Maggie's Farm

Fruits are designed as attractions for critters to spread their seeds. Thus they contain sugar (fructose, not glucose) and a bit of fiber to hold it together.

Fruit is a fun snack, especially with pears. Pears are perfect with cheese.

If you want to lose weight, fruit is something to avoid. Fructose goes directly to fat storage.  

This article is about stressful exercise, not about walking or "long slow 'cardio'": How does the brain respond to a single bout of exercise?

Some links from Boudreaux

Why not get a booster? It won't kill you. Latest info is that you can mix up the shots. It makes sense to me.

Nobody likes to get sick. I got my annual flu shot today at CVS. I am required to do so, and the flu is miserable.

Quillette's Best on Human Nature

Here's an addendum to my past post about recovery: Do Older People Need Longer to Recover from Exercise?

What is "older"? But anyway, generally the answer is no, especially once you are into a month or so of a daily fitness program.  Nobody can benefit from heavy deadlifts every day, or HIIT every day. For general fitness (maybe not for master athletes in training), mixing it up for an hour or so daily works best.

At any age, get your 20 gms or so of protein after a workout. It can't hurt. 

What Light Does ‘Three Identical Strangers’ Throw on the Nature/Nurture Debate?

From the article:

... researchers are now digging deeper into the mechanisms that underlie the benefits of physical activity. They are finding that exercise is both powerful and wide-reaching, affecting not just muscles and the cardiovascular system, but almost every part of the body, from the immune system to the brain to the energy systems within individual cells. And as scientists understand more precisely which levers exercise pulls to improve our health, clinicians are on the verge of being able to change their practice. The goal is to think of exercise as a medicine — a therapy that they can prescribe in specific doses for specific needs.

In exclusive interviews, two prominent providers sound off on puberty blockers, 'affirmative' care, the inhibition of sexual pleasure, and the suppression of dissent in their field.

As readers know, I view these "treatments" as malpractice, quackery, or something in that direction. 

About semaglutide and related topics: The Future of Weight Loss:

 Semaglutide, and the drugs that will follow it, may soon replace most bariatric surgeries. “Slowly, slowly, slowly, we outcompete the surgeons,” predicts Macklin, who is already referring many fewer patients for surgery. “They know we’re coming.”

How a ‘fatally, tragically flawed’ paradigm has derailed the science of obesity

Yes, it is about carbs and not so much about calories.

That is the wrong question but James Q. Wilson's 2004 essay (re-posted at City Journal for 9-11) is good.

Why is it the wrong question? Because it makes it sound as if terrorism were some sort of pathology rather than a form of war for those without large armies and weapons.  

The Truth about Autogynephilia

After having spoken with many people, over decades, about their lives and sometimes their wildest sexual fantasies, I still find the gender identity issue sort of strange. I suppose I have heard it all, but have never seen a patient who was worried about their gender expression. I have seen plenty of gay men who were afraid to come out of the closet though. That was usually prompted by wives who wondered about their husbands' lack of sex drive.

Wild fantasies are normal, at least in people lacking in the usual sorts of repression of taboos. Perhaps the political climate is making way for the overcoming of sex and gender taboos. 

From Marilyn Simon's The Language of Sex, at Quillette:

 My students, for instance, are surprised to learn that of the 154 love sonnets that Shakespeare wrote, the first 126 of them are to a young man. (The final 28, give or take, are love sonnets to the “dark lady,” who is characterized as both sexually experienced and sexually active, with desires and a will of her own. A woman adored and respected, deserving of admiration and love. So much for repressive patriarchy.) The question students invariably ask, then, is: “So… Shakespeare was bi?” To which I reply, “I think Shakespeare would have simply characterized himself as a man, a husband, and a father, though he clearly had an attraction to the beautiful young man of the sonnets, to say nothing of his many characters who demonstrate sexual flexibility in identity and desire.” “But then he’s bi!” they insist. To which I reply, “I think Shakespeare would have found our need for precise labels strange. Why do we have the need to define and to categorize human desire? Why this compulsion to attach precise labels to attraction, lust, and pleasure? If what Oscar Wilde says is true, ‘To define is to limit,’ then is it really Shakespeare and his contemporaries who are more repressed than us moderns because they didn’t self-identify as a category? Or is it us who try to contain our sexuality by itemizing every possible iteration of lust and attraction? Are we ready to assume that because we attach a label to human sexuality, we somehow understand better than Shakespeare did? Are we in a cultural position to say that Shakespeare’s insight into human nature is limited compared to the average 19-year-old student’s today?”

