My Thing

I am at last bowing to this unreasonable and completely overwhelming popular demand. I just don't want to handle the constant requests -- pleading, weedling, harassing. People are always making promises, and I'm tired of driving all over town to, uh, collect, and it always turns into a surreal nightmare. Lies lies lies.

So below, per your demands, I have posted some pix of my penis. Don't peek, because first I have some things to say, about specifically male beauty, and aging.  

 Errol Flynn.

 

Really, an Adonis.  

But then... 

.Yikes.

Well yeah, sure, of course everyone ages. But he died at age 50. This is not aging, it's degeneration.

And Peter Lorre. As we'd expect, he played his character roles, 

but we look beyond that. 

You know, he's really quite handsome. 

 

But age 55

It must have been a hard 20 years. 

In Flynn's case his catastrophic aging was certainly due to alcohol abuse. Lorre had various health issues due to improper diet. Which is my point. Nutrition 

In terms of my personal life, nutrition is quite important. I've made jokes about it over the years, my health and fitness. The discerning reader will have seen the performance art of it, but behind the parody, it really is about health, which really is about nutrition. 

Very much of the craping and creasing of skin is that it's not getting the nutrients it needs to repair and maintain. Same with all the organs. There are no guarantees, no promises against tragedy. I should know. I got an autoimmune chronic pain issue some years ago. Incurable. It lasted six or eight years, but it's gone now.  I cured it. With lifestyle.  Stole my joy, changed my personality, but the pain I have now is not from that. 

That's meant to be inspirational. No joking, here. Eat for nutrition. So I'll give you one simple thing, and then add a few easy complications.  I have my berry smoothie, daily.  A pound of frozen blue black rasp straw berries. A scoop of protein powder.  A fair bit of flaxseed oil.  Water.  This is literally perfect nutrition.  Sip it, don't drink or guzzle.  It's not for thirst. 

To complicate it a bit -- and you should never start a new thing, complicated — I have, well, it's quite a list. Dried apple pear nectarine peach prune cherry coconut banana pineapple kiwi mango papaya date fig *deep inhale* goji mulberry gooseberry raisin currant … and a few things you haven't heard of. I've mixed these together into various containers, sort of by categories, and I add a scoopful from one of the "buckets" to the smoothie. I do a few other things with it, re probiotic/culturing and digestion, but we'll skip that.

A few years ago I noticed that I've finally started to age.  Some "fine lines" in the mirror. Again, despite my humorous persona, I'm not more vain than average. So I take my delayed aging as confirmation of lifestyle, a proof of concept, a validation of a theory. 

Skin is the largest organ of the body, and old-time, competent, doctors used it as an aid to diagnosis. The implication is that it's, oh, an early warning system about the rest of your organs. My cholesterol and bone density and hormone levels etc are youthful. My BP is the same as a hunter-gatherer's -- at the very low, and healthiest, end of "normal".  Again, these are not boasts. It's cause and effect. I operate from the "cause" side of things, and get a satisfactory effect. 

As I say, nutrition, and therefore health, and therefore fitness, is my thing. 

But, as I promised, and I know how much you want it, below are those pix you all have been begging for.  To be frank, I've never understood why there's been such a clamor for this. All the time, on and on, harping about how you all want to see these pix. It's just ridiculous. But   HERE   they are. Hope you're finally satisfied. 

 J

Nox

Went to bed early but didn't sleep AT ALL. Somehow, this is your fault.

I think I may have decided to write another book. Nutrition. And maybe another one, on exercise, depending on just exactly how voluminous they get. Lord knows I have enough source material. So there's that. Should take a year. Maybe half a year. Three months. I wrote a book in a month, once. Had all the research done already, though, and that doesn't count revisions.

I think I'll approach it from a protein fat carb perspective. Deal with the Atkins thing, the vegetarian thing. The Fat Fallacy. It's very complicated, in terms of the evidence. The reality is pretty simple. Eat food. Industrial carbs are not food. Factory meat is not food. Trans fats are not food. What gets tricky is how much, of even good food, proportionally. That Zone thing. And the Protein Power slash Paleolithic Diet people. Eat lots and lots and lots of that really good-for-you meat. Approach it from a health v performance angle. There are trade-offs. But the whole field is so cluttered with emotion. One of my mottoes, Be sensible. Another is, Be rational.

We'll see. It's a major undertaking, even if I've been involved in it for over thirty years now. Does the world need another long and practically perfect book that no one reads by internet genius Jack H?

Someone asked me when I'd start my next family. Cuz I was such a fantastic father. I said I needed a wife for that. Then I decided that all I really wanted was a housekeeper, babysitter and sex partner. You know, so it's all about me. It would be hard to stop being so self-involved, after all these years. I do need a lot of alone-time. Women don't like that. But, if you know any, women I mean, feel free to, like, talk about me. I'm really very impressive. And I'm loyal. And as far as I can tell, I've outgrown the youthful need to dominate. Maybe I'm thinking of my father. Was it me who loved to use and invalidate women? I can't remember. I think it wasn't. No matter. It's all theory anyway. No one will ever love me again.

I should be starting bjj next week. For just a month. Mornings, I think, mostly. I train up to six times a week nowadays, 3 met con, 2 strength, one hard run. The strength workouts are more like once a week, due to time and energy restraints. I just don't think I'll be able to do strength and bjj, with the rest of it. Certainly not for more than a month. Sad to say, age is catching up to me. Not so anyone would notice it, but I do.

You see it in volume of work that can be maintained, and in recovery time. I look good. Don't know if I'm gaining weight, muscle, but I'm sore from a workout. I think my fabulous abs, my fabs, are getting even more dramatic. Hardly seems possible. Point is -- aside from how beautiful I am -- well, I think that was the point. Maybe it's that I don't really want to gain weight or look better. Yes, that's it. I just want to be better. So met con, and strength training, and interval runs -- 9 (1/5 miles) at 12.8 mph last night, with a 0.1 walk between at 3.3 mph. Next time 10 @ 13 mph. I am amazing. And bjj. Seems like too much, even for a superman like me. And I'm so smart too.

And handsome.

La dee da. Ho hum.


J

The Rules

It's obvious, but the obvious bears repeating. Fitness is really easy, because it's just this limited set of specific behaviors enacted in a brief period. Ten or twenty minutes of intensity, a few times a week, and you get fit. Easy. Oh, sure, it's tough. But tough things can be easy. If you take my meaning.

Then there's diet. It should be so easy. It's just what we eat, and we pretty much have complete control over what we eat. We may not be able to lift 500 pounds -- it's just impossible -- but anything we can eat, we can lift. It's just that we shouldn't eat everything we can lift. Temptation. Hardly anyone is tempted to get fit. It's a discipline. We sacrifice, as a sort of agape, that we may have more abundant life. Food on the other hand is one of the things Satan tempted Jesus with.

So both, diet and exercise, are easy, and hard. In my mind there is no question whatsoever as to which is more important. Diet is about health. Exercise is about fitness. Health is about proper functioning. Fitness is about what we can do. Both are important. But you can't depend on a malfunctioning machine. You are made out of what you eat. Imagine trying to build health out of cheetos and dingdongs and coca cola and pig colons. Coca colons. It's like a Great Wall, made out of paper mache.

Any talk about health or fitness is going to be repetitious. These things are not unknown. Details may be wrong, and whole philosophies, but being sensible is the message. Sure, religions have cults, that pervert universal truths, but that's why criminals counterfeit real money. It is the nature of evil to mock truth. Point is, eat good food, and use your body vigorously, that it might be vital. Everyone knows this. Why then is there illness and indolence?

It's easy and it's hard. The relatively few minutes it takes to be fit require sometimes an almost heartbreaking intensity. We might approach it with dread. But it's easy, once it's done. The not-unreasonable self-control of diet -- the very same that we expect from children, about not filling up on candy -- well, parents can, really they can, control the diets of their children. Controlling other people is much easier, and apparently more pleasant, than controlling ourselves. It's diet. Diet is what's hard. All it would take is the application of rationality. Eat this, because it is healthful. Don't eat that -- it is sweet but deadly, like a bad woman.

The rules? Eat food, not too much, mostly plants. That's one rule, or set of rules in a catagory. Work hard, don't get injured, rest. So those are the rules of diet and of exercise. Real food is nourishing -- not transfats, not dried molded slurries in boxes, not factory meat. Real work is practical -- not sitting on a bench doing dumbbell curls. What that achieves is impractical -- big guns, no grip and no shoulders. It's work the way compulsive handwashing is work.

It's hard because intensity is hard, and so is appetite. We're tempted to sloth, and to indulgence. Just saying no, or yes, gets us through some larger fraction of a second, in the process of self-discipline. After we've said no to the bad thing, or yes to the good, there still remains the need for action. And we do, as everyone knows, live in bodies of death.

Hope? There is no hope. Just do it? Sure, somehow. How? That's the magic. There must be hope, as the desert seed awaits the brief showers of spring. My feeling is that encouragement helps. We are after all very small children, learning to walk. Attaboy! Other people, and their opinions, seem to matter -- even people we don't respect. It must be a sort of temptation. But that's the alchemy of it. Even as we can transform vitiated food into almost 60 or 70 years worth of lifespan, we can draw motivation out of human contact.

