Maggie's Farm

Everybody may have a devil inside them, but the people we term "psychopathic" or "sociopathic" are outliers on the bell curve of human behavior. Sociopaths have habits of exploitation, deceit, cheating, impulsiveness, manipulation, rationalization, and often of cruelty. Clever sociopaths are masters of disguise and of acting. There is a genetic component.

Clever sociopaths can put on a "mask of sanity" and, if careful enough, make successful lives in some careers.

When Your Child Is a Psychopath - The condition has long been considered untreatable. Experts can spot it in a child as young as 3 or 4.

Most people have at least some degree of this potentially life-damaging fear. Oftentimes, the fear is justified because it is likely that many people will not find us interesting, appealing, or worthy of relationship (boo-hoo), but sometimes our fear is indiscriminate. 

Faking confidence isn't a bad starting approach, but the real trick is to improve one's rejection tolerance and that can only be achieved by enduring rejection.

Life isn't fair. We all know that.  We also know that everybody has "issues," from the mild to the severe. While I would advise most people to try to address their issues, my first advice would be to try to conceal them in public.

That starts with behaving "appropriately"  at all times, dressing well, getting a good hair style or haircut or whatever, and, if a guy, shaving before going out in public. I've been out and about quite a bit lately and see some women going to work almost looking like bag ladies or schizophrenics and guys looking like alcoholics. Maybe they are, but they should not advertise it. Odd and unstylish (relatively-speaking) appearance is only a good idea on Halloween.

Whatever people have going on inside, looking together and making a good social presentation makes a big difference in life. I do not mean to be superficial but first impressions carry a lot of weight. Like Peterson's "start by cleaning your room and getting rid of old stuff", acting and looking like you have got it together is a good first step. If you or your living environment look a little "off," that's an unfortunate impression. It's off-putting.

Part 1 is here 

Now to the related topic of Satiety. 

It was not long ago that being pudgy or having a bit of a gut signaled prosperity, and leanness signaled lower class. Now it's the opposite. With incredible food abundance, and with obesity always in the news, funding for nutrition-related studies has grown.  So now we know a lot more about how insulin works and about how the three food categories (fats and oils, carbs, and protein) are handled by the body. We are also learning about how hunger and satiety work. It's quite interesting but complicated.

These are "First World issues."  In our world of nutritional abundance, recreational, social, and emotional eating, and the constant temptation of food porn, "hunger" often does not denote a need for nutrition except for the skinny, and satiety is often over-ridden by habit, speed-eating, stomach-stretching, delicious foods, sugar-and-carb dosing, and insulin-resistance.  That is what it means when overweight people, who have no pressing energy needs at all other than water, vitamins, and minerals, eat hungrily two or three times a day. We term that appetite "false hunger" not because the appetite is not subjectively experienced but because appetite has, for them, disconnected from nutritional need and satiety signals (which are very slow to go into effect). That luxury used to be only for the wealthy.

It's like the flip side of anorexia. Anorexia nervosa is famously difficult to ameliorate, but it is not too difficult for most pudgy or fat people to re-set their bio-psycho-social food-o-stat if they want to. For starters, that entails small portions, plenty of protein to satisfy the hormones, and very slow eating so as not to short-circuit the awareness of the moment at which "That's enough to sustain me, because I don't feel hunger anymore." That way, the "Eat 'til I'm filled or stuffed...now I'm stuffed" effect never has to happen.

In the Western world, "sufficient" can be the stopping point, not "filled." Except Thanksgiving, when feeling ill from getting stuffed with stuffing is expected.

Being too scrawny, with underdeveloped muscle and bone, is life-limiting and unhealthy, but not as life-limiting as carrying excess fat around with its lengthy list of associated ailments. There's no need to carry it on your body, because there's a pizza joint on every corner to prevent sudden death from starvation.  Most people, fortunately, make themselves sensitive to satiety signals most of the time so most active adults are neither significantly under- or over-weight. 

Obviously, little of this applies to most children and adolescents. 

Where did the cultural habit of three square meals per day come from?

 It's quite recent, actually, and really a European cultural concept. More specifically, a British aristocratic concept because even today an Italian breakfast (except for the tourists) is an espresso or latte and a biscotti, and a typical French breakfast is a cafe au lait and a croissant. Typical Italian supper?  Soup and bread, or cheese and leftovers.

