Week 8: Nutrition

10:49PM 3/20/19

First week back from Spring Break and I’m doing alright, but I’m just plateauing. I’m seeing minor fluctuations in my weight due to bloating and what not, but for the most part I’m still making physical progress. My chest is beginning to show signs of flattening out, but my workouts have grown largely inconsistent and my lifts are starting to show it. I did one of my deadlift workouts once over break and couldn’t do 5 sets of 225, I was just simply exhausted. That being said, I aim to squeeze in some more intense and structured workouts over the next week as it is unusually busy: I have to fill out three applications to law schools, get two recommendation letters from my professors, and request transcripts from Bridgewater. It’s going to be a long week, but nothing worth having comes easy.

Moving on to the chapter on nutrition…. I hated it. There’s so much misinformation in there. At one point it suggested a diet varying from 40-65% of your daily calories as carbohydrates… that’s just ridiculous. Carbs are only good if you’re extremely active or looking to put on weight very quickly. What people don’t know is that carbs, in every form, are simply sugars. You ingest these carbs as bread, pasta, breading on fried foods, etc. and they immediately spike your blood sugar levels. Throw in some fruit or fruit juice into that meal as well, and the result is a blood sugar meltdown. So many people don’t realize, including the FDA apparently, that fruits have an enormous amount of naturally occurring sugars for very little nutritional benefit in return. Humans didn’t evolve eating mainly grains, fruits, and vegetables. They evolved eating primarily animal products. They were hunters. They could subsist on plants and fruits if they had to, hence why we are omnivores, but our bodies run the best and actively seek nutrition from animal products, the king of all being beef. The idea that you need to eat mainly fruits, vegetables, and carbohydrates is incredibly harmful because these are all not calorically dense foods, and the carbohydrates that are calorically dense are filled with empty calories that are driving the obesity and diabetes epidemics plaguing this country. Therefore I am committing to continue to follow my diet centered around primarily consuming animal products, eating a small amount of vegetables when available at the dining halls mainly for fiber. There is no vitamin in vegetables you could not obtain from animal products, primarily beef, in a more readily digestible form, that being retinol over carotenoids. Finally, the idea that you should ideally not consume any dietary cholesterol as you can produce “all you need” from your liver is completely ridiculous. There are many studies now coming out stating the LDL cholesterol plays no role in heart disease whatsoever, but rather minerals vastly over-prescribed for our daily diets, mainly Calcium, may play a larger role in clogging our arteries. This clogging is also governed in part by a person’s Vitamin K levels, which significantly effects the thickness of the blood and reduces clotting. The idea that you should not ingest cholesterol, an incredibly important cell membrane component, as well as molecular transporter, is quite frankly ludicrous. The problem is only compounded by the fact that while high in cholesterol, egg yolks are extremely nutrient dense, and thus the FDA’s insistence that they be avoided due to high cholesterol content, which is gradually being revealed to be a boogeyman, is in turn depriving Americans nationwide of many vitamins they may in fact be deficient in. But ignore the man behind the curtain, big pharma, of whose companies stand to gain enormous profits from the sales of Lipitor, the most widely prescribed and consumed medication in the United States, aiming to treat, you guessed it, heart disease by lowering your cholesterol, which is gradually being shown to be a non factor in heart disease. Also, let’s not neglect the fact that the completely unregulated supplement industry has billions to gain by encouraging the FDA to keep discouraging the public from eating nutrient dense egg yolks, the only comparable source of vitamins to animal liver, as a way to market their products to nutrient deficient Americans who already have a social stigma against eating liver, the single most nutrient dense food on the planet. Pearson’s promotion of this absolutely terrible nutrition advice is appalling, as were this chapter’s online questions, filled with falsehoods and misconceptions.

Long story short, I won’t be taking any dietary advice from Pearson, and I’ll continue to strive for at least three high intensity lifting sessions per week.

To contrast that heavy rant, here’s a picture of me on a date I went on last weekend, it was really fun to finally paint again: