This is a bold topic for me to take on as a self-professed misanthrope, but I have constantly remarked that what I despise most about our species is our unwillingness to realize our TRUE potential, and this segues perfectly into that discussion. What ultimately triggered this thought was my reading of a “fitness hack” online the other day, which advised those tracking their macros to save themselves frustration through the following approach: instead of tracking everything you eat in a day, calculate everything you’re GOING to eat FIRST, put it in the tracker, and THEN eat it. …and it was the most alien, NON-human idea I had read in a LONG time. That someone actually sat down and wrote it thinking it was a legit “ah hah” sort of realization made me think that this specific “person” couldn’t pass the Turing Test. I would have thought for sure that this was some off-brand AI currently experiencing the robot equivalent of a stroke were it not for the fact that several OTHER “people” chimed in with what an EXCELLENT idea this was and how they’ve been doing the same and it TOTALLY revolutionized their results. Folks: we’re in this to maximize our human potential: how are you going to do that by doing very NOT human things?
HE achieved peak human potential the AMERICAN way: with dodgy research pharmaceuticals
Yes yes, I
know: here I go to rally against calorie counting/macro tracking again, but
come on people: we HAVE to admit that it’s weird. My most recent post on “all diets are fad
diets” spoke to this. There is literally
NO other animal on the planet that has to live this way. Every other animal KNOWS what food it’s
supposed to eat and EATS THAT FOOD, and it eats it until it’s had enough, and
then it doesn’t eat again until it’s time to eat. If we are unable to do the same, isn’t this
indicative that something very WRONG is afoot?
What’s one of the drivers here?
Scheduled meals. Again: the only
OTHER animals that operate in such a way are the ones we’ve domesticated, and,
in turn, those are ALSO the only other animals that are at risk of obesity and
diabetes. Why are we eating lunch? Because it’s “lunch time”. Are we even HUNGRY? Although, truthfully, the answer to that
question is often “yes”, and it’s from a combination of issues. Either it’s because we ate a “breakfast” of
processed sugar stacked with sugar (remember pouring sugar ON TOP OF rice
crispies?) so our blood sugar massively spiked and crashed and now we’re
absolutely starving OR we didn’t eat upon waking because last night’s sweets
binge right before bed had us wake up nausea and hungover, plus we slept until
the VERY last minute because our sleep in general is abysmal due to a
combination of poor sleep hygiene and caffeine abuse…primarily because our
sleep is awful. Do you SEE how these
cycles of “non-humanity” perpetuate?
So yeah,
let’s dive deeper into the weirdness of pre-logging your food. This, again, hinges on the idea that you’re
going to eat pre-designated meals at pre-designated times IRRESPECTIVE of if
you’re even hungry at the time or in need of the energy. And again: this is because we’re loading up
on stuff that is so alien to our species that our body doesn’t know how to
respond appropriately to be able to send us the proper signals to engage in any
sort of natural manner of nutritional regulation. And we’re doing all this in an attempt to get
CLOSER to our end potential? What sort
of sense does it make? We should be
moving BACKWARD, closer to our origins, in order to be better able to realize
our species’ potential. Whatever it is
that we’re becoming as a result of these practices, it certainly isn’t “more
human”, unless it is to be understood in the Blade Runner sense of “more human
THAN human”.
And YOU thought it was just a great White Zombie track
And this
extends into the sphere of training as well.
Allow this to be the rallying cry for auto-regulation and intuitive
training because, again, folks are missing out on the human aspect of this. And let’s even extend it further as to WHY
periodization is a thing, because we humans exist WITHIN nature, and nature
operates in seasons and cycles that, again, the REST of the animal world fully
embraces and WE attempt to deny, once again, in some sort of backwards attempt
to realize our maximal human potential.
But folks want to outsource their training to an APP and to AI: they
want a program (not in the training program sense, but in the computer program
sense) to decide their path toward becoming their best human possible. Can this possibly make any sense? No matter how much data you feed the machine,
it’s simply not going to know how to “go by feel” as it relates to an athlete:
it’s why coaches are coaches.
Inexperienced trainees like to think that coaches are just information
ATMs that know ALL the things and just administer them as needed, but,
amazingly, many coaches AREN’T that knowledgeable academically and, instead,
simply know the fine and delicate craft of ATHLETE management. They know how to tell when an athlete is
having a good day and it's time to push, when it’s time to backoff, how to
tailor the training to meet the PSYCHOLOGY of the specific athlete (some guys
ALWAYS need to move, so they find filler junk to keep them occupied without
compromising recovery, others need little achievements throughout a training
session to pursue, etc), and they know how to keep them fit enough to be able
to perform when it’s time to perform.
And this simply comes from years of experience: it’s not something that
can be programmed into an algorithm and spat out.
And it all
mirrors up into something I’d discussed so many times: we need to make the
NUTRITION match the TRAINING. Which,
again, all other animals but US understand.
An animal that has worked hard will eat more, because it needs to
recover from the hard work it performed.
It will drink more, because it is thirsty. And when the activity drops, so does the
food, such to the point that SOME animals will enter a state of torpor and eat
NOTHING. Whereas us humans would set an
alarm to make sure we’re STILL eating every 2-3 hours to “maximize protein
synthesis”. We’ll decide “time to lose
weight!” and engage in some alien caloric restriction protocol wherein we have
to employ hacks and tricks to overcome hunger (hello GLP-1 agonists), a sign
our body is CRYING out for nutrients, and then double it up with some sort of
soul crushingly exhausting training protocol to try to burn every last calorie
in our system and get us TOTALLY diced for summer…and then experience a
necessary compensatory binge after the fact that leaves us in a worse place
than where we started, as we hemorrhaged off our lean tissue during the weight
loss and put on a bunch of additional fat mass during the binge. Or we’ll decide “it’s time to gain weight!”
and, of course, put LIMITS on how fast we accumulate the weight, train hard,
underfeed ourselves because we don’t DARE bypass the holy limit of weight gain,
run ourselves into the ground due to inadequate recovery, and, when the whole
process is done, we need such a break from training to ACTUALLY recover that we
lose what minimal lean mass we accumulated and end up in the perpetual
skinny-fat cycle of “bulking and cutting” the same 8lbs over and over again.
This is a terrible physique advert but actually ok if you're selling tanner
Match it all
together: train with some auto-regulation and intuition, wherein you can HAVE a
structure to operate within while also allowing yourself to call the necessary
audibles based on your body and brain’s real HUMAN inputs. Train seasonally, the way that nature moves,
so that you HAVE some form of periodization.
Eat real HUMAN foods, such that your body and brain will send you
appropriate signals for when it’s time to eat, and then eat based on those
signals SO that you actually eat in a manner that supports the training you’re
performing. This could mean actually
SKIPPING a meal or 2 during a fat loss phase (how bizarre!) because you’re not
training so hard that you NEED all those meals.
This could mean actually putting away some food during a gaining phase
because (surprise!) your body NEEDS that food to recover. Spend some time actually BEING human and you
may, in fact, find yourself becoming the BEST human you can be.
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