Gettin’ shredded: Hunger abatement methods

So I’m digging into the “induction phase” on Kiefer’s Carb Backloading diet plan.  Some of you will be grimly sympathetic already; “induction” on a ketogenic diet plan basically means “depleting all the glycogen in your body until you get fully into ketosis (and incidentally feel like shit for a week)”.  Yeah, lucky me.  Glycogen depletion is the price I have to pay for slamming Pringles and Rockets after my workouts.  At least I get to drink while I do it (fun fact: alcohol without carbs hastens and deepens ketosis, hence the “alcoholic ketoacidosis” that’s freaking out your pharm-major friends when they hear about Atkins).

Keto sucks; “low-carb flu” and struggling with 60% of your max for sets of five is an enormous pain in the ass, but that’s what we have to go through to earn our sushi rice and carby treats once we get to the glycogen loading phase.  I have yet to find a way around that.  Dieting in general sucks, because when you’re in an effective state of calorie depletion you get hungry.  I have found a few ways to mitigate that, and I’ma write about them here.

Intermittent fasting

Yes, to deal with hunger I suggest you skip breakfast.  Yes, this is part of my ongoing jihad against meals in the morning, but hear me out and you might learn something.

First off, IFing helps you deal with ghrelin better.  Ghrelin is, among other things, the “hunger hormone”, and it does neat things like sharpen your awareness and make you think better.  So bathing in ghrelin every morning isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  But from a hunger perspective, once you’ve come to terms with “zOMG I can’t eat until noon and it’s only 8:30 FFFFFUUUUUUUUU…” there’s not a hell of a lot else that dieting can throw at you from an acute hunger perspective.  You get really hungry around 10, deal with it for half an hour or so, and then realize that it’s not such a big deal.

By far the bigger benefit of IFing, though, is that you backload your meals.  On a “normal, sensible” diet, you eat a breakfast that doesn’t quite satisfy; a lunch that doesn’t quite satisfy; and a dinner that doesn’t quite satisfy.  You’re always hungry, and you always have to stop eating before you’re satiated.  When you’re IFing, though, you get to eat a big (er, “normal”) lunch and a big (er, “normal”) dinner, to the point where you’re stretching your stomach sufficiently for it to send “stop eating, dammit” signals.  IFing, you can eat to the point where you’re full and want to stop, rather to a point where you know you ought to stop and can convince yourself that you’ll be full-ish, kinda, relatively speaking.  It’s good.

Also, you can sleep in an extra half hour.

Protein shakes before meals

This is another “fucking with your satiety response” trick, which is how many diets work (until they stop working).  Simple idea: About half an hour before you eat a meal, start drinking a protein shake.  Give it a good 40g of protein, and while you’re at it throw in a teaspoon of Metamucil and a teaspoon of some greens powder.  You’re probably not getting enough veggies anyway, and the fibre is good for (a) enhancing your sense of satiety and (b) giving you some truly majestic shits, especially if you do the right thing and eat veggies with all your meals.  (Fibre also tends to carry off some of the kcal from your meal with it down your colon, although I’m not sure if consuming it before a meal makes this work.)

Plan some smaller meals and chug a protein shake before each.  When you’re on a kcal deficit you want to be taking in more protein anyway, to minimize lean tissue loss among other things, so you should be doing this anyway, but the protein shakes will increase your satiety on each of the smaller meals.  And you never know, you might actually put on some muscle or something useful like that.

Ephedrine + caffeine stack

It works, bitches.  Take 20mg of Ephedrine HCl and 200mg of caffeine when you get up in the morning, then again about four hours later.  EC is thermogenic in general, so you should be stacking it anyway, but for the first few weeks (months?  Depends) that you take it it’s also a mild appetite suppressant.  And seriously, stacking EC is cheaper than lentils, why would you not.

