Article on Exercise Not Leading to Weight Loss

Cover of Good Calories, Bad Calories

Lately I’ve been on kind of a diet and exercise kick trying to put on some weight and get more cut. It started with Tim Ferriss‘ article on gaining muscle quickly. Then I saw Dream’s talk on proper exercise and nutrition which opened me up to a whole new world of ideas. I’ve since read Body by Science and there was a whole new world of information which I digested in a couple of days. I’m now reading Good Calories, Bad Calories, which Tim Ferriss considers to be the definitive work on nutrition, and it’s making a lot of sense to me. It’s really fascinating that the public’s general understanding of these two topics is essentially wrong in every possible way. In fact, if you do the exact opposite of what pretty much anyone out there tells you to do, you’ll be healthier and get better results.

So obviously since this is something that I’ve really engulfed myself in and including starting an all (grassfed) meat diet, people I know have started to take some interest, including a colleague of mine sending me an article in a NY Times blog which baffled me. I spent some time today writing an email in response:

Hello,

When I saw the title of this article, I had really high hopes for it. Could this help fix all of the myths in current weight loss and exercise culture? Unfortunately, I was very disappointed. I barely even know where to start.

First of all, not all calories are created equal. While taking in less calories than you burn is a sure fire way to lose weight, the macronutrient that you get those calories from matter. Tim Ferriss gives a GREAT example of this in the scientific research in this post comparing Ancel Keys’ Great Starvation Study (Keys is the man who is basically single handedly responsible for this pervasive myth that saturated fat and cholesterol are bad while carbohydrates and sugars are good) with John Yudkin’s low-carb study. As you can see, the two groups on average ate nearly identical numbers of calories, yet one group starved to the point of insanity and breaking off their own fingers while the other self selected to eat 10 less calories on average.

Second, this sentence is, and I mean no disrespect in saying this, beyond idiotic: “It is well known physiologically that, while high-intensity exercise demands mostly carbohydrate calories (since carbohydrates can quickly reach the bloodstream and, from there, laboring muscles), low-intensity exercise prompts the body to burn at least some stored fat. All of the subjects ate three meals a day.”  While low-intensity training may burn some fat stores in your body during the exercise, the number of calories burned during exercise is totally irrelevant, particularly given the number of calories that you’re burning in an exercise. One pound of fat has 3500 calories, and you just aren’t going to burn that many calories from exercise, or even anything close to that, so why are we measuring the fat that is burned during the exercise?

On the flip side of this discussion though, here’s what a low-intensity training does do; it stimulates low order slow twitch muscle fibers which require very small amounts of energy (ATP) to fire. There are a lot of these slow twitch fibers, and they recover very quickly, so no matter how long you pump your legs on that bike, you’re not going to get to the higher order fibers. This type of exercise tells your body that you are about to find food, and as a result makes you hungrier, because our biology is built for a world in which food is a scarce resource (2 million years as compared to 300 generations since agriculture). This is why people get hungrier as a result of “cardio.”

Assuming that people resist this urge to eat more, however, they are still not going to see the calorie burning effects. You see, your body likes homeostasis. It’s about survival. If your body notices an imbalance in the energy being taken in and the energy being burned, it will fix this by breaking down your most energy expensive tissue, your muscles. As of now the most difficult exercise you’re doing is riding a bike with low resistance for a half hour, and you’re only using a couple of your slower twitch fibers, so the body will break down the more energy expensive fast twitch fibers that are not being used. This will lower your basal metabolic rate, and now you need to cut your calorie content even more to lose the same amount of weight.

The solution to this is doing High-Intensity Training, which works out all of your muscle fibers to failure very infrequently. The idea behind this training that you put your body through a substantial trauma and then give it time to recover. Given enough time, your body will overcompensate in its recovery, thinking that your environment is more dangerous than your current musculature can handle, and the result is more muscle mass. The number of muscle fibers in any given muscle is fixed, but the size and strength of each of these fibers is variable. This means that your body will be able to do the same exercise using less muscle fibers, and as a result require less oxygen.  These are the “aerobic” gains that people speak of. It’s not actually an increase in your lung and heart capacity, it’s a change in the musculature. Now, lung and heart capacity can increase, as they will grow proportionally to growth in your musculature, but “aerobic” gains are muscle specific. This is why someone who is a marathon runner will get out of breath very quickly if they try rowing a meaningful distance, and vice versa.

