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Biohacking Lite

karpathy.github.io

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Re: Biohacking Lite

#321

Post by dorian-graph »

gdebel wrote: post #219
dorian-graph wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This may sound dumb, but any suggestions on how to eat (i.e. a recipe book) in what you describe as "normal"?

I had to think a little to answer. I don't know any book to learn to cook "as usual" (by the standards of my family for example). However, a good place to find such recipes could be a website called "Marmiton" , where people write their recipes , that are evaluated by the community. If you go for simple recipes, you should not be far from what I define as normal (with all my subjectivity: I understand this is not a v…

I appreciate you taking the time to answer! I'll check out Marmiton.

Re: Biohacking Lite

#322

Post by GuiA »

selimthegrim wrote: post #312
GuiA wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

San Francisco is an anomaly as far as food in the US is concerned. I'm French and have been living in SF for close to a decade (and Louisiana before that, so I've been spoiled when it comes to "american food" that doesn't suck), and there are very few things I cannot find here - people are into food, and if you take the time to look for specialty stores you will find them. Of course there's the cost difference, but t…

What food/restaurants do you remember in Louisiana?

I was a broke grad student so can't speak much to restaurants, although I know my foodie friends have lots of favorites in New Orleans (I was in BR). I was just fortunate enough to make some local friends with cajun families, and the dinners I was invited to were always a flurry of new foods, spices, etc. I got to try new things I had never had before, like okra or catfish or pecan pie, and there was just a very strong food culture.

This was all very different from the more "corn on the cob & chicken nuggets eaten in front of the TV" USA I had known until then.

Re: Biohacking Lite

#323

Post by meroes »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #262

Water factor. Another fun thing I noticed is that my observed weight can fluctuate and rise a lot, even while my expected weight calculation expects a loss. I found that this discrepancy grows with the amount of carbohydrates in my diet (dessert, bread/pasta, potatoes, etc.). Eating these likely increases glycogen levels, which as I already mentioned briefly, acts as a sponge and soaks up water. I noticed that my wei…

No sources but it's common knowledge in fitness groups like bodybuilding. For every 1g for carb you intake, your body wants 3-4g of water to digest it.

Also glycogen is what provides your muscles quick access to energy, and is stored within the tissue. It increases dramatically with higher carbs and water.

All of these increase your weight temporarily, but they are not fat. Weight!=fat and you want high glycogen stores in prepartion for a workout. And bodybuilders further manipulate these facts to get a pump and more muscle defintion.

Re: Biohacking Lite

#324

Post by lordlic »

miku86 wrote: post #276
shawxe wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In general, I agree with a lot of what you're saying here about eating more vegetables and way less sugar being the way to go health-wise, but I do want to respond to some specific things you've said. > You can find really good junk food everywhere, or pay a really high price to eat in high-level Italian restaurants for example, but it is very difficult to eat standard meat-with-vegetable-without-sugar-added, except…

As a doctor, your primary job is to make sick people healthy, not to make healthy people more healthy. This is why you want to have a high compliance, meaning that the sick person does what the doctor recommends. This is mostly caused due technical or behavioral complexity. You can increase compliance by reducing complexity. At the same time, the accuracy decreases. Example: High Accuracy / High Complexity : "Do not…

This whole argument strikes me as very silly. If I want to eat healthy foods badly enough to change my diet and check the ingredients every time I buy something, I'm not going to want to oversimplify it to the point of near meaninglessness by adopting a rule like "3 ingredients or fewer." I'm perfectly capable of learning what ingredients to avoid.

And if I'm sick, and there are clinical details that are important to my treatment, then I'm absolutely not going to be satisfied with a low-accuracy simplification.

