ANAEROBICS Destruction & Reconstruction
Mark Baker
ANAEROBICS Intensity, Strength, Freedom and Health
Anaerobics is anti-aerobics – literally, symbolically, morally and everything-ly. Fifty years ago in 1968, ‘Aerobics’ by Dr Kenneth H. Cooper was published. This book kick-started a period of the most profoundly foolish exercise and nutrition advice the world has ever seen. What made it so damaging was that the advice became universally hegemonic. It was pushed by experts and used as the basis for Government health policy. The 1970’s and 80’s saw an explosion of university research ‘proving’ the virtues of everything which turned out to be bad for us. People who disagreed were cranks.
We are now paying with rising levels of obesity, heart disease, diabetes and a host of insidious disorders, many under the radar at a population level but worryingly noticeable at a personal level. All the dieticians, nutritionists, exercise professionals and health experts who thought they knew what they were talking about; all of them backed by qualifications, certificates, degrees and PhD’s – it was all tripe.
The ‘scientifically proven’ aerobics paradigm recommended three meals a day with snacks between, a high carbohydrate diet, healthy grains, polyunsaturates, low protein, low fat, energy balance, superfoods, wholefoods, five-a-day, light resistance, high endurance, fat-burning exercise, on and on; in other words, the derangements of modernity, practically the reverse of our evolutionary history - the apotheosis being the skeletal, sugar-fueled marathon runner, and the overweight, calorie-counting, jogger - at opposite ends of the discredited BMI table but both unhealthy and sick.
When society, culture, and modernity are stripped away, we are essentially wild animals. Wildness is in our genes. The denial of this has led to all sorts of chronic conditions and illnesses - for example, we now know that during periods of food deprivation the body ‘eats itself’ via the process of autophagy, and that this is a good thing not a bad thing. However, for the past fifty years we
were told to constantly eat and keep energy stores topped up, thereby putting the brakes on a crucial nutrient sensing mechanism which keeps us healthy.
Anaerobics proposes that most of the problems of human health come from being too domesticated – not wild enough (including the food we eat). We have evened out acute hits of physical stress and adrenaline for chronic manmade stress. We’ve swopped robust, hard graft for ‘fun-running’ and Pilates. At the same time we’ve been told to avoid things which could harm us; the Sun, dirt, germs, eggs, red meat – elements of our lives for two million years, and to eat more wheat, grains, pasta, rice, and low-fat breakfast dust. This idiocy needs to be reversed.
If you are hooked on data and ‘science’, I ask you to read this book with an open mind, or stop reading now. Where there is no or little scientific evidence we must use experience, reason and logic – alien concepts to people who can’t operate without ‘solid proof’.
When you look at health and nutrition through an ecological, environmental and evolutionary lens, you won’t always get it right (it’s a complex system), but you’ll develop the ability to smell bullshit at a distance. Contrary to the contention of experts, you don’t need to know how everything works (they don’t either); as long as you understand that for a wild animal to remain healthy, it needs the challenges of a wild environment.
Note: This mini-book serves as a flavour of the full book’s content; the format and layout will be different. The subjects herein will be greatly expanded and more content will be added + references where appropriate. Some parts may overlap and be repeated, for which I make no apology. Comments and feedback are welcome. @guruanaerobic
‘Anaerobics’ will be available for purchase ~July/Aug 2018. Back Cover: Olusegun A. Adekanye Instagram: b7k_photography
FASTING
1 WHAT IS A FAST?
Nature has provided a mechanism that has been tested over millions of years; our attempt should be to replicate it, within limits. Many people think of a fast as the complete absence of food, only water – this is the case in absolute terms but it doesn’t reflect reality. During periods of starvation anything edible, no matter how meagre, is potential nourishment (I recall reading a newspaper article about a famine stricken Ethiopian family who resorted to eating their hut’s worn and dirty floor-matting; everyday they tore off a piece and boiled it in water to make a type of soup). Our omnivorous ancestors would have found something to eat as it is unlikely that all food sources would have been simultaneously unavailable. In a natural environment during famine, people foraged and got some calories. So, we can consider a fast to be any period of substantially reduced calorie consumption – not necessarily zero food.
However, it would be incorrect to assume that an absolute famine would never happen - a water (only) fast is acceptable, just not an imperative (a memoir from the aboriginal Pintupi tribe recalled that when lacking water they would drink lizards’ blood). Fasts of up to 24hrs can be done free of food - some people may prefer not to eat any food as “it is easier to fast than to diet”, but longer fasts should include some calories. Some studies suggest that 500 calories can be consumed every 24hrs whilst keeping fasting benefits [ref], fasters may mistakenly interpret this as a target, not an upper limit - 500 calories a day translated means, ‘some food’. Since calorie-counting is predicated on the naïve view of the human body as a car engine we should take into account not just calories but also the type of food, in that x calories from sugar has a different effect on the body than x calories from fish. Have savoury rather than sweet; vegetable soup, a broth of some sort or bouillon give some salts and satisfies hunger pangs or the psychological desire to eat.
1.1 How long to fast?
The necessary (but rather unhelpful) answer is, “long enough to elicit some sort of positive effect”. This may be as little as eight hours; a night’s sleep, but as most people generally go without food overnight for eight or ten hours we should start somewhere higher.
Fasts can broadly be classified as intermittent (IF) or periodic (PF) – the difference being the length and frequency of the fasting cycles.
Examples:
Intermittent:
24-36hrs every week or fortnight
2 days a week – ‘5:2’ style
Alternate or "every other day” – no cals one day; normal eating the next Random foregoing of meals
Periodic:
2 to 5 days straight – upwards of two weeks between. Extreme fasts of up to 30 days; once a year.
Additionally, there is time-restricted eating where all the day’s calories are consumed within an 8hr window (16/8 fast) or less. One meal a day (OMAD) is becoming more popular.
We don’t yet know the full physiological effects of fasting (scientific research to date gives us a good indication), but we can know with certainty that four 1-day fasts over two weeks will not have the same effect as one 4-day fast in the same period; so we
can assume it’s reasonable to utilise both IF and PF. It seems there is an ‘effect-timeline’ with accruing benefits (to a point) the longer the fast; this doesn’t mean that only long fasts should be observed but that there is a place for PF within an intermittent structure.
Most people start the timing of their fast directly after their last meal, i.e. the ‘post-prandial’ state, when the stomach and intestines are absorbing nutrients from food. However, it’s only after complete digestion and absorption of a meal, 4-6hrs later that a fast actually begins. It’s in this ‘post-absorptive’ state that the body has to create energy from the breakdown of its own reserves. Very simply, in a process called glycolysis, the body normally derives energy from glucose in the blood stream which comes from carbohydrate in food. Glucose which isn’t used straightaway is converted into glycogen and stored in the liver and muscles. The post-absorptive phase begins when food no longer supplies glucose and blood levels starts to fall, so hepatic glycogen is converted back into glucose for energy. Once the glycogen stores are near depletion, 12-24hrs later depending on activity levels, the body creates glucose/energy from non-carbohydrate sources such as fat and amino acids (gluconeogenesis). After 2-3 days of fasting the body ‘switches’ to the muscle sparing process of lipolysis/ketosis – look elsewhere for a description on this as it’s outside the objective of this paper
2 ENVIRONMENTAL STRESS
Figure 1: Indigenous Australians on Bathurst Island in 1939. The population was isolated for 6000 years until the eighteenth century. In 1929, three quarters of the population supported themselves off the bush – Wikipedia.
Figure 1 shows three modern hunter-gatherers who subsisted on bush-food; note the condition of the older individual in the middle, he resembles an athlete - yet it’s not likely he had a gym membership. He looks stronger, healthier and more robust than the average adult today, ‘achieved’ without the aid of healthcare, superfoods, protein shakes or a degree in nutrition and exercise. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors were exposed to environmental challenges which hardly feature in our modern lives. They needed to hunt and find food, deal with nutritional deprivation, suffer the vagaries of the weather, and avoid animals and agents that could harm; just a few of the normal features of survival.
As a biological organism the human body is adaptive; more than that, it is antifragile [Ref], this is an important distinction in that things that are antifragile need stress to improve. So, the health and ‘fitness’ of the body is demand led – the demand comes from our environment.
We know that the stress of intermittent physical exercise is good for health; however, until recently, nutritionists and dieticians missed 50% of the health equation in that this also applies to food - nature delivers nutrition in an unbalanced and stochastic fashion. They missed that the supply of food matters just as much as its constituents. Keeping energy levels topped up, balanced meals, five (or more) portions of fruit or vegetables a day, calories in/out, three meals a day – are all based on the unnatural idea of regularity in food supply.
The environment 'talks' to our cells and genes, telling our body what’s going on around it. These signals or messages influence cell function and gene expression. Deprivation is information, powerful information – absence of food is understandably a strong and urgent signal, so the body has developed strategies to enhance survivability and increase its chances of finding sustenance. Again, health professionals got it wrong when they said constant feeding is good; actually the reverse, constant feeding is sending all the wrong signals as far as human health is concerned. They looked at the ‘destructive’ aspects of starvation without realising that what was being destroyed (and recycled) were the body’s damaged and dysfunctional cells. And the reverse, they failed to see the beneficial effects, in that, 1/ the brain ‘improves’ in response to hunger [Ref2]; 2/ the body preserves itself in response to deprivation [Ref5]. Seen as an evolutionary survival mechanism the fasting rationale becomes clear.
