Finally... The Food Journal, In Its Great Glory

Hey blogging world.  It's been a really long time. This is gonna be a short post, too.

I have some of the things I promised, and have lost some of the other things I promised.  Here is very detailed food journal data.  There are obvious inaccuracies that are unavoidable, but otherwise this represents everything I ate (with the exception of vacation food) since about the end of August, in condensed form with nutritional data (so you don't have to read through 1000 lines of excel).  Nutrition source used was usually the USDA's food database, though occasionally I had to add items in that the USDA doesn't have current data on, like coconut flour.  The USDA's database is incomplete for some food items, some of which I ate.  This means that the data is not terribly accurate or precise, but I have done the best I can from my end.  Food was measured with a kitchen scale; in cases where the food was consumed in its entirety with drippings, it was weighed before cooking, otherwise it was weighed after cooking.  Some items had estimated mass, since I can't always have access to my scale.  This has become a hobby of mine, and I have no intention of stopping soon.  I have lost some earlier data which I promised... Sorry.

What you will actually see here is a visualization of my food eaten and the nutrients contained within it.  Some of the data appears to be missing; do not be alarmed.  I have excluded data that is simply not interesting, such as my vitamin A intake, which has always and consistently been much higher than it has to be.  In addition, I have excluded certain vitamins and minerals for the same or similar reasons (e.g. if I supplement with them and thus get more than enough of them).  There are some minerals included that I do supplement, and still apparently don't get enough of (Like magnesium. Supplements were not included in my analysis).  I take magnesium, potassium, vitamin D, Vitamin K2, and fish oil.

Food Journal on Tableau

A few more disclaimers.  I like plain visualizations of data.  The most adventurous I got here was with a word cloud, which isn't that exciting.  I'd be interested in thoughts on what could make this look cooler, but it's not a huge concern of mine.  Also, if it's not easy to tell what's going on anywhere and you think it's important, feel free to say so.

I will be updating soon with my paper... As if anyone wants to read a 15-page amateur manifesto about hating on a medical field.  I also want to have some sort of, "I intend to blog more often, because 2014."

Until next time!

Almost Pi day!

I love to change the subject when I have something I'm embarrassed about.  In this case, I haven't posted anything for about 5 months.  That's cool!  Pi day is tomorrow and I'm making duck pot pie from a mishmash of a few recipes.

Yep pot pie with real flour.

You read that right.  Flour.  But duck too.

Anyway, the food journal ended near the beginning of November.  I basically ate that way on most days, so I got a bit tired of recording it all the time.  I think food journaling is a great thing to do periodically, but I don't think it's really very necessary to journal for very long, and the instructive aspects of it disappear after the first few weeks.  Still, it's nice to have proof.  I will be posting it before long (I promise!).

The paper had to change direction just a little.  I left out a thorough criticism of popular nutrition, and focused mostly on some basic facts about how terrible the research is, and how easily misinformation becomes common knowledge.  There was also a touch of a historical perspective, borrowed heavily from Taubes.  I will post it soon too (I got a good grade, but I felt disappointed by my own work.  When I actually post it I might explain why.  No promises on the explanation, but the paper will go up.).

There's gonna be some changes come pi day!  In addition to the flour in the pie, I plan to change things somewhat.  March 14th is the unofficial two year mark.  This means it's time to begin a new experiment.

I've been toying with a few ideas... Vegan, vegetarian, vegan ketogenic, vegetarian ketogenic, and I have decided against them all for various reasons (vegetarian/vegetarian keto would end with me eating heaps of cheese and eggs... not much different from what I'm currently doing, just without cows.  Vegan would end with me crying in a corner over a lack of food that I actually enjoy, and spending uncountable millions of dollars on shipments of avocados in an effort to satisfy my cravings.  Or French fries.  Lots of them.).

I've decided that I want to try returning to a relatively ordinary diet, but not being afraid of fats.  In other words, I will now eat carbohydrates, but I'm still going to eat high fat.  How, exactly?  I want to add fruits and veggies, and I don't want to avoid carbohydrates in all form in cooking.  I will do this by actually using starches and such to cook.  Instead of using onions only when a recipe requires them, I will add onions to my beef because they taste good.  When I need to make a sauce, instead of laboriously whisking acids into butter, I'm going to use real balsamic vinegar so the sauce can turn a little syrupy.  When I make broccoli beef I will add a little cornstarch so the sauce isn't a runny greasy mess.

