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Thank you for the write-up.
Longevity / health has been an interest since I read Lustig's Metabolical. FWIW, Lustig does a good job of getting into the details of how the macros (fat, protein, and carbohydrates) interact to fuel you - or to cause metabolic syndrome, "leak gut", and all sorts of insulin issues. The transfats section was particularly scary.
On the Zone 2 exercise claims. I've seen these floating around health twitter for sometime. I cannot at all claim to be an expert, but I think some of the confusion may come down to the fact that the difference between Z2 for multi-year trained folks and those just coming off the couch can be massive. The reality is that most people, even those who go to the gym regularly, are actually very undertrained in a whole-of-athlete sense. Gym Bros can move big weight, but they have the cardio of smokers. Treadmill bunnies can stomp out 7 min miles for ever, but have heart palpitations after doing a few box jumps or kettlebell swings. Casual gym goers train themselves into hyperspecialization which leads to overall system brittleness. I think that's hard for people to deal with because it means treating your fitness as a dynamic system that changes meaningfully every six or so months. The only people who are going to be able to keep up with that are already in the top 20% of executive function / discipline / planning capability - which means they likely are already doing it! It's such a hard problem for that 50% - 80%. It's an impossibility for < 50%.
Agree broadly on nutrition. There's no special diet. You eat whole, minimally processed foods, with roughly balanced fat-protein-carbs. I think anything from 40-30-30 (fat protein carbs) to 20-50-30 (fat protein carbs) is probably fine and mostly rests on an individuals particular sensitivities and situation. Any diet where a macro is less than 15% if total calories seems suspicious to me. The protein cult is real. You cite 1g / lb of bodyweight as a max. I've seen references to 0.8 g / lb as where diminishing returns start. If you're really getting after it in the gym or elsewhere (marathon runner etc.) then going above 0.8 can have benefit.
Sleep is king. Got disciplined with it about 18 months ago. Perhaps as much of an impact on mental and physical health as a good gym routine. After a while, I started to really enjoy the end of day pattern I had constructed for myself to signal sleep to my brain and body.
Emotional. Again, person to person. There are recluses out there who do perfectly fine on their own, but they are an exception. Definitely against the "everyone should go to therapy" line. Pretty good way to develop neuroticism. I think the gold standard is a religious community. You get a deeply committed community aligned to a transcendental or metaphysical "goal." That's self-sustaining in a permanent way that a softball beer league or trivia night group is not.
I read Lustig's book about two years or so ago and his personal assumptions mingled with science became too much for me to the point where I no longer view him as authoritative. I don't have the book with me but I remember he would often write how specialists in other fields often asked him breathlessly about his statements, which to him suggested he must be on the right track (in his demonization of sugar.) He references so-called"leaky gut" regularly in a very pop-science way. And of course he hawks his own fiber snacks or whatever.
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Yea I think the confusion on Z2 comes from the fact that in highly trained athletes, Z2 is heavily fat burning still. As you get fitter you can handle more intensity without it cooking you. Same with strength. What Gordo and I advocate for is a volume first approach where you focus on time exercising first and then worry about intensity. Of course not appealing in current milieu because people don't want to spend the time exercising that is required to be fit. Weight lifting and cardio are both important as you say, which means even more time.
I think you might be a little bit heavy on the protein still, but I broadly agree.
Sleep really is key. The biggest problem I have with it is that my cronotype is much earlier than most of the population, so I get a ton of shit for wanting to go to bed earlier.
Also agree with religion as an alternative to therapy, although I unfortunately don't find the versions of Christianity around me to be very appealing. I want a more environmental-focused version of christianity basically, but the only communities that I see doing that are a bunch of wokies. I also agree therapy isn't the answer. Perhaps it would be if therapists actually wanted to cure people, but it seems like the current profit model leads to people spinning their wheels forever and using "childhood trauma" as an excuse to never change.
I've heard a minimum of 0.8 g/kg for an active person (roughly ~.4 g/lb). The max dose with a shown benefit for performance is 2.2 g/kg, which is 1g/lb. So making sure you get at least 0.5 g a day seems good, and not more than 1g/lb, especially if you aren't training intensely. This likely means protein in the 80-200 g range for most of us.
It's been a problem with every single girl I've dated. I've decided to bite the bullet one day a week and have no limit on bed time, but it's still difficult. Going to sleep at 10pm most nights, and between 11-1am one night a week, which usually fucks me.
I'll look into it, especially when I move away from Baltimore. Just tired of the options here, which are either extremely woke or extremely trad.
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