Week 6 – Take a Chill Pill

I’m not a great scholar of the Book.  I don’t know the Jewish traditions very well, or how they got turned into metaphors by Christ.  But I’ve heard of the Jubilee. Every fifty years, everyone would take a year off of some types of work, some celebrations were held, and debts are forgiven.  I’m sure there’s a lot I’m getting wrong and glossing over, but the idea of regular debt repayment is a popular one that’s survived through the ages. Everyone has probably felt like, if they could just take a break from their bills and their stress, they could really get ahead in life.  

The Jubilee is a mesocycle of rest and repayment, with a weekly day of rest acting like a microcycle.

What does that have to do with getting fit?  Lots, actually. Rest, recovery, mesocycles and microcycles.  Mastering them is actually really important for making changes to your body.

Part 1: The Microcycle, or Go The Fuck To Bed

I kept running into three pieces of advice for people trying to get fit.  1) Try hard. 2) Eat right. and 3) Sleep. Numbers 1) and 2) I get. Arnold, Hulk Hogan, and Mr. T have been telling us since I was watching them on Saturday morning.  But sleep?

Yeah, sleep.  It’s a thing. If you want to lose weight, try sleeping more.  If you want to get big, try sleeping more (after a protein shake.)  If you want to perform better athletically, try sleeping more.

Give it a try.  What’s the worst that could happen?  You fuck up and get eight hours of sleep?  Oh noes.

Part 2: The Mesocycle, or Taking a Break While You Look Up What Mesocycle Means OK I’ll Save You a Click It Means Big Cycle

So we got our microcycle down, but what is this about mesocycle?  Well, our bodies are super complex. And lazy as fuck. They will adapt to a new stimulus, but only the bare minimum needed.  In order to keep pushing it, you gotta change things up.

For exercise, well, that’s been studied so much I can farm out the description to someone else.  Go read this.

For diet, not so much with the researching.  In fact, there are a lot of otherwise-well-informed people that think the human metabolism can stand up to a constant calorie deficit and not adapt.  They are wrong.  It happened to me, and let me tell you first hand, it sucks.  The solution? Cycling on and off a diet. There’s only been one published study of this approach that I know if, but it’s got a punny acronym for a name so you know it has to be good. 

In broad strokes, they found that for a bunch of obese people, two weeks of diet followed by two weeks of eating to maintain weight led to more weight loss than a steady diet.  Eventually. It took twice as long, you know, for taking half time off. But the two groups ate the same deficit overall.

So what the lesson here?  The lesson is it’s week 6. If you have been kicking ass for five weeks, take a rest week if you think it might help.  Rest. Recover. Come back next week.

Weekly Challenge

None!  Didn’t you just read this article about taking a break?

Week 5 – Finding Truth in a Sea of Lies

There is a lot of good information about health and fitness out there.  There is an order of magnitude more bullshit out there. Set aside the bad actors like Men’s Health actively peddling lies for money (current headline: Can Eating for your Bloodtype Help You Lose Weight?  No, and there is no evidence this works, and everyone knows it.) The real problem are the evangelicals.  No wait, not that link.  Those guys were awesome.  These ones.

Lots of people struggle with their health goals.  They either don’t put the effort in, they don’t have a good plan of attack, or they have a good plan of attack that happens to not work for them.  They try it, and it fail. Repeat this over, and over and over, and “nothing works.” Then, after years or decades of trying, bam. Something works.  Maybe they actually put the effort in for the first time (that’s me, this time.) Maybe they get on a good plan (ok, that’s me too.) Maybe the plan is just a good fit for their preferences and habits (yep, me here again.)

And this leads to the error in logic.  You’ve tried everything, and everything failed.  Then you found this one thing, and it works. And being a social creature, you want to tell the world.   This doesn’t make you a bad person – just the opposite! You “know” the one thing that works, and if people would just try it, they can skip over all the pain and disappointment you had.

