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.)

Bulkin’ ain’t easy

The latest post at SuppVersity is relevant to what I was saying about bulking from lean being more efficient (and what I’m probably going to say about macronutrient composition if/when I get around to writing about it).  Lots of good crunchy data; go have a read.

Gettin’ shredded: Why the hell would I do this to myself?

Shredded (adj) – possessing notably low levels of subcutaneous body fat, so that vascular and muscular definition is easily seen by awestruck onlookers.

Dieting — by which I mean honest-to-balls dieting, trying to drop significant amounts of fat while preserving lean mass — sucks.

Despite what the magic-macro peddlers will promise you, you’re going to get hungry.  You’re going to spend irritating and inconvenient amounts of time preparing meals, calculating kcal and macros in at least rough proportions, and awkwardly dodging at least a few social events.  Your strength is going to go down, at least some of the time, and your gains are going to grind to a halt (or nearly so).  You’re going to drink a lot less beer than you want to.  All that stacks up against maddeningly slow progress measured by infinitesimal changes in belt tightness or the length of the vein that’s starting to pop out on your bicep, with your metabolism being an asshole in the process and occasionally stacking up five or six pounds of fluid for no good goddamn reason at all except to test your will.  I’m told that, once I get down to a certain level of leanness, the dieting game will get closer to fun as feedback gets closer to real-time — “Sure, I haven’t had an IPA in months, but I found new veins on my abs this morning!” — but I’m not there yet.

I wasn’t fat by any standard, except perhaps that of a competitive bodybuilder, when I got serious about getting my shred on this winter.  There were no dire warnings of impending health problems, no awkward “real talk” interventions from concerned friends.  I was sitting around 185 with a blurry but persistent two-pack, slamming meat slop and watching my squat inch higher at an agonizing pace.  I put on about 20lbs over the course of 2012, and most of it — greater than half, at least — was muscle.  Pretty good by the standards of the general population, right?  Cool story bro.

So one answer is vanity.  Not just “I want men to shrivel and women to swoon when I wear a t-shirt” vanity, but the fundamental existentialist drive to be better than two standard deviations above the mean in everything I care about (and can affect).  I earned a Ph.D.; I deadlift four plates; and I once described my job as “saving the world with linear algebra”.  By the standards of the truly elite, I’m weaksauce, but compared to a distribution with seven billion samples I’m doing pretty well.  That self-image won’t tolerate hot-dog rolls of lower back fat.

But then again, I’ve been an arrogant asshole for at least two decades.

The second answer is sheer cussedness, the obverse of the “fundamental existentialist” coin.  I’ve never been truly lean before.  I want to see if I can do it.  I might get there and think “this is cool, but IPA tastes better than veins on my abs look, so fuck it”.  But I’ll have gotten there, and I’ll know that I can get back.

But I’ve been an arrogant existentialist asshole for well over a decade.

The real answer, the real driving motivation here, is that I’m a strength nerd with equal emphasis on “strength” and “nerd”.  To get stronger I need to add muscle — broad strokes here, maybe we’ll talk about neurological adaptations later — and I’m not being terribly efficient about that if half of the mass I put on is fat.  Worse yet, that fat is metabolically active, slurping up kcal, fucking up my insulin response, and shitting out estradiol — not what a growing boy needs, unless “growing” refers to gynecomastia and prostate cancer.  Simply put, bulking produces more muscle and less fat at lower starting body fat percentages.  That’s what I’m after.  I want to cut for a year and bulk for a decade.

Also, I’ve been looking for diet plans that (a) fit with and enhance my understanding of energy metabolism and (b) don’t suck all of the booze and bacon out of my life.  I’ve come across a few candidates, and I’ll blog about them later on.  I’ve yet to find anything resembling a free lunch, of course, but if you’re willing to lift like you mean it you can put yourself in the somewhat awkward situation of not being able to eat enough chips and candy to satisfy your diet over the next thirty hours.  Slamming a stack of Pringles and following it up with half a pound of Rockets – and then going to bed wondering how you’re going to get twice that volume of carbs the next day — is a peculiar kind of fun, but I’d recommend it.  I’ll explain glycogen supercompensation a few posts down the line.

One last word, if you’re interested enough to have read this far down the page: I won’t pretend that I can tell anyone else how to get lean.  I’ll write about how the things I’ve tried have shaken out for me.  You might be able to apply some of it — maybe even all of it — but don’t blithely accept anything I claim as typical or universal.

Update: Digging around a bit I found this article on meat toxins by SilverHydra (you know, “meat slop guy”).  Turns out that the Maillard reaction, which is responsible for that delicious brown crust on meat, produces “advanced glycemic end-products”, which appear to be (at least in part) responsible for the horrors that a diabetic body inflicts upon itself.  So getting lean means being able to eat more tasty meat.  (That article’s also great on its own merits, and follow through to the one on aromatase too.  That’ll come up when I tell you to eat yer fuckin’ veggies, just like Mom said.)

