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.
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.
You can be age 15, age 37, age 58, or age 72. And any gender you what to be. One day, you wake up and confess that you are a lazy-ass, or even a lard-ass, unfit person, and hate yourself for it. Or maybe something triggers the reaction, like feeling tired from activity. Dragging. Pudgy. Invisible muscles. Etc.
So you decide to be the best you can, and you want the energy, mental and physical vigor you might have once had.
How to start? First, you need to agree that most of a fitness program is mental, not physical. Besides going to the dentist, a serious workout program is a rare thing where it can cost money to subject yourself to pain. What are the first steps?
1. Confess that you are in lousy condition. Then commit to the long-term (life-long) project.
2. If fat, construct a nutrition plan to lose 2 lbs/week. Now is the time to do that. That will help. If scrawny or underweight, don't worry about it yet.
3. Begin a gradually-advancing program of not-intense cardio and calisthenics for 4 weeks, total 4-6 days/week. 2-3 days of light calisthenics, 2 of light cardio. This will tell your body and mind that you might be beginning to make some demands on it. However, it is best to begin conditioning gently to avoid injury.
By light cardio, I mean working up to 45-50 minutes of fast walking, inclined walking, elliptical, rowing, stair machine, etc. Maybe swimming laps. Mix it up to avoid boredom.
By light calisthenics, I mean beginner calisthenics like this 2-3X weekly (just put up with her annoying enthusiasm because it's a very good way to get moving and not as effortless as it looks. Good stretching at the end):
Step 2 for beginners in another post once you have 16-20 sessions under your belt.
We've all had it. It only lasts about 24 hours, but it is miserable and not treatable.
It's not treatable because the Staph bacterium (Staphlococcus aureus) produces a toxin which causes the physical reaction. The toxin is the problem, not the Staph. Staph is everywhere.
Food poisoning is avoidable by proper food management. Specifically, don't leave susceptible foods out of refrigeration for more than 2-3 hours. Yes, I know, we all do sometimes but it's not "best practices."
My last food poisoning incident was from a shrimp dish.
Furthermore, as is well-established now, being overweight is a major risk factor for dementia (#2 after genetic).
My view of overweight is Live and Let Live. Overweight people know all of the consequences, and accept them as adults. I do help pay their self-inflicted Medicare bills but that's life in the US today. As an outdoorsy, sporty, fitness person I feel that giving up on vitality is sad, but people must do what they want to and nobody needs to be like me.
If you care, it's easy to lose 1.5-2 lbs of fat/week in a healthy way with a smidgen of self-control. We have posted on that topic many times. Underweight is another issue entirely.
Rightly or wrongly, we reserved physical punishments for dangerous situations. For example, running into the road when told not to. For running into deep, wavy water before being adequate swimmers.
However, we were of the generation of gentle rather than authoritarian parents. Probably not the best. Now, I feel the youth need some fear of parents because it is parents' job to represent reality before the kids hit real reality.
Reasons to visit Vienna: Coffee, pastries, horses, the Belvedere and the Kunsthistoriches.
You can't "do" the latter any more than you can do the Prado. It's like the Metropolitan in NYC, but Vienna has the best collection of northern European art (thanks to the Hapsburgs). We went there to see the Breughels, and that was enough. Mind-boggling.
That article is close to what I wrote yesterday. Mind you, this is for daily intense exercisers and weight training. It's not for ordinary exercisers, or for those needing to gain of lose weight.
I'm talking about lifters who are working on strength and muscle-building for 3+ hours/week. For muscle repair and renovation, such people need from 70-90 gms of protein daily depending on their size and body type.
Serious strength-builders also need more carbs and fats/oils than non-lifters. It's near-impossible for men to gain significant strength without gaining some weight (muscle weight, not fat weight). Women are different because they can not normally build muscle bulk.
Sedentary or cardio-exercisers need around 40 gms of protein daily. That does not include people in marathon training. And don't forget that there is some protein in everything we eat, so vegetarians can build strength as well as carnivores as long as they consume enough volume.
HOWEVER, nobody's body can use or metabolize more than 20-25 gms of protein in 3 hours. Anything more than that goes to waste or into body fat (yes, excess dietary protein can go to body fat). That's why lifters eat multiple small meals daily rather than the conventional three - to keep a stream of usable protein flowing.
A nice steak contains 70+ gms of protein, so most of that steak goes to nutritional waste. However delicious, it's recreational eating - something Americans specialize in. I love a t-bone occasionally but am under no illusion that I need it. It's for enjoyment.
