Your excess fat eats (some of) your excess food

I have this recurring nightmare. I indulge myself with that delicious but superfluous baguette for lunch -- tomato and thick slices of brie, with perhaps a caramel bar to follow - and slowly and surely I'm going to blow up.

All those years of 5:2 fasting and self-denial put to waste.

But it won't happen - at least, not to infinite weight. The extra fat is real but surely it's self-limiting: after all, it metabolises. That extra fat needs extra calories. A new equilibrium will be born.

The health-police don't want you to know this, but a quick back of the envelope calculation makes it clear.

They say men should consume 2,500 calories per day and women 2,000. Notice that the larger bodies of men already require more calories to maintain themselves. Apparently, the average UK man weighs 84 kg while the average UK woman weighs 70 kg.

And so we get get this rough-and-ready graph.

We're ignoring the differences between bone, muscle and fat plus the fact that women have a third more fat in their bodies than men. If we had it right, the constant would be zero.

But, just roughly, if you eat an extra 360 calories a day (my superfluous lunch) then your equilibrium weight will be pushed up by .. 10 kg.

Oops! A price not worth paying!

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In fact my weight has gone up from its target 67 kg to almost 69 kg since Christmas.

Could I be consuming (36 *2 =) 70 calories a day too much? No, nothing so benign.

Building this extra weight (gaining 1 kg of fat = 7,700 calories) is far more expensive than simply maintaining it (maintaining 1 kg of fat = 36 calories/day).

I think I see what that baguette has been doing .. and why expansion might not stop anytime soon .. .

Diary: exercise today

Weight this morning: 10 stone 10.4 pounds (68.2 kg) - admittedly after a 5:2 fast yesterday.

After five minutes on the exercise bike and some floor exercises (press ups, bicycle crunch, plank) I pioneered a new two mile run from the house, up the Mendips and back. Took 21 minutes and I wasn't pushing it. A good target would be 18 minutes - parts are quite steep.

Finished off with an abbreviated weights programme.

Finally had my hair buzz-cut - thanks Clare! - which in terms of reducing weight I maybe should've had done before I left the house.  😏

Gym: Dec 2012 - November 2016

In December 2012 I wrote about my gym induction. The Wells Blue Sports Centre is just seven minutes walk from home and I had signed up.

The proximate cause was Dr Michael Mosley. In August 2012, after his TV programme introducing the 5:2 diet, I decided to give it a go. By December the fat had rolled off - I lost more than two stone. But healthy thinking is contagious: fed up with being a couch potato, I had decided to join the local gym.

So here we are, four years of gym-bunnying later. Recently it penetrated my consciousness that I'm not getting a whole lot stronger. Blaming my poor use of the resistance machines, I took the weight room induction.

There are big advantages to free weight training. But it's complicated learning the exercises and assessing the right weights, much harder than the choreographed resistance machines. Serious home study was required, so I bought the York Dumbbell set and started working through their recommended suite of routines.

Bench-pressing 20kg: things can only get better!

It's good, and this morning I additionally jogged almost two kilometres up the Mendips and back, so that's seen to my warm-up and cardio needs.

Why do I need the gym?

So there you have it. I walked across to the gym an hour ago and cancelled my direct debit. From the beginning of November, if Clare or myself want to use it, we pay-as-you-go.

'The Diet Myth' - Tim Spector

'The Diet Myth' is full of good, solid advice. The author, Tim Spector, is Professor of Genetic Epidemiology at King’s College, London and a geneticist. If anyone can do solid science without the 'blank slate' agenda, surely it is he.

Here's what The Daily Mail had to say (apologies for the breathless gushing):

"Calorie-controlled diets don’t work. Many of us may have suspected as much for years — but now there’s compelling evidence in a new book by Professor Tim Spector, a leading genetics expert at King’s College London. What’s more, he’s offering a tantalising new theory about what really makes us fat — which could revolutionise our approach to weight loss.

As one of the scientists leading worldwide research into the trillions of bacteria living in our stomachs, Professor Spector believes they hold an amazing power over our health and moods — and that our modern diet may be having a negative effect on them. His specialist area is twins. For more than two decades, he has been scientifically following 11,000 identical twins, examining information on their health, lifestyles and diet habits to discover the role of environmental and genetic factors in disease. And one of his key findings will come as a shock to anyone who puts their faith in calorie-controlled dieting and the idea that the current obesity epidemic is simply down to people taking in more calories, and burning fewer through exercise, than previous generations did.

