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Behold! Millions of stories that will never, ever get professionally published, much less reach best sellers lists. The academic/non-fiction market's much smaller, but also fiercely competitive. I'm reminded of the "everyone has to write a million words of crap before they can start producing good fiction" quote (attributed to Raymond Chandler, it seems), so I guess it's reasonable to ask your experience with writing: How much have you written, and how often have you accomplished the substantially lesser tasks of getting published at all and making (any!) money off your work? Since you listed a bunch of pop-non-fiction to fill, your, err, "intensional cluster", what are your areas of expertise? Most of those authors were either well established in their fields or had written extensively already.
Anyway, as for ideas, Dan Carlin recently gave a potential topic (not for money, but for attention) at the very beginning of one of his recent podcasts. Could try something like that. Controversy seems a more reliable way than others to sell.
Haven't pickup artists been explicitly discussing status signalling in the context of day-to-day, person-to-person interactions since the late nineties? And biologists have noted its pervasiveness all through the mid-to-late 20th centuries, at least. I'm sure cultural anthropologists too, but I'm not as familiar with that literature. Nor am I, however, with any of Hanson's posts on the subject, but a quick glance at the links on the LW wiki's page puts them all in the mid 2000s, with nothing popping out as unusual. But I also couldn't find anything of his that suggested status to be "an explanation for everything" (I'm guessing everything here means all human behavior? Though that too seems really unlikely), so maybe I wasn't looking in the right places.
Well, there's your problem right there -- it sounds like you didn't really especially "do" a ketogenic diet, if you never once reached ketosis (as I understand, you typically need to deplete glycogen stores before entering ketosis, and so you might have 3,000~6,000+ kcal to burn through first, and then there's an interim period of glycogen depletion before it actually begins. Which is where the magnitude of your caloric deficit becomes relevant; was it large enough to get through your stored glycogen in the 1-2 weeks you ate no-carb? I think recently consumed food is generally metabolized first, before dipping into glycogen stores, though that's likely a huge oversimplification), any more than someone eating an egg for breakfast can be said to have "tried" keto.
And even with weight as your metric you should have seen some noticeable reduction after a month and a half of "dieting" on a >300 kcal deficit if you were consistent in your measurement conditions (eg, every day after waking/bathroom and before breakfast). Maybe you just overestimated how many calories you needed for maintenance each day? Which is quite common among "dieters". Like I mentioned, the usual advice for muscle preservation is to eat 300-500 kcal below maintenance each day, and if after a month you fail to note any weight loss or note weight gain to reduce your consumption by an additional 300 kcal, rinse and repeat. It might take several months to note any reduction in weight if you had a shoddy initial estimate (or if your metabolism is exceptionally sensitive to intake, though that can only account for so much. Eventually as you progressively reduce consumption [or increase activity!] you will lose weight).
Haha, and many people report a "mental fog" when first trying ketogenic diets. Maybe that's why you can't remember :D
disclaimer: this isn't my field of study and it's been several years since I tried keto and my research then was cursory, at best, which is why I used less-than-confident language in the above. In the three months that I ran a cyclic ketogenic diet I think it took 2-3 weeks to make the ketostik turn purple (or whatever) the first time, then a weekish after that, ulitmately down to 2-4 days after each weekly recarb.
edit: also, I've heard it might be useful to think of diets less in the "dieting" sense (a temporary change in eating behavior that will end once you reach a predefined goal) and more in a "biological" sense (the typical assortment of food that an organism habitually consumes). Less temporary, more permanent or semi-permanent lifestyle change.
Haha, well yeah. Though you should hardly need stats if you're recording over a period of months ("golly, I wonder if my 40 lb weight change these past 6 months is just me being dehydrated right now? Maybe I should wait till after I drink my morning 4 gallons just to be sure"). I meant it more on time scales of "between 1 week and 2 weeks", or for where weight loss was very minor due to a tiny caloric deficit.
With more precise measurement (eg, via bodpod) of body composition you would better be able to track smaller changes, too.
Huh, I think I read your comment too quickly and missed the "as long as...: qualifier and then started replying and went off on a tangent and forgot what the original comment was. Hah. My bad. Also didn't notice your name, hence my reference to you in the 3rd person.
Yeah, weight's not the best metric to use without taking into account body composition.
