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paper-machine comments on Minimum viable workout routine - Less Wrong
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Comments (114)
If someone sounds crazy to you, maybe you have misinterpreted them.
The original post said that nutrition was "fairly easy", and that one should follow the rule of "calories in, calories out" and that one should eat "micronutrient dense food." CI:CO is broken because it's difficult to measure CI with any accuracy and intractably hard to measure CO. It ignores all sorts of subtleties like getting enough protein in your diet and the difference between bulking and cutting.
For example, good luck seeing gains if you're eating 20% fat, 70% carb, and 10% protein on a 10-15% caloric deficit. All the micronutrients in the world won't save that diet. But you're still following CI:CO!
Sigh. If this point is really so hard for people to get, maybe it's just not worth making. It's probably easier to let LW devolve into a bunch of badly-sourced self help advice than to continue tilting at windmills.
It's not so hard to measure calorie intake. Just memorize the relative base amounts of calories in the composing parts of one's meals, and learn to judge when one is hungry from physiological cues (ergo gratia consistently drinking water in sufficient amount that the scratchy, parched feeling at the back of one's throat indicates hunger and not thirst, the difference between digestive sensations and starving sensations, where one's stomach is, etcetera).
Once one learns how to tell when one is hungry, and how hungry, they can estimate how many calories lasts one how long, and thus measure one's average caloric need per hour, and therefore one's caloric need per day. Since it takes about twenty minutes to have an accurate sensation of hunger or satiety, at first one's estimates will only be accurate to within about 100 calories. As one tests their predictions of how many calories one needs per hour by: eating, judging when one will next be hungry based upon the estimated amount of calories consumed, then losing oneself in a non-stressing activity until one feels hunger sensations; noting the time one feels the sensations, if the time is when one predicted they would next be hungry, and if one is fairly certain one isn't guilty of a bias or a bias blind spot (good on one if they can detect these); one can accurately estimate to within about 50 calories their caloric intake.
Caloric outtake could then be measured by being slightly hungry when going to sleep, and tallying up the total amount of ingested calories that day (caloric intake per 10-16 waking hours).
Note this may take one a couple of years.
[...]
Please recognize that this advice is really quite far from what the original poster was proposing, and uses a radically different assessment of difficulty.
Your method of measuring caloric outtake is wrong, because the body doesn't use only the calories ingested that day during that day. (Yes, perhaps the calories ingested from the past and used today can be balanced out by the calories ingested today and stored for the future, but that assumes a whole host of processes are weakly varying over a long period of time.)
Having said that, I prefer your method to any other method I'm familiar with, perhaps even to the point of implementation...
I suppose so, but as long as one's caloric intake caters to cues from physiological needs (which can be co-opted by MSG and to a lesser extent HFCS and sugar alcohols, and should thus be avoided at most costs), measuring one's caloric outtake doesn't really matter so much. I'm trying, but can't see how knowing caloric outtake would be necessary when the sole criterion for calorie intake levels is physiological need, as determined by learning the cues. If one learns their average hourly caloric need at relative metabolic rest, one can judge whether they have over- or under-eated. Learning one's average heart beats per minute, and what different degrees of elevated bpm feel like, they can additionally learn by what estimate exercise increases their caloric need.
The one caveat to this, though, would be if one has imbalanced ghrelin and leptin levels - that would disable one's ability to trust their body's cues. If this condition is a concern, I think it can be tested through blood work.
However, maintaining a steady rate of metabolic activity is crucial to learning one's average caloric need per hour. Drinking cold water to just adequate levels of hydration (as judged by urine color), and consuming calories at a rate sufficient to maintain near-constant levels of digestion are of tremendous help in achieving this. I'd recommend erring on the side of unnecessarily diligent hydration (consistently clear urine) when learning what is the 'just-right' amount of hydration for one's body; learning what this amount is may take a while.
I can go into detail about why maintaining near-constant levels of digestion is helpful, but I think it might be unnecessary, and will thus abstain.
As you may have gathered, this is essentially what I do (at the most basic level). I cannot yet accurately judge its effectiveness as a strategy, considering I may still be young enough for my naturally-high metabolism to significantly confound other variables' effects. There are also many other factors to consider, like blood sugar levels, inflammation, certain types of foods' effect on immunological processes and such processes corresponding effects upon digestion, etcetera.
In general, though, the logic should be sound. In regard to its difficulty, since becoming fluent enough with one's physiological cues takes a while, the effort expended may sum to a very high net amount of expended effort. During acclimation, however, only minimal amounts of effort would need to be expended at any one time (even less if one already has self-control/self-discipline).
We're in complete agreement here.
What I'm arguing against in my comments above is the standard implementation of "calories in, calories out" (as seen in popular self-help dieting books and even in such august bodies as r/fitness, for example) does not involve learning physiological cues at all (rather, usually, ignoring them as "bad") but instead attempting to count the calories in the food one eats, come up with some justification for a value for BMR, estimating additional expended calories due to exercise, and so on.
The more I think about your method, though, the more I like it.
If you want to talk more about it, feel free. I think I laid out all the major caveats to consider.
I haven't checked this thread for a while, so sorry for the late reply.
You make it out as though diet by CI:CO is too difficult to be practical. Maybe it is, for people who can't track stuff to save their lives.
For me, it's been easy. When I'm dieting, I have a spreadsheet where I record the calorie and protein content of everything I eat.
Yes, calculating calorie content for homemade meals is a fair amount of work, and takes dedication. It takes me up to 30 minutes of lookups and calculations to calculate calorie and protein content in a meal, and that's after my wife has weighed and recorded all the ingredients.
Because of this complexity, I stick mostly to prepared foods that display their calorie content, or homemade meals made of well-known ingredients in well-known proportions.
I have a fair amount of confidence in my calorie calculations. I know from experience that when I keep the daily sum of calories under a certain level, my waist size goes down. It works.
I don't know anyone else who brings this level of dedication to their diet. I know people who don't, and so they're fat.
I accept your argument that CI:CO is hard for people lacking conscientiousness, but this is different from saying that CI:CO doesn't work.
Also, for people lacking conscientiousness, chances are that no diet is going to work.
My argument had nothing to do with conscientiousness.
There is currently no convenient way to accurately track your caloric intake and caloric expenditure. Attempts to do so have all the usual sources of error that this thread already covered.
In particular, adding up the numbers on the labels of the things you eat is not a sufficiently accurate method of determining caloric intake, see for example the FDA's Food Labeling Guide, questions N30-37. That's before we begin to talk about preparation loss ratios, nutrient bioavailability and the vagaries of the human metabolic system.
So when somebody recommends CI:CO, they're recommending either 1) vapid numerology or 2) a time-sink that is also largely numerology. It's unreliable, and therefore not something I would ever suggest to somebody else.
All your self-congratulatory narcissism is also largely off-topic. In particular,
is such a bizarre source of evidence that I can't imagine why you bothered stating it. Is it really so controversial that pseudoscientific magic is bad advice?
I was right in the grandparent. I'm tapping out.