A Geek with Guns - Diet

Guaranteed Wins

2026-07-20T15:00:00-06:00

This post is brought to you by the recent craze around red light therapy. Red light therapy has been used in the healthcare industry to successfully treat a number of ailments. Now it's being researched for use in treating various other ailments. Unfortunately, this has caused it to become the latest healthcare fad promising to cure everything from depression to low testosterone. The reason I say this is unfortunate is because, as with other previous "miracle cures," people are focusing on it instead of guaranteed wins.

Guaranteed wins is the name I give to all of the things we know provide significant health benefits. Strength training is an example of a guaranteed win. If you start strength training, you will have health benefits that range from improved mood to higher resistance to injury. Diet is another example. If you improve your diet</a>, assuming you also control your calorie intake, you will lose weight, which comes with numerous health benefits. Getting enough sleep is also a guaranteed win. If you keep yourself up late at night doomscrolling, you likely suffer several unpleasant side effects such as difficulty concentrating and irritability. Putting down the phone and getting enough sleep will improve both of those plus grant you other aspects significant health improvements.

The especially observant amongst you likely noticed that my list of guaranteed wins is largely lifestyle changes. Therein lies the secret. We know for certain that being overweight and not getting enough sleep are detrimental to health. We know for certain that people start to lose muscle mass as they age. Almost everyone claims that they want to address those issues, but they don't want to change their unhealthy lifestyles. This is why "miracle cures" are so widely sought.

Glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) drugs are a recent example of this. GLP-1 drugs were originally used to treat people with diabetes. Then the pharmaceutical companies noticed that they also result in weight loss and started marketing them as a "miracle" weight loss drug. This was music to many overweight people's ears because GLP-1 drugs offered them a way to lose weight without lifestyle changes. Although that's not entirely accurate. From my understanding, GLP-1 drugs effectively force lifestyle changes by suppressing appetite. But having lifestyle changes forced on them with a drug is preferable to most people than instigating lifestyle changes through their own efforts.

With that said, there's now enough evidence that taking GLP-1 drugs does result in weight loss. This isn't the case with most "miracle cures." Most "miracle cures" develop from a kernel of truth extrapolated to absurdity. One example is eating an alkaline diet to will prevent or even treat cancer. Advocates of this belief claim that cancer thrives in an acidic environment and that eating an alkaline diet will result in your body becoming an alkaline environment. Fortunately, this is bullshit. I say fortunately because if eating alkaline foods did increase your body's pH level, you would die. It turns out our bodies can only survive in a very narrow pH range. Luckily for us, our bodies are good at regulating our pH level and we therefore won't kill ourselves by eating an alkaline died.

There are a number of guaranteed wins for preventing cancer. Don't smoke. Smoking unquestionably increases your risk of cancer. Be smart about your time in the sun. Too little sun isn't necessarily ideal, but too much sun can increase your risk of skin cancer. Test your home for radon and, if the radon levels are high, get a radon mitigation system installed. Inhaling high levels of radon will increase your risk of cancer. The first two are lifestyle related. None of the three are sexy or necessarily easy depending on your lifestyle and financial situation.

When people ask me about the latest health fad, I immediately ask if they've already went after the guaranteed wins. Red light therapy is another example. Do you know what is shown to decrease depression and increase testosterone levels? Regular exercise, a reasonable diet, and getting enough sleep. If you're asking whether or not red light therapy or any other health fad will improve your health, check to see if there are any guaranteed wins you haven't pursued first. If there are, take the time you were investing in researching the fad and instead put it into pursuing those guaranteed wins. Your time investment will give you guaranteed results instead of potential results. Guaranteed wins trump potential wins every day of the week.

A High Protein Diet and Weight Loss

2025-10-16T12:00:00+00:00

Americans are fat. This is true even if you set aside the flawed model of using body mass index to determine whether somebody is underweight, at a healthy weight, or overweight. Everywhere you go there are large guts foretelling the coming of an American through a door, into an aisle, or around a building. Unfortunately, despite what liars claim, it's not possible to be healthy at any weight. Being fat (or severely underweight, but that's far less prevalent) negatively impacts your health. Perhaps you're a far American. Perhaps you want to change that. I've written about how exercise can help with weight loss but a far more important factor is diet. In this post I will describe how a high protein diet can help you lose weight.

