“
technical debt’ that is not being paid down. It comes from taking shortcuts, which may make sense in the short-term. But like financial debt, the compounding interest costs grow over time. If an organization doesn’t pay down its technical debt, every calorie in the organization can be spent just paying interest, in the form of unplanned work.
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Gene Kim (The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win)
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It is not as if farming brought a great improvement in living standards either. A typical hunter-gatherer enjoyed a more varied diet and consumed more protein and calories than settled people, and took in five times as much viatmin C as the average person today.
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Bill Bryson (At Home: A Short History of Private Life)
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One consequential change is that people used to get most of their calories at breakfast and midday, with only the evening top-up at suppertime. Now those intakes are almost exactly reversed. Most of us consume the bulk--a sadly appropriate word here--of our calories in the evening and take them to bed with us, a practice that doesn't do any good at all.
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Bill Bryson (At Home: A Short History of Private Life)
“
Love is the ultimate no-calorie sweetener.
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Richelle E. Goodrich (Slaying Dragons: Quotes, Poetry, & a Few Short Stories for Every Day of the Year)
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It is not as if farming brought a great improvement in living standards either. A typical hunter-gatherer enjoyed a more varied diet and consumed more protein and calories than settled people, and took in five times as much vitamin C as the average person today. Even in the bitterest depths of the ice ages, we now know, nomadic people ate surprisingly well—and surprisingly healthily. Settled people, by contrast, became reliant on a much smaller range of foods, which all but ensured dietary insufficiencies.
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Bill Bryson (At Home: A Short History of Private Life)
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I spent the summer cloaked in shame, seething with jealousy. I envied other women's bodies. i envied fat women who draped their luscious curves without any embarrassment, thighs quaking as they walked. I envied thin women lounging effortlessly in T-shirts and shorts, nothing pinching or pudging, just smooth skin over smooth muscle over delicate bones. I envied anyone who didn't hate their body. People who ate without hesitation or pre-emptive shame at how all those calories would stretch over their flesh. It was about beauty, yes, but it was also just about belonging. People treat you with kindness and an invitation to belong if they like the way you look.
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Francesca Ekwuyasi (Butter Honey Pig Bread)
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He helped me sit up on my bed and tried to force-feed me glucose dissolved in water and a biscuit he’d grabbed from my roommate’s bedside. But I spat it right out, still thinking about calories and numbers.
“That’s enough, Amira. I’m literally trying to feed you water. It’s not going to hurt you!” he screamed.
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Insha Juneja (Imperfect Mortals : A Collection of Short Stories)
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We live in a permissive society that won’t count any sin against you as an adult, but will count the calories in your kids’ hot lunches.
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Kevin DeYoung (Crazy Busy: A (Mercifully) Short Book about a (Really) Big Problem)
“
A typical hunter-gatherer enjoyed a more varied diet and consumed more protein and calories than settled people, and took in five times as much vitamin C as the average person today.
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Bill Bryson (At Home: A Short History of Private Life)
“
You’ve just described ‘technical debt’ that is not being paid down. It comes from taking shortcuts, which may make sense in the short-term. But like financial debt, the compounding interest costs grow over time. If an organization doesn’t pay down its technical debt, every calorie in the organization can be spent just paying interest, in the form of unplanned work.
”
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Gene Kim (The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win)
“
In the savannahs and forests they inhabited, high-calorie sweets were extremely rare and food in general was in short supply. A typical forager 30,000 years ago had access to only one type of sweet food – ripe fruit. If a Stone Age woman came across a tree groaning with figs, the most sensible thing to do was to eat as many of them as she could on the spot, before the local baboon band picked the tree bare. The instinct to gorge on high-calorie food was hard-wired into our genes. Today we may be living in high-rise apartments with over-stuffed refrigerators, but our DNA still thinks we are in the savannah. That’s what makes some of us spoon down an entire tub of Ben & Jerry’s when we find one in the freezer and wash it down with a jumbo Coke. This ‘gorging gene’ theory is widely accepted.
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Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
“
I don’t care if you eat worms and cardboard; if you eat 35% fewer calories, you will lose weight and your cholesterol levels will improve50 in the short run, but that is not to say that worms and cardboard form a healthy diet.
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T. Colin Campbell (The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss and Long-Term Health)
“
First, when you try to restrict calories and exercise more, your body is hardwired to perceive a starvation situation. That makes you tired (so you move less and conserve energy) and hungry (so you eat more), and it slows down your metabolism (so you don’t die!). This “eat less, exercise more” formula is not too successful for most people. It can work for a short time, certainly, but less than 10 percent of people lose weight and keep it off for a year;4 you will almost always rebound and gain back the weight. Second, when you eat carbs and sugar, insulin spikes and your blood sugar drops. The insulin drives most of the available fuel in your bloodstream into fat cells, especially the fat cells around your middle, otherwise known as belly fat. So your body is starved of fuel, and this stimulates your brain5 to make you eat more.6 You could have a year’s worth of stored energy in your fat tissue and yet feel like you are starving. The only thing that can stop this vicious cycle is eating a lot of fat and cutting out the refined carbs and sugar. A high-fat, low-carb diet leads to a faster metabolism and sustained weight loss.
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Mark Hyman (Eat Fat Get Thin: Why the Fat We Eat Is the Key to Sustained Weight Loss and Vibrant Health)
“
Maggie nodded. She was more than okay. Not only was she no longer sick, she felt as if she'd just awoken from the long, safe torpor of her childhood. The night had blasted her free of that shell, and she had emerged new and raw and ready. She felt the ticket stub folded carefully in her pocket. How many kids in Bray would be able to say they'd stood just feet from Billy Corgan, that they'd been at the Metro for the "Siamese Dream" record release show, that they'd seen Lake Shore Drive on a Sunday morning through the prism of a concert comedown, the runners looking so silly with their skinny legs and their neon shorts, chugging along the footpath with their calorie counters and Gatorade?