In fact, suggests Professor Spector, if you put identical twins on high-calorie diets, where they eat an extra 1,000 calories every day, after six weeks they’ll have completely different changes in weight. Some will have gained as much as 13 kg, others as little as 4 kg — all on identical diets. Clearly, calories aren't the only factor. So what’s going on? Professor Spector believes it’s down to the bacteria in our gut. He has found that the type and variety of our gut bugs have an astonishing influence on many aspects of our health.

‘Microbes are not only essential to how we digest food,’ he says.  ‘They also control the calories we absorb and provide vital enzymes and vitamins, as well as keeping our immune system healthy.’

Our gut microbes are also linked to cardiovascular health, risk of diabetes and mental wellbeing. In a book published this week, The Diet Myth: The Real Science Behind What We Eat, Professor Spector argues that, with the right regimen of diet and exercise, we can change our personal mix of gut bacteria to become one that keeps us happy, healthy — and lean. For he also believes bacteria are likely to be responsible for much of our obesity epidemic. The root of the problem, he says, may be our modern diet and its effect on our gut bugs.

Compared with our ancestors, we have only a fraction of the diversity of microbial species living in our guts. Fifteen thousand years ago, man regularly ate around 150 ingredients in a week. Nowadays, most people consume fewer than 20 separate food items, and many — if not most — of these are artificially refined, says Professor Spector.

To test what a modern-day junk food diet does to our gut bacteria, he enlisted the help of his 22-year-old son, Tom. For ten days, Tom, a student, went on a diet exclusively of Chicken McNuggets and Big Macs, washed down with McFlurry ice cream desserts and regular Cokes.  By the sixth day, he reported feeling bloated and sluggish. On the eighth, he’d started to sweat after the meals.

‘Tom found that his [university] assignments took even longer than usual,’ says Professor Spector. ‘Friends remarked that his skin seemed to have a yellow tinge and he looked unwell.’

Hardly surprisingly, by the end of the experiment, Tom had put on 4 lb. But what was telling were the results of the tests on his gut bacteria, which found that just three days in, 40 per cent of the bugs had died. The bacteria that remained in Tom’s gut showed a worrying profile. Levels of health-promoting bugs had plummeted, while dangerous bacteria had thrived. Tom’s levels of firmicutes, for example — which create chemicals that fuel our cells with sugars, fatty acids, proteins and vitamins, enabling the body’s myriad systems to communicate with one other properly — had halved. Meanwhile, he had higher levels of bacteria associated with inflammation, which is linked to cancer and heart disease, and with damage to the immune system.

Professor Spector found that several rare bacteria species flourished on the diet, including one called Lautropia. This, he explains, is ‘usually only noticed in immune-deficient patients’. Tom’s mix of gut bugs was still unhealthy a week later but, thankfully, slowly began to return to normal after he began eating properly again. But what about the weight he’d gained?

Nowadays, we naturally associate junk food diets with weight gain. But is it the food itself that causes the pounds to pile on — or could it be a result of the damage it causes to our diversity of gut bacteria? To find out, Professor Spector, who is head of the Department of Twin Research and Genetic Epidemiology at St Thomas’ Hospital, London, turned to his area of expertise. Professor Spector’s work has revealed a number of significant findings in relation to bacteria. A study of four pairs of twins where one was obese and the other was not found notable differences between their gut microbes — with the leaner twin in each pair ‘having a richer and healthier set, and the fatter twin having a less diverse, inflammatory-looking profile’. Stool samples were then taken from the twins and transplanted into the guts of mice.

‘The results were surprisingly clear-cut,’ says Professor Spector. ‘The mice receiving the fat twins’ stool samples quickly became 16 per cent fatter. ‘This was clear proof that fat-associated microbes are really toxic and can be transmitted like an infection. The toxic microbes are more likely to grow rapidly in our guts and be a problem if other microbes are suppressed or if there is a lack of diversity.’