I’m told that taking L-tyrosine with EC can potentiate its appetite suppressant effects even after it’s stopped being effective, and L-tyrosine seems to be well-regarded as a peri-workout stimulant anyway.  If it’s cheap (I haven’t played with it at all, ever), go for it.

L-carnitine

I’m going to throw out some props to my favourite nootropic ever.  L-carnitine L-tartrate is fucking amazing, for me, for sheer focus.  Want some extra willpower for five minutes or so?  Listen to Hatebreed.  Want some extra willpower for two hours or so?  Pop some LCLT.  I’ve been sticking to at most 1.5g/day to avoid developing a tolerance, and so far it’s still helpful for (among other things) getting me to the gym when my fuckitometer is reading high.  I think I’ve mentioned before that if I’d been slamming this stuff in junior high, I might’ve gone to MIT.  Not cheap, but not out of sight pricey.

Find a diet plan you can stick to

Something like Cheat Mode, where you carb up after heavy workouts, helps a fuck of a lot because it gives you a chance to eat your face off under controlled circumstances.  I ate Cheat Mode for half a year or so and probably lost about half a pound of fat per month, because I wasn’t really trying.  I ate a Mk. 1 mod 0 targeted ketogenic diet, lost just under a pound a week, and hated it for a month and a half because there was no real payoff.  I ran Lyle’s Ultimate Diet 2.0 and lost over a pound a week, and my carb-ups were fucking glorious.  Right now I’m giving carb backloading a shot, with the hope of finding something somewhere in between.  Try a bunch of different plans, and see what works best for you.

Suck it up or stay fat

This is the last piece of advice from the Lyle McDonald article that sort-of inspired this one.  If you’re in a kcal deficit, you’re probably going to get hungry.  Embrace it; that means you’re doing something right.  Yeah, it sucks; put on some metal and get over it.  Embrace the suck.  Most of hunger is just habit; your body telling you “I’m used to getting a meal half an hour ago, and I don’t see no meal here; what the fuck, buddy?”  Give it a week and that gnawing hunger won’t gnaw quite so hard.  Make ghrelin your bitch.

I will also say that you shouldn’t be going hardcore kcal-deficit for too long — work in a cheat meal every week or ten days, and work in a total diet break every two months or thereabouts.  (Want more details?  Buy Lyle McD’s books; that’s where I get much of my info, and I’m not about to give away his ideas for free.)

Drinking is good for you

(Sorry guys, this isn’t a nutrition post; I’m just quoting Korpiklaani.)

Eric Crampton leaves us with an entertaining anecdote and a fascinating statistic:

There’s a longstanding alcohol wage puzzle: drinkers earn more than non-drinkers even after correcting for a bunch of stuff. Chris Auld found that moderate drinkers earn 10% more than non-drinkers and that heavy drinkers earn 12% more than non-drinkers; plenty of other studies have found similar effects.

Correlation not being causation, I look for upstream connections.  Way back when, Psychology Today noted that intelligent people drink more, and it doesn’t take Bryan Caplan to deduce that intelligence is a half-decent predictor of income.  I’d lay 90% odds on smart people not being able to get through a day surrounded by nattering nihilistic nabobs without the promise of getting soaked at the end, and 10% on an eerie Harrison Bergeron-style conspiracy in which normals are made to feel better about themselves because they can be almost as productive as I can when I’m murderously hungover.

In which I stay cool

Got a bunch of traffic on the previous post because Robin Hanson fucking linked it.

I feel rather like Dennis.

Ads make the ‘net go ’round

Robin Hanson has a very Robin Hansonny post up:

• In praise of ads (Overcoming Bias)

It’s fairly short, so you should go read the whole thing, but I’m a big fan of this bit:

Many see ads as unwelcome persuasion, changing our beliefs and behaviors contrary to how we want these to change. But given a choice between ad-based and ad-free channels, most usually choose ad-based channels, suggesting that they consider the price and convenience savings of such channels to more than compensate for any lost time or distorted behaviors. Thus most folks mostly approve (relative to their options) of how ads change their behavior.

I’ve been arguing for some time that the news media exist primarily to sell advertising space and only incidentally to provide whatever acts of journalism they may inflict upon innocent consumers.  If you want a paper without ads, you probably want a paper that costs twenty bucks a copy (and for which there’s no market, which is why you can’t get one).  Oh, are you one of those clever fellows who uses something like Adblock Plus?  Congratulations, you’re a moocher!  Savvy folk like you evade online ads, but the sites that depend upon ad revenue don’t get any less dependent — so they make ads ever more intrusive, to the detriment of people like your grandmother who aren’t quite as savvy.  Dick.

But if most people dislike ads, it’s interesting to ask why.  Robin has some ideas:

One plausible reason is that ads expose our hypocrisies – to admit we like ads is to admit we care a lot about the kinds of things that ads tend to focus on, like sex appeal, and we’d rather think we care more about other things.

Another plausible reason is that we resent our core identities being formed via options offered by big greedy firms who care little for the ideals which we espouse. According to our still deeply-embedded forager sensibilities, identities are supposed to be formed via informal interactions between apparently equal associates who share basic values.

Permit me to offer a couple more:

First of all, the story that “ads are an evil destructive manipulative force that exists only because big bad firms run the world, and use ads to control us all” isn’t just a great piece of anti-corporate, pro-the-rest-of-us in-group signalling (which is useful by itself, as you’ve noticed by my use of the word “signalling”).  It’s also a great way to abrogate responsibility.  ”Oh, it’s not my fault that I just devoured a large cheese-crust pizza and washed it down with two litres of Coke – teh ebil corporate ads brainwashed me into thinking I wanted it!”  It’s a fantastically (heh) effective fairy tale to tell when cognitive dissonance rears its ugly head: If someone (or some group) is behaving in a way that’s inconsistent with your world-view, it must be because an evil corporation or special interest group or even the Goddamn Liberal Media has advertised to them.

Were that the case, I don’t doubt that McDonalds and &c. would have brainwashed us all into believing that soyburgers are the tastiest things on the planet — surely it’s more profitable to turn soy directly into a burger patty and sell that to the consumer than it is to run tons of it through a cow first.  The fact that they haven’t — indeed, fast food menus are chasing consumer preference rather than creating it — suggests to me that advertising isn’t quite so goddamn powerful as we like to pretend.  But rather than acknowledge an unpleasant truth, we prefer to double down (heh) and impute to ads ever more astonishing powers of persuasion.

My second suggestion is unrelated: We feel cheated by ads.  Here I am, trying to watch a football game on a cable channel I’m already paying for.  All of a sudden, play stops, and General Motors is trying to sell me a Buick on the startlingly unlikely premise that the fucking thing’s sporty.  This isn’t what I bought!  I bought a (subscription to a (cable package which includes a)) sports channel!  Get the fuck off of my TV, General Motors, you parasitic wretch, and get back to the bittersweet spectacle of the Bengals breaking my heart again!

Nobody subscribes to a basic cable and ads package, or reads a blog for political commentary and ads.  The ads tag along in an unwelcome symbiosis.  The only exceptions that spring to mind are movie trailers and Super Bowl ads — welcome and expected parts of either experience.

(I’d add something about most ads landing somewhere in the realm between banal and idiotic — no, AdSense, I don’t need to know the one weird tip that a mom discovered to give me striated glutes — but people read Buzzfeed and watch Two And A Half Men, so I’m not convinced that the ads are any worse than the content.)

In any case, if you’re not paying through the nose for some content you enjoy, you should probably thank advertisers for the privilege.

Self-reporting shenanigans

The careful reader will know that I’m no fan of epidemiological studies.  I expect that they have their uses in some arenas, but the context in which I tend to see them is personal health — and they’re generally worse than useless.  But even worse than a run-of-the-mill epidemiological study is one based entirely upon self-reported data.

