We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
The word "myth" seems to have two meanings in English: first, ancient and enduring tales containing deep meanings about human nature and existence itself, and, second, common but mistaken out-dated beliefs. For examples, "myths about nutrition" vs "so-and-so is mythic in depth, scale and scope." Moby Dick is mythic.
Freud's one-time colleague in depth psychology had many interests but among them was a study of myths and the representations of archetypes embedded in them. In a way, Jung viewed myths as related to humanity as dreams are related to an individual. I suppose that seems obvious now.
My libertarian self is in favor, but my medical self is opposed. However, it remains a fact that more Americans die from overeating than from drug abuse, and food can not be illegalized. I tend to feel that government has little role in peoples' doing self-destructive things as long as we others do not have to pay their bills. Let reality rule. AA and NA cost nothing.
In my experience, males are just as emotionally-vulnerable as any other gender. Without male emotional vulnerability there would be no country music.
What the people promoting this notion miss is that most males spend years trying to be, or trying to at least act or appear, emotionally strong, brave, and tough. There are many good reasons for that, not the least being because these are things that appeal to women.
It's not just cultural, though. There's a biological substrate to it, obvious to anyone who has raised kids. Guys work to be emotionally strong in the same way they work to be physically strong, and to be tough in their effectiveness in the world. It's their job. Might be womens' job too, but that's another subject.
So enough of this baby-talk, Princeton, unless you wish to become a high-end kindergarten..
"Vita brevis, ars longa, occasio praeceps, experimentum periculosum, iudicium difficile."
That is the Latin translation of Hippocrate's first sentence in his medical text, "ars" - art - meaning the craft of medicine, is slow to learn given the brevity of life. I think the quote has been often misunderstood and misapplied.
It has always been interesting to me that the etymology of our use of "art" refers to "craft."
English: "Life is short, and (mastering a) craft slow, opportunity fleeting, experimentation perilous, and judgment difficult."
Those test levels are quite modest for active people. Everybody can aspire to better, but the doctors have learned to be modest in their expectations of us.
My only objection is to their including BMI on the list, which is a bad index for excess body fat. Is your waist size an ok measure of your body fat? Yes it is. Your waist size is not your belt size or jeans size, especially if you wear them on your hips which most people do these days. Your waist is above your belly button, the narrow space below your rib cage and above your hips (if you have a narrow space there).
How to Measure Your Waist
How do you measure your waist? Sounds simple enough, but it’s not always obvious where your waist is. Posture and other variables can affect the reading, so here are some basic guidelines to follow:
Position a tape measure at the narrowest point between your lower rib and the top of your hip bone, or at the midpoint in between. It should be snug but not compress the skin. If you can’t find the narrowest point (it may be difficult if you’re very overweight), measure just above your belly button.
Stand straight and breathe out normally; don’t suck in your belly.
Measure your waist first thing in the morning, before breakfast.
Though there’s no magic cutoff point, values over 37 inches for men and 32 inches for women indicate increased health risks, according to the World Health Organization; values over 40 for men and 35 for women represent substantially increased risk.
The referring person tells me "She is a 22 year-old cum laude college grad with no goals and no direction. She was just a diligent student. No stem classes. She is living at home, and terrified by the big world. She is shy and not overly-attractive. Self-involved, alternating between self-loathing and mild grandiosity. Very supportive family. Despite her college grades, she seems to lack some basic life skills so her low self-esteem seems justified to me. I think you would be a good fit for her if you can engage her. Self-pitying but not depressed, not psychotic."
OK. I'll do a consultation. This sad story is in my wheelhouse, and I have seen it many times.
IQ was less important in pre-post industrial societies. In personal experience, many people with below-average IQ have excellent common sense, work ethic, wit, and practical knowledge in abundance. Often, less interest in abstractions.
I'll admit that IQ below 80 is a handicap, but I see far more life difficulties produced by character flaws, maladaptive traits, and annoying or unsettling eccentricities than by IQ shortages.
Why Peterson's talks are controversial escapes me. The useful thing he does is to talk about Human Nature 101 and Adult Life 101. Maybe some people do not want to learn about human nature or adult life.
The only thing remarkable to me is that these things need to be said. Basics. A life worth living has to be constructed thoughtfully, in my view. I find it sometimes needs revisions, if not tweaking, because the things that mattered to me at 25 are no longer the most important things to me now. I like to think I have gained a little bit of wisdom.
