Month: January 2009

I’ve begun to realize over the course of the weeks and months I’ve been intensely focusing on fitness that there are a few core questions I should have asked myself when I started. Knowing the answers to these questions — essay, not multiple choice — helps me focus on what I need to do to achieve my fitness goals.

1. Why do I want to be more fit?
2. Think about the level of fitness I want to achieve. What does a person at that level do on a daily and weekly basis to keep and improve upon that level of fitness?
3. Think about my current level of fitness. What do I do at that level on a daily and weekly basis?
4. Assuming as true that someone not using steroids should intensely resistance-train* each body part for a maximum of one hour per week, how could I improve my workouts to prevent overtraining while maximizing results?
5. What are your current eating habits? Will they support your fitness goals? What can you improve?

My answers:

1. I want to be more fit, in part, because I have a huge Irish bobble-head that is out of proportion to my body. I’ve tried being fat, and while that definitely makes my head be proportional to my body the downsides really suck: being out of breath all the time, unable to keep up with my kids, looking awful at the pool and avoiding swimming because of it, pre-diabetes, etc. That’s just not worth it. So I want to build some nicely bulky muscle to get the body size to make my head appear a little less huge. There are other reasons, too, but this will do for today.
2. A person at the level of fitness I want to achieve:
   • Eats six to eight small, protein-filled meals per day.
   • Monitors body fat and weight daily, getting used to the fluctuations and able to ascertain the moving average to maximize results and keep fit.
   • Performs resistance training four to five days per week, training each body part a maximum of one hour per week.
   • Does twenty minutes of cardio three times per week to keep body fat in check and support heart health.
   • Avoids sugared foods, soda, white flour, and white rice.
   • Consumes healthy, slow-digesting carbohydrates in moderation, while focusing on getting most of his caloric needs from lean protein and planned fats high in omega-3.
   • Ultimately, eats boring food to have an exciting body, and supports this with regular training while trying hard to avoid over-training which would hurt his fitness efforts.
3. Currently I do much of what my idealized fitness-nut would do. I eat five to six small, protein-filled meals per day. I resistance-train three to five days per week, but miss a day and don’t make it up here and there. I’ve occasionally over-trained and felt the inevitable sleep problems, lack of desire to train, and overall fatigue as a result. I avoid high-glycemic-index foods really well, but will have a piece of dark chocolate on occasion. I regularly eat more dietary fat than I plan for, and it comes from fatty and processed meats.
4. I should hit the gym every day Monday through Friday, leaving promptly at 8PM, regardless of if I feel like it or not. I should resistance-train four of those days. One of those days — probably Wednesday — should be an open day to either work on a lagging body part, try a new exercise, do some cardio, or try out a class like yoga or circuit-training.
5. My current eating habits definitely support my desired lifestyle, but there is room for improvement. I should reduce the amount of processed meats I consume, while increasing lean meats. I should find a palatable source of omega-3 supplementation that is not in a capsule form, and begin taking enough to support my heart health.

(*Note: I use the word “intensely” to mean “to the point of muscular failure”. If you’re doing light weights and high reps, your recovery time will be much faster, but your muscle gains much slower. If between 6 and 12 reps your muscles simply can’t lift the weight again, that’s “intense” resistance training. If you’re just doing push-ups and sit-ups or other calisthenics without additional resistance, you can do them every day without the week-long recovery time.)

One of the barriers I faced recently in building my MythTV-based HTPC (Home Theater PC) setup was understanding the terminology and acronyms in widespread use in the community. I wrote this hoping to document and illuminate some of the terms commonly in use.

