It might be a gray area according to some, but heresy seems like a little much. A google search has only two results in the first page saying that it’s bad, with the rest saying it’s fine. Robb Wolf (a paleo advocate) says that rice is OK for active, healthy people (ctrl+f “rice”), and Mark says that white rice isn’t bad.
ephion
Karma: 559
In this claim, “consume” means the number of calories absorbed by the body, and “burn” means the amount of calories used (or wasted).
You can measure you resting metabolic rate. Most people are close enough to what formulas report that actually measuring your caloric expenditure isn’t terribly useful, but some people (myself included) have slower metabolisms than calculators and formulas predict.
Diets that require expenditure of willpower fail because the willpower expenditure indicates that something is going wrong with your body, which may well be shutting down or slowing down.
This is not true. Willpower expenditure is required for all sorts of decision making activities, so that a diet requires willpower expenditure is not evidence that it is damaging your body. A diet that requires significant willpower is severely suboptimal, which is why very few people report success with intense calorie counting and moderation, and why very many people report success with “trick” diets like Shangri-La, paleo, keto, intermittent fasting, etc.
You only have one pot of willpower. If you use up all your willpower doing professional tasks, exercising, etc then you’ll have less willpower to resist over eating. If you use up all your willpower for weight loss, then you’ll have less willpower for other tasks.
This article (and other research done by the authors) talks about that sort of thing. This is why diets that work are ones that reduce the amount of willpower required, or shift the willpower requirements to situations where it is easier to control your decision making. For example, a low carb diet works because you simply don’t buy carbs at the store, so when you’re at home, you don’t have to expend willpower when you’re hungry and deciding what to eat. Intermittent fasting works because you simply don’t eat breakfast.
I eat for pleasure and I have a hard time moderating my intake, so I’ve worked around this by reducing my breakfast to coffee, yohimbine (caffeine/yohimbine is great for energy and appetite reduction), and fish oil (~2g). Lunch is two cups of milk and two scoops of protein powder as these are all that I have at work, so it is the only option—no willpower used. This puts my daily calories low enough that I can eat as much as I want for dinner and still lose weight consistently.
He’s referenced a lot by paleo and ketogenic diet bloggers. Not sure if he holds much of an audience outside of there.
From a cursory overview, that looks very similar to a standard paleo diet, but without the caveman verbiage or naturalistic fallacy.
It’s true. It’s said that for every gram of glycogen, you need three grams of water to store it. The average person has about 500g of glycogen, so you’d have around 2kg weight loss just in glycogen and water from starting a low carb diet.
It’s a psychological effect. People start the diet, immediately lose 5lbs over a week, and think “OH MY GOD, this is working, I can stick to this!” They establish the habits and systems of losing weight. Then when weight loss slows down to the more reasonable 1-2lbs per week, they aren’t bummed out because they know it’s working.
When they cheat, their weight immediately shoots up—and then when they stick to it, it immediately goes back down. This helped me a lot with getting back on track when I used a low carb diet to lose weight.
Well, I just bumped it very near the top of my list—a lot of the optimizations covered in the original post I’ve already implemented, but it can’t hurt to see if I’ve missed any relatively low hanging fruit. Thanks!
I will still say no because I don’t think food is addictive.
Casomorphins in dairy have opioid effects, as does chocolate. Overconsumption of high-sugar high-fat foods alters opioid receptors in the brain. Naloxone, a drug for treating opiate overdose, is effective in reducing binging.
It also seems that food scientists specifically try to make food as addictive as possible, which seems like an expected outcome from a capitalist food market—whatever encourages the most consumption will win greater market share.
Is it an addiction on par with heroin, alcohol, or tobacco? I doubt it, but using an addiction model might be helpful in treating overeating.
Here is the study cited. There are four health markers that were chosen to be analyzed for this analysis. Actual physical fitness (ie VO2 max, strength, body fat percentage) were not measured. In all but one of the examined studies, diet was not controlled for, and they specifically only included endurance exercise, when virtually every recommendation is to combine endurance and strength exercise. Claiming that this population doesn’t respond to exercise is a vast overstatement. More accurately, you might be able to say that “Endurance exercise alone isn’t sufficient to improve health markers in a small fraction of the population.”
EDIT: The inverse to that is “Endurance exercise alone is sufficient to improve health markers in most of the population,” which doesn’t strike me as a good reason to not prescribe it.
No mention of the possibility that some people just don’t benefit from exercise.