Increases in your musculature will also increase your basal metabolic rate, as well as a bunch of other great weight loss and health benefits. Your body stores glycogen in the muscles in case it has an emergency fight or flight situation that it needs to get out of. Low-intensity exercise will not tap into these reserves, which is why it will burn some fat during the workout, but high-intensity training will deplete the energy in these stores. As a result, when you eat new carbohydrates, they will be taken up by your muscles as opposed to your fat cells. Your muscles will also become more insulin sensitive, which is important because insulin is very bad for your tissue. Less insulin in your blood stream means less trauma to your veins. Cholesterol is the substance that your body uses to patch up this trauma in your veins and arteries, so lowering this trauma lowers your cholesterol levels. Cholesterol is not inherently bad for your body, it is actually a symptom of problems rather than a cause. You can find more color on this subject in Good Calories, Bad Calories. That’s pretty much the definitive book on nutrition and weight loss if you want to learn how to effectively diet, although I would argue that this is how everyone should eat.

I implore you to do your own research and correct your article. If you want to learn more about all of this, Body by Science is a great resource.

Thanks,

Hammer

NFL Betting – Week 4

Last week I was flirting with disaster, and got lucky doubling or nothing on the Sunday night game. That said, I must like taking punishment, because I’m back at it again. Here are the picks:

Teasers:

$55 Bengals over Browns -0.5 and Bengals/Browns over 32 WIN

$55 Saints over Jets -1 and Saints/Jets over 39.5 LOSS

$55 Steelers over Chargers -1 and Steelers/Chargers under 49.5 TBD

Single Bet:

Ravens over Patriots +1.5 LOSS

NFL Betting – Week 3

Last week was kind of a rough week. My bet on the Giants/Cowboys game didn’t end up going through because of some error on the Bodog website, but I ended up winning $100 on the Monday night game, making me -$30 on the week last week but +$140 on the season.

My picks for this week are:

Teasers:

$55 Giants over Bucks -1 and Giants/Bucks over 38

$55 Bills over Saints +12 and Bills/Saints over 46

$55 Redskins over Lions -0.5 and Redskins/Lions over 32.5 (part of my always bet against the Lions strategy)

Parlay:

$33 (to win $80.40) Titans over Jets +3 and Colts over Cardinals +2.5

NFL Betting – Week 2

What’s up guys? I had a pretty good week betting last week, winning a total of $170 (If the fucking Bears had just held onto the football it would have been another $110). Anyway, I forgot to post my bets for this week on here, but I did pretty poorly, particularly compared to last week’s results.

3 Team Teaser (6 points)

$100 Titans over Texans -1, Vikings over Lions -4, Patriots over Jets +2

Result- LOSS. Fucking Pats your defense was embarrassing against the rook QB

Single Bet

$30 Carolina over Atlanta.

Result- LOSS. Really didn’t expect the Falcons to beat the Panthers. They didn’t look very good against the Eagles last week, but I thought that was because they were playing the Eagles. Lesson learned I guess?

Teaser

$55 Steelers over Bears +3 and Steelers/Bears under 43.5

Result- PUSH. Kind of lame, the Steelers missed 2 field goals at the end, but at least I get my money back.

$55 Giants over Dallas +9 and Giants/Cowboys over 39

Result- TBD

NFL Betting – Week 1

It’s that time of year again! I did really poorly last year, but I’m looking forward to killing it this year. Week 1 is always a toss up because you don’t know how people are coming out, but there are some teams that you always know how they’re going to come out, and I’m feeling good about my picks. The only scary thing is that I probably made too many of them, so we’ll see how things go.

6 Point Teasers:

$55 – Colts over Jaguars -1 and Cowboys over Bucks

$110 – Giants over Redskins -1/2 and Giants/Skins OVER 31

$55 – Steelers over Titans -1/2 and Steelers/Titans UNDER 41

Parlay

Eagles over Panthers -2.5 and Bears over Packers +3.5

Psychological Addiction Through Intermittent Reward

A couple weeks ago I got my hands on an account to BitSeduce and went download crazy. I basically downloaded an entire library of pickup material and stored it on an external hard drive  before getting kicked off for having a poor Upload/Download ratio. It’s kind of bs to me because there was no way that I could have a good download ratio since no one was downloading anything from me, but oh well, I pretty much got everything I could possibly ever want for anyone off of it.

