How does a person lose weight eating high carbs? Metabolism-protective, high fruit, pro-thyroid eating and living attracts stressed, burned-out people because they find that denying themselves by willpower becomes untenable, and, the opposite of what they were aspiring to happens: insomnia, depression, anxiety, weight gain, hair loss, low libido, crushing fatigue, a sensation of being overwhelmed by small things.
Weight gain is a subject of concern to peatarians because many find that eating more sugar with adequate protein that they feel much better, but they have gained 30 lbs in the process. Typically this is after an adult lifetime of dieting to reduce calories and programs of exercise.
What to do?
Physiological adaptations are, in themselves, survival and life-coping mechanisms. To the extent that they function as protective is not morally bad, though there are always side-effects in a bad environment. The truth does out. Your physiology wants [you] to live and live well. If the resources aren’t available to adapt healthfully then this is the basic source of inflammation.
It is true that—in a way—every fat person is eating too much. But what that “eating too much” is referring to, and the context in which it takes place does matter. Even a fat body needs to eat, even if, or especially if, it is to fuel the processes of fat loss through metabolism and reverse stress adaptations.
It’s not all relative, but context makes the meaning clearer. Being fat during a famine means something different from being fat when food is available but the culture is harmful. Of course, thinness doesn’t equal health. It’s like those houses in interior design magazines. They look so attractive. But do they accommodate how life in a good home really works?
Also, over-fat of 10 lbs. is different from over-fat of a lot more lbs. But at what point does fat stop being healthful or neutral and begin to be harmful? It depends.
It is helpful to think of fatness as a side-effect of an ineffective metabolism under physiological stress, and not necessarily independent of everything else but eating too much. It is common to link fatness to an imagined psychological defect as in “emotional eating,” but not to link it to basic physiological functions.
To do this is to ignore the most fundamental physiological fact of life: the production of energy in mitochondria from O2 and sugar. All else in the perceptive world arises from that fact.
In the peatarian groups it is common to see arguments over whether fatness is a matter strictly of CICO or not. The “not” position doesn’t have a name, but let’s call it “Macros Matter” where you can eat without unreasonable, elaborate caloric restriction, without compulsive vigilance, engage in activities you enjoy without fatigue, depression, or chronic illness, and maintain a reasonable weight for you, which promotes health and life.
As Ray Peat has said, “Living is good for you.”
Some thoughts on physics and biology
In this view, macro-nutrient ratios allow or disallow that capacity. In the peatarian groups it means that eating high fructose and eating a ratio of easily digestible carb grams to protein grams should be [edit] right for you, generally about 2:1 to 6:1.
On the other side, in the CICO view, the First Law of Thermodynamics is the rule: if you don’t use in caloric value what you eat, you store the excess as fat. The macros don’t matter as fundamentally as the calories. Simple.
Well, and the First Law of Thermodynamics assumes the system is closed, so there is that. It would be as if to say, “Well, it worked in the test tube.”
The burned-out person who has gained weight, gotten insomnia, depression, and chronic disease is practically definitively a person with low thyroid function and an ineffective, inefficient metabolism.
Broda Barnes thought that the invention of pharmaceutical antibiotics in the 1940s caused low-thyroid persons to survive and reproduce, who would have otherwise succumbed to infectious disease. He estimated that this could cause about 40% of the population in the 1970s to be functionally hypothyroid. The use of T4 meds have not really relieved the problem.
Ray Peat has written about how this is made much worse by the introduction of PUFA into the food supply as “essential” and “heart healthy” [see his Sugar Issues article] when, in fact PUFA blockade the mitochondrial use of sugar and O2, forcing the organism to produce energy by glycolysis-producing-lactic-acid. This glycolysis accumulates slowness in the production of energy over time, leading to degenerative illness and death.
The problem unique to taking up a high fructose, stress protective diet after a lifetime of stress and calorie restriction is in the transition: when you aren’t sleeping, are stressed, gaining weight already because the metabolism is substantially using glycolysis, then it is going in the direction of becoming a little bit diabetic and having a little bit of Cushing’s. It takes time and attention to turn the ship around.
