Eat to Perform

A long time ago, I read a book written for athletes called, "Eat to Win". It dealt with eating in a way which maximizes athletic performances. I read it and either I didn't understand it or I really wasn't interested in using it in a musical performance context. It wasn't until several years later that I began timing my eating in ways very much similar to what the "Eat to Win" book described. So here is my version of "Eat to Win". I call it, "Eat to Perform". 

Blood Sugar and the Brain

Once upon a time, I checked out about a dozen books about the brain, memory, creative thinking and genius. I didn't take notes and it was long ago, so I can't quote sources. But one of the many things I learned in that short two weeks of reading was that the brain needs two things to function; glucose and oxygen. 

I had experienced some things in my life which explained this need for glucose. I remember going to the library to do research. After only two hours of research, I was wiped out. I felt as if I had jogged six miles. Back then, I blamed it on the florescent lights, but now I know that my brain was working hard for that two hours, using up lots of glucose, even though my body stayed primarily motionless. 

I remember another occasion when I drove straight from Western Pennsylvania to Sweetwater Texas, only stopping for gas. Anyone who drives long distances knows that it's a lot of hard work because you have to concentrate for hours on end. That's hours and hours of using our brains. So after twenty four hours of driving, I was so beat up that I felt as if I had run an entire marathon. 

My point is that using our brains takes energy. They get that energy from the same sources as our muscles do; blood sugar and oxygen. Have you ever thought of "thinking" as an athletic even? Well I do now!!! The brain has several different things which make it similar to muscles. For example, did you know that you can "exercise" your brain the same way you exercise your muscles? Did you know that, if you don't use your brain, it weakens over time and won't be strong enough when you do need it to be. One of the authors of the books I checked out said that many retirees get falsely diagnosed with having Alzheimer's  disease when in reality, when they retired from their jobs, they also retired their brains. Then, when they needed to use those brains, they were too weak to be used. 

Here's another example of tired brains. If you've ever played any pit work, you know that playing an opera, musical or ballet is a lot more than just sitting and playing your part. A lot of the pit work that I've done has been low budget musicals, where no true conductors were hired, only piano players who knew how to nod their head in rhythm. This puts a lot of responsibility on each of the performers to know exactly what's going on and exactly when to come in. It takes a lot of brain work and it is some of the most taxing playing I've ever done. Again, after doing shows for a week or two, I literally feel like I've been beat up. 

I have one more example of a time in my life when my body was inactive but my brain was on overtime. I saved it for last because it was this "occupation" which allowed me to conduct experiments on myself which became so valuable in this whole "Eat to Perform" thing. I'm referring to teaching private lessons. I used to teach a whole bunch of private lessons each day. I began as early as 7:30 in the morning and taught as late as 9:00 at night. 

I always took my teaching very seriously. In every lesson, I listened intently to what every student did in each lesson and I used reasoning and other "brainy" skills to find solutions to the different problems which would present themselves. As is consistent with the other examples I gave, this wore me out. It depleted my energy and made me feel as if I was out running or doing something physical like that. I did this for about four or five days each week.

Me, Myself and I - the Guinea Pig

It wasn't uncommon for me to get up late in the morning and go to teach without eating anything. With as hard as I worked my brain while I taught, by the time my lunch break rolled around, I was feeling ill, as if my blood sugar level had dropped to a dangerously low rate. 

This was the setting for my little experiment. I used this opportunity to test different kinds of foods to see how long it took to "metabolize" each of them. How long would it take to turn a single kind of food into glucose and how long would it take for me to feel the effects of that glucose?

In order to get accurate results, I had to eat only one kind of food for lunch. So, on one day I would eat rice. The next time I performed the experiment, I ate potatoes. The next it was beans, beef, chicken or bread. I tried many different kinds of foods in this context and made notes of how long it would take for the energy to "kick in". 

The Results

The results were interesting. Generally speaking, the meats were the slowest. In fact, the meats produced no results that I could recognize for that day, which confirms what I had read somewhere that meat takes about twenty four hours to digest and metabolize into usable glucose. Breads, on the other hand, were the quickest sources of glucose energy. 

The following is a chart which shows some of the foods I tested and the approximate lengths of time each of them took to enter the blood as glucose. Please keep in mind that some of these figures will be different for different people.