I recommend

While I sell Beachbody’s products, there are a lot of other great products and books out there. I personally use and find the products on this page valuable, or read the book and found it outstanding. I am not being paid to endorse any of them, and am not affiliated with the makers/authors of any of them other than Beachbody. These are just my opinions as a satisfied user/reader of these products and services. I have used/read and/or own all these products/books and I think you should strongly consider them too, if they fill a need, interest, or curiosity you have.

Pillar 1: Exercise

Garmin Forerunner® 405CX

Why I like it:

1. It stores fancy, complicated running training programs I’d never get done otherwise and tells me what I’m supposed to be doing right now. (Without a programmable GPS watch, I’d never have been able to follow Jack Daniels’ fitness running plans in Daniels Running Formula (2nd ed.), which really improved my running.)
2. It gives me a way to objectively see how my speed on hills varies and how that relates to my heart rate. Given that I run in the foothills of the Rockies, this is important to me! Knowing my flat speed and my 2-mile-8%-grade-hill speed is important in any speed or time estimate for my trail runs and races.
3. It tells me elevation changes, so that when races say things like “2000 ft of climbing” or “4500 ft of climbing” about their courses, I have some sort of comparison picture relative to my usual trails of how hard that’s going to be.
4. This particular watch has a heart rate strap for measuring calorie burn. After having my calorie-math-is-very-fuzzy epiphany, I don’t think striving for tremendous accuracy in calorie numbers is worth the effort. But being an engineer, I do think measured numbers are better than numbers from formulas. I use the calorie burn and heart rate functions for non-running to gage my fitness and effort level for strength training, as well as non-running cardio like spinning, Insanity, and TurboFire. Thanks to my Garmin 405CX, I know that my calorie burn during the P90X strength workouts has been steadily dropping from about 300 to 170, no matter how hard I bring it. My heart rate just doesn’t get up there anymore, and thus neither does my calorie burn (during the workout itself). I don’t do strength workouts expecting any calorie deficit anymore (after the recovery drink, it’s a wash) – I do them expecting to build strength and muscle, understanding that any effect on calorie burn is indirect through my metabolism rather than direct during the workout. I have also learned that if I want to continue to improve my cardiovascular system more than just incrementally, I’m going to have to go seek out the challenge, go out and dig deeper. As my cardiovascular system has gotten fitter and has built both more endurance and better handling of intensity, just trying to keep up with the DVDs isn’t the same level of challenge it used to be. I’m not saying I can keep up easily with Shaun T. I’m just saying my heart rate data tells me that even when I feel exhausted, my heart didn’t work as hard as it used to when I felt the same a few years ago. Or maybe I just forgot what it felt like because I got used to being fitter. Either way, if I want to keep improving fast, I know I have to choose to kick it up a notch thanks to the Garmin. (No spice weasel required, though!)

Daniels’ Running Formula – 2nd Edition

This book was recommended to me by a double-marathon-running co-worker, who described the book as “running for engineers”. (Interestingly enough, he whipped out a copy from his cubicle. I’m not the only one with fitness information materials at my desk!) That description is apt. This $11 book is a one-stop information shop about running training, adaptations, responses, and an algorithm for putting together a training plan given a goal race length and a time to reach it in. The second edition also had pre-made running training plans for fitness runners – the book is originally intended for competitive runners and coaches – which was very valuable for me. I have recommended this book left and right and so something would be amiss if I didn’t include it here.

One of the pre-made plans for fitness runners is one for people wanting to start running – a run-walk plan. It is much better than the ad hoc run-walking I did initially in terms of fast results and comfort. If you are just getting started with fitness (or are picking back up after many years) and want to be a runner specifically, or want to be outdoors rather than use fitness DVDs, this is a great plan for you! This book is goal-oriented, however – it is all about how to reach specific running goals as fast as possible – so if you’re looking for easy-going, playful fitness, this is not the book for you.

PowerBlock U-50 Urethane Adjustable Dumbbells

If you are into P90X, P90X2, or anything else that needs dumbbells at home, you should strongly consider adjustable dumbbells. (Unless you are so lucky that you have a dedicated exercise room with room for a proper weight rack.) We started with the cheapest adjustable dumbbells we could find at Target (two 2.5-12.5 lb dumbbells and two 5-25 lb dumbbells) when we first started doing P90X. After two rounds, though, we got pretty frustrated with the adjustment mechanism on the 5-25-lb set. It would get stuck a lot and/or slide too fast once it got unstuck, so that adjusting the weights got aggravating. Since we knew at that point that we’d be doing P90X for a long time, we splurged on some premium adjustable dumbbells.

We looked into the BowFlex SelectTech dumbbells too, which I initially favored, but once we saw them in a store we immediately changed our minds because of the width. There’s a move in P90X called Crouching Cohen Curls (reported to have been invented by a crouching, curling kind of guy named Cohen) where your hands need to be knee-width. If your dumbbells are wide enough, that’s going to be a problem. We gave Crouching Cohen Curl a try with the SelectTech dumbbells; too wide for us. I understand there are people who are very happy with the SelectTechs for P90X. We just made a different choice that we’re very happy with.

PowerBlock makes a lot of variants of their dumbbells. We selected as follows:

• The urethane-coated variety, to minimize any damage from the weights to our floors and to get 2.5-lb increments (rather than 5 lb). The weight increments you get with the U-50 set are 2.5, 5, 7.5, 10, 12.5, 15, 17.5, 20, 22.5, 25, 27.5, 30, 32.5, 35, 37.5, 40, 42.5, 45, 47.5 and 50 lbs per hand.
• The 2.5-50 lb set (U-50), to cover the range of weights both I and my husband need for both low-weight moves like Arm Circles (~ 5 lbs) and high-weight moves like Lawnmowers (~35 lbs for me, ~45 lbs for my husband)

The painted PowerBlocks are cheaper, but we figured floor damage is even more expensive than the more expensive PowerBlocks. We wanted the small increments to make sure we can move on up in weights without encountering a ‘jump’ that’s too big. 5 lbs can be quite a jump, especially at lower weights. I have never experienced a problem with going up 2.5 lbs.

Now, in practice, the PowerBlocks are 10 – 50 lbs for us, not 2.5 – 50 lbs. That’s because of the messing around with the adder weights for the handle, which we avoid if we can help it. We leave both adder weights in by default, meaning if the handle gets us 10 lbs. If we want less, we need to mess with the weights, and we still have the smaller cheap-o adjustable dumbbells plus 5-lb uretane coated bright blue stand-alone dumbbells, so we just grab something else instead. We only really need less for the “grab a small weight” exercises anyway. You also need to pull one of the adder weights out to go up by 2.5 lb-increments, but I’ll do it then because it’s the only way.

These are (other than the actual fitness programs themselves, of course) the best fitness equipment investment we’ve made. And while the sticker price may make you think twice, don’t let it if you’re serious about home fitness. I ran some math here recently to help a friend determine whether doing P90X or joining the cheapest gym she could find for a year was the most inexpensive, and it turned out that even if she bought the PowerBlocks instead of the cheap-o adjustable weights (at $379 plus $59 shipping and handling, mind you) P90X would have been cheaper. We bought the PowerBlocks about three years ago, so even though the initial cost really stung in the wallet, it was a smart financial move for our fitness.

This is consistently ranked as the top yoga mat on various yoga mat aggregator sites, because it’s thick, it’s durable, and it’s sticky. It’s unfortunately also pricey at %94.00. It’s also heavy, because it’s thick and dense. I really like mine a lot! I never have to fold my mat over to protect my knees, and it feels very stable under you in balance poses. It does take a little ‘breaking in’ when you first get it – yoga non-slip socks are recommended at first.

(If you’re wondering what would ever wear out a yoga mat, the answer is your hands and feet. My yoga teacher’s mat has holes in it. Yes, holes. She’s been talking about getting a new one.)

