Eating bugs in Mexico (and beyond)

I was in Mexico City last week, and one of the things I was most excited about was not late-night greasy taco stands (although that was a highlight), but the opportunity to eat bugs. There aren't too many restaurants in the Western first world where you can get insects. But I wanted to eat insects in Mexico quite badly, not necessarily for the taste or experience, but because I believe entomophagy is the future, and I want to put my money where my mouth is.

I'm happy to report that Restaurante Limosneros in Mexico City did a great job preparing these tasty bugs.

Left: Beetles with various salsas. Right: Ant eggs.

From the gift shop: "Tequila salt" made from grasshoppers. But you can put it on anything; very tasty!

Not only are bugs delicious, they are an awesome source of nutrients. Check out how they compare to beef, chicken, and salmon.

Insects stack up well nutritionally with the meats we commonly eat.

Bug farming is also much more environmentally friendly than animal farming, requiring far less feed, land, water, and carbon. Also, many of the issues that surround animal cruelty in factory farming are not an issue with insect farming.

(As an aside, vegetarianism is not an answer to the environmental issues of meat. First of all, I do not accept as a premise that humans do well without getting some measure of their food from animal meat. I'm willing to accept that it doesn't need to be a high percentage, but it's almost certainly not zero. I'm quite convinced need some animal product to thrive.)

Fact is, if we're going to meet growing nutritional needs while recognizing that we have a finite amount of land and energy, people in the first-world West need to get over the stigma of eating bugs.  This is not without precedent, of course. Lobster was considered an undesirable food for the lower classes and even prisoners until the mid 19th century.  Now it's a luxury food and often the most expensive item on the menu.

Now, I don't know whether anyone out there makes a cricket steak that's as good as a North Atlantic lobster or an Argentine rib eye. But bugs can't only be the domain of fancy restaurants in the West. Farmers in the West are trying to cram more chickens, cows and pigs into tinier and tinier spaces which is not only bad for the animal, but unhealthy for the end consumer. (Animals crammed into small spaces get diseases.) We need to start creating demand for bugs. The cricket-based protein bars by Exo are a great start. But that's only a start. It can't just be a niche product for health nerds or hippies. This stuff needs to be in casual restaurants and ubiquitous in supermarkets. That's the best way to reduce our reliance on factory farming.

Buen provecho!

“There’s nothing to eat” - the first-world problem with a real-world solution

Like many people, especially those people who claim to live a healthy lifestyle, I have opinions on what people should eat. I can never be sure my opinions are certifiably correct, but I make an effort to read and research things, experiment on myself, and attempt to draw conclusions based on a sample size of one. But I also realize that there is very little consensus on what one should eat, regardless of whether we are talking about the population of dieticians, doctors, scientists, or laypeople.

But I do think I can propose a concept in eating that fits regardless of whether the diet one follows is Paleo, Whole 9, Mediterranean, Zone, low-fat, low-carb, low-sodium, alkaline, vegan, vegetarian, pescatarian, or holds no label whatsoever. The proposal is: when there is no food that is good for you, you should not eat anything at all.

As I compose this post, I’m at 30000 feet. I’m presently in the midst of a 13-hour flight from Vancouver to Hong Kong, which door-to-door is closer to 17 hours. To help my circadian rhythm adjust to the new time zone, I requested that my dinner and breakfast be served together. I’ve eaten the fish, chicken, vegetables and fruits, but skipped the bread, rice and dessert. Without the “filler”, this really only constitutes one meal, especially for a big eater like me.

I will be hungry when I land. My hormones will surely express the desire for food by the end of this flight. I’ll be uncomfortably hungry.

But in the end, I will be fine. In fact, I would say I’ll be much better off than those filling up on the provided meals. Skipping the bread and the desserts means I’ll be operating on a short-term caloric deficit. But unless I hit the one-in-a-zillion parlay of: 1) this plane going down, 2) surviving the crash, and 3) ending up in a place where I do not have access to food, I won’t really miss those bread and dessert calories. In all likelihood, I’ll get them back when I land safely. (Spoiler alert: I landed safely.)

