Training strategy for an obese mountaineer

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LURE
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Re: Training strategy for an obese mountaineer

Post by LURE »

RockiesAdrian wrote:
LURE wrote:Soda has no place in the human diet, if you ask me. The whole beer thing, all the calories in there are like 90% from the alcohol. The body can't store alcohol calories, so it's pointless to count beer and liquor calories. Every alcohol calorie gets burned and removed from the body no matter what you do. It's an interesting physiological misconception that beer and liquor make you fat. Food makes you fat. Alcohol can contribute to weight gain, but it's not the alcohol calories doin it.
I think soda is disgusting and never drink the stuff. But to say alcohol calories do not affect weight gain/loss seems very hard to believe. Do you have any sources to back up that claim?
Well, in a sense alcohol calories do effect weight gain. But it's not the calories, it's the metabolic prioritization of alcohol that causes weight gain.

In short:

Alcohol is poison. The body therefore prioritizes it as the number one thing in that body that needs to be metabolized and removed once ingested - so that you don't die from it. All alcohol in the body ends up, ultimately, as CO2 and water, in the liver and other tissues. Because it becomes the emergency priority for being metabolized, real food calories get sidelined to a degree and go straight to storage. That's how I've come to understand it.

These sources talk a lot about alcohol metabolism which is the first step in figuring this stuff out:

- https://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/aa72/aa72.htm

- "Alcohol inhibits fat oxidation, suggesting that frequent alcohol consumption could lead to fat sparing, and thus higher body fat in the long term" - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4338356/

- Alcohol Metabolic Process - https://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications ... 45-255.pdf

Here are some articles that talk about the priority thing with alcohol:

- http://www.fitday.com/fitness-articles/ ... olism.html

- http://www.health.com/health/article/0, ... 97,00.html

There's more out there. It's hard to scrounge up good research on google at work but this should give you an idea of how much more complicated it is. The main point I'm making is that its more or less fact that the body can't store alcohol calories. You're body burns them as quickly as it can to remove the poison so you don't die. The many effects of this process on the body though are difficult to fully understand, and research suggests that this is the problem that leads to weight gain; that other calories getting sidelines while the body prioritizes the alcohol. Not to mention the fact people get the munchies when they drink or the effects of drinking lots of sugary cocktails.

Think about an alcoholic who starts replacing meals with alcohol. They would get skinny and jaundiced. Not fat.
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AlexeyD
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Re: Training strategy for an obese mountaineer

Post by AlexeyD »

Not sure if this has already been mentioned, but one other suggestion would be to pick a more short-term, intermediate fitness goal that will force you to stick to a training schedule in the medium term. I know from personal experience that goals a year off can be hard to stay motivated for, but 3-4 months are much more manageable. Races are an obvious choice here, and are often held throughout the year. Start with picking one that you can reasonably expect to train for in a couple months (10K, 10 mile, half marathon, whatever your current running ability allows), and then when you do that one pick another, more ambitious one. You'll find the training required for these to overlap 90% with your bigger objective, and you will have something in the meantime to keep you focus.

Good luck and respect!
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Re: Training strategy for an obese mountaineer

Post by Timothy »

JaredJohnson wrote: I should probably go ahead and seek out some input from a nutritionist, as well as doing some of the additional reading recommended on this thread. I've always been hesitant to spend a lot of time researching but I think it's time to dedicate more brain cells to the problem if I want better results than I'm already getting!
Sounds to me like you are on the right track. Happy climbing.

And for what it is worth, I agree that soda is one of the worst things you can put into your body. Phosphoric acid is just plain evil, as is HFCS. On the other hand, I agree with whomever it was who said that beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy :-D
שְׁמַע יִשְׂרָאֵל יְהוָה אֱלֹהֵינוּ יְהוָה אֶחָֽד׃‎
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Re: Training strategy for an obese mountaineer

Post by mtn_hound »

LURE wrote:
RockiesAdrian wrote:I disagree that giving up soda or beer is a necessary step, so much as setting a specific calorie goal and sticking to it.
Soda has no place in the human diet, if you ask me. The whole beer thing, all the calories in there are like 90% from the alcohol. The body can't store alcohol calories, so it's pointless to count beer and liquor calories. Every alcohol calorie gets burned and removed from the body no matter what you do. It's an interesting physiological misconception that beer and liquor make you fat. Food makes you fat. Alcohol can contribute to weight gain, but it's not the alcohol calories doin it.
This is partially true but misses the point. So what if the alcohol gets burned first? Every alcohol calorie you burn is a food calorie you don't need to burn (assuming the same activity level). Those extra food calories can then be stored as fat. You want calories in to be less than calories out, and the NET effect of alcohol calories are the same as the NET effect of food calories.
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Re: Training strategy for an obese mountaineer

Post by justiner »

RockiesAdrian wrote:I disagree that giving up soda or beer is a necessary step, so much as setting a specific calorie goal and sticking to it.