Re: Biohacking Lite

#325

Post by lordlic »

outworlder wrote: post #190
gdebel wrote: post #51

I'm French (and incidentally a doctor,and my post is not judgemental in any way, this is not the point). Everytime I travel to the USA, I'm puzzled by how difficult it is to "eat normally" (= by my own standards). You can find really good junk food everywhere, or pay a really high price to eat in high-level Italian restaurants for example, but it is very difficult to eat standard meat-with-vegetable-without-sugar-add…

> I'm puzzled by how difficult it is to "eat normally" That very much depends on your location. High tourism locations will often have lots of junk food places. If you can move larger distances (i.e. rent a car and the like) you'll find wonderful and cheap restaurants pretty much anywhere. Even in otherwise expensive places like SF or NY. Here's the problem though: portion sizes are _enormous_ . It took quite a bit o…

> High tourism locations will often have lots of junk food places. If you can move larger distances (i.e. rent a car and the like) you'll find wonderful and cheap restaurants pretty much anywhere.

I'm pretty sure this is the opposite of the actual situation. Cities attract both tourists and high-income residents, and the latter combined with high population density drive the development of much more diverse eating options within a reasonable range than a person in a more rural area has available to them.

Anecdotally, the organic grocery stores and vegan eateries I see in SF just don't exist where my parents live.

Re: Biohacking Lite

#326

Post by agumonkey »

jdhzzz wrote: post #304
agumonkey wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I need some polls about the relationship between 'hunger' and boredom. I felt skipping meals was difficult for a few minutes but then I turned the eating-stress into action and it made me slightly manically motivated into doing some task (electronics, cleaning, jogging) and few minutes later the hunger disappeared.

Also a coronavirus convert to "skip breakfast". That has let some weight to "effortlessly" slide off. Down about 7 pounds (3-ish kg) from 195 (88.5). I have many more days behind me that before me, so I refuse to give up on eating things I've spent a lifetime consuming (red meat, super processed snack foods: high density carbohydrates, fat, salt and probably more sugar/HFCS than I care to consider. Mmmmm). It has bee…

Well weight is one thing but in my case sport is such a cornerstone of my well being. Even if one is heavy, I think being very active leads to tons of benefits internally.

Re: Biohacking Lite

#327

Post by agumonkey »

borski wrote: post #154
agumonkey wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Few years ago I had some eating disorder, I could only eat raw vegetables. My diet habit shifted 180deg in 48h, it's a weird realization: 1) eating raw vegetables tickles your brain differently (raw veggies make you feel full faster) 2) most probably because there's no fat nor sugar added (which makes you want to eat more I guess) 3) even dressing is bad, so raw is best to have a natural negative feedback system 4) e…

Fat actually satiates you more than almost anything else, so I suspect your culprit is sugar, not fat. If you cooked those veggies in some butter or olive oil, I would bet you’d get full faster.

Possibly, I think I recall reading about the fat+sugar being ultra nasty because your brain never wants to stop this mouth sensation. That said, I don't feel the same when eating fatty stuff, it's more nausea than what I feel with veggies.

Re: Biohacking Lite

#328

Post by meroes »

ryeguy wrote: post #243
virtualritz wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But in the end, even eating NO sugar, if you eat a ton of things, you'll get fat. Not really. Try a ketogenic diet. You can eat tons food (including tons of fat) and still loose weight.

Yes really. Keto still follows calories in/out. Low carb diets are just a way of restricting calories without counting them. People naturally restrict calories when eating low carb -- this is the sole reason it works. You can eat twinkies and mcdonalds and still lose weight if you eat little enough. You can eat no carbs or sugar and still gain weight if you eat more calories than your body needs. Every diet that does…

Just not true. Imagine eating 50g of sugar during a run vs 50g of sugar while sitting in the couch for a sedentary person. Your body's hormones also determine fat gain/loss beyond just calories in/out. And fats and proteins, calorie for calorie, produce less fat storage signals.

Re: Biohacking Lite

#329

Post by lordlic »

systemvoltage wrote: post #180
dpoochieni wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But then there are things that do make a difference. Take for instance homogenized vs non-homogenized milk. This processing destroys lactoferrin which is a molecule that strongly binds iron and reduces its absorption. Before someone argues this is actually bad, understand first why milk has lactoferrin and how this apparently only cosmetic process of homogenization has nutritional and health consequences.

