It gets my goat that politicians still haven’t answered the most basic of planning questions: how many people should this country contain? I firmly believe that until you decide how many people you want in the country, you can’t possibly have a sensible conversation about anything to do with the country’s infrastructure. If you don’t know how many people there are going to be, how can you decide for example:
How many hospitals we need?
How many teachers there should be?
How many roads to build and how wide they should be?
How many power stations we need to build?
How many people should we let into the country every year?
How much to invest in the train system?
I could go on… For so many years talk of over population has been a taboo subject, for the simple reason that if you accept the fact that there may be too many people, then you must accept that the logical conclusion is to somehow control the population, and that’s something that most people instinctively rail against. Only the Optimum Population Trust (rebranded as Population Matters) seems to be talking about it openly.
Slowly however the tide is starting to turn. Tools like the BBC’s What’s You Number tool that calculates what person you are in the world. I’m around the 3.8Bn out of 7Bn mark, which means that since I was born, the world’s population has nearly doubled… that’s staggering, and not in a good way! That’s why a few years ago I wrote a rather ranty post about why IVF should be banned I realise posts like that are never going to make me any more friends, but that’s the kind of thinking that stops people talking about what needs to be talked about.
So it was a refreshing change to see a serious engineer and scientist (despite what you might remember of him from the Great Egg Race) as Professor Heinz Wolff starting to talk about the difficult issues over population brings. This is what he said (my emphasis):
“But the critical subject we have to face worldwide is overpopulation. We have to be schizophrenic about the benefits of medicine and health. Overpopulation is down, to some extent, to the fact that even elementary medicine – anit-malaria treatments, anit-parasites, clean water – all reduce death rates.
“Somebody at some stage has to have the courage to ask questions about issues such as how we react to famine? To do this you have to think the unthinkable, which you can only do in your own mind because this often gives rise to opinions that would put you in a great deal of trouble – even with one’s own conscience.”
Whilst I accept it’s only hinting, I’ll take it. I firmly believe that over population, and hence population control, will become the defining political issue of our life time.
Further to my very popular recent article on why calorie counting is flawed, I just received this link by email from a friend, which exposes the fact that the calorie values on food are all wrong, because they’re based on the raw ingredients of food. Whereas in fact as soon as you cook / process food, the available energy is increased, so the calorific value should increase too. (It also contains disturbing stories about eating raw monkey meat and a video of mice eating live albatrosses!)
Here’s the short video if you’re feeling gruesome:
What’s surprising to me about that article is that it’s surprising to the author! I thought it was common knowledge that energy from cooked / processed food was more easily accessible than uncooked / unprocessed food. That’s part of what the Glycemic Index charts are all about.
I do include “processed” whereas his article is more about cooked, because even raw foods have an increased GI from processing, for example oranges’ glycemic index (44) is 18% higher when it’s processed into orange juice (52), see the GI chart on the Southbeach Diet Site. That’s why any kind of fruit juice is bad from a weightloss perspective, due to the breaking down of the plant cell walls during juicing. It’s far better (and a whole lot more satisfying I’d say) to eat the fruit just as nature intended.
Either way, it’s all more fuel to the fire that counting calories is a simply flawed approach to diet and weightloss. Even Weight Watchers have recently ditched their calorie based points system, admitting that they’ve been getting it wrong for decades!
If you’re a regular to my blog (there are several thousand of you) you will have seen me sporadically post about my shoulder injury. I won’t bore you with the sordid details again, as I’ve already done into details about my SLAP tear, MRI + Arthrogram scan, and how I did it doing CrossFit’s butterfly pullups.
Just to bring things up to the current day, I was booked in to have my surgery, a biceps tenodesis, this Thursday the 8th December. However the consultant suggested that I may want to think twice. I’ve since been to a Physiotherapist who told me that should wouldn’t recommend surgery; I’ve spoken to a 2nd shoulder Consultant over the phone who told me not to have the surgery, and I’ve exchanged emails with a 3rd shoulder Consultant who also said that I shouldn’t have the surgery. Guess what… I’m not having the surgery!! This is what they were going to do (in summary, cut off my biceps tendon from my shoulder, drill a hole in my Humerus (upper arm bone) and stuff it in there):
To summarise all their advice, the common theme is this: shoulder surgeries are not to be taken lightly. They carry not insignificant risks of failure (of various forms) in addition to possible long term problems like pain, stiffness and weakness. So the advice boils down to this: if you think you can live with your shoulder as it is, don’t have the op, and if there’s any suggestion that your shoulder is improving, like mine is, don’t have the op.
