Making peace with food and my body.

 This blog has gone a bit off the rails since I titled it "FatFitnessNerd" 2 years ago.  Watch this space for changes, and a renewed focus on fitness at any size, making peace with food, and mindfulness.   Expect quite a few posts to be deleted!

4 on - 4 off x 4 VO2 max workout

Peter Attia sugests one workout a week being at VO2 max, with the rest of the workouts building out a solid aerobic base.   The workout he suggests for the hard one is 4 minutes on, 4 minutes off, 4 times. This is something I haven't done in years, and am a little nervous about  (as in nervous enough to want to do this in an environment with an automatic external defibrillator). 

He describes this a little bit like I used to think of a 2000m test on an erg, but condensed.  The first minute is relatively easy, if it's not, you've gone out too hard and are going to blow.  Minutes 2 and 3 are really uncomfortable, and you only get through minute 4 because its the last minute and you can go for broke.  I would suggest doing negative splits here, where you get progressively faster, but he admits that he is pretty much universally positive splitting.

The rule Attia uses is the 80/20 rule, so if you are going to do 5 workouts in a week, 4 of them (80%) ought to be base training, and 1 of them (20%) ought to be as I described above.

He also notes that he warms up significantly before doing this workout.   I could see doing VO2 max after a full base training workout as a warmup.

I'm not a doctor, and this isn't medical advice... I'm also kind of OK with dying on a treadmill as a honorable end.   I might strongly consider actually asking my doctor before doing this.  There is something called a cardiac stress test which would get you up to this level of exertion in a controlled way in a medical environment where a resuscitation team was nearby.

The final note is that I'd be tempted to start slow, like wearing a heart rate monitor play with where you are in the zones.  Don't go for broke (dead?) all at once on the first interval.

What are the zones on a Polar heart rate monitor?

 From: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPFq9EpovNw

Heart rate training and after-workout stretching/cool-down data.

 My temptation with a heart rate watch is to stop the tracking immediately after I stop the activity and then do my stretching / cool-down.  The problem with this approach is that the data around how quickly the heart rate comes back down during the cooldown is useful data.

It's obvious looking at a longitudinal heart rate graph where the cool-down is, so including the cool-down in the data doesn't really meaningfully pollute the data in any way.  Also, my cool downs tend to be of a fixed 5 or 10 minute duration.  

The only problem with doing this is the stretching time is included in the volume calculation for the week.  Honestly, if getting some credit for actually stretching motivates me to stretch, I'm OK with the volume number being inflated by 5-10 minutes per session.  Again, for any individual workout, it's obvious where the work was done, and where I was cooling down.

Another way to look at this data is in a weekly or monthly report from Polar Flow or your tracker's software.  Here I can see the number of minutes total in various heart rate zones.  Looking at the total minutes in the green 70-80% zone, and the blue 60-70% zone gives me a good idea of where I am, and where I want to be for the week.  Looking at these numbers tends to leave out the stretching, even if I don't shut off the watch immediately after the actual work is done.

Looking at total min in zone 2-4 in Polar Flow's reports excludes most of the stretching.

A Concept2 RowErg might be too loud for a 1 bedroom apartment.

 https://youtu.be/NHlguKhStsA?si=GuWBNBzPEzycwdum&t=444

Whether it is actually too loud, or whether it would just be a nagging sense of guilt for disturbing neighbors, either way it's not likely that I'd buy one of these for my current living situation.

My 2023 Fitness Infographic

 

There is a lot of room for improvement in my workout schedule.  There were a couple of 2-month long periods where I was exercising pretty regularly, but there are also intervening months where I am doing nothing.  I'm not 100% sure this log represents all activity, but it's reasonably accurate.

A pathological definition of "whole grain"

 

The video above is (or was at the time of writing this piece) "SOFT and FLUFFY 100% Whole Grain Biscuits | Jill Winger Prairie Homestead Biscuits for Whole Grains". In the video, it quickly becomes clear that what Jill means by "whole grain" is the whole pulverized flour that comes from milling wheat berries.  

I believe this is the definition that a lot of industrial bakers use too.  On the one hand, this process might include some phytonutrients that you would otherwise lose by throwing out the bran of the wheat berry.  On the other, the process of pulverizing the berry into flour makes the flour digest rapidly into blood sugar.

To my knowledge, you need flour to make baked goods.  For me, I define "whole grain" to mean the literal whole grain, unpulverized and unfiltered.   You cook and eat these foods like rice or pasta.  So definitionally, there is no such thing as whole grain bread.  Whole grain bread is essentially white bread with a little coloring from the bran and germ, and marginal nutrients from the bran and germ, mixed in. According to Andrew Weil MD, whole wheat bread has the same glycemic index as white bread, because of this pulverization process. 

From "What is a whole grain" by Academy of nutrition and dietetics.

When someone says, "you shouldn't cut out whole groups of macronutrients"...

 There are two issues with that criticism of a low-carb diet:

1) Flour and whole grains don't have the same effect, but whole grains are much scarcer in the modern food environment.

Joe Rogan joked, "if your trainer is telling you to eat bread, find a different trainer.  That sh*t is terrible for you."

To bake wheat into bread, the wheat has to be pulverized into flour.  Bread made out of truly whole grain would be all but inedible.  What modern industrial bakers call "whole wheat bread" is just white bread with a little bit of the pulverized bran mixed in.  Often it's not even that, it's just white bread with caramel coloring.

Flour has a terrible effect on the body.  The flour becomes simple sugar very quickly in the body, causing a dramatic rise in blood sugar, with all of its downstream problems.  So if someone is essentially saying "you can't cut out carbs entirely", they might be right, but they don't, or shouldn't mean you should eat flour.   Good carbs are from green leafy vegetables, and depending on carb-tolerance fruit, beans, and whole grains.  The problem is that, with whole grains in particular, these foods are much scarcer in the modern food environment.   When was the last time you saw farro on the menu at a restaurant?

2) People have differing levels of carb-tolerance and blood sugar issues.

As I said above, flour raises blood sugar.   It's not only flour though.  A cup of brown rice still has a significant amount of sugar bound together in its carbohydrate content.  Parroting Virta Health's youtube channel here: someone who is diabetic, or pre-diabetic, probably (on an individual basis) shouldn't be eating even these complex carbs.

Even if you don't have an issue with being overfat, have high blood sugar, abnormal lipids, or high blood pressure, one can still make the argument that, at the very least, it's not a good idea to eat a lot of processed flour as this may, over time, lead to those very conditions.

Conclusion

The person giving this advice might not have the same carb-tolerance as you do.  They might be naturally lean, have normal blood sugar....etc.  For them, eating carbohydrates, maybe even eating processed flour, doesn't seem like a problem.  For me though, with a current BMI of 42, a fasting blood sugar of 105, and high LDL cholesterol, it's a very different story.

Often, if the person giving this advice means "flour" when they argue to add carbohydrates to the diet, there is a pretty cogent argument that they are just plain wrong.  If they are one of the truly exceptional people that eats a lot of actual whole grain, and that's what they mean when they argue for adding carbohydrates, they might be more correct, but it depends on your level of carb-tolerance and your current health situation.

I eat a low-carb diet, but I also eat a lot of green leafy vegetables that grow above ground.  I don't currently eat beans or whole grains.  On this diet, I have had good success with weight loss, how I feel day-to-day, and motivation to make other health changes like adding more exercise.   I might experiment with more liberal carbs in my diet periodically as a way to stay motivated to largely eat low-carb, and I may liberalize my diet as my weight goes down.  For now though, I eat low-carb (+ veggies), and I especially don't eat much, if any flour.

I would love to learn how to prepare (actual) whole grains.

 

If I was going to move from a keto / low-carb diet like a diet inspired by the writing of Gary Taubes, to a slow-carb, largely plant-based diet as inspired by the writing of Walter Willett, one of the main changes I would have to make is to bring on much, much more whole grain.

I think a mistake a lot of people make is rooted in the fact that industrial bread bakers haven't been entirely honest in labeling.   The brown-colored "whole wheat" bread that you see in most markets categorically isn't made of whole grain. If something is made of whole grain, you will actually be able to see the whole grain.

Here are some examples of whole grain (from the article '9 of the Healthiest Whole Grains to Help You Eat More Fiber' by Eating Healthy:

1. Bulgar
2. Brown Rice
3. Oats
4. Farro
5. Teff
6. Sorghum
7. Quinoa
8. Buckwheat

Here's the problem though - I think most people just fundamentally don't have experience in preparing whole grains.  I would absolutely love to take an in-person cooking class entirely focused on making healthful and tasty whole grains.

