When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but with creatures bristling with prejudice and motivated by pride and vanity.
― Dale Carnegie
Every morning I get a slew of articles on health. I read them when I have time, which unfortunately is not often these days. But today there were several that were just too good to pass up. To start us off right, let’s read about this poor woman:
While you are experimenting, do not remain content with the surface of things.
–Ivan Pavlov
In the last post you’ll perhaps recall our Calorie Math™ conundrum. I had exercised about 400 calories worth and then eaten over 2,800 calories that day. Despite being told that I should eat 1,300ish calories to lose a pound in the course of a whole week and 1,660 calories to stay at the same weight, I somehow managed by the next day to reach the smallest number I’ve yet seen on the scale.
After eating all that, I wasn’t particularly hungry for a few days. I ate what I wanted; and I have now gone to the trouble of figuring out that it ran around 1,500 calories a day. Yet despite under-eating for several days, I didn’t lose any weight. Stayed the same. This is fairly typical.
The other day, however, I wondered: What if I ate 2,800 again, only this time with a large proportion of carbohydrates?
LET’S SEE!!
After cheese comes nothing.
–English Proverb (from the Latin)
Having discussed whether we should avoid dairy entirely solely because our supposed Paleolithic ancestors are believed not to have eaten it, let’s now consider a couple other thoughts, shall we?
The next thing to think about is this:
2. What’s up with the conflicting studies? Why does one study show that dairy will kill you, while another claims that it is a health food?
The reason is that you eat too many foods that are high in “calories,” which are little units that measure how good a particular food tastes. Fudge, for example, has a great many calories, whereas celery, which is not really a food at all but a member of the plywood family, provided by Mother Nature so that mankind would have a way to get onion dip into his mouth at parties, has none.
― Dave Barry
How are we all feeling today? In the Christmas spirit?
Well, never fear. A number of helpful news agencies have published some gobblitigook that will pull you out of that mood as fast as you can say Kris Kringle.
I used to moderate a weight loss community and we had this whole Weight Watchers trend a while ago and 20 women or so joined it. Only one that was 270lb or so was told to eat above 24 points… Everyone else was supposed to eat under 24 points. 24 points is 1,200 calories, so they were supposed to eat less than where most starvation diets begin.
This summer I met a number of people doing Weight Watchers.
I also met a number of people doing Weight Watchers for the second, third, fourth or fifth time.
No real gentleman weighs more than 300 pounds.
–William Howard Taft
It’s been all over the news the last few days: William Howard Taft, our 27th president and later supreme court justice, struggled with his weight just like you and me, the lowly peons, do.
Patience and time do more than strength and passion.
–Jean de la Fontaine
Over the time I’ve spent eating high fat, moderate protein and few to no carbohydrates, I’ve noticed a lot of awesome benefits. I’ve detailed most of them here. But I noticed a couple new ones recently.
My grandmother was one of those older ladies who started slowly shaking as she aged. My mother was getting it too, till cancer took her in her early 50s. Every year you could see it a little more–a slight shake, especially when trying to do some kind of very fine motor skill work with the hands.
And I was getting it. I saw it when I tried to write with a pen for too long. No big deal there, since no one writes with pens anymore. Might as well just carve your words in blocks of stone. But it also affected me when I put anything in the kitchen into a measuring cup or spoon and tried to carry it to a bowl. With the little things, like a teaspoon, I’d end up spilling half of it before I got it to the bowl.
Just a couple days ago I realized that was gone. I tried to make it come back and it wouldn’t. Apparently…it was carbs? Or too little fat? Or not enough meat? I don’t know what, but I’m glad about it.
The energy of the mind is the essence of life.
― Aristotle
You may recall that back at The Beginning I mentioned drinking a version of “bulletproof” coffee. As I mentioned then, the real thing is done with MCT oil, but I was using plain old coconut oil and dodging spears from the Bulletproof Faithful for my heresy.
Then a few posts back, I went on and on about coconuts and coconut oil. If you recall, I mentioned that drinking coffee with butter and coconut oil resulted in feeling full and energetic. When we ran out of coconut oil and then got some more two weeks later, I was able to narrow down that it was likely the coconut oil that made the biggest energy difference.
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
–Albert Einstein
I woke up this morning to see similar headlines blasted all over the web. I would love to quote it for you, but I just can’t decide which particular headline to use.
The upshot of all the headlines is that the FDA has finally approved a new obesity drug, Belviq, for sale in the USA. And there are so many things to mock here that my head is swimming. It’s like that time I got dragged to go “fishing” at a fish farm. The pond was about 3 feet deep, 20 feet widem and 10 feet long and contained approximately 1,546,453 fish.
You could just put on your apron, grab one with your bbq tongs, and stick it right on the grill.
A bear, however hard he tries, grows tubby without exercise.
–A.A. Milne
Another big question I get in eating this way is, “what about exercise?” This is a good question. If you read at all, or are able to hear, you’d think that exercise was the magic elixir that solves all of life’s problems. You can’t open a web page anywhere without seeing it lauded in glowing terms as the key to weight loss, heart health, and even longevity.
Of course you can’t find many centenarians who exercise, but we’ll just call that a paradox and pretend it doesn’t happen. The key for you to live a long life is obviously to exercise.
Only maybe it isn’t.
Because there are enough paradoxes lying around here to build our own gym with.
Ask Me How It Happened 