H__thP_tn_m

First Stairclimbing Race

2012-02-19T11:49:00.000-08:00

I'm out of condition. Several weeks ago I stopped working out. I had an arm injury and got sick, so I stopped working out completely. Then I went to Europe. Besides chopping some wood, I didn't get much exercise.

I'm still sick. I feel weak and my arm still hurts. I'm down to 178# (from 185#), and a little fatter than 6 weeks ago. Although I stopped taking creatine (which supposedly increases bulk), I think I've lost some muscle due to inactivity.

Lately it has seemed that despite me quitting exercise, the arm isn't getting better, so I might as well start training again.

I was figuring I should do my first stairclimbing race. The idea is that in the time leading up to the race, I'll focus on my legs and conditioning. That my left arm is gimpy shouldn't bother me as if I was strength training.

What really got me taking action yesterday is that I thought I looked less jacked, and a friend confirmed that I not only looked less jacked, but, when hugged, actually felt noticeably smaller. That got me to take action.

My first step was easy: I bought stuff online. I ordered some unflavored whey protein isolate and some creatine (because Martin Berkhan says it works). I'm not even sure why I got the whey, except that it makes it very easy to eat lots of protein.

My second step: I went to the gym and worked out very hard doing pushups, box jumps and the leg presses on the leg press machine. I also did some shoulder presses, as it seems I can do those without bothering the arm too much.

I track how much weight I can lift. I noticed that I wasn't nearly as strong as I was six weeks ago. At a certain point, I noticed that I was feeling miserable by comparing my current strength to that of 6 weeks ago (my peak fitness). Of course, had I compared myself to my nadir, I'd feel happy - but how many of us make that comparison?

The whole thing reminded me of this video - when we judge our current experience to how we think it ought to be, we suffer.

I haven't even run up a building's stairwell, so all this is new for me. I asked Kevin for tips. He's been very helpful. I've started by doing box jumps, leg presses and intervals on my exercise bike to get ready. I have to count on the race taking ten minutes.

I went to the mall and happened to see some cool-looking shoes. I was tempted to buy them - just because. I asked Kevin if I should get such shoes for the race. His answer was that running shoes (of any sort) would suffice. So I guess I won't get those shoes.

Buyers and Sellers

2012-01-29T11:42:00.000-08:00

I got an email from a guy this morning:

I have a quick question I hope you will be willing to answer. I've been following you and your pigs for a little while now, and I've been interested in the work you have done preserving the genetics of a rare pig breed. I am currently working with some close friends who are long time dairy farmers and we have been discussing getting into the high-end pork business. At this point, I don't know the exact model we will be following, but working to maintain the genetics of rare breeds interests me. So anyway, I'm interested that you are leaving the business. I realize there are many reasons to move on, but I can't help but wonder if some of the reasons might be relevent to a few people getting into the business.

Is there anything you can share about running your business and why you have left it?

Thanks for any insight,

My reply:

Mr. XYZ,

I've wanted to sell my business from the time I bought it. You can
read that in this article:

http://www.seattlepi.com/lifestyle/food/article/Super-succulent-imports-are-everything-U-S-pork-1269620.php

As I said then, "if the right offer came along, I would sell
tomorrow."

Indeed, why does anyone sell anything? At the moment of sale, a buyer
and a seller come together and discover a price. The buyer wants what
he gets more than what he gives up. The seller likewise wants what he
gets more than what he gives up. By exchanging things, each person
becomes happier.

How can it be any other way?

Usually, when I explain this phenomenon to people this way, they conclude I'm an asshole.

Is there some way to explain this to people and not come off like an asshole? If you know how to do it, please leave a comment and tell me.

Kelly McGonigal's Willpower Talk

2012-01-27T10:42:00.000-08:00

A neat talk by Dr. Kelly McGonigal on willpower.

To quote Dennis Hopper's character Clifford Worley in True Romance, "I find that shit fascinating."

Philip K Dick Yet Again

2012-01-27T10:35:00.000-08:00

I read this story about automated planes and couldn't help but think of PKD's claws in the story "Second Variety".

Alexander Technique, Book Recommendation

2012-01-27T01:25:00.000-08:00

Paging Chuck Norris!

I did a bunch of Alexander Technique (AT) lessons last year, starting around May.

They seemed to have helped a lot, so I'm mentioning it. My teacher was Sara Padilla in Seattle. If you've got back pain, I recommend you try her.

I hadn't mentioned it until now because I was embarrassed to admit I'd done it. I had a number of reservations about the whole thing.

The reason I decided to try AT is that I've had back pain for decades, and stuff like this suggests that it helps, assuming one sticks with it a while. I decided I would, despite my skepticism, commit myself to doing it and see if it worked.

I think I was ready to try it, despite the skepticism because I'd gone paleo/low-carb and lost a lot of fat. I had already had the experience that if you stick to a program that works for a lot of people, despite the fact that you are a snowflake (totally different and better from everyone else), it can work, and might even work better than you'd expect.

My back hurts a lot less now than it used to. I'm not sure if it from the AT lessons, because I was doing other things in the same period. The reason I'm writing about it now is that I understand that the AT is like meditation and I think AT helped me a lot with meditation.

When you do AT, you learn how to pay attention to your physical sensations on a moment by moment basis, while lying, sitting or moving. E.g. when you get up, you don't need to tense your neck like your life depends on it. You just need to get up. Yet many people will tense their neck a lot. They aren't even aware of what they are doing. That unawareness leads to pain.

I learned quickly that I had chronic tension in my back. I wasn't even aware I was holding it. E.g. suppose I'm driving. When my mind wanders and I think thoughts that generate tension, my body tends to tense up. When I "come to" and realize that I've lost connection with my body and its physical sensations, I scan it for tension - and normally find some in the shoulders. I then release. This cycle can happen 10 or more times in a minute. It is a bit demoralizing at first, but it gets easier. It is a similar phenomenon to the mind wandering during meditation on one's breath.

Mindful Way through Depression: Freeing Yourself from Chronic Unhappiness

I recently found a neat book, "The Mindful Way through Depression: Freeing Yourself from Chronic Unhappiness".

That book describes the depression process in a way that makes a lot of sense - basically, the body, emotions and thoughts are all interrelated. E.g. emotions cause things to happen in your body. Your body will cause you to feel certain things, or have certain thoughts. E.g. when your heart races, you'll think, "I'm going to die." When you think you're going to die, you'll get stressed, which will impact your emotions and body.

After a depressive episode, your brain and body are primed to interpret reality a certain way; you'll more easily become and stay depressed.

There are guided meditations on the CD that remind me a lot of the AT lessons. In one, you scan the body. In others, you try to monitor what's going on in the body, moment by moment. If I recall correctly, they don't generally emphasize trying to modify what's going on in the body (e.g. release tension) - the emphasis is on observing moment to moment.

A very interesting thing the book talks about is the depression process. Basically, when the judging part of the mind kicks in, and we start thinking about why things aren't better, we make ourselves miserable. We try to solve a feeling problem with our mind - and the result is that we feel worse. Basically, if you aren't feeling good, and you start thinking, "I should be feeling good right now," you'll easily get upset with yourself and make your mood worse.

Having read the depression book and done some of the exercises (the body ones being a lot like the AT lessons), I'm convinced that my AT lessons were very helpful. By practicing, I learned how to monitor my body better.

That's why I decided to write about it, despite my reservations and negative associations.

Negative Associations - Thanks Hippies!

Finally, I should mention the embarrassment phenomenon, and how unfortunate it is. E.g. it is too bad that my negative associations (of chiropractors and a bunch of other things) made me reluctant to try AT sooner. And it is too bad that once I tried, I was too embarrassed to mention it until now. I'm not the only person like this.

For example, I know a former highway patrolman with a chronic knee injury. I'm pretty sure that he'll never try meditation for pain relief. I suspect it has to do with things he associates with the word "meditation" - it probably reminds him too much of drug-addled hippies, or the freaks from Berkeley that he used to arrest. In some sense, the druggies and the freaks have ruined some non-chemical pain management tools for him.

I notice I've got that bias too: Tibetan Buddhism turns me off, because there's so much talk of universal love and compassion, which sounds too mushy to me. I'm aware that the Tibetans are being dispossessed by the Chinese. Even as I pity the Tibetans, I can't see wanting to take on the religion of people who are losing and not putting up a fight (and extending compassion to the people that are dispossessing them); it just seems like a bad idea. Give that religion a Darwin Award.

In contrast, in a similar situation, a samurai would resolve to fight, even if he knows it will inevitably result in his death. For whatever reason, that attitude fits my natural inclinations. As an expert explains:

for the Samurai warrior tradition, moral worth is determined by the resolution to die for one's cause out of a duty of loyalty to the group.

Given zen's compatibility with samurai, and killing stuff, some question whether or not it is Buddhism at all. Thankfully, being a practical person, that stuff doesn't trouble me. A bit like the samurai, I'm interested in stuff if it can help me to be more effective.

Who will help to save the guinea worm?

Unsurprisingly, with minor exception, the people around me drawn to Tibetan Buddhism rub me the wrong way. This is my automatic reaction - a bit like how when you smell poo, you wrinkle your nose in disgust.

When I went to a group meditation session run by someone with a lot of Theravada and Tibetan Buddhism experience, there was a lot of talk about love and compassion for all the beings in the universe. That includes mosquitoes, tapeworms and guinea worms. Does anyone seriously want to save those things?

I found myself thinking again and again that all the non-mosquitoes in the world would be a lot better off if they lived in a world without mosquitoes. Basically, while the exercise was to think with love and compassion, I immediately found myself thinking in terms of extermination. I tried to do the exercise. I felt like I just didn't belong and didn't want to go back. The fact that other people were OK with wishing parasites well made me think they were a bit nuts (or phony, which bugs me more than being nutty) - although, to be honest, I have no idea what they were really thinking. Again, this is just my own automatic reaction.

In contrast, I felt better about zen when I realized the samurai were into it, because it allowed them to kill people more effectively, and perform in an environment where they might need to throw away their own lives any instant. An important part of that, for me, is the fact that there's acceptance of the samurai as samurai; they don't have to stop being themselves.

Also, I figure, if zen is good enough for hardasses living in impossible situations, it is good enough for me. You'd think firemen, cops and soldiers would be into the same thing, because they likewise must be ready to throw away their lives in an instant, yet go on living a day-to-day existence.

I had a lot of reservations about going to the zen center. Thankfully, when I went, they got right down to brass tacks, like how to sit on a cushion. They asked my name, but that was about it; it was relatively painless. My personal practice improved dramatically after attending a few group sessions.

The samurai lifestyle reminds me: I know a mom who is terribly worried about her son in Afghanistan. The son is a marine, going door to door, raiding houses. Sometimes his group kills people. He's had friends get hurt. It seems like he's starting to lose his mind; he seems on track to come back to the USA with PTSD, which will suck for him and the mom. The mom is worried sick about him now.

At first I suggested she give him a great book on zen. The hope was that he'd practice and get a head start on dealing with the stress, and pay more attention in dangerous situations, potentially saving his skin.

But then it hit me that he thinks of his mom as a hippie. He might not take the book seriously. But that sucks: if he doesn't practice, there's no benefit to anyone.

So then I recommended she get him this book. The cover is so cheesy; it reminds me of Chuck Norris. They might as well put an electric guitar on there too, along with a ninja throwing a shuriken.

Of course, the book will tell him to do the same things as the other zen-related books (meditate, do one thing at a time, pay attention), but he's more likely to read it and practice, as he'll think, "this is going to help me to be a better soldier." Even if he's approaching it as, "this is going to help me kill better," whatever - as long as he practices.

Meditation, Pain Relief, Suffering

2012-01-27T00:43:00.001-08:00

There's a fascinating video about meditation and suffering. The researcher is Dr. Kelly McGonigal. She looks at what happens to different peoples' brains when they feel pain.

My interest in this began with trying to figure out how to lift weights most effectively. My inability to tolerate pain was stopping me from achieving my goals.

Having looked at Dr. McGonigal's video, I would think endurance athletes would be all over this stuff - particularly stairclimbers, as the sport is all about tolerating pain:

Here's something from Dr. McGonigal about weight loss and meditation. My own experience is that intermittent fasting is easier than ever. When I feel hungry, I tend to pay attention to the physical sensations in my body. In the past, I'd get really anxious and then shovel a lot of food in my mouth.

In the recent past, I've even had the experience of taking food out of my mouth after I'd put it in (without really meaning to). For most of my life, I'd have swallowed it, telling myself, "damage is done."

My cold tolerance is also better than ever. Same thing: when I feel cold, I take the opportunity to explore the physical sensation of the cold in my body.

I'm not saying I can tolerate anything - just that I think I might be doing some of the stuff that she's talking about: less judging and story-telling, more physical perception of the experience. She's got a little article about that and some of her own pain here.

I wish I'd found out about this stuff years ago. In any case, I feel very lucky to have found out about it now.

23andMe

2012-01-23T02:40:00.000-08:00

I got my DNA analyzed at 23andme.com.

Some of the results relate to diet. Basically, they look at your markers and can advise you based on studies done on other people with the same markers.

Here are 3 different results based on my markers:

A diet high in monounsaturated fat is not likely to have beneficial effects on BMI or waist circumference.

Typical odds of obesity on both a high and low saturated fat diet.

A high fat diet (30% of calories from fat) is associated with higher BMI.

Thoughts:

It is too bad monounsaturated fats won't help me to stay lean.

I'm guessing the people in the last study (high fat diet -> high BMI) were eating a high-carb diet. My own experience says that if I'm eating high carb and high fat, I'll get fat.

Paleo Movie "Naked Prey"

2012-01-23T02:29:00.000-08:00

I just saw "Naked Prey" (1966).

This movie is a paleo movie!

A safari insults an African chief. They respond by killing all but one of the safari members. They turn him loose and hunt him. He has to try to survive in the bush, dealing with dangers like crocodiles, elephants, snakes and so on, in addition to the tribesmen hunting him.

That's quite Stone Age.

Pretty much everyone in this movie is ripped as can be.

Sold the Pigs - Update

2012-01-19T20:27:00.001-08:00

If you look at the Wooly Pigs blog, you'll see I recently sold my pigs to Mosefund.

I'm relieved to be getting out of the luxury food business. It has been a long, hard slog since the economic crash which starting in 2008. Basically, a lot of people that had money to spend on fancy food suddenly didn't. They've altered their tastes for the long haul, which means you can't count on people suddenly adopting fatty luxury pork.

Suddenly I don't own several hundred pigs. In fact, I can't, according to my contract with the customer, own pigs for a year.

People said it was sad I'm out of the business, and they expect me to feel sad. I feel as happy as can be. I guess they haven't ever owned a luxury pig business.

Fitness & Meditation

I would probably be more happy, but for the fact that I got sick and also injured. Both of those are keeping me from working out, which is causing me suffering. In a way, this is giving me something to meditate on.

One the meditation front, things have gotten more interesting. I'm much more aware of my thoughts. In the past, I'd have thoughts, but not notice what they were, or be able to say what they were.

Lately I'm tending to notice the thoughts more, and remember them immediately after thinking them. I'm able to categorize them (e.g. worry #2). Doing menial tasks (e.g. washing the dishes) is particularly useful, because any thought you have while doing them stands out more than when you are, say, writing an email or talking with others. At least in my case, I get distracted and carried away by the conversation.

The Flinch

2011-12-22T11:52:00.001-08:00

There's an interesting Paleo Solution podcast here.

Robb Wolf talks with Julien Smith about "The Flinch".

My own experience with lifting weights XGym-style reminds me of this: every time I work out, I'm in severe discomfort for about 20 minutes. Similarly, anytime a stairclimber runs a race, he knows he'll be in a lot of pain. Although there's pain, there's little chance of long-term damage.

One of the best books I've read all year is on zen. When zen practitioners sit, they attempt to sit still, even if, for instance, they feel an itch. The urge will typically grow, perhaps getting very intense, and then fade away.

The experience is an amazing one - but easy to experience. Just try not scratching yourself the next time you have an itch. Lately I've been doing this stuff on purpose, because I suspect it will increase my mental toughness.*

I don't know what the benefits of this training are (besides increasing self-efficacy), but I suspect that it could help people attempting to break bad habits and increase the ability of athletes to persist despite incredible physical discomfort.

* Zen seems to be popular with a certain New Age crowd. E.g. the sort that think we can just sit around and sing Kumbaya with everyone. I'm not like that. My own interest in zen reminds me of this bit on samurai and zen:

As in China, the Japanese government became fearful of the power Buddhist Temples had over the people. Eventually they ordered the samurai to destroy many of the temples. Ironically, this made Buddhism more powerful. The samurai were warriors in dangerous times. They were duty bound to hold their lives cheap, risking death constantly. This was as hard for them emotionally as for anyone else. They had assumed the Zen monks would run screaming at the sight of violence, but instead, many of them were unintimidated. some of them meditated inside their temple even as the fires consumed them. This impressed the samurai greatly and they began to study Zen.

Acting

2011-12-05T00:24:00.001-08:00

I took an acting workshop. It just finished.

Acting is interesting because it isn't what it appears to be. It isn't much about memorizing lines.

Besides ignoring stage fright and knowing their lines, actors must to recall (and reexperience) emotions and sensory experiences. They must fool themselves as much as possible in order to deceive the audience.

I'm guessing actors are better liars than most people.

I wouldn't trust a great actor. I remember reading about an actor that told a journalist a great story - a real tearjerker about himself. At the end of the story, the actor shed a single tear. As the journalist explained, upon hearing the story, she felt tremendous sympathy for the actor. Then she saw a recording of the same actor, telling another journalist the same story. The "performance" was the same, including the tear. She couldn't tell if he was really feeling the feelings or not. She couldn't tell if the actor was self-deluded or genuinely feeling the emotions.

Actors also need to be very aware of their breathing, posture, tension in their body and how they move. They may have to change that stuff if their role demands it.

Some exercises will seem absurd, like this one below, where people walk slowly across the stage.

An actor must observe and respond to their partner in the moment, as if it is the first time it has ever happened that way. They have to "forget" what's coming, and generate the emotions (surprise, betrayal, anger) as if they are experiencing things for the first time ever.

One thing that people don't appreciate is that an actor must act like the character, even if it is absurd or unnatural for the actor. For example, I doubt that Willem Dafoe has anything in common with his character in Boondock Saints. He might even feel embarrassed to be associated with the absurd character. Nevertheless, he delivers the required performance. Seeing him do that made me realize what a great actor he is.

Supposedly, Robert DeNiro is a shy guy - but a great actor who can portray characters nothing like himself.

If one thinks about becoming a character for a role, one learns about one's own personality and what it means to be a person. E.g. a to become a character, you need to take on that character's present circumstances, memories, body language, emotional reactions, accent and mental life. If you can do that, you can portray that character and people will believe it. If you could change your own memories, emotional reactions and thoughts, if only temporarily, you'd seem like a different person.

That reminds me a bit of a computer program - with denotational semantics you can model an expression in a programming langauge as an environment, store, continuation, etc. Change any of those things and you change the meaning of the expression.

Protein Sparing Modified Fast

2011-12-04T11:23:00.001-08:00

I've been doing a protein-sparing modified fast for the last several weeks, following the guidelines of Lyle MacDonald.

One of the things I've figured out is that bodybuilders know how to recompose their body. Most people, who want to "get in shape", would do well to follow the advice of bodybuilders. Just do what they say. All they care about are results, and they've had decades to figure out to gain muscle and lose fat.*

There are a lot of people who will tell you what to eat (e.g. this guy) - but I'd ignore him. If you want results, listen to the men who have compulsively dedicated their lives to figuring out how to recompose their body - and actually done it.

In a nutshell, this is my PSMF regime:

vitamins, minerals, plenty of protein (350g/day) a bunch of fish oil and maybe some vegetables. I regularly cheat and eat a tiny amount of carbs (fruit or sweet potato).

Whole-body workout with weights every 4 days. Typically one set to failure. That gets it done quickly. Training more than every four days seems too often to me; I don't recover quickly.

Once a week or so eat more carbs (more on that below) and some alcohol.

I'm doing a bit of low-intensity cycling too (more on that below).

The point of the diet is to preserve muscle mass while running as large a calorie deficit as possible. Lifting weights helps to preserve muscle mass and avoid atrophying while starving. Periodic refeeds (of carbs) work against a crash and diet fatigue. The low-intensity cycling works against slothfullness.

I recently added in the cycling, because I figured that my metabolic rate had to be getting too low. Imagine: I'm eating very little food, but I'm not feeling hungry. Then I notice I'm not moving around much. The body does that naturally after a prolonged fast - it slows down, to conserve calories. Cycling or walking works against that natural slowdown.

I plan to eat this way until I get lean enough. Then I'll switch back to a paleo leangains approach: meat (real food) and weight lifting.

One of the reasons I'm not as lean as I want to be is food cravings. To reduce cravings, I'm purposefully eating bland/nasty food. So I crush my fish oil capsules and taste the nasty oil (after a few weeks it doesn't taste nasty). Rather than eating lean meat to get protein, I'm eating unflavored whey protein isolate.

Whey protein isolate is interesting: the most popular stuff tastes really good. It has artificial sweetener in it, so if you've got a sweet tooth, you'll crave it. This stuff (double chocolate!) gets excellent reviews for a reason: it tastes like sweet chocolate. In contrast, the unflavored stuff is somewhere between bland and nasty; it is a chore to eat it.

I'm still doing intermittent fasting; rather than eating the food in several meals, I typically eat it all at once. That means I'm going long periods (16+ hours) without any food. That's when I'm alone. When I spend time with friends and we eat, I typically eat a lot, having not eaten for 16+ hours.

Strength results have surprised me. Recently I deadlifted 335#. That's up from 275# a few months ago, when I first started regular deadlifting. I'm surprised to be gaining strength while running a calorie deficit.

I've definitely gotten leaner. My shoulders are more defined, less abdominal fat and my skin feels thinner and looser.

The refeeds are ridiculously fun. Basically, if you deprive yourself of carbs and flavorful food, when you do eat "normal" food (even mediocre stuff), it tastes incredible. Be careful with alcohol; it hits hard when you are starving.

Having starved myself for several weeks, here's how I broke a 24-hour fast yesterday by gorging on the following (in a few hours):

a little candy
small piece of cake
2 slices of pizza (gluten!)
2 cheeseburgers from Dick's in Seatle (the gluten-filled sandwich buns were delicious)
a lot of fries! (sweet potato and otherwise from Dick's, Table 219** and Sun Liquor)
a microscopic tuna taco and a half from Table 219 (Seattle)
some carby desserts (at Table 219)

I went a bit overboard. But it was good to get a break. Now it is back to the bland starvation diet.

I can imagine some people would object to the diet. It sounds masochistic. I have a different way of looking at it: throughout history, people have lived on more or less nasty food. Most Americans eat awful food - e.g. bologna and mayonnaise on white bread. Prisoners eat lousy food. People in hospitals eat similar food. Eating nasty food for a while isn't the end of the world.

The fact that I'm gaining strength while doing this tells me it can't be that bad for my body. If I was losing strength, that would signal to me that something bad was happening.

* Interestingly, the nutritional guidelines of bodybuilders (high protein!) are generally in line with the paleo/primal people (Eades, Robb Wolf). Eades even wrote a book on PSMF. That's another reason I pay attention to Eades and Wolf - the most performance-oriented dieters are eating in line with their advice.

** unfortunately I can't see going back to Table 219. The appetizers were OK. Table 219's ice cream tasted downright sandy, and their "apple crisp" wasn't crisp. I think they used the wrong kind of apples (which released too much water), so the "apple crisp" was more like an "apple soggy". The house-made ding dong tasted good but was huge; had I not been ready to really eat, I would have thought it was just too much. The best food I had there was the sweet potato fries - and it really shouldn't be that way.

Caffeine

2011-11-16T00:09:00.001-08:00

In the last few months, my weight loss plateaued, and it seemed like I wasn't gaining much muscle. Considering that my diet, exercise and sleep are pretty good, I figured it had to be something else.

That something else - a nasty twenty-year caffeine habit.

Since I was 19, I've been a caffeine lover. About ten years ago, I decided I needed to get my work done, so I gave myself carte blanche on caffeine. Daily intake reached 2000+ mg/day. 2000 mg is roughly 10 double espressos a day.*

I was ashamed to tell people how much of the stuff I was consuming. It is embarrassing to be that addicted to caffeine.

Caffeine raises cortisol. Cortisol breaks down muscle. It also makes the body store abdominal fat. If your cortisol is too high, you won't put on muscle (or you'll lose muscle) and you'll store fat around your middle. As Robb Wolf says, you'll feel "tired and wired." To gain muscle and lose the fat, lowering the cortisol helps.

I was very resistant to cut the caffeine. Had it been possible to continue losing fat and gaining muscle while drinking the stuff, I would have persisted. It is only because I plateaued that I decided to cut back.

So over a few days I cut back from 2000mg/day to 400mg/day, and I've held it there since.

The effects so far:

I feel less "tired and wired".
I'm gaining muscle. I've lost some fat too, particularly on my arms.
Sleep is better.

My fitness routine has changed in the same period. I'm doing more aerial and strength, and essentially no metcons. I also started doing deadlifts.

Looking in the mirror, I look bigger and stronger. My shoulders and legs, in particular, seem bigger and more defined. My max deadlift went from 275# to 315#. I can press 390# on the leg press machine. Overall the body fat percentage has dropped a bit. My weight has gone up, from 185# to 191#.

One nice thing about measuring the body fat with calipers is that I'm indifferent to the scale weight, which fluctuates a lot. E.g. eat a lot of carbs and I'm topping the scale at 198#. Most people, if they went from a low of 181# to 198#, would be concerned.

Another thing - this brings to mind the fact that BMI is a pretty useless measure. My BMI is 26.2, implying "overweight". That's just not true.

* I suspect I was drinking so much caffeine to elevate my mood.

Organ Trade

2011-11-06T10:00:00.001-08:00

I read this article, "Organ Gangs Force Poor to Sell Kidneys for Desperate Israelis" and was reminded of Larry Niven's organlegging concept:

The crime of organlegging involves several aspects: abduction of unsupecting persons, the harvesting of their organs, and finding customers to purchase the organs once they were acquired. Thus a successful organlegging gang required three groups of people, one to handle each aspect of the operation.

It appears we have something like that going on, but in a more Philip K Dick sort of way: the people providing the organs are "sold" on doing a donation. The fact that the insurance companies (at least in Israel) were able to pay for organs transplanted outside the country allowed the unseemly organ-locating people to get paid.

I can see two obvious models of the international organ trade:

The Chinese system - government runs prisons like organ farms, providing incredible customer service and one-stop shopping.

The distributed middleman system - hustlers rope in dupes, bringing donors and recipients together in venues with loose regulation and decent medical technology.

In the end, I think the Chinese system will win out. It will be able to deliver higher quality and availability at lower prices. There's too many middlemen to get paid in the second system.

The difference in the two systems reminds me of surrogate babies. Currently, we've got small businessmen like Rudy Rupak bringing together eggs, semen and surrogates in different venues, depending on the regulatory and economic environment.

If there is a big market for designer babies, the Chinese will get into the market and achieve efficiencies that will drive the Rupaks out of business.

When one considers all this, Niven's idea, that there will be organ abduction gangs, and sleazy organ transplanting doctors, sounds silly and immature, like a comic book:

The first group (the "snatch men") usually consisted of young, tough, uneducated males, with just enough intelligence to capture a prospect, and get him or her to the harvesting facility alive without getting caught.

The second group were the "doctors", the ones who harvested the organs and kept them ready for transport to a customer at a moments notice. This was usually the safest aspect of the operation as the harvesting facility could be hidden in a remote location, and the doctors had little or no public contact.

The third group (usually referred to as "organleggers" proper) were the ones who found potential customers, and delivered the organs to them. They were salespeople and field surgeons at the same time. The advent of automated precision surgical equipment allowed them to transplant the organs on the spot and required minimal training to operate. This was by far the most dangerous aspect of the operation. Some customers would attempt to turn in the organleggers in a fit of conscience after receiving their transplant. At least one pair of organleggers were killed by a customer attempting to cover his tracks for another crime. For this reason, they changed their identities, faces, and other physical characteristics frequently—a simple process given that they can use their own stockpiles for cosmetic grafts.

The reality of the organ trade: insurance companies paying for organs from pressured donors is already quite Philip K Dick.

As it is, I imagine people in Belarus googling "borrow money" and Google serving them "donate a kidney, get money fast" ads.

The future will be more of the same, just more morally ambiguous.

Master of the Flying Guillotine

2011-11-06T08:25:00.001-08:00

Master of the Flying Guillotine is one of the best Kung Fu movies of the 1970s. It comes after the death of Bruce Lee and before Jackie Chan.

