I think sugar is the main problem (not fat) and I'm not convinced calory count is key. We did not evolved to eat processed sugar, which is not easily found naturally in the environment.
My 2 cents: - eat as much vegetables as you want (learn to cook them, with a little bit of olive oil) - eat as much fish as you want (no need to cook! Low temperature baking, 1h at 70-80°, the best cooking you'll ever have) - eat meat in reasonable, "as-if-you-had-to-hunt-it-with-a-bow" quantities - ban every processed food, sauce, appetizer.... If you would not eat a spoon of every single ingredient of some food, don't eat it. - ban all added sugar, except (real) honey in reasonable proportions.
This implies to know/learn how to cook (not so hard but this is easier when the local/family culture allowed you to learn passively).
It looks like this is hard to do in the USA: you don't easily find, for example, yogurt without sugar added. (Or I didn't look at the right place, once again this is not judgemental).
Generally speaking, it is easy to find online high-level cooking courses, but hard to learn the basics of how to cook your onions or tomatoes in different ways in everyday life, or make an healthy meal with what's left in the fridge; this could be interesting to have.
--edited for typing errors
> You can find really good junk food everywhere, or pay a really high price to eat in high-level Italian restaurants for example, but it is very difficult to eat standard meat-with-vegetable-without-sugar-added, except in Asian restaurants
Restaurants are typically not where I go to eat healthy food anywhere in the world, although I do think you have a pointed that American restaurants are often relatively junk food oriented.
> ban every processed food, sauce, appetizer....
There is nothing inherently wrong with "processed" food; it is entirely possible to use industrial processes to make a perfectly healthy and wholesome food product. Take for example, (this is by no means an endorsement) Larabar [1]. They make snack bars that typically contain 2-3 ingredients that are all just dried fruit. Should they be banned as "processed" food because of how they are made?
> If you would not eat a spoon of every single ingredient of some food, don't eat it
This is a ridiculous statement and is one of the main reasons why I'm commenting. I wouldn't eat a spoonful of yeast, should I not eat bread? I wouldn't eat a spoonful of salt, should I not eat... anything?
> It looks like this is hard to do in the USA: you don't easily find, for example, yogurt without sugar added.
I've never lived in an area in the United States where I've ever had any problem finding anything like this.
1. The number of ingredients in something does not directly indicate how (un)healthy it is. The fact that Larabar contains 2-3 ingredients says nothing about its nutritional value.
2. In fact, many people would not consider Larabar to be a "processed" food to begin with because it literally is just 2-3 fruits and nuts mashed together. You could make something very similar in your own kitchen. The way you're speaking makes it sound like "processed" food is anything that is cooked or combined in some way. That is not how people use the word IME.
3. Have you looked at the sugar content of Larabar? It's not low, nor would I consider it healthy or wholesome. They likely chose dates specifically because of their extremely high sugar content so that they could pretend they are healthy while actually including unhealthy amounts of sugar in their product under the guise of dates.
There's a distinction between processed and ultra-processed (or highly processed). For example, canned fish is processed (added salt and oil), while a frozen TV dinner is ultra-processed (many ingredients added, some of which you probably don't have in your kitchen).
Processed food is fine assuming you're aware of what's in it, how it's processed, and make sure you're not overeating any of it.
This is why you want to have a high compliance, meaning that the sick person does what the doctor recommends. This is mostly caused due technical or behavioral complexity.
You can increase compliance by reducing complexity. At the same time, the accuracy decreases.
Example: High Accuracy / High Complexity: "Do not eat frugugle, fergerio, flululu and fnyvoo." Why low compliance? Because the behavioral complexity is very high, especially for sick people: 1. Find the food ingredients list. 2. Loop over the ingredients list and compare the current item with the "do not eat"-list. 3. Make a decision for every ingredient, if this is in the list ("frugugle" is on the list, but one ingredient is "fruguglelase", what's my decision?)
Lower Accuracy / Lower Complexity: "Do not eat products with more than 3 ingredients." Why higher compliance? Because the behavioral complexity is lower: 1. Find the food ingredients list. 2. Count the amount of ingredients. 3. Make a decision after reading max. 3 ingredients.
IMHO it's easier to start with the second approach, because you make progress faster, and keep the momentum going.
I don't know if I'd go as far as to say "wrong" but certainly the less processing a food has, the better, primarily because you get to retain more of the fiber content (and so the food is more filling).
Given how profit in the food industry and addiction is so closely tied together, I don't see how this is possible.
The flour you make French bread with is not found any more or less naturally in the environment than the sugar you get from cane or beet.
This whole thing about evolution and nutrition is entirely pseudoscientific woo.
If humans had to eat the same way as our ancestors (ie actual paleo, not some hipster fad diet) humanity would have died out long time ago.
The French thing makes this all the more ironic... I can’t imagine much more triumph in modern processing than the five mother sauces.
Clearly the American diet has a crazy oversupply of sugar... fructose, glucose, sucrose... at the amounts we’re talking about in the average American diet it doesn’t fucking matter (making the whole HFCS controversy always a joke).
I would not take paleo food as a reference, but rather look toward what our grandparents had for lunch when they were kids. I don't think they were doing so badly.
And I don't cook like Bocuse everyday, the five mother sauces are not intended to be eaten on a daily basis :-)
In the end, I think it's good to know how much raw stuff go into making any ingredients. It takes a lot of sugarcane to get a soda's worth of sugar.
At least I grew up on the east coast and my parents cooked. Anecdotally, I'm shocked by what my acquaintances from the midwest eat, and the consequences really start to show up when people reach their 30's (although there are signs earlier)
I read Michael Pollan's books (Omnivore's Dilemma, etc.) 10-15 years ago and they opened my eyes to how broken this country is in terms of food.
https://michaelpollan.com/books/
It's funny he is considered "liberal" here but it's just common sense in the rest of the world. The thesis is actually "conservative": eat things that your grandmother would consider food. If your grandmother wouldn't recognize it, don't eat it. Did your grandmother (or great grandmother) cook with high-fructose corn syrup? Or processed oils / margarine?
Who knows what additives were in our grandparents' foods.
There's a reason every country has an equivalent to the FDA that has to approve food additives. These agencies were not formed in advance - they were formed as a reaction to dangerous unregulated food additives, supplements, medicines, and so on. The FDA was formed in 1906. Michael Pollan saying that our grandparents only ate real food is an example of the golden age fallacy.
• Restaurants don't sell food, they sell satiation, taste, brand, ambiance, customer experience.
• You rarely can ask for an ingredient list, you often can't see who made your food, it is a black box in a black box.
• All we really care about are omissions: the list of chemicals, macronutrients, hormones, and ingredients that are excluded from our menu items.
Not only does this disconnect us from the ingredients in our food... I think this is a huge problem that compounds toward multiple health crises such as obesity and diabetes. Chefs are seen as food experts, yet the nutrition aspect of restaurant food is entirely ignored. We expect individuals themselves to be their own nutrition experts (curating meals and ingredients for their own health).
I don't know what the solution is. But at the very least I think every restaurant owes its customers the macros and ingredients for every product they serve, in accessible formats. It should be easier to get that information onto your phone than a tweet. Food receipts should list macro and calorie breakdowns. Tools for nutrition analysis should be free, standard, integrated, and widespread. etc
I will have to disagree. Maybe this is a cultural thing (I'm from Brazil) but on business days I mostly refuse to have lunch in restaurants that don't offer nutritional food options, and I'm not alone in this matter, the majority of my team mates also care about their diet. Those who don't care about it and eat junk food at work every day are the exception.