I have no plans on watching, listening to, or reading everything I downloaded, but there definitely have been a few things I’ve been checking out. The programs that I’ve been going through have mainly been focused on relationship management and specifically getting a girlfriend to do the things that you want her to do.

I have quite a bit of experience with relationship management, but up to this point my strategy for getting what I want from a girl is purely based on compliance and denial of attention (e.g. “I understand if you don’t want to have a threesome but I have threesomes in my relationships and if that’s not okay with you then let’s take a break”). I still have a bunch of programs to go through, but so far the one that I really really loved that I would recommend to anyone in a relationship is NathanX’s Relationship Management program. It talks a lot about relationship dynamics and value balances as well as reframing beliefs in order to get what you want out of a girl and “build a better girlfriend” as Mark Cunningham puts it (this is another program on the to watch list).

Getting back into the theoretical side of things a little has given me the motivation to finally dive into Mehow’s “10 Second Sexual Attraction” course which I talked about a while back, having recently gotten my hands on the program through Demonoid. So far, I’m very impressed. I expected 10SSA to be specifically about the mid-game strategy that he has developed from watching Kamoflauge and Hypnotica, but it is really an all encompassing pickup book from what I can tell. Maybe not quite as in depth as something like Magic Bullets, but at least the first part of it gets pretty in depth about lifestyle design, which is probably as important if not more important to the pickup as techniques.

In his book, Mehow brings up a really interesting point about psychological addiction, and how you can use compliments and what he describes as “edge elements” to get a woman addicted to your attention in the same way that a slot machine does through “intermittent reward.” Intermittent reward is a seemingly random system of positive and negative reinforcement which actually causes the subject to want the payout more than if you were to just give consistent positive reinforcement.

I have heard something similar to this once before. I don’t recall where at the moment, but I remember reading or hearing something about how love is chemically addictive in the brain, and the withdrawl from those chemicals are what make breakups so difficult. As I read on in Mehow’s book, I look forward to learning more about how to specifically cultivate this addiction, but in the meantime I think that being conscious of this process can really help with your game.

Day Game is Fucking Easy…

I don’t really do much day game, in fact I can count my non-night game approaches this summer on one hand, and there are a lot of reasons for this. The first and most important is that I don’t have the patience or time for it. Even in NYC, women who are hot enough for me to justify approaching are few and far between, so I can walk around for literally 2-3 hours and not run into any women of that caliber. Then again, there are other times where I’ll be in a hurry to get somewhere and I’ll see five women who I should approach but just don’t really have time to. The second reason I haven’t been doing day game is that I have had a pretty regular stream of quality women that I’ve been meeting lately at night and wouldn’t have the time to go out with the women were it to go successfully. Then of course there’s the whole having the balls to do it; it takes time to psych yourself into the headspace (or at least it does for me) and there are definitely times where I see someone I want to talk to and I just take too long to decide to make the move.

It’s really hypocritical of me to not be doing day game. I’ve been sort of semi-instructing my friend on his journey lately (not that I’m really all that qualified to do so), and a big part of this has been getting his ass fired up to approach, particularly during the day since it’s more conducive to what he likes and wants. The thing is though, he’s been doing this for months, and yet he’s not getting results. He’s not really getting dates, and one of his first approaches in a pizza shop led to a lay but it was clearly a fluke with a girl who just wanted it because he hasn’t had a day game lay since.

I went on a “day game” date last night, although I put it in quotes because even though it was a day game style street approach, it was at 9 PM last Friday and was decidedly dark outside at the time, and it reminded me how fucking easy day game is. When I approached her, Kiwi and I were walking around my neighborhood totally smashed after coming from a free open bar. We had been sort of teasing each other about our game, i.e. he was teasing me about my game and I was laughing at him because my results speak for themselves, when I saw him approach and get blown out quickly. So I now had material to knock him on, which I proceeded to do for a block and a half, at which point I told him that I was going to show him how it was done and I ran up and approached this girl who was about a block ahead of us.