Beachbody re-sells these through the Team Beachbody web store, so if you want one you can throw one in with other things you’re ordering, or vice versa. If you are a Club member, your 10% discount is good on the Black Mat as well even though Beachbody doesn’t make it. I got mine for $67.46 because of my coach discount! It’s a little hard to find, though: it’s under P90X equipment (not yoga!) and it’s called a “Plyometrics Mat.” If you read the description, it’s identified as the Black Mat by Manduka.

The Chin-Up Max

When I started doing P90X, I couldn’t do an unassisted pull-up. As Tony instructs, I used a chair. Over the course of the next year, I discovered some problems with the chair strategy. For one, it’s very hard to judge whether you’re making any progress. I realized over time that without really noticing, I adjusted how much help I got from my foot on the chair and could meet pretty much any rep goal I set without necessarily pushing myself to get any stronger, or at least not enough to make clear progress toward an unassisted pull-up. Second, if you’ve never done an unassisted pull-up, you don’t know what good form feels like. This means it’s very, very, very easy to “cheat” without realizing it by doing chair-assisted pull-ups with lots of kip, or backwards and out motion.

I started making clear progress in the pull-up department only when I climbed up on a chair, held myself in place at the top of the bar, had my husband move the chair out of the way, and the lowered myself down as slowly as possible. This worked well, but had the downside of needing a second person to move the chair. The Chin-Up Max is kind of new, so it wasn’t available at the time. My husband surprised me with one when he saw the idea and I’ve loved it! My pull-ups have improved a lot more and I don’t need the second person. This is also a way to do pull-up ‘strip sets’ if you really want to squeeze everything you can out of your pull-ups, even when you can bang out 20 or so yourself.

PowerStands

We thought these Beachbody push-ups stands were just another upsell when we started doing P90X. We didn’t want to wait for shipping from Team Beachbody and were also hoping to save money, so we went to Dick’s Sporting Goods and picked up the only pair of push-up stands they had. The other push-up stands were okay, but they dug into our hands on pike presses and incline push-ups (not to mention on ALL push-ups with a weighted vest on!) and they always threatened to fall over on wide push-ups.

When we ordered the P90X2 Ultimate Kit, we got a pair of the PowerStands in it. Hindsight is 20/20, but we should have just gotten the PowerStands the first time. We saved about $5 and shipping time, but we were never quite happy with the other stands. The PowerStand handles are wider and sturdier, and thus don’t dig into your hands ever, and the round, very wide base means they’re much more stable in wide pushup positions than the other bars we had. It’s nice to not have to worry so much! Had I known I’d have paid the extra $5 and waited for them to arrive back two years ago. That’s why I’m recommending them here, so maybe save someone else the regret.

Beachbody’s Non-Squishy Medicine Balls

Before P90X2 was finalized and released, my husband and I were subscribed to the P90X One on One season 3, where Tony tested out moves for P90X2. As we were watching him use medicine balls as push-ups stands, we were wondering what brand of medicine balls he was using, because all the ones we’d used are, well, squishy. That sounded precarious to use for what Tony was doing, we though. We went to Dick’s Sporting Goods and looked for hard medicine balls. There were none. The ones in the Team Beachbody store are, so if you’re wanting medicine balls for P90X2, get these!

Beachbody’s door attachment kit for bands

If you don’t have a pull-up bar and don’t want to buy one (or are traveling), get this cheap door attachment kit to create a place to anchor your bands to out of any door with hinges. (And what door doesn’t have hinges?) No hooks, no marks. We got one with one of the P90X One on Ones and it’s great!

 

Pillar 2: Nutritious Food

The China Study

A co-worker gave me the tip about The China Study and said he became a strict vegan after reading it. This is the best book on nutrition I’ve ever read. I’m always on the lookout for good health information and picked up the book, and like my co-worker, went to work on changing how I eat. My husband refused to go vegan, but we stopped eating dairy completely and cut down on our animal protein consumption from other sources.  You should note that if you are not used to ploughing through fact-dense non-fiction, this is going to be a stiff read. It’s much easier to read than a paper, but it’s fact-packed all the same, and you’ll be asked to think.

What I like about The China Study:

• It’s written by a researcher, who writes like a researcher. In-line references, clarity regarding what a study has found and what is interpretation. He is arguing facts, not primarily emotions.
• Like any good literature review, it includes many types of studies by many different researchers. The sources include causal studies, epidemiological studies (including the namesake of the book, the China Study), and clinical trials.
• The book also includes perspectives and outright discussion of self-disclosure, which is very rare in the sciences. I have heard social scientists talk about disclosing their own biases, but scientists rarely even want to acknowledge they themselves have any. Campbell discusses his own and those of others, which is nice.

More related information can be found in the online resources section.

Forks Over Knives isn’t far from being the movie version of The China Study. Less facts, but more anecdotes and interviews with people from the clinical studies who have saved themselves from heart disease. Campbell is interviewed heavily in the film, together with Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn, who wrote a book simply entitled How To Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease based on the clinical trials he conducted. Definitely worth a watch! This is a much more laid-back way to get the same message that The China Study and How To Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease is sending. The companion book has some of my favorite vegan recipes pictured on my blog, such as lemon-kale sandwiches and seared red lentil pâté.

Food, Inc.

A very interesting look at the United States food supply. Directed by Robert Kenner, who basically took Michael Pollan’s book The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Eric Schlosser’s book Fast Food Nation and made a film out of the mix. Like Forks Over Knives is to The China Study and How To Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease, this is a quick, more easy-going way to get the same message as reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Fast Food Nation. Regardless of how you feel about a whole-foods, plant-based diet, you should inform yourself of the safety and ethical problems with the US food supply. (No, this is not an hour of sad, mis-treated animals, although poor animal conditions is one of the ethical problems mentioned.) For your own sake, knowing the sanitation and regulation limitations of the meat industry in particular is very important. To vote well with your dollar, you need to know what you’re voting for.

Don’t assume the FDA and the USDA has your back. They don’t have the money or the resources to inspect and enforce regulations. And the regulations won’t even let the USDA force a meat company to recall meat known for sure to be contaminated with deadly bacteria at levels above specification limits. Not even when people have died already. Because it’s simpler for everyone, the food industry largely polices itself. It’s cheaper and simpler, all right. It’s just that now you have to worry about the safety of your food in a way you don’t really expect you should have to in a Western country, and you should know that when you’re in the grocery store.

Bob’s Red Mill (particularly their steel-cut oats)

Bob’s Red Mill is just a reliable quality brand. I’m not going to type a whole paragraph on their oats. I’m just plain going to recommend them. Good brand, better and cheaper (at least at my local store) than Quaker.

In Defense of Food

Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food is what it sounds like – a defense of eating things like apples instead of apple-flavored things, fistfuls of raspberries instead of raspberry-flavored things, and real yoghurt instead of products that look like yoghurt, but are not in fact made by culturing milk with yoghurt bacteria. This appeals enormously to the European part of me (I was raised on three continents and the food we ate at home was a Swedish-Finnish combination), which has very strict definitions of what ‘cheese’ is (NOT “cheese product”!) and what various kinds of cultured dairy are. (Needless to say, “meat product” grosses me out. I can’t understand what it is, if it looks like meat but isn’t!) Perhaps this is unsophisticated of me, but I want food words to mean simple things: cheese means what you get after you treat milk with rennet, get rid of the whey, and shore the solids up into a wheel; what happens next determines the sub-type of cheese –  butter means what you get after churning full-fat milk so much that solid chunks form – eggs are what come out of a chicken’s behind. I want food words to mean either the source of a food – fruit of the such-and-such plant, seed of the such-and-such plant, such-and-such piece of an animal – or what you do to a food source, like the cheese and butter examples above. And I do mean you as an average non-food-chemist person, working in a kitchen or on a farm. If you need a factory or a lab to do it, it’s not “real food”. I don’t want to get into complicated philosophical discussions of the meaning of the phrase “real food”, either. I just want it to be simple to talk about foods and cooking. I want to be able to be clear. And that certainly does need defending.

