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.)

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.)

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.

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

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* The “police rounding up dissidents” rant is a Drug War topic, and is ably covered elsewhere

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.

As well as some pretty good post-lifting music:

1. Cars are powered by explosions.  More to the point, most cars are powered by exploding prehistoric flora.  (Okay, technically it’s deflagrating, but shut up.)
2. Steve fucking McQueen.

(Note that the motivated reader can combine my rebuttal with some of Woolley’s arguments to claim, rather persuasively, that motorcycles are cooler than both bicycles and cars.  This should come as a surprise to precisely no-one.)

• Value in scarcity, broadly and narrowly construed

He considers philosophy majors (in the broader context of Whether Brick And Mortar Colleges Can Survive In The Face Of The Internet), and notes that philosophy majors make (relatively speaking) a shit-ton of money… because they’re smart.  I have no reason to doubt that he’s correct; the only philosophy majors I met in undergrad who were dumber than I was — I’ll note, perhaps unpleasantly, that I went on to get a doctorate — were in a bunch of required courses whose names started with “one-” and, maybe, “two-”.  So yeah, the PHIL majors in my sample tended to be pretty clever.

Thoreau, however, wonders whether “[t]here is value in training capable people to attain the level of intellectual sophistication that a good philosophy program instills.”

I submit that this conundrum is a catastrophic conflation of correlation with causation.  (I don’t even have an English Lit degree and I pulled off some pretty awesome polysyllabic alliteration there.  Govern yourselves accordingly.)

I’ve been reading a lot of The Last Psychiatrist lately, partly because he drinks more than I do but also because he’s put a fair bit of effort into unravelling why people send their kids to college at ruinous expense (mostly, but not always, to the kids) for absolutely no good goddamn reason at all.  In the first part of his epic Hipsters on Food Stamps rant — go ahead and click through, I’ll still be here in an hour when you’re done — he wonders:

I am not anti-liberal arts, I am all in on a classical education, I just don’t think there’s any possibility at all, zero, none, that you will get it at college, and anyway every single college course from MIT and Yale are on Youtube.  Is that any worse than paying $15k to cut the equivalent class at State?

Now, let me tell you a story a friend of mine loves to tell, from his perspective.  Text in brackets is mine.

The three of us — William [not his real name], me, and Matt, took Advanced Software Engineering last semester [or whenever].  It was basically User Interfaces In Java, although we saw the Design Patterns book for a few minutes in the second lecture.  William loved that shit, so he went to all the lectures, and he got a seven [out of nine].  I didn’t really care, so I skipped most of the lectures, and somehow I got an eight.  But Matt only attended the first lecture, the midterm, and the final, and he got a nine in that class.

(Yes, I’m the Matt in that story.)

I tell you that not to convince you that I’m amazing — the Ph.D. will have either done that already or convinced you irretrievably otherwise by now — but to convince you that that course was a waste of my fucking money.  Not my time, I spent all of maybe twenty hours on it that semester, and I can’t say it wasn’t a little bit educational.  I learned that I hate Java with the burning fire of a thousand suns, and also that 2000-vintage Swing was, while eminently hateable, better than anything else on the GUI-widget-set market at the time.  Also, in the first lecture one of the other guys in the class found out the hard way that he was colour-blind, so that was a thing.  I dunno what the fuck else I was supposed to have been educated upon in that course.  And they gave me the highest mark they could!

So if you’re an undergraduate programme committee member — and if you really are, I’m sorry — why would you put a course like that on the required list in the syllabus?  There are a lot of excellent cynical reasons, but the only pedagogical reason I can come up with is “so that every student we graduate must demonstrate, at the end of a semester of either skipping or attending class, that s/h/it knows how to make a calculator in Java.”  Actually I did that in high school, but thanks for taking four months to make me prove it to you.

This is not to say that I got no knowledge or skills of value from my undergrad.  If nothing else, the compilers course was worth the price of admission (and if you’re a CS student reading this blog, for fuck’s sake take a compilers course, it will change your life).  But I kind of doubt that I had to go to university to learn any of this stuff… maybe I had to go to university to be persuaded to study LL languages before attempting to write a compiler, but if you’re reading this sentence you don’t.  In any case compilers wasn’t a required course; I selected into it (as did both of my friends from the anecdote above).  And, of course, I got a B.Sc. and a GPA that convinced a grad school to admit me, whence I got a Ph.D. and a bunch of publications, whence I got a useful job.

And that last sentence is my point.