To rehabilitate this physiology you add fructose generously, but the body isn’t adapted to using it immediately. It does get transformed into fat because this is the cell’s way of accommodating electrons accumulated in anaerobic glycolysis. At least until the physiology de-adapts to its stress and re-adapts to more complete sugar-burning, producing water and CO2. Meantime, the pounds increase. It’s a developmental process. The body changes it shape in developmental time. It’s a good, old idea.
Most people in the groups report gaining about 30 – 40 lbs.
There is a difference of opinion in the groups over whether this is a necessary part of recovering the sugar metabolism or whether it is a rationalization for eating ice cream, cokes, and table sugar. This is an interesting controversy because those who say it is pure indulgence are making both a factual statement, and also a moral judgment: it is indulgent, it does physiologically calm the stress hormones, it does feel great after years of stress and burn-out. But whether it is morally incorrect is not a matter of physiology. As part of a plan it can be coherent. And appearances can be deceptive. Can you enjoy too much something as necessary as eating?
If it were possible to eat one calorie over your caloric needs in order to reverse the stress adaptations, perhaps that could work. That is impossible to know now. Eating several hundred calories over caloric needs daily is what people report working over time.
The problem is exacerbated by the facts, an implication of Peat’s view. He himself says that maintaining an effective, lively state is a matter of being, “sandwiched between the sugar energy we get from plants and the carbon dioxide we make as the final product of the energy we make from the sugar. . .” [Ray Peat in one of the Politics and Science radio interviews, with John Barkhousen]. In this process, if the metabolism is unable to use O2 to oxidize the sugar all the way down to CO2, it will make lactic acid instead and create fat to use up the production of electrons.
His view is about recovering the facts about metabolism in order to protectively rehabilitate a greater capacity to burn sugar, to become less diabetic, less Cushing’s-like, to create an increasing momentum of energy for repairing, maintaining, building, engaging, creating, seeing the world in new ways.
But there is a problem with recovering your metabolism after degenerating it: how to lose weight, a catabolic function, without re-entering a cascade of stress adaptations? Without reversing the protective gains you have made?
It seems an impossible problem.
This by itself becomes a source of anxiety because over-fat, but relatively healthier, high-fructose-eating people sometimes come to feel stuck between 1) a protective diet and life practices; and 2) a less-fat shape.
The impression tells you that you should be able to rehabilitate the metabolism, the body can become euthyroid [or slightly hyperthyroid], and the weight should “fall off” without the strains and stress of dieting. But this doesn’t really take the strains of past abuse into account. But it can still happen that way. It just takes a lot of patience, heart toward yourself, some cold reason, and a memory for life.
They rightly recognize that the real choice is between 1) protecting the physiology by storing PUFA, which is somewhat harmful, but not harmful in the same way as; 2) burning PUFA body fat, which is also inherently harmful and poisons the mitochondria, until the body is generally, and not just metabolically, PUFA depleted.
Neither choice is very good. Being unable to know what you wish you had known earlier [that PUFA is poison and not to eat it], you do the best you can. It takes time to make the changes you need to once you perceive the world more accurately.
The CICO people seem to me more often to say, “you should have been more careful to begin with.” The “Macros Matter” people seem to me more often to say, “it’s a process that a burned-out person can’t avoid because you can’t avoid the compensation for damage already done. Rehabilitate and gain until losing is easier.”
Seeing as how Peat’s views became somewhat more known around 2011, it is about now 8 years later that a lot of people encountering Peat’s views who can be easily in touch with each other are coming to a similar understanding: the weight does come off; it doesn’t have to reverse the progress you’ve made, though you do have to make some rational choices, and experiment with what works best for you.
I think weight loss using peat’s suggestions should feel like a seamless process without a lot of stress or inherent resistance. Your physiology should be prepared for it. That takes time and attention like building a cabin in the woods with hand tools.