So, if we look at food as information; just the same as refraining from the news, taking time off work or being on our own for a while is beneficial, we can assume that resting from the ‘noise’ of food has its benefits. Too much information in the form of constant feeding dulls the senses and causes harm. Just as water tastes better when we’re thirsty, if we go off sugar for two weeks our taste buds can detect it in parts-per-zillion - we can practically smell it from a distance. And the opposite, when we eat a lot of sweets (candy) it’s not surprising that an apple tastes bland - the excess sugar has desensitised the taste receptors and/or the processing part of the brain. Absence of food means the senses are upregulated. As anyone who has fasted for 36hrs or more knows, eyesight improves and sense of smell becomes more intense. This makes sense in that when we most need to find food,
our senses are heightened – we become ‘sharper’ [Ref]. The theories that this happens at the cell receptors or in the neocortex, or both, is being researched, but we do know the effect regardless of mechanism.
Studies show that ageing and disease back off in the face of hunger [Ref5]. Intermittent fasting promotes the body’s ability to remove and recycle molecular ‘rubbish’ (defective and damaged organelles, proteins, mitochondria...) in a process called autophagy [Ref7], reduces inflammation, and seems to have neuro-protective and tumour suppression effects [Ref6/10].
The problem, as far as health is concerned, is that we have moved out of the environment we evolved to live in. We have too much comfort. Most of us now live in an environment where physical activity is not necessary for survival, food is constantly available and macronutrients such as carbohydrate and sugar, which were once delivered in intermittent amounts, make up 50% or more of our daily diet. Further, hormetic [Ref] stress has been replaced by manmade chronic and debilitating stress. Even with all our medical knowledge and advanced healthcare, it’s not surprising that chronic conditions such as heart disease, obesity and diabetes are the major killers.
Some studies conclude that we are hard-wired to overeat [ref], and this is causing us problems in our food-abundant environment. If overeating is an evolutionary response to deprivation, rather than trying to stop or ‘cure’ overeating, perhaps we should increase deprivation?
3 CALORIES AND NONLINEARITY
Many only view fasting as a means of losing weight by “calorie reduction”. This is a gross misunderstanding of its utility, diminishing fasting to the superficial world of dieting. It misses the fundamental point that the main benefits of fasting derive from the intermittent or periodic abstinence from food, not total calories. Further, they have little (practically zero) understanding that the effect of calories on the body is nonlinear; 3000 calories in one day, then zero the next has a different effect to 1500 calories each day for two days. Studies have shown this nonlinear effect on the body composition of mice following a time
restricted diet [Ref23]; and positive effects on glucose metabolism and neuronal resistance to excitotoxic stress when following an alternate day fasting protocol, both independent of caloric intake [Ref24].
Traditionally, nutrition science has focused on average ‘balanced’ daily intakes, however the problem with the average in a nonlinear world is that it comes at a cost – if we are crossing a river by foot, we want to know more than the average depth. In a nonlinear world the distribution or volatility of something is just as, or more, important than the average. In mathematics there’s a property known as Jensen’s Inequality - simply put, if there’s a nonlinear relationship between an input (calories) and an output (effect), and if we look at the output for two different inputs, the average of the outputs is not equal to what we would find for the output from the average of the inputs. As an example, we see Jensen’s Inequality in chemical reactions and their relationship with temperature. If we run a reaction for a certain amount of time at one temperature, T1 and then change the temperature to T2 and run it for the same amount of time, the extent of the reaction will be greater than if we had run it at the average temperature, (T1 + T2)/2. The reaction runs faster at the higher temperature compared to how much the colder temperature slows it down [Ref22].
So, the effects of fasting are independent of average calorie intake; whilst it’s possible that adherence to a ‘5-2’ style fast will result in an overall reduction of calories, that shouldn’t be the rationale.
It goes without saying that the positive response to food variation, or anything, clearly has a limit; unlike snakes we can’t go without food for three months after a big meal.
Using Jensen’s Inequality we can assume that on breaking a fast we can eat ad libitum (under supply followed by over supply). Due to convex [explain convexity] effects, overeating after abstinence is beneficial. Further, it doesn’t make ecological sense to break a fast with only a small amount (given food availability), no animal would “leave the table with room to spare” after starvation. Some people may find they eat less on their non-fast days as they have broken their submissive relationship with food - this may be a welcome (and revelatory) side effect but it is not gluttony to eat until satiation directly after fasting. As the body is antifragile to variation we can overeat after a fast and benefit from the famine and the feast.
3.1 Chronicity
Nature made sugar hard to get, there wasn’t much and we had to work to for it. When people say sugar is bad, it is at the amount we are eating but the idea of good or bad is meaningless without looking at dose. Sugar is not a problem in natural doses; when we look at it hormetically it may in fact confer some benefits. Clearly, the typical western diet has far too much, 100x more than nature would deliver. The modern supply is profoundly negative. Unfortunately, the increase in sugar consumption was made worse by the low fat, high carbohydrate advice from mainstream nutritionists.
Too much of anything will harm; eaten chronically red meat is harmful but intermittently is beneficial [Ref]. Humans are omnivores - we are not continual feeders of salad, meat or pizza; we are adapted for variation, not just in calorie intake but in food composition. Paleo, LCHF (low-carb, high-fat) and other diets that try to replicate naturalistic feeding miss a trick in that they deny randomness, we were made not only for famine and feast but to be a herbivore one day (or week) and a carnivore the next. [Nutritionists mistook what being omnivorous meant, leading to recommendations that the dinner plate should be ‘mixed’, when what it really meant is that variation comes over time not at every sitting].
Low-carbohydrate diets that apparently have the same effect as fasting (ketosis, lipolysis, reduced insulin and blood sugar) can’t recreate its range of effects because lack of calories is an entirely different signal to lack of carbohydrates. We see weight loss achieved by Paleo, supposedly by reduction of circulating blood insulin, but there is a hidden downside if Paleo means fat and meat every day. We don’t need to know by what mechanism this happens (lacking nutrients, adding toxins, hypervitaminosis, harmful by-products, etc.) only that it’s an insult to the variation of nature – it’s not that the diet is intrinsically harmful (dose- response) but that the body benefits from variation. This is similar to veganism in that we know being a long-term vegan is harmful but intermittent veganism isn’t. The general point is that what may be good for you intermittently isn’t necessarily good for you chronically.
People may think this means “moderation”, it doesn’t, it means variation. The moderate says we should have regular and balanced portions of meat, vegetables, starches and fruit, but this is completely abnormal. Nature doesn’t deliver nutrients like a restaurant menu - we are designed to eat in an irregular fashion with intermittent bouts of nutritional hardship.
Therefore, it’s not peaks and troughs we should be worried about; it’s the chronic and the habitual.
This is why calorie restriction (CR) isn’t the answer. CR has some benefits for health and longevity but has a problem in that it’s a chronic condition, and as such breaks every rule of nonlinearity – aside from making a person a miserable bore. We are beginning to realise that maintaining health means to alternate between periods of ‘self-destruction’ and reconstruction. [Ref]. Importantly, self-destruction without recovery is a one-way street to fragility. CR is long-term sub-lethal starvation; it’s long on harm (however minimal) but short on recovery. It is like jogging a marathon every day. It ignores the fact that stress, like most things, is dose-dependent; it can be overdone. CR leads to a reduction in muscle mass (amongst other things [Ref]) as well as fat mass, whereas intermittent fasting reduces fat whilst retaining muscle [Ref13]. CR completely misses Jensen’s Inequality in feeding, in that benefits derive from the absence of food followed by recovery, something which the long-term reduction of calories never mines. Apart from being more naturalistic, fasting is far easier to adhere to than CR - not eating followed by overeating is deprivation rewarded, whereas living on reduced calories is constant austerity.
Intermittent food deprivation is the polar opposite of chronicity and indeed seems to be able to alleviate or completely cure chronic conditions such as type 2 diabetes, insulin resistance (strictly speaking, hyperinsulinaemia) and inflammation [Ref] – this makes sense in that chronic conditions are generally brought about by chronic agents. Further, we know that one chronic condition, say insulin resistance, can bring about other chronic conditions. An interesting feature is that these conditions are mostly preventable, regardless of genetic predisposition. Constant eating, three times a day, day in day, out is far removed from our evolutionary history; it makes sense to eat well and be physically active but it’s not enough - we need more nonlinearity in our lives.
4 SUBTRACTION VS ADDITION
Getting rid of things that harm is better than taking something to counteract that harm. As an example, it’s clear that we benefit more by taking out the junk food in our diet than adding multivitamin tablets or so-called ‘superfoods’.
