Geoff's Miscellany

Miscellaneous Musings

Health

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: 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.

 

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.

The Tao of Bro-Science

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When the gym is your lab: Bro-Science

If you go to any gym, you’ll find a great deal of unusually specific information about strength training. Strangely, you’ll find very little in-depth knowledge of anatomy, physiology, or scientific literature appended to it.

This information is Bro-Science. The problem with Bro-Science is that it differs from gym to gym based on a combination of the shared experience present and the amount of time people spend on the Internet and what lifting forums they frequent.

I used to make fun of Bro-Science. Truth be told, some Bro-Science could kill or a least injure you.

But some of it has proved remarkably prescient. Sarcoplasmic hypertrophy, occlusion training, increased protein for cutting fat, training to failure, and the rep-ranges for muscle growth all seem to have been discovered, not by bespectacled dorks in white lab-coats but by oiled gym-bros in sleeveless shirts. But what process gives us bro-science?

Tradition is Antifragile

Enter Nicolas Taleb. Taleb describes systems in terms of three traits: fragility, robustness, and antifragility. Fragile systems break when they encounter chaos. Robust systems survive. Antifragile systems grow and adapt. He describes this process in connection with tradition here:

Consider the role of heuristic (rule-of-thumb) knowledge embedded in traditions. Simply, just as evolution operates on individuals, so does it act on these tacit, unexplainable rules of thumb transmitted through generations— what Karl Popper has called evolutionary epistemology. But let me change Popper’s idea ever so slightly (actually quite a bit): my take is that this evolution is not a competition between ideas, but between humans and systems based on such ideas. An idea does not survive because it is better than the competition, but rather because the person who holds it has survived! Accordingly, wisdom you learn from your grandmother should be vastly superior (empirically, hence scientifically) to what you get from a class in business school (and, of course, considerably cheaper). My sadness is that we have been moving farther and farther away from grandmothers.

Taleb, Nassim Nicholas (2012-11-27). Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (Kindle Locations 3841-3847). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

In other words, bro-science works because the people who practice bro-science are still in the gym. Sometimes this is because their genetics and luck helped them survive and thrive under dangerous training methodologies. But sometimes it’s because the methods keep training interesting, help them get stronger, and keep them injury free.