by Tom Brady
In my belief, not all electrolytes are the same. Some electrolytes have a positive charge, and others have a negative charge, and it’s possible for these negative and positive ions to cancel each other out.
Every day we deal with an excess of positive ions coming from our cell phones, TVs, microwave ovens, lightbulbs, and indoor environmental pollution. It may sound counterintuitive, but in my belief, negative ions have the greatest benefit on our physical and mental health. They increase our bodies’ alkalinity and serotonin levels and accelerate healing and recovery, while amplifying our levels of pliability.
CAN YOU OVERHYDRATE?
Alex and I both believe there’s an optimal point of hydration, and theoretically you can overhydrate in the same way you can overdo anything. You can also reach a point where your body has taken in so much water in so short a period that it can’t metabolize it. But in reality this happens to people so rarely that it shouldn’t be a top concern. The larger issue is that most people are underhydrated relative to the optimal pliability levels we recommend at TB12.
DEVELOPING A WATER ROUTINE: STEP-BY-STEP BASICS
Where hydration is concerned, balance and pacing are important. As usual, don’t do everything at once. Work toward proper hydration step-by-step, line by line, precept by precept. Drinking at least one-half of your body weight in ounces of water every day is a great place to start. Drinking those ounces of water enhanced with electrolytes is even better. It has taken me many years to get into a great routine—but I know I will have great hydration for the rest of my life.
DRINK ONE OR TWO GLASSES OF WATER WHEN YOU FIRST WAKE UP
Drink a glass or two of water with electrolytes when you wake up, but be sure to wait half an hour before you eat breakfast, and don’t drink water while you’re eating (see below). It gets in the way of optimally digesting foods and absorbing their nutrients.
SPREAD OUT YOUR HYDRATION DURING THE DAY
Try not to drink all your water at the same time. Space out your water drinking over the course of the day. In general, it’s not good to drink more than four eight-ounce glasses during a one-hour period. If you weigh 160 pounds, via our rule of thumb you should be drinking at least 80 ounces of water per day. Assuming you’re up by 8:00 a.m. and in bed by 10:30 p.m., that’s a glass of water every couple of hours. I carry a water bottle with me wherever I go, and I make sure I’m always properly hydrated.
LIMIT DRINKING WATER DURING MEALS
Try not to drink too much water during a meal, as it can interfere with digestion. Wait an hour or so after you’re done eating before you drink water, since water washes away the body’s natural enzymes, which break down your food. Rule of thumb: Drink more water before and after meals than during meals.
TB12 ACTION STEPS
• Hydrate, hydrate, hydrate. Drink at least one-half of your body weight in ounces every day, and more if you can.
• Add electrolytes to your water as often as possible.
• Reduce or eliminate your intake of caffeine, soda, and alcohol. All three can be dehydrating. If you drink coffee, soda, or alcohol, rebalance your hydration by drinking two glasses of water for every one of those beverages you consume.
• Remember that if we don’t drink enough water, our lymphatic system can’t flush out the built-up toxins in our bodies. That’s one reason why keeping well hydrated is key to our overall health.
• Hydration and pliability are interdependent. How fast or slowly you develop pliable muscles depends to a large extent on how well hydrated you are.
WATER IN OUR BODIES
WHY HYDRATION MATTERS
Our bodies are made up of anywhere from 60 to 80 percent water, and our muscles alone are 75 percent water. Water aids in brain function; ensures healthy metabolism, digestion, and kidney function; helps circulate oxygen in the bloodstream; lubricates joints; and ensures proper muscle function. Proper hydration helps restore the body’s natural percentage of water while creating optimal pliability.
This is what a healthy diet looks like to me.
CHAPTER 8
NUTRITION
BY NOW, HOPEFULLY YOU REALIZE that pliability doesn’t refer only to targeted, deep-force muscle work. You can do pliability treatments and work out every day, but if you don’t pay attention to what you put inside your body, or if you ignore the connection between good nutrition and healthy muscles, then you’re not giving yourself the opportunity to achieve your peak performance. It really doesn’t matter how much exercise you do if you’re not eating the right food and providing your body the right nutrients.
One important point to remember goes back to one of the principles of the TB12 Method—balance. You need to optimize and maintain your pliability even when you’re not in the gym or on the field. To do that, proper nutrition is critical. What’s more, the type of nutritional regimen you choose will either promote or reduce inflammation. That’s why after pliability training and making sure I drink enough water every day, the next most important choice I make as an athlete centers on nutrition.
During the season, I know I’ll be hit hard every Sunday—and I will be dealing with negative-unintentional traumas that lead to inflammation responses in my body. I also know my body will generate trauma responses to deal with the line-of-duty soreness and pain I feel. On and off the field, my goal is to avoid additional inflammation on top of the inflammation I get from playing football. Every Monday after a game, for example, the whole team comes into the weight room to bench-press, squat, and do other weight-bearing activities. The way I see it, they are creating more trauma in addition to the “car crash” our bodies were experiencing less than twenty-four hours earlier. Knowing my body needs to recover after a game, I’m careful about how I train on Mondays. I do enough to keep my strength optimal and my muscles firing at 100 percent, but I stop short of generating additional inflammation. Younger athletes may be able to get away with this routine because of their natural pliability. But as a forty-year-old athlete, I have to think differently about my time allocation, as discussed previously.
