John Maki: Surviving Las Vegas Heat

[John Maki]

Parker: I just found your forum and read your article on surviving Las Vegas Heat. I want to point out a mistake that I made. Yes you should drink plenty of fluids, but remember they tend to also wash the nutrients out of your body, so you also have to remember to eat. I didn't and was drinking only ice water and diet coke this lowered my body temp. enough that by the end of the week I had uncontrolable shakes and sweaty extremities. It turns out that I was suffering from a combination of heat exhaustion and low-blood sugar.



Although I find it difficult to eat when its very hot I now schedule meals when I play!



So plenty of fluids yes, but also plenty of nutrition.

[Parker]

While I would love to take credit for that excellent post, honesty compels me to point out that it was in fact written by a regular poster around BJ websites who uses the handle "98%."

Other than that, you are absolutely correct. You sweat out not only fluids, but water-soluble vitamins and minerals as well.

So-called "sports drinks" such as Gatorade address this to some degree.

Naturally, it is important to eat as well. This is yet another reason why I like to keep my sessions short. It is easy to get caught up in playing and ignore hunger pangs, but once I leave the table my stomach lets me know if I haven't eaten recently. :-)

Besides, half the fun of a Las Vegas trip is enjoying the endless variety of very inexpensive or comped food available.

I also have been taking a vitamin-mineral supplement, "Mega-Men" for many years. It consists of high potency time release capsules, and is available from GNC. If I run out and miss taking it for a couple of days, I can definitely feel a difference.

[Moose]

Parker,

when you need lots of nutrients in a short bundle that isn't too heavy, a good protein bar, which will be about 50% protein and 50% carbs, does just the trick for me.

M.

[Parker]

> Parker,

> when you need lots of nutrients in a short
> bundle that isn't too heavy, a good protein
> bar, which will be about 50% protein and 50%
> carbs, does just the trick for me.

Do any of these actually taste good? The few I've tried left me with the impression that I'd just eaten an art gum eraser or a glue stick.

Personally, I've found a bowl of Horseshoe chili, washed down with black coffee, to be an excellent "jump-start."

I realize that I've just lost any semblance of credibility with the healthy-food set.

Not that I had much to begin with. :-)

[98%]

Yes, I suppose I should have reminded people to eat in that post If your entire diet consists of water and diet coke, you're bound to run into trouble sooner than later (though I heard somewhere that Frank Zappa lived off of cigarettes, coffee and chocolate eclairs for quite a while).

As for protein bars, none of them taste particularly great, but they are quick and easy which is a big plus for the blackjack player on the move. Any health-food store and even most grocery stores will have a wide variety of bars and, after some sampling, perhaps you can find something you consider tolerable. They also have a selection of other nutrient-rich foods, supplements and multi-vitamins but, before you go on a spending spree, realize the snake-oil salesmen are out there marketing more than just gambling systems.

While I do occasionally enjoy a gatorade or other "sports drink" I certainly do not recommend them over water. If you're turning to them for nutrients, you should probably just try to eat better. In the end, nothing is more quenching or refreshing than H2O. Also, you can find water with minerals and vitamins which would have more nutritional value than water and would not have all of the undesirable components of gatorade.

By the way, there's nothing wrong with a bowl of chili and coffee, though I would tend towards iced tea over the coffee, which I find tastes like dirt about 99% of the time in the United States.

[Moose]

.. the higher the protein-to-carbohydrate ratio, the more it tastes like chocolate-covered gyprock.

On one end of the scale you have what amounts to little more than corn-syrup-sweetened wheat with the really high protein variants, sky-high in healthy protein but of course very hard to eat. On the other end of the scale, you basically have a Snickers bar

The best compromise of the bunch is the "Promax Bar". A typical bar (70 grams I think) has 20g protein and 40g carbs (of which only 5g are sugar), and about 8g of fat. They're really soft and chewy, and the "Cookies-n-Creme" flavor are probably the tastiest. Again, not the best nutritionally, but the best balance between taste and nutrition. On more than one occasion when I can't contain my food, I've lived on those bars and Gatorade for days at a time.

M.