John:

That's a good idea: I've been eating that way for quite a while, I just hadn't added it to the manifesto.

Uncephalized:

Much appreciated!  Slick new avatar, too.

Joe Brancaleone:

News media often gives the impression that riding a mountain bike is all about twenty-something daredevils chugging Mountain Dew and hucking off jumps.  No: it's how many of us enjoy seeing the outdoors, and it lets us see beautiful places without burning an entire day, or requiring an overnight trip, to do it! 

Plus, as anyone who actually builds trails can tell you, bicyclists and hikers have about the same impact on trail surfaces.  Horses are what does all the damage: 1000+ pounds balanced on four small metal shovels.  (Let's not even mention the dung…when's the last time you saw a cyclist squatting in the middle of the trail, taking a dump?) And even that is rounding error next to erosion caused by water, which is proportional to trail tread and exacerbated by poor design…so a couple hundred feet of your average steep, badly eroded logging skid road (now called a "fire road" by the Forest Service) has more impact than a mile of your average singletrack.

Today a friend and I were checking out the aspens, which are peaking right now.  Maybe I'll post some pictures.  They're stunning.

Beth:

Yes, I'd love to address disordered eating…but since it's such a touchy subject, I want to make sure I'm doing so with respect and care.

Joe:

I'm glad it's helped you! 

Frankly, I've been surprised that previous presentations of these issues failed to separate these provably distinct phenomena.  No wonder everyone has been so confused…

Daniel:

Yes, steak and eggs are nearly a panacea.  Myself, I add some potatoes (sweet or regular, your choice) and a salad.  But they're most definitely supporting actors in the drama.

"you've pretty much beasted the whole food reward thing."  Thank you for noticing!  I don't write articles unless I'm familiar enough with the subject to be confident in what I write.

Re: dopamine.  These are huge subjects, and I've had to limit these articles to a very small subset of the issues.  Furthermore, they're areas of active research.  But you're absolutely correct that some people have much greater sensitivity to reward signaling than others — sometimes only around very specific issues.  It's a fascinating area of research.

snakeojakeo:

It's not a synthesis: it's a re-examination.  I backed up and started over with a combination of basic principles and observed reality, read the relevant literature, and followed it where it led. 

This is why it's coherent and easily understandable: I'm not trying to make the evidence fit into a conclusion I started with.

Also, I've tried to stay out of the bickering matches and flame wars: I'd rather investigate at my own pace instead of being goaded into arguing in the comment section.

Thank you for the support!

tess:

Sincere thanks are never redundant.

chris:

Nothing's stopping you from trying it…but I think you'll find that by the time you ingest all the supplements AND all the fats, protein powders, etc. that you'd need, the volume and complexity of preparation will approach that of real food.  I think it's simpler to eat an egg than try to mix the combination of fat, protein, cholesterol, lutein, choline, biotin, and the myriad other nutrients required to simulate the nutrition in an egg.

Franco:

Yes, real chocolate mousse is absolutely delicious!

As far as relative satiating capacity of PRO/FAT/CHO singly or in combination, there are hundreds of studies out there — and you can prove whatever you want simply by choosing the ones you like.  I started to write an article on that subject once, and quickly realized that most of the papers are cleverly designed to produce the desired conclusion.

More to come…thank you for your support! 

My apologies: I replied to a whole bunch of you, but lost the reply due to a broken mouse.

How does that happen?

Imagine a mouse button that sometimes magically presses the center button (the "wheel" button) when you press the left button (the main button).  So instead of switching to a tab, it closes the tab...not incidentally deleting anything you might have written.

FFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUU-

I fixed it.  Turns out the mouse wasn't actually broken: it just had a bunch of grit built up in the mechanism.  I disassembled it, cleaned it out, and now everything is fine...except for the hour of work I just lost. 

Anyway, I need to go outside, ride my bike, and clear my head.  I'll be back in a while.

JS

Fmgd:

"It all sounds natural, and it's great to back up intuition with research."

If what I write about hunger doesn't have relevance to our daily experience, it doesn't matter how many citations I make.