Drug companies (and the health-food industry) are in the business of getting us to take something to ‘make us better’; they won’t promote fasting unless they can find a way to profit from it. The upshot is an inbuilt bias towards over-diagnosis and intervention. Additionally, there is an asymmetry in medicine in that drugs (and physicians, dentists, surgeons, etc.,) showcase their benefits but hide their defects. A case in point are statins – taken regularly they undoubtedly lower cholesterol (increasingly thought not to be the cause of heart-disease [Ref21]), but have hidden downsides. Statin manufacturers are having to admit that statin usage has more severe and wide-spread side-effects than they realised (or cared to tell us); however, rather than calling for a reduction in statin prescription, a paper funded by the American Diabetes Association recommended that other drugs, such as Glyburide (an oral medication for diabetes), should be taken alongside statins to counteract their side effects [Ref20]. But we have a problem in that taking a cocktail of drugs only increases, never decreases, iatrogenics (harm from a medical intervention) and side-effects. Further, some of the downsides may only become apparent years later.
We have the general problem that when we introduce something into a complex system like our body, we have 2nd order effects - a causal chain of unintended consequences; and the more that is added the greater the constellation of effects. The result may be to cause more harm than good or even the reverse of what was intended. The further removed the effect from the source the more difficult it is to prove a causal link, meaning that arguments linking outcome y to input a will be dismissed as “unscientific” and anecdotal. However, phenomenology comes before scientific theory; if subtraction of an agent leads to the alleviation or cessation of harm we are being ecologically rigorous – it doesn’t matter that current scientific theory says the causal link is unfounded.
It is better to remove something than add something to the system [Ref]. It is more effective and less likely to have downsides. This principle of via negativa or what not to do/what to avoid is far more robust.
One of the best examples of via negativa is giving up smoking. Arguably, more health benefits (removal of harm) arise from stopping smoking than any other single lifestyle change. In response to the concerted campaign against smoking, cigarette manufacturers initially used the argument (rather like statin manufacturers) that the negative health effects of smoking weren’t proven – the shoddy 'absence of evidence' argument [Ref]. Once it was no longer credible to use that line, they could only come up with the “freedom of choice” argument.
Fasting is the ultimate subtraction; we are removing food to improve our health. Because fasting is not adding something into the system it is inherently less prone to iatrogenics; it provides benefits with little downside apart from irritating unenlightened people.
[People who argue that fasting is an extreme or excessive behaviour, need to think harder. Fasting is a normal part of our evolutionary history. Abstinence is not extreme behaviour, like sleeping is not extreme inactivity. Some people will never understand fasting; aside from any health aspects, they don’t have the faculty to understand the notion of ‘denial’ in the midst of abundance.]
If a scientist or doctor tells us that drug x confers the same benefits as fasting - we know to ignore them (some are recommending pharmacological options to mimic the effects of low-carbohydrate or ketogenic diets). An effect gained by the addition of something can never replicate one caused by the subtraction of something. No single drug or supplement can mimic the range of effects achieved by fasting. Science giving us a one-hit solution in the form of a pill is vastly different to nature giving us a mechanism which has been tested over a million years.
4 NO FOOD AS MEDICINE
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The Wild, the Autophagic, and Not Getting Killed
The wild doesn’t afford for human, animal, or plant rights. It operates under a system of destruction, recycling and reconstruction – an autophagic process.
The process that keeps nature ‘healthy’ also keeps us healthy. So far we know there are two main initiators of autophagy; 1/ a stress response from exercise or nutrient deprivation, and 2/ signalling from old or damaged cells that they want to be eaten (by autophagosomes). The former will preferentially target the latter.
For health you should design your own ‘destruction’ so that something better can be created. Indeed, you have to do that as the wild environment is now mostly out of the equation. Strength, alactic anaerobic power (an emergency life-saver), acidosis, and a necessary aerobic base are the physiological and ecological ‘tool-kit’ for robust health.
NOTE: Nature didn’t make us to be as strong as possible – only just strong enough, with a capacity to get stronger via an adaptive response to environmental demands/signalling. The body has inbuilt redundancies to call upon. - sorry scientists, you didn’t develop the General Adaptation Syndrome, nature did.
We are demand led – the more intense and acute the demand (to a point) the stronger the body gets; which includes starvation – the greatest challenge.
Most modern maladies are brought about by chronic man-made agents. Embracing the acute, the extremes, the tails, the outliers; whatever you want to call it, acknowledges the naturalistic and the wild - a denial of which is slowly killing the modern person. Forget about “we are all living longer” – the wild 70yr old, conditional on survival, is healthier than the one in the modern city.
The thankful part of modern life is that we no longer get eaten by lions, die by infection or slowly demise from the disability of a broken leg. We don’t need to hunt mastodons with the risks that entails.
What we should do is recreate the lifestyle of the HG, minus the sabre-toothed tigers. We need our modern technology and knowledge to protect us from life-threatening harm but should minimize it in other areas for the sake of our health. We need the stress of exercise, the stress of nutrient deprivation, background radiation, the Sun; dirt - all the things that a wild life would provide.
A friend of mine was recently driving home from a tennis match with his wife; another driver accelerated through the intersection in a failed bid to beat the lights and hit his car. The car’s crush zone and airbags meant he and his wife came off shaken, but with only a few bruises and knocks.
Modernity should protect you from acute harm but not turn you into a domesticated animal.
Older marathoners who are still running look half-dead, like something from an Iron Maiden cover
Running fast is one of the best exercises and the most ecological; better than rowing, cycling, swimming... However, marathon running (more precisely, training for the marathon) is the worst endurance exercise, worse for you than cycling, rowing, swimming... The chronic repetitive stress on the muscles, ligaments and joints (we now know – the damage to the heart and oxidative stress) is greatest. Additionally, many endurance runners train on hard surfaces adding to the chronic stress. If you’re an older endurance runner, better to drop running in favour of cycling and resistance. Endurance running is ok (sort of) when you’re younger but is fragility inducing when you’re thirty-five plus. To make things worse, endurance runners are hooked on carbohydrate (“fuel”) - when they get injured and can’t train for three weeks they put on fat; a sure sign that what they are doing is wrong. If you eat paleo-ish, do resistance and robust HIIT or Interval type training (+ a necessary aerobic base – but not from long distance) when you don’t train for three weeks, you won’t put on fat.
Things you can ‘get away with’ as a youngster but not in middle-age
1/ veganism
2/ a high carbohydrate diet 3/ chronic endurance
4/ no strength training
This doesn’t mean it’s good for youngsters, just that youthful bodies can ‘cope’ better (whatever that mechanism is). By the time middle-age approaches two things are at play, 1/ the accumulation of ‘damage’ from two decades of inappropriate input/stimulus - chronic conditions and derangements start to reveal themselves; 2/ the body is less able to cope.
This is one reason why it’s generally better to take health advice from an older person. Many young personal trainers, health coaches and advisors are not fully aware that their health and fitness may be mostly down to youth, not that they know what they are doing. They don’t realise their limitations in knowledge as their mistakes are covered by their age. Older people can’t get away with this (Note: however they can still confuse their knowledge with their own genetic predisposition for strength, health, speed, flexibility, youthfulness, etc).
The Benefit of Eating Leaves
Seeds or nuts encased by a fleshy body (i.e. fruit) want to be eaten (modern fruit is sweet; ancestral less so). Wind dispersed seeds use a different vector and are protected by husks, mast, cones, keys...they aren’t bothered with being edible. Leaves don’t want to be eaten (neither do animals, but they can run or hide) so they have toxins and pesticides to deter foragers. This doesn’t stop
herbivores (vertebrates and invertebrates) from benefitting by their consumption; they have metabolisms which thrive on them [this highlights the general point that what is poison for one is ‘vitamins’ for another].
Only an idiot would contest that humans aren’t omnivores, and only the semi-blind argue that animal sourced food isn’t necessary for health. In a sense vegans and carnivores are two sides of the same coin (to be fair, carnivory has more going for it in that no hunter-gatherer could have survived on a purely vegan diet).
Absence from meat is good NOT bad: If you want a long-term benefit from something, don’t do it all the time. Nature delivered randomness, seasonality, famine, feast...If people want to recreate a hunter-gatherer lifestyle by being carnivorous, paleo, etc – why stick to chronic meat and fat? They argue that eating plants is sub-par; we only ate them to get us through periods of meat deprivation – really? One could argue that ‘starvation’ is sub-par but now we know that intermittent food deprivation has all sorts of benefits precisely because of absence. And absence increases our sensitivity. Intermittent herbivory is good, giving us phyto- pesticides in random dosages but also sparing us from too much meat (second order effect).
We can view intermittent herbivory as mega-dosing with phytochemicals. Or small amounts eaten like herbs/garnish, as micro- dosing. Far from being sub-par, leaves are medicine. And what does medicine operate under? Dose-response. Some people may react differently in the same way that people react differently to paracetamol or penicillin...but that doesn’t obviate the need at a population level (carnivore types who say plants are bad or unnecessary need to stop drinking coffee and taking aspirin).
There seems to be two types of New Carnivore – the ones who don’t eat plants because they argue they’re not needed, and the ones who think plants are bad for humans. Coffee is good because it has a drug effect, and aspirin is good because it thins the blood but natural plants or berries that contain them are bad because...“too many bad phytochemicals”; “too much fibre”; “we don’t have a digestive system designed for plants” – you can’t win.
Plants are in their own version of gang warfare – but to the victor comes some sort of benefit. Plants are healthy not because they shield you from oxidative stress but for quite the opposite reason: They stress you. Eating leaves isn’t about calories or energy (vegans need starch to get enough energy) but micronutrients, toxins, medicines and phyto-doses under hormesis.