It may feel very “first-world” to have the luxury of casting aside the grains and sweets. I see it differently. I think the first-world attitude is the idea that people should never go hungry. I used to subscribe to the idea that people - especially athletes - would waste away if not constantly nourished; that muscular hypotrophy and fat storage would quickly ensue if a person did not get five small meals a day. But I think in the first world, the opposite is far more of a problem: the abundance and ease of food is too great.

We have food whenever we want it. If you are reading this and you have $10 in your pocket, I’ll bet you can get some kind of food within 15 minutes. But we don’t always have good food available. Sometimes we are on a plane and at the mercy of the airline. Perhaps it is 3am and the only thing open is McDonald's. Or we are at a restaurant that someone else chose, and absolutely nothing on the menu is conducive to what we think we should eat. Too frequently, I hear people rationalize their poor choices with, "well, I don't have time, and I have to eat something." I write this post to challenge that idea. You don't have to eat "something" at all.

Beyond the direct health benefits of intermittent fasting and consuming fewer empty calories/bad things, I think there are some second-order benefits to the “don’t eat when there’s no good food” approach as well.

1) You will make better meal-planning decisions. If you know that you will be “punished” for a failure to prepare your meal in advance (whether that means grocery shopping, cooking food in batches, or even intelligently planning your restaurant choices), then you will teach yourself to make better decisions.

2) You will appreciate food more. We in the first world are very fortunate to have access to very cheap and very available food. I am not a hippie liberal by any stretch of the imagination, but I think it is important for us to feel some gratitude towards the availability of our food.

To be clear, I don’t think that you need to do this often (especially athletes and active people). Once a week or a few times a month is likely enough to enjoy any health benefits.

If you live in the first world, then you should eat well. You should eat enough to satisfy your caloric requirements and to meet your physical goals. But you should also be choosy in what you eat. Being choosy doesn’t mean simply substituting the fries for the salad (and the ranch for the balsamic). It means throwing out the idea that you will eat something from the vending machine simply because you were too busy to eat lunch. If you didn’t eat lunch, too bad. You should have planned your day better. So you end up going from 1pm to 6pm (3% of your week, mathematically) feeling like you're "starving". Well, suck it up -- you'll live.

Actually, you'll live better.

The Value of Being Uncomfortable - And How You Can Start

So we're two weeks into the new year. By now, some people have already quit their 2014 resolutions, and some are going strong. Of late, it seems more en vogue and hip to haughtily and cynically eschew the New Year's resolution for some reason or another.

Very specific resolutions can be of limited value, especially those which prioritize an outcome over a process. I'd like to propose a non-specific resolution to you, the reader. It's not nearly as specific as "lose 20 pounds", "go to the gym four times a week", "stop eating junk food", "stop biting my nails" or anything of that nature. The resolution I propose is as follows:

Be uncomfortable.

Comfort is generally something we think of as a good thing. We want comfortable shoes, comfortable beds, comfortable sofas. We want the air to be at a comfortable temperature. When stressed, we seek comfort food.

But little attention is paid to the value of discomfort. Discomfort is tremendously important, just as important as comfort.

Exercise is the most obvious example of a beneficial discomfort. Living organisms generally want to conserve energy. Sometimes they are forced to expend energy (to survive a predatory attack, to kill prey themselves, to reproduce, to migrate, or a number of reasons). Since most 21st century humans don't actually have to exert physical energy avoiding predators, killing prey, attracting mates or moving countries, we use exercise as a substitute.

Exercise is necessarily discomfort. Like all organisms, we desire to conserve energy, so the expenditure of energy is necessarily uncomfortable.

Here's the thing, everyone understands that some amount of exercise is good for people. But if this type of discomfort is good for you, aren't there other discomforts that are good for you?

I have a roommate who strongly dislikes the cold. As soon as the room becomes too cold for his liking, he immediately turns up the heat up to a desired comfort level. Similarly when it's too hot for his liking, he'll turn on the air conditioning. And to be honest, I don't much like being too cold or too hot either. But humans are actually pretty well-adapted to being a little too hot or a little too cold. I'm not advocating that you go out in a t-shirt in Siberia or try to jog in a sweatsuit during a Vegas summer. And I'm not saying you should never use climate controls. But it is my contention that we should make an effort to be uncomfortable, with enough regularity that it creates a decent hormetic effect. If nothing else, think of the maxim that what won't kill you, makes you stronger.

