The redesign is mostly finished. There are still a few things I want to fix, but that will have to wait for now. The good news is the site looks awesome on mobile and the new search engine is much better. It not only searches posts, but your comments as well. Results are not returned in date order, but weighed for relevancy. If you have a WordPress site, look into Relevanssi. Their free version is excellent.

When you do a blog redesign, you stumble upon older posts. Some that are still good and others that aren’t. As tempted as I am to remove some of the stinkers, I don’t. A blog is place where I can throw up an idea that was on my mind that day. It doesn’t mean that I’ll keep that opinion. I often don’t.

Critical MAS logo from 1997.

The Critical MAS blog now has 1,898 posts and 7,825 comments. It has 487,633 words (not counting this post). Finding the good posts can be difficult for even me. While I am away, I’ll be thinking about better ways to highlight the better posts. The BEST OF section above is OK, but not ideal. Until then, here are 10 random posts I still like.

1. Tales From the Glitter Gym – The Commando
2. The Problem With Boot Camp Training
3. Space Needle For $1
4. How To Get Lower Rent
5. Rejecting Nutrition
6. True Job Insurance Means Shorting Your Own Company
7. Rejecting the Naked Warrior
8. How Tim Ferriss REALLY Gained 34 Pounds of Muscle in 28 Days
9. Blinded By Successful Outcomes
10. Kimchi 2.0

In 2010, Escape the Herd alerted me to the story of a professor that proved that fat loss was all about calories and not about nutritional quality. I still read people that cite this study as proof that it is all about the calories and if you just cut the calories you’d lose the fat. For those unfamiliar with the diet, read Twinkie diet helps nutrition professor lose 27 pounds:

His premise: That in weight loss, pure calorie counting is what matters most — not the nutritional value of the food.
The premise held up: On his “convenience store diet,” he shed 27 pounds in two months.

In my opinion his study proved very little.

The only thing this study showed is that in the short term a single healthy male of 41 years old with University resources can eat a mostly poor diet and lose fat. How does this further our knowledge on obesity? It doesn’t. There are many examples of prisoners of war or concentration camps where those detained consumed nutrient poor and calorie restrictive diets. And they lost weight.

When we discuss fat loss, we should be striving for long term and sustainable. I suspect that one of the reasons people over eat is because they are under nourished. Putting out press releases saying you can lose fat eating Twinkies isn’t helping those that struggle with dieting that may have real health issues in addition to being overweight.

Photo by Joel Kraut. 

Hostess vs High Velocity Super Warrior

Since so many people seemed hellbent on showing that the only thing that matters is calories, I’d like to propose a study. My study would add two additional metrics: long-term success and perceived hunger. Take 100 people with at least 50 pounds to lose over the age of 30 evenly divided by sex.

• Group A: They would follow the caloric restrictive Twinkie diet for 2 months.
• Group B: They would get 70% of their calories from the foods listed on the post High Velocity Super Warrior Foods.

If a calorie is a calorie, they should lose weight at equal amounts. Fair enough, but that part isn’t interesting. I want to see what happens when they resume normal eating. Who keeps the weight off better and feels the least hunger? The Twinkie group or the Super Warriors? I strongly suspect it won’t be the Hostess group. I believe the more nourished group will have greater long term success.

Explore your DNA with your family. Now 20% off on all additional kits.

For those that are interested in learning more about my experiences with 23andMe, see these two posts.

23andMe Results
Genetic Testing for the Health Conscious Coffee Drinker

Later this year I will be doing a post on the Ancestral side of the 23andMe report.

Disclosure: I am an affiliate of 23andMe and get sweet referral money from those that sign up after following a link from this site.  

1. New theme. The current theme I am using hasn’t been updated in a long time and unsupported themes can be problematic.
2. Better typography. Although I like the fonts on this site better than 95% of all sites, I still think they can be more readable.
3. Slightly wider content area. I’d like to start adding 640 pixel width images to posts without having them cramp up.
4. Mobile. I had an OK mobile theme for a long time, then I tested a mobile app solution that ended up not working for me. When I tried to roll back to the older mobile theme, it wouldn’t work. The new theme will be Responsive, meaning one design to fit itself to a wide range of devices from monitors to tablets to phones.
5. Better search engine. I’ll be deploying a site search engine that will not only search posts, it will also search user comments. 99% of blogs don’t have this capability. I’ll also be able to weigh content, so better posts appear higher than newer posts in the search results.
6. A little bit faster. This site usually moves pretty fast, but I’ll explore some ideas on increasing performance.

