"Make it Count"
Videos and stories like this make me want to abandon all responsibilities and go galavanting around the planet.
An article by Ari Schulman, which I quoted last week, Jack Kerouac's On the Road as an example of the kind of inspirational journey which is increasingly difficult and even impossible to make today. After fifty years of media saturation ruining the thrill of the unknown when making the trek to a hitherto unexplored place, journeys of self-discovery aren't what they used to be.
This video, however, reminds me, and should remind all of us, that spontaneous travel can still yield very, very special results.
For me personally, I'm seeing this at just the right and wrong time. I graduate in two weeks, but I've already applied and been accepted to the only graduate school to which I applied. It's hardly the time to drop everything and go globetrotting...but after seeing this video, I really, really want to.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxfZkMm3wcg]
Video by Casey Neistat.
Originally seen on Living Superhuman.
Eating like adults.
When I start thinking about health, food and culture, I have a hard time stopping. Within minutes of posting about intermittent fasting, I had to go ahead and start a draft of this entry. There will be some anger.
Most of my acquaintances are maintained on a fairly transient basis. I keep very few close friends, and outside of that small sphere I often go weeks or months without seeing many other people. Given these circumstances, my dramatic weight loss last summer surprised a lot of people when they saw me again in the fall. The inevitable question came often: "how did you do it?" And they still come often. The questions have come for so long by now that my response is barely more than a grunt and an email containing a link to Mark's Daily Apple.
Americans' general lack of culture-wide health consciousness is revealed in the way that people almost always follow the same script with the questions they ask. And it drives me batty. Everyone is still influenced by what "authoritative" sources have told us about low-fat and heart disease, but this leads to worry and confusion when confronted by the success seen in high-fat diets like Atkins or the Primal Blueprint/paleo lifestyle.
For the latter half of the twentieth century to the present, Americans have been steadily gaining weight and making concerted efforts to lose it. And, in our defense, our culture does not help this pursuit. Our entire system of food business, subsidized grain crops, additives, long-term shipping and storage of produce, factory farms, processed foods and the fructose industry all work in concert to create an environment which lends itself much more easily to an unhealthy population than a healthy one. The icing on the cake is the misinformation that, for forty years, has dominated weight loss and nutrition advisement.
Medical science, historically, evolves and changes over time as new research finds the flaws in old research and the accepted standards are amended accordingly. In the 1970s, the research surrounding weight control and heart disease was latched onto by the government and incorporated it into the recommendations on what US citizens should and shouldn't be eating. This occurred at the same time as the creation of farm subsidies and the corn and soy industries. Matters of health were made into matters of business and government policies. Today, far too many doctors still operate off of their med school training from thirty years ago, or longer, while "nutritionists" speak from the same tired script as the docs.
And this is why I grow so angry with the people with whom I come into contact. The food pyramid was tried, and it failed. Low-fat diets were tested for forty years and also failed in their turn. But the morbidly obese, still excusing themselves as "big boned" and "genetically disadvantaged," like the mouth-breathing groupthinkers they too often tend to be, stubbornly cling to the exhausted notion that "heart healthy whole grains" and "low fat" variations on pizza and snack foods are the route to good health and fitness.
In the age of the internet, if you truly care about how look, feel or eat, you have no excuse to be misinformed. When you are still quoting research from forty or fifty years ago and claiming authority on the subject of weight loss, don't be offended when I laugh in your face. To discredit my experience is disrespectful. To deny science is ignorance.
But above all, don't ask for me to waste time explaining my lifestyle to you if your response is going to be "I could never do that."
Hmm. One expresses their desire for a change, but simultaneously proclaims their weakness and pre-accepted inability to execute said change. That's a self-fulfilling prophecy right there.
Think of it this way, and perhaps you will understand my lack of patience. There is a group of people who allow emotion and the pleasure of the moment to dictate their choices. They like sweet things and fun foods sold in brightly-colored packages. In the grand old American tradition of "if some is good, then more is better," they desire their sweeties in large amounts, and they get complain when they can't get them.
In almost any other context, we would be talking about children.
However, in the realm of lifestyle and nutrition, this mentality is an accurate description of most adults. Despite their age and supposed maturity, too many adults are downright unwilling to accept the facts when confronted with evidence that our American food culture is a business which sells poor health in the long run.
Steady weight gain occurs from an unhealthy lifestyle. A short-term diet is a temporary fix. Long-term weight loss and weight maintenance requires an acceptance of these facts and permanent changes in lifestyle. Nothing exists in a vacuum.
