As with an a early post to any new blog, it is fitting that I lay out who I am and why you should care about anything I have to say. First, I’ll say what I am not. I’m not a doctor or a personal trainer. While I have stayed in plenty of Holiday Inn Express hotels, scoured WebMD and online medical journal sites countless hours through the years and had a keen interest in human physiology I can make no claim of being a licensed expert in these fields. I’m not here to claim to be a health guru either. I don’t have some new magical elixir to sell you that will magically make you healthy, feel twenty years younger or be able to live into your 100’s. I’m not an adherent to any particular diet principle, tried and true or relatively newly discovered. I’m not a film maker working on yet another recast of a Morgan Spurlock adventure.  So who am I?

…that is the question posed by Ben Greenfield on his Facebook page based on a discussion he found here: http://b-reddy.org/2013/05/20/issues-with-foam-rolling/ .  The article by Brian Reddy certainly makes a compelling argument against it, or more so against only doing foam rolling or to foam rolling in excess.  I think he presents a false dichotomy though.  He points out how foam rolling can’t fix underlying movement problems.  His main points are summarized in big bulleted letters, but I think over-simplifies the argument and creates that false dichotomy:

Power yoga kicked my ass, that or a combination of that plus allergy medicines, allergies and overly light breakfast.  Comfort food was in order for lunch, but still didn’t make me feel better.  A 3+ hour nap in the afternoon after taking rest of day off of work did however.  Hearty steak and salad dinner with some yogurt and mango dessert (plus some pita chips and brownie bark) made for a not terrible but not great SAD diet day

How long should I be trying each diet out?  I’m taking great care to consider the proper phasing and timing of the entire experiment.  I’m trying to make sure that I’m not setting myself up for failure by doing things overly aggressively.  I’m also trying to make sure that I don’t bias any results for a given diet.  It would be a pity if I switched off a diet just in time for the effects to be felt.  At the same time I don’t want to make the period so long that it takes years for this process to unfold.

As I think about how an adaptation to a new diet evolves, I think that commentary of the results day to day needs to go along with a more general discussion of how things are going in the diet.  There is the concept of a journal entry to discuss this general component, but a look at the day-to-day specifics of what is going on really deserves its own section.  The journal will be more colorful language and describing the failures and successes at that given point in time.  An accounting of what I ate or did in a given day however will go into a daily updates section.  Ideally this would take my already digital log of consumed food, activities and perhaps moods and show it in a brief set of words and graphics.