Referencing the Virta material, the decision about whether to shift from the one diet to the other depends entirely on the individuals carbohydrate tolerance.  I universally think shifting from a well formulated keto diet back to the SAD (Standard American Diet) is a bad idea.  You don't want to start eating bread, and pizza, and pasta, and potatoes.  However, it would be fun to experiment with whether shifting some calories to actual whole grain allowed me either to keep losing weight, or to at least maintain.

That's at the crux of Willet's argument for whole grain:  If you are metabolically healthy, and don't have insulin resistance or obesity, it might be a no-brainer to eat a largely plant-based diet in the way that he describes.  However, that's not most Americans.

Video on the types of whole grain

Video on cooking whole grain - the "pasta method" doesn't seem that scary.

Dealing with belly while rowing

 

The TLDR of this video is that rather than splay your knees out, or some other pathological adaptation, it is better to just shorten up the stroke, and not go to full compression.  Body preparation out of the finish is key, you don't want to stress your lower back.

If you look at elite rowers sprinting on the erg, this is not all that different than the stroke that they do.

Cam Buchan near the catch on a sprint workout, notice that he is not fully compressed.

Photo Check in, 280lbs, Early February 2024, BMI of about 43

 

Sanity on the question of low-carb and cholesterol...

 

Voice of sanity on fruit.

 The Virta Health youtube channel is a goldmine. https://www.youtube.com/@VirtaHealth

Gary Taubes Interview

 

Everything that is old is new again.  I got a lot out of this interview with Gary Taubes about Keto.  In it he addresses (among other things) my concern about the difference between clinically keto, and just low carb.

The last thing I need here is a lower back injury

I have been looking for lower-risk activities than weight lifting.  I gave myself 2 impinged shoulders, and severe tennis-elbow over the course of only 1 or 2 months of lifting.

My first thought was rowing, however lower back injuries are really common among rowers.  I have been rowing for about a week, and I can already feel what is "bad" soreness (as opposed to "good soreness", not "severe soreness") in my lower back. 

In lieu of having anyone reputable to ask, the advice I'd give myself is stick to walking, preferably not on a treadmill.  Do lots of stretching.  Add cycling when I want to do a lower-impact, or non-weight-bearing activity.

That's it.

Update/Edit: I have continued to row approximately every other day.  I haven't increased the volume or intensity from what I started with.  I am paying extra attention to technique and drills - in particular body preparation at the finish.  I seem to be doing fine.

Standing Calf Stretch (esp. good for rowing and compression at the catch)

 

Colloquially "Keto" or actually clinically Keto.

 Various clinical sources for epilepsy put a Keto macronutrient ratio at 4:1 (fat to protein + carb.). 

It is important to note that I believe this is by calorie, not by weight, a point I had wrong in my initial post.

Here is my most recent salmon and cauliflower mash meal:

		percentage by weight		percentage by calories
Fat	40	45.45%	360	65.22%
Carb	13	14.77%	52	9.42%
Protien	35	39.77%	140	25.36%
ration of fat to protein and carbs by weight		.82:1
by calorie		1.875:1

11oz sirloin and double broc at Outback...

		percentage by weight		percentage by calories
Fat	57	34.13%	513	53.83%
Carb	16	9.58%	64	6.72%
Protien	94	56.29%	376	39.45%
Ratio of fat to carbs and protein by		1.165909091
calorie.

To make that meal "more keto" should I consider the 8oz cut of sirloin with an oz of butter?

Standing, chair-assisted hamstring stretch

 

All of these fitness a**holes are juicing.

 

Full Eating Days - Off Low Carb Diet

Common every day

Throughout the day:

Everyday I have about 2-3 cups of coffee with half and half or light cream, so I'm not going to list that individually.

Wed February 14th 

Meal 1 (1pm):
Lox and bagel platter: Lox, bagel, cream cheese, tomato, red onion, cucumber

Workout (4pm):
Brisk Walk Outdoors: About 25-30 minutes, or 4500 steps

Meal 2 (6:45pm):
Small cup of beef chili.  Chef's salad from the case (lettuce, yellow pepper, tomato, provolone and ham roll, boiled egg, Italian dressing.).  

Dessert (7pm): 
$3.50 container of honeydew, blueberries, and strawberries.

