Fitness and Fieldwork

Getting a few lunges in between digging

I’ve just got back from Sicily, not on holiday as I accidentally keep telling people, but on an archaeological excavation, which is one of the best parts of my job! Since I started training I’ve found tracking macros to be fairly straightforward on a day to day basis (thank you MyFitnessPal), and actually enjoy the variety in diet between high carb (low fat) and low carb (high fat) days. I was hoping to stay at least a little on track with this whilst away on fieldwork, and brought a few snacking essentials – rice cakes, whey protein and Nakd bars. The plan was to eat the fieldwork food as much as possible, and supplement with snacks where needed. I even thought I would give ice cream a pass, maybe just have a cheat weekend. But oh how that went out the window on day one. There is nothing in central Sicily that fits my macros. So much carbs, with carbs and more carbs, all cooked in olive oil. And really, once you’ve had just a little bit of Italian gelato, there’s no way you’re not going to eat ALL the gelato at any opportunity. And we’re staying in a village that has its own bakery, and they bake fresh croissants every morning and fill them with ricotta. Even my willpower isn’t that good.  Actually, with the amount pf physical activity I’ve been doing, my main worry has not been eating enough and losing all teh gains. After the first couple of days I realized I had a deficit of about 1000 calories and so switched to stuffing my face with all the carbs, whilst also trying to eat all the protein physically possible. This has mostly meant 3 protein shakes a day, plus eggs, tinned tuna and salami mini meals in between main meal times. I’m hoping the past 6 months of building muscle and increasing my metabolism will mean this leads to great gains in muscle, though I’m pretty sure my newly visible abs are going to disappear again.

I also had grand plans to stick to my lifting routine as much as possible, doing body weight versions of exercises. But the work schedule has been so tight I didn't get a chance. Instead my routine looked like this:

• Wheelbarrow dead lift row (emptying wheelbarrows into standing sieves)
• Bucket goblet squats (emptying buckets onto spoil heap)
• Bucket lat raises (walking from trench to spoil heap with a bucket in each hand)
• Bucket curls (as above but curling as you go)
• Shovel lunge, delt raise twists (don't forget proper shoveling technique!)

Add in the fact the site is on a hill, and there’s plenty of HIIT going on as well. It turns out that all the gym knowledge has translated really well to fieldwork. I definitely noticed the difference in how hard everything is. I used to be absolutely crap at maneuvering a wheelbarrow full of soil, and was rubbish at shoveling, now I can do both easily. Having spent ages trying to get a good form for squat and dead lift, it also feels really natural keeping health and safety approved body positioning for physical tasks. No more bending at the back for me!

Motto of this story is, don’t bother trying to carb cycle if you go to Italy. Embrace the food safe in the knowledge you can easily get back on track with macros when you get home. But do bring extra protein! And if you’re not an archaeologist doing physical labour for 6 hours a day, it might be a good idea to do some press ups and suitcase squats.

Coming soon: lessons learned from shoveling dirt everyday for 2 weeks...

Palaeodiet from Palaeofaeces

What?

Yes, you read that right, there is such a word as palaeofaeces. It's a word archaeologists sometimes use to refer to ancient human shit. It's pretty common knowledge that archaeologists work with human skeletons, so it's not that much weirder that they look at poop, right? Another word that is more commonly used is coprolite. Technically it means fossilised poop, and is the word for dinosaur poo that has turned to rock, cause it's like millions of years old. Ancient human poo isn't really old enough to be properly fossilized, but coprolite sounds much more polite than palaeofaeces doesn't it. Anyway, why I am posting about ancient poop? It's something I've talked about a lot over on my archaeology blog, and that's because it is probably one of the most useful things that we can examine in order to understand what people ate in the past. It can also tell us a lot about the gastro-intestinal health of ancient populations. So if we want to learn something about 'real' palaeodiets, it's a fun place to start.

What can you learn from ancient poo?

Just like a doctor can ask for a stool sample to check the health of your digestive tract, archaeologists can look as these little packages to get an idea of how healthy people were in the past, and what they were eating. Although a lot of the nutrients that you eat are absorbed by the body in the process of digestion, it's not a completely efficient process, and bits of the food and nutrients make their way through the body until they emerge at the other end, in an amorphous brown lump that we are all familiar with. This can include stuff you can see like fragments of bone, parasite eggs, bits of partially digested seeds and plant fibres, and also 'invisible' stuff, like chemical residues of fat and protein. We use pretty much the same tests that a doctor would to determine how much of this stuff is present, and where it came from. Unlike many of the other methods that archaeologists use to study ancient diets, looking at the stuff bundled up in a coprolite is a direct indicator of what someone was eating, over a very short period, probably a few days, along with an indication of their health. If the coprolite is well preserved, you can even slice it up into little bits to look at how the diet varied between each individual meal!

It's a bit like a detective game - not everything makes it's way through the digestive tract. Some stuff survives better than others (corn cobs anyone). So we have to be careful when we interpret the results. Ideally we look at lots of samples to get an idea of variations and whatnot. So finding ancient toilets is way more exciting than finding the next Stonehenge or some boring old precious metal object. If you're interested in palaeodiets anyway.

Next time...what sort of stuff do we know about palaeodiets that we learned from looking at palaeofaeces?

The famous Lloyds Bank turd - Viking coprolite

How it all started

How it all started. I am referring here to the gym thing, rather than how I became an archaeologist. If you're interested in that you can read all about it here. So, the gym - some background. I was never ever into fitness or sports when I was younger, in fact I was one of those kids that absolutely dreaded PE lessons and would come up with any excuse not to do it. Not because I was lazy - actually when I was really small I used to love running around playing outdoors. I can't really remember when I started hating physical activity, but I do remember it being linked to being diagnosed with asthma as a child (not really bad asthma, but enough that I needed an inhaler), which made me really nervous about exerting myself. That, and being a very shy child, I found the team sports that we focused on at school very daunting. It didn't help that the PE teachers didn't really pay any attention unless you were already really good at something. All in all a combination that led me to label myself as being crap at any sort of physical activity, with a medical condition to justify it.

Fast forward to university. I still considered myself crap at sport, but I did begin to wish I wasn't. For some reason though it never occurred to me that maybe I could do something to change things. I tried stuff like climbing with friends, but there was always a voice in the back of my head telling me that I wasn't any good at it and that I would never be a 'sporty' person. I was good at academic stuff and books, and that was that.

Funnily enough the major change happened as a result of a personal crisis with the academic stuff. Back around 2013 I found myself in a situation where I didn't have a permanent job (contract jobs are the norm in the early stages of an academic career, and there is no guarantee that you will ever get a permanent contract). My future was hugely uncertain, and I thought I might have to give up everything that I had worked towards. At the same time I became pregnant, which made everything even harder. I sank into a bit of a depression, probably post-natal combined with the career crisis. It was pretty bad if I'm honest, and I knew I had to do something to help deal with all the negative feelings. Putting on my researcher hat I read that physical activity was a really good way to combat depression, and something clicked. I thought, honestly nothing can be as bad as the way I am feeling right now, and even if I'm crap at it at least it will give me something different to focus on.

Julie Bell self portrait

So I started running. I was bloody awful at it to begin with. I spent 40 mins to an hour at a time on the treadmill, slowly slowly increasing my pace and aiming for 5k. Sometimes I made it, sometimes I didn't, but after about 4 weeks it suddenly got easier, like really noticeably easier. I started doing 5k in around 20-25 minutes, and better still, I didn't feel like I was dying afterwards, all the tightness in my chest that I got from the asthma disappeared. I started to feel more confident, and plucked up the courage to start running outdoors. Up and around Arthur's Seat in Edinburgh (where I lived at the time) nearly every day. The feeling was so exhilarating. Not just the running, but the feeling of achievement, having done something I never thought I would be capable of. Once you have that moment where it 'clicks', everything else becomes easier. I started to wonder, if I have managed to become a runner, maybe I can do other physical things as well.