Outrage fatigue II: And your little dog too

I have a great idea for a series of posts, if not a whole website.  Titled Goalposts, it would chronicle the continuum fallacies perpetrated by people I don’t like* who insist that since a bad thing (e.g. warrantless wiretapping) isn’t immediately a much worse thing (e.g. a Stasi-like police state), the first bad thing isn’t actually bad at all.  (“If it’s not the worst thing ever, it must be okay” is the continuum fallacy in play here.)  Then, when the much worse thing they dismissively toss out as an unthinkable absurdity actually happens, I dance my little I-told-you-so jig, post an amusing image macro, and record the new location of the unthinkable-absurdity much-worse-thing goalposts.  ”Banning trans fats isn’t an infringement of liberty!  All we’re doing is regulating a chemical that’s well-known to be toxic in humans.  Quit talking about Prohibition; it’s not like we’re banning large sodas or something asinine like that!”

Unfortunately, I can’t bring myself to document the process of the world going to hell in quite such real-time obsessive detail.  I’m slowly trying to build myself a beautiful bubble, and to my pleasant surprise I’m actually making progress and feeling more optimistic less carnassial as a result.  I’m unlikely to improve the state of the world by blogging about outrages or by chronicling the mendacities and idiocies of the politicians and parties for whom I might vote (or for that matter by voting) nearly as much as I might by doing my job well, being nice(r) to people, and maybe even writing some useful software on my own time.

I doubt very much that I’ll give up ranting about stupid shit entirely (I didn’t last time, and neither has Bryan Caplan), so at some point in the future you’ll probably see more vitriolic rantage.  But until I start feeling less like a pale shadow of Kafka and more like a pale shadow of Voltaire, politiblogging can make its dick like a Klein bottle and go fuck its own pisshole.

That doesn’t mean I’ma quit blogging altogether, though.  If nothing else you’re probably going to read a bit more about my continuing quest to get jacked.  Presently I’m trying to get lean as fuck, which is boring as hell so I want to do it in a hurry, and I’d really like to do it without losing appreciable amounts of strength.  Sound unlikely?  Yeah, me too, but so far I’ve tried a couple of Lyle McDonald’s diets (targeted ketogenic and Ultimate Diet 2.0) and seen some encouraging results.  I’ll probably write about those soon.  I’m also gearing up to give Kiefer’s Carb Backloading plan a try, which looks a hell of a lot like Cheat Mode on steroids (perhaps a poor choice of metaphor, that).

I’m also likely to keep ranting about stupid nutrition tricks.  On which note, PopSci recently(ish) debunked eight ridiculous nutrition myths which, like most ridiculous nutrition myths, were largely debunked by mid-century physical culturists (who in turn were largely written off as idiotic and dangerously unbalanced meatheads until the paleo movement rediscovered them within roughly the last decade).  You could just flip through my blog archives, I think I’ve covered all of these, but PopSci has new and different citations which is always cool.  Too bad they didn’t bring up breakfast.

——

* I’m an equal-opportunity misanthrope, so this includes pretty much everyone

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.

RMR and daily calorie counts are bullshit

You heard me.

Okay, maybe for J. Random Sedentary Individual it’s worthwhile to plug your bodyweight and “daily activity type” into an online calculator and come up with a random number between 1800 and 2500, but I’m working on the assumption that anyone for whom that game’s appropriate clicks “next” as soon as they realize I’m writing about nutrition.  The rest of you, I figure, are doing some sort of exercise intense enough that you can’t do it every goddamn day at the same intensity without turning into a weeping ball of cytokines and injury.  My bias leans heavily toward weight training, but I’ve been reading Lyle McDonald’s ebooks lately and he’s convinced me that there are some fucking hardcore endurance athletes out there.

Anyway, it’s example time.  Suppose you’re a Mk. 1 mod 0 standard-issue college lifter on the oldest split known to humankind:

• Monday: Chest and bis
• Wednesday: Back, shoulders, tris
• Friday: Legs, abs

You might burn through, I dunno, 2200 kcal over the course of a Sunday that consists of seven hours of Call of Duty followed by an extended six-hour session of twelve-ounce curls.  On the other hand, maybe on Friday you ate up closer to 5000 kcal over the course of six sets of heavy squats, whatever ab shit you kids do these days, three hours of dancing at the club, and twenty seconds of wet slapping noises.  And Saturday?  Started with an impromptu 400m sprint and a brief but violent puke that made your abs hurt worse than yesterday’s workout, followed by a gruelling twelve hours on the couch because (unlike most people at the gym) you actually took your squats seriously.  So based on all that, what are your macro targets for a day’s eating, huh?  Sixty grams of carbs gonna cut it?

