“THIS IS THE GREATEST MOMENT OF YOUR LIFE AND YOU’RE MISSING IT!”

The title for this post comes from the movie “Fight Club”, because as my readers know, I was a child of the 90s, and that movie is one of the most 90s movies out there and will always remain iconic for those of us that were “there”, right next to Office Space, for related yet completely different reasons.  For those that have not had the absolute delight of enjoying this film (at least a few dozen times), this line is spoken by Tyler Durden during a moment wherein he is inflicting a severe chemical burn upon the narrator and forcing him to endure the pain of it.  Specifically, he’s chastising the narrator for trying to distract himself from the pain by trying to think of something else: something pleasurable, happy, and absent of pain.  For Tyler, the entire point of the experience IS the experience: to distract yourself from it is to defeat the purpose and miss out on the lesson of it all, which in Tyler’s case is that “You have to consider the possibility that God does not like you.  He never wanted you.  In all probability, he hates you.  This is not the worst thing that can happen…we don’t need him!”  Which, oh my goodness, THAT quote would also make a great post sometime, but today we’ll focus ON the part preceding that, because Tyler was absolutely right: this IS the greatest moment of your life, and you ARE missing it.

And just like that, my blog traffic went up 700%

 

Ok, I had to post a “Brad Pitt in Fight Club” photo, because this is a blog on physical transformation and that’s so incredibly cliché it’d be wrong NOT to.  But allow me to explain myself otherwise.  This applies in a few areas, the first of which I’ll address is how often trainees live so much in the future that they never actually experience what is ACTUALLY happening to them.  They are experiencing the greatest moments of their lives and completely missing them, because they are too busy trying to live in the future.  Examples?  Think of how many trainees engage in an alleged muscle building phase of training, but restrict their caloric intake in some sort of attempt to minimize fat gain. Why?  Because they don’t want to have to cut in the future.  WHAT?  For one: good luck.  Centuries have taught us that the way of physical transformation is a process of gaining and losing, for reasons I have covered extensively in this blog (spoilers: to train hard, you have to eat big, and when you don’t eat big, you don’t train hard).  But beyond that, think of how much this is robbing Peter to pay Paul.  The point of the muscle gaining phase is to GAIN MUSCLE.  This isn’t a “minimize fat gain” phase.  The minimize fat gain phase is known as a MAINTENANCE phase: most humans are simply wanting to minimize their fat gain day to day (and they’re doing that quite poorly in that regard, but I digress).  A muscle gaining phase says it right there: the goal is to gain muscle.  When you shift your nutritional priorities AWAY from that, you waste the entire training phase: this time you were SUPPOSED to be focused on building muscle, you instead focused on minimizing fat gain.  Now, the phase ends…and you barely gained any muscle.  Hey, now you don’t need to cut.  Congrats!  …it’s because you didn’t gain any muscle!  And now while we engage in our follow on phase, all we can think about is how we gotta gain some goddamn muscle during our next muscle gain phase, because right now we’re just spinning our wheels.  That muscle gaining phase was the greatest moment of your life at that point, and you missed it.

 

The same holds true for the trainee that is overly concerned about achieving “optimal”.  This trainee doesn’t want to waste ANY time in their pursuit of physical transformation: every second spent training MUST be the most productive second of training possible.  For this trainee, they need to ensure that, in 2 years time, they’ve reached their “natural potential” (HAH!  If you’ve trained MORE than 2 years, you understand the comedy of that statement), just like all the experts on the internet said they would.  Could you imagine the tragedy if it took 2.5 years to get there because we used “sub-optimal training”?!  Meanwhile, while Johnny Optimal is pouring over tomes and articles (let’s be real: they’re just watching TikTok influencers), Jimmy the Meathead walked into the weight room and maxed out the lat pulldown machine every day and saw their upperbody EXPLODE simply because they were there putting in the effort on a consistent basis.  90% of your potential achieved today is far more impressive than 100% achieved tomorrow if we are actually experiencing the greatest moment of our lives!  But you’re there missing it.  You’re so focused on your future you forgot all about your present.  No matter WHAT we do, time will march on and we will reach the future: there’s no need to try to get there before everyone else.