We are omnivores, not only so we can survive periods of meat deprivation, but that non-meat sources are good for us in doses and variety that science hasn’t yet ascertained, despite the (unsubstantiated) five-a-day fruit and veg advice. Plus these periods give us a rest from meat and fat.
Aside: Some meat eaters eschew fruit as well – this doesn’t make sense. Too much fruit sugar (fructose) may be bad but not when delivered a la Nature’s distribution. Olives, plums, tomatoes, artichokes, and cucumbers are fruit which are designed to be eaten. Recent research has shown the anti-inflammatory effect of Olives similar to Ibuprofen (intriguingly, by a different pathway. Perhaps less side-effects?). Fossil records show that olive trees have been around for over twenty million years. Modern inflammatory diets breed modern drugs, so we could say that “Ibuprofen has olive oil-like anti-inflammatory properties”.
Intermittent Feasting – an alternative theory
Has EVERYBODY got fasting wrong?
In the wild, it’s rare there’s an abundance of food for *long* periods. Feeders would flock to the area the same way that traders exploit profit opportunities [Note: there is a thing called ‘Predator Swamping’ where the prey overwhelm the feeders by giving birth to huge numbers). It’s more likely the default eating distribution of hunter gatherer omnivores was slight calorie restriction with intermittent feasting than even calorie supply and intermittent fasting. Food abundance would have been quickly gorged and/ or attract more feeders.
Can we assume that periods of ‘famine’ were comparatively long, whilst feasting periods were comparatively short? We know the body preserves itself in the face of starvation but ultimately will need feeding. We know that CR has longevity benefits but its chronic application has negative downsides. Unless I'm mistaken this is a new paradigm - not intermittent or periodic fasting (IF/ PF) and not calorie restriction (CR).
Intermittent Fasting should be changed to INTERMITTENT FEASTING - we shouldn't eat well or sufficient and then fast; we should eat ‘sub-requirements’ for relatively long periods and then feast.
IF = Intermittent Fasting IFe = Intermittent Feasting
All the books on fasting are based around eating with bouts of fasting - they may have it the wrong way round.
Human Aging
The human death rate roughly follows a geometric progression from 30yrs to 80yrs: (Gompertz-Makeham Law) 1% - 2% - 4% - 8% - 16% - 32%: Senescence may or may not reflect this progression, but either way it ends in a terminal phase transition. It’s a one-way process (for now) from cellular to macro. If we can halt or reverse chronic conditions such as type 2 diabetes we get to slow down certain deterioration but the organism as a whole still ages. Notwithstanding infusions of young blood, new body parts, stem cell technology, etc., can we slow down senescence by reducing the common ratio (by diet/fasting/PA/CR – but not being a bore). The question is; if we can push back the 32% to the tenth decade, do we die at 100yrs or still die at 80yrs but ‘healthier’?
The Obese and the Powerlifter
Out of an obesogenic environment both the overweight and the powerlifter lose weight; the former, fat - the latter, muscle. Too much muscle requires feeding, and constant feeding is bad. Bodybuilders (who, unlike common perception, are practically as strong as powerlifters but with abs) are optimized for bodybuilding but are hardly useful for anything else – indeed many seem to have psychological disorders or food and drug addictions. Natural BBs are no different in that they consume vast amounts of powders, tablets and supplements. Whilst the powerlifter with the fat gut is strong, they are not ecologically fit and would have difficulty maintaining their strength and size. Being stuck in the wilderness changes your concept of fitness.
The single most important quality to retain as an older person is the ability to generate and withstand extremes.
Retired Brits move to Spain to escape the British winter - the damp messes with their joints. Warm weather, not too hot, not too cold, feels more comfortable. This reflects a wider property that aging means diminishing tails, extremes, outliers, whatever you want to call it. The robustness of a biological system is marked by its ability to cope with variation. Our own evolutionary history has been marked by our ability to populate and thrive in vastly different environments.
As you get older you should dedicate a greater proportion of your diminishing exercise capacity to hard and robust exercise – yet you’re told to take it easy. If all you do is “take it easy”, eventually all you’ll be able to do is take it easy - your body will have lost its capacity to generate and tolerate force, a high heart rate, acidosis, shocks, or running for the bus - until eventually even the normal task of walking up a flight of stairs is an effort and leaves you breathless. Senescence is decreasing range/variation
In aging we want to maintain our physical variability (beta-blockers are designed to clip the heart rate to protect the patient; variation may kill them). Two things happen over time if you don’t push your heart rate (HR); max HR decreases and resting HR
increases. Endurance training lowers the resting HR but doesn’t work the top end – a reason to keep up high intensity work, to ‘push’ the high HR which will lower the resting HR.
In athletics there’s a belief that you go up a distance as you age, as you retain endurance but lose speed – a self-fulfilling idea if there ever was one. Masters athletes have blown this out the water by retaining a high percentage of their speed and strength well into their 40’s, 50’s and 60’s.
No Warm-Up Training.
10-15% of my (more intense) training is undertaken without a warm-up. The majority of injuries in sport and exercise do not come from lack of warm up, more due to 1/ overtraining; 2/ too heavy a load, or 3/ not being conditioned appropriately (in effect the same as 2/). The sport/exercise mantras of icing, high carbs, periodisation, calorie burning....have mostly been mostly debunked; one of the last remaining Sacred Cows is to warm up before an exercise session – especially an intense one. Apparently it prepares the body for the work that is about to come; increases blood flow, raises body temp, muscle elasticity, and so on. However, maybe there is a deeper conditioning which is being missed? Masked by the ‘obvious benefits’
Young humans and animals in the wild can go from rest to full pelt in the blink of an eye. It’s one of the hallmarks of youth and dynamic vitality that the body can cope with sudden changes in conditions (output 10% to output 95%); the cheetah from a standing start to 60mph in five seconds; the cat on your sofa, from semi-asleep to jumping up the curtains in an instant when a bird flies past the window.
When one gets older, even if fit, strong, flexible, etc., it takes ‘more time to get going’ - no way are we going to risk pulling something by going from cold to max effort. In the wild the lion doesn’t normally telegraph her attack, neither the crocodile. On the city streets we don’t have a warm-up before a run for the bus or a street fight.
We hear stories of people with ‘dicky’ hearts having a heart failure from plunging into freezing water, and the elderly dying from the shock of being mugged. If the antifragility of the body is activated by overload or stress, to keep young and vital we should undertake more sessions without a warm-up, not less - we don’t want to protect the body but utilise its adaptive processes. “What about injury?” Well, you don’t robustify the system by overprotecting it; in any case, injury is (mostly) caused by the above factors, not from lack of warm-up.
Note: Doing a performance session without a warm-up will most likely lead to a poorer session overall, but a ‘no warm-up’ session is a different kind of conditioning. If you run off hard without a warm-up for a four miler or hill session (say), you get straight into oxygen debt - this generally leads to a more uncomfortable run (even if you slow down), but, again, this is a different type of conditioning, one we’re taught to avoid by warming up. Who knows? Importantly, it gets one psychologically used to running full pelt from nothing; something which people over forty avoid.
The Acute and the Chronic
Modern life is characterised by the transfer of the acute to the chronic. The acute things which make us stronger (or kill us) have given way to chronic work, chronic exercise, chronic food intake, chronic conditions, chronic medication, and the drip, drip, of chronic stress and depression. The chronic leads to physical and psychological fragility.
For many, middle-age is marked by; 1/ the accumulation of ‘damage’ from years of non or inappropriate input/stimulus leading to chronic conditions; 2/ the body being less able to withstand/generate >1Std dev. The body is now reducing its range of effectiveness.
If ageing is the diminishing ability to cope with or generate extremes then we need to go towards what ‘harms’ us, not deny it. A street fight fought bravely, win or lose, boosts your testosterone for six months (Do I have proof? No. But you ‘feel’ good).
Sprints and HIIT make you stronger and more wild, whereas jogging and calorie counting turns you into a boring, sandwich- eating fart.
Most of the problems of human health come from being too domesticated – not wild enough (including the food we eat). We have evened out acute hits of physical stress and adrenaline for chronic manmade stress. We swopped robust, hard graft, for jogging and Pilates. At the same time we’ve been told to avoid things which could harm us; the Sun, dirt, germs, eggs, red meat - elements of our lives for two million years, and to eat more wheat, grains, pasta, rice and low-fat products.
The ‘scientifically proven’ aerobics paradigm recommended three meals a day with snacks between, a high carbohydrate diet, healthy grains, polyunsaturates, low protein, low fat, energy balance, superfoods, wholefoods, five-a-day, light resistance, high endurance, fat-burning exercise, on and on; in other words, the derangements of modernity – practically the reverse of our evolutionary history. In the aerobics world everything was balanced, moderate and chronic – being half alive.
It’s not surprising that when you live like this your body is less able to cope with the variation and randomness of real life - adrenaline, fights, high heart rates.
Weakness, sarcopenia, dynapenia and systemic fragilisation all affect your ability to bear variation and extreme demands.