That must be another rule. Be human, not impatient, with integrity. Humans strive to transcend weakness. They aspire beyond their capacity. Humans are foolish, like small children. They should make us smile. The meaning of their lives is embodied in the word, hope.

J

Day of Reckoning

I have my little jokes, but it is serious business. Diet, nutrition. Right now just for the fun of it I'm reading a book on the link between diet and acne. Not my problem. Anymore. But adolescence was difficult. Yes, it's genetic, but diet is major. Stay away from dairy. And as with cardiovascular disease, it turns out to have a major inflammation factor. Omega-3, then. But that's not my point.

I'm taking my own advice, keeping track of what I eat. It's easy for me, since my tastes are simple. Just a few little jottings. Then I decided to actually plot out the glycemic load. It's a little embarrassing. But today was an odd day. You know those Trader Joe's granola bars? No sugar, all natural ingredients. Lots of "fruit juice" -- lots of "cane syrup". Plenty sweet. Tiny little bars, six to a box. It's easy, really it is, to eat the whole box, those six tiny little itty bitty bars. I roughed out the glycemic load: 23 grams of digestible carbs. A glycemic index value of aprox 70 -- estimated from other granola bars with posted values. We don't have to be too precise ... but a GL of about 95. That is. A lot. A boxload. A whole day's worth of GL. Remember? A day's worth typically ranges between 60 and 180, with the mean a tad below 100. Like, say, 95.

I don't always eat a whole box. Even so. GL of 16 per bar. That's a bowl of rice. Or take a bag of microwave popcorn. My other vice. No one eats a single serving. There are 2.5 "servings" in the bag. That, my friend, is marketing BS. "See? A serving of our wonderful popcorn is only a mere inconsequential 160 calories!!!" True. But the bag has two and a half "servings" -- and since I am a math genius, I'll just inform you that it amounts to 400 calories. Lies lies lies. The bag has a glycemic load, then, of 26. Adds up, don't it.

Well. Today was not a good day, then. I do have a scratchy throat. Missed out on my smoothie, too, my healthful berry smoothie. I'll rough out a GL score for that, too. Probably about 8. A whole big blender full of nutrition, for free, in terms of insulin. That's the easy thing about it. The really nutritious food is free. It's the crap that costs so much, metabolically. As I have said, the Lord appointed seven annual feasts unto the Hebrews. Seven pig-out days. The body can handle it. But for Americans, every day is a feast day. This is not actually the blessing some might suppose, especially since there is hardly ever any thankfulness that goes along with it.

It's not hard, estimating glycemic load. Most people only eat 10 different meals. The meat doesn't count, or the fat. It really is just the industrial carbs, and the hardcore starches -- potatoes and rice. After that it's just a matter of estimating the serving size, and that's simple too. About the size of your palm? (Palm, without fingers or thumb or wrist.) About the size of your fist? (Palm, with fingers and thumb -- twice as much.) So it's a little bit of figuring, and then you know it. It's like writing a check to pay a bill. Yes, it's a little bit of a hassle, having to spell out those words and know the date and sign your name. Such a chore. Then again, it's the price you pay to pay the price you have to pay.

A can of coke has a GL of 15. At least my granola bars have a nutrient somewhere in there.


J

Fuel to the Fire

For 25 years my cruising weight was 172. In a time of grief I got down into the 150s -- I was afraid to weigh myself stripped, so I don't know the precise number. In my 40s and now, with increased exercise, it's about 180, more if I'm doing strength training. My body finds its weight according to my activity level, and my diet adjusts itself to that. When I stopped bjj last year, I gained about five pounds of useless weight. Same when I stopped running, six years ago. I was eating more than I was using. But it leveled off. There is a lag time, then. But there is self-regulation.

Getting fat, very fat, should be no easier than getting very muscular. Both are functions of hormones and metabolism. Eating by itself won't do either. Neither will moving or not moving. There is a range that normal individuals have, within which they will gain or lose weight. After that, it takes exceptional effort or circumstances, or a profound genetic or hormonal disruption.

To get muscular, amino acids and glucose must be directed within muscle cells. To get fat, free fatty acids and glycogen must be localized within fat cells. It is not the presence of amino acids or FFAs that dictate this. It isn't the presence of insulin per se. It is the receptivity of cells. A muscle cell takes in raw materials not because they are in the bloodsteam, but because its receptors have been activated or sensitized. Exercising a muscle does that. Then, if sufficient nutrients and the proper hormones, testosterone, HGH, etc, are in the bloodstream, muscle growth will occur. Same deal with fat. An excess of glycerol and insuln, in a generally insulin resistant body, will result in the pervading corpulence of the current American population.

It isn't about excess calories anymore than being muscular would be. It's about the type of nutrients and the hormonal reactions. Some people are born to be powerful, some to be fat. The rest of us have to work at it, or fall into it by habits of lifestyle. It's not a moral statement. Only choices can be judged by moral standards. We might say, informed choices. That's why there is the concept of unwitting sin -- it is treated differently by God. The harm is done, but the guilt is less. Those who are congenitally muscular may be proud, as those who are fat may feel shame or guilt. But not all blessings are earned, nor curses. The universe, like metabolism, is hormonal. There is balance, within a range.

Because muscle is made of protein, and fat is made of, uh, fat, people generally assume there is a cause and effect relationship. But perhaps we've seen the dudes with the protein powders straining away in the gym trying to bulk up those guns. Some of them do. But they usually look, to my eye, sort of puffy and soft, and always malproportioned. Unwitting sin. It's the opposite with the fatties. They think fewer calories rather than more grunting will do it. Yes, it will, sort of for a while, until they start eating again in the way they think is normal. But it's not, none of it, about calories, anymore than heat is about fuel. There's a lot of fuel in the world. Why isn't the world on fire? That's a better analogy than you think it is. It just requires that you do the thinking.

If you're tired of reading about fat et al, stay away. I have pages and pages of ramblings now. Not all of it will come up here, but it's a fruitful field, and this is a season in which I get depressed. I'd rather be manic. So suck it up, or leave. I don't want to hear your complaints. And do some pushups. And eat a salad.


J

Unexpected Fruits

You know I just had to do it, go on about it. I mentioned some unlikely fruits. Cucumbers, tomatoes, melons, pumpkins, dates, strawberries, chili peppers, allspice, eggplant, lychee nuts, pepper, rosehips -- all fruits. Any gourd or melon, anything with a seed in it, that can be eaten. A fruit is, technically, an ovary. Yum. Sometimes it ripens into a shell, sometimes into something leathery or papery, sometimes into something juicy enough to recognize as a fruit. What's the big deal about fruit?

There is the large class of things with seeds. All fruits have seeds. All nuts have seeds. All nuts are fruits ... in a sense: with some nuts the part we would think of as the fruit, the ovary wall, is the shell, and we don't eat shells. A true nut is a type of seed where the actual "fruit" cannot be separated. Chestnuts and hazelnuts. Pretty small category, if we limit it the biological definition. But we shouldn't. A walnut is not a true nut -- the shell is separated and we eat the seed but not the fruit. Likewise, almonds, cashews, pistachios -- they are the seeds of nuts. But come on, they're nuts. A coconut is the seed of a nut.

As we loved to remind people when we were 12, bananas are legumes. But legumes are fruits. We eat the seed and toss the fruit, the peel, the pod. Same with peanuts. Peas, alfalfa, lentils, beans, carob -- legumes are fruits. Same with cereal grains, wheat, corn, rice -- they are technically fruits. The fruit wall is fused and uselessly thin, and what's edible is the seed, but they're fruit.

Nuts? They, like obvious fruits, have a strategy. For animals: eat my nuts, but forget about some that you hide so they will grow. With humans the strategy is just as easy: eat my nuts, notice how useful I am, and plant orchards of me. It's the same deal that fruit trees make. Philosophically we can think of them as fruit.

Regarding the Edenic diet then, of all the fruits of the trees, it seems that human food is anything a tree or vine or bush produces that can be eaten and isn't leaves, bark, or wood. Likewise with berries and gourds and melons, the fruit of the ground -- such vines and bushes are a subclass of fruit tree. Grains do not come from trees, of vines. They come from grasses. Just different. But they are fruit. Strange. The problem seems to be in the amount people eat. As for vegetables (the bodies of plants), and herbs (the leaves and twigs), the are edible, but not quite kosher, according to the dietary law of Eden. But we don't live in Eden.

Did you know that we have the gene to make vitamin C? We, and the higher primates. It's mutated though, and silent, and useless. Did our original primate ancestor have a bottleneck mutation, so that all resulting Evolved species and individuals inherited that damaging mutation? So this Evolutionist link would have it -- complete with a bunch of really super great reasons why he's right. An ignorant dogmatic religionist like myself is baffled by his cogency. I'm fuming. All I can come up with is the painful and obviously wrong and desperate canard, that there was a pandemic virus that attacked the vitamin C gene in all species that had a sufficiently close gene-design. Take your pick. I'm a little embarrassed with myself, about how stupid and blind and stubborn I am.

