Inflammation And Lifestyle Habits

I've spoke about stress in several different article but this article will go little bit more in depth.

We hear about inflammation when you have injury and see bruises or bumps in your arms or legs. However, inflammation can appear in area that you cannot see. Yes, you can have inflammation in your vital organ without you knowing.

Understanding Inflammation

Inflammation in definition is your body is fighting something that harms the body. It is your protective mechanism or immune system that send signal saying "hey, we need some attention in this area".

Inflammation can categorized into acute inflammation and chronic inflammation. Acute inflammation can cause allergic reaction, chemical irritation, infection, visceral

fat accumulation, burn, cut and so on. When leave them without treating can lead to chronic inflammation, which includes, cardiovascular disease, neurological disease, autoimmune disease, cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, and chronic fatigue syndrome.

So how do we get inflammation? There are several ways we can get stimulate our immune system to cause an inflammation.

Inflammation from Physical Activity

You may have twisted your ankle and got swollen or may have arthritis in you joints. You may be familiar with these type of inflammation. These types of inflammation happens because the body has physically receive more damaged than it can recover. For example, if you lift weights at 100% effort for 7 days straight, the body will have no time to recover.

Then the body will send out signal to protect the body by cause inflammatory response with muscle aches and joint tightness. This is why it is very important to balance between exercising and recovery. Working out hard is great but recovery is equally important. Duration of recovery may vary from person to person, however, it is ideal not to exceed more than 2 consecutive workout days as much as possible unless it is supervised by fitness professionals.

Inflammation from Consumption

Eating and drinking may cause inflammation and interfere with our hormonal balance and immune system. First way that can cause inflammation is consuming same sources repetitively. Asian countries, especially Japan and Korea, are known for eating healthy. But biggest benefit that is often overlooked is variety of food they eat. When looking at western culture, people tend to eat or drink same thing over and over again. It is not surprise to see people eating burgers 3-4 times per week in the U.S. or fitness guru eating chicken only. Reason why this is bad is body will start resisting. Have you ever wonder why the medicine does not work after certain period of time? Same reason. Body does resist when the same sources are entering the body on frequent basis.

Stimulants are also an issue. So many fitness enthusiast use caffeine or pre-workout supplement that contain so many stimulants. Taking them is not an issue but not knowing what it does to the body is an issue. Caffeine, for example, has half life of 6 hours and quarter life of 12 hours. What does this mean? So let's say you had your coffee or pre-workout supplement around 12 pm. Some of the effect may clear by 6 pm but the substances can linger in your body, including in the brain until 12 am, which will be affecting the sleep. Similar thing may happen with alcohol, smoking, marijuana, and even a sleeping pills.

Consuming sugar, refined carbohydrates, food additives can also have similar affect. If you want to argue, look into obesity history in the U.S. Until 1960s, U.S. maintained obesity rate of around 15%. When importance of carbohydrate intake was addressed in about 1970, obesity rate had increased and by 2010 the rate has increased to more than 35%. And we are still promoting to drink low fat milk where sugar content is about 22%. How many boxes of cereals do you see at the grocery store?

Here is a little more touchy subject. We do need protein. I'm not going to argue there. However, over consumption of protein can lead to inflammation and can cause mental impairment such as dementia. Protein consumption of around 0.6-1.0 g/lb of body weight will be fine.

Inflammation from Social Stress

Whether it is work, school or relationships, we do go through stress just by living. As long as we live, there always will be social stress. However, not being able to coupe with those stress may give you a hard time to recover from days stress. It is very important to find what can bring your stress level down. Some people prefer to read, listen to music, practice yoga, and so on.

Yet most important way to monitor stress management is your sleep quality. If you are having a difficulty sleeping or staying a sleep, there is something is going on in your body that require an attention. And when this is not properly worked on, you may have some health issues including increasing in size of mid-section, thyroid issues, poor immune system, digestive issues and so on.

How to find inflammation?

If it's an inflammation as result of physical activity, you can tell by the pain of the joints, such as, arthritis and bursitis. However, there are inflammation that it is hard to tell. There are few ways to know. One is to check your c-reactive protein level from your blood test. C-reactive protein is high when there is inflammation in the body. So when you injure yourself, c-reactive protein does go up. It can also be elevated when there is internal injury or inflammation like atherosclerosis, which you probably cannot feel it.

Another way to monitor is skinfold test in lower portion of subscapularis or under the shoulder blade and the abdominal region. There is a high correlation between increased cortisol level and high fat accumulation in subscapularis and belly fat that may have higher reading of skinfold in those areas.

What to do when inflammation level is high?

It is very important to understand how the inflammation is happened. If it is from physical activity, then you will need to lower the intensity and work on loosening up your joint and muscles for proper functioning.

Food is little tricky. Though, it has been noted in several studies that vegan diet seems to help reduce an inflammation in our body. We do see a lot of former athletes turning into vegan but mostly because of benefit of reduced inflammation in their body. So if you do have, increased size in mid-section and have higher skinfold reading in subscapularis, you may want to reduce sugar, refined carbohydrates, and animal food sources and increase the vegetable intake. Those who are meat eaters, it will only be 2-3 weeks of inflammation reduction process so give it a try.

Social stress is very tricky but main focus is to improve your sleep quality and quantity. To do so work on sleep habit by setting a time to sleep and to wake up. Second work on deep breathing. Not just breathing in but also breathing out. Majority of time, people focus so much on breathing in and forgetting the importance of breathing out. Target your sleeping goal for 8 hours. If you do have tendency to wake up in the middle of the night, check your caffeine and sugar intake during the day. If none of those work, increase your salt intake to help the body retain water, especially for those who are following low carbohydrate diet.

Inflammation can be easily detected but also can be really sneaky and not able to detected just by being careful. If you have any unclear symptoms, such as allergy, irritation, infection and so on, ask your doctor or health specialist to perform an assessment. If you do get positive results or you think you may have hidden inflammation, try out the following.

1. Reduce intensity of your workout

2. Try vegan diet

3. Drink more water

4. Improve sleep quality and quantity

It does take time but practice for at least 2-3 weeks to see some changes.

Kota Shimada