"Eating between meals"? I suspect people might feel better with 5 mini-meals - balanced snacks, really, because stuffed and lazy after supper is not an effective life plan. Stuffed and lazy after any meal is not a good plan except on Thanksgiving. Serious exercisers and athletes tend to discipline themselves to a 5 meal program to keep the nutrients flowing. They have to eat when they aren't hungry to maintain their level of fitness and power, and to keep their weight up.

A mini-meal for many can be something like a couple of slices of chicken and a handful of olives, or an apple and some cheese slices, maybe a slice of pizza or a cup of yoghurt or oatmeal with berries. Volume and details depending, of course, on total muscle mass, body frame, daily physical demands, physical goals, etc.  Body-builders need 4-5 full meals daily to put on muscle mass, while the old-fashioned three squares/day will make most adults flabby if not obese.

To understand what your body needs, look at it nude in the mirror. One look will tell you what it needs in fitness and nutrition in terms of muscular development, leanness or fatness, posture, etc. When it comes to food, we can't listen to our body too much. It's a liar because it was programmed for scarcity a long time ago, before agriculture. Humans seem to have the instinctive inclinations (eat, nap, fight, play, sex, and repeat until dark when the predators come out) of monkeys, chimps, and gorillas but we have some added higher capacities, or so the scientists claim.

A brief history of the origin of three meals/day.

Part 2 on Thursday will deal with hunger, appetite, and satiety. 

The 30-Day Get Lean in 2017 Challenge

It's not a "diet."  It's an exercise and fitness plan with a simple weight-loss component. It can't hurt to try it, if you need it. Lean and fit is better than fat and unfit.

It's a lengthy essay: Growing Pains  - Problems with Puberty Suppression in Treating Gender Dysphoria

Labeled as "boot camp" and "toning" for women, it's really just progressive calisthenic routines and is just as good for men, and for any age. Calisthenics don't care about gender. These sorts of cali routines combine cardio, so doing this sort of program for several weeks covers both, while keeping your muscles in use and building stamina and agility.

Doing it daily in a group, or with a group of pals, works best but anybody ought to be able to follow this path which begins fairly easy, about an hour daily, and ramps up in challenge but not in time spent.

For each week, you would do the routine 5 days.  It doesn't require a gym or any special equipment besides hand weights. If you start now, you should be "well-toned" and fit by Labor Day: Get Toned Fast 

Right here and now I issue a challenge to some of our guy readers who are sarcastic or dismissive about structured fitness to give this a 6-week try at 5 days per week, and then get back to me with a report. Nothing to lose, and no need to tell anybody it's a girl program. Mr. Bliss is doing it with me, before work each morning, as a summer break from his usual gym routine.

When I first encountered this program, I had to check out what they meant by some of the terms on Youtube.  Try the Turkish Get-Up. I'd advise against the crunches. Do V-ups instead. 

What most people want from fitness, probably only second to looking good/feeling good, is Stamina. 

I like that word better than "endurance" which sounds painful and tedious, while "stamina" connotes an energetic or even joyful get-up-and-go attitude while including the ability to keep going when the going gets tough, pushing the point of fatigue further out while taking some pleasure or satisfaction in a strenuous or stressful life. 

The older we get, or the heavier we get, the more difficult it becomes to maintain or build physical stamina. Unfortunately, it requires psychological stamina (ie, the talent to seek or invent, engage, and push through difficult challenges and opportunities. The most common adaptation for those lacking that talent is old-fashioned self-discipline) to build or maintain physical stamina. As the experts say, the day you "don't feel like" exercising is the day your body and mind need it most.

"I don't feel like it ..." is one of the most insidious, anti-life, anti-energy phrases ever invented. Why not try "I wish I hadn't been born on this planet with this annoying gravity and all these interesting and difficult things to do"?  Unless they are clinically depressed, there is no cure for low-energy or relaxation-oriented people for whom inactivity or passive activity is the default setting or the desired state. Indolent is just the way they are made. Some people are naturally vigorous, some indolent, and most somewhere in-between. It's a Bell Curve of a partly-genetic and partly-cultural personality trait and it is quite obvious in what people do when given the choice.