We have every resource available to us, and there are people like me who are walking proof that a little bit of time spent researching health can yield amazing benefits in a relatively short amount of time.
If you are one of those people who complained of "those ten pounds" so long that they've had time to multiply into twenty, it is time to stop looking for easy fixes and annoying the rest of us with your repetitive complaints. It is your responsibility. Not your environment, not genetics, not your family history. It is your responsibility. And in the age of endless free resources on the internet, you have no excuse.
Autonomous cars and a lack of margins.
This article was left over on my reading list from yesterday.
At a 2009 technology conference, Brad Templeton of the Electronic Frontier Foundation lectured on the promise of autonomous vehicles; when asked by a member of the audience how a society that didn’t have to pay attention to the world would be affected in its perception and cognitive abilities, he responded: “I don’t think that’s a bug. I think it’s a feature.” After all, he said, we would be freed to read or be otherwise productive in the car. Of course, one might object that there are ways in which paying attention to the world is a “feature” and not a “bug”: surely, for one thing, there are things in the world worth paying attention to. [Link]
I don't have any real thoughts or analysis on this. It simply makes me sad that our culture's non-stop drive to work and make money for its own sake means that Mr. Templeton suggests that people would be "freed to read or be otherwise productive in the car."
If this is the wave of the future, I wish that it might be advertised in a different way. Such as: saying that consumers would be "freed to read or otherwise relax in the car." We tend to always try to squeeze extra work into the unoccupied periphery of our lives. We meed margins!
For myself, this my daily commute represents the only part of the day wherein I can let my mind rest a little bit, so I turn on an audiobook. At home, I try to turn off the computer at least an hour before I go to sleep, just to give my brain some time to relax and settle before I go to sleep. And the funny thing is that my productivity goes up when I allow myself some extra time to decompress.
Pointing the Finger II - A final thought.
A couple of weeks ago, before the throes of a research paper derailed my unscheduled-yet-regular blogging, I spilled some thoughts about degraded communication. Instead of reiterating everything I wrote there, I will simply post a piece of the Arnheim quote which opened that entry:
We must not forget that in the past the inability to transport immediate experience and to convey it to other made the use of language necessary and thus compelled the human mind to develop concepts. For in order to describe things one must draw the general from the specific; one must select, compare, think. When communication can be achieved by pointing with the finger, however, the mouth grows silent, the writing hand stops, and the mind shrinks.
Okay, that's pretty well established. Unless we consciously communicate our thoughts and impressions of life in a literate and descriptive manner, as was once the necessity, our capability to do it at all will diminish.
Considering the matter further, it struck me just how much that we as a culture have become accustomed to "pointing the finger."
Consider:
- Emoticons
- Microblogging
- Chatpspeak
- GIFs
- Memes
Intermittent fasting and the myth of "three squares a day."
Scenario #1 Standard American Life
I wake up in the morning and start my day with a bowl of cereal, toast and a glass of juice.
At noon, I eat a sandwich with chips and a Snickers bar for dessert.
At 3pm, I'm hungry and focusing on work is difficult, so I eat another Snickers and wash it down with a cup of coffee.
For dinner at 6pm, I eat a "real meal" of meat, vegetables and a dinner roll. A piece of leftover cake follows for dessert.
I go to sleep and repeat the sequence the next day.
Scenario #2
I wake up in the morning and start my day with some eggs and salsa or a leftover piece of meat from the night before.
At noon, I have a salad with grilled chicken strips, drizzled with olive oil and balsamic vinegar. I eat a few squares of dark chocolate for dessert.
At 3pm, I'm feeling a bit peckish, so I toss back a handful of nuts.
For dinner at 6pm, I eat meat, vegetables and some fruit as a garnish or a dessert.
I go to sleep and repeat the sequence the next day.
Scenario #3
Primal Blueprint + Intermittent Fasting
I wake up in the morning. I ate a big meal the night before, so I drink a cup of coffee and decide to wait until I'm hungry to eat again.
At noon, I'm hungry for lunch, so I go out to my favorite restaurant for a bunless hamburger with plenty of onions and mushrooms on top, served with a side salad or some mixed vegetables. A few squares of dark chocolate round out the meal to satisfaction.
At 3pm, the fats and proteins in the burger are satisfying enough so that I am not hungry and can work through the day without loss of focus.
At 6pm, I'm hungry but not ravenous. Dinner is another arrangement of meat and vegetables, light portions.
