Month: October 2015

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How Do I Carbohydrate Load for Endurance Events?

Even though I loved lifting weights since I was 15, I have probably been more involved in endurance sports than anything else over my varied athletic career.  So I do get questions related to endurance activities and they do interest me.  So today I want to look at the question: How do I carbohydrate load for endurance sports?

Specifically, I want to answer the following question:

What does the science say regarding the proper protocol for carbohydrate loading before a goal endurance event like a full marathon? As usual, internet articles are all over the place: some say 2 days, some a week or more, some say keep calories the same but higher carb percentage, some say to jack it up to 5-7 g/lb.

So there’s actually several questions to address here.   Before getting to them, let me, as usual, start at the beginning.

What is Carbohydrate Loading?

The concept of carbohydrate loading is fairly simple. … Keep Reading

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Bipolar Recovery Update 7

So I haven’t done one of these in a fairly long while simply because I haven’t had a whole lot to say and this will probably be fairly short for that reason.  But I figure it will be a nice break from my relentless discussion of women’s specific issues (as I continue to grind, reorganize and over-edit the women’s book).  So here’s a quick overview of what’s been going on in the last few months.

The Bipolar Itself

I know I have mentioned in previous updates that my bipolar swings seem to be very seasonal with my hypomanic upswing happening in the spring and my typical depression being when fall starts and the weather changes again.  Which means that the rest of the year it’s pretty boring and stable.  And this summer certainly was.  Honestly, it just sort of moved along as I was grinding along on editing and re-editing and re-editing the women’s book.… Keep Reading

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Dietary Restraint and Cortisol Levels

I don’t think I’ve done a research review in a while and even though I imagine some visitors to the site may be getting tired of topics related to the book I’m working on, well, that’s what I’m currently working on so it’s kind of at the top of my mind right now.  Today I want to look at how dietary restraint impacts on cortisol levels based on the following paper.

McLean JA et. al. Cognitive dietary restraint is associated with higher urinary cortisol excretion in healthy premenopausal women. Am J Clin Nutr. 2001 Jan;73(1):7-12.

And you can get the free full text here.

A Primer on Cortisol

I imagine most visitors to my site are familiar with the hormone cortisol, even if many aren’t quite clear on what it does. Cortisol is often thought of as a “bad” hormone but this is too simplistic; what cortisol does in the body depends on a host of factors.… Keep Reading