However, I'm not going to have "starch" as a component of meals.  Breakfast will never be eggs and hash browns, though it might be eggs scrambled with onions and a side of fruit.  Lunch won't be sandwiches, but I might eat an apple if I get hungry.  I will no longer be afraid of carrots.  In other words, I'm still not going to eat bread or potatoes very often, but it's not going to be something I completely exclude from my diet anymore.

What will I be testing?  I've managed to lose quite a bit of fatness without ever really worrying about how much I eat.  I've been eating until satisfied and often beyond with hunger as my guide, and it has served me well.  I am rarely truly hungry, and when I am I satisfy that need.  If I switch to a diet with carbohydrates again, will hunger be as reliable a guide?  What if I journal my food again (I intend to) and eat the same amounts I ate before?  Will I gain weight or gain weight faster than I did before?  Will reintroducing carbohydrates into my diet make exercising easier, or more difficult?  Okay, so trying to answer all of these questions is going to be basically impossible, but I still think they are interesting questions and I hope that this new experiment will shed some light on the subjects.

There will be a new post soon, probably on the 15th, of pictures from pi day, and with the previous food journal, and with the paper

Food journal update, and then some!

So.  The food journal has been going well :)  I've managed to finish two days, and I'm working on the next few, they are in process and I will be (occasionally) keeping track of days in the future and number-crunching them.  I have not been able to get every day down, as I haven't accurately recorded every day (In fact, I only have about a week total accurately reported...).  I've also done a bit of skipping around... I have some food journals done from late August and early September and from the past couple days.  I also found that certain home-made things are difficult to figure out the contents of, like home-made chicken broth.  For that reason I have decided to skip those days on which I ate home made broth altogether, as I have no way of accurately measuring my intake based on this homemade item.  Some time in the future I may try to replicate the homemade broth and get a better estimate of the contents of it, but I'll be honest when I say that I will have no idea how to measure anything in it except for the free-floating fat.  Maybe I could assume that all the sugar in all the vegetables used to make the broth were leeched into the liquid, whereas all the fiber and probably the starch has mostly remained in the vegetables, then since I discard the veggies I wouldn't get those.  Then I could assume that most of the fat from the chicken used to make the broth was rendered out of the skin (let's say, 80% of it?), then since I generally add the meat back to the broth to make the soup, the contents of that will be easily determined.  Vitamin C and some certain b-vitamins will be destroyed by the long cook times, but most vitamins should be unaffected.  And maybe I can figure out the minerals that I'd get leeching out of the bones (though I don't really know how).

At any rate, that sounds like a lot of work.  Maybe I will just avoid home-made broth in the future for the sake of easier food journaling.  I hope to turn the excel file into something easily viewable here so you can see what my eating has been like in general.  Before I do that though, I may want to get a few more days done and try to make the spreadsheet look a little nicer.  I'll summarize what I have so far though.

It's been an average daily intake of around 3500 calories, 70-80% of them from fat, about 30g of carbohydrates, about 10g of which are fiber, and around 130g of protein.  I have been consuming sufficient levels of most vitamins and minerals, save vitamins C and D, and magnesium (though this does vary a bit).  A larger portion of my fats are monounsaturated than are saturated - beef and most meats have more monounsaturated fats than they do saturated fats.

I want to talk a little bit about what this proves, and a lot about what it doesn't prove, and to clarify my frustrated statements about what I think you can trust in terms of dietary advice. 

First of all, my diet is not a well-controlled experiment.  There are a lot of variables that I changed when I switched diets.  I started consuming more fats and less carbohydrates, without doubt.  I have drastically increased my calorie intake.  I probably am consuming more protein, but maybe not.  The types of fats I am eating are different.  I am consuming different amounts of cholesterol (not that I think that matters).  I am consuming dramatically more sodium.  I am not consuming vitamin C in large quantities.  I am exercising regularly.  In addition to these variables, there's the one that I wanted to change in order to test something, and that was the basis of my diet.  The basis of my diet switched from omnivorous to what is probably about 90% animal based, and in doing so I disproved the theory that eating animal fats will give you heart disease and kill you (at least, it hasn't been as swift as lots of people would have predicted).  I am under the impression that this variable was the important one, because it essentially determines the rest of the variables I listed (except for exercising - but if this diet + exercise is not killing me, it is unlikely that this diet alone would kill me.  Nothing we know about exercise shows it to have such a powerful effect that it can reverse the effects of an extremely unhealthy diet to the extent it has in my case). 

