Think of it as the same energy currency as glucose, but a big bushy branched glucose shrub centered around a protein core.  Glycogen is converted into glucose by the liver and our muscles and this glucose is our body's energy source...but during endurance exercise, we deplete our glycogen stores and must refill with glucose.

Ideally, we'd start exercising with a full glycogen tank.

Realistically, I run on an empty stomach (ok, with some sugar-free Red Bull sloshing around in there, true, true) and I'm lucky to get more than a bottle of water or handful of crackers after a long run while scurrying to shower, change, and arrive at work on time.

You might think at first, well, if I'm low on glycogen, I need to replace with glucose, and go for pure carbohydrates (the source of glucose).  I thought that was true until reading this study, which found that refueling with carbs plus protein is a better recovery than pure carbohydrates, even of equivalent caloric value:

I love this stuff...

Especially when you are doing twice a day workouts!  With 24-26 hours between workouts, there isn't such a rush to replenish glycogen.

Protein is a superhero and aids in the body's uptake of glucose (and thus increases our glycogen stores) because it signals an enhanced insulin response- insulin, our buddy which gets sugar (glucose) out of the blood and into cells where it creates energy and is used for sustaining life.

So what does this article mean to me?  It means I'm going to throw a Luna bar into my gym bag instead of a baggie of pretzels or handful of Cheerios.  I do love Cheerios though, so maybe I'll have them with chocolate milk.  And this article tells me it's best to ingest your post-workout snack soon after exercising, within 30 minutes.  So maybe I'll eat that Luna bar in the shower then.

Other research has shown that more than 20-25g of protein at any one meal or snack is just going to end up in poop, there's no meat-to-muscle direct pipeline.  For all those guys out there eating piles of steak or the old 47-egg white omelet because you are trying to "bulk up," (you know who you are) well, you're going to get some bulk, but mostly, you're going to be making some stinky poops and stressing your kidneys.  I'd still like to sell you some organic free-range eggs anyway.

As a reference, this is what 18g of protein looks like:

3 oz can of lemon-pepper tuna...anyone else thinking of Jim Halpert?

Here's some good (scientifically proven!!) recovery carbohydrate + protein choices, no need for fancy concoctions and $$$ supplements:

• Chocolate milk
• Cereal and milk
• PB&J
• Cheese and crackers
• Yogurt
• Brownies
• Brownies + ice cream (heh)

But really, it's only good if you're going to eat it...time to get creative and tell me all about your favorite post-workout snack...I personally like lemon Luna bars and chocolate milk.  I probably don't need both...I would also please like a brownie now to go with my ice cream...