Hence, restaurants have the incentive to serve healthier food in order to attract customers like me and my team mates.
That's not to say that I don't like junky food. I love to grab a beer and a burger, but I grant myself that treat at most once a week, not more than that.
That very much depends on your location. High tourism locations will often have lots of junk food places. If you can move larger distances (i.e. rent a car and the like) you'll find wonderful and cheap restaurants pretty much anywhere. Even in otherwise expensive places like SF or NY.
Here's the problem though: portion sizes are _enormous_ . It took quite a bit of time to adapt, and adapt I did, if my measurements are any indication. If you want healthy portions, you'll either waste food, or you'll have to ask for a take out box. Essentially, a lot of places will serve you portions that are enough for two meals.
Ingredient availability varies a lot. In larger centers you can find almost anything you could possibility want. Even farmer's markets if you are lucky, which will often have locally sourced produce at lower prices compared to big supermarket chains (and sometimes even lower if you get there near closing hour ;) )
After doing a trip in America, I interpret "eat normally" for a French as not eating in the restaurants, but the food available in the supermarket that you cook at home. Finding vegetables, fruits is hard, if not impossible. You don't find it in every supermarket.
Eating normally, for me, is buying the vegetables, meat, etc, and cooking it myself.
Yesterday I made a ratatouille: Eggplant, courgette, poivron, tomatoes.
I remember finding these in USA was really hard.
And the only fruits we found was already cuts pineapply/mango/apples/etc...
I'm pretty sure this is the opposite of the actual situation. Cities attract both tourists and high-income residents, and the latter combined with high population density drive the development of much more diverse eating options within a reasonable range than a person in a more rural area has available to them.
Anecdotally, the organic grocery stores and vegan eateries I see in SF just don't exist where my parents live.
This I don't agree, I was in a backwhole and all I got was a supermarket and fast food. Sure I could take the raw veg, but it was cheaper to get the TV dinners.
Maybe you know your area better to find them but are they known by all, known enough to be advertised to tourists/visitors ?
> Here's the problem though: portion sizes are _enormous_
This is a result.. Not really a cause, I fully agree with you the portions are alien for me, but they didn't decide on those portions from nowhere.
> Ingredient availability varies a lot > Even farmer's markets
This is both true and the problem. The fact you need to say that sometimes Farmers markets can handle you meats, and depending on what supermarket you go to you can get good veggie.. It's strange from an EU POV.
We have EU standards on all food trades, the UK is leaving the EU based on a few lies about the standards. But it actually is standing to prove that hey : 'Don't eat shit'.
I travel all around the US a lot for work (or did, pre-covid) and all the way down to your fast food restaurants all the way up to fancy $500/plate places, I've never once found it difficult to eat a "standard meat-with-vegetable-without-sugar-added". I would say that 80% of my meals are exactly that. I've never once been to a single non-fast-food restaurant where they didn't have multiple different kinds of vegetables on the menu.
There's certainly an issue with portion size at most US restaurants, but I've never found it difficult to get a plate of plain roasted vegetables with lightly seasoned fish, for example.
>It looks like this is hard to do in the USA: you don't easily find, for example, yogurt without sugar added.
Yogurt in particular is not really popular in the US, so you will not find it in many restaurants. You can, however, find packaged sugarfree yogurt in most convenience stores and certainly every grocery store if that's your thing. Other than yogurt, there are plenty of sugarfree snacks widely available. Starbucks is on every corner and sells plain vegetables, plain fruit, plain eggs, etc, for example.
I suspect your complaints are mostly rooted in simply not being aware of certain brand names or which stores are known for what type of food, because all of the things you mentioned definitely are available as long as you aren't going to McDonald's or Five Guys for every meal.
> "You can, however, find packaged sugarfree yogurt" That stuff is a miracle of modern chemistry. It has, however, only a passing resemblance to actual yoghurt. Nobody who grew up in Europe really wants sugar-free. It's "no sugar added" that matters. Nobody wants fat-free, either. And there are quite a few studies making the point that these "healthy" food actually contribute to weight gain.
"Starbucks is on every corner and sells plain vegetables, plain fruit, plain eggs"... if you're lucky. Usually, it's sold out fairly quickly.
In general, yes, getting healthy food in the US is much harder than it is in Europe. The vast majority of food here is processed to within an inch of its life, and the remainder is incredibly expensive, because it's treated as a luxury good.
I've spent a few decades in Europe, as well as a few in the US. I'm fairly confident I know which food I can get where in either place - and the US is severely broken. Trust me, I wish it weren't. But healthy food is difficult, and becomes extra-hard as you leave bigger cities with specialty stores behind.
Actually, I find that a simply prepared, decent (not excellent, cut of meat) steak has now become a rare thing and is ferociously expensive.
I suspect that there is too much wastage of better meat cuts and that restaurant margins are so thin that every owner immediately cuts back the expensive stuff right away.
Anything other than turkey, chicken, salmon, or shrimp is now problematic to find as a protein. And, with the possible exception of certain kinds of salmon, all those flavors are bland enough that they almost always need something in the dish to help them out (cream, butter, sugar, etc.).
The Rise and Fall of American Growth by Robert J. Gordon makes the exact same point but gets there via analysis of where Americans are spending money for food. Since the 70s we've more than doubled the fraction of our income we spend eating outside of the home.[1] This tracks with the rise in adult obesity in America and is a divergence from trends in other developed countries like France.
[1] Chapter 10
I have a difficult time finding these, as well. The culture here (spoken as an American) is to avoid fats, which is why most products advertise "no fat" (yoghurt with no fat seems like a strange contradiction to me).
> in Asian restaurants (and even there, food is often sweetened)
This is also true from my experiences. Chinese restaurants add sugar due to believing that's part of the American palette. (For Chinese foods, there's also a distinction between "typical" and "authentic" styles, and most Americans are unaware of the latter.)
So if you go for industrial-level food production, you end up with a higher proportion of sugar than what would be considered healthy. Sugar per se ist not bad at all (try to have an apple without it ;)). But our economy demands cheap, somewhat tasty, calories. Hence we end up with a lot of sugar or carbohydrates in general.
Any diet that rules out carbs works well because of that, not because of some intrinsic property of carbs.
As a French person you would probably never consider giving up on a good croissant or baguette, but in France these things are expensive. I doubt anyone gives their kids fresh croissant before school every day.
Bake at home ones are half that.
Cheapest "fresh" at Carrefour are 20 euro-cents.
https://www.carrefour.fr/s?q=croissant
Are village bakeries still a thing in France?
Croissants or baguettes are not a daily thing if my assumption is correct. My experience is buying them when walking home from work and if I'm in the mood because bread isn't generally healthy for people compared to something else that happens to be better.
edit: okay, I now understand the comment is about apples having natural sugar.
Some points are valid though. Honestly, as an American, we've got some awful vegetables and tasteless food just about everywhere unless fat/sugar is added to them. Probably due to the way mass production and transportation of food goes in to the US. It wasn't like that. There is nothing wrong with our soil. I spent some time in India, Thailand, Vietnam, Japan and Korea and the veggies are almost like they grow in your home garden. Go to a store and pick out a tomato and it is impossibly good. America has farmers markets in every city, even in some of the most impoverished cities. But that's not where the majority of the middle class goes to shop for their vegetables.