Comments:

• I realized that I have been worried about the pesticides from fruits and vegetables.  Buying the prepared food today was an end run around that.
• After the walk I was ravenously hungry.  I decided to watch some nutrition youtube, and kind of let that subside before going for dinner.    I have some curiosity around putting yourself in the right mental state to buy food.  Can you consciously override a desire to binge by either noticing/accepting it, or waiting it out?  At some point you internalize a lot of good material on nutrition, and then you just have to make sure you are calm enough when buying food to operationalize it.
• Walking outside improved my mood by a couple of rungs on the ladder.
• I slept better last night than I have in weeks.  One of the roles of desert is a little bit of carbohydrate to cap off the evening, which does seem to make me sleep better.  Seeing if the fruit is as effective as something more processed.
• The lox and bagel was consumed with an eye towards satiety and protein.  I haven't had a desire to eat "keto" foods recently, and have had some stomach problems.  I've been following the Hava app's perspective on satiety over macronutrient restriction.  The bagel probably wasn't ideal, but it was accompanied with enough fish (and wasn't accompanied with say, a large orange juice) to make it a satiating meal.

Thurs February 15th

Meal 1 (1pm):

Cheese steak sandwich (roll, beef, sweet peppers, fried onions, provolone cheese).  Small side salad with Italian dressing (lettuce, tomato, onion, oil, vinegar, spices).

Dessert (4:30pm):

Moderately sized, small-ish piece of chocolate birthday cake with white icing.

Workout: (5:30pm):

Same brisk walk as yesterday, about 25 minutes, 5k steps.  Did it at an even faster pace than yesterday.  Capped it off with an LMNT sugar-free electrolyte drink.

Dinner (8pm):

Sushi dinner: miso soup, salad with ginger dressing, 9 nigiri pieces, 1 California roll.  (this was too much food, and I would order a la carte next time).

Comments:

• I saw a film with Mat Fraser, the CrossFit champion, where he talked about eating mini candy bars before workouts, or even in the middle of workouts.  There is some reality that that piece of birthday cake made me feel more apt to take a run/walk than how I feel when I am eliminating carbohydrates.   If I can keep my weight steady over the next few months, I'm not opposed to using a little bit of sugar pre-workout.
• Still interested in investigating the concept of trying to be in a calm, controlled state of mind when buying food, rather than going from binge to binge.  I don't currently have a rigorous meditation practice, but I can use techniques I learned when I did to check my mindset before going into a supermarket.
• Psychologically, the exercise is just this huge boost.  There is an energy of activation, where I think "maybe I will skip it today".  Then I knuckle down and do it, and I just feel 1000% better afterward.  I wouldn't negate the nutritional impact of getting over this energy of activation.  If I'm glycogen depleted from a fast, or from cutting carbs, it feels a little bit harder to actually get out the door.

Friday February 16th

Meal 1 (1230pm):

Bagel and lox platter: bagel, lox, onion, tomato, cucumber, cream cheese

Dessert 1 (115pm):

Small slice of chocolate birthday cake

Workout (5pm):

6000 steps, about 30 minute walk.  Pretty relaxed pace, although I feel my lower body a couple of hours afterward.  I'm carrying around a lot of weight, so it's kind of like rucking.

Meal 2 ( 6:30pm):

Chicken Caesar Salad: grilled chicken breast, croutons, lettuce, Caesar dressing

Dessert 2 (7:15pm):

Wawa $3.50 size large cup of fruit salad.

Comments

• I feel I could have easily replaced the chocolate cake with a similar fruit salad.  With the fruit, you can afford a little bit more volume.  It is pretty sweet and satisfying, also hydrating.  I was in a funk this morning after an anxiety dream, and felt that I needed the sugar pick-me-up.  What I could have gotten away with was  a fruit salad, some pineapple, watermelon, or some strawberries...etc.  I probably wouldn't have felt I missed out on anything if I did that.  
• Watching my weight for the last 30 days, I'm doing well at maintenance.  There is even a bit of a downward trend.   The walk felt amazing, even though there was a little bit of "Idonwanna" activation energy.

Saturday Feb 17th

Meal 1 (3:30pm):

Sushi (9 small nigiri, 1 roll, ginger salad, miso soup)

Dessert 1 (4:45pm):

5oz white birthday cake

Workout:

20 minute spin on the bike, reasonably good effort, hr around 130-137.