A couple of interesting things about this particular approach:

1) I scared the shit out of her, and I think it worked to my advantage. When I approached, I walked up ahead of her to check out her face for a second, then dipped behind her for a moment before touching her arm and opening. She had headphones on so she didn’t see or hear me coming and was startled, but I used very passive body language backing off a full five feet and apologizing for startling her (note: for startling her, not for approaching her or interrupting her), and we started talking. I think scaring her helped me though, possibly by crossing signals with attraction switches and making me seem hotter.

2) She is at the very least three years older than me, and it hasn’t come up at all. Usually women her age will qualify me on my age immediately, since they don’t like dating guys younger than them, and I look about 6 years younger than I actually am (23). So since it hasn’t come up, even on our three hour date, I think she’s probably concerned that her being as old as she is will disqualify her from me. That means that my frame is good, and she’s interpreting me as “the chooser.”

3) She was totally dressed down when I approached, so I didn’t realize how fucking hot she was! When I saw her from behind, I could tell she was definitely in the range, but for some reason I thought she had a little junk in the trunk (maybe it was the loose t-shirt covering her ass) and I knew that her face was already showing her age, so after getting her number, she wasn’t exactly that high on my priority list. But when last night opened up, she got her shot, and wow was I wrong about her body. She had just run a half marathon yesterday, and the fact that she was a runner definitely showed. Tight little body (spinner!!), totally flat stomach (with a belly button piercing), nice rounded athletic ass, basically totally perfect fuck buddy material. It’s always nice to find a sleeper hottie.

4) She thanked me for approaching her as we said goodbye. This further confirms my hypothesis that women like to be approached by guys they’re interested in having sex with. It’s nice to have that positive reinforcement, especially since it’s such a socially awkward thing to do. I’ve pretty much always had success with day game, but that doesn’t mean there still aren’t going to be personal obstacles to overcome in order to man up. I fully believe that we are evolutionarily hard coded with approach anxiety to prevent approaching the wrong women (which would lead to being killed by an alpha of the tribe, a phenomenon that still occurs in many cousin species), and it always amazes me the mental gymnastics that my mind can do despite such blatant evidence in my personal experience to the contrary.

Alright well I wanted to touch on a few things that I notice about what I do differently from my buddy that I think a lot of guys who are having trouble doing day game might be doing wrong. The first thing is that he’s not being genuine with women. He’s using no inflection when he complements and making it seem like he does this all the time (which he does), but the problem is that he’s not making them feel special. When I go direct on the street, I have this very coy attitude and come across non-threatening. My friend isn’t getting the results that he wants, and I keep telling him that he needs to do a better job of being genuine, but he refuses saying opening is not his problem because he’s getting into conversations with women. Yet I’ve seen him in conversations with women, and the dynamic isn’t right from the beginning. He’ll figure it out eventually, but for now, you guys can learn from his mistake.

The next BIG mistake he’s making is that he’s not stopping women. I don’t really understand why he doesn’t do this one, but it makes such a difference. Even when you’re going in the same direction as a woman, stop her to talk. You’re important, and it builds compliance. As you open, stop and wait for her to stop. Then talk to her, and if after a few minutes you want to walk together, do that on your terms.

The last mistake he’s making is that he’s not having interesting conversations. Everything is logistics, where she’s going, what she does, etc. There’s no emotion, nothing that is going to hook her. It comes down to being interesting and likeability. He’s not taking a genuine interest in these women and as a result he’s not receiving a genuine interest from them. So he’s getting numbers, but they’re all flakes. Flakes happen a lot in night game, and no matter how good you are you’re still going to have at least a 25-50% flake ratio there, but during the day they really shouldn’t happen very much.

Anyway, just to round out the story, I didn’t lay the girl on the date last night, but we made out quite a bit and if there’s a next time, I think that it’ll happen with near certainty.

Not Getting the Results You Want?