Nevertheless, my experiment has still been poorly controlled, so that limits what it can prove and disprove (as does the size of my sample... n=1 is never a good thing).  Basically all I can disprove is universal statements, such as "all animal product-based diets will rapidly degenerate your cardiovascular system."  All I can prove is that this diet has the ability to make a person gain weight in the presence of exercise, much of which appears to not be fat.  My experiment of one has disproven (as if it had to be done) claims that a person cannot have a functioning brain or be athletically productive on an extreme low carbohydrate, or even possibly ketogenic diet (but since I have not accurately determined whether or not I am in or have been in dietary ketosis at all, this last part is a bit adventurous).  I have disproven the claim that such a diet would lack essential nutrients.  I have proven that scurvy cannot be the result of low intake of vitamin C, and there simply must be another variable involved (even with the citrus I have been eating, I haven't been getting nearly enough vitamin C, especially when you consider that I don't always eat lemons and limes).  Because of my lack of proper controls, I can't tell you that my diet is superior for muscle and strength increases to any other diet (or for that matter, inferior to any other diet).  I haven't proven that this diet is healthier than any other diet, except for those outrightly guaranteed to kill you quickly (or I suppose those known for a fact to be unhealthy, like unsupplemented veganism).

I can also predict that I have disproven the calories in/calories out hypothesis of fattening.  Like I said, I dramatically increased my calorie intake, but if anything I have lost fat.  Despite the exercising that I do, it is unlikely that I am exercising enough to burn off all those calories that I eat in excess of what I used to - there simply must be another variable at play that is too difficult to detect with casual observation (recall the hypothesis from "Why Are Thin People Not Fat" which suggested that people up there unconscious physical activity, by twitching for instance, in response to excess calories - and if you haven't watched that, GO WATCH IT NOW).

I've also proven that my diet results in low post-meal blood glucose levels (~70).  I don't, however, have a standard to which I can compare this value.  I have not checked my fasting glucose levels, but they are likely lower if just by a smidge.  I cannot, however, describe what this means for a diabetic person.  I would like to be able to claim that the effect on a diabetic would be similar, but I didn't experiment on a diabetic.

I want to apologize for the rant I went on in my last post in which I decried any form of dietary advice.  I think there is good, solid, scientific dietary advice out there - I just think that without access to the original scientific paper, it is nearly impossible to determine that an experiment is a good one that actually proves things.  Conversely, it's really easy to figure out that an experiment (or just an observational study) is a waste of your time.  Furthermore, I think that Gary Taubes is a clear thinker and is an honest person, thus I trust his advice - but I do not have access to the original scientific papers he consulted to come to his "guidelines."  For this reason, I would still advise you to be skeptical of even his advice.  You should even be skeptical of advice concerning not eating sugar (at least in the specifics) - despite this skepticism, you should note that the consumption of sugar has known impacts on liver function and blood sugar and insulin levels.  I also think you should take my advice with a grain of salt - I don't have access to these studies and I can't show them to you.  Without these, the only reason you have to trust me is if you can cross-reference my information with another valid source.

There are some advantages to Gary Taubes' view of things.  You will note that in his book, Good Calories, Bad Calories, he calls his way of looking at nutrition the "alternative hypothesis."  He doesn't call it the "alternative fact" or even the "alternative theory."  This is a sign of someone who is being honest about how much he knows.  It's a sign of scientific humility.  It's a sign that this is believable stuff, with the caveat that there isn't enough to prove it yet.

Essentially, what I want you to do is be skeptical of the things you hear in the field of nutrition.  The reason for it is that there are a lot of dishonest or lazy researchers even with Ph.D's who will try to pull the wool over your eyes.  And there are a lot of people who see this as a way to profit from misinformation by spreading even more misinformation.  The true solution to the problem, as I see it, is to eliminate any respect that the field of nutrition gets.  If we can reboot the system and set new standards of scientific research in the field, then it will be difficult to deny the information they publish (much like we would feel about anything published in, say, a chemistry journal).