[I just can't resist. The entire Evolutionist argument here is undermined by the ugly fact that many of the passerine, perching/songbirds also have lost the ability to produce vitamin C, according to no intelligible supposed Evolutionary pattern. This invalidates the E-bottleneck assertion, and argues for a non-random mutagenic cause -- ie, one that attacks various but similar species. Just off the top of my head. After a google search of about 12 seconds. Pitiful. This is the religion that dominates the intellectual world. E-idiots. I don't mind their being wrong. At least be convincing. It's enough to make me start writing about Evolution again. Did I say, pitiful? Pitiful.]

The point is, we are not what we once were. Maybe there are vitamins that we don't even know about, that we used to get from some common food, a fruit from a tree of life, as it were. Now extinct, never recovered from the Flood. Some essential nutrient, for heart health, for brain function, for cancer repair. Perhaps the centuries-long lifespan of the patriarchs is not so fanciful, if we change a few assumptions or glean some new insights. Perhaps.

Conclusion? We live in an ad hoc world. We don't live by Eden's rules anymore. Now there is entropy, then there was none. Now mass extinctions corrupt what was meant to be an ideal orchard. We have to find our nutrients where we may. Because we too are not what we were made to be. Meat? Sure, if it's necessary. Grains? Likewise. Moderation in almost all things. We wouldn't want to eat just apples, either. Now, we don't have Divine rules to guide us. We've got to use some common sense -- which is not, alas, governed and guaranteed by appetite.

So we look at the nutritional content of a food, relative to the amount of calories and ease of digestion, and weigh that against taste, and get busy composing a livable, sustainable menu. You know, that's pretty smart. You should listen to me more, and do exactly as I tell you. You'll live almost a thousand years, I bet.

And buy my incredible Infinite Dinosaurs Program™!!! It's the bomb! And I'm offering a fantastic new revolutionary mega supplement energy drink that will hyper repair your genetic macro deficiencies!! Get it now, while supplies last!! E-bottleneck PrimaVita-C Mutation Negation Libation™!!! (Do not feed to canaries.) Act NOW!!!


J

What I Know About Diet

It's not as much as one might suppose. Let's see. History, functioning, and common sense/ethics.

What is the ideal human diet. That's a history question. It's whatever we were made or Evolved to use. That's the heart of the matter. (Readers familiar with these pages will understand my usage of the capital Evolved -- it's the religion, not the real sort of evolution, the way cars change over time because they're redesigned via intelligence to be better ... when they are.) Did we Evolve so that whatever nutrients were available, that's what we adapted to need? -- and what wasn't available we Evolved out of a need for? Or were we Designed, as by God, to need whatever it is we need -- and sometimes we get that and sometimes we don't, but it's a fixed need, with only a fixed, genetically-determined capacity for variability?

If Evolved, then the "Paleolithic Diet" is correct or nearly so -- determined by observations of what tribal, hunter-gatherer societies have access to. Because modern stone age cultures would be reasonably similar to ancient ones, from which we Evolved. If it's true, it's true. Never argue with what's true. Is it? If so, what is the evidence? The evidence is the assumption of Evolution, and the fact that hunter-gather cultures eat as they do. In other words, the argument begs the question and the reasoning is circular.

As for my own bias, it's what is now called Intelligent Design -- a disingenuous vocabulary concession to atheists and secularists. If we were actually created, by God, in a Garden say, then there would have been an ideal diet that was meant to sustain the species. We can be certain that it was not a hunter-gatherer diet, nor an agricultural one. Something else, entirely.

If this Garden was in Eden, then I can be specific. Rule One: "I have given you every herb that yields seed which is on the face of the earth, and every tree whose fruit yields seed; to you it shall be for food." Things that grow on the ground and have seeds; things that grow in trees and have seeds. Cucumbers; tomatoes; squash -- herbs that have seeds ... they are fruits.

Rule Two: "Of every tree in the garden you may freely eat. You may freely eat of every tree, but one of them will kill you." So we have free will, regarding what we may eat -- but not everything that may be eaten, should be eaten. Diet affects our health. You heard it here first. What then was, oh, say, let's call him Adam, designed to eat? Tree food, ground food, with seeds. As it were, fruit. Coincidentally, fruit and berries and less obvious fruits are designed, unlike virtually every other food, to be eaten. That's the deal the plant makes: you can eat my fruit if/because you spread my seeds. Pretty clever, eh?

Leaves are meant to convert sunlight into sugar, and may be eaten. Vegetables are meant to be the body of a plant, and may be eaten. Roots are meant to pull up water and minerals, and may be eaten. Tubers are meant to store energy for the plant, and may be eaten. Grains/seeds/nuts are meant to grow into another plant, and may be eaten. Flesh is meant to be the body of an animal, and may be eaten. Eggs and milk ... well, you know. Whoever it was who wrote all those fairy tales in Genesis at least had a good idea about what fruit is for.

Mankind was designed to eat fruit. That was the original perfect diet. Not Paleo ... Edenic. Cucumbers, tomatoes, melons, pumpkins, lychee nuts, dates, chili peppers, nuts -- they are fruit. What, you were thinking apples? Alas, the world since that distant age has changed. We did not change with it. We have the same needs as always, but not the same resources nor even the same world.

First, the Fall. Mankind no longer has access to the original menu. Rule Three: "You shall eat the herb of the field." Behold, the invention of agriculture. Adam the orchard-tender becomes a farmer. Hunter-gatherer? It is a degenerate state. It did not come first. It is a result of the Fall and the Flood. Agriculture was an ad hoc response, an adaptation to being kicked out of Paradise. Still plant-based, but second-best. Well, we know that anyway, because too many carbs/grains will make you fat.

Then, the Flood. Neither Fall nor Flood affected our genetics, but they did affect the expression of our genes, and they did effect our environment. The ideal startup conditions were not sustained. The Garden perished. After the Flood, essential nutritional resources became rare or extinct. You've heard about mass extinctions. Evolutionists did not invent the idea. Go to your local library and find a Bible there and read all about it. I think you may find it online. The Bible? Genesis? The Flood? Mass extinctions.

Rule Four: "Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you. I have given you all things, even as the green herbs." The entire biosphere of the planet was disrupted by the Flood. There was no agriculture just after it, because all there was were mudflats and growing iceshields. What to eat? Immediately, animals, who could scavenge on debris. I go into it in great detail, in Dragons in the Earth. (You think you see objections. I have anticipated and answered them.) Point is, we eat meat because we can, especially in the absence of something better. And some better things are absolutely absent. Mass-extinctions, remember? Who can say what nutritionally perfect fruits and herbs and seeds and mushrooms are now extinct. Who can say how much longer we'd live, with vibrant health, if these lost but essential nutrients were not lost. The pre-Flood patriarchs lived so long, as I think they did, for a number of reasons. One of them would have been a diet inaccessible to us.

Theory, yes. But so is Evolutionism. We decide by the evidence, not by the dogma. What's that you say? -- the Bible is all dogma? Well ... that would be your religion. Maybe you're right. Maybe we came from monkeys and shrews and lizards and fish and germs and inorganic matter that was stuck by lightning. Sounds like a theory to me.

So that's history. Either we Evolved on a hunter-gatherer diet of grubs and sap and roots and lizards and monkeys and bark and mold and algae and salamanders over the past several hundred thousand years -- and I haven't detailed that because you know that story already -- or we were designed, etc. Both assumptions require that there be an ideal human diet, optimal for health and performance. The former suggests that such a diet is reproducible. The latter, in my iteration, says it cannot be reproduced, but diet can still be optimized within existing if irreparable limits.

If I'm correct, then a purely vegetarian diet seems likely to be best. Only those necessary nutrients that can no longer be found in plants should or could come from animals, if any. Are there any? -- any essential nutrients that can come to us only via animals? Well, vitamin B-12? But that's from a bacteria, and only secondhand through animals. Even so, if that's it, that's it. But they say it's in Brewers yeast. So that's it. Anything else supposed to be unique from animals? Omega-3? Well, yes and no. We make it ourselves. But the health benefits are very real indeed. Someone with an ideal diet, however, wouldn't need to supplement with fish oil. So my theory would have it. Anything else? You'll have to tell me.

The rest of it, functioning and performance, and common sense and ethics, well, these are easy. Whatever works. The China Study tells us that animal products are powerfully correlated to degenerative diseases. That's functioning. Performance is a more difficult issue -- my son is looking at it right now, or will be. Common sense? Yeah, it's good to eat something that will kill you if you leave it in the sun too long. Something that stinks to make you puke is really good food. The deader the better in fact ... put hair on your chest ... make you strong like bull! Ethics? Let me kill you and eat your body because, well, because I like the way you taste. Yum.

It may be that my son's experiment demonstrates, conclusively, that animal flesh, its "high-quality" protein, results in better performance. I won't be able to argue with that. No, you're not performing better? This wouldn't say anything about Evolution or Design, since extinction confounds the matter, but it would prove that meat is good, somehow, dammit. But that's getting ahead of ourselves. On the other hand, if a plant-based diet results in better performance, then the Paleo/Evolution diet is invalidated. If my logic is wrong, please inform me.