The problem is, figuring out exactly how much you “have to” eat on any given day is a constantly moving and incredibly obscure target.  ”Eat for what you’re going to do” is a great piece of advice; problem is, “what you’re going to do” probably consists mostly of “recovering from what you’ve already done” (except when it doesn’t, you’re sprinting hills in an hour and you need some muscle glycogen RIGHT NOW, DAMMIT).  It’s sort of useful to micromanage your diet on an hourly sort of basis — “get some fructose-bearing carbs a couple hours before your workout to load up on liver glycogen and create an anabolic environment”, “get some starchy carbs right after your workout to replenish muscle glycogen and facilitate myosynthesis”, blah blah blah you already know this stuff if you’ve read about Cheat Mode and Leangains and googled Lyle McDonald and &c.  This is the sort of micro you do because fiddling with your diet gives you a nerd boner so hard it could cut diamonds; it is not the crucial difference between a fat lump of lard and a taut muscular physique.

Y’see, even if you agonize over every last detail, any changes in your physique or performance are going to happen agonizingly slowly.  ”Oh no, I ate a carb and dropped out of ketosis for half a minute three hours before my scheduled refeed!”  Well, that’s a fucking disaster you’ll never notice in the mirror or on the scale.  ”I forgot to drink my third protein shake yesterday, I only got 0.9g/lb instead of 1.1g/lb!”  Life is hard.  Cowboy up and have an extra can of tuna today, your nitrogen balance will not know the difference.  If you’re leaning out, probably you’re losing at most a pound of fat a week.  If you’re bulking, probably you’re gaining at most half a pound of muscle a week.  Getting the balance wrong for a day, which incidentally you’re going to do anyway because you’re vastly unlikely to be able to predict your kcal/macro needs if one day is interval hell and the next is… well, the day after interval hell, is not going to make a noticeable difference.

Which gives one to wonder why people obsess over calorie and macro counts for individual meals.  ”That was a rounded scoop of protein powder, not a level scoop, I bet it has 20g of protein rather than 19.5g.”  Seriously?  If you like micromanagement that much, play Starcraft.  Similarly, don’t weigh each chicken breast you put on the grill — just add up the flats you buy on grocery day and figure out how much protein and fat they’re putting into your weekly diet.  And don’t weigh out your spinach because you’re worried about blowing your diet.  Just don’t.  Spend that time studying two rax openings, because your life needs more Starcraft and less FUCKING AROUND WITH SPINACH.

“But how will I know how much to eat if I don’t calc out my macros, huh Matt, huh, smart guy, huh?” Well, I dunno, you’re eating something now, right?  And probably you’re either happy with where you are, in terms of your physique and performance goals, or you’d like to get bigger/stronger, or you’d like to get leaner.  So take the first thing and figure out — roughly! — what you’re eating on a weekly basis.  Maybe you’d like to get a bit more out of your training, so you drop some waxy maize — or some ground-up Rice Krispies, same deal — into your pre/peri/post workout shakes.  Try that for a few weeks.  How’s it work?  Maybe you’d like to see visual evidence of your lower abs, so you tearfully stop putting bacon into your meat slops.  Try that for a few weeks.  How’s it work?

Point being: You already have a baseline diet.  It’s what you’re eating now.  Unless your body weight’s steadily increasing (or decreasing) it’s probably pretty close to your baseline metabolic requirement for your current weight, body comp, and activity level.  And while it might vary from day to day it’s probably pretty consistent over the course of a week, or maybe you’re a special snowflake and it’s only consistent across a two-week window.  That’s where you need to start, not “if I park at the far end of the lot I’ll burn between 56 and 59 kcal walking to the grocery store, which is like almost a third of a cake-pop!”  Eat a damn cake pop if you want it and fold it into your weekly diet if it’s a regular thing.  If you’re worried about cake pops you need to squat more, anyway.

Olympic regression complexes

As usual my queue of “someone was wrong on the internet” rant fodder is overflowing, but I continue to suffer from elevated levels of dilligaf secondary to chronic outrage fatigue.  Look, the TSA are being sadistic assholes again.  I guess that means only libertarians and (checks federal balance of power) some Republicans will raise a stink, while neocons and (checks federal balance of power) Democrats will snidely dismiss the complaint as “whining”.  So it goes in this best of all possible worlds.