Doing everything wrong can sometimes still get you pretty damn far

 

Finally, let’s discuss a situation that’s really on the nose as far as the context of this quote and scene goes: so many of you folks out there are actually flat out distracting yourself FROM the pain of training.  Whenever someone tells me they enjoy training, I know they’re out there MISSING the greatest moment of their lives.  I have posted many videos of me accomplishing stupidly high rep sets of exercises: it’s kinda become my “thing”.  I have an annual tradition of doing 300+ reps of high handle trap bar pulls with 135lbs on Thanksgiving (current best is 401 reps), and I’ve posted some recent videos of an 85x185 squat and 101x146.  I am frequently asked how I manage to keep count of all those reps, informed by many people that they easily get distracted and miscount reps in sets up to 20, let alone the 100s.  And upon hearing that, I know that these people are missing out on the greatest moments of their lives.  There is IMMENSE pain during these high rep sets, along with sheer physical exhaustion and just all around soul-crushing suckage…but that’s WHY we do them.  Because it’s the enduring and overcoming of these experience that allow us to grow.  But what ends up happening is a trainee does whatever they can to DISTRACT themselves from this experience WHILE they are experiencing it.  They let their minds wander, distract themselves, blast the music in their earbuds to max volume, hit up the smelling salts, and basically try everything they can to HIDE from the pain.  That psyche up ritual of yours takes on a whole different look when you stop and realize you’re basically trying to scare away the pain because you’re afraid of it, like a housecat that arches its back and raises its hair up to try to look bigger to a predator.  Instead: EXPERIENCE this greatest moment of your life.  Live EVERY rep of it: don’t let a single one go by without your own 100% focus on it.  It’s not about the 20 reps of Super Squats that transform us: it’s about us DOING those 20 reps.  If we check ourselves out and try to wake back up when it's over, it wasn’t US that was doing it.  We are in pursuit of transformation, and we aren’t caterpillars in that pursuit.  We don’t get to wrap ourselves in a cocoon of distraction and wake up one day a butterfly.  Instead, our transformation is the vicious, ugly and brutal transformation of taking a hunk of raw iron, heating it until it’s pliable and beating it until it takes on the shape we desire.  We must experience the searing heat of the flames of the forge and every hammering blow of the mallet beating upon our frames.  The blade that skips the heat or dodges the strike is the blade that breaks in battle.  We will be weapons of legend: masterly forged.

Although we can also be needlessly huge too

 

At least that’s cooler than being a bar of soap.          

LESSONS LEARNED FROM SOVIET ROCKET CLUSTERING: NOT ONLY IS FAILURE AN OPTION: IT’S AN EXPECTATION!

I’ve discussed my rather electric educational upbringing, so it should surprise absolutely no one that, at some point in my life, I was educated on the difference between American and Soviet rocket design theory as it related to space exploration.  The Americans employed a very American approach to the design theory: they would recruit the greatest scientific minds possible (Hello “Operation Paperclip”) in order to perform the most precise and exacting scientific calculations to determine exactly what/how and why to design a rocket to reach its intended destination, then contract out to those companies that could provide the top-of-the-line equipment necessary to build this rocket, ensuring a “zero-failure” scenario such that the goal of the space exploration mission could be reached.  And it was, in fact, “zero-failure”: if anything went wrong in the execution of the plan, typically, the entire plan would be scrubbed.  If it was an unmanned rocket and it went off trajectory, it was exploded before it could possibly harm anyone on U.S. soil.  The Soviets, on the other hand, employed a strategy known as “clustering”.  What is clustering?  Clustering is the idea that some failure is inevitable: so we plan FOR that failure: typically about a 10% rate of expected failure.  Putting that into numbers, if we know it takes 100 rocket boosters for us to reach our target, we’ll put 110 boosters on the rocket, figuring that 10 of them are going to fail, and therefore we’ll get our needed 100!  Compare this with the “no-failure” strategy of the Americans, and you can observe the much greater degree of flexibility allowed in such a plan: you can shed several rocket boosters before you need to start discussing scrubbing the mission.  As much as we love to say “failure is not an option”, the truth is that, not only is failure an option: it’s an expectation!

Someone experienced with rockets AND failure

Many trainees out there are wanting to employ “the American approach” when it comes to training and nutrition in pursuit of physical transformation.  They engage in a “zero failure” campaign, where everything is so tenuously strung together in the most precise of manners that there is absolutely no room for failure…which means, when the inevitable failure DOES occur, the entire thing falls apart.  “If It Fits Your Macros” is a primary example of one of these “no failure” nutritional approaches, which is so funny, because to many this would appear to be the most FORGIVING nutritional approach, but it is the infinite flexibility of this approach that lends to its downfall.  When we already decide “food quality doesn’t matter: all we need to do is meet our macros”, we’ve put ourselves into a “no-failure” situation: now we NEED to meet our macros, because we’ve already abandoned the pursuit of high food QUALITY.  So now, when we fail on IIFYM, we COMPLETELY fail: not only are we eating poor food quality, but we didn’t even meet our macro nutrient goal, so we’re eating a poor quality INEFFECTIVE diet.  Yes yes, the IIFYM apologists will always inform me that you don’t HAVE to eat bad food on IIFYM: I’m just gonna say that, if you WANTED to eat quality food, you wouldn’t pick this strategy.  We do this so we can justify the ice cream and Pop Tarts: let’s be real with ourselves.

And we continue to flip the script when we look at the “super restrictive” nutritional protocols and acknowledge how they fall so well within the notion of clustering and acceptable failure.  Diets like Carnivore or Paleo are both incredibly restrictive: the former saying “eat only animals, no plants” and the latter saying “eat only things paleo man could have eaten, nothing processed/alien”.  Attempting to abide by these protocols 100% by the letter of the law can be impossible for many trainees: these requirements are quite stringent and do not account for when “reality” shows up.  We overslept, the store was out of the food we needed, unscheduled travel, unplanned office luncheon, etc.  But herein we observe clustering: if we’ve been eating the high quality nutrition that is prescriptive of these plans, when we fail to meet them, we’ve now simply entered a realm wherein 90% of our diet was outstanding, and only 10% of it was less than adequate.  For most trainees, a 90% success rate for nutrition is MORE than adequate to accomplish many degrees of physical transformation.  We were eating VERY well for the majority of our journey: we can account for these rocket engine failures.

This failed carnivore meal is a successful vertical diet meal!

 

And along with that, consider where we “land” when we fail on these two different approaches.  For the Americans, when their rockets failed, they were obliterated and landed in pieces and fragments (ideally) across the ocean.  For the Soviets, their “failed” rockets MADE IT TO THE DESTINATION!  It’s similar with these nutritional approaches: when you fail IIFYM, you are REALLY obliterated: you’ve been housing ice cream, Pop Tarts and protein powder, and now you forgot the protein powder, so it’s been an ice cream and Pop Tarts diet.  But you were eating carnivore and you went and ate a vegetable or a piece of fruit?  How awful!  You were eating paleo and you broke down and ended up having a protein shake or a Quest bar?  For shame!  You were on a bro-diet of chicken, rice and broccoli and you had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich?  For one: Dan John and Paul Carter approved, but secondly the IIFYM crowd claims that is how it’s “supposed” to be.  When your “failed” diet ends up being the ideal of the majority, you’ve definitely gotten your nutrition sorted out.  

 

Funny enough, one of the sloppier approaches to nutrition ALSO falls under the realm of Soviet clustering: The Gallon of Milk a Day. Now, I’m not going to try to sell you on the idea that a gallon of milk a day is a healthful approach to eating/living (they killed Socrates for sophism, although if I was sentenced to drink a gallon of milk rather than hemlock, I’d appreciate the irony).  GOMAD is an extreme method of achieving extreme results, but with that, it STILL employs clustering.  There’s nothing particularly magical about the amount of “one gallon”: it’s simply a handy way to measure the amount of milk you’re taking in.  If you drink a gallon of it a day along with eating a lot of food, you’re sure to grow.  But say you “fail” and only take in 90% of a gallon one day, or even a few days in a row?  You STILL took in a ton of calories: you’ll be alright.  You forget to buy milk one day and skip a whole day of it?  In a 6 week span, that 1 day won’t really matter.  Once again, even when we fail, we land at our intended destination.

Sometimes it's not worth trying to cram in those last few ounces

 

Wanna walk some Soviet Clustering training?  It ties perfectly into that gallon of milk: SUPER SQUATS!  And again, at face value, you may see Super Squats as a more American approach: either you get the set of 20 or you didn’t.  But look a little deeper: if we FAIL in our pursuit of that set of 20 that one particular day, isn’t that indicative of the amount of effort we put INTO that set?  Is there something particularly special about the number 20, or is it simply a number we utilized because the pursuit of it drives us to push our bodies hard and keep a weight on our back for a LONG time.  Super Squats pushes a VERY aggressive training protocol, paired with an aggressive nutritional protocol, and failure is pretty much a given, simply because we are human and we are flawed.  But when we fail, we obsess about it for the next 47 hours, pound the milk, come back strong, conquer it, and in conquering it prove to ourselves that very workout wherein we failed actually MOVED US FORWARD to our goals.  We have proof of concept right there: a weight that previously defeated us has now been defeated.  We failed on the program, and succeeded toward our goals.

 

The American approach to training would be something more akin to linear periodization (no, not linear progression).  Linear/Western Periodization (already with the American there) hinges on the idea of calculating a max weight we need to lift and then working backwards over the course of many training cycles to determine what weights, for what sets and reps, we will need in order to achieve that lift.  It is VERY precise and demanding, and those sets MUST be hit. …so what happens if we get sick during the training cycle?  Pick up a small injury?  Have to work late one night and miss a workout?  Etc.  How comical that a western approach to training required a real Soviet style approach to execution: like some sort of state sponsored athlete.  There is no wiggleroom: the expectations are set, and we must do so for the Motherland! 

Rocky IV really did it right here

 

Holy cow this is going long, but you can see where this all plays out.  It may seem cool to believe “failure is not an option”, but when you actually put yourself IN those situations, you don’t create the environment that produces perfection: you simply experience the very real and human experience of BEING imperfect, and your perfect plan falls to pieces.  Engage in a little bit of clustering: build failure INTO the plan, so that, when you fail, you end up where you were heading to anyway.  “Shoot for the moon, for if you miss you end up among the stars”?  No, shoot for the moon, plan to miss, for WHEN you miss, you’ll end up on the moon.

 

…yeah, that one probably won’t catch on…but I planned on that. 

     

LESSONS LEARNED FROM FRED DUKES: YOU DON’T NEED TO BE THE HULK

 

I absolutely understand enthusiasm as it relates to the topic of physical transformation.  That should be readily apparent: I’ve been writing a blog for 11+ years now where, once a week, I write at least 1000 words on the very topic, and often time I have to restrict myself from writing MORE or more frequently than that.  I’ve expressed how one of my earliest cognizant memories or thoughts was relating to wanting to be big and strong: how I would watch Popeye cartoons and see the commercials for the Marcy all-in-one fitness machine and would try to frantically copy down the 1-800 number to order it, thinking that they’d just send it to me if I managed the phone call (spoilers: you have to PAY for that).  When given a free moment, I’ll read about physical transformation, or go for a walk while listening to a podcast (2-birds with one stone there).  And, of course, I love ALL media relating to those beings that are big and strong, which meant that growing up with the X-men cartoon, playing cards and comics was like having an IV-drip of pure dopamine (quite the heroine problem, eh?).  And from there, I was introduced to Fred Dukes, aka “The Blob”, and from there I feel like we can all stand to learn a lesson from this portly gentleman: we don’t NEED to be The Hulk.

"Don't worry Hulk: this happens to lots of Superheroes..."

 

Who is “The Hulk”?  For those living under a rock, The “Incredible” Hulk, much to my disdain as a forever Juggernaut fan, is consistently ranked as the physically strongest creature in the Marvel Comics universe.  He is the barometer of which we evaluate all other “heavy hitters” in Marvel Comics.  He’s big, green, angry, and he smashes.  I honestly never cared for him, but credit where credit is due, he’s “the Strongest”.  Who is Fred Dukes?  He is, “The Blob”: a mutant in the X-Men universe, which was a BRILLIANT universe because characters no longer needed an elaborate origin story to explain their superpowers: they simply had a mutated gene responsible for it!  In the case of Fred Dukes, his mutant powers included “superhuman strength, endurance, and great resistance to physical injury”, and whereas Juggernaut claims “nothing stops the Juggernaut”, the Blob’s claim to fame is “nothing moves The Blob”, based off an ability to alter the gravity beneath him (which, fun fact, the Blob HAS been moved by Juggernaut, Hulk and Strong Guy, but that’s another story).  But let’s key in on that superhuman strength.  How strong is The Blob?  Well…

