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.
…in a culture of abundance and affordable luxury, bodily self-abnegation no longer retains this primeval horror. Rather, the twenty-first-century middle-class American must actively labor not to become fat. Thus eating becomes moralized behavior. How often have you heard a woman describe a rich dessert as “sinful”? To eat is to sin—in secular society, the body replaces the soul. Good and evil are no longer purely spiritual concepts—these words have been transubstantiated into the realm of the flesh.
Bone weakness is mainly seen in post-menopausal women. It isasymptomatic until a bone breaks and you face a real problem. When men have it, it tends to be at least ten years later than women, on average.
You do not need to appear frail to have bone fragility, but osteopenia is one component of what we term "frailty" - vulnerability to things breaking. While being underweight is one risk factor, being heavy is not a protection. Vit D deficiency and inactivity are other factors, along with bad habits, unlucky genes, and a life style lacking in daily resistance exertion.
Hip fractures are one of the common presentations of previously-undiagnosed bone weakness. Contrary to common belief, people do not "fall and break their hip." It is usually the opposite: their femur just fractures from weakness, causing them to fall. People with bone weakness, though, are more prone to any bone fracture anytime they fall or have an accident.
Diagnosis is usually via a routine Bone Density Scan or after a fracture.
Prevention and Treatment: Besides getting some sunshine daily (not just on your face) and taking Vit D along with a good diet, the prevention and treatment for bone weakness is strength training. The medicines for osteoporosis are problematic and often ineffective. Cardio exercises - things like walking, running, swimming, etc. are not effective in building muscle or bone strength. (It is not unusual for runners to be weak-muscled - or for weight-lifters to be unable to run a mile. Balanced fitness means strength, a little cardio, and calisthenics for athleticism but only the strength component is relevant here). Some full-body calisthenics might be helpful (eg squats, farmer's walks, push-ups, step and press) but what really helps is moving heavy weights against gravity with all the muscles you can engage for a couple of hours each week.
That works because muscle stress and muscle growth put the good kind of stress on the bones to which they are attached. This naturally stimulates bone development. Bone-ligament-muscle is a functional unit. Weight training can not damage your bones. Quite the opposite.
For strength training for post-menopausal women, I recommend working towards multi-muscle-group exertions like barbell or goblet squats, bench press, deadlifts, assisted pull-ups, military press, leg press, etc with ever-increasing resistance. The uninitiated should not do these things without an experienced and savvy trainer with some nutritional sophistication. Being overweight is no obstacle to strength training, but a low BMI is a major obstacle to strength-building and requires remediation.
Bone weakness aside, any non-casual fitness program should include strength training, some cardio, and calisthenics. In addition, a nutritional plan that supports your conditioning goals.
A young friend recently asked, while on a lovely July walk, how plants got the energy to grow. It is high school bio, but I forgot some of it. I recalled the rough outlines of the Calvin Cycle, then began wondering whether plants had mitochondria because they use solar energy. Well, plant cells are eukaryotes just as are animals, so of course they have mitochondria.
The mitochondria of plant cells are somewhat different and are more variable than those of animal cells (meaning everything from the paramecium to humans). But why do plants need mitochondria at all?
For photosynthesis, they don't need mitochondria much. Light waves provide the energy to split water into the Hs and the O, and to attach those Hs to ADP onto ATP - the main energy source of most living things. Thus