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Jessie Ann Foley (The Carnival at Bray)
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Cutting carbs, fats, or calories (dieting) is like trying to hold your breath. The longer you do it, the more your body resists it until you finally gasp for air – taking in more than ever to overcome the short-term deficit you induced.
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Matt Stone (Diet Recovery: Restoring Hormonal Health, Metabolism, Mood, and Your Relationship with Food (Diet Recovery #1))
“
It was haunting to be entangled in this obnoxious cycle. I want to get out of this viciousness. That pizza is staring at me. I think that slice of pie might hurt me. Thirty-five calories for an Oreo cookie; 75caloriesfor a slice of bread; 285 for a slice of pizza; 350for a plate of pasta. You know, maybe I’ll just study the digits of eggs, wheat, vegetables, apples, oranges. Ugh! Stop. It all hurts so much. That’s it. Make it stop. Please, I beg you. Just make it stop.
I felt like the walking and living encyclopedia of numbers and digits.
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Insha Juneja (Imperfect Mortals : A Collection of Short Stories)
“
Pilchard begins his long run in from short stump. He bowls and … oh, he’s out! Yes, he’s got him. Longwilley is caught leg-before in middle slops by Grattan. Well, now what do you make of that, Neville?’ ‘That’s definitely one for the books, Bruce. I don’t think I’ve seen offside medium slow fast pace bowling to match it since Baden-Powell took Rangachangabanga for a maiden ovary at Bangalore in 1948.’ I had stumbled into the surreal and rewarding world of cricket on the radio. After years of patient study (and with cricket there can be no other kind) I have decided that there is nothing wrong with the game that the introduction of golf carts wouldn’t fix in a hurry. It is not true that the English invented cricket as a way of making all other human endeavours look interesting and lively; that was merely an unintended side effect. I don’t wish to denigrate a sport that is enjoyed by millions, some of them awake and facing the right way, but it is an odd game. It is the only sport that incorporates meal breaks. It is the only sport that shares its name with an insect. It is the only sport in which spectators burn as many calories as players (more if they are moderately restless). It is the only competitive activity of any type, other than perhaps baking, in which you can dress in white from head to toe and be as clean at the end of the day as you were at the beginning.
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Bill Bryson (In a Sunburned Country)
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The upshot of all this work can be summarized as follows: short sleep (of the type that many adults in first-world countries commonly and routinely report) will increase hunger and appetite, compromise impulse control within the brain, increase food consumption (especially of high-calorie foods), decrease feelings of food satisfaction after eating, and prevent effective weight loss when dieting.
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Matthew Walker (Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams)
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Recently an interdisciplinary team of scholars identified a common cause.18 It was not an aura of spirituality that descended on the planet but something more prosaic: energy capture. The Axial Age was when agricultural and economic advances provided a burst of energy: upwards of 20,000 calories per person per day in food, fodder, fuel, and raw materials. This surge allowed the civilizations to afford larger cities, a scholarly and priestly class, and a reorientation of their priorities from short-term survival to long-term harmony. As Bertolt Brecht put it millennia later: Grub first, then ethics.19
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Steven Pinker (Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress)
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The brain makes up l/50th of our body mass but consumes a staggering 1/5th of the calories we burn for energy. If your brain were a car, in terms of gas mileage, it’d be a Hummer. Most of our conscious activity is happening in our prefrontal cortex, the part of our brain responsible for focus, handling short-term memory, solving problems, and moderating impulse control. It’s at the heart of what makes us human and the center for our executive control and willpower.
The “last in, first out” theory is very much at work inside our head. The most recent parts of our brain to develop are the first to suffer if there is a shortage of resources. Older, more developed areas of the brain, such as those that regulate breathing and our nervous responses, get first helpings from our blood stream and are virtually unaffected if we decide to skip a meal. The prefrontal cortex, on the other hand, feels the impact. Unfortunately, being relatively young in terms of human development, it’s the runt of the litter come feeding time.
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Gary Keller (The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results)
“
Why, for example, do people gorge on high-calorie food that is doing little good to their bodies? Today’s affluent societies are in the throes of a plague of obesity, which is rapidly spreading to developing countries. It’s a puzzle why we binge on the sweetest and greasiest food we can find, until we consider the eating habits of our forager forebears. In the savannahs and forests they inhabited, high-calorie sweets were extremely rare and food in general was in short supply. A typical forager 30,000 years ago had access to only one type of sweet food – ripe fruit. If a Stone Age woman came across a tree groaning with figs, the most sensible thing to do was to eat as many of them as she could on the spot, before the local baboon band picked the tree bare. The instinct to gorge on high-calorie food was hard-wired into our genes. Today we may be living in high-rise apartments with over-stuffed refrigerators, but our DNA still thinks we are in the savannah. That’s what makes some of us spoon down an entire tub of Ben & Jerry’s when we find one in the freezer and wash it down with a jumbo Coke. This ‘gorging gene’ theory is widely accepted. Other theories are far more contentious. For
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Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
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This is a short public service announcement: you don't have to fail with abandon.
Say you're playing Civilization, and your target is to get to sleep before midnight, and you check the clock, and it's already 12:15. If that happens, you don't have to say "too late now, I already missed my target" and then keep playing until 4 in the morning.
Say you're trying to eat no more than 2000 calories per day, and then you eat 2300 by the end of dinner, you don't have to say "well I already missed my target, so I might as well indulge."
If your goal was to watch only one episode of that one TV show, and you've already watched three, you don't have to binge-watch the whole thing.
Over and over, I see people set themselves a target, miss it by a little, and then throw all restraint to the wind. "Well," they seem to think, "willpower has failed me; I might as well over-indulge." I call this pattern "failing with abandon."
But you don't have to fail with abandon. When you miss your targets, you're allowed to say "dang!" and then continue trying to get as close to your target as you can.
You don't have to say dang, either. You're allowed to over-indulge, if that's what you want to do. But for lots and lots of people, the idea of missing by as little as possible never seems to cross their mind. They miss their targets, and then suddenly they treat their targets as if they were external mandates set by some unjust authority; the jump on the opportunity to defy whatever autarch set an impossible target in the first place; and then (having already missed their target) they reliably fail with abandon.
So this is a public service announcement: you don't have to do that. When you miss your target, you can take a moment to remember who put the target there, and you can ask yourself whether you want to get as close to the target as possible. If you decide you only want to miss your target by a little bit, you still can.
You don't have to fail with abandon.
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Nate Soares (The Replacing Guilt Series)
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The foragers’ secret of success, which protected them from starvation and malnutrition, was their varied diet. Farmers tend to eat a very limited and unbalanced diet. Especially in premodern times, most of the calories feeding an agricultural population came from a single crop – such as wheat, potatoes or rice – that lacks some of the vitamins, minerals and other nutritional materials humans need. The typical peasant in traditional China ate rice for breakfast, rice for lunch and rice for dinner. If she was lucky, she could expect to eat the same on the following day. By contrast, ancient foragers regularly ate dozens of different foodstuffs. The peasant’s ancient ancestor, the forager, may have eaten berries and mushrooms for breakfast; fruits, snails and turtle for lunch; and rabbit steak with wild onions for dinner. Tomorrow’s menu might have been completely different. This variety ensured that the ancient foragers received all the necessary nutrients. Furthermore, by not being dependent on any single kind of food, they were less liable to suffer when one particular food source failed. Agricultural societies are ravaged by famine when drought, fire or earthquake devastates the annual rice or potato crop. Forager societies were hardly immune to natural disasters, and suffered from periods of want and hunger, but they were usually able to deal with such calamities more easily. If they lost some of their staple foodstuffs, they could gather or hunt other species, or move to a less affected area. Ancient foragers also suffered less from infectious diseases. Most of the infectious diseases that have plagued agricultural and industrial societies (such as smallpox, measles and tuberculosis) originated in domesticated animals and were transferred to humans only after the Agricultural Revolution. Ancient foragers, who had domesticated only dogs, were free of these scourges. Moreover, most people in agricultural and industrial societies lived in dense, unhygienic permanent settlements – ideal hotbeds for disease. Foragers roamed the land in small bands that could not sustain epidemics. The wholesome and varied diet, the relatively short working week, and the rarity of infectious diseases have led many experts to define pre-agricultural forager societies as ‘the original affluent societies’.
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Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
“
Why, for example, do people gorge on high-calorie food that is doing little good to their bodies? Today’s affluent societies are in the throes of a plague of obesity, which is rapidly spreading to developing countries. It’s a puzzle why we binge on the sweetest and greasiest food we can find, until we consider the eating habits of our forager forebears. In the savannahs and forests they inhabited, high-calorie sweets were extremely rare and food in general was in short supply. A typical forager 30,000 years ago had access to only one type of sweet food – ripe fruit. If a Stone Age woman came across a tree groaning with figs, the most sensible thing to do was to eat as many of them as she could on the spot, before the local baboon band picked the tree bare. The instinct to gorge on high-calorie food was hard-wired into our genes. Today we may be living in high-rise apartments with over-stuffed refrigerators, but our DNA still thinks we are in the savannah. That’s what makes some of us spoon down an entire tub of Ben & Jerry’s when we find one in the freezer and wash it down with a jumbo Coke.
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Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
“
It also makes us question the admonitions that carbohydrate restriction cannot “generally be used safely,” as Theodore Van Itallie wrote in 1979, because it has “potential side effects,” including “weakness, apathy, fatigue, nausea, vomiting, dehydration, postural hypotension, and occasional exacerbation of preexisting gout.” The important clinical question is whether these are short-term effects of carbohydrate withdrawal, or chronic effects that might offset the benefits of weight loss. The same is true for the occasional elevation of cholesterol that will occur with fat loss—a condition known as transient hypercholesterolemia—and that is a consequence of the fact that we store cholesterol along with fat in our fat cells. When fatty acids are mobilized, the cholesterol is released as well, and thus serum levels of cholesterol can spike. The existing evidence suggests that this effect will vanish with successful weight loss, regardless of the saturated-fat content of the diet. Nonetheless, it’s often cited as another reason to avoid carbohydrate-restricted diets and to withdraw a patient immediately from the diet should such a thing be observed, under the mistaken impression that this is a chronic effect of a relatively fat-rich diet. In
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Gary Taubes (Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease)
“
It just occurred to me that life’s too short. Plenty of time to watch the calories when one goes to heaven.
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Ian Fleming (Thunderball (James Bond, #9))
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Jump. A “rebounder” is a small trampoline you can use indoors to get your lymph to flow merrily gently down its stream without much effort (and it’s a great way to burn calories, according to research from NASA). Utilizing the benefit of gravity, you can jump up and down or simply bounce your feet on the trampoline, and within a short time, your fluids are moved along four times faster than
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Gerald M. Lemole (Lymph & Longevity: The Untapped Secret to Health)
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Men’s increased sex drive, their preference for a larger number of sexual partners, and their willingness to drop their standards in order to procure short-term mates all testify to men’s polygynous (if repressed) urges. Mothers fare better when they receive assistance in childrearing. This assistance is chiefly economic with men being far less involved in hands-on care of children. In the environment of evolutionary adaptation, men provided meat which augmented the calories that women themselves were able to provide by foraging.
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Anne Campbell (A Mind of Her Own: The Evolutionary Psychology of Women)
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Here are a few notable things that can spark inflammation and depress the function of your liver: Alcohol overload—This is relatively well-known. Your liver is largely responsible for metabolizing alcohol, and drinking too much liquid courage can send your liver running to cry in a corner somewhere. Carbohydrate bombardment—Starches and sugar have the fastest ability to drive up blood glucose, liver glycogen, and liver fat storage (compared to their protein and fat macronutrient counterparts). Bringing in too many carbs, too often, can elicit a wildfire of fat accumulation. In fact, one of the most effective treatments for reversing NAFLD is reducing the intake of carbohydrates. A recent study conducted at KTH Royal Institute of Technology and published in the journal Cell Metabolism had overweight test subjects with high levels of liver fat reduce their ratio of carbohydrate intake (without reducing calories!). After a short two-week study period the subjects showed “rapid and dramatic” reductions of liver fat and other cardiometabolic risk factors. Too many medications—Your liver is the top doc in charge of your body’s drug metabolism. When you hear about drug side effects on commercials, they are really a direct effect of how your liver is able to handle them. The goal is to work on your lifestyle factors so that you can be on as few medications as possible along with the help of your physician. Your liver will do its best to support you either way, but it will definitely feel happier without the additional burden. Too many supplements—There are several wonderful supplements that can be helpful for your health, but becoming an overzealous natural pill-popper might not be good for you either. In a program funded by the National Institutes of Health, it was found that liver injuries linked to supplement use jumped from 7 percent to 20 percent of all medication/supplement-induced injuries in just a ten-year time span. Again, this is not to say that the right supplements can’t be great for you. This merely points to the fact that your liver is also responsible for metabolism of all of the supplements you take as well. And popping a couple dozen different supplements each day can be a lot for your liver to handle. Plus, the supplement industry is largely unregulated, and the additives, fillers, and other questionable ingredients could add to the burden. Do your homework on where you get your supplements from, avoid taking too many, and focus on food first to meet your nutritional needs. Toxicants—According to researchers at the University of Louisville, more than 300 environmental chemicals, mostly pesticides, have been linked to fatty liver disease. Your liver is largely responsible for handling the weight of the toxicants (most of them newly invented) that we’re exposed to in our world today. Pesticides are inherently meant to be deadly, but just to small organisms (like pests), though it seems to be missed that you are actually made of small organisms, too (bacteria
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Shawn Stevenson (Eat Smarter: Use the Power of Food to Reboot Your Metabolism, Upgrade Your Brain, and Transform Your Life)
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Despite constant insistence that we lose weight for our health and track the simple arithmetic of calories in, calories out, there is no data illustrating that dieting achieves long-term weight loss. To the contrary, constant dieting may make weight loss more difficult, as our metabolisms fight back, searching for the stasis of a familiar, fatter body.57 A major study following contestants from the television show The Biggest Loser showed that despite their dramatic weight loss on camera, most contestants were unable to maintain their smaller size, despite hours of working out each day. The study’s results were staggering: after their extreme televised dieting, every contestant’s body burned fewer calories at rest than it did at the beginning of the competition—and one contestant was shown to burn eight hundred fewer calories each day than expected for a peer of the same gender and size.58 Those results aren’t limited to reality TV contestants. As one Slate writer put it, addressing dieters, “You’ll likely lose weight in the short term, but your chances of keeping it off for five years or more is about the same as your chance of surviving metastatic lung cancer: 5 percent. And when you do gain back the weight, everyone will blame you. Including you.
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Aubrey Gordon (What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat)
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Why, for example, do people gorge on high-calorie food that is doing little good to their bodies? Today’s affluent societies are in the throes of a plague of obesity, which is rapidly spreading to developing countries. It’s a puzzle why we binge on the sweetest and greasiest food we can find, until we consider the eating habits of our forager forebears. In the savannahs and forests they inhabited, high-calorie sweets were extremely rare and food in general was in short supply. A typical forager 30,000 years ago had access to only one type of sweet food – ripe fruit. If a Stone Age woman came across a tree groaning with figs, the most sensible thing to do was to eat as many of them as she could on the spot, before the local baboon band picked the tree bare. The instinct to gorge on high-calorie food was hard-wired into our genes. Today we may be living in high-rise apartments with over-stuffed refrigerators, but our DNA still thinks we are in the savannah. That’s what makes us spoon down an entire tub of Ben & Jerry’s when we find one in the freezer and wash it down with a jumbo Coke.
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Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
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RICE CAKES These are now a staple for the whole pro peloton. They are super-easy to make and can provide a tasty snack for kids as well. I have used these in other endurance sports, including Olympic sailing. Servings 20 Calories per serving: 157 kcal Carbohydrate per serving: 23 g Fat per serving: 6 g Protein per serving: 3 g INGREDIENTS 500 g white short-grain rice 1 l water 2 tbsp coconut oil 2 tbsp sugar (white or brown) 1 tsp vanilla extract 300 g cream cheese (or 200 g creamed coconut) METHOD 1. In a rice cooker, cook the rice with the water, sugar, vanilla and coconut oil. If you are not using a rice cooker, follow the instructions on the rice packet. 2. When cooked, mix in the cream cheese. For a non-dairy alternative, substitute 200 g of creamed coconut.
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Nigel Mitchell (Fuelling the Cycling Revolution: The Nutritional Strategies and Recipes Behind Grand Tour Wins and Olympic Gold Medals)
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Recall that when we eat, the calories in our food are either turned into usable energy or stored for later use. The usable form of energy is called ATP, short for adenosine triphosphate. Most of our ATP is made in energy factories known as mitochondria. Energy can also be stored as fat or glycogen (the storage form of carbohydrates), both of which can be converted to ATP if food is not available.
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Richard J. Johnson (Nature Wants Us to Be Fat: The Surprising Science Behind Why We Gain Weight and How We Can Prevent-and Reverse-It)
“
In addition to these irregularities, Dr. Keys and the AHA also failed to warn the public that smoking might be an important factor driving heart attacks, going so far as to downplay the connection between smoking and heart disease even though they certainly knew about it. According to a short book called The Seven Countries Study: A Scientific Adventure, by the first five-year analysis in 1963, Dr. Keys knew that smoking twenty-five or more cigarettes daily increased heart attack fatalities by 400 percent, making smoking the most powerful predictor of death by heart attack by far.17 But he did not include this link between smoking and heart attacks in his 1963 publications. Nor did he do so in the ensuing years.
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Cate Shanahan (Dark Calories: How Vegetable Oils Destroy Our Health and How We Can Get It Back)
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High fat/protein, zero carbohydrate diets have a dramatic impact on weight loss. This is because a diet with no carbohydrates in effect stops the production of insulin. If you eat nothing but fat and protein, for even a short period of time, despite the fact that your calorie intake may be high, you will see rapid weight loss.
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Zoe Harcombe (Why Do You Overeat? When All You Want Is To Be Slim)
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When you eat food, you give your body a relatively large amount of energy (calories) in a short period. Glucose levels rise far above what is needed to maintain life, and instead of “throwing away” or burning off all excess energy, a portion is stored as body fat for later use. Scientifically speaking, when your body is absorbing nutrients eaten and storing fat, it’s in the “postprandial” state (post meaning “after” and prandial meaning “having to do with a meal”). This “fed” state is when the body is in “fat storage mode.” Once the body has finished absorbing the glucose and other nutrients from the food (amino acids and fatty acids), it then enters the “postabsorptive” state (“after absorption”), wherein it must turn to its fat stores for energy. This “fasted” state is when the body is in “fat burning mode.” Your body flips between “fed” and “fasted” states every day, storing fat from the food you eat and then burning it once there’s nothing left to use from the meals. Here’s a simple graph that depicts this cycle:
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Michael Matthews (Thinner Leaner Stronger: The Simple Science of Building the Ultimate Female Body)
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Of those that appeared to play obvious roles in heart disease, three in particular stood out even in the early 1950s. Two of these are familiar today: the low-density lipoproteins, known as LDL, the bad cholesterol, and the high-density variety, known as HDL, the good cholesterol. (This is an oversimplification, as I will explain shortly.) The third class is known as VLDL, which stands for “very low-density lipoproteins,” and these play a critical role in heart disease. Most of the triglycerides in the blood are carried in VLDL; much of the cholesterol is found in LDL. That LDL and HDL are the two species of lipoproteins that physicians now measure when we get a checkup is a result of the oversimplification of the science, not the physiological importance of the particles themselves. In
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Gary Taubes (Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease)
“
Why, for example, do people gorge on high-calorie food that is doing little good to their bodies? Today’s affluent societies are in the throes of a plague of obesity, which is rapidly spreading to developing countries. It’s a puzzle why we binge on the sweetest and greasiest food we can find, until we consider the eating habits of our forager forebears. In the savannahs and forests they inhabited, high-calorie sweets were extremely rare and food in general was in short supply. A typical forager 30,000 years ago had access to only one type of sweet food – ripe fruit. If a Stone Age woman came across a tree groaning with figs, the most sensible thing to do was to eat as many of them as she could on the spot, before the local baboon band picked the tree bare. The instinct to gorge on high-calorie food was hard-wired into our genes. Today we may be living in high-rise apartments with over-stuffed refrigerators, but our DNA still thinks we are in the savannah. That’s what makes us spoon down an entire tub of Ben & Jerry’s when we find one in the freezer and wash it down with a jumbo Coke. This
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Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
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If the primary change in traditional diets with Westernization was the addition of sugar, flour, and white rice, and this in turn occurred shortly before the appearance of chronic disease, then the most likely explanation was that those processed, refined carbohydrates were the cause of the disease.
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Gary Taubes (Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease)
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Insulin, in short, is the one hormone that serves to coordinate and regulate everything having to do with the storage and use of nutrients and thus the maintenance of homeostasis and, in a word, life.
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Gary Taubes (Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease)
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Will I go into starvation mode? The short answer is an emphatic “no.” This is one of the great dieting myths—the fear that if you cut your calories for even a day, then your metabolic rate will slow right down as your body tries to conserve its fat stores. This starvation mode myth seems to be based on the Minnesota starvation experiment, a study carried out during World War II. In this experiment, young volunteers lived on extremely low calorie diets for up to six months.
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Michael Mosley (The Fast Diet: The Simple Secret of Intermittent Fasting: Lose Weight, Stay Healthy, Live Longer)
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given sufficient time, high-fructose diets can induce high insulin levels, high blood sugar, and insulin resistance, even though in the short term fructose has little effect on either blood sugar or insulin and so a very low glycemic index. It has also been known since the 1960s that fructose elevates blood pressure more than an equivalent amount of glucose does, a phenomenon called fructose-induced hypertension. Because
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Gary Taubes (Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease)
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It’s a puzzle why we binge on the sweetest and greasiest food we can find, until we consider the eating habits of our forager forebears. In the savannahs and forests they inhabited, high-calorie sweets were extremely rare and food in general was in short supply. A typical forager 30,000 years ago had access to only one type of sweet food – ripe fruit. If a Stone Age woman came across a tree groaning with figs, the most sensible thing to do was to eat as many of them as she could on the spot, before the local baboon band picked the tree bare. The instinct to gorge on high-calorie food was hard-wired into our genes. Today we may be living in high-rise apartments with over-stuffed refrigerators, but our DNA still thinks we are in the savannah. That’s what makes some of us spoon down an entire tub of Ben & Jerry’s when we find one in the freezer and wash it down with a jumbo Coke. This
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Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
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The short answer is that building muscle requires a lot of energy. Based on doing math ourselves and with clients, we estimate that synthesizing one pound of lean muscle burns around 5,000 calories. Yes, the energy cost of building a pound of lean tissue is that high. Next, muscle increases your BMR, which means you’re burning more calories while you watch Netflix. A pound of lean muscle burns on average three times more than a pound of fat. A pound of lean muscle burns around six calories a day, whereas a pound of fat burns around two. A metabolic study found that after nine months of resistance training, resting energy expenditure (REE) went up 5 percent. So, if you add 20 pounds of lean muscle, you’re going to burn an extra 120 to 130 calories a day. This adds up over time.
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Matt Gallant (The Ultimate Nutrition Bible: Easily Create the Perfect Diet that Fits Your Lifestyle, Goals, and Genetics)
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The generic term chemists use for all these toxins is lipid oxidation products, or LOPs for short. Think of LOPs as lopped off pieces of PUFA.