Any other ideas? What would you like to see improved on the next version of Critical MAS?

I’m going to speak for myself, but I pretty sure I’m not alone. The reason I started lifting weights was to gain muscle. I wanted to be bigger. I did not like having scrawny arms and legs. I wanted muscle. Back then the scrawny hipster look didn’t exist. Back then being a Stick Boy sucked.

Like many other lanky males, I joined a gym to get muscle and size. The first 10 pounds of muscle came effortlessly. Using the machines was a great introduction to strength training. But then like other ectomorphs I got impatient and made the classic false assumption made by so many.

If the big guys in the gym are lifting free weights and not using machines, then free weights must be better for size. And the guys that lift the most weight tend to be the biggest, therefore to get bigger I needed to lift heavier free weights.

I could spent paragraphs going through all the false assumptions, but instead I want to focus on how the goal of “getting bigger” got replaced with “getting stronger” and that “getting stronger” became defined as lifting more pounds using the classic bodybuilding exercises of barbell squat, bench press and the dead lift.

Now I have come to believe that the quest to get stronger using classic definitions of strength is a major factor in limiting the muscular potential of ectomorphs. But I am getting ahead of myself.

Come for the Muscle, Stay For “the Strength”

I fell for it. At a certain point I found gaining muscle difficult. I was doing squats, dead lifts and benching. I read everything. Pavel, Bill Pearl, T-Nation and hundreds if not thousands of articles and posts on getting stronger. I assumed that I needed to get a lot stronger to get bigger and getting stronger meant lifting heavier weights and training more frequently.

There is nothing wrong with getting stronger, but that wasn’t the original goal. Which brings us to the question – what is strength? I found this definition of muscular strength by Paige Waehner on About.com:

Strength refers to a muscle’s ability to generate force against physical objects. In the fitness world, this typically refers to how much weight you can lift for different strength training exercises.

If strength is measured in how much weight we can lift, then how can we lift more weight? By making the movement as EASY as possible. The way you do that is by executing a perfect form where the weight moves quickly through the repetition. You want the amount of time the weight spends on the targeted muscles minimized. If the weight spends too much time on the targeted muscles, fatigue will set in and the repetition will be aborted.

When you watch a weight class power lifter, there is a fluidity in the movement. Almost like a dance. Certainly they are strong, but the grace of the movement is equally as impressive. They are using momentum to get their numbers up. In the interview with High Intensity Trainer Luke Carlson on Conditioning Research, Luke said:

If the weight actually moves fast during strength training, momentum is introduced and muscle tension is reduced (as the musculature is essentially unloaded); this is the exact opposite of the goal of strength training and the requirement for muscle fiber recruitment.

In one sentence, he said exactly why you shouldn’t be chasing the classic definition of strength if your goal is building muscle. We need to recruit more muscle fibers and we need to do it safely. That means slowing down the movement and using machines. It means using less weight and not unloading the tension on the muscle with each repetition. In other words, Reps, Sets and the Weight Aren’t that Important.

The Original Goal: Just Build Muscle

You don’t need to bench or squat to build muscle. That fact that most guys use those exercises to do so, doesn’t mean it is necessary. Just fatigue the muscle in a safe manner using machines or static holds like those described in the e-book Hillfit. Then eat to a caloric surplus. I like foods with saturated fat, protein, sugars and cholesterol, such as dairy kefir or ice cream. Then rest. Rest a lot. Stop chasing strength and start chasing muscle.

The 2012 posts explains why I don’t like fish oil, multi-vitamins or whey protein powder. Those views have not changed.

Supplements I Lost Faith in Last Year

5-HTP – I was enamored with the brain supplements last year, especially L-Tyrosine. But I learned from Dr. Dan Kalish why L-Tyrosine needed to be balanced out with 5-HTP. See the post Safe Uses of 5-HTP and L-Tyrosine. The problem is that even at the lowest dose, my sleep quality was worse with 5-HTP. Not at first, but I have enough data to confirm that fact now. Without 5-HTP, I cut way back on L-Tyrosine and only use it on days when my caffeine levels are low and my mood is poor.