• 120Hz: See 3:2 pulldown.
• 3:2 Pulldown: Television screens traditionally run at roughly 30 frames per second (60fps, but interlaced). Movies traditionally run at 24fps. Since both 60 and 30 are not divisible by 24, movies would display the same frame 3 times, then the next frame 2 times. This results in picture judder. Newer hi-def screens often have a mode to support 24fps movies by being capable of running at 48, 72, or 120fps, which are all multiples of 24. This is often referred to as “120Hz”; other modes are much less common.
• 5.1: Refers to sound systems with five channels. Center, right and left front speakers, right and left rear speakers, and a subwoofer channel composed of a mixed front right and front left signal.
• 7.1: Refers to sound systems with seven channels. Center, right and left front speakers, right and left middle speakers, right and left rear speakers, and a subwoofer channel composed of a mixed front right and front left signal.
• 480i: Old broadcast-quality television. 480 lines, interlaced.
• ATSC: A video standard widely in use in North America for high-definition broadcasting.
• DVI: Digital Video Interface. It is a digital signaling standard for PCs. This standard is virtually identical to HDMI video (and in fact converter cables are cheaply available), but treated differently by most screens.
• EIT: A standard to advertise show dates and programming schedules over ATSC.
• HDMI: Refers to the overscanned home-theater digital cabling standard. HDMI cables carry both digital audio and video on the same cable, and are capable of supporting 1080p resolutions. HDMI differs from DVI principally in that it uses overscan.
• HTPC: Home Theater PC. Usually an all-in-one, high-end PC with one or more video capture cards, a few terabytes of storage, a fast processor, and a good video card capable of projecting full-resolution native video on your screen.
• Interlaced: Refers to a technique of reducing the amount of data required by only displaying every-other-line on a display. The “i” or “p” on the end of a resolution description dicates whether it is “interlaced” or “progressive scan”. For instance, a given frame of a 480i broadcast is only 240 lines.
• IR Blaster: An infrared transmitter. Usually, this is set up on your HTPC to automatically change settings on a set-top box (STB) like DirectTV or a cable tuner.
• Judder or Screen Judder: A symptom where smooth-scrolling items like stock tickers or movie credits appear to run at inconsistent speeds. This is an artifact of 3:2 pulldown in some cases, but in other cases a firmware update to a screen or player may fix it. Not noticeable to many people.
• Just Scan: A Samsung-specific feature that will map an HDMI signal pixel-for-pixel rather than relying on overscan. Gives a cleaner picture at the expense of losing the extreme edges of the picture.
• Overscan: Sending a signal slightly larger than the expected resolution of the display device so that the signal takes up the full screen. This is usually used on analog devices rather than digital, since analog tolerances to display resolutions vary while digital usually maps pixel-for-pixel to the screen.
• Progressive Scan: Refers to resolution run at full resolution. For instance, a 480p signal transmits a full 480 lines per frame.
• NTSC: The North American 480i at 30 frames per second broadcast standard.
• VGA: Video Graphics Standard. Supports HD resolutions, but usually DVI will give a better picture. Many hi-def screens have VGA inputs for attaching a PC to the screen.

Taken yesterday by my wife in Wal-Mart. What happened to “always low prices”?

The original MST3K crew is back again for a live performance over the Internet on January 28th operating under the name “RiffTrax”. Don’t miss it. In case you missed the original discussion, we’ve discussed RiffTrax here before.

–Matt

Wrote this in response to someone attempting to paint low-carb as nutritionally deficient yet again. In the tradition of “low-carb makes Matt all ranty”, I’ll toss it over the wall yet again.

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Because [low-carb] avoids Grains,Fruits and Vegetables, so you don’t take sufficient micronutritients.

That question is based on an incorrect assumption. If you aren’t eating huge amounts of green leafy veggies — among other vegetables — you aren’t low-carbing right. According to my Fitday profile, the only deficiency I have regularly just from dietary sources is Potassium. This is common among Americans, and most of the very potassium-rich foods are also carbohydrate-rich. I work around this through supplementation, and comparing my pre-TSPA diet to my post-TSPA diet, I’m way way way way more covered on all the nutritional bases.

It’s a common fallacy that low-carbing is nutritionally incomplete.

There is one other dietary fallacy that I want to address: fiber. The only benefit of fiber for a low-carber* is the slowdown of the absorption of carbohydrates in the bowel and relief from constipation. There’s no benefit to colon cancer or overall health other than steadying blood insulin… which low-carb does better. Here are the so-called benefits of a high-fiber diet: * Reduction of heart disease. Fiber slows the absorption of carbohydrates, which steadies blood sugar. Low-carb reduces carbohydrate entirely, which also steadies blood sugar. * Reduction of cancer rates. Shown false this year in a Harvard study once you eliminate the variable of obese people. Obesity increases cancer risk, and obese people tend to eat less fiber. Low-carbing reduces obesity in far superior numbers to eating more fiber (viz: “Good Calories, Bad Calories” by Gary Taubes stresses this topic). * Reduction of diabetes. Once again, this is because fiber slows down sugar absorption rates… a redundant function for a low-carber! * Reduction of diverticulitis. A high-fat, low-fiber diet is among the healthiest treatments for diverticulitis or Crohn’s disease (see: Lutz, “Life Without Bread”). * Reduction of gallstones & kidney stones. These are both responses to the release of large amounts of glucose into the bloodstream, which low-carb controls. Consumption of large quantities of water — also advocated by virtually all low-carb eating plans — dramatically reduces both types of stones.

