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To Take Tylenol or Not To Take Tylenol

September 26, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Dr. Mario TylenolI was miserable last weekend. I was congested, my throat ached, my head hurt and my body felt like a 500lb gorilla had used it as a punching bag. I was feeling and acting pretty pitiful when my wife said “how about you take some Tylenol?” My guess is I was annoying the crap out of her with my whining but that question got me thinking, why don’t I take more medication? I resist taking anything from Tylenol to aspirin. I didn’t take the anti inflammatory medication my doctor prescribed for my elbow and I didn’t take any anti histamines when I developed an allergy to something unknown last summer. Why not?

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Filed Under: Editorial, Illness and Injury Tagged With: , , , , ,

All Clear! Life Is Good :)

July 11, 2011 By 1 Comment

This update is going to be a little short due to a life that has become increasingly busy over the past two weeks but normal posts should resume next week.

The Finger Update

First, that numb finger I told you about?  Turns out it’s most likely a pinched nerve.  Which brings me to a funny story. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Announcement, Diets, Eating Healthy, Illness and Injury, Running, Weight Loss Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

Why Is My Finger Numb?

June 27, 2011 By 9 Comments

fearI woke up about a month ago and my finger was numb. Specifically, my left pinky finger felt like it was asleep. I thought nothing of it until I got to the gym that day. On certain exercises, the weight in my left hand kept slipping. It felt like I was gripping it hard enough but no matter how hard I grabbed it I couldn’t seem to keep it in hand. When I looked at how I was gripping the weight, I felt that numbness again. I also noticed that it was my pinky finger that kept slipping and the ring finger next to it wasn’t doing so well either. Once again, it felt like these fingers were asleep, like I had cut off blood flow for a while. Only this time I hadn’t just woken up, this was in the afternoon and there was no reason for any part of my hand to be asleep.

I wrote it off. Maybe it was a pinched nerve, or maybe it was some injury that I hadn’t noticed. Whatever it was, it probably wasn’t serious and it would go away if I just worked through it. Only it didn’t go away. Day after day I wake up and my left pinky finger is numb. Sometimes it’s better and sometimes it’s worse but it never quite goes away. It’s been a month now and I still occasionally wake up with a numb finger. In fact, it’s a bit numb now as I type this post. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Communication, Illness and Injury Tagged With: , , , , ,

How To Improve Your Posture

June 24, 2011 By 1 Comment

Bad Posture WestLB, 2002I’ve spent the last three days having an absolute blast in Las Vegas with a group of my closest friends.  This is my first time here and my first time actually gambling, so I’m having a ton of fun.  I’ve been keeping up with my marathon training but I did decide to take three days off from my 4 hour body diet.  It’s worth it I think and I’ve been getting good enough results so far that I’m perfectly fine taking a few days off.  Anyway, that’s not the point of this post.  The actual topic is the complete lack of back pain I woke up with this morning.

Wait, why is this special?  Afterall, aren’t we supposed to wake up with a lack of back pain every morning?  Well yah, but we don’t, at least I don’t.  I have had low and mid back pain for many years now.  Nothing severe but it’s definitely noticeable.  So it’s interesting that I woke up without pain morning.  I tried to think about the last few days and figure out if I had done anything specific that might account for this change and the only thing I came up with is the lack of sitting with bad posture. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Fitness, Healthy Habits, Illness and Injury Tagged With: , , , ,

How To Prepare For A Marathon, AKA “My Legs Hurt A LOT!”

September 20, 2010 By 1 Comment

marathon sacrificeHere I am, 24 hours after finishing the Maui marathon.  My legs hurt so much that I actually considered crawling to the fridge :)  However, before you dial 911 for me, let me just tell you that I am overjoyed!  I may not have finished like I wanted to (you can read all about that here) but I did finish, and that’s what matters.  I’m happy with my run and wanted to share a few running tips with you.

Don’t carry so much – You don’t need three water bottles, an MP3 player, a camera, a backpack full of Gatorade and replacement shoelaces just in case.  All that weight will just weigh you down.

Carry some pain killers – Two Tylenol will help you keep running / walking post the 20th mile when your legs feel like nothing but pain.  Four Tylenol is even better.  Just don’t over do it.

Use the water stops – Don’t be shy, they’re there for a reason.  Drink a half cup of Gatorade, a bit of water and pour a cup of water on your head.

Stop wasting money on goo – You don’t need whatever is in those packets.  The water and Gatorade are just fine.

Vaseline is your friend – Yep, Vaseline.  Trust me, you’re going to have body parts rubbing against other body parts for a very long time.  If you don’t put something there to “smooth” things out, you’re going to regret it.

Sunscreen is a must – You’re going to be spending a lot of time outdoors, you don’t want to do it without sunscreen.

Protect the nipples – Hah!  You women laugh, but us men rarely think of this.  Well guys, when you’re running for a long time, sometimes things chafe.  Vaselines helps in other places but the best way to protect nipples is bandaids.  So be a man, slap a couple of flintstone bandaids on your nipples and run like the wind!

Train with an uphill – This is for all you treadmill jockeys out there (like me) who rarely run outdoors.  Do yourself a favor and run some hills.  Otherwise, when you do hit a hill, it’s going to hit back, hard!

