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.
Yes it is. Your waist size is not your belt size or jeans size though, especially if you wear them on your hips which most people do these days. Your waist is above your belly button, the potentially narrow space below your rib cage.
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.
Many or most people in the US have used opioids whether for surgical or dental procedures, cancer pain, etc. The number of those people who become addicts is extremely low, but I do not have the numbers.
I know that there is some recreational use too, which seems, intuitively, more likely to lead towards addiction.
The few times I have used opioids (prescribed, of course), I have found them to be sort-of ok for pain relief but generally unpleasant (sleepy, stupid, unsettling) so I switch to NSAIDs or Tylenol as soon as I can.
Others find opioids to provide a feeling of deep, warm well-being if not euphoria. That sounds appealing, doesn't it?
“If you want to model the APA, you could do worse than a giant firehose that takes in pharmaceutical company money at one end, and shoots lectures about social justice out the other.”
A terrible meeting. I never attend.
My experience is that people like to mock or disparage Psychiatry. That is, until they or a family member need one.
We've written about this topic in the past, but it's worth reviewing the misconceptions about cardio fitness and cardio exercise. (Remember, in our view, "cardio" should be only 1/3 of your exercise program beacuse it does little for muscle and bone strength, and little for athleticism.)
Any exercise, from walking to weight-lifting, makes more demand on heart function than sitting or lying down. So cardio exercise has a spectrum from very light to maximum intensity. Simply put, the core purpose of "cardio" exercise is to maintain or upgrade heart function (cardiac condition is measured by things like a Cardiac Stress Test with Echo, Stroke Volume, Cardiac Output, cardiac vasculature, and left ventricle size to some extent). Like weight-lifting for skeletal muscle, it requires stress, relative to your conditioning and medical condition.
With lighter stresses (eg non-sprint, endurance-oriented swimming laps, jogging, rowing, stair machine, elliptical, etc) we are putting our hearts to some use, but we are working more on general time endurance than cardio. (Lots of people do those things thinking that they involve fat-burning, but don't count on that to work if you do 1 hour/day.) For people who are not training for specific goals, building endurance is great for life. Nobody wants to slow down or feel tired during ordinary recreational activities like sports or hiking. These non-sprint exercises aim for around 70% of one's max heart rate to make it worth your precious time.
The higher the physical demand - the intensity of an exertion for your level of fitness - the more you are training your heart rather than just using it. The highest levels of exertion (say, with sets of deadlifts near 80% of your max, or with 30-second sprints) are anaerobic and can push your heart rate to 90% of your max. That heart-pounding rest time or slow time is to catch up on oxygen.
For endurance, an hour of lap swimming, cycling, jogging, elliptical, stair machine, ski machine, rower, etc at around 70% of your max heart rate is where you ought to be, if in decent health. Over time, you will need to raise the speed to get to those heart rates. These exercises do nothing much to build muscle or bone strength.
For maximum cardiac fitness (with bonus endurance benefits as well), mixing in sprints which get your HR to 80-90% of your max should be included. Bursts of intensity. In the Maggie's Fitness for Life program, the other good sources of intense cardiac stress are the powerlifts and calisthenics. Ideally, some of all of those because there is more to fitness than cardiac fitness. Fitness is a package deal.
An interesting detail is that to up your game in any area of exertion, it's always a good idea to do what you do not usually do. Explosive linebackers get better with distance running, distance runners get better with weights and sprints, heavy lifters get better with calisthenics. Balance.
Muscle pump from resistance training is caused by the increased blood flow into the muscle to supply needed oxygen. That's why it subsides after a while. It's a sign that you are making a muscle work hard.
For strength-maintenance and strength-building you need to create micro- tears in your muscle fibers. This can sometimes result in muscle soreness for a day or two. It's a good sign of the inflammation needed for muscle repair.
The repair is what builds strength. That's why it's never a bad idea to have a 20-25 gm. protein shake as a meal (we like to make it with a banana) shortly after an hour of resistance exertion. It's also why it's smart to recover for 48 hours or so before pushing heavy weights again. (We advocate "active recovery" days in the form of calisthenics and cardio.)
There is an exception, though, to the 48-hour rule. That is when people separate their resistance days between legs and upper body. That works for some people but I do not like it.
Cardio endurance training is one component of the Fitness Triad (strength, athleticism, endurance) or, as we usually divide it, strength, calisthenics, and cardio.
Unless one is a competitive runner, swimmer, biker, or rower, we believe it's good to mix up cardio exercises because just doing one improves one's efficiency too much for the cardiac stress you are looking for.
Cardio training (ie exercising your heart muscle) is like anything other muscle: you want to stress it without injuring it. That can either mean keeping your heart rate at 55-85% of your max heart rate for 30 minutes (depending on age), or it can mean HIIT cardio training with sprints. I recommend the latter for time efficiency and because it is gentler on your body.
I no longer recommend road-running, especially distance road running. A morning 5-mile jog is harmless but the main benefit is mental because few joggers get their heart rates very high. Distance runners/races (ie from marathoners to 50 milers to 100-milers) are admirable in their dedication and amazing endurance but it just isn't healthy for joints, heart, body inflammation, risk of kidney damage, and so forth. Pheidippides, who was a professional distance courier (before cell phones), died in Sparta.
