Episode 48: #Spring4Change Nutrition Week Recap with Annette Zapp, CSCS*D
It's time to pass the baton on Spring4Change, but today's episode is a recap of nutrition week. In case you're new here, Spring4Change is a mental and physical health initiative to mitigate firefighter suicide through education on upstream intervention.
The biggest take-home regarding nutrition is that we tend to complicate it...it's simple but not easy, and that's where we get into trouble.
So what, now what?
Grab onto one manageable habit and KEEP GOING.
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Episode 48
[00:00:00] Welcome back to episode 48 of the Fire Rescue Wellness Podcast. I am your host AZ, and today I am recapping week two of Spring4Change-Nutrition Week. But first I realized a couple weeks ago that I really don’t spend very much time talking about myself, my business, and my services. And so I wanna take just a couple moments to share with you some ways in which you might work with Fire Rescue Wellness.
The first one is simply engaging with me on social media. I am very active on Instagram. I try to put out good quality content five or six days per week, and of course, all of the information is free and you're able to share it with other firefighters. I would say that would be a great entry point if you are looking for some resources.
The second thing [00:01:00] is you can get on my email list, and admittedly, I'm not the best yet at sending out emails, but my email list always gets the best of the best and they get it before anyone else. And so, if you wanna make sure you're staying up on what's happening with Fire Rescue Wellness, I would subscribe to my email list and I will put a link in the show notes for you.
The next way you can work with Fire Rescue Wellness is you can have me in to do shift lectures at your department. I can do those live. I can do those virtually. That said, I just took a look at the rest of the year and it looks like I have only three sets of dates left with availability. And so by three sets, I mean three shift days available to get those lectures presented.
[00:02:00] Long story short, if you're thinking about having me in to do some lectures for your department, we need to start the process sooner than later because those dates are coming and going very quickly. And then the last thing I wanted to tell you about, some of you might not even know that I do this, but I teach a course called Building Your Career in Fire: A Health and Wellness Professional’s Roadmap.
And it is a six week course. Previously it had been six virtual meetings, but I'm changing up the format this time and it's gonna be three live virtual meetings and then three recordings for you to watch on your own. So the time commitment is gonna be a little bit less stringent for you, and you'll still get all of the information, all of the support.
And so my call to action for you is that if you even think you might be interested in taking that course, get on my wait list because my [00:03:00] wait list gets the best deals and they get first dibs at the course. And so you might be saying, oh, okay, whatever. Like, I don't even know if this course is for me. I got you. I got you. This course is for health and wellness professionals who want to work in fire, and so it's not for, say, the firefighter who's trying to get something going at their own department. It's for the physical therapist or the dietician or the athletic trainer, the strength coach, even the mental health professional who is really, really good at what they do, and they know they wanna offer services to fire and they just keep banging their head up against a brick wall. Because as we all know, the fire service is a close-knit community, and anyone that's not an insider is an outsider. And so my six-week course can help you speed up that process, get you through some of those speed bumps.
It's still gonna be a [00:04:00] long process. I know. I can't promise you that I can get you something instantly. Instant gratification. I'm not gonna promise that, but I can certainly, certainly short circuit that long, long process. And so I will put the link to get on my wait list in the show notes, and it looks like May 22nd is gonna be our first day, so a little over a month from today if you're listening in real time.
So call to action. Get involved with my free resources either on Instagram or sign up for my email list. Link in the show notes. If you're a department thinking about having me in for some educational lectures, don't delay any longer. I'm running out of time. And if you think you might be interested in the Building a Career in Fire course, get on the waitlist.
Okay, so today we are gonna recap week [00:05:00] number two of Spring4Change, which is nutrition week. Now, if you've been following along, you know that Chris Marella and I started this initiative. This is our fourth year now. Every year we've changed it up a little bit on how we do things. And this year we were just so freaking busy, both of us, that it was just impossible to collaborate on everything.
And so we just decided I would handle the Sleep and Nutrition weeks, and then he's gonna handle the exercise or fitness, if you wanna call it that instead. And the mental health and mindfulness weeks. So I am running towards that finish line with the baton that I am going to beat Chris Marella over the head with this coming Sunday, and he will take the baton and run.
But this past week we have been talking all about nutrition, and if you've listened to any of my previous podcasts with my dietician friends, Megan [00:06:00] Lautz, the Rescue Rd, or Maureen Stoecklein. You know, they, they kind of have the same message, which is nutrition really isn't that hard. We just make it hard.
We make it hard because, you know, food isn't just fuel. If we could think of it that way, it might be helpful, but there's so much more to it. There's so much emotion in food. There's tradition wrapped up in food. There's comforting ourselves wrapped up in food. All of those things kind of put together in, in a pot and sizzle together to create challenges with eating.