To be clear, when I first injured my shoulder back in February, I couldn’t even scratch my head with my left hand and it did not make much improvement for several months. Once I’d stopped sulking however (lol!) and started going back down the gym, focusing on what I could do instead of what I couldn’t do, things started to improve rapidly. Fast forward to November and I was doing the following, all without pain:
– Shoulder press: 5 x 45kg
– Snatch: 40kg
– Clean & Jerk: 60kg
– Pull ups (kipping): sets of 5, slowly
– Hand stands: multiple reps, holding for 10 seconds
– Front squat: 5 x 100kg
In fact the only thing that hurt, and then just a bit, was wall balls. But I managed to manage this by using a lighter ball and favouring my right arm on the catch (the bit where it hurt). I’ve yet to try things like Thrusters and Push Press etc. In fact I’d already decided not to have the op at this point.
It was only when I hurt my shoulder again (a PDR Self Defence session with a fellow PDR Coach Chris Worrall) that made me think twice about the op again. This time however, after just 2 weeks my shoulder felt as good as had taken 6 months previously. Cracking a rib wasn’t part of the bargain mind, but that’s another story!
So it’s left like this: I’m to get my butt back down the gym and see what I can do, or rather what my shoulder can do. Time will tell if this is the way it’s to stay forever.
My apologies if you were unable to access this site in the last 24 hours, getting this rather sparse error message:
As you can see it’s fixed now; who knew a GigeByte a day wouldn’t be enough! Only last month I posted that this site had tipped over 25,000 unique monthly visitors for the first time. Well it seems that November blew that out of the water with a massive 40% increase to nearly 35,000!!
The reason was bonfire night, as my Remember, Remember, the 5th of November Poem post got 8,073 visitors, which is obviously a seasonal spike (see the bump in the graph above). Not only does that post give the full poem, including the bit about burning the Pope in a tub of tar(!) but it also has a healthy and sometimes fervent discussion about censorship and at what age it’s appropriate to teach children real, unfettered history. It’s worth a read if you have 5 minutes.
Anyway, I’ve increased the bandwidth by 50% so we should be good for a while to come, and now I have to fire off a support ticket to my host to find out why I didn’t get an email warning me that I was getting close to my bandwidth limit, grrrr…
Diet programs on TV depress me. They depress me because 90% of them continue to trot out the same old advice, which can be summed up as:
Weight Change =
Calories In – Calories Burned
That statement was disproved 55 years ago
Oh I wish it were so. I wish that you could reduce the complex processes in the stomach to such a basic and simple equation, fit for the headline science that rules most people’s lives these days. I watch these programs and hear so called food experts saying: “A Calorie, is a calorie, is a calorie. Eat less, exercise more, and you’ll lose weight.” And indeed, at least the second part of that sentence is sometimes true, for some people, some of the time. But it belies the reality of human physiology and sets people up to fail, principally due to the hunger they will feel on such a calorie restrictive diet will mean they won’t stay on it for long, but also because a calorie, is not a calorie, is not a calorie! Our body doesn’t treat all calories the same, because proteins, carbohydrates and fats are fundamentally different and our bodies react to them differently.
Before I show that that statement was disproved 55 years ago, this is what Wikipedia says about 1 of the 3 phases of digestion:
Gastric phase – This phase takes 3 to 4 hours. It is stimulated by distension of the stomach, presence of food in stomach and decrease in pH. Distention activates long and myenteric reflexes. This activates the release of acetylcholine which stimulates the release of more gastric juices. As protein enters the stomach, it binds to hydrogen ions, which raises the pH of the stomach. Inhibition of gastrin and gastric acid secretion is lifted. This triggers G cells to release gastrin, which in turn stimulates parietal cells to secrete gastric acid. Gastric acid is about 0.5% hydrochloric acid (HCl), which lowers the pH to the desired pH of 1-3. Acid release is also triggered by acetylcholine and histamine.
Calories are calculated by burning food and see how much it heats up a beaker of water.
That process is really just the basic mechanics of digestion and doesn’t address the work of the enzymes that break down the food, or the absorption process, or the hormonal response the body has to the receiving the food’s constituent nutrients. Do you know how scientists reduce all that to a simple calorific value? Calories are calculated by burning food and see how much it heats up a beaker of water. How that has any relation to what really happens in our body is beyond me. Take a look at this video of the process:
The problem is, your stomach doesn’t burn food!
Because fat releases more energy when burned than carbohydrates, it heats water up more and so has more calories. Hence if you believe the equation at the start, fat must be worse for you than carbs. This is the basis for the “fat bad, carbs good” argument that has dominated modern dietary advice for decades. The problem is, your stomach doesn’t burn food! And therein lies the nub of the problem. Do we know for sure that our bodies react differently to fat calories, than carb calories, or protein calories? Oh yes, we’ve known this since 1956 (and before really).