So I started lifting weights. Despite being anti-sport when I was younger, I've always had a huge admiration for athletic female physiques. I was (and still am) very much into sci-fi and fantasy books and comics, and some of my favorite artists since I was young have been Boris Vallejo and Julie Bell (NB some of their art is a bit NSFW). Julie Bell was a bodybuilder in her youth, and the women (and men!) in their paintings are all very muscular. I would spend hours trying to draw women that looked like that, but I never imagined it would be possible for me. I didn't have a clue what I was doing though. I spent about a year randomly doing bicep curls and lat pulldowns. Not much happened to my physique but I did find it oddly relaxing.

Then, at the end of 2015 I achieved the impossible and got my dream job in my hometown of Newcastle! After the stress of the house move I stopped running for a few months, but was desperate to get back into doing something physical. I tried doing some classes at the university gym but didn't really enjoy it. My new route to work took me past a private personal training gym, and I thought maybe I should talk to someone who knows what they're doing and see if I can really do this muscle building thing. I cannot stress the difference this has made - I've been training with guidance for 6 months now, and in that time I've learned so much about biochemistry, biomechanics and nutrition. It's a perfect applied science in many ways, putting ideas into practice with yourself as the experiment, and seeing how amazing the body is at responding to change. And it's a huge challenge - if I can get the job I always wanted, maybe I can master this as well!

Phoenix versus Magneto - one of Julie Bell's X-Men paintings

Palaeo!

As this is the first post of a new blog, I'll begin by explaining a bit about me, and the name of the blog. I am not new to blogging - over at my other blog, Castles and Coprolites, I've been blogging there for 5 years now, mostly work related. I am an archaeologist, I work at Newcastle University, and I blog about my research, field work and topics related to academia. Archaeology is a very diverse subject, and my own work comes under the heading of environmental archaeology, which means I look at how people interacted with the environment in the past, how they selected and used different resources, and the impact this had on the environment. One of the ways I do this is by looking at ancient diets. What types of food were people consuming, how did it relate to what was available in the environment, and how does it link in with other things that rely on environmental resources, such as cooking and fuel use. And also, how did all of this vary in different parts of the world, and how did it change over time?

So this is where 'palaeo' comes from. In archaeology the word 'palaeo' means old or ancient. So when I look at what the environment was like in the past, it's the palaeoenvironment, when I look at what people were eating in the past, it's palaeodiet. But the reason I started this new blog is because of my non-work interests. At the beginning of 2016 I decided to take up bodybuilding. I'll be posting more in future how and why I made that decision! I've learnt that a huge part of weight and strength training is diet, more than I ever realized. There is a lot of talk in the fitness world about Palaeo Diet, based on the types of foods that are presumed to have been eaten by early humans, but largely separate from archaeological research as far as I can tell. This seems to be based largely on meant and fish, with certain vegetables and fruits, and excluding cereals, dairy and processed food. I've been fascinated how popular the Palaeo Diet is, and how it relates to my academic research. There has been a lot of criticism from archaeologists about the justification for Palaeo Diet not being wrong, but that is not the point of this blog. I am more interested in why people are into Palaeo and the mechanisms behind why it really works (or possibly not, for everyone?). So a lot of what I'll be talking about in this blog is related to the modern idea of Palaeo Diet, in what ways it relates to the 'real' paleodiets that we know about through archaeological research, and also how it differs. Importantly I'll be thinking about geographic variability. We have a tendency to talk about the past as if everything was the same everywhere, which is obviously not true today and wasn't true in the past either!

As I learn more about fitness and nutrition, I'll be incorporating this into the blog as well. So basically this is a place for me to discuss my thoughts informally about diet, fitness and nutrition, with less of the serious stuff about academia!