Fun Day Fridays ~ 4/22/11
Happy Friday! Here’s my Top 5 links of the Week.
1 – This week is the first in a 7-week diet to get to my goal of 8% bodyfat by my 30th birthday. The hardest thing about putting together programs for myself is, well, putting together a program for myself. I know too much – I think too much and I end up losing focus because of it. Chris Shugart put together a post about Ego Depletion (which is what I wrote about on Tuesday), and finally answered why it is so hard for me to write my own workout programs:
“This is why so many knowledgeable physique competitors pay someone else to write their training or diet programs for them. They’re not ignorant; they just know they need to conserve as much cognitive currency in their psychological bank accounts as possible.
If they spend a lot of mental energy on writing the perfect twice-per-day workout plan, then spend more on designing a 12-week diet, there wouldn’t be enough left to spend on willpower, self-discipline, and simply carrying out the all-consuming plan.”
Read Ego Depletion and Cognitive Currency here.
2 – So what plan am I following?
This Monday, Christian Thibadeau released a new workout system, that I’ve been doing this week and loving. You see, I wanted a program where I could train twice a day, between 30-45 minutes per workout, and could add some eccentric-less work at the end. So what happened Monday morning while taking the van to work?
A Fat Loss program that you can divide into two 30-45 minute workouts where you can add eccentric-less work at the end. One word: Winning!
3 – Let’s talk about shit for a moment – People studying shit have identified 3 different macro groups of gut bacteria. In the past 5-10 years, the research on the relationship between gut bacteria, weight, obesity and overall health has significantly increased. This is the latest in that research:
“Each human being is host to thousands of different species of microbes. Yet a group of scientists now report just three distinct ecosystems in the guts of people they have studied.”
“Over all, the studies found that women who had higher exposures to pesticides during pregnancy gave birth to children who eventually had lower I.Q. scores once they reached school age.”
“Sugar scares me too, obviously. I’d like to eat it in moderation. I’d certainly like my two sons to be able to eat it in moderation, to not overconsume it, but I don’t actually know what that means, and I’ve been reporting on this subject and studying it for more than a decade. If sugar just makes us fatter, that’s one thing. We start gaining weight, we eat less of it. But we are also talking about things we can’t see — fatty liver, insulin resistance and all that follows. Officially I’m not supposed to worry because the evidence isn’t conclusive, but I do.”
