I have been in many places on this globe, but this is one of my most breath-taking experiences.

Girl in the old town of Haikou

Old man drinking tea

The flower hat; you find it on many heads ;-)

Dogs on the road; I love dogs and they don't eat dogs here!

On this canary island our partner Hannes has organized a triathlon training camp. Beside the fact of shooting our athletes, we are promoting biestmilch with a booth at Hannes’ base on Fuerteventura. On Tuesday Fritz, my dear DOP, and myself left for Fuerteventura to collect some footage of our biest athletes, who are currently polishing their bodies for the season. Whenever I am on the road like this I try to find a few short seconds to get off the track and see something else of the place. I have to admit this time these moments were extremely rare. We had only 3 days.

Heavy gusty winds turned the Atlantic into a wild creature

Peaceful coexistence. The dog has got some features of my borders

Typical local restaurant, our refuge on the island

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Currently Ross Tucker is writing about this topic on the Science of Sport blog. I want to pick up this topic very briefly, because as we know even among lean athletes weight is a crucial issue of discussion all the year through. The gossip around training your metabolism to burn more fat is fairly noisy, controversial and not very profoundly based on evidence. This has got to do with the fact that reliably measuring parameters of energy consumption and moreover to measure the kind of energy used is not trivial. While the procedures are very time-consuming and possibly invasive (e.g. muscle biopsies), the results for the individual are volatile, and contribute more to statistics than giving you advise on a very personal level. The data you get on an individual basis depend so much on your training, your diet regimen, the actual time of measuring that results can only give a rough guideline and may vary from individual to individual and intra-individually as well.

Energy use and loss follow the rules of macro-physics, at least we don’t know any better until now. The thought concept behind still seems to be applicable: you only lose weight, if your energy balance is negative regardless of the energy source your body uses. Of course, this does not indicate that you cannot train and optimize your metabolism. It only may say that low-intensity workouts don’t make you lose more weight than high-intensity ones. If you burn fewer calories than your intake may be then weight loss remains a dream, and weighing a shear frustration.

It is known that athletes have more effective fat burning capacities compared to sedentary individuals. This I think is easy to explain. Sedentary people are reaching the point, at which the energy contribution from carbs becomes greater than that from fat a lot earlier than well-trained athletes. This cross-over point (named by George Brooks, a very famous exercise physiologist) is relative to a person’s training condition. The conclusion is straight forward: If your body is well trained, you enter the zone in which mainly carbs are burned later than an untrained person.

Therefore workout and increasing your muscle instead of your adipose tissue brings about burning more calories and more fat. Obese persons are often disappointed, that they don’t lose weight despite reducing the calorie intake. Maybe they don’t have the muscles that help them burn more fat? Therefore one advise among thousand others may be to work more on an intensity program than remaining in the cardio or fat burning zone as many coaches and machines in gyms recommend.

For figures and scientific details please, have a look on Ross Tucker’s series about exercise and weight loss.

For many people the beginning of the New Year is the time of detox. Therefore I wasted some thoughts on this issue.

To flush the body from toxins! A slogan well known based on a thought concept that dates back into the ancient times of Greece. Essentially, this theory held that the human body was filled with four basic substances, called four humors, which are in balance when a person is healthy. All diseases and disabilities resulted from an excess or deficit of one of these four humors. The four humors were identified as black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood. This theory was actively practiced until the end of the 19th century. Methods of treatment like bloodletting, emetics and purges were aimed at expelling a harmful surplus of a humor. Other methods used herbs and foods associated with a particular humor to counter symptoms of disease, for instance: people who had a fever and were sweating were considered hot and wet and therefore given substances associated with cold and dry (source: Wikipedia)
But many of the old metaphors our ancestors used for explaining sicknesses are still alive today. The advent of modern science was not able to change the thinking of hundreds of years. Deeply engraved into our body is the view that toxins are piling up in our body, debris we need to rid our body from.
The imagination to cleanse body and soul from harming compounds is thus very old. The industry of detox products takes huge advantage of these ancient patterns in our thinking far beyond scientific evidence. I don’t want to indicate that scientific evidence is right and the old theory is stupid and inefficient. But I think we should be aware of the fact, from where our strong desire for purification comes, and why we may be an easy prey for an industry that knows about our weaknesses so well.

Some points you may want to consider (published by sense about science) before getting roped in the detox affairs:
Usually a healthy body’s liver, gut and kidneys are able detoxify your system. Another “detoxification system” or better filter is the lymphatic system and the skin. Only few chemicals / toxins can penetrate the skin without destroying it.
The term toxins is fairly vague. Whether a compound is toxic or not depends very much on the ingested dose… water can be toxic, so can be oxygen, this is what our Western science tells us.
Only in case of an intoxication you need a detox-ification.

Our Natural Science says:

1. Have glass of water to help you rehydrate
2. Eat a balanced diet
3. Get a good night’s sleep