13 Weeks: Season 2, Week 3 — Homo What?

Homeostasis.  This is our vocabulary word for today.

Homeostasis is “[t]he ability of the body or a cell to seek and maintain a condition of equilibrium or stability within its internal environment when dealing with external changes” (via Biology Online.) On any diet or exercise program, homeostatis may not seem to be your friend.

Certainly, for the last six weeks it hasn’t seemed to be mine. Above is a table of the current results of this second season (I’ll be running similar tables for comparison for the rest of this 13 week season.) I’ve been keeping to the diet pretty religiously, with a very few days in excess of my 30g carbs target. According to LoseIt!, I’ve run a total calorie deficit in the previous six weeks of roughly 42,000 kcals (Calories), or on average about 7000 kcals a week. It only requires the tiniest application of higher math to see that at 3500 kcal/pound, I should have lost 12 pounds, or should have been losing 2 pounds a week.  While I’ve hit several new lows, including breaking 270 about ten days ago, I haven’t lost any weight, according to the 7-day running average, since the second season started. In fact, what has really happened in  is that I’ve actually gained something like 1.3 pounds.

This could be depressing. Believe me. What this is, is a demonstration of my body trying to preserve homeostasis. Basically, bodies don’t want to change, and they have mechanisms to prevent it.

Luckily, this isn’t a weight-loss experiment, this is a better-health and better-glucose experiment. (Repeat after me….) And I’m doing much better there — my cholesterol is now great, my glucose is near normal (and it’s been ten days or so since I cut my metformin dose in half, with no apparent damage to the glucose level), and — here’s the kicker — my body fat has dropped from around 33 percent to just over 29 percent — which means I’ve changed my body composition fairly radically in these three weeks.

Now, part of this is another demonstration that the naive “calories out minus calories in” model of weight loss is once again breaking down.  Of course, since that model is so entrenched in so many people’s minds, the usual doctor’s explanation would be “you must be cheating”, as I talked about in an earlier episode; presenting the food diary and such wouldn’t deter them.

Another possible explanation is that it’s water — just as when they tell you rapid weight loss early in a low-carb diet is “only water”. But just as when I was dropping weight quickly, we’re talking about a lot of water. “A pint’s a pound the world round”, and that means we’re talking about 12 pints, 6 quarts, a gallon and a half of water.  Call me crazy, but I’m thinking an additional gallon and a half of water would be pretty obvious in edema and puffiness and heart failure and such.

But the body composition — and one other thing — are hints at what I think is actually happening. That other thing is that after weeks of little change, I’ve begun to have measurements changing. Specifically, I’ve lost 2 inches around my neck and 5 (!!) inches around my waist from when I started the first 13 weeks.

The third favorite explanation of this would be that I’m gaining muscle as well as losing fat, and that one I think is plausible. What’s more, you can do that even when you’re running a big calorie deficit, as I have been, because a pound of fat contains about twice as many calories as a pound of muscle. The explanation that makes sense is that I’ve lost fat at 3500 kcals a pound, and gained muscle at 1800-odd kcals a pound, leaving me slightly heavier, and a good bit skinnier.

I can live with that.

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Related at PJ Lifestyle:

13 Weeks: The Thirteen Weeks Method

What Will Happen if I Consume Too Much Calcium?

It is tempting for people to suppose that if a little of something is good for them, then a lot of it must be better. Unfortunately this is not always or even usually the case; and I first realized that people are inclined to make this mistake when, as a student many years ago, I was shown a baby who was bright orange; it was suffering from a condition known as carotenemia. The parents, having heard that carrots were healthy, concluded that only carrots were healthy, and fed their baby accordingly.

A study from Sweden, recently published in the British Medical Journal, examines the important question of whether calcium supplements are good for middle-aged and old women. The question is important because millions of women around the world take such supplements – 60 percent of American middle-aged and old women, for example. There is no one quite like the Swedes for carrying out such epidemiological studies because the medical records of their population are by far the most comprehensive in the world: creepily so, one is sometimes inclined to think.

What the Swedish researchers found was that the graph of the relationship between calcium intake and death rates was a U-shaped curve. People with a low consumption of calcium had a higher mortality than those with a moderate consumption, but so did people with a high consumption.

The sample of women was not small, and in the period of study 11,944 of the 70,259 women studied had died. Those with a high dietary consumption of calcium alone had an increased death rate of 1.4 times for all causes of mortality, 1.49 times for cardiovascular mortality, and 2.14 times for ischaemic heart disease (heart attacks) compared with those whose who consumption of calcium was associated with the lowest mortality, that is to say a moderate consumption.

Charlie Martin, Late-Blooming Athlete: Week 3 — Yoga, Without the Yoga

(See Week One, and Week Two. The key passage:

The majority of activities people are accustomed to doing at a gym are neither efficient means of getting fitter nor particularly safe. A typical trainer at a typical gym is now a terrible investment, both for your fitness level and because elite-level training information is freely available online. There is no substitute for an actual qualified trainer at a quality gym, both in instruction and motivation, yet you can do great things for yourself on your own, with a computer. Charlie’s PJ Lifestyle entries strike me as a good opportunity to demonstrate this; he’s agreed to be somewhat of a lab rat.)

—————————— 

Last week I preached the Gospel of the Squat, the movement that: a) would save humanity from much lower back and knee dysfunction; b) would be as familiar as running (which most of us do incorrectly as well) without our cultural reliance on butt-sitting; and c) done exclusively as an exercise program, would just about suffice to make you fit without trying any other exercise. This week, I’m moving on to …

Nah, I’m going to talk about squats more.

But different squats: these next two movements are as genetically determined as the Air Squat, but include the added dimension of things, which people are designed to handle. Your frame is built to carry external objects, a necessary survival function. For an opposing example, look at, say, a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Those little arms were vestigial, not intended to do much of anything. You, however, are made to hold stuff.

The Air Squat is how a human raises and lowers his center of gravity. Our new exercises:

1. The Front Squat is how a human raises and lowers his center of gravity while holding an object in front of him, like a slaughtered antelope, or a laundry basket.

2. The Overhead Squat is how a human would do the same with an object overhead. It happens less often, but your shoulder girdle is specifically built to handle weight overhead.

(Also, there is the Back Squat, which most are familiar with. You can handle the most weight with the Back Squat; it is the best movement of the three for building strength. Technique-wise, though, it is essentially the same as the Air Squat, which we’ve already discussed. Also, it is the least likely position that a human would be holding weight, since the arms are mostly out of the picture.)