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"When researchers fed rats artificial sweeteners at the recommended human doses for three months, they found that their levels of bacteria and diversity dropped significantly. And this particularly harmed the health-enhancing microbes, according to a 2008 study in the Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health. Tests on mice by Israeli researchers suggested that artificial sweeteners can alter the balance of gut bacteria, so that the bugs, in turn, release chemicals that, ironically, raise blood sugar levels, increasing the risk of weight gain and diabetes.

But chocolate’s fine... as long as it’s dark

When participants in a study at the University of Reading were given cocoa extracts for four weeks, their levels of beneficial stomach bacteria rose significantly. Meanwhile, levels of potentially harmful bugs and bodily inflammation fell, The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition reported in 2011. It seems microbes enjoy chocolate as much as we do. In the gut, they play a major role turning chemicals from cocoa into substances that lower the level of potentially harmful fat and ‘bad’ LDL cholesterol in our bloodstream. To get the benefits without piling on the pounds, the darker the chocolate, the better. Milk chocolate contains only one-fifth of the cocoa of dark chocolate, so you would have to eat five times as much to get the same bacterial benefits — which would mean a lot more sugar and fat, too."

So a well-written, interesting and insightful book, full of good advice. I have two problems with it. Firstly, Professor Spector has a particular kind of hammer (the gut biome) and therefore everything looks rather like a nail (thus the gut biome is implicated in every kind of food type). This makes the book rather one-sided - I'm not saying he's not right, he has plenty of evidence - but it can't be the whole story.

Secondly, the book isn't really paradigm-busting, it's a long collection of gut-biome-related facts made a little more palatable by telling anecdotes. This just about retains interest, but makes the book hard to summarise. Eat the Mediterranean diet is my best attempt.

In the interests of science I was semi-tempted to enroll in Professor Spector's British Gut Project which would sequence my gut population. But at a cost of around £75 for a relatively opaque report I couldn't summon up the enthusiasm; an anaemic version of 23andMe.

Read the book if someone lends it to you.

The Dieting Mirage

Every day you eat three to five pounds of food - where does it go? Most of it is (or is metabolised to) water which leaves the body as sweat, moist breath or liquid waste. Between half a pound and a pound is excreted as solid waste (eat more fibre!). The remainder is exhaled as yet another metabolic by-product - carbon dioxide. Oh, and maybe some of it adds to your unsightly girdle of fat!

Remember conservation of mass?

Suppose you go on a diet; you reduce your day's food intake by 1,000 Calories (i.e. half rations). Next day you weigh yourself. Triumph! ... you weigh a pound or two less!

So now it's an eating day again. Next day, omigod ... you've gained two pounds!

This is not a story of yo-yo dieting. You're weighing differences in internally-carried food!*

A pound of fat provides around 3,000 Calories. If you reduce your daily intake by 1,000 Calories you will metabolise of the order of one third of a pound of fat to compensate. Honestly, you will not notice this on the scales. If you can maintain a 1,000 Calorie daily deficit for a whole week (a big ask!) you might lose that magic two pounds for real - something noticeable behind the daily ups and downs of eat-process-excrete! Think incremental, marginal gains and stick at it.
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* I don't think we should forget the gut microbiome either. Weighing in at two to three pounds, it seems plausible that this mass of symbiotic bacteria should be quite responsive to levels of nutrition, dying back when the host is dieting and re-expanding once the good times return. This additional (non-fat related) ebb and flow of weight probably occurs on a timescale of some days: yet another delayed reaction to dietary change.

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And now for something completely relaxing: take your shoes off, lean back and just chill with this ...

Thanks to Marginal Revolution.

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In other stuff, we have not seen the painter for some days after an initial half day of preliminary wall-scraping, an absence due entirely to rain and inclement winds. We hope to see him again tomorrow.

Free Energy is a thermodynamics concept: it's the amount of energy in a system which can do useful work. It's the reason why only differences in temperature can power machines like steam engines: a uniformly warm heat-bath can't make anything work. This has (negative) implications for life in the outer solar system. Remember Europa in the book/film 2001?

How do we know it's Spring? A vole's head, tail and unidentifiable lump on the kitchen floor yesterday morning + the animal has taken to ambush-hunting birds in the bushes under the feeders. Just thought I'd share ...

Mars One

Just started "The Martian" by Andy Weir, passed to me by my sister.

"In Andy Weir’s novel, The Martian, an American astronaut named Mark Watney is stranded on Mars after a vicious sandstorm cuts him off from his fellow crew members. They assume, with good reason, that he has been killed in the storm; their only recourse is to save themselves by aborting the mission and returning to Hermes, the mother ship.

Watney’s situation then is the most dire that can be imagined. He has no means of communication with Hermes or Earth; as far as the known universe is concerned, he is dead and therefore no rescue operations are contemplated.
...
Watney is heir to the labours of countless other individuals — he has at his disposal numerous gadgets left behind by his fellow astronauts, ranging from a hammer and screwdriver to a plutonium-fuelled generator called a radioisotope thermoelectric generator. (Such a device does exist by the way — Weir’s future fiction is pretty much set in the present.)

It is through these devices — mainly an atmospheric regulator, oxygenator and a water reclaimer — that Watney is able to keep breathing and moving around and even to start planting and harvesting a potato crop on the soil of Mars."

The ludicrous "Mars One" project is doomed in a variety of ways, but the most telling fact is that the kind of guys you need on a no-return, ramshackle Mars base are plumbers, electricians, botanists and electronic engineers: people with mechanical aptitude and green fingers. The people who've signed up all seem to be folk with doctorates in black hole physics. As I said, doomed.

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In "Wolf Hall" last week, Thomas Cromwell advises his son, who is about to joust with King Henry 8th for the first time. Cromwell explains that he once met a superb jouster in Turkey who explained the key to success: relax in the saddle, hold the lance as if it were light as air, and lose all care as to whether you will survive or not.

This is a very familiar trope. I recall some years ago watching a very bad film about King Arthur. I dimly recall someone like Danny Kaye playing the knight Lancelot, who at this point is wandering around incognito as the sword-fighting equivalent of a prize fighter, taking on all comers. A young man asks him the secret of his success. Kaye/Lancelot replies with the usual - do this with the sword, watch your opponent like that .. and then his final advice, and don't care whether you live or die.

Do you recognise this as another example of 'hawk vs. dove' or the game of chicken? A superlative dogfighting tactic was simply to fly head-on at your opponent, firing all the time. Both aircraft are small targets, but the first one to break away exposes itself completely to its opponent's fire and will be shot down. The pilots who 'didn't care whether they lived or died' were the ones who lived.

I think this advice comes down to: we can't all be psychopaths but sometimes it pays to emulate one.

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I am a really slow learner. For years I tolerated being thirteen and a half stone, with a spherical abdomen and a vast, forty inch plus waistline. Six months of the 5:2 diet a couple of years ago lost me two and a half stone and for ages I was stable at just over 11 stone (70 kg). Recently I realised that I was still tolerating a layer of flab under the rib cage and a residual layer of abdominal fat. Why?

I guess I just hadn't engaged. I have now decided to forget BMIs and target weights, I just don't need to carry this extra stuff around. I was 10 stone 12 (69 kg) this morning and the loss of a kilogram is already noticeable at the gym (more power!). I have in the past been briefly 10 stone 9 lb and it's looking like ten and a half stone might be a healthier weight to be at. We shall see.

I recall Matthew Parris's famous remark on dieting. 'If you're a bit overweight, skip breakfast; if the problem is a little more serious, skip lunch too. The problem will soon be resolved.'

I agree.

Obesity genes and me

The BBC science programme Horizon is currently running a three part series on the science of dieting. They have identified three categories of the obese and one - the 'constant cravers' - are defined by having 'obesity genes'.

It seems likely that I'm a 'constant craver'.

A little internet research provides a short list.

1. The FTO gene

As Wikipedia explains: "In 2009 variants in the FTO gene were further confirmed to associate with obesity in two very large genome-wide association studies of body mass index (BMI). It was shown that adults bearing the at-risk AT and AA alleles at rs9939609 consumed between 125 and 280 Calories per day than those carrying the protective TT genotype," (c. 5-12% of the daily allowance).

A quick search for rs9939609 confirms I'm AT at this location. No wonder I was thirteen and a half stone before starting the 5:2 diet (I'm now at 11 stone = 70 kg but not without continuing maintenance). As a carrier of one of the 'A' risk alleles my disposition to obesity is 30% higher than that of baseline TT people.