"I haven't really looked much into it, but I don't get the fixation on food reward as a cause for making people fat."

That's entirely due to one blogger, who's spent the last six months pushing that particular hypothesis.  I believe I've shown here that hunger is clearly much more than just the hedonic value of food — and that its incentive salience is the product of other factors, not a magical property of food that causes us to overeat.  Like I said, food didn't suddenly become tasty in 1978.

"If you stay hungry because you can't really absorb or use the nutrients on food, it's not very clear to me that simply eating less wouldn't be equally harmful."

Absolutely true.  And that's the first problem with most diets.

Franco:

I agree.  Presenting a theory of "food reward" over several months and a 40-minute presentation without mentioning Kent Berridge, or his separable concepts of hedonic reward and incentive salience, is like presenting a unified field theory without mentioning Maxwell's equations. 

And even though Round 2 of explanations, six months later, has finally started to cite Berridge and use the accepted scientific terminology (though only after I've done so for months…see Part I, Part II, and Part VI, all of which predate Round 2), I agree that the concepts are still being conflated. 

That's why it's best to read the existing literature, and familiarize ourselves with the terminology, before making a big public splash (in which we claim to have discovered concepts understood for many years) and telling everyone else what to do: otherwise we just end up confusing people.

Scotlyn:

I agree, and I've said it before: a "set point" is just a homeostasis we don't understand yet.  If you go on a diet, and then gain all the weight back when you go off it, that's to be expected: your previous bodyfat "set point" is the result of your diet, life(style), and genetics — and if you return to that same diet and lifestyle, it's very likely that you'll return to the same body composition! 

Also, most diets depend on willpower: they don't actually nourish us better.  In fact, they nourish us less, because they still stress nutrient-poor foods like whole grains and fat-free dairy.  If we want to permanently change our "set point", we're going to have to permanently change our eating and activity patterns.

(Note that this is NOT to say that these patterns change instantly with diet, nor that metabolic damage cannot prevent us from returning to a diet on which we were once skinny and healthy.)

Asclepius:

The rhythm of the seasons is deep and unfathomably ancient…though I'm not a pure locavore, it's both delicious and much cheaper to eat food and do activities in season.  In the summer I sweat a lot, in the winter I spend a lot of time being chilly, because I'm outdoors.  That's fine!  I get tired of doing the same thing all year anyway.

tess:

"if i hear another 20-something male tell me you just have to eat less and exercise more, i fear i might commit a violence! ;-)"

Exactly.  People aren't overweight because they want to be fat: they're overweight because they're hungry all the time!  That's part of why I'm writing this series of articles.

Paul:

Thank you for your continued support and contributions!

I believe that Kurt Harris has perhaps become too liberal with his recommendations: just because an always-skinny person can tolerate certain variations from optimal doesn't mean the rest of us can, or should.  I think the Jaminets have a good handle on the high end of carb consumption: going lower is a matter of individual response.  Some achieve great weight loss, some don't.  Some do well on it indefinitely, some don't.

Daniel:

Thanks for the heads-up: I'll probably try to find a copy at the library.

Txomin:

My approach is to chew until I'm no longer enjoying it.  If I tried to chew my grass-finished, 28-day dry-aged steak until the flavor disappeared, I'd still be eating right now!

Fmgd:

Yes, chuck steak is the same cut in America.  It's delicious, but as you say, most of it contains a lot of connective tissue.  (Though it's possible to get an excellent flatiron.)

Franco:

I agree about resistance exercise and HIIT.

Diane:

First, you're most definitely not eating enough protein for breakfast.  Eat meat, or at least eggs, and not so much pure fat.  (Think omelet with ham or chicken, or eat some meat with your yogurt and ditch the creme/coconut milk.)  The point is not to add fat to everything; the point is to eat whole, nutritious foods, which contain fat as part of their complement.  Protein is especially important for weight loss, as it's the most satiating nutrient.

