MTheads

Part I Where LFHC Goes Head to Head with LCHF

Just for fun, I've been reading up the LFHC diet, the one completely opposite from my LCHF diet.  LFHC is promoted by Ornish, Mcdougall, Esselstyns, etc.  This is the kind of diet Bill Clinton is on now.  Hey, guess what!  These low fat high carb guys also claim their diets will cure you of death and unattractiveness!  And just to prove it, they too have millions of personal testimonies on their sites from formerly diabetic fat people with rashes who are now thin, healthy, and rash free.  Just like on LCHF sites. 

How can this be?  One diet advocates fat as 75% of your diet and no carbs, the other no fat and mostly carb.  Yet both claim to be the perfect diet for humans!   Ahhhhh!  Let's look very shallowly into some of their claims and see where they differ.

1)  Both claim science is unequivocally on their side. 

LCHF: Man descended from the trees carrying tongs and hickory wood chips, ready to grill. 

Agriculture wasn't a thing until 10,000 years ago, when man was snookered into high interest mortgages, attending early morning religious functions on his one day off, and monogamy. 

Obviously, we were better off as hunter gatherers.

LFHC: Ha! Man shares 99% of his DNA with apes, and apes love whole grain pasta with butternut squash.  What, you think you're betta than an ape?  Get outta here.

Man lived nasty, brutal millennia eating grubs, bark, and grass seeds while hiding in caves from predators until someone finally figured out walls and industrial farming. 

Thank God.  Now man could stop skulking around in fear of being eaten and instead learn to fear other men.

 

Pre agriculture LCHF man

 

Pre agriculture LFHC man

Diet Ruminations, Part I

I'm eating so much fat on my diet!  I drink coffee with cream now. And I'm talking 1/2 cup or so of cream.  I slather on the mayo, baste in butter, cook with bacon lard, eat marrow, eat liver, and chew the fat, literally, off my rare steaks.  So far, not fat.  My dh thinks it's because I'm genetically unable to gain weight.  I don't think so.  I like to think Taubes and company are correct and a LCHF diet is nourishing while not being fattening.

I've always been someone interested in eating for health. I believe that food acts on us like any chemical or drug.  One has to eat well to be healthy.  The trick is to figure out what to eat!

But at the same time, I fully appreciate eating for pleasure.  I like virtually all foods.  Name it.  Kimchi, umi, natto, intestine, marrow, liver, roe, brussel sprouts, sauerkraut, raw oysters (God's food), fish eyes, tongue, and so on.  Good luck finding something I don't like to eat.  So, for me, being vegetarian became too limiting.  I needed to find a new philosophy for eating. 

And it's too easy to say, "Eat moderately, not too much, move more, etc."  But what's moderate?  If one was raised on the pyramid eating scheme moderate is different than if one was raised before the 70's.  One has to have a baseline to determine moderate. And what to make of our ever increasing rates of obesity and diabetes?  I suspect many of us are already trying to eat "moderately."  Many of us are watching what we eat, choosing low fat alternatives, eating skinless chicken breasts, and getting enough fiber. 

Yet we're getting fatter and sicker.  What's up?  Maybe it's the junk food and processed foods.  Many of us eat mainly by fat and calorie counts.  If it comes in a box but is low fat, it's alright.  If the calories are around 100 per serving, we throw it in the cart.  A "moderate" diet based around skim milk, low fat yogurt, and Special K doesn't appear to be working.  So, as Taubes called his original essay for the NYT's, What if It's All Been a Big Fat Lie?

What if everything we were told about what is healthy to eat is not true?

Bro, Do You Even Lift 120lbs Once and Then Dance Around the Gym Like a Chicken?

Ha ha!  120lb BP!  Take that, 115lb BP 1 rep max!  That's right, I'm kicking sand in your face, loser.  Whatcha gonna do about it?  Cry?  Yesterday's MThead, do you even lift?

 

Sewer Cat Friday!

Here's our little sweety after several hours outside. 


Not helping much.

Workout Log or Wlog or Wolog or Wklog. Voting Later.

Still stuck on 115lb bench press...depression setting in.  I can do one and a half reps but can't get that second lift!  So I'm working on pushing out more 100 / 90lb -ers. That's almost as gratifying...not.

My pull ups, however, are going gangnam style.  I'm working on getting to 10 wide arm pull ups and so far I'm up to 7!  I like to do a certain quantity each gym visit.  On leg day I try to do 30 pull ups all together and on arm day, 25.  Arm day is such a struggle to reach 25.  But I do.

My dead lifts are up to 145lb.  I could do more, but my lower back needs time to catch up.  I'm staying fairly low in the squat also for the same reason.  But I do plenty of reps of both.  It's the walking lunges with 40lb dumbbells I find exhausting.  It's my aerobic system which seems to poop out first.  It's such a good heart workout, I can feel it for hours.

I did do 100lbs incline presses which seems strange to me.

I rarely do sit ups or any kind of isolated belly exercise. 

