2013 WBC Day 5

Wednesday is the first real meat and potatoes day of WBC. Tuesday has the auction and earlier days tend to have fewer events for the early arrivers. Things really kick off on Tuesday and keep on trucking all day Wednesday. Just looking at the schedule I made up beforehand I was looking to play two heats of Race for the Galaxy, a Vegas Showdown, an Empire Builder, a Ra Dice, and Egizia, attend a demo, and win Can't Stop. There was even a gap in the middle for eating or squeezing something else in. Especially when I ultimately skipped crayon rails to play two things instead. So I had lots of grand dreams of things I was going to do.

Instead I slept in until after 2. Then I got up and jumped in the tub for an hour and read a book. Then I went and watched Sceadeau play a heat of Goa. Went back to the room, wrote a blog post or played Rogue Legacy or something.

7 o clock brought something I could sort of do... I went to another seminar from the life as a game lady! This one was on nutrition and how conventional wisdom is tricking everyone into doing it wrong. There was a lot of lead-in and discussion about evolution and other mammals. A talk about how the 'bad' LDL cholestrol actually works and how it only actually causes heart disease when it gets oxidized, and that the stuff that oxidizes it only gets made when your muscles are stuck processing carbohydrates instead of fats. So while LDL is a thing made of fat and protein and it is the thing that does eventually cause heart disease it actually only gets bad when you cut down on fat and ramp up on carbs. She went on to talk about how the early studies that showed saturated fat was terrible have all been refuted and showed the results of a 2010 metastudy that showed that there is no link at all between saturated fat consumption and heart disease. Following from that was a pretty linear trend line showing how heart disease goes up as you eat a diet composed more and more of carbs. Certainly something worth looking into more for some people I would think. Personally I eat plenty of fat and protein and try to avoid carbs as if they will kill me!

She talked a bit about how hunger signals work, and basically said the body doesn't have a good way of telling you when you're short of something in particular. So if you're down on carbs or down on fat or down on vitamin C basically the only thing your body can tell you is to eat more. Maybe the next thing you eat will solve the problem! But for most people the next thing is going to be the same sort of thing as the last thing, which sucks. If you're eating too much fat before you're going to end up eating even more fat and still not enough vitamin C. Or if you need more fat and fewer carbs you're going to end up eating even more and more carbs until you get enough fat and that's going to result in way overeating. Then eventually when you go on a diet you end up starving yourself in the same proportion and your body goes into a crazy conservation mode and slows down your metabolism and making you really hungry which screws your goals and makes you miserable. But if you changed to following the right rules and actually got the right split of everything in the first place you'd end up eating substantially less overall, get a health metabolism, and end up at a reasonable weight. Made sense to me! I know when I started eating worse when I had to work a regular job I ended up putting on weight and now that I'm eating what seems like a better mix of food I'm losing weight at a pretty decent clip!

She then talked a bit about why plants may have evolved the way they did and why that may make them worse for humans to eat than animals. Basically if an animal wants to evolve in order to avoid getting eaten it will evolve stealth, or speed, or claws. Maybe it will become poisonous like a toad, but for the most part animals use methods to avoid getting caught and eaten at all because it's very bad for them evolutionarily if I eat them. Plants on the other hand are stuck in the ground. I can see them, and I can walk up to them, and I can eat them. They could also become poisonous like a toad, but the sneakier thing to do is instead to evolve to abuse the fact I'm going to eat them when I walk up to them. A smart plan would be to trick me into eating their seeds and then get me to go poop them out somewhere else. As long as I don't destroy the seeds in my digestive tract this is a winning scenario for the plant. Especially if the seeds taste good and the part of the plant without seeds tastes terrible. The idea she talked about is that this is why gluten exists. Not as seeds themselves or to taste good, but to disrupt the digestive process. Make it so my body gets a little sick and can't digest things as well to give the seeds the best chance of making it all the way out. Evil plant! I won't fall for your plan! I just won't eat you at all! Come here, cow! OM NOM NOM!

The end ended up talking about how she used to be a vegetarian but is now into the paleo diet and thinks it's awesome. I don't know details about it, but if it avoids glutens and eats meat it's probably pretty good in my books. I liked how she presented information this time around, showed some now disputed studies to give an idea of where the random anti-science rant came from last time, and gave some interesting info to think about. It didn't seem to come across as a recruitment drive for a paleo diet, though she did endorse it pretty strongly as having worked well for her. And one thing I definitely noticed is that she was rather slim compared to most people at WBC. Maybe she's just "lucky" with a "good metabolism" or maybe her plan of blending a stick of butter into her coffee every morning actually has something going for it.

After that I think I went to watch some Brass, or went to the room and surfed the internet for a while.

11pm actually brought Can't Stop. I was still feeling pretty badly but I figured I could probably roll some dice and actually play a game for 10 minutes without wishing I was dead. Can't Stop also has the advantage of letting you play against your friends if you want to, so I played in a game with Robb and a couple of the people I know through Sceadeau (Matt and Andrew I think). I rolled a lot of trips and fell often. I did manage to get the 2s done, which made me happy. Then I lost and got to leave.

I hadn't actually eaten all day (well, I had a lot of gluten free snacks I brought, so a granola bar type thing and some ginger snaps) so we went to Waffle House. It was pretty empty and I spelled out what I needed to the waitress who seemed to be able to hook me up. I did get an onion in my hash browns which implied some cross contamination was going on but it didn't make me sick so I guess the scrambled eggs, hashbrowns with ham, a random onion, and salt are all nicely gluten free.