The CICO people are not as sympathetic with this view, so the assumption is that they haven’t been as utterly metabolically deranged, depressed, and at the end of their resources as the “Macros Matter” people report being. That isn’t always true, but it sounds like it. They do seem like they are committed to a disciplined and disciplinary approach. Disciplinary approaches are for disciplinarians, it's a kind of perfect tyranny combined with radical individualism; the "I'll go first" of rigid abuse.
I doubt that, like recovery from anorexia, that relatively speaking “you can’t gain forever” hyperbolizing that overshooting of your best weight. A recovering physiology can gain an alarming amount of weight. There is some really real sense involved in perceiving, thinking, and acting. There are deceptive stress symptoms, and then there is not taking things for what they are. The fact is that some people are so adapted to profound stress that the body is a journal of its harm.
A destroyed education system makes perceiving and thinking harder than it has to be. Think of the human cost of generations of physics envy, with its beautiful calculus handmaids.
The CICO single-rule weight-loss/gain view also has the drawback of not being able to escape advising people to continue to reduce calories throughout developmental life in order to prevent weight gain. This is the default view. It leads to aging people being unable to eat more than 1200 – 1400 or fewer calories a day unless they want to risk weight gain. This can lead to fear of eating.
CICO-only weight loss—without regard for macros—can drive the metabolism down, risking degenerative disease as well as weight gain when normal calories are used.
Low-fat for weight loss without calorie restriction, keeping protein:carb at [edit] a ratio that allows continual rebuilding from protective types is a recurring theme in peat groups. People who aim for very low-fat often report that they either need to have slightly more fat in their diet than they started out with [not aiming for zero, but around 20 - 30g/day]. Some find that a week or 10 days of very low-fat needs a day of higher fat to keep sleep sound and nervous function stable.
Extremely low-fat can work well for weight loss especially when the fat weight is causing more physiological instability than they think losing it might cause, like blood sugar instability. Timing matters, with a bias toward sooner rather than later. With extremely low fat and a lowish protein:carb proportion, a dramatic calorie restriction wouldn't be needed since the fructose is protective. A smaller persons lower numbers all around means less absolute flexibility. But if low calories are the prospect that bothers most people with fat loss then they might find delightful success in trying even more carbs and less fat. Are there ever any real heretics?
It would make sense if the lower fat you could go and feel stable and sleep well, that your physiology would be more thoroughly able to use the sugar you are eating. It is the craving of a lot of fat that seems likely to be a signal of fatty acid metabolism as an adaptive pathway for producing energy; that glucose metabolism might still be improved. It’s like a “low-carb flu” in reverse. However, greater fat grams in the beginning is the way many people begin their physiological restructuring, slowly lowering it over months or years.
I think some enjoyable movement or play is also helpful to driving the use of sugar. Walking in a pleasant atmosphere is good if its available.
Organicism, a small introduction
But there is something much different at stake than an extra 40 pounds of fat around the middle: the future of biology. And that is really less dramatic than bad drugs and inferior education; unless those could be rehabilitated by a better understanding of ourselves, too.
The biologic controversy remains, “What constitutes an organism?”
The CICO people are not wrong, but they are reducing biology to only physics. If you took a body, cremated it completely, and were able to measure the liberated energy, the First Law of Thermodynamics says that that figure will equal all the energy the body is carrying when this happens. In some sense, CICO is true, no matter whether the metabolism is more efficient or less efficient. But if you are treating the human body as a wet machine, then you aren’t treating it as an organism, a part of a system that is also interrelated systems.
The fields even to the cellular level have an innate intelligence about how they develop over time. Their intelligence is generated for themselves, by themselves.
When it comes to efficiency in metabolism, there is another controversy: Peat has said, and actuarially it’s true, that the kind of metabolism that is most resistant to chronic, degenerative disease is that of a 10-year-old child who is very active and has a voracious appetite for fructose.
That metabolism also produces “extra” heat as a by-product, indicating a type of positive inefficiency in metabolism: uncoupling; not all the complete burning of sugar is going to produce ATP, but some is being wasted as heat. Temperature matters.
When you push back against the assumptions of mechanism you see that efficiency is not what it has been made out to be. That is the underlying lesson of the 20th century. Economies of scale in destruction and death are still economies of scale.
