How I lose weight and keep energy up during fight camp

Professional poker player Dan Smith, gave me the following feedback on Twitter as to what he'd like to read about:

@tchanpoker i would be v interested to read about how many cals you're eating, your BMR, and how much you're burning while training etc. GL!

— Dan Smith (@DanSmithHolla) August 24, 2016

@tchanpoker and generally how you feel. I would expect energy levels to be super low?

— Dan Smith (@DanSmithHolla) August 24, 2016

It's a great question -- how can a person who is already fairly lean lose 10-20% of his bodyweight in 4-8 weeks and still manage to fuel something as demanding as an MMA training camp?

Well, I've been messing with this stuff for a while and put a lot of thought into it. But first a disclaimer: in the past I've been accused of broscience and being sloppy with "shit i read on internet". What follows is just what has worked very well for me when we're talking specifically about diet and nutrition the context of a mixed martial arts camp.  Now I've studied and read and re-read obsessively. But I'm lazy and this is just a personal blog, so I'm not going to be providing citations. This is all simply the result of n=1 experimentation and yes, it involves shit I read on the internet. People are free to disagree and tell me I'm an idiot for doing what I'm doing, and I'm very much open to the possibility I'm wrong about things (which I have been on many occasions in the past).

Okay first up, BMR (basal metabolic rate). The calculator suggests 1557 calories for a person of my size and age. Estimates of my daily caloric burn in a day (even with the "heavy" exercise multiplier) usually fall way below my usual intake, and yet I don't gain weight. Caloric burn is a function of so many things going on inside bodies that until they actually start putting microchips inside our bodies, I don't worry about it too much. But I would say on a typical training day I'm eating/burning between 3000-3500 calories.

Cutting weight over a training camp

Anyone will tell you that it's better to shed weight throughout camp than it is to simply cut a ton of weight. Losing 15 pounds in the sauna is a terrible experience: it's dangerous, it hinders performance, it creates the potential for getting sick on fight day. All kinds of bad stuff. And yet there is basically no one at the elite level competing without some form of water manipulation in the last 24-72 hours. And that's because if you've dieted down to a point where you are losing zero water, you're going to come in as the much smaller guy, simple as that.

But yeah, back to cutting weight. My philosophy is that prevention is better than solution. As a 125-pound fighter, I'm never letting myself get over 145. Ever, ever. This is rare. I know many 135ers who are hovering around 170 when they're not near a fight, and 170 lb fighters peaking well over 200. I pretty much never eat garbage and let myself go completely because I don't want to be the guy running a huge caloric deficit during a tough camp.

Most of my vegetable intake is organic and all of my meat intake is grass-fed/pasture-raised. When I'm eating out a lot and being social, I have some cheats but I'm still being reasonably selective off the menu. My girlfriend jokes that I am orthorexic. I don't actually think that I am, but I admit I'm more strict than basically anyone I know. Something like pizza or cake is around a once-a-year proposition for me, which even I have to admit is a bit strict.

Eating like this keeps me between 141-145 most of the time. When it's fight camp, becoming even more strict gets me usually about 1-2 lb of weight loss per couple of weeks. So ideally i'm around 135-137 when i'm 7 days out while doing not much caloric restriction. I don't count calories at all until the final two weeks, although I'll make some small adjustments (I'll talk about that shortly).

Beyond Calories: Winning at the Micros

Everyone is obsessed about calories, but here I want to focus more on micronutrients than macronutrients. For the uninitiated, micronutrients are basically the vitamins and minerals that make the body work. When you see a label like the one below, the micronutrients are in the bottom section:

There are a shit-ton of important micronutrients, many of which are presented here in a word cloud for some reason:

Compared to micronutrients, macronutrients are simpler for most people to understand because they know them all: protein, fat, carbohydrates, and alcohol.

Macronutrients get all the play because they are generally easier to talk about in sound bites and blog posts, but micronutrients are massively important and I focus way more on getting micronutrients in a bioavailable form. (This is the tricky thing about micronutrients; basically every micronutrient is available in a bottle, but it may or may not be well-absorbed by the body.)

I don't pay too much attention to calories and macros. I don't really care if I'm 40/40/20 or 50/35/15 or whatever. But I do pay attention to micronutrients and if I'm going to do a food log, it's mostly to ensure I'm getting enough minerals and vitamins. Usually I do a pretty great job; here's a randomly selected day out of my food log:

(Hope it was sunny outside today.)

