Geoff's Miscellany

Miscellaneous Musings

Geoff

Self-Experimentation: Carbs and Training

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I went on a very low carbohydrate diet several years ago to solve my heartburn. I’ve since experimented with various dietary subtractions/additions to help avoid the seemingly inevitable fatness of middle age and the constant complaints of people in their 30s about getting old.

What will this do to my training? Rip think it will make me sorer. Maybe he’s right for most people.

Every January, I always eat a steak and eggs diet with minimal dairy. It’s an easy way to shed any extra fat as Texas gets hot again. My carb intake is therefore between 10-20 grams per day. But I also have been trying to lift every day since mid-November. Having eaten very little carbohydrate in November-December and essentially none in January has given me some interesting personal insights into carbs and training. You don’t need them. I weigh 158 right now. At my heaviest, I weighed 173 in 2013. My max squat back then was 365. Every week since November I’ve hit 355 for a single rep. My deadlift max at 173 was 375. Now it’s 405. And my bench max back then was 200. Now it’s 205. And I’m almost never sore despite working up to heavy squats daily. But I will say this since I’m used to using fat as energy, if I were to say, binge on rice-full Chinese food and ice cream, I could perhaps more easily achieve a PR on a high-rep set the next day, but I seem to be far less sore in general as a consequence of eating so much more protein.

 

David Bentley Hart’s That All Shall Be Saved

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I pre-ordered Hart’s most recent book as soon as I discovered it would be released. I like Hart’s work and I found his New Testament translation to be mostly helpful despite its many shortcomings. His new book is thought provoking and contains at least three hard to beat arguments for apokatastasis (the doctrine that God will redeem every last living soul in the end). I’ll write about it in the future. To be honest, I’m nearly convinced.

But this book helped be realize something else about Hart that I had only ever had intimations of, but never quite verbalized.

Hart’s verbal invective is something I used to excuse as the result of reading so much rhetoric from the eras he studies most, a fun way to be in an otherwise stultifying and boring life: academia. I took his rudeness as a sort of acquired by study version ancient honor-shame culture that men of great ambition used to utilize to make important points. Teddy Roosevelt made awesome insults, so did Seneca, Jesus, Augustine, the puritans, etc.

So when people complain about Hart’s verbal abuse, I’ve always taken them to be thin-skinned. If Hart is too mean, then isn’t Jesus?

But thinking back through it, Hart treats scholars with whom he shares 99% agreement as imbeciles if they do not agree with even his most obscurantist viewpoints. This is not mere rhetorical flourish, but an inability to empathize with other viewpoints. More importantly, they give them impression of being the angry lashings out of somebody who feels bullied. Now, who feels bullied by slight disagreements? Typically the physically unthreatening or inept. The man who feels rejected by the physical culture of other men fells that his only weapons are words. Men like this have no other way to hurt people they feel misunderstood by. I’ve met a lot of academics and quite a few of them have this problem. May Hart’s compassion for those who misunderstand him grow in proportion to his belief in God’s grace.