Popular with both the Wu Tang Clan and Quentin Tarantino ("one of my favorite movies of all time"), it has had an outsize impact on pop culture.

One thing I hadn't known until a few days ago is that the theme music for the villain, reused by Quentin Tarantino in Kill Bill Vol 1 is from the Krautrock band Neu! So you've got music going from Germany to Hong Kong, and then to the USA - via people like Quentin Tarantino and the RZA.

Halloween Costume

2011-11-03T09:09:00.001-07:00

Here's my Halloween costume.

Get Carter 1971 vs 2000

2011-10-22T23:45:00.001-07:00

I recently viewed both Get Carter (2000) and the original from 1971.

Get Carter (1971)

The 1971 version features Michael Caine as a professional hitman investigating his brother's death. When he discovers what happened, he goes on a killing spree.

The original has an 89% Tomatometer score. It is one of the best British films ever made.

The film features some great shots of Newcastle:

row houses

Caine on Blackhall Beach

Google images will show you more cool shots of Newcastle from the film.

By today's standards, Caine looks too physically unfit to be a leading man. Yet in the film, Caine not only kicks ass, but is a confident, playful and witty ladies' man. Despite being a brutal killer, he's the most likable guy in the film.

Ladies' man

The 2000 remake, starring Sylvester Stallone, is interesting to watch, because it is so different. In contrast to the original's 89% Tomatometer score, the remake comes in with just 12%.

It is amazing to reflect on that disparity: the original is one of the best British films ever. The remake is lousy. How could that happen?

You have to assume that everyone with an important role in the remake watched the original many times. The director is on record saying he really like the original, and in fact felt nervous about remaking it, especially with Caine himself playing a small role in the remake.

It is interesting to examine the remake to try to see where things went wrong.

Get Carter (2000)

In the remake, Sylvester Stallone plays Carter. Mickey Rourke is a villain. Michael Caine has a supporting role.

As a leading man, Stallone is very serious. He's earnest pretty much the whole way through. That gets old.

Physically, Stallone is jacked and ripped, but unlike Caine's Carter, he doesn't seduce anybody. There are scenes where Stallone shows off his muscles. I got the feeling he insisted that be in the film, to gratify his ego.

Stallone has one nice scene where he cries - and it is very moving - but that's the only scene where I thought, "hey, Stallone can act."

Stallone's Carter just doesn't feel as real as Caine's, and he isn't anywhere as likable.

Stallone vs Mickey Rourke

I watched the remake (despite its reviews) because Mickey Rourke is in it.

I will watch pretty much anything with Rourke in it. I like Mickey Rourke, despite his awful cosmetic surgery. Rourke isn't like most actors (he quite acting at the top of his career so that he could box professionally). He's said as much that he doesn't consider acting to be real work.

Rourke plays a great thug. He's believable and even funny. He looks great in his shades. The fight scene between him and Stallone is fun: a professional boxer who acts versus the famous actor who "boxes".

I'd like to think that Rourke could beat Stallone in a boxing match.

The remake is set in Seattle, but a bunch of it was shot in Vancouver. Unlike the original, the movie doesn't feature landmarks. There's just lots of rain - because it rains all the time in Seattle, right?

Additionally, the original shows Carter going into locations like pubs. Several scenes are just locals interacting with each other (e.g. women in a bar fighting over a guy). The remake lacks this local color and feels less real as a result.

Besides Stallone's Carter being so simple compared to Caine's, there's one major difference in the plot that really hurts the remake: in the original, once Carter figures things out, he kills everyone he considers marginally culpable. In the remake, he doesn't. The same characters get killed, but it isn't clear if they off themselves or get killed by other bad guys. The remake waters down the plot unnecessarily.

I have to figure the remake is different because Stallone didn't want to make a movie where he heartlessly murders a woman.

Another key aspect of the original: the women are rotten too, just like the men. The main women characters are corruptible, deceptive and opportunistic. The original makes it clear: Newcastle is a shithole; everyone is flawed, women included. The remake puts a few women on pedestals, taking another big hit.

Standard American Diet, Standing Desk

2011-10-22T10:53:00.001-07:00

Here's some kids eating a bunch of processed carbs. I noticed that they gnawed the cornbread coating off the corndog, leaving the meat behind.

When I saw them, I was surprised to see how thin they were. Then it hit me that they are still young enough.

I know paleo-eating parents who would consider putting food like this in front of kids (banana excepted) child abuse.

Here's the cheapest standing desk I've seen. Standing desks are the rage in paleo circles.

Hell's Kitchen

2011-10-18T13:11:00.001-07:00

Coley performing

Spider Club member Coley had a show with his band American Wrecking Company at Hell's Kitchen in Tacoma.

Teresa and Coley

In a show of solidarity, some fellow Spider Club made a field trip. The pictures are from the event.

A foreign nursing student joined us for the evening.

Coley turned out an energetic performance.

All in all a fun evening.

Underground Kettlebell Class

2011-10-10T19:34:00.001-07:00

Getting ready for the warmup

While at Starbucks, I saw an older woman in great shape. I figured she had to be eating paleo and probably doing weight training.* I asked her about her diet and exercise program. She said she was eating paleo and working out with kettlebells, in a class taught by her son. She's 55 and looks a lot fitter than most women in their 20s.

She explained that she's been eating paleo for about 9 months. She does a bootcamp-style workout in a public park a few times a week. I've actually worked out in that park solo before, so I figured it would be fun to do it and not look like a weirdo.

She invited me to attend, but warned me that to date, no men had been able to stick with it. So I'd probably be the only guy there, except for Nic, her son.

One cool thing about the workout: it took me under 5 minutes to get there and it didn't cost me anything. That's pretty awesome!

It was an interesting experience. There were quite a few moms their with their adult daughters. It didn't have the intense feeling of a CrossFit gym, but it was clear they were quite serious. You aunt who thinks that going for a walk or doing Zumba is reasonable exercise would be terribly intimidated by this sort of workout.

It was very odd to be doing the stuff in a public park. At various times people using the park walked pretty close to the area where we were working out. I hope we didn't inconvenience them by taking up so much space.

The warmup was tough. We did 3 sets of a situp-like exercise, then lunges and a sprint. The women were faster on the lunges than I. I couldn't keep up with them. I tried to make it up on the sprint.

After the warmup we did 4 sets of an 8-station workout. At the stations we did pushups, kb swings, lunges while holding kbs, pushups and some sort of abdominal twist exercise. I got gassed after about the first 8 minutes and did my best to put in a reasonable performance.

It was pretty cool how they rigged up a chinup bar. It was a loop of nylon and a bar. The nylon strap attached to the roof. We were told to hold it in such a way that the bar wouldn't slip off. It made me wonder if the city knows what's going on in their public park.**

I wish there'd be another guy there; I probably would have worked out harder if there'd been someone else there who could really bang out the chin ups and the pushups.

Overall, I was glad to put in a reasonable performance. Lately I'm just doing weights and a little bit of double unders (jumprope), because I want to be stronger. So this sort of workout was tough for me.

I think it is neat that people meet in public parks and really work out. If Americans did this sort of stuff a few times a week, and ate better, we'd be a much healthier country.

I gave the instructor a giant tub of Mangalitsa lard. He said he mostly uses butter. I hope he likes the Mangalitsa lard!

*It amazes me how trainable the human mind is. A year ago, if you'd shown me paleo dieters, I wouldn't immediately think - "eating paleo & lifting weights". Now they really pop out, without me even trying to spot them. I'm reminded of the Terminator: as he searches for clothes that will match, he automatically sorts the clothes into "MISMATCH", "INAPPROPRIATE" or finally, "MATCH."

** That got me thinking - it would be hilarious to tie up a rope outside and do tricks on it.

Higher Ceiling, No Hands!

2011-10-05T23:13:00.001-07:00

Kevin Crossman and I visited a gym with a higher ceiling than VisionQuest Auburn.

They've got a rope attached to it!

It was great fun. In all the photos shown here, we're staying up in the air without using our hands.

When I see this I think of "air guitar" for some reason.

We did some tricks and took photos. People in the gym don't seem to use the rope.

A lot of people stared at us as they went up or down the stairs.

Great fun and nobody got hurt.

Kevin Crossman visits Spider Club

2011-10-02T00:23:00.001-07:00

Kevin Crossman, stairclimber champion, visited Spider Club today. Here he is with Teresa, the instructor.

It was a lot of fun. We worked on the trapeze and rope for hours.

After training we got some beer and pig at the Powerhouse in Puyallup. The stuff on the plate is pork shanks.

Kevin on the trapeze.

I learned how to climb the rope and wrap it around my back so that I could hang from it.

Me hanging from a rope.

This stuff is really fun!

Spider Club: Silks

2011-09-26T03:26:00.001-07:00

Spider Club - people are fit.

We did silks at Spider Club this week.

We also did some cartwheels off of each other.

That's Kevin flipping. He's over 200# and very strong.

He's got lots of martial arts experience. He showed up and a few minutes after arrived, was showing us his backflips.

One of the exercises we did was to climb the sliks, grab the bar and do a bunch of toes-to-bar.
Silks are popular with girls. They look frilly and pretty.
Silks are very difficult to work with. It takes more effort to climb them, because they stretch and are slippery. And even when you get tied up in them, they cut into you. From the moment you go up, you are either exerting yourself or feeling pain.

My hands ache right now from climbing the silks, becuase I had to grip as tightly as possible.
This stuff looks ridiculous. But it is a very challenging workout. The danger of falling keeps one focused.

You can see what an odd gym this is. In the foreground, we've got a woman up in a ring telling a guy how to get down out of the silks. In the background, there's guys grappling.

Philip K Dick Again

2011-09-22T08:18:00.001-07:00

John Derbyshire just wrote an essay, mentioning Philip K Dick, about gamers solving a protein-folding problem:

Gumm is the hero of Dick’s 1959 novel Time Out of Joint, which my early-teen self consumed from the pages of New Worlds Science Fiction, a British pulp magazine. Gumm, resident of a cozy 1959 American suburb, makes a living by repeatedly winning the prize in a newspaper competition called “Where Will the Little Green Man Be Next?”
“In a world of smart machines, what is there for dull-witted humans to do?”

It turns out that Gumm’s reality is all fake. His real reality is the late 20th century, a time of interplanetary war. Gumm has the gift of figuring out where enemy missiles will strike. For complicated reasons, his military-intelligence employers have put him through certain cognitive adjustments, given him an illusory mid-20th-century environment, and dressed up the missile-strike calculations as a newspaper competition.

So we are catching up with Philip K. Dick. I need to hold onto something solid here, or I shall go off on a long Philip K. Dick tangent...

I was thinking about Blade Runner just yesterday.

I also came across this, as a result of this. It wonder how Ellison and Dick got along.

Spider Club

2011-09-20T00:11:00.001-07:00

I've discovered Spider Club. It's an underground group. Some of the training includes aerial acrobatics.

Everything seems to start with a straddle.

For now, Spider Club meets inside VisionQuest Auburn on the weekends. I suspect this will change. Spider Club is the best thing about Vision Quest Auburn, but I can't see it staying there for very long.

David

You can't be in Spider Club unless you are already quite fit. It isn't open to everyone.

The acrobatic training builds strength, balance, cardio, pain tolerance, etc.

Hanging off my feet

Teresa, the creator/instructor (pictured at top), is a trainer at Vision Quest Auburn. She built the equipment we use. It is heavy duty.

Heather supporting her boyfriend.

Spirits are high. This stuff is ridiculously fun. It is also very tiring. When you are up in the air, you have to work and concentrate.

Try to think back to being a kid and climbing on stuff. When you got up high, you had to balance and focus.

I haven't tried Mov Nat yet, but having done the aerial stuff, I can imagine it would be fun too.

People help each other. Progress is fast. When I see other students doing stuff well, I feel compelled to work hard despite being tired.

Now for some reality: this stuff hurts. It looks neat and is fun to do, but when you are hanging all your weight (and maybe then some) off a small part of your body, you'll get cuts or bruises.

Tights can help with cuts, but when you are hanging off a bar, ring, rope, you'll get bruises. It can't be avoided. They hurt.

Some moments are thrilling. This picture shows me wrapping myself in rope so I can take my weight off my knee.

Here I am with the rope wrapped around my leg. If I were to un-pike, I'd flip out of the rope and fall.

Once you get wrapped in the rope, you can hang. But while you do that, the rope tightens around you. That hurts. It also gets harder to get untangled.

After a while you start to trust that you won't fall. That's a big part of the training.

Teresa is game for pretty much any physical challenge. I took her and her nephew, Carlos, to Sumner CrossFit so they could experience it.

The workout was a very intense 7 minutes (7:40 for me - I was second to last in the group) and left us lying on the ground, panting.

When we were done, we felt great about finishing, so we took the last photo.

I hadn't done CrossFit in months. The strength training I've been doing for the last few months really helped.

My diet these days is a Mangalitsa-based paleo diet constructed by Robb Wolf. That is, Mangalitsa (meat and lots of fat), fruit, sweet potatoes and a little bit of vegetables. I don't use butter or coconut oil - there's always plenty of Mangalitsa fat. I take a multivitamin. I also take fish oil because of the O-6s in the Mangalitsa.

Second Variety

2011-09-04T20:38:00.001-07:00

Second Variety, by Philip K Dick, is online and Copyright free.

Skynet

2011-08-28T12:24:00.001-07:00

In some timelines, Skynet, the fictional computer system, becomes self-aware on August 29. That's tomorrow.

I don't think Philip K Dick got paid for the Terminator franchise, although if you look at a few of his stories, he might as well have written them -- in 1953!

As Wikipedia explains:

"Second Variety" is an influential short story by Philip K. Dick first published in Space Science Fiction magazine, in May 1953. It is one of Dick's many stories in which nuclear war has rendered the Earth's surface an uninhabitable, gray ash pile, and the only things remaining are killer robots and a scattered humanity. The short story "Jon's World" (1954) revisited the claw-infested world of "Second Variety".

Some of the robots in Second Variety look and act like humans, in order to infiltrate the human bunkers and wipe them out.

It blows my mind that Philip K Dick could conceive of that in 1953.

Just like in Blade Runner, the key issue is who is human and who isn't, and how can people know one way or the other.

I recently watched Angel Heart. In it, Mickey Rourke plays a man living with false memories. He goes around killing the people he used to associate with. It is a bit like Richard Deckard in Blade Runner, except rather than killing replicants for the cops, he's killing sinners for the devil (played well by Robert De Niro).