The benefits of the Front Squat and the Overhead Squat extend far beyond strength. Most fascinating to me: the movements themselves provide elegant, circular answers to questions regarding balance and mobility. (Most use the term “flexibility”. “Mobility” is more accurate as it implies a purpose for having flexibility).

The specific questions which the Front and Overhead Squats answer, by merely existing:

Why should I get more mobility?

How much mobility do I need?

Why do I need to get better balance?

How much balance do I need?

If balance and mobility are important, what is the best way to get there?

Over the past couple decades, yoga — and to a slightly lesser extent, Pilates — gained the upper hand as gold standard exercise activity for gaining balance and mobility. Why? Well, because being good at yoga and Pilates requires lots of balance and mobility, and doing yoga and Pilates will give you better balance and mobility.

So what’s the problem? The problem is that being good at yoga and Pilates essentially means only that: you are good at yoga and Pilates.

As mentioned in Week Two, fitness is — among other things — about being prepared for whatever life throws at a human body, which is why a human body looks like a human body to begin with, and not like a platypus.

You don’t have legs so that they can get into Warrior Three pose. Warrior Three pose is just something you happen to be able to get into.

This is not an indictment of yoga and Pilates — indeed, I could make the same argument regarding throwing a baseball, and I would never imply that throwing a baseball is a pointless activity. (Even thinking that makes me a bit sad.) What I’m implying is that yoga and Pilates and baseball should all be thought of as sports, as part of an active life, and not as activities to get you fit.

13 Weeks: Two Weeks in, I See Some Real Results

So, as far as my own progress goes, the last couple weeks were kind of boring: I wasn’t losing any weight, my glucose was coming down, but nothing very dramatic was happening.

Since the last time, though, I’ve done several things: I got “after” pictures taken for the first 13 weeks, I have started tracking bodyfat as well as weight, and best of all, I got my post-13-weeks bloods done.

Those are the most fun, so let’s hit them first.

Glucose. My A1c is now down to 5.9 percent, from a starting A1c of 7.5. That means I’ve lowered my average glucose from roughly 170 mg/dL, or just over 100.

My doc was more or less slack-jawed. I had to talk her into doing the A1c, as she didn’t think it could have changed much since the one I had in January.

I’ve cut my metformin to 1000 mg/day from 2500 when I started this.

Cholesterol. Or more generally, blood lipids. Now, remember that I’m following what is, by traditional medical measures, the perfectly wrong diet for cholesterol — heavy on meats, no grains at all, and with roughly 60 percent of my calories coming from fats.

My total cholesterol is down to 123. That’s the bottom of the normal range; that’s a score that the ultra-low-fat Ornish diet would be happy to reach.

Low-density lipoproteins — LDL, the “bad cholesterol” — is down to 70.

High density lipoproteins — HDL, the “good cholesterol” — is up to 26 (up in this case being the good direction.) Although it’s still low as an absolute number, what’s perhaps more important is the ration of HDL tot total cholesterol. HDL of 26 makes my total cholesterol over HDL ratio about 4.7. This is now well under the boundary the American Heart Association recommends.

In other words, while my HDL could be better, I am now in the “good” to “very good” range.

Body fat. I’ve just started tracking this, so the numbers don’t mean a lot yet, but as you can see from the chart, it is showing a real down trend. I’m somewhere around 30 percent right now, and obviously I hope it’ll drop significantly in this 13 weeks.

My daily bodyfat percentage.

Exercise

So far, I’ve mainly been tracking Fitocracy points, which are a kind of arbitrary measure of various kinds of exercise, but handy because it converts various exercises into one easily-tracked number. (I hope to have an interview with some of the Fitocracy people in the near future; in the meantime, if you want to follow me, you can sign up for Fitocracy here.)

Since this 13 weeks season has started, i’ve accumulated 2800 Fitocracy points.

Of course, David Steinberg is doing his own series on this. I sent him some videos which didn’t work out, but I’ve just taken another set. Have a look at his piece this week, in which he makes some entirely unsubstantiated suppositions about how I’ve managed to practically break every bone in my body over 57 years. It’s pretty funny, and good advice.

The Perfect Health Diet

Hello Dave,

I like your Plan.  A great idea for people of any age.

A book suggestion for Point # 6:  
Perfect Health Diet: Regain Health and Lose Weight by Eating the Way You Were Meant to Eat by Paul Jaminet, Shou-Ching Jaminet

Also the blog:  http://perfecthealthdiet.com/

(I first heard of this on InstaPundit.  Glenn posted a plug by Paul Jaminet for his own book.)

A lot of research and thought has gone into what they recommend.  It’s very enlightening, even if you don’t choose to adopt all their ideas.

Cheers!

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Click to submit book suggestions for the new daily feature at PJ Lifestyle.

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Related at PJ Lifestyle:

 The Plan So I Don’t Waste the Last Year of My 20s

Charlie Martin, Late-Blooming Athlete: Week 2 – ‘Quality of Life’ and ‘The Un-Calloused Butt Mystery’

(See Week One here. The key passage:

The majority of activities people are accustomed to doing at a gym are neither efficient means of getting fitter nor particularly safe. A typical trainer at a typical gym is now a terrible investment, both for your fitness level and because elite-level training information is freely available online. There is no substitute for an actual qualified trainer at a quality gym, both in instruction and motivation, yet you can do great things for yourself on your own, with a computer. Charlie’s PJ Lifestyle entries strike me as a good opportunity to demonstrate this; he’s agreed to be somewhat of a lab rat.)

In Week One, I asked Charlie to tell me about any old injuries, ailments, etc. that he might have and which could be a detriment requiring a workaround while exercising. Here’s Charlie’s answer — it isn’t so much that he has some nagging pains, but that the first 53 years of his life were an extended prison beating:

The only big joints I haven’t injured somehow are my left ankle and right shoulder. Poorly resolved fractured right ankle, meniscus surgery medial side right knee, plus painful knees (right knee today) consequent to tight IT band syndrome, lower back injury in car wreck, two whiplash injuries in car wrecks, chronic RSI from typing too much, left shoulder separation in martial arts tournament.

Charlie’s medical records also show that in 1983 he took a shiv to the lung from a fellow named “White Power Bill”, but Charlie thought that not relevant to a mobility question.