Time in gym is usually around 30 minutes.  I like to work out hard and quickly.  Right now I'm not doing any aerobics other than walking. 

LCHF diet still low carb and high fat.  I have not noticed any difference in energy or in anything else during workouts.  While I've gained a few pounds in muscle, no real difference and I'm eating high fat.  Maybe my calories are less, but it's hard to tell as I don't like keeping detailed logs, obviously. I prefer to record impressions.  Impressions tell me I'm doing great!  Or the same.  Whatever.

I'll be adding some more gun show photos soon.

Gorillas in the Gym

I love to lift heavy weights, and I have loved lifting since I was a teenager. I first took an elective weightlifting class in my sophomore year in high school. I don't know what I was thinking, or why I decided to try something rather foreign to me.  Up to then I had been a runner and a biker.  Why weightlifting?  It's not like I knew anyone who lifted.  Why not aerobics or jazzercise?  And not many girls then could be found in an elective weightlifting class...in my case, just me and two bored girls who were taking the class to be with their football team boyfriends.

After this, I joined a gym and learned to not care how many guys were working out in the free weight area.  A lot of women, and probably men too, are intimidated by the big beefy sweaty guys strapping on belts and grunting.  But I had my training from coach Big Belly.  I had my books.  I'd watched Pumping Iron.  I read Muscle and Fitness magazine.  That gym was my natural habitat, too, even if it didn't feel natural yet. The trick was to keep showing up and lifting.  Eventually the male lifters accepted me and just went about their business while I went about mine.  Ahhhh, gym symbiosis. 

Each time I change gyms there's that time between being the only woman in the free weight room (glaring at the guy using my squat rack for shrugs) to becoming just another person working out, to becoming almost invisible to the other lifters -- accepted but different.  Gorillas in the gym, indeed.

Random Workout Log

Workout log:

I have been killing my legs the last two workouts with the soreness lasting more than four days!  I have increased all the weights but not to any degree different from my usual increases.  So I'm forcing myself to take a few days longer before I hit them again.  It's hard not going to the gym.

But the upper body is going fine.  I managed to do 10 pull-ups in a row, finally.   Now I'll start to work on other styles of pull-ups.  Once I hit ten, I stop and either do weighted pull-ups or work on harder grips.  I'm still going for quantity every gym visit.  For leg day I do a total of 25 pull ups in any style, and 30 on upper body day.

I'm still stuck at 115lbs for the bench press, but my deadlifts are getting better.  I'm going to try and improve PRs on both on next the visit.

I'm still eating low carb.  I'm not as hungry lately so I've have eased up on eating steak after butter drenched steak.  My morning cup of cream with a shot of espresso seems to do the trick until lunch.  My sister is also eating low carb.  She has lost weight, but I think I've actually gained some, though it is probably in muscle.  It's hard to tell because the scale at the Y is kind of fiddly.  One moment I weigh 110lb and the next 116lbs!  But I do think I weigh a few pounds more.  

Goals:  10 wider arm pull-ups.  120lb BP.  145lb squats.  145lb DL.

Doctrine Creep

If a diet can be compared to a political ideology, the LCHF diet would be near the libertarian end of the spectrum with veganism and raw foodism planted firmly on the fascist end, really firmly.  The whole low carb movement reminds me of the homeschooling movement -- same kind of non-conformist slightly geeky people, same disregard for cultural norms, and the same self confidence that the individual is more than capable of steering their own lives.  (This is where anti-Homeschoolers will sarcastically ask if we think we can DIY our own brain surgeries, too, implying that teaching children is as difficult as surgery, brain surgery, and that only teachers should be allowed to operate on children.)

I love information, but I hate dogma.  As soon as I read anything anywhere in whatever area I'm interested in, and I come across preachy instructions on how to apply their general POV to every aspect of my life, I get highly skeptical and irritated.  A completely lame example:  In a macrobiotic diet book by Michio Kushi, which I read maybe 25 years ago, there were detailed instructions on how to  take a proper shower.  Scrubbing that caucasian off was the basic idea.  You just want some dietary advice and guidelines and you end up in a Japanese cult. 

While exploring my new perfect forever diet, I'm also learning a lot about the Paleo movement.  There are similarities btwn the two diets, and their followers even take cruises together.  But whereas the LCHF diet is about following science blindly to whatever absurd method of eating is shown to be the most efficacious, the Paleo movement encompasses your entire life.  Food has to be pure.  Eating has to be clean.  Sleep has to be 7.5 hours in duration in a cool and lightless room.  Shoes are buffers btwn you and life.  And one should leap and frisk along wave swept shores like heathen cannibal island children.  Admittedly, primal eaters do seem a happy group, always smiling and baring their perfectly toned bodies in a bonhomie kind of way.  I think it's the excess of omega-3s in their diet.

Stupid Pet Friday!

X marks the spot.  Pet here for treasure, ye scallywag! 

Friday Cat in a Box Day!

That's how he found him.  He had nothing to do with it.  And if we hadn't come home early no one would be upset.  We have only ourselves to blame.