Farmed Pacific Salmon

2011-08-27T16:50:00.002-07:00

There's farmed Pacific salmon now, grown entirely in tanks.

A few implications:

If it says "coho" or "Pacific salmon", that doesn't mean it is wild. If you want "wild", make sure it says "wild" on the label.

Some of the farmed coho supposedly has a minimal environmental impact. If you care about the environment, you might want to give that stuff a look.

Grief Counseling

2011-08-24T23:57:00.001-07:00

Even when things are terrible, I try to look on the bright side of things. I also try to move on.

The following is a scene from Breaking Bad (Season 3, first episode).

Walt, the speaker in the video, cooks meth. His actions, through a convoluted series of events, including multiple failures in the air traffic safety system, lead to two planes crashing into each other. Many people die as a result, and his community is traumatized.

The video shows him speaking to high school students during a grief counseling session.

It doesn't go well. Yet my own sense, when I watched it, is that he wasn't far off the mark.

Terrible things happen. People forget them, ignore them, etc.

If people are concerned with something - e.g. their own aching back - it typically overshadows the much greater misery and suffering of others. E.g. if you take someone and scratch his cornea, such that he suffers pain, and then give him the choice to either improve the lives of several hundred people he doesn't know, or restore his cornea to its normal painless condition, most will choose to have their cornea restored.

Vision Quest Auburn

2011-08-23T18:18:00.001-07:00

I joined a gym so I can lift heavy weights.

This came out of an email exchange with Robb Wolf.

My goals are to get strong and lean. I would do CrossFit, but right now I really need to avoid getting injured. I'd rather get a lot stronger before taking up CrossFit again.

I'm now trying to eat strict paleo for 30 days. Compared to my previous routine that means eliminating all wheat and dairy. I'm OK at home, but I can't seem to go more than a week without eating a little grain or dairy when I'm at someone's house eating dinner.

In any case, no more whey protein. But I'm taking BCAAs post workout, which Robb advised. I had some persistent acne on my chest when I was eating 150+ grams of whey per day. They acne is gone now. Supposedly that's the sort of thing that dairy causes.

To make up for the whey protein, I'm eating lots of Mangalitsa protein every day e.g. 600 to 900g of cooked meat.

I was trying to train ala the X Gym and "Body by Science" (one set to failure) but with systems like that the weights are fairly low and I don't think I as working out intensely enough to really push myself. If you train alone, that's typical, because you'll give up too early. A trainer helps one to keep going. Exercise research says you don't need to lift heavy to stress all your different types of muscle fibers - but most trainers say otherwise.

So now I'm doing 2 or more sets, with the first heavy enough that I can only do five or fewer reps.

Just from switching to body weight pullups instead of 160# lat pulldowns to failure, I seen to have added a half inch to my arms. I also feel stronger.

I picked Vision Quest because it is cheap. The contrast between it and every CrossFit box I've visited is noticeable. Just getting a pass to the gym is a awful, like buying a used car. The CrossFit boxes I've been to just cost a lot, but once you get over that hump you are done.

I've read CrossFitters saying decisive things about other gyms. Now it makes more sense to me; the sales process at typical gyms is awful.

E.g. Vision Quest makes you sign up in such a way that they'll automatically renew after the term you commit to is done. It costs most people 2 months of a gym membership they don't use, because they don't realize they have to give notice. I saw plenty of complaints on yelp about this policy.

When I signed up I said "hey, I just want a pass for so many months. Let's strike the auto renewal from the contract." The salesperson refused. So I signed up for my time and told the guy I wanted to cancel. That way it is just like having a pass for several months.

Can't beat the price: $21/month.

You might think, from looking at their page, that it costs $19/month. The reason it costs more is that they tack on a $25 fee for maintaining/upgrading equipment. As "equipment fee" is different from "processing fee" or "joining fee", they aren't committing fraud; but the fees certainly aren't what a typical person would assume based on their statements.

Getting a membership really felt like buying a car from a used car salesmen. There were many times during the process when I thought, "if I didn't really want to do this, I'd leave right now," something I've done with car salesmen.

But now that it is over I'm trying to move on. As long as the equipment works I'll be happy, and would probably even recommend the place.

After I got out of there I decided that I pity high-pressure salesmen. Their jobs suck, plus, if they have any conscience at all, I don't see how they can sleep at night.

Car Thief Movies

2011-08-12T03:04:00.001-07:00

Breathless (1960) and Repo Man (1984) are both about car thieves.*

Watching Breathless allows you to see what Paris looked like 50 years ago. Fascinating stuff. Belmondo does a great job as the protagonist. I like Godard's style, particularly the jump cuts.

As good as Breathless is, I enjoy Repo Man more. It is funny. I like the music. The repo men are hilarious. My favorite is Sy Richardson - I can't help but think that he had a big influence on Samuel Jackson and Quentin Tarantino. Finally, I like that some scenes are set on the same LA locations as Point Blank (1967).

* obviously a repossession agent never steals a car; he's just taking back collateral on behalf of the car's lawful owner.

Role of Government

2011-08-11T22:13:00.001-07:00

I was thinking about the role of the state today.

Some think the state's job is to protect the rights of individuals. That's the libertarian way of looking at it: as individuals, we surrender our rights to the state. In return, the state makes sure that we don't get victimized.

Some think the state's job is to redistribute wealth. Tax the rich and give to the poor.

Some think the state's job is to manage public policy, making everyone better off. Individuals, for whatever reason, won't or can't collaborate to run things optimally; government's job is to do that for us.*

I started thinking about the role of the state because I was reading the news. Spot gold hit $1813/oz (up from $1533/oz on 7/7/11). People are rioting in the UK and USA. Our government is continuing its unsustainable policies, which will inevitably result in a huge crash.**

If the rioting continues, I won't be surprised if we eventually see surging sales of ammo and guns for home defense. With unemployment and gold both up, and rioting, it will be time to buy ammo with whatever money you've got left. Until today, I hadn't heard of "preppers" - an apparent re-branding of "survivalists" - until today, but I guess we'll hear more about them.

One thing that hits me is that we are wrecking our society voluntarily. It is a slow and process, potentially avoidable, unfolding before our eyes. Some Romans must have felt the same way.

Many times in human history, it is invading humans that wreck things quickly, spectacularly and decisively. For instance, if you were a woman in Central Europe in the 1940s, there were pretty decent chances Red Army soldiers would rape you. That's true whether you were Russian, Polish, German, Austrian, Hungarian, Jewish etc - you wouldn't expect gangs up drunk rapists to discriminate on the basis of victims' citizenship.

If you were unlucky enough to live in Bagdad about to be sacked by Mongols, you were screwed. No matter what you did, you were probably going to wind up raped and/or killed.

Similarly, the Taíno were doomed. It was all beyond their control.

I think about Baghdad and Berlin and try to imagine what it would be like to be in the city and know that it was all going to end soon.

Our own case is like an alcoholic drinking himself to death. The outcome is known and awful. He could stop any moment and improve things. Yet time and time again, he chooses to continue down a path of self-destruction.

Whether you think the role of the state is to protect individuals, redistribute wealth or avoid unnecessary catastrophes, if ours sticks to its current track, it won't, because it won't exist.

I recently read someone saying that we are determined to turn ourselves into a cautionary tale told to Chinese children. That makes sense. After some reflection, I decided that I hope the Chinese learn from our mistakes.

* Wanting government to save us from ourselves is orthogonal to being liberal or conservative. For example, the conservative Enoch Powell stated, "It is the supreme function of statesmanship to provide against preventable evils."

** Bill Fleckenstein has an essay about this. Part of it says:

In any case, the posturing over the debt ceiling illuminates how many politicians of both parties are trying to turn this into political theater. While there are a few who seem to understand that we have a massive problem in this country, they are in the minority. Only when the country has a financial gun to its head will the politically expedient types deal with the issue.

Even Beginners Can Curb Pain With Meditation

2011-08-04T01:38:00.001-07:00

There's an interesting article here about beginner's curbing pain via meditation.*

This study doesn't have people causing themselves pain and then meditating to relieve it -- the very sort of thing you'd do if you wanted to train people to use meditation for pain relief. Nevertheless, people still benefited.

One would presume that if they were specifically learning meditation for pain, and then experiencing pain and managing it via meditation (like athletes or chronic pain sufferers), they'd get better results.

* It is already clear that experienced meditators can curb their pain.

Fakes

2011-07-31T17:06:00.001-07:00

Philip K Dick wrote a lot about fake things - fake people, fake art, fake memories. Fake everything.

Cracked has an article on Philip K Dick.

Due to my work, I just attended a party at a winery, Andrew Will, on Vashon Island. I got to taste the vintage mentioned in this article, which was used to fake the ’82 Château Mouton Rothschild.

The wine tasted great - of course. I drank it before I read the story about the fakes. I wonder how different it would have tasted if I'd read the story before drinking it.

"Mindfulness to Go"

2011-07-25T00:04:00.001-07:00

There's a book, Mindfulness to Go, by David Harp.

Based on their cognitive inclinations, he divides people in to bees, barnacles, birds and bats. People content to sit still are barnacles, of course. There's plenty of materials for them.

Harp's book is for the active - the bees. One problem the bees have is that they aren't inclined to setting aside time to sit still. That's not a problem - Harp's exercises can be done while moving around.

A bunch of his exercises have one counting steps or breaths. If you've done workouts where you try to do reps for time, you know that it is hard to keep a proper count, because the mind tends to wander and one loses count.

People interested in practicing meditation while moving should consider checking out Harp's book.

Harp's material on pain management isn't as in-depth as this or this.

Gold Update

2011-07-24T22:49:00.001-07:00

Gold is up approximately 5% in the last 17 days.

Looks like today's price is around 1614, versus 1533 just 17 days ago.

Surrogacy and "Blade Runner"

2011-07-24T20:47:00.002-07:00

I saw an article in the Wall St. Journal that reminded me of Blade Runner, called "Assembling the Global Baby".

A broker is arranging surrogate babies for people who want them. The method by which the babies are produced, allows people to cheaply acquire children that they couldn't acquire via adoption.

The careful choosing of jurisdictions allows him to offer people what they want:

Clients tend to be people who want children but can't do it themselves: families suffering from infertility; gay male couples. They may also have trouble adopting because of age or other obstacles.
And they're price sensitive. PlanetHospital's services run from $32,000 to around $68,000, versus up to $200,000 for a U.S. surrogate.

Overseas surrogacy has other advantages. Surrogates in some poorer countries have little or no legal right to the baby. In Greece, a surrogate can be prosecuted for trying to keep a child. By contrast, some U.S. surrogates have tried to legally claim the children they've carried.

I have to imagine that at some point, they'll offer clone "insurance" on the kids: for a small fee, parents will be able to produce clones of the kids. The clones will be "warehoused" in a country like North Korea. At some point, if the primary kid needs organs, they'll be harvested from the clones.*

It is easy to see why the parents who pay for surrogacy would pay for that; they've already done something morally ambiguous, so why not go all the way, and potentially help out their kid?

Based on events that have already occurred, my guess is a country like North Korea, Burma or China could offer the clone production, grow-out, warehousing and organ harvesting services for foreigners. China, in particular, is giving customers what they want (at the expense of the donors, of course):

In one instance, an Asian patient recounted that after rifling through a list of potential donors, a military doctor departed and returned to the hospital several times, bringing back a total of eight different kidneys before finally settling on a match.
In another, a sick patient found out one day he needed a transplant and had an organ within 24 hours.
Websites market transplants in China in five languages and in some cases guarantee availability of a matching organ within two weeks. The average wait time for a kidney in Canada is 32.5 months, while in British Columbia it is 52.5 months.

When I read things like this, it seems clear that all this stuff is going to move overseas, where there aren't restrictions.

I happened to see the article because I follow Melissa McEwen on twitter. Her remark was that it reminded her of "The Handmaid's Tale". I have to disagree. The Handmaid's Tale is about a theocracy that controls women wombs.

In contrast, in Philip K Dick's fiction (e.g. Blade Runner), corporations create people, and they are treated like things (e.g. livestock). One key difference is that the "surrogate, organ and clone" sector is new, so the Wall St. Journal writes about a small businessman like Rupak instead of a giant company like Monsanto or Cargill.

Obviously, if there really is demand for this sort of stuff, large corporations will eventually dominate the trade, making Philip K. Dick right again.

I've been interested in this sort of stuff for a long time. I think my experience with the pigs gives me particular insight into it - essentially, humans treat other humans like livestock. We've done it before. We are doing it now. We'll do it again.

* It might even be possible to somehow modify the clones and make the whole thing more humane. E.g. somehow render the clones non-sentient - aka "brain dead" - yet still capable of producing the organs the primary would need.

Famine

2011-07-24T06:54:00.002-07:00

I was reading news and saw that people are starving in Somalia.

I own a bunch of food. It occurred to me that I could donate them some food - specifically, some Mangalitsa. I could give them meat, shelf-stable products or even live animals. We might save some human lives.*

Then I remembered that Somalia is full of Muslims. Normally they'd choose to avoid pork. As this online translation of the Koran states:

Forbidden to you (for food) are: Al-Maitah (the dead animals - cattle - beast not slaughtered), blood, the flesh of swine, and that on which Allah's Name has not been mentioned while slaughtering, (that which has been slaughtered as a sacrifice for others than Allah, or has been slaughtered for idols) and that which has been killed by strangling, or by a violent blow, or by a headlong fall, or by the goring of horns - and that which has been (partly) eaten by a wild animal - unless you are able to slaughter it (before its death) - and that which is sacrificed (slaughtered) on An-Nusub (stone-altars). (Forbidden) also is to use arrows seeking luck or decision; (all) that is Fisqun (disobedience of Allah and sin). This day, those who disbelieved have given up all hope of your religion; so fear them not, but fear Me. This day, I have perfected your religion for you, completed My Favour upon you, and have chosen for you Islam as your religion. But as for him who is forced by severe hunger, with no inclination to sin (such can eat these above mentioned meats), then surely, Allah is Oft-Forgiving, Most Merciful.

I was happy to read that bit in bold at the end. Obviously, the more flexibility we've got to deal with the famine, the better.

Then I read this depressing news item. It is the sort of thing that makes me think that we are doomed as a species.

* sorry pigs.

Fake Apple Stores

2011-07-20T10:05:00.001-07:00

Philip K Dick would have anticipated fake Apple stores, filled with employees who think they are working for Apple, but aren't:

Located in the south-central Chinese city of Kunming, the faux shop might as well be a movie set; it looks convincing, going by the photos originally posted on the blog of an ex-pat living in the city, uncovered by ifoAppleStore. However, the employees, outfitted with Apple name tags and blue t-shirts with Apple logos, aren't in on the ruse. They actually believe they're working for Apple.