This is the subject of my paper, free from frustration (I had to tell my professor of argumentative writing that correlation does not imply causation.  Needless to say, my blood was boiling out of my eyeballs).  This is the heart of what I would like to convince people of.  Unfortunately, I hand-wrote the first "part" of the paper that was due October 2nd.  It's a 1000-word prospectus, so at least I can distill it down to a few sentences for you:

I want to argue for why you should disbelieve virtually everything you hear about nutrition.  First of all, because so much of what we read is based on observational studies incapable of proving things.  And second because those which are based on experiments are often poorly conducted in one way or another.  Next I wish to criticize popular print and unpopular, scientific journals for insisting on continuing to print falsehoods or at best misleading things.  Beyond that, I want to criticize specific issues within observational studies, to demonstrate that they show even less than an ordinary skeptic might think.  Next I want to criticize specific popular diet books and gurus, like the china study; and government guidelines.  Last I want to give my own personal experience and discovery of information - and explain that my ideas aren't new and shouldn't seem outlandish.  I also want to set a historical context in which all of this began to occur - there actually is a half-decent reason for it all.

I meant to post this a while ago, my bad... The food journal post is going to be the next one.  Also, I have an outline for my paper that is basically done, which will be posted.

Update on the Input Idea, and some thoughts

So, keeping a food journal isn't that hard, but actually sitting down and breaking down calories and fat and such is not an easy task.  As such, despite relatively good food journaling - for only a week, I'll admit - I have yet to sit down even once and try to figure out my intakes of various nutrients.  The good news is that I haven't been eating much in terms of variety, so once i check up on a few things, I should be able to figure out those seven or so days pretty easily.  I'll be doing this within the next couple of days.  I may, on occasion, food journal again, just to see if anything major has changed, but I doubt that it will, since I tend to eat the same things, and usually in the same amounts.

Also, weighing myself and checking body fat percentage (according to the scale) appears to be a waste of time.  I have done so almost daily, and this morning, after many tiny variations, I weighed 170.8 lbs with a 17.4% body fat.  I also don't believe the body fat scale anymore... It has told me that I was above 24%, and right at 14%.  Now, I may actually be closer to one of those measurements than I am to 17%, but I know that my body fat has not varied by 10% in the past month.

I've been pretty good about going to the gym lately.  I've reduced the frequency to about 3 times a week, and upped the intensity, while decreasing the duration.  This has actually made it dramatically easier to be consistent.  I haven't been running much - usually just a quick warmup.  Instead I've been focusing on about 6 major exercises and trying to keep them in the ~5 reps range.  So I've been doing bench, overhead press, chin-ups, deadlift, squat, and shrugs (and a few others). And I got a new max on bench, 215 lbs!  It's cool to see progress.  At the beginning of the year I think I couldn't quite bench 185.  I also think I figured out how to deadlift right, since I started lifting a lot more weight than I had been before.  I'm interested in trying something unorthodox just to see if there are results and progress - I'd assume there will be, because fitness is about as reliable as popular nutrition in terms of what we know works and what we claim doesn't... then again, maybe I should put a little more faith in the fitness people's ideas.

I began my last quarter as an undergraduate!  I am taking an English 102 night class...  I expected there to be a lot of freshman who would be writing papers about how we should save the whales.  Surprise!  There's only one!  We get to write our paper about anything.  I am going to write my paper about what is wrong with the science of nutrition.  I intend to put my ideas and writings up here for critique.  I'll start with a bit of a disclaimer:

My ideas will sound hauntingly familiar if you've read anything by Gary Taubes or Peter Attia...  they've kinda been my inspiration.  But there was a reason why I was so interested in what they had to say.  The science of nutrition essentially has within its power the capacity to be a science that is as solid as chemistry - but for whatever reason, the scientists in the field have chosen not to do so.  As a math person, my sneaking suspicion is laziness.  Observational studies aren't hard - all you have to do is crunch numbers - and then if they show you the wrong things, ignore them!  To get a truly good experiment, you need carefully contrived controls - you have to mess your experiment up eleven times until you have finally put a stop to all confounding variables and have the right controls in place; then you have to throw caution to the wind and accept the results you get even if they aren't what you or the people paying you wanted to see.  Instead, nutrition has fashioned itself as a sort of "social science" type of science (I really mean no offense to social sciences by this statement - social sciences are incapable of large-scale, well-controlled experiments, and so are confined to best guesses and inferences.  There's nothing wrong with this, they just aren't capable of attaining the level of certainty that a hard science is.), confining itself to what seems right, and ignoring the possibility that its own researchers might be biased, and pretending that it can't do anything better.  So basically, the crux of my argument is that the field of nutrition is fatally and fundamentally flawed by the ivory tower that it's stuck in - because certainly there is no way to police every researcher in the field to make sure he understands what he can prove and what will prove it; as well as what he can't prove and why certain things can't prove things.  As a result, I believe the only logical thing to do is to reject virtually all claims about good health as it results from eating - and look instead to theoretical arguments and ideas from other sciences (for example, the theory that sugar is bad for you because of fructose's known effect on the liver, and because of the many harmful results of high blood sugar and insulin are good enough reasons for me to avoid sugar).

