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by fbdab103
746 days ago
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Supposedly chess layers burn excessive calories playing. From one popular culture article[0] ...The six-game championship in 2004 left Rustam Kasimdzhanov 17 pounds lighter. And in 2018, one company tracking the heart rate of grandmaster Mikhail Antipov concluded that he had burned 560 calories in just two hours. Sitting still. Playing chess. (An average-sized person would need two hours on a treadmill to break 500.)
Last week, ESPN looked more closely into the toll the stationary sport takes on the body. ESPN spoke with Robert Sapolsky, a Stanford University researcher who studies primates. Sapolsky explained that some chess players respond to the game like any elite athlete, burning upwards of 6,000 calories a day during tournaments, due to tripled breathing rates, elevated blood pressure, and muscle contractions. That means during tournaments they can lose two pounds each day.
I have done several fasts, and I am quite dubious of the supposed mental improvements. My brain has spent 99%+ of its existence no more than 12 hours away from a steady supply of glucose. I personally feel physically and mentally sluggish. While probably erring much on the side of caution, I avoid driving during a 5+ day fast because I feel my reaction speed is diminished.Furthermore, the brain is the single most energetically expensive organ in the body. If there were a shortcut metabolic pathway, it seems like it would have been exploited long ago. [0] https://www.menshealth.com/fitness/a29144951/chess-players-c... |
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The brain has to run on something, and we store very little glycogen. It wasn't uncommon in the ancestral environment for food to be entirely unavailable, or for the only calories to be in the form of meat, which itself has little glycogen.
So there's a secondary pathway to account for those conditions. A hand-waving argument could be made that in circumstances where there are no calories, it is the most important time for the brain to function well. Glucose is the cheapest, metabolically, that doesn't automatically mean that it's the best.
The reaction someone has to a fast, or to a diet which induces ketosis, is fairly personal. I don't think there are broad sweeping conclusions we can draw here.
My n=1 is that after two days of a fast, I feel pretty sharp. Electrolytes are indeed essential to this; in this context salt is far and away the most important, for whatever reason. I would expect the YMMV factor to dominate though.