Submitted by:  Dr. Joseph Henderson, Alexandria, VA 

First off, I'm one of your biggest advertisers! I'm a chiropractor and you've singlehandedly been able to put together everything I've learned over the years in school and in practice and put it into an understandable format. I've directed so many people to your book. It's done wonders for me since November. I decided I was going to turn 40 without love handles, and with a 31 inch waist, dropped that spare tire from 35 inches to 32 and have maintained it.

Which brings me to my question, regarding training, overtraining, and glycogen stores. I row with a crew team four mornings a week. I'm concerned about overtraining, but competitive crew needs at least that many days on the water. About three out of the four workouts are pretty heavy. I only go to the gym one day a week now, because of the fear of overtraining. I'm pretty happy with my body for the most part, and people that haven't seen me have noticed the difference.

My concern, apart from the overtraining, is that I'm noticing that if the workouts on the water are falling on the third or fourth day of the low-carb phase, I have no endurance. My guess is that my glycogen stores are so low by then that my body's hitting a wall. Or at least it feels like that. When we do sprints I'm great for about 15 strokes and then as if someone's pulling a plug, for the next 20 strokes I feel like I got nothing.

Should I alter my carb intake at all, do you think? I think I'm following the program pretty well, I get plenty of fat, I have a protein shake with fat and vitamins before practice. Our races are coming up fast, so I'm a bit concerned. Thanks again for a great lifestyle boosting book.

Although we often lump them together, health and fitness are not the same. The best football players in the world are extremely fit, but because most of this group is undertaking unnatural forms of hormonal enhancement and often painkillers as well, these athletes may be unhealthy. If an athlete dies or is debilitated within a few years of retiring from pro sports of natural causes connected with taking unnatural drugs during his career, then he probably wasn't healthy while performing marvelous feats of fitness on the field. Besides, where optimal health is the object the last thing one wants is to be colliding with other players at high velocity, getting beat in the head like a boxer, or high-diving headfirst off a cliff. The famous long-distance runner Jim Fixx is credited with having started America's "fitness revolution," but he died while running at fifty-two years of age.

Looking at your specific case, we need to make another distinction: between one who has achieved a major health/fitness goal and one who is seeking to achieve it. Your goal was to rid yourself of love handles by your fortieth birthday. Largely as result of applying Natural Hormonal Enhancement, which you report has "done wonders," you mastered that objective. This, along with the fact that you have a 32-inch waist, places you in a position different from someone with a 35-inch waist who is seeking to lose three inches as far as dietary experimentation is concerned.

I'm not convinced that adding more carbohydrate to your diet will serve you better than ingesting more lipid toward the latter part of the downcycle. I do, however, believe going off the NHE Eating Plan represents a risk of losing a portion of the improvements obtained as a result of going on the Eating Plan. One option is to load creatine the day before you predict your performance will drop-off. If the power failure you describe is glycogen related, creatine can "pinch-hit" as a high-intensity energy substrate. Creatine is problematic when used continuously because it can inhibit the amidinotransferase enzyme responsible for creating creatine from arginine and glycine. Just as with hormones, exogenous intake suppresses endogenous production through bioregulatory feedback. And for long-distance runners, creatine loading can have a net negative effect on performance because it adds water weight. But for someone performing a sporting event in a seated position and seeking a targeted performance boost at specific times, periodic creatine loading may be the perfect answer.