Try growing veggies in your own garden on American soil and its gonna taste amazing.
Don't worry, Asian population wants malls, walmarts, and giant grocery stores with similar tasteless food. It is happening at a massive unprecedented scale.
In the dietary world, you'll find anti-sugar camps, anti-fat camps, Atkins diet, ketogenic diet, fitness buffs. This article is an example. It's a deep dive full of science. The conclusions, however, are mostly nonsense.
I'll eat like you suggest. But I'll entertain with the reading. :)
Most of the research is that it's both. (Tt's the worst when fat and sugar are together) Specifically food is more rewarding, denser, cheaper, and easier to find than it used to be, so we overeat it. Same thing happens with almost any animal that's given ad libitum access to the american diet.
It seems there are two societal solutions, extremely heavy handed government interventions to ban tasty food or we invent a weight loss pill.
There was a study that determined that the reason for the sugar+fat combo was that sugar "scratched" arteries and made them easier for fat to stick to.
Just plain fat is OK, because it doesn't stick to healthy arteries. But combine (highly processed) sugar and fat, then you get an insulin spike AND the fat clogs your arteries more easily.
I travel quite a bit for work (at least, when there's no pandemic) and even though my per diem would cover restaurants, I have almost completely switched over to hotel BBQs and eat better for way less money.
This youtube video goes into more detail about the US problem compared to japan: "Why is it so Easy to be Thin in Japan?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lr4MmmWQtZM
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/02/26/172969363/ho...
"Standard" in the countries I've lived in would include a starch. Part of your reaction may just be to cultural differences in what's considered a standard meal.
Your "2 cents" is nothing more than an expression of the food culture you grew up with. There are many other amazing food cultures around the world - even in parts of the US, although you don't find them in the chain stores and chain supermarkets.
But no, not typical. Most Americans buy all their food at the Dollar Store, and its everything you say.
Yes. What do you do with it?
Avoiding food because "we didn't evolve to eat" is not sound science, either.
My diet habit shifted 180deg in 48h, it's a weird realization:
1) eating raw vegetables tickles your brain differently (raw veggies make you feel full faster)
2) most probably because there's no fat nor sugar added (which makes you want to eat more I guess)
3) even dressing is bad, so raw is best to have a natural negative feedback system
4) even the most mundane raw veggies have a lot of flavour.. I eat carrots like M&M's nowadays, it's sweet. Same for lettuce or tomato. I really think modern western culture is hurtful there.
As a Dutch person living in Amsterdam, I completely agree. I noticed when I visited SF a few times (and California in general) that:
- Vegetables are more expensive
- Bread is sweetened (there goes my breakdfast)
- Bread sucks (yep, I said it, basic bread should be thrown into the thrash can)
- Basic cheese in the US is a new species, and I am afraid of it
I went around these 2 issues by buying the highest quality French bread and imported cheese (how I missed actual France with their actual French bread... :'( ). While it was expensive, I could at least make a breakfast that I eat in Amsterdam (bread with cheese with butter, unsweetened).
The butter was normal. I have to give the US that.
Though, I do like what you guys can do with oatmeal. It taught me that the normal Dutch breakfast is uninspiring as hell, haha. So all in all, it was reall a positive experience, but it's so much nicer when you meet American people showing how they eat breakfast rather than traveling around in the country and simply guessing how to eat normal (normal being unsweetened / healthy -- I find that normal...).
Also, I found the US amazing with certain dinner options (e.g. sushi burito's).
Of course there's the cost difference, but then again that goes both ways - I can find avocados, strawberries, etc. here of a quality and at a price you'd be hard pressed to find in France. Tbh, I'd argue that as far as meat/seafood/etc. is concerned, you can get better quality in SF than you can in 90% of France, where your main option will be an Intermarché or a Carrefour.
I'd also argue that the pastries you find at Tartine/Four Barrel/etc. (they typically source from a variety of bakeries from around the bay) are way beyond, in quality, what you'd find in 90% of French bakeries (the glory days of master bakers are long gone, and a lot of it is frozen crap these days, although it's been getting better in the last few years). I suspect that by this point there are more world class bakers by square kilometer in the Bay Area than there are in France, perhaps with the exception of Paris/Lyon (quite a few that I've met went to France to study baking though, so our national pride isn't completely destroyed). I bake my own bread and can buy freshly milled flour from the The Mill, which would also be hard to find in France unless you had personal connections.
But of course, I haven't gotten to the main part - which is the insane diversity of food stores and restaurants here. No matter what kind of south american, african, middle eastern, asian cuisine you want to make/eat, you'll be able to find it. That is not the case at all in France.
I spent some months working in Houston a while back, and this drove me crazy! I mean, why on earth would you sweeten bread?!
Another thing that struck me was how many ingredients everything seemed to have - you could pick up just about any item in a grocery store, and it was pretty much guaranteed to contain 10-30 ingredients. Even the bread.
> Basic cheese in the US
This too - most cheese was of the horrible processed variety, with little flavour and an odd texture. And of course, dozens of ingredients. And of course, there was sugar in it.
Another thing - corn syrup. Not content with putting sugar in everything, corn syrup was added too.
The proliferation of junk foods, boxed refined products, seems higher in North America. As you say dining out tends to comprise the Standard American Diet of high fat and carbs, low fiber.
And a handy side effect for producers is that satiety is short lived, leading to repeated demand in the short term when included in a product.
This really needs so much attention and focus given the ungodly delicious amount of butter French people cook with.
I'm convinced that the quality of European food is, on average, vastly superior to what's available in America.
As biologist with a background in Agriculture and Culinary: they exist, most farm to table restaurants in the US just have a small footprint in overall ecosystem. I spent most of my culinary career within them, ranging from Vegan to vegetation to seasonal based omnivore option. I also worked and ran kitchens in Agrotourisms in Europe and I'm familiar benefits with the Mediterranean diet, Spain having now surpassing Japan in Life expectancy, and diet is a significant contributor to it.
> I think sugar is the main problem (not fat) and I'm not convinced calory count is key. We did not evolved to eat processed sugar, which is not easily found naturally in the environment.
Agreed, and even that is not always so cut and clear as having extra CNV of the amalayse gene (like I do) can be super beneficial, which leans to the need of the Biohacker space (of which I'm a part of and is comprised mainly of many dissatisfied Health Scientists) to play with diet and the epigenetic effects of it, as that has been woefuly neglected for decades in Medicine and Scientific journals but a mainstay in the Biohacker community that has become mainstream due to influencers.
As a kid I never understood the allure of sweets/desserts because of the CNV in my saliva is already breaking down the sugars in my mouth and makes super sweet things always taste a bit like the after taste of bitter chocolate or coffee--none of which I like. I always liked eating fruit, especially tart or sour ones more as a desert and only found out later in Life why that was. the study of how a palette is formed is a very interesting and entirely negated study in my opinion.
> This implies to know/learn how to cook (not so hard but this is easier when the local/family culture allowed you to learn passively).