I go to sleep and repeat the sequence the next day, with variation in schedule and meals skipped based on hunger.
Which of these makes the most sense? The latter two are obviously the more healthy choices of food, as well as in which order the meals are consumed, i.e., starting the day with protein and fat instead of simple carbs...but what's all that nonsense about skipping meals?
Question for your Sunday: Why do we eat three meals a day? Do we eat because we're truly hungry, or because a government-recommended diet high in simple carbohydrates has conditioned us to want three meals a day?
America has an epidemic. It isn't obesity or diabetes or heart disease; those are symptoms.
The epidemic is herd mentality. Blind acceptance of a status quo.
A USDA stamp on a box does not make a food nutritious or ideal as an energy source. It simply means that it has the required amount of certain ingredients or "fortifications" to make it passable to be sold to consumers. 60 Minutes aired a piece several months ago that showed how companies actually engineer processed foods to have the same qualities as addictive or controlled substances. Pre-made food bought in colorful boxes is created specifically to manipulate you into feeling hungry sooner, desire that taste again, and buy more. Think about that.
Healthy foods, that is to say, whole foods, meat and produce, raised or grown without additives, are where true nutrition is to be found. They provide necessary fats, proteins, vitamins and minerals for human life. And most importantly to the human experience, they provide satiety.
When your food is satisfying and provides your body with what it needs to replenish cells and nourish your muscles and organs, there is no reason to eat, unless you are hungry. The problem is, food is so easy to procure in our culture that we often forget what hunger actually feels like, resulting in snacking and overeating. One reason for this is the Western attachment to the idea of three meals a day, and the oft-repeated mantra that breakfast is somehow the most important meal of the day.
However, if your meals are complete and provides actual nutrition, you might not really be hungry first thing in the morning. If so, don't eat! Alternatively, if you are hungry in the morning and eat breakfast, and the satisfaction from breakfast stays all the way until the lunch hour, do you really need to eat lunch?
This applies to any meal, or more than one meal. Modern life often requires a lot of time spent being sedentary, either working behind a desk or, in my case, spending time sitting in a college lecture/regurgitate-lecture-on-paper environment. The assumption that we need to constantly replenish the very minor caloric expenditure of sitting is just silly.
In a hunter-gatherer society, or at the very least, a society that is not dependent on grain agriculture (something that wasn't necessary until humans started congregating in cities and found it necessary to sustain large populations with cheap, bulk crops), food isn't always readily available. That is why primitive cultures who still hunt and gather instead of rely on farming for their food sources tend to be incredibly healthy until "heroes from the West" descend to "civilize" them.
If you're not hungry at one of the culturally prescribed 8am/12pm/6pm meal times, do yourself a favor and just wait. The idea that "one size fits all," that something terrible will happen if you skip a meal, is just silly. What you put into your body is an individual experience, and should be a conscious choice. If you're not hungry, no one has the right to make you eat.
Every now and again, I like to go twenty-four hours without consuming food. I'll drink some black coffee (no sugar) or tea, but I give my body time to reset. It accelerates fat-burning, it sharpens my mind through consequent ghrelin production and restores insulin sensitivity. And when I am between meals, I try not to snack; my liver needs a break now and again. This comes in handy on long flights, where the unapologetically disgusting food served on airplanes actually does more to discourage one from eating.
But, perhaps most importantly, it makes me appreciate food. You have to eat properly before you can skip meals properly. When you eat real foods like meat, fowl, fish, vegetables, fruits and nuts, your palate becomes much more sensitive; the act of enjoying a meal when nobly hungry takes on special significance.
When you choose to set your own schedule, you are no longer one of the herd. Your relationship with food changes. Instead of mindlessly shoving back lab-engineered, factory-assembled crap every few hours, the food experience becomes just that: an experience.
I am fasting as I write this. I indulged in a large meal of Indian food yesterday, liberal helpings of chicken and vegetables topped off by an indulgence in the heavenly Indian dessert gajar halwa. I haven't been hungry since, so I haven't eaten. It's been almost twenty-four hours now, and I feel fantastic. I am awake and alert; the words are flowing freely as I write.
Respect yourself. Respect your food. Eat when hungry or not at all.
Further reading:
- Mark Sisson's "Why Fast?" Series [Mark's Daily Apple]
- I Am a Ghrelin Addict [gnolls.org]
- Intermittent Fasting: A Beginner's Guide [Art of Manliness]
- The Flavorists [60 Minutes Excerpt - Video]