On Nutrition, Zendurance, and Sugar
Sunday, June 7, 2015 at 6:01PM 
(Yours truly, hosting a low-sugar diet clinic at a local grocery food store in 2011. That's a spaghetti squash, which you can make non-bread noodles out of.)
Well here we go again. I hate writing posts like this, but if I don't, I'm letting incorrect information keep spreading.
I just had a Twitter exchange with somebody that listens to Zendurance shows telling me I eat sugary stuff and to cut out the excuses. I'd blow this off, except that it painfully ignores the tens of thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours I've spent buying and eating no-sugar-added health food for the near-entirity of my life. And not to mention the torment from the kids growing up and my coworkers on a daily basis for eating "rabbit food" or "not having anything good to eat" when I'm eating exactly what is saving my life and hurting most of their's. I even bought my own fridge at work many years ago and it has crazy healthy stuff inside, and a fruit and veggie basket on top, and no junk in sight. Honestly, it's like I'm in some kind of Twilight Zone episode where I'm Jewish, escaped from Dachau, and now I have people accusing me of denying the Holocaust. WTF? It's truly bizzare and a real lesson on how you shouldn't believe what you read/hear/see in mass media.
From infancy to age 17, you didn't want to be at my house unless you already ate whole foods with no extra sugar. I can tell you, that's nearly nobody in the 80's. Friends would come over and be miserable, and then never come over again. No cokes (I won't even dignify coke with capitalizing their name), no Lucky Charms, no nuthin'. You didn't want to be on my soccer team the week my mom brought snacks after the game. Cokes? (It's the beginning of a sentence, so I'll cut coke some slack.) Gatorade? Hell no. You (and I) got an orange... And a lecture about "that other stuff is just sugar." I would just hang my head as the rest of the soccer team would glare at me for depriving them of their Capri Suns and popsicles. We had popsicles at my house, but they were fruit juice with coconut fiber and fat added... and only as a rare treat. I was "slow carb" before slow carb had a name. My mom fed us real cooking nearly every meal, and she was raised in a German and Swedish kitchen, using recipies from the 1920s. Let me tell you, they don't fuck around with crap ingredients. Still today, she tries to feed my son liverwurst all day long. If you can stand it, it is insanely good for developing little brains with it's super high fat and nutrition content.
It is this style of eating that got me to the top in my swimming game and in incredible shape, and also a lifelong education in proper nutrition. Well-rounded meals, no extra sugar, fat is fine, go outside and play and don't come back in unless you're bleeding or if the Sun has gone down - that's how to eat and live.
My senior year in high school, I was swimming HARD 1.5 hours a day. So I ate some raisin bran to fuel my workouts. Guess what - It's whole grain, I drank it with regular milk, and it was purposefully the kind without sugar added to the raisins. That's the best we had back then where I lived. If there was better, I'd know. My mom would have put it in the pantry.
When I went of to college in 1991, I started eating like crap. Everybody else was. Plus lots of beer. Lots! I eventually ballooned up to 230 lbs. from the 180 I should be at. I was burned out from swimming, but was still lifting weights and mountain biking a lot with my buddies.
In 1998, Emily and I got married just as she was coming down with Type 1 diabetes. I immediately threw the transmission back into "whole healthy foods" gear again, the same stuff I knew how to do and was taught by my mom. Thanks, Mom! When I get accused of eating sugary stuff today, I distinctly recall the time Emily was bawling, calling her mom, and near divorcing me because I threw the box of powdered doughnuts in the apartment complex dumpster against her wishes. I was risking greatest thing I'd ever worked for to get sugar out of her life. I've been through a lot of pain eating clean, and when people say I need to fix my terrible diet, I honestly cannot believe what I'm hearing.
By a few years after 1998, I'd gotten my weight back down to 180 lbs. There were a few bumps figuring out how to do it without my mommy making me dinner and still having the occasional beer, (I'm a grown-ass man, remember?) but I'm all good and have been for a very, very long time. I've hosted many podcasts and given many talks about healthy eating and how to do it right. I've been raw vegan (got down to 165 lbs.), high fat, high protein, and on and on... I can and have exercised great control over my diet, many times over, enough to be the exact same weight as when I graduated high school and have stellar blood test results for all the health indicators they've got.