Regardless of what my protein/fat/carb looks like, if I'm hitting well over 100% RDA on most vitamins and minerals and my digestion feels good, I think everything is dandy. And I feel great and energetic.

I make it a goal to choose really nutrient-dense foods, which is usually in the food department. The biggest single thing I do is choosing vegetables over grains, since gram-per-gram and calorie-per-calorie, vegetables destroy grains. Note the comparison of the three leftmost columns to the three on the right.

Source: In search of optimal nutrient density: veggies or whole grains?

Even in the case of more similar comparisons, sweet potato and squash destroy rice and pasta.

Another thing that sets me apart from most athletes is that I tend to avoid over-reliance on sports drinks. Not drinking calories is one of the best things you can do for nutrient density, since liquid carbs in general are very low in nutrients.

That said, I sometimes use a few high-end sports drinks, like Superstarch and Vitargo, as well as coconut water. I think it's useful to think of simple processed carbs like sports drinks and white rice as performance-enhancing drugs (except of course, not illegal). They're great for optimizing performance and endurance, but they are not providing much nutritional benefit, and a significant side effect (weight gain/insulin spiking). The regular public doesn't fast carbs at all (in much the same way the public generally doesn't need steroids), but athletes in high-intensity sports benefit from a quick, easily digestible way to shuttle glucose into muscles. So I don't avoid them completely, but as much as possible, I simply drink water. When I need to lose weight quickly, the sugar drinks are the first thing to go.

Talk more about carbs!!11

Carbs are not necessarily the enemy of weight loss when it comes to the high-intensity athlete. As I mentioned, I don't really track this stuff, but I probably used to be too low on the carb side, clocking in around 20-25% carbs. I've increased this to 40-50%, especially deeper into fight camp where I'm doing a higher number of high-intensity rounds and my muscles need this fast fuel.

When do i eat those carbs (and fat)?

On days and weeks where I am not training, or it consists of either low-volume or low-intensity training, my carb consumption is back down near 20-25%. This improves three things for me personally:

a) body comp (I stay leaner)

b) brain function

c) better digestion (slightly)

On days I do train, I will load up on carbs+protein in the 2-3 hours after training, and eat mostly protein+fat the rest of the day. I try not to have very many meals that have fat+carbs together, because those can really cause weight gain (think of most things people overeat -- pizza, ice cream, potato chips -- and it's notable how many of them are this simple fat+carbs combo).

During fight camp, where usually I am mostly doing light workouts in the morning and lengthy high-intensity activity in the evening, I do a cyclical carb or a "carb backload", meaning I eat very few carbs before dinner, but eat a ton of them (and less fat) after training.

This day was 40% carbs, but 80% of those were during/after training.

Final hacks:

I do a daily 12-hour fast, so I do not eat from 10pm to at least 10am, usually past that. Obviously I'm sleeping a lot of this time, but doing a little light aerobic work in the morning in a fasted state helps me burn off a little belly fat.

I also do a 24-hour fast once a week, usually Saturday dinner to Sunday dinner, so I do not eat before 8pm or so once a week. This is just a good practice to give the digestive system a break, and losing weight is just an extra benefit.

So how do I feel?

Losing the first 8-10 pounds in 6-8 weeks, even on a lean frame like mine, requires discipline. But it isn't horribly hard. I feel pretty good most of the time. My energy levels are high most of the time, and when they're not, it's not because of lack of calories but rather because the intensity of the training has worn me down. Fasting, a lack of junk food the rest of the year, going high-carb only after workouts, and keeping nutrient numbers high gives me tons of energy to train at a high level throughout the camp.

The hard part is the last 8-10 pounds on the final week. Once I'm 7 days out from the weigh-in, the carbs and eventually the entire meals start getting reduced, to deplete glycogen from my muscles (which I don't need too much anyway since I am not training intensely in those days). Then we get into sodium loads, saunas, and all the water manipulation. This is the part that really feels awful, and so ideally you do as little of it as possible. In a perfect world, I might be something like 130 with seven days to go, but it's hard to lose that kind of weight and train as hard as I'd really want to.

Questions or comments? Comment below (may require you to click on the title of this post).

Less is (sometimes) more; ruminations on the minimum effective dose

I normally drink 4-5 cups of coffee a day and also a few cups of green tea. This probably comes out to around 600-800 mg/day, which is probably too much, especially for someone who only weighs 64kg.