However, if you are trying to stick to 1500 calories per day, you will find that your desire for either of these beverages must be quite high to find room for them.

If you were on a 2000 calorie per day restriction, it wouldn't be nearly so challenging to find room for one or the other.
Check out that Sugar, the Bitter Truth video. One big problem with sugar is that it's added to everything food-like that's even remotely processed, so once you get to drinking a soda, you're already overwhelmingly over and above any sane level of sugar in your diet.

Setting a caloric limit no matter the source of those calories is also debunked in that video.
LURE wrote: Well, in a sense alcohol calories do effect weight gain. But it's not the calories, it's the metabolic prioritization of alcohol that causes weight gain.
Again, check that video, he explains that sugar and alchohol are processed almost the same way in the liver, except that 10% of the alchohol you drink is metabolized in your brain, which is what makes you drunk. Absolutely, 100% count alchohol calories. Beer bellies are caused by beer ( subcutaneous fat). The video goes through in great detail the metabolic process of breaking down alchohol:

https://youtu.be/dBnniua6-oM?t=51m10s
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It's not, "in a sense" - it's got a good chance that it's converted to fat.

I had to watch the video a few times, but on a recent viewing, I finally realized that the sugar in say, candy is not metabolized the same way as the carbs in bread. I was always under the impression that carbs in bread are easily broken down to basically sugar, and then digested and used the same way in the body. That's not true. Bread gets broken down to glucose, which is different from what sugar is (fructose). According to this video, fructose is handled by the liver, glucose is absorbed into your bloodstream. Why does the liver handle fructose? That's the whole thesis of this video - what else does the liver handle? (answer: poison, like alchohol).
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Re: Training strategy for an obese mountaineer

Post by RockiesAdrian »

justiner wrote:Check out that Sugar, the Bitter Truth video. One big problem with sugar is that it's added to everything food-like that's even remotely processed, so once you get to drinking a soda, you're already overwhelmingly over and above any sane level of sugar in your diet.

Setting a caloric limit no matter the source of those calories is also debunked in that video.
Yes, balancing macro-nutrients is important, and that's one more reason MyFitnessPal is great. By default, they have you target 50/30/20 Carbs/Fat/Protein. It was surprising how hard it was to get the balance of fat in my diet below 30%. Beer and soda both skew things wildly towards carbs, don't help your fiber totals at all, and screw up your sugar.

After using the app for a while and doing some research, I started eating a lot more tuna, chicken breast, beans, etc. I was also surprised how good of a protein source peas, spinach, and other green things are.
In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.
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Re: Training strategy for an obese mountaineer

Post by LURE »

mtn_hound wrote: Every alcohol calorie you burn is a food calorie you don't need to burn (assuming the same activity level)
I'm not an expert, but I highly, highly doubt it's a 1:1 ratio like that. The correlations between alcohol and weight gain exist in certain drinking intervals, and others not so much. And where they do exist the increase in waist size isn't huge, but it certainly is there. I think the moderate drinking interval really doesn't have a correlation.

Nonetheless, I agree with that logic - just not that it's one to one - and that's why alcohol should be a factor in trying to lose weight. My point here is that people think drinking 150 calories of beer is like drinking 150 calories of soda. Which is more or less unequivocally false. Not to mention alcohol often causes drops in blood sugar.

There's also interesting research I once read on the ability of the body to garner any actual ATP from alcohol. It's not much if any, but I think it can actually utilize some of the energy in alcohol as ATP, I can't really rememver. Alcohol calories are more comparable to the calories in unleaded gasoline, calories are just a unit of energy, and gasoline has a ton of calories - our bodies just happen to have a special method of metabolizing ethanol, probably because it occurs naturally in foods in some instances. Whereas unleaded gasoline would do away with us pretty quickly.
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Re: Training strategy for an obese mountaineer

Post by justiner »

RockiesAdrian wrote: It was surprising how hard it was to get the balance of fat in my diet below 30%.
But there's no reason to keep your fat below 30%. That video touches upon that as well, because it asked, "why is there so much sugar in our food?". It's because fat was taken OUT of our food. The going thought at one time (1975) is eating fat makes you fat, eating food high in cholesterol (eggs) causes heart attacks. These have been thoroughly debunked. But, "fat free" food made an appearance. When you take away fat, food tastes awful, so you add sugar. The video goes on to show that the obesity problem didn't go away, even though we all ate less fat, it went UP! Why did it go up? Sugar.