(No one is suggesting that an extinction of food-animals is a relevant factor; it would be an ad hoc invention to save their theory. The presumption is that we would continue to Evolve, with extinct food-sources replaced by our newly Evolved capacity to utilize other sources. For once, Evolutionists would be trapped by their own malleability. But of course they wouldn't be. Since Evolutionism is true, it can't be falsified. Only theories can be falsified, and Evolution is a fact. Stupid. Didn't you know that?)

What do I know about diet? I know there is a lot of nonsense involved in the whole area. Lots of emotion, lots of extremely shoddy thinking. I know diet is a profoundly religious thing. I know that physically I'm not like any other 50 year old you've ever met, and the greatest likely factor in this is my own diet, vegetarian for 30 years. I know that disease has a number of causes -- bacterial and viral, genetic and chemical -- but that the major cause of disease in our own culture comes from a diet that is nothing but slow poison. Too many carbs, and too much animal stuff.

So, does it matter, all this talk about apemen and Eden? Matter in some way other than philosopho-religio-theoretically? Yes, it matters insofar as it opens or closes our minds to what is best for our health. False assumptions might lead us to healthful conduct. True assumptions seem more likely to. But anything that closes our minds to behavior that would improve our lives, well, that's a thing to be avoided. I spent 32 years, man and boy, as an Evolutionist. I spent 19 years mostly boy, as a Flesheater. I can make a case that evidence can change my mind. Regarding religion, the results aren't in. Maybe Jesus was wrong. But as for health and performance, well, you must know by now how radiantly beautiful I am, and how unbelievably powerful, and so manly, and virile and so desirable to all the chicks, and did I mention beautiful yet? Cuz I am, beautiful. Just beautiful. Ah. And blond and tall. That's my hotmail address, hottallblonddude4u. So that proves it then.

Rule Five: "You may freely eat of every thing that you can fit into your mouth and swallow, but many of them will kill you, fast or slow." (See Rule Two.)


J

Experiment

From: nh@googlemail.com
To: jh@hotmail.com
Subject: Experiment
Date: Sat, 16 May 2009 23:33:16 -0700

I've been reading a few articles about diet and am thinking about experimenting with a completely whole food plant based diet that focuses on overall nutrient density. I'm thinking 2 months will give me a good idea in terms of results. I'll monitor weight, heart rate, training and sleep etc. I'm going to keep my blocks the same at 20@4x fat. I'll supplement with hemp/pea protein along with my normal other supplements.

I'm not sure when I'm going to start, I have to get all the supplies together to make sure I don't run out of stuff. It'll be interesting. I'm going to try to not mention it to anyone, because I don't want the hassle or debate.

Thoughts, ideas?

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On May17, 2009, at 8:22 AM , jh wrote:

What do you mean by whole foods? Is it paleo without the animals? Sounds very good.

This is my basic philosophy. I'm pretty self-indulgent, re treats and such, but I make sure to get the essentials, the berry smoothie and the veggie stew. Nuts when I want them. A sort of tabbouleh salad with sprouts and cabbage and whatever once in a while -- should be more often. I think brans are good -- I mix oat wheat rice bran together and have it once in a while, should be more often too.

Point is, this sounds like the optimal human diet.

Cordain's error is this: he looked at tribal primitive diets, and says we evolved eating thus. He's assuming the tribal diet is ideal, because he's an Evolutionist. But they don't eat that way because it's ideal. They eat that way because it's all that's available. Because it's whole and organic and the like, it's very good and healthful. This in no way proves it's ideal. Something else may be even better. Because of his starting assumptions, he doesn't look for that something better. They have virtually no degenerative diseases, which are associated with the modern diet. But they look like they're 98 years old when they're fifty. Something is wrong. Too much protein?

The tribesmen eat a lot of protein. Good for them. Maybe. But you should only eat what you need, not everything that's available. There's an idea: Live forever on the evolutionarily proven LOCUST DIET!!! How do we find what we need? You're looking to find out right now.

The purpose of blood is more than just hemoglobin and oxygen. It's the highway that brings every nutrient to the cells. It should be FULL -- thick with nutrients. As it were. Not with calories. So nutrient dense, calorie poor is the ideal. Since we're not robots, we want sweets or whatever too, sometimes. There must be a balance, between nutritional needs and psychological needs. Part of it is that an educated appetite wants less crap. But education takes time.

It's good not to argue. I look pretty good. Lean muscle. People are surprised when they find out I'm vegetarian, but they never argue, because I've got 30 years of it behind me. Let the results do the talking. It may be that some people need, NEED animal products. It's possible. I wouldn't know. But it's performance that matters, that proves the case. Theories is fer losers -- din't I beat that into yer head boy? Two months is a good start. It's something we should discuss.

Love

Dad

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From: nh@googlemail.com
To: jh@hotmail.com
Subject: Re: Experiment
Date: Sun, 17 May 2009 09:41:58 -0700

I'm not thinking exactly paleo (which has no grains.) Even though I have seen good results by taking them out; but it could be taking out the dairy that is the positive thing. Basically I want to create the most nutrient-dense diet I can... Brenden Frazier talks about 'net gain' in terms of nutrient content, and that seems like a really good idea. Limit the stress through digestion, but maximize the nutrition. I can't really argue with that. The thing I'm looking to find out is whether or not taking out meat and eggs will even further limit internal stress. I mean, logically, eating a dead animal doesn't seem healthy. It just doesn't. And even though 80%+ of the meat I do eat is organic free range, it doesn't make up the difference. I've never argued with that anyway, my point has always been performance. I don't think performance will be the same, I think it will either be better or worse by varying degrees. If it's better, that will be pretty cool -- and give me another advantage in terms of performing at an elite level physically.

I've been doing a lot of reading about yoga and qigong. Very similar sciences, although yoga seems to have spawned qigong. There are yogic postures that go back 5000? years... I'm not sure how accurate that is, but they definitely go back a long time. I've been meditating consistently in the morning from 15 to 30 minutes. It's the art of intense focus, which I can see will translate extremely well into cf workouts. Usually the meditation goes by without any incident, but sometimes I feel really good... and I consistently feel clear-minded afterwards. Meditation seems to be the missing link in most physical pursuits. I'm still learning about yoga and qigong though, it's really interesting stuff -- and weird to think of them as non-religious sciences developed over a long time to maximize longevity, health and wellness. Imagine combining them into one 'better' science (postures and breathing) with an excellent diet and an excellent fitness system. It all starts with experimentation and actually doing it.

Love

N

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On May17, 2009, at 11:22 AM , jh wrote:

My new motto: Net gain not grain. You heard it here first. One hundred dollars please.

Grains are just calories. I use the image of a water balloon -- the rubber is the bran, the knot is the germ, and the water is the calories. You can see ... just a tiny little bit of nutrition, relative to a huge volume of calories. Great, if you're starting a neolithic civilization. Not so good if you're looking for a high level of phytonutrients.

Same with animal products. You can make a case for eggs -- they're meant to supply everything needed to grow a body. But where is the bulk of the nutrients, and what is just the energy, the calories? -- I think it's the white that's the energy, and the yolk that's the complex nutrients -- yet they say eat the white only. Sort of backwards, except that there's supposed to be all sorts of problems with the yolk. I don't need to know, since it's not my thing. But there it is. As for milk, if it were human milk, maybe -- we'd be best equipped to digest those proteins. But our digestive system has probably changed a tiny bit since infancy, no? Goat milk is closest to human, but the problem remains, of adults using milk at all. As for cow milk, it's not food, any more than leather or glue is food ... it can be eaten, is all.

Meat. Ask, what part of meat would you use after it's been sitting on a table for 24 hours? The fat? the blood juice? -- the, uh, goo? Picture those elements inside your blood, rushing to where they're needed. Do the same thought-experiment with plant source foods. Bit different outcome. That's just emotion, but there is a certain logic to it. Ask, what nutrient is unique to, and therefore necessary from, animals? I can think of none. Creatine? We make it ourselves. Etc. As I've said -- aside from the digestion issues, of very complex proteins, and leaky gut maybe, and auto immune problems -- think of what bacteria you're inviting into your body, and feeding, with meat. Compare that to plant foods. Again, emotional, but it makes sense.

Nutrient dense/calorie poor is the model. So is ease and simplicity of digestion -- resources used, for ultimate benefit. Is my spell checker working? That's my problem with protein -- it's VERY expensive, in terms of difficulty to digest ... hydrochloric acid is like nuclear fuel-rods. You don't burn diamonds for the carbon, like coal in your barbecue. Adequate nutrition, in this case, is ideal nutrition. You don't need more than you need. That's why we want a wide variety of plant sources -- you don't know what you need, so give your body a lot of options. Have your bloodstream FULL of good chems, so it can pick from abundance. Plants do that. Meat? I doubt it.