Physically and psychologically, injuries can become an overwhelming discouragement from participating in a fitness regimen. My worst was a ruptured disc in my lower back that I chose not to treat with anything besides time; I had sciatica pain down my left leg for over a year and still get twinges now. But here’s the thing, and don’t just take it from me (Seriously, as I mentioned in Week One, do not just take it from me. I have a Crossfit Trainer’s Certificate, but it is currently inactive, and my attorney wife does not specialize in liability claims. Take it from this guy, a friend and brilliant Physical Therapy PhD): your body is obviously healthier when it moves. Exercise releases a rush of great stuff that encourages healing. And despite the psychological barrier of not being able to move the way you want to, either temporarily or permanently, if you haven’t — G-d forbid — suffered a catastrophic paralyzing injury, then exercising is still an activity for you.

An example: my wife had surgery to repair a torn ankle ligament about ten days ago. Nine days ago, we went to the gym together. This Monday, in a walking boot, we did this workout together: 5 One-legged squats, 10 pushups (from her knees), 15 situps — as many rounds of that triplet as possible in 15 minutes. She was working harder than anyone else in the gym, without using one leg from the knee down.

Further, that leg, according to the science, is going to improve more rapidly because the rest of her body was being healthy — all the good chemicals a workout releases head to the bum leg, too. (Kelly Starrett, the trainer linked above, cited a study noting a 30% increase in the immobilized limb’s muscle mass due to the rest of the body doing work.)

For a heroic example: here’s a video of paraplegic servicemen working out harder than most of us ever have.

So whatever’s wrong with you, Charlie: do your research, come up with a plan for your body, and get moving. Injuries don’t mean the end of your physical activity. Fight for yourself, which you’ve already been doing.

The plan should start with gaining competence with the basic functional movements, the ones a human is designed to do: raising and lowering your center of gravity (the squat); picking things up (the deadlift); and pushing things (the press). Whether you’re young and pain-free, 95 years old, or recently bludgeoned with a pipe, you should start by figuring out what your body’s “ceiling” for those movements is, and work towards that.

In Week One, I also asked Charlie to make videos of himself from the side of him trying to do a proper air squat, and then of him doing a proper deadlift and a proper shoulder press with no weight besides a broomstick or PVC pipe.

These are the primary functional movements of the body, and should be the core of every human’s fitness program. And yes — there is a proper definition of “functional” exercise.

Perhaps, at your gym, you ran into Trainer Brad from Newark, who had you balance on your knees on a giant bouncy ball while doing dumbbell shoulder raises with one arm, because he said it was “functional”. Brad was incorrect, and possibly a clown fetishist with a closet of discreetly videotaped clients.

People: you are not Cirque du Soleil sea lions. If that stuff is “functional”, than anything can be called “functional”. This would be like some 31-year-old affluent perma-student declaring a “right” to free birth control. (Bad example, I’ll come up with something more plausible.)

Rather than expand on the full, elegant definition of “functional”, I’ll describe the piece of the definition that I’ve noted tends to elicit an “ahhhhh!” from the newbies, and gets them interested in learning more, and this is why I asked Charlie to send the videos. Let’s start with the squat: why is the squat so important, and what does a healthy range of motion for the squat look like?

Again, you are not a sea lion. Your body looks like a human body primarily so you can walk, run, and raise or lower yourself, because that’s what you had to do back then to survive. And you were most definitely not designed to rest by sitting in a chair, you were designed to rest in a deep squat.

Starrett illustrated it to me this way:

If we sit so much, why don’t we get a calloused butt?

Rules to Help Break A High Fructose Corn Syrup Addiction

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Click to submit book suggestions for the new daily feature at PJ Lifestyle.

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Related at PJ Lifestyle:

TRANSCEND: The Ray Kurzweil Plan to Live Healthy Until We Finish Evolving Into Cyborgs

13 Weeks: Week 12 — In Which We Get Cross and Fit

How I Lost 50 Pounds in 6 Months without Exercising

Human Feces as Medicine?

­­­During my childhood, medicine always tasted disgusting and I suspected that adults made it so deliberately to spite children. They could have made it delicious had they wanted to.

Disgusting ingredients have been used in supposedly therapeutic concoctions down the ages. They had three qualities: vileness, rarity, and expense. These strongly promoted the placebo effect, for who would not claim to feel better if continuing to swallow camel’s goat’s bile were the alternative? A little bit of what revolts you does you good, that is the theory.

Now at least when we resort to disgusting means, they are scientifically reasonable. I worked for a time for a surgeon in a country where antibiotics were not easily available, who wanted to test honey as an antiseptic dressing for open wounds (bacteria do not grow in honey). I cannot remember the results from the bacteriological point of view, but I recall that the aesthetic results were not pleasing.

I have also seen the use of maggots for wound cleaning. The therapy is effective, but it is difficult not to be repelled by it, especially if (as I have) you have actually suffered a parasitic skin infection by maggots.

However, my disgust at honey and maggots paled by comparison with what I felt upon reading the title of a paper in a recent edition of the New England Journal of Medicine, “Duodenal Infusion of Donor Feces for Recurrent Clostridium difficile.” The excrement of various creatures was long an ingredient of supposed remedies in the days when nothing really worked, but I had fondly supposed that medicine had passes what Freud, in another context, would have called the anal stage.

The Real Purpose of Near-Death Experiences: An Interview With Betty J. Eadie

Last week on PJ Lifestyle I read with great interest a piece by P. David Hornik titled “What Near-Death Experiences Tell Us.” With “great interest” refers to my long-time fascination with near-death experiences (NDEs), which began in 1994 after a friend gifted me the book Embraced By The Light by Betty J. Eadie.

The book, according to my friend, was a “must read.” As proof, she claimed it was still on the New York Times best seller list after an entire year. (For the record, Embraced By The Light was #1 on the New York Times list in September 1993 and in the top ten for 78 weeks. Subsequently, it became the fifth bestselling book of the 1990s.)

Embraced By The Light, published in 1992, was Eadie’s personal account of her near-death experience after an operation gone awry in 1973.

Then, for more than a decade, Eadie was hesitant to write or speak about her NDE out of fear that people (including family members) would think she was totally nuts, or would not believe her story.

What makes Eadie’s NDE so controversial and intriguing is the title of the book itself. Because, immediately upon reaching heaven, Betty was “embraced by the light,” and that light was Jesus Christ and he made himself known to her.

Betty is then taken on an unforgettable tour of heaven which she describes in great detail. Throughout the book, Jesus teaches Betty His message of eternal and unconditional love. But despite her pleas to stay in heaven, Jesus sends her back to earth because it was “not yet her time.” The book concludes with Jesus’ final message to Betty, “Above all else, love one another.”