I went through a phase for a while in November and December where I jumped in the freezing cold (not literally, but damn cold) outdoor swimming pool for a couple minutes a day. It fucking sucked, and I cannot know for sure that it provided any real health benefit (the research on cold water therapy actually seems pretty inconclusive), but I thought it was important to be consistent with the idea of being uncomfortable.

Another good example of discomfort is fasting. Sometimes people say that fasting is bad, that you'll waste away and lose valuable muscle mass and screw up your metabolism and so on, but I think the medical literature is decently clear that some amount of fasting is good. The incredible 24/7 availability of food to satiate any and all hunger pangs, as soon as you get them (or much sooner), is surely a contributing factor to the obesity epidemic. So, once in a while, when you're hungry -- just keep going hungry! Don't make that sandwich or order that pizza. Just suck it up, princess, and learn to embrace the hunger. Better yet, if you're hungry: go run a few miles, or lift some heavy shit, and then eat something. You'll get some improved insulin sensitivity out of it and hell, food just tastes better when you've earned it.

Fasting is something that I had never tried until fairly recently, but once I did it, I found out it wasn't really that hard. And now I reap the benefits. I used to be a cranky, ornery, son-of-a-bitch when I was hungry. How, I've learned to embrace the hunger and I'm better off both mentally and physically for it.

Discomfort does not need to be only physical, as well. Doing brain teasers, studying a new language, public speaking, and other cerebrally difficult or stressful things also qualify as discomfort. But most people (especially those who read blogs written by former professional poker players) are pretty good at practicing mental discomfort. Anyone who has ever made a big bluff in a cash game or late in a big tournament certainly experiences discomfort, and most poker pros have done this many times.

Important point: Too much discomfort is a bad thing.

It's pretty obvious how too much fasting would be a bad thing. At some point, excessive fasting becomes anorexia, or starvation. It's a bit less obvious, but too much exercise is a bad thing too. Too much exercise can leave one chronically stressed and cause serious health and injury problems. And obviously staying for a long time in extreme conditions of heat or cold without taking adequate mitigating measures is a bad idea. On the mental side, a professional poker player who grinds 10 hours a day, 10 tables at a time, 300+ days a year, is just asking for mental burnout (the cure for which cannot be purchased in the FPP store, by the way).

Nevertheless, I'd suppose most people reading this are leaning towards the "too comfortable" side of the balance. Are you reading this blog post in your comfy computer chair? Do you have a nice, just-right beverage sitting next to you? If you get hungry by the end of it, are you immediately going to the fridge to satisfy it?  My advice to you: get more uncomfortable. Turn off the heat or the a/c for a few hours. Take a cold, or at least a somewhat-too-cold, shower. Skip breakfast once in a while, or dinner, if you prefer. Or both. Learn a difficult language or a musical instrument. Gamble a little too big for your bankroll.

You shouldn't do it all the time -- you'll end up either chronically stressed, dying of heatstroke or hypothermia, mentally drained, or broke -- but you should at least do it with some regular frequency. So the next time you're faced with something that will cause you physical, mental, or emotional discomfort, don't look for a way out of it. Face it head on, and dive in. I think you'll be a better person for it.

All the best in 2014!

My bodyfat test and results (aka my trip into nerd/jock vanity)

A few weeks ago I decided to get a real body composition test done. The last time I had a body fat test was in my second year of university, done for free by a kinesiology student with some calipers. I think I got 8.9% or something stupid like that, likely because calipers are really inaccurate.

There are a number of reasons I felt now was a good time to get a body fat measurement done. The first is my age. I'm turning 32 soon and I'm now reaching an age where my metabolism will start to slow and I'll have less muscle and bone density relative to my fat. But I've also been doing a lot of "body hacking" (for lack of a better term) of late. I've been eating paleo/primal for well over a year, mixing in a little intermittent fasting, trying to sleep a bit better, taking my vitamin D and fish oil -- in short, trying to do all the little things right. To be honest, probably the least healthy part of my life is the part that people think makes me healthy: the fighting. A late-night 3-hour high-intensity session is actually pretty rough on the adrenals, will result in some level of chronic inflammation, and really just not generally ideal. But I love the sport and so to me it's worth it.