I also became concerned that using 5-HTP might not be safe and using it to boost serotonin might be unwise. Here are some links to articles that question the conventional understanding of serotonin.

• The Sadder Side of Serotonin by Matt Stone
• Serotonin: The Misery Hormone by Danny Roddy
• Serotonin, depression, and aggression: The problem of brain energy by Dr. Ray Peat

Melatonin – I almost never take melatonin, because I fall asleep effortlessly 99% of the time. However, I have kept melatonin on hand for those rare occasions when I can’t get to sleep. Not anymore. It doesn’t help me fall asleep faster and when I do wake up I feel terrible, If that isn’t enough of a reason not to take it, I learned another yesterday. In the post Thyroid Deficiency & Common Health Problems, Matt Stone and Danny Roddy linked to an audio interview of Ray Peat discussing how melatonin lowers body temperature which can make it more susceptible to infections.

Supplements I am Testing or Considering Testing

Pantothenic Acid (Vitamin B5) – I started taking B5 after Pauline tipped me off that it could help with adrenals. Too soon to tell if it is helping, but it is cheap insurance.

Rhodiola (Rhodiola rosea) – I was taking this as a tea during my caffeine detox period, but I’ve found making the tea too inconvenient, so I am considering using the supplement version. Rhodiola is supposed to help to with stress and muscle recovery.

MSM – Glenn tipped me off to this supplement for helping with tight shoulders. At a low dose I felt nothing, but a high dose I think it is working. Since going from 1 capsule a day to 6-8 capsules, my shoulders are far less tight. At the time I upped the dose, I didn’t try anything else new, so I’m going to keep using this supplement, because it appears to be working.

Creatine Monohydrate – I stopped taking creatine almost immediately after last year’s post, because I wanted to isolate all weight gains to the ice cream experiment. Then I forgot all about it until last night when I listened to SportsCoachRadio’s podcast show Creatine: All About The Go-To Sports Nutrition Supplement. Now I understand the supplement more and will resume taking it.

Calcium-D-Glucarate – Dave Asprey recently talked about this supplement in a podcast. Then I found his post 4 Reasons Bulletproof (and Paleo) People Should Take Calcium-D-Glucarate. I’ve never taken a calcium supplement, because I figured I was getting plenty with my higher than average dairy intake. However, the problem with dairy is it can be high in estrogen  What is interesting about this article is that this form of calcium is supposedly removes excess estrogen from the body. To what degree it does it better than other forms of calcium, I am not sure. Because it is cheap, I am considering taking it.

Natrol Calcium D-glucarate 500 mg Tablets, 60-Count (Amazon USA)

Supplements I Still Take

Mostly the same from the 2012 Edition, which included magnesium, copper, selenium and Vitamin D3. I also still consume food supplements of gelatin powder and kelp tablets.

I still think whey protein is a rip-off. You are better off eating ice cream or dairy kefir.

How about you? Any new supplements you like? Any you lost faith in?

#1 Vertical Mouse

If you work on a desktop computer and use a traditional mouse, this product may very well eliminate pains in your mouse arm and shoulder. It did for me. For years I got pain in my shoulder, upper and lower arm after spending hours on the computer. I’d take Advil or Aleve and sometimes go as far as icing. My right shoulder was almost always out of alignment and was higher than my left.

The vertical mouse is more like hand shake. Those familiar with some of the principles of High Intensity Training might recognize this is what is known as natural position. The palm of the hand wants to turn inward towards the body. It doesn’t want to be torqued downwards for extended periods. This causes the elbow to flare out. Hours of doing this day in an day out can cause pain. When we hold the vertical mouse and our palm faces in towards our body, you’l see the elbow doesn’t flare and the shoulder doesn’t hold tension. Try it for yourself as you read this post and you’ll see what I mean.

It takes a few days to get use to the vertical mouse, so when I first started using it, I’d go back and forth between it and a traditional mouse. I still keep the traditional mouse around for guests. The result is all that pain is 100% gone. Evoluent now also sells a Left-Handed version of the mouse.

