Geoff's Miscellany

Miscellaneous Musings

Diet

Low Hanging Fruit: Weight Loss

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I train clients in basic barbell movement as a side hustle and while I’ve tried some unusual approaches to dieting that make sense to/for me, they are far from the mainstream of dietary practice or science. In other words, they’re not what I would recommend to the general population. That being said, I do think that for individuals trying to lose weight there are some pieces of the puzzle that could get you 50-80% of the way toward your goals without creating a major hassle in your life. These are the low-hanging fruit of weight loss:

  1. Stop drinking calories. No cream or sugar in coffee or tea. No milk, no fraps, no soda, no juice. Don’t do it. When I was a barista, we served a blended coffee beverage that had nearly 1,100 calories in it. People would drink it with a 700 calorie piece of cheese cake. Don’t do this. If you had three of these in a week with normal meals, you could feasibly have gained a pound of extra fat if the frap takes you above maintenance calories.
  2. Pick a number of meals to eat during the day and stick with it. Whether three or two, eat those meals and no more and no less. When you’re losing weight, outside of certain methods, you’re just going to feel hungry, accept that now to make serious progress.
  3. Make your first meal, whether breakfast or lunch, high protein. I recommend eggs, chicken, cottage cheese, red meat, or pork. Protein is satiating. Protein plus fat or protein plus a carb will be even more filling. But if you can eat more protein for your first meal, there is some evidence that this helps your body burn more fat for energy through the day.
  4. Track your meals and snacks (though quitting snacking is wise). Peter Drucker was fond of saying, if it isn’t measured, it isn’t managed. If you want to manage whether you’re following these rules, then you need to measure what you’re doing by writing it down. I recommend getting a moleskine notebook, though you can just use your phone. If you plan, for instance, to only eat dessert on Sundays, you’ll want to know if you screwed up.
  5. Only buy food for your planned meals. No eating out, no snacks at work, not junk food at home (throw it away). If the garbage isn’t there it won’t be eaten. Will you have to cook and store food? Yes. Will it be worth it? Only if you want to lose weight.

There are more things to do. You’ll notice I left of counting calories. Why? It’s not low-hanging fruit because few adhere to it. There’s a progression here. Get discipline in recording meals, cutting desserts, and planning to eat, and counting calories for 2-3 meals a day will be a breeze.

If you decide to pick these fruit, you’ll find that about two days in something will try to interrupt you. You’ll say, “well, I can start tomorrow.” No. Don’t do it, don’t give in. The fact is that every time you start something new, an event that wouldn’t register in your mind as significant will suddenly be used by your brain as an excuse to revert to old habits. Everytime my evenings get too busy to lift weights and I set my alarm for 4:30 or 5am, my daughter has a bad sleep night on the first or second attempt. My thoughts: “I guess this is a bad day to train.” This is false, I wouldn’t have even changed a thing about my day if I was training in the evening. Don’t treat normal events as portents of bad timing on your part.

 

Self-Experimentation: Sunburn Edition

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Okay, so this post is kinda crazy. But here goes.

My whole life, except for one summer when I was very poor in 2006 or so, I’ve easily sunburned and so avoided the outdoors like crazy unless I was covered in sunscreen. At one point, I when I was a lawn-guy, I gave up entirely on sunscreen and just wore breathable slacks, long-sleeve shirts, and fishing hats to mow (this is smart by the way, I was in the sun for like 7-10 hours a day).

As recently as February 2018, I’ve been sunburned to the point of peeling by sitting on a picnic table for the last half of lunch break at work (we’re talking 15 minutes). So when I came across Tucker Goodrich‘s idea that reducing linoleic acid in your diet by removing seed oils reduces sun-induced skin damage, I was willing to try it.