As people age they avoid oxygen debt – it hurts. Generating lactic acid (which *currently* is a fuel) or acidosis is uncomfortable. They convince themselves there’s no need to run for things or expend too much effort – however it’s the fear of how it feels that really stops them, so it becomes a downward enfeebling spiral. You need to reacquaint yourself with acidosis, a high heart rate and muscular effort, especially generated by the lower limbs. Use it, or lose it.
Dynamic Endurance
TASK – find a half-mile (800m) route in your neighbourhood – don’t have any warm up, just go outside and start running; fast as you can...don’t stop, keep going; when your breathing gets difficult or your legs start feeling heavy, back off for a few seconds then speed up again; when you’ve finished wait five minutes then repeat. Do this twice a week for 6 weeks - by then you’ll virtually be able to sprint all the way. In the US they have a horse called a Quarter Horse, it’s bred specifically to sprint distances from 100m to 800m - some have been clocked at 55mph (88 km/h) which isn’t much slower than a cheetah. They can cover 400m in 20seconds and 800m in less than a minute. If you train like a Quarter Horse you will develop the sort of fitness that you need to run from the Law - the majority of coppers have eaten far too many doughnuts to be able to keep up with that.
Anaerobic Aerobic
!!
If you want you can extend the distance to 3⁄4 or even 1 mile – but no further! You want a strong, athletic, and dynamic body – not the fragile ‘fitness’ of a marathon runner’s body. Long distance running will make you weedy and skinny; and in the process, kill any natural speed you have. Endurance should always be built in at a fast or dynamic pace.
Note: Why no warm-up? Well, in what real-life situation would you be able to do a warm-up? You may be running for your life. There’s a gang wanting to give you a beating or the fuzz are chasing you – “Oh, excuse me, would you mind giving me a few minutes to do a warm-up?”
It’s said that a horse can be pushed until it runs itself to death; don’t know how it dies, perhaps it’s heart explodes, You can run a 1⁄2 mile so fast that you’ll think your chest is going to burst – don’t worry, it won’t. What will happen is that your physiology will undergo such a remarkable transformation that you’ll turn into the human equivalent of a Quarter Horse.
Some other sessions to try (on track, road or grass):
1/ Sprint 200m (or 30secs) as fast as you can - rest for three minutes and repeat. Session is finished when you have completed six
runs.
2/ Run 400m (or 70secs) non-stop - rest for five minutes. Repeat three times.
3/ Run 300m fast (or 45secs) - rest for 90 seconds then sprint 150m (around 20secs). Rest for five minutes. Repeat twice. 4/ Find a reasonably steep hill. Run up for 150m. Slowly walk down. The session is over when you’ve completed six runs.
Note: I’m sure you already know that his type of training is called ‘Interval Training’ - where you run a certain distance, rest and repeat. There are many variations you can try - the distances run can be anywhere from 60 to 1000m with recoveries (rest) from 30secs to 10mins, or more.
Centres of Excellence are *Mostly* Marketing
The high-tech ‘Centres of excellence’ don’t make great athletes in greater abundance than poorer facilities – they may add icing on the cake but they don’t produce the cake. Once an athlete becomes on the verge of world-class, the world-class facilities (and coaches who are apparently world-class) avail themselves. Everything is subordinate to two things; elite genetics and great coaching. Great facilities enhance great coaching but never, ever, make up for poor coaching. The problem is that great facilities have been mistakenly (or marketed) taken to imply great instruction, so “world-class facilities” = “world-class coaching”. There is ABSOLUTELY no correlation between great facilities and great coaching but it certainly impresses the media, sports journalists, sports governing bodies and investors.
The coaches, nutritionists and sport scientists who end up at the centres of excellence are experts at marketing (they are not focused on coaching, but something else), utilising their connections and producing slick presentations. Once they’ve attained the higher levels of sports organisations they tend to stay there, moving from one organisation to another and adding to their CV; listing all their achievements - “I helped the national team to win twenty-five medals at the world championships”. “I coached x elite athletes to Olympic Gold”. No doubt the tea lady could also take some credit.
Champions are created through three main things (in order of importance); genetics, great coaching (includes self-coaching) and hard work – great facilities come 59th on the list.
MLF Syndrome
Athletic training, especially for speed (which is especially vulnerable to junk training) for the teenager is often poorly done, but hidden by the general growth/development of the athlete – in other words, natural growth out-competes the poor training... something which will stop when the athlete gets older and has a few years training under their belt. This is why a club can have great juniors but hardly any good seniors – the young athletes progresses in spite of their coaching, but sooner or later this comes to an abrupt halt much to the bewilderment of the coach. I call it ‘MLF Sydrome’ after Mark Lewis-Francis, an outrageously talented young sprinter who never realised his potential as a senior; this happens with so many young athletes in sprinting that it borders on the serially criminal. The poor coach then blames external circumstances for the failure of their athlete; worse still the senior athlete who was once a promising junior blames themselves for their lack of talent, and eventually drops out of the sport through sheer frustration, unfulfilled hopes or injury.
Prince Charles, the Pea Plant & “Anecdote”
If sports training, health, nutrition, and exercise advice is based *purely* on current scientific knowledge (like many diet/exercise books are), it’s likely that in twenty-five years (maybe only ten) fifty-percent, or more, will be out of date or debunked (noting that the debunking itself may later be debunked). Research papers are like Amazon self-publishing in that much of it is spam. This is not denigrating science but acknowledging that there’s real science, scientism, shoddy science, and biased studies wrapped up as objective research.
Some years ago, Prince Charles was roundly ridiculed by the media, scientists, and the general public for declaring that he talked to his plants. He contended that his flowers thrived from him conversing to them. This is still brought up occasionally in the media as some sort of proof that the Prince doesn’t have a full set of marbles (we subsequently found out that other gardeners talk to their plants, or even play them music, arguing that this creates an environment which plants respond to growing healthier and more robust).
It’s known that plants use moisture gradients to direct their roots through soil once water/moisture is detected. However, recent research on the Pea plant (Pisum sativum) has uncovered that in the absence of moisture information in the soil, the pea can detect and follow the acoustic vibrations of running water. The study recommends ‘the urgent need to better understand the ecological role of sound and the consequences of acoustic pollution for plants’.
So, is it too far-fetched to believe that plants respond (in some fashion) to talking?
In the absence of scientific evidence and data whom should we choose to believe? The scientist/researcher, or someone with forty years practical experience?
The saying that “the plural of anecdote is not data” is widely used to nullify an opponent’s personal experience which has no “proof” - but this seemingly intelligent phrase, used by seemingly intelligent people, has been warped to infer that lack of data means “doesn’t exist”.
Charlie Francis (RIP) probably the greatest sprint coach of the modern era said that science (as far as athletic training was concerned) was thirty years behind the field. It may be the case that science is often hundreds perhaps thousands of years behind the field.
The Invisible Processes of Nature & the Limitations of Knowledge.
The effects of exercise and diet are both overt and unseen. We choose to stick to the observable or scientifically provable (data/ evidence/research).
The unseen has two parts; 1/ no observable effect; 2/ an effect we don’t realise (or have proof) is causal or related. Just about every exercise, fasting and diet recommendation is based on the ‘observed’ whilst ignoring, or denigrating the latter as “no proof”.
At some stage combine intense exercise with a long fast. The benefits of this may be invisible or under the radar. We don’t know – neither does the expert who likes to bamboozle us with scientific ‘observed’ proof. Half of the challenge is trying to figure out the unobserved.
We should do some intense resistance exercise (or HIT) in a fasted state as it mimics the naturalistic reality of survival. Individuals who are fixated on muscle don’t want to do this as they feel that a session with no food before, during, or for hours after, will cannibalise muscle, negate the session or result in some other fragility inducing outcome. However, what if there are benefits ‘under the radar?
According to experts, post-exercise is the golden window of feeding – but if the body doesn’t get nutrition after the hunt won’t it ‘preserve’ itself until it does? The body can’t be profligate in the absence of food. The process is ‘destruction’, recycling and then growth – not constant grazing on food.
There is a theory that muscle shouldn’t be fed directly after intense exercise as it abbreviates the process of cellular waste removal and recycling – the mechanism of proteolysis recycles damaged proteins and makes new ones; to a certain extent the body builds muscle without an exogenous dose of protein in the ‘golden window’. We should let proteolysis and autophagy run before feeding the body. Even if we miss out on some muscle growth, we gain by getting rid of cellular junk, the accumulation of
which has been shown to cause senescence and disease (this is one reason why non-stop eating to grow muscle is such a bad thing). Constantly topping up the body with energy (grazing) has been debunked – how would we have survived the African Plains if we needed constant, regular energy?
The pursuit of muscle growth purely for the sake of it is not ecological. “Muscle is medicine”, yes – but too much ‘medicine’ harms. The obese AND the heavily-muscled powerlifters die earlier. Some people don’t want to hear it, but the pursuit of massive strength and massive muscles is not healthy. You want a strong healthy body, not a bloated one. The body is a product of the Wild. Always eating after hard exercise is a product of Domestication.