Almost every advice article I read about fitness makes a big point about fat loss and fat-burning. Perhaps that is what readers are interested in, given that so many people in the Western world are over-nourished but wish to look better and to be lighter on their feet if they can do it easily.
Fitness training is about strength, agility, athleticism, endurance, speed, power. Good things like that. I am a strong believer in maintaining maximum functionality with a fitness program, but mixed and balanced exercises (ie calisthenics, weights, and some cardio) done at a rational level (5-6 hrs/wk, not including walking, sports, hiking, etc) will likely have no effect on your body fat. That's not why you do it.
As the guy in this article notes (and as I have noticed countless times), after a year or two of nothing but daily cardio machines, running, or swimming, most people in the gym are just as pudgy as when they began. Sometimes more. Just putting in their time but ignoring their food intake and their exercise intensity.
To get rid of body fat, you must manage your daily nutrition. Do not rely on exercise or cardio, especially "long, slow cardio" to do it. It will not. (In fact, an excess of cardio exercise, anaerobic or aerobic, might be a bad idea for many people, if not a waste of time.)
Fitness and nutrition are separate but somewhat overlapping topics.
The idea that government knows how we ought to eat is absurd. Many of us assume that government is stupid, but even your Mom doesn't know.
Nobody can say what a "healthy" nutrition plan is because humans and all higher primates are omnivorous. That means humans can thrive on almost anything as long as it contains sufficient calories to support life. I've seen enough kids grow big and strong enough to play varsity football on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on Wonder Bread to be convinced of that.
Because of the ambiguity of being omnivorous, everybody has an opinion about what is best. "Clean diet," paleo diet, low-fat diet, high-fat diet, vegetarian diet, vegan diet, Mediterranian diet, bla bla bla. My advice is to eat moderate amounts of everything. Small meals are best for health, fitness, energy, and mental clarity.
With a few comments:
- If overweight and if you do not want to be, cut the carbs and cut the volume. Don't be a pig. If fat and happy, that's fine with me because I am neither your doctor, parent, or spouse. - If you exercise hard daily, especially with heavy weights, keep daily protein up to around 80-90 gms/day for adequate muscle repair, and eat some sugar - Coke, candy, fruit - before the workout. - If you hate vegetables, take a multivit. If you think fruit is "healthy", show me the data. (There is none. Fruit is dessert or a quick sugar fix.) - If you worry about overly-high bad triglycerides, discuss with your doctor. Bear in mind that elevated cholesterol does not appear to correlate with heart disease (except in diabetes and familial hypercholesterolemia). Your doc knows that.
... gender dysphoria—the official psychiatric term for feeling oneself to be of the opposite sex—belongs in the family of similarly disordered assumptions about the body, such as anorexia nervosa and body dysmorphic disorder. Its treatment should not be directed at the body as with surgery and hormones any more than one treats obesity-fearing anorexic patients with liposuction. The treatment should strive to correct the false, problematic nature of the assumption and to resolve the psychosocial conflicts provoking it. With youngsters, this is best done in family therapy.
I believe that gender surgery is, or is close to, medical malpractice. Psychotherapy is not likely to change these people either. Same with effeminate gays. Like it or not, we must all just accept that there is a lot of variety, strangeness, and discontent in the human species. Blame our hypertrophied cortex.
Since a study came out a few years ago, based on BMI, that heavy people live longer and healthier than thinner people, many heavy people applauded the news.
In fact, it turns out that higher muscle mass correlates with reduced risk of illness and death. (Well, risk of death is 100% but they mean sooner rather than later.)
A meaningful gauge of being overweight for your build and fitness is your Body Fat percentage. The simplest way to do this is to have somebody use the body fat caliper method on you. That does not measure intra-abdominal fat deposits, but it assumes a correlation. Your doctor's nurse knows how to do that. There are other ways too. (An easier way is to study yourself naked in a mirror.)
This site has two charts, one depicting "ideal" fat percentages based on fitness, and the second based on age. As an athletic female, I like to be around 25-30%. Seems disgusting for your body to be 30% lard, doesn't it? It can be fine for a slender lady, though.