As Pollan points out, we eat foods, not nutrients. We don’t pile ourselves up some vitamin C, some vitamin K, some protein, and some carbs on our plates. We eat combinations of micro- and macronutrients as spinach, potatoes, kale, apples, and tofu. Nutrition advice in the form of nutrient intake always has to be translated into foods you can put on a plate, and frankly, most of the time that translating is your problem, not the experts’. As is figuring out how the nutrients work in combinations with each other. Really, what we need is nutrition advice in terms of foods. Talking about nutrients only gets really confusing really fast, something Pollan calls nutritionism.

Nutritionism is a variant of the can’t-see-the-forest-for-all-the-trees smokescreen that’s a standard fallback for scientists and engineers when their back is against the wall, or when they just truly lose the big picture. (Intention to confuse or deceive isn’t always there; when you spend your life sorting out details, sometimes you do simply miss the big picture.) You’re virtually guaranteed to always have some detail that doesn’t fit in with the other details or the bottom-line conclusion. That’s doesn’t automatically mean something’s wrong. A huge part of being good at what you do is knowing when it does and knowing when it doesn’t. (And reasonable people can and do disagree on that.) But the flip side is that you are virtually guaranteed to find a “but” if you go looking hard enough, even if it’s a little silly.

In scientific seminars, this is usually accomplished by hammering the speaker with all the “did you think about/measure/correct for THIS?” questions you can come up with. Some are probably good questions. But at some point, if you keep asking, you’ll get a little ridiculous, along the lines of “While growing films in your vacuum chamber, was the humidity level in your lab always the same?” or “What if there is a contaminant in the chamber?”. (The latter one can always be asked, and since you’re being asked to prove a negative, it’s incredibly hard to answer the questions without lots of qualifications, so it sounds very dodgy.) The difference between good and ridiculous questions, of course, is whether it matters in practice or not, which isn’t always clear during the Q&A after a seminar, and certainly not to people who aren’t in the field. Think about is as deviating from a recipe – have you truly made the recipe if you did? If someone really wants to, they can get pushy in saying no, even if it’s pretty clear you basically did, because that half teaspoon less of pepper really doesn’t make it a completely different recipe. Pollan argues that the way out of this for what he calls an eater – someone who isn’t in the nutrition field who just wants to eat right – is to focus on foods, not nutrients.

Pollan put the thesis of his book on the cover of the book already: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. But even if you agree with the premise, Pollan does a great job of delivering interesting facts and ideas in covering why that’s his thesis. He also offers a set of food-centric guidelines for what to put in your grocery cart at the supermarket, as well as for deciding what is food in the first place. It’s a short but sweet book. In Defense of Food made a huge impact on how I thought about food and eating, and I highly recommend it to anyone else interested in eating well.

Shakeology

If you’ve read this blog for a while, you know about Shakeology. Shakeology is Beachbody’s superfood premium nutrition shake. It’s not a protein shake or a meal replacement shake in the sense that while you can use Shakeology as either, the real point is all the micro- and phytonutrients from the plant ingredients. There would be no point in drinking a protein shake for the non-protein nutrients; that’s silly. There would similarly be no point in drinking a meal replacement shake as a snack – too many calories for a good snack size. (At least for me!) I personally drink Shakeology as a snack, no matter what I mix it up with. (Thus, I generally stay away from the more caloric recipes.) I love the energy boost it gives me (one of two I’ve clearly noticed when it comes to what I eat – the other is lots of dark, leafy vegetables), so even though I’m not really into either high-protein eating or drinking my meals (plate and utentils, please), I really want to keep Shakeology as a daily part of my diet.

There are three flavors of Shakeology: Greenberry, chocolate, and tropical strawberry. Greenberry and chocolate contain whey protein; tropical strawberry is vegan. I was listening to an interview with co-creators Isabelle Daikeler and Darin Olien recently in anticipation of the launch of the vegan Shakeology and apparently, the intention was originally to make the shake vegan. The problem was that they couldn’t find a mix of plant proteins that passed taste tests.