You see in 1956 there was an experiment done, published on 28th July 1956 in The Lancet (the world’s leading general medical journal) by Kekwick and Pawan, in London, to test exactly this. It was called: CALORIE INTAKE IN RELATION TO BODY-WEIGHT CHANGES IN THE OBESE. They did 2 experiments, each over about a month, under hospital conditions.
For both experiments, water intake and salt intake was controlled for to keep total intake at the same level for each patient on each diet (3 litres of water and 10g of sodium chloride per day if you’re interested), further water retention / loss was measured and accounted for to get a real view of actual (non-water) weight loss. They also accounted for water retention due to the menstrual cycles of the female patients (which they found was significant)!
In this first experiment, Kekwick and Pawan put 6 obese people on 2,000, 1,500, 1,000, and 500 calorie diets each (after a period of stabilisation) for 7-9 days each. Not unsurprisingly, as the calories dropped, so did their weight. All diets maintained the same proportions of Protein (20%), Carbs (47%) and Fat (33%) (the 3 macro nutrients).
Experiment 2: 1,000 Calories, Proportions Changed
To prove that the proportion of Protein, Carbs and Fat is unimportant whilst calories are maintained at a set level, a second experiment was done. This time 14 obese patients were all placed in turn on 3 diets (again after a period of weight stabilisation), each diet was just 1,000 calories but the proportions were changed to rotate through 90% fat, 90% protein and 90% carbohydrates (and a control diet of normal proportions). This should prove that a calorie, is a calorie, is a calorie, irrespective of source, yes? Clearly the result should be that all would lose weight, and do so at the same rate, irrespective of macro nutrient make-up. Wrong! Quoting directly from The Lancet, the authors said:
“So different were the rates of weight-loss on these isocaloric diets that the composition of the diet appeared to outweigh in importance the intake of calories.”
This is their actual results, showing the differing weight loss rates for each patient on each diet (the graph is sort of upside down, in that bars above the line indicate weight LOSS, and bars below the line indicate weight GAIN):
Not only do we see that each of the four 1,000 calorie diets results in a different weightloss rate, what’s most astonishing is that over half the patients on the 90% carbohydrate diet actually put weight on. That’s an OMG moment ever I’ve seen one! If you’re on a high carb, low fat, low protein diet, your calorie restriction skills had better be awesome if you want to lose weight, certainly this shows you need to virtually starving yourself to death in order to lose weight.
Kekwick and Pawan then came up with a 3rd experiment to confirm their findings, but this time rather than reducing calories form a normal diet, they increased them. After first finding a baseline stable weight on a 2,000 calories diet (all either gained or increased weight on a 2,000 diet over 7 days), they then increased the calories by 30% to 2,600 calories per day, but changed the proportion to high fat, high protein levels. Again in their words:
“It was demonstrated that these patients on the whole could maintain or gain weight on 2000 calories but except in one instance, lost weight consistently on a 2600 daily calorie intake.”
Let’s just be clear what’s being said here. Increasing calories by 30% triggered weight loss, just by changing the proportions of the macro-nutrients. That’s huge! That’s not to say that caloric restriction doesn’t work, it obviously does. The issue is that caloric restriction requires considerable willpower to maintain and for most people is not a long term diet solution. Remember that if you use diet as a temporary weightloss tool, and then return to your usual diet, your weight will also return to it’s usual pre-diet levels. To illustrate this point, I’ll again quote directly from the Kekwick and Pawan study (gotta love the 1950’s terminology here):
“In such a study the difficulties are formidable. The first and main hazard was that many of these patients had inadequate personalities. At worst they would cheat and lie, obtaining food from visitors, from trolleys touring the wards, and from neighbouring patients. (Some required almost complete isolation.)”
Summary
The point of this post was to prove that a carbohydrate calorie is not the same as a protein calorie, which is not the same as a fat calorie, and the Kekwick & Pawan study conclusively proves that. Yet here we are in in the present day, and still the mainstream dietary advice is to cut calories to lose weight. It’s shocking that 55 years on, and we still haven’t taken on board fundamental research like this. Slowly I see evidence that the world is changing though, so I remain hopeful. I still maintain that history will record the 20th century as the dark ages of dietary advice, responsible for millions, if not billions, of premature deaths.
Below are 2 videos of CrossFit Founder Greg Glassman giving a lecture at Tony Blauer’s Combatives Camp in Las Vegas earlier this year. I could listen to Coach G talking all day, but I particularly like his answer to the common question:
Edit:November’s final number (including a dip because I exceeded my bandwidth limit) was 33,212, a 35% increase on 25,000!