Now, in February 2018, I had already cut such oils from my diet for about 30 days when I tried the carnivore diet for a 30 N=Many experiment. But I figured I’d keep seed oils like soy, canola, safflower, etc out of my diet for the foreseeable future. I mentioned earlier the sunburn I got sitting on a picnic table for no time at all, well as that year progressed, I experimented with more sun exposure during yard work, just to see what would happen. I tried 30 minutes while mowing. 45 minutes with my wife and daughter at the pool. No burns, but this could have been due to repeated bouts of brief exposure, that led to tolerance. Now, in my past, this is not what would have happened, so I was already suspicious of greater sun tolerance.

So, starting this Winter, 2019, I continued the experiment, doing yard work without sunscreen and without a hat. The yard was huge, and I know how it feels when I start to burn, so I just continued working (about 3.5 hours of work) waiting to get that sunburn feeling. Nothing happened. As the year has gone on, I have yet to wear sunscreen, I still look quite pale with my shirt off, and I have not burned once. Just today, I went swimming in a river that runs through a desert in direct sunlight for 45 minutes. In the past, I would have been toast. Instead, I just feel fine.

Rewind: In 2006, I went on a service project and forgot to take my sunscreen. I was digging in the sand and took my shirt off to avoid chaffing. We dug a giant hole after a few hours. And all I could think of was how horrible my sunburn would be. I went the rest of the week without getting burned and no sunscreen. How did this happen? Well, back then my diet was basically beans, tuna, oatmeal, eggs, peanut butter, and butter. Coincidence? Probably.

More Resources:

  1. Here’s a podcast in which Tucker Goodrich discusses HNE’s and their role in inflammatory diseases including skin disorders. OVer N-6 oil consumption also makes people hungrier for salty and sweet foods in a fashion comparable to marijuana.
  2. Here’s Susan Allport‘s experience intentionally increases Omega-6 fatty acids. Here’s a scary quote: “The change in resting metabolic rate wasn’t all. At the same time my RMR was falling, my arteries were becoming stiffer, or less able to expand and contract, as revealed by the follow-up ultrasound. In just 30 days, the amount of dilation my brachial artery was capable of had dropped by 22%, a change much larger than the day-to-day variation of this test. The direction of this change was also predicted by what is known about omega-6s, but the amplitude surprised everyone involved in this project. “
  3. Over consumption of Omega 6 fatty acids at the expense of Omega 3s can exacerbate inflammatory disorders. I would think that this includes skin damage from the sun.

Self-Experimentation

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Seth Roberts wrote The Unreasonable Effectiveness of My Self-Experimentation. He explains how self-experimentation improved his sleep, mood, health, and weight.

Self-experimentation is similar to foraging and hobbies more than strict lab-science, he says:

“My self-experimentation resembled foraging, hobbyist, and artisanal exploration, Professional science is a poor match for any of them. The similarity of foraging, hobbyist, and artisanal exploration suggests that our brains are well-suited for jobs with a lot of exploitation and a little exploration. Although full-time scientists are expected to explore full-time, full-time exploration is very uncomfortable.”

Seth Roberts

The idea is that foraging and hobbies involve exploration followed by rewards in a way that lab-science does not. In other words, self-experimentation is an engineering approach to personal problem solving using aggressive-tinkering. Taleb reminds us in Skin in the Game, “The knowledge we get by tinkering, via trial and error, experience, and the workings of time, in other words, contact with the earth, is vastly superior to that obtained through reasoning, something self-serving institutions have been very busy hiding from us.”

This makes sense. Now, self-experimentation involves some major problems. If you tinker with small changes in a way that increases risk, you’re making unwise gambles. For instance, experimenting with strength training almost guarantees health and strength gains. Experimenting with drugs to improve strength may sacrifice long-term health for short term strength.

Self-Experimentation and Published Science

Sometimes, when you have a specific problem, you can look up published research, determine the process used to test a hypothesis, and then try something similar on yourself if your problem was solved or improved by the experiment. But you want to do this in a risk-reducing fashion. For instance, when I used Kjaer’s chronic tendon loading research to cure my 8-year bout of patellar tendinitis, I knew that squats had never made it worse. I knew that my back was healthy. I knew that the highest risk I had was getting weaker over a few weeks or making my knee feel a bit worse.

