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Eaters of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your bellies! And all it will take is a bit of thought coupled with a modicum of effort. Part of that modicum will involve a bit of reading, but hopefully we can keep it from becoming an onerous burden. On the bright side, there are no miracle pills, no magic bracelets, and while I am sure that you have a lovely aura, that is largely irrelevant. All that I ask is for some reflection into why we eat the way we do. Hopefully, armed with some insight from this process, we can then take meaningful action. I know I have, and I am here to share those thoughts, insights, and actions with you.
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Every Meal Counts
Whether you follow the 8 hour diet, Fast 5, Lean Gains, or my own intermittent fasting protocol, you will have noticed that the principal difference comes down to the concept of an eating window. Simply put, each protocol specifies an interval during which no food is taken, and a subsequent interval during which meals are permitted, the eating window. In the 8 hour diet, this window is unsurprisingly 8 hours, Lean Gains is also an 8 hour protocol, Fast-5 gives you five hours in which to eat, and as for me, I actually don’t have a...
read moreThe Heisendiet Effect
The man in the photograph is Werner Heisenberg, a name that might be familiar to you in the guise of the eponymous Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, or you might know it from the name of the antihero protagonist of Breaking Bad. The Heisenberg of Uncertainty Principle fame told us back in 1927 that when it comes to physical properties of a particle, there is a fundamental limit to what can be known simultaneously, so the more precise we are with respect to the momentum of a particle, for example, the less we can know about its position, and...
read moreSite Outage
Some of you may have noticed that the site was recently down. Unfortunately, I ran out of disk space on the server and that resulted in some database strangeness. I was ultimately forced to restore an earlier image of the site, with the net effect being that I lost a few posts in the process. I’m working on getting those reposted, so please bear with me in the interim.
read moreIntermittent Fasting And Fast Twitch Muscle Fiber Atrophy – Part II
Why would any individual concerned with fitness, performance, appearance, and health voluntarily choose to not eat? Obviously because by not eating they expect to be able to positively impact one or several of those dimensions ( fitness, appearance, health etc. ) without doing overt harm to the others. Recently, however, several studies have been published linking short term starvation with increased autophagy in fast twitch muscle fibers. If this is true, then it is of significant concern because fast twitch muscle fibers are the ones...
read moreIntermittent Fasting, Autophagy, and mTOR – Part I
Rob, a reader from Ireland, pointed me to a worrying post regarding the potentially negative aspects of intermittent fasting and asked about my opinon of it. Ok, I’m being generous here by throwing in the modifier potentially, because the post’s author definitely holds the viewpoint that fasting will kill you … I’m paraphrasing here and exaggerating a bit for effect, but not much since the actual quote from the posts’s conclusion is: John Kiefer The...
read moreWhy You Shouldn’t Eat When Hungry
There is a school of thought out there that says that all of our dietary problems would resolve themselves of their own accord if only we regained the ability to listen to our bodies as they sent presumably unambiguous signals to our higher faculties as to what was metabolically required. I may even have said something to this effect ( listen to your body ) in the context of fasting. However, if we apply this notion to the question of when one ought to eat, it becomes somewhat more nuanced, and potentially polemic. While this ought...
read moreIntermittent Fasting – A Primer
This post has been a long time coming, and I’ve posted it in various forms, and bits and pieces in several internet haunts, but at long last, I’ve repatriated it here. When it comes to intermittent fasting, the amount of misunderstanding, misconceptions, and misinformation out there finally compelled me to put metaphorical pen to metaphorical paper here. First thing first, just to get it out of the way, intermittent fasting is not a miracle cure for all that ails you. I think that there is a lot there to recommend it to...
read moreHow Kim Lost 10 lbs. in 10 days!
That’s what the breathless headline blared from the cover of the celebrity tabloid at the magazine stand. Now, I’m not much for gossip, so I didn’t read the article. As a result, I am completely in the dark when it comes to what dietary strategy, supplements, exercise, or other tactics Kim employed to achieve this newsworthy outcome. I do know a few things about metabolism, however, and this gave me pause. The implication of the headline is that the weight lost was fat, so naturally, we may ask what would one have to do...
read moreDoes dairy make you fat?
The primary proteins in milk are unique to milk, not found in any other tissues. Broadly speaking, there are two categories of milk proteins, the main group is the casein proteins ( about 3 or 4 depending on the species ), with the remaining proteins in milk grouped together as the whey protein group. All of these proteins are highly insulinogenic, meaning they produce a pronounced insulin response, even in the absence of carbohydrate. Keep that last bit in mind, it will be pivotal later. Several studies have been performed to determine the...
read moreThe Leptin Marketing Miracle
It turns out that adipose tissue, something that was previously thought to be a collection of inert bags of triglycerides, is actually metabolically highly active tissue, producing a number of hormone-like substances such as leptin, resistin, adiponectin, tumor necrosis factor alpha, interleukin-6 and so on. Research is furiously proceeding in this area in the hope that obesity can one day be cured via a pill rather than by taking the apparently onerous step of changing ones behaviour and diet. Now, when you stop to think about it,...
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