If I drink zero cups of coffee, I feel pretty lousy. Headaches, withdrawal symptoms and the like. Once every few months I will do a caffeine reset and try to go 3-4 days without any caffeine, but I am pretty unhappy while doing it.

Yet if I drink just one cup of coffee, I feel surprisingly decent. Today I've had one cup, went to the gym, and here I am writing a blog post, and generally behaving like a normal human being.

The health/exercise benefits of caffeine are well documented. Caffeine, in a reasonable dose, is a very good thing for the body.

But the curve is U-shaped (like it is for many things we ingest). The effects of too much caffeine is also well-documented. Man, I love me some caffeine, but I don't want to destroy my nervous system either.

Each cup makes me feel a little better, but there are diminishing returns. Meanwhile, the dosage that is beneficial for me increases rapidly and falls sharply.

So my general thought for this low-caffeine morning is that you should always try to find the minimum effective dose. Know what you need as a baseline. Often you should push yourself past the minimum. If you've just got to study for the big exam, you're running a marathon or you're going to spar 10 hard rounds, then you can caffeinate as much as you think you need. But on other days, try to find the minimum.

To know how much is too much of a good thing, you also need to know its opposite -- not enough of a good thing.

Why fight? Part 1: The Investment

People I know from the poker world, or from regular society -- or from any place other than the inside of an MMA gym, really -- often think I'm crazy for being willing to get in a cage and endanger myself by fighting another man until one man quits or is rendered helpless against the assault of the other.

The truth is, however, that fighting itself is not the crazy thing.

The crazy thing is what fighters do in order to fight.

For the last five weeks (and the next two), I have faithfully shown up the at the gym to take my daily beating. I have done this voluntarily and in full control of my own faculties. I do this without being bound to any contract, and without any financial incentive.

For these weeks I have felt exhausted throughout most of the day. I have woken up many mornings feeling like I have been hit by a car. I'm a morning person and yet I am often forced to train past 10pm, eat dinner around 11 and fall asleep well after midnight. But since I seem to have developed the lark chronotype, I have trouble sleeping past 5am.

Though I haven't tested them, I am sure my cortisol is elevated and my testosterone is lowered. In health terms, those are bad things -- they lead to increase in fat, decrease in muscle, decrease in sex drive, insulin resistance, cravings, bone loss, and illness.

Indeed, being a competitive athlete is not nearly as healthy as most people think that it is. Of course, it is better than being sedentary. But too far in the other extreme can be unhealthy as well. Being a serious competitive athlete means doing a lot of things that trade health in favour of performance. The athlete trains hard and risks injury and overtraining. All athletes train while injured; the only difference between athletes is how injured is too injured, necessitating a missed practice or competition. Virtually every serious athlete practices and competes through minor injuries, and many (most?) compete through more serious injuries. A typical training camp always involves a handful of small injuries. No one ever enters a fight at 100%.

Combat sports are worse than most in terms of training through injury, stress, and fatigue. Part of it is the inherently macho aspect of the sport itself. But some of it is simply the incentive/disincentive mechanism. The boxer, wrestler, or MMA fighter considers a day off of training to be a day that his opponent is gaining an advantage on him. And there are real consequences to being less trained than your opponent. The athlete who loses at a big swim meet or baseball game surely feels bad about his performance, and wishes he trained harder or better. The unprepared fighter, on the other hand, can find himself dominated, brutalized, and concussed. The soccer player misses out on a trophy. The fighter can end up in the hospital. This is not to put fighting on a pedestal or claim it is a more noble or tougher sport; it is just reality.

Thus overtraining and injury are too often ignored. It is a rare day that the fighter is seen outside the gym during fight camp. Fighting is not a sport for to dabble in. It's all-in, or fold.

And yet, injury is the most fearful part of a training camp. I know that every day I show up, I have a small percentage chance of suffering an injury which will prevent me from fighting on May 30. That percentage on any given day might be just 2-3%, but still with 8-10 sessions left, these odds might be as high as 1-0.97^10 = 26%, still nearly a 1-in-4 chance I won't get to fight.

That's scarily high! It is hard to express how much it means to get through each day without suffering a major injury. Although I know it's not true, I feel like the world would end if I didn't fight on May 30. This is why fighters fight hurt. A fight camp demands so much of the fighter emotionally, psychically, and financially. Fighters spend so much time getting psyched up about the fight. They endure the beatings in the gym knowing that when they leave, they are one day closer to the fight. They sell tickets to their family and friends. They have told everyone around about their fight. To not fight feels like a crushing defeat, far worse than stepping in the ring and coming up short.