So for the low-carber, fiber is redundant and unnecessary unless you get stopped up. Period. Every benefit of fiber is reproduced by a low-carb, high-fat diet, and there is no further health benefit for a low-carber other than fixing irregularity. For many of us — self included — eating low-carb stabilizes stools with or without meeting the US RDA for fiber.

Regards, Matt B.

* Note: Thank you, Marochka Raduga, for pointing out that fiber also increases satiety with meals, and for those who have trouble maintaining satiety on low-carb fiber may help them feel fuller longer.

So I’ve decided it’s finally time for this nerd to step forward in the digital age with a PVR: Personal Video Recorder. Looking at TiVo, I think it’s really cool. What’s not cool are the price, the cost, and knowing that if TiVo ever goes out of business I might lose both my listing service and the functionality of my device. I got looking for alternatives and found MythTV.

Now, MythTV looks like it has all the ducks in a row, but man is it hard to wrap your head around at first. Unlike a traditional PVR, MythTV dissociates “boxes” from the front-end viewing functionality you might want. Instead, you have various resources, typically divided into two types: front-end and back-end.

A front-end is something that faces you, the viewer. It can be a PC, a little device, or whatever… the only requirement is that it has a display, sound, and maybe a few games loaded if you like. It looks to resources on your home network. In a way, it might be considered like a Media Center Extender, for those of you used to Windows Media Center. A front-end can talk to as many back-ends as it likes, but has one master back-end that it basically belongs to.

Then there’s the back-end. This is where it gets confusing. The back-end is some type of service provider in your house. If it’s a PC with lots of storage, maybe it just provides storage for archiving old videos. If it has a video tuner card or two or three, maybe it provides real-time viewing as well as recording services.

So let’s say you have three spare PCs laying around your house, like I do. Because they are older boxes, you want them to do one job apiece. Set one up as the master back-end with a TV tuner card. Set a second one up as a secondary back-end, with another TV tuner card and lots of storage. Set up the third as a front-end.

Let’s say that each tuner card can only tune into one station at a time, and you want to watch live TV with the ability to pause and fast-forward. First the back-ends will check if both tuner cards are already in use; if they are, unless you tell MythTV to allow disruption of recording, it will tell you you’re SOL because all tuners are in use. Anyway, let’s assume one tuner is recording and the other one is free. It will buffer a bit on the free one and start streaming that data to your front-end over the network.

Basically, you end up with a pool of back-end resources accessible via any front-end. MythTV will decide what resources are free and allow you to maximize your TV-watching time however you like.

But in the meantime, as I spend Day 2 mucking around with conflicting IRQs and machines that don’t have enough power to run a back-end and front-end at the same time, I’m a little frustrated at the complexity. If I had three sparkling-jewel brand-new PCs with at least a gig of RAM apiece, this would not be a problem. Given that I’m trying to cobble together a MythTV setup using hardware that ranges from four to eight years old at this point, it’s been a little off-putting.

–Matt B.

Mid-week motivation time for me.

Even when I was 178 pounds in high school, I had a little pudgy gut. I was “skinny fat”. The only time I remember being really fit was back when I was a Mormon missionary (not Mormon anymore, nor a missionary) and riding my bike constantly. I rode my bike so much that I got stretch marks on my butt from the muscle development. Some of that leg development has stayed with me as an adult, and I’ve always retained the ability to lift heavy weights that make other people at work balk.

But this morning for the first time ever, my Wii Fit showed a straight-up (that is, no adjustment for clothing) weight of 220 pounds this morning when I took my weight in my shorts and T-shirt. Shortly, I’ll be down into the teens, and another ten pounds gone! The next weight goal is 215 pounds, and at my current rate of weight loss that’s 2-3 weeks away. Sure, the ultimate goal is 190 pounds or so where I’ll be below 10% body fat, but it took me many years to get this fat; it will take a while to get myself into better shape than I’ve ever been before. I’ve never been lean and muscular before. Sure, I’ve been skinny, but had basically no muscles and didn’t eliminate my pot belly at that low weight.

A decade and a half of holding babies, and working a job that required me to sling around 70-pound boxes regularly has kept my muscle mass up a bit; I tend toward muscle, while my identical-height co-worker weighs seventy pounds less than I do. He’s on the low end of the BMI scale as a tall, skinny guy, while I’m toward the high end as a somewhat naturally muscular fellow.