Like millions of other readers around the world (the book was published in 130 countries, translated into 38 languages, and to this date has sold over 20 million copies), I was totally captivated by Embraced. This captivation stemmed from my belief in Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior. But Betty’s NDE account, the first one I had ever read, only served as sweet confirmation that the “benign deity” (the phrase used by Hornik in his piece) not only exists, but that we will meet Him face to face “when it is our time.”

Here’s a video of Eadie on the Oprah Winfrey Show in the ’90s, when Embraced was a best-selling book:

How a Mammogram Can Kill You

Life being complex, many simple principles turn out on examination to be not as simple as at first thought. For example, everyone knows, or thinks that he knows, that prevention is better than cure. But is it always? It is often very difficult to say with certainty.

Three articles in a recent British Medical Journal tackle the vexed question of mammography, whose purpose is to detect cancer of the breast early in its development on the assumption that early detection leads to more effective treatment. The advice to women, therefore, is to get themselves scanned regularly.

This seems straightforward and commonsensical, but in fact the question of whether the light of mammography is worth its candle is devilishly complex. For example, if the treatment of breast cancer has improved (and death rates in Britain have almost halved between 1990 and 2010, thanks mainly to improved treatment rather than to early finding), then the number of cases found by mammography in order to save a single life has to increase. This in turn means that old trials – and all trials to determine the long-term effect of mammography have to be old – may no longer be relevant to the present situation. Trials of mammography are, in effect, always trying to hit a moving target.

The main problem that has bedevilled mammography is that of the false positive: the diagnosis of cancer when in fact there is none. For example, it is estimated that approximately 70,000 women in America are falsely diagnosed with cancer annually by means of mammography, that is to say a half of all those who are diagnosed.

The Plan So I Don’t Waste the Last Year of My 20s

#ByeByeRefinedSugarAddiction

On Tuesday I turned 29. Apparently this is one of those “milestone” birthdays meant to suggest that now I’m really growing old and should start worrying or feeling worse about myself in some abstract way. Apparently when you’re 30 it means that the party decade is over and you should scrape the cheeto dust out of your navel, put some pants on, and finally grow up.

So be it. Growing old has never really bothered me. (Though I wish the hair wasn’t going so fast…) I’ve felt like a cranky old man trapped in a young person’s body since at least junior high. So how about this for an old-fashioned way to really put the last 362 days of the third decade of my life to use: actually writing out a plan for the year. Here’s what I’m going to try to do so that when the 30th birthday hits in 2014 I can look back and not feel too much embarrassment at another wasted year.

In December I declared my “7 New Year’s Resolutions I Invite Others to Steal” and then began the process of integrating these general self-improvement goals into both my daily routine and the weekly schedule of my PJ Lifestyle blogging. I left them somewhat vague so over the course of the month more concrete goals could materialize. And here they are, revised from my original list but generalized so perhaps others might still find them useful to consider as potential additions to their own Lifestyle self-programming.

1. Family Life on Monday: Rediscover and Celebrate Your Family’s Origins.

On Monday this week I blogged an open letter to my wife informing her that the time had come to change directions with our Netflix diet. The number of Dexter/Battlestar Galactica-level cable shows on DVD had dried up and new releases offered little hope of consistent entertainment satisfaction. We had to start mining older regions of film and TV history — but could we agree on a path forward?

Turns out we still can. April selected the first option:

1. Watch the entire Criterion Collection. Maybe in order?

You’re always complaining (rightfully) that the past few years I’ve spent too much time on politics and don’t show you weird, artsy movies anymore. Well here’s the mother lode and now we should start exploring it.

April suggested we call it “The Criterion Challenge.” We’re going to attempt to watch as many as we can this year — and yes, as close to in the order of their release as we can. We started last night with my copy of The Seven Samurai (spine #2) and watched the first hour. I’d forgotten how entertaining a film it was — and was delighted when April got into it too.

In charting this new entertainment course for us, we’re really going back to the origins of our relationship. I never realized what a role my oddball movie tastes had for April. When we began dating seriously for a second time in the fall of 2006 (a few months after I’d graduated and she was starting her sophomore undergraduate year), I would drive up to Muncie from Indianapolis on weekends with different art movie DVDs to share with her.

But in the years since our marriage I’ve neglected this original film guide role. My movie obsession fell by the wayside to make way for political warfare and new media trouble-making. Now’s a good time to correct course as I seek to re-balance my life between the legs of culture, religion, and politics. (Instead of the ideological focus that it’s largely been for the last three years…)

And we’re both on the same page in why we’re watching this series of classic films — to further develop our own understanding of the visual arts. What makes a beautiful, powerful image? How does film tell stories and evoke feelings? April and I are going to explore these questions together and I’ll try and blog a few thoughts on each film. Also, keeping with the return to film, for our year off from Disney Land I’m going to make a point to explore the ideas that brought it into existence.

Monday Bookshelf and Blogging Focus: Research the life, work, and ideas of Walt Disney to separate the wheat from the chaff.

TRANSCEND: The Ray Kurzweil Plan to Live Healthy Until We Finish Evolving Into Cyborgs

Official description from Amazon:

Publication Date: April 28, 2009

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Click to submit book suggestions for the new daily feature at PJ Lifestyle.

New Year’s Resolution #6: Stop sacrificing health on the altar of workaholism. Saturday Bookshelf suggestions explore various diet and exercise regiments.

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Shutterstock image courtesy /  Andrea Danti

Related at PJ Lifestyle:

13 Weeks: Week 11 — In Which We Consolidate Our Losses

PJTV: Glenn Reynolds Interviews Singularity Rising Author James D. Miller

13 Weeks: Week 11 — In Which We Consolidate Our Losses

It turns out that I happened on a picture I took of myself on the 16th of October, which is just about the time I started finding myself writing in my morning pages that I was only 12 years younger than my father had been when he died….

2012 October 16

Here’s a picture from a similar angle with the same (iPod Touch) camera, taken today (Friday):

2013 January 18

I see where I’ve lost the 30 lbs: it was all from my neck. Jaysus.

So, even with my troubles seeing myself clearly, I’ve got to say, now I’m seeing some differences.

I’m continuing to plan for my next 13 weeks experiment, and you know, there’s a question I’ve been asked multiple times now: why 13 weeks?  Honestly, the answer is probably “I don’t know.” Some of it is pure superstition: I have good luck (contrarian that I am) with thirteens.  Both of my parents were born on the 13th, and they married on the 13th; I’ve lived at #13 addresses many times.  But there are some practical points about it.