Evoluent VM4 Vertical Mouse Right Handed – The Patented Shape Supports Your Hand (Amazon USA)

#2 Eliminating Wheat

Lately there has been a backlash against the backlash against wheat. Not from me though. Although I am not certain eliminating wheat was the reason I lost 20 pounds – it probably helped – I do know I feel way better without it in my diet. My skin is much better and it did cause headaches for me.

Part of the gluten ain’t so bad movement comes from attacks on Dr. William Davis and his book Wheat Belly. The PubMed Warriors lit into him for some of the details in his book. My response to the attacks on Dr. Davis is that he has worked with hundreds if not thousands of patients. He has first hand seen the benefits of ditching the wheat. Whether we understand all the mechanisms fully or not can’t negate the successes of his patients. And it isn’t just Dr. Davis. Robb Wolf, Chris Kresser and Paul Jamient all are witnesses to how much health can improve when wheat is removed from the diet. Even the Peat-a-tarians are anti-wheat.

To me going a month without wheat and reintroducing it is a super low commitment to testing something a large number of people are having problems with. There are some disingenuous bloggers that love their cakes and cookies that are saying gluten is fine. Behind most of those bloggers, I have found that have a strong bias against low carb diets. When did pro-carb become pro-gluten? Not for me. I love my carbs, but I loathe wheat.

#3 The Book: 3 Minutes To a Pain Free Life

For twenty years I have been doing some form of mobility or alignment exercises. I start off with dedication, but in the end I always quit. The idea of spending 20 or 40 minutes every day or even a few times a week becomes cumbersome. In 2011, I received a comment telling me about the book 3 Minutes to a Pain Free Life. As much as love the alignment work of Peter Egoscue and the mobility exercises from Eric Cressey, the 3 Minutes book is the bomb. This is the protocol that I have stuck to more than anything else. And it works. Only 3 minutes a day has corrected the rounding in mid-back and I feel much better.

My full review for 3 Minutes to a Pain Free Life.

3 Minutes to a Pain-Free Life: The Groundbreaking Program for Total Body Pain Prevention and Rapid Relief by Joseph Weisberg

Wrap Up

Those are the first 3 ideas. The mouse costs about $90 and the 3 Minutes book is $12. Going without gluten is free and you will likely save money as bread, pizzas and pasta cost a lot more than rice and potatoes.

When I read the accounts of people that had poor experiences on a Paleo diet, I almost always see that they followed a strict, sometimes extreme, interpretation of the diet. Then after a honeymoon period, when their health gains started to reverse, they increase their commitment to what had already started failing for them. In the post Am I Paleo?, I mentioned that I never experienced any negative health issues from a Paleo diet and that I would explain why.

The reason why I’ve been fine with Paleo, low carb, ketosis, cold weather exposure, intermittent fasting or even massive amount of ice cream is that I approach nutrition from the mindset of an investor. Nutritional gurus love to wrap themselves in their PubMed blankets and dish out narratives that they believe work for everyone, but a simple observation shows that isn’t working. The fact that some succeed on any plan is not proof that it works for everyone. There are are too many failures.

How does one succeed in nutrition when nobody seems to agree on anything? How can one get the benefits that arrive in the early stages of a diet without staying too long and compromising their health? What has worked well for me is thinking about nutrition like an investor thinks about investment opportunities.

Undervalued, Overvalued

When you are investing the goal is to put your money into something undervalued and then get out before it becomes overvalued. In other words, buy low and sell high. The more undervalued the investment, the less risk one takes. If we think about this nutritionally, we benefit most from the nutrients and foods that we are deficient in. A fast food junkie will likely benefit from a vegetarian diet and a vegetarian will likely benefit from a Paleo diet.

For a while.

I still recall the first time I had beef liver a few years ago. Although I’ve never had anabolic steroids, I imagine what I felt was similar. I had this surge of strength and felt amazing. However, by the 10th time I had liver it was no different than an apple.

As an investment gets close to or hits its true value, the less return we can expect to receive. This leads us to our next investment idea.

Lock In Your Gains and Re-balance Your Portfolio

Remember in investing as a security gets closer to true value, the risks increase. The reason for this is it is no longer undervalued. The gains you got early on when the asset was undervalued are now gone. This is the time to re-balance your portfolio. A fast food junkie that switched to a vegetarian diet might start adding some seafood or meat into the diet a few meals a week. A low carb Paleo person might start adding white rice and fermented dairy. In each case, you are diversifying your nutritional portfolio.

But what if your new portfolio of food isn’t working as well? That brings us to our next investing idea.

Stop Loss Nutrition

A stop loss order is an investment term. The definition from Investopedia:

An order placed with a broker to sell a security when it reaches a certain price. A stop-loss order is designed to limit an investor’s loss on a security position.

I’ll provide a simple explanation of how a stop loss order works. At the time of this post Apple (AAPL) is $430 a share. Let us say you did your research and you believe the stock will go up $100, so you buy a share. However, you accept the possibility you might be wrong and the stock could drop by $100 a share. But you don’t want to lose $100, so you set a stop loss order for $400. If the stock drops to $400, it automatically triggers a sale. You’ve limited your losses to $30.

Why not apply the same principles to nutrition? Define the point at which you will abandon or alter your new strategy. I think this would prevent many people from following ever stricter versions of diets that have stopped working for them.

Hedging and the Fructose vs. Glucose Debate

Good investors will hedge their portfolio. They might have a primary thesis on what they think might happen in the market, but in the event they are wrong they also have secondary thesis. They invest in both, so their losses are limited in the event their primary thesis is wrong.

In nutrition, there is a huge debate between which form of carbohydrate is superior. Paul Jamient believes glucose is better. Andrew Kim sides with fructose. Both are extremely smart and they disagree with each other. What is the average person to do?

There are 4 possible ways to “invest” in this debate:

1. Side with Paul Jaminet. Consume primarily safe starches and limit fruit and sugar carbs.
2. Side with Andrew Kim. Favor fruits and limit starches.
3. Assume both are wrong (the very low carb thesis) and greatly limit all carbs.
4. Hedge. Consume both safe starches and fruit evenly.

As you probably guessed, I’m “invested” in #4. Now if I’m wrong, I’m likely not “too wrong”. I consider #3 to be a short-term strategy. One that I’ve already pursued and benefited from following.

Last Words

I left the low carb interpretation of Paleo a year before the safe starch debate even began. I had leaned out and I wanted to lock in my gains. If I could add back carbs and stay healthy and lean, then my portfolio was more diversified, which I view as less risky. And that is exactly what happened. Going from Paleo to a more WAPF diet was a no-brainer to me. The investor in me saw it as a very low risk way to greatly expand my nutritional portfolio.

The problem with most nutritional gurus is they believe nutrition is settled science and that their interpretation is correct. But simple observation shows that can’t be true. Not only is there too much disagreement, but even what they are disagreeing about is always changing. I don’t expect that trend to end. Nor does it need to. In the absence of information, I can still make good decisions when I approach nutrition using an investor’s mindset.

So am I genetic gold or genetic junk? The fact you are seeing this post should tell you that it is mostly gold. Had something bad surfaced on the report, I would have kept that secret.

Risk Factors

From the screenshot below, I learned that I have decreased risk for several of the most pressing health conditions. Those include heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer’s and MS.

Note: I reduced the image size so it would fit better on this post. The font size is larger and more readable online. 

In the Typical Risk section, a few different forms of cancer, obesity and Parkinson’s show up.

I only had a few items that showed up as Elevated Risk. One was kidney disease, which is something I had never heard of before. Clicking into the report on kidney disease tells me that only 27-33% is attributable to genetics. The rest is environmental and the recommendation is to not smoke, eat healthy and exercise. Done, done and done.

Drug Responses

I was recently listening to my favorite podcast EconTalk and the guest Eric Topal was talking about the future of medicine and the 23andMe tests. If this topic is of interest to you, I highly recommend listening to the full show Topol on the Creative Destruction of Medicine. In the discussion it was pointed how just learning how one responds to so many drugs, including caffeine, makes the test worth it.

