For over the last year I have had this aching, sometimes debilitating, but mostly just irritating sciatica. I have tried diet changes along with many other modalities such as body work, restorative yoga, Yamuna, aerial yoga, inversions, and nothing seemed to help for long. I even bought a sacro-belt and new orthotics for my shoes, which again helped, temporarily. Always a person who loves to workout, this nagging back issue has effected my ability to workout. Squats were out, lunges, nope, any form of weight lifting, ack. I have had this constant pain and started to succumb to the potential reality that sciatica would effect me for the rest of my life. In truth, I have had some sort of hip/back/sciatic/psoas issue since my teens, but never for very long and never as debilitating as over the last year. If I stood or sat too long it would get aggravated. If I lifted heavy things without my sacro-belt, it would get aggravated. If I worked in the garden too much, bending over pulling weeds it would aggravate it. Pretty much everything I did aggravated it. I mean I was able to go about my life teaching my group fitness class, exercising mostly, but avoiding all squatting motions, I even bartended this summer and did ok. But after my 3 back-to back-shifts though, and with a farmers' market booth in between, I was hurting pretty bad Saturday mornings.
Then one day I heard something about how bad dairy really is for inflammation. I mean, of course, I know that. But over the years, dairy has slowly creeped back into my diet. All lactose free or fermented dairy, so I thought I was doing well. I didn't eat much, but as the late nights after my bartending shift accumulated and I was awake and hungry when I got home, a quick quesadilla or grilled cheese would hit the spot. At the time it didn't feel like much, but in hindsight, it was a lot more dairy than I thought.
And then I spoke with a friend who recently cut out dairy and she said it literally made her sciatica go away in days! Really?! I couldn't believe that something as simple as cutting out dairy would make back pain go away. But always curious about the body and willing to experiment with dietary changes effecting the way I feel, one day I said, 'yup that's it, no more dairy.' I mean I know I shouldn't eat dairy. I know it is inflammatory. I know I am lactose intolerant. I know, I know...but the implementing is always the hard part. So one day, I just stopped eating dairy.
Now it has been about a month and half since I cut out dairy. And literally, I kid you not, 4 days after I cut it out cold turkey, my sciatica was gone. GONE! Not like kinda gone, but gone gone. I felt better, less lethargic, my bowels were better, but all I cared about was that nagging back pain that has irritated me for over almost a year was gone! So eventually I had to try my dreaded squats. I took it easy the first time. Nothing. No pain. No radiating irritation down my leg and up my back. Nothing. Gardening was a breeze. Even last night I took my first Brazilian dance class in a long time. It is a lot of hip action. I was nervous because after the class, as we were cooling down I could feel my back tighten up and get the sensation I used to get before the whole thing would lock up and I would be in pain for the next few days. Today, I feel great! I am sore from not using back, lower ab and hip muscles I haven't used in a while, but it is not like last year when I took this class, where I was out of commission the next day due to the pain.
So dairy free = pain free! At least for me. I kid you not! I didn't believe it either. Give it a try, if you are curious.
This whole body experiment and nutrition is a slippery slope I tell ya (in a good way) 😉, so I have been eating meat, but not much, actually, actively less since I have cut out dairy. Then I asked myself 2 weeks ago, why? Why are you eating meat? I have actively been reducing my meat consumption. I have never been a huge meat eater. I don't digest it well and I feel all over slowed/bogged down when I eat too much meat. Granted, I am only ever eating local, organic and/or grass-fed or pasture raised meat (ideally all of the above). So I have considered myself a conscious meat eater. But somewhere in the back of my mind, veganism has been swirling around. If you recall I gave veganism a try back in 2015, which you can read here and here. It. Was. Hard. I have never craved eggs so much in my life. But this time it feels different. I am already gluten free (Always! Going on 8 years now!) and now completely dairy free and continually reducing my meat consumption, so how far off is being a vegan?
I listened to @yoga_girl 's podcast recently with her guest speaker James Aspey on veganism and something clicked. I think maybe because I was toying with the idea already, I was more receptive. And it wasn't the horror stories James talked about in the meat and diary industry that did it. I've always disliked that freak-out tactic of veganism, but 2 things stuck with me; the way he and Rachel approached it was not forceful and both talked about veganism from a place of love, compassion and education. James didn't even shame Rachel, when she admittedly called her self a hypocrite because she too, has let dairy creep into her life. And who are we to determine which animals we eat. In some countries they eat dogs. I could never even consider eating my beloved dogs and yet I consider myself an animal lover. And pigs are just as smart and personable as dogs. So why do we eat them? And the dairy industry is just as awful as a slaughter house. I am not trying to convince anyone, because I believe everyone's journey is different and happens in its own way towards your goal of feeling your best. So listen for yourself.
