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!