# Tag Archives: control theory

## An engineers approach to diet and work-outs (part 2)

This is my second blog post series on my attempts at fighting obesity through the means of applying control theory to dieting and working out. Control theory is an interdisciplinary branch of engineering and mathematics that deals with the behavior of dynamical systems with inputs

In my first post in this series on applying control theory to dieting and working out,  I proposed an alternative to the use of the Body Mass Index (BMI) as primary output for our dieting and exercise efforts. Given that a basic control system has an output, a feedback loop end an input, we still need to look at the input and feedback loop. I will come to those later in this series. In this blog post I shall try to elaborate on the Body Strength Index (BSI) component of the  Generic Body Health Index  (GBHI) that I described in my first post, and I will explain why strength training and power lifting complement a good and healthy diet in our attempt at a healthier body composition.

As I described in my first post, the GHBI is a value in the complex plain made up of two components. The first component is the Body Fat Index (BFI) that describes how close our body is to the leanest we can get without going into under-fat conditions. Its sufficient for health purposes to get out of the over-fat range, but as most of us also want to look good on the beach and all, we should not mind overshooting that goal as long as we stay out of the under-fat range. Its important to once more make the distinction between loosing weight and getting leaner. We are going to seriously work out  and are gain muscle mass to get a healthier body composition. This means we may or may not loose any weight while getting leaner. It might even mean that we are going to be gaining weight as a result of getting leaner. This may be a cognitive challenge to many of us. The concept of ‘loosing weight’ as a way to get healthier has been so pervasively entrenched into our collective perception that it takes quite a mental leap to abandon it and to accept that gaining weight while getting leaner is something to be happy about.

The second component is Basic Strength Index (BSI) that describes how close our body is to the strongest we can get without getting into professional power-lifting. There are several reasons why adding this component to the GHBI, and getting serious about our body strength makes sense:

• By working out all your muscles, you are telling your body that you are “using” all your muscles. Given that its a ‘use it or loose it’ game, this is essential to keep your body from eating your muscles while leaving your fat-mass untouched.
• When you get stronger you will actually gain muscle mass.
• Muscle mass consumes calories. I’m not talking about calories burned during work-out, these are mostly sugars, it consumes calories 24/7. So when you increase muscle mass you increase your base metabolic rate.
• Muscle mass acts as a sugar store for your body. This helps absorb carbohydrate spikes in your diet that otherwise would go straight to increasing your fat-mass.
• Higher muscle mass reduces the bodies relative fat mass.
• Focusing on muscle strength rather than muscle mass gives most of the above advantages without your body getting to bulky. You will end up with compact muscles with a high metabolic increase per kg of muscle mass rather than with body-building muscles with a relatively low metabolic increase per kg.
• Negative changes to your power stats are a good indication that your diet is off, this allows us to react relatively quickly to an unbalanced diet.

Again we run into our psychological cognitive wall. By increasing our muscle mass we are deliberately increasing our weight. If we aren’t loosing fat at at least the same rate this means we are gaining weight. Whats more, as I described in the previous post, if both your body strength and your body fat are relatively low, you will want to focus first on balance rather than body fat.During such an initial period, you will slightly increase your body fat and significantly increase your muscle and total mass. A phase that bodybuilders and power lifters often refer to as bulking. You could easily gain 5kg or even 10kg in such a period, and when getting in shape this increase in body mass can be quite a psychological burden.

I’ve said it a couple of times before, your body weight and BMI are not that relevant for your progress. Its essential that you get used to the idea:

Changes in your total body weight are in no way indicative of changes in your body health.

So now that we have established the importance of working out and of using strength training as a tool for improving our body composition, we have a look at what our work-out schedule should ideally look like:

• Work out every muscle at least once a week and at most twice a week.
• Make sure you work out for a total of at least 5 hours per week, double that if you can manage it.
• Give every major muscle group at least two resting days between workouts.
• Start each exercise with  a 8..10 rep set, increase the weight progressively up to the point where you can only manage 1 or 2 reps.
• Make sure the big 3 (squat, bench-press, dead-lift) are part of your weekly routine, preferably on different days.
• If you must do cardio, do high-intensity cardio and do it at the end of your workout. Avoid using muscles during cardio you also used during the strength part of your workout.
• Try to work out around the same time on every day you work out. So if you work out in the evening on week days also try to work out in the evening in the weekends.

The big 3 that I just mentioned are going to be our primary measuring tool for calculating the BSI. If you are very strong and aren’t doing professional power lifting, benching plus squatting plus dead-lifting a total of seven times your own body weight should be quite an impressive accomplishment, especially if at the same time we are striving for low total body fat. The BSI puts this ‘seven time your own body weight’ as the ultimate strength goal to strive for (just like the low value of the healthy body fat percentage is the ultimate fat percentage level to strive for) .  Working out and eating healthy and sufficiently is going to help us towards this goal. Eating sufficiently however isn’t in the end going to get us towards the goal of truly getting leaner, so we will need to strike a balance and find a path between the caloric  deficit that helps us quickly loose body fat and the caloric surplus that helps us to quickly get stronger and gain muscle mass. One major help in striking the balance on a caloric level lies in picking the right macro nutrients and in picking the right time to consume them. In my next post in this series I shall be elaborating on what I found is a good ratio for the different macro nutrients, and on how you should time our intake of these macro nutrients relative to our workouts.

## An engineers approach to diet and work-outs (part 1)

This is the first in what I hope will be an interesting blog post series on my attempts at fighting obesity through the means of applying control theory to dieting and working out.   Control theory is an interdisciplinary branch of engineering and mathematics that deals with the behaviour of dynamical systems with inputs. My first attempts at trying to harness my body’s use of nutrients with control theory failed miserably in a way not dissimilar to how my first attempt at creating an amplifier  while studying electronics failed miserably. In folow-up posts I will talk about different aspects that went wrong, but in this post I shall focus on the most essential aspect of applying control theory to any system: picking the proper parameters to use in the feedback loop.