Meal 2 (9pm):

Steak Caesar salad (6oz sirloin, croutons, romaine, dressing -- heavy dressing. ick.  Outback Steakhouse's recipes are sub-optimal for health.)

Sunday Feb 18th

Meal 1 (8am):

Tuscan omelet (red pepper, egg, spinach, provolone, sausage), potatoes, rye toast, butter, jam

Dessert 1 (1pm):

Wawa large cup of fruit salad

Workout (4pm):

25-30 minute brisk walk.

Dinner (6pm):

2 pieces of meat lovers pizza

Dessert 2 (7pm):

Traditional size (250cal) snickers bar.

My problem

Assertion: My body has finely tuned homeostatic mechanisms to keep me at a healthy weight.

Evidence: Satiety hormones: GLP-1, cholecystokinin, peptide YY

Evidence: Hypothalamus legioning experiments

Evidence: Lack of obesity of animals in the wild, prevalence of obesity in pets

So then the question is: What the heck is throwing my weight set point off?  

(I phrase it this way, because the answer for me is likely different than the answer for someone else.  )

• addiction to processed flour and sugar.  These foods blow right past satiety signals.
• shopping in a food environment that features these foods. (is there one that doesn't?  This is a legitimate question.)
• Diet limited by budgetary constraints.   It's a double whammy that the flour and sugar are both addictive and cheap.
• Social constraints pushing me to eat out more than I should.  Restaurant food can be engineered to tickle those flour/sugar addictions.  I don't have a family at home or people to eat with unless I eat out.
• preference for sedentary behaviors like working in front of a computer over activity.
• preference for solitary activities that are sedentary.  A lot of people get a lot of success out of group classes like CrossFit or Zumba.  I find these classes psychologically taxing even before the physical activity starts.
• disordered eating that goes back as far as cutting weight for lightweight sports, or farther.  Potentially being made worse in the present by attempts to control weight like fasting that result in bingeing.
• Historic lack of temporal structure around eating.  There was never a meal-time growing up, snacking was always permitted.  In the present, I have trouble having food in the refrigerator, because I just eat constantly.
• I don't feel like I am well tuned into my satiety signals.  I have a regular experience of craving some food, eating it, and then lying down an hour later only to realize how stuffed or bloated I feel.  This is related to the answer about flour/sugar.  Sugar overrides the satiety signal, providing that "second stomach [always have room for desert]" effect. 

Some things I'm interested in trying out

• Treating flour/sugar as an addiction, and opting to abstain completely.
• exploring weighing food
• Cooking more, eating luxurious foods that I love (the first thing that comes to mind here is basil, tomatoes, mozzarella, balsamic vinegar, and extra virgin olive oil.
• Learning to cook some new low-carb foods.  This isn't a matter of learning 20 new recipes.  It's a matter of learning 1. (at a time).
• Experimenting with keto meal delivery.
• Not worrying so much about eating luxurious low-carb meals out, balance them with a cheap second meal of eggs.
• Changing where I shop from convenience stores to real markets where I have some better shot at not being fucked-over by a shit food environment.
• Trying to find a group fitness experience where I feel like one of the in-group, and that reinforces my participation, rather than serving as an additional source of anxiety.  That or just walking outside more and learning to really love the feeling of being outside.

Edit: 

There is another class of problems though beyond the largely behavioral ones I listed above:  That is namely, insulin resistance and a pre-existing condition of obesity.  Having become obese before my teens, it became all that much more difficult to maintain a normal weight.  I'm not sure of the mechanism here -- dieting surely doesn't always help and can make things worse if done wrong.   Insulin insensitivity is a biological condition that just makes things like avoiding addictive flour and sugar all the more important.

Ideas for working on insulin insensitivity:

• Avoid foods that spike insulin
• Fast somewhat regularly for periods equal to or over 36 hours. [I might avoid this in preference for the next two as fasting relates to disordered eating, binging, and regulating sleep-wake cycle]
• Exercise
• Exercise at high intensity with some regularity

Being sick is hard...

 I'm resolved to abstain from flour and sugar. period. However I have had a severely upset GI system for the past few days.   I had pancakes for breakfast, which agreed with me.  I had a turkey sandwich for dinner, which did not.

Planning for an illness like the Covid bout that took me out of my low-carb routine seems like a good proposal.  I'm just not sure what the answer is.  

Maybe it's something like if eating flour, make sure it is in chicken noodle soup or saltines, nothing else.  If eating sugar, make sure it is in ice cream for a sore throat, and nothing else.  And then get back on the program as quickly as possible.

Covid sent me into a 2-month long tailspin.

What foods do I have trouble with?

It was 3am the other night, and I was sitting in the parking lot of Wawa, after having just ordered and downed 90% of a family size mac and cheese.  I then marched right back into the store and bought the super-jumbo-king pack of Reese's peanut butter cups, and a king size bag of peanut M&Ms and ate them sitting in the parking lot.

So the question is, what kind of foods put me on the road to this kind of downward spiral?

The answer is fairly straightforward: it's processed sugar, and flour.   It feels like if I stay away from these, I'm in a pretty safe and serene territory.

These foods include:

1) Chocolate bars

2) Bread and butter

3) Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches

4) Pasta and noodles

5) Candy

6) Pancakes and French Toast

7) Bagels

8) Brownies and cakes

9) Ice cream

10) Cookies

11) Gatorade

12) Sweetened yogurt

13) Chocolate chips

14) Candied berries or fruit in syrup

15) Diet Soda

16) Meatballs from local Wawa cooked with an excruciating amount of sugar.

17) Fast food burger and fries.

The reading I've been doing recently indicate that it might just be better to abstain entirely from stuff like this.  There's still a lot of room left for richness.  Tonight I had chicken noodle soup (my stomach has been off, the noodles are marginal, but it was satisfying -- I needed the hydration, and a container of pre-cut watermelon.  I felt full, and I didn't feel like eating 100% more of the same in the same sitting.   This is telling, because with trigger foods there is literally no bottom.

Fat Fitness Nerd, Part III: Food Addiction

 I'm opening a new chapter in FatFitnessNerd, focusing on food addiction.  I will still write about fitness and other topics, but I want to return to something that was successful for me early on: treating food with an addiction model.  Knowing that all that it would take is one candy to knock me into a months-long binge of sugar and weight gain.  This is in fact what happened after a bout of Covid.

I'm currently reading this book, and will report back with progress.  I feel optimistic that treating sweets and refined carbs this way (maybe also nuts and very sweet fruits) has worked for me in the past and can work now.

A workable description of what addiction is is that it is the continuation of a behavior despite clear consequences.  I have been walking around with a prediabetic blood sugar.  Why did I spend a week eating cake at lunch?

Positive Phrases for E/O January into February

 "If I ease back into my nutrition plan and workouts, the weight I gained will slowly come off..."

"Everyone falls off the wagon a bit around the holidays.  The trick is to fix the flat, not slash the other three tires."

"There is an element of going slowly in nutrition.  Pick meals slowly, eat slowly, even workout slowly and gently.  Take time.  Nothing catastrophic happened."

"I am on the path to making December and January just a bump in a much longer road of weight loss and nutrition.  It's temporary."

"I already feel better and healthier, and it's just been a couple of days of walking, fasting, and eating well."

Fasting yields flexibility when doing low-carb.

Fung doesn't make a really coherent argument about what goes wrong with Atkins over the long term. He argues that long-term failure of adherence to Atkins is a function of adaptation to the diet.  Over and over again he makes arguments for intermittent, or pulsatile solutions -- ultimately fasting.   In particular he cites this study as an argument that intermittent fasting is more effective than continuous calorie restriction.  By proxy he seems to argue that this is what is missing with the low carb approach - IE because low carb is meant to be a long-term, continuous behavior, it fails due to some kind of adaptation or development of resistance. 

He may be right about the fasting, but I don't find the argument that "Atkins fails because it is too restrictive... what you need to do is add fasting" to be particularly compelling.  Peter Attia in an interview said that the reason he fasts is to give himself a bit of flexibility in his diet over strict "keto".  This is a much more cogent argument.

