TRAVEL AND HEALTH

Does travel have to play havoc with your health? I'm just back from 3 months traveling (for work - see http://www.foodworksasia.blogspot.com) in Yemen and Georgia (the photo is from South Ossetia in the Caucasus).

I dread these extended trips to exotic places, nice perhaps as a holiday, but when you have to work under stress you wonder what impact it has on your health - different diets, little or no chance to rest or to exercise, bumped around in 4X4 wheel vehicles and in Eastern Europe and Central Asia especially a hospitality culture that has you drinking vodka for breakfast!

The amazing fact I just discovered after getting home is that my body has responded quite well to high elevation (over 7,000 feet) in Yemen, a lack of fresh vegetables, a diet high in carbs and protein and yes, in Georgia, copious amounts of alcoholic beverage.

I was able to exercise; in Yemen on a relatively good multi-machine in the basement of our office and in Georgia in the standard hotel fitness room. The weights were not what you'd expect from a professional fitness center or bodybuilding gym, but just about adequate to maintain my strength. I tested against my September 2009 weights benchmarks yesterday at my home gym in Bangkok and came out slightly ahead (tip: keep a written record of what you do in your fitness routine, it's easy to forget and gives you something to play against). Today I had my regular 3-monthly blood chemistry profile: amazingly my blood sugar was stable (just under the extra-tough Kurzweil and Grossman reference level - see my post on Kurzwel) and my lipid panel (cholesterol, triglycerides) had actually improved.

I did manage to stay off the desserts and extra sugar (fruit sugars are OK and you get whatever other sugar you need in your normal food) but my consumption of carbohydrates rocketed - the baguettes in Sana'a City in Yemen were fresh and excellent and Central Asia lives on bread. So while the diet hasn't been good, somehow my body has responded well to the abuse. It's interesting that this hunt for fitness isn't just a straightforward matter and that sometimes extreme travel and rough times can actually do you good. Or maybe it was just the vodka!

LIVE FOREVER!

This great book, 'Fantastic Voyage' by Kurzweil and Grossman (see the website on http://www.fantastic-voyage.net/#) has really changed my life. I'll review the book in detail on the 'Think Fit' page (see link) but I want to tell what an impact the book has had on how I look at myself - near age 60 and thinking I was doing OK fitness-wise. Boy, did the book make me change that point of view! I've always concetrated on simple physical fitness (especially through resistance training) and neglected the real objective - keeping the entire biological machine running at optimum levels so I can live long and fruitfully. So reading this was a shock to discover that there was a wealth of things I neglected, especially in my case diet. Equally, I guess I didn't understand or bother with enough of the basic mechanics of how the machine works and the battery of tests you should do to ensure that you are getting the right picture of what's happening to you. I've changed: cut the coffee, switched to green tea, focused on low glycemic load foods (to name only a few changes) and plugged in other tests (e.g. homocysteine level - check out the book) to my regular check up. This team have written another book 'Transcend' which I haven't got to yet, but it's on my priority reading list.