Beachbody is a company living off of “information arbitrage”: they take our best state of knowledge about health and translate it into something that people actually can and do buy off of late-night TV infomercials. They are not trying to sell primarily to people like me, who think spending their free time researching some health finding and then blogging about it is fun, the way I am part of many other health companies’ prime demographic. (Whole Foods and basically any product (including fresh produce) inside one are paying marketers good money to sell to people like me. I can also tell from the Safeway coupons I get that companies like 365 and Silk have me on their radar because of previous Safeway purchases.) Beachbody is not trying to sell just to people who are already interested in health and health products, they are trying to sell to everyone regardless of pre-existing interest and involvement with a healthy lifestyle – to be the rarity when a good idea does interrupt you, as Jim Rohn says. (“Rarely does a good idea interrupt you.”) That means that Shakeology has to be palatable not just to people who say “Yum!” about buckwheat-corn-flax-hemp protein powder pancakes that are green in the middle (Yum!), it has to be palatable to people who have more recently been drinking milkshakes, not just nutrition shakes.

The vegan protein blend they settled on comprises ultra-fine, bio-fermented, raw sprouted brown rice protein with sacha inchi. The brown rice protein is sprouted because sprouting seeds or grains (any of them, in fact) creates an explosion of nutrients we can benefit significantly from. (That’s why sprouts are considered so nutritious.) Sprouting increases vitamin, mineral, phytonutrient, essential fatty acid, and antioxidant content. It also synthesizes healthy enzymes and increases the quality of the proteins, and reduces the amount of phytic acid, an acid that interferes with a body’s ability to absorb minerals, in the grain. It is fermented because the fermentation process breaks down the rice grain further, beyond just sprouting, which releases enzymes that make it easier for your digestive system to absorb the vitamins, minerals, and phytonutrients in the rice. The blend as a whole has 9 essential amino acids.

The sacha inchi is one of the superfoods in Shakeology that is pretty rare but also very special. Sacha inchi is high in high-quality protein, which is easily absorbable, and adds to the protein content of Tropical Strawberry Shakeology as well as Greenberry and Chocolate Shakeology. Sacha inchi is one of those foods that seems to have a lot of several important nutrients – in addition to the protein, sacha inchi is naturally rich in good fats and fiber, it also helps promote the body’s natural anti-inflammatory response, and it has a very high concentration of omega fatty acids—providing a perfect balance of omega-3, omega-6, and omega-9 fatty acids. The fats and fiber help you feel and stay full. The anti-inflammatory properties help your immune system keep you healthy. The fatty acids keep a number of complicated systems in your body running right.

Shakeology is a whole foods-based supplement

Of course, the very best source of nutrients is from whole foods on your plate, not supplements, no matter what they contain. I’ll be the first – if I can be fast enough to beat everyone else shouting the same thing – to advocate eating whole, fresh foods as the basis of a healthy diet. The Shakeology bags point that out, the website says that, and the online FAQ says it. But I’m a little worried that not everyone is really hearing what that means, so I want to dwell on that through for a minute.

Plan A nutritionwise is always eating lots and lots and lots of home-cooked vegetables and fruits, legumes and whole grains, virtually no red meat or dairy, and a lot less fat and sugar than most Americans eat. (Yes, I’m naming food names, not just vague phrases like “well-balanced diet”.) Plan A is staying in the top two tiers of Michi’s Ladder. Plan A is always doing your own grocery shopping and your own cooking. And Plan B is pulling something you previously cooked and froze out of the freezer. Other convenience of any sort is Plan C. (Not because I want to make you work and suffer, but because no one can sell you true healthy, high-quality convenience at a price you can afford a lot. Places that can do that for you are four- and five-star restaurants – elsewhere, shortcuts are being taken and you know it. You can never buy home-cooked quality affordably.)

Do not delude yourself into thinking that you will be ok eating a diet you know isn’t so good if you just eat enough supplements! Do not use Shakeology as a crutch or patch-up for a poor diet! Eating supplements may or may not have the same effect as eating whole foods with the nutrients in the supplement in them. If you want the benefits of a healthy diet, you need to eat one, period. Even if the supplement helps, you are giving up your biggest opportunity to make your health better if you just rely on supplements.