It’s too bad that the Machine Age swept along even biology and politics because so much time has already been lost and hardly any real investigative and theoretical rehabilitation has been done. You’d think intelligent people would know better, wake up in the morning, and look around. They often could, but powerful people willfully don’t encourage it: organicism in biology was compelled, for political reasons, to be sidetracked by genetics and molecular biology post-WWII because politics, war, nuclear armament, consumerism, factory work, and the use of the environment required that powerful individuals not be held accountable for the politics of the 20th century. Powerless people, on the other hand, are taught that there are grave consequences to their irresponsibility.
The upshot in health matters is that it is often said that, “disease just happens to people, no one knows why.” Or, that genes cause all developments, but we just haven’t studied them enough to know why this person falls ill at this time and place. It shouldn’t be a surprise that the most likely cause of nuclear catastrophe has for nearly 3 generations been supposed that it would be an accident. This is not even to talk about eugenics.
It’s as if Kafka’s The Trial were not fiction. I mean, Gordon Gecko was supposed to be a cautionary character tale, not an instruction manual. I don’t think that’s what the Straussians liked about Machiavelli, but it’s a lost cause that it could have been.
Organicism in biology always had its loyalists even when they could not get a means for living or disseminating their ideas, were written up as criminal, ideologically motivated, eccentric, or irrelevant. Ray Peat has described this as the biological and political understanding that has traveled “underneath” the story of consensus biology and politics.
There are always those who can see life as it is. When the world starts to look like it rewards people in an upside-down way, then I think things are getting into focus. Not all obscure people are thinking well, but many intelligent people live in obscurity when culture refuses them.
They are alert to opportunities where reality can be injected into the hallucination of consensus views. Peat has said that's his effort. I think that's a solid example of life. It's a tangle but that shouldn't prevent a curious person from entering the fray. Meeting ourselves as full human beings on the way to shedding our useless timidity that resolves in a kind of intolerable narcissism of symptoms would help both ourselves and everyone else. Delaying is denying the things that make us organic human beings.
I read an article today of an interview with a Brazilian physician. The title was clickbait-y, but the interview was about the misnomer of “brain death” and how death is signified, generally by no evidence of breathing. Which is interesting, considering this is indirectly linked to the life of the brain, but brain activity or glucose uptake aren’t the criteria. That was the point of the interview. The physician said that thyroid hormone could probably save some people considered “brain dead” and that this is not taught in medical curricula.
The also interesting point is that he explained that doctors often change their thinking and learn new things about medicine from their exposure to thinking in the general and educated public, and not from medical school or professional journals [they don’t have time to read these, he said].
I mean, the Keto Diet didn’t become practiced first because doctors were recommending it, but because bloggers did. Now doctors carry around ketosis articles in their coat pockets and suggest it for. . .weight loss.
It would be as if to say, “Race car drivers get better at racing cars by reading Car & Driver magazine.” It’s probably not completely wrong, but it’s not right either and it might even be a kind of perverse improvement over not knowing at all how a car works while trying to race one. This would be all right if Formula1 weren’t considered authoritative on the operation of very healthy cars.
The real problem with CICO is not that you can’t lose weight while thinking about it and also eating less. The real problem is that it reduces biology to physics. It is said that if a human being is hit by a train and pulverized he “goes from being biology, to being chemistry, to being physics.” That was meant as a kind of instructive joke, I think. To a biologist, this is true, as far as it goes. By the time a body is pulverized you’d have to ask yourself how is it any longer an organism?
To an organicist it’s missing a couple of important layers: mitochondria, organelles, tissues, nerves, tissue communication, hormones, and so on. Also, politics and society, cosmology. To a priest it seems like it’s missing even more. But then, they are priests.
Organicism is the view that what we ordinarily have come to call “parts” are integral participants that in themselves express the coherence of the whole organism. The whole determines the role and meaning of the “parts” and not the other way around.
There are a couple of things to think about that follow from organicism. The people who see the world this way are very inquisitive about the relationships among the things we call “living” and “nonliving.”