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Cate Shanahan (Dark Calories: How Vegetable Oils Destroy Our Health and How We Can Get It Back)
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I just burned 2000 calories. Serves me right for having a nap while the brownies were cooking in the oven.
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Graham Cann (1001 One-Liners and Short Jokes: The Ultimate Collection of the Funniest, Laugh-Out-Loud Rib-Ticklers (1001 Jokes and Puns))
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In short, the invention of agriculture caused the human food supply to increase in quantity and deteriorate in quality, but food industrialization multiplied this effect. Over the las hundred years, people have developed many technologies to produce orders of magnitude more food that is usually nutrient poor but calorie rich. Since the Industrial Revolution began about twelve generations ago, these changes have enabled us to feed more than an order of magnitude more people and to feed them more. Although approximately 800 million people today still face shortages of food, more than 1.6 billion people are overweight or obese.
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Daniel E. Lieberman (The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease)
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Once You’re in Keto, How Can You Keep It Going Without Fasting? The short answer is: Eat a boatload of fat (~1.5 to 2.5 g per kilogram of body weight), next-to-no carbs, and moderate protein (1 to 1.5 g per kilogram of body weight) each day. We’ll look at Dom’s typical meals and day in a minute, but a few critical notes first: High protein and low fat doesn’t work. Your liver will convert excess amino acids into glucose and shut down ketogenesis. Fat as 70 to 85% of calories is required. This doesn’t mean you always have to eat rib eye steaks. A chicken breast by itself will kick you out of ketosis, but a chicken breast cut up into a green leafy salad with a lot of olive oil, feta cheese, and some Bulletproof Coffee (for example) can keep you in ketosis. One of the challenges of keto is the amount of fat one needs to consume to maintain it. Roughly 70 to 80% of your total calories need to come from fat. Rather than trying to incorporate fat bombs into all meals (one does get tired of fatty steak, eggs, and cheese over and over again), Dom will both drink fat between meals (e.g., coconut milk—not water—in coffee) and add in supplemental “ice cream,” detailed on page 29. Dom noticed that dairy can cause lipid profile issues (e.g., can spike LDL) and has started to minimize things like cream and cheese. I experienced the same. It’s easy to eat a disgusting amount of cheese to stay in keto. Consider coconut milk (Aroy-D Pure Coconut Milk) instead. Dom doesn’t worry about elevated LDL as long as other blood markers aren’t out of whack (high CRP, low HDL, etc.). From Dom: “The thing that I focus on most is triglycerides. If your triglycerides are elevated, that means your body is just not adapting to the ketogenic diet. Some people’s triglycerides are elevated even when their calories are restricted. That’s a sign that the ketogenic diet is not for you. . . . It’s not a one-size-fits-all diet.
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Timothy Ferriss (Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers)
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As I will discuss shortly, the body’s resting metabolic rate (RMR) is a key player in our ability to stay lean, and it is affected to a large degree by our body composition with muscle being our greatest calorie burning ally. With that said, it’s important to place the emphasis on a positive change in body composition and not just weight loss. Losing muscle weight is bad and counterproductive. Using the calories in vs. calories out theory alone, can at best give you a temporary fix. It’s unrealistic and unhealthy to go through life following a diet that causes you to feel tired and hungry while your hormones run amuck.
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Mark Lauren (You Are Your Own Gym: The Bible of Bodyweight Exercises)
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Heat escapes from small planets more easily than from large planets, because small planets have a greater ratio of surface area (through which heat escapes) to volume (which stores heat and generates it by radioactive decay). A small planet would require a much greater amount of radioactive heat generation, per kilogram of rock, to maintain vigorous lava-producing volcanism. This is basically for the same reason that a mouse needs to consume many more calories per gram of body weight than a human. A typical mouse, weighing 40 grams, consumes 10 kilocalories (sometimes called simply ‘calories’ in everyday usage) per day. Scaled up to the mass of a human, that would amount to 25,000 kilocalories a day—equivalent to 7kg of dry spaghetti.
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Raymond T. Pierrehumbert (Planetary Systems: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
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Your kettlebell exercises strengthen your bones and fight osteoporosis. • Kettlebell swings are great for the back and can help overcome back pain and immobility. • Kettlebell swings are the fastest exercise. You can go from sitting to full exertion in seconds and be all done in little over a minute. • With your daily workouts, you will be fierce. And why not? You are slimmer, harder, taller, smarter, fitter, and your booty be bad! The twelve minutes are not done at once. As a matter of fact, eight sessions, each 90 seconds long may be optimal for exertion and spacing for maximizing metabolic risk protection. Eight sessions has you exercising frequently throughout the day, in quick, easy sessions. Well, quick at least. Your twelve minutes is roughly the cardiovascular equivalent of running an eight minute mile pace for a mile and a half in 12 minutes. A moderate daily aerobic workout is a key component of nearly any health regimen. It is very good for your heart health to raise your heart rate and respiration with cardiovascular exercise on a daily basis. In many ways, the first minute and a half of running a long distance is the most difficult part of a run, as the body shifts from rest to intense exercise. In this same way, the 90 second kettlebell swings are quite intense, as your body adjusts from no-load to heavy exertion immediately. Kettlebell swings represent a type of interval training, a short burst of intense exercise. Twelve minutes a day of kettlebell swings build muscle. Muscles, generally, are a good thing, helping us be athletic, protecting us from injury, burning lots of calories and basically looking good. Twelve minutes per day is a very short time to build muscle, compared say, to a construction worker doing demanding physical labor all day. The construction worker will be well muscled, but not necessarily better than yourself, because you are harnessing the weight training effect with your kettlebell swings. You can build significant muscle size and strength with just these few minutes each day, while not having to spend the entire day in hard labor.
