Light GAINZZZ Thread

A couple of weeks ago, I got the Giant Size container of pork rinds and a lot of sour cream and onion dip mix.

And so what I did was, get this, pig out on a very high fat diet. And I was also breaking my fast early, telling myself, "Hey, it's just fat, can't break the fast."

Well yes and no. It doesn't provoke an insulin response, but fat can in fact make you fat if you eat too much of it.

Which, of course, I did. Because nothing will cause you to overeat more than telling yourself the stupid lie that your overeating is actually helping you lose weight.

I got a nice week-long stall on my GAINZZZ from that debacle.

Serendipitously enough, Dr. Fung had written a post right around that time cautioning people not to go overboard with fat.

To be honest, I'm a little confused, because a High Fat Low Carb diet (which he recommends, along with fasting) obviously contains a High amount of Fat.

I can't really reconcile this article with his other writing, except to say, maybe this:

Yes, you're shifting away from carbs and replacing that macro mostly with fat, but no diet in the world recommends you eat more than you need.

Though many hear it that way. When I went on Atkins for the first time, I read him saying "Cut out all carbs, and then eat reasonable portions of protein and fat until full." But what I actually heard was "Cut all carbs, and then JACK THE SHIT out of protein intake because you can't let your body go into catabolysis even for one hot second and you're gonna need 200 g of protein a day to feed muscles from the weightlifting you're gonna get to one of these days."

Anyway, I did lose a lot of weight, but then I stopped losing. Because I was eating less of the wrong things, but I was eating too much of the right things, too. If I used to have two double cheeseburgers with the bun, now, eating them bunless, I was eating four double cheeseburgers, just meat and cheese, but that's too damn much. Two and half or three would have made up for the missing calories of the bun. I was going a lot further than that.

I think anyone prone to gain weight has a psychological thing going on where he or she really wants to think that it's eating the right things that makes you lose weight, whereas, actually, it's not about eating the right things, it's about not eating the wrong things.

But someone with a psychological bias in favor of over-eating is going to keep on seeing some variation of over-eating as the way to lose weight he gained from his previous over-eating.

Does that make sense? No, of course not. Addictions don't make sense. They're dumb lies the addiction tells us because the addiction is a parasite that wants to remain fed and indeed over-fed so that it can grow even bigger.

I've got to resist the parasite inside of me always trying to convince me that the way to shed weight is to eat more. Fat cells want to be full, and they must send hormone to the brain saying "Feed your starving children" and the brain must make sense of these hormone signals by creating utterly stupid narratives like "You gotta eat stupid amounts of pork rinds and onion dip if you want to lose weight this week."

I bet all addictions work like that -- your body lacks the thing that appeases the addiction, hormones flow to the brain making chemical complaints, and then the higher cognitive parts of your brain, actually being a little bit stupid and also not speaking chemical code very fluently, try to make up a coherent narrative out of these non-verbal and illogical signals, the way the brain tries to make up stories about randomly firing memory synapses when you dream.

So your brain winds up making up some lie about how you need that next cigarette just to focus on this or that, or how you need to eat that ice cream cake "just to keep the metabolism from shutting down." Your brain thinks it's having these ideas, when in fact it's just putting the claims of hormones into some kind of verbal form.

Sometimes hormones just need to be told to shut the f*** up.

Fung also has an interesting article on how insulin resistance develops.

Short version: Insulin sweeps glucose out of your blood because too much glucose in your blood is acidic (I think) and damages your blood vessels and I guess the cells in the bloodstream. That's why insulin pushes glucose out of the blood, into the muscles and liver.

However, excess glucose is also dangerous inside those cells and tissues too, and just as insulin tries to protect the blood stream from too much glucose, the cells and tissues getting flooded with glucose try to protect themselves by refusing the glucose. Thus, they make themselves more and more fortified against insulin's effects, because they too don't want too much glucose.

I guess this is an equilibrium sort of thing, where each system is working kind of in opposition to another, trying to find some mutually-acceptable level of glucose. I guess both the circulatory system and the systems it feeds are going to be damaged by having too-high glucose, and each is doing some turf-protecting.

Kind of interesting.

Oh, one more thing. In insulin resistance, it's not that insulin receptors have become less sensitive. They remain exactly as sensitive as they ever were.

But there are much fewer of them.

It turns out that insulin receptors are created quickly in the cells, and then disintegrate pretty quickly too -- the life cycle is on the order of hours. Cells are spurred to create insulin receptors on their surfaces according to how much insulin they sense outside of themselves. In an environment of rising insulin, some feely-receptors on the cell's surface (whatever) are supposed to send some messenger RNA (or whatever) to the cell's nucleus (or something) telling it to start promoting a higher insulin receptor population on the surface.

Anyway, in insulin resistance, what happens is the cells grow tolerant to -- start ignoring -- the signals to produce insulin receptors, taking a "Meh, it's Friday, I'm posting bullshit all day" sort of attitude about it. They just stop making as many receptors in response to a given level of stimulation, thus making them harder to actually open up for glucose by insulin bonding with the receptors. And then the pancreas has to pump out higher levels of insulin to get them to finally start making enough receptors, and allow some glucose to enter the cells.

That's described in this 1983 paper about what was then known about the still-young diagnosis of insulin resistance. Worth a read.

That's not the sort of thing you need to know for the basics of it, that too much glucose leads to insulin resistance, but it can't hurt to know the mechanism by which it works.

Anyway, my own GAINZZZ: I'm off really caring about weight loss gains but I lost a pound and a half over two weeks. Not exactly a quick pace, but, you know, I' taking creatine now which adds water weight and whatever, I don't really care about the scale as much as I used to.

My primary goal now is losing bodyfat percentage, but as that's hard to measure, a proxy measurement I'm doing is hips-to-belly ratio. Trying to get the fattest part of my belly down to the same measurement as my hips, and then, even better, maybe a little smaller than that.

Not doing any liftzzz lately, so no TRUE GAINZZZ. Basically, I've taken the last 12 leg days off. And since they're all leg days, well, no liftzzz at all.

So tell me about YO GAINZZZ and also any interesting stuff.

posted by Ace at 05:12 PM

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