I am on board with the Maggie's Fitness Doctrine that strength is foundational, but that strength is just a tool for building functional physical conditioning to apply to the average active and athletic American life. (Average Americans, unlike Europeans, are prone to engage in sports and/or challenging exercise.) Decent strength makes general conditioning exercises - cardio and calisthenics - more possible, more forceful, more energetic, and more enjoyable. Strength itself is great for schlepping stuff, but the general conditioning reward of strength is to be able to be more fully-engaged in all the cool things life offers - including physical chores, adventures, sex, and sports.

This is why I believe that a couple of half-hours of cardio HIIT, and a couple of hours of intense calis, are the best plan for building stamina for life for ordinary people. For beginners, get those muscles woken up with weight-training, hard and and grooving, and then move on to the challenging moving that really applies to living this brief and precious life to the fullest.

My personal test to assess people, including myself, on the Vigor-Indolence Scale is below the fold - 

Instapundit (of course) found this: The orgasm cure - What if we could expand ecstasy, reduce stress and lift depression, all by delaying and extending orgasm?

Playing a woman's body like a violin? Wonderful. Bonded men and women ought to try to please each other as best they can in all sorts of ways. That is what it is about, partly. Fun, however, is no replacement for a spiritual emptiness. 

An excellent, detailed, and relatively non-technical introduction to the topic: PHYSIOLOGIC AND LONG-TERM ADAPTATIONS TO EXERCISE.

One quote:

The deterioration in physiological function normally associated with aging is, in fact, caused by a combination of reduced physical activity and the aging process itself. By maintaining an active lifestyle, or by increasing levels of physical activity if previously sedentary, older persons can maintain relatively high levels of cardiovascular and metabolic function, including ˙VO2max (Kohrt et al. 1991), and of skeletal muscle function (Rogers and Evans 1993). For example, Fiatarone and colleagues (1994) found an increase of 113 percent in the strength of elderly men and women (mean age of 87.1 years) following a 10-week training program of progressive resistance exercise. Cross-sectional thigh muscle area was increased, as was stair-climbing power, gait velocity, and level of spontaneous activity. Increasing endurance and strength in the elderly contributes to their ability to live independently.

The saddest part of the story is how quickly training gains are lost during periods without regular (meaning 3+ days/wk) strenuous activity. There is measurable decline in cardio functioning and muscle strength in weeks, and training gains can be lost in a few months. Use it or lose it. That is just how it is after age 30 or 35.

Physical fitness, like mental fitness, is a life-style choice.

Like many other animals, humans are napping creatures.  Our Western society doesn't really take that into account, nor should it because we demand a lot from people. 

In my workday, I schedule in a 20-minute catnap after a chicken-salad lunch. It does me a lot of good, since I do my daily workouts at 6 am. After my catnap I am good for another 6 hours of work or a drive to NH.

Mediterranean-based societies have siestas - especially Spanish and Italian. Naptime, or sex + nap. In many cultures, lunch is their dinner and I do not know how they handle work after a large meal.  I don't know about Asians or Africans. 

I do believe that some of what we term "sleep disorders,"  and diagnose at great expense and often treat with amphetamines, are simply due to a need for a power nap. People vary.

 Benefits of napping in healthy adults: impact of nap length, time of day, age, and experience with napping

The Benefit Of The Power Nap

General anesthesia has risks which are well-known and calculable. Sadly, Anesthesia may have lingering side effects on the brain, even years after an operation.

IQ is easy to measure, as an example, but many things which effect our reaching our goals are more difficult to measure.

I know that,when organizations consider people for hire or for promotion, they always consider the person's "intangibles." That includes things like amiability, appearance, dress, comportment, manners, sophistication, cultural knowledge, reliability, tone of voice, and so forth. Their "vibe." A good vibe is a sort of personal capital.

Another intangible which matters in life is social capital, something Charles Murray often speaks about. People obviously vary a great deal in the extent of their social connections and (cliche again) one can easily be lonely in a crowd. Many prefer to be isolated but I think there is a basic human need to be "in community," to have human connections of all sorts outside of family. We are tribal creatures. I feel sad for those who lack tribes with whom to touch base and reconnect during the holiday season. That makes it depressing indeed because it's supposed to be about fun fun fun and party party party, right?

There are many ingredients to constructing a satisfying life, but what a satisfying life means is different for everybody. However, I believe that to be in community, or really a part of multiple communities, is a key component. Some care about it more than others, for certain. With a little luck, the construction begins with an anchor solidly lodged in immediate or extended family, and extends, in separate but often-overlapping circles, out from there depending on what one does or decides to build.

