The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
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Long time Mottizens might barely recall that about a year ago on the subreddit I experimented with the croissant diet. That's the diet where you cut out all polyunsaturated fats, and eat a lot of saturated fat instead. Specifically the point was to reduce consumption of linoleic acid as much as possible, and increase consumption of stearic acid. Why? Because of metabolism stuff related to the Krebs Cycle. See Brad Marshall's website for more details, since he's the main driver behind the diet. Scott wrote about it a couple years ago as well.
My experiment was technically a failure, but a weirdly promising one. When I stuck to the diet strictly I ate like a king, as much food as I wanted (that fit the diet) and I didn't gain any weight. I also didn't lose any weight. After a month or two I started to lose interest and didn't keep to the diet as strictly as I had been, at which point I started gaining weight faster than normal. In the end, I abandoned the diet and went back to trying to watch my calories and eat lots of healthy food, etc. But the fact that I didn't gain weight while eating sourdough bread fried in butter with heaps of cream cheese on top every morning for breakfast intrigued me. I marked Brad Marshall down as "Might not be a nutrition crank."
I kept up with his blog, and in the time since then he's moved more towards specific metabolic supplementation on top of cutting out polyunsaturated fats. A few months ago he recommended supplementing with high amounts of calcium pyruvate combined with L-carnitine.
These supplements aren't expensive, so I was willing to give them a try. He recommended 2 grams of L-carnitine and 12 grams of calcium pyruvate per day, taken in two or more doses. Thats more than it's particularly feasible to take with pills, so I bought it in power form. I don't have a kitchen scale so I just eyeball a half teaspoon of L-carnitine and a teaspoon of calcium pyruvate, taken dissolved in hot water at 9:00 AM and 5:00 PM each day. I've been taking them for about 7 weeks now.
This has been the most remarkable experience I've ever had with a supplement.
My experience with supplements has always been as follows: I take the supplement, and hope it will improve my life. I take it for a while and the whole time I'm unsure if it's doing anything. Nothing significant happens, though it's possible there is a gradual improvement that's hard to notice. Eventually I stop taking the supplement because things don't seem any different if I take it or not. The only exception is Vitamin D, and only because I live in at a high latitude and my doctor brings it up every time I have a checkup. I don't feel any different if I take it or not, but I know I should and annually checkup bloodwork confirms that I need to keep taking it. Overall, supplements are always a leap of faith with uncertain results.
This has not been the case with l-carnitine and calcium pyruvate.
Within an hour of taking my morning dose, I feel a strong upswell of energy. I want to move, and moving in general feels easier. I hate exercise normally, but when I feel this feeling it's easy to start walking or running. More enjoyable. It's not a small sensation, and it's not always pleasant (mostly if I can't get up and move, which feels good. If I have to stay seated I get a bit twitchy).
More importantly, in his post Brad claimed one easily measurable effect form taking the supplement: an increase in body temperature, caused by increased metabolism. "The thermogenesis from pyruvate is real. Within minutes after drinking 10-15 grams of pyruvate I can feel my body temperature rise. If I’m fasted, my body temperature usually stays in the 98.6-99.0 range. If I then eat a bowl of white rice, my body temp will often shoot to over 100." So after taking my first dose, I decided to use one of those forehead scan thermometers to see if I was heating up. To my shock, it came bad reading 100.4 degrees. I've been keeping track of my temperature ever since. Before I take the my morning supplement my temperature reads normal (around 98 F), and after taking the supplement it reads 99-101 F. Forehead thermometers are not the most accurate, but given that I'm using the same thermometer for before and after temperatures I'm confident that there is an increase in temperature, even if the exact number is off. This is consistent: it isn't always as significant an increase, but it always goes up.
I have been losing weight, but it's difficult to attribute that to the supplements. I started taking the supplements in large part because I was already trying really hard to lose weight. Since I started taking the supplements I've lost 10 pounds, but during that same time I've tried to cut calories significantly and started at least light exercise daily. Still, I do feel that the supplements are definitely making it easier to cut calories and exercise: I'm not as hungry as I used to be during the day, and I'm actually looking forward to my daily jog which is novel for me. I'm going to keep taking these supplements indefinitely because I feel like my life has been significantly improved.
However, the comments at r/Saturated Fats tells me that my experience is far from universal. Many people reported no effect at all: some said it made them feel lethargic and lowered their body temperature. Interestingly enough, I recently found a mouse study where they found that giving obese mice pyruvate actually induced torpor, sending them into hibernation and lowering their body temperature significantly. They also found that lean mice given pyruvate did not go into torpor, and the pyruvate instead activated their brown fat and increased their temperature. So it seems to me there are possibly multiple factors that would cause people to have very different reactions to pyruvate, which might explain why so many people report bad effects.
I posted this because I feel obligated to do so: after a lifetime of trying things with no apparent effect, the fact that this has had a strong and significant effect is worth sharing. There is something here.
On the other hand, I'm taking a very large amount of calcium pyruvate here. Every resource I've checked says I should be okay, and that the side effects are just digestive troubles (which I haven't experienced, but I have a pretty resilient digestive tract). On the other hand, maybe someone here knows something I don't.
I did buy from them. Do you have a supplier you'd recommend?
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