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3 Reasons Why I Never Get Sick

September 14, 2009

sneezing-womanI can’t remember the last time I was sick.

Seriously.

Not even a sniffle.

It was at least 12 years ago since I had a cold and even longer since I came down with the flu. And except for a couple checkups, I haven’t been to the doctor in a decade.

Normally I don’t think about stuff like this, but looking over my notes today I was reminded of an old blog post written by my friend Jason where he talked about how a lot of people have commented to me that I’m “lucky” or that “nothing bad ever happens” to me. Sickness and disease are often among those “bad things” they mention.

Well, I need to set the record straight: bad things happen to me all the time. The only reason most people don’t notice is because I’m often fairly well prepared when Lady Fate drops by to sprinkle some shit on my parade.

Like a hitman silently slitting the President’s throat, it is preparation and prevention that lets me deal with my problems quickly, quietly and without fuss.

Since nature trapped us in these damn bodies of ours, we’d better take good care of them for as long as possible. Even if you’re a worshiped genius who uses $100-dollar-bills as toilet paper, life’s no fun when you’re fat, sick, and ugly.

So here are 3 things that slimmed me up, sculpted my body, and beefed my immune system into a cigar-chomping badass motherfucker.

#1.General Eating Habits

I eat two low-calorie meals per day. In rare cases when I’m especially hungry, the third meal is always very small. And since they’re usually the same, I never have to worry about portion sizes, fat, cholesterol, or any of that other nonsense. Template the meals once and never worry about them again.

My main food mostly consists of 90% lean beef (with the remaining 10% almost entirely cooked out by my Flavorwave infrared oven), sometimes Alaskan salmon, sided with vegetables like corn, green beans and spinach. Sometimes I swap out the meat with a small helping of Stouffer’s Meat Lasagna. I never snack in between meals or in front of the TV.

You might think I’d get tired of this after awhile. But in 4 years, that has never happened. Why? Well, I discovered that if you eat only when you’re absolutely starving, you train your body to a Pavlov’s dog-like response to the welcome relief the meal inevitably brings. That way, you’re always satisfied.

When I eat alone, I usually do not drink while eating. Doing that weakens the stomach acids and makes it more difficult for your body to digest the food. So I do my “heavy drinking” after the meal and throughout the day. I’ve found green tea (with lemon juice added to increase absorption), MateVana, and Samurai Chai to be the best drinks. They’re all either low-calorie or no-calorie and the latter two jumpstart your brain similar to coffee, but without the jitters and unhealthy side effects. I never put additives in my drinks.

After eating in the morning, I then mix up a glass of whole milk (yes, whole) into a chocolate whey protein shake, which gives me an added boost of about 26 grams of protein and a few more calories. This is also the drink I use to wash down my buckshot load of nutritional supplements that we’ll talk about here in a minute.

Then I pour a mug of tea and get to work.

By the way, have you ever looked at the whole milk label? It’s not that much different than 2%. One of my friends thought for years “whole milk” meant something like “100%” or some other obscenely high number. No no no… whole milk is about “3 1/2%” – only 3 more grams of fat and 20 more calories per serving. Hardly the heart-stopper many believe. Still, why whole milk? Because that’s how it comes out of the cow. In other words, it hasn’t been messed with as much as the other milks. Skim milk is “ok” but I find it too watery for my liking. Surprisingly, Sam’s Club sells good milk guaranteed to have no hormones or any other crap in it… for about $2.20 per gallon. (Aside: Funny how right next door at Walmart, the milk DOES have hormones, costs more, and tastes worse… incredible how screwed people are when they don’t want to pay the $45 annual membership fee.)

As for alcohol, I seldom drink. When I do, it’s usually wine which has about 12-18% alcohol. At that level, the worst case scenario is you get a little loopy after downing a bottle. It’s the easy-going, fun kind of loopy. No big deal. The hard stuff leaves a dry-as-dust trail of fire down the throat, makes you look and feel like shit, and wrecks your body over time – not fun. The only mixed drink I really like is the White Russian or Irish Cream.