And I do mean "build." Like career, community is never handed to you on a silver platter. I like to connect with interesting, intelligent, positive, and amusing people with interesting and adventurous lives. Who doesn't? On Saturday night, I met a gent, a retired banker, who covered the erection of the Berlin Wall for the New York Times when he was 21 years old. He had taken his grandkids to the Checkpoint Charlie museum in Berlin this summer. I want to include him, and his wife, in one of my circles.

Finding people with whom we have affinity and comfort is not easy especially for the shy, and seeking at least a few which go beyond the superficial is a wholesome and worthwhile life challenge. For example, I do not need any more friends who love to discuss handbags because my handbag interest is two minutes deep. Possibly three minutes.

I discussed the topic somewhat in my post Class, Social Capital, and Character Traits. Sometimes I ask patients to create a Venn diagram of the human communities in which they live and form relationships, beginning with family and extended family as the necessary and solid core - regardless of how one may feel about them at a given moment. It can be illuminating.

The categories (Venn circle diagrams) that I suggest include things like:

Family and the people who are "like family" 
Closest confidants, closest personal and family friends
Old friends
Spouse's buddies and closest pals
Warm and friendly acquaintances, friendly neighbors, and friendly shopkeepers, doctors, lawyers, and other life helpers
Group connections (eg church, clubs, sports friends, favored activities companions, etc)
Colleagues and work-related groups or organizations
Local community-based organizations and volunteer organization associates and pals

and so on.

It can be a bit of a drafting challenge when there are plenty of overlapping circles. but that results when one has built "an established life," a well-rooted and integrated life over years.  I drew one such diagram out for myself last year, and it was an interesting little project. 

When people move, they risk losing quite a bit. I don't know how some people move or retire to South Carolina or Florida and rebuild a rich life from scratch. We could not do that, but we would not want to anyway.

The Wki article is a pretty good summary.  Human consciousness is often considered an emergent phenomenon 

Except for Blueberries. There is no reason to even think about this topic unless you want to lose weight, or unless the physiology is interesting to you. Fruit is a fine dessert because its main nutritional ingredient is sugars. Especially Fructose. There is nothing "healthy" about fruit or fruit juice.

Fructose is metabolized in a different way than is Glucose. 

The very short story is this: All sugars are not created equal. Fructose is metabolized into fat. Glucose in moderate amounts is turned into glycogen for energy. Table sugar is Sucrose, which is metabolized first into its components of Glucose and Fructose. 

Corn syrup, the most common commercial sweetener, contains Glucose and Fructose. Thus eating a fruit, or drinking fruit juice, is equivalent to drinking a Coke other than the virtue signaling. No common sweeteners contain pure Glucose. 

Children are best off drinking milk or water. 

It is not just the compensation that discourages physicians, especially internists and pediatricians, from working for the government (eg Medicare, Medicaid).  A major issue is the paperwork burden. The government paperwork requires a specialized back office staff which only large practices can afford. 

A recent sample of the bureaucratic mess doctors are supposed to figure out.  A Medicare billing error is a potential felony, even if inadvertent.  

While enduring an implant at the dentist ("implantologist") the other day I was distracting myself by contemplating similar situations of shame, vulnerability, or potential humiliation in which we sometimes must put ourselves. Usually, at the dentist, I distract myself with thoughts about sex or politics, so this was a different approach.

I'll lreveal some of my moments of unpleasant self-revelation or exposure:

- the Dentist. You sit or lie there helpless while some guy struggles with the most disgusting things he can find in your oral cavity

- annual physical. Take your clothes off while some guy or gal tries as hard as they can to find defects. Not to mention a Gyn exam...

-  Pooping in a public bathroom. Sooner or later in life you just have to stop caring about your noises.

-  Disrobing with a new lover. I can vaguely remember that.

- Psychological nakedness, as with a Psychiatrist. "Now, why not tell me the things about yourself that you don't want to tell me? It might save a lot of time."  That is like "Take all your clothes off and the doctor will be with you shortly."

- Oral examinations.  Not dental, real oral exams as in college or grad school. Being quizzed by a panel of profs is far more daunting than a paper exam because it's personal and feels - is - more exposing. In med school orals, they just pushed you on every topic until you said "I don't know."  Their goal was to discover your limits.

There are plenty of fad but fake diseases out there. Peak US public health body warns of risk from treatments for disease that doesn’t exist.