And this is the primary argument in my paper: nutrition is wrong, virtually 100% of the time.  Ignore what I tell you to eat, ignore what Gary Taubes tells you to eat, ignore what Dr. Oz tells you to eat, and for the love of God, ignore what Colin T. Campbell tells you to eat.  Eat whatever the hell you want to - and if it pleases you, try to create little experiments for yourself (control them as best you can!) to determine the effect - or lack thereof - of particular dietary elements on any number of factors.  For example, my experiment has been proof that you can gain weight on an ultra-low carbohydrate diet, and that it won't kill you in a year-and-a-half.  There's not much more that I can say about it though, and it's VERY important to realize that!

A more detailed input will follow, probably within the next few days.  Until then, prepare for my writing!

Hey - at least its not September!

     So apparently that whole "see you in September" thing was basically serious.  Topology was a rough ride - I had to learn LaTeX in order to do my homework assignments.  LaTeX really isn't that bad, but I have no coding experience so I had to learn on the fly.  It is, according to Wikipedia, a "document markup language."  Since I don't really know precisely what that means, I will describe it for you as best I can:  It's a coding language for use with maths and sciences that lets you, for example, plug an equation directly into a text document.  It's probably the language that was used to code any math test you took in the last... say 10 years (probably more).  I did well though, thanks to the professor, which was nice after my experience in analysis...  But it was still a lot of work.  There's a spot in my bedroom where all my work from all my homework assignments is scattered on the floor.  I'll clean it up eventually.  I am now going to try to plug as many math puns as possible into the rest of this post, and you will get bonus points for spotting them.

I was talking with an old friend of mine last night about a couple of blogs he reads.  Apparently, they at least include mine and those of a vegan work associate of his.  This brought to mind something which I think I have stated on my blog before, which is that I think it is entirely possible to be a healthy vegetarian, though I am skeptical of the healthful qualities of a vegan diet (and, of course, I can't understand for the life of me why anyone wouldn't want to eat meat!).  Of course, vegans can take supplements and take care of any serious issues that I think they may otherwise potentially face, and as my friend pointed out, otherwise just eat a ton of avocados, so that resolves that problem.  If you haven't realized by now, I essentially believe that a diet can only be healthy if it is largely based on fat, protein  is mostly unimportant and carbs are mostly harmful.  Thinking more on this issue reminded me of something that I really ought to mention before there are any misunderstandings (it's only been a year and a half, but please bear with me).

Much of what I say is a joke.  I don't actually hate hipsters, for instance.  I do find their culture to be extremely immature, but I derive a great deal of pleasure from people-watching hipsters, and without them I wouldn't have that enjoyment.  I don't actually think less of (non-militant) vegetarians and vegans.  They aren't the only ones who have been deceived into thinking eating animals is a health hazard.  At least they took it to its (not-so) bloody conclusion and cut out meat altogether - or found another reason not to eat anything that comes from an animal.  I mean, honestly, if you think something is unhealthy or immoral, then I congratulate your self-control in avoiding eating it altogether - I know that I occasionally indulge in things that I know very well are extremely unhealthy due entirely to a lapse in self-control.

But I am dead serious about what I've been eating: meat, dairy (no milk!), and eggs have indeed made up the bulk of my diet, with a smattering of leaves, non-starchy stems, fatty vegetables (olives and avocados come to mind), and aromatics... and cheat days...  I also have been, as of late, actively trying to eat more fat - and I am becoming more and more interested in documenting this as accurately as is feasible.  So, here's the plan:

I want to bring back the input part of input/output.  But rather than just say "I ate this," I want to say, for example, "For breakfast I had 2 egg whites, 4 egg yolks, a quarter cup each of cream, butter, and cream cheese, totaling X calories, Y grams of fat, Z grams of protein, W grams of carbohydrates; this day I consumed enough of these vitamins, and not enough of these ones..." and so on.