RE tai chi (qi is the communist way of spelling it -- I don't let totalitarians dictate my spelling), it may be older than yoga (if it's a legitimate psychological technology, it was taught in the prophet school that one of the OT books mentions -- a tradition then from Noah; odd how they've always tried to make psychology into a religion). The actual history is non-existent on these things, really. They get their dates from legend, from images on pottery of some guy standing strangely, which they assume is yoga or taichi, etc. They always throw out these dates, as if they knew what they were talking about. Only I know what I'm talking about. But don't argue about non-essentials. Don't argue about essentials, either. Inform, from knowledge, and let them decide to be right or remain wrong. :-) I like tai chi more than yoga, because it's active. But it is really just meditation, in motion. Seems more useful, and easier to focus, if you have a movement to help channel the energy. I've got quite a few books on taichi. Am I even spelling it right? Urgh.

I'm doing some thinking on mental aspects of exercise. Not unrelated to your thinking on it. It's important stuff. Breathing is major. Don't know much about it though.

Love


J

Seduction

I was listening to Satan this evening while I was working out. "Oh Jack, " he said in a silken and sonorous tone, "you poor thing. This is so hard, Jack, all this hard hard work. It's so much. Just go a little slower, Jack. It will be easier, and it doesn't really matter, a few more seconds. You can make up for it with a strong finish. Sure Jack. Save nothing. At the end I really do want you to save nothing. Balls out, Jack, absolutely. But Jack, Jack, don't exhaust yourself right now, for heaven's sake. Be sensible, sensible, Jack. Exhaustion is dangerous. You're very healthy for your age, Jack -- you really look so good, for your age -- but blood vessels do burst. And no one knows how hard it is, for you in particular, Jack, and they won't even know if you take it a little slower, a little easier, not that you would ever go easy. No one will know, Jack, not that it's their damn business ... and anyway they don't even feel sorry for you. Jack, is it hot in here or what? Man is it hot. They don't even notice how the sweat is just POURING off of you. And Jack, isn't that talking a distraction? But just keep plugging alone, I mean along. Heh heh. A little slowing each time is expected. Oh! Jack! -- you're wobbling! You almost STUMBLED, Jack! Jack, you must REALLY be working hard. Did they notice? No, of course not. So hard. Too hard. And Jack, this is only four minutes! Another sixteen?!? Ridiculous."

On and on he went, Satan. Thing of it is, he was right. No lies at all. No lies this time. Even the "too hard" -- it is too hard, to do something faster than I can do it. But it's not too hard to do as fast as I can do it. Which this wasn't. Satan loves the truth. He loves most of the truth. Sometimes it's all, or mostly, or at least some lies. You can't do it. You're not good enough. But with me he knows he has to stick with the truth, mostly. Because I can hear the lie. But I can be fooled by the truth. It is hard. There is another 16 minutes. The heat is unpleasant. If I save it now I will finish stronger. You shouldn't argue with what is true. It's just that in this particular circumstance, truth is invented by what you do. You choose your truth.

Just as I was getting started, E reminded me about mental attitude. Too late though. That's a strategy that has to be practiced, trained. Start with a short workout. Develop a monologue, see what works, what's effective. It may be different with different people. It will be a trial-and-error thing, because not all theories are correct. There should be workouts designed to identify mental techniques that work. We have p-factor workouts, and for all the joking around I've done here with it, it is a valuable idea. This seems like it should be valuable too. Because every champion understands at some level that he will succeed. No maybe about it. "Champion" is a confusing word, because we think it involves other people. At my level, I just have to beat myself.

In ritual magic there's the idea of the magical personality. It's a deliberately developed state of mind, something like the way role-playing games have characters that the players build up over time. The ritual magician is not to use this personality outside of that ceremonial place. It's just psychology. The idea of sacredness, separateness. Every religion has it, in the solemnity of its rites. The High Priest of Israel would be struck dead if he entered the Holy of Holies with an impure mind. That's why he entered with a rope tied around his ankle -- if he died in there, they could drag him out.

Application: neither ceremonial magic nor athletics is sacred. But attitude matters. Tai chi is not a form of exercise. It's a form of meditation. That's an interesting point. Exercise also may be most productive when it is a form of meditation. Because it's all about the brain anyway, its neurons and its hormones. And the brain is just the sponge that holds the fluid of the mind -- as it were. It's just a sort of meat. It is the servant. I am the master. Aren't untrained dogs obnoxious? Isn't it annoying when kids have bad manners and stupid parents? And isn't it a huge mistake, when you listen to your meathead instead of your wisdom?

Tonight my strategy was to just work at a steady pace, and try to take as few rests, or as brief, as I could. Pretty big p-factor, so I think that strategy may be a failure. Too soon to tell though. I don't know how much thought I'm going to give to this latest idea in the next few days. Maybe brew up a few stratagems. A script, a visualization, a theatre of the mind progression. Incremental velocity. Integral veclusion. You're very lucky to know me.

I have in mind something about music. Music bypasses the mind and goes straight for the emotions and subconscious. That's why it's dangerous. But, yeah. This is a good idea. The rhythm alone should make a difference, without even touching the subconscious. A matrix, a scaffolding, to organize unconscious energy. A cue toward a mental attitude. A way of keying into and associating with past successes -- picking up where you left off. Something to occupy the mind, other than failure talk. I wish I knew some songs. What do they call it? a mix tape? a mix? Upbeat, 'Rocky' you can fly now stuff. Not Eminem. Eye of the tiger. You know that I am, unfortunately, right.

Ah well. It's not my month to program the workouts. We shall see. Meantime, just relax. Have some popcorn. It can't do any real harm. And you work so hard, so much of the time. Mmmm. So hot and crunchy. The smell. So salty and buttery. It's so good. And here. Have a cookie.


J

Rewrite

Exercise, in a gym, say, is not about the movements you see there, or the weights being moved. It's about two entirely different things. First, it's about the body's training response, hormonal and neuromuscular, which we've discussed before. The movement of the weight is just a way of getting a signal sent to the brain, which responds, if the signal is strong enough, by causing the release of some amount of hormones, amount again depending on the magnitude of the signal. Small stress, small signal, small response, small benefit. Like with curls or flies or any other isolation exercise. You're not isolating the muscle. You're doling out the hormones in tiny itsy bitsy little droplets. Use demanding weight, systemically, and an endocrinal demand will be generated. So that's one function of training. Hormones. And of course, recruiting untrained motor units, so that muscle fiber that exists but is not subject to volition becomes available. Without a gram of protein being added to a cell, overall strength can be doubled.

The other function of real training has to do with the mind. It's about resetting the subconscious, the autonomic safety gauges that the brain presets to where it thinks the safe place is. But the brain is an old lady crossing guard, looking not just to keep us safe, but to keep us weak and dependent. Now be careful. Don't run. Hold my hand. We never outgrow that, unless we outgrow it. We do so by demonstrating that we can handle new responsibilities. It's like the red zone that the dashboard gauge needle isn't supposed to get near -- but the red starts way too soon. 15 miles per hour. Zoom.

It's by pushing into fatigue that we convince the brain that false signals of fatigue are an unnecessary safety measure. Recalibrate the gauges. Not all, but some fatigue is not real. It's the nagging of the crossing guard, chiding us to go back even when there's no hint of actual danger. Hysterical handwaving in the form of nausea and tunnel vision, and negative self-talk, and phony excuses that nobody else really believes but they don't want to shame us, because then maybe we'll do the same to them. Meantime the brain does whatever it takes to preserve us from the very hint of real stress.

Back when I used to teach human reproduction to 12 year olds, I'd tell the girls, "Your body wants to be pregnant. You don't, but it does. It will lie to you, and make you feel all sorts of things, and change the timing of your menstrual cycle, so that it can be pregnant, which is what it wants." Well? Same thing here. Your brain wants you to be safe, and when you're looking to become excellent, safe translates into weak, and slow, and not athletic. Don't blame it. That's its job. Your job is to train it until it learns something better.

It's about emotional unfocus, mental weakness, negative self-talk, eagerness to fail, our ingenuity at finding excuses, our willingness to believe the deals we make so we may strive less -- deals we don't even keep ... I'll run to that tree and then I can walk ... but I start walking even before I get there.

That's the big problem. Call it emotion. The other problem, of hormones, is just biology, and it's mechanistic. Stimulus and response. The properly functioning body doesn't have a choice. It's a dog, that you train. It will obey. The master should be in charge. Like with Confucius, who slapped the father when the child cursed. Generate the signal, and a hormonal discharge is elicited. Flip the switch and the light comes on. If it doesn't, it's not because you didn't flip the switch, it's because something is broken. We're not talking about broken ... well, not broken biology. Broken habits -- or unbroken, rather, left over from babyhood.

Bad habits and weak minds. Weak is okay. We all start out as babies; but babies know how to do only one thing: get stronger. Everything they do is designed to help them survive and grow. The behaviours that are well suited to this specific task under those specific conditions, however, become maladaptive with age and ability. Yet we hold on to them. They are, if you'll allow a serious application of the term, the root of p-factor. The whining and fussing and pretending and self-pity and transparent manipulations. It's infantile.

Who are we trying to fool with all this noise? Ourselves, mostly. Which is sort of sad, but it's universal, this temptation, the same way that the healthy human form follows a predictable pattern. The mind follows patterns as well. The differences between us, those who prevail and those who quit, have to do with how we respond to the voices in our heads.

And that is the point. Which voices to listen to, and more specifically, which voice we deliberately summon up in times of great physical stress. Because ideas matter in more than just our public conduct. They matter in how we motivate ourselves, and in how we fail.

So I'm thinking that part of the workout is about generating a deliberately positive, empowering internal monologue, even if it feels like a lie. A monologue of success rather than of discouragement. Because the mind-body connection is clear. The placebo effect is real. Game face is real. And isn't it obvious, that if the lying voices telling us to give up can have an effect, then another voice, that says we can succeed, may not be lying at all? -- even if it feels like a lie? Because we can succeed. At any possible thing. And doing better, running faster, lifting more, working harder -- this is not possible? That's the lying voice again.

It's called rewriting the script. Because the old dialogue sucks, and another unhappy ending is not appropriate for these characters -- you and me.

I think I'll do some actual research on this.


J

T

Part of the trouble with contemporary gym training is that it thinks it's a lot more scientific than it is. It's like the scene from Modern Times, the Chaplin movie, where he's strapped into an automatic feeding machine. The very last word in efficiency, don't you know. All figured out. What could possibly go wrong? Or the '50s idea about how to care for babies. Have them all laid out in ranks and files of cribs, with meticulously timed feedings and changings. Exactly 1.32 minutes per hour allotted for cuddling and cooing. Cuz the babies will conform, y'see. We're all cut to a pattern, just an assemblage of organs or a complex but manageable interaction of chemicals.

Uh huh.

As for the gym, the standard model is to have arm day and leg day and ab day and back day and uh shoulder day and er neck day and huh kneebone day that's connected to the hipbone day. How very scientifical. Cuz y'see that way you give duh udder parts uv yer body a chanst tuh rest!

Alas, what's been forgotten in that otherwise very-brilliant-indeed theory is that the actual purpose of being in the gym isn't to move weights around, not to spend a lot of time making painful faces and emitting grunts and other impressive hard-working sounds, not to show off your latest choice in skin-tight gym fashion. All of these things are very beneficial and productive, it must be admitted. But the actual theoretically intended purpose of a gym, with the attendant work presumed, is to stimulate the release of hormones.

You can move as much weight around as is humanly possible, and if there's no hormonal response all you've done is tear muscle down and deplete your biochemicals. On the other hand, if you could generate a tide of hormones, you wouldn't have to do much work at all, and you'd gain lots of muscle. That's what steroids are about. A cheat. We don't cheat, now do we.

So what is it that stimulates the release of hormones? Loud groans and tight shirts? Well, uh, yes, sometimes. But in the gym? The thing that tells your brain that it had better send out the signal to get the hormones flowing is engaging major muscle mass during the workout. That is the key. It's all about hormones, and not very much about weight. Except that the thing that provokes the brain, frightens it into reacting powerfully, is the weight.

So you have to move a lot of weight. Otherwise the hormonal signal is proportionally small. So arm day? Well, the biceps are small muscles. Doesn't really matter how much you work them, they are still going to require only a small hormonal response. Add some other body part into the workout and you'll get a little bit more of a response. And if that's what you want, a little response, keep doing arm day. Cuz that's so scientifical and stuff.

Or you could engage the whole body, every workout. Take something like dumbbell swings. Move the weight from knee level to overhead, in a straight-arm arc. Now, what part of the body does that work? The legs? -- back? -- shoulders? Is it an arm day? No, it's body day. Db swings work everything, athletically. Major muscle mass is involved, so the signal to the brain is very clear: Need help, send hormones. This is why heavy squats are so productive. Two-thirds of the the body's muscle mass is below the waist. Lots of muscle doing hard work, therefore major hormonal response and significant strength gains. Easy. Why, it's almost like ... like science!

Case in point: something called deadlift static holds. This is not something anyone should do without proper training. But the protocol is simply to lift a lot of weight at waist level, moving it only about an inch, off a rack. Hands hanging down, holding the bar, and just a little lift at the knees. Hold the weight for a count of ten. Then you're done. How much weight? Well you work up, only once about every week or so, adding weight every workout, 20 pounds or 40 or 5% or 10% -- doesn't really matter -- it's not a race -- just being safe and consistent. How much weight can you hold? Well, grip strength is a limiting factor, but lifting straps or lifting hooks take care of that. You can lift hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pounds. You don't believe it. But it's true.

Why do this? Because there is a major, massive hormonal signal, that comes from lifting that much weight under those conditions. It's a Gatorade drench of testosterone. Testosterone and human growth hormone. It's perhaps the single most productive thing you can do. But don't do just one thing. In any case, there's so much more T coursing through your blood that your muscles can't use it all. So there can be a significant increase in libido. Highly significant. Whether or not this is a good thing is a personal consideration. But it happens. Understand that testosterone is not a male hormone. It is a youth hormone, for both male and female, correlated with thicker skin (less creped or wrinkled) and denser bone mass and greater energy. You know -- youth. It's one of the innumerable secrets of my own unbearable masculine beauty. The upshot here is that this higher libido is direct and undeniable confirmation that there is a significant hormonal response, which is the point of the weightroom and of all those tight sexy gym clothes.

And it validates the theory, that body day works, whereas arm day and glute day is for posers, poseurs, wannabes and steroid users.

But that's not you.


J

Second Place

Dig this! Aerobics is groovy, man. It's far out. The happenin' 70s thing, for the dude on the go! So boss! Right on! Dy-no-mite! Red rocket man! Totally out of sight! Shazbot! Kiss my grits! Let it all hang out! Jive turkey! Sit on it! Plop plop fizz fizz. I can't believe I ate the whole thing! Keep on truckin! Disco lives!

Aerobics. It's not what it used to be.

Not a bad thing. It's just not the only thing. Not even the main thing. Unless you live in the Kalahari, in which case covering long slow distances -- LSD -- is a requirement for survival. But you don't, and it's not.

For most people, aerobics workouts plateau after about 8 weeks. After that, it's just burned calories, but at a reduced rate, because the body has become efficient at that narrow activity. Being efficient is a good thing, if the thing is an adaptive trait. Flying south for the winter, say. But that's not why people do aerobics. So do your 8 weeks, then do an occasional maintenance workout for that skill. It is, after all, a skill -- and it would be a shame to lose a skill. But otherwise it's just sucking up your time. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news. If aerobics is your thing. Dude.

Aerobics makes you slower. ... Aerobic make you slower? ... Whateverrrrr. Muscle cells adapt to the activity they are most required to do. Spending a lot of time in low-grade calorie burning makes fast-twitch fibers (required for power and strength) function as slow twitch fibers (weak endurance). The expression of your genetics changes. One myosin protein type within the cell is selected over another. Regarding athletics, most people would rather be fast and strong, than slow. You get good at what you practice. Practice being slow, and you will be.

Aerobics generates a higher volume of free-radicals, than more strength-focused workouts. Free radicals are aging. Highly aging. The longer you run, per workout or habitually, the greater the flood of oxidative pollution in your system. This depletes your supply of antioxidants. Bad all the way around. Always at your back you hear Time's winged chariot racing near. You can run, but you can't hide. Damage equals age.

Aerobics stresses the, uh, stress hormones. Testosterone goes down, cortisol goes up. Bad combination. Testosterone adds muscle. Cortisol dissolves it. It's a bad thing. Your body doesn't know you're working out. It thinks you're fleeing a wildfire. There's a difference between controlled exercise stress, of pressure alternating with rest, and prolonged flight. The result can be adrenal fatigue, symptoms of which are: fat retention, allergies, arthritis, flus, fearfulness and anxiety, depression, lack of focus, forgetfulness, insomnia, tiredness and fatigue. This stress, added to workaday stress, is a formula for fat retention. Counterproductive, it can be.

Sprinters have less fat than marathoners. Go figure. On the other hand, it makes sense. Fat is the fuel marathoners use. Not so, with sprinters, for whom fat is unwanted ballast. Intensity burns fat. Intensity is high heartrate, not miles plowed. Jogging for an hour will burn more calories than running 10 sprints of 20 seconds -- but over the next two days, the sprinter will burn more calories. Go figure. It's the ramped up metabolism. In a 1997 study (by I. Tabata et al.), joggers improved aerobic capacity by 10%, with zero% anaerobic gains. Sprinters improved aerobic capacity by 14%, and anaerobic by 28%. Hmm. Intensity burns fat.

Jog? Sure, why not. Generally, not more than 45 minutes at a time. More than that may raise cortisol output to detrimental levels. Cortisol, a stress hormone, breaks down muscle protein for its glucose. Your body figures it's more important to escape the danger, than to keep muscle that isn't helping you run away. A live to fight another day sort of strategy. Very sensible, if you're fleeing tigers. You, alas, are trying to flee your fat behind. The wrong thing is being shrunk. And you did just see the numbers. Intense intervals increase aerobic capacity 4% more than does jogging. Less time, greater benefit.

Still, something is better than nothing. Jogging is generally better than sitting, only. And if you won't do the better thing, at least to a thing that's better than nothing. A workable compromise, eh? Sort of like the way we manage to live in the world. Perfection is not required -- just effort.


