If you’re expecting me to talk about financial investments or things like BitCoin, I’m going to have to disappoint you. Getting financial advice from me would be like getting child safeguarding advice from Ghislaine Maxwell.
Fungibility is the ability of a good or asset to be interchanged with other individual goods or assets of the same type. Fungible assets simplify the exchange and trade processes, as fungibility implies equal value between the assets.
I want to talk about another kind of fungibility - the transformation of food into blobby stuff.
I’ve struggled with MPB (Male Pattern Blobness) pretty much all my life. I only need to walk within 100m of a cake shop and I’ll put on a kg. And if a Cinnabon opens up . . . . . . well, just forget it
My brother, however, obviously has an entirely different set of processes going on in his body. There was a time when he was trying to ‘bulk out’ - he’d have a huge breakfast, eat the large packed lunch he’d taken to work around 11am, then have a large lunch at the staff canteen. He’d have a huge meal, usually with seconds and a dessert when he got home, then he’d have a high calorie protein drink, and supper would be some soup with 8 rounds of bread.
He managed to put on the grand total of about 7lbs (about 3kg) in 6 months on this regime.
I’ve oscillated between being fit and healthy (and slim) and a lardbucket from Lard-Lard Land, all my life. Nothing I’ve tried has been a ‘permanent’ solution. It’s my own fault, of course, and I’m not going whip out the victim card from the Woke Tarot. But why is it so difficult for so many to lose weight, and to stick to it?
It wasn’t until I read the ideas of Dr Jason Fung1 did a few things start falling into place. I’m not going to suggest that Dr Fung is right in every particular, and maybe he’s wrong on lots of things (although I doubt that). However, for the first time, I read an account that actually made sense and explained things.
The basic thesis he makes is that being overweight should not, primarily, be seen as an ‘eating’ disorder, but as a metabolic disorder, or dysregulation. It’s a dysregulation brought about by eating too much of the wrong things too frequently, to be sure, but understanding the ‘why’ here can help enormously.
You’ll no doubt be aware of the mantras Eat Less, Move More, and Calories In Equals Calories Out, and I’m not going to suggest that the first Law of Thermodynamics is wrong, but the picture is a lot more complicated than these simple mantras suggest2.
Is it possible to put on weight whilst maintaining a perfect balance between calorie intake and calorie use? Technically, yes. Consider that a typical ‘ready meal’ from a supermarket might weigh 400-500g and let’s suppose you have one for lunch and one for dinner.
So, that’s about a kg per day. Over the course of 30 years you will have eaten about 11 tons3 of food. Let's suppose the body processes the food (uses it for energy and eliminates waste, with no ‘excess’ to be stored) but there's about 0.1% that gets a bit stuck (not eliminated or otherwise processed). After 30 years you'll have about 11kg of this stuff accumulated.
That’s a scary thought. Does it happen? No idea - I don’t think so, but who knows?
Anyway, it outlines at least one possibility where “calories in equals calories out” kind of thinking isn’t going to work when it comes to weight gain and retention.
Whilst this “balancing of energy” idea is correct, it’s only correct in a crude, overarching, way and assumes we’ve done the balancing correctly. Your body does not have some kind of magic “calorie counter” that’s ticking off the food items as they come in. Nearly there, nearly there. Oops, that’s one cookie too many, send it off to storage. There’s a vacant spot around the thigh area.
In energy terms we will have an equation that looks something like
CU + SE = BP + EX
with CU being calories utilised (not all the calorie content on that food label might be utilised by the body), SE being the stored energy used, BP being the body processes necessary for living when you’re completely inactive, and EX being the energy expenditure required to ‘move’ about, i.e., ‘exercise’. The energy to do BP and EX has to come from somewhere.
But we ought to have known from the outset that focusing on ‘calories’ was only ever going to be a part of the picture. It’s just one variable in a complex multivariate system. Do we really think that when we eat 500 calories of steak the body processes this in exactly the same way as eating 500 calories of sugar? Or that the calorie content is going to be the only variable that matters?
The real questions, if you’re interested in losing weight, are how does your body decide between using food for immediate energy needs and storing that food (primarily as fat deposits) for later energy use? and under what conditions will the body use the stored food as a source of energy?
If we understand this correctly then maybe we have a chance of adapting our diets to maintain a healthy weight.
But how do our bodies ‘know’ to do anything in the first place?
One major signalling mechanism the body employs is mediated by hormones. I’m not going to pretend I know much about them in any detail, but they can act, as far as I understand it, as a kind of chemical signalling network. It was fascinating to learn, for example, that the feeling of ‘being full’ is mediated by several so-called satiety hormones. It’s your body telling you “OK, lardy, if you stuff another donut in, I’m going to make you feel really uncomfortable”.
But why so many4 ? Isn’t just one enough?
The body has obviously evolved all these different mechanisms for a reason, but if they stop working, or are out of balance, then the ‘messaging’ received by the body is going to be difficult to properly process - a bit like trying to make sense of one of Kamala Harris’ speeches.
As most of us know, hormones can make us feel stuff. That’s one way that they work. In the case of satiety hormones, they make us feel full - and it’s not just about distending our stomachs (when our stomach is overstretched a particular satiety hormone does get released that makes us feel very ‘full’). It’s how our body ‘knows’ that we’ve overdone it.
So, given this complicated signalling ‘network’, it shouldn’t be at all surprising that if we bugger it up (by consistent long-term bad eating, for example) then stuff is going to go a bit doo-lally. This, in essence, is Fung’s reasoning. But just how lally is doo-lally?
Hormones can induce powerful feelings. Ancel Keys, the scientist responsible for one of the crappiest pieces of science of the 20th century with his almost fraudulent5 7 countries study and his incorrect diet-heart hypothesis, also did some good work. Around the time of WWII, Keys was asked to investigate some issues surrounding food rationing. He put a group of volunteers on calorie-restricted diets for some months. Some dropped out, but those who continued gradually became unhinged. They obsessed over food and, basically, went a bit bonkers (about food).
It was their bodies (via hormones) telling them “Look, I’m sorry for calling you lardy before, but you really need to eat. You’re starving, and not in any figurative sense. For eff’s sake eat a donut, or several”
It gives us at least one line of reasoning to follow when trying to explain why the vast majority of diets don’t work much beyond a timescale of around 6 months. You just need more and more willpower to overcome those urges as time goes on. Obviously everyone’s different, and some manage successfully to change things for good - but for most people, it gets harder, not easier, as time goes on with ‘traditional’ approaches to dieting.
If it was just solely a case of ‘willpower’ I think traditional diets would enjoy far more success, long-term, than they do.
One of the main hormonal ‘culprits’ that Dr Fung highlights is insulin. It would seem that insulin does (at least) a couple of things. Its presence informs the body that there’s plentiful energy (insulin spikes after eating) AND it triggers the shutting down of the mechanisms for conversion of fat storage into energy.
Fung uses various analogies, but it’s like having a fridge/freezer in your kitchen - and a bigger chest freezer in your garage that takes a bit of effort to get to and to rummage through to find the food you want. You’re going to use up the (short term) resources first before heading off to use the (long term) storage in your garage.
So, if you’re trying to lose weight, you’re trying to get your body to burn the blob. But, your body can’t do that when insulin levels are too high for this to happen. It just won’t access the long-term storage in preference to any short-term resources. It’s the reason why so many diabetics on insulin and drugs that increase the production of insulin tend to gain weight and struggle (more than usual) to lose weight.
One of the most interesting aspects of Fung’s ideas was the extra dimension of time. I’d been brought up on the ‘calories are the only thing that matters’ viewpoint and it had never occurred to me that the frequency with which we eat might also have a role to play.
The idea here is that if we continually stimulate the production of insulin by eating, then we rarely get into the low-enough insulin zone to start burning the blob. Insulin spikes after eating and then decreases - but we need to give it enough time to drop to the blob burn level.
This notion of ‘3 meals a day’, although very common, does not happen ‘naturally’. Pre-Neolithic Mr and Mrs Ugg and their son Buttpul, were not munching on a bowl of coco pops before their daily morning hunt. And nor did they stop for lunch for a BLT from their local Muggs and Spencer.
