HumpGAINZZZ Thread

A few articles today.

First, a couple of observations I've noticed about what works. Although I've been sticking, mostly, to HFLC (high fat, low carb), even through the Christmas day feast, I have backslid a great deal on Intermittent Fasting. I only do IF maybe three or four days a week.

I've reverted to a bad old habit: eating late at night. The justification I give myself for this is that I have to eat when I'm hungry because I'm working out, and my body needs muh food to power muh GAINZZZ, but that's a dumb lie, and I know it, because I can always have an extra dose of cassein protein powder with dinner if I'm really worried about protein.

Also, I've largely stopped drinking my before-bedtime potion of water, a dash of salt (to boost electrolytes), apple cider vinegar, and guatamine and BCAA's (for recovery and during-the-night muscle growth). BCAA's are Branch Chain Amino Acids, the building blocks of protein. I don't know if they have any calories, and even if they did, they would't have much, because you only have like 5 grams of them in a dose.

I think both IF and the apple-cider-plus-various-powders drink were effective, because I'm stuck in low-GAINZZZ mode recently. Maybe I'll drink the apple cider vinegar earlier because supposedly it's an appetite suppressant, and so maybe will curb my recently-returned eat-late-at-night habit.

Ketosis is definitely weaker since I stopped the vinegar and IF.

By the way, thanks to whoever it was who recommended the apple cider vinegar trick.

I haven't gained weight but I haven't lost any for a week, either.

So here are some articles:

FiveThirtyEight looks at a recent study comparing different diet regimes, and finds that within the first six months, Atkins (which is pretty much the HFLC diet I'm doing) delivers the most GAINZZZ (22+ pounds on average), but after a year, Atkins slips to basically a four-way tie with four other plans (including a low-fat one) at around 14 pounds lost.

It should be noted that while Atkins posted the most weight lost in the first six months, it was very close, just about a pound separating it from the second-place diet, which was a conventional "eat less of everything" diet.

And at the year mark, the conventional eat less of everything diet beat Atkins by 0.4 pounds.

Basically, the study found that everything works -- assuming you can actually keep to the diet.

But much more important is the observation that most people seem to find diets hard to maintain. For example, people on Atkins lose 22 pounds in the first six months, but gain about eight pounds back six months later. This means that the particular diet you choose is likely less important than choosing one you can actually stick to.

I can testify to this. I've lost a lot of weight four times in my life, once by the conventional "eat less, move more" plan, three times by Atkins. At some point, you give up on all of them. I got some big GAINZZZ, but then got bored or just snacky and started listening to my fat cells all singing out "Feed us, feed your little belly children."

The reason that I even began this thread was because I was determined that this time, I was not going to stop the plan five or six months in, but keep it going for at least a year (or maybe two) before moving to maintenance.

I'm about seven months in now (I began in late June) and I've lost 33 pounds, and maybe 41 pounds of actual fat. I'm 3.8 pounds away from my waypoint weight of 170, which isn't my goal weight, really, just a number that seemed doable to me and so would make for a good waypoint.

Keep at it, keep at it. It takes three things to win a war: willpower, firepower, and staying power. Staying power is where most people lose.

Gary Taubes just released a new book on the dangers of sugar, and previews it in this article for Aeon.

The case against sugar

A potent toxin that alters hormones and metabolism, sugar sets the stage for epidemic levels of obesity and diabetes

[The current, related epidemics of obesity and diabetes are] a 'slow-motion disaster' suggests the critical nature of the problem: 'population-wide' explosions in the prevalence of obesity along with increases in the occurrence of diabetes that frankly strain the imagination: a disease that leads to blindness, kidney failure, amputation, heart disease and premature death, and that was virtually non-existent in hospital inpatient records from the mid-19th century, now afflicts one in 11 Americans; in some populations, as many as one in two adults are diabetic.