Run with someone – A running partner makes a huge difference.

Pace yourself – I know you feel really good on the 4th mile, but there are 22 more miles and they’re going to be much harder.

Last but not least, have fun – Unless you’re the guy who finished the marathon in one hour and fifty eight minutes (which I find amazing by the way) then relax and enjoy yourself.  Don’t beat yourself up if you were a little slow.  You’ve still accomplished something amazing.  Enjoy it.

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Don’t worry, next week we’ll get back to our series about supercharging your life.  In fact, have you set out some goals yet?  Have you started adding some activity into your life?  Have you started eating healthy?  As for me, I’m going to go soak my legs in some hot water and send thank you letters to the makers of vaseline.

Filed Under: Exercise, Illness and Injury, Injuries, Running Tagged With: , , ,

Primal Blueprint, Day 4

June 12, 2009 By 1 Comment
This entry is part 4 of 4 in the series The Primal Blueprint

A few things I’ve noticed now that I’m paying more attention to them.

The Undying Cough!

If you’ve had a bad cough recently, you can empathize with what I’m about to say.  Yesterday, I was feeling pretty darn well.  My head was clearing up, I had no headache and that crummy “sick” feeling was almost completely gone.  Only one problem, I was coughing.  Now coughing is a natural thing.  It’s your body’s way of trying to get rid of crap in your airways.  So I don’t usually take anti cough medication during the day.  However, what about at night?  As good as I was feeling, the cough was definitely keeping me awake.  It’s hard to fall asleep when every couple of minutes your body is wracked by a coughing spell.  So I did what most normal people do and took a couple of cough lozenges.  Basically, these are bits of candy with some numbing agent in them that makes the coughing trigger go away.  It seemed to work and I fell asleep.  By the way, I never used to take these lozenges before.  I only started doing so a year or two ago when someone told me that needlessly suffering coughing attacks is silly and only leads to prolonging the cough.

This morning I woke up and I felt worse than before.  The headache was back, the throat felt worse than ever and I felt generally crappy.  So is Mark right?  Is coughing something we should put up with even at the expense of sleep?  Was the cough lozenge a good way of covering up the symptoms but a bad way of getting healthier?  The answer is, I have no clue.  This could just be a bad cold that came back or it might be that I blocked one of my body’s necessary ways of getting rid of disease.  My sample size of 1 is simply not enough data, but it is something to think about.

I wonder how many other ways we have of circumventing the body’s natural function in the name of comfort.  There’s a study I read a while back on how some necessary nutrients are no longer in our foods because we insist on cleaning them up.  That’s right, dirt has nutrients and when you insist on making all your food perfectly clean, you lose out on a lot.  Same applies to medication which reduces fevers.  Fevers are a way for our body to make it tough for viruses and bacteria to live inside us.  When we suppress those fevers, we often make it easier for infections to persist.

So is all medication bad?  Is all treatment unnecessary?  Well, I wouldn’t go quite that far.  However, this is giving me a lot of food for thought.  I think that, as I progress along this two month experiment, I will try to avoid all unnecessary medicine, even things as simple as throat lozenges, and see how I do.

Chocolate Tasted Funny!

Yes, that’s right, I had a sweet tooth breakdown yesterday.  I was in a candy store and there was maple fudge (my favorite!) and I just craved it so much that I broke down and bought a small piece.  Guess what?  It tasted WAY too sweet.  Just four days after starting, something that would have tasted perfectly fine to me before, now tastes way too sweet.  Again, this is just a sample of one, which means that in the long run, this might be meaningless, but I find it encouraging that the cravings for processed sugar are less and less frequent.  Maybe I can finally kick this candy addiction once for all!

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All in all, I’m liking this new lifestyle, although I’m still having difficulty finding good things to eat.

Filed Under: Illness and Injury, Nutrition

The Problems With Body Image

May 22, 2009 By 3 Comments
This entry is part 1 of 1 in the series Body image

Over the next few weeks on 60 in 3, I’m going to write a series of articles about body image, what it means, how important it is, the kind of problems it can lead to if badly handled and my own struggles with it.  I wanted to start out this series with the following video:

It’s from the Dove evolution campaign and it’s a bit old (2006) but I think it makes an amazing point.  What we see today as the “ideal” body image is nothing but a manufactured illusion.  Take a look at this video and see the transformation this woman undergoes.

Some of this transformation was done through makeup, some through technology.  Either way, she is made into something that is impossible for her to achieve on her own.  This is a model, someone picked for beauty, and yet even she must be artificially transformed into something she could never be.  This is what we’re sold every day.  This is what our children see every evening.  This is what we’re told we should look like.  Women get more of this than men, but men get enough of it too.  One look at some recent action movies (300 anyone?) and we can easily see that men too are bombarded with artificially enhanced images of the “ideal” male physique that they must aspire to but can never achieve.

I’ve always said that looking good is a perfectly fine goal to use as motivation for being healthy.  However, like many things, this can be taken to an extreme which is both unhealthy and unrealistic.  That’s what I’d like to talk to you about in the next few weeks.

In the meantime, check out that video.

Filed Under: Editorial, Illness and Injury, Motivation, Weight Loss Tagged With: , ,
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