I am not one of those crazy vegans, forcibly telling people that you should know about all the horrible things that happen in the meat and dairy industries. I know scare tactics and forceful advocacy wouldn't work on me. So I would never do that to anyone else. For me, this is a personal journey, that started with removing dairy from my diet. Then realizing meat just didn't sit well with me, physically and consciously. Also, because I struggled so hard the first time around with veganism, I was kind of curious to see how I would do a second time. With that being said, I am still eating eggs. I feel without eggs I am doomed to fail and also I feel ok with my choice, because I am getting my eggs from my neighbor and I know they are free range and happy chickens. But to each her own. We all need to be conscious in our bodies and also conscious beings in the world. We make choices every day and I am currently choosing to do what feels best for me, my body, my mind, my soul and my health.
The Right Dose of Exercise for a Longer Life
No one doubts, of course, that any amount of exercise is better than none. Like medicine, exercise is known to reduce risks for many diseases and premature death.
But unlike medicine, exercise does not come with dosing instructions. The current broad guidelines from governmental and health organizations call for 150 minutes of moderate exercise per week to build and maintain health and fitness.
But whether that amount of exercise represents the least amount that someone should do — the minimum recommended dose — or the ideal amount has not been certain.
Scientists also have not known whether there is a safe upper limit on exercise, beyond which its effects become potentially dangerous; and whether some intensities of exercise are more effective than others at prolonging lives.
So the new studies, both of which were published last week in JAMA Internal Medicine, helpfully tackle those questions.
In the broader of the two studies, researchers with the National Cancer Institute, Harvard University and other institutions gathered and pooled data about people’s exercise habits from six large, ongoing health surveys, winding up with information about more than 661,000 adults, most of them middle-aged.
Using this data, the researchers stratified the adults by their weekly exercise time, from those who did not exercise at all to those who worked out for 10 times the current recommendations or more (meaning that they exercised moderately for 25 hours per week or more).
Then they compared 14 years’ worth of death records for the group.
They found that, unsurprisingly, the people who did not exercise at all were at the highest risk of early death.
But those who exercised a little, not meeting the recommendations but doing something, lowered their risk of premature death by 20 percent.
Those who met the guidelines precisely, completing 150 minutes per week of moderate exercise, enjoyed greater longevity benefits and 31 percent less risk of dying during the 14-year period compared with those who never exercised.
The sweet spot for exercise benefits, however, came among those who tripled the recommended level of exercise, working out moderately, mostly by walking, for 450 minutes per week, or a little more than an hour per day. Those people were 39 percent less likely to die prematurely than people who never exercised.
At that point, the benefits plateaued, the researchers found, but they never significantly declined. Those few individuals engaging in 10 times or more the recommended exercise dose gained about the same reduction in mortality risk as people who simply met the guidelines. They did not gain significantly more health bang for all of those additional hours spent sweating. But they also did not increase their risk of dying young.
The other new study of exercise and mortality reached a somewhat similar conclusion about intensity. While a few recent studies have intimated that frequent, strenuous exercise might contribute to early mortality, the new study found the reverse.
For this study, Australian researchers closely examined health survey data for more than 200,000 Australian adults, determining how much time each person spent exercising and how much of that exercise qualified as vigorous, such as running instead of walking, or playing competitive singles tennis versus a sociable doubles game.
Then, as with the other study, they checked death statistics. And as in the other study, they found that meeting the exercise guidelines substantially reduced the risk of early death, even if someone’s exercise was moderate, such as walking.
But if someone engaged in even occasional vigorous exercise, he or she gained a small but not unimportant additional reduction in mortality. Those who spent up to 30 percent of their weekly exercise time in vigorous activities were 9 percent less likely to die prematurely than people who exercised for the same amount of time but always moderately, while those who spent more than 30 percent of their exercise time in strenuous activities gained an extra 13 percent reduction in early mortality, compared with people who never broke much of a sweat. The researchers did not note any increase in mortality, even among those few people completing the largest amounts of intense exercise.
Of course, these studies relied on people’s shaky recall of exercise habits and were not randomized experiments, so can’t prove that any exercise dose caused changes in mortality risk, only that exercise and death risks were associated.
Still, the associations were strong and consistent and the takeaway message seems straightforward, according to the researchers.
Anyone who is physically capable of activity should try to “reach at least 150 minutes of physical activity per week and have around 20 to 30 minutes of that be vigorous activity,” says Klaus Gebel, a senior research fellow at James Cook University in Cairns, Australia, who led the second study. And a larger dose, for those who are so inclined, does not seem to be unsafe, he said.