When did narcissism become such a widespread problem? Seems like it used to be confined to a few "beautiful people" but more and more i see it turning into a more mainstream ugliness.
Is it because in the late 20th century, American child-rearing practices became so fucked-up? "Entitled" children whose desires direct their entire households have been existant before, but they seem epidemic now. When parents don't want to behave like parents, but rather be their children's FRIENDS, it shouldn't be a surprise. Is it the gag-worthy example children have been seeing on television for the last couple of decades, on the Disney Channel and its imitators? My daughter doesn't agree with my hypothesis that the shallow and overpriviledged characters on television are a big influence on behavior in children -- she says that as a child she always had an appreciation that people in sitcoms etc. were not real-life role-models for behavior, but i have to wonder about others....
It's not that attention-seekers and human deraillieurs haven't been around a LO-O-O-O-ONG TIME -- of course they have. Way back in my youth, every year in gradeschool had its class clowns trying to attract the notice of their teachers and fellow-students. There was always one kid whose hand shot up and waved around when a question was asked or solicited, even if their input was off-topic. In later years, always someone who droned on and on while time ran out for others who needed questions answered too.
Did these people, as children, get too little attention at home or too much? Whatever the cause, i see more and more people in public and online, making every subject ALL ABOUT THEM. They are incapable of objectivity. Every discussion HAS to include them, relevancy be damned. If they aren't the center of attention, there is something wrong with the situation and the human wallpaper around them.
These people have no respect for others, and their own self-esteem is inflated to an anti-social degree. I wish more venues would ban their trolls, because correcting and arguing with them is counter-productive -- they're merely sucking up the attention they've solicited for themselves, whether it be positive or not. Simply ignoring them leaves them free to pollute and clutter; taking away their power to distract is a far better solution for their victims.
(On a related note, check this out: http://www.totalityofbeing.com/FramelessPages/Articles/BaronofVampires.htm )
Friday, July 5, 2013
Thursday, July 4, 2013
another seeker doesn't tolerate meat-only diet
Because of one thing and another, i'm slow in presenting the news -- my husband gave the Strong Medicine protocol the ol' college try, and concluded that it isn't for him. He faithfully played the game for three days, and got thoroughly bored with it ... AND said he wasn't feeling very well either.
Of course, three days didn't get him past the low-motility phase (i was doing it with him, and nor did i adjust in that fashion). However, i "allowed" him to quit at the point he did because of his first objection -- if the dietary tedium got to him so quickly, there's no way he can do this long-term. Sustainability is immensely important when choosing a dietary plan to live with for (essentially) the rest of your life.
I came up with a new way to compromise in our shared dietary future: he gets an additional side of bagged salad with home-made (low-omega6) dressing to add fat calories and bulk to every lunch and dinner we have at home. He's much more fond of salad than i am, and tolerates lettuce just fine (while i don't). Since i learned the stick-blender method of mayonnaise production, it'll be quite simple to churn out plenty of good dressings, especially since my daughter gave me the MDA recipe book of sauces and dressings for my birthday (thanks, L!).
For my part of the food landscape, i'll continue to go meat-heavy while being careful of what vegetable-matter i use by way of garnish. Realizing that some of my intolerances may be related to my intestinal flora, i recently began a probiotic containing C. Butyricum (and a couple of other "bugs" -- thanks for the inspiration, George!) in hopes of improving diversity of population in there. I've also been inspired by Kindke's recent post to increase my intake of carnitine, and i just ordered a bottle of a high-potency liquid version....
We'll see how these tweaks succeed! As Wooo pointed out, there's still a couple of months to profit from summer's seasonal benefits before autumn's fat-encouraging qualities descend on us again.
Of course, three days didn't get him past the low-motility phase (i was doing it with him, and nor did i adjust in that fashion). However, i "allowed" him to quit at the point he did because of his first objection -- if the dietary tedium got to him so quickly, there's no way he can do this long-term. Sustainability is immensely important when choosing a dietary plan to live with for (essentially) the rest of your life.
I came up with a new way to compromise in our shared dietary future: he gets an additional side of bagged salad with home-made (low-omega6) dressing to add fat calories and bulk to every lunch and dinner we have at home. He's much more fond of salad than i am, and tolerates lettuce just fine (while i don't). Since i learned the stick-blender method of mayonnaise production, it'll be quite simple to churn out plenty of good dressings, especially since my daughter gave me the MDA recipe book of sauces and dressings for my birthday (thanks, L!).
For my part of the food landscape, i'll continue to go meat-heavy while being careful of what vegetable-matter i use by way of garnish. Realizing that some of my intolerances may be related to my intestinal flora, i recently began a probiotic containing C. Butyricum (and a couple of other "bugs" -- thanks for the inspiration, George!) in hopes of improving diversity of population in there. I've also been inspired by Kindke's recent post to increase my intake of carnitine, and i just ordered a bottle of a high-potency liquid version....