That extends to my nutritional regimen. After Monday practice, and with Tuesdays off, a lot of players will go home and not think much about their nutritional choices. I was that way myself in my early twenties. If I was going to work out and play hard, I told myself, I could be as undisciplined with my nutrition as I wanted. Back then I didn’t give much thought to what I ate, so long as I stayed in the 220–30 pound weight range. Of course, not all calories are created equal. The calories you get from an apple are different from the ones you get from an apple pie. It’s the nutrients in that apple that can help accelerate recovery and reduce inflammation, and a big reason why I can recover from Sunday’s game significantly faster than players who may be ten or fifteen years younger than me.
Some younger players don’t give too much thought to nutrition. They think they can eat anything they want, and their bodies will burn off the damage. The problem is that by eating inflammatory foods, they’re eating things that create inflammation on top of the weight lifting they’ve done on top of the football game they just played on Sunday. That’s an inflammation response times three. As I said, if I know my body will experience inflammation every Sunday during the season, the last thing I want to do is stack on more inflammation on top of it—not if I want to feel great every time I take the field.
That’s why for the past ten years I’ve followed a pretty disciplined nutritional regimen. It’s based on eating fresh, seasonal, organic foods from authentic and, ideally, local sources. I also subscribe to the philosophy and principle of eating 80 percent alkaline-forming and 20 percent acid-causing foods. What that means in practical terms is that, while I’m not a vegetarian by any means, I do subscribe to a commonsensical, mostly plant-based/plant-heavy and seasonal nutritional regimen. What we’re learning from the slow-food and farm-to-table movements is that if the food we eat is grown naturally and locally, and we avoid processed foods, we’re already doing our bodies an
d minds a big favor. For these reasons, I try to eat only “real food”—food that comes from nature rather than from industrial sources. A lot of what we buy and eat today is sold to us as “natural” when it isn’t, or else it’s so watered-down or pumped full of additives, chemicals, and preservatives that it has almost nothing in common with the real thing.
The regimen I follow is a mix of Eastern and Western philosophies. Some of these principles have been around for thousands of years. My nutritional regimen may seem restrictive to some people, but to me it feels unnatural to eat any other way. Many people have conditioned their bodies to a nutritional regimen made up of lots of white or pale-looking foods—french fries, potato chips, white bread, chicken nuggets—that don’t exist in nature. A friend once told me that when his young son was asked in school where ketchup came from, he said, “A bottle.” He had no idea that the source of ketchup is supposed to be tomatoes. Still, it’s never too late to teach children how to eat right. If children learn nothing else but the principle of eating more real food and fewer processed or refined foods, it won’t just benefit their pliability, it will also help reduce obesity levels and help them feel healthier and more energetic.
The principles behind my nutritional regimen have nothing to do with fads or trends. As you go over them and, more important, the specifics of what I eat, remember that this is what works for me in my life and my job. Everybody is different. Changing a nutritional regimen isn’t easy—I know that. Modify things at your own pace. As always, try cutting out or adding something here, something there. Halfway measures are better than no measures at all. Try to figure out what works best for you, and if it gives you more energy or improves your performance, you’re on the right path.
Vegetables are obviously a very important—and alkalizing—part of my diet.
GENERAL GUIDELINES
THE DOS
EAT AS MUCH REAL, ORGANIC, AND LOCAL FOOD AS YOU CAN
I eat foods that are as fresh as possible, and most of the time that means I choose to eat organic foods. Their nutrient content is much higher than the foods you find in the supermarket, and organic foods don’t have any of the pesticides, preservatives, stabilizers, growth hormones, and other chemicals the commercial food industry uses to grow and preserve food. Even if you eat only a small percentage of organic foods, you’ll have more energy and you’ll feel more satisfied. Why? Because the chemicals in some industrial foods stimulate natural chemicals in our brains that block leptin, a protein that governs our metabolism and that creates a feeling of “fullness” during meals. Basically, the chemicals that food companies put in our foods increase food cravings. Our brains never turn off. They’re always hungry. Nutrient-dense, high-fiber foods, on the other hand, not only give us more energy but also, thanks to their natural fiber content, make us feel fuller faster, and with smaller servings.
If eating 100 percent organic food isn’t an option, focus instead on eating real food, whether you buy it at a supermarket, a farm stand, or through a farm share program. Most food sold locally is real food, and most of the time close enough to organic—the difference being that local farmers may not have devoted the time, expense, and paperwork needed to get official US Department of Agriculture Organic Certification. Real food is also local and seasonal. Unlike industrial processed food, which puts old things or ingredients in new products or packages, real food never changes, and eating real food makes the most sense—humans have been eating vegetables, fruits, meat, and fish for centuries. It may go without saying, but whether you buy fruits and vegetables in the supermarket or at a local health-food store, always wash them before eating them.