Thirteen weeks is exactly one calendar quarter — there are 4 of them in a year, with a day left over.  Thirteen weeks is long enough for longer-term trends and effects to show clearly, but short enough that I can foresee an end.  If I hadn’t decided to do this experiment for thirteen weeks no matter what, there have been a couple of weight plateaus (and sudden weight gains) that could have been very demoralizing — about which more below.  Thirteen weeks is right around the average lifetime for a red blood cell, so an A1c (average blood sugar) taken next month will be from entirely within the experiment. (As you’ll recall, it’s my blood sugar that concerned me more than weight in itself.  Even though, dammit, I do tend to obsess about the weight loss.)

Now, I’ll say, the thirteen has put some people off for the opposite superstition from mine, the common triskaidekaphobia. I do intend to write this up in book form; I’ve had people tell me that I’ve got to change the title. But I have to say, 13 weeks seems to have worked for me.

As far as consolidation.  The pictures above do show the difference I think, and I’m really feeling other differences.  I’ve got a two story house; I’m not putting off trips up and down the stairs as I used to.  I feel exceptionally good.  I got a CPAP about 10 days ago, which is also helping — I may be sleeping well for the first time since puberty.  I’m sure that the apnea has been helped by the weight loss and I’m hoping continuing weight loss will help more. And, of course, my blood sugar has showed a marked improvement — as I said last week, from diabetic to post-diabetic (although it’d be more correct to say “type II diabetic in remission.”)  My mood is better too, which for someone who has had paralyzing depressions is a good and useful thing.

I seem to have more energy, both physically and mentally. Again, this isn’t too surprising.  I buy water in 1.5 liter bottles from Eldorado Springs Water Company, in cases of a dozen.  That’s basically 40 lbs; 9 bottles is just about 30 lbs.  The effect is like if I were carrying around nine of these bottles in a backpack and I took the damn thing off.  But I’m just finding it easier to do things, and not just physical things — I’m actively studying Mandarin again, and getting more writing done.  Some of that also may be the CPAP — I don’t think I understood the effect of actually getting a decent night’s sleep.

More Training

As I’ve promised, the next 13 weeks will be more about exercise, physical activity, and so forth.  i’m accumulating a number of experts to help me with this, and reading a bit more widely.  Now, you may have noticed that there is a fair bit of controversy about different diets — low fat, low carb, paleo, and so on.

What Can Be Done to Reduce Post-Hospital Syndrome?

Hospital is a dangerous place, especially for the old and very sick — which is one reason why a measure of a hospital’s efficiency is the speed with which it discharges patients home after treatment. Another reason for this measure is, of course, economy. Long stays in hospital are hugely expensive.

However, aiming to discharge patients as quickly as possible may be neither humane nor efficient. People are not units of accounting or components in an assembly line or mere mechanical contrivances. Hospitals are not car repair shops.

An article in the New England Journal of Medicine reflects upon the fact that nearly a fifth of patients treated under Medicare, 2.6 million individuals, return to hospital for further treatment within 30 days of their discharge as cured or sufficiently improved to manage at home.

Rather surprisingly, perhaps, the chances of a patient having to return to hospital do not reflect the seriousness of his original condition, nor are re-admissions invariably for the same condition as that for which the patient was admitted in the first place. On the contrary, in the majority of cases the patient is readmitted for something quite different. For example, 63, 71 and 64 percent of patients readmitted after treatment for heart failure, pneumonia, or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease are readmitted for reasons other than their original diseases.

Remembering Austin When Lance Armstrong Was Still A Hero

I still lived in Austin, Texas in 1999. That summer, against all odds, Lance Armstrong, cancer survivor, new husband, father-to-be, won his first Tour de France in an impressive display of athleticism.

He was a hero, an inspiration. When he returned to Austin, the city held a victory rally, in which park I can’t recall as Austin is loaded with large and picturesque gathering spots. A couple of friends and I went to the rally early to grab a patch of ground close enough to see Armstrong and his miracle-pregnant wife. It wasn’t all about Lance. Austinites need only the flimsiest of reasons to gather outside for a couple of beers. But we did love him. We were so proud of him. Even now, when the whole truth has outed, I can still remember the energy and joy at that rally. And the yellow. Everyone wore yellow.

A few months later, his wife gave birth to their son. The following summer he repeated his Tour victory. Soon, he welcomed twin daughters and claimed another Tour de France victory. Our pride in Armstrong overflowed. He could have done anything.

But then Lance Armstrong took off his hero mask. Sometime after his twins arrived, he left his family. I can’t remember if he already had Sheryl Crow waiting for him. It doesn’t matter really. His marriage didn’t have high conflict, at least not on her part. He might have been cheating or she might have left him due to his doping habit. But in hindsight-enhanced scenarios, he was the culpable party.

My shock at the truth about Lance Armstrong came with the split. I have a few girlfriends who spilled tears over the news. The kind of guy who can abruptly walk away from his wife and his children is capable of almost anything in service of self. So current shock at the truth surprises me. We learned that Lance Armstrong lacked honor back in 2003. The doping simply provides more details and removes any pretense for keeping that scar in the heart of Austin.

13 Weeks: Week 10 — In Which We Scheme

My mother, on what turned out to be her last birthday, with my sister-in-law Tawney.

Great news — for me at least, we report you decide — the 13 Weeks series has been renewed for another 13 weeks. (You can follow it day to day on the associated Facebook page.)

It’s actually kind of fitting that I’m announcing this now: today as I type this is the 11th of January, and the one year anniversary of my mother’s death. It will be published on Saturday 12 January, and Sunday 13 January would have been her 78th birthday.

As I said when I started this:

A sense of mortality struck me on my birthday, 57 this year; arithmetic started showing up for me. My father died in 1994, at 69. That’s only 12 years older than I am now. Mom at 77, only 20 years older than I am now.

Now, my Dad weighed in the neighborhood of 450 lbs when he died, and he smoked. My Mom, around 200 lbs and she’d smoked heavily, drunk heavily, and generally been rode hard and put up wet nearly her whole life. I’ve got some advantages, since I don’t drink or smoke; on the other hand, I’ve been struggling with my weight since I was literally 6 years old. You can hear a lot of bad diet advice in 50 years.

The long and short of it is that I want to change this and need to change this, and there’s relatively new science that suggests there are better, faster, more efficient ways to change this. So I’m doing an experiment: for 13 weeks, which I plan to start a week from today, 4 November 2012, I’m going to start an experiment where I’ll be keeping a very low carb, more or less “paleo” diet, and doing “high intensity interval training” and “high intensity strength training” two sessions a week. This scheme has good reasons behind it, biochemically and otherwise.