That being said, provided that you have your nutrition priorities in order, my experience with Shakeology tells me supplements can still enrich an already healthy diet. The amount of nutrients in conventionally grown food today is lower than it was 50 years ago. The organic farming movement may one day start reversing that development. (In the meantime, sign up for a Community Supported Agriculture share!) Since I never noticed any difference if I forgot to take my multivitamins (when I was still trying to take them, thinking that it was good for me) but do notice if I don’t drink Shakeology for a few days, I conclude that Shakeology does something for me the vitamins didn’t. I have more energy when I drink Shakeology. More energy means fewer things feel like obstacles in a given day, and it means higher productivity. That’s enough for me. I drink Shakeology every day. What that means for whether a hypothetical hunter-gatherer would have the same experience I don’t know, but frankly, I don’t think anyone else knows either. Blogging about what we do know takes long enough; I don’t have time for discussions that are 75% guesses with a few facts or studies sprinkled in.

So, let me finally get to the point. The idea behind Shakeology is to try to stick as close as you can to whole foods in making a supplement in order to avoid the complications in deciding what to put in the supplement. Don’t try to figure out what dose of vitamin 1 with what dose of vitamin 2 together with fiber does for what disease, just try to pack as many nutrients from whole foods, processed as little as possible and gently, into the supplement. (Funny story: if you take vitamin A supplements, you can overdose and get sick. If you just eat lots of food with the precursors to vitamin A in them (usually also counted as being vitamin A, although that’s not technically true), your body makes more vitamin A if it needs it and doesn’t if you have enough, so that you can’t overdose on vitamin A from food sources.) Don’t look for why, look for how. If it works, don’t worry about why. Focus on action, leave the why to the academic researchers. Find plants people consider very healthy. Take them and dry, grind, whatever works, them into a powder. Use the powder to make a shake. Leave it at that. All the key ingredients in Tropical Strawberry Shakeology come from 100% whole foods. They are sourced locally from farmers by Darin Olien. (Yes, still!) He goes out there and negotiates the deals with the farmers and makes sure to pay a fair price to boot. I love this video about Darin’s travels and about the local sourcing – there’s also some ingredient fun facts thrown in!

What’s in Tropical Strawberry Shakeology?

Note: Shakeology is best consumed within 30 minutes. This stuff contains live enzymes, and they’ll get to work whether it’s in your belly or not! Also, on a related note… don’t let Shakeology cups or blenders sit around. Enough said.

The basic nutrition breakdown for one serving (one scoop):

Calories: 160
Calories from fat: 10
Total fat: 1 g (2% of the RDA for a 2000-calorie diet)
Saturated fat: 0 g
Trans fat: 0 g
Cholesterol: 0 g
Sodium: 70 mg (3% of the RDA for a 2000-calorie diet)
Total carbohydrate: 20 g (7% of the RDA for a 2000-calorie diet)
Dietary fiber: 4 g (16% of the RDA for a 2000-calorie diet)
Sugars: 10 g
Protein: 15 g (30% of the RDA for a 2000-calorie diet)

19 g of the much-touted smooth proprietary vegan protein blend

Raw sprouted whole grain brown rice protein and Sscha inchi seeds (Plukenetia volubilis).

8.350 g of proprietary superfood-fiber blend

Coconut flower nectar, sprouted chia seeds (Salvia hispanica), sprouted flaxseed (Linum usitatissimum), pea fiber (Pisum spp., seed), quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa, seed), amaranth (Amaranthus hypochondriacus, seed).

1.675 g of a proprietary adaptogen herb blend

Maca root (Lepidium meyenii ), Astragalus root (Astragalus membranaceus), Ashwagandha root (Withania somnifera), Maitake mushroom (Grifola frondosa), Cordyceps (Cordyceps sinensis, fungi), Reishi mushroom (Ganoderma lucidum), Holy basil (Ocimum sanctum, leaf), Schisandra (Schisandra spp., fruit), Ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba, leaf).

1.4 g of a proprietary antioxidant/superfruit blend

Pomegranate (Punica granatum, fruit), Acerola cherry (Malpighia glabra, fruit), bilberry (Vaccinium sp., fruit), Goji berry (Lycium barbarum), Camu-Camu (Myrciaria dubia, fruit), açai (Euterpe oleracea, fruit), blueberry (Vaccinium angustifolium, fruit), citrus bioflavonoids, green tea (Camellia sinensis, leaf), rose hips (Rosa canina, fruit).

