Quote from illiquid:
(Yes, there is a trading angle to this at the end)
I've been the same weight for most of my adult life, around 170 (I'm 5'7"). Although alot of the weight was muscle, I could pinch a good hefty inch or 2 of flab on my belly that I'd had since high school. I'd always fluctuate +/- 5lbs, depending on how hard I tried to exercise and pay attention to what I ate (low-fat, junk etc).
For the past few years I ramped up my gym visits and ran 20 miles a week religiously, and yet still I couldn't get past this "set point" of 170. Last year, I started a pretty difficult boot camp class, 3 times a week to replace my cardio. I definitely noticed an improvement in overall tone, but still the weight remained.
2 months ago, I read up on a few articles about how a couple generations of Americans who'd been taught to eat low-fat by the surgeon general just became all the more fatter than their parents. Instead, some are now advocating eating more fat, especially healthy vegetable fats, instead of trying to avoid them all together. I had tried low/no carb diets in the past just to see if they would work (not for me). This time I figured why not try things from a different angle.
I added 3 sources of non-animal fats into my daily diet: avocados, nuts, and coconut oil. For breakfast each and every day, I'd have a bowl of steel-cut oatmeal mixed with a tbsp of almond butter and a tbsp of coconut oil. Between lunch and dinner I'd make sure to eat a half an avocado, most times on some plain crackers. Whenever I got that urge to snack on something, I'd grab a big spoonful of nut butter instead of a bag of chips. Besides the above additions, I made no other major changes to my diet.
After the first few weeks, I really began to see a change in my daily eating habits. My overall appetite just suddenly evaporated. I no longer had urges, especially late at night, to raid the fridge, just to have something to munch on while watching the tube. In fact, just the thought of eating a small bag of doritos (once a daily treat for me) seemed just "too much" for my tongue to take. Now, before every meal, I don't even feel hunger in the usual sense. I can still enjoy and savor good food when I have it, but it's almost as if I need to remind myself to eat a meal when the time comes. The bowl of oatmeal every morning, for example, is just a chore to put away, a real grind. But it gets me through the day, and six hours later before lunch I'm in the gym busting my ass in boot camp class. I feel great with plenty of energy -- in fact, alot more than before. I've also been getting by with about an hour less sleep each night than I'm typically used to.
It's as if I've retrained my body to burn fat again as a source of energy. This is the exact opposite of trying to diet and eat low-fat, which only teaches your body to store fat and preserve it as much as possible. Now, by consciously trying to add more fat to my diet (and yes, I'm also eating bacon, steak etc along with plenty of veggies), my appetite has become completely tamed. You know the feeling of heavy, greasy fullness you have after eating a whole box of chicken mcnuggets or a giant order of steak frites? Well it's kind of like walking around all day with that feeling, only not in a heavy way. You just become way more sensitized to all flavors in general, as if everything you ate came with it's own dollop of butter.
Right now, I feel I'm in total control about how much fat I want to lose. I still go out to eat and stuff myself once in a while, and yet the pounds are staying off. I've lost 15 lbs in 2 months, almost all of it in fat, as I'm still lifting the same weights at the gym, after being the same weight for nearly 20 years. My fat % has gone from upper 20's to mid-teens. Of course, I am still going to hardcore boot camp classes 4x a week, you can't do this with just diet change alone. But I've only seen big changes once I brought my appetite under control. Give it a shot and see if it works for you.
What does the above have to do with trading? Well, judging by how obese this country has become, I think the 90+% failure rate applies for both dieters and traders alike. You need dedication to do the hard work that is required (two words: screen time -- and naught else), but you also have to have an innate tendency to be willing to go against the grain, to try things that on the surface seem counterintuitive. Who would have thought that by eating more fat, you'd lose fat? And yet in the end it all makes sense, contrary to what the media and surgeon general would have you believe for the past 3 decades. There are many similar corollaries in trading, concepts that don't make sense up front but after you delve into it from a different angle, you just know it's right.
The one major difference between the trading world and the nutritional world would be this: what works in trading will always change to keep the slowest 90% in the red -- that's just the nature of the business. But the ability to stay ahead of the game will always require that gut instinct to go against the flow, that will never change.
Makes sense to me. I'm skinny as a toothpick, yet I've been a fat glutton for most of my life. I can't stand eating non-greasy foods for too long...