In any case, I figure that the result I get now is probably going to be the best result I get going forward. There are probably some modest improvements I could make in my lifestyle, but I suspect I can't improve my "score" very much, considering the effects of age.

So after some research, I found that the two most accurate, reliable and consistent methods of body composition measurement were the "BodPod", which is an air displacement method, and DEXA (Dual Energy X-ray Absorptiometry). There was a DEXA lab called Bodycomp Imaging very close to my home, so I decided to give it a try.

Like anyone, the first thing I wanted to know was "the big number".  It came as a surprise to me:

13.8%.

I'd had a discussion with poker pro/bodybuilder Jason Koon who was certain that I was under 10%. I'd also googled around and seen images like this one:

and thought that I looked a lot more like the 8% guy than the 12% guy. For reference, this is what I currently look like (relaxed on left, flexed on right):



Despite me being less than impressed with the 13.8% number, Peter, the guy running the DEXA machine, was very impressed with it. I felt a little better when he said that many of the Vancouver Canucks players come in around 12%. I suppose when I consider that I'm not a professional athlete, not exactly a genetic freak and also that I have never used any sort of "assistance" (ahem), I can be a little prouder of 13.8%.

But in the end, the absolute number doesn't matter much; it's the relative number that matters. Now I have a number, and so as I age, I will try to not get too much worse than 13.8% using DEXA.

The DEXA scan also provided some cool information about things like my symmetry and bone density. I've uploaded the full results here, but as an example, this part of the results were interesting:

As you can see, my left arm has (slightly) more muscle and less fat than my right arm, which Peter says is extremely rare in right-handed people. Maybe it is more common in fighters because we use our left more frequently in throwing jabs. My right leg being more muscular than my left makes sense in a fighting context too, since in an MMA stance you have more weight on your back leg. Nevertheless that level of asymmetry is probably a slight concern.

I was amused that my head is 22.5% fat. Feel free to refer to me as "fathead", since it is technically accurate.

My bone density scores were good but not great for an athlete, according to Peter. While my body fat is 2 standard deviations below the average North American male, I'm only 0.5 sigmas north of average for bone density. Peter said he would like to see that higher, but that it should improve with consistent Vitamin D supplementation. Also with my MMA workload being what it is, I rarely lift weights -- something like once a month -- so I suspect improving that would help a bit.

In any case, I learned a lot about my body, and most importantly, established a baseline that I can try to improve or maintain. For people who are concerned about fitness, I strongly recommend getting a body composition test done. I see many people (especially girls) on Facebook/Twitter/etc feed worrying about their weight when they should be worrying about their body composition. After all, you don't really want to lose weight, you want to lose fat.

If you're in Vancouver, I definitely recommend Peter at Bodycomp Imaging. He's super-knowledgable not just about the test but about recommending lifestyle changes to improve your well-being. You should get $10 off if you follow the above link.  Yes it's a referral link, and yes, I got a discount for plugging them on my Twitter, but I receive no compensation for this blog post. I think you guys know me well enough to know I wouldn't be writing it if I weren't fully satisfied with what I got.

Best of luck in your own fitness goals!

a fast fast - 60 hours without food

Since the WSOP began, I've trained jiujitsu five times, and taken three Muay Thai lessons. Eight sessions of training is usually a week for me, but instead it's constituted my last five weeks here in Las Vegas. Last Friday, after frustratingly busting out from Day 2 of the 5k NL tournament, I went over to Cobra Kai Jiujitsu here in Las Vegas for a pair of classes. I got whooped on, as one would expect. I had been planning to attend the Grapplers Quest tournament here in Las Vegas, but given my performance I was starting to reconsider. Then J.C. Alvarado, another poker pro who has taken up grappling and MMA, tweeted at me and said that despite his inexperience, he would be willing to compete. Well, I figured if J.C. was willing to sack up and compete, then I could too.

The problem, of course, is that I haven't been training. Not only that, I've been playing poker, sitting for hours on end, eating poorly, sleeping worse, and just generally getting fat and out of shape. On Monday the 2nd, I bought a new battery for the scale and checked in at 138 lbs, needing to get down to 129.9 lbs on what would be today, Thursday the 5th. So starting on Monday, I went zero-carb, and had my last real meal on Tuesday morning: a big, greasy mess of bacon, eggs, and avocado. I basically haven't eaten since that Tuesday breakfast. I'm a voracious eater, so I had assumed that going 60 hours without eating would be pretty miserable and questioned whether I should even do it.