1.3 g of a proprietary fruit powder blend

Strawberry (Fragania chiloensis, berry), apple pectin (Malus pumila, fruit), banana (Musa spp., fruit), pineapple (Ananas comosus, fruit), papaya (Carica papaya, fruit).

1.075 g of a proprietary prebiotic and probiotic blend

Yacon root (Smallanthus sonchifolius), Lactobacillus sporogenes (as Bacillus coagulans) naturally micro-encapsulated.

750 mg of a phytonutrient / supergreens blend

Spirulina (Arthrospira platensis, Arthrospira maxima, whole), chlorella (Chlorella sp., whole), spinach (Spinacia oleracea, leaf), barley grass (Hordeum vulgare), kamut grass (Triticum turanicum), oat grass (Avena sativa), wheat grass (Triticum aestivum).

250 mg of MSM (methylsulfonylmethane)

100 mg of a proprietary digestive enzyme blend

Protease, amylase, cellulase, lipase, papain, lactase, bromelain.

Natural thickeners, flavorings, and colorants

Tapioca, natural flavors (strawberry, banana, pineapple), konjac gum, beet juice powder, citric acid, natural sweetener (proprietary blend of erythritol, oligosaccharides and natural flavors), cinnamon powder, Himalayan salt, stevia, and luóhàn fruit.

If you would like to buy a bag of Tropical Strawberry Shakeology and feel like my blogging and social media stream of my lifestyle is helpful and worthwhile, I would appreciate it if you bought it through me. Here’s the link to do so. If you do, I will receive a modest commission. The commissions off of Beachbody products is what makes it worth my while to use my free time to help and support people trying to create lifestyle change for themselves and to put good fitness and health information out there. If it weren’t for the commissions, I wouldn’t feel beholden to be consistent, thorough, or even share what I know at all other than with interested personal friends in real life. I probably wouldn’t even tell people I’d ever been borderline obese and they’d never know any better. I am here to help others, and that’s always been why I became a coach, but the commissions are what pays for this domain and website hosting, the fitness and nutrition books that I buy to learn more to share with others, and other associated costs of doing the work of helping others. (If you already are working with another Team Beachbody coach, or ever bought anything from Beachbody, don’t worry – the person who is your coach will get the commission, not me.)

The P90X2 Nutrition Guide

Interestingly, Beachbody is selling just the P90X2 nutrition guide, independently of the P90X2 kits. For replacements, perhaps? Or for people who are still doing the old P90X but who want the new vegan and paleo options? I don’t know. I just think it’s really cool that they are doing that so that other aspiring vegan athletes can drop $40 on this thing and get their meal plan going! ABSOLUTELY worth the money – this is half recipe collection, half manu planner. The menu planner is the part that I’m personally so grateful for. Don’t get me wrong, the recipes are great too. But I think like most people, I already HAVE recipes. Even vegan recipes. What I needed help with is making sure I balanced my amino acids in the big picture (doesn’t have to be every meal) and knowing that my diet is not just vegan, but also intended for an athlete, is worth so much more than $40 in terms of peace of mind.

 

Pillar 3: Sleep

Invest in a good mattress. I don’t have any particular recommendations as I can’t remember where I got ours.

Keep your bedroom cool.

Stay away from LCD screens for an hour before bed.

Pillar 4: Stress Management

Turning the Mind into an Ally by Sakyong Mihpham Rinpoche

This is a fantastic book for anyone trying to learn how to meditate. It’s clear, it’s comprehensive, and it’s focused on the how-to. This is not really a book on Buddhism, it is a book on how to learn how to meditate. Whether that is good, bad, or indifferent from your point of view only you can decide.

Samadhi Gomden Meditation Cushions

These rectangular cushions do a great job in making sure that your knees are lower than your hips as you sit. You may wonder why that matters. It’s an alignment thing I learned from Anusara yoga.

These cushions are the ones Shambhala Centers use, so if you’ve been to one, these are the cushions.