In fact, when two employees and three plainclothes security guards asked the blogger to stop taking photos of the store, she said she was an American Apple employee visiting China to take a look at Apple Stores in the country and they let her continue to snap pictures.

The photos show that store includes such details typical to Apple's retail locations as acrylic information panels, long wooden display tables, and a winding staircase leading to the second level. The iPads, iPhones, MacBooks, and other Apple products look real, too.

Unforgiven

2011-07-19T20:13:00.001-07:00

This is the final scene from "Unforgiven".

As a Western, it is neat because the people in the movie are realistically flawed and self-centered. They mostly seem to act the way people would act, if they actually lived in the American west in the late 1800s.[1]

The main characters, played by Eastwood and Hackman, have both killed lots of people. They have very low empathy.

Hackman is a results-oriented lawman. He polite and nice and also sadistic and unpredictable. Eastwood is a retired hitman. He doesn't so much seem like a reformed assassin as a rusty assassin. He's a pig farmer who decides to do "one last job", because his hogs are dying off from one or more diseases.[2]

Morgan Freeman plays a hired killer and Eastwood's partner, who, at the most inconvenient moment, can't perform. Shortly thereafter he quits the team. I found it hard to believe he chose to leave his longtime partner in the lurch like that. It clearly couldn't be that he suddenly decided his fellow humans had lives worth sparing - were he that way, he wouldn't have had such a long and successful career as a gunman.

For a guy raising hogs for a living, Eastwood's character can't move hogs around to save his life. Clearly the obligatory scene where he falls down in the muck is just comic relief.

[1] One obvious difference from reality, of course, is that guys in 1876 would have been very lean and gaunt-looking, like the guys in the black & white photograph above. There are too many fat guys in the movie to make it plausible. Eastwood is lean, as is the brothel owner. But the sheriff and a bunch of his men are all too chubby.

The real cowboys probably ate all the lard they could get their hands on. The modern actors probably eat lots of carbs, and not enough lard.

[2] If you look at old books, epidemics caused lots of losses. The hogs pictured in the movie are all meat-type breeds, not lard type breeds. That doesn't make sense; back in the 1800s, lard-type hogs were very important, as was lard.

Philip K Dick

2011-07-17T17:20:00.002-07:00

Blade Runner

That video is the final scene of Blade Runner, The Final Cut (2007).

Philip K. Dick, the author who created the book that inspired the film, was amazing in that he accurately imagined how we'd use technology. Among other things, he anticipated that we'd have ever-present personalized advertising bombarding us. If that doesn't ring a bell, try using a modern smartphone or surfing the web; Google figures out what ads you will respond to and puts them in front of you.

Dick's books aren't written well; he wrote under hard deadlines and under the influence of drugs. Nevertheless, the ideas in them are fascinating. He's had a big impact on films. He was more than just a pulp writer.

If you are a philosophical person, I recommend watching Blade Runner, The Final Cut.

Here's an excerpt from an online essay about the philosophical issues of the movie:

The issue of whether the replicants empathic deficiency in the novel make killing them acceptable is closely related to a popular argument in favour of vegetarianism. Many meat eaters attempt to justify their behaviour by saying that the animals they eat lack either the intelligence, or the potential to build relationships that humans have. The response being that there are mentally ill and brain-damaged humans who also lack these qualities, so to say it is acceptable to eat animals on that basis is to say that it is acceptable to eat mentally ill people. But few meat eaters would agree with such a position.

The big question that Dick is asking us is: what is it about humans that gives us more right to moral treatment than ay other animal, or android for that matter?

I think that final paragraph is important. Fairly soon now we'll be cloning humans. Rich people will produce clones of their kids, so that should their kids need organs, they'll be available. In the USA, we'll probably make this illegal, for ethical reasons. There will be countries on the planet without those restrictions (the sorts of countries where prisoners get forced to play video games). The ethical issues we'll have then will be the same as the issues raised in Blade Runner.

By the way - when I read the title of that article, "China used prisoners in lucrative internet gaming work", I thought, we're living in Philip K Dick's world, whether we want to or not.

A Bow-hunter and the Vegans

2011-07-15T21:28:00.001-07:00

Broke meat-lovers (poverty induced vegans)
eat meat-flavored crackers.

I recently met with Kevin Crossman for lunch in Seattle. We ate Mangalitsa neck at Monsoon on Capitol Hill (19th Ave). We had a great time. He'd only tried the fatty Mangalitsa stuff like lardo, lard and bacon, and not the neck, so he really loved it.

Among other things, we talked about killing animals and how it changes you. He's a bow-hunter, so he's got a lot of experience killing and eating big mammals.

E.g. you shoot the animal. Hopefully it drops and dies. Then you drag it out, eviscerate it. Then you've got to get it home and cut it up, and freeze it before it rots, making everything you did pointless. Basically, killing the thing is just the start; you've got to work hard until it is done.

He agreed that this experience is important. Paleo people who don't kill animals and go through this are missing out. I mentioned that maybe paleo people ought to volunteer at a slaughterhouse and kill a bunch of animals. They won't eat the meat, but at least they'll know what it is like to kill stuff.

Vegans

Recently I bumped into some vegans at an event. I probably pissed them off, among other things by offering them some free Mangalitsa bacon, if they'd eat it. I also asked what I'd have to pay them to lick the wrapper of some lardo.

My position:

Most traditional peoples ate some meat. Some lived on meat alone. Meat is good for humans to eat.

Even if non-animal protein is sufficient, it probably isn't better than meat. If you've got the choice, eat the meat.

The vegans had a number of arguments. Among them, primitive people didn't eat much meat. Also, non-animal protein sources are good enough. So we can live well without killing animals and eating them. Where I see eye-to-eye with vegans is vat-grown meat.

The vegans are clever in how they go about things. E.g. they asked me if I'd eat people; pigs are pretty similar to people, they said. I said I like a lot of pigs more than I like humans. Nevertheless, I persist in eating them. Oh - and of course I'd eat humans, if it was necessary; I'll do anything that's necessary.

There's nothing like wrangling with a bunch of vegans to get me feeling like killing things and eating them. I'm exicted at the thought of eating more meat, or killing something and eating it. Similarly, I'm pretty sure when the vegans were done with me, they also felt more certain in their convictions.

Bloody Hands

2011-07-09T18:35:00.001-07:00

Approximately 7 months ago, I personally killed and bled out 3 Mangalitsa stags, producing a mountain of meat (600+ pounds of carcass). I cut them up in my house. I got my hands bloody, my car bloody, my kitchen bloody. There's still a few bloodstains on the sidewalk leading to my apartment.

It took me many hours to cut and wrap my meat. It was a major project. After I did that, I ate the meat, meal after meal. Whenever I ate the meat, I reflected on killing the pigs and cutting them up. Eating involved thinking about the whole process.

Since then, I haven't killed any food animals. I was thinking about it today and it hit me that not killing stuff has got me feeling a bit more squeamish about killing animals.*

If I had to kill and cut up a pig today, I wouldn't be able to do it as well. I might not stick it well. The killing would weigh on my mind more. I wouldn't cut it up with as much skill.

I know many farmers who can't kill animals and get the meat. If an animal gets injured and they can't get the custom slaughterer out to kill it, they just put it down and lose the meat.

These days, guys like Bruce King, who spring into action on a moment's notice, are the exception. I can't help but think that if a normal guy had to put down a maimed cow and cut it up on a moment's notice, he'd be so traumatized that he'd want to claim disability for PTSD, or cope by drinking too much, beating his girlfriend, using drugs, etc.

My rustiness when it comes to killing reminds me of Christopher Walken's character in True Romance, who, after shooting Dennis Hopper's 4:58 into the clip, explains that he "hasn't killed anyone since 1984."

Vincenzo Cocotti is a bad guy. I wish I had an example of a reflective killer that isn't a villain - but I don't. So he'll have to do:

Vincenzo hasn't killed anyone since 1984.

I would imagine that as the paleo movement takes off, there'll be more and more people encouraging hunting or at least killing their own meat. We've evolved to kill and eat other creatures. Killing and eating animals is more natural than just eating them.

Most people like eating anonymous meat. They don't like to kill and cut up the animals. But similarly, most people like eating junk food, and leading sedentary lives - and they are a lot worse off for it.

* Even as I feel I've gotten softer when it comes to killing, I can still sit down and eat a pound or more of meat at one sitting - that hasn't changed.

Conflicting Advice

2011-07-07T14:33:00.001-07:00

I just saw this today, about weight training every day. It sounds like it could work - and some people apparently get impressive results that way. It also conflicts with what you read from pretty much everyone else - the obvious argument against it being that you'll overtrain, not recover, burn out, etc.

This phenomenon recurs with financial advice, exercise advice and nutrition advice.

I find it interesting when proponents of different systems debate. Even though that doesn't lead to resolution.

Gold the Anti-Investment

2011-07-07T02:05:00.001-07:00

The price of gold on 7/7/11 was $1,533.90.

Talking gold at a restaurant opening.

I talked with Bill Fleckenstein tonight about gold.

He explained that money is pretty much worthless. People will figure it out. When they do, gold will be worth a lot more.

So commenter rps and Bill agree; people are going to change their attitudes about gold. There will be more demand for gold in the future, based on gold's ability to hold its value.

It is hard for me to imagine a scenario where gold is going to greatly increase in value without there being massive inflation. If gold takes off, it won't be just gold shooting up. It will be food, power, oil, etc.

I can imagine one day I'll look back on the photo above and think - boy, we sure were relaxed, having fun, etc. back when it seemed clear the economy was going to go off a cliff. But that's how it always is, right?

Singlehanded Circumnavigation of the Globe

2011-07-07T01:12:00.002-07:00

I went to middle school with someone who just circumnavigated the globe in a sailboat. He has a blog.

Like Magellan's crew, he sailed a boat around the world. He did it mostly by himself, and almost entirely with wind power. That's an amazing accomplishment.

One thing I noticed: between Thailand and the Caribbean, your options are very limited. Wherever you are, it won't be very nice. If nothing else, read about Hellville, and be happy you live wherever you live.

Cravings and the Gut

2011-07-05T23:35:00.002-07:00

Looks like the gut and the brain work together to produce hunger and cravings.

There are different mechanisms for cravings of fatty food versus carbs.

Nitrates

2011-07-05T16:52:00.001-07:00

There's a new story about beet root juice as a performance food. Beets are loaded with nitrates, which impact circulation & metabolism.

I can easily imagine some people wanting to eat beets for a boost in performance, while eschewing bacon, due to nitrosamines.

Pain in the Wall St. Journal

2011-07-05T13:45:00.001-07:00

Satisfied McFlurry customer

If you found this page because you are looking for pain management help, I suggest you read this comment.

I suspect pain management will be huge in the future; people are living a lot longer, and in poor health. Pain is an interesting phenomenon - it is very complex, poorly understood and impacts pretty much all of us.

There's an article in the Wall St. Journal about pain:

Even when pain is real, it's highly subjective. "Two people can have the same nerve compression, but one guy will be bedridden and the other guy will be saying, 'Nah, I'm fine,' " says David Kloth, an anesthesiologist and past president of the American Society of Interventional Pain Physicians.

A very interesting phenomenon. You see the same with food. For example, if you take Brad Pitt to McDonald's and get him a McFlurry, he could be happy because you are giving him a "taste of home". If you take Dominique Strauss-Kahn there and give him the same thing, he could be very irritated.

Pain psychologists also play a key role, especially when physicians can't minimize patients' pain and have to help them live with it instead. Therapists often wish they were brought in sooner. "Many patients feel like the doctors are saying to them, 'There's nothing we can do from a medical standpoint, so it must be mental,' " says Robert Twillman, a veteran pain psychologist who is now director of advocacy for the AAPM. He often tells patients that whatever the initial cause, the pain must be taking an emotional toll as well, which is in their own power to change.

It must be odd to be a pain psychologist and see patient after desperate patient. A bit like working in a hospice.

Using Bribe Amounts to Determine Influence

2011-07-04T15:58:00.001-07:00

I saw a study that analyzes the size of bribes that Peru's head of the secret police paid different parties to get them to do what he wanted. It is an interesting way of trying to determine who had the power.

At first blush, that makes sense.

Businesses make similar decisions constantly.

E.g. that busy restaurant where you can't get a table? You can be that the President, New York Times food writer or any other number of VIPs can get a table there, on essentially no notice.

What's cool about the study (as opposed to who gets a table or not) is that so many different people were bribed, for different amounts of money, revealing a lot about the price of corruption.

Suffering & Fussiness

2011-07-03T13:53:00.001-07:00

I saw two articles, very different, and I was reminded of the pain vs suffering phenomenon.

E.g. I go into a restaurant and eat some meat-type pork. I "suffer", in the sense that I'm used to eating something much better. No matter how good the stuff is, I almost certainly will find fault with it and feel like I'm doing without.*

Here's a guy who can't enjoy sake anymore. The only sake he likes is totally over the top, he doesn't bother to drink & enjoy sake anymore:

Five or six years ago I went to a sake-tasting event in San Francisco called “The Joy of Sake”. About 140 sakes. In a few hours I became such a sake connoisseur that the sake I could afford — and used to buy regularly — I now despised. The only sake I now liked was so expensive ($80/bottle) that I never bought another bottle of sake.

Here we've got a guy in prison, claiming that by not giving him porn that he finds acceptable, they are torturing him:

Detroit— A Macomb County inmate is suing Gov. Rick Snyder and the state, claiming he is being subjected to cruel and unusual punishment because jail rules ban pornographic materials...
In legal filings, Richards says he suffers from chronic masturbation syndrome and severe sexual discomfort, which he labeled physical ailments caused by living conditions behind bars...
The lack of pornographic materials behind bars forces Richards to endure "such a poor standard of living, suffering from both sexual and sensory deprivation…" he wrote.

I can see rapists arguing that when we deprive them of victims to rape, they likewise feel that they've got a poor standard of living, suffering from both sexual and sensory deprivation.

* My current approach is to tell myself it is chicken, and that I should try to appreciate it for what it is. The general phenomenon reminds me of Osama Bin Laden's observation about luxury and deprivation:

“You should learn to sacrifice everything from modern life like electricity, air-conditioning, refrigerators, gasoline. If you are living the luxury life, it’s very hard to go to the mountains to fight.”