EAT MOSTLY VEGETABLES
Vegetables are high in nutrients, fiber, and enzymes. I try to eat as many as I can at every meal. I also try to eat some percentage of vegetables either raw or lightly steamed. Very high cooking temperatures can strip away the nutrient and enzyme content of vegetables, and raw foods also have an alkalizing effect on the body. I’ll be talking more about alkalizing foods later in this chapter, but as I’ve gotten smarter about eating, I’ve moved toward adopting an alkalizing diet—and most vegetables are alkalizing. The benefits of vegetables and their alkalizing effects is that they promote less inflammation than other foods do—and create healthier muscles, which leads to optimal pliability and helps maintain great vitality and peak performance.
A mostly whole-food, plant-based nutritional regimen is one centered on vegetables, fruits, whole grains, and legumes. It limits meat and fish, dairy products, and any refined, processed foods, including flours, sugars, and oils. When people ask if I’m a vegan or a vegetarian, I tell them no, decidedly not. I may be plant- and vegetable-focused, but I also eat meat, chicken, and fish in limited amounts. If anything, I subscribe to balance. In grade school, we all learned to eat in a balanced way—the difference being that we now have a better idea about how to achieve that balance and are smarter about the differences between real foods and processed or refined ones.
Let food be thy medicine.
—HIPPOCRATES
Leafy greens are packed with vitamins and antioxidants—I try to eat as many of them as I can.
EAT LOCAL FOODS WHENEVER POSSIBLE
In general, the more local your food is, the better. The fruits and vegetables you see in the supermarket have been shipped anywhere from 1,500 to 2,000 miles on average to get there. They’ve been packed in Styrofoam in trucks and on planes, and by the time you see them on the shelves, they’re a week to ten days old—and the average apple for sale in a US grocery store was picked up to ten months ago. Most have likely been frozen and thawed out at least once. With national soil levels nutrient deprived to begin with, the vitamins and minerals in the fruits and vegetables we buy have degraded even more. When food travels, it begins a long, slow death. This slow death depletes the nutrients of the food we eat, so our bodies are never really being nourished with what we need for optimum health.
The principle behind my eating habits is simple: I want to eat food in ways that maximize its nutritional value. The more concentrated my nutrition, the fresher it is, and the more local and organic, the better it is for me. I know that local and organic food often costs more, but the way I see it, I’m making up those savings in decreased health-care costs in the long run—and, most important, I feel better and have performed better as I’ve eaten healthier. It’s impossible to eat the cheapest foods while also eating the best foods. Eating healthy is an investment I make in myself. We all have one body and one life. I’ve made it a priority to treat that body and life as respectfully as possible.
EAT SEASONALLY
In my experience, my body needs and responds to different foods depending on the climate where I live, and also on what season it is. I know, for example, that following a mostly plant-based nutritional regimen is good for my health, but that’s because I live in New England most of the year. If I were living in a place like Alaska, where the climate is colder and darker for a longer period of the year, my diet would need to shift to incorporate a higher percentage of fat and protein, which counteract the cold temperatures outside. It’s all about balance. That’s why your environment, and what you ask your body to do in it, is a big part of determining what nutritional regimen best suits you.
In some medical traditions, there are certain “warm property” foods that are higher in fat and protein, while other foods, known as “cold property” foods, are lower in fat. On hot summer days, it feels more natural to cook or eat foods that are light or “cool,” like salad or fruit. On colder days, our cravings naturally skew toward stews or soups. A few warm-weather foods that cool the body include cucumbers, asparagus, avocados, broccoli, and celery. On the list of cold-weather foods are root vegetables, fennel, oats, quinoa, and rutabaga. Some foods fall in the middle. They’re neither warm-weather nor cold-weather, and are considered neutral: apricots, beets, grapes, green beans, lentils, pineapples, potatoes, and raspberries. These principles are thousands of years old,
and they make intuitive sense.
A good rule of thumb is to observe the seasons and eat whatever foods are locally available in the climate you inhabit. Spring vegetables in the spring. Fall vegetables in the fall. If one food feels more “summery” and another feels more “wintery,” they probably are. Once I understood this concept, I became more aware of what I ate and when I ate it, and why I was better off eating more meat in the winter than during the summer. When I could feel the difference in my body, the habit stuck. The bottom line is, I try to eat as seasonally as possible. This nutritional regimen works for me, and I would expect it to give you the same results. But again, take your time. Making changes in your nutrition is challenging, so start slowly and build on your positive results.
CONSUME ESSENTIAL FATTY ACIDS
Many believe the best sources of dietary fat are essential fatty acids, especially omega-3 and omega-6 fats. These can be found in sardines, wild game, flaxseed and flaxseed oil, walnuts, pumpkin seeds, and canola oil. The media and most high-profile diets would have us believe that fat is the enemy, but the truth is our bodies require a certain daily percentage of fats. Fats create insulation in our bodies, stabilize our body temperatures, give us more energy, transport oxygen, and help us absorb fat-soluble vitamins. Best of all, they act as natural anti-inflammatories. Omega-3 fatty acids, which are concentrated in the brain, have been shown to enhance both memory and performance.