When one has a fight lined up, one obsesses about the fight. The fight not only occupies one's thoughts all the time, it also dominates one's activities. I wake up in the morning and do mobility exercises, yoga-like movements that will lower my chances of getting injured, and make me more powerful. Many people are happy to get an hour a day to exercise. I spend at least an hour a day getting ready to exercise.

I run. I lift weights. I'm getting extra private lessons. I bought a Compex stimulator unit and use it daily. I plan all of my meals meticulously and carefully -- protein and fat in the morning, carbs at night. I schedule naps, because as mentioned I only get 5 hours of sleep a night. I watch fight footage and technique videos in my spare time. I stalk my opponent on Facebook and Twitter.

In truth, I become a very boring person while fight camp is going on. I am about fighting, and nothing else. There is very little that I do in any given day that is not related to my goal of winning my upcoming fight. (I do watch a lot of TV, and read a lot. That is because those are things I can do with minimal effort, either physical or mental. Most of my day, I am conserving energy.)

The time that I am not spending on the fight, I try to use to take care of personal relationships. I began writing this post on Mother's Day, and I did my best to make my mom feel special that day. My girlfriend has been tremendously supportive of me through this fight camp, putting up with both my moodiness and low energy levels, and so I do my best to take care of her in turn. But personal relationships are surely compromised through a fight camp. I see friends and family much less often than I would otherwise. In truth, I see a lot less of anyone other than my training partners and my physiotherapist.

Fighting is pretty much a financial net negative for anyone but the top 1% of pros. Fighters not in that 1% would make far more money working in a trade. I have spent money on this camp on physiotherapy, acupuncture, medical tests, private training, equipment, high-quality food, and supplements. I am very fortunate that I am not under financial pressure and that I get to pursue my passion fully. For me, the opportunity cost is more significant than the actual expenses. I have passed up on money-making opportunities (consulting jobs, poker, DFS) because of a lack of time and energy to spend on them.

This is what choosing to fight really is, beyond what you see in the cage on the night of the fight. It is angst and difficulty.

If that's the case, why does anyone do it? I'll talk more about that in my next post.

How to defeat mediocrity: making stress work for you

Imagine any form of strenuous physical exercise. Lifting the heaviest weight you can, running your fastest possible 5k, sparring against the toughest fighter in the gym. You are trying to get through the last rep, the last hundred meters, the last 30 seconds of the last round. You are a full 10-out-of-10 on the effort scale.

Drenched in sweat, you hit the showers. You've earned yourself a nice cool shower and you start to feel better immediately. Now, depending on how well you manage your lifestyle, one of the following two scenarios result:

Scenario 1: Your lunch hour is almost over, and you've got a huge meeting with the boss. Or your wife is landing at the airport in ...oh shit, eight minutes! Time to cut the water, towel off, and still sweating, you throw on your clothes. You grab your gym bag (oops, forgot your water bottle), sprint to the car, and start speeding out of the parking lot. Two hours later, you're exhausted, but there's still lots of work to do, so you reach for another coffee or energy drink to get back to baseline.

Scenario 2: You take a long, cool shower for ten minutes. You towel off and have a smoothie at the juice bar. You take a 15-minute walk home, grab a quick power nap, then move on with the rest of your day.

Obviously, I think most people would prefer to be in Scenario 2.

Since our body always wants to be at a state of equilibrium, I've tended to look at health and wellness through this lens of equilibrium. One of the most important interplays in our body is that of the one between the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) and the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS). The SNS is the "fight-or-flight mechanism" that engages the body for action. The PNS is the "rest and relax" part of your nervous system. The two systems ebb and flow like yin-and-yang. Neither is ever completely inactive, but throughout the course of the day, the two work together to keep the body in equilibrium.

Activities and experiences can either be sympathetic-dominant or parasympathetic-dominant as well. For example, contrast any of the following:

• intense hill sprints / a slow nature hike
• waking up in the morning / falling asleep at night
• an ice-cold shower / a warm bath
• daydreaming and fantasizing / executing and building
• rigourous studying / escapist pleasure reading
• deep tissue massage / gentle foam rolling
• intense intellectual thought / quiet meditation
• hunting for food / eating and digesting it

These pairs are not "opposites", and neither is one in the pair "better" than another; I simply wanted to show the types of activities that are SNS or PNS dominant. The only thing that is actually bad is too much of one and not enough of the other. Also, I didn't just list physical activities; in fact, for most people who aren't serious athletes, mental stressors (and factors such as diet and sleep) probably have the greatest nervous system impact.

Typically, you want to ramp stress up, and then ramp it back down into recovery. That's why people do warmups before the tough workout. It's also why I take a short walk outside in the morning before I do any heavy mental lifting, as well. When I'm done with the stressful task and it's time to put the weights (or the laptop) down, I wind down, grab a drink, and do something relaxing.

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Imagine that we had a way to determine, in real time, what a person's stress level was at any given moment. This guy is competing for a gold medal at the Olympics, he's at 10. This guy is delivering a career-defining presentation, he's at a 10. This guy is doing his usual morning workout, he's at a 7. This guy is getting a Swedish massage on the beach, he's at a 2.

What's useful is, of course, not the average or the sum of a person's stress level, but rather its distribution. Probably, most people in first-world countries are at a normal distribution:

(I should note that stress should not really be linearly evaluated in such a way, but I am treating it as linear to make a point here.)

Most people spend almost all their time in the middle. Their lives are fine. They get some exercise, but probably not enough. They get some sleep, but probably not enough. They are fairly good employees at work, but not superstars. They don't have financial troubles, but nor do they have great wealth. They watch a lot of TV and spend a lot of time on Facebook. They can also probably tell you a lot about the personal lives of their favourite celebrities and athletes. 

When they try things, they set low expectations. They half-ass a lot of different things, and are rarely too engaged in what they are doing. 

There's nothing wrong with these people, really. Society needs them, and luckily they are an abundant resource. They're just simply not serious achievers.

I don't want to be one of these people, either. You probably know some of these people. One could be your boss, your personal trainer, your teammate, your colleague. They might make a lot of money (or go broke gambling it all). Two hours after they leave the gym, they are reaching for another can of Monster or Red Bull just to get back to baseline. They are writing e-mails at 11:30pm and checking for responses at 5am. They certainly don't bother with meditation, or gentle stretching. Ain't got no time for that!

If they are professionals, they are running from one high-stress decision to another. If they are athletes, they are training multiple times a day to exhaustion (and never take days off). Sure, they might end up billionaire CEOs, Olympic gold medalists, or revolutionaries. Or they may drop dead of a heart attack. It's a coin flip.

Note that in spite of the fact that the huge majority of their lives are spent in the 7+ range, there is a big spike at the 1. That's because their lifestyles are so high-stress that they frequently get sick or injured, or get burned out, have nervous breakdowns, and so forth. At some point, their bodies have enough and shut them down. If you spend all of your life at the redline, don't be surprised when the engine blows up. 

Most of us don't know too many of these people. We probably don't know too many zen monks living in isolation on top of mountains. While these people might seem enlightened and happy, the vast majority of them probably aren't getting much done either.

In his fantastic book Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi argues that this approach is possibly even responsible for some of India's troubles:

"...the Indian fascination with advanced techniques for self-control, at the expense of learning to cope with the material challenges of the physical environment, has conspired to let impotence and apathy spread over a great proportion of the population, defeated by scarcity of resources and by overcrowding." 

This is what I'm looking for. As an athlete, I am trying to train hard, at high intensity, to improve in my sport. As a businessman, I am trying to work hard and think of creative solutions. As a student, I try to study with intent. As someone currently writing a blog post, I am trying to put aside distractions and focus on my words. But I also make sure to balance this with down time. I do some post-workout static stretching and quiet meditation. I eat well. I take naps, lots of them. I take caffeine in the morning, and magnesium at night.

You'll often hear people say (with pride), things like "I work hard and I play hard". This is great. But to this, we must add, "I rest hard". You might also hear someone (probably a millenial) describe him or herself as "pretty chill and laid-back". This person needs to add, "but I get shit done when I need to."

I am not putting myself out there to be better than anyone else. I often fail both at being too intense and being too lazy. I still spend more time at the 5s and 6s -- that wishy-washy level where you're not really doing anything useful, but not actually focused on recovering -- than I would like. But I put this out there as an ideal to strive for, not a goal to be reached.

