On Scientific Knowledge, Weight Loss, and Being Very Wrong

I have been wrong, very wrong, about diet and nutrition for my whole life. I hate being wrong.


As a critical thinker and trained research scientist with a Ph.D. in biology I feel that I should have done better. My only defense is that when one is an expert in a field, one tends to trust the opinions of experts in other fields.


I know I have the tools and ability to become an expert at many things, but it takes some serious motivation. If I was diagnosed with cancer, I would devour the literature and trust no one until I mastered it. But for everyday matters like nutrition I have always just done what I was told.


I have been blogging on and off about my weight loss efforts (roller coaster) since 2007 (read the whole mess in reverse chronological order here if you want), but the roller coaster actually started much earlier. The short version goes like this: 300-220, 270-213, 280-220, 285-225, 270-219 (current). As you can see I am really very good at losing weight, but pathetic at keeping it off.


So what is different about this time? Why do I finally think I have found the answer? Easy: I am not on a diet this time. Oh, it started out as a diet (Slow Carb from The Four Hour Body), but it has morphed into a simple and hopefully permanent lifestyle change.


The change is this: no grains and no sugar and no starchy vegetables. Or more prosaically no bird food or hippopotamus food (hippopotami eat sugar cane).


OK, that's a little over-simplified, but the whole thing really is just to minimize insulin production - eat few enough carbs (especially fructose! - no fructose that doesn't come from whole fruit!) so that you are losing or not gaining weight and stop worrying about fat intake, especially saturated fat. Other than that, eat anything in any quantity, especially meat and vegetables. But beware things that can cause insulin spikes even if they are non-caloric like artificial sweeteners.


I weigh less than I have in ages. I have more energy than I have had in ages. My teeth feel cleaner. I am less irritable and more positive. I am never hungry. I don't have to measure or record what I eat. I get to eat lots of things I love (bacon, eggs, cheese, steak, broccoli, kale, collard greens). I do miss a few things (bread, beer, sweets), but there is no formula for weight loss that doesn't require some changes/sacrifice - I should know, I've done enough of them.


So do I have my own brilliance to thank for this? Alas, no. I must give full credit to Gary Taubes who devoured the literature for me and laid out the arguments in a clear logical fashion. I can't overstate this - my entire view of nutrition, science, and even human history has been altered in the last few months as I digested these ideas and then proved them out on my own body.


A huge fraction of the conventional nutritional wisdom is wrong. Demonstrably wrong. Scientifically wrong. Gary certainly isn't the first person to espouse reducing carbs (neither was Atkins), but he lays out the history and arguments extremely well. From a scientific perspective we don't even really know that carbs are the problem (the telling experiments have not been done), but I now believe that the carbohydrate hypothesis is highly compelling and most likely true (with a fructose hypothesis as a close second - but that's another post).


Gary Taubes is a an excellent science writer who frequently writes for Science magazine, often on the topic of bad science. He has written two books and some articles on the carbohydrate hypothesis. You can see him speak here. if you are going to read just one book, it should be Why We Get Fat: And What To Do About It. His other book, Good Calories, Bad Calories, is excellent, but be warned that it is dense with literature references and the like - it is very complete - doctors and scientists will likely want to read this one.


These books and the seminar are all top notch stuff. Two thumbs up. Go watch. Go read. Why We Get Fat is also available on audible.com, so you can listen too.


These are not diet books, so don't expect that. You'll have to go elsewhere for low carb diet advice (or make up your own as I did - the principles are easy).


I do not believe that a thinking person can read Why We Get Fat without changing their diet, so be warned about that as well. If you'd rather live with your head buried in the sand, stay far away.


The really scary thing is that if the carbohydrate hypothesis is correct, we are royally screwed. Only a tiny fraction of the planet can afford to eat properly and our entire global food production system is set up almost exactly wrong to address it. But that too will have to be another post.


David

Book Review: The Tall Book

There are three things that absolutely define me. Three things that anyone who meets me knows within seconds. Three things that I could not hide from the world if I wanted to. 1) I am very tall (6' 7"), 2) I am a redhead, 3) I am a nerd.

Of these three things, the one that has defined my life as most different from the norm (whatever that is) is being tall.

There are many benefits to being tall, to be sure. I am never ignored at a counter while waiting for service. People remember me. It is comparatively easy for me to project a powerful confident presence. I am very rarely threatened or lashed out at.

And there are many disadvantages to being tall. Some would be obvious even to the non-tall (difficulty buying clothing, hitting my head on doorways, getting jammed into airline seats while some 5' 2" business woman stretches out in the exit row). And some probably have to be lived to be appreciated (ultra low toilets and urinals (actually almost everything about bathrooms), low ceilings, low kitchen counters, cars designed for the comfort of someone a foot shorter than me, foot boards on beds, the non-stop, "Do you play basketball?" Or alas the increasingly frequent, "Did you play basketball?").

When I saw The Tall Book by Ari Cohen I immediately bought a copy (for the Kindle iPad app, of course - see (3) above). But I must confess that I bought it more as a show of tall moral support than because I thought I would get anything out of it. I mean, I was six feet tall on my twelfth birthday. That's 33 years of being indisputably tall. What could a book possibly teach me about it?

I was wrong, of course. I learned a bunch of interesting tidbits. I certainly learned more about tall female psychology than I had ever managed to uncover on my own. Tall people and the curious will enjoy this book. Tall teens will find a bunch of useful advice for dealing with life. And if you know a tall teen girl, stop reading right now and go order her this book. Ditto if you know a tall teen boy who wants to date tall teen girls.