I'll say it again, because it seems counter-intuitive to us, because we've all been taught the exact opposite: FAT DOES NOT MAKE YOU FAT. Cultures have been thriving on a high fat diet forever. You can look at other cultures that follow low fat diets, that are high in carbs (like rice), they're doing just fine to. Why? lack of processed sugar. What happens when these cultures adopt a more western (added sugar, added salt, processed food) diet? Obesity.
RockiesAdrian wrote: Beer and soda both skew things wildly towards carbs, don't help your fiber totals at all, and screw up your sugar.
Maybe myfitnesspal doesn't do this, but don't think of food sources with complex carbs/glycogen and soda as the same. Don't even think of soda as food most of the time. I wouldn't necessarily suggest letting myfitnesspal look at the ingredients for you - check the label, and see how much added sugars are in your food.
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Re: Training strategy for an obese mountaineer

Post by LURE »

justiner wrote:
LURE wrote: Well, in a sense alcohol calories do effect weight gain. But it's not the calories, it's the metabolic prioritization of alcohol that causes weight gain.
Again, check that video, he explains that sugar and alchohol are processed almost the same way in the liver, except that 10% of the alchohol you drink is metabolized in your brain, which is what makes you drunk. Absolutely, 100% count alchohol calories. Beer bellies are caused by beer ( subcutaneous fat). The video goes through in great detail the metabolic process of breaking down alchohol:

It's not, "in a sense" - it's got a good chance that it's converted to fat.
Mmm, no. I can't watch all of the video right now. But no, I don't think any part of alcohol has the physical ability to get converted to fat. Just cause some sugars are converted in the liver doesn't mean that alcohol will result in the same compounds. If alcohol could be turned into fat like normal sugars, or if it contained any functional nutrition whatsoever, it would be considered one the main food groups. Re-read some of those research papers I posted above. They also explain the metabolic process of alcohol. The one I've seen time and time again, in many places is this:

ethyl alcohol --> acetaldehyde --> acetyl radicals (acetic acid) --> carbon dioxide and water

Alcohol calories are simply not the same as FOOD calories. Counting them would be misleading towards ones goals and depending on how sensitive ones body is, could hurt goals.
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Re: Training strategy for an obese mountaineer

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The end product of ethanol metabolism is acetate, which forms acetyl co-a that can form triglycerides. These can be stored in the body.
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Re: Training strategy for an obese mountaineer

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billycox wrote:The end product of ethanol metabolism is acetate, which forms acetyl co-a that can form triglycerides. These can be stored in the body.
Not carbon dioxide and water?

https://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/aa72/aa72.htm:
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Re: Training strategy for an obese mountaineer

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polar wrote: Why do you think you’ll need anything pretty “zealous”? Like justiner said, “run, not too fast, mostly uphill” (Replace “run” with “walk” if like me you cannot run uphill). It’s really that simple.
What I mean by "zealous" is, I'm gonna hafta do it a lot, and it's probably a good idea to do it progressively so I don't get injured or burned out, and it's probably a good idea to throw in a little strength training so I don't get injured and to progress faster toward my weight goals, and it's probably a good idea to make a thought-out plan on my diet and execute it in order to progress faster toward my weight goals.

I'm certainly not in a position to follow TFTNA exactly as it's stated, but it has a lot of good ideas for the above. I was already staying off the couch and avoiding all really bad food choices, and it was already helping me, but my theory is that it won't get me fit enough for LB/Blanca by next year and that a more balanced, "TFTNA-inspired" plan will do better. We shall see 8)
Sean Nunn wrote:What does TFTNA mean?
It's a book called Training for the New Alpinism. It's geared toward people who want to like summit an 8000er faster than anybody before them, but it claims to be applicable to many mountaineering objectives. One of its basic points is that the best way to succeed at most alpine/mountaineering goals is to have a good aerobic base so you feel good when you finish the approach hike. It has some complex suggestions toward getting there including mixing in strength training and diet choices but "run, not too fast, mostly uphill" is definitely the biggest part of it.
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