Just for fun, no ab exercises will give you 6-pack abs. Killer abs are all about fat. "Good abs" are visible in men at around 8% body fat, and in women around 12%. Those are either highly-athletic (ie well-beyond "fit" percentages) or otherwise verging on anorectic. I will not recommend any %s lower than those, even for models and ballet dancers, and, generally, feel that those %s are too low for regular fit people. 20% is fine for a regular fit male who plays sports and works out.
Below the fold, photos for comparison of men and women with varying body fat percentages.
You can argue that some people have difficulty accepting terminal illness. True, some people do. However, there is a freedom issue missing here. The Brits do not value freedom in the way that we American rebels do.
Since it was a bit of a hiking weekend, I decided to consider the topic from a health and fitness standpoint rather than from a fun and adventure standpoint. What I will say generally applies to all aerobic activities (ie rowing, biking, swimming, etc).
- First off, most articles we search discuss these topics in terms of weight loss and calorie-burning. That is nonsense. Unless you devote several hours/day to these things with a carb-restricted diet, they will do nothing for your fat. Let's take that off the table and accept that body fat is about nutritional choices and nothing else.
- Second, we are talking about things which are often referred to as "cardio" fitness and cardio training. They really are not cardio training without the high heart rate which can not be attained for healthy people through walking or jogging. Similarly for skeletal muscle strength. For general endurance, good. True "cardio training" entails repeated anaerobic sprints of almost any activity (often termed HIIT. You can do HIIT with kettlebell swings, wall ball slams, road-sprints, sprint pool laps, or anything that stresses the heck out of you for 30-60 seconds). 15-20 minutes (including rests) of HIIT accomplishes far more for cardio fitness than an hour of aerobic activity.
Third, recreational hiking, jogging, swimming, biking, rowing are more the happy rewards of fitness than stimuli to increased fitness. I can hike 10 miles because I am somewhat fit, not to become fit. Nonetheless, they are the sorts of things that distinguish an "active" person from a "sedentary". "Sedentary" roughly refers to a person with less than 8-10 hours/week of intentional, vigorous physical activity (not strolling, or housework or easy stuff), or less than 6 hours of high-intensity physical activity/week. A good measure of "high-intensity" is that you are short of breath most of the time.
- Except for newbies, the elderly, or the infirm, the above relatively low-intensity aerobic activities (I hesitate to term them "exercise" because they lack the high exertion component) are just fine for maintaining mobility and endurance for casual activities. They do not increase fitness once you can do them. Any healthy person can walk 10 miles, jog 3-5 miles, or swim a mile of laps. Still, aerobic endurance is a handy thing for life enjoyment.
- Walking and jogging put the same lower-body muscles to use. Both are easy on the hamstrings, which can lead to a muscle imbalance if jogging is your only activity. Anyway, these are not strength-builders or meaningful cardio training (because there is not a high-enough cardio stress once you have adapted to them).
- Jogging on cement or asphalt on a daily basis will come back to your joints at some point. For "long, slow", once/week is enough for a fit person who works out daily in other ways along with recreational physical activities such as sports. Running is speedy jogging with a long stride and sprinting is sprinting.
There is nothing healthier than taking on things to dispel our self-esteem despite the ego-protective temptation to hide and avoid them. Into life, outside the comfort zone. Here are some of the things that work well:
- Socializing with high-achieving, highly life-competent witty people - Taking a calisthenics/fitness class at the gym - Taking the Great Courses Intro to Calculus or Intro to Immunology Class and discover your IQ limits - Joining a Bible, or classical music/opera study group and discover your ignorance and lack of insight - Accepting the duty of running a small volunteer organization - Inspecting your naked body carefully in a mirror - Reflecting on one's mortality and what good one will have left behind - Taking an advanced yoga class - Try to get your book published - Go to a new city or woods without a GPS and make yourself get lost - Reach out to befriend somebody you feel is smart, fun and interesting, and get the brush-off - Learn a new sport or skill from scratch - Go on a job search - Get into weight-lifting
I welcome your suggestions for deeper humility in the comments -
How to Measure Your Waist
The idea that government knows how we ought to eat is absurd. Many of us assume that government is stupid, but even your Mom doesn't know.
Since a study came out a few years ago, based on BMI, that heavy people live longer and healthier than thinner people, many heavy people applauded the news.
Since it was a bit of a hiking weekend, I decided to consider the topic from a health and fitness standpoint rather than from a fun and adventure standpoint. What I will say generally applies to all aerobic activities (ie rowing, biking, swimming, etc).