My favorite thing about the book, though, isn't the book at all. It is the fact that Ari has devoted some space to tall activism on the tall book website. That joins colleenification and the Tall Clothing Mall blog as one of my favorite tall resources. There just aren't enough tall resources out there. I would love for there to be a place where I could go to find cars I might fit in before I go shopping for them or find out whether that expensive home gym will be usable before I spend thousands of dollars.

Anyway, I'm rambling. It's a good book. It's on sale on amazon ($7.60 for the hardcover as I write this). Go buy it.

David

Long Culinary Weekend

We didn't do much over the long weekend. Our plans for Saturday got canceled due to the weather and the rest of the time we chilled. So I spent some time in the kitchen.

The tally:

• White sourdough bread
• American sandwich bread. Twice.
  
• Double-vanilla ice cream (best I've ever had)
  
• Rich chocolate sauce
• Deep caramel sauce
• Terrific baked ziti (supposed to go the party on Saturday, but we ate it instead)
  
• Whole wheat sourdough bread
  
• Fromage fort
• A couple of spatchcocked chickens on the grill
• Cornbread
  
• Scratch buttermilk pancakes
• French toast from the sandwich bread
• A killer sandwich of ham with caramelized onions and fromage fort browned under the broiler.
• Meringue cookies (to use up the egg whites whose yolks went into the ice cream)
  

There might be something wrong with me. If nothing else, I think I should probably go back on my diet...

David

The Big Rip Is Over

Whew. I finished the big rip project. 121 gigabytes of Apple Lossless files (5215 tracks), piles of clean up and de-duplication, and a bunch of manual hunting for cover art, but it is done. Was it worth it? I'm not really sure. I had some hope of actually using some of the lossless music on my iPod, but 121 gigs? I think not.

The one advantage is that if I change my mind about the lossy format that I actually want to use (192kbps MP3 for now), I have everything tagged and organized so that it is pretty easy. Just the processor time to chug through it all again.

My one gripe is that I had to fight against iTunes in a number of places. Everything is possible, but not necessarily easy. It would be very nice, for example, if you could force imports to go to a different directory than the main iTunes directory. Or if you could display (and sort by) the file location. Or if you could use iTunes to move physical files around. Or if you could delete music from playlists. Or if when you do a conversion it asked you if you want to keep duplicates (like it does when you rip a disk). Or if you could have it touch every file in your library to find the missing files (and then if you could sort by the [!] or something). Or if you could swap back and forth between two or more different iTunes directories and then merge them at some point (I got to a place where I had to finish the entire process before I could sync my iPod or things would go horribly wrong - it would be nice if I could have done some of the fiddling in a separate environment).

On the other hand, some things iTunes got very right. Smart playlists are a godsend. The search function is almost magically good. And now that I have actually filled in my album art, cover flow is pretty neat.

And speaking of filling in album art - I never could have done that without amazon.com and google image search. Not a chance. The iTunes missing album art function only hit about 50-60% of my collection - that's what I get for being eclectic I guess.

One interesting thing about the whole process is that it took 24 hours running at ~75% CPU utilization on a modern dual core computer to transcode the files from Apple Lossless to MP3. That is an astonishing amount of CPU time on a computer that would have been classed as a supercomputer a few years ago and magic a few years before that. I estimate it used about 3E14 CPU cycles. A circa 1990 Cray Y-MP would have taken around 625 days to do this processing (obviously not counting any of the optimization that you definitely would have taken the time to do and using a 1:1 assumption about CPU cycles that probably isn't strictly accurate).

David

The Big Rip

In the wake of the realization that my music collection has gone the wrong direction, quality-wise, I have decided to re-rip my entire CD library in Apple Lossless. I expect this to keep me busy for the foreseeable future.

Why apple format instead of flac? Because iTunes supports it natively (and it is a nice ripping environment) and the format is playable in Linux and convertible to other formats. The thing that sucks about any format is that there is no one perfect choice. MP3 is the only real generic choice for lossy, but there is no similarly universal format for lossless. So I will need a minimum of two copies of my entire library to support my existing audio needs. Possibly three. Sigh.

I don't actually expect the ripping to be the really painful part of the process. I expect incorporating the lossless items into iTunes without losing anything or duplicating anything and without hopelessly wrecking my playlists to be the hard part.

The way my luck is going lately, my hard drive will probably crash halfway through the process. I should get a Drobo, but I want a Mac to attach it to. Or I could take a chance and attach it to linux (formatted hfs+), I suppose...

48 disks down, lots and lots to go.

David

Antique Ouch

My grandfather once described this exact circuit as one that he used to train a dog not to pee on a certain post in front of a market. Needless to say this would not go over well today...

David

Cool Coffee Products

It is not that often that new products come out in the coffee world that are truly novel and potentially useful. I mean coffee and the art of drinking it is old.

But here are two.

The first and coolest is an espresso maker that is completely hand operated. It works kind of like a bicycle pump. I would love to see a non-pod option, but even with pods it blows my little camp stove-top espresso machine away.

The second is the "I am not a paper cup..." cup. Yes, it is just another travel mug and it isn't even as well insulated or as spill resistant as most. But I like it because it is a really nice visual design and because it is completely dishwasher safe. The last is important to me because I use a travel mug every single day. I am so tired of hand washing these things that there aren't words.

Tips for other dishwasher safe travel mugs will be appreciated.

David