 

In the world of Marvel, strength tends to be divided into classes based off how much the character can lift.  The previously aforementioned Hulk, as “The Strongest”, is in the 100+ tons class.  His strength is considered limitless, so he can lift over 100 tons.  That is, of course, unfathomable.  A “lower tier” heavy hitter, like Strong Guy, was capable of lifting 50 tons at base level, which a potential of getting stronger based on circumstances.  Where does Fred Dukes rank?  5 tons.  10 times “weaker” than Strong Guy, and over 20 times “weaker” than The Hulk.  In the world of heavy hitters, The Blob is a lightweight…but in the world of humanity?...

 

If any of us tried to bitchslap Colossus, we'd have a liquified hand

Can you IMAGINE how you would respond if you woke up one day and could live FIVE TONS?!  For a true blue meathead, this would be like having all 3 of your genie wishes granted at once.  Your prayers have been answered: you are the strongest being to have ever existed.  You quite literally transcended humanity and became “something else”.  And if it meant looking like The Blob to get there, who cares?  You’re quite literally a god amongst humanity now: you can decided if you’ll use your powers for good or for evil.  The Blob may be used as a punchline of a villain in the Marvel Comics universe, because there are SO many more powerful beings out there that can kick sand in his face, but perspective needs to be maintained here: he’s STILL a villain IN a universe full of heroes, primarily because, objectively, he is STILL a superpowered being capable of great accomplishments, either in the realm of good or evil (and if you dig deep into the comics, he HAS worked both sides of that coin).

 

Which ties everything back to the beginning and the title here: I GET that we would all LOVE to be “The Hulk”: the absolute most strongest being there ever was, top of the heap, absolute clear number one.  BUT: we must keep perspective here: simply being in the SPECTRUM of heavy hitters is, in and of itself, an accomplishment.  Fred Dukes may be “only” in the 5 ton class, but in doing so he’s established as having SUPERHUMAN strength.  On any team, he IS the “strong guy”: that’s his role.  Others might have superspeed, projectiles, flying, energy manipulation, control of the weather, etc etc, but Fred Dukes is the strong tank of the team.   He works to HIS maximal capability and is able to leverage those abilities to accomplish his end.

When you rank among these dudes, you've "made it" as far as a heavy hitter goes

 

In turn, we don’t need to worry about being perfect or optimal or the absolute most very best: we can simply be “good enough”.  Because, in truth, when we spend ALL of our time trying to be the absolute most best we can possibly be, we end up spending so much time trying to figure out HOW to be the best that we run out of time to actually enact the plan to get there!  We exist on a definite and finite timeline: eventually, we will simply get too old to continue achieving our goals, and as we march toward that timeline, often our ABILITY to achieve these ends ALSO diminish.  A “good enough” plan violently executed today is SO much more valuable than a perfect plan executed next year, to say nothing of the fact that, as we execute that good enough plan, we can CONTINUE to grow and learn to refine our craft, in much the same way that Fred Dukes actually DID grow stronger from his initial 5 ton capability.

 

And hey, while I’m talking about X-Men, why NOT bring up genetics?  The X-Men serve as a perfect example of just how unfair genetics can be.  Fred Duke’s mutation got him 5 ton class strength, whereas Colossus started off around an 80 ton class and advanced up to the 100 ton class over time.  Both were simply humans that had mutated genes: one simply was “luckier” than the other in terms of how these genes manifested.  But do you ever see The Blob call out Colossus of Strong Guy or Warpath or any of the other heavyhitters for being “unfair” and being genetically blessed?  NOPE!  Fred just does as much as he can with as much as he’s got.  AND he’s given all those dudes trouble in turn: taking the hand he was dealt and playing it for all it’s worth. 