#2. Nutritional Supplements

Our bodies are just one big chemical cocktail. A chemistry experiment that doesn’t function properly without the right molecules floating around in the right places.

That’s why I’m big on supplements. You can’t get all the weird mix of stuff your body needs just by eating the food you find at the store. Even if you’re rich and buy all the best stuff, it’s still damn near impossible. There’s a lot of reasons for that, but it has a lot to do with how our food is grown and processed these days and also because you can’t possibly scarf enough of all the stuff you’d have to eat to get every single nutrient.

That’s why it’s good to supplement. Here’s a complete list of what I take every day:

500 mcg B12 (in liquid spray form) – This is AWESOME for energy. If you’re a slug in the morning, start taking this and you won’t even have to “wake up” – you’ll hop right out of bed, ready to do whatever.

5,000 to 10,000 IU Vitamin D3 – This makes depressed people happy, boosts the immune system and helps with tons of diseases, including all kinds of cancer and many virii. Your body makes a certain amount of vitamin D whenever you’re exposed to the sun, but many of the soaps people use when bathing cause it to leave the skin before it has time to be carried away by the bloodstream. Also since most people work indoors, they’re never exposed to the right amount of sunlight for it to do them any good. Certain people (me included) get depressed in the winter time for lack of sunlight. Supplementing with D3 solves these problems.

2,000 mg Vitamin C - I shouldn’t have to tell you about vitamin C. You should already know how much ass it kicks, but you probably aren’t getting enough of it. I’ve found 2,000 mg (that’s 2 grams) per day to be the ideal for me. I used to have a problem with bleeding gums whenever I brushed my teeth, but since I started doin’ C, I have healthy strong gums. This one alone is also a major factor into never catching cold or getting the flu. Hell, I can even hang around sick people and not get anything. You betcha.

Misc assortment of B1, B2, B6 - The additional B vitamins link up the nervous system with the rest of your body and helps it all communicate with one another. This solves a bunch of muscle issues and boosts your energy even more.

1 standard multi vitamin with everything - There are a lot of trace minerals that are hard to get in food and expensive to buy separate supplements for, so a good gel-cap multi-vitamin is a one-stop-shop to cover all the miscellaneous B.S.

800 IU Vitamin E - Actually this is the only supplement I take where I’ve not noticed any sort of tangible benefit. There was some study published awhile back where they said vitamin E made people slightly more likely to die sooner, but then some doctors called bullshit on the study citing bias, incomplete facts, and an inherent flaw in the study itself. So who knows? The only reason I still take it is because the bottle isn’t empty.

Calcium, Magnesium and Zinc combo - Now THIS one is awesome. Taking these 3 separately won’t do you nearly as good as taking them all at the same time. That’s because they all rely on and enhance each other in various ways. The calcium is great for bone-strength, the magnesium keeps the calcium from turning into arthritis (and a lot of other good benefits) and the zinc… well, let’s just say the zinc helps certain parts of a man’s body perform with absolute reliability and precision :)

2,600 mg Flaxseed oil - Flax seed is a great source of omega-3 fatty acids, which help your brain perform at its best and antioxidants help slow down the oxidation process that slowly damages your cells over time and eventually kills you… literally. The more we can slow down this oxidation process, the longer we’ll live and the better we’ll feel while doing it.

3,000 mg Fish oil - More antioxidants and omega-3′s. Actually now I’ve replaced my traditional fish oil with a mixture of several oils (including fish oil) that provide omega-3, 6, and 9 all in one.

1,200 mg Sun Chlorella - These are weird little green crumbly bits of a type of single-cell plant organism grown from freshwater green algae. It contains tons of amino acids, vitamins, and minerals. Awesome little plant. Helped improve my mood and clean out my digestive system when I first started taking it.

26 extra grams of protein via shake - I already talked about this one in the food section above. The extra protein from whey builds muscle much faster when combined with a good workout. Actually this 26 grams is pretty small compared to what I should be taking if I were more serious about bodybuilding. I’ve heard some meatheads say to inhale the same number of grams of protein as your body weight per day. So if you weigh 150 pounds, you take 150 grams of protein.

All that may sound like a lot to you, but this is real life and most people don’t even get a fraction of what they need. A lot of young people (up to age 34) eat junk and don’t notice many side effects, so they think it’s fine… but the only reason their body can handle the malnutrition is because they’re so young. Soon enough the body will cough, wheeze, and choke they’ll end up like everyone else on death row who thought prevention was for saps.

Right now I’m considering adding a few more things to my list because recently I read this:

The biggest breakthrough in anti-aging medicine in our lifetime involves telomere biology.

Each time your cells divide, they copy your DNA to make the new cell. But the telomeres – the sections of DNA at both ends of a chromosome – get shorter with every copy. And the shorter your telomeres are, the “older” the cell acts.

Once the telomeres get to their shortest length, your cells can no longer divide, and damaged or diseased cells aren’t replaced. This causes a chain reaction that weakens your tissues and organs. And that can only lead to disease… and, ultimately, death.

Fortunately, there are some ways to start to slow down the rate at which your telomeres are shortening right now…

1. Lower your homocysteine levels. According to a report in the journal Atherosclerosis, high levels of this amino acid can shorten your telomeres as much as 3 times faster.

I help my patients lower their homocysteine levels by having them supplement daily with the following:

Vitamin B12 – 500 mcg
Folic acid – 800 mcg
Vitamin B6 – 25 mg
Riboflavin (B2) – 25 mg
TMG (trimethylglycine) – 500 mg

You can find these supplements at your local health food store. If you don’t want to take them all separately, you can use the same formula I give my patients.

2. Take vitamin C. This inexpensive supplement is a powerful antioxidant. And recent studies – including one reported in the journal Life Sciences – show it can slow telomere shortening by over 50 percent. I recommend 2,000 mg per day to my patients.

3. Take SOD. Besides protecting your cells from the damage of toxins and stress, SOD (superoxide dismutase) has been shown to slow the rate of telomere shortening. I recommend 500 mg a day. You can find it at your local health food store. Or you can check out my formula, which contains SOD as well as other potent cell protectors.

All men should be taking 200 mcg of selenium and at least 200 IU of vitamin E daily.

Hmm, so I guess vitamin E isn’t so worthless after all.

#3. Workouts

The building I live in right now has a full-blown gym in the basement, so I like to sneak down there late at night when sane people are asleep to do cardio and pump iron.

What I’ve learned is if you’re going to do cardio, do HARD cardio for shorter periods of time instead of lighter cardio for longer periods of time. In other words, it’s MUCH better for your body to bust your butt for 15 minutes than it is to walk long distances. Walking or running long distances when its easy will actually do more wear and tear on your body over time with less health benefit.

So what I do is a quick mile to a mile and a half on an incline while carrying weights and swinging my arms back and forth naturally. This SUCKS when you first start out, but after about a week it gets a lot easier.

Then I do leg and arm curls, bench press, sit-ups, pullups, and several other kinds of weights to top everything off. Recently I also got the P90X workout DVDs to help me with a good stretching routine, some Yoga, and more hardcore ways of strengthening my body. The whole goal of that system is to vary the workout enough where the muscle development never plateaus, leaving you with a straight line of growth.

Overall, I’m sure there are a few tweaks I could make to my system. But after 4 years of testing… everything I’ve described here really does work wonders for me. It keeps me in shape, healthy, and of course… I never get sick.

If you have any sort of weight or health problem, maybe it would help you too. Give it a try and find out.


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Tags: anti-aging, antioxidants, bodybuilding, disease, healthy living, minerals, nutrition, preparation, prevention, sick, sickness, vitamin supplements, vitamins

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