Tuesday 30 July 2013

Chow on chow, Parkinson's Law, two ways of doing something, and love.

Another mixed bag of subjects. First, here is Mr Carson C. Chow.
From A Mathematical Challenge to Obesity
According to Mr. Chow, Americans are getting increasingly fat because they're eating increasingly large amounts of "chow", because there's increasingly large amounts of it being produced. That's classic Parkinson's law (consumption expands to absorb the available supply).

According to Armi Legge, over-fat people need to . . . . Eat Less (& Move More).

There are two ways to "Eat Less".

1) Measure everything that goes into your mouth, calculate the calories in it and stick to an average daily calorie limit. Weigh yourself daily and adjust your intake to achieve a certain rate of rolling-averaged weight loss i.e. you consciously create a caloric deficit.

2) Tweak your diet until you find one that you can live with, that results in your belt and/or clothes getting looser i.e. you unconsciously create a caloric deficit. If you can't unconsciously create a caloric deficit, there will have to be some conscious restriction.

1) suits athletes & body-builders, as they are highly-motivated people who have a specific target in mind, whether it be athletic performance or a specific body-fat percentage/muscle mass/appearance.

2) suits the general public, as they aren't generally highly-motivated and won't tolerate hunger pangs.

Unfortunately, "Move More" has to be done consciously. Unconscious "Move More" i.e. Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis (NEAT) a.k.a. Spontaneous Physical Activity (SPA) is genetically-determined.

Finally, I read Stretching out. I've been spending too much time on a blog full of fallacies & hate and it's been making me tetchy. I've now disengaged from that blog permanently. Breathe in. Breathe out. That's better!

Continued on Completing the trine: vive la différence!

2 comments:

Adam said...

I do think Carson Chow's simulators is one of the best simulators around. I also do think one of the best strategies for weight loss (If you can tolerate calorie counting) is taking 10*(current weight-goal weight) and subtracting that from your estimated total daily energy expenditure. I also think perhaps an upper bound should be established on how much of a reduction should be taken (Perhaps a limit on the size of reduction of say.. 750 or even 500) as it would be best to promote slow weight loss.

Nigel Kinbrum said...

As I said in http://nigeepoo.blogspot.co.uk/2009/01/why-counting-calories-and-weighing.html , I use a very low tech approach to weight maintenance - the tightness of my belt, which I always fasten on the same hole.

As my typical diet of mostly meat & veg results in slow weight loss, I just vary the frequency of "treats".

But yeah. That 10kcals/day/lb rule of thumb is pretty good.