My GERD Experiment

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I’ve mentioned before that I have a genetic bone disorder and have utilized my interpretation of scientific publications to self-experiment.

This self-experimentation has had positive health results. Other times I have merely yielded knowledge about what does not help. For instance, I’ve had pretty bad acid reflux for the past few years. I recently discovered from my mother that I also had terrible reflux as a baby. I might even have a weak LES muscle. I don’t know, I haven’t been to the doctor for it for years because they just prescribe proton pump inhibitors or histamine blockers. I can buy those and as far as I can tell, they have long term deleterious effects on the human body. 

  1. Gregory L Austin et al., “A Very Low-Carbohydrate Diet Improves Gastroesophageal Reflux and Its Symptoms,” Digestive Diseases and Sciences 51, no. 8 (August 2006): 1307–12, doi:10.1007/s10620-005-9027-7. In this study, a very low carbohydrate diet (consuming less than 20 grams a day) led to improved symptoms in all eight participants. The metric was a probe utilized to determine acid exposure time in the esophagus. There was no blind in this particular study, but the objective measurement is interesting. The measurements were taken before the diet was initiated and then six days later.
  2. WS Yancy Jr., D Provenzale, and Ec Westman, “Case Reports. Improvement of Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease after Initiation of a Low-Carbohydrate Diet: Five Brief Case Reports,” Alternative Therapies in Health & Medicine 7, no. 6 (November 2001): 120.

In this article records the case of five individuals who self-initiated a low-carb diet found themselves without frequent symptoms of heart-burn and indigestion. It is published in an alternative therapy journal, but it’s still peer-reviewed.

The Pay Off

So, I started an extremely low carbohydrate diet about two weeks ago. The main purpose was precisely to decrease symptoms of heartburn that had become more frequent that non-heartburn. My existence had become somewhat miserable because if I happened to even eat a small snack, within minutes I would feel very full and bloated. I would have heartburn (even if I took medicine prior to eating) and the full feeling would last for several hours. If I ate lunch at work, I usually was not able to eat dinner or go to the gym at night. The only way to get food in prior to the gym was to eat around 10 am, then just be full and miserable all day at work. This started around March, but the heart burn goes back to my early twenties.

Anyhow, I started the diet, eschewing the conventional wisdom that fatty foods lead to heartburn. For the first two days, I ate less than 20 grams of carbohydrates, continued drinking coffee, and obtained most of my carbohydrates from sauerkraut, spinach, and mushrooms. My protein and fat came from butter and meat. I expected my digestion to remain slow, but to at least experience less heartburn. Within two days, I had my first day with no heartburn and no medication. Upon increasing my carbs to about 50 grams per day, and allowing myself one “cheat day a week,” I have had only one serious experience of heartburn and 7 light flare-ups that went away as soon as I took an antacid or dissipated by the time I walked to the medicine cabinet. My digestion has sped up as well. Just Tuesday I ate a rather large lunch and was able to hit the gym by 3:45 without losing my food after deadlift.

So, despite conventional wisdom to the contrary, a high-fat, low-carb diet may assist with the relief of symptoms related to GERD and indigestion.

Update: Carnivorous Diet

I tried the carnivorous diet to contribute data for N Equals Many. During it I had no heartburn at all. This makes sense.

Update: More Research on the Same Topic

  1. The effect of dietary carbohydrate on gastroesophageal reflux disease “More acid reflux symptoms are found after high carbohydrate diet. High carbohydrate diet could induce more acid reflux in low esophagus and more reflux symptoms in patients with gastroesophageal reflux disease.”
  2. Dietary carbohydrate intake, insulin resistance and gastro‐oesophageal reflux disease: a pilot study in European‐ and African‐American obese women “GERD symptoms and medication usage was more prevalent in European‐American women, for whom the relationships between dietary carbohydrate intake, insulin resistance and GERD were most significant. Nevertheless, high‐fat/low‐carbohydrate diet benefited all women with regard to reducing GERD symptoms and frequency of medication use.”