Agreed! The best thing to do is to learn to cook with local, fresh organic products and help solidify a local food supply chain and relationship with your local farmers! This has a compound effect throughout the entire community and many communities are open vacant lots to community garden spaces.
> It looks like this is hard to do in the USA: you don't easily find, for example, yogurt without sugar added. (Or I didn't look at the right place, once again this is not judgemental).
It's there, its just found at higher end stores and outlets, ironically it costs more to deliver a product with less sugar and additives; but even Walmart has been a big player in the Organic produce Market. There is one next to my gym and I often went in to buy a pre-workout snack or a kombucha and there was always something I could eat without spiking my glucose levels.
> Generally speaking, it is easy to find online high-level cooking courses, but hard to learn the basics of how to cook your onions or tomatoes in different ways in everyday life, or make an healthy meal with what's left in the fridge; this could be interesting to have.
Agreed. Its an undervalued art and craft, in Boulder (one of the most concentrated 'foodie' places in the entire US) there are classes offered via a business that offers Learning Kitchen experiences where professional chefs from the surrounding area are commissioned on a topic/recipe/menu and teach paying members of the community on how to do things via interactive cooking.
Its a very cool model that I think should be expanded on. I'd love to be able to work with some of my old team members in the Industry especially if it could help offset my expenses and help me fund other projects in my Life; online learning could be a bridge or a primer, but cooking is ultimately a craft you learn by repeated instruction and correcting hand positioning (re-enforced with lots of cuts, burns, scrapes) that makes it more like going to the gym than watching a lecture on a subject.
You can learn online, I know I did watching Michelin Star chefs on Saturday Kitchen on the BBC before making the return into culinary in Europe, having only ever worked in catering while I was attending University as it inspired me to experiment with different techniques. I'm now retired from Kitchens but want I want to create a food docu-series, as I feel now is a critical time in Restaurants after having been so impacted due to COVID, that many may not make it.
> ban every processed food, sauce, appetizer.... If you would not eat a spoon of every single ingredient of some food, don't eat it. - ban all added sugar, except (real) honey in reasonable proportions.
I'm not for banning anything, just using it in moderation and having people have a solid understanding on what it does to you metabolically and its impacts on health. Japanese and Italian cuisine are the two pillars my culinary repertoire and sugar is a vital component of Japanese recipes that simply cannot be substituted. I've tried stevia and honey but it just doesn't work, a proper tare is sweetned with sugar not just for taste and lush sheen and gloss when used to grill, but also as the precursors for the bacteria to ferment that takes place over years to give it a unique and umami loaded taste that defines Japanese cuisine.
And pasta and bread, carbohydrates, are just processed long-linked sugars and I can never give those up despite seeing and personally experienced the benefits of keto and carnivore diets in my friends.
I'd throw including intermittent fasting and meditation/yoga in that equation as well and you have a solid foundation for how to be healthier and more productive in Life that I found via Biohacking methods, cooking and farming professionally.
I also have the genetics for longevity on both sides of my family: my grandparents all made it to their late 90s, and my grandmother on my maternal side hit 99.7 before passing due to non health related issues, so I'm hoping that with this information guiding my behaviour I can make it to 150 years of age.
I'll second that, I've only been once for a few weeks on a work related trip, and I never paid attention to what I was eating but by the second week I felt run down, lathargic and really 'not great' - Hard to describe properly but I wasn't myself at all. With work I was connected with a doctor that I met because I just didn't feel 'right'.
I wasked asked the usual questions but after talking a bit more about my diet usually (even before mentioning what I was eating in the US) she knew exactly what was going on. My body wasn't used to breaking down the amounts of processed sugars that are more commonly found in everyday foods in the US.
I took a more concious approach to what was coming into my body and over a week I was able to feel normal again.
I come from Ireland, we have a diverse mix of foods available, you pick a country, I can tell you a street to find their food authentically and I love trying them. I also cook heavy with bad cholesterol, lots of butter thanks to French friends, lots of salt in other dishes from others, lots of cheese, cured meats, smoked cheeses and meats, snacks etc. - My diet was never interestingly good.
After my US trip I realised that there is a small poisoning in a sense being taken over the consumption.
> My 2 cents: - eat as much vegetables as you want (learn to cook them, with a little bit of olive oil)
I'm not stereotyping here, my exposure to the collegues from the local area never cooked. This is fine, but when you replace good food for fast food, you start to go into that chain. They didn't know a good way how to peel an avocado, which I found out on a drunken night with them in my apartment. 10+ and none of them knew how to prep an avocado. But that is not their fault at all..
> It looks like this is hard to do in the USA
Spot on. I cannot stress this point enough. You have to go out of your way to eat even moderately health conscious. This is a real shame. We will all take the easier path : 'Ah tonight I'll just get take-away, I'll just grab something on the way home.'
I grew up as a kid in Italy until I was 12, probably the only thing that I too away from it as a positive was that preparing, cooking and eating food is really not for sustenance.
Sustenance is the result, what matters is the social time, the prep is almost like a meditation, and the collaborative effort is like a social movement.
Food is really not just for sustenance. And I implore anyone reading this to try just cook a meal with friends, family or loved ones. It has a nice impact on way more than your sustenance intake.
Sugar is good, avocadoes have a lot of them, even the bad ones, but I would much prefer to enjoy my food than inhale it, in the US, it was seen as a time consumer.
'You are what you eat' - This expression didn't come from nowhere.
PS: 5 a day and the Pyramid might be wrong, there is no 1 scale for everyone. But there sure as shit isn't a cereal loaded with sugar for anyone.
What really annoyed me though, was the cost of it. To eat more natural, is more expensive than processing food. Odd.
Anyway, here in the EU we have strict rules on when/how foods may be labeled as "no added sugar". I think we should take those rules and turn them around and require "with added sugar" labels on basically everything that is not candy or patisserie, where you would clearly expect sugar as a main ingredient.
I do agree that the quantities of sugar in everything are _way_ too excessive though.
Not really. Try a ketogenic diet. You can eat tons food (including tons of fat) and still loose weight.
This does not happen with fat, so it is harder to get fat by eating fat.
If you want to get fat, like a sumo ringer, simple carbs are the way to go.
The two measures I take everyday are:
1. Body weight; and,
2. Waist size.
I use the following routine for weight loss (I've lost about 50kg, and have kept it off for several years):
1. You must have a diet to weigh less;
2. You must have a distinct diet to lose weight;
3. You must do low impact cardio — I walk 3-5 miles a day; and,
4. You must do resistance training.
Those four things have the following purpose:
1. Keep you at a stable weight;
2. Take off weight;
3. Increase background caloric burn from "super sedentary"; and,
4. Encourage fat loss over lean body mass loss.
All of this is requires routine. You must develop a routine for the rest of your life, and not vary from it. It also requires honesty: you need to be honest with yourself about what you're eating, when; what exercise you're really doing; when. And, finally, if you're overweight you're at the mercy of millions of years of evolution, but you're the victim of our modern diet. It's not your fault, but there is something you can do about it.
I play and follow golf and the big injury issue with Tiger that made him multiple surgeries, and also had to reshape his golf swing from the pain running caused. Here's an article[0] about that from Running Magazine. There's more to the story on this, like his background and mentality on Navy Seal training, with his body type and high impact running it caused huge problems he's still dealing with.
As for funning form types, check out the video of Cliff Young and his running style[1] for the Sydney to Melbourne race at 61 but shuffling.