Stress is not good, stress is not bad. Stress just is. It is a part of life and one that should be embraced as well as respected. One should not go through life trying to avoid stress, but rather actively managing it, and making it work for you.

If you want to be an achiever, then achieve. Work hard. Focus. Go all-in. But then, rest, recover, then do it again.

“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.

Bigger, Faster, Stronger - why I no longer believe in banning steroids in sport

Over the weekend, I watched and quite enjoyed the 2008 documentary  Bigger Stronger Faster* on Netflix. I found it an honest assessment and good treatment regarding the controversy of steroids in professional and amateur sports, and enjoyed the combination of the director's personal anecdotes and paneling of relevant experts. I recommend watching it regardless of what side of the steroid debate you are on.

My own opinion on steroids in sport has changed significantly in the last couple of years. Not long ago, I was staunchly against steroid users. I thought all users were cheaters, that enforcement needed to be stepped up, and punishment needed to be harsher. I read the book Numbers Rule Your World, which included a chapter on how it was probable that the vast majority of steroid users are not caught, because Type 1 errors (false positives) are far more rare than Type 2 errors (false negatives). In a nutshell, the author argued that almost no one claiming innocence after testing positive is actually innocent, and that there are numerous athletes who are not testing positive but really are on the juice.

At some point, I started to change my mind on the issue. My position just didn't continue to make logical sense to me. It is definitely clear that steroid usage is in fact "cheating" in the sense that it is against the rules. But it's clear that not all forms of cheating are treated the same by sports fans. A basketball player who pushes the bounds of contact with his opponent but doesn't get whistled for a foul is not considered a cheater, he's considered a good defensive player. We have a culture of "it ain't cheating if you don't get caught", especially if you happen to be a fan of the individual committing the foul. And so it is with steroids. The most successful steroid users are those who are able to cycle off steroids in time, so that they don't get caught. What effectively is happening at this point with respect to steroids is that only the dumb, poor, or overly aggressive users are getting caught.

Difficulty in catching steroid users is not itself sufficient to argue that steroids should be legal, of course. Just because something is difficult to enforce does not mean you stop enforcing it, if it is deemed beneficial to do so.

The problem is that I no longer believe that it is beneficial to continue to try to ban steroids. The argument against steroids usually goes something like this:

• Steroids create an unfair playing field between users and non-users.
• As such, non-users would feel at a disadvantage; everyone would have to use, or risk being at a competitive disadvantage.
• Steroids are dangerous/have dangerous side effects. If athletes feel compelled to use steroids, then you are encouraging these athletes to harm themselves.
• Legalization would encourage children/teens to use them, since their idols would be known to use them.

The Unfair Playing Field

This argument is probably the most common, but the easiest to take apart. The playing field is not fair. Never has been, never will be. Some people were born with better genetics. Some people were born into a better socioeconomic path to athletic stardom. We like to think that with hard work, anyone can become a world champion in any sport, but the hard truth is it's bullshit. If you're not from a village in Kenya or Ethiopia, you're probably not going to be the best long distance runner in the world. Conversely if you *are* from a poor village in Africa, I don't much care for your chances of winning the America's Cup or the PGA Championship.

I find it hard to believe that there are still reasonable people who think that it's totally fair if you're genetically predisposed to having higher testosterone, red blood cell count, bone density, better body composition, and so on, but arbitrarily draw an ethical line at using technology to improve any of the above.

Additionally, I think it's worthwhile to explore the effects of non-steroid enhancement. No one thinks laser vision correction, or surgery to repair injured body parts is cheating.  Nick Diaz, an MMA fighter known for great striking but also famous for always getting cut (a marked disadvantage in a sport where a doctor can stop a fight if he thinks the cut is dangerous), had surgery to shave down some of his facial bones, making it less likely for him to get cut in the future. Absolutely no one in the MMA community thinks this is cheating, at least certainly not on the level that anabolic steroid usage is considered to be.

Even if we're just worried about hormone levels, there are many different ways to increase testosterone. Getting more sleep increases testosterone. Lifting weights increases testosterone. Having sex increases testosterone. Supplementing with Vitamin D increases testosterone. Same with creatine, zinc, and anecdotally, taking cold showers. And some people have genetics that lead to them having higher testosterone. You can't realistically ban these things, and you also can't provide universal access to these things.

