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.

Eat Fat and Grow Slim

"Eat Fat, Grow Slim" by Richard Mackarness

Click here for HTML
Click here for .pdf

Take a look: it's interesting stuff.

Pulse: Macronutrient Basics and Low Carb diets

I concluded the last pulse post with the following:

In order to lose weight:

Eat a low carbohydrate (LC) diet of probably less than 10-15% but definitely less than 40% of energy

But what is a low carb diet? What does this mean exactly? It's time for a lesson in the basics of macronutrient composition.

All the calories that you eat (or drink) are made up of four types of what are called "macronutrients": fat (aka "lipid"), carbohydrate (carb, CHO), protein (PRO), and alcohol. Carbohydrate and protein have four calories per gram, fat nine, and alcohol seven. And calories are just a synonym for "energy".

When I say, "eat fewer than 40% of your energy from carbs" I mean, if you were to keep a food log, (you are keeping a food log, aren't you?) your graph would show that less than 40% of your calories came from carbs. Here's the macronutrient breakdown of one of my recent days:

	Fat: 54%		Carbs: 10%
	Protein: 36%		Alcohol: 0 %

Probably the first thing you'll notice about this: I eat a TON of fat. Here's the deal with this: you can only eat so much protein (anywhere between 10-40%), then after that, you have to fill in your energy needs with either carbohydrate, fat, or a combination of the two. Since I'm trying to lean out, fat is my weapon of choice, and I find it easy to take in enough, since it's so rich in calories per gram. Butter (if you're eating dairy), olive oil, coconut oil, tree nuts and nut butters, as well as the fat that your meat (and if you're eating it, dairy) contain are all okay, as are fish oils and things like avocados and artichokes. More processed oils like canola, peanut, margarine , and anything with trans-fatty acids are not so good. Basically, I want to eat things that I can imagine coming from nature. If you squeeze an olive, you get oil, but I've never gotten oil out of a cob of corn.

The next thing you'll notice is how low the carbs are. This graph actually contains a combination of my grams of "active" and "fiber" carbohydrates. I usually don't count the fiber: I subtract the grams of fiber from the total grams of carbs, then multiply by four to get the calories from carbs, but fitday calculates the fiber as being 4 calories per gram. Technically, the fiber provides about two calories per gram--but you'll be hard pressed to get much more than 30g of fiber a day unless you supplement your diet, and I defy anyone to screw up their diet with 30 extra grams of fiber: it's too filling, and 30g of fiber only has about 60 calories with a minimal effect on your insulin levels.

So, you're only getting a few grams of carbohydrates a day, probably between 20-100g. A common question is, "What kinds of foods are the best when it comes to choosing carbohydrates?" Let me quote a couple of sources here:
From Jimmy Moore:

"When eating carbohydrate foods, look at the carb/fiber ratio and keep it under 6. Anything over that and definitely those in double digits are to be eaten very sparingly if at all. For example, the carb/fiber ratio of strawberries is just 3, but bananas is 10. Likewise, broccoli is 2, but corn is 9. Even so-called healthy brown rice contains 12–it’s better than than the 40 from instant rice, but both are still not good for you."

From Dr. Michael Eades:

"Okay, here are my insights. There are no good carbs and bad carbs. Carbs are carbs. They all run up your insulin levels and play havoc with your metabolic system. They are all sugar. Once you accept that, then the question becomes what is my trade off for eating all these metabolically disruptive carbohydrates. If they are packaged as pure sugar, then there is no good trade off. If they are packaged as, say, blackberries then the small amount of carbohydrate is offset by all the antioxidants and other healthful phytochemicals in the blackberries. Same with blueberries, asparagus, tomatoes, and all the rest. It’s a trade off. How much good stuff can I get to make eating the metabolically disruptive carbs worth it."

So basically, we are looking for high-fiber, low carb, high-nutrition foods like broccoli, spinach, berries, and other, similar foods. A good rule of thumb is to eat things that are darkly colored (berries, green leafy vegetables, tomatoes, etc.) and avoid foods that are pale (potatoes, corn, banannas, bread, etc.)

The last macronutrient is protein, which mainly comes from meat, eggs, and cheese. You can also get protein from soy or quinoa, or by combining different grain and legume foods, but that's not what I'm going to recommend here, since our focus is on losing fat, and not on being a vegetarian. The main thing to remember about protein is to eat good, whole sources of protein like meat, eggs, protein powder, or cottage cheese, and not stuff like gelatin or soy powder. If you stick as close to nature as possible, you won't go wrong: wild salmon, free range chickens, grass-fed (and finished) beef, game--these are great for you, but a bacon cheeseburger with no bun will do in a pinch. I wouldn't strip the meat of the fat--leave it on, you'll need the calories. Likewise, don't strip chicken of it's skin, unless you're eating something deep fried.

That's basically it, in a nutshell. 10% or so of calories from carbs--probably 10-50 grams, 100-250g of protein (10-40%), depending on your size and weight, and probably another 100-200 grams of fat (whatever calories are remaining) will be satisfying and help you lose weight. Feel free to adjust your calories as you need--you'll probably find yourself spontaneously restricting your calorie intake, and that's great. Just make sure to get at least 100g of protein a day. As you become leaner and more active, you may find it useful to include more carbohydrate. Just remember the guidelines I've provided above, and you won't go wrong.

Post any questions to the comments.

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.

Pulse: the Basics

I decided to make a series out of the post I've been working on--it's called "Pulse" and I'll let Brad Pilon kick it off.



Take home points:

1. Insulin levels must be low for fat loss to occur
2. Growth hormone must be released for fat loss to occur


Brad implies but does not explicitly state a few things here. The first is that calories out must be greater than calories in. The second point is that fasting drops insulin levels, raises GH levels, and cuts calories.

I'll be back tomorrow with more.

Control Your Environment

Do you ever have this problem? There's one little corner of the office that has the candy and cookies and pie and every time you walk by those areas, you get hungry.

Or, you're at home, watching TV, and you look down, and you've eaten the entire bag again.

When you have control over your environment, it's easier to stop yourself from screwing up. I know this isn't exactly ground-breaking stuff, but like I say over and over again, the most basic principles, applied diligently and regularly, are all you typically need. Does it help to know the biochemistry of the human body? Without a doubt, but it helps more to eat less of whatever you're eating.

All of this is reminding me a bit of--What's his name? Mike Magnusson. He wrote a book about losing weight and finding himself--Heft on Wheels: A Field Guide to Doing a 180". The first half of the book, that's what I'm identifying with.

Anyway, old Mike starts punishing himself on his bike, and doing crunches and stuff, and he's drinking espresso and protein shakes, and not much else. Really, it seems like a pretty extreme version of the Velocity Diet. Really, though, whatever he had to do, he was willing to do. I think that's the point you have to reach.

I don't mean that to be discouraging--the key here is to put the dumb part of your brain in touch with the smart part of your brain (this is the way that Merlin Mann talks about lifehacks). The lifehack in this situation is to not have the bad food in your house.

If you want to know why this is so important, take a minute to listen to Radiolab's Choice episode. Go ahead, it's worth it. For those of you who want the summary, just check this out. You hear what happens when you get distracted by some cognitive task, just a little? You take the cake.

Now think of your average work day. How much stress is there? How many times does bad food show up, all on its' own? This is why, I think, people gain weight when they stop smoking: they're so consumed with stopping themselves from smoking that they can't control their drives to eat.

So the smart part of your brain says, "Don't eat cake," and the dumb part of your brain says "cake". In a head-to-head matchup, who wins? The dumb part. The dumb part is big, strong, and willful.

But the solution is simple--the good news about the smart part of your brain is that it's smart. If the smart part of your brain can engineer situations where there is no cake to be had, then it wins by default. The dumb part of your brain never knows what it's missing, because it is only triggered by being near the stuff you crave. That's why TV is such a bitch if you want to lose weight.

In addition to making you less active, the TV actually makes you eat more. Why? How long can you go without seeing an ad for food if you watch TV? 8 minutes? Maybe?

The point of all this is to say: Control your environment, don't let your environment control you.

Don't bring the crap into your house. The best way to do this is to make a list of the food that is on your diet, hopefully whole and fresh, and go shopping for it after you've eaten.

At the office or workplace, don't go to where the crap is. And you know what the crap is: sugary, cakey, floury: crap. Anything made with corn, oil, or corn oil.

Cancel your cable. I don't think you should get rid of your TV, but maybe cancelling your cable isn't so bad. I like for this very reason: no ads, and you get to watch exactly the shows you want, in sequence. At the very least, using a TiVo or something to skip the ads would be part of the game plan to keep the temptation at arm's length.

By controlling your environment, you control temptation. If you can control temptation, you can control your diet. If you control your diet, you control your weight--and that's the whole point.

Planning meals ahead of time

I'm going out to eat tonight, because I'm not going to have enough time between work and This American Life's live show tonight. So, it's time to drop some science about how to plan meals on the go.

Bring your own
This is usually both the cheapest option and the least practical. If you're into bodybuilding or fitness, you've probably seen the cooler people. Those people who pack like 16 tupperware containers for their eight meals a day? Yeah, that doesn't work for me. But, at the very least, this is an option. To be fair, I usually brown-bag my lunch this way, pre-measured and ready to go.

Nutrition Calculators/Information
The web has made things a lot easier. I'm going to Chipotle tonight, and I was able to use Chipotle Fan's nutrition calculator to plan my meal in advance. Basically, what this gives you is the opportunity to fine-tune your meal. I also like the fact that, because of the way Chipotle serves their food, it's easy to say "this, not that" without raising eyebrows or ruffling feathers. So, you can plan ahead, or you can freestyle and figure out what you ate on the back end. If you're really trying to lose fat and not in a maintenance phase, I caution you against freestyling too much--check out how much sugar those salsas have!

Intermittent Fasting
If all else fails, you can skip a meal. It's not going to hurt you. If you skip dinner, just go to bed at your normal time, and eat breakfast normally.

There you go, three options for eating on the go!

Fat Loss Made Easy

I wrote a long post a while back about why I generally think that eating low carbohydrate diets is effective for fat loss, and I stand by that. More than that, though, I think the challenge of dieting is not picking the most effective one, but rather, it's sticking to the one you pick.

It's the same issue with exercise--the challenge isn't necessarily picking the most effective workout program, it's sticking to the program that you pick. This doesn't obviate the need for intensity or progressively more difficult workouts, but it does point out that it doesn't matter how good your plan is if you're not executing.

One important caveat--if you're not used to working out every day, don't start with weight training or interval training every day. Start with weight training or intervals a few times a week and then fill in your sessions with walking or yoga. Don't kill yourself--the point is to build the habit of being active.

So here's my three point fat loss plan. I'm giving it away for free. You ready?

1. Figure out something that you really want. This can be anything but food, and it should be something that you can afford but you usually wouldn't buy for yourself. More fitness equipment is great, clothes are great, going to see a movie, a new video game or video game system, music or a movie that you wouldn't normally buy, a book, whatever. You know what you want more than me. I am using an Xbox 360 to motivate myself.

Figure out how much it would cost to buy it at the end of 30 days if you broke your savings amounts down to a daily cost. So, I'm budgeting $300, say, for an Xbox and games, there are 30 days, $10 a day. I can afford this, so I'm good to go. If your rewards are smaller, you can give yourself more of them and do a reward bi-weekly or weekly.

2. Eat according to your diet plan and keep a detailed journal including what and how much, then punch it into a site like fitday.com. Fitday is much better than keeping a food journal by hand, something I did when I was coming down from my all time high of 273 lbs. If you're interested in why food journals work, check this out.

If you keep a food journal, and you are in the guidelines for whatever diet you have chosen, congrats, you get to put $8 (about 80% of the total) in the kitty towards whatever you want. (IOUs work just as well as cash, but cash is uniquely satisfying, don't ask me why.)

3. Exercise according to your exercise plan every day. For each day that you exercise, throw $2 in the kitty (about 20% of the total).

That's it!

So this post doesn't tell you much about how to get motivated or pick the correct program, but I do think it speaks a lot for maintaining your motivation. I've certainly felt a pick up with my motivation since I've instituted it. It is simple to implement, and easy to do, but will have profound effects given the compound interest of time. It will also help you build habits by creating things that you do every day the same way.