And so it's not as simple as just saying, eat fuel. And we recognize that, but there are some ways that we truly do make it so much more complicated for ourselves and we really could stand to simplify it a few notches. And so [00:07:00] I have a few points that I wanna summarize for you today and review that we already hit during the Spring4Change Nutrition week.
The first one is this. You have got to set your future self up for success because even if you have the best, very best intentions of coming home after the, the JV football game and cooking some chicken on the grill, some asparagus and some rice, and having a nice pitcher of water with cucumber slices, even if that is your best intention, once that JV game goes into overtime, or it goes a little bit longer than you thought, or your kid has an injury and you have to run them to urgent care before you can come home, the draw of the drive-through becomes so strong. Andeven, even if none of those things, those complications [00:08:00] happen by the end of the day…
By the end of that game, you're freaking tired. And then you walk in the front door and you're presented with raw chicken breasts. That is, if you remembered to take them out of the freezer, raw chicken breasts and these vegetables that have to be dealt with and rice that's gonna take 30 minutes and you just, you look at it and sometimes you say “Crap. It would be just so much easier to stick a frozen pizza in the oven.”
And so that's my first point. Planning is imperative and making it easier for your future self is so important. One of those things that you can do for the planning is what I call POP, point of purchase. And so when you're in the grocery, and it's really tempting to grab that frozen pizza or some prepackaged food if you think ahead and [00:09:00] think, “do I want, is this what I want to be eating this week?
Do I want this option?” And if the answer is no, don't put it in your cart because if you put it in your cart, even if you put it in your cart with the intention of this is for emergencies, anything that you put in your cart is eventually going to get eaten. That's not true. That's not true. That box of spring mix that you buy every week with the intention of eating it and then it gets thrown out, that may be the one exception, but truly, even if you, if you throw a family size bag of Doritos in your cart thinking, “well, I'll have it for next time the kids have a sleepover or a movie night”, guess what? You're gonna be standing in front of your pantry, eating out of that, directly out of that family sized bag of Doritos while you try to figure out if you even want [00:10:00] Doritos.
So control at the point of purchase works really, really well for me. If you don't want to eat it, don't bring it into your house.
On the other side of the coin, if you do want to eat it, make sure it gets into your cart and into your house. It's real freaking hard to eat your vegetables when you didn't buy any vegetables. So if you want to eat it, put it in the cart and make sure it gets in your house. Now, back to the varsity or JV game and those chicken breasts again, it's now seven o'clock, 730, and you have raw chicken.
What if? What would it look like for you if you prepared? If nothing else, you just prepared your proteins for the week. Sarah Thompson was one of our friends who gave a tip this week, and her tip was fabulous. She said, sometimes you don't have [00:11:00] time for a full meal prep, but if you prep proteins, then you're gonna be so much better off.
So could you…an hour on Saturday or Sunday and prep your proteins. So go grill your chicken breasts grill your, your Turkey burgers hard, boil your eggs. Or let's be honest, use the instant pot for eggs cuz it's way better. But prep those proteins so you have them available and it just will make everything seem so much easier.
So plan ahead for future you, who's going to be tired. Plan ahead and do yourself a favor. That's, that's my first bit of advice. Second bit of advice. Whole foods are inherently more nutrient dense than highly processed foods. Now, don't get it twisted. [00:12:00] Canning things, freezing things, drying things. Those are all processing methods, and those are ways to keep fresh foods edible for a lot longer, and there's nothing inherently wrong with having frozen broccoli as opposed to fresh broccoli.
In fact, it might be even better depending upon where you live and the time of year. So we're not talking about that type of process. But we're talking about, say the difference between a lean cut of steak versus a pepperoni stick. The pepperoni stick has been highly processed. It's highly palatable and less nutrient dense than the lean steak.
Let's take it another step further. Well we'll get rid of the steak example, but [00:13:00] things like the Doritos I mentioned earlier, mac and cheese in a cup even those frozen TGI Friday chicken wings and potato skins, all of those things are really, really highly processed, hyper palatable, and they're also not gonna fill you up very well.
And so if you go back and have that chicken breast or have that steak that you had ready for yourself, by the way, you're gonna feel so much more satisfied than, say, eating a pepperoni stick and a TGI Friday's potato skin leaning over the sink. So whole foods first, and the closer they are to their natural form, the more nutrient dense they're going to be.
Whole Foods first and then use supplements to fill in the gaps. You know, [00:14:00] arguably there are authorities out there that say the food that we eat now today is so much less nutrient rich than say our grandmother and grandfather's foods. And you know what? I'm not a food scientist and I'm not gonna pretend to be.