In the midst of such a public health crisis, the obvious question to ask is why. Many reasons can be imagined for any public health failure, but we have no precedents for a failure of this magnitude. As such, the simplest explanation is that we’re not targeting the right agent of disease; that our understanding of the aetiology [causes, pathways] of both obesity and diabetes is somehow flawed, perhaps tragically so.

Researchers in harder sciences have a name for such situations: 'pathological science', defined by the Nobel Laureate chemist Irving Langmuir in 1953 as 'the science of things that aren't so'. Where experimental investigation is prohibitively expensive or impossible to do, mistaken assumptions, misconceived paradigms and pathological science can survive indefinitely....

The history of obesity and nutrition research suggests that this is indeed what has happened. In the decades leading up to the Second World War, German and Austrian clinical investigators had concluded that common obesity was clearly caused by a hormonal disturbance; starting in the 1960s, other research would link that disturbance to the sugar in our diets. But the German and Austrian thinking evaporated with the war, and the possibility that sugar was to blame never took hold, dismissed by a nutrition community who, by the 1970s, became fixated on dietary fat as the trigger of our chronic diseases. Now, with an explosion of the epidemic and compelling new research, it's time to reconsider both our causal thinking on obesity and diabetes, and the possibility that sugar is playing the critical role.

When researchers and public health authorities today discuss their failure to curb the rising tide of obesity and diabetes, they offer the explanation that these disorders are 'multifactorial and complex', implying that failure is somehow understandable. But this obscures the reality that prescriptions to prevent and treat the two depend almost entirely on two simple causal concepts, neither one of which is necessarily correct.

The first assumption equates obesity and Type 2 diabetes (the common form of the disease, formerly known as 'adult-onset' until it began appearing in children as well). Because obesity and Type 2 diabetes are so closely associated in both individuals and populations, the assumption is that it's the obesity -- or at least the accumulation of excess fat -- that causes the diabetes. By this logic, whatever causes obesity is ultimately the cause of the diabetes as well.

The second assumption then strives to explain 'the fundamental cause' of the obesity itself: an energy imbalance between calories consumed on one hand, and calories expended on the other hand....

The energy balance paradigm implies that the only way in which foods influence our body fat is through their energy content, or calories -- that is, through the energy that we absorb without excreting, and so make available to be oxidised or stored. This is the only variable that matters. It’s the implication of the phrase
'a calorie is a calorie', which, by the 1960s, had become a mantra of nutrition and obesity researchers, evoked invariably to support the dogma that only calories count when it comes to understanding and treating human obesity.

...

Thinking of obesity as an energy-balance disorder is as meaningless as calling poverty a money-balance problem...

So here's another way to frame what is now the imperative question: is the energy-balance hypothesis of obesity correct? Is it the right paradigm to understand the disorder? The competing hypothesis has existed for over a century: in this paradigm, obesity is not an energy-balance disorder but a disorder of excess fat accumulation and so, clearly, a hormonal and metabolic disorder – the result of an
'endocrine [hormonal] disturbance', as it was phrased in the 1930s by Eugene Du Bois, then the leading American authority on metabolism. By this logic, the foods we eat influence fat accumulation not because of their caloric content but because of their macronutrient content, the proteins, fats and carbohydrates they contain. This paradigm attends to how organisms (humans, of course, in particular) orchestrate the careful 'partitioning' of the macronutrient fuels they consume, determining whether they will be burned for energy or stored or used to rebuild tissues and organs. It proposes that dysregulation of this exquisitely-evolved, finely-tuned homeostatic system (a system that is biologically balanced) is the necessary component to explain both the excessive storage of calories of fat -- obesity -- and the diabetes that accompanies it.