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Don Fitch (Get Fit, Get Fierce with Kettlebell Swings: Just 12 Minutes a Day to Lose Weight, Prevent Sitting Disease, Hone Your Body and Tone Your Booty!)
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Glucose and fructose are two kinds of sugars that contain equal amounts of calories (400 calories per 100 grams). Both are unhealthy in large amounts, but fructose even more so than glucose. Glucose can be processed by all organs in the body, whereas fructose is processed mainly in the liver. Consequently, fructose causes an even greater risk of fat accumulation in the liver, resulting in a potbelly, more fats in the blood, and insulin resistance. In addition, fructose creates cross-links with proteins much faster than glucose does. Fructose also sends fewer saturation hormones to the brain than does glucose, making you eat more of it and gain more weight. In short, although all these substances contain equal amounts of calories, they have completely different effects on your metabolism and your health, certainly in the long term.
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Kris Verburgh (The Longevity Code: Slow Down the Aging Process and Live Well for Longer: Secrets from the Leading Edge of Science)
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Debris of beer cans, Subway wrappers, and chip bags attested to the fact that Jules, by dint of youth, good genes, and an active lifestyle, could consume as many calories as he pleased with zero impact on the eminently fuckable physique on display through his tie-dyed tank top and his voluminous cargo shorts.
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Neal Stephenson (Termination Shock)
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SUCCESSFUL MUSCLE BUILDING: 7 TIPS FOR MORE MUSCLE MASS
How does successful muscle building work? Today I have 7 tips for more muscle mass for you. In addition to the training itself, there are many other factors that determine success in building muscle. The more of the following points you take into account, the faster and more successfully you will be able to build muscle.
THE RIGHT TRAINING PLAN
No training plan is suitable for everyone. Find or create a training plan that matches your level and goals. For beginners, I recommend a full-body plan . The whole body is trained every time in 2-3 units per week. If you have been training longer and have some experience, I would recommend a 2 or 3 split. Every muscle group can be trained up to 2 times a week. I would fundamentally advise against a 4 or 5 split, but of course, there are also professionals for whom such a plan can make sense.
CONTINUALLY GROW STRONGER
The increase in strength is a very good indicator of successful muscle building. Try to train so that you slowly but surely get stronger. That doesn't mean that you have to move heavy weights every time you exercise. You can also improve your technique or do one more repetition here and there. It is only important that you make progress.
PROPER NUTRITION
You could easily write your own contribution to the muscle building diet. The most important thing is that you consume enough calories. Your body needs a slight excess of calories, i.e. more calories than it consumes. This is the only way you can gain weight and therefore also muscle mass.
It is also important that you consume enough protein: approx. 2g protein per kilo of body weight. For example, if you weigh 80 KG, you should eat around 160g of protein a day. The remaining calories can then be consumed divided into fats and carbohydrates. The higher the quality of the food, the more strength you will have in training.
ADEQUATE SLEEP FOR REGENERATION
Your muscles grow in the resting phases and not during training. It is all the more important for the body that it receives sufficient regeneration and sleep.
JUST FOCUS ON YOURSELF
Everyone does it every now and then and compares himself with the other members in the gym. Especially when it comes to strength and muscle mass, it quickly becomes a competition who is stronger or wider.
However, this way of thinking is dangerous because it leads you to overexert yourself. In these situations in particular, high spirits or even a little inattentiveness can quickly lead to an injury. Apart from injuries, you are not doing yourself a favor, because everyone is different and has different requirements. Do not try to compare yourself with other members, but concentrate on yourself and try to become better than before.
DRINK ENOUGH
Your body needs enough fluid and, above all, water to function properly. It is best to drink 1 liter per 20kg bodyweight . So if you weigh 80kg, you should drink about 4 liters a day. In addition to water, you can always drink unsweetened tea. This has a pleasant taste and you can drink it both warm and cold. Thus, your body is ideally supplied with liquid, which supports many important processes in your body.
TAKE THE CREATINE SUPPLEMENT
Creatine (or creatine written) can give you additional strength and volume in your muscles. Many studies have proven the effective effects of creatine. When you take creatine, the cellular energy level of your muscles improves, which increases your short-term performance, so you can train harder, increase your maximum strength and reduce cell damage during long endurance sessions. I recommend taking 5g a day. Either in a shake before or after training or immediately after getting up with a large glass of water.
If you take these tips to heart, successful muscle building is almost guaranteed
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Kate
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Whether you choose the 500-calorie modified fast day or the 16- to 42-hour full fast, on the up days, you'll eat without restriction. While that doesn't mean that you should force-feed yourself or purposefully overeat just because you "can," you do want to be careful that you are not "dieting" or having a short eating window on any day following a down day. This is really important, so I will say it again: On any up day that is directly following a down day, do not purposefully restrict what you are eating or eat within a short eating window.
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Gin Stephens (Fast, Feast, Repeat: The Comprehensive Guide to Delay, Don't Deny® Intermittent Fasting)
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let’s say that you choose to go on a strict, low-calorie diet for two weeks in the hopes of losing fat and looking more trim and toned as a consequence. That’s precisely what researchers did to a group of overweight men and women who stayed in a medical center for an entire fortnight. However, one group of individuals were given just five and a half hours’ time in bed, while the other group were offered eight and a half hours’ time in bed. Although weight loss occurred under both conditions, the type of weight loss came from very different sources. When given just five and a half hours of sleep opportunity, more than 70 percent of the pounds lost came from lean body mass—muscle, not fat. Switch to the group offered eight and a half hours’ time in bed each night and a far more desirable outcome was observed, with well over 50 percent of weight loss coming from fat while preserving muscle. When you are not getting enough sleep, the body becomes especially stingy about giving up fat. Instead, muscle mass is depleted while fat is retained. Lean and toned is unlikely to be the outcome of dieting when you are cutting sleep short. The latter is counterproductive of the former.
