I really enjoy the details in your post. On the contrary, Peacenik's post was incredibly vague; Good food with a reasonable amount of exercise is good for everyone. It's almost meaningless, since you have to define good food and a reasonable amount of exercise. My morbidly obese sister use to bowl a couple times a week. Bowling burns the same amount of calories as ironing a shirt. Some would call that reasonable. People who are overweight will tend to say that a reasonable amount of exercise is walking around the block for 5 minutes and then eating a baked potato covered with butter and sour cream.
Are you a serious weight lifter? Your weight is so out of proportion to your height. I will soon weigh the same as you and I'm 6'3". My wife is taller than you and weighs 135 pounds. She hiked up Mt. Whitney yesterday and is training to hike/run rim to rim to rim (46 miles) at the Grand Canyon.
The information is not bad unless you are looking at only bad information. Athletes are better trained than ever before and often eat a perfectly balanced diet. I've read most of the same information you shared. There was a time when I ate a very disciplined diet. Not anymore. I eat what I like. I stuffed myself at a sushi bar a few days ago. I ate a fast food burger yesterday. Today I ate healthy. I have a few vegan friends who can't possibly keep up with me or my wife on mountain bike rides. The diet is fine, but it doesn't replace hard training. You see, diet is easy. It's not exhausting like hard exercise. I lifted weights this morning and then ran out in 100 degree temps for 45 minutes. My wife is running twice as long as me. She trains hard. Eating right is easy. Everything you need is at the grocery store. Modern grocery stores in the U.S. are huge and have foods from everywhere. But as easy as it is to eat right, I prefer to exercise a lot and indulge myself. I had a chocolate muffin after lunch today. A huge amount of sugar and calories.
Information is trendy. First they tell you to increase carbs, and a few years later you need to decrease carbs. I use to read about an Indian tribe, the Tamahumara (sp) Indians, who diet on 80% carbs and do a lot of endurance running. I think Adkins talked about them in his books. I got good at training my body so I did not burn muscle and had plenty of quick burning carbs available. Recently, my friends and I are discovering that a loss of a mere 3% of water results in a 10% loss of performance. We drink water almost all the time. The U.S. women's marathon team was carrying their water bottles during the race because they wanted to hydrate in between official water stations.
We bought a Ninja blender at Sam's Club. I use it mostly for smoothies. My wife blends some spinach and other vegetables. I am not going to blend food unless I have to. I love to go eat BBQ beef brisket and pizza and food from India and Thailand and Vietnam. We also eat carnitas about once a week. None of this is particularly healthy. But superior fitness gives us a lot of wiggle room in our diet. I don't disagree with most of your diet assessments, but I would say that most upper level athletes are so fit that they indulge in comfort foods.
Most people don't really care about their health until there is a problem. By then its not always too late, but your system has been taxed to the point of failure so you have to make big changes instead of small ones. My research has lead to these conclusions and I believe they were revealed to me by God.
1. Everything is created to maintain balance. Everything outside the body like the world and everything inside the body. So nature has the same checks and balances that our body does, to maintain harmony.
2. Humans were created to be stewards of creation and our bodies are machines that were given to us to do our job here on earth. Its like getting a company vehicle, that is specific for your role, but its designed to naturally adapt to the environment. This is why God has little regard for our bodies. Its like the boss is happy you maintain your vehicle but its all just temporary. Whether people die or live isn't as important as you think it is because our eternal spirit or soul is who we really are.
3. He designed our bodies like the animals giving us will to live and reproduce, but that is part of the machine just like the other machines or animals. That's the struggle of man, separating the desires of the flesh (the program of the machine) and the will of the spirit (serving the Creator). We sin because we choose to serve the machine instead of the one who created us. It would be like a boss giving you a fork truck to unload a semi and you decide its too much work for the fork truck. Instead you give it extra oil changes and polish it up, build it a lavish garage to make it "happy". When the boss comes back, and He's coming, He is going to see if the semi is unloaded and if its not, we are going to point to the garages we built for our vehicles and expect praise and gratitude but He will shake his head in amazement at out stupidity. Instead we seem more satisfied to just give fuel to other machines so they can do it and then they will get our pay. We might not get fired because we are part owners in the business but the reward will be less.
4. Sorry about the side track. Our machines adapt to maintain balance so if something goes wrong other systems compensate until its back on line. Its like we have a little mechanic trying to fix everything bypassing some systems and constantly making changes until "the parts come in" for proper repair. Our bodies build muscle with protein but the "work order' is testosterone, so you need both. Otherwise there is no point to build. If we don't use our muscles to release testosterone then mostly what protein we eat gets wasted. Sugar is the fuel and whatever is extra gets stored because everything runs on sugar (or fat during sugar shortage). Anyways giving our bodies what it doesn't need or too much of what it does need is EXACTLY like putting too much oil in your car, or using the wrong fuel, not giving it proper parts for repair, giving it crappy fuel that's been sitting in the shed for the last ten years (canned food). Eventually the little mechanic going to have so many quick fixes going on he's going to pack his bag and go on vacation until you start getting the right stuff. Enter disease and illness. This is premature death designed for natural environment balance.
5. What we put in our bodies and activity we do identifies or signals the environment we live in so the body adjusts to the environment. Poor nutrition and nourishment not getting into the body, too much work and not enough food, too much food and not enough work, hazardous food getting into body, all signal poor environment so thinning of the herd for environment balance. This means premature death from disease, and low testosterone so the body doesn't reproduce On the other hand good nutrition, productive and active, and little stress leads to health and higher testosterone because its a good environment for good population growth. Hostile environment with lots of physical labor and good nutrition, higher testosterone to repair muscles faster to make work easier and increase population to lighten the load. The environment we signal to our bodies these days is high stress, little nourishment, little activity so thinning the herd protocol is in full swing but instead of fixing the problem with our natural program we hire a less educated mechanic, enter medical profession, to fix the problems.
Sorry this post is so long but I have a lot in my head and trying to narrow stuff down in a few sentences is a bit of a challenge for me. I guess the point is this, finally, you can abuse your body a bit and it will repair but if you abuse your body too much it won't fix itself. Enjoy a burger now and then just don't kill the mechanic. For the record I'm not a serious body builder. My brother in law says I look like a body double for Wolverine.