It's Dangerous, So It's Unethical To Make People Feel Like They Have To Do It

I think this is the stronger argument. The side effects of anabolic steroid abuse are pretty well known, and they are real. What I find unfortunate about steroid education are the exaggerations and misinformation spread about it. I've never done steroids (nor even been tempted to), but from everything I understand, it's not like users immediately grow hair everywhere, get massive roid rage, grow breasts and have their testicles shrink. I think it's far more likely that if used under proper supervision from a qualified and ethical endocrinologist, steroids probably enhance performance with a small, but significant, amount of side effects.

Like we've seen with criminalization of other drugs like marijuana, exaggerating effects and providing misinformation about steroids inhibits what society really needs -- an open dialogue about the matter. "Bigger, Stronger, Faster" draws a parallel to "Reefer Madness", an absurd 1930s propaganda film which claimed that marijuana would turn users into violent sociopaths (as opposed to useless, lazy stoners). While there is likely more truth in claims of steroid damage, the point remains that providing exaggerations and misinformation prevents a useful dialogue.

Suppose that a given person has decided that he or she will use steroids, and you cannot talk him or her out of it. This person is committed to being the best football player, track and field competitor, powerlifter, bodybuilder, fighter, golfer, or whatever. This person rejects the idea that he cannot be the best, and is willing to go to whatever means necessary to do this. While we wouldn't want our son or daughter to be this person, what is the best situation for this person? The status quo, where this person orders a bunch of steroids over the internet, or perhaps makes a trip to Mexico to get it from a veterinarian? Or one where he or she can have an open dialogue with someone qualified to dispense the steroid; someone who can provide good, honest, ethical advice?

Elite Level Sports Performance Itself Is (Probably) Inherently Unhealthy

To get to an elite level in professional sports, you have to be willing to sacrifice your health. I think this statement comes as a surprise to people, because there is often an association between health and fitness. These two are not the same thing, even though they are so often used together. Elite level professional athletes are almost always very fit. They are stronger, faster, more flexible, and have better endurance than most people. But that does not mean they are healthy.

Elite professional athletes play through pain, injury, and illness. Those are bad things to do. The training required to reach the elite level in most pro sports is unhealthy, or at the very least, it is far from optimizing health. Optimal health for humans probably looks something like: walk a few miles every day, get some more intense exercise 3-4 times a week, and eat regularly while fasting intermittently. But elite level athletes train at a high intensity 5-6 days a week, often two or three times a day. They constantly eat a tremendous amount of calories to fuel that training, and when they are not training they are most likely sleeping, because they are exhausted. The level of fatigue and strain accumulated on an elite level athlete is hard for the average person to fathom, and it likely goes well beyond what is actually healthy in most circumstances. When you think of that way, it's very little wonder why so many athletes die prematurely.

The Maude Flanders Argument

 (I'll take any excuse to use this image.)

Even if it's not expressly stated, a lot of people feel that it's important to villify steroid users because if we don't, we are implicitly saying to children that it's okay to use them. We want our kids to eat their vegetables, so Popeye gulps down a canful of spinach; he doesn't jab a needleful of Winstrol in his ass.

And no, I don't think kids should be using steroids for athletic performance enhancement. But here again, I think it's far better to be able to have a healthy dialogue about steroids than it is to misrepresent and scare children and teenagers. Kids aren't stupid. If you treat them like intelligent, autonomous beings capable of making reasonable decisions, they're actually less likely to abuse drugs and alcohol. I see no reason that steroids wouldn't be different.

In "Bigger, Stronger, Faster", one of the protagonists is a steroid user as well as a high school football coach. The coach has clearly lied to his teenaged students about the fact that he uses. You're left to wonder what those kids are supposed to think if they ever get their hands on the documentary that they appear in.

If Steroids Are So Great, Why Don't You Do Them?

Well, quite simply, I don't want to.

I don't want to use steroids simply because of the cost-benefit analysis. From a legal perspective, I'm unwilling to get arrested or otherwise get in trouble with the law to get the performance gains that steroids could potentially provide me.  From a health perspective, I'm not sufficiently knowledgeable about them to feel like I can use them correctly without screwing up my health. I also feel there is a lack of long-term evidence that anabolic steroids can be used safely without significant negative consequences. I'd like to have kids one day, and have no desire to risk infertility. In summary, I don't care so much about being elite that I'm willing to risk the associated health and legal issues.