This is seriously an awesome comic

 

If EVERYONE was The Hulk, then the Hulk wouldn’t be special.  There are always going to be outliers out there that are just absolute and total freaks that NO ONE has a chance of ever catching no matter how hard they try.  YOU aren’t that person.  I know that, because you’re reading my blog, and therefore none of this stuff comes naturally to you (because people who are naturally gifted about being big and strong don’t need to read about it: they can just BE it and go do something else).  BUT, you can STILL work as hard as you possibly can for YOU and get yourself to the point that you rank AMONG the heavy hitters.  Do you genuinely imagine you’ll somehow turn out WORSE if you were to invest 100% effort into training and nutrition?  No matter WHAT genetic hand you’ve been dealt, vesting the time and energy into attempting to transform yourself is going to result in you being an objectively BETTER version of your current self.  You won’t look like Cain Marko or Pitor Rasputin, but you ALSO won’t look like Arcade or Mojo if you push yourself in pursuit of transformation.  We need the Hulk out there to be our barometer, sure, but the universe ALSO needs a whole pantheon of heavy hitters so that we can have interesting stories, a variety of teams, different personalities AND so we can sell more merchandise!

 

You don’t need to be The Hulk.  If you can be Fred Dukes: be the best Blob you can be.                   

DUNGEONS AND DIETS: NUTRITION FROM THE LENS OF DND (PART 4-PARTY CONSTRUCTION)

Now we arrived at the “meat and potatoes” of the whole ordeal, and given what we’re read so far we already understand what a non-apt metaphor “meat and potatoes” is, so how about we transition to “steak and eggs”?  But either way: party construction, which is to say: diet construction.  How are we going to BUILD our adventuring party so that we ensure success during our exploration of various dungeons and exciting locales rather than getting one-shotted by the first goblin raiding party we run up against?

I already can hear the true nerds on the audience yelling "those are orcs!"

Herein it becomes necessary to do an HONEST stock assessment of your own capabilities along with the demands of the adventure you are about to embark upon. 

 

Some players are EXPERT players of arcane spellcasters: they know all the ins and outs of the rules, where the loopholes are, where they can exploit/leverage things, how to min/max or “munchkin” the game, and, ultimately, cheat at a game that is supposed to be “imagination but with rules”.  I have known many a player like this, and they’re an asset to have in your party so long as you’re at peace with the fact that they’re going to be the “main character” of your game while you are effectively an NPC.  But, if your goal is to have fun rather than “win Dungeons and Dragons”, these dudes can be a little odious. 

 

This is how it tends to go for me when I try my hand at it

As is blatantly apparent at this point: I am NOT that player.  I just never “got” arcane magic, the biggest reason being that I don’t want to have to invest post-graduate level effort into reading and studying the nuances of something I’m doing for the sake of having fun.  Pair this with the fact that DnD allows me to live out my boyhood power fantasies of being a big and strong barbarian, and it’s really hard for me to be anything BUT that.  In turn, I am VERY good at being that.

 

It’s no different with the world of nutrition.  Some folks are nutritional wizards (pun full intended), and their mastery of carbohydrates is awe inspiring.  Justin Harris is a fantastic example of this, and hearing him discuss carb cycling for bodybuilding is dizzying in the amount of detail and nuance he is able to discuss and dissect how carbs impact physique.  Stan Efferding is another fantastic example, as is Skip Hill and his “skiploading” protocol.  These folks have read all the rules, the sub-rules, the current errata, the spinoffs, etc, and can take that education and work magic where us scrubs just stumble.  Unless YOU are that guy, your best bet is to recruit these dudes, let them run the party, and relegate yourself to being an NPC. 

When your coach is as big and strong as a half-orc and smart as a wizard, you best listen

 

Absent that resource, you may have to be at peace with the fact that your adventuring party is going to be pretty bare bones: warriors and divine magic users.  COULD you have an arcane spellcaster in the party?  Of course, but keep in mind: all decisions are opportunity costs.  That arcane spellcaster COULD have been another strong sword arm, or another healer.  When you elect to have the arcane spellcaster, you choose to NOT have any of the other two classes.  Which, ultimately, is going to benefit you more?

 

And to answer that question, we then must ask “what kind of quest are we about to embark on?”  Is this a one-shot campaign where we just fight off a goblin horde over the course of an afternoon, or are we engaging in a multi-year long expedition wherein we expect to go from level 1 to 20, fully flesh out our characters and fight off the most epic level challenges available?  Because the party that can do well in the case of the former will most likely be unequipped for the challenges of the latter…but, in turn, the amount of effort necessary to craft a party for the case of the latter would most likely take up the WHOLE play session for the former, meaning we never even get to play the game because we were too worried about the details!