Also, I recommend some resistance exercise (lifting heavy weights) and some HIIT (high-intensity, low-duration interval training).  If hiking the PCT didn't make you lose weight, no amount of hiking will!  Not that you should stop hiking — but you should only hike because you enjoy it, not because you think you'll lose weight.  You can't keep doing the same thing and expecting a different result.

Finally, I gave you a few possible dietary experiments a while ago.  Try those.

JS

I'm catching up…more to come.

Txomin, Fmgd:

Chewing your food thoroughly will make it digest more quickly.  This may or may not be desirable.

I'm more concerned about the sensory exposure, which affects satiation.  Eating more slowly, all other things being equal, causes us to eat less.  So we should chew until we're not enjoying whatever we're chewing anymore.

Interestingly, I find that I eat foods like sashimi more slowly than foods like potatoes.  If I'm eating something absolutely delicious, I'll take the time to savor each bite.  If a food is just "good", I have no problem shoveling it down as quickly as I can.  And, of course, if a food is gross, I'll eat it slowly or not at all.

Beth:

"I get the connection between incentive salience and the idea that folks believe there's room for dessert, but I am not getting the connection between this and dessert being nutritionally incomplete.  Seems to me that having "room for dessert" has more to do with wanting, liking and especially variety … and not downstream satiety."

The key concept is that incentive salience, or "wanting", which is our drive to consume something, is primarily a product of the other drives, not a property of the food itself. 

As I said in the article when asking "Why do we ever stop eating?" -- "The Oreo didn't change...we did."  Hedonic reward ("liking") combines with our current degree of satiation and satiety to produce our drive to actually consume more food -- incentive salience, or "wanting". 

For example, we can "like" prime rib more than any other food...but if we've just eaten 20 ounces of it and are stuffed full, we don't "want" any more -- because the hedonic impact of the delicious taste of prime rib is pre-empted by our satiation.

That's why the first bite of prime rib leads to the second, but the twenty-fifth doesn't necessarily lead to the twenty-sixth: our "wanting" for more decreases, because our satiation increases.

To return to the dessert example: let's say you just finished your prime rib, and someone offers you another of your favorite whole foods.  (In my case, I'll pick bacon.)  Sure, I can eat a bite or two of bacon: but again, my satiation will quickly reduce the bacon's incentive salience to zero and stop me from eating more. 

However, dessert has little power to satiate.  So I can eat that bite of candy or ice cream, and since I'm no less satiated than before, the dessert's incentive salience remains the same, and I can probably finish it off.

Is that more clear?

Roger:

That's great!  I'm glad I've been able to distill all this science into a simple takeaway that you can use to improve their life and health.

Aaron:

"I'll be back! And it's not just the fat-binging that made me say this."

I'm absolutely honored.  The research I'm citing overlaps with your field of expertise, and it means a lot to have a highly regarded professional, such as yourself, tell me that my work is legitimate and valuable.

Chris:

The one advantage of that approach is that the ingredients aren't usually perishable.  So if we're talking about a cache of survival food, it's actually a legitimate approach.  I may write an article about this someday.

Jean:

Some of us have noticed that the more nutritionally dense the food we eat is, the less variety we crave.  But there's a lot more to say about its impact on eating.

Wow!  I think I've finally replied to everyone.  Thank you all for your continued support -- and don't forget to share my articles with others! 

Live in freedom, live in beauty.

JS

Beth:

The complicating factor is learning.  Because we've eaten dessert before, we know that dessert won't be satiating, and that we can probably finish it -- without necessarily having to eat a bite first.

Imagine yourself at a buffet, making decisions on what to eat next, and you'll understand.

As for myself, there are definitely desserts that are "heavier" than others.  For instance, cheesecake is a "heavy" dessert, because it has some satiating power due to being made of cheese, not just sugar and flour.  I've definitely been too full to eat cheesecake before.  Regular cake is a bit lighter because it's just sweet bread and frosting.  And then you have things like fruit topped with whipped cream, which are basically 100% sugar with a bit of fat, are quite "light", and can always be packed down somewhere.  Or, even better, those little cups of sherbet sometimes used as a palate cleanser.

JS