Link Theory Vol. 5

Hey, I'm back--it's been a crazy couple of weeks, and I'll tell you all about it over the next few posts. For now, I want to talk about some online tools that can help you with your weight loss.

I've talked about fitday.com over and over again. Let me try to sell it to you a different way. This is how Jason Statham talks about it in a Men's Health Article here:

2. If it goes down your throat, record it on paper. "This is the bible," Statham says, holding up a black hardbound journal. He writes down everything he swallows, including water (he tries to drink 1 1/2 gallons a day -- that'll keep you feeling full). "Writing everything down makes it impossible for you to muck it up," he says.

This physique is the result:


More tips on achieving the Jason Statham physique here and his 2006 workout here. He's really come along since he added in weight training, hasn't he? You can read more on how I use fitday here and here.

One useful way that I've found to track my weight and bodyfat percentage over time is at physicsdiet.com. This site takes a moving average of your weight, so that odd day where you weigh 6 lbs more than you did yesterday doesn't frustrate you quite so badly, and the day where you weigh 3 lbs less than you did yesterday is taken a bit more in stride. This is an important concept for anyone who is losing weight, but this is absolutely critical for people who are on Cyclical Ketogenic Diets (like the Men's Health TNT Diet--which I highly recommend) because their weight will vary not only with their fat mass, but also with how many carbs they ate during their carb-up.

physicsdiet.com borrows its important concepts from the Hacker's Diet which explains how and why the graphs work, as well as a geek-friendly way to lose weight. This is a full length diet book, with an engineer's approach to weight loss. It is definitely geek-friendly, but it shouldn't be too intimidating to complete laymen either. I recommend reading it, even if I think the representation of the human body as a black box to be overly simplified.

I have to shout out to Google Docs as well, since I use a docs spreadsheet to record and calculate bodyfat percentage, waist measurement, and weight alongside the physics diet site. This way I don't have to keep track of USB keys or software incompatibilities if I'm traveling. It's very convienient, and for excel users, pretty intuitive.

If you're looking for new ways to make your kettlebell workouts the "same... but different," check out the kettlebell workout generator.

Lyle McDonald talks about genetic limits and realistic goals in this excellent post.

Gary Taubes is back with another talk. He's changed up his slides and presentation again, and the short Q&A at the end is refreshing. I'm still hoping I can see a presentation of his where he isn't rushed through the last slides.

I think I'll wrap things up with this link about process visualization via The Simple Dollar. This reminds me of this article on how Allen Iverson applied Psycho-Cybernetics which talks in detail about this kind of process visualization.

Enjoy your weekend.

Link Theory Vol. 3

Image by Toni Lazano

Way back in 2002, the Crossfit journal had this great piece about building a garage gym (the checklist at the end is particularly helpful).

Gary Taubes shows up at T-nation for an interview.

Also at T-nation, Dan John brings back the 40-day program from his Feb. 2005 newsletter. And over at Elite FTS, Darren Mallette tells us about how he went from bombing on the bench at 315 to hitting a personal best at 345 in two months on this plan.

I've been reading about how the body can store fat even without carbohydrate here and here. This is why you have to be cautious with your overall calories, not just carbohydrates.

That wraps this edition up--stay tuned for more in the Pulse series, Mnemonic techniques, and some lifting platform advice.

Pulse: Growth Hormone Basics

There's a slight difference between what Gary Taubes says and what Brad Pilon says: Taubes says that the main precondition for fat loss is to lower insulin levels. He does say that you need some other hormonal responses, but that basically everything else is antagonistic to insulin, including growth hormone, adrenaline, noradrenaline, and glucagon.

Pilon says that you can actually suppress fat loss by suppressing GH levels, which I'm not sure about-I'm still doing the research. It is clear that having a high GH level reduces muscle breakdown and inhibits free fatty acids from going back into the fat cells, as well as encouraging the use of free fatty acids for energy.

Basically, what this means is, a low insulin level "opens the fat cells up" and a high GH level will protect your muscle from being burned while encouraging fat to come out of the open fat cells and be burned for energy. This is a great turn of events for fat loss.

So how do you increase GH levels in ways that we can manipulate in our own bodies (without a prescription)?