Deadlifts and Squats are HyperG
Weight training is hyper-gravity training so the effects go far deeper than strengthening a muscle. If we increased gravity by 10% or changed some aspect of the environment, we would adapt to it (every chronic stressor elicits a ‘resistance’ - good or bad). The tale of Superman hit upon this in that Clark Kent (Kal-El) was normal under conditions on his planet but became superhuman on Earth. If you were born on the Moon you wouldn’t be able to jump about like Neil Armstrong and a holiday on Earth would be like wearing a 200lb weight jacket (you’d need a wheelchair). The body is DEMAND led; the demand is our environment. With weight training you are recreating (to an extent) hypergravity – hyperG doesn’t just work the muscles but also the bones, the heart and other systems of the body we haven’t yet figured out. We know that ZeroG has all sorts of effects far beyond muscle atrophy and bone weakness; maybe resistance training impacts the same (or some of the same) systems.
Minimum Effective Dose
The single biggest killer of athletes is overtraining. Overtraining is the bug bear of highly motivated but dumb athletes, and highly motivated (usually) but ignorant coaches. A training session could be devised which would practically kill a rhino in three minutes – once or twice a week is ok (maybe three if you have a high level recovery protocol in place) but if you did it every day you would be hospitalised in a fortnight.
However, people get injuries from being overtrained AND undertrained. Being undertrained means you are not able to cope with the imposed demands through being unconditioned at that level. Another definition is that the work you are doing is insufficient to elicit any adaptive progress. Being overtrained means the demand has overwhelmed the absolute limits of your adaptive processes - you have no more redundancy at that particular metric. Athletes are supremely fit but surprisingly fragile – like an F1 race car, they’re a sheared bolt away from disaster. It makes sense that the adaptive process has a biological limit (genetics), otherwise training would be a never-ending chain of personal bests. Witness athletes with overtraining or chronic fatigue syndrome - when they are forced to rest from injury, colds, viruses, external circumstances, etc., they come back super-fast. Sebastian Coe set three world records (800m, 1500m & Mile) in the space of forty-one days when he was forced to reduce his training volume due to taking a degree. Supercompensation was only achieved through rest from the severity of the training stressor. Previous to this he had essentially been running with the breaks on.
Most athletes careers are ended by acute or chronic injuries; the accumulation of damage from chronic day in day out training. For long-term health it is wrong to mimic the work-load of a competitive athlete. The body builds ‘resistance’ to background chronic stressors (the result may be good or bad; i.e. gravity – good; carbohydrate intake – bad [insulin resistance]; likely delineated by natural environmental chronicity vs manmade chronicity) but needs adequate rest from acute stressors; Too much volume, too much loading, too much frequency, not enough rest or recovery – this is deadly.
A friend, an ex-athlete now a personal trainer, spends a zillion hours per week exercising, yet I get 95% of the benefit (and less downside) from two/three hours a week, leaving the rest of the time free for writing, fishing, knocking about the city, and generally avoiding anything which resembles paid employment.
If you like constant exercising, hanging out in gyms, and admiring the posterior chains of the opposite sex - all well and good. If you like chronic cross-fit, that’s your business but there’s a law of diminishing returns and it may be stopping you from attending to other areas in your life. If you are like most of humanity, at some point you will be forced to reduce your commitment to over- exercising; children, family, career, injury, wear and tear, and so on.
MED is the smallest dose which will elicit the desired outcome; what that dose is you can only really know from experience. Further, to retain a quality generally requires a smaller dose than it took to gain that quality. What MED is not; it is not an excuse to do hardly any volume, nor is it an excuse to not work hard, in fact the opposite is the case – utilizing MED requires that you cut out the junk and work the tails. Some people have it wrong in that they say MED is an excuse to shirk volume – properly applied, this is incorrect; if you want to train for a marathon (don’t), you need to put in the miles; however, some marathoners run 40 miles per week whilst others run 120miles per week.
If you’re aggressively focused on performance or times (the only interest of a competitive athlete), you will have to utilise the Maximum Tolerated Dose (MTD) and risk injury (in fact, injury will be inevitable). The MTD is the highest exercise dose that will elicit the desired performance metric without an unacceptable downside. The training is up-titrated (as should the recovery and recuperative modalities) to the point where the benefits just outweigh the harm. This is basically a cliff-edge.
Nothing has destroyed an athlete more than hard work under bad coaching – in this case it would be better to underwork. “A great work ethic coupled with bad coaching destroys athletes”. For ecological health, minimum effective dose is *generally* the way forward.
Note: Like all other sections in this mini-book, this area will be greatly expanded in the published book. Undertraining, MED,
MTD and overtraining are important concepts – as are the related ideas of dose-response and acute vs chronic stress.
Can ‘Carnivores’ Eat Honey?
Can carnivores eat honey? If they’re on zero/low carbohydrates (they’re scared of sugar) get them to eat a spoonful of honey, and stand back - it will hit their system like an explosion. Don’t tell me there’s no use for *some* carbohydrate delivered quickly. [From ‘Fasting’] Nature made sugar hard to get, there wasn’t much and we had to work to for it. When people say sugar is bad, it is at the amount we are eating but the idea of good or bad is meaningless without looking at dose. Sugar is not a problem in natural forms and doses (ref, the Hadza); when we look at it hormetically it may in fact confer some benefits.
No-carbers seem to deny that dose makes the poison (or the cure) - yet everything in Nature operates in dose-response. They understand the dose-response of exercise but not of nutrition? Is there anything where x/10 has the same effect as 10/x?
Does a dose of sugar every now and then cause insulin resistance, obesity, chronic inflammation, AGEs, hyperinsulinaemia? Unlikely. We want a hit of simple carbs when we have hardly any in the diet, we get an almost instantaneous rush of energy - perhaps there are other benefits? (Has fruit exploited our metabolism or have we exploited fruit?).
What many people don’t realise is that you can get Insulin Resistance (IR) on a no-carbohydrate ketogenic diet. IR prioritises glucose during starvation and low carbohydrate intake. The brain gets to use the glucose, not the body’s other cells. Further, IR is a fat-sparing mechanism. Body fat is as a long-term energy storage substrate, the body requires it for periods of food deprivation,
low-level energy requirements, foraging for food and persistence hunting. It makes sense that the body wants to preferentially use available carbohydrate for energy.
The modern carbohydrate and calorie laden environment has turned the body’s defences against itself, what is protective becomes a derangement (see inflammation). Ketogenic or starvation IR is good but modern IR comes with high blood insulin levels (hyperinsulinaemia). Most research concludes that the chronic combination of hyperinsulnaemia and hyperglycaemia is a slow insidious health disaster.
The mainstream consensus is that chronically elevated blood sugar causes a resistance in the cell’s receptor (general manifestation; chronicity -> resistance) but it may also be that modern IR is a protective mechanism stopping glucose overload (toxicity) in the cells.
In a hunter-gatherer environment carbohydrate is fat sparing – good news. In our environment carbohydrate is fat sparing – bad news
High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) is a subset of Interval Training – the definition of ‘intensity’ is appropriate to distance or time. There is a general misconception about HIIT that it involves maximal efforts repeated, when it’s actually a maximal effort over the session. In other words, the earlier reps are sub-max - but over the session the heart rate increases in a peaks and troughs or ‘rachet’ fashion; acidosis increases in the same manner, CNS fatigue, etc., meaning that as the session progresses each rep gets harder to achieve at the target pace.
[Heart rate; acidosis, ‘fatigue’ as the session progresses]
!
The motivated athlete arrives DOA (almost) at the end of the final repetition.
Generally, a HIIT session involves acidosis/oxygen debt – 6 x 200m with 3 mins between doesn’t involve ‘all-out’ sprinting but a high sub-max. Pure sprint sessions involve fast (95% -105% top speed) short reps with long recoveries where there is no acidosis, or at least, complete recovery (sort of) between reps.
[Note: This is definition is simplified; ‘Anaerobics’ will cover in depth].
Some sessions to try (on track, road or grass). These are running sessions, use your imagination to convert to cycling,
rowing...your sport/activity. Many more sessions to try will be included in ‘Anaerobics’.
1/ Sprint 200m (or 30secs) as fast as you can - rest for three minutes and repeat. Session is finished when you have completed six
runs
2/ Run 400m (or 70secs) non-stop - rest for five minutes. Repeat three times
3/ 400m - five times with 1 min between
3/ 300m fast (or 45secs) - rest for 90 seconds then sprint 150m (around 20secs). Rest for five minutes. Repeat twice 4/ 10 x 100m; 1 min between
5/ 18 x 60m; split into 3 sets. 1 min btwn reps; 8 min btwn sets
6/ 100m (3mins recovery); 150m (4 mins); 200m (8mins); 200 (8mins); 150m (6mins); 100m
7/ 600m x 3 (8 mins btwn)
8/ 8 x 300m; split into 2 sets. 4 mins btwn reps; 10 mins btwn sets
9/ 40m, 60m, 80m, 100m, 120m, 150m – full recovery btwn
10/ Find a reasonably steep hill. Run up for 150m. Slowly walk down (3/4mins). The session is over when you’ve completed six runs
11/ 100/150m hill – run up fast; jog for 15secs at the top (on flat) – sprint 100m. Repeat four times.
