The Fat Gene

The relatively recent discovery of a so called "Fat Gene" seems to give people the excuse they always needed for being overweight. After all, if you're programmed to be "fat" there's not much you can do about it.

But the gene is really unfairly named. I suspected my family has had it for a long time before it was discovered. I figured we came from northern Europe, and genetic programming like that was the difference between living to reproduce and dying. The growing season would be shorter, times of scarcity would be amplified. And if your ancestors came from Ice Age northern Europe, it was transmitted and built into a large segment of the "caucasian" population.

So it's really a "metabolic efficiency gene". For those of us with the gene, adequate nutrition to survive is more economical.

In keeping with my theme that everything you are told is part of a political process, handed down from people with some academic axe to grind, I'll tell you how I see it.

There was a time when I contested my doctor's information that for my size, I should eat 2,000 calories a day. When I was in my 20s and serious about keeping my weight down, I did serious calorie counting. And I came up with an equilibrium figure of 1,200 calories a day. That is, once I got down to around 160 lbs, to stay at that weight I could average no more than 1,200 calories a day, or 60% of the calories recommended by my doctor.

That was when I was in my 20s. Now, it's probably less.

What inspired me to write about this was this article:

MSNBC article on the fat gene

In case the link gets link rot here are the salient points:

Maybe you CAN blame being fat on your genes. But there's a way to overcome that family history — just get three to four hours of moderate activity a day.

Oh really? For those of us with "decent jobs", that is jobs that have us sitting behind computers for 8 or more hours per day (much more in the case of people who, like me, work in the special effects industry), that is not very practical advice.

Not for the Amish of Lancaster County, Pa., who were the focus of a new study on a common genetic variation that makes people more likely to gain weight. It turns out the variant's effects can be blocked with physical activity — lots of it.

So, if you're in a society where you roll back time to an era when people didn't travel far and didn't use cars or other modern conveniences, you damn well have to do a lot of physical work. And in that case, 2,000 calories a day, or even more, is an appropriate nutritional level.

The first problem we have, is that we think we can lose weight through diet and exercise that we don't want. The definition of "diet" for most of us, is something you start, and when you reach your goal, you stop. This doesn't address the primary problem: we eat too much for the amount of exercise found in our lives.

We have other problems. Eating is a social event. It's the only social event where I work. Unlike my last job, we don't go drinking together once a week after work. So we go to lunch.

And therein lies the second problem. If you eat out, the serving size of the food you will receive is too big. The last time I lost a lot of weight and stayed there for a period of years, I adopted a rule of thumb that worked really well: the total size of your meal should be no bigger or thicker than your hand.

You can eat two meals of that size a day, no matter what that food is. I'd stretch it to including two fast food hamburgers a day, NO FRIES, diet soda or water only. That's about 1200 calories, if you make sure the burgers don't have mayo on them.

My wife buys pre-made pasta from Whole Foods. I've been gaining weight on those pastas, because I've been eating the serving included in the containers. Lately, I've been putting those "meals" into a soup dish. What appears to be a small container, actually contains enough food to fill that dish to well over filled, a diameter of 6-8 inches, and 5 inches high. I fill the dish to about an inch and a half deep, put the rest back in the fridge. It'll last me three days.

I've been avoiding lunch with the co-workers. This is a bad idea, because being part of the social group is the key to longevity in my business. People recommend and hire the people they like, and social pariahs die on the vine. So I'm taking to portioning my food appropriately, and throwing the rest away.

This takes a lot of discipline. The food is almost always "good". And the goal of good food, is to get you to eat more of it.

Throwing a third problem in the mix, is the ingrained training nearly all of us get in our youth. Keep in mind that when you're young, you don't have a car and when I was growing up we did a lot of outside activities. I know that's different today, because society has turned against children doing anything unsupervised, because small numbers of cases of "bad things happening to children" and the news media harping on it, has led to parents trying to get their kids to reduce their risks of becoming random victims by staying home. Video games have played into that mentality. So now even kids live the physically unfit lifestyle of your average computer graphics nerd.

I digressed.

We're brought up with a couple of concepts that work against us the rest of our lives. The first is that if we didn't finish the food prepared by our mothers, it was an insult to the hard work they did preparing the meal. The other is that as growing kids, we burned a lot of energy, and cleaning our plates usually provided a replacement for burned energy.

We gained an appreciation for food. We enjoyed the taste, and were compelled by that taste, to eat until there was no more food. Often, our moms responded to this, by making extra food so we could have "seconds".

So, I'm on another round of doing what I know I should always do. Eating the same food, but eating less of it. Re-learning to measure food to the amount I actually will burn during an average day. I'll get more exercise, but no where near the amount my athlete wife gets. I'll take vitamins to compensate for the vitamins I don't get in my food. Which also serves to defeat mechanisms in my body that compel me to eat more calories, because certain nutritional expectations have been met.

I know from experience, that what you eat isn't important. You can eat the fatty foods you want, but you have to eat a lot less of them. You can eat steak every day and lose weight (I did it once), but take that one lb steak and cut it into 4, and only eat one of those 4 oz steaks if that's what you want to do. Or eat that 1/4 lb burger for lunch (sans mayo), but understand that for dinner you only get 600 calories, which isn't much.

If you eat breakfast, take that into account. If you eat three meals a day, you get no more than 400 calories a meal (nothing with eggs and bacon and toast will give you that little). Any meal you eat more, you'll have to eat less of the others.

I don't eat breakfast. Never did. So I have a budget of 600 calories a meal or so.

Mind you, it will be useful to get more exercise. But it burns a lot fewer calories than you'd imagine. I used to ride my bike 7.5 miles to work every day. 45 minutes each way (lots of ill timed stop lights). I figured out, that I was only getting around 400 calories of exercise out of that hour and a half a day of exercise. 2/3rds of a burger. less than an order of small fries. 2 16 oz Cokes with sugar.

But the really hard part of all this, is constantly saying no to our bodies. To think of our bodies as great betrayers of our ultimate goal of being at a reasonable weight. Our bodies are arch liars, the villains in the battle of the bulge. Every time our bodies tell us they're hungry, they're lying. When we're eating, when our body tells us to eat more, it's lying.

The fourth problem is value. Like many people who were brought up in austere homes, getting more food for your money is considered a good thing. Restaurants know we think this way. In an Italian restaurant, you get free bread or bread sticks, and with the meal you'll get your main dish and often a side of pasta. The pasta alone is large enough to blow your entire day's allocation of calories, but with the meal and bread you have about 4 times more calories than you will burn with an average lifestyle.

Should you not eat there? Of course you should. But you should practice using a "push away" practice (pushing yourself away from the table before you're done). Take a knife and divide all your food by 4. Eat 1/4 of it, and take the rest home.

As a leftover, when you eat it, eat another 1/4. Then throw the rest away. Seriously. It's OK to throw away food. Make it a regular practice to eat some, and throw the rest away. Learn to laugh about it. The act of finishing your food won't feed a homeless person, or stop people from starving in Africa or whatever place food shortages are happening at this year. The act of throwing food away will mean you have absolute confirmation that you are eating less and doing something. Throw at least half your food away, and feel great about your discipline and you'll know you're on your way.

I don't mean to trivialize any of this. I wouldn't be fat if I put what's in my head into practice. But I don't make excuses about it.

Now I get to the bad part. There are two specific exercises that help remind you about your diet. Crunches and push ups. Work up to 100 crunches a day, and maybe 20 "no knees touching the floor" push ups. The crunches help you hold your stomach in, and make you feel fuller faster when you eat. The push ups energize your upper body muscles, and every movement reminds you that you're in a life improvement program. It only takes 5 minutes a day or so.

You might not be able to start out with that level of exercise, and it is truly minimal. My wife does that crunch and upper body workout every day for an hour. All you're trying to do, is wake up your body to the fact that you're give a shit.

The fifth problem is that there is a health community that is out there demanding that you put an unreasonable effort into exercise. They learn something in school, at a point where they're at their physical peak, and get scientific "religion". These nutritionists and doctors and whoever, learned that you should eat a certain number of calories a day, and they won't budge from that.

And they think you should get a certain amount of exercise a day, without considering that for many people, the 8 hour day is dead, and including the commute and preparation for work, you've burned 10-12 hours of your day already. For them, they believe you should exercise, work, come home and sleep. Or wake, work, come home and exercise until you go to sleep. That is unacceptable, and stoopidly impractical for most people.

I would agree with some things that researchers say. Take the stairs instead of the elevator, park farthest from your work and walk a little. Do the little things you can to not take the easiest route.

