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Gardens of the Moon (Part 3)

January 29, 2012 Books / Read-A-Day 2012
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Even though I haven’t been writ­ing about it, I have been slowly chip­ping away at this book. Mostly only on bus rides to and from school, but I got decent chunks done at home yes­ter­day and today. I just got to chap­ter 12, or about 54% through the book.

All the major play­ers on con­verg­ing on one loca­tion, so things are heat­ing up. How­ever, I still can’t tell what everyone’s plans are. I am barely able to form opin­ions about whether cer­tain play­ers are “good” or “bad.” And some char­ac­ters that seem to be good also seem to be being used by “bad” forces beyond their control.

If only I had the proper time to chug through this.

Eat Stop Eat

January 25, 2012 Books / Diet / Food / Read-A-Day 2012
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Today, I burned through Brad Pilon’s Eat Stop Eat, another book from the sug­gested read­ing list at Lean­gains.

This one was focused on Inter­mit­tent Fast­ing. The read­ing was short and sweet, but did not leave me com­pletely con­vinced. He did add foot­note cita­tions, so I may look through those. The basic prin­ci­ple is that brief fasts drop insulin and raise glucagon and growth hor­mone, lead­ing to fat loss.

Assum­ing that the sci­ence is solid, I’m not sure how I would imple­ment it. There seem to be a lot of vari­a­tions on IF. The author rec­om­mends 24-​hour fasts once or twice a week. Lean­gains rec­om­mends a 16-​hour (14 for women) fast every day. Fast-​5 is another pop­u­lar IF plan that rec­om­mends a 19-​hour fast every day.

As for the rules — dur­ing the non-​fasting times, you eat as nor­mal. No extra calo­ries in prepa­ra­tion for a fast or as reward after a fast. Dur­ing the fast­ing times, only non-​caloric drinks and sugar-​free gum are allowed. From a strict calorie-​restriction per­spec­tive, I can see how this plan would work. And it would be rel­a­tively easy to do long-​term since there are no types of food restricted, but it seems to fall back to count­ing calories.

Starting Strength

January 23, 2012 Books / Health / Read-A-Day 2012
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Post is late by a bit but I was dis­tracted by laundry.

I’m look­ing to start weight lift­ing for strength and gen­eral fit­ness, so I spent the week­end read­ing through sug­ges­tions from Fitoc­racy. That led me to Lean­gains, which is more diet-​centric, but it in turn led me to Mark Rippletoe’s Start­ing Strength.

It was crazy detailed, which is good for some­one like me who knows basi­cally noth­ing. Last time I touched a bar­bell was over ten years ago, when I was on the high school wrestling team, and even then, I just mim­ic­k­ing the other teammate’s rou­tines with­out any sort of under­stand­ing or planning.

Even though I do not have a coach or even a work­out buddy at the moment, I feel com­fort­able enough to get started. Let’s see how this goes…

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