We could all stand to have a little more of this in our lives

We see that with trainees all the time: they want an “optimized” diet for a non-optimal goal.  They want to eat like an IFBB pro even though all they’re trying to do is put on some quality muscle, lean out and get healthier.  The IFBB pro eats the way they eat because there is a PRIZE at the end: their “why” can overcome their “how”.  But if your goals are nebulous and your timeframe indefinite, you will absolutely burnout trying to employ an eating strategy that is intended to deliver extreme results on a specific date and time and then immediately cease.  Much like trying to build a level 20 adventuring party for a simple afternoon game, trying to force this much specificity, effort and compliance toward a goal that does not necessitate it is just going to ensure that no fun is actually had.

 

Now, if one DOES have such lofty ambitions, they should absolutely learn the ins and outs of arcane magic, or bring on board someone that does so that they can benefit from all of their knowledge and experience.  I may be a simple barbarian, but I must recognize and acknowledge the power contained in arcane magic.  I have witnessed first hand those that are expert carbohydrate manipulators and the results they can achieve with them, and they cannot be ignored nor handwaved.  Carbs ARE magic: kudos to the magicians that have mastered them.

I remember when we were TRYING to pretend that these were healthy

 

But my adventure is not THEIR adventure.  I am here to have fun.  And in that regard, my adventuring party is a simple one: warriors and divine spellcasters, with the occasional mercenary arcane spellcaster showing up if we ever wanna spice up the session, or simply “remember” what arcane magic is like.  And often, that arcane spellcaster showing up serves specifically as a reminder of why we don’t regularly have one in the party: they’re more trouble than they are worth, and we have less fun when they’re around. 

 

So again, take an assessment here.  WHAT kind of adventure are you about to embark on, and what are your honest to goodness capabilities here?  If you’re like me, want to have fun and have a grasp of the basics, a simple adventuring party covering the basic needs will be more than adequate, and anything beyond that may simply overwhelm you and take away the fun of the game.  If you’re going on a grand journey, are you EQUIPPED with the knowledge necessary to do so?  If not, will you study the rules in order to improve that, or will you recruit someone who knows how to min/max?  If not, there’s a fair chance you won’t have any fun either, primarily because, despite your intentions of killing the dragon, saving the kingdom and raiding the treasury, you end up getting killed by an opportunistic kobold.

 

 

Folks, that’s a total of 16 pages and over 7500 words, and I could honestly go on and on with this analogy.  I’m going to table this for now, but I hope you had as much fun reading it as I did writing it.

DUNGEONS AND DIETS: NUTRITION FROM THE LENS OF DND (PART 3-POTIONS AND WANDS)

ON POTIONS AND WANDS

It’s true: sometimes we simply DON’T have enough players available to make a well-rounded adventuring party. Sometimes we were banking on SOMEONE being the cleric or the sorcerer and it just didn’t pan out.  In these situations, we attempt to fill the gaps with some potions.  Which are, of course: supplements.

I have purchased sketchier looking supplements

In DnD, we have healing potions.  They are a warrior’s best friend, because when you’ve been swinging the sword for too long and taking too many blows, you’re going to be low on some hit points, and in the absence of a buddy who knows some magic, a potion will heal you up right quick.  In that regard, even during periods of a protein sparing modified fast, I will make sure to take in some fish oil supplements, because, as we’ve observed before: you can quite literally die without essential fats, and prior to dying you will be VERY unhealthy.  The whole “fats=divine magic” thing is really a lot more true than it should be.  There are, of course, OTHER fatty acid supplements out there (MCT oil as an example), and there’s also the possibility of strategically employing fats AS a supplement itself (butter in the coffee ala “bulletproof”), but the point remains that there ARE methods of obtaining dietary fats without consuming them.  But we also observe the limitations there: a potion cannot REPLACE a party member: they simply help us get by until we are able to fully recruit someone to fill the role.  Because though a potion of healing is nice when we need HP, it can’t put on a suit of armor and take on some of the brunt of the damage, nor can it replace some of the other super awesome spells that the divine spellcaster can do.  It’s got one very specific function.