Then I’m writing about it, and I’m going very public with it, so, frankly, it’ll be too embarrassing to quit.

Well, it appears to have worked. At 271.5 today, I’m down 30 pounds from my October high of 301.5, and down 18 pounds from my official start date of November 4. My A1c is down from 7.5 percent to 6.2 percent, making me officially post-diabetic, and I’ve got hopes that by the time this thirteen weeks is done I’ll actually have my A1c into the normal non-diabetic range. That is to say, remission.

Forget the Calories. Nutrients Will Make You Feel Better.

Book Description

Publication Date: January 5, 2011

A revised food pyramid from the one most of us grew up on…

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Click to submit suggestions for new books for the new daily feature at PJ Lifestyle.

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Related at PJ Lifestyle:

7 New Year’s Resolutions I Invite Others to Steal

A Tsunami of Seniors: The Crisis Begins In 2026 When The First Baby Boomers Turn 80

In 1967 the Beatles song “When I’m Sixty-Four” appeared on the now iconic Sgt. Pepper album, and many, including this writer, considered age 64 “old.” (Of course, I was only 12, but 64 was old at that time.)

But when General Norman Schwarzkopf recently died at age 78, I did not consider him old.

So what happened to change my view of when old age begins?

Well for starters, I got old along with the 76 million Americans born between 1946 and 1964 who are affectionately known as “baby boomers.” Boomers transformed America at every stage of life.  Unfortunately, our nation was totally unprepared for all the change we brought every step of the way and now is no different.

Last year at an Aging in America conference, Ken Dychtwald, CEO of the consulting firm AgeWave, summed it up like this:

“We weren’t prepared for the boomers,” he said. “There weren’t enough hospitals or pediatricians. There weren’t enough bedrooms in our homes. There weren’t enough schoolteachers or textbooks or playgrounds. The huge size of this generation has strained institutions every step of the way.”

Then Dychtwald compared his New Jersey high school, with such overcrowding that students had to go to classes in shifts, to what’s in store for aging baby boomers in the coming decades.

“The boards of education had 13 years to see this coming. What was the surprise there?” said Dychtwald. “But it’s the same today with senior care and geriatric medicine and continuum of care. It’s staggering how unprepared we are.”

Yes, it is staggering indeed — and, as the saying goes, “we ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

Trigger Point Therapy for Relieving Computer Pain

I am always in pursuit of something to relieve my neck and shoulder pain from the hours I spend at the computer (yeah, I could just stay off but then how would I fill the empty days without my vice?). Anyway, my husband, Glenn, ordered this trigger point foam roller called The Grid. I already have a regular foam roller but it is large and has lost its shape. I decided to give the new foam roller a try this week and it has been a positive experience so far.

The Grid boasts using trigger therapy to treat soreness and relieve pain:

Trigger points are tiny knots that develop in a muscle when it’s injured or overworked, and are commonly a cause of most joint point. They’ve been known to lead to headaches, neck and jaw pain, lower back pain, tennis elbow, and carpal tunnel syndrome.

Based on the discoveries of Drs. Janet Travell and David Simons, in which they found the causal relationship between chronic pain and its source, myofascial trigger point therapy is used to relieve muscular pain through stretching and applied pressure to trigger points. Trigger point therapy, such as that achieved using Trigger Point Performance products, can relieve muscular aches and pains in association with these areas. It can also assist with the redevelopment of muscles and restoration of motion to joints.

The foam roller comes with a very easy to use instruction pull-out that shows you basic exercises with correct form. I went through the set and it hits every muscle group. I’m already back at the computer and feeling better. If you have computer pain or just general tightness from sitting, this little device seems to be a good one. It’s also small and easy to take on trips, to the gym or the office. Of course, staying off the computer and moving around is probably a better solution to neck pain but not likely to happen for me.

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Related on Self-Improvement at PJ Lifestyle:

7 New Year’s Resolutions I Invite Others to Steal

13 Weeks: Week Nine — In Which We See Results

13 Weeks: Week Nine — In Which We See Results

Starting on November 4th 2012, I began a 13 week experiment in changing my eating and exercise habits, for the best of all reasons: I didn’t want to die. I was chronically ill with stomach troubles, I was sleeping badly, and my average blood glucose was in the neighborhood of 150 mg/dL — well into the range of type II diabetes mellitus.  For the experiment,  I’ve cut my daily consumption of carbohydrates to a net of 30 grams a day and cut wheat out entirely, and I’ve added exercise following a Tabata Protocol, along with yoga, kettlebells, and (too rarely) weight lifting. I report my results here at PJ Media Lifestyle, and also on my 13 Weeks Facebook page.

If you’re been reading 13 Weeks since I started, you’ll remember that I had realized on about October 15 that I was 100 lbs or so overweight at 301.5; I was in chronic ill health with both gastric reflux disease and irritable bowel syndrome; and I had moved from pre-diabetic to flat-out diabetic in the span of about a year. At 57, I realized I was only 12 years younger than my father when he died, and only 20 years younger than my mother was when she died on January 11, 2012. Twenty years wasn’t enough, and twelve years was for damn sure not enough; something had to be done.

Now, after Week Nine, the effects of what I’ve done are starting to really show up. Here’s the chart I’ve been keeping to plot my progress.  The plus signs are my weight in pounds, the x’s are my blood glucose as measured with a drugstore glucometer, and the lines are the linear best fit line to the data.

As you can see, the lines are headed down — which is the good direction. On Wednesday I went to the doctor, and got weight and my bloods done again. My weight’s down 30 lbs since October 19, 19 lbs since I started this November 4th. But I swore I wasn’t paying attention to the weight (gloat). Even if I lost a lot. (Gloat.) One of the blood tests I did was the glycosylated haemoglobin HbA1c test, which is a diabetes test. I’ll tell you my results below; before I do, however, I want to explain the test and why it’s important.

With diabetes, of course, we’re primarily concerned with the blood glucose level. When I was a kid, my “second mom” Julia Medina took care of us; Mrs. Medina was diabetic and dependent on insulin, but home glucometers weren’t available; the only real test diabetics had was to watch their urine for ketones using test strips, and the only real measure they had for control of diabetes was whether you tended to fall into a coma, either from low blood sugar, or from high. If your blood sugar stayed too high, you risked blindness, advancing neuropathy and pain, and kidney disease, hearth disease, or — worst of all from my point of view — creeping necrosis of the extremities. (Your fingers and toes die and become gangrenous; they’re amputated. The stumps become gangrenous; they’re amputated a little higher. Eventually you run out of pieces and you die. Don’t even google “diabetic necrosis”, you don’t want to look at those pictures.)