Just.  Do. This.  One. Thing.  Paleo. Veganism.  Keto. Whole Food Plant Based (we just called that vegetarianism in my day.)  Lift Heavy. No, Lift for Hypertrophy. Pilates. Yoga. Crossfit. Whatever.

You know what that makes most people?  Evangelicals. Lots of these even have the strong odor of moralism.  

This is how your body is supposed to work. Eating dolphins is a sin.  Real men lift heavy. Real men Eka Pada Rajakapotasana until they can smell their own taint.  

They have one data point, and they want everyone to know it and love it like they do.  They are not good sources of information. But good information is necessary for my throw-everything-against-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks method of fitness improvement.  After all, my goal is to work smarter, not harder.

So what would a good data source look like?  Well, N would need to be a lot bigger than 1.  So we need lots of people. And some personal anecdotes are important, but so is access to larger statistical data.  Group think is always a danger, so we’d need a conflict resolution mechanism that rewards good ideas not conformity to ideology.  That mean… oh crap. I know what that means.

See, there is this engine that someone built.  Its fuel is the autistic rage of over-educated social idiots, and it spits out hate.  It’s a weaponized hive of scum and neckbeardery. But it has all those features we are looking for.

That’s right, my trusted data source is (Lovecraft help me), Reddit.

See, Reddit has this social dynamic where, to win a fight, you have to ascend the scale of reliability to appeal to the notions of the overeducated idiots of Reddit.  The weakest form of argument is the anecdote. A better argument is the appeal to group wisdom. Then low-quality internet article, then high-quality internet article.  And the winning argument on Reddit is a link to a journal article that you haven’t read.

So yeah.  Reddit. If a mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems, Reddit is a machine for turning antisocial behavior into reasonable fitness advice.

I should take a step back and say that there are two kinds of Reddit communities.  This is my own taxonomy, but I say there are two kinds. First are the process based.  These are all about how to get fit and healthy. /r/keto, /r/veganism, /r/HIIT, /r/weightroom.  Then there are the outcome based communities. /r/fitness, /r/loseit, /r/gaint. The first are a breeding ground for evangelicals.  The second aren’t invested in a way to get there, just get there. Get fit. Lose weight. Bulk up.

It’s in those places that I look for information.  And you know what… it’s scary how good that information is.  Probably not quite as good as a specialist medical profesional like a physical therapist or a bariatric nurse, but better than a general practitioner.  At least in my experience.

I’ll prove it.  Using Reddit’s favored resolution mechanism.  Factors Associated With Weight Change in Online Weight Management Communities: A Case Study in the LoseIt Reddit Community.  They studied activity in /r/loseit, one of those outcome based communities.  They found “Our findings suggest that among active users of a weight management community, self-declaration of higher BMI levels (which may represent greater dissatisfaction with excess weight), high online activity, and engagement in discussions that might provide social support are associated with greater weight loss.”

/r/gainit, /r/loseit, and /r/fitness are three subreddits to get to know, if you are looking for diet and fitness information.  All three have high-quality content in their wikis, and generally you can get a good answer to a question if you post it.

Of course, all things in moderation.  Reddit makes you stupid. 

Bonus 1 week challenge:

Go read about how veganism doesn’t make you live longer.  Found this link on Reddit.

Week 4 – Satiety

Every GlibFit 2.0 is, in-part, about ALaTW.  That’s because he is writing them and he can only write about things that he knows.  But this week is more so. You see, ALaTW got fat because he was hungry. He was always hungry.  I don’t mean that, every once in a while, he was a fourteen year old girl having a second bowl of ice-cream and texting “oh I cud eat a horse lol” to her friend.  

I mean he was deeply, truly, pathologically hungry.  All the time.

He wasn’t eating to cover up his emotions.  He wasn’t eating to get back at his dad. He was ravenous.  And nothing would make him full. Eating wouldn’t make him full.  His rule was once a year he would eat until he was full, usually at Thanksgiving.  It never worked. One year, he was bound and determined to see what it was like to be full.  For Science. Yes really.