Bonus problem: Dessert

I love dessert. And I came up with a way to eat dessert. No reason that can't be your "meal". If you eat a meal and a dessert, it's just too much. But dessert instead of a meal? Why not? Just because our mothers said you couldn't have dessert without finishing the meal doesn't mean that they were right.

My mom has said recently, that if you want to have dessert, get the dessert before the meal. She's implying that if you get the dessert before the meal, you won't have room to finish your meal. Maybe. If you did that, and you still get the meal, take 5 small bites of the meal, and have the rest boxed up. I've never seen anyone do this yet in my family.

But I have gone for dessert: ice cream, pie, whatever...instead of my meal. I liked it. Can't do it every day without some sort of nutritional deficit, but you can do it once a week. Use the other rule of thumb about portion size though. If you get three scoops, big scoops aren't a bonus, they're a curse. Mentally steel yourself for a couple of spoons of the ice cream, and leave 2/3rds of it in the bowl and throw it out.

Will I lose weight? Maybe. I've lost some already. I'm 50 years old, and don't have the muscles that help burn the weight like I used to, and building them in much harder because the hormones that help you build muscles are much less prevalent in my body at this time. I'll see where it takes me.

I know that if I lose weight, it'll take time. Losing weight in a hurry never works right. It took me years to gain the weight I've got, and it might take years to take it off. I'll look for around a half pound a week.

There's one more rule of thumb I learned. A pound of fat takes around 3,200 calories above your equilibrium consumption. For every 3,200 calories you eat under that equilibrium, you lose a pound of fat. So for me to lose 1/2 pound a week, I can only eat 971 calories a day (229 calories under my nominal equilibrium weight). To lose a pound a week, I'd have to eat 743 calories a day.

But I know if I don't lose weight, it'll be because I just lack discipline. But I won't use the fat gene as an excuse.

So there you have it. Scale your consumption to your actual calorie burning, throw out most of the food that's put in front of you (even veggies if they have butter or cheese sauce or something), eat the dessert instead of the meal and still throw some of it out (or split it), get an idea of how much of the food you like meets the "budget" for your meal, park as far away from your destination in the parking lot as possible, take the stairs, do crunches and push ups. It might not get you where you want to go as fast as you'd like, but it would be a real good start along that road.

Obligatory Global Warming Rant

Seems like everyone has a blog about global warming. Most people don't know what they're talking about. I thought I'd just add one more.

It's pretty obvious that global warming is real. The causes...debatable.

I'd weigh in that anthrocentric causes are contributory, but not the only source. Global warming has been a consistent trend since the end of the last ice age. Other planets have been showing surface temperature increases. There are just all sorts of variables going on.

The problem is this: reducing co2 and ch4 emissions isn't going to stop it. There's already too much co2 and ch4 present in the atmosphere. Global warming will continue and be amplified by greenhouse effects for at least 100 years. If we stopped putting out co2 completely, today. Which is damn unlikely.

It's funny. When I was growing up, there were people worried about a new ice age, until we came up with a theory on why Venus is so damned hot.

Largely speaking, global warming is good for the environment and species diversity. It tends to expand the tropics, but makes existing deserts more...desertified. Polar ice caps melt and anything that depends on it is history until the start of the next ice age.

Which can also be a natural backlash to global warming. More moisture in the atmosphere means more cloud cover reflecting solar energy. A big volcano or inevitable meteoric impact can tip the balance quickly. The land bridge between north and south america guarantees eventual oceanic circulatory failure, and is the cause for multiple ice ages for the last two million years.

We don't know whether the increased cloud cover will simply cause some self regulation mechanism to kick in. Expanding tropics can add more oxygen, and increased water temperatures can increase plankton and other oxygen producing life by increasing the depth of the epipelagic zone in the oceans.

But in the short term, most of the problems caused by global warming are anthrocentric. We have decades to take action in relocating populations (which humans have done all along), we have decades to take technological initiatives to ameliorate problems such as fresh water shortages, through large scale desalinization. We'll have to get used to Florida being an archipelago, and the Republicans will have to get used to a losing a depopulated Florida as a swing state ;)

Most of the losers in the game will be inconsequential poor populations who have to abandon their low lying traditional areas and islands, and rich property owners with coastal property. For me, if I live another hundred years, the ocean will be about 1/2 to a mile closer to my home. I win! ;)

Increased numbers of hurricanes are inconsequential. Most of damage caused by hurricanes would be solved by better building codes and more care to human made infrastructure like dikes. The idea that a nation has to do everything in its power to save cities like New Orleans or Miami will seem quaint. The country survived pretty well without New Orleans for over two years, and it's still not a really functional contributor to the national economy.

