Essay:A nutrition and fitness guide

Why this guide?

This guide is not aimed towards communists specifically -- the principles apply to everyone similarly. However, arguments can be made as to why a guide on a communist encyclopedia is important and interesting:

• Many comrades want this information, but do not know where to get it. In this way we are bringing it to them if they happen to read ProleWiki.
• The fitness industry is dominated by reactionary content and personalities. With this guide, you are sure it was written by a communist and will not contain unwelcome anecdotes.
• And of course, fitness is important to all communists for a variety of reasons.

What is this guide based on?

This guide is based on my own reading and experience based on several years. I take a scientific approach to fitness and nutrition (the latter especially), and I read the scientific studies. With that said, scientific studies in these two fields are very specific in scope and I myself do not know each and every single one of them that exists.

Without further ado, let's delve into the guide.

Nutrition portion

Why learn about nutrition

Nutrition, or dieting, is important for anyone wanting to improve their fitness condition. We will come back to a definition of fitness, but I generally define it as any physical state one wants to achieve. Some people need/want to gain weight, and some people want to lose weight. They are at completely opposite ends, yet their state of being converges because the principles of weight gain and weight loss remain the same.

It is also important to learn about proper nutrition, in my opinion, because there is so much bullshit being sold by an industry that has been making a lot of money on telling outright false advice to people. We aim to set the record straight.

Whatever your fitness goals, they happen mostly through your diet.

Diagram showing the different fat molecules and their similarities.

Nutrients

Types of nutrients

Macronutrients

The first thing you have to learn is what nutrients are and how they work.

We talk often about macronutrients, from the Greek large or big. Macronutrients are found in large amounts in food, and as such form the bulk of what we eat. Chemically, they belong to one of three broad categories because their molecules share similarities in their structure and atoms. These are:

Fats

Fats, contrary to popular belief, are needed by the human body. This makes sense as they are a macronutrient. If they were unequivocally bad for you, how could they be available in such large quantities?

The idea that fats were a cause of weight gain came about in the 90s from the sugar lobby, who successfully campaigned to reduce fats in food and replace it with their sugar.

Fats are broadly broken down into three categories:

• Unsaturated fats: these are generally considered healthy.
• Saturated fats: these are not unequivocally bad,
• Trans fats:

(you will find examples of healthy food that is high in unsaturated fat and has little to no other types at the end of the Nutrition section)

Carbohydrates

Carbohydrates are essentially sugars. When you consume carbohydrates, your body breaks down the glucose part of the molecule and assimilates it. Therefore all carbohydrates you consume will eventually be broken down into glucose by your body, which is a form of sugar. All nutrients ending in -ose (glucose, fructose, lactose...) are sugars and are very close chemically (glucose and fructose "only" differ by one atom) -- but your body will still break them down into glucose to use them.

We can denote three types of carbs:

• Sugars, which are "simple" carbohydrates, already close to their pure glucose form. Cane sugar or beet sugar (white sugar) are simple carbs. They are also found as fructose in fruit.
• Starches, which are more "complex" carbohydrates. Their molecule is essentially a chain of glucose strung together, and your body will have to do more work to extract the glucose.
• Fibers. Fibers are technically a type of sugar, but your body is unable to process it and therefore will extract almost no nutrients from it. Fibers are important, as your doctor has surely told you, and are also an easy way to feel full without actually consuming calories.

Proteins

We will look at proteins a bit differently. Protein is a molecule made of amino acids. There are 13 amino acids in existence, and 9 of them (75%!) are essential -- meaning your body cannot produce them and so they must be consumed from outside sources. These 9 are:

• histidine,
• isoleucine,
• leucine,
• lysine,
• methionine,
• phenylalanine,
• threonine,
• tryptophan,
• valine.

I obviously don't expect you to remember these names (I certainly don't). Rather, it is important when consuming protein to consume essential proteins and understand what that means.

You might also come across the term complete protein (or whole), which means that a protein contains all 9 essential amino acids in sufficient quantities. Such a protein is whey (non-vegan), which is the most famous protein supplement -- but we will talk about dieting options later on.

Non-essential proteins are synthesised by the bodies and so there might not be any reason to consume them from outside sources. An example is collagen, which you can get as a supplement, but is also naturally found everywhere in your body.

Protein is generally healthy. There is one (to my knowledge) known problem protein can lead to, which is that it is absorbed in the kidneys. If you have a kidney condition, high protein intake in such a case can be dangerous to them. Otherwise, people with healthy kidneys will have no problem eating as much protein as they want to (although we will look into proper amounts in the fitness portion of this guide).

Daily macro- and micronutrient recommended intake by age and gender (click to open in full size)

Micronutrients

We will quickly cover micronutrients. Whereas macronutrients are found in large quantities in foods, micronutrients are found in (very) small quantities. These are vitamins and minerals. While all micronutrients have a different healthy quantity threshold in the human body, for most of them you only need milligrams.

You will find a table detailing the recommended daily amounts of micronutrients on the right and as you can see, these are outright impossible to calculate in a day-to-day setting. Who can count how many milligrams of vitamin A they ate on a day-to-day basis?

Therefore, for proper micronutrient consumption, I would suggest firstly diversifying your diet very widely, and then try supplements and see if you notice any difference after a few weeks.

Micronutrients should not be ignored on the basis that they are counted in mere milligrams. These are essential to your life -- you would die without proper vitamin or mineral intake.

An easy way to diversify your eating habits if you struggle with that is to snack on a different thing every day. One day it can be a banana, then an avocado, then a fried egg, etc.

Supplement types

Supplements are a gigantic industry and not all are equally good. Omega 3 supplements (an unsaturated fat and essential nutrient to the human body), when tested in labs, read out a "TOTOX" (total oxidation) index. This index indicates how oxidized the oil is, which makes it pretty much dead as far as nutrient absorption is concerned and outright unhealthy. There is also the concept of bio absorption, which essentially measures how much nutrients your body is able to get from a pill (or anything you consume). Magnesium oxide supplements for example have terrible absorption, whereas magnesium bisglycinate have much better rates. Essentially, your body gets more magnesium out of it per gram of magnesium.

Therefore, you should do your research before trying out supplements. While I have tried different supplements myself, I can't really write about specifics as virtually all micronutrients (and macro!) are found as supplements these days. Don't hesitate, however, to ask a company to provide you with their lab tests results if you're interested in a supplement.

Which nutrients are bad?

It must be understood that no one nutrient is unequivocally bad and must be avoided at all costs. It would be actually very difficult to avoid them entirely as for example, saturated fats are found alongside unsaturated fats in most foods. The key word is quantity. Minute quantities of trans fats will not damage you. However, to eat healthy, you should aim to reduce trans and saturated fats and look towards consuming mostly unsaturated fats.

Essential and non-essential nutrients

The second important thing, which we mentioned when talking about protein, is the concept of essential vs non-essential nutrients.

Essentially, the human body is capable of producing some nutrients itself, known as synthesis (meaning to transform two or more components into another one). However, there are some nutrients we are not capable of producing.

Where to go from here

There is a lot I cannot cover in this guide regarding nutrients, as I want it to be as easy to follow as possible for day-to-day life. I am also not a biologist and could not go into the atomic details of nutrients and oils. We could go deep into maths and bio absorption (and how a gram of protein has the same amount of calories as a gram of rice when tested in a lab setting, but not in your actual body) but I think there is no point to that for such a guide.

The bottom line is that all macronutrients that we denoted as healthy can be consumed in any amount, with the only limiting factor being calories, which we will look into right now.

Calories

The second thing we have to understand about nutrition is calories.

Scientifically, calories are a unit of energy. 1 calorie is the amount of energy needed to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water (equal to 1 millilitre of water) by 1 degree Celsius. This is an older unit, and the scientific community now uses Joules, which you might see sometime when looking up calories.

Regardless, calories are still in use for food specifically and will generally be more representative for people than Joules.

There is a very simple principle in regards to calories and the human body. Your body consumes a certain amount of calories every day by just existing, which is essentially energy your body needs to live -- this can be your heart pumping blood, your stomach producing acid, your kidneys filtering blood... literally everything your body does requires energy of some sort to do it.

If you give your body more energy than it needs to function, it will have to find a use for it. It can't just make it disappear by magic. In the human body, this translates into the creation of fat storage. Fat has a very high energy potential, and so this is what evolution has decided would be best for us to store energy.

Therefore we can deduce a simple mathematical rule. If you eat more calories than your body needs, you will gain fat weight (the distinction with fat-free weight will be important in the fitness portion). If you eat fewer calories than your body needs, you will lose fat weight (although you will also lose some fat-free weight unless proper precautions are taken). Unless otherwise specified, from now on when I mention weight, I will always be talking about fatty weight.

Regulating your body weight -- at least the fatty cells -- is as easy as that, technically speaking. In reality, it can be a difficult road that we will detail in a dieting portion later on.

Empty and "full" calories

There is somewhat of a "pop science" concept known as empty calories, which are very interesting when one starts looking at their nutrition from up close.

So-called empty calories are called that way because they don't make you feel like you've eaten anything. These are generally liquids (supposedly an evolutionary holdover so that we can drink as much water as we need) and a deadly combo known very well to fast food and snack companies of fats, salt and sugar (which I will call FSS).

This combo essentially does two things: it is on the one hand very tasty and addictive and, on the other hand, it is packed with calories but will not satiate you in any way.

The FSS combo is theorised to be an evolutionary holdover, as these foods would have been difficult to come by in older times, but are packed with calories -- as such your brain would tell you to eat all of it because you wouldn't know when you'd find such a source of calories again. Thus there is a mechanism in the body that makes them feel "empty" so that you can eat all your supply.

Empty calories however still pack on calories, and as such will become very important when talking about dieting later.

On the contrary, "full" calories like fibers make you feel full and as such less likely to snack on something later. They are also very important in a dieting plan.

Calculate your calories

The first step if you are interesting in taking control of your nutrition is to start counting your calories. This will help you understand how much you might be eating in a usual day (most people are very bad at counting their calories in their head, and so am I!), and also how many calories your body actually needs.

There are a few different algorithms to calculate your TDEE (Total Daily Energy Expenditure), but most calculators are based on the Miflin-St. Jeor formula, so any calculator (such as this one) will do.

Personally however, I find that these calculators tend to overestimate one's TDEE. I would suggest leaving your activity at the "sedentary" level, even if your job has you on your feet all day or you go to the gym three times a week. We will go into more details on this in the dieting section.

You should get a number around 2000-2500 calories (or kcal in metric ; 1 imperial calorie = 1 kcal metric calorie. I will only be using calorie to mean kcal in this guide).

There is also a basal metabolic rate, which does not take into account your life (such as walking 10k steps a day), but only what your body consumes for its processes, as if you were laying motionless in bed for 24 entire hours.

Fun fact: when sleeping, your body burns calories at a third of the rate as when you are awake.

The structure of a fat cell.

Fat cells

I find fat cells very interesting in their functioning, and I want to detail them a bit so that you can better understand how putting on or losing weight works.

As you can see from the diagram, a fat cell is essentially a balloon that fills a reservoir with fat.

Some have theorised that this is the reason it is more difficult to lose weight than to gain it, as these cells are not destroyed when you lose weight -- they just empty the reservoir. Thus, once created, they always remain in your body and are simply waiting to be filled up again. However, I am unsure about the validity of this theory.