New year, new nutrition experiments

No milk today, it wasn't always so... (Herman's Hermits)

I am probably more than average curious about nutrition and willing to experiment with new things. And I am perhaps quite easy to convince to try out various theories if they sound reasonable and not so difficult to follow. So, for the last couple of weeks, I have introduced two changes in my eating habits:

1. I have cut out all dietary supplement pills containing vitamins, minerals, anti oxidants, etc.
2. I have cut out milk, cheese, butter, and all other dairy products (things made of milk).

Why?

During my training towards Amsterdam marathon, I had added quite a bit of dietary supplements to my daily diet, to stay out of injuries and to keep healthy. I continued with these supplements also after Amsterdam, and I even increased them as I kept feeling exhausted a long while after the race. However, my form improvement still did not come as expected, and by chance I stumbled upon some articles recommending to avoid vitamins, anti oxidants, in form of supplementary pills. The point seems to be the following: all of these supplements that are good for you in general, might be stopping your form from improving, because they are simply helping your body too much. During hard exercise nasty substances accumulate in the muscles, and our body gets in better shape by working to get rid of these substances. If a lot of dietary supplements help the body in this work, then the form improvement might not be as much as it could be.

I don't know if it's true. As with most of dietary advice, this might be debated. Also, research about nutrition is very difficult to compare to your habits, since there are so many components of a diet that play a role. What I know is that I do eat pretty varied and healthy, with lots of vegetables of all sorts,  so anyway I should be getting enough of all these vitamins and minerals in my food. That's why I decided to give it a try for a couple of months to see if I see any change. I am still taking a spoon of fish oil every morning, though. And red beet powder before competitions...

And what's the deal with milk and dairy? This is something that came up quite unexpectedly. During a run, I was complaining to my friend Mats (the first guy from Bergen to climb Mount Everest, so his advice definitely counts!) that I was experiencing lack of form improvement although my energy was back and I was training properly. He explained to me that he and a few others had gotten huge benefits from cutting out all dairy products. He was so sweet to run at my speed almost throughout the whole run, and explained to me in detail a lot of things he had read, presentations he had watched and lectures he had listened to. At first the idea seemed very scary. I don't normally drink milk really, but I do eat a lot of yogurt and cheese. How to continue my normal diet without these things?

Fortunately there are a lot of substitutes available in normal supermarkets.  And they all taste just like the real thing, sometimes even better. As a nice side effect, they are really low on calories! I have tried out a few different brands and tastes, and in the pictures you see the products that I like the most. For me it works fine to continue to eat and drink as before, by simply replacing, milk, yogurt, cheese, and sour cream with these products. For those who live in Norway, you can find them at Rema1000 and Meny stores.

The story about milk and dairy seems to be that they have an inflammatory effect on the body. As runners, we get already quite a bit of inflammation in our joints and tendons from running, and dairy products make it harder for our body to repair this. This is why dairy is pointed to by many doctors as something that causes or worsens diseases like arthritis. It also promotes cell growth, which is good when you are young, but speeds up aging as you get older. And of course cell growth also applies to bad cells, like tumors. Again, these findings are very difficult to compare to your own diet, because medical tests objects are usually people who did not have a healthy diet to begin with. But I found the indications strong enough to give it a try.

Have I noticed any changes? I fact I have! But I cannot be sure that these are entirely due to the diet. I have been feeling less tired and much more energetic, and I can take more training than before without getting exhausted. But this can also be because we had a Christmas break and I had a lot of opportunity to rest and sleep between the sessions. But I have also noticed that my stomach feels more comfortable compared to before. Not that I ever noticed problems with dairy products before. But now that they are gone, I keep finding myself thinking how pleasant and relaxed my "insides" feel.  Since the change is anyway so easy to follow, I will give this a couple of months' try and see if this is something I want to make into a permanent change. After all:

How will you know if it's the right decision, if you never make it?