Our current "Maggie's Recommended" general fitness training for the cardio component is roughly one hour of endurance cardio (a mix of elliptical, treadmill, stairmaster) keeping a solid (ie 55+% but sub-max heart rate; and 1/2 hour of HIIT cardio (30-60 second max sprints on rower, treadmill, combat bike, stairmaster, etc) with triple slow recovery times; and the mix of cardio and athleticism training in calisthenics/exercise classes.
I almost forgot to mention sports. Two hours of basketball is excellent cardio/athleticism exercise. Same for martial arts, or a tennis class.
Remember, unless you are in training for multiple hours daily, you can not lose weight by doing cardio exercise.
Doctors have become fearful of prescribing opioids. I hear stories about terminal cancer patients being denied adequate analgesia out of "fear of addiction."
Until new non-opioid and promising pain meds are available, I am in favor of adequate dosing for pain when nothing else works. Chronic pain is a terribly disabling thing, mentally, spiritually, physically, etc.
The two best things medicine has provided mankind have been antibiotics, and anesthesia/analgesia.
Celebrities are always touting the latest nutritional fads like "clean eating", veganism, etc. Now it's the Fasting Plan. Of course, these people know nothing. In fact, little is known about human nutritional needs but we do know some simple things to prevent starvation. For example, your nutrition requires fats.
There seem to be all sorts of variants of the Fasting Fad, but there may be something useful in it. For example, no adult without an all-day manual labor job (or a heavy lifter or a distance runner) needs three meals/day unless they are underweight. Three meals/day was designed for farmers, just like summer school vacation.
Furthermore, most hunger is what we have described as "false hunger" (meaning it represents no need for significant nutrition) for anybody even 5-10 lbs overweight. Our fat cells are a massive storage battery waiting to be used.
So what about fasting, whether it means just skipping one of the conventional meals or even taking a day or two off from food every week? Not as a weight-loss plan, but just as a plan. Many find it increases their energy.
When you think about it, during almost all of the 300-500,000 years (except the past few thousand agricultural years) of human life and evolution, food scarcity was the norm. Humans are designed for food scarcity rather than for today's abundance. That's why eating is fun rather than necessary.
This month’s Harvard magazine has an article on just this topic. Scroll down to the section titled, ‘Eating to Excess: Metabolic Inflammation’.
“The metabolic stress that is a hallmark of modern life, the stress that the body has not evolved to handle, is constant eating, he continues. When people eat, energy and nutrients enter the body rapidly, are processed, produce in turn a lot of by-products, and then need to be reduced to “functional substances that are distributed throughout the body, and then disappear very quickly. Many cells and tissues actually undergo a huge amount of stress during this process,” he explains, “as they store appropriate nutrients and dispose of harmful intermediates.” Part of this process also involves mounting an immune response. “The pancreas, for example, must secrete four to five hundred milliliters of enzymes every day” to be able to manage the incoming energy load with every meal. “If you place these organs under constant stress, they start malfunctioning.” The consequence is that “right now, one out of every 10 individuals has diabetes. One out of every four individuals has fatty liver disease. And if you reach a certain age, one out of every three individuals will develop neurodegenerative disease.”
The metabolic stress that underlies these conditions comes from the daily imbalance between how much energy people consume and how much they need, and can process in a healthy manner. The long-term consequence of overconsumption, combined with lack of sufficient expenditure, is stored energy—the accumulation of fat...”
Also interesting in that article is a bit about the benefit of muscle inflammation due to stressful exercise. Muscle damage, of course, is how we build strength.
We have written about habitual, ritual, compulsive, and recreational eating several times. Except for growing kids, manual laborers, distance hikers, and people who lift, all the talk about "the most important meal" was nonsense.
Yet we hear it all the time. For most people nowadays, the best way to get fat is to eat three meals/day.
Extramarital affairs have tradtionally been normal among the social class extremes: the wealthy and aristocratic, and the poor. An interesting sociological topic might be why so many ordinary people do not see this as a good idea.
The cited motives listed are these:
Top Reasons for Men:
His wife’s libido has dropped after marriage, children, etc. His wife is more preoccupied with being a mother than a partner. His wife no longer makes him feel sexy, masculine, virile. He is nostalgic for his free and wild youth The relationship is dull. Same conversation over and over again, same position over and over again, etc.
Top Reasons for Women:
Her husband no longer makes her feel sexy/desirable. Wants to explore sexual desires (kinks) she was too immature or unaware of in her youth. Her husband views her as a caregiver not a sexual being. Her husband initiates sex like she is a robot. No slow burn. No romance. No passion, excitement, thrill.
It's a crazy subject, fraught with myth. Animals do not need to read articles about when to have a drink of water, but seemingly humans do.
Where I live most of the time, females go around with a plastic bottle of water. In the car, in the gym, on the tennis court, at the supermarket, as if living in the Sahara. There are hardly enough public bathrooms for them all.