Oh wait, I think I figured it out. I'd combined your post and paper-machine's in my head, so I thought the simple calories-out-calories-in model in the highest level post being the thing referred to by discussion of conservation laws.
Have you tried eating less and exercising more? How long did you "diet"?
Also, how closely were you monitoring things? How many calories below maintenance were you consuming daily, on average [300-500 kcal's generally touted for muscle preservation for those not on steroids by the internet, but that's still pretty slow and not obvious weightloss against a backdrop of fluctuating water weight]? How long did it take you to enter ketosis if you were carb cycling (measured more definitively using something like ketostix and not my housemate-on-keto's "I can just feel it!")?
Err, have you been lowering calorie intake relative to your activity and changing metabolic rate? Lighter bodies require less energy both to maintain and move around. If you haven't been adjusting your "dieting" diet it's no wonder you plateaued, because where initially you ran a caloric deficit you're now much closer to equilibrium.
Also, I've intentionally gained weight on cyclical low-carb diets (<5 g carbs each weekday, 1200-1500g carb-up on weekends). It's because I ate a lot.
I don't think so, because calories are a unit of energy, so a simple calories-in calories-out model would necessarily model energy balance as energy intake (through food) and energy expenditure (through body maintenance and activity). Your thermodynamic/energy balance is what would ultimately determine either the anabolism or catabolism of different tissues (a more complex calories-in calories-out model, rather than the simpler one mentioned, would have the greatest explanatory power, I imagine. Metabolic rate is under hormonal control, hormones interact in complex ways, and intake of different foods and different activity patterns can alter hormone expression. A calorie-budget model incorporating varying hormone expression/sensitivity, genetics [for both little things like minute differences in receptor molecules and bigger ones like hyperthyroidism], and different metabolic pathways used [as dictated largely by the previous two], would be pretty accurate, I reckon).
Weight can also be stored as different things, which is why it's not the best proxy for the success or failure of a "diet". Different substances (like fat or muscle or glycogen or water) have different energy densities, so not all changes in weight signify the same thing (presumably, a "dieter" wants to lose fat. Drinking a gallon of water might cause his weight to rise beyond where it was a month ago, but that does not mean that his "diet" has been shot, or that he has gained fat). A study that looks only at weight change and not change in body composition under different conditions would enormously simplify what that weight represents -- in the study Qiaochu_Yuan mentions, 90% fat diets might have gained fat and lost muscle, water, and glycogen, resulting in a net weight loss, where the 90% carbs group gained muscle, glycogen, and water, and lost fat, resulting in net weight gain. The second case is obviously preferable to "dieters" than the first.
(what I suspect happened in the study is that the first two groups were depleted of glycogen, an energy source the body tends to use before it starts catabolizing fat or muscle deposits. Glycogen also tends to increase water retention, further inflating the weight of high-carb dieters. If they put all three groups on a 0-carb diet for a week to deplete glycogen stores and then dehydrated them, I'd suspect their net weight loss to be much more similar (changes in muscle and fat would vary [again, because of hormonal interactions and different energy densities], but bodies seem to need a lot less protein for maintenance than often suggested so unless the non-protein groups were consuming mostly carbs/fats for their 10% I doubt there'd be a huge difference)(also, the fact that obese individuals might gain muscle/fat on a 1000 kcal diet is obviously silly. If they were using the [again, stupidly oversimplified] BMI to define obesity [where obesity occurs at BMIs>30], a 5'10" man would have to weigh >209lbs, giving him a BMR at minimum of roughly between 1500 and 2000 calories, which is a good bit more than 1000kcal, so he'd still probably lose weight [but ignoring changes in BMR from hormones and such] completely sedentary)
There's also calorie type influencing activity level (eg, People starting ketogenic diets often report lethargy that eventually levels off, but whether that's a true return to past alertness or a subjective change in perceived vigor I'm not sure).
I wouldn't call SS the end-all, be-all solution for getting stronger, that would more closely be something like "progressive overload using compound exercises (or whatever you want to get stronger at) while under caloric surplus and having decent macro/micronutritional spreads. Also sleeping well and not having any other unusual health problems".
SS is a great program for beginners, but any other program that fits the above should work (like stronglifts). I also wouldn't recommend SS to intermediate or advanced lifters, when linear progression is no longer possible.