He ate so much he got physically ill.  You know what he felt on the way to the bathroom?  Hunger. Just like the other 364 days of the year. His normal was just an unending, unmanageable hunger pang.

When the Internet’s Hottest Young Intellectual reviewed a book about hunger and satiety, ALaTW’s ears perked up.  He read the book (the way God intended, as an audiobook.)  In fact, he read it twice. And he never does that. The Bible and Lord of the Flies are the only other two books he’s read more than once.  But this book was particularly related to his interests and he wanted to sign up for the newsletter. That was in May of last year.

Because ALaTW is a slow and careful and meticulous and lazy thinker, he let those ideas percolate until December, when they got put into action.  A doctor’s visit telling him he was going to die also helped him get started. And you know what?

Two days in, he felt something he never felt before.  He felt full.

Without further narcissistic ado, here’s the meat of this post.  Losing weight requires you to eat less. The human brain is the universe’s most powerful supercomputer in command of the world’s most complicated data network in your hormone system.  It evolved to keep you alive, which means “with fat stores.” If you try to eat less, your brain will fight you. Hard. Most people can’t beat it. ALaTW couldn’t.

So don’t fight fair.  Fight fucking dirty. Don’t take it head on.  Look at it from a security perspective and twist the system to your ends.  How can you give it inputs its not expecting in order to get it to behave in a way it was never supposed to?

Here’s what you do.  ALaTW did this and was able to maintain a 2,000 calorie deficit a day.  And he was full, the whole time.

The Holy Trinity: Fat, Protein, and Volume

The first and biggest hack is to put food in your body that looks like high calorie food.  When your stomach senses fat, protein, and volume, it releases a hormone that tells your brain it got a bunch of calories.  Note the flaw in this design. Its using fat, protein, and volume as a proxy measure.

So eat fat, protein, and volume in low calories.  What does that look like? The vegetables for a huge ass salad are maybe a hundred calories.  Grilled chicken thighs, ground beef, and pulled pork are all full of fat and protein. That’s right, ALaTW ate a ton of salad.  Grilled chicken salad. Taco salad. Cobb salad. Yeah, I know. Salad is something of a meme for the conspicuously non-FitGlibbing.  How about a ribeye and asparagus? That’s got volume, fat, and protein too. Where’s your God now, trolls? ALaTW happens to love salad, and probably eats five a week when not dieting, so this wasn’t too hard for him.

You know what else has fat, protein, and volume?  A protein shake fortified with healthy, nutritious heavy cream.  Four fl oz of heavy cream, two scoops of protein, and a bunch of water was his lunch every day and it kept me full.  

The astute reader might notice that.. Hm.. that sounds a lot like keto.  Yeah, it is. There’s a reason it works. Lots of people on keto can eat on a deficit without trying.  Those of us that still have to try find it easier while on keto. This is why.

Eat on a Schedule

Lots of people get in a routine, and their body adapts.  They wake up two minutes before their alarm. Or they need to drop the kids off at the pool right before they leave for work.

Well, hunger works like that too.  Eat breakfast at exactly the same time every day.  Eat lunch at exactly the same time every day. Eat dinner at exactly the same time every day.  Hell, ALaTW even ate the exact same things for breakfast and lunch every day. Four scrambled eggs for breakfast.  Protein shake for lunch.

ALaTW’s body got on a schedule.  It didn’t expect food outside of 6:30 AM, 11:30 AM, or 6:00 PM.  So it never sent ALaTW hunger pangs unless he was late to a meal.

The astute reader might notice that.. Hm.. that sounds a lot like intermediate fastings.  Yeah, it is. There’s a reason why it works. Lots of people on IF can eat on a deficit without trying.  Those that still have to try find it easier while on IF. This is why. (ALaTW tried IF for a week by skipping breakfast.  IF + 2,000 calorie deficit + an hour at the gym on no breakfast was like getting hit by a truck.)