We'll see how these tweaks succeed! As Wooo pointed out, there's still a couple of months to profit from summer's seasonal benefits before autumn's fat-encouraging qualities descend on us again.
Monday, July 1, 2013
Saturday, June 29, 2013
physiological/dietary hint
"If a woman is fat, fair and forty, and has borne some children, she is the type most likely to be full of gallstones," reminisced Dr. Donaldson of "Strong Medicine" after a long and successful career. I believe this fact contains hints about perennial truths of modern life as well as compelling dietary advice.
If you want to keep your figure, having children is one of the worst things you can do to your body. Between Nature (flooding you with hormones and robbing your body of nutrients) and Conventional Wisdom ("chow down! you're eating for two!"), it's a rare individual who comes out the other side without laying down body fat which is progressively more difficult to get rid of after each pregnancy.
Middle age, through the niggardliness of enzyme secretion and even MORE bad hormonal signals, piles on the pounds all by itself. Women who had remained effortlessly normal-weight up to perimenopause finally get an idea of what some of us have dealt with all our lives, when with no change of diet or habit their body composition goes straight to hell.
As for those of us who were willing and able to fight fat-growth, well, we have tended to spend decades in calorie-counting and non-fat consumption, losing some pounds and gaining some back, over and over till our metabolisms are thoroughly confused about whether it can afford to let us burn body-fat or not. And we know what causes gallstones -- yes, all those low-fat-eating years when bile sat in storage in underused gallbladders.
This brings us to the "fair" portion of the introductory sentence -- women whose forebears have spent thousands of years in northern climes, where their ancestrally-dark skin, hair and eyes have been bleached by countless generations of seeking to absorb optimal quantities of sunlight. Women who are, genetically, separated by millennia from large amounts of plant foods in the diet, until agriculture finally reached the "frozen north" (which was significantly later than in places like the "Fertile Crescent"). Women who have no business eating a year-round load of concentrated carbohydrates of ANY kind, let alone the garbage that passes for food these days.
RIGHT BEFORE OUR EYES we have seen what happens to this kind of people when "novel modern foodstuffs" are introduced to a gene-stock not accustomed to a high-carb diet -- Cleave wrote about it, Stefansson wrote about it, countless missionaries wrote about it.... People in North America and Pacific islands and other places that were not invaded till comparatively recently, who took to the addictive and easy-to-prepare carbs of "civilization" and twenty years later WHAM -- unprecedented diseases completely destroy their well-being!
"Fair" women should not eat industrial and agricultural foods on a regular basis. To put that in LESS archaic and exclusionary terms, women, even more than men, should eschew the neolithic agents of disease, ESPECIALLY women whose ancestors have most recently adopted an agricultural lifestyle. We have fewer hormonal buffers to protect our bodies from the damage that these things wreak. Our bodies have built-in protections for survival of ourselves and our children, but they are no match for the sheer destructiveness of modern life.
If we could find an objective and unbiased jury before whom we could present our evidence, i believe they'd come to the same conclusion i have: products of agriculture as well as the kind of society that agriculture (including pastoralism) has empowered, are SINGULARLY bad for the health and welfare of women. We've been encouraged to breed excessively while undermining our ability to do so in a healthy fashion. We've lost our individual dignity, autonomy and sense of sorority because of the "need" to compete for high-quality mates (i.e., capability of passing the best genes to the next generation). We've been indoctrinated to believe that the very things which are "killing" us are in fact good -- like paternalistic religion, libertarianism, nationalism ... and wholesomewholegrains, antioxidantfruitsandvegetables, hearthealthyvegetableoils and the low-fat diets which undeniably give us gallstones.
If you want to keep your figure, having children is one of the worst things you can do to your body. Between Nature (flooding you with hormones and robbing your body of nutrients) and Conventional Wisdom ("chow down! you're eating for two!"), it's a rare individual who comes out the other side without laying down body fat which is progressively more difficult to get rid of after each pregnancy.
Middle age, through the niggardliness of enzyme secretion and even MORE bad hormonal signals, piles on the pounds all by itself. Women who had remained effortlessly normal-weight up to perimenopause finally get an idea of what some of us have dealt with all our lives, when with no change of diet or habit their body composition goes straight to hell.
As for those of us who were willing and able to fight fat-growth, well, we have tended to spend decades in calorie-counting and non-fat consumption, losing some pounds and gaining some back, over and over till our metabolisms are thoroughly confused about whether it can afford to let us burn body-fat or not. And we know what causes gallstones -- yes, all those low-fat-eating years when bile sat in storage in underused gallbladders.