This will be a lot more work than I've been putting into this in quite some time, but I think it will be worth it.  One of the theories I'm working with is that the consumption of less carbohydrate/protein will lead to fat loss, and one simple way to achieve that is to eat more fat.  I want to find out if this is true.  Over the past year and a half, I can't honestly be sure if I've lost much.  I didn't accurately state my starting point, or even know where it was, and until recently I haven't been getting detailed information about my weight and body fat, nor have I been keeping track of it.  Basically all I know is that from my minimum of 150 pounds last summer, I am up about 20 pounds, and based on appearances I am assuming that it is primarily not fat, which is a good thing lol.  So I'm going to try to be better about that by starting with today:  This morning I weighed in at 170 pounds on the dot, with a body fat of 17% (pre-breakfast, post output). For those keeping score, this is a vast improvement over my freshman year of high-school, in which I weighed 170 pounds with a 30% body fat!  Of course, I would submit that growing up over 10 years had more to do with it than eating meat over 1.5 years, but who knows?


Another note:  Even if I do not post daily with updates, I do intend to at least write down things like weight and body fat and input so that there will be a record.  Also, that blood test may become a reality... We shall see...

Oopsie bread, end of the quarter, ketosis, and all-nighters [In no particular order]

So, the quarter has come to an end.  And my professors have graciously passed me.  I can now explain to you precisely how the Discrete Fourier Transform is (theoretically) used by a computer to do practically anything to an audio signal (and given the appropriate number of years I could also do these things by hand).  And I can also tell you about the Lebesgue integral - but I still don't really know how to use it (and the proofs for these things are not pretty - it involves invoking the words "simple" and "function" about a billion times... "simple" function does not even begin to describe it).  But most importantly, I do not have to take any more analysis!  I have wisely decided instead to take a class called Topology over the summer (Topology sounds innocuous enough, but it isn't - I can assure you).  See you in September readers!

Hehehe... Anyway, I had to pull some all-nighters to get my research and writing done for the Discrete Fourier Transform thing.  I do not like all-nighters, but caffeine is a hell of a drug.  One of my many methods of coping with the burden of the research was playing chess on the internet :) another was checking out this website:

http://eatingacademy.com/

This is a blog of sorts maintained by a guy named Peter Attia, a medical doctor and a fitness nut who decided to go super-low-carb and super-high-fat to the point of ketosis (and in the process actually had to cut back on protein too).  I can't do his story justice, so I HIGHLY recommend you visit his site, but I can do my best to summarize (his site has a button at the top that says "START HERE" - and oddly enough, you should start there).  Despite being extremely active and eating "right" and being trained as a doctor to know these things, he ended up becoming, as his wife described, "not thin."  So, he went low carb and lost a ton of weight, and took it a step further and went for full-on ketosis.  He then documented the athletic advantages and disadvantages of such a change, and many of the health implications (mostly good, don't worry, dear readers).  He is associated with Gary Taubes in some way, and the two of them believe that there is about to be  dramatic shift in the way we think about diet and nutrition and health (and maybe I agree with them...).

The blog is, in a way, what I wish my blog could be.  He has access to the actual studies that purport to show certain things, and he can clearly demonstrate what they do and do not show (whereas I must take other people's critiques and distill them for you - hoping there's no wool being pulled over my eyes - in other words I stop when I read the words "population study" and shout BOGUS!!!!).  He takes frequent and detailed blood tests, showing spectacular blood chemistry that improved from not-so-good blood chemistry (and he explains, in great but understandable detail, what "good blood chemistry" is and what "bad blood chemistry" is and why).  Since he has experience with it, he actually has the capacity to describe a change in his athletic performance - both from a feelings perspective and a quantitative perspective.

His blog has also inspired me to try for this whole ketosis thing, so I have been actively eating more fat and less protein.  I have now entirely removed milk from my diet, and I eat a lot more high-fat dairy products.  I still eat meat, but it's fairly difficult to find meat that is fatty enough for these purposes, so I am now eating less of it.  I discovered this thing that the internet calls "oopsie bread" that is basically bread without any carbs.  Here's how you make it:

3 eggs, separated
4oz cream cheese
1/8 tsp cream of tartar
1/8 tsp baking soda

Preheat oven to 300 degrees.  Whip egg whites and cream of tartar first with a hand mixer until you can turn the bowl upside down and they don't move (getting any yolk in them will make this step impossible).  Then mix the yolks and cream cheese together until the cream cheese is mostly not-chunky (there will still be a few tuny chunks unless you whip them for so long that they start to heat up... you don't want this).  Fold them together (for those not in the baking world, "fold" is a cute way of saying mix gently... housewives...).  Put appropriately sized discs of the stuff onto a baking sheet smoothed out to about a half inch (for me, its about two tablespoons smoothed out - they only puff up a little, so the size you make them is the size you get, and you can make them as thick or thin as you like, as long as you watch the cooking time).  Bake for around 30 minutes, or a few more - but be careful not to overcook or they become crumbly like meringues, which are not bread like - they will be nicely golden and still kind of spongy when done.  Let them cool and then let them air dry before you use them (they get kinda damp and stick to plates and fall apart if you don't do this, but in my opinion that's not such a terrible thing).  Make epic sandwiches with them.

My epic sandwich for oopsie bread right now is, by layer from top to bottom:
oopsie bread, sour cream, cream cheese, cabbage leaf (for crunch), lots of pepperoni, avocado, provolone cheese, liverwurst, sour cream, oopsie bread.  I didn't realize how much I had been missing sandwiches until I made myself one of these - it's awesome (plus no gross mayonnaise!)

Due to the all-nighters, I had to take a break from the gym, but I still went on occasion.  I've been doing a bit more running than usual... trying to push my limits on one-mile runs.  I managed a 6:18 mile as my best so far - I was absolutely shocked.  The first time I went for it I got a 6:21 though.  My goal was to get 50-second laps - at 8 laps per mile that would be a 6:40... based on my previous best of around 8 minutes, I knew it was a lofty goal, but I also knew that 8 minutes was not as fast as I could go.  So I started out pretty good, getting laps around 49sec or so.  Then as I started my 7th lap the music switched and I really started pushing it, and I guess the last two laps must have averaged out to about 40 seconds each.  I know that means I need to get better about pacing myself, so that has been the goal since then.  A friend of mine said it best, so I'm going to quote (paraphrase) him:  I don't think I ever could have run a sub-7 mile.  It's fun to try to push myself, and it's cool to actually be inspired by improvements to the point where I want to go run some more, but it still doesn't feel great hahaha.  Most of all, that whole runner's high thing is either a lie, or you have to run for more than 6 minutes to get it.

Well, I think it's about time to wrap things up, so maybe it's time to throw in something a little philosophical...  Reading Peter Attia's blog has shown me one thing above all else: even someone who has been trained in the field of health didn't know what it meant to eat healthy - what are the odds that you know what that means?  Maybe it's best if you avoid the wool being pulled over your eyes and try to see for yourself.

Till next time! (Hopefully before September!)

I'm (still) not dead!

So, I decided it was time for an update if for no other reason than to keep from falling of the face of the (blogging) Earth all over again.

There isn't much to say, except that I have been bad about a few things... I ate a lot of MnM's recently, and also a couple of those cheesy drumstick ice cream cones.  But other than that I've been pretty good.  I have also been mostly good about drinking less milk... It is sad, indeed, but I have been replacing it with cream, which is cool.  Whipping cream in a blender with ice is basically like unsweetened ice cream, and it's at least as awesome as it sounds.

Food adventures have been minimized because of busy-ness in school and life, but I did try a cold cut in the deli section of the grocery store called "liver cheese."  There is no cheese in liver cheese.  It is basically liver sausage with a layer of pork fat around the outside (Yum!).

Also, I have taken to doing wind-sprints at the gym instead of just running around the track for what feels like forever (even if its only 3 or 4 laps).  It's way more fun, and you get to feel like you're going fast for a little while, and then not kill yourself for a little while, and then start the process all over again.  If they told me to come up with names for particular exercises, I'd be more creative.  Instead of "wind-sprints" it would be "winded-sprints" and I could let out a nervous chuckle every time I told someone about it because I enjoyed the pun so much.  Maybe even ask someone if they got the joke, and make it especially awkward.  Maybe that's a bad idea after all...

I've been seriously considering shaving my head too.  I've been buzzing it pretty short since about mid-January, and it might just be me, but it seems like the hair is just thinning more and more.  Pretty soon I'm just gonna have a patch at the top of my forehead and a ring of baldness.  I'd rather just get rid of it all, especially if my head could be really shiny hahaha.

Well, that's all I can think of for now.  Until next time!