What I'm saying, and what I'm glad you included, is the importance of cardio being low impacts, and to also not feel bad if you're not a running. Biking, and especially swimming are great alternatives and so much better on your body long term.
[0] https://runningmagazine.ca/the-scene/tiger-woods-regrets-run... [1] https://vimeo.com/258718906
I still drink way too much so losing weight is an issue, but I do feel healthier at least.
With IF, I lost about ~5 lbs doing nothing besides being more mindful. Once I added in daily runs / walks of ~4-5 miles, I lost another ~10 lbs easily.
I think the biggest challenge for people looking to lose weight is mindless eating / snacking. Initially I kept a diet journal and wrote down everything I ate or drank, and realized I would get more snacks throughout the day than I thought. I also drank a lot less water than I thought.
The other thing is portions. When I was at my largest, the portions I would set for myself were larger, and I would more often get a second round. All without really thinking about it, of course. Now I deliberately think about how big of a portion is appropriate and I never go for seconds except on some cheat days.
For me, the key to staying hydrated is large containers.
When there is a glass of water on my desk in front of me, I sip it as I get thirsty. When it runs dry, I don't interrupt my current task to refill it, so it might sit empty for hours, and I won't drink enough later to make up for it. So, the fewer times I have to refill, the more water I drink.
In college, when I moved between many locations, I used a 1-quart canning jar in a knitted sleeve (classier and a little fall protection -- just remember you still have to wash it). These days, it's a 1-liter jug (err, may technically be a vase) that sits on my desk. I refill it in the morning (or night before) and once in the middle of the day, after it runs out.
Whereas if you workout daily even in a minimal form, suddenly you have a much easier budget.
For me, snacking was fixed by not buying snacks that I would consider too unhealthy. Generally the only snack foods I have in my house now are biscuits to dip in my tea in the evening (British..). Also I've never really liked fizzy drinks and pretty much drink water and black coffee (soya milk once a day for the B12 and protein).
I do agree with the biggest thing for me being portion size, I'm one of those people that if there's food on the table I will finish it, and I'll finish my wife's food as well if she doesn't want it. My wife also doesn't help as if I mention I'm hungry to her, she'll assume that I want more than usual and have to try and remind her that the usual amount will be more than enough :)
I want a scale without a screen and a measuring tape without numbers. Track often but only see the trend when you ask for it.
In my experience, the trick with body weight is that you actually do have almost perfect control over the day to day.
Assuming you take it in the morning before breakfast and after the bathroom, it's almost a pure function of your weight yesterday and the caloric balance from the day prior. If you control your caloric balance with diet and exercise, you can predict your 1-2lb swings (aka constant swings) pretty accurately.
Traditional Japanese meals follow a standard format [1]: a bowl of rice, several small sides (which can change by the day), and an optional cup of miso soup. Sticking to this format every day can be boring, but it keeps my diet reasonably balanced without the need for conscious efforts like counting calories (which I'm too lazy to continue long-term).
[1] https://elemental.medium.com/ichiju-sansai-how-to-construct-...
I think in modern cities we have too much freedom with regard to what we eat, which is great of course but the downside is that we’ve lost a great deal of local culinary tradition, and along with it intuitive understandings of what is and what isn’t healthy eating.
I don't think we've lost anything; it's just that, in an era of cheap economies of scale from mass-production, artisanal anything (including artisanal cooking) is going to cost more—possibly enough to put most "authentic" / "traditional" cuisine out of reach of the working class, unless they're willing to make it themselves. (And who has the time for that?)
If you live in a city, look through restaurant reviews for a couple minutes and you'll probably be able to find a dozen local places in your own neighbourhood that have been open for 80 years or more, keeping up the tradition of serving the same food, the same way, that they always have. The only thing that such places have changed between then and now, are their prices.
> Despite its long history in Japan rice was, for a long time, a food reserved for the warriors and the nobility. It was consumed by the majority of the population only from the seventeenth century onwards, not becoming the basis of Japanese food until the early twentieth century
https://www.japan-experience.com/to-know/chopsticks-at-the-r...
> A disproportionate share of the rice crop was therefore consumed in the cities and by the political and economic elite, while the diet of much of the rural population continued to depend on the availability of a range of other grains – wheat, millet, barley, etc. – together with vegetables, fruit, pulses and occasional fish or game, grown at home or collected in the locality.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0955580070133003...
As far as I'm aware, all the current medical literature states to avoid simple carbs (like white rice) to prevent insulin spikes, and to eat things like whole grain breads instead. But, we noticed that this seems to only be true for people of European descent - my Asian co-workers were able to process white rice just fine. Which kind of makes sense - East Asian people eat a ton of rice, and yet they're thin.
This is all purely anecdotal of course, and I'm not a doctor, but we do know that different ethnicities process food differently (e.g. lactose), and it's not so hard to imagine that our current dietary recommendations might be a bit skewed, because the people in the datasets are mostly of European ancestry.
But it's supposedly healthier (there's a famous story about how eating too much white rice crippled the Japanese navy [1]), and personally I think it tastes better too.
[1] https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/rice-disease-mystery-e...
I've had great success losing weight and keeping it off with food logging (shout out to Cronometer, the best food logging app I've used), trying to adhere to a keto diet, and time-restricted feeding (18 hours fasted, 6 eating). If I tried to do an ancestral diet instead, I'd fail primarily from ignorance of just what that might be. (Also, I'm from the southern US, so it's not like that ancestral diet is necessarily good for me anyway.)
For example, cooking rice is simply a matter of putting rice and water into the cooker and pressing a button [1]. In the past we needed to first rinse the rice by hand.
[1] https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2009/04/16/reference/no-wa...
I appreciate this honesty
For example, I've been losing weight and doing body-weight training the last month-and-a-half and a picture of my body now vs. then shows a fairly drastic change. But I can' say that I feel like I weigh less or feel that I'm stronger. Though, the scale and reps of exercise that I can do say otherwise. Every day starts a "new normal."
This has been my biggest struggle with health. I've always had troubles with autobiographical memory and without it, I can't stay motivated because I quickly forget how good exercise felt or how junk food made me feel a few hours later. I started going to the gym to dogfood when I joined a fitness company and within a few months I was looking a lot better but not feeling it. It wasn't until I started to really push my limit with rowing workouts that I felt the "runner's high" athletes talk about. From that point on, it was felt like I was discovering a new muscle group every few weeks and correlating how far I rowed in a 60 minute rowing session with my diet and lifestyle. Junk food that I would scarf down because unappetizing. Drinking alcohol went from a no-brainer to "how will I feel tomorrow?" Morning stretches and exercise became mandatory just to feel "normal."
Even now, with the gyms closed for months, I can feel that newly acquired skill slipping and predictably, my self discipline slides too. I've almost forgotten how good it feels after a nice workout.
It's refreshing
When I stop training, I quickly feel sluggish, with brain fog, muscle knots, difficulty sleeping, etc.
This is mostly a reminder to myself that my body wants movement and good nutrition, and that lapses are not worth it.
While I agree that there is way more to "being healthy" than just not being overweight/underweight, I think it isn't a bad idea to approach this in the priority order. Solving the issue of being overweight is much simpler and much more impactful to the overall public health than trying to go after more rare and difficult problems.
0. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/obesity-overweight.htm
1. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/underweight_adult_15_16...
Everyone tries to compress a workout into a single time interval in the day, where you do n sets of each exercise and then go home. To do three sets in three minutes, you're going to have to pick a very conservative goal. Doing 5 sets spread out over the entire day, I could lift more and saw results pretty much right away, and really for the first time. I'd exercise while waiting for things like the drier to ding or toast to pop up, a file to download, a commercial break or a cut scene to finish. But, I had to have exercises I could do at home, which takes some creativity (or a lot of money).
Your body is conserving resources. The whole point of 'exercise' is to trick your body into thinking that you are an active person who needs to spend the extra resources to build and maintain large muscles, cardiac or lung capacity, or all three. If you are actually active you don't have to 'work out'. Your life is work, and your body adapts.
Once I got past that initial roadblock, I got results even from the gym, but I was able to be more consistent doing it at home.
The trouble with putting on a lot of bulk though, is if you stop. Exercise burns a lot of calories. Persistent exercise therefore changes your notion of what a 'normal' amount of food is. If you stop, it probably due to some major life event, and adjusting your notion of 'normal eating' might get lost in the mix. Which is probably why a lot of pro athletes chunk up when they retire (or get retired). Going from 3-4000 calories a day to under 2500 is quite a lifestyle change.
For anyone interested in learning more about this, it's called "greasing the groove". There are plenty of web articles about it, and it's also covered pretty thoroughly in the book _Overcoming Gravity_ by Steven Low.
edit: Caution: don't start on squats without coaching.
It took 2 months of rereading the squat chapter, filming myself, correcting myself, etc, before I finally got that one down. Now that I understand it, I can spot faults in others, but it took a while for it to click. Rereading the dbook helps, though a couple of Rippetoe's coaching cues set me on the wrong path. A starting strength specific coach can straighten you out in just a couple of sessions. DON'T think any other certification, personal trainer, or coach is a substitute, they are NOT.
Don't do starting strength for a year. (If it takes you that long to do the novice linear progression, you are definitely doing something wrong.) Rippetoe's advice for intermediates is pretty marginal IMO and you can't possibly stay a novice for a year doing the program.
Switch to Barbell Medicine's "the bridge" instead of resetting the weights a second time.
That said, I recommend against people teaching themselves deadlift, because it's not nearly as intuitive, has more potential for injury, etc.
Another funfact is that you can literally go to bed for a few weeks, let muscle atrophy kick in, and lose more weight than any diet+exercise regime. Won't make you healthier, but you'll lose the weight. Yay metrics!
This is a bit disappointing, but I know how the author feels. I can definitely feel like I am going to be judged for being crazy telling people about the strange ways in which I try to empirically optimize my health.
But, nothing is more important than our health, and I think it would have great effects on readers for the author to continue to expand on all of these other great health topics they're interested in. Speaking for myself, I became much more interested in this stuff just after reading some great detailed blog posts from others that are very into biohacking and related areas, and it had a wonderful effect on my life.
I'd love for others to be able to receive the same, much of us often focus too much on technical endeavors and lack giving the proper attention to diet, exercise, and much more. It becomes a lot more interesting and fun to some people when they realize the level of detail, optimization, quantification, and so on, they can put into this.
The best part is that instead of having your code run faster or your customer retention go up, you literally increase your life span and decrease your risk if diseases.
But, to try to provide a more helpful answer, here is two examples of things I do now, with much more detail:
1) I get a lot of (mostly blood) tests, and work to optimize them past 'making sure they are okay'. A lot of basic tests can be kind of pass or fail, like "do you have enough iron?" or "do you have enough vitamins?". But, a lot of other tests are less quantized, and have a lot of room for improvement past just being in the standard range, which does not mean you are optimal, just not doing terribly. A good example for this is an advanced lipid panel, triglycerides, blood pressure, and insulin resistance. Just getting results of "you probably aren't going to have a cardiac event or get diabetes" is good, but they can be optimized much more than this to reduce your long-term probability of many problems to as low as possible. It's also fun to find out the diverse array of other tests you can get to learn more about yourself, and potentially optimize. Nerdy people generally like optimizing things, and having numbers to attach to how well you are doing makes this a lot more alluring, at least for me.
2) A lot of more speculative research on different dietary (whether food, supplements, or drugs) changes that I can make for hope of long-term noticeable improvements. More common examples here might be things like magnesium or Vitamin D, but there's countless rabbit holes you can go down of many, much more interesting examples (For example, metformin, rapamycin, and many many others). The reason I don't provide a list is mostly because everyone is very different and has different goals, and also because I'm not a fan of the (mostly terrible) supplements industry as a whole. But just because so many popular products use junk science and scam consumers, doesn't mean there are many real gems out there.
A change that I would want to see in the food industry is traffic light labeling. This is popular in Europe and in limited use in the US. In this system, food and beverages are labeled by color, with green indicating the healthiest options, and yellow and red less healthy ones. In the UK, total sugar content is used to determine a beverage’s rating, placing juice on par with soda. These simple systems help consumers especially in the western world make better choices, even when they don’t have the time to peruse a nutrition facts label.
It's so hard to visualize small long-term biological changes without moving averages. "Trust the process" is so important.
"Trust the algorithm" is even more apt:
• what/when to eat,
• what/when to train, and conversely
• what/when to rest.
If you haven't seen exercise/nutrition through an algorithmic lens, you might be surprised how straightforward it is to make progress day-to-day and how much progress you can really make in a short period of time. I wish strength training had more academics/coders and fewer 'meatheads' because the documentation around it is so anti-intellectual.
Even as a trainer it's taken time to find reliable resources to optimize this algorithm, but I've been using a solid combination of tools and methodologies that make this complete and quantitative. I have clients that have lost a lot of weight and are lifting serious weight in a short span of time.
It's great to see software engineers speak about health topics in general.
(Personally, I'm probably above-average knowledgeable about fitness, but I still find the information unmanageably overwhelming - train every day, every 3 days, every muscle once a week, every muscle 3 times a week, big muscles less often than small muscles, focus on strength, focus on growth, focus on flexibility, cardio, no cardio, ...)
For generic "get fit" goals, stretch every day and some amount of cardio/resistance training three times a week is hard to get wrong. The important thing is to read your body and don't push your luck. Also, to stop when you lose good form.
There is a lot of overwhelming information, but a lot of it is conflicting and anecdotal. You yourself point out - should you go for growth? 5 days on? 7 days on?? You can find information online to support pretty much any theory you like (particularly about training frequency).
I'm in the process of building the largest online fitness database of its kind to democratize a lot of this information. I'm not sure what sort of business model I will pursue yet. But I want to collaborate with likeminded people and make the foundational information open to the public.
Eventually you'll have to learn through experimentation what works for you. Will take 5 to 10 years.
The thing that makes it alternative is that it sets you up to be reactive rather than prescriptive. A lot of people end up rebelling against prescriptive rules for eating and then fall off the wagon in frustration.
The Blood Glucose monitoring approach is to see what spikes your blood sugar on the idea that higher levels are more likely to lead to reduced insulin sensitivity which often leads to more of the calories you eat being stored as fat. I just take the measurement first thing in the morning.
I find that how I eat shows up in my morning BGL and so I can be a little bit more reactive. If the level is high, then I need to pull harder on some of the levers that day.