Tawnee's show is a bit on the extreme side, but I'm OK with that. Some people need to be hit upside the head with the no-sugar hammer. But in contrast, I don't agree at all that I should take all grains out of my diet. Too many health experts (probably 99%) say they're fine, just eat whole grains and not too many. I've been reading the ingredient labels looking for added sugar probably since I was 12 just like my German great-grandmother said to. She lived to be 90, and so did most of my relatives. I'm not worried about the grains I eat too much. But Tawnee and I agree on so much, it's incredible. One of the first interviews I ever had on my own show back around 2007 was Christine Lynch, talking about the dangers of added sugar.
What has concerned me and the reason I started working with Tawnee was the carb-dependency while working out. It's weird stuff, and something that has only recently popped up in society with the combo of ultra-endurance training and sugary shit like Gatorade being pushed on everybody all the time. While my daily diet of healthy whole foods that got me back to my high school weight, completing 14 ironmans, and lots of other fun and happy stuff was great, I lately couldn't seem to go more than twenty minutes in a workout without needing a sugar boost. And also I run out of gas at the very end of really long stuff like Ironmans. We should all be so lucky to have a problem like that! Lol.
Coming from my super-healthy background and being no dummy about nearly every problem being food-related at its source, I knew something was up in my diet somewhere. Tawnee and I realized she could help me out with her awesome knowledge about carb-dependent athletes. In just a month or so of working with her, I figured out that I had let simple sugars creep into my pre-workout and early-workout ritual and that was totally screwing up my metabolism. In spite of making nearly zero changes to my daily diet (which I'm already very happy with, and you are now painfully aware of... sorry.), my bonking has gone away and I'm having the best race and workout results of my life.
Ok, so long story short and the way I need to summarize it is like this - If you tell me to eat better, I can barely contain my frustration at how insanely wrong somebody could be and how twisted my life has gotten received on this Zendurance show. I lost a lot of friends growing up and have denied myself tons of tasty foods to stay lean as an adult. It hurts. And it's hard work. And I'm both glad and sad I've had to do it. I'll probably live longer, but it's not as fun as everybody else is having and the teasing sucks. Just last week, a meeting at work was brought to a complete stop as my boss made fun of me in front of the rest of the staff because I was eating carrots while everybody else was eating kolaches (greasy, cheesey, crap-food wrapped in white bread.) It hurt, but I just smiled and ate my carrots, and remembered what my mom said - "White bread is not real food. It's cake. And cake is for special occasions only." I heard that plenty growing up, while also being chased around the house by my grandother trying to get me another spoonful of cod liver oil.
I deal with enough diet torment in the real world already. But to have somebody on Twitter that I don't even know tell me not to eat doughnuts, when I'm the one that threw them out of my house against the will of my crying wife, that's nuts (almonds?). So here I sit, writing something again...
The biggest lesson I've learned from this is to never think you know somebody unless you actually know them. The stuff you think could be way wrong.
I also want to add something about excuses. My parents sent me to U.S. Marine Corps JROTC military school when I was only 14 years old. My drill instructor had just retired as the head drill instructor of Paris Island (Full Metal Jacket). If you started with an excuse, they smacked it out of your mouth before you could finish the sentence. I haven't made an excuse for anything since my first day there. No excuses is one reason I love Ironman so much. You either have done what you have supposed to or you have failed. There's mission success or mission failure. Respect yourself and believe in what you do. If I don't do what Tawnee says, it's because I haven't gotten to understanding enough why I should... yet. I'm simply taking extra steps and time to try to explain my mindset so the audience can see what I'm thinking and why, wrong or right.
Reader Comments (3)
You drank WAY more beer in college than you are letting on.
And even though you threw out her donuts...E will always be better looking than you...sugar or not. ;-)
I'm still a fat ass...but you have become an inspiration...for real. Even if your mom won't let me spend the night. =)
Brett - love your show. My mom was the same with food when I was a kid, carob instead of chocolate, plain yogurt instead of sour cream, wheat germ put on my cereal, etc.
At least beer doesn't have sugar in it.
Good luck with your training.
Fuck yeah Brett! Put those haters in their place!