We observe the same thing when we attempt to replace our warrior.  Yes, there are potions and spells out there that can attempt to turn the more meager of traveling companion into a mighty warrior, but their effects are temporary at best and quite taxing on party resoruces.  Protein supplements have been around for decades now, the first generation of them being some horrible soy abomination that radically increased the presence of sulfur in training centers due to how strongly they wrecked the guts of those that consumed them.  These days, they are far more elegant and many have been so artificially flavored that it’s a damn near dessert to consume them at this point.  Which, of course, is an issue in and of itself: we lambast and bombard our tastebuds with so much artificial flavor we lose the ability to appreciate natural flavors, screwing with our satiety signals and creating a state of “false hunger”.  We observe the dangers of meddling with unnatural and unholy “black magic” when we are but noble savages.  

And 100% natural

That rant aside, protein supplements, much like supplemental fats, are once again something that is best utilized sparingly, in situations wherein we simply are unable to achieve our goals without them, or in those situations wherein we are attempting to accomplish a VERY specific objective.  “The Velocity Diet” and Jamie Lewis’ “Apex Predator Diet” are based around protein supplements in order to specifically accomplish a protein sparing modified fast, and both are paired with a fat supplement as well to prevent the maladies that occur when fats are too low, and in both of these cases, the use of the supplement is VERY specific and goal focused.  Those trainees that simply go STRAIGHT to the supplement before they even consider how they can get more protein in their diet vs food put themselves at risk of being ABSENT these spells and potions when the party gets jumped by some opportunistic ogre pack.  And once again, observe what is missing with these supplements: the associated fats and micronutrients one normally gets when consuming a whole food protein source.  Yeah: your thief may suddenly be able to swing a sword a little better with that potion of bull strength he consumed, but he STILL doesn’t have the ranger’s “favored enemy” ability to REALLY put the hurt on those ogres.  

Regarding using magic wands in the absence of an arcane spellcaster, though there ARE in fact carbohydrate specific supplements out there (things like runner’s gel/goo, waxy maize powder, etc), given that there is no such thing as an “essential carbohydrate” compared to fatty/amino acids, there isn’t quite the same market or demand for a blanket carbohydrate supplement.  What we DO encounter in that regard is weight/mass gainers, and the vast majority of these are simply garbage.  It’s basically maltodextrin (intensely processed corn, rice, potato starch or what), which is technically not classified as a sugar for the sake of nutrition labels, so companies can claim their mass gainer only has 8g of sugar per 1000 calories, even though this junk will spike your insulin and jack up your blood sugar.  That’s just downright lawful evil right there, and that kind of wizardry can only happen with arcane magic.  This is combined with a cheap protein powder and whatever other fillers they deem fit to put into it.  The massive amount of simple carbs will drive a huge insulin spike, which means that, despite drinking 1000-1500 calories of “food”, you’ll still be hungry, which DOES make weightgainers effective at gaining weight…but you can tell this is NOT the weight you want to gain.  This is like how you’d fatten up livestock: not build a strong and healthy human being.  In that regard, weightgainers are more like cursed items in DnD: you think it’s going to do one thing, but it does the opposite. 

If only all merchants were so honest

Where we MIGHT be more inclined to engage in some manner of arcane magic supplementation is when it comes to vitamin/mineral supplementation.  It IS possible to get all the vitamins and minerals you need from a diet that is fats and proteins with no carbs, but it does require some strategy/intention (organ meats, bone/cartilage, collagen, etc).  And even in a diet with carbs, it’s possible for us to be deficient in certain vitamins and minerals.  In this instance, a solid vitamin or mineral supplement can be effective.  Ideally, yes, we should get all of this in from whole food sources, but if the choice is to not get these in OR to get them in with supplements: take the supplement.  But, much like a magic wand is not a spellcaster, a supplement is NOT whole food.  It does not satiate, it does not absorb the same, it does not come with the paired/associated macronutrients or other micronutrients, and sometimes the body simply will not recognize/process the supplement.  We also must take into consideration variables such as if it’s a fat vs water soluble vitamin and how the dosage protocol works.  Water soluble vitamins aren’t too big a concern: you’ll pee out the excess.  Fat soluble vitamins taken to extremes can cause some significant issues.

The big takeaway from this entire section is this: if your party is lacking a key member, or if the key members of your party are underpowered for your current adventure, you CAN make use of potions and wands to bridge the gap, but that’s exactly what they’re for: gap bridging.  Much like the donut tire, they will get you to where you NEED to go, but once you’re there, you need to actually fix the problem.