You eat with your eyes first

Your hunger response is controlled by a very old, very primal signaling system in the brain.  The best way to think about it is to think of it like a two year old. It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop… ever, until you are dead!  I mean eating!

So when you eat, only let yourself see what you are ok eating.  Make your plate in the kitchen. Then put away the leftovers, take your plate to the dining room, and eat.  If you have to fight with your brain about having another scoop of food, you will lose. Instead, avoid the fight.  Just like putting a toy away and distracting a two year old.

Bonus Week 4 Challenge

Cook a meal from scratch.  Make it in the kitchen. Put a serving on your plate, put the left overs away, walk the plate to the dining room, and eat it there.

Week 3 – The Tabata Protocols

Last year, about two millions Americans died.  Of those two million, about 760,000 were related to heart issues of some type. That’s more people than were killed by cancer.  More than killed reading derp on the internet.  Even more people killed than those droned by Obama while attending a wedding. Combined.

So take care of your heart, or it will kill you.  But there are things worse than death (far more worse than death.)  

Like doing cardio.  I’ll take death over boredom.  Probably shouldn’t, but I would.  I tried it all. Audiobooks. Podcasts.  Thinking about baseball. Nothing could convince me to get on that bike six days a week for a half hour to an hour.  I chose death over boredom. I had high blood pressure. This wasn’t an abstract choice.

But it was a false choice.  I found out, there is another option: Pain.  And pain’s name is Dr Izumi Tabata.  I’ll take fifteen minutes of pain over an hour of boredom any day of the week.

The premise is this – ‘cardio’ as we all know and love it is more accurately called Low Intensity Steady State cardio, or LISS.  Do the same thing at a rate that gets your heart a little elevated, and do it without variation. The other option is the opposite – High Intensity Interval Training, or HIIT.  

You sports fans know these.  Ten and turns. Suicides. Push as hard as you can for a few seconds, then recover for a few seconds.  And when you push, push HARD. Then, when you feel like you are going to puke – presto. You’re done.

I find this to be much, much easier to get over and done than droning on and on and on and on at a slow pace.  Maybe I’m a masochist. Maybe I’ve got ADHD. Maybe I’m a sinner and deserve death. But in any case, I’ll take it.

So I tried it.  And I just about died.  I did HIIT three times a week, and it was too much.  Four days a week wasn’t enough recovery time for my heart, or my nervous system, or something.  So I did what any sane person would do. A literature search!

I found a journal article titled Three Minutes of All-Out Intermittent Exercise per Week Increases Skeletal Muscle Oxidative Capacity and Improves Cardiometabolic Health.  Three minutes?  WTF. So I read it, and the study uses overweight subject.  Hey, I’m overweight.

Long story short, but it looks like the worse shape you are in, the less HIIT you need for dem hart gains.  Good news. I was in terrible shape, so I didn’t have to push nearly as hard as I was.

I know the N only =1 here, but every week I’ve been doing 1x LISS and 2x or 3x of the protocol here.  My blood pressure has gone from “Uncontrolled Hyptertensive” with four meds to “Prehypertensive” with two meds (and its the lower band of prehypertensive that doesn’t look to have elevated rates of cardiovascular disease or reduced mortality, but don’t tell the American Heart Association, they don’t want to hear it.)

Should you do HIIT?  I don’t know. But if you are a masochistic sinner with ADHD and uncontrolled hypertension, it might be worth a try.

Weekly Challenge

Go do 1 round of HIIT.  Sprint/jog. Cycle. Do push ups.  Shadowbox. Whatever. Use the protocol from the Three Minutes paper:

2 minute warm up; 3 cycles of 20 second of all-out work + 2 minutes of low intensity work; 3 minute cool down.  10 minutes total.

Week 2 – IIFYM

When I was starting to lose weight, I knelt at the altar of Keto. I thought it was the best way to lose weight, bar none. What I’ve learned since then is that it was the best way *for me* to lose weight. And it didn’t work because the mighty forces of Beta Hydroxybutyrate valiantly went to war and defeated the Goblins of Insulin Bog. It worked for me because I could eat on a significant calorie deficit every day without being hungry.

Every successful weight loss boils down to a simple conservation of energy. Put a lot of energy into your body and the extra gets stored. Put to little into your body, and your stores get used. Thermodynamics, how does it work?

So do I think keto is necessary? Nope. Is it a good way to keep yourself happy on a calorie deficit? Yep.

But really, the important thing is to set your goals and stick to them. How do you know what your goals should be? Glad you asked. Go use this little work sheet.

Follow the steps given, and this worksheet will spit out your macronutrient targets for every day. For weight loss, the most important target is your calorie target. Eat less than your total daily energy expenditure and you’ll lose weight one way or the other. After that, your protein goal should be met every day. That’s important for keeping your muscles from wasting away with your fat. After that, your fat and carb goals are set.

Once you have this, you’ve done all the hard work. Deciding on what food to eat and how much is just a matter of making it fit your macro goals. Should you eat a hamburger slathered in butter? It’s not a moral question where you have to decide. You just need to figure out If It Fits Your Macros (IIFYM).

To make this work, you pretty much have to be willing to log what you eat. Or at the very least keep a tally of your daily calories. Is that a little bit of work? Yes. Suck it up and be an adult.

But this it the epitome of working smarter, not harder.

Bonus 2 Week Challenge

Get a tape measure and calculate your body fat percentage.

Week 1 – Setting Goals

Glibernauts and Lady Glibs, are you prepared? GlibFit returns with a lower budget, straight to Netflix sequel starring Ted McGinley! Can you feel the excitement?!?

Week 1’s Real Talk – Trust the Process

Most fitness challenges tell you to commit to some goal. Lose 10 pounds in 10 weeks or something like that. I think that’s a bad idea. Instead, I’m going to challenge to you commit to a process.

Don’t tell me you are going to lose so many pounds, or increase your squat by so many pounds, or nail that hot crazy Korean chick you know you shouldn’t. Tell us what you are going to do.

First thing – pick your goal. Is it weight loss? Or is it fitness? Weight loss is the process of depriving your body of energy so that it converts fat stores into energy. Fitness is the process of picking things up and putting them down, using excess energy in your diet to improve your heart, lungs, and muscles. These are not the same things. And while they aren’t mutually exclusive, most people should pick one as their goal. Not both.

Is your goal weight loss? Cool. What are you going to do to eat less? Keto? Food tracking? Fasting?

Is your goal fitness? Cool. What are you going to pick up? How are you going to move your flabby, disgusting, pale body?

Are you such a fat out of shape fuck that you can do both at the same time productively? Cool. What are you going to do?

In the comments, tell us where you are at and what you are going to do for the next 10 weeks.

If you followed GlibFit 1.0 and the comments, you know that I am such a fat, out of shape fuck that I could do both. Yay. I’ve been doing this for the last six months, and I’ve picked up a thing or two in this time. I’m not an expert, far from it. But I’m a fan of the wall-thrown spaghetti approach to life. So for the rest of GlibFit 2.0 you can expect wholesome programming where I lay out one thing that’s worked **for me.** You can take it or leave it.

So here’s my status and commitment. I’ve gone, so far, from 422 lbs to 336 lbs and from about 50% body fat to about 35% body fat. I’ve discovered tendonitis in my knee and I’ve greatly reduced pain from it with bodyweight exercises. And I’ve totally wrecked my metabolism in the process.

So my goals are to get my metabolism on track while maintaining a much smaller and more reasonable calorie deficit (eating 2800 calories for a 750 deficit instead of 1800 eaten per day), while going to the gym six days a week. Six days I’ll do the PT, four days I do upper-body lifts, and three or four days I will do cardio.

Don’t know what to do to lose weight? Go read this. Don’t know what to do to start improving fitness? Go read this.

Bonus 1 Week Challenge

Log your eating, or log your workout, for one week. Keep track of what you are doing, and then at the end of the week look back at what you did. Are you happy with that?