This way of thinking also sets you up to have a better personal sense of what levers matter. For me, pasta is much worse than chocolate chips. What really flips my levels though is two high carb meals in the same day.
I stopped doing it and started eating later and later in mid-march. I weighed 153.2 (the heaviest) on May 31. I resumed time restricted eating on June 1 and have consistently done it. I currently weight 147.6 and I feel much better. Less cravings and my pants fit quite nicely again.
Yes, processed sugar is crap, but whole food carbs are not. People who eat mostly whole food plant based diets, in long term studies live the longest and are healthier. And why do people accept processed carbs to be bad but skip the same logic for oils (yeah, squeezed oil is processed food and also pretty much empty calories).
I experimented with a lot of things during my life, one of which was keto diet. I tried it several times for months, but always abandoned it for several reasons. Firstly, I feel like I loose 20+ IQ points on it, I can not think clearly, have brain fog, and after strenuous exercise, I start to forget things. And no, it was not a transitional period, it was the same after 1+ months and I tested ketosis with urine sticks. And it is understandable because brain is the largest consummator of glucose. Second, you do not have the same amount of energy, especially for burst activity. Third, you stink more, my sweat stink more, and breath also (which is kind of normal for keto). And lastly, it is harder to maintain which is not a problem for me if I found it to be beneficial, but it could be problem for many. And one more thing, each time I tried keto, I got sick during the period. It could be coincidence, but probably not.
Now I eat plant based whole food diet. And from all the things I have tried, it thicks all the good boxes. Eating plenty of very tasty foods, never hungry, never have sweets cravings, tons of energy (my libido went through the roof too), extremely easy to loose excess fat (while feeling good during the process), very good workouts and recovery and steady mental energy throughout the day, stool is regular and good, sleep better (and need less of it) and am much happier (yeah, carbs are precursor to serotonin, and fiber feed the gut microbiome which is extremely important for many things and most of serotonin is made in the gut also) etc. And tons of research which supports the benefits of it for longevity, health and sports.
Still it boggles my mind that we somehow managed to vilify foods like a sweet potato or brown rice or whichever carb containing food. I think Pollan summarised it the best : "Eat food (food=unprocessed whole food stuff). Not too much. Mostly plants." That would give 95% of benefits to most people. We get bogged down with details and minute optimisations while loosing the sight of the big picture.
False-positive when you are first starting because you are not well adapted to utilizing ketones and urinate out most of the BHB.
False-negative when you are well adapted because usable fuel will not be wasted in urine.
It is generally accepted that the only foolproof way to truly know if you are in ketosis is to do a blood BHB measurement.
Other than that, I would only comment that it seems there are certain phenotypes that have much more success with low carb diets and vice versa with high carb diets. I don't think it is as easy as dismissing it because you had a poor experience.
Also, not particularly a fan of many of the observational nonsense coming out of both camps (low carb vs plant based) over the last few years. There was a HN article posted a while back but we really have a legitimacy problem in nutritional science right now. P-value hacking and nonsense correlation is just far too common and then most never read the study to get the true story behind the results.
Finally, this is anecdotal but I have known people whose libidos have dropped on low carb diets and also others who lost libido when they went most vegan (whole food, plant based). This supports the idea:
"Figure out what works for you and ignore the rest."
Crazy concept...
And yes, food research is very problematic. Some reasons are valid, for example we will probably never have randomized double blind placebo control study on various food intake patterns which lasts years or decades because it would cost too much and is very hard to do. But we can draw at least some conclusions based on the weight of evidence that we have. My only "problem", setting anecdotes aside, is that people jump on latest trends and make a cult out of it, when there are not even low quality observational studies to support what they claim. For example lately carnivore diet pops up too often with magical claims.
There are differences between people, and some will thrive on some diets where others would be miserable. But that is why we need to find the biggest common ground for all of us first then optimise on differences. Cut all the fluff and pointless optimisations in the beginning, first stick to the most basic things : eat real food, move moderately, sleep well, don't drink alcohol or at least not too often or daily, try to be less reactive (less stressful), do it for a few months and then try to optimise for your ticket in the gene lottery.
The reason our body always favors burning glucose first is NOT because glucose is "better" but actually because it is an inferior type of fuel (it creates "pollution" and is difficult to burn - you can develop diabetes from too much of it) - so our evolved system tries to get rid of it first, while hanging on to the "good stuff" for as long as it can.
This is not the standard textbook biological view of the bodies use of glucose and fats.
I'm all for having heterodox opinions but I think you should let people know what is a heterodox position, and provide more supporting evidence than when giving a textbook explanation.
Also, what is the pollution you are talking about? From what I understand, lipolysis generates ketones, which at normal lipolytic amounts aren't toxic.
In the first stage, I lost about 30lbs. I did not modify my terrible diet, and mostly did cardio (running ~4-5 miles every other day). My health markers (heart rate, blood sugar, blood pressure, cholesterol) improved, but not a lot. I plateaued at 180 for a few years.
Last year, I made some changes and cleaned up my diet. I avoided deserts and all "accidental" carbs (switched away from sandwiches for lunch, etc) and tried to run a bigger calorie deficit. I bought a rowing machine (waterrower like from House of Cards, highly recommend) and replaced running every other day with an hour of rowing, since its a full body workout. I started lifting weights on the alternate days when I was not rowing. I lost 30lbs over the course of about 5 months. After this, all my health markers improved markedly and my doctor stopped wanting to put me on a statin.
In the 9 months since I reached my target weight, I've increased my carbs to make my diet more long-term sustainable, but maintained my activity. My weight has remained steady. Since COVID and the closure of gyms, I've replaced lifting weights with lots of pushups, situps, planks, etc, but I'm worried that is not quite as effective, and i'm looking forward returning to my gym.
Weight loss is difficult and I think everyone, no matter how smart, dumb, famous or obscure they are, has trouble with it. It's always a surprise how difficult it is.
Maybe you don't have to entirely agree with me that Nutrition science's idea of a calorie is the last bastion of phlogiston theory in any science, but surely you can admit that all of the evidence suggests the model isn't accurate enough, continues to give surprising results that do not match reality, (and arguably causes more harm than good in the way some diet plans use calorie deficits as a bludgeon to make people feel bad). The models need to be refined, the human body is not an ideal furnace nor a "spherical cow".
(But yeah, I wish the Apple Watch would let me change all the displays that read "calorie" to just read "phlogiston" as useful as they "are" to me.)
Can anyone point me to more info on this? Yes, I can google it, but the immediate results are things like this:
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/320603
I would like to have something with a little more info about how this works at the molecular level or something.
Also glycogen is what provides your muscles quick access to energy, and is stored within the tissue. It increases dramatically with higher carbs and water.
All of these increase your weight temporarily, but they are not fat. Weight!=fat and you want high glycogen stores in prepartion for a workout. And bodybuilders further manipulate these facts to get a pump and more muscle defintion.
3 meals a day have become the basic necessity for most. Our ancestors used to eat as much as they could because there's no guarantee that they will have enough food until the next hunt. So, the body will go into a state we call "hungry", which reminds us to eat.
However with such plentiful of food available (know it didn't came easily, at least for me, grateful for it, hope that more people is out of hunger), is the feeling of hunger just a placebo effect that we trained ourselves to feel?