"Well I mean if we are going to get really technical, the benefits are overstated, or only proved in animal models...  So I don't know if those benefits would extend...  So for me what it comes down to is that it's just an easier way, it gives me much more liberty with what I eat during my eating window, I don't have to be nearly as restrictive when I'm eating if I have that period off..."-- Peter Attia MD

Volumetric Satiety

I'm re-reading Jason Fung's book on obesity and am in the chapter where he talks about changes in basal metabolic rate due to underfeeding or overfeeding.    One experimental description caught my eye:  A British trainer overfed to the tune of 5500 calories per day, but did it on protein and fat.  He only gained 2 pounds, but reduced his waist size.  The weight gain was muscle mass.  He then did the same thing but overfed on the Standard American [high-carb] Diet.  The weight gain was as predicted by the level of over-feeding, on the order of 20lbs.

I've been talking about hedonic satiety in recent posts, but there is another kind of satiety related to the volume and frequency of food intake.  Anyone that has pushed back from an all-you-can-eat buffet knows what it feels like to be overfull on sheer quantity.   Honestly, for me, this is a pleasant feeling.  I like feeling full, and conversely, I don't like walking around hungry.

We all have a cultural problem here, in that we universally assign judgements of gluttony to overeating, and we don't differentiate if the macronutrient composition is weighted towards protein and fat.  If we are all going to naturally want a period of overfeeding after a long period of caloric deficit, why not try it this way?

Punch line - if you are hungry, eat.  Just don't eat Wawa mac and cheese.

Hedonic Satiety

 

During covid, I ate a bunch of ice cream, and peanut and butter jelly sandwiches.  I did it because I was feeling miserable, and because my throat hurt.  It's been really tough to bounce back to the diet that lost me 50lbs since last November.

Over the last couple of weeks I have been doing a little bit of an experiment with carnivore.  This has been a financial experiment as much as a nutritional one.  A pound of 80/20 ground meat at my local trader joes is $5. Chicken is $8.  By not eating the salads and the veggies, and the fresh tomatoes, I guess I have been saving a bit of money.  Certainly, I have been saving money over eating out.

However, what I have noticed is that I have been ping-ponging between eating 100% carnivore, and going to the local Wawa and buying 3 candy bars and a personal pizza.  Part of this is the addictive nature of that food -- during Covid I 'fell off the wagon' and it has been hard to get back on.  Part of it though is also something I'm calling "hedonic satiety".

"Hedonic satiety" means that our desire for pleasurable food has been met.  This can be accomplished with sweetness, with quantity, and with salt/spice/umami.   In eating a loaf of ground meat for dinner, I was setting myself up to want a candy bar later that evening.  More recently, eating a well-spiced, well-prepared low-carb meal at Outback steakhouse (shown above), sets me up to feel full and satiated.

The problem here is one of economics.  A candy bar is $2.50.  A steak dinner is around $35.  It's a lot cheaper to be hedonically satiated by garbage than it is to be hedonically satiated by high-quality restaurant food.  Cooking is ideal, but most people I know eat out, most of the time.  The reason for poor health is that in doing that we all can afford hoagies, not sirloin.

What's the answer?  Ideally, build some cooking skills to turn that 1lb loaf of 80/20 ground beef into something satisfying.  Short of that though, I am resolved to up my food budget to where it was when I lost the bulk of the weight early last year, and to save on other aspects of my budget.

It's been really hard since Covid...

 

When I had covid, I went off of my low-carb diet.  It has been very difficult getting back onto it.  

I want to double-down on treating sugar as an addiction.  A little leads to a lot.  Even "keto" chocolate bars that are artificially sweetened lead me to crave other sugary foods.

The other thing that has been difficult is that I have been trying to cut my food budget.  I learned back in November that there is something akin to "hedonic satiety", where you have to replace sugary sweet meals with well-prepared savory meals.  These are not conducive to cutting food funds.

So what to do?  I had a good "keto" day today.  I think I'm resolved to find savings in other areas other than food -- to get back to having satisfying (hedonically satisfying) savory meals at restaurants.  It lead to my early success, so I feel I can rely on it.

Could alternate day fasting restore a will to live? Anterior Midcingulate Cortex growth via "the suck."

 

There is apparently a brain structure, or a pair of them, that grows in response to people essentially doing "things that they don't want to do."    This supports the idea that we can train willpower.

Dr. Huberman says something interesting in this video clip though, and that is that this brain center might also be responsible, as we age, for the very will to live.  

I of course connected some dots in a way that might not be supported by science:  Could regular fasting, because we never truly become accustomed to it in a way that we come to like it, serve an almost antidepressant function by working on our will to continue.  

Could growing these structures through regular practice help us down the road when things get really rocky due to health or relationships?