Luckily, Mrs. Medina was well-controlled; she lived a long life. A whole lot of diabetics didn’t. Three things, put together, improved the chances of a diabetic living a long life over the last 20-30 years. The first was inexpensive direct tests for blood glucose levels; the second was bio-engineered human insulin (before then, insulin extracted from the pancreases of hogs was used, but it doesn’t exactly match human insulin. It was better than nothing but still had problems.) The third was the wide availability of the glycosylated haemoglobin HbA1c test (which we’re going to just call the A1c from now on.) What the A1c let doctors do is infer what your average glucose had been over about the last three months.

As a red blood cell passes from erythropoiesis (birth) to eryptosis (death and recycling), the hemoglobin sometimes binds with glucose, a process called glycosylation.

Here’s how it works. Hemoglobin, the chemical component of the blood that carries oxygen and makes the blood red, can bind to glucose, forming glucose-bearing (or glycosylated) hemoglobin. The rate at which it binds is proportional to the concentration of glucose in the blood. It binds fairly slowly, so your hemoglobin doesn’t just suck up all the sugar right away. Instead, over the life of a red blood cell (an erythrocyte), which is about 100 days in the normal human, a fairly small percentage of the hemoglobin will glycosylate. At the end of the average 100-day lifespan of the red blood cell, it’s broken down by the body and it’s components recycled; part of that process separates iron from the hemoglobin, which also liberates the glucose.

Remember, though, that the rate at which the glucose binds is dependent on the concentration – the more glucose, the more it binds to the hemoglobin, and once bound it stays bound until the red blood cell dies. The result is that the percentage of cells with glycolated hemoglobin in the blood is proportional to the average blood glucose level for the last several weeks.

Still with me? We’re getting to the payoff. From my blood glucose readings, I’d known things were improving.

In October, A1c was 7.5 percent. You can compute the equivalent average blood glucose, which comes out to be about 170 mg/dL. An A1c of 6.5 percent or more is diabetes.

Yesterday, my A1c was 6.2 percent, or an average of around 130 mg/dL. An A1c of between 5.7 percent and 6.4 percent is considered enough for a diagnosis of pre-diabetes.

Or, in my case, post-diabetes. By blood sugar is controlled now, down to healthy levels — and I’m only about two-thirds of the way through the life span of red blood cells that were new when I started this; I can expect the A1c to go down. If it keeps declining at the rate it has been, it might be as low as 5.5 percent by the end of this 13 weeks.

That would be normal.

One more thing I want to mention. A dear young friend of mine has decided she wants to enter the military, but to do so she needs to lose ten pounds, and wants to get in better shape. As a result, she’s started a blog of her own, 14 Weeks for Freedom, where she’s making her own open commitment to some life changes.

I am extremely proud of her; please drop over to the blog and give her your support.

What Is the Best Way to Treat Diabetes?

Medical controversies last a long time and are often bitter not only because science gives provisional rather then definitive answers to most questions, any of which answers may soon be overturned by further evidence, but because science by itself provides no means of deciding between incommensurable results according to a single criterion of value. Besides, everyone likes a good intellectual argument and wants to keep it going as long as possible.

An editorial in a recent edition of the New England Journal of Medicine claims that the long-running controversy over whether surgery or angioplasty is better for diabetic patients with ischaemic heart disease has now been decisively resolved in favor of the former, thanks to a paper published in the same edition. The matter is not a small one: in the United States alone 175,000 diabetic patients were treated last year either with surgery or angioplasty, and the figure is likely to rise as the number of diabetics grows.

The paper described a trial in which 947 diabetic patients with ischaemic heart disease underwent surgery and 953 underwent angioplasty (there were no untreated controls). At five years, mortality in the angiolasty group was 16.3 percent as against 10.9 percent in the surgical group; in total 26.6 percent of those treated with angioplasty had either died or had had a stroke or heart attack, as against 18.7 percent of the surgical group.

7 New Year’s Resolutions I Invite Others to Steal

For 2013 at PJ Lifestyle we’re going to try to organize the seemingly endless abyss of “Lifestyle” topics with a general theme each day. These appear on the About Us page and include links to some of the articles we’ve published this past year:

We try to blog on seven general subjects each week from a variety of perspectives that do not always agree. The topics include:

Family

On Mondays, you can read up on parenting, marriage, interpersonal relationships, dating and romance, motherhood and fatherhood, male/female relations and more.

Practical

Every Tuesday, we post career advice, self-improvement tips, product reviews, and how-to guides as well as blogs on entrepreneurship, disaster preparation, gardening, and self-sufficiency.

Laughter

The middle of the week requires some laughter. That’s why every Wednesday we’ll have humorous pieces featuring satire, viral videos, goofy images and amusing photoshops, cute animals, slideshow galleries and other memes from across the Web.

Culture

On Thursday, PJ Lifestyle is your go-to place for the latest info on pop culture – ranging from movies, TV, novels, music and celebrities – as well as posts about other cultures – like military culture, counterculture, California culture, traditional culture, international culture, odd subcultures, geek culture – and more.

Mind

End the workweek with some brain food. On Fridays, we’ll have posts on science, technology, the future, history, philosophy, and the natural and animal world.

Body

Spend Saturdays finding new recipes and cooking tips, learning about new ways to exercise and stay healthy, reading medical stories, and keeping up with sports and outdoor life.

Spirit

And on Sundays, you’ll find content featuring interfaith dialogue, religion-based commentary, and posts on spirituality, ethics and morality.

One of the most important contributors to PJ Lifestyle this year has been Charlie Martin. His Thirteen Weeks diet and and exercise regimen has been an inspiration. This past fall Charlie has updated us every week on his progress to improve his health and live a long, long life. We’re going to try to provide more content like this — but on all seven subjects. Not just blog posts pontificating on what should be, but articles documenting what we do. Too often as writers and bloggers we forget that these New Media tools aren’t the end. They’re merely the means to whatever end we want to pursue and achieve. And at PJ Lifestyle that end is a happier, more fulfilling, richer life appreciating all the possibilities of what it means to be free.

A book I’ll be blogging about more this year and including on a future update of my Counterculture conservatives book list…

I’ve decided on 7 New Year’s Resolutions this year, each corresponding with one of these themes and inspiring my daily blogging. I invite others to join me and offer their suggestions.

5 Positive Personality Traits Baby Boomer Women Developed While Waiting By The Phone

“It must be him, it must be him, oh dear God, it must be him or I shall die.”