I am able to reduce my daily meals to 2 by having a bulletproof coffee in the morning. There's urge to eat between meals but even if I skip them, I'm fine.
Since I have a desk job, I still have plentiful of energy left in the evening for gym time.
One point to argue is nutritions but even if one is eating a lot, there's no guarantee that much of that intake is nutritional.
For whatever it's worth, two tablespoons of butter on your coffee is 204 kcal according to Wolfram Alpha. Even Bulletproof says things like "Bulletproof Coffee is breakfast" and "curbing your hunger with food that keeps you full for hours. Bulletproof Coffee checks those boxes." which I read as saying that they think of it as (liquid) food. https://www.bulletproof.com/recipes/bulletproof-diet-recipes...
You're replacing a potentially less structured breakfast (I eat different breakfasts every day) with a single standardised one. If you buy Bulletproof's analysis, you might be doing something ketogenic which might be beneficial in some way. But you're not skipping a meal. Though there is a blurb on that page that says something like "you're having a meal without breaking your fast because [arbitrary definition we made up on the spot]".
For whatever it's worth, I wouldn't take health advice from a product sold with an origin story of "the founder was dangerously overweight and at acute risk of stroke or heart attack at the age of 30, so the biohacker in them decided it would be smart to go on a difficult mountain trek in Nepal".
That being said, a lot of gym activity that I see is basically useless and probably taken up just to feel good about going to a gym regularly (some examples in my gym: walking on treadmills instead of around the block, paying for membership every month to solely use the 5lb dumbbells for 30 minutes that go for $12 online).
I would say one of the biggest problems is seeing weight loss as either being nutrition or fitness, when it should ALWAYS be seen as a combination.
Why? Because the goal is usually to lose fat. Without muscle stimulus, the body will include muscle in the weight loss. Muscle tissue is important long term for metabolism and other health aspects.
That is my biggest pet peeve in terms of dietary discussions. Many people seem to believe that there is a magical property of "natural sugar" (such as honey or the sugar in fruit) that means it doesn't affect your calorie intake or something and so is okay to add to things, whereas table sugar is processed and therefore somehow totally different.
I believe this myth derives from the fact that high-fructose corn syrup does in fact concentrate sugar. But that doesn't mean it isn't metabolized the same way as other types of sugar, it just means you get the same amount of sweetness in less volume. So that is measured on labels and in the sweetness.
The common thing I hear is something like people saying they had a really delicious mango smoothie but it was totally healthy because they did not add any sugar. Or they switched from putting sugar in their tea to using honey and so now they think they don't get calories from the sweetener in their tea.
https://hackernoon.com/im-32-and-spent-200k-on-biohacking-be...
For those who interested with the topic.
It is really easy to geek out on the complexity of metabolism and how our society interacts with it. Sometimes that's cool, but for getting through life I try to stick to the above.
No matter what you eat and how much you eat, your body will always try to return to normalcy as soon as possible. However, this action itself, metabolizing the excess, is a very energy consuming act. As shown by multiple research, more fat and protein in your diet is harmful and counter-intuitively you need more carbs.
Here we need to view the body as a full system. In fact, just looking at the metabolic cycles should hint at the real reason why people stay fat, but it's a very subtle message.
Drink more water, and avoid ingesting cold things. Eat as normal when your body wants it.
That's pretty much it. Water is needed almost everywhere in the metabolic cycle, and yet it's really dependent on our ability to drink and absorb water. Notably, cold water diffuses slower than warm water, so our body can't absorb it as well. Drinking water solutions like Coke where diffusion favours the Coke than your body cells also hampers absorption. So TLDR: drink warm water.
Next would be eating. Sugars are easily metabolized by your body and are low investment food compared to everything else. However, eaten in excess when your body no longer needs it causes it to be stored as fat, which requires a lot of water and energy. You see where I'm going at? When your body feels hungry, most of the time it means it's processing something and it needs more energy, so we should give it something that's easier to process.
So that's what I've been trying, it actually shocked me with the results. I've been testing with some TCM tea that helps with digestive system functions and it works even faster.
Lean body mass = Total Body Mass - Fat Mass
That's "lean body mass," but it's not 1:1 "muscle mass," because bones, organs, and etc. do not constitute as skeletal muscle, but still take up weight.
And muscle mass itself is a misnomer, because the actual weight of your muscle protein is not 1:1 to the actual weight of your entire muscles.
Most people think muscle is made out of protein, but while that's true, it's not the main way you muscles get "bulk." The main compound that gives muscles "bulk" is water. Usually that's because your muscles have hydrophillic compounds like glycogen (stored sugar), electrolytes like potassium and sodium, and creatine. These latter compounds draw the water into the muscle, and make up for most of its weight and size.
All these compounds get used up during exercise, so your muscle hold less water, and it's technically "consumed" during exercise, and needs to be replenished after. A coincidental fact is that once these stores are depleted, they become "super-sensitizied" that means they're much more likely to take up compounds out of the bloodstream than before. So, exercise depletes them, but if you eat enough after, you can fill them up to be bigger than where they were before.
P.S. I do marathon training and glycogen storing as well as activating the fat burning are essential!
Interestingly, my observation is that increased water consumption impacts metabolism a lot
Note: I lost 4 kgs in 2 months
It’s an excellent textbook. You’ll need a base level of chemistry and biology - not two of my best subjects, But despite that I still got a lot of it.
I'm not following this math here. 678 * 239kcal ~= 162Mcal. But that's a thousand times 162kcal. Seems like 40lb of fat only contains the energy of .678 sticks of dynamite.
One thing missing is the effect of testosterone on lean mass creation.
Wonder if the fat to co2 process can be ventilator assisted without hurting the lungs .
I admire this effort, but I have a huge problem with the conclusions. Simply "avoid carbohydrates" is silly advice. Billions of people live quite healthy lives eating carbs (pasta, bread, rice). How can you ignore this simple fact? I understand what the author is trying to achieve, but... I can't take this as good advice. Bits and pieces, yes. Everything? Unlikely.
1 - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00256...
2 - https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00198-008-0666-3
3 - https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-of-n...
Good sources of potassium include fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts, milk, yogurt and eggs -- or, in other words, anything except meat, cheese, grains, and overly-processed crap. (When cheese precipitates from milk, most potassium remains in the liquid phase. I am not sure if the same happens with tofu.)
I haven't ever really tried to lose weight, but I've always had very strong motivations to maintain low body fat:
- my mother's family has a history of cardiovascular disease (grandfather d. stroke at 67, aunt d.m. type 2)
- my father's family has a high prevalence of obesity
- I have scoliosis with associated back pain
With these factors in mind, I've spent a lot of time combing the USDA nutrient database: http://fdc.nal.usda.gov/ . I don't use an "energy out" calculator -- rather, I keep track of my intake and habits and correlate these to changes in my weight.
The strategies I use are mostly quotidian: every meal must have some dietary fiber; avoid snacking -- drink water first and choose foods with fiber if you must; stay active etc. Possibly the most valuable thing I've learned, though, is how many things -- particularly vegetables -- you can prepare using nothing but an oven and aluminum foil, without making more dirty dishes. This is invaluable for continuing to make healthy choices when it's late and you're tired, or improving a meal that already requires substantial effort. Fatigue is your most formidable enemy, and "lazy cooking" techniques ward it off.