Few months back we got one of those bio-impedance scales that shoots electricity through your body to figure out how fat you are.
A top-quality bio-impedance scale can get within the margin of error of a DEXA scan, which is the gold-standard of fat scanning. That sounds impressive until you see what’s involved in a DEXA scan and realize how arbitrary that measurement is, too.
I don’t know how accurate this scale is. I get a consistent read of between 10.6% and 11.2%. To my eye that is a low-ball by 1-3%. But who knows. It’s winter, I’m hair-covered, a little lax with my eating, and how would you even figure out the so-called real number?
More on that in a second.
One of the more fun things about having veins all over and abs coming in is playing Post Fizeek with the nutrition know-it-alls shouting at each other on the internet. I only do it a little bit over on the LinkedIn, where I am minimally active only to sow chaos.
Carbs make you fat? Post fizeek.
Calorie deficits don’t work? Post fizeek.
You don’t need nutrients from plant foods? Post fizeek.
The human body didn’t evolve to thrive on modern processed foods? Post fizeek.
The food pyramid from The Government (PBUH) is the healthiest way to eat? Post fizeek.
In other words: If you’ve got it all figured out, let’s see what results you’ve got.
It’s a crude game, which means I find it hilarious because basically I never matured past age 21.
I’ve realized though that there’s a genuine epistemological gambit here beyond my gleeful childishness.
Talk’s cheap. Free. Less than free. We’re at the point of such word-saturation that we’re paying people to stop talking to us.
The rare and therefore valuable resource is not the talk, it’s the achievable outcomes.
Post fizeek stands for a principle of getting the result in advance before you commence to flapping gums.
Don’t tell me what you’re going to do. Do it and show me what you did.
You have to wonder, though. The keto paleo carnivore food-pyramid diet-apparatchiks are 100% confident in data that is about as stable as quicksand in an earthquake.
They care more about this data and their theories than the real outcomes.
Like I pointed out to a friend in a conversation the other day: Data has a history.
Numbers come from somewhere, which means somebody had to collect them from somewhere, using instruments, and do some kind of modeling with probabilities to make them mean anything.
Each step in that chain is rife with error and uncertainty that makes precision impossible.
What’s really in these foods you eat? How many calories does your body really use over a 24-hour interval? Who the hell knows.
The ingredients list and the macro breakdowns and the calorie counts on the labels down at the grocery store give the impression that some smart dudes in white coats down at the lab did some serious science and arrived at measurements that have all the accuracy of Newton’s laws of motion.
I’m shaking my head in disappointment. You can’t see it, but I am.
The further a science gets from mathematical physics, the more doubt, ambiguity, vagueness, and uncertainty infect its numbers.
Riddle me this:
How long is a yard-stick?
One yard, duh. How long is a yard?
The length of a yard-stick.
Don’t try to out-think it. There’s no escape from that loop.
Measures are man-made and in some sense circular.
Circularity isn’t always a problem. We’ve used measures by convention as long as we’ve used signs to speak to each other. That is to say, we find ourselves in the business of talking of miles and gallons and degrees and inches because these are useful ways to communicate about what’s going on around us and what we’re doing.
Some quirk in our damaged society leads us to confuse our useful measures and models with eternal metaphysical structures of existence.
If somebody takes the measure XYZ about ABC, then that’s the damn truth, now, always, and forever, and you’re a real jerk if you don’t agree.
That attitude already causes much grief, but it gets a trillion times worse when everybody shows up with their own personal head-canon. Instead of a single religious vision we have potentially millions of people with The One Right Answer, and they’ve got The Data to back it up.
These warring tribes of keto paleo carnivore food-pyramid true believers are re-enacting the Reformation and the Thirty Years’ War (look it up) for obsessive fitness people.
My way is the Right Way and you’re a heretic if you don’t agree.
Disagreeable arguing is just as natural to human life as agreeing on standards that let us cooperate. We fight because we can’t agree how to cooperate. We’re a pretty silly species.
Anyway, here’s how I think about it:
Measures and models of reality aren’t reality.
Reality exceeds any ways that humans can measure and model it.
Our number-obsessed minds confuse abstract measures for the reality they measure.
Believing In The Data may as well be a secular expression of religious faith.
Quantum physics ended the dream of a complete scientific explanation of everything over a century ago. The biologists and the psychologists and the neuro-cognitive-AI people have yet to get the message.
What are you supposed to do, then?
I only speak for me, because nobody else listens anyway, but I use a stupid simple solution.
The great lesson of systems dynamics tells that optimizing the parts makes the outcomes worse for the whole.
This is why that bio-hacker guy in the news, what’s his name who wants to live forever, 1) looks and sounds ridiculous and 2) is slowly killing himself in his vain quest to optimize his life piece by piece.
Your body is a whirling vortex of time-reversed energy flows organized into bewildering complexity that sustains itself without the help of managers with spreadsheets.
You can’t optimize the parts of that even if you wanted to.
Thinking about the outcomes you want for the whole system trains you to look for the points of greatest leverage in all that chaos. Work at points of high leverage, which create most of the effects, and forget everything else. I’ve got a few levers I pull at the gym and in the kitchen and in my inner/mental life. Pull them, and magic happens. I don’t have to worry about anything else. The Data can suck it.
Most any diet, or workout plan, or anything else that works, works because it’s pushing the leverage points. That’s hard to see with all the bickering.
Most folk are so addicted to worrying that they wouldn’t know what to do if they couldn’t worry, which I suspect is the real problem behind all this bickering.
Matt Perryman