The final note--if you slip up during the 30 days, that's okay. Add whatever money you got for that day, but you may want to pick another reward (maybe one that's about 1/2 as much) and start working towards that. Feel free to go again if you found it useful--there's nothing to stop you from using it all the time, though my hope is that eventually, you will no longer need it.

Try this out whenever you find your habits slipping.

Saturated Fat

What if Bad Fat is Good for you?

On Diet (part 1)

This is one of the posts that I promised a while back. I've lost about 25 pounds since this time last year and my measurements say that it's over 90% fat. (I have been using a simple waist-wrist:weight ratio. I know it's not hydrostatic weighing, but I knew my body fat was too high, and now it's getting lower). I know I'm stronger than I've been--especially in pressing and upper body pulling--since I have been since about 2003-2004 when I set a bunch of PRs. But now I'm significantly lighter. I'd like to introduce you to the dietary concepts that I think are important and worthwhile, that have enabled me to lose weight and fat while gaining strength.

These are:
1. Eat a lower carbohydrate diet.
2. Consider carbohydrate cycling.
3. Fast occasionally, intermittently, and randomly.

Eat a Lower Carbohydrate Diet

The one book that I think everyone who is trying to lose fat should read is "Good Calories, Bad Calories" by Gary Taubes. Most of the fat I have lost has been in the time since I read Taubes' book. Twice as much fat in less than half the time-that's four times the rate of loss. This is the kind of thing that you could sell on an infomercial, but it's all true: faster fat loss while retaining strength and muscle, much less hunger, and increased energy levels. I realize that I am one person and this is not a representative, scientific sample (how do you measure "increased energy levels" anyway?) but it does represent my experience.

OK, so I've had great results since reading Taubes' book. Why? The biggest problem I have had following lower carbohydrate diets in the past is psychological. The dietary zeitgeist of the last 25 years has been that all fat is bad, and protein is viewed with concern: being a vegetarian is not only healthy, it's somehow more ethically laudable than eating meats.

The problem is that eating a lower carbohydrate diet works. So you get a certain sense of dislocation and cognitive dissonance: as your diet is working, you're being told that it couldn't possibly be working, and even if it is, it's killing you. So you try to walk a fine line in between the two extremes: fat-free chicken, veggies and fish do not an appetizing diet make. We need some fat to feel sated. So we feel hungry all the time, and we slip off the diet. Or we do the Atkins' plan and eat a bunch of butter and cheese and saturated fats, we feel physically better, but then our mind starts hemming away with "You're clogging your arteries... you're going to die." So we mentally screw ourselves up, and find ourselves unable to continue working with the diet, even though all measurements show that it's working. I've had a couple of "realizations" where I thought "this can't be good for me" and that would basically end that.

Taubes lays this debate/cognitive dissonance pretty much to rest, by spelling out most of the research done on the dietary question for the past 200 years, then showing how the science got off track, and why the common "knowledge" became that fats would kill you. Anyway, I've posted too much text, it's time for a couple of links so you can decide if you like what he has to say or not. I've got a couple of videos. Excellent stuff, but I hope you have an hour per link and enough time to pay attention, at least to the audio.

Berkley, November 27, 2007

Stevens Institute of Technology, February 6, 2008

And you can buy Taubes' book here.

One note about the second link: it goes to Jimmy Moore's blog. Jimmy Moore annoys me, but he puts up consistently good information. I'll let you draw your own conclusions.

Also note that Taubes book is descriptive, not proscriptive. You're smart though, otherwise you couldn't have read his book, so you can figure out a game plan that would work. If you can't, I like the Protein Power and Protein Power Lifeplan as a place to start. There a tons of books out there that are proscriptive and lower carbohydrate.

Consider carbohydrate cycling

Once you've nailed down the basics of a lower carbohydrate diet, I would recommend looking into a carbohydrate cycling approach.

Basically, why I think this is a good idea is that it's psychologically satisfying. If you are on a diet, eventually you're going to want to eat ice cream, so it's a good idea to give yourself a few hours a week where you can eat whatever you want.