This brings us to the "fair" portion of the introductory sentence -- women whose forebears have spent thousands of years in northern climes, where their ancestrally-dark skin, hair and eyes have been bleached by countless generations of seeking to absorb optimal quantities of sunlight. Women who are, genetically, separated by millennia from large amounts of plant foods in the diet, until agriculture finally reached the "frozen north" (which was significantly later than in places like the "Fertile Crescent"). Women who have no business eating a year-round load of concentrated carbohydrates of ANY kind, let alone the garbage that passes for food these days.
RIGHT BEFORE OUR EYES we have seen what happens to this kind of people when "novel modern foodstuffs" are introduced to a gene-stock not accustomed to a high-carb diet -- Cleave wrote about it, Stefansson wrote about it, countless missionaries wrote about it.... People in North America and Pacific islands and other places that were not invaded till comparatively recently, who took to the addictive and easy-to-prepare carbs of "civilization" and twenty years later WHAM -- unprecedented diseases completely destroy their well-being!
"Fair" women should not eat industrial and agricultural foods on a regular basis. To put that in LESS archaic and exclusionary terms, women, even more than men, should eschew the neolithic agents of disease, ESPECIALLY women whose ancestors have most recently adopted an agricultural lifestyle. We have fewer hormonal buffers to protect our bodies from the damage that these things wreak. Our bodies have built-in protections for survival of ourselves and our children, but they are no match for the sheer destructiveness of modern life.
If we could find an objective and unbiased jury before whom we could present our evidence, i believe they'd come to the same conclusion i have: products of agriculture as well as the kind of society that agriculture (including pastoralism) has empowered, are SINGULARLY bad for the health and welfare of women. We've been encouraged to breed excessively while undermining our ability to do so in a healthy fashion. We've lost our individual dignity, autonomy and sense of sorority because of the "need" to compete for high-quality mates (i.e., capability of passing the best genes to the next generation). We've been indoctrinated to believe that the very things which are "killing" us are in fact good -- like paternalistic religion, libertarianism, nationalism ... and wholesomewholegrains, antioxidantfruitsandvegetables, hearthealthyvegetableoils and the low-fat diets which undeniably give us gallstones.
Thursday, June 27, 2013
accidental loss of connectivity
J and i took a two-day road trip down into southern Missouri and back, using a lot of state and county roads instead of US-highways and interstates -- such drives are a lot more interesting and scenic! We visited the farm home of one of my favorite authors from childhood, we stayed overnight in a cabin at a state park which is famous for its trout-fishing, we looked around another two state parks, and we were not only internet-bereft for most of that time, but the cellphone read "no service" a shocking amount of time.
Oh, how the internet has spoiled me! The ability to look up information about the next segment of one's trip is a luxury we didn't have until comparatively recently. To pull the car over into a roadside stop area, turn on the portable modem and connect the ipad up to see if there's anywhere decent to eat in the upcoming town is a marvelous ability. IF IT WORKS.
My longer trips, which utilize the interstate highway system more, have revealed comparatively few "dead" zones for my Verizon service, mostly in northeastern Texas (even in desert areas in west Texas and New Mexico, where my daughter's T-mobile was useless, my smartphone was working though sometimes VERY slow). In tight little valleys (like Montauk Park) and canyons, "no service" is expected. But 100 miles out from St. Louis, in farming country, i have NO ability to call AAA if my car decides to throw a tantrum? Amazing -- in a bad way.
I guess public telephone booths and highway call boxes are NOT obsolete yet....
Oh, how the internet has spoiled me! The ability to look up information about the next segment of one's trip is a luxury we didn't have until comparatively recently. To pull the car over into a roadside stop area, turn on the portable modem and connect the ipad up to see if there's anywhere decent to eat in the upcoming town is a marvelous ability. IF IT WORKS.
My longer trips, which utilize the interstate highway system more, have revealed comparatively few "dead" zones for my Verizon service, mostly in northeastern Texas (even in desert areas in west Texas and New Mexico, where my daughter's T-mobile was useless, my smartphone was working though sometimes VERY slow). In tight little valleys (like Montauk Park) and canyons, "no service" is expected. But 100 miles out from St. Louis, in farming country, i have NO ability to call AAA if my car decides to throw a tantrum? Amazing -- in a bad way.
I guess public telephone booths and highway call boxes are NOT obsolete yet....
Sunday, June 23, 2013
"authoritative" writers owe their readers good reasons for their recommendations
This was a note i made to myself on the Low-Carb Cruise, and i meant to write on the subject when i became inspired. The inspiration came yesterday, from the person who originally prompted the note. She did it again!
This was the woman whose talk actually "put off" my husband during the seminars. Her husband, a physician, came across very well both on the stage and off -- he gave me a piece of advice which impressed me with his insight and experience. Apparently, before the two of them married she was in publicity ... and it shows. She's probably been an asset to their professional success, but as the front-woman for nutritional educators, she leaves a good deal to be desired.