For the first time since I started this ‘ckle blog some 4 yearish years ago, it has racked up over 25,000 unique visitors over the last 30 days! “Unique” means that each visitor is only counted once, no matter how many times they come back over the month, as opposed to “Visits”. Oh and that doesn’t include me either, I deliberately filter my own IP address out of the stats. 😉
It seems only yesterday that I first tipped over the 1,000 visitors a day mark. Ah ok, not yesterday, but just 3 months ago. Whereas now, 1,000 visitors per day is a regular occurrence, take a look:
Google Analytics Screenshot
Trying to imagine 25 thousand people is pretty tricky, but when you scale that up to 300,000 people per year visiting this blog, that’s pretty astonishing, quite humbling and somewhat of a responsibility all at the same time.
I think I need to go lie down in a dark room somewhere…
For the last 6 weeks I’ve been working hard on building a new website and am very pleased to say it’s now ready for public consumption. As you may know, whilst I might be a mild mannered office worker by day, I have a super hero alter-ego as a self defence coach. Well maybe not “super-hero”, I mean who doesn’t like to wear superhero pants?!? but hopefully you get my drift. (Pssst that’s not a picture of me, just in case you were confused.)
I actually don’t like the term “self defence” which conjures up all the wrong images I think. Certainly before I had my eyes opened to the alternative, self defence to me was all about taking years to learn martial arts, wearing Gi’s and belts, hitting pads, bowing, counting in Japanese / Korean / Chinese, learning lots of techniques and repeating them thousands of times till they are inch perfect. Sorry, but that’s just not my bag, as Jim Carey rather facetiously demonstrates:
You can learn to defend yourself in a matter of hours not years
Fortunately that’s not what Personal Defence Readiness (PDR) is all about and it was a massive eye opener to me to realise that you can learn to defend yourself in a matter of hours not years. The key to this approach is to realise that personal protection is influenced far more by mindset and attitude, than it is by physical techniques or skills.
The PDR system not only peels back the layers of Bad Guy behaviour to reveal what they want and what the don’t want (knowing this gives you a distinct advantage) but also allows you to open the door to your own emotional and psychological state, to free yourself of fear and to take the right action at the right time.
Towards this end, Karl and Rachel Steadman (from CrossFit3D), Chris Worrall (CrossFit Tameside) and I have all got together to launch PDR Manchester, which is a collaborative website for all present and future PDR Coaches in Manchester to work together to promote each other and PDR generally in the wider community. Together we can and will help to make the people of Manchester safer, with more confidence and I’m proud to be a part of that.
Our first collaborative course is open for bookings
The website has lots of information about PDR, the SPEAR System and it’s creator Tony Blauer. It also has a real-time list of all the courses we’re putting on with an online booking facility. Our first collaborative PDR course is currently open for bookings and is split over the 4 Thursday evenings in November at CrossFit Tameside. Go take a look.
In the mean time, I wonder what the best phrase is to replace the tainted “self defence”. Initial thoughts are:
Personal Defence (obvious from the PDR connection)
Personal Safety
Personal Protection
Self Protection
Conflict Management
Violence Resolution
If you have an opinion on this, please comment below.
When things in life are bad, it’s worthwhile taking a moment to check out some of the wonderful things you find on this great internet of ours, for the purposes of inspiration and motivation in life. Here are a few of my favourites:
Or sometimes called the CrossFit Promise or Crossfit Mindset, depending on source. Either way, it does sum up a lot of CrossFitters I know, and reminds me to occasionally keep my mouth shut when I have stuff to moan about.
1. I will promise to do my best. My best will vary from day to day, from hour to hour, from minute to minute. But in that minute, I will do the very best that I can.
2. Lactic acid is my friend. The wind is my friend. Anything that opposes me is actually helping me to become stronger. If I had no opposition, I would be weak.
3. If I can run, I run. If I have to walk, I walk. When I am forced to crawl, I crawl. And then I rest and live to fight another day.
4. I fear no man but I fear my workout. If I don’t fear my workout, it isn’t hard enough.
5. I may puke. I may cry. But I will not quit. Ever.
6. I never cheat. There is no honor in cheating. What joy can there be in a victory I did not earn?
7. The workout missed is the opportunity missed. I will not cheat myself of the opportunity to become a better athlete and person.
8. I understand the value of the push-up, the pull-up, the sit-up, the squat, and the deadlift. Just as there are a million ways to make chicken, so too are there a million ways to squat, sit up, pull up, push up, and deadlift.