Well, I’ve lost thirty-one pounds total since starting low-carbing in September, accelerated by deciding to join a gym mid-October. Since I’ve packed on muscle as well, that means according to my latest body-fat readings I’ve lost exactly forty pounds of fat.

Do you know how huge that is? That’s not small, that’s not some insignificant change that can be attributed to water weight, or that can be disguised in a photo by “sucking it in”. That’s the weight of my smallest child! I’ve lost a person worth of weight. People told me I looked my age at thirty-five; could I possibly look younger? I dunno, my wife says the lack of body fat on my face makes me look years younger. One of my best friends, Matt, (yep, same name) had the reaction of “Holy Crap!” when he saw me because he hadn’t seen me in so long and my weight had gone down so much.

Whatever level you’re at, wherever you are in your fat-loss and muscle-building goals, you can always find at least one thing to move up a notch to the next level. That’s what I’m learning, that there’s always room for improvement no matter how hard I’m working. I just have to always find that one thing I can do to move forward rather than stagnating.

–Matt B.

My wife recently purchased a game for our iPhones: “Bejeweled 2”. It’s a great little puzzle game with 3 modes: Classic, Action, and Endless. Classic mode is all about planning ahead, trying to conserve your resources and taking as much time as is necessary to set up the ideal plays so you can continue to play without running out of options. Action mode is fast-and-furious, all about how fast you can make matches, and the game will always provide you with more opportunities as long as you can find them in time. Endless mode is a kind of combination of both, allowing you to practice as long as you like.

I’ve found the Action mode to provide some profound life-lessons that have application far outside of the game world, particularly if I think about the puzzle jewels like people.

1. Good things happen when similar things move together.
2. Move in ways that enhance similar things moving together.
3. Often, the best course of action isn’t the ideal move, but one that will keep you in the game long enough to get to the ideal move.
4. Sometimes you need to make any move just to stay in the game. Sometimes that move is wrong and you get screwed out of an opportunity.
5. Perfect matches come along rarely.
6. You gotta stay in the game long enough to see a perfect match.. and for that, you have to be quick enough to recognize “good enough” fits that let you keep playing the game.
7. You never know what’s coming along next. That match that may not have looked worth playing may save your bacon in a few minutes.
8. Sometimes you have to make decisions that aren’t rational but are based on your first reaction to the problem.
9. If you’re playing well, you make so many decisions so quickly that attempting to justify them later may prove very difficult.
10. Your early victories set the bar for higher skill levels later.
11. It’s possible to do better by slowing down a little bit to make sure you aren’t playing well above your skill level.
12. It’s a great feeling to move ahead after you’ve stalled out for a while.
13. You’re going to stall out. Just keep playing, and eventually you’ll be back in the game.

Got a question regarding the metabolic processes of ketosis/lipolysis vs. ketoacidosis on a forum yesterday. Thought I’d post my response here, since it’s really a frequently-asked-question by people who are modestly familiar with diabetes and confused by the similarity of terms.

1. In a low carb diet consisting of less than the required carbohydrates the body enters Ketosis. What in a normal healthy person prevents this from developing into a state of ketoacidosis?

Corrections to your question: 1. There is not necessarily such a thing as “required carbohydrates”. Your body can manufacture all the glucosal needs of your tissues via gluconeogenesis, or the process of converting protein into glucose. Also, some tissues which prefer carbohydrate metabolism to ketone metabolism — like your brain — will eventually convert to at least partial ketone metabolism. That said, some carbohydrate is necessary for the phytonutrients (plant-only nutrients) required by your body. Humans are omnivores, after all.

2. Ketosis/lipolysis and ketoacidosis are two completely different metabolic processes which share only the same by-product and unfortunately similar names. The state of ketoacidosis is due to wildly high blood sugar and a failed pancreas, whereas ketosis is the result of the body manufacturing glucose to prevent low blood sugar.

I would restate your question: “In a low-carb diet the body enters ketosis/lipolysis for extended periods. What is the difference between ketosis/lipolysis and ketoacidosis?”

So to be clear: you simply cannot get into a state of ketoacidosis by eating low-carb. In fact, even Type 1 and Type 2 diabetics cannot enter into a ketoacidic state by eating low-carb. You can only get into that state by consuming too much high-glycemic food and producing little to no insulin to stabilize this out-of-control-high blood sugar (or by being so insulin-resistant that the insulin does no good… and low-carb eating fixes insulin resistance).

