The last few essays can be summarized with this: calories and nutrients are universal, but how your body makes use of them isn’t. You’re body is smart enough to take care of needs—you’re “flinching” a certain way; you’re signaling different things inside of your body based upon what you encounter (or expose yourself to) in [...]
The last few essays can be summarized with this: calories and nutrients are universal, but how your body makes use of them isn’t. You’re body is smart enough to take care of needs—you’re “flinching” a certain way; you’re signaling different things inside of your body based upon what you encounter (or expose yourself to) in the wonderfully wacky world.
Some of these signaling-flinching processes are genetically programmed. Others are a product of our own doing, be it on purpose or mistake. All in all, they are a product of stimulation, supply, and soul—each of these contribute to signaling and flinching. Emergence says so.
And although all of these S’s are important, I think one is driving the car; the others are following the tire tracks. The following way to think about things changed my philosophy and the way I approach things for the better.
I think it will do the same for you.
Muscle vs. fat, gloves off
An overly simple way to look at body composition: you have fat, and you have muscle. Whichever convinces the body for most attention and priority wins. (And now, caveats: muscle and fat have different attention spans, people have different amounts of fat, people have different muscle responsiveness and sensitivity for said attention, and the list goes on. I said it’s overly simple for a reason. Otherwise, I wouldn’t even know what I’m saying.)
This is where the thermogenic calorie game gets a little funky, because it says little about this fight. For instance, take two people that eat the same amount, say 500 calories over their needs daily.
- Person (A) puts emotion into distance running.
- Person (B) puts emotion into strength training.
You might be able to say something about weight gain here, but certainly not about body composition because each form of training stimulates the body differently.
The importance of stress
Humans are remarkably able to not only handle stress, but also thrive because of stress. This is the 101 of Taleb’s antifragile concept, which is essentially the 101 of biology for those too incompetent (like me) to comprehend lifeless biological concepts (isn’t that rather paradoxical — lifeless biology?).
Few seconds (if any) pass without your body either breaking itself down or building itself up in response to the interpreted stimuli around you. Reading one sentence or thinking one thought has the ability to turn your body into a sympathetically dominant being that breaks itself down to have energy available for immediate use. You might go into a further mythical zeal if you have sight beyond sight.
We are shaped by these stressors, specifically what we do to overcome them.
Although there is a general stress response, there is also a specific stress response. We don’t just overcome stress, we overcome specific stressors. You have a fever (general response) when you have the flu. When you overcome it, you develop somewhat of an immunity to that strain of flu, and not chicken pox, measles, or mumps (specific response).
In other words, the only reason you now have the immunity is because you sustained the stress.
And the winner “S” is…
The way you stimulate and train forces your body to overcome in a unique way based upon the stimulation. Running a marathon forces different adaptations than lifting weights.
Stimulation comes first.
It’s tough to provoke any sort of meaningful physical recreation unless you first stimulate something that needs adapted to and overcome, regardless of supply or soul. The latter two more or less facilitate the stimulation-signaling process, and so the primary job is to stimulate the right way.
(An “ideal” nutrition or “diet” plan considers the stress. Different types of physical stress use different types of fuel sources, which then leads to a specific kind of depletion, which then leads to a better form of replenishment.)
I encourage you to break away from the thermogenic game for a second and instead think in terms of:
- What kind of effect will this stress have?
- What’s going to break down in order to eventually be overcome?
- What’s exactly going to be going on besides burning calories?
Star wands turning slop into slick
No, you might not have the ultimate bone structure for the ideal muscular build. No, you might not have the ultimate hormone profile for being hench and muss. No, you might not stack up against those at the top of your aspirations. No, you might not have Adrian Peterson’g genetics. And no, you might not have had a Grandpa Gohan that instilled solid nutrition and training habits within you when you were teeny tiny that lasted for life.
I’m betting the vast majority don’t have a Grandpa Gohan or Peterson genetics though, which leaves us swimming in a pool of the past. You can wonder about this all day, but you’re always left with two options.
- You can take the genetic mindset and quit now.
- You can take the change mindset and get to work.
Nothing is haphazard. Want something? It’s your job to put it there. There aren’t magical fairies running turning slop into slick with star wands.
You have to stimulate for the right things and bank on time working its magic.
In the end, do you have any other choice?
But an even better question:
Are you stimulating for the “right things?”
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Photo Credit: tire tracks