9. I will give everything I have. And then I will find more within myself.
10. I don’t complain. Complaining is for crybabies. There are 250 babies born every minute worldwide. I will leave the crying to them and I will soldier on.
11. I will bite off challenges, spit out results, and beg for more.
What are you going to do?
My PC’s Wallpaper
This collection of quotes I’ve put together is what I have as the wallpaper on my PC, to help keep me focused every day:
Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.
You will never get this day back again, don’t waste it!
Every man dies, but not every man really lives.
On your deathbed, are you going to wish you’d watched more TV? Or wish you’d made more of your life?
When it’s all said and done, will you have said more than you’ve done?
Construct sufficient meaning to support actual living, and not just mere existence.
Would you rather have less work to do, or more work you actually enjoy doing?
What is the difference between being alive and truly living?
The Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear
This comes from the amazing mind of Frank Herbert, in his classic book Dune.
I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.
This morning I had a Consultant’s appointment to get the result of my MRI and Arthrogram for my shoulder injury. Previously I’d been diagnosed with a PASTA lesion, which is a tear of the supraspinatus rotator cuff tendon, and the MRI was to look for a SLAP tear as well, which is where the cartilage cup inside the shoulder socket (the Labrum) which connects to the bicep tendon, comes away. Here are the findings:
The PASTA lesion that he identified with an earlier ultra-sound didn’t show up on the MRI.
I have a “not obvious” 1.5cm SLAP tear.
Also there’s a small Inferior Glenohumeral Ligament (IGHL) tear.
The PASTA tear may or may not be there and the SLAP tear may not be as big as 1.5cm (which is small anyway) as he said that MRI’s are not great at showing up tears (missing maybe 40% of tears) and where they do, they tend to exaggerate. It seems there’s nothing that can be done about the IGHL tear.
At 39 I’m too old for a normal suture and anchor SLAP tear repair!
However the big news was that apparently at 39 the likelihood of success of normal SLAP tear repair (suture and anchor the labrum back into place) is not good, and so he would do a bicep tenodesis instead, which is where they simply cut the bicep tendon away from the Labrum and anchor it to the humerus (the upper arm bone) instead and bypass the shoulder altogether. That doesn’t sound like much fun!
But it gets worse as the bicep tenodesis has risks of life long shoulder stiffness, or frozen shoulder syndrome and that’s on top of the more obvious risks of infection, the operation simply failing or the tendon rupturing. Either way my Consultant reckons that recovering 75% pre-injury capacity from a bicep tenodesis would be a good result, and that’s after a year or 2 recovery period.
I’m able to do more and more things, e.g. push-ups and burpees
The issue is that I’ve been careful not to make my shoulder injury worse and through exercise and some home base physio, my shoulder has improved to the point that I’m 99% pain free. In fact this morning before my appointment, I actually couldn’t find any shoulder or arm movement that caused me any pain! Now it’s true that I’ve only been going to the gym say once a week, and only been doing a small subset of exercises, e.g. nothing overhead, but I have found that I’m able to do more and more things, e.g. I can now do push-ups where I couldn’t 4 months ago, and I can do burpees too where I couldn’t before. And a weekend full of martial arts recently didn’t give me too many problems.
So this leaves me with something of a dilemma. Do I elect not to have the surgery and keep up with my own recovery and stay 99% pain free through normal life, but maybe will never be able to do some exercises or workouts (no more butterfly pullups for example!)?
Or do I go for the surgery and get a proper repair done, albeit my bicep tendon now won’t be connected to the normal place, but after enduring a long recovery period, there’s still a significant risk that it’ll make the situation much worse than it is now?
I’m to get my butt back down the gym and see what my limits are
It’s a tough decision. Fortunately the delays of the NHS mean that I don’t have to decide today. The current plan is that I’ve booked in the for the surgery, but as there’s a 4-5 month waiting list anyway, I’m to get my butt back down the gym and see what my limits are, starting slowly and working up of course. I have 4 months then to decide if my current ability is sufficient for my needs for the rest of my life, and I suppose if it gets worse again later, I can always get the surgery then.
These things are sent to try us, as they say. But as my father pointed out when I told him: “At least you’re not coming back from Afghanistan with an arm or leg missing!”
Slowly however the tide is starting to turn. Tools like the BBC’s What’s You Number tool that calculates what person you are in the world. I’m around the 3.8Bn out of 7Bn mark, which means that since I was born, the world’s population has nearly doubled… that’s staggering, and not in a good way! That’s why a few years ago I wrote a rather ranty post about why IVF should be banned I realise posts like that are never going to make me any more friends, but that’s the kind of thinking that stops people talking about what needs to be talked about.
Recent Comments