I read an article recently about people “opting out” (i.e.. giving up) of dating on Simone Grant’s blog, and it really made me kind of think about myself and how I just really can’t identify with the experience of ever having a desire to give up on anything, let alone something as important as one’s love life. I see people do it all the time, but it’s just something that I don’t understand intellectually. It’s just my personality and how I was raised. A million things can go wrong in my life but I still believe with every ounce of my being that I deserve happiness and if I work at it eventually I’ll get it right.

It’s so incredible to me how many parallels there are between entrepreneurship/business/sales and dating. Most of the most successful people in the world aren’t successful because they got lucky the first time around; they’re successful because every time they failed they viewed it as one more idea that didn’t work bringing them a step closer to an idea that would.

People talk about how Thomas Edison tried thousands of failed designs when he was trying to invent the light bulb before he finally created one that worked, or even how long actors and musicians pound the pavement trying to get a break before they hit it big. The constant is always that these people believe that they DESERVE the success that is around the corner for them and it’s never about the goal, but rather about enjoying the journey, and knowing that the more difficult the road the better it will feel when you arrive at your destination.

There are definitely two distinct types of people in the world when it comes to goal setting and ambition. There’s the person who reads a book like “The 4 Hour Work Week” by Tim Ferriss and thinks it’s a cute story but is not replicable for them or anyone else (this is the feeling that I got when I read the Dateable Dork’s blog post on pondering her road ahead), then there’s the person who reads that book and feels like he just got slapped across the face by the voice of reason. He realizes that his life fell off track somewhere along the way and it’s about time that he get his shit together. What’s funny about it is that a lot of the people who think that way about career ambitions often think the opposite way about their love life.

I’m sure that many of you have heard all of this stuff before and for most of you it will not resonate, but for someone like me, this is how I think, and that’s the difference between successful people and everyone else. It’s the difference talked about in “Rich Dad, Poor Dad.” Call it delusional, call it idealistic, say it’s because I’m young and haven’t been beaten down by the world yet, but fuck you! I am delusional, I live in my own reality, but you know what? By believing it, it becomes true. One of my favorite t-shirts I own is a shirt from Reflect Ts that says “I create my reality” on it backwards so that I can read it to myself in a mirror. Maybe some of you need to think back to who you were at the age of 23 and imagine what that version of yourself would say about the current one.

Game 3.0

Wow! Life’s been pretty crazy lately. I guess I’ve alluded to the fact that my game has DRASTICALLY improved in the last month or so, and not to sound totally PUA cliché but it’s definitely starting to feel like I’ve seen the matrix. I titled this post “Game 3.0” because I really think that we’re starting to see the next wave or innovation in the community, and I wanted to talk a little about what is coming next and where you should look for the next wave.

First some definitions:

Game 1.0: This is the original stuff. Mystery Method, Cocky/Funny, Speed Seduction, etc. In the evolution of pickup, I look at this as the Newtonian physics of pickup; it’s a convenient way to solve the basic problems, and is probably what you should be learning first. But it’s not the end all be all, and when examined at a more advanced level it has many flaws.

Game 2.0: This is the recent wave of Masculinity/Inner Game and Natural Game products that have come out over the last couple of years. It’s more tailored toward more normal guys who are stumbling upon the community that are successful and probably already have social skills but just want a lot more choice when it comes to women instead of feeling like the women are always the ones choosing them. To continue the physics analogy again, Game 2.0 is the equivalent movement to quantum mechanics and relativity.

Game 2.5: Toward the end of the inner game movement, a social circle game movement and a same night lay game movement (featuring sexual framing and logistics management) popped up. I don’t think these quite deserve their own revolution because for the most part it’s merely minor tweaks to what is already out there as opposed to a complete evolution.

Game 3.0: From what I can tell, we’ve got a new set of things coming around the corner. I see Captain Jack and El Topo at the forefront of this movement right now, but as it catches on I have little doubt that there will be others jumping on the bandwagon as always. CJ’s stuff is, for now at least, much more back end and theoretical, although I am sure that it will become more pragmatic as he continues to work with it. El Topo’s stuff is much more outer game related, and it’s all about using your own identity to hook really hard really quickly.  Both of these are game changers, sort of the super-string theory or some otherwise “unifying theory” if you want to round out the physics analogy.