Fasting is something that I have always meant to do but never gotten around to doing. I've adopted a paleo-type lifestyle for a while now, and (mostly) adopted protocols with respect to nutrition, sleep, activity levels and so forth, but one thing I have never really felt strong enough to do was fast. I've always been scared to do it because I know that in the past I have been, quite frankly, a short-tempered asshole when I'm hungry. And I'm frequently hungry. Like 99% of the first-world population, I have grown accustomed to food-on-demand. I have often raided the fridge out of boredom, or simply eaten because the clock -- not my stomach -- has dictated that it is mealtime. I'm a very physically active person 11 months out of the year and so despite my size, I burn and consume a lot of calories. The thought of even going 24 hours without food had always terrified me.

But I'm now past the 48-hour mark, and it's not so bad. Yes, I'm hungry right now. But it's merely "hungry", not "starving" or "famished" or "dying".  My body has accepted that it's not going to get some convenient external source of glucose but that instead it will have to use up this body fat to fuel the systems. I played an entire day of poker (well, 8.5 levels anyway) yesterday and for the most part felt very mentally sharp. I thought about food only occasionally, whereas if you would have told me I would play a poker tournament after having not eaten for a day I would have guessed that the thought of food would be all-consuming. I was in a good mood most of the day and am in a perfectly good mood now, although I imagine as tonight's 6 PM weigh-in approaches I'll start to anticipate breaking the fast in a very big way.

Overall, I am completely surprised at how well I am handling my first 48 hours without food, and I think it's been a great learning experience. The old me would have freaked out at the thought of 48 hours without food, that my body would wither away and die. But really, the most difficult part of this is leaping that psychological hurdle. I've had to force myself to recognize that a fast of this length is not that big a deal and that humans are in fact designed and have evolved to deal with food scarcity. Sometimes the caveman threw the spear at the buffalo and missed.

As for the grappling itself, unfortunately I survived Day 1A of yesterday's 1k NL with a measly 8500 in chips, so I end up with the worst of both worlds: I have no chips, and barring an absolute snap-bust, won't get to compete in Friday's no-gi tournament. But since I have gotten this far, I will still cut the remainder of the weight (down to 133.6 this morning without cutting water) and register for Saturday's gi tournament, with the intent to compete in it unless I manage to somehow luckbox my way to a day 3. If, as expected, I bust out efficiently on Day 2, I'll jet it over to the Mandalay and coach J.C. in his no-gi grappling debut.

I guess I would wrap this entry up by saying that if you're a person who, like me, has considered himself a slave to food, you might benefit from attempting some sort of fast. Numerous studies have shown the tremendous health benefits of intermittent fasting, and not only has this been not nearly as hard as I thought it would be, it's been educational. Give it a try!

What I believe (or rather, don't believe), human body edition

I'm impressed with what seems like increased interest in health and fitness in the poker community in the past couple of years. It seems that a lot of poker pros are realizing that the lifestyle they lead is not the healthiest, and are looking to better themselves. As kind of a health/fitness nut myself, I applaud this! However, it seems that there are still a ton of beliefs out there among the general populace over what to do and when/how to do it, and unfortunately a lot of these beliefs are way off.

The following is a nowhere-near-exhaustive list of things that most people believe but I believe are wrong. And to be truthful, I previously believed almost all of them at some point! Generally, the below statements are simply asserted and accepted as fact regardless of the evidence. In response, I will do the same and assert that the opposite of these statements is true without bothering with the pesky evidence. :) I am by no means an expert, but I read an awful lot. Sometimes I even read those boring medical studies that no one reads.

Anyhow, I have only included the most ubiquitous of beliefs. I have only included statements where you took a random sample of people in first-world, Westernized countries, I bet you would find that over 50% of people would agree with the following statements. But I now agree with none of them.