The best books I've read about this approach are the following:

1. The Metabolic Diet by Dr. Mauro Di Pasquale
2. Natural Hormonal Enhancement by Rob Faigin
3. The TNT Diet by Dr. Jeff Volek and Adam Campbell

These books all deal with the tricky topic of losing fat without losing muscle, or losing fat and gaining muscle at the same time, or gaining muscle without gaining fat. The traditional "wisdom" of bodybuilding is that you "bulk up", gaining muscle and fat at the same time, and then you "cut up". The problem comes when you put on too much fat in the bulk, and lose too much muscle in the cut. A carbohydrate cycling approach allows you to avoid this negative cycle.

I recommend the third book: it has the best proscriptive plans, but the least science and it's cheaper and more easily available. The other two have good (but less flexible) plans and much, much more science. Depends on what your wants/needs are.

I'm going to leave the third part of this post for later, as I've gone on long enough, and it's going to involve quite a few more hyperlinks.

Stay tuned.

Workouts This Week

M: Off
T: (Variety)
A1: Bodyweight Squat 5x5
A2: 32kg row (each hand) 5x5
(Warming up and regreasing grooves)
W: Off
R: (Medium Day--still regreasing grooves))
A1: 3x(1,2,3) 32kg military press (each hand)
A2: 3x(1,2,3) pullup (wide grip)
B: 6 minutes of 12kg swings @ 70%
F: 45 Minute Walk
S: Off (A lot of DOMS and a poker game delayed my Hard Day)
U: (Hard Day)
A1: 4x(1,2,3) 32kg military press (each hand)
A2: 4x(1,2,3) pullup (wide grip)
B: 2 minutes of 20kg swings @ 100% (about 27/hand)

Notes:
My two roommates and I are playing the Fitness Challenge, with probably a baker's dozen house rules. I've chosen the more advanced of Pavel's "Enter the Kettlebell" workouts as a general template for my workouts. The two "Variety" workouts each week, I roll a pair of dice. The split works as follows:

M: very easy/off
T: Variety
W: Medium Presses/Pulls
R: Variety
F: very easy/off
S: Heavy Presses/Pulls
U: Light Presses/Pulls

Presses, Pullups, & Swings as defined in Enter the Kettlebell

Variety: roll dice (or choose)

Chance Dice roll Workout
2.8% 2 sandbag training
5.6% 3 Burpees/Prison Workout + rows
8.3% 4 W.O.D. from Gym Jones
11.1% 5 5x5 rows and 5x5 Squats
13.9% 6 windsprints/interval training
16.7% 7 bent pressing, windmills, turkish get-ups (various grinds)
13.9% 8 Grip training - beginner training (Clay Edgin)
11.1% 9 Heavyhands + rows
8.3% 10 W.O.D. from Crossfit
5.6% 11 beach workout + rows
2.8% 12 sledgehammer training

This gives the approximate chance of each workout. I tried to put things that I thought I could benefit from quite a bit (e.g. windsprints) in the middle of the distribution curve, and things that would be more of a variation (or really... just too hard to do on a regular basis) on the outside of the curve. I could probably rewrite this a little bit and write a whole freaking book off of it. You fill most of those books with exercise descriptions, anyway.

I got a set of "Perfect Pushups" from my girlfriend for Christmas, hence the "beach workout". Also, since I don't have rings, if the WOD from Crossfit or Gym Jones has ring pushups, I'll be subbing the perfect pushup. And the weird split is because I work four tens (four ten hour shifts) at work, so I try to hit two big workouts on the weekends. So there you go.

My diet is pretty basic. I have just under 15 more pounds that I'd like to lose--lost about 17 since March last year, basically with diet only--so I'll keep with what I've found works best for me: a TNT/Anabolic/NHE carb-cycling with a distinctly EVFit/Intermittent Fasting approach. What this boils down to is: low carbs about 90% of the time, with as much green vegetables as I want. One meal a week, I eat out and have whatever I want (carb loading) and I try to get a little fruit in there. Sometimes, I go hungry on purpose.

So I guess my diet's not so basic after all. I'll have to make a whole post on that sometime.

Anyway, I lost the first week of the exercise challenge.

Kaliden: 7 points
Parker: 6 points
Thalayli: 5 points

Also, there's a clear call for some links to help explain my workout and diet regime. So those are most likely upcoming--I might just edit this post or I might make a new one, haven't decided yet. And blogger ate my formatting, so it might be tough to discern the method of the dice roll thing. Oh well.