2. The MC4R gene

"Mutations in the MC4R gene account for 6-8% of obesity cases. A common variant of the MC4R gene, distributed in about 22% of the population, increases the risk for weight gain by causing increased appetite and decreased satiety. Calorie restriction through portion control and smart food choices is the best strategy for weight loss for people carrying this variant."

The relevant SNP is rs17782313 where C alleles are associated with higher body mass index (BMI). The three options are CC, CT, TT - where TT is baseline normal, CT is associated with a BMI increase of 0.22 units and CC with a BMI increase of 0.44 units. As is so often the case, the allele effects are, as you see, additive.

What am I?  Yep, it's bad: CC.

3  The ADIPOQ gene

The relevant allele is rs17366568. "A significant genotypic association was observed between ADIPOQ rs17366568 and obesity. The frequencies of AG and AA genotypes were significantly higher in the obese group (11%) than in the non-obese group (5%) (P=0.024). The odds of A alleles occurring among the obese group were twice those among the non-obese group (odds ratio 2.15; 95% confidence interval 1.13-4.09)." (From here).

At last some good news! I am GG at this location.

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Doubtlessly I'll return to this topic when more is known, especially as the results to-date are so personally depressing!

One year of the 5:2 diet

It's been one year since Michael Mosley's Horizon programme on intermittent fasting; one year since I started a calorie-restricted diet two days a week. And here are the results.

Month	Date	Stone	Lb	Pounds	Kg	Δ(Lb)	BMI	Height (m)
0	07/08/2012	13	8	190	86.4		27.20	1.782
1	08/09/2012	12	13	181	82.3	9	25.91
2	06/10/2012	12	7	175	79.5	6	25.05
3	08/11/2012	11	12	166	75.5	9	23.76
4	08/12/2012	11	6	160	72.7	6	22.90
5	08/01/2013	11	2	156	70.9	4	22.33	Waist
6	10/02/2013	11	1	155	70.5	1	22.19	34.5 inches
7	09/03/2013	11	0.4	154	70.2	1	22.10
8	09/04/2013	10	12.2	152	69.2	2	21.79
9	11/05/2013	10	10.8	151	68.5	1	21.59	34 inches
10	11/06/2013	10	10.6	151	68.5	0	21.56
11	11/07/2013	10	13	153	69.5	-2	21.90
12	08/08/2013	10	13.2	153	69.6	0	21.93

I started at 13 stone 8 pounds and have finished at around 11 stone. Let's say a weight loss of two and a half stone. My BMI has changed from an overweight 27 to a healthy 22. My NHS markers for blood glucose and cholesterol seem good. So here are some of the lessons I learned over the year.

1. You will feel hungry

It's sad but true. It's impossible to lose weight - to fast - without feeling hungry. The body, looking on fat as insurance against lean times, prefers you to forage rather than draw down the fat reserves. Hunger is its message: ignore it - tomorrow you get to eat again.

2. Weight loss does not equal fat loss

A pound of fat contains 3,400 calories (you need about 2,000 a day to operate). If you don't eat a thing, you will burn - over a day - about half a pound of fat.

A litre of water weighs a kilogram, 2.2 pounds. If you drink you will gain weight; if you eat you will gain weight; if you go to the toilet you will lose (a little) weight.

After a recent holiday my daily weight fluctuated over a week between 11 stone 3 lb and 10 stone 12 lbs, a difference of five pounds (plus or minus one kilogram). Losing fat is watching that kind of interval steadily reduce in its endpoints.

3. The 5:2 diet is not a road to anorexia

Once the fat had burned off at the six month point, my weight plateaued at c. 11 stone and refused to stay much lower. On an eating day you would be frankly appalled to watch me at dessert.

4. Fasting and exercising

About half-way through the process last year, I joined the local gym and began hour-long workouts three days a week. I soon discovered that it's:

a. Not a good idea to fast the day before a hard gym session: no energy.

b. Not a good idea to eat nothing after a gym session: no protein repair.

So I schedule gym sessions after a day of eating. When I return home I have a protein-rich salad (c. 5-600 calories) if it's a fast day, eating nothing else. I estimate a gym session burns around 400 calories.

5. It's more about cell-repair than dieting

Best not to forget that Mosley's programme promoted intermittent fasting as helping to fight cancer and diabetes - fat loss was was a desirable side effect.

So, we carry on.