Viewed in that light, the question of how a healthy person prevents ketoacidosis while low-carbing is a non-sequitur. The two metabolic pathways have nothing to do with each other except the by-product of possible ketones in the urine. It’s much like asking how much gasoline would a person have to drink to create a carbon dioxide profile similar to that of a motorcycle. Humans don’t contain internal combustion engines even though we produce carbon dioxide — like a motorcycle does — as a by-product of oxygen consumption.

2. Is there or is there not a threshold of carbohydrate intake that will essentially pull you out of Ketosis? Or in other words if you have entered a state of ketosis but then gradually increase carbohydrates after the switch is made to a suggested amount that is below the norm of suggestive carb intake, what prevents your body from coming out of ketosis and utilizing the conversion of carbs into glucose for energy?

This is a common low-carb fallacy. You aren’t “kicked out” of ketosis by breaking through a certain magic number, nor are you kicked into ketosis by the same. Your body has a sliding-scale of fat-burning metabolism dictated largely by your insulin and cortisol levels. However, there is a certain level of carbohydrate and protein consumption at which the level of ketone in your blood is low enough that your kidneys no longer filter ketones out. The point at which my Ketostix stop turning purple is around 40-50g of carbohydrate per day.

So let’s distinguish here: Yes, there’s a certain carbohydrate (and protein) consumption level at which your body no longer excretes a measurable amount of ketones into your urine. If you are in lipolysis — losing fat — your body is always secreting some level of ketones into your bloodstream. This is why the Ketostix are a nice morale-booster, but little else. The real clue is your shrinking waistline, reduced body-fat percentage, and more-defined musculature to allow you to track your level of ketosis/lipolysis.

Even the low-fat dieters enter ketosis/lipolysis. They just enter it while they are sleeping, or several hours after each meal, while we low-carbers are in it all the time but might be metabolizing dietary fat for ketones and protein for glucose rather than carbohydrates for glucose. We’re not mobilizing body fat all the time, either, but we are always mobilizing fat of some sort.

I am just trying to understand, to the most of my ability, what exactly occurs during the process and how it is really balanced.

The take away message here: 1. Ketoacidosis and ketosis/lipolysis are two completely different metabolic processes on opposite ends of the dietary spectrum. A healthy person cannot have a ketoacidic bloodstream while consuming a low-carb diet. 2. Whether or not you are in ketosis/lipolysis is not a black-and-white game. It is a sliding scale of function, dictated by your own dietary needs, and if you are losing fat you can be certain your body is producing and using ketones for energy. Measurement of ketones in urine, however, tends to be an all-or-nothing proposition as your kidneys filter out excess ketones.

Note none of this applies if you are in acute renal failure; you must carefully manage your protein — and thus urea — quantities if you don’t want to be hooked up to the dialysis machine 24/7. Also if you are hospitalized due to extreme insulin resistance, or near death due to multiple organ failure, this doesn’t necessarily apply.

As usual, I’m not a doctor, YMMV, etc. However, I read WAY too many science books for my own good. Recommended reading: “Good Calories, Bad Calories”. It describes these metabolic processes in excruciating detail.

Regards, Matthew P. Barnson

In other news today, it appears that a flying car is finally going up for test flights. There have been several other attempts to create personal air commuter vehicles over the past several years, all of them unsuccessful. This one, however, with a price point at $200,000, appears to be in within the price realm of “imaginable” for the upper-middle-class who might spend a similar amount on an aircraft… and a big loan for said aircraft.

All that said, $200,000 is a lot of money for a two-seater. For comparison, you can pick up a second-hand Robison R-22 two-seater helicopter for considerably less, and with the $80,000 you save you can afford the maintenance and fuel for a few years. Sure, you can’t drive it around town after you land it, but it sure as heck can land a lot more places than a flying car can.

Heck, it’s even cheaper to build or buy yourself a brand-new RV-4 two-seater, and buy a couple of really nice economy cars for that price, too.

I think it’s sort of like the Space Shuttle problem. Originally, the Space Shuttle was pitched to the American population as a cheap, re-usable launch platform. The reality has turned out that it’s much cheaper to use disposable launch platforms than to worry about trying to use the same shuttle over and over again… and we’re not talking about a small difference, either. The difference in price between launching a disposable platform into space vs. the Shuttle re-usable platform is HUGE.

Similarly, I think it will be much cheaper to own an aircraft and a couple of cars than it will be to own a combination vehicle for many, many years to come.

That said, though, NOTHING would beat the cool factor — or nerd factor — of pulling into the corporate parking lot with your automobile/airplane hybrid.