What it all comes to, is coping with reality, whatever it may be, and spending money. Lots and lots of money. If someone still wants to do something about atmospheric co2, they'll have to work on global scale carbon sequestration, and budget trillions of dollars to accomplish that.

I'm down with reducing co2 emissions and such only for one reason: it forces technological change and makes us rethink technology. Electric vehicles are a good idea, for lots of reasons, in the long run. The techno kludge of modern batteries will be replaced by something better, probably supercapacitors (which are catching up to battery storage in cubic capacity, and should exceed it in less than 20 years with none of the drawbacks). Supercapacitors can be filled as quickly as a gas tank.

If you can increase electric storage capacity two or more orders of magnitude per pound, even jets can run on electricity. Maybe even rockets. You get electric storage well above chemical storage of energy as in combustion, it changes everything at every level. You get electric energy cheap enough, and transmutation of elements becomes economically feasible.

The hydrogen economy that so many hippy types want, is a shell game promoted by the oil industry. The oil industry burns excess hydrogen on smokestacks now, and they'll be able to produce it the cheapest using petroleum for the next two to three decades, thus delaying the inevitable switch to electric power.

Gasoline has a chemical formula of c8h18, meaning that there are 18 hydrogen atoms in a single gasoline molecule. Is there any genius out there who doesn't think it's easier to get those 18 hydrogen atom than it is to insure a consistent gasoline molecule and a blend of detergents and other additives? And there are many hydrocarbon molecules in petroleum, some with higher densities of hydrogen per carbon atom. And the simplest byproduct is good old co2. Makes me wonder how long the oil industry will release massive amounts of co2 before the hydrogen geeks figure out that they're really contributing to global warming and need to force the oil industry to turn the carbon into some sort of useful sludge.

The dream of getting hydrogen from water is flat stupid, because it takes electricity to do it and the hydrogen gained as a storage medium takes more energy to attain then the energy you get out of it. I mean, water only has two hydrogen atoms. How inefficient. Also, you can't store hydrogen long term without refrigeration.

The auto industry supports the hydrogen economy, because you can always adopt existing engines to run on hydrogen. Not to mention always being in cahoots with Big Oil.

It's stupid to deny global warming exists. Polar ice caps and millenia old glaciers are melting everywhere. The anti-industry and anti-technology left discovered, and has grabbed it as their own cause, so you're seeing the natural political short-term outcome of that. The more the right denies it exists or fights it, the more the left owns the issue. Once it's an accepted fact that 50 year olds have grown up with, and some consequences of it become more visible, some realistic action will be proposed, and it'll be an issue used by both sides of the aisle.

But the early and beneficial fallout of this era will be increased investment in electrical storage and non-combustion power, and I predict solar roofing panels as cheap as current petrochemical and silicon based ones. Maybe they'll even pave roads with solar cell materials.

http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/13659/

Supercapacitors would help with storing the sunny power for a rainy day:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercapacitor

If they could exceed battery storage density, and they should since the capacity is increasing dramatically since they first appeared 10 years ago, they can be filled with electricity as fast as a gas tank is filled with gas.

In any case, if you look at how technology changed from 1900 to 2000, you can expect it to change more by 2100, and it'll be used in ways that are impossible to know at this point. But look at the tip of the iceberg we see right now.

The pressures from the left are the trigger for a massive shift in technology that will define this century. The left will not give up their Macs and iPhones ;)

It won't stop, and probably won't slow global warming though, assuming that nature doesn't just balance out. And it's ironic that in a few centuries or millenia, we may be trying to figure out how to massively increase co2 in the atmosphere to stop a new ice age, or maybe we'll be even smarter and separate the North and South American continents (largely the reason we have ice ages at all) and end ice ages for a long long time, and bite the bullet on the environmental damage from that move.

Of course, the bigger elephant in the room is the possibility of methane clathrate melting in the ocean because of rising ocean temperatures. That would be a pretty severe, as in global extinction, possibility. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane_clathrate

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_Gun_Hypothesis

If humans are going to survive in the really long term, they're going to have to be able to think really really big and be able to mobilize vast resources to deal with things like that sooner or later. We're so not ready for that. But the more mild global warming problem we currently face might yield some political mechanisms to fire up if those clathrate deposits start to pop ;)