J

Wrong Theories

Gym coaches are still telling their students that the way muscles grow is that first muscles get torn down by exercise, damaged, and then they build up again, repair, only stronger. Yep. Damaging something makes it stronger. Like mutations and Evolution. Uh huh. Cuz that’s what the body does, y’see, when it gets big muscles. Something to do with scar tissue, maybe.

No. It isn’t the damage that makes us stronger. The damage comes not from doing enough, or from being effective. Damage comes from doing too much, from overtraining, and from foolishness. Yes, it can accompany muscle growth, the way busted gaskets can accompany reckless driving. But jumbled in with all such associations is a profound tendency toward the post hoc logical fallacy. Correlation does not support causation. No duh.

The actual “cause” of muscle growth is hormones -- not movement, not exercise, not sets and reps and routines. None of these things could have any beneficial effect, without the hormonal signal to add protein to muscle cells -- whereas new size can be added if the hormones are there, with only a token amount of exercise. Effort stimulates hormones, but effort does not build muscle -- hormones do. Keeping it simple, of course. Steroids? The needle replaces the effort, so the same amount of work produces much bigger muscles. Smaller testicles, though. An acceptable tradeoff, one must suppose.

The point is, how do we stimulate the clearest hormonal signal? Intensity. Major muscle mass engaged in powerful effort. The brain reads this as a call for more strength, and provides it. Damage? The brain reads this too, and sends out reparative hormones, to clean up the mess. The mess, however, does not make you stronger. It’s there because the workout was foolish. Coach was wrong.

Another wrong theory. The plateau. The dreaded plateau, where you work and work and just don’t make any more progress. How very sad for you. Your body has adapted to some motion, some exercise, and you’re stuck at the same weight, just can’t break through to a heavier weight. How frustrating. How to fix it? Do more of the same? Try harder? Psych yourself up? Pray? Take a supplement? Have your spotter do more work, all the while saying that it’s “All you!”

Some of it, this limit, is psychological. The 200 benchpress, or 250, or 300. It’s not the weight, it’s the number. Frightening, somehow, and the unconscious just won’t let you do it. But that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about the actual limit to what your body can do with that motion. It’s a real barrier. Lots of theories, not all of which can be correct. How bothersome, all these wrong ideas filling people’s heads. Like the way to overcome the plateau limit.

“Muscle confusion”. Goodness gracious. What a concept. It’s just a descriptive term though, and of course there is no brain in the muscles to be confused. Still, it’s a silly phrase. Adaptation is a smarter one. The body has become efficient at executing a movement, say the benchpress, and it’s become more of a skill than a stimulus to muscle growth. This is a bad thing? Only if it’s size, and not effectiveness, that you’re after. Well, either size, or attaining a new goal -- the latter of which is an honorable thing. Even so, for all that adaptation may be an explanation, it’s not a solution to the problem.

I humbly propose another, presumably new solution to the problem. It’s not that the muscles, the pecs and the triceps, have become as strong as they can be. Far from it. These muscles are not the limiting factor. The limit, the plateau, is in the stabilizing muscles. These neglected "muscles" -- which are in fact motor units -- are not being challenged by that same old foolish motion, executed rep after rep, set after set, day after week after years and years and years. Mercy. Is there nothing else to do with your time, than these same few non-functional movements, mindlessly rehearsed like a pagan bowing before his idol?

It’s not a plateau, it’s a rut. It’s not the big muscles -- they’re getting plenty of work. It’s the auxiliary, the stabilizing muscles, and the more peripheral motor units -- that are not getting much of a workout, not even in their supporting role. The big muscles, the mainstreet fibers, have crowded them out, attempting as it were to take over their function. Well? The benchpress may think it’s a lonewolf hero, but it’s just a player on a team. Everyone needs to play, on a team.

The way out of the rut is indeed to mix things up, do new movements -- give the rest of the body a chance to develop. It should be obvious. It’s only one of the many reasons that constantly varied functional movements must be the core of an effective training program. It’s not an eat-your-vegetables sort of thing, because eating them is somehow theoretically good for you. It’s because vegetables supply the most nutrients; in this same way, doing many varied movements trains the whole body, including the limiting factors, the weakest links, the "stabilizing muscles", that make the difference between someone who only looks big and strong, and someone who is actually strong, no matter how big.

So that’s another sort of wrong theory, arising from the wrong theory of isolation exercises, where doing bodybuilding, which is entirely about appearance, is supposed to make people more fit. Fit for what? In actuality, fit for standing on a stage in a thong, chemically bronzed, slathered with baby oil, glinting in the spotlight. Oooooh. The correct theory, we modestly asseverate, regarding how one might attain fitness, is that it is achieved by treating the whole body as a unit, rather than as a collection of mostly independent parts.

So that’s it then. Ah. I just can’t get over it. You know what I mean. About how smart I am. It hardly seems fair -- so good looking, so smart, so charming. I’m like a superhero or something. It’s almost too much.


J

Athleticism

An athlete is someone who uses his whole body to accomplish sports goals. That’s the first thing. The second thing is that he doesn’t just exercise, he trains. Let’s look at it. As I've said, the body is not a bag full of hinges, with this joint moving and that one too, maybe, as chance might have it. It’s not some child’s tumblejack toy of sticks and swivel screws that you can shake and it clatters about like bamboo chimes in the wind. No. That’s not what the body is. The body is a spring. Every part of it is used in every dynamic movement. When you pull one end of a spring, the other end participates in the action, equally if not as dramatically. When you push on a spring, the entire structure, and every atom within it, plays its part.


Likewise, when you lift something with your right arm, the left side of your body is engaged, counterbalancing, accommodating the motion and finding a new equilibrium. What, you thought it was just the muscles of the right arm working, and maybe a little something in the shoulders, the right shoulder, and maybe the back sort of somehow too? If you think that, you’ve been living in your body without paying attention to it. What it’s really about is architecture, about load-bearing and flying buttresses and shifting foundations -- only in flesh, and moving, moving all the time.

The application here, regarding athleticism, is that the arm is more than just the biceps and a hand, and the biceps is more than just something for doing curls with. The arm, in fact, is just an extension of the shoulder, which is anchored to the trunk, which derives its power from the hips. We’re using the word “power” here in a slightly broader meaning than that required by someone doing a benchpress.

Yes, there’s a lot of strength in a strong guy’s benchpress. But unless you’re trapped under a wagonload of timber, the benchpress isn’t a terribly useful motion. It’s use is very very narrow. Virtually singular, in fact. It is good at doing the one thing that it does. This is precisely the opposite of what athleticism is. If you train only the upper-body outward-pushing structure, without training the core that supports it, and without training the lower body that makes an ally of gravity -- instead of ignoring it and hoping it will go away -- then you’ve trained precisely one third of what needs to be trained to achieve athletic goals in the real world. You're a sort of circus freak, who can perform some gimmick; you're a one-trick pony, or two-, or whatever the not very large number. What you are not, technically speaking, is an athlete.

If you’re playing football with big manly arms and no strength in your midsection and no push in your legs, well, you’d make a good slap fighter, but you’ll be bulldozed over. You won’t be a wall, you’ll be a swinging door. You won’t be a tank, you’ll be a pushcart. If you throw a ball by swinging your arm, you’ll throw about as far as a talented nine year old. It’s when you lunge with your leg, twist with your hip, follow through with your shoulder -- that’s when you throw far.

Athleticism engages the whole body. It’s not about dramatic sweating and grunting and making painful faces. Bowling is athletic, and so is golf. It’s not about how long the feat takes, it’s about how engaged and integrated the body is in performing it. That’s why rolling dice isn’t athletic, and marksmanship is. The whole body is incidental with dice, regardless of manipulative skill. Whereas with marksmanship, stance and stillness and breathing and control of the heartbeat all matter. Didn’t know that, did you. It's the difference between a game and a sport. Both require skill. Only one requires integrated whole-body functionality.

It’s about harmony and balance. The Classical Greek Ideal. It’s the bodybuilder ideal too, in theory, in theoria. The bodybuilder praxis, alas, is a grotesque perversion of this. Not just in the abuse of steroids and the insane lust and quest for size. For our purposes, in the bizarre fad that it’s become with regular joes, and high school and college athletes. Why why why are they doing bodybuilding routines?

Will training individual muscles make those muscles function in closer harmony with all the others? Will making the biceps disproportionately bigger and stronger than the deltoid make them better for any sport? Will isolating and decoupling a movement from the complexity that real-world motions require somehow augment the workings of the central nervous system and its ability to recruit motor units in an integrated fashion? These questions answer themselves. Isolation exercises as they are used by bodybuilders are the opposite of athleticism. It’s almost designed to make someone less functional.

What is athleticism? It’s being able to meet the physical demands of whatever it is that some sport, or life, throws at you. It’s being fit for the task, whatever the task may be. It is mastery over your body.

Which brings us to training. I've discussed it before, the ideas of activity, and exercise, and training. Activity is just an expression of metabolism. Living things move around, most of them -- even sponges. Going here, doing this, moving that -- just a part of being alive. Then there’s exercise. It requires an accelerated heartrate. There’s no intelligence required, it’s just working at a more intense level than usual. A good thing, pretty much, but possibly rather haphazard. Then there’s training: exercise with the addition of intelligence. It requires a plan, and a goal, and measurable progress, and consistency.


The crossfit model has its flaws. Too randomized. Yes, life has its randomness. But it's not random. It's predictable, in a statistical way. No guarantees, but usually it's business as usual, usually. We don't however train for the usual. We train for the extraordinary. Yes, we may have to climb stairs every day. That counts as exercise. If we plan on climbing a mountain, though, we need to do more, we need to train.


An athlete can’t be better than his deficits allow him to be. They hold him back, obviously. A weakest-link thing. So training must identify and address those shortcomings. They are not something to be ignored. They are to be embraced, as it were, and made the heart, the core of a workout. It’s not about idealism. It’s a necessity, for improvement. The reason a gym-bodybuilder is so much weaker than he should be is that he has never trained his shortcomings. No, it's not about calves or forearms or deltoids or rhomboids. It's about the little stabilizers that hardly anyone knows the names of, and that don't show up in the mirror except subliminally, as the difference between a guy who works a few muscles so he can pose in front of a mirror, and an athlete who's trained his body the way it was meant to be trained -- completely.

Well, there it is. Some fairly focused musings on a fairly obscure subject. What do you expect from me? -- gossip about celebs? Girlfriend. Please. The only celeb I care about is famous internet sensation Jack H, under-appreciated but looking fabulous. You should see his pecs. Divine.


J

Middle Body

We've looked at the lower body. It does two things: horizontal and vertical movement. It steps and stands, runs and jumps, lunges and squats. Simple. We've looked at the upper body -- it does two things: pushes and pulls. Arms up, arms out, arms down, but pushes and pulls. Overhead press and chinups; pushups and rows; dips and highpulls. That's everything the upper body does. Simple. What's left? The middle body. Torso, trunk, abs, core. It does two things: bends and twists. Exercises for the core? Not as simple as the others.

First, the core is, or should be, involved in all athletic activity. That's the problem with the standard gym routines, the isolation machine mentality of working just a single muscle at a time. Take the fabulous benchpress. Isolates the outward pushing structure. There you are, all relaxed lying on a bench, with just that one part working. Alas, when it comes time to push a Buick out of a ditch, as my grandmother once had to do, all you've trained is one third of what's necessary. The rest of you was lounging on the bench. So when you're trying to push your 1949 Roadmaster (a car that does, I confess, give me an erection) out of the ditch, well, your butt folds out like a sugarplum fairy sprinkling stardust.

You didn't train your body, bonehead -- you trained only part of it. It's the difference between being integrated, and being disintegrated. The body should, as I've noted before, be trained not as a bag of hinges (this one moves, that one moves ... whatever) but as a spring (every part of a spring is involved in every movement). Point is, the core should always be engaged. That's why benchpresses are good only in theory, and pushups are good in practice -- you engage your whole body, with pushups.

You can demonstrate this to yourself, thus: compare an overhead press, sitting to standing. You will find that with standing it becomes a whole different experience. I won't elaborate. Discover it for yourself. It's the difference between training wheels and mountain bikes. It's junior high compared to grad school.

So real, useful, functional exercises take heed of the fact that muscles are related not only to joints and bones, but to the central nervous system and to other muscles. We are not a palm and a collection of fingers. We are a hand, and when need be, a fist. That being said, we still want to focus, not on body parts, but on body functions. Pushing and pulling; standing and stepping; and, here, bending and twisting.

Deadlifts, kettlebell swings, the horrifying burpies -- all are full-body movements which exploit the hip movement that amounts to bending and unbending. What, did you think bending was just curving the spine? Not something you want to do a lot of, with weight. No. Don't.

As for twisting, there's a machine in the gym designed just for that. You sit in it, and grab ahold of a lever or somesuch, and taaaa-wiiiiiist! Really fast, too! Boom boom boom. Now that's a workout! Cuz it works the abdominal obliques, y'see -- that's such a good thing! Ahem. Whoever invented that machine should be poked in the eyeball with a stick, while in prison. Aside from any actual damage to the vertebrae, we just know, because it has happened to us, what happens when we lift something heavy, with a twist. Pulled muscles -- not as bad as damaged vertebrae, but bad enough.

Sidebends exercise the same muscles, and there's no twisting involved. Situps with elbows to opposite knees hits those muscles, with only natural bodyweight. And so on. These are fine, when done with good form. But I don't do any of these, or rarely, and I have visible obliques, complete with intercostals. Not a vanity thing -- it just happened, from what I do. What I have always done, unconsciously, naturally, is engage my core when I exercise. So my core is developed. What I did naturally, others have to think about. No worries. Think about it, and then do it.

Isolated middle-body exercises? Crunches paired with back extensions. Sidebends. Alternating situps. Yeah, they're fine. Maybe you have a photo shoot for your Sports Illustrated bikini issue? Men's Health? The poster of "300"? Sure, go crazy. But for actual functional improvement, so your back doesn't ache so much, so you can lift your grandkids without slipping a disk, well, deadlifts and knees-to-elbows.

But here's the point. Crunches are an isolation exercise, for the abdominal rectus, the abs. Crunches shorten the distance between sternum and pubic bone. Hm. How useful a movement is this? Um, clipping your toenails, and packing yourself into a small box, and, uh, vomiting. Y'see, the actual, functional purpose of the abs is mid-line stabilization, working in close conjunction with the small of the back -- so that you don't flop forward, or backwards. It's a dynamic tension, an equilibrium thing. You see it when toddlers walk -- they're wobbly in the hips -- their abs and lumbar muscles are learning the job.

This is the core that they talk about. It's the stabilizing girdle of muscle around the midsection, without which there is no athleticism, aside from the sort possessed by, say, wheelchair athletes. How odd. The kids think it's about curls and the benchpress. Adults understand that the lower body is where most of the muscle is. But athletes, whether they're aware of it or not, spend most of their time training their core.

A way to illustrate it is with punching. A child, or a woman, or someone who's just not into it, hits with their arm, as a sort of push, like their arm is a club or an arrow. The toughguy in the bar winds up and hits with his shoulder behind it, like John Wayne. But the professional, the knowledgeable fighter, understands that the real power comes from the twist of his hips. Hips first, then shoulder, then arm. A whipcord progression. The point? Power comes from the hips, which is of course where the middle body begins.

That's it then. Middle body. Not so clear-cut. Almost muddled -- it comes from being centrally located -- a place where the confluence of energies makes it hard to, uh, isolate things. Yes, it's about bending and twisting, and there are exercises that train these functions. But it's about so much more. We think of the starfish as five arms, but those are just appendages. The fish is at the center. That's always were the strength is. Everything else is peripheral.

Any more questions? Cuz I'm sure to have the answers. I just can't get over myself, how wonderful I am. Wonderful. Wonderful.

Ah.


J

Upper Body

Does two things. Pushes and pulls. It can pull down, pull in, or pull up; it can push down, push out, or push up. There's a necessary symmetry to it all: an arms-up push and pull; an arms-out push and pull; an arms-down push and pull.

In terms of exercise we have this: Arms up -- overhead press, and chinups. Arms out -- pushups, and rows. Arms down -- dips, and highpulls.

That's it. That's as complicated as it needs to be. Simpler? Of course. The arms-down and arms-out pushes -- dips and pushups (or benchpress) -- cover a lot of the same musculature. Do one or the other. Alternate. Whatever. Same with the arms-up and arms-out pulls -- chins and rows -- a fair bit of redundancy. The unique push is overhead, and the unique pull is from below. They're more shoulders than arms or chest or back, for purposes of this discussion. Traps and delts. Seems like that would make them more important, not less. But you never would see the dudes in the gym doing them in a meaningful way. It's all about the benchpress and the curls -- cuz pecs and guns is what it's about, dude. The chicks dig them.

It's almost comical, the malformed creatures we see parading themselves about. Isn't beauty supposed to have at least some element of symmetry to it? Instead we see these Picassos returned time and again to the mirror, like self-manufactured clockwork automatons, an inartful hybrid of homunculus and golem. Dude, them guns is groovy, but hit the delts too -- you look like Popeye's less gifted roommate.

But perhaps I'm being slightly unkind. The point is functionality. If you do a natural and full range of functional movements, you'll develop proportionally. If not, not. Aside from the asthetics of it all, there's the functionality

Bodybuilding and the gym mentality of muscle isolation has done more damage to actual athleticism than, than ... well, than television has. Television and twinkies. And heroin. And global warming. It's a fact. Because unequal development, disproportional development, leads to injury. So that manly chest grafted onto the front of that delicately feminine back -- its benefits are purely superficial and short-term. And it looks kind of freaky, to an informed eye. Michaelangelo would cringe.

Ah well. Here's tonight's workout. As many sets as possible in 20 minutes of:

5 ringdips & 5 highpulls (95 lbs)
10 OH presses (95) & 10 chinups
15 pushups & 15 ring-rows

I made up ring-rows -- just a reverse pushup, lying on your back under the rings. How long will all that take? Twenty minutes, weren't you listening? The question is, how many sets in that time. Don't know. No one has ever done this workout before. Which just goes to prove that, in exercise as in so many other things, I'm a flippin' genius.

Ah.


J