Aging female baby boomers can relate to these lyrics from a 1967 hit song by Vikki Carr entitled, It Must Be Him.

Before the advent of answering machines, and decades before mobile communications and social media, waiting by the phone for your man to call was an ancient mating tradition that single women of all ages thankfully will never again have to endure.

I was reminded of this dating ritual since we are on the cusp of celebrating what is traditionally known as the greatest date night of all, New Year’s Eve.

While wracking my brain thinking of a suitable baby boomer topic applicable to this holiday, it hit me… New Year’s Eve, 1971, when I was a high school sophomore and my boyfriend was a senior.

All that stands out about that evening was my having to wait by the phone for my boyfriend to call to tell me the time he was coming by to take me to a house party (where someone’s parents were out of town).

As 5 pm turned into 6 pm, turned into 7 pm, turned into 8 pm, I became extremely anxious, especially when my mother said, “Would it be so bad if you stayed home?” (Yea mom, how about the end of the world as I know it.)

When Mr. Considerate finally called at 8 pm the trauma ceased. But thinking back upon that 1971 New Year’s Eve, it was how waiting by the phone helped form five positive personality traits that women like me did not even realize we were developing.  Eventually these five traits served baby boomer women extremely well as we made our way through the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s taking advantage of all the new career opportunities that the women’s movement afforded.

Here are the five personality traits aging baby boomer women learned while waiting by the phone.

1. Patience

When you were forced to accept someone else’s timetable you learned it was not just all about you. Waiting by the phone developed patience and was superb training for almost any career and life in general.

2. Rejection

This feeling was experienced when you finally realized that he was not going to call after he said (or you assumed) he would. Learning to cope with rejection without feeling like a complete loser was an important life lesson. The key was to think about all your positive attributes that this man was obviously missing. Then move ahead and don’t look back. This concept was easily applied to the professional world, especially if you were a business owner or involved in sales of any kind. Women of a certain age who experienced sitting by the phone waiting for him to call learned how to be resilient in the face of rejection.

3. Self worth/Self esteem

You waited by the phone and he did call. High five! You were on top of your game. All your flirting skills worked and you were the master of the feminine universe. (But sometimes you discovered that he was not worth waiting for!)

Later in life this same initial exhilaration was experienced when you landed a new job or a new client/contract/project was won. But you never let it go to your head. One learned early on that you must never be cocky because rejection in love or life could be lurking right around the corner.

4. Diplomacy 

He called, (maybe even weeks after he said he would) and you refrained from telling him that he was an insensitive jerk. But since you were really glad to hear from him you said no such thing. Later in the business world this skill came in handy when “the customer was always right” even if he/she was not.

5. Playing the Game

Once while chatting with some guy friends in my high school classes they admitted to me that often they did not call a girl after they said they would because they did not want to appear “pussy whipped.” (Yes, that was the operative term at the time.) So from this conversation I learned that there was a lot of game playing going on when it came to the timing of “the call.”

As a result, my friends and I would discuss when it was time to stop waiting and time to start living. (However, flirting with his friends was always an appropriate response.) The lesson “stop waiting and start living” developed into positive personality traits that were applicable to many future life situations.

But alas, girls/women today don’t have to deal with any of this waiting by the phone. In fact, waiting is a thing of the past since now there is no stigma attached to calling a boy before he calls you. Girls today will call, text, tweet, Facebook, or email and if that does not get his attention they will have their friends call, text, email, Facebook or tweet. From what I have heard about today’s dating habits, “whatever it takes” to catch the attention of the man of the moment seems to be acceptable behavior.

This behavior is a result of both the instant communications revolution and the women’s movement which generally has made the girls/women of today much more aggressive than my friends or I ever were in high school and college.

Perhaps this more aggressive behavior is cultural “payback” for all the countless hours their baby boomer mothers and grandmothers spent waiting by the phone especially in the weeks leading up to important date nights like New Year’s Eve. For around that time whenever the phone rang, teenage girls and young women were conditioned into thinking, “It must be him, it must be him, please be him or I will die.”

Happy New Year’s everyone!

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More on generations at PJ Lifestyle:

Dissecting Baby Boomer Liberalism Like a Frog in Science Class

Baby Boomers: The Most Depressed Generation

Young America! Stop Letting Boomers Feed Off You

13 Weeks: Week Eight — Plateaus and Diets and Goals, Oh My!

Episode VIII: A NEW HOPE. It is a period of gluttony and excess. The Taubes rebellion, striking back from a hidden base of scientific papers, anecdotal stories, and statistics, has managed to win its first high-intensity battle against body fat and blood glucose, only to find itself stymied by the holiday season, plateauing weight, and coffee cake. Follow Our Hero at PJ Lifestyle and Facebook  as he enters the eighth week of his thirteen week experiment.

Yeah, okay, it’s a little cheesy, but it sure worked for Lucas. So this is Week Eight, and you remember all that stuff about plateaus for the last two weeks? Well, you can forget about it. This morning’s weight was 272 pounds, which is 5 pounds or more off in the last week and within a hair of 30 pounds off since I first had my mortality wake-up call in October. Blood glucose has a bigger variance, so since day numbers aren’t as useful, but my average morning fasting blood glucose for the first week of the experiment was 142; for the last 7 days, it has been 122. This is progress.

Twelve-steppers are told to “trust the process” and it’s good advice, but it sure is a helluva sight easier to trust the process when it’s actually visibly working.

Now that I’m well past the halfway point, however, and the end of this experiment starts to be something foreseeable, people are starting to ask me what my next goals will be. This goes along with the people who ask you what your New Year’s Resolution will be?

My New Year’s Resolution is not to make any New Year’s Resolutions.

As I’ve said a couple of times, the physiology of this whole low-carb eating plan is interesting, but the longer I go into the experiment, the more the psychology of “dieting” and weight loss, and socially-conditioned feelings about diets and weight, and my own personal baggage (two steamer trunks, three suitcases, and an extensive scrapbook) involving all of this has become the most interesting part.

This week, in addition to the sudden weight loss itself, I had what I think has to be described as a therapeutic insight about my weight and that baggage. How I came to that realization would be a long, extraordinarily geeky but eventually boring story involving, of all things, MMORPG computer games, but the upshot is that I realized that in my day-to-day life, when I’m interacting in person with other people, I’ve always — always — had a subconscious awareness that I was fat, and that being fat was disgusting, so therefore I was disgusting.

I suspect this may have had some impact on my confidence in social situations.