Definitely, if you want imperfections, artisan value and appreciate craftsmanship, there is nothing wrong with handmade goods. Just don't tell me that your Japanese knife when hand sharpened cannot be as good as something done by a robotic arm. Otherwise, I have some news - Japanese knife's edge sharpness(not durability) is no match for a surgical scalpel which is made by millions in quantities in fully automated fas…

I feel like you're blowing past some pretty significant psychological factors. People find it interesting and valuable to own a one-of-a-kind item that nobody else can ever have. An artist might paint pretty much the same thing a hundred times, but those small differences make each one slightly more valuable than a mere print. And the fewer instances there are in the world, the more valuable it is, at least in theory. Also, people like it when, for example, a favorite table was made over tens of hours of work by an expert carpenter, and they imagine that it was a labor of love by someone happy to have their work be a part of someone's life. It's personal somehow. There's also a lot of signaling involved in these "artisanal" or "handmade" marketing labels, because they are legitimately associated with higher-quality goods. Manufacturers mechanize processes to cut costs, and if they're so concerned with cutting manufacturing costs maybe they cut corners on quality too - this is how "Made in China" got a bad reputation even though of course China is perfectly capable of making high-quality goods. Finally, if an object is individually made by hand then there's a kind of automatic quality control that doesn't necessarily exist in an automated process.

And I seriously doubt that anyone will claim that a knife sharpened by a robot arm reproducing the exact movements of a human will produce an inferior product. The problem is that most automated sharpeners are some variant of a rotary grinding wheel run linearly along the blade and, unless you're sharpening a machete, there are all sorts of aspects of the blade geometry that are ignored by this process but can be accounted for by a skilled worker at a whetstone.

Re: Biohacking Lite

#330

Post by DoreenMichele »

meroes wrote: post #323
DoreenMichele wrote: post #262

Water factor. Another fun thing I noticed is that my observed weight can fluctuate and rise a lot, even while my expected weight calculation expects a loss. I found that this discrepancy grows with the amount of carbohydrates in my diet (dessert, bread/pasta, potatoes, etc.). Eating these likely increases glycogen levels, which as I already mentioned briefly, acts as a sponge and soaks up water. I noticed that my wei…

No sources but it's common knowledge in fitness groups like bodybuilding. For every 1g for carb you intake, your body wants 3-4g of water to digest it. Also glycogen is what provides your muscles quick access to energy, and is stored within the tissue. It increases dramatically with higher carbs and water. All of these increase your weight temporarily, but they are not fat . Weight!=fat and you want high glycogen sto…

Thank you.

I have a genetic disorder and I'm prone to edema. I've lost multiple dress sizes over the years, in part by altering my diet to account for the defective cell channel.

I don't believe I have lost fat. I believe it's all water weight and it's substantial amounts of water weight. I have reason to believe that I actually have a higher amount of body fat than I have ever had before and it's a good thing.

The right carbs plus the right fats plus the right kind of good quality salt is a powerful combination for me that helps heal my body and consuming them together in one sitting is typically followed by severe diarrhea. So eating certain carbs is one of the things helping me lose excess water weight.

I really need to do some reading on the molecular processes involved to try to fit this into my mental models for what is happening because this information flies in the face of my first-hand experience.

I've read what I can to understand what is going on at the cellular/molecular level. There are a number of weird things that go on with my condition, such as calcium hoarding and also hoarding of glutathione inside the cell (with too little glutathione occurring on the outside of the cell).

High levels of calcium inside the cell are associated with cell apoptosis (cell death), so some people with the condition believe calcium is a bad thing and they avoid it. I believe the opposite. I believe the body is hoarding calcium and glutathione to buffer against extreme acidity and other chemical derangement.

People with the condition are prone to developing osteoporosis at extremely early ages, sometimes in their teens. Glutathione has a strong, sour, skunk-like smell and I sometimes seem to dump it from my system as I go through periods where one or both armpits and/or my bowel movements have that smell. Afterwards, my baseline functioning is permanently improved.

So I'm trying to figure out what is going on that I am so prone to edema and what I need to address to fix it because I think if I can resolve the remaining edema, I will be more or less "normal" and largely asymptomatic. I think the remaining edema is indicative of remaining issues and although I continue to make progress, it's harder to make progress than it used to be. I am looking for clues to help me figure out some new piece of the puzzle and find a path forward on resolving this.

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