Red Wine & Miasma Theory of Disease

2011-07-03T13:15:00.001-07:00

Often in the media you'll see articles like these, discussing how healthy red wine is. Some think resveratrol explains why wine is healthy. Others thing the flavanols are why.

It may be that red wine isn't that healthy after all. I recall a discussion a few months with Dr. Eades who said that when scientists try to explain why some societies are healthier than ours (French Paradox or Spanish Paradox), while refusing to blame our high-carb diets they will inevitably find explanations that are nonsense. Here's an excerpt of him writing about it:

The lipophobes hold the hypothesis dear that saturated fat causes heart disease. When the data began to surface that the French eat tons more saturated fat than do Americans yet suffer only a fraction of the heart attacks, the French Paradox was born. Nothing wrong with our hypothesis, it’s just those pesky French people who are somehow different. It’s a By God paradox, that’s what it is.

Same thing happened with the Spanish. Researchers looked at the food consumption data in Spain and discovered that Spaniards had been eating more meat, more cheese and more dairy while decreasing their consumption of sugar and other carbohydrate-rich foods over a 15-year period. And, lo and behold, during this same period, stroke and heart disease rates fell. Can’t be. Saturated fat causes all these things. But the data show… Thus came the Spanish Paradox.

I don't know if Dr. Eades is correct or not. I suspect he's right.*

What's neat about this phenomenon is that typically humans believe one thing until we believe another. This phenomenon gives you something to observe and monitor. You can watch what people say on the topic, how they respond over time, etc.

Things change quickly now. It may be that in just a few decades, most people will believe Dr. Eades is correct. If that happens, the educated may cleverly talk about resveratrol the way we talk about epicycles.

Also, in the past things moved slower. E.g. there was a time when most Europeans believed the miasma theory of disease. It looks like it took more than a hundred years for the miasma theory to lose out to the germ theory of disease. It may be that in our lifetime people will decide Dr. Eades is right. If so, we'll get to see the whole phenomenon unfold. Thanks to the internet, it will be all be documented.

* For sure, I don't think Americans who add resveratrol or flavanol supplements to their lives are going to improve things measurably.

If You've Got a Good Watch

2011-07-01T01:21:00.001-07:00

If you've got a good watch that needs repairing, I recommend Nesbit's in Seattle.

I have a nice watch. I think they are the only authorized repair center around here.

Also, they've fixed my watch twice now, and they haven't charged me for it. Who still does that sort of thing in 2011?

Stuff I Wish I'd Learned a Long Time Ago

2011-06-29T00:53:00.001-07:00

I wish I'd known this stuff decades ago:

Resistance training - e.g. weight training - offers huge benefits for the time & effort required to do it. Low-intensity cardio probably isn't worth doing.

It is possible to radically improve one's willpower. It takes constant practice, none of it all that hard, but it can be done.

What & when one eats has a huge impact on cravings.

Intermittent fasting really works.

You can't exercise your way to being thin. At some point, you will have to control how much food you eat to reach your goals. But it isn't impossible. It gets easier the more you do it.

Breeders

2011-06-27T23:35:00.001-07:00

I found out today that a pig breeder I recently sold pigs to has kids who are dog breeders. Here's their dog site.

I think animal breeding runs in families. Knowing what I know about animal breeders, I don't think they'd be shocked or offended by that observation; they notice things like that too, only more.

A few thousand years ago, in the right environment, these guys would have been very important. We only exist today, and have the technology we have, because our ancestors decided to exploit animals for the benefit of humans.

It amazes me to think that until quite recently, humans worked with wild and half-wild animals, primitive facilities, herbal medicine (I'm thinking Chinese animal breeders), etc. but still managed to get things done. It is bit like NASA putting guys on the moon with slide rules.

Normal people were probably too busy slaving away, drinking, reproducing or doing whatever normal people did back then to contribute to the advancement of humanity.

Is Bacon Paleo?

2011-06-27T02:21:00.001-07:00

Is bacon paleo, asks one blogger.

Simple answer: no. Here's a decent summary.

Two dealbreakers:

1) Bacon comes from farmed pigs. That's neolithic, not paleolithic.

2) Ignoring how it is produced, pork has more polyunsaturated fat than wild game. Even if you look past how it is produced, the stuff that is produced (the pork) is quite different. So even if all you do is insist that the food you eat be close to what paleolithic people ate, pigs can't be in your diet, because their fatty acid composition is too different.

Nevertheless, paleo dieters will continue to eat bacon and lard indefinitely, because the fat of grass-fed beef, goats and sheep don't taste nearly as good as the fat from pigs (particularly these pigs).

Just as people who really like carbs will find a way to convince themselves that cutting or eliminating carbs is the wrong thing to do, people who like bacon will find a way to convince themselves that there's just no reason to go without.

You see similar behavior with respect to alcohol; many paleo dieters consume alcohol. There's good reasons to think its shouldn't be in their diet.

Eades on Starting Low-Carb Diets

2011-06-25T13:38:00.001-07:00

Diets are interesting because they allow people to push themselves. Most people I know can live their lives without stressing themselves too much. Diets are one way that people can easily make themselves uncomfortable.

Dr. Mike Eades has two interesting posts on starting low-carb diets. Part I and Part II.

One neat thing about carbs, that many people don't understand, is that they are addictive. Many agree that cigarettes, caffeine, alcohol, video games, porn and email are addictive, but don't want to admit that carbohydrates are too.

This section, from Dr. Eades's first essay, is particularly good:

The surest road to failure in the first few days of low-carb dieting is to listen to your body. The whole notion of listening to your body is one of my major pet peeves. In fact, just hearing those words makes me want to puke. In my experience, they are usually uttered by females with moist, dreamy looks in their eyes, but not always. I just read a ton of comments in recent Paleo blog post in which vastly more males than females actually wrote this drivel.
Listening to your body is giving the elephant free rein. If you’re three days into your stop-smoking program, and you listen to your body, you’re screwed. If you’re in drug rehab, and you listen to your body, you’re screwed. If you’re trying to give up booze, and you listen to your body, you’re screwed. And if you’re a week into your low-carb diet, and you listen to your body, you’re screwed. Actually, it’s okay to listen to it, I suppose, just don’t do what it’s telling you to do because if you do, you’re screwed.

The general topic - listening to one's body - reminds me of stair climbers. If you listen to your body, you won't finish the race. If this guy listened to his leg, he'd stop way too soon. If you are trying to things mindfully, avoiding acting on urges - e.g. being "impatient and driven to gobble" (PDF), but not doing it, means "ignoring the body".

Another thing you'll hear from people - particularly if you bring up the topic of an elimination diet (e.g. paleo diet) is "everything in moderation". E.g. we should eat a little meat, a little fat, a little grains, a little ice cream, a little bit of legumes, etc. -- because doing anything else would be "extremist".

That doesn't make sense: if you believe in evolution, there's no reason to think that our ancestral environment included grains, ice cream, legumes. Go ahead and eat that stuff if you want - but there's no reason to presume you'll be better off for it.

I can't help be but reminded of the pigs.

When we finish the pigs, they get some wheat and alfalfa hay. That's it. We don't give them a varied diet. The reason: we've figured out what makes their fat hard, white, sweet and neutral tasting. The key is carbs (to make them fat), which result in de novo lipogenesis. Starving them of O-6 and O-3 fatty acids results in fat that is more oxidatively stable than if we fed them any polyunsaturated fats. The antioxidants make the fat sweet and keep long. If we put in other stuff (e.g. a little corn) or some random plants, we'd produce fat that would be only worse. So we don't put any of that in.

We certainly don't give the pigs free choice of a variety of foods and let them "listen to their body" and decide what they want to eat. If we did that, they'd choose the same foods that humans do. E.g. big macs, ice cream, beer, pastries etc. If you don't believe me, this will give you an idea of what they do when given free choice.

Dennis Hopper

2011-06-23T23:11:00.001-07:00

Dennis Hopper is one of my favorite actors. My favorite scene of his, featuring Christopher Walken, is in "True Romance", written by Quentin Tarantino, one of my favorites. He's great in "The American Friend", playing opposite Bruno Ganz (of Downfall fame).

The relatively unknown "Carried Away" (1996) stars Dennis Hopper, playing Joseph Svenden, a shy and insecure Midwestern school teacher. The role is of course atypical for Hopper. He does a great job with it, proving that he can do more than just play violent psychopaths.*

In the middle of the movie he has a midlife crisis. He "loses it" and decides to go for it. He's got some good lines.** The first really good line is:

I'm a bad man. But sometimes it's great fun to be bad.

Hopper won't be making any more movies, as he died recently. His final months were messy. It was no fun to read about his deathbed divorce. Also, for all the talk of how crazy he was, he acted pretty nice to her, considering that he was dying, she was messing up his final days and the specter of long term punishment couldn't deter him (as he'd be dead soon).

* Hopper was born and raised in Kansas though - if there was a normal guy role for him to play, it is hard to imagine a more natural one.

** He gets excited and commands his girlfriend to take her clothes off. When he does, his voice changes enough that it will remind you of Frank Booth in Blue Velvet.

Gold the Anti-Investment and Rabbit Cannibalism

2011-06-21T23:07:00.001-07:00

I was talking with a gold bug the other day. I mentioned, along the lines of this article, that it is depressing when smart money decides that the best thing to do is to sell equities and fixed income (bonds) and buy gold. Taking physical delivery (which entails more costs) takes it even one step further.

It is a vote of no confidence in the central banks, governments, etc.

The equivalent in the animal kingdom: mothers (rabbits, pigs, etc) eating their newborns, in response to stress. Under certain circumstances, the mother decides the rational thing to do is to pull the plug.

When professional investors decide that gold is the right thing, if they are right, they'll win the loyalty of customers. Obviously, that could make your entire career, if you hit it right.

When individuals buy gold (without leverage*), if they turn out right, they'll only preserve the value of what they own. That's a bit like a mother rabbit deciding that rather than letting a predator eat her babies, she'd rather get the protein by eating them first (and trying again another day). In the "best" case (predators are going to steal your wealth/babies), you get to keep what you started with, instead of letting the predators take it from you.

Being that sort of investor/mother means being able to view the world/situation as a hopeless. A lot of humans can't do what rabbits do instinctively.

*Of course, leverage changes everything; if you borrow a bunch, buy gold and turn out prescient, you'll come out ahead.

My Short Experience with Intermittent Fasting

2011-06-20T21:48:00.002-07:00

I've been doing intermittent fasting "for real" for about a week now. It took me many weeks of trying to be able to stick to a 16 hour fast, 8 hour feed period, as recommended by Martin Berkhan of leangains.com.

It took so long because I'd get hungry during the fast and snack. Typically I couldn't stop eating at the end of 8 hours without feeling hungry. I wasn't prepared to ignore the hunger, so I'd eat and screw up the schedule.

After trying many times, I seem to be able to do it. I think the meditation (for pain) helps a lot to deal with hunger. Basically, if you practice observing pain and not being as bothered about it at you would typically, feeling hunger but continuing to fast is easier than it would otherwise be.

A common observation from people doing IF is that it helps with cravings. E.g. IF works better than eating 6 meals a day. The 6 meals a day is standard bodybuilder practice.

When I read that, I got curious. I couldn't figure it out.

Having done it a bit, I think I understand a bit more. There's something about being hungry that fixes cravings. Intermittent fasting will guarantee that you'll regularly be hungry. Hunger trumps cravings.

It is odd to think that people would willing subject themselves to an eating regime that ensures they'll be hungry some of the time, in order to avoid feeling cravings. But somehow it works.

On the positive side, intermittent fasting seems to be allowing me to lose some stubborn fat. Having plateaued at 16%

Double Down

2011-06-19T13:45:00.001-07:00

The KFC Double Down is interesting because it tells you who is low-carb* and who isn't. Fruit is the same, but from the other side.

"Fag thinks fruit is healthy" captures the low-carb side, in a 4chan way. I laughed out loud at this.

If you do a little research, you'll see bodybuilders seem to like the Double Down - although they complain it costs too much. That makes sense: when you need to eat a lot, you pay more attention to grams per dollar.

Low-carb dieters generally love telling people how the Double Down is healthy - although some point out that it has something like 100+ ingredients (a bit concerning for those who like food to be simple). Some low-carbers would be concerned that the thing does have 22g of carbs, implying that one can easily eat too many.

One would guess that paleo people would generally like the idea of the Double Down (a fatty, meat treat), but be concerned about the cheese (neolithic!) in it, the gluten, the fact that its fried in plant oils and has 100+ ingredients. They'd rather see grass-fed beef strips, covered in potato batter (avoid the gluten!), and fried in grass-fed beef tallow. Maybe hold the bacon, because that stuff's high in O-6s.

People are hilarious about food.

* and who believes the lipid hypothesis.

Solstice Party

2011-06-19T13:17:00.001-07:00

I've been invited to a customer's solstice party for the last few years. In the last few years, I either forgot about it after doing the farmers' market, or was so beat I didn't bother to go by.

He's been doing the party for something like 15 years. He gets several grills going and smokes a bunch of meat, often some goat. There's beer. And there was some booze (The Kraken, a rum).

Many of the people at the part had eaten Mangalitsa before, and loved it. I brought some salo (plain, Ukrainian-style salted fatback) and shared it with them. I gave some to one guy who left early, and he was happy.

I brought a few Mangalitsa tenderloins. Jeff cooked one fast on a hot grill, and Shamus did some slow. Faster was better, probably because the meat carmelized a bit.

When they came off the grill, I told people they were "horse cock".* That slowed down the eating a bit, allowing us in the know to get seconds or thirds. Nevertheless, it only took moments for the guests to exhaust the plates of Mangalitsa once it hit the table.

* If you think "horse cock" is too vulgar, just look at the flyer for the party.

Savage Behavior - Human and Animal

2011-06-18T12:45:00.001-07:00

Latent savages

There's a guy in Kenya whose penis got chopped off, perhaps by his girlfriend.

Pigs do this sort of stuff.

I remember talking to a vet in 2007. My pigs were in quarantine. I wanted him to breed my open sows. I didn't want them to get fat and barren; better to put babies into them and keep them lean.

The vet wisely refused. He said something along the lines of:

We don't have the resources to hand mate (1-on-1). We could do pen breeding (put boar in with sows), but if sometimes you'll get a mean old sow and she'll get jealous of the boar, and she'll bite his penis. If that happens, your boar is done. I don't want the liability.