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Matthew Walker (Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams)
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researchers recognized that nearly any diet can cause weight loss at least short term, but the ends don’t always justify the means. Their challenge was to design a “nutritionally sound” diet “conducive to a lifelong pattern of healthful eating.”3074 To that end, the diet encourages people to eat more high-bulk, calorie-dilute foods (vegetables, fruits, whole grains, and beans) and fewer energy-dense foods (meats, cheeses, sugars, and fats).
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Michael Greger (How Not to Diet)
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The poor like subsidized grains, but as we discussed earlier, giving them more does little to persuade them to eat better, especially since the main problem is not calories, but other nutrients. It also is probably not enough just to provide the poor with more money, and even rising incomes will probably not lead to better nutrition in the short run. As we saw in India, the poor do not eat any more or any better when their income goes up; there are too many other pressures and desires competing with food.
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Abhijit V. Banerjee (Poor Economics: Rethinking Poverty & the Ways to End it)
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The irony of this is that it actually takes more intellect, time, and thought to communicate a message in as few words or short a time as possible, but in doing so, in you spending the brain calories on your consumers behalf, you make your content more graspable, absorbable, attainable, and memorable than the competition, setting you at a distinguished advantage.
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Jason Heiber (Instagram Stories: The Secret ATM in Your Pocket - Financial Freedom Between Your Thumbs)
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calories and no fat. 1 ounce dried wild mushrooms 1 teaspoon extra-virgin olive oil ½ cup minced onion 1 cup diced button mushrooms 1 teaspoon fresh thyme 1 cup short-grain white rice 2 cups low-sodium chicken or vegetable broth ⅛ teaspoon sea salt Freshly ground black pepper 2 tablespoons grated Parmesan cheese 2 tablespoons minced fresh parsley, for garnish ½ lemon, cut into wedges, for garnish 1. Soak the dried mushrooms in 1 cup of very hot water while you prepare the other ingredients. 2. While the mushrooms are soaking, grease the inside of the slow cooker with the olive oil. Add the onion, button mushrooms, thyme, rice, and broth. Season with the salt and pepper and stir everything to mix well. 3. Remove the soaked mushrooms from the hot water, roughly chop them, and add them to the slow cooker. 4. Cover and cook on low for 6 to 8 hours, until the rice is tender and all the liquid is absorbed. Just before serving, stir in the Parmesan cheese and garnish each serving with the fresh parsley and a lemon wedge.
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Pamela Ellgen (Healthy Slow Cooker Cookbook for Two: 100 "Fix-and-Forget" Recipes for Ready-to-Eat Meals)
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To my surprise, Erik interrupts. “Well put, Bill. You’ve just described ‘technical debt’ that is not being paid down. It comes from taking shortcuts, which may make sense in the short-term. But like financial debt, the compounding interest costs grow over time. If an organization doesn’t pay down its technical debt, every calorie in the organization can be spent just paying interest, in the form of unplanned work.
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Gene Kim (The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win)
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We can change flows quickly if we want, but stocks react more slowly to change. We can eat a piece of chocolate (inflow) and then go for a half-hour jog (outflow) to get rid of the extra calories. But our weight (stock) doesn’t instantly drop or rise. We can plant one hundred trees in a short period, but it will take decades for those trees to grow into a forest. Areas affected by droughts do not immediately see their reservoirs return to their normal water levels, nor are the negative impacts of global warming instantly reversed.
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Albert Rutherford (Learn To Think in Systems: Use System Archetypes to Understand, Manage, and Fix Complex Problems and Make Smarter Decisions (The Systems Thinker Series, #4))
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Mindfulness, neuroplasticity, trauma-informed cognitive behavioral therapy, psychoanalysis, career coaching, Kripalu yoga – the list of “cures” for our lack of resilience and related problems is endless. If you are overweight, alone, miserable at work or crippled by stress or anxiety or depression, there are hordes of gurus and experts chasing you with books and quick fixes. With their advice, guidance, motivation or inspiration, you can fix your problems. But make no mistake: They are always your problems. You alone are responsible for them. It follows that failing to fix your problems will always be your failure, your lack of will, motivation or strength. Galen, the second-century physician who ministered to Roman emperors, believed his medical treatments were effective. “All who drink of this treatment recover in a short time,” he wrote, “except those whom it does not help, who all die. It is obvious, therefore, that it fails only in incurable cases.” This is the way of the billion-dollar self-help industry: You are to blame when the guru’s advice does not produce the expected outcome, and by now, we are all familiar enough with self-help to know that expected outcomes are elusive. […] Personal explanations for success actually set us up for failure. TED Talks and talk shows full of advice on what to eat, what to think and how to live seldom work. Self-help fixes are like empty calories: The effects are fleeting and often detrimental in the long term. Worse, they promote victim blaming. The notion that your resilience is your problem alone is ideology, not science. We have been giving people the wrong message. Resilience is not a DIY endeavor. Self-help fails because the stresses that put our lives in jeopardy in the first place remain in the world around us even after we’ve taken the “cures.” The fact is that people who can find the resources they require for success in their environments are far more likely to succeed than individuals with positive thoughts and the latest power poses. […] The science of resilience is clear: The social, political and natural environments in which we live are far more important to our health, fitness, finances and time management than our individual thoughts, feelings or behaviors.
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Michael Ungar
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People that survive shark attacks were never attacked. Sharks can tell with a single bite—a short fin mako’s jaws can exert four ton of pressure per square inch—whether they’ll burn more calories digesting the kill than they’ll gain from it. Millions of years of evolution tell them whether to eat you or not.
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Anonymous
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And, finally, Atkins wrote, “The main reason low-calorie diets fail in the long run is because you go hungry on them…. And while you may tolerate hunger for a short time, you can’t tolerate hunger all your life.
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Gary Taubes (Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease)
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In a study of teen soccer players, many athletes were under-fueled (they ate fewer calories than needed) and short on carbohydrates and other nutrients like folate, calcium, and vitamin D; some even showed signs of deficiencies in iron and vitamin D.2
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Jill Castle (Eat Like a Champion: Performance Nutrition for Your Young Athlete)