This alternate hypothesis implies that sugar has unique effects in the human body leading directly to both diabetes and obesity, independent of the calories consumed. By this way of thinking, refined sugars are indeed toxic, albeit over the course of years or decades. We get fat and diabetic not because we eat too much of them -- although that is implied tautologically merely by the terms 'overconsumption' and 'overeating' -- but because they have unique physiological, metabolic and hormonal effects that directly trigger these disorders. If all this is right, then thinking of obesity as an energy-balance disorder is as meaningless as calling poverty a money-balance problem (caused, of course, by earning too little or spending too much, or both). By conceiving of obesity as a problem caused by the behaviours of excessive consumption and physical inactivity, researchers not only took a physiological defect – the excess accumulation of fat, often to a massive extent – and turned it into a behavioural problem. But they made a critical error, one that has grown over the course of decades into an idea that seems too big to fail.

...

By von Bergmann’s logic, obesity was clearly not a problem of energy balance, but of fat trapping (just as global warming is not an energy-balance problem, but an energy-trapping one). The question that had to be answered is why this trapping occurs. Any viable hypothesis of obesity had to explain why the fat tissue of the obese is so avid in hoarding calories as fat, rather than allowing that fat to be metabolised and provide energy for the body.

As I've noted before, Taubes' argument is that saying obesity is an "energy imbalance" problem is simply a way of avoiding the question itself. Obviously yes, obesity is an "energy imbalance" problem -- you're packing away too much energy as fat.

But giving a name to something does not explain why that something happens in the first place. I can tell you that the force which attracts your body to a heavier body is "gravity," but in doing so, I have not afforded you a single clue as to by what mechanism this "gravity" causes, instantaneously (faster than the speed of light!), heavy objects to pull towards each other.

Slapping a descriptor on something is a way of avoiding confessing "We do not know how to actually describe the process that's going on here."

So: Why is it that some people -- most people, actually, now that we're all on supposedly "healthy" low-fat diets -- pack on large amounts of excess fat, some people pack on smaller amounts of excess fat (and yet are still kind of overweight by historical standards), and some people pack on little to no excess fat?

Study after study has shown that fat people actually do not eat appreciably more than lean people -- at least, not nearly enough to explain their weight gain.

His theory -- well, not his theory; it goes back centuries, as you can see above -- is that some foods (simple carbs and, crucially, sugars) cause a disturbance in the hormones that regulate fat storage and cause the body to sweep sugar out of the blood and into muscles for immediate use and into fat cells. And if you're not exercising right now, that means the sugar just gets swept into fat cells.

Even worse, an overproduction of insulin results in too much blood sugar being swept out of your blood, so after you eat a sugar or carb-rich meal, you feel hungry a short time later. And that's not just an illusion; your body really is signalling "I need more blood sugar, eat something," because you really are low on blood sugar.

The blood sugar has already been stored as fat, to (almost) never be touched by your body's metabolism again.

Thus eating sugar causes immediate fat gain as well as subsequent fat gain, as your body needs to replenish the blood sugar it just all locked up into fat cells.

The problem is that insulin, a hormone which keeps blood sugar within what the body considers acceptable bounds, is released in great, great quantities in response to a sudden spike of sugar in the body -- especially in those who have a "disturbed" hormonal system, whether due to genetics or just because they've spiked and crashed their blood sugar so much by overconsuming sugar they've turned a once-functioning hormonal system and made it dysfunctional.

Anyway, rather than babbling on some more, I'll just link his video explaining the aetiology of weight gain again.

As January 1st comes up, consider either committing to your GAINZZZ or, as many people (such as myself) need to do, re-committing to the GAINZZZ, lest months and months of work is let to slip by the wayside yet again due to mere thoughtlessness and inattentiveness and boredom at having made some GAINZZZ already.

Oh, another by the way: Whoever suggested that I swap out pork rinds for potato chips and have some pork-rinds-and-onion-dip (loaded with fat, almost no carbs) was an effin' genius.

It's a great snack.

Bonus vid from Professor Broscience. It takes a little while to get going as he explains his port of Monopoly into "The Game of LIFT" -- game rules are always boring, even in a video about a parody game -- but once they get playing, it's pretty funny.

posted by Ace at 05:27 PM

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