CJ’s new stuff is called “Player in the Game” theory. Basically the idea is, women are attracted to men who are playing the same game as them. In fact, most shit tests are not shit tests as originally defined, but rather screening questions to help determine what game the two of you are playing together and if it is a game she wants to play. The two basic games are the two paths that Savage discusses.

There are four game dynamics, and all of them have to be established in order for your game goal to be completed. As a result, any blowout can be explained as either a disagreement or ambiguity on at least one of the game dynamics. Take a look at the posts here, here, and here to learn more about it. I’m really looking forward to seeing where CJ takes this.

Steve’s stuff is all about hooking. I remember hearing Steve interviewed a while ago, maybe by Adonis of the Charming Rogue, where he talks about how there are people who are better at picking women up or getting laid than him, but no one hooks harder than he does. When I heard that, I realized how true it really is, having experienced it firsthand. I watched Steve pickup a girl at the Hard Rock Circle Bar, then continue to text her essentially all night. He never got a chance to meet up with her that weekend, but he ended up going on vacation with her a month or two later with only text exchanges between meet and flight. He’s putting out a series of videos the first three of which are here, here, and here. Take a look at that stuff because they’re very content rich even though there’s plenty that’s being left out.

Meeting someone for ten minutes and building enough of a connection to meet them in another country sounds like a fluke, I know, but the thing is that Steve does this consistently. In the month of May alone he had something like 6 girls fly to Austin to stay with him at The Ranch. He’s so consistent with his hooking, in fact, that when he went to The 21 Convention to speak, he stayed with a girl all four days. But what’s crazy is that this isn’t some girl he knew from back in the day, no. Steve stayed with a girl he picked up in a coffee shop when he arrived in Orlando. Again, you can say that it’s kind of a fluke, and I’d tend to believe you, but the thing is, that was the plan. He didn’t book a hotel room, he didn’t make plans to stay with friends. Steve’s plan was to pick up a girl to sleep with that weekend and whose house he and Savage and another dude could stay at for all four days. Bobby Rio from TSB Magazine and Great Seducer: Get a Night Life is looking to do an interview with Steve soon, so definitely be on the lookout for that as well.

Six months ago, stuff like this was not even in my realm of possibility when it came to how good you could get. Hell, two months ago, I knew it was possible but it still wasn’t even in my head as something I could potentially do. I still can’t do anything close to this with consistency, but I can imagine a scenario in which I hook a girl hard enough to make it happen, and I can imagine working out the kinks enough that I develop consistency around this hooking capability. I’m sooooo much better than I was just one year ago when I started this blog (and I was pretty good back then). It’s really exciting to imagine where I will be one year from now if my skills continue to improve like this.

Hilarious!

After watching this video of Mehow running his 10 Second Sexual Attraction game live infield, I saw this comment on the video:

Striking Swede says:

R-Bone, after reading your post I feel like I wanna see a challenge too. I make childish vivid scenes in my head with different gurus, calling it a battle or fight instead, where it’s one scarce girl at a time having to be picked up. The winners between Hypnotica vs Matador, David DeAngelo vs Mehow, and finally Jeffy vs Sinn then face off in some finale to pick up the sassiest, hottest chick of all times, both with suprisingly cool amogs from unsuspected sources (Eben Pagan having read Mehow blog says “your wife just called, the kids wonder when the heat will be back on” and Mehow responds with “dude, you’re like Bart Simpson all grown up…”

Yes… And epic confrontation of tight game, astonishing amounts of mad amoging and nasty elbows to eachothers chests… Mehow starts round 1 by peacocking as a buff ballerina, Sinn comes in dressed like THIS… Yes an epic battle indeed, filmed like Keys to the VIP, with commentators Tyler Durden, Ross Jeffries, David Shade and Mark Cunningham. Tyler wears a rat costume, Ross’ personality for the day is Vlad Tepes (Dracula), Shade has somehow found a vaginadress that he keeps salivating on, and Mark has hypnotized the announcer girl to give him a blowjob under the entire show.

One can only dream of what then happens, as mystery guest Bill Clinton shows up to show the boys how it’s done, only he doesn’t realize that he’s hitting on a his own wife, while she’s dressed up as a fat darkhaired intern who just brushed her teeth. You can tell because she still has… no wait, that’s not toothpaste!

The plot thickens..

Hilarious!!!