When I heard that, I was shocked at how savage it all sounded. I felt traumatized just having him tell me that. It is a bit like the narrator woman on the duck gang rape video; she just can't conceive that the drakes are gang raping the poor duck.

I'm surprised more cops and farmers don't try to get disability for PTSD; they certainly see awful enough stuff. Their understanding of what humans and animals are capable of is necessarily different than that of normal people, who don't have to plan for the worst.

Diabetes, Looking for Excuses to Avoid Discomfort

2011-06-18T01:23:00.001-07:00

I was at the super market and saw a depressing publication - Reader's Digest's "Reverse Diabetes".

That fact that it's at my supermarket implies there's a big market for it; there's enough people with diabetes that Reader's Digest can put out a popular publication and make money doing it.

I'm not an expert on this stuff, but I've learned a little, in the course of learning about low-carb diets, why people eat "paleo", intermittent fasting, etc.

I took a look at "Reverse Diabetes". Most of the advice seemed to be the typical stuff you read - exercise more, eat whole grains, cut out fat, cut calories, etc. -- the stuff that, for most people, just doesn't work. People have been trying and failing that way for decades. The reason people are fat and have diabetes is that they couldn't stay thin by taking those measures.

One thing that bugs me about that advice is that there isn't good anthropological evidence for it working. I have to figure that over thousands of years, humans evolved to eat certain things. Eat those things and you're fine. Eat other things and you are taking your chances.*

My guess: most people can probably be the healthiest if they eat a lot of meat and very little carbs.

Sadly, there was essentially nothing in the magazine about the efficacy of low carb diets. Mike Eades has written on the bias against low carb diets. It starts at the top. This is very unfortunate; there's a lot of people losing their toes and legs because they eat the wrong food.

From talking to Dr. Eades, it is pretty clear that when obese people go on low-carb diets, their insulin sensitivity improves very rapidly, even though they are still obese. That's really important: they can basically cure their diabetes very quickly. They'll still be fat, but at least they won't be dealing with diabetes. But, as Dr. Eades explained, doctors don't want to prescribe those diets, because they are afraid to tell people to eat fat instead of carbs.

Given how sheep-like people are, probably the best thing that could happen would be if Oprah went on a low-carb diet, lost a bunch of fat and kept it off.

Most people aren't willing to do what it takes to achieve difficult things. They look for ways to avoid doing hard work and still tell themselves that they tried.

I went to a Weston A Price meetup recently. ND Tim Gerstmar talked about gluten. The audience was filled with people thinking that maybe they ought to eat less grains. I was surprised at how many women kept asking about tests (blood, DNA and stool) for celiac disease and tests other related conditions.**

It sounded so pointless. The tests are inaccurate. No matter what the tests say, as a practical matter, the only way they can get relevant information is to experiment on themselves (cut out the seeds - grains, beans, quinoa, soy - for a while) and see how they feel.

I suspect they wanted a test because they were looking for a reason to avoid making unpleasant and inconvenient dietary changes. It would be a bit like an alcoholic insisting, before trying to give up alcohol for a while, that he take an "alcoholic test", to see if he had a genetic predisposition or blood chemistry suggesting he was (gasp) actually an alcoholic.

Restricting or giving up grains and carbs entirely, even temporarily, sucks. You have a lot fewer food choices after you do that.*** Of course, doing it for a month won't kill you. Also, after you eat that way for a while, sweet potatoes and nuts start to taste really good.

I'm such a hedonist, I'm not bothering to give that stuff up completely. I just eat a lot less of it than I used to, in a disciplined way.

The discomfort aspect of dieting is why I think cyclic diets can work. E.g. you tell someone, "eat all your junk food on Saturday (cheat day). Eat totally clean Sunday-Friday." If you emphasize that you really mean they should pig out on the cheat day, some of them will be able to take on the challenge. That's just reward substitution. Over time, they don't need as big of a cheat day to feel good about their lives, and they develop willpower by telling themselves, six days a week, wait until the next cheat day.

* When talking about anthropoligical evidence for what people should eat, if you suggest people should eat meat, some people will point to certain populations that ate (and still eat) a lot of carbs. Nevertheless, your ancestors, if they were European, ate the low-carb foods found in Europe. They probably weren't Kitavans eating carbs and coconuts. That's why I'm dubious about carbs and coconuts - much as I like coconut milk, I know my ancestors didn't eat that. They killed animals and ate them.

** There were way too many women concerned with their stools. I thought women didn't poo or fart.

*** You are basically left with meat, eggs, vegetables, fruits and nuts. No ice cream. no chocolate croissants. If eating a traditional diet sounds terribly restricted, keep in mind that our animals (pigs, dogs, cats) mostly eat corn and bland soybean protein, day after day. Be glad that you aren't a dog, cat or a pig.

Information & Dishonesty

2011-06-17T21:48:00.001-07:00

Mencken

I imported and started marketing Mangalitsa pigs and pork in 2007. Perhaps right now, and certainly until very recently, every pig with Mangalitsa genetics (pure or partial) bred and slaughtered in the western hemisphere was at one point owned by me.

The pigs are used across the USA. The food business is such that when Mangalitsas get used, people talk about them, and it normally winds up on the internet. That's because when you've got something fancy that costs more, you tell people about it.

In a nutshell, these three factors

single source
customers' interest in publicity
use of internet for PR
search engines

mean that I know what's being sold where, and what people are saying to sell it, in real time.

The main thing I've noticed is that people are very dishonest and sloppy. It pervades all stages of the business.

When people sell things, they lie to get it sold. It reminds me of something that Mencken wrote:

It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.

If only out of self-interest (reputations are important when you need people to trust you), I've been quite honest with my customers. My customers have not been honest with their customers. Their customers haven't been honest with their customers, and so on - and due to my position I know it, can prove it, etc.

I've been in a particularly privileged position, for a few years, and this has allowed me to see the situation and what people say about it over time.

A few years ago a farmer in the meat business explained that people get worse and worse the farther away you get from live pigs. I thought that was funny. I didn't really get it, because I'd only gotten started in the business. I didn't have enough experience.

A few years in, with a lot more experience, here's my understanding:

E.g. you, your family, your hired man and your feed company: fairly decent & honest. All parties have reasons to treat each other conscientiously.

Moving on, you get to the slaughterhouse and meat cutters. Mistakes are expensive. For example, you're paying them $.50/lb to make a product from ingredients that cost $5/lb. If they screw up and they have to make good on the raw material, they are sunk. So they lie to avoid paying. Also, the workers are generally low-wage. They don't care if they make mistakes. Their bosses care because they get in trouble or it costs them - assuming the customers find out. So at the meat stage, you've got a lot more indifference and dishonesty than you did at the farm level.

Then there's the trucking firms. Some of them are honest. Others aren't - e.g. they'll "disappear" or deceive the temperature monitors attached to loads. Assuming you get a decent logistics company, you can essentially forget about them; if a hot load of meat arrives at a distributor, it is the fault of the processor, not the shipper.

Once the food gets to the meat distributor, things devolve even more. Meat distributors and their sales staff say what it takes to sell stuff. They know all the other meat distributors lie to sell stuff, so why hold back? If you are honest, you'll only lose.

Chefs buy food, process it and sell it to customers. When you get a plate of food from a chef, you can't tell what he made it from or how. Chefs have a big incentive to lie about what they are doing. If a chef tells you something is local & organic, and if it is on the menu regularly and doesn't cost an arm and a leg, there's a good chance he's lying. Because it is a lot easier to say that (and reap the benefits) than actually do it (and pay the price day after day).

How people rate the food depends a lot on subjective things like price, what people said about the food, the setting, etc. So a little bit (or a lot) of fraud can go a long way to making people happy.

Part of the problem is that Americans have very low standards. You can convince them that mediocre food is exceptionally good, very special, and just like what they'd get if they spent a lot of money to travel to a place where food actually tastes good.

Even if the chef tries to be honest about what he's serving, the waitstaff, who are paid on tips, lie as it suits them. They invent explanations, exaggerate, dissemble, etc.

I've talked to people in other industries. They are just as loaded with dishonesty. The one advantage to being a cog in a big organization is that you get to remain ignorant.

My little experience with people makes me think that the reason we humans have speech is so that we can lie, that we have verbal intelligence so that we can lie & convince better and that we reason so that we can win arguments.

Money Slut Walk, Duck Rape, Pig Rape

2011-06-16T02:07:00.001-07:00

Someone is mocking the Slut Walk with a hypothetical Money Slut Walk. The clip art makes it especially biting.

Photo by JR.

Moving on to animals, I'm reminded that ducks regularly rape each other. When I first heard that, I thought, "how can they rape if they don't even have hands?"* Here's a video showing how it happens.

Pigs rape too.

I remember seeing one boar that got stuck to the fence by his tusks. He tried pulling back to get away, but that just ensnared him, stopping him. Another boar mounted him and began raping him. The stuck boar squealed until we could cut him loose. The rapist boar was quite quiet as he did his thing. He seemed completely without empathy for the other pig. The other pigs in the pen also didn't seem to mind that one of them was getting victimized by the other; they went about their business as if things were normal.

If you really observe animals, you'll regularly see nasty things like this.

* Commenter RPS (see below) provided this informative link about duck behavior. Of course hands aren't required to rape; ducks do without hands their whole lives.

Food Attitudes & Conditioning

2011-06-14T23:21:00.002-07:00

In the course of losing a bunch of fat these last few months, it has hit me that dieting successfully is a lot about reconfiguring the brain.

Skinny people are skinny because they have the habits of skinny people.

Looking back, I can see I had a serious inability to delay gratification when it came to food. I had very bad habits.

If you want to get better habits, you can't easily do it all at once. You need to go step by step. It is a bit like lifting weights - in the beginning, your nerves and muscles can't work to move the weight. You practice, your body changes, and you can move the weights. Then you can move heavier weights.

Here's some food-related things I tried out in the last few months, and how impacted me.

Use Body Calipers

Track your progress with body calipers, not a scales. Scales suck, because of water weight, which will be all over the place if you cycle carbs. Just measure your skinfolds. You don't even need to look up your bodyfat %, just measure the same skin folds consistently. You can track progress that way. This is a good thing to do; you'll get positive feedback as you lose fat. If you are exercising, you'll gain muscle too. Using calipers will stop you from getting bothered about gaining muscle, which will happen if you use a scale, because muscle is heavy.

Cyclic very low carb diet: 6 days <50g carbs, 1 day (e.g. Saturday) no restrictions.

Carb restriction is huge, because insulin levels drop and hunger decreases. When you don't have much willpower, it is good when your hunger goes away.

Here's why you want 50g max carbs - probably less in the beginning. If you are doing CrossFit or something similar, you'll want more carbs, or you'll crash and burn. If you just lift weights, you can get by with not so many carbs.

When doing this, I craved carbs in the middle of the week. At the end of the week, looking forward to the cheat day. Come Saturday, midnight, carb blowout. E.g. cookies, ice cream, etc. until Sunday midnight. Monday - not very hungry, some carb cravings. Tuesday more cravings. Wednesday & Thurs fewer cravings. Friday not hungry at all, but looking forward (in the entertainment sense) to midnight and the next carb extravaganza.

Lost a few pounds of fat a week. Incredibly enough, eventually got fussy about what carbs to eat, didn't want to binge as much. Didn't feel so bad about the 6-day carb restriction. This technique was huge; diet would have failed without this. Got the original idea from here - but I'd not eat the legumes. Just stick to Mangalitsa, eggs and vegetables. I really like kimchi as a vegeatble, it contains good bacteria and vitamins and just enough spices to make things tasty, but not too tasty.

Reward Substitution

I like this one a lot: plan out what you are going to give yourself when you hit some milestones. Then hit the milestone and give yourself the reward. Having a nice reward to think about can make it a lot easier when things get tough.

Writing down everything I ate

Makes it harder to eat junk in a mindless manner. Here's a new version of the same idea. The photo version should allow you to get the time and place information. That could be good for analysis later.

Eating meal in special place, playing special music during meal

Paid more attention to meal. When I ate, it was somewhat special. Not much mindless eating that way. Got the idea from here. Basically, if you take away the place and the music, you don't have as many cravings. Cue the music & you cue the hunger. If you pay attention to this phenomenon, you start to realize that the hunger pangs don't necessarily have to be taken seriously all the time.

Restricting food choices, eating bland food

On low carb days, at a lot of meat and veggies and whey protein. That gets boring. Chewing is a bother. Food is more satiating that way. Hard to eat that stuff for pleasure, compared to say, a cookie. I purposefully hold the line at salt and pepper, to avoid making the food taste too tasty. You want to reset your taste so that meat, fat and simple spices are enough to satisfy you.

Restricting food choices works. It helps if you resolve, from the beginning, that it is more important to develop willpower than to enjoy the food every time you eat.

Make it difficult to eat certain foods, eliminate if you crave them

I found myself eating lots of nuts. So I bought them in shells. I'd shell them while standing in the kitchen. When I found myself shelling one after the other for 20 minutes or more, I stopped buying them altogether. Problem solved. Basically, if you find yourself craving food, cut it out (except for on the cheat day). Does a lot to retrain your brain to just want food as fuel, not mouth entertainment.

Again, once you resolve that at least some of the time (e.g. 6 of 7 days) you'll not be eating for enjoyment, you feel a sense of satisfaction when you cut out such foods. Just tell yourself that after you conquer the cravings you'll bring the stuff back into your life; it is just temporary.

Cue exposure therapy

On low carb days, visited donut store. Made a point of sniffing, looking at donuts & trying not to order them. Eventually got to the point of being able to turn down freely offered (sample) carbs, cancel requests for carbs.

If you've got willpower, this probably sounds like a crazy exercise. If you don't have willpower, this is a powerful way to develop control over what you eat.

Intermittent fasting

This is the best control exercise I attempted. Just keep trying; you'll probably not be able to fast on your first attempt. Here's the best summary of the intermittent fasting program from Martin Berkhan that I've seen. Key thing is, after a while, you get good at not eating until mealtimes. That means you'll get some practice dealing with hunger pangs.

I suspect the reason IFers say cravings are not a problem is that if you've got enough control to cope with hunger pangs, cravings are trivial.

If you don't have much willpower, that last bit probably sounds scary. Really, you just have to try doing the IF. You'll probably fail at it for a while, eating small (or not small) snacks in the fasting period. So what. Keep trying. Eventually, when you get the hang of it, you've got what it takes to control your response to hunger, and the cravings fall away.

Mindfullness & Ignoring Hunger

This is an important technique. When you get hungry, observe the feeling/sensation. Don't act on it. Just observe it. It will go away. Then do whatever you were doing. It will probably come back. Do it again and again.