Exercise science is a notoriously poorly executed field, so I’d take any studies done with a decently sized grain of salt. This study gets referenced very frequently as evidence for exercise non-responders. However, anyone with even a surface level knowledge of fitness knows that diet and training must work in synergy to achieve a goal, and this study did not consider diet, calories, or nutrition. If you are not eating enough food to recover from exercise, your strength and fitness will go down (along with your weight). Minimizing muscle loss is the reason why 1-2lb is the recommended rate for losing weight. This chart is pulled from the study, and it shows that a combination of strength endurance training is beneficial for the vast majority of the study population (older adults). The small groups that are negative or non-responders were likely just not eating enough to recover from exercise, rather than some group which mysteriously doesn’t benefit from exercise at all.
This article is cited by the video you’ve posted, and also does not mention diet, nutrition, calories, etc. I checked the studies analyzed for dietary controls, and only the STRRIDE mentioned bodyweight and nutrition controls. The meta-analysis seems to exclude non-endurance training, and the risk factors it identifies are related to disease, not fitness. At best it can claim that endurance exercise doesn’t improve disease markers in a tiny subset of the population. With so many factors not being controlled for, to me the probability that hypothesis “Some people don’t respond to exercise” is true is much lower than the hypothesis “Exercise alone isn’t sufficient to reverse negative health markers caused by unhealthy diet and weight in a small population.”
I believe that they don’t mention exercise non-responders because it’s unlikely that that is even real for normal population. Unless you have muscular dystrophy or some similar disease, you will gain strength, muscle mass, and bone density by weight training and eating a caloric surplus. People with weak bones, muscles, and connective tissue are more fragile and prone to injury, and as you get progressively weaker, the injuries become more devastating. By becoming stronger, you become more resilient to injury.
Reliability for SSDs is better than for HDD. However, they aren’t so much more reliable that it alters best practices for important data keeping—at least two backups, and one off site.
It seems to me that Soylent is at least as healthy as many protein powders and mass gainers that athletes and bodybuilders have been using for quite some time. That is to say, it depends on quality manufacturing. If Soylent does a poor job picking their suppliers, then it might be actively toxic.
Based on that, it seems like it’s best to get one with only a solid-state drive and no magnetic drive. Is that accurate?
Not necessarily. Most laptops nowadays are equipped with anti shock hard drive mounts and the hard drives are specially designed to be resistant to shock. The advantages for an SSD are speed, not reliability.
This reliability report (with this caveat) indicates that Samsung is the most reliable brand on the market for now. I’ve always considered Lenovo and ASUS to be high quality, with ASUS generally having cheaper and more powerful computers (and a trade off in actually figuring out which one you want, that website is terrible).
If you are backing up your data responsibly, the SSD failure isn’t as much of an issue. And if you aren’t backing up your data, then you need to take care of that before worrying about storage failure.
A glass of wine (or two (or three)) or a beer after a workout have noticeably improved how I feel the next day. I didn’t believe this post either, but it appears to have panned out.
I’d like to see creatine included, just because most people would see mental and physical benefits from supplementation. The micronutrients otherwise look good. I’ve read things to the effect that real food is superior to supplementation (example), so I don’t think that this is a suitable replacement to a healthy diet. I do think that this will be a significant improvement over the Standard American Diet, and a step up for the majority of people.
The macronutrients also look good—especially the fish oil! 102g of protein is a solid amount for a non-athlete, and athletes can easily eat more protein if desired. Rice protein is pretty terrible to eat, I hope that they get that figured out. I’d probably prefer less carbs and more fat for myself, but I think that’s just a quirk of my own biology.
The human mind is an incredibly powerful and really weird contraption. If it believes something to be true, then it almost bends reality to make it so. This is most easily demonstrated with the placebo effect—which works, even if patients know it’s a placebo. Buddhist monks can alter their body temperature through meditation. Athletes can train for years in order to achieve superhuman levels of strength.
Unfortunately, that power works both ways—if you believe that you’re incapable of something, you will fail, even if you’re otherwise capable. Most people limit themselves by believing that they’re less capable than they really are. Most people give up when they could push through and succeed.
This point is highly suspect and should be easy to test. There are people who live on raw foodstuffs and do just fine. If you don’t believe it, try it for a while.
A raw food diet that a modern consumer with access to supermarkets and kitchen equipment might try would not resemble a raw diet in pre-agricultural times. Most raw food diets strongly recommend juicing, blending, mixing, etc. which are essentially pre-digestion. Furthermore, they’re also generally billed as “weight loss diets,” allowing sedentary people to lose weight without exercising—the calorie total might be in the 1000-1500 range.
Cooking greatly increases how many things you can eat, what’s safe to eat, and how many calories you can fit into your stomach. Cooking might decrease nutrient absorption by 5-10%,but when you can eat 50-100% more, it’s a fine trade.
I’m training for strength sports, and this involves cycles of gaining weight to add muscle and losing weight to cut fat. As such, I’ve done a number of weight loss diets in the past two years, and this is what I’ve found to work every time for me (or, consistently).