Well, if you do a scan of the common variants in a genome, which is really almost becoming not useful–so you can get that now for $99 through 23andMe.com. There aren’t many of those consumer-genomic companies still standing. That’s certainly the main one. It was $400; it’s just come down over time to now $99. That gets you a peek into the genome. It does get, by the way, going back to our discussion earlier about the drug interactions, it gets you something like 25-30 major drug interactions about you. So, just that alone is a bargain in my view.

I learned that I have a reduced response to a drug class called Clopidogrel, which is used to to prevent clotting that could trigger a heart attack or stroke. I also learned something interesting about my reaction to caffeine, which I’m posting about on the INeedCoffee article Genetic Testing for the Health Conscious Coffee Drinker.

Inherited Conditions and Traits

There are entire reports for inherited conditions and traits. The one thing that stood out on my inherited conditions were that I have an Alpha-1 Antitrypsin deficiency, which is a protein that primarily protects the lungs. Their advice is I definitively shouldn’t start smoking, because my lungs would have less protection than someone with two copies of the M (normal) form of the SERPINA1 gene.

I found the Traits section more interesting. From my saliva sample they were able to say that my eyes were likely blue and that I am likely lactose tolerant. True and true. However, the report stated I do not have an alcohol flush reaction, which is false. And in the more good news category, I discovered that I am norovirus resistant. This is the “stomach flu” outbreak that sometimes hit cruise ships.

Muscle Talk

The Muscle Performance report really surprised me. Before I share my data, I want to refer back to a post I did in August 2012 called Is High Intensity Training Best for Ectomorphs? The book Body By Science talks about the alpha-actinin-3 gene and how those trainers that lack that marker could be modest intensity responders. Meaning that high intensity might not be best for them. They tend to be built for endurance. And unless I misread everything, they tend to be ectomorphs.

Since last August, I assumed I was in this camp and have reduced my intensity. Well, maybe it is time to turn back up the intensity, because I have one copy of the alpha-actinin-3 gene! Did not see that one coming.

Family and Friends

There is an entire ancestry component to the 23andMe that I’ve just begun to look at. They have already genetically connected me with 989 3rd to 6th cousins. I’ve learned that I’m 99.5% European – and I thought I was Korean. How much caveman am I?  2.9%.

Highly Recommended

I am so glad I did this test. I’ve only begun to scratch the surface on the massive amount of data on the 23andMe site. Every time I log on, there is usually some new data waiting for me. If you are at all interested in your risk factors for illnesses, drug reactions or how you might respond to caffeine or High Intensity training, get the test. The ancestry side of 23andMe is as extensive as the Health side.

I’ve signed up as an affiliate, which means I get $5 if someone signs up after clicking a link on this site. Doesn’t cost you any more though and maybe I can recover faster from my $1500 car repair bill. If does take about 8 weeks for the data to start showing up, so the sooner you get started the better.

23andMe <– Click here when ready to get $100 test. Thanks!

I’d rather hike in the city. Less driving, more hiking. Plus I can always stop for espresso along the way. Can’t do that in the mountains.

During the winter months I’d walk on average maybe 2 miles a day. Yesterday I did an 8 miler and today a 7 miler with little effort and no soreness. I’ll probably do a 10 miler later this week.

http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=5901042

http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=5902390

How can I ramp up the distance that fast with no aches and pains? High Intensity Training.

Once or twice a week I go to the gym and do a very slow set of leg presses. Sometimes I just load up the weight and perform a static hold. And if I don’t feel like going to the gym, I’ll do the Wall Sit exercise described in the Hillfit book. Unlike the days when I did barbell squats and dead lifts, I’m never injured. My joints and back feel great.

When I lived in San Diego I hiked all the time, yet now hiking is easier, because my legs are much stronger. Too many people think they need fancy shoes or poles or whatever they see being sold at REI. Nope. Double your leg strength and every hike gets twice as easy.

Speaking of Hillfit, version 2.0 has just been released. I have a copy and although I haven’t read it yet, it looks even more impressive than version 1.0. Version 2.0 has 70 more pages of content. If you are looking for an introduction to High Intensity Training, I highly recommend Hillfit. You can get super strong without risking injury and do it all from home – no gym equipment needed.

Click here to visit Hillfit

Disclosure: I received a copy of Hillfit in exchange for feedback on a draft version. I’m also in an affiliate relationship with E-junkie.