You do that for a few days, you get good at ignoring the hunger sensations. This is how you can go from not being able to IF to being able to IF, or how you go from not being able to restrict calories to restricting calories.

Results & Summary

Not too long ago, I realized that if I was going to try to sell pig fat, I'd be able to do it a lot more effectively if I didn't look fat like a Mangalitsa. In particular, if you want to sell this stuff to paleo/CrossFit people, you don't want to look like a lardass.

I'm not the only one that thinks this way. Talk to sales reps who sell to fit people - most of them, after a time, will decide that they need to get in shape, or else. To some extent, you feel like you've got no excuse to be fat, because your customers are living off your stuff, and they are thin.

In conjunction with weight training, I've lost approximately 40# of fat in the last several months; maybe more. Body fat is at 14% now, down from around 30%. When I was at my fattest, I wasn't mentally prepared to make an objective assessment of how fat I was. If I'd known I'd make such progress, I might have gathered more info.

While losing fat, I hit a plateau for a while, but I'm losing fat steadily now that I've got the ability to ignore my hunger pangs. Cue exposure therapy was a key intermediate step to develop willpower, leading up to actual IF.

E.g. I've got a half-eaten pint of my favorite Ben & Jerry's ice cream in the freezer. It has been there a few days. I have no cravings for it. Something is different in my brain; I haven't ever been able to have my favorite dessert around and not crave it.

Once you get over milestones like that, you get some self-efficacy, which makes it a lot easier to continue. You know that even if you slip, you can keep trying and succeed.

Being able to ignore hunger pangs is key; once you can do that, you've made huge progress. The mindfulness approach really works to control hunger pangs. Here's a book on using that sort of technique to deal with pain.

Doing these things, steadily, over a period of approximately 5 months, has altered my habits. The new habits probably appear compulsive to some. But the previous habits - compulsive eating - were also compulsive, and had negative health consequences. I'd rather wear jeans with a 30" waist than a 36" waist.

It does make it a lot easier to sell the best-tasting pigs if you look thin & fit and explain to people that you live on pig fat.

Once you get some control over what you eat, it is a bit odd, especially if in the past, you've always eaten automatically. E.g. when you stop overeating, you start to wonder if you are eating enough. When you get to the point that you can ignore your hunger pangs, you are on your way to being able to do a hunger strike, or a protein sparing modified fast. That's downright strange if your whole life it has been impossible for you to even imagine not eating food when it is in front of you and you get a little hungry.

In general, bodybuilders have this stuff all figured out. Likewise, IFers really seem to have it figured out. Most people who want to "get in shape" want to lose fat and gain muscle, like bodybuilders or IFers. If you just do what they do, you can probably improve quickly.

What I did would probably work for a lot of people - start with a cyclic low-carb diet. When you hit a plateau, cut out any booze. If you still plateau, it is time to start with the IF and ignoring hunger sensations. By the time you've gotten there, making those sacrifices will seem natural and something you can get over.

My personal plan

I'm hoping to get down to 10% body fat and try to gain some muscle.

Willpower, Cravings, Hunger, Intermittent Fasting

2011-06-14T20:17:00.001-07:00

I've lost a lot of fat in the last 8 months, while gaining a bunch of muscle. I've also changed my eating habits and thoughts about food.

I think the key has been restructuring my habits. If you have the habits of a skinny person, you'll get skinny. You can make changes in diet and exercise that will make it easier to restructure your habits; if you work on things long enough, your brain rewires itself and it gets easy; you learn to stay lean.

For years, I didn't bother to try to get lean. I was OK with being overweight. I just wanted to stay out of the morbidly obese zone. As I didn't know how to go from overweight to normal, I didn't bother making any effort to do so. I didn't see any point to losing weight temporarily and then gaining it back.

Making changes in diet, exercise and sleep can help the process a lot. E.g.

If you eat a very low carb diet, your hunger will crash. If you aren't that hungry, you don't eat much. You'll lose a lot of fat that way. Also, when your insulin drops (due to avoiding carbs), your body can burn fat. If you eat carbs, your insulin goes up and your body doesn't burn fat.

If you do resistance training and aerobics, your hunger drops. That makes it easier to run a calorie deficit.

Here's some habits that work:

Eat in a specific way. E.g. eat in the same spot, play the same music. Make it an occasion. If you do that, your cravings for food will drop.

Cycle your carbs: 6 days no carbs, with one cheat day (e.g. Saturday) where you eat all the carbs you want. Blow it out - 9000 kcal if that's what it takes. Although that sounds insane, it really builds willpower, because several days a week, you tell yourself, "no."

On the days when you aren't eating carbs, and know you can resist them, do cue exposure therapy. That helps you to develop willpower. Particularly if you get to the point of ordering the junk and either canceling the order or buying it and not eating it.

If you restrict your food choices, you'll eat less. Just training yourself to say, "I'm not eating that until Saturday" helps to develop better habits.

Do intermittent fasting.

Intermittent fasting is a strong technique for developing willpower. It may take some easing into. The basic idea:

don't eat for 16 hours,
eat in an 8 hour period
repeat indefinitely.

Intermittent fasting has a lot in common with carb cycling, but on a 24 hour instead of weekly or bi-weekly time scale.

I find it very difficult to do intermittent fasting. I typically have a small snack or two in the 16 hour period.

If you work at getting on the schedule long enough, you'll eventually notice that cravings aren't a big issue. The leangains people talk a lot about how intermittent fasting reduces cravings. Having done it, I think I've figured it out. The answer may shock you.

When you don't eat for 16 hours, you are pretty much guaranteed to feel some hunger at the end of 16 hours. Hunger and cravings are two different things. Hunger trumps cravings. So part of intermittent fasting is learning how to deal with hunger. You learn to ignore the hunger. If you do that long enough, ignoring the cravings is trivial.

Blub Paradox

2011-06-14T08:21:00.001-07:00

Why on earth would you ever listen to
what this guy says about fitness, nutrition, etc?

As I mention here, some people always insist on not believing something until they experience it first hand. In that case, the topic is how Mangalitsa pork is so much better than everything else.

People can hear something is great, from multiple sources, and yet still insist on independent confirmation before they'll accept it.

I do the same thing.

Taking a recent example, when I heard about XGym from Kevin - a long time ago - I should have believed the guy. He's done CrossFit, he's done XGym, he's done his own workouts. If he says his XGym workouts were the toughest he's done, you should probably just believe him and act accordingly.

Like most people, I needed to experience it. It was the most intense workout ever (duh!) - more than what I'd done by myself, at CrossFit, etc. I could have saved myself about 6 months of time if I'd just listened to him earlier.

Paul Graham has written about this phenomenon, calling it the Blub Paradox.

I wish there was a way to make money off this phenomenon - some sort of pure play on the Blub Paradox. Just as gold is a pure play on money printing. I haven't found a way yet. I'm not sure if such a method exists.

My policy now: I try to find the people who are the best at things - the real outlying ass-kickers. I try to figure out if they, as people, are decent and honest. If they are, I ask them for advice, and I listen to it. Even if they say something that sounds dubious, I resolve to try it out.

Leangains

Want to go from being jacked and ripped to even more jacked and ripped? These guys seem to do that better than anyone. Yet people will ignore or doubt what they say.

Similarly, want to exercise hard, in spite of pain? Why not see what this guy has to say about how to experience pain while minimizing suffering? He only does it a minimum of an hour a day, every day.

Kevin Climbs, XGym, Pain vs Suffering

2011-06-13T23:38:00.002-07:00

Kevin Crossman's blog Kevin Climbs (his twitter feed) is worth checking out if you are into fitness. It's stated purpose:

To shamelessly promote the KC blog, the sport of stair racing (a.k.a tower running) and those that compete.

Kevin runs up very tall buildings. What does it take? As one article explains:

What does it take to be a good stair-runner? Mental toughness, says Kevin Crossman, 27, of Seattle, who finished third in 14:18.

“All the best stair-racers are people who can suffer,” he says. You'll generally see the regular folks out of breath, walking at the end of stair race, but “the fastest people, the best people are falling across the finish line.”...
According to Seattle exercise scientist and trainer P.J. Glassey, the suffering is the result of overloading the lungs, the heart and the legs, “At around the 20^th floor you're reaching your maximum heart-rate and your body starts telling you to slow down.”

Runners' lungs burn as they work frantically to get oxygen into the bloodstream. Meantime, lactic acid builds up in muscles, an after-product of their aerobic energy-processing.

“Your brain is getting messages from the legs saying there's too much acid plus you're way overheated,” says Glassey. “Then the brain says 'let's check the lungs' and the lungs can't keep up. So the brain checks the heart which says 'I'm givin' it all I got Cap'n.' Finally brain says 'I'm making an executive decision and it's time to shut it all down.'”

That first wave of pain gives way to a sort of second wind. The body can and does process some of the lactic acid that muscles accumulate as fuel, and when that happens, the runner feels good again, something that can last for 10 or 20 floors.

“The first wall is a false wall,” and then there's that second wind, says Glassey. “The second wall comes on when the body realizes it can't process all the lactic acid and the muscle temperature is so high.” Elite runners are able to push through this second wall and still keep their speed to the end.

“In most extreme sports the pain is accidental and hopefully not expected. This pain is deliberate and long-lasting,” says VanOrden, who finished fourth in 14:35.

...

It's typical for elite runners to writhe around in agony for 10-15 minutes after the race, except for Jesse Berg, this year's winner, who functions more or less normally. “I'm convinced he doesn't have pain receptors,” says Glassey.

This sport is amazing: every time they run up a building, they know it will really hurt. Yet they keep running up buildings.

The incredible XGym.

Having plateaued in my fitness program, in April, I asked Kevin for details on how he got so fit. He explained that in his mid-20s he was in his worst shape ever at 15% body fat. He decided to train for 3 months at XGym, the gym that produced winning stairclimbers. He gained a lot of strength and reducing his body fat down to 6%.

6% body fat is like "Brad Pitt in Fight Club".

Sounds good!

I asked Kevin for details. As he explained, he only did two twenty-minute strength sessions a week, and two 15 minute cardio sessions, in conjunction with eating a high-protein, relatively low-carb diet.

I found it hard to believe that just 40 minutes of strength training could produce such gains in just 12 weeks; how could that possibly work?

Kevin pointed me to this next video. In it you can see XGym creator PJ's version of a leg workout. Like a stairclimbing race, that leg exercise is about tolerating completely unnecessary suffering, that can, at any moment, be alleviated by giving up:

When I watch that video, I laugh, becuase PJ just goes and goes and goes, like a terminator robot.

His intensity scares me. I resolved that I'd better have Kevin train me XGym style, instead of going in for my free XGym session. I knew Kevin would take it easy on me. I didn't want to go to the XGym and feel like a weakling.

Kevin trained me. I paid him with Mangalitsa.

The 20 minute strength session was ridiculously intense, and unlike any other workout I've done. When I was done, I felt like a weakling. Interestingly, considering how uncomfortable it was while doing it, I didn't hurt much the next day. The reason: low momentum exercises don't stress the ligaments as much as typical exercises.

Here's what happened.

For each exercise, I did 7 very slow reps (10 sec each) until my muscles started to fail.

Having hit fatigue, Kevin told me to make motions like an explosion (bottom to top really fast), top half, bottom half, splinter (moving back and forth in the middle position), hold or negatives (trainer moves the weight to the top, you fight it on the way down).

My muscle started failing. I got hot. My heart rate took off. I think got an adrenaline rush. It felt like being on a roller coaster. It really started hurting.

As the muscle really started failing, Kevin assisted. Having the trainer there helps you to keep going.

After about a minute, the muscles are completely fatigued. Some call this muscle failure - your brain tells them to contract, but they can't do any work. The muscles spasm and go limp.

The next day, your muscles might feel a little bit sore. That's about it. You'll probably be surprised at how little it hurts.

I suggest you experience this yourself. XGym gives people free workouts. The XGym staff are very nice.

I tried training using the XGym DVD. That's a DVD made for the customers who have to travel and can't make it to their workouts.

What I noticed is that I could go about 15 seconds once the muscles started to fail, versus 60 seconds with Kevin. I dropped by the XGym and watched people training, seeing again that most clients could only last 60 seconds after muscle fatigue.

After the session with Kevin, I was shaken up and exhausted. No matter how hard I tried, when I trained solo, I couldn't train as hard. It took a while, but I figured out that I was quitting due to the pain.

Pain

When you work your muscles to fatigue, they hurt. Keep going and they hurt more and more. As soon as you quit, it stops hurting. We all learn to quit early once our muscles start hurting.

I figured that to break past this, I needed to figure out a way to deal with the pain.

I looked and found this book by Shinzen Young, "Breaking Through Pain". One of the key insights of the book is that when we resist pain, we experience suffering. If you can feel pain with equanimity, you won't suffer.

Looking at it that way, I'm guessing that the trainer helps you to shift your attention away from the pain, reducing suffering, allowing you to work harder. When you are all alone and you feel the pain, it is easy to focus on the pain and how nasty it is, and how unfortunate you are to be feeling the pain - which leads to suffering.

My goal now is to learn how to keep exerting myself despite pain.

Meeting PJ

I met with PJ Glassey today. We got right down to talking. He gave me a few mental techniques that have worked for him and others to keep going. He showed me some exercises I can do to round out my training & recommended some changes to my cardio routines. He was warm and helpful.

I recommended that he get Shinzen Young's book "Breaking Through Pain". Once I explained the contents, he immediately ordered it on Amazon. I was impressed.

We talked a lot about willpower. It is amazing how much training and dieting come down to willpower. Basically, to really push things, you need will. I explained some exercises I've done in the last few months to build willpower, and how it seems to have worked. PJ mentioned some other exercises.

PJ's has theories on how his techniques work. Not all of his explanations make sense to me - but that doesn't matter. What matters to me is getting results. Basically, do you want to stay how you are, or do you want to improve? How bad would it be to look like Brad Pitt from "Fight Club", anyway?

Starting my Mangalitsa business has allowed me to meet some incredible people. When you produce the best, you deal with high-performing people.

First Post!

2011-06-13T11:25:00.002-07:00

This is my non-work related blog. This is my twitter feed for non-work topics.

My work blog is about Heath Putnam Farms (aka "Wooly Pigs"), Mangalitsa pork, butchery, Mangalitsa recipes, etc.

This blog is where I'll stick the stuff that I want to write about that doesn't fit the format of the other blog.