But if you do think about it, we have over farmed and stripped our soils and, you know, we are force feeding, so to speak our fowl, our poultry, they're a ton bigger than they used to be. I mean, even if you just kind of look at it through that lens, food isn't quite the same as it was decades ago. And so arguably even people that eat very well may need supplementation to fill in the gaps.
And if you are concerned or if you need help figuring out supplementation, [00:15:00] I'm gonna point you towards a dietitian because they'll be able to help analyze your intake and, you know, they may have you get blood work and, and they may really take a close look at what you've got going. But in general, from the research, first responders could benefit from about four, maybe five supplements, and those are as follows.
The first one, creatine, monohydrate, and I say Monohydrate because everything else is just expensive and does the same thing. So thanks Eric Trexler for that good analogy. But creatine monohydrate, it's the cheapest. It's the most widely researched. We know it's great for bigger, stronger muscles, but it's also been implicated in bone health, in anxiety and depression helping with those symptoms in women.
It's been it's [00:16:00] been shown to be neuroprotective if you have a brain injury. And it also helps us function better when we're sleep deprived. And so, you know, that's a pretty good laundry list for a supplement that has been studied in all populations and appears to be inherently safe unless you have some very specific medical.
So creatine monohydrate is the first one. The second one is whey protein and, and I should just say protein in general. First responders, specifically firefighters who took in routinely took in more protein were stronger and leaner. And so that was some research from my friend Dr. Hirsch. And then there's also some unpublished research floating around out there that that is showing that perhaps supplementing with whey protein improves body composition as well.
And so if you can [00:17:00] tolerate whey protein, again, it's not that expensive. It's there's really no risks to it. For me, it's a no-brainer. So creatine and whey protein. The next one I have for you is Omega-3. And -3 has been fairly widely studied in heart health, and also more recently in brain health.
And also, it can be neuroprotective in brain injuries, which is great. It can also, it's been shown to help with mood, which is tremendous. And then in a study done in the military. In members that had completed suicide versus members that had died of other means, the members that had completed suicide had statistically, significantly lower omega-3 levels in their brain.
[00:18:00] You know, again, it's one of those supplements that as long as you are taking a high quality supplement, there aren't really any shortcomings or risk factors, and the benefits could be really great in our population. So check off Omega-3. We already talked about creatine and whey protein. Let's move on to caffeine.
There's great data for caffeine that says it enhances your performance and it enhances your cognitive ability, your executive functioning when you're tired. So those are great things, great tools and weapons for our first responders, it's just very much one of those abused, very widely abused drugs. It just happens to be legal and we can get it at a gas station.
And so just keeping in mind with your caffeine, the biggest thing is make sure it's not impacting your nighttime sleep. So make sure you're backing up your last dosage, at least six hours, maybe more prior to bedtime. And then the [00:19:00] research is saying maximum of 400 to 500 milligrams per day, depending upon who's research you read no more than 200 at any given time in a four to six hour period. And then just be careful because some of those energy drinks. 250, 300 milligrams of caffeine. And then they've got, as Dr. Brager discussed in a previous episode, those neurotoxic ingredients. And so just being cognizant that judicious use of caffeine could be your friend.
And then finally vitamin D actually is one of the supplements I recommend across the board. I always ask people to work with their doctor because technically it's a fat soluble vitamin, and so technically you could overdose on vitamin D. The Northern Hemisphere is historically low on vitamin D, and so it's just I, I think it's something that you should talk to your provider about and perhaps [00:20:00] get some blood work, but I would say 99% of our first responders are probably vitamin D deficient.
So using supplements to fill in the gaps is my point there. And then I wanna make one last point. We need to be so, so careful that we're not majoring in the minor.
I have people message me routinely asking me about supplements I've never heard about that supposedly do things. I think “yeah, that sounds great. But I've never heard of the supplement. And also like, are you sleeping? Are you eating meals?
You know, they're, they're so worried. A supplement or maybe meal timing or intermittent fasting or, you know, they're just so worried about a sexy diet and they really just need to go back to, like Scott Forbes says, back to the basics and hit the sledgehammers. The really big bang for the Bucks things, which again [00:21:00] is your whole foods. Getting enough sleep and exercising.
So that's the recap for Spring for change, and it's been my pleasure leading you through the first two weeks. Again, I'm handing off the baton to Chris and he's gonna run with it for two more weeks.
So stay tuned. And again, call to action. Follow me on Instagram, sign up for my email list. If you want a department lecture, reach out sooner than later. And then if you are a health and wellness professional, get on my wait list for Career Coaching Fire. This has been AZ and another episode of the Fire Rescue Wellness Podcast.
And I am out.