Historically they have tended to be personally intensely involved with the environment around them, the things, people, animals, plants, processes. They have a fundamental trust that what they are perceiving is not a hallucination and that there is a truth about it that can be known. Even so, all perceivable phenomena are in a state of developmental flux and change. It’s as if they see their environment as a psychedelic flow in which they are just another feature, if an intelligent feature just like all the others. The environment has a propelling quality.
Also, language as it is, is not adequate to communicate this reality. Committed organicists not only have to be prepared to meet the cultural world where it is, but also they recognize the need to handle language in a careful, patient, and provisional way since language isn’t adequate to communicate very well the reality of life in its organic wholeness.
And still we would need to study the world by using that language that also does harm to that reality. That is what we are stuck with now and what the incidental work of an organicist is. It’s a problem of the human condition and probably the way we have built a culture of seeing and imposed it on children. I am I and you are you.
It’s like wondering if satori is made important to Zennists because of the conventional development of ego individualism in the first place. As if it were only a psychological or spiritual matter recoverable through discipline.
Organicists seem adjusted to see the world differently. I think this can be cultivated, but only if there is enough energy and freedom available.
Because they view development as the important movement that explains states and conditions of life, as laboratory scientists they are attracted to embryology and morphology because it looks like the source of how cellular life comes to differentiate from 2 germ cells into complex, living organisms and their environments.
They seek to understand how the undifferentiated cells know what to do, where to go, how to become structurally and functionally fit to become brain, muscle, nerves, and how to alter their functions when there is change or injury.
They are interested in rehabilitating Darwinian evolution from a state of descent-with-modifications as a series of genetic accidents and reproductive favor, to an intelligent but not teleological, coherent, meaningful whole flowing [if not “overflowing” in a metaphorical sense] with excellent potential, and without any outside genesis. It’s self-organizing at every field level. There is no outside, unmoved mover to start a big bang or a ball rolling or a first step. The organism is its own reason for living.
This is where the attraction to utopianism comes from in organicists: they see what conventionally is called “utopian” as perfectly real and available to be and do if only we could stop our nightmarish attachment to mechanical, bureaucratic, ideologically bound hallucinations. To do less is a heinous, immoral waste of life, wholeness, happiness, beauty, and enjoyment. We owe this to ourselves and others.
Fat, physics, and organicism. . .and life
And this is the point I want to make in this post: it’s not wrong to consider yourself and to act on what is good for you. But if organicism—which is anti-mechanistic and anti-vitalist—is correct, and I think it is, then it’s not all about the individual because although there is a conventionally understood sense of talking about individuals, in reality no one is utterly separate. To talk that way is just a convention. To live that way is against a better, more perception of every detail of life.
Is this so far afield of something like whether weight loss is CICO or Macros Matter that there is no segue? It’s really not because organicism is all about the involvement of the whole in the parts of the smallest details, and smallest most mundane increments of life.
That’s why the kind of bath soap you use makes a difference or why hydrogenated coconut oil is a point: every detail does make a difference in fact. It may not make a great deal of difference, but it does make a difference.
Organicism is an –ism. For an organicist the name is unfortunate and deceptive. They have an urgency to get people’s thinking out of the weeds and back on the track of reality. This applies also to academics, bureaucrats, and theorists who tend from their bookishness and rationalism to forget what the bookishness is for: to understand the world as it is. To an organicist part of the effort is to return theory to its role as the handmaid of building intelligent life, not for life to be just some interesting, fluctuating material to make parsimonious theories out of in order to get rewards in the professional world.
Living life is an urgent matter.
In an effort to help people break out of their dreams of rationalistic, rigid, logical consistency—the hallucination of authoritarian order—apparently outlandish propositions become a useful, not to say also amusing, tool. Whether an organicist believes it to be true may not even matter. Communicate with kittens by enunciating your English better? Yes. Even that will do if it rocks your usual thinking and makes you laugh.