It was more likely that eating was sporadic and, possibly, not a daily occurrence at times. It should be of no surprise that our body shows signs of evolutionary adaptation to this pattern. If you fast for a day or two, something which many people view to be ‘unhealthy’, some very interesting things happen. Around about day two (it varies) your body’s metabolism ramps up, you feel more alert, and your thinking gets clearer.
It’s obvious that there’s a mechanism in play which is basically “priming” the body for the next hunt. If you haven’t eaten for a day and you need to hunt, then the last thing you need to be is dozy and slow.
And there are other recognised benefits of fasting. Autophagy, for example, is a fancy word that describes the body’s process of sending in the industrial cleaners. Dead stuff and broken stuff gets broken down and re-cycled and waste processed. This process is accelerated by fasting.
But in much of the ‘Western’ world - and increasingly in other parts of the world as MacDonald’s culture takes over - we’re seeing a rise in metabolic diseases and inflammatory diseases. I can’t remember the exact figures but in India, for example, Type 2 diabetes has absolutely skyrocketed over the last few decades. It’s gone into orbit - and the increase is measured in the thousands of percentage points.
And the typical ‘treatment’ for Type 2 diabetes borders on the insane. In Type 2 diabetes the body is producing insulin but it’s not working as well as it used to (typically, the reason for this is the build up of insulin resistance which throws the metabolic balance out of whack). The solution? Flood the body with more insulin and get it further out of balance and increase that resistance.
This rise in metabolic and inflammatory diseases is great news for Pharma - but that’s entirely coincidental - it’s just their great, good, fortune that they get to increase their sales of beta blockers, blood thinners and the rest.
It’s probably true that without all these drugs people would be dying younger, but it’s also true that if people ate better (and exercised) they probably wouldn’t need these drugs at all. We are slowly turning the world’s population into Pharmanimals.
And here’s the kicker. We followed the ‘science’. It turned out the ‘science’ was shit. We ignored results and research on the dangers of excess carbohydrates in the 60’s and ploughed ahead with the woefully ill-advised and spectacularly wrong “food pyramid”. One can only speculate as to why stuff was ignored - follow the rolls, would be my guess. Not rolls of fat (although we got plenty of those because of the food pyramid), but great big fat rolls of cash.
I’m trying to think of something similar that may have happened over the last couple of years.
Nope - completely escapes me - something like vodick or cackseen - not sure why those words spring to mind.
He’s far from being the only one pointing some of these things out, but he was the first person that I read
Official bodies do love their mantras, don’t they? Nobody is safe until we’re all safe, save the NHS, and so on and so on.
Imperial tons
Satiety hormones, not donuts
“The cherry picking was strong with this one” (Dr Yoda)
I think the important thing is to work out a healthy eating habit that suits you rather than trying to slavishly follow someone elses prescription. So the broad ideas outlined by Rudolf are all ones that are imortant and that I discovered in the wake of covid.
After reading about the dangers of obesity in relation to covid for a year I decided I really needed to do something about my weight. I had always hated traditional diets because the calorie counting is tedious and you always seem to have to eat lots of things you don't like and it makes it really difficult eating in company. The changes I made were to cut out as far as possible any processed food (anything where the ingredients included a load of numbers or things I'd never heard of - it's quite enlightening to read these regularly whenever you shop), I'd already reduced fats to olive oil and butter, considered full keto, but realised I would not follow it strictly, but broadly followed its tenets as far as suited me combined with restricted eating - keeping meals within a 6-8 hour window as far as possible. As a result I've managed to lose 4 stone in 18 months.
Another thing that really helps is to eat a meal in company and not alone, if possible. I'm wondering if I should invite my childhood dolls to dinner on the days I cannot eat with my son and family!
Good stuff. I discovered the metabolic health approach through high fat/protein and low carb/sugar diet about 4 months into Covid in 2020. It worked wonderfully for this early 50's dude.
Some other great voices on this topic are Dr Ben Bikman (the guy on insulin), Dr Casey Means, Dr Tro Kalayjian. All great. The themes are all very consistent.
As Dr Means says, with Covid we missed a once in a generation opportunity to get people's attention on improving metabolic health through diet.
Instead...we shoved an experiment down people's arms.