1. Fasting
2. High protein meals
3. Exercise
4. Sleep

Things are just getting interesting now that we know how to cut calories, control insulin, and increase GH. Stay tuned: we're going to start putting this knowledge into practice.

Another Taste of Taubes

Hey, I just wanted to post this here as it's a bit longer (and slightly different) lecture from Taubes' other one.

It's real media, for which I sincerely apologize.

Watching this video has given me a few ideas to investigate.

Pulse: Insulin basics

In the first part of this series I explained some take home points. These were:

1. Insulin levels must be low for fat loss to occur
2. Growth hormone must be released for fat loss to occur
3. Calories out must be greater than calories in.
4. fasting drops insulin levels, raises GH levels, and cuts calories.

All of these points lead to some interesting questions. I'll deal with the first of these today: controlling insulin levels.

First, though, what is insulin? From Taubes' Good Calories, Bad Calories

Insulin is the primary regulator of fat storage. When insulin levels are elevated—either chronically or after a meal—we accumulate fat in our fat tissue. When insulin levels fall, we release fat from our fat tissue and use it for fuel.

All food stimulates insulin release, but foods with sugar and/or starch (carbohydrate) release the most insulin.

Here's an excerpt from Taubes' book where he explains his basic ideas about nutrition or you can order his book here. You can also watch this video, but it's NSFW, since it includes shots of naked fat people. Taubes comes on about 2:40 if you're not interested in his bona fides.




So if insulin levels drive fat storage, how can we control insulin levels? There are three ways that I will consider here:

1. Eat small, frequent meals (SFM)
2. Eat a low carbohydrate (LC) diet of probably less than 10-15% but definitely less than 40% of energy
3. Fast intermittently (IF) for more than 12 but less than 48 hours

Let's talk about the "small frequent meals" theory. The idea here is that you can control your insulin levels by eating mini-meals of 100-500 calories, five to eight times a day. If you've read Body for Life or are a tupperware-toting bodybuilder, then you know all about this approach. The idea, as I understand it, is that you can keep things humming along, your blood sugar never dips, and you'll never get hungry if you just eat these small, frequent meals. The problem is that all eating has some insulin response. So eating five to eight times a day, even if they are small responses, creates insulin responses five to eight times a day. Even if Taubes wouldn't call this "chronically elevated" insulin levels, I think I would.

This also presents a couple of practical problems: if you have to eat five to eight times a day, this means you have to prepare five to eight meals a day: a tiny portion of meat, a tiny portion of carbohydrate, a tiny portion of vegetable. Five to eight of them. Welcome to the tupperware club, my friend. This is why supplement companies have hawked this plan for so long: not necessarily because it's more effective, but because preparing five to eight meals a day is such a pain in the ass, it's easier to eat a "meal replacement" shake--and if that stuff isn't processed food, I don't know what is.

The second practical problem with the SFM idea is ghrelin. If you've ever noticed that you get hungry at the same times every day, that's ghrelin in action. One of the effects is that you can basically train yourself to get hungry at specific times of day--we'll talk about this later, as it relates to intermittent fasting--but think about this for now, as it relates to SFM. If you eat these small, frequent meals at the same times every day, you are training yourself to get hungry five to eight times a day, and you're not eating enough calories to maintain your bodyweight, so the gherlin is just lurking in the background. So when you (inevitably) miss one of your five to eight meals a day, you get extremely hungry, and you go for whatever junk is nearby.

Ultimately, I can't recommend SFM as a solution for insulin management. That leaves us with two other options:

2. Eat a low carbohydrate (LC)diet of probably less than 10-15% but definitely less than 40% of energy
and
3. Fast intermittently (IF) for more than 12 but less than 48 hours

If you watched the video, you'll know that Taubes' solution is to use a LC diet to control insulin, and I think this is a good first step. I'll discuss my approach to LC diet later in the Pulse series.

The other option is to fast (not eat) intermittently for more than 12, but less than 48 hours. This isn't a complicated approach, but it definitely deserves its own post as well, because there are a lot of ways to screw this up.

The take-home points from today's post:

1. Insulin causes fat gain
2. Eating causes the body to release insulin
3. Eating carbohydrates (sugars and starches) causes a larger insulin response, and thus more fat gain

Stay tuned--the Pulse series is just getting warmed up.