The List of Lies

• Saturated fats are bad for you
• Vegetable/canola oils and other polyunsaturated oils are better to cook with than butter or lard
• Low-fat yogurt is better for you than full-fat (you may replace "yogurt" with virtually every dairy product)
• For a healthier meal, trim the fat from your meat
• You should limit fat consumption to 20-30% of total calories
• Whole grains are good for you
• Brown rice is better for you than white rice
• Chicken is better for you than beef (or other red meats)
• Eating 5-6 small meals a day and snacking frequently is better than eating 2-3 large meals a day
• Skipping breakfast is bad for you
• Eating a big dinner at night is bad for you 
• To fight a cold/bolster your immune system, you should take lots of Vitamin C 
• You should eat lots of "antioxidant" foods 
• Wear lots of sunscreen to avoid harmful UV rays
• Get a good stretch before you work out
• If you want to lose weight, just do more cardio
• People who run should get shock-absorbing shoes to minimize damage
• You shouldn't work out on an empty stomach

I feel like I'm still missing a number of things, but I suppose these are the big ones. Of course, you should not just assume that I am right and popular opinion is wrong just because you're reading my blog. Do your own research. I'm just putting this out there as something to consider the next time you get some diet/exercise/lifestyle advice.

Cebu is Ce-bomb!

(You have no idea how long I spent internally debating what Cebu-related pun I would use for the title.)

Well, Cebu was fantastic. For years I had asked my friends who regularly play the Asian circuit what their favourite destination was, and usually the answer was Cebu. I wasn't able to make Season 2 or Season 3's editions, so I was excited to get to go this year.

Poker-wise, there was certainly nothing to write home about. I played two events and a total of 7 hours. I was comfortable and felt I played well in the main event, but I was a spaz and paid the price in the 6-max. I'm now 0-for-6 in 2012 in terms of tournament cashes.

But what a phenomenal destination. I actually spent only 3.5 days in Cebu and I definitely wish it had been more. I saved a bit of money by choosing to forego the Shangri-La Resort, where PokerStars put its qualifiers up, in favour of a 3-star room which ran me about $70 US (and where friends rented out the penthouse suite for only about $40 more). I have somewhat mixed feelings about this because while my hotel was good (and had massages on the 2nd floor for $3/hour), the Shangri-La is amazing. It's a gorgeous resort with lots of free activities and the service seems good as well. For those who have been to the PCA, I think the Shangri-La is everything that the Atlantis in the Bahamas should be, but isn't. The Atlantis has more attractions but the service is atrocious and everything is massively expensive. In Cebu, I found the service and atmosphere everywhere to be excellent.

At the resort, we did some free kayaking, I worked out a bit at the gym (also free), and rented some jetskis (not free, but not that expensive either). The jetskiing in particular was tremendously fun. I'd never ridden on one before, and was really surprised how fast they go. In fact, they go so fast and I wandered so far out that I lost track of where I was and had to ask some fisherman for directions back to the Shangri-La. All in all, I spent about 5 hours in the sun on Saturday and even got a little bit of sunburn for the first time in about 15 years.

And the food. Oh, the food. The Philippines is really not known as a culinary paradise, but man do these people know how to roast a pig. There was roast suckling pig at the Stars party and I had it on numerous occasions, but my favourite was a local place called Zubuchon, which served up this amazingness:

One blog writes: "Zubuchon’s pigs are not from commercial piggeries but are hand-picked from pigs raised in the backyards of certain individuals. They do not use MSG or commercial mixes for flavor. Instead, they use organic ingredients, including olive oil, local sea salt, home-grown lemongrass, peppers, green onions, and other herbs and spices."

Sign me the hell up.

Aside from the poker, beach and the food, there was also a street festival in progress that took place on the street directly in front of our hotel. I mean, really, really directly:

That's my hotel, and that's the party. Here's another shot:

Like Mardi Gras, without the nudity

It speaks to how busy I was eating that I didn't really investigate this street festival at all, but it seems like it would have been fun. I know it definitely made getting a cab a bit tricky.

All in all, Cebu was a great trip. It's not somewhere I'd want to spend a really long period of time, but it's such a great short getaway from Hong Kong and I'd love to do it again. If I were taking someone I were trying to impress, I'd consider staying at the Shangri-La and laze around the beach, but staying at any of the hotels nearby which are a third of the price (not just rooms, but food/massage/activities) and a 10-minute cab ride away are also viable options. Can't wait to go back!