Vitamins, Minerals, RDA’s & RNI’s
It seems that what you eat has an impact on your vitamin and mineral requirements, independent of other factors. A high carbohydrate diet has a different effect to a high fat or carnivorous diet. It may be that vitamins and minerals are supplied in direct and sufficient proportion to the macronutrient profile, or the opposite, that there’s an inverse relationship (at least for specific nutrients). For example, there is research that a high carbohydrate diet increases the need for vitamin C - a high-carb diet without citrus fruits (sailors/‘limeys’) or other vitC containing foods leads to scurvy; but an ASF (animal sourced food) diet decreases the requirement for vitC so that ‘lack’ of fruit, etc., doesn’t lead to scurvy. The same may apply to thiamine (B1), and who knows what else. However, it could also be that a high meat or protein diet increases our requirements for certain vits/mins not supplied by a carnivorous diet. Humans are omnivores; many keto-carnivores are adamant that we are omnivorous only so we can survive during periods of ASF deprivation, in other words non-ASF is inherently sub-par. Herbivory lovers argue that we need plant based food - they provide nutrients, phytochemical and hormetic toxins which ASF doesn’t supply. Additionally, it
could be that eating plants (a non-meat period) gives our body a rest from too much protein, fat, meat, - i.e. from toxicity, desensitisation, and resistance (and giving animals a rest from being predated?).
Dietary vitamins and minerals operate under dose-response; environment, acute vs chronic(mega-dosing vs daily inputs, in that 5grams of vitC in one day has a different effect to 250mgs a day over twenty days) environmental signaling/stess (pollution, exercise, sleep levels), environmental supply (sunlight), blood donation (iron), chronic deficiencies/illness, pregnancy, age, body size, sex, genetics, ethnicity, eye colour? We understand that a dose of Sun reduces our requirement for VitD in our food. Maybe pesticides from food means we need more vits/mins to be support the body. Does caffeine ‘leach’ out certain micronutrients, perhaps sugar in urine does (T2D)?
What do we do in the face of biological complexity? The idea of daily micronutrient intakes, RDA’s and RNI’s is too linear - no doubt people will argue that “we have to have something!” Ok, but for your health treat the guidelines with a pinch of salt, in the same way you that you should treat “a balanced diet” with a pinch of salt...
The Portfolio Effect and Fasting
Fasting triggers a cascade of effects which peak or ‘work’ over different timelines. Imagine Fasting as a cryptocurrency wallet containing BTC, XRP, TRX, FUEL, etc. Each currency has its own value timeline which has a weighted effect on the overall wallet. So with fasting we have an overall effect timeline made up of separate (but overlapping) components - autophagy, proteolysis, ketogenesis, lipolysis, neuro-regeneration, insulin sensitivity, tumour suppression, up-regulation of senses (eyesight, smell, hearing)..and other things we haven’t discovered yet [Note: this is not a discussion on what fasting does or doesn’t do].
The optimal length of a *general* fast doesn’t necessarily mean the optimal expression of each component; it is most likely that the peak cumulative effect of one component coincides with the downgrading or even negative (inverted ‘U’ - dose-response)
effect of another component (This is why arguments that say fasting over 24hrs (say) is bad because of X component having gone past it’s usefulness, are missing the whole picture).
This leads us to assume two main uses (or applications) of fasting - firstly, as a general ‘holistic’ benefit utilising 16/8, OMAD, IF, PF, long/short fasting and intermittent CR. Secondly, in a more targeted way for specific conditions, derangements or illnesses - it may be that longer fasts are necessary to cure or help some conditions so *some* muscle atrophy (or whatever) is acceptable. It may be that short fasts are helpful for other specific conditions without incurring the downsides of longer fasts.
[Note: one can assume this applies to the ingestion of different foods and macronutrients]. The popular idea of fasting as a weight-loss aid doesn’t do it justice.
Life is a Field Test, Not a Lab Test
Someone educated me that the reason a laboratory VO2 max test is good is that the environment is controlled, not subject to the vagaries of the temperature, wind, humidity and other variables. Isn’t this the weakness of the test? Creating an artificial environment gives you reliable but ‘artificial’ non-ecological results. We saw this with the recent Nike marathon Breaking2 in Monza; an attempt to produce a super-fast marathon time by controlling the environment, which they achieved – just twenty-six seconds shy of a sub 2hr marathon (as far as I can remember only one athlete ran faster - controlling an athlete’s internal environment is far more problematic).
Field tests give you better results than laboratory tests. One can find VO2max rankings of athletes from various sports, which may be interesting, but are mostly irrelevant as far as your training is concerned. It’s like predicting the financial success of a student by how well they do in their economics module. Most sport scientists and technicians sort of know this; however their remit is to push the benefits of lab testing not highlight its shortcomings.
Barbell exercises are better than machine exercises for that same body part(s). I notice some guys training bench-presses on the Smith Machine, pushing 120kg – put them on a bench with a barbell, they can hardly do 80kgs. Similarly, with the squat. Further still, getting strong in the gym may transfer poorly (or less directly than you may think) to lifting kegs of beer or digging potatoes in a field. General strength helps of course. And this is the point, maximising a single metric, even strength, may not transfer well (it may even be negative) in a different environment. Not necessarily due to that ability, but because of the things you have left out to be able to maximise that ability. My opinion is that it is better for the average person to have a good/high level of general abilities rather than an optimised level of a single one. Some areas/abilities compete with each other – a powerlifter wouldn’t last in the Amazon forest and a marathon runner would be a wet-noodle working at a cattle ranch.
In the Wild, nature presents challenges for you out of the blue...you could ask, “what has that got to do with me, I don’t live in the wild?” The point is that the challenges which keep you healthy in the wild are the ones which keep you healthy in modern society. First, and foremost, our bodies processes are designed with survival in mind; so, being without food upregulates metabolic and physiological systems; acute challenges and loads mines the body’s redundancies, triggering its adaptive processes; lack of oxygen means the body produces more red blood cells, the list goes. We should view health through the lens of ecological and environmental rationality.
The Dangers of Abundance
Chronic disease; NCDs - Diabetes, IR, Hyperinsulinaemia, Obesity, Cancer(?), Inflammation, Heart Disease. How many modern derangements and diseases are caused by chronicty of oversupply?
We cannot cope with *chronic* abundance (oversupply) as we have evolved to cope with scarcity & acute or intermittent abundance. (We’ve had no need to develop/evolve/select a mechanism to deal with an environment of chronic abundance) This is why spikes in things generally aren’t a problem.
Chronic abundance leads to *either*, novel conditions(?) or derangements of normal physiological/metabolic responses.
-Chronic oversupply (abundance) harms
-This seems to apply to all things – abundance of stress is bad - work, commuting, sunlight, food, training, etc
-Intermittent ‘oversupply’ the body can cope with, and may be good – however one-off doses operate under dose-response
-The body prefers chronic undersupply, but is fragility inducing without intermittent doses or periods of abundance.
-A lot (considered ‘normal’ today) of food with intermittent fasting may not as be effective as slightly under-eating with big doses once/twice a week (and fasting).
-The body thrives under variation (in the sense of cycling, on-off, high-low – HR, muscular effort, working the ‘tails’ - sleep/ wake; light/day etc. Variation has a Jensen’s inequality effect. i.e. 16hrs awake + 8hrs sleep is better than 24hrs resting or semi- asleep or semi-awake.
-Chronic activity and schedules (employment/commuting) cause psychological fragility -we need intermittent bouts of danger and excitement, freedom & spontanaeity - days without a schedule– increases testosterone, creativity, and ‘feeling alive’
-Each agent/environmental signal has its own profile - a) dose-response curve – acute; and dose response curve - chronic
So we need to deal with over-proliferation of bad effects through the process of 1/ via negativa (withdrawal of causative agent/s); 2/ via the continual process of destruction and reconstruction; 3/ Giving the body rest, to recover – reducing inflammation, etc; or from stress of exercise, training...
CANCER: The Optionality of Non-Standard Protocols. A Basic Overview.
Any ‘non-standard’ approach to cancer treatment should viewed in the light of ‘Optionality’.
The fear that people have when applying any treatment (especially for cancer) which isn’t supported by mainstream medical science is that the treatment will cause more harm, and worsen the existing condition. The patient and most of their friends will say “listen to the doctor, they know best, don’t listen to pseudo-science and unproven rubbish” - so it’s very easy just to stick to the standard advice.
A long option is financial market parlance for a position that has a limited or capped downside, but a potentially unlimited upside (a total cure in the case of cancer) – to me this sounds a reasonable, even obligatory approach. I would try it on myself and would advise my loved ones to try as well (otherwise you just feel hopeless).
As far as population cancer figures are concerned we don’t want to indolently fall within the average treatment outcomes but achieve the best possible outcome (by being proactive) within that range of outcomes - whilst realising that a 100% remission cannot be guaranteed.
If a certain non-standard protocol has no downsides (ok, we can never fully know) then there is no harm in trying it. We don’t want to spend too much time on something ineffective (even if it doesn’t harm) as the patient is in a race against the potential spread of cancer.
Optionality: We open the door to opportunity and a potential cure/help whilst clipping the downside. If we try a few things together maybe only one of those is effective, but who cares (initially) if the net effect is positive. The top-down approach to treatment has certain tried and tested merits (and iatrogenics) but we should also try a bottom-up approach without causing harm.
Potential downside of non-standard treatments:
Worsening the condition by ‘feeding’ or accelerating the cancer, weakening the immune system or interacting in some sort of negative way with the drug or treatment protocol. Maybe there’s a psychological downside if we have false hope in a useless protocol (but is hope ever bad in this context?)
Potential upside:
Boosting the immune system, keeping a healthy bodyweight, making the patient feel subjectively/objectively better, suppressing or reducing the tumour/cancer, preventing a relapse. Much of the acute deterioration in the cancer patient is to do with the treatment itself, so anything which alleviates this aspect is a relief regardless of whether it helps to combat the cancer itself.
Five (treatment) areas to consider:
1/ Cancer in general
2/ A particular cancer
3/ Protection from the negative effects of radio or chemotherapy
4/ Boosting the effects of radio or chemotherapy
5/ Post-treatment (recovery): Ongoing cancer/tumour suppression or inhibition, to prevent relapses.
Note: I’m aware there’s all sorts of dubious advice on the internet re health, nutrition, disease...signal ‘n noise and all that - however, they may be a future for IF and Keto (and maybe certain supplements and cheap drugs) with regards to cancer treatment.
Starve – destroy – recycle – reconstruct – eat – build – eat – build - starve – destroy – recycle – reconstruct - eat – build – eat – build – starve....
Much of modern society is aimed at saving you energy, whilst at the same time oversupplying you with energy in the form of calories. Then society supplies you with medication to counteract the insidious effects of the first two (heart disease, diabetes, metabolic syndrome, obesity, inflammatory disorders).
In the Wild, practically the reverse is the case. To get energy you have to expend energy; further, you may expend energy and not get any...for a while, or you may get some, just not enough. Or you may get a bonanza. In this scenario the body has to ‘preserve’ itself to survive. It knows how to cope with deficits and it knows how to deal with acute (to a point) calorie inputs. [Note: The idea that the body can only utilise 30gs (or whatever) of protein at one sitting is complete nonsense – especially following a period of protein deficit.
Starving (fasting) uses up your energy stores - glycogen, then some amino acids, then fat, then more amino acids. It destroys and recycles damaged cells and proteins and makes new ones. Then you need to eat to build up your reserves, keep muscle mass and stay strong. You need to keep doing this because it’s what keeps you healthy. Ignoring any part of this long term either leads to derangements of too much energy input, or fragility from too much ‘destruction’ and not enough energy input.
None of this requires calorie counting or steady feeding or knowledge of how many vitamins are in a lettuce leaf. This is the problem with *many* dieticians and nutritionists, stuck in a world of micronutrients, calories, balance and percentages. An old- skool dietician is like a mechanic who doesn’t know how to drive. Worse than that, as a mechanic actually knows how a car works.
Everything in the universe works in cycles. The human body is no different.
The Hunter Mode & Fasting
Fasting is an attempt to replicate Nature’s supply of food – recreating (within reason) the distribution of calories in a wild environment. So, ‘hidden’ processes which have been damped down by our modern, constant supply of food reappear. Some of these we may have experienced as youngsters when we stayed out all day during the summer holidays, and only returned home in the evening for supper. As adults we are more sensible...
Why would we want to replicate the wild, after all we have constructed society precisely to protect us from its brutality? The problem is that have protected ourselves from the very bad life-threatening stress, which is very, very good, but at the same time ‘protected’ ourselves from the eustress – the stress which benefits us, the stress which makes us strong and healthy.
The rationale for fasting is quite simple – food deprivation is a potentially life-threatening situation which triggers a strong evolutionary response, so our body has developed strategies to enhance survivability and increase its chances of finding food, in that, 1/ the brain ‘improves’ in response to hunger; 2/ the body preserves itself in response to deprivation. These are the two ‘master’ conditions from which all of the benefits of fasting flow.
In other sections of ‘Anaerobics’ I’ve written about the the necessity of being able to tolerate and generate extremes as we age; aging is decreasing variation. Also that we should preserve the ability (as far as we can) to generate sudden changes in physical output: ‘Young humans and animals in the wild can go from rest to full pelt in the blink of an eye. It’s one of the hallmarks of youth and dynamic vitality that the body can cope with sudden changes in conditions (output 10% to output 95%); the cheetah from a standing start to 60mph in five seconds; the cat on your sofa, from semi-asleep to jumping up the curtains in an instant when a bird flies past the window’.
A longer fast ‘switches’ us to hunter mode, a primal state which conserves energy when we don’t need it, but turns it on instantly when we do. Energy is conserved in the form of a lowered resting heart rate and a feeling of physical lethagy when we are
stationary (not doing much) for a period of time – but is delivered when we need to focus, react quickly and ‘run for a kill’. Just like the lion, our senses (which are heightened; smell, eyesight, hearing) are on a trigger; this is a life or death situation. Bursts of energy are required but inbetween needs recovery. There are only so many opportunities.
Again, this makes sense in that when we don’t need it, we shut down to conserve energy, but can instantly spring into action – like the cat (your pet Lion) on the sofa, when we do.
The hunter mode is only brought on by fasting - not paleo, keto or any other dietary protocol. The hunter mode is a systemic condition, not simply a ketogenic effect on the brain.
A Frisbee is not a Space Rocket.
The Nature of the Beast is not only determined by the domain but also by the tails or extremes of that domain. A swimmer is not a runner – but a runner is also not a runner in that a marathoner is not a sprinter. That’s pretty obvious. But it doesn’t stop there; a marathoner is not a marathoner.
An elite Marathon runner can run 4mins flat (or better) for the mile. A 2hr10min marathoner is as different to a 4hr30min marathoner as sprinter is to the average person off the street. What John Doe doesn’t understand is that an elite marathon runner could do ‘sprint type’ session which would make them (normal Joe) look practically comatose. The ‘frail’ distance runner could complete a 50sec 400m whereas you with your muscle strength couldn’t run under 70seconds. Muscular strength is only one type of ‘strength’ in that an overweight powerlifter may have a heart attack running for a bus. However, he could fend off three ‘pencil-necks’ with one hand. Conversely the pencil neck could jog half a mile backwards and still beat the Squat-meister. As far as *health* is concerned, the pencil neck would holistically benefit from strength training and the power-lifter would benefit from more CV fitness.
Running sprints is good for you but it doesn’t make you a sprinter or a sprint type; running marathons doesn’t make you a marathoner....
Skill acquisition for the self-taught or badly taught
It is far easier to learn from scratch than to have to unlearn something which you’ve done incorrectly for a long time, there is less internal resistance. Unfortunately, it’s more difficult to change if you have had some level of subjective ‘success’ with your existing paradigm or technique (early success can be a bad thing). This is the psychological prison that many amateur and recreational sports players inhabit. The quintessence of this is the ‘weekend warrior’ - probably the dumbest of all sports participants.
Tennis is a perfect example, as by far the majority of recreational players are terrible, yet most of them (secretly) believe they are better than they actually are. These individuals are the most fossilised and unable to learn (you can identify a bad tennis player simply from the way he holds a racquet, in the same way that you can tell a chimpanzee can’t write by the way it holds an ink pen).
The bug bear of any tennis coach is coaching the adult who has played tennis for many years. Most coaches if they’re honest will admit to having no real interest in changing them – it’s too frustrating.
The problem with the long-term recreational player is that what they are doing ‘feels’ right, even though it’s wrong, and what is actually right feels very wrong - so there is tremendous internal resistance to adopt any significant change in technique. Furthermore, in the process of transitioning from the ingrained incorrect ways of doing things to the new correct way, things will get worse, sometimes faaar worse – they can no longer hit the ball over the net.
The resistance to change is 100% psychological - ok, there are motor patterns to undo; automatic and reflexive responses for dealing with an opponent’s heavy topspin cross-court forehand, but the willingness to change come from the mind. Of course, there is a new physical skill which has to be mastered.
Incorrect technique will only get you so far – you’ll hit a ceiling which you’ll never be able to break through.
If you want to improve on something you’ve been doing for a long time, it may mean that you’ll have to completely destroy everything you’ve learnt and been doing for years. You will need to break out your mental prison and stop being a fossil - become like you don’t know anything so you can start learning. Most people find this very difficult to do, they’ll never be able to change – go to your local tennis court and watch middle-aged and older people who regularly play, they hardly ever hit the ball correctly. It’s like watching non-tennis, tennis.
How does it happen that people stay bad at technical sports for so long? Again, using tennis as an example – it goes back to how they learnt as a beginner. Rather than concentrating on process and technique they only focused on outcome, i.e. quick results or success. Rather than focusing on footwork and hitting the ball correctly (i.e. prepare early - racquet back and low, move the feet, hit up, eye on the ball, etc.) they only concentrated on getting the ball over the net.
Fundamentals always come first – and strangely enough, hitting the ball over the net so that it lands in the opponent’s court is not an early fundamental, in fact it severely limits how an individual technically progresses, in that they will want to repeat the same action that achieved that outcome, regardless of technique.
If you have being playing a technical sport badly for years, the only way to improve is:
1/ Empty your mind of everything you’ve learnt.
2/ Prepare for feeling extremely uncomfortable and clumsy
3/ Understand that you’ll get far worse before you (slowly) begin to improve 4/ Lose your results oriented ego and focus only on the process
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