A few points:
Coffee is not dehydrating. Beer is hydrating. When you work out hard, especially in the heat, a little water is good. There seem to be extremes: people who are insensitive to their thirst, and people who drink too much. If confused about one's needs for liquid, the frequency of peeing, and the concentration of one's pee, are good indicators.
I have had outdoor adventures when my fatigue was entirely due to a touch of dehydration, when I perked up like a wilted plant with a bottle of water.
Gloria Steinem once called sex differences research “anti-American crazy thinking.” Senior colleagues warned me as an untenured professor around the year 2000 that studying sex differences would be career suicide. This new book by Rippon marks the latest salvo by a very small but vocal group of anti-sex difference individuals determined to perpetuate this cultural myth...
It is always sad to see science politicized. Nothing good ever comes from it.
A friend recently went vegetarian just for kicks, as an experiment. In 6 weeks, the friend lost the 8 lbs that no amount of exercise could burn off without quitting dinnertime wine. (This friend is an athletic sort, a strength and fitness buff but not a fanatic.) She asked me how that could happen since she goes light on carbs.
It turned out that the answer was easy: Too much protein.
That sounds crazy, doesn't it? It's not crazy because any excess protein (protein in excess of what you body needs to maintain or repair muscle) is converted into and stored as fat. Many people are not aware that most of their steak ends up as body fat.
So whether you are sedentary (less than 6 hrs/week of fairly intense exercise/wk, not including walking) or not, your protein needs might be less than you imagine because you can only use about 20 gms of protein every 4-6 hours.
That's why people who restrict carbs, and replace the food volume with protein, have trouble losing body fat.
People who pursue daily strength-building (weights) or daily endurance training (ie triathlete types) can need more than the basic 45 gm/day for women or 55 gm/day for men - maybe up to 100-150 gms/day. That's why they tend to go for 4-5 smaller balanced (carbs, protein, fats/oils) meals/day.
Nutrition and fitness go hand-in-hand, and it takes a little bit of thoughtfulness. A few simple recommendations:
If you do barbells/powerlifts 3+ times/week, eat a lot of everything. If in daily endurance race training, eat a lot of everything. Until "stuffed". If a regular daily exerciser (some wts, some calis, some cardio, some endurance), 45-60 gms/day is plenty in divided doses. For weight loss, cut the volume dramatically. If overweight, you do not really need hardly any food at all other than some protein and vitamins and minerals. Overweight people have no caloric needs.
Grams protein conversion to lbs for all sorts of foods are easily found online. For one example, a regular chicken breast contains around 55 gms of protein. So if you eat one in a meal, about 30 gms of that protein goes to body fat and some in excretion. Sliced into thirds or quarters over the course of a day, that breast would be plenty for a full-grown male who works out.
So, again, volume management matters for weight-lifters, and for the overweight. It's a "First World Problem." And do not imagine that protein does not become body fat. It does.
If you are fatter than you want to be for appearance, functionality, energy, joint health, or fitness, you can fix it. However, it can be as challenging as quitting smoking or quitting excess booze. Deprivation of greedy impulses takes character strength, the building of which is good and a wholesome exercise in itself.
Exercise is great for vigor, strength, and general fitness for life, but it is no good for fat loss unless you are hiking the Appalachian trail 7 hrs/day for a month or two.
If serious about it, you should aim to lose 2 lbs/week. More than that is unrealistic and too painful. Here's the easy way: Eat less food and drink water instead of other stuff. Set a limit to beer and cocktails. Less food? Cut your normal food portions in half. Quit almost all carbs. If you exercise hard especially with weights, try 4 small meals/day with 20 gm of protein in each and vegetable carbs. Remember, excess protein, like excess carbs, go to fat. Volume control!
Remember: If even 5# overweight, your hunger is mainly false hunger. You have plenty of fuel on board to keep you going for days or weeks. Some people, months.
When you arrive at your target, you should be able to figure out a good maintenance plan. It's not rocket science.
Jump rope is a favorite Maggie's calisthenic for general conditioning. It's an HIIT cardio exercise, and a lower leg strengthener too.
Why do it? 7 Benefits of Jumping Rope. That article shows several of the fun variations of jumping, but the photos show a girl with a rope that is almost twice the proper length for her.
One popular way to jump is to fit jumps into a calisthenic workout circuit including light weights and other things. For example, weighted lunges, kettlebell swings, jump rope, pushups. I see guys in the gym do 20 minutes of jump variations non-stop for their cardio. They are fit for sure.
My jump intervals are 1-2 minutes. Jumping is gentle on the joints because there is minimal impact, about the same impact as walking.
Besides the fun variations, double-unders are the coolest format. Triple unders are ridiculous.
How to Measure Your Waist
We've written about this topic in the past, but it's worth reviewing the misconceptions about cardio fitness and cardio exercise. (Remember, in our view, "cardio" should be only 1/3 of your exercise program beacuse it does little for muscle and bone strength, and little for athleticism.)
If you are fatter than you want to be for appearance, functionality, energy, joint health, or fitness, you can fix it. However, it can be as challenging as quitting smoking or quitting excess booze. Deprivation of greedy impulses takes character strength, the building of which is good and a wholesome exercise in itself.