When it comes to something as apparently intractable as weight-loss, this view is instructive. Yes, physics is truly at work. No, it is so far from a complete view of biological reality that it is as if you were to say, “sex is pleasant,” and call that “sex education.”
Weight-loss can’t be only CICO because biology isn’t only physics, and metabolism can’t be explained by the First Law of Thermodynamics. Will you lose weight if you use CICO? Yes, probably, but if it doesn’t take the general state of the person into consideration, that weight loss is likely to be temporary and disappointing, even if it is a dramatic change and people love the before and after pics.
That is why one formula doesn’t work for everyone, each person has to figure out what works best for them. It’s a frustrating prospect because it requires self-directedness, self-organization, which requires abundant energetic initiative, independence, and some capacity for confidence in your own judgment. Today, most people would just rather be told what to do. That is the basic material of authoritarian incompetence.
Sickness renders some people in need of advice and this can be freely given. It is best if it is temporary and with a purpose of gaining independence.
The prospect of weight loss can also be the prospect of breaking out of the cultural hold and changing your mind. Thinking like an organicist is like becoming an ophthalmologist. You can be different because you can detect how to change your vision. If beginning with, “Which is better, 1 or 2?” then that’s not a bad place to start. It occurs to me that a lot of organicists wear thick glasses and have bad vision. I suspect astigmatism helps them resist seeing in prescribed ways ideologically since they already visually see differently.
It’s not that physics is not at work. It is that its explanations are not relevant to biological intelligence at its work.
Besides that, physics has changed a lot in the 20th century, and envying it is just physics-envy, not an aspiration toward a rigorousness fitted to your object of study. It was J. S. Haldane who is said to have said that in the face-off between physics and biology, physics will recede as biology grows. That's really how a political theorist gets away with writing about biological theory. Besides the fact that policing the borders of disciplines is believing you should carry water in a sieve.
The people who perceive that Macros Matter to body weight may not know why they are convinced this is so, and they may never be moved to find out. They may be motivated to understand the here-and-now, the material value of proving the theory by just losing the fat weight. Philosophy isn’t for everyone. It may seem as if it’s not for anyone sometimes.
Weight-loss need not be biological theory, but biological theory does need to be linked to real life. Embryology is the usual, but weight-loss will do. I mean, it’s not really good to say, “don’t learn because the examples aren’t complex enough.” The Spemann-Mangold Organizer experiments are the basic theoretical biology problem for organicists. Weight-loss is the more politically and personally apparent.
Consider what happens to most people who gain weight on a high-fructose diet with adequate protein, alkaline minerals, and cholesterol: they gain 30 – 40 lbs. and then their weight stabilizes. The fact that they stop gaining is a signal that their bodies have adapted to the higher caloric intake, some metabolic structure has probably been restored, and the greater sugar, the frequent meals, the bedtime snacks have improved function.
The point of raising calories in ways that make sugar-phobics raise an eyebrow is to support the most robust physiology possible, in order to produce the most robust life possible. It wouldn't be surprising if this were the beginning of great politics. If you wanted to change society, then redistribution of nutritionally robust calories wouldn't be a bad place to start. The WIC posters in grocery stores would have to stop being like advertisements for "failure to thrive."
This should be attracting more attention than it does. And while no one considers fatness a sign of health in itself, not seeing its context can be deceptive. Most people settle for, “I feel so much better that I don’t mind being a little chubby.” But I don’t think that has to be where their health trail stops unless they want it to, or they were underweight before.
The CICO people have something right because biology is physics, but it is not only physics: you might have to have a mild calorie deficit to lose some fat weight. But that doesn’t mean that it would have to be fast, or particularly stressful. Burning PUFA is threatening, but the best way to do it is very slowly so that the damage can be managed easily. Vitamin E is your friend. The carrot protects the liver and GI functions.
It’s not just the lowering of numbers on a scale, it is physiological adaptation to a better physiological environment. In a bad environment this turns out to be an intractable problem that isn’t completely solvable. Everyone does the best they can.
The calorie deficit doesn’t have to be every day, it doesn’t have to be stressful, and it doesn’t have to be damaging. Many peatarians report stabilizing after a year or more, then becoming more flexible in their thinking and health habits, less compulsive, having incorporated the peaty suggestions and adapting them as their own practices.
When the changes come easily, when the weight comes off consistently and doesn’t return, when sleep is deep part of the night, there is coherent development.
The point is not to be a peatarian, the point is to be the fullest you.
Adaptation to a fuller life is a practical as well as a theoretical milestone. Ray Peat is not infallible, but he has done his homework every day for at least 40 years. This makes his views accurate in a way that seems bizarre to people educated in a culture of forgetfulness.
Today, I do, and recommend to others, the milk, the OJ, enough protein, good mineral ratios [low phosphorus and iron], high-fructose, low-fat, and low-starch, CO2, dry warm climates, socializing. But not necessarily all on the first day, and not if you don’t understand what you are trying to accomplish. If I could communicate one thing it would be to perceive, think, then act [Ray Peat], in that order, but then to do that all the time.
It’s a conundrum to feel that you wouldn’t be able to do this unless you were perfectly well and not stressed, while you are trying to figure out how to be more perfectly well, alive, and less stressed. It’s the fundamental problem of development.
You are the best source of your own solutions. Starting small can build your confidence. It could take a decade to remake your life. Breaking it down into manageable, smaller changes makes sense.
For many, the time for protective inhibition seems almost to be a sheltering in place. But there is a time to emerge.
Between the sugar we get from fruit and the carbon dioxide we produce as the final product of the energy from the sugar lies all the intelligent autonomy of life embedded in interacting systems. It’s a curious puzzle of the human condition that we can enjoy new every day, especially when it vexes our muddling “methods.” We can break out of the bureaucratic hallucination but it takes a continual, energetic effort. That takes a terrific amount of energetic ingredients. The organism has its intelligence. Being alert to it is a good use of the energy.
©Celise Schneider 2019
Notes and Further Reading
Nguyen, Doyen. 2016 Aug; 83(3): 258–282. Linacre Q. Brain Death and True Patient Care.
The aim of this paper is to re-examine the notion of “brain death,” especially its clinical test-criteria, in light of a broad framework, including medical knowledge in the field of neuro-intensive care and the traditional ethics of the medical profession. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5102188/
Winwood-Smith, Hugh S., Craig E. Franklin, Craig R. White. 2017. Low Carb Diet Induces Metabolic Depression: A Possible Mechanism to Conserve Glycogen.Long-term studies have found that low-carbohydrate diets are more effective for weight loss than calorie-restricted diets in the short term but equally or only marginally more effective in the long term. Low-carbohydrate diets have been linked to reduced glycogen stores and increased feelings of fatigue. We propose that reduced physical activity in response to lowered glycogen explains the diminishing weight loss advantage of low-carbohydrate compared with low-calorie diets over longer time periods. We hypothesized that a low-carbohydrate diet would cause a reduction in glycogen stores, which recover over time, a reduction in physical activity, and an increase in resting metabolic rate. The low-carbohydrate diet reduced glycogen stores, which recovered over time. Activity was unaffected by diet, but metabolic rate was reduced, in the low-carbohydrate group.
https://www.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/ajpregu.00067.2017
https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/neurologist-exposes-brain-death-myth-behind-multi-billion-dollar-organ-transplant-industry Interview with Cicero G. Coimbra, MD, PhD, June 5, 2019.
raypeat.com
Almost any of the articles is a good place to start. Sugar Issues, The Dark Side of Stress, or Protective CO2 and Aging are first choices.
Erik L. Peterson, The Life Organic: The Theoretical Biology Club and the Roots of Epigenetics, U. Pitt Pr, 2017. A history of the persons and contributions to "third way" thinking in biology in the late 19th and 20th c. Not only shows what kind of persons have thought as organicists, but also chronicles their experiments, their struggles, their successes, politics, and their careful use of language. This volume closes with an optimistic view that the growing area of epigenetics gets its fundamental outlook from organicism. There are others who contributed to organicism besides those in Peterson's book, but not all were writing biological theory.