Is Obesity A Lack Of Will, A Poor Lifestyle Choice, Or A Disease?

I term being overweight (aka fat) simply as a physical condition regardless of how it came to be. Many people seem to be quite content with being heavy even though it is not fashionable or entirely functional.

When people I see want to lose weight, I offer simple nutritional advice. Once in a while, they take it. 

How What Was Good Became Ugly and Then Bad

In history, being fat was a sign of prosperity. In this world of food abundance, it is the opposite: "You can't be too rich or too thin."

Money is great but it can't buy happiness, and you can be too thin but that is another issue. 

There is "cardio", and then there is real Cardio exercise.  What many people, especially women, do for cardio is actually endurance work: Swimming a mile, fast walking, stairmaster, treadmill, elliptical. An hour or four of endurance work per week will keep you moving, but it's not really Cardio for a relatively healthy person.

Real Cardio means training the heart muscle (the invisible muscle) and stressing the cardio-pulmonary system. For the Cardio component of our Fitness For Life program, we recommend some endurance cardio but, more importantly, HIIT cardio training. 

What does it do? Primarily, it builds cardiac muscle and cardiac vessels. We need those for life exertions (eg mountain hikes), for endurance, for energy, for our sports, and, sadly, to help us survive our first or second heart attacks. Since most of us will die from cancer or heart disease, why not postpone the latter if we can, and have more energy and life vigor in the process? There's some evidence that it might help postpone dementia too.

HIIT entails maximum sprints, 30-45 seconds, integrated in a regular cardio program. You want your heart rate near you max output, 90% or more. This can be done with swimming, treadmill, stairmaster, Jacob's Ladder, rower - whatever.  Best not to undertake this without a stress echocardiogram and your doc to clear you first to make sure you do not drop dead in the gym. That would be embarassing for you and for them.

Customizing your HIIT workout. 

If you do 5-10 fully-intense, max effort cardio sprints on your cardio days, you will feel it. A bit of dizziness means you've done your best. Good calis classes offer this too, and you can, of course, exert yourself to your own best level.

Reminder: Whether you do "long-slow" exercises, or do HIIT, or jus take walks or swims, none of these will offer you any meaningful loss of abdominal fat. Fat is nutritional unless you workout 6 hours/day.

Not "social science". Real science. Dr. Ioannidis is on the video panel.

Immune system “clock” predicts illness and mortality

As researchers unravel the molecular machinery that links exercise and cognition, working out is emerging as a promising neurotherapy.

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 tomorrow will deal with hunger, appetite, and satiety. 

From Mate Selection for Modernity:

This mathematical model offers key insight into our unbalanced sexual marketplace. The number and weight of a woman’s mate preferences is negatively correlated with the number of eligible mates that are available to her. Thus, the distance of a prospective mate to a woman increases with each new preference she adds. Put simply, the more you demand, the less you receive.

More generally, there’s a disconnect between what women want and what is actually available to them. Whereas greater male attainment increases the number of romantic options a man has, greater female attainment reduces the number of options a woman has.

I quit them years ago when they were hijacked by lefty functionaries. 

This new AMA position paper is crazy, illiterate, and only comprehensible in tone: AMA Organizational Strategic Plan to Embed Racial Justice and Advance Health Equity.

It sounds like the Babylon Bee.