As many people coping with obesity do at first, I too made the horrible mistake of focusing on my scale and my Body Mass Index (BMI), thinking these numbers were somehow indicative of my health.  The body mass index is basically an index that describes the relative weight for someone of a certain height. The problem is, the body weight however is composed of multiple components, including:

• Muscle mass
• Fat mass
• Water mass

What we mostly care about with respect to obesity is not the total mass, but mostly the size of the fat mass compared to the bodies total mass, or the total body fat percentage (TBFP). The current use of the BMI by nutritional professionals and throughout the medical profession and throughout society stems from the statistically significant correlation between the BMI and  TBFP within populations.  The problem is however that ‘improving’ ones BMI does not necessarily imply any improvement to the TBFP.  You could for example under specific conditions loose weight, basically eating your muscle mass while actually gaining  fat mass, or you could loose weight by dehydration, both leading to a higher TBFP.

In the end, and I realize this is difficult as the idea is so deeply rooted, we should stop believing that weight is a useful measure for individual body compositional and health goals. Instead of the BMI we need to look at different numbers. So what parameters are a good measure of our general health and of a healthy or unhealthy body composition. As stated, the TBFP is an important and relatively undiluted  number. Lets star by creating a simple scale that most likely will yield a number between 0 and 10 for most probably anyone who is struggling with obesity tendencies.  Lets define the Body Fat Index as:

$BFI = \frac{TBFP - LBFP}{5}$

That is, we take your total body fat percentage, subtract from that the lowest number from the dark green section of the below chart, and divide the result by 5.

So a 43 year old male with a body fat percentage of 46% would end up with:

$BFI = \frac{46 - 11}{5} = 7$

There is a second dimension we need to look at regarding a healthy and stable body composition. You may have heard the phrase “use it or loose it”, well basically that’s how your body works when you start starving yourself, especially if you are also eating the wrong things while starving yourself.  If you don’t exercise all of your muscles regularly, are on a calorie deprived diet, but at the same time are bombarding your body with insulin by getting much of your calories from fruit juices, you leave your body no other option than to start consuming muscle mass. You weren’t using those muscles, and the fructose induces insulin spikes will make sure you won’t be using your bodies fat as an energy source, so your body will basically start eating your muscles. And to make things worse, with less muscles your body will burn less calories, further reducing your chances of loosing fat.

You need to use these muscles, grow them if possible so they help out at burning calories, and you need to monitor them to make sure you aren’t eating them by starving yourself. The best way to do the later is by keeping track of your strength. Carbs are bad if you don’t work out, but if you are getting into sports, you will need sufficient pre-workout carbs to fuel your workout. If you eat to little calories all together, or to little protein for muscle repair. your strength will suffer. If you start cutting to fast for your body to keep up with, your strength will suffer. If you eat well, you will get progressively stronger from your exercises. As such, your strength is a good indication of how well your body is doing. So in addition to our BFI above, we shall define a Body Strength Index (BSI) that we also aim for should have a value that for the most of us is between 0 and 10. We define:

$BSI = 14 - 2\frac{S + B + D}{W}$

$BSI = 14 - 2\frac{125 + 225 + 275}{100} = 14 - 2\frac{625}{100} = 14 - 12.5= 1.5$

With the BSI, your strength training becomes a measuring tool for measuring how well your body is doing. How well your diet is working an if you aren’t taking your diet beyond the point where is helping you.

Now we come to the interesting part, how do we combine the BFI and the BSI in a useful way that can help us apply control theory to our work out and dieting routine? We combine the two by defining a Generic Body Health Index that is complex number:

$GBHI = BFI + BSI i$

The absolute value of GHBI is defined by Pythagoras’s theorem:

$|ghbi| = \sqrt{BFI^2 +BSI^2}$

While this absolute value is the value we are aiming to ultimately reduce, if there is a large difference in the values of the two components, its probably wisest to focus on the component that’s contributing most to the absolute value first. If we subscribe to the idea that its a good idea to not focus to much on either component but to balance the two, a way to find a good balance in our projected goals for body improvement  would be to define a circle segment that starts at  the point in the complex plain defined by GBHI and that ends at 0 +0i under an angle of exactly 45 degree.

As the above example shows, our ideal path may warrant for one of the two components to suffer slightly in order to more effectively address the one that needs most attention, and, and this is just as important, to allow us to be able to define a smooth line suitable for critical dampening. In this case our individual is rather strong and extremely fat so he/she should allow a little loss of strength in order to loose fat first. Other individuals may need to allow gaining some fat to easier allow for gaining substantial strength. The basic idea is that we define a circle segment that aims for both a balance between strength and leanness and for providing a smooth path to an ultimate attainable goal.

I hope this post has shown how my GBHI makes sense as an alternative to the over used BMI, and how projecting a circle segment on the complex plain defines a desirable path towards a healthier stronger and leaner body.  In part two of this series I’ll try to address how and why combining a basically low-carb diet with substantial complementary pre-workout carbs seems to be a good basis to base our control system input on. How low-fat high carb destabilizes the BFI part of our control system while low-carb high-fat interferes with  progress on the BSI part.  Basically both the low-carb and the low-fat approaches lead to sub optimal results at best, my personal experiences with applying control theory to my diet have made me come up with what I think is a reasonable yet somewhat cumbersome middle ground where timing of different calorie sources is essential. I’ve been able to trace back any lapse I had to failure of applying strict timing discipline. More on that in my second post in this series.