I read an article which she wrote -- one of those "x# foods you should never eat" kind of things. I confess, that kind of article tends to annoy me in the first place because the style is so "cheap media hook-ish." But when she was discussing the objectionable ingredient in the product being targeted, she threw in the logic-dismissing comment that this ingredient was also used in an industrial application -- after all, if they use THAT to do this icky thing, you certainly won't want to EAT it!
Sorry, chickie, you just lost all the engineers in the audience, and probably a good chunk of the chemists, biologists, lab-techs, mathematicians, and other technical folks too. You may win over the kind of people who think liver is "gross" with your kind of logic, but they're about all.
Anyone who makes recommendations to their fellow creatures from a position of "authority" SHOULD feel a responsibility to provide a sound and cogent reason for their point of view. "Because they use ingredient X to do nasty-job Y" is not a sound and cogent reason. Should i never cook with baking soda because it can also be used to clean toilets? Should vinegar be off the menu because it will kill weeds in the cracks of my garden path?
Granted that a wax made from petroleum is probably not as good a choice for food use as one made by bees, that does not mean paraffin in certain applications is unwholesome. There are an awful lot of neutral substances in this world, which are perfectly safe and reasonable to use in food applications. The nutritional -- and chemical -- realms are NOT properly illustrated in black-and-white....
The same emotional illogic is used in the condemnation of sucralose and a lot of other products, the utilization of which may not be IDEAL, but is minimally problematic for most people. This kind of thinking is behind why i had to buy my mother a special little soft brush for cleaning mushrooms -- "they're grown on COW MANURE!" Uh -- no. They're grown on COMPOSTED cow manure which is an entirely different substance. Uncomposted manure has too high a nitrogen content to grow ANYTHING.
I hope this lady will learn that dropping buzzwords (natural! organic!) and scare/gross-out tactics (bugs! petroleum!) is not doing their nutrition-and-supplement business any good amongst thinking people. At the end of her talk, as we were trotting off to the Red Frog Pub to get a drink during the break, J snorted, "we shouldn't eat THAT because it's used to de-ice airplane wings? They spray beet-juice on roads to help de-ice them -- does that mean we can never eat beets again?"
Saturday, June 22, 2013
giving "medicine" to my husband
I can't get J to read any of the literature on dietary philosophy, but he declares himself willing to just eat whatever i tell him to; okay, you asked for it, buddy! ;-) I'm putting him on the Strong Medicine protocol.
This is THE most effective dietary regimen i've ever experienced. Historically, i've resisted the temptation to limit other people this way, though i widely recommend that people read the book. J has always been able to lose fat much more easily than i, so i haven't advocated it to him before. However, he's been expressing disappointment in his rate of loss this time (i'd be thrilled with it, but that just shows ya...), so i'm bringing out the big guns.
We'll see how it goes! Frankly, I LOVE the ability to forget about food. On this plan, you don't need to be creative or spend significant time in the kitchen. Just keep plenty of the right meat on hand, and forget about wondering what to have on tomorrow's menu! After forty years of marriage, i occasionally find meal-planning unbearably tedious. But with Strong Medicine, you eat fatty meat and coffee for three meals a day, and the pounds melt off. The first time i did it, i worked the bugs out -- i HAVE to add salt, and three 6-oz meals work better for me than 3 8-oz (though 2 8-oz seems to be okay). When i'm by myself, forgoing alcohol on this plan is easier than when i'm around other people -- but my husband is on the wagon for weight-loss purposes already! So....
Gonna go ZC for awhile! YES!!!!! :-)
This is THE most effective dietary regimen i've ever experienced. Historically, i've resisted the temptation to limit other people this way, though i widely recommend that people read the book. J has always been able to lose fat much more easily than i, so i haven't advocated it to him before. However, he's been expressing disappointment in his rate of loss this time (i'd be thrilled with it, but that just shows ya...), so i'm bringing out the big guns.
We'll see how it goes! Frankly, I LOVE the ability to forget about food. On this plan, you don't need to be creative or spend significant time in the kitchen. Just keep plenty of the right meat on hand, and forget about wondering what to have on tomorrow's menu! After forty years of marriage, i occasionally find meal-planning unbearably tedious. But with Strong Medicine, you eat fatty meat and coffee for three meals a day, and the pounds melt off. The first time i did it, i worked the bugs out -- i HAVE to add salt, and three 6-oz meals work better for me than 3 8-oz (though 2 8-oz seems to be okay). When i'm by myself, forgoing alcohol on this plan is easier than when i'm around other people -- but my husband is on the wagon for weight-loss purposes already! So....
Gonna go ZC for awhile! YES!!!!! :-)
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