I’m also suffering from fatigue fatigue subsequent to today being deadlift day.  With that in mind, I’ve gotta link to Wil Fleming’s outstanding post on T-Nation today:

• Olympic lift variations to get big

That title is, um, less than encouraging.  It brings to mind absurdities like “Do 3×12 split-stance Zercher kettlebell half cleans with a slow, five-count eccentric to get hyooge!  Look, I said “clean”, it’s Olympic lifting and stuff!”  But Fleming is smart and his article is blindingly clear.  Regression complexes will make you more awesome.  (And somehow, until I watched his videos, I’d never realized that high pulls are a great way to practice scooping the bar.)  I’d give it two thumbs up but, well, hook grip.

On the off-chance that you’re bored by both my minimal political content and by that link, have some metal (you might, er, want headphones if you’re at work):

It’s gotta be the shoes

(This is a nitpicky lifting post.  If you want something else, I suggest Axis of Oversteer or EconLog.)

If you read a book on lifting, it’ll eventually have a section on gear, and if it’s any good that section will talk about shoes.  Most will tell you not to lift in squishy-heeled cross trainers or the like — not that this stops anyone — because the lack of heel stability will fuck you right up.  Instead, they’ll tell you to pick a shoe with a “flat, solid sole”.  The better books will briefly mention weightlifting shoes, then suggest Converse All-Stars and simply lifting in your socks as “practical” options for “real-world” lifters.  I presume some of the newer books mention minimal shoes like Vibram Five-Fingers.

Mark Rippetoe doesn’t fuck around in Starting Strength:

Shoes are the only piece of personal equipment that you really need to own.  It takes only one set of five in a pair of squat shoes to demonstrate this convincingly to anybody who has done more than one squat workout.  [...]

Just buy the damn shoes.

I squatted for years in a pair of Converse All-Stars and “never had a problem with it”.  About a month ago I just bought the damn shoes.  (I’m linking to those shoes because they’re the ones I bought, not because I think they’re the best there is or because I’ve sold out to Rogue.  This post is about lifting shoes in general.)  I really should’ve bought them earlier, say five years ago.

The lifting shoes give me two things that Cons or Vibrams or skate shoes don’t.  The first is a slightly raised and rock-solid heel.  It’s not an enormous lift, but it helps free up my ankles at the bottom of a squat, and I think the heel-to-toe slope helps my knees track better over my toes.  The second, most transformative, thing is incredible stability.  Between the tarsal straps and the shoe’s construction, my feet just don’t fucking move within the shoes.  I didn’t think they moved in the Cons either, until I switched.  Basically that means that there’s less slop in my feet and ankles and I’m more efficiently putting power into the floor.  One of the strong people at the campus gym where I used to lift claimed that proper lifting shoes would put forty pounds on your squat, and now I believe him.

The downside is that the sole doesn’t flex, at all.  This is part of the upside, but if you like to bring your feet way back towards your shoulders when setting up your bench, as I do, you’ll need to find another way to do it.  Also you’ll need to bring along another pair if you want to sprint after lifting.  If you have to mix up squats and sprints, or whatever you Crossfit guys do, these look like a decent compromise.

I’ve done a bunch of lifts in these shoes and have some comments on each:

• Squats – back, front, or overhead, welcome to the easiest PRs you’ve set in years.  All that tension you used to spend trying to stop your feet from squirming around — “spread the floor apart!” — now gets to go straight into moving the bar.  You’re probably not going to ditch all of your form issues — for me, the big one is corkscrewing counterclockwise as my right knee compensates for my lack of  left ankle mobility — but they’ll probably get a lot better.  And because you’re not wobbling around in the hole, you might find yourself sinking a couple inches deeper than usual and thinking “man, that was easy” as you drive out of the hole.
  
• Cleans and snatches — as long as you don’t get shoes with a stupid-high heel your pull from the floor shouldn’t be affected.  When I started doing cleans in lifting shoes, I realized that I was a lot closer to a full squat clean than I’d expected.  No shit, Sparky, huh.  Maybe weightlifting shoes really do make weightlifting easier.
• Deadlifts — see previous comment about “pulls from the floor”.  You might be pulling the bar an extra half inch depending on how much of a heel you get, so lifting shoes might take a pound or three off of your absolute max.  I haven’t pulled an absolute max in about five years, so I have no basis for comparison, but if you’re that serious about your deadlift you probably pull in socks anyway.  SGDLs and RDLs seem unaffected.
• Bench — the bad news is that I can’t set up the way I like.  The good news is that I have slightly better leg drive in the setup I don’t like.  If I was training for powerlifting I’d probably bench in different shoes; as it is I probably lost five or ten pounds.  That might come back if I find a better setup.
• Press — in theory I should have a stronger base; in practice I probably need to put in more core work before I can get anything extra out of the shoes.

I’m with Rippetoe on this one — just buy the damn shoes.