Every serious athlete has to, at some point, make a choice about how far they are willing to go. Usually, the ones who make it to the top 0.001% of their sport are the ones that are willing to risk everything. They risk concussions, spinal cord injuries, knee surgeries, heart attacks, and more. That elite level athletes are willing to do damage to their bodies is nothing new to sports, but while we lionize the athlete who risks his brain, neck, back, or knees for his sport, we demonize the athlete who risks his endocrine system. This is not logically consistent.

The fact is, I'll never be an elite level athlete in my chosen sport. But I like watching sports, and I'll continue to watch elite level athletes do amazing things. I'll know the lengths they have gone to do these amazing things. They will have likely trained since a very young age, possibly being pressured or even abused by a parent or coach. They will likely have sacrificed academic pursuits in favour of time in the gym or on the field. They will sacrifice time with friends, staying out late, or their favourite foods. They will have pushed their bodies to the limit of failure in both training and competition. They will train and compete through cuts, bruises, aches, sprains, broken bones, and concussions. And I realize that quite possibly, they will have used exogenous hormones to get through all of these things.

Would it be cooler if I knew for certain that those athletes were able to do these things solely through their genetically-granted gifts and their hard work and discipline? Perhaps. To be sure, I think as long as steroids continue to be against the rules, sports organizations should continue to seek out and punish those who use them. But as a society, it grows increasingly hypocritical to demand that our athletes sacrifice their brains, bones, and joints while simultaneously demanding that they keep off the steroids that so many of their rivals are using.

Product Review: Beddit sleep tracker

I admit it: I'm a sucker for wellness apps. I'm an athlete, but I'm also a geek. So anything that intersects physical performance and numbers is right up my alley.

I also think that more than diet, more than exercise, sleep is probably the single most important major lifestyle determinant in wellness and human performance. How much and how well people sleep seems to have massive effects on body fat, cancer rate, athletic performance, cognitive performance, and more. Additionally, I find sleep results harder to modify and optimize than either diet or exercise. While diet and exercise are largely an issue of good decision making, commitment, and time management, I find that I often do all the "right things" when it comes to sleep and not get a great result. I try to go to bed shortly after sunset, sleep in a nearly pitch-black room, avoid late afternoon caffeine, do relaxation exercises, and basically everything that is thought to achieve a good sleep result, but my results are still inconsistent.

Enter the Beddit (www.beddit.com), which promises to "automatically tracks your sleeping patterns, heart rate, breathing, snoring, movements and environment. In the morning, Beddit tells you how you slept and how to do it better."

After hearing that pitch, this was me:

The Beddit consists mostly of a strap containing a sensor that goes underneath your bedsheet. It connects via Bluetooth to your smartphone and gives you results that look like this:

There's even more data promised in future versions.

This is the kind of shit that I love. The only small problem? It doesn't work.

To date, the Beddit is largely giving me garbage data. According to the Beddit, I haven't slept over 5 hours a single night that I've gotten it, and most nights it's said I've only slept 2-3 hours. I will be the first to admit that I don't get enough sleep, but after one night of just 2-3 hours I'm usually useless, and after a week of it I'd probably be approaching death. The Beddit is recording large gaps in my sleep during hours that I know I was definitely asleep.

Part of the problem may be the length of the Beddit strap. I have a queen-sized bed, and the strap covers less than half of my bed. That means if I roll over on to a part of the bed that the strap isn't sensing, then I'm not getting tracked for that sleep. On one particular night, the Beddit told me that I got up from bed 7 times, when I actually got up from bed once or twice, at most. I think increasing the strap length will help, but I do not think that is the only source of the Beddit's problems at this point, since even when I sleep through the night and wake up on the same side of the bed, my sleep is being dramatically underreported.

I've contacted Beddit support, and they've been fairly slow to respond. This is not too surprising considering that they're an indie company who probably weren't ready to handle the amount of business that they got. I'm happy to be an early adopter of this item and in spite of the fact that the product is currently unsatisfactory, I'll be happy that they got my money as long as that money goes towards product improvements. I want to support a company that comes up with good ideas like this, and I hope they are able to deliver on it. As someone who works in a startup that simultaneously seems to "get it", also desperately needs some major product improvements, I think I'm more sympathetic to this idea than anyone.

I'm continuing correspondence with Beddit support and will update this review if information changes (it's possible I just got a lemon, for example). But the bottom line is this: I think at this point unless you also want the good karma of supporting a sleep app, you should probably pass on the Beddit for now. 

But like some might say about my company, I'll be cheering for them.