“Hi, I’m calling from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.  I’d like to ask you some questions about your loathsome, immoral, un-American fatassedness.  To begin, what is your current height and weight?”

Does that sound like a reliable method for obtaining high-quality data to you?

Hence, I find this report utterly hilarious:

• People in the South are not so fat after all — and they lie less (Mike Oliver)

Looking at the numbers shows the wide discrepancy between what people say on the telephone and the physical evidence of actually getting weighed. When weighed in the REGARDS study, all of the regions’ obesity’s numbers went up — it’s just that the southern region numbers went up less.

“Everybody underreports their weight but women do it more,” Howard said.

Men, on the other hand, do something else that affects the Body Mass Index, which is weight divided by height squared and is used to define obesity.

“They overreport their height, which makes them seem less obese.”

It’s difficult to tell from the abstract whether the authors somehow corrected for the BMI’s manifold and obvious deficiencies, but it hardly matters.  The real punchline here is that many published obesity researchers — and the policy wonks who craft legislation from their abstracts and maybe a few of the more colourful figures — are astonishingly naive.

When your name is a verb

Via Tyler Cowen we discover this post on efficient charitability from Scott Alexander:

• Investment and inefficient charity (Slate Star Codex)

It’s worth reading in full, if only to get the context for this line:

Then Robin Hanson of Overcoming Bias got up and just started Robin Hansonning at everybody.

Which leads, inexorably, to this:

I have never seen a group of distinguished Berkeley faculty gain so sudden and intuitive an appreciation for the Athenians who decided to put Socrates to death. I spent the whole speech grinning like an idiot and probably scared Robin a little. And okay, some of that was because I woke up really early to get to the airport today and had become dangerously overtired and mentally imbalanced, but the rest of it was just that he sounds exactly like he does on his blog, he’s a great speaker, and it was just really funny in a train-wreck sort of way to watch a whole room of innocent and basically decent people get Hansonned.

Just, wow.

Stop doing that

Megan McArdle and Brett Arends lay a knowledge carpet-bombing on the internet:

• Mom and Pop: The world’s worst investors (WSJ MarketWatch)
• You are a terrible investor and you should stop that (Asymmetric Information)

Read Arends’s story for the context, but McArdle’s polemic for lines like these:

Markets are herd phenomena, and you should never forget that you are part of the herd.  When everyone is stampeding into a stock, that’s the worst time to buy, because it means that the price is probably too high.  But that’s when you’re going to want to buy, because–momentum!  Plus it feels safer when all of your neighbors are doing it.

This is how hunter gatherers used to be able to drive 10,000 wildebeests over a cliff without any of them stopping and saying, “Hey, guys, this seems like a bad idea.  Let’s stop and have a think about this.”

[...]

You guys have enough money to save, which I can scientifically prove because your grandparents almost certainly lived on a small fraction of what you now do.  And don’t tell me things were cheaper, back in the good old days: in almost all cases their houses were smaller, less well heated, and entirely un-air-conditioned; their entertainment budgets were much leaner; their groceries heavier on the cheap and utilitarian and lighter on the tasty and expensive.  They literally had about a quarter as many clothes as the ones bursting out of your closet.  Their health care was cheaper because it sucked and they died quicker.

You have enough money to save and still live a rich, satisfying life.  What you maybe don’t have is enough money to save while enjoying what you have come to think of as the minimal standard of living for your peer group.

I have nothing to add beyond RTWT.

Classic British one-upmanship

All y’all remember “Helicopter Ben” Bernake, right?

Well, the Brits seem to have found out about this upstart Colonial plot to drop a million dollars out of a helicopter, and are one-upping Us Across The Pond with a million Euros on a military transport:

• Britain’s “bailout” for Cyprus: An airplane full of cash (Motherboard)

Somebody got trolled, I’m just not sure who.