(Other examples: a chicken breast has around 70 gms protein, an egg about 8 gms, a McDonald's burger about 20 gms, a cup of green beans about 2 gms, a cup of yoghurt or milk 8 gms, a cup of oatmeal 6 gms. )
The current socio-political meme is that men are pigs, sometimes but rarely aggressive pigs, when it comes to desire and sexuality. As somebody who is privy to male fantasies, I have no doubt about that. As Freud taught us, human apes are civilized and restrained at great cost.
But what about women? Wholesome women are libidinal too, if less aggressively so. All or most honest females will admit their needs for romance and exciting sex lives. It's biological that both men and women want sexual satisfaction as often as possible. Because of culture and moral demands, many keep it safely in the fantasy realm.
It's a challenge for women to keep their men charmed and enchanted by them, and vice-versa. Worth the effort, though. Besides trying to remain interesting and fun, it never hurts for guys and gals to look good naked.
This is a spliced Youtube, which begins with the semi-humorous political and winds towards the infinite. "Tragedy is the precondition of being. Being is the interplay between the finite and the infinite."
The man sure can talk powerfully. He's a preacher of sorts.
So when there was once a bimodal distribution of mortality - infancy and youth, and then old age, now there is only one. All of those deaths in youth skew average or median statistics to the point of meaninglessness. Antibiotics and immunization have made a huge difference.
Regarding infant mortality, it is difficult to compare the rates across countries because it depends on at what point the medical system declares an infant viable. In the US, where almost every infant is viewed as possibly viable, many more infancy deaths are named as such than in other places. It's the same phenomenon that rates Sloan-Kettering (cancer) hospital the worst hospital in the US. Many of their patients do not survive, obviously, despite possibly being the best cancer center in the world.
After the huge effect of public health, immunization, and antibiotics, medical advances have accomplished remarkable things in improving the function and independence of the elder cohort even though I have seen no stats to measure and compare this. In some ways, this is more valuable than life span alone. A generation or two ago you never saw people in their 80s playing tennis, skiing, or hiking up Mt. Washington. Now, it's common in the US (not so much in Europe).
The blessing we all have now, whether we are the half who live past the mid-late 70s, or the half who do not, is the opportunity to live what we're given with as much richness and independence as possible.
It's a topic which is rarely discussed, but one which can make a big difference. After all, almost no exercise is improved by holding one's breath during its execution.
-Aerobic exertions (ie, not sprints which are anaerobic, but swims, runs, biking, elliptical, etc) call for a good breathing rhythm. A typical aerobic breathing rhythm is 2:2, that is, breathing in for 2 steps and exhaling during 2 steps. Swimmers know all about breathing rhythm, typically one breath every two strokes or maybe every three strokes, and exhaling with face down in the water. I like to swim with breaths every 4 strokes, but it's just endurance swims, not speed.
- Breathing during sprints (as in HIIT): Sprints are of short duration. Many sprinters inhale once every 10-20 yards. Slow deep breaths, slow exhales. Panting is counterproductive. However you breathe in sprints of any sort, you will not keep up with oxygen needs. You can pant and gasp after you finish.
- Breathing during planks: Planks are typically 30 seconds to 2 minutes. Lots of trainers' advice is slow "in thru nose, out thru mouth," while others suggest in and out both thru nose. The latter is better.
- Breathing with resistance work: As the weights get heavier, breathing patterns become more important. Typically, inhaling during the eccentric motion and exhaling during the concentric motion. (Eccentric and Concentric movements). An exception might be an exertion which demands special core stability, like weighted squats. In such cases, a deep breath can be taken before the eccentric movement begins, and the breath held until exhaled on the concentric stand-up.
Also, with the powerlifts, there is no federal law against taking an extra breath after 5 or 6 reps of an eight rep set, at the end of a concentric motion. Why not? It's not meant to be a sprint. The purpose of weights is just to stress the heck out of muscle to the point of some micro-tears, not to be anaerobic cardio even if it tends to be.
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.
Accompanying 
No. At least not in one sitting.
The current socio-political meme is that men are pigs, sometimes but rarely aggressive pigs, when it comes to desire and sexuality. As somebody who is privy to male fantasies, I have no doubt about that. As Freud taught us, human apes are civilized and restrained at great cost.
By Paul Fussell, not new but interesting and amusing: