Dr. Kenney’s Friday 5 Spot
I interact with hundreds of patients each week and get asked a lot of questions. On Fridays I like to share some of the answers I give and hope it has value for you.
A piece of nutrition advice I like? Most grocery stores are laid out so that the perishable (aka fresh) items are along the perimeter. The fruits and vegetables lead into the proteins that lead into the dairy section, etc. Your nutrition should include more of these fresh items and less of the packaged and processed items that you’d find on the shelves in the middle of the store (not all are bad obviously). Natural foods are difficult to over-eat, will provide nutrients, boost energy and satisfy you so that you’re not hungry and looking for quick sources of energy like sugar. Eat more of the foods you’d find on the perimeter and your nutrition will improve immediately.
A workout I’ve been enjoying? Truthfully “enjoying” is more like “completing” but it’s still a good one. In my 100-mile races there are always a fair number of large hills (or mountains) involved and thus climbing is part of the deal. Covering so many miles, only the elite can physically run every hill. For a guy like me, big hills mean powerwalking in most cases. To prepare for this, I put a treadmill up to its maximum incline level which on a good machine is steep. Then I set the speed to 4 miles per hour. As simple as this sounds, walking a 15-minute mile at that incline is quite a challenge. Depending on when I do it, I will go anywhere from 1 to 4 miles in this manner. Physically this gets me ready for the large hills and mentally it gets me ready as well because in general I hate treadmills and find them boring.
A recent observation? A good friend of mine just started his own podcast. I’ve listened to podcasts for over a decade and my assumption was that they’d be very expensive and time consuming to start. He and I had lunch and I expressed this to him. As it turns out, he uses his phone, an app and a $17 microphone to create his podcast. Other than being proud of him, this stood out to me because it occurred to me that many times in life, we avoid things that we feel will be too tough, complicated, time-consuming, etc. when in fact they are well within our grasp.
A cool moment recently? Last week I accidentally knocked my Kindle off a countertop and the screen broke badly which is a bummer because I read so much. A few days later my 13-year-old son saw that it was broken, and I told him what happened. He then disappeared upstairs for a while and when he came back down, he told me that he’d used some Amazon gift cards that he’d gotten for Christmas to order me a new one. I was very touched that he would do that, and it meant a lot to me.
A quote I love? “Alone we go faster, together we go further.”
Want more?
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