As I'm wont to do, I'm going to start this post by blaming the government. The USDA</abbr> publishes a food pyramid</a>. Supposedly it's a guide to eating healthy. Like most things the government produces, it's garbage. I'll go so far as to say it's dangerous because it encourages overeating and therefore promotes obesity.

The foundation of the pyramid is carbohydrates and the very top of the pyramid is... more carbohydrates. The problem with the base of the pyramid being carbohydrates is that carbohydrates are easy for your body to digest</a>. Your body needs to expend far fewer calories digesting carbohydrates than it does protein:

On average, a person uses about 10% of their daily energy expenditure digesting and absorbing food, but this percentage changes depending on the type of food you eat.
Protein takes the most energy to digest (20-30% of total calories in protein eaten go to digesting it). Next is carbohydrates (5-10%) and then fats (0-3%).
Thus, if you eat 100 calories from protein, your body uses 20-30 of those calories to digest and absorb the protein. You’d be left with a net 70-80 calories. Pure carbohydrate would leave you with a net 90-95 calories, and fat would give you a net 97-100 calories. </blockquote>
Calories are the key to weight management. If you want to gain weight, you need to consume more calories than you use. If you want to stay at your current weight, you need to consume the same number of calories as you use. If you want to lose weight, you need to consume fewer calories than you use. The key is that consumed calories in this case specifically refers to digested calories.
Not all calories are equal. Some require more energy to digest. Fats require the least amount of energy to digest. Carbohydrates require just a bit more energy to digest, but the difference is marginal. Then there are proteins. Proteins require the most energy to digest and the difference is significant. Between one fifth and almost one third of the calories in protein are burned up by your body just digesting them. Somebody who eats more calories in the form of protein will absorb fewer calories than somebody who eats the same number of calories in the form of carbohydrates.
There's another advantage to protein that I alluded to in the beginning of this post. When I wrote that the base of the food pyramid being carbohydrates encourages overeating, I was referring to the protein leverage hypothesis</a>:

The protein leverage hypothesis states that human beings will prioritize the consumption of protein in food over other dietary components, and will eat until protein needs have been met, regardless of energy content, thus leading to over-consumption of foodstuffs when their protein content is low. </blockquote>
You've likely heard that protein satiates more than carbohydrates. The protein leverage hypothesis explains why. Proteins are the building blocks of your body. According to the protein leverage hypothesis, you will continue to experience hunger until your body has the building blocks it needs. If you consume a high amount of protein, your body will have the building blocks it needs and cease sending hunger signals. Thus a high protein diet will make you want to eat less.
Another advantage comes from combining a high protein diet with hypertrophy training (body building or focusing on increasing muscle mass). Muscle requires more calories to maintain than fat</a>:

The takeaway from this article should be pretty straightforward: The next time someone asks how many calories a pound of muscle burns, the bros and the nerds are both wrong. The bros pulled a random figure out of their ass (or they’re just passing along a figure that someone else pulled out of some other ass), and the nerds are only correct if you never leave your bed. When you account for the impact on both active and non-active energy expenditure, we can estimate that each pound of muscle you gain will increase your total energy expenditure by about 9-10 calories per day in total. </blockquote>
It's not a huge difference but gaining 10 pounds of muscle (a very achievable goal) increases your daily energy expenditure by 90 to 100 calories.
In the description of this article I wrote, "The foundation of the [USDA] pyramid is carbohydrates. It should be protein." I was being a bit hyperbolic. A pyramid is actually a stupid way to model nutrition. My rule is to make a majority of my diet fruits, vegetables, and protein. I have a protein goal and try to make it every day (I admit that I don't always succeed). I consume some carbohydrates too, but they make up the smallest percentage of my calorie intake. This has proven to be a winning strategy for me especially when combined with weight training. I've slowly lost fat and gained muscle. I've never been much overweight but I definitely look better in the mirror with this diet than before. If you're overweight, try adjusting your diet so you're consuming a lot more protein and see how it goes for you.

Diet Cleanup

2025-07-20T12:00:00+00:00

The diet of the average American is revolting. It seems to be made up primarily of carbohydrates. While it's trendy and easy to blame this on the food pyramid (the base of which is carbohydrates and top includes more carbohydrates), the average American diet is even worse than that. The side effect of this diet is easy for anybody with eyes to see. Everywhere you go is populated with obese people. The upside for us Americans is that there's an easy starting point for cleaning up our diet: cut back on the carbohydrates.

I've gone through several iterations of diet cleanup. My first one was simple. I all but completely stopped drinking carbonated high fructose corn syrup (commonly referred to as pop or soda). The only thing I didn't eliminate entirely was root beer. I'll drink two or three in a year. But the only things I regularly drink are water, milk, tea, and coffee. Simply cutting out soda can remove a tremendous amount of empty calories.

My previous cleanup efforts focused on two things. The first was my main weakness when it comes to food: salty snacks like potato chips, pretzels, etc. Like my efforts with soda, I didn't completely eliminate those junk foods from my diet. I prefer moderation over elimination for my diet. The second was eating more vegetables. Each weak I'd cut up a bunch of vegetables, put them into containers, and eat them with meals throughout the week. I ended up abandoning that effort because it resulted in some unpleasant digestive side effects. I still eat vegetables, but not as many as I was.

At this point my diet is pretty decent. I've eliminated most of the common American problems and am now focusing on tweaking things. My latest efforts have focused on further increasing protein intake. Recommendations for protein intake vary. I've seen numbers as low as 0.8 g per kilogram of body weight and as high as 3.1 g per kilogram of body weight. I'm aiming for a daily intake between 1.5 to 2 g per kilogram of body weight. Part of my diet being pretty decent is that I'm consuming enough calories to maintain (I'm neither losing or gaining) body weight. I want to keep it that way. In order to accomplish that, I need to increase the amount of protein I intake per calorie. Another thing I want to do is increase my intake of dietary fiber. I, like most Americans, consume an inadequate amount.

The first change I made was to what I call mobile meals. I need to drive into the office two days a week. I have three options for lunch on those days: eat out, pack a lunch, or fast. Eating out is expensive and eating healthy at a restaurant is challenging (actually damn near impossible). I'm already maintaining body weight so I'm not interested in fasting. That leaves the option of packing a lunch. On one of those two days I also have martial arts classes in the evening so I leave home in the morning and don't return until late at night. That means I need to pack dinner too. Since the dinner will be sitting in a lunch box all day, I also need something that will keep without refrigeration and doesn't require cooking (admittedly I could bring my small camp stove to cook on the go, but I'm lazy).

My wife and I buy half a cow every year from a friend of ours who raises beef cattle. When you buy half a cow, you end up with a lot of ground beef. This gives me a great option for mobile meals: homemade beef sticks. I bought a dehydrator at the beginning of this year specifically for this. Unlike store bought beef sticks, homemade ones don't need to be loaded up with salt, sugar, and other common ingredients I want to avoid. While they do require refrigeration (we don't use curing salts in ours) for long term storage, they easily survive the day without it. If you don't have a dehydrator and supply of ground beef, summer sausage also works well (but you'll need to keep the ingredient list in mind when buying from a grocery store). I also buy mixed nuts from the grocery store, which are a decent source of protein along with other nutrients. My mobile meals typically consist of a sandwich, homemade beef sticks, and mixed nuts. I might toss in a protein bar too (all of the ones I've tried taste like ass though so I only eat them when I need to in order to meet my protein intake goal).

The second change I made was to breakfast. I developed an overnight oats recipe that consists of rolled oats; vanilla protein powder; a mix of chia, flax, and hemp seeds; collagen; creatine; milk; and nonfat Green yogurt. When I pull it out of the fridge, I mix in a bunch of berries too. This ends up being a huge intake of both protein and fiber. It's also easy to prepare. On Sunday I toss all of the dry ingredients into mason jars. Every evening I add the milk and yogurt to a jar, stir the contents up, and place the jar in the fridge.

There are three key points I want you to take away from this post. First is the importance of diet. It's one of my three pillars of fitness along with exercise and sleep. All three pillars are weak for most Americans, but the diet pillar is probably the easiest to improve quickly because there is an obvious strategy: reduce carbohydrate intake. Second is improving your diet in stages. You don't need to drastically change your entire diet immediately. Most people who do this fail long term. Instead start with easy targets. Cut down on the biggest culprits like soda and candy. Then address the next biggest culprits. Continue this over time (the timeframe can be months or years) until you develop a diet that is pretty decent. Once your diet is pretty decent you can tweak it for specific goals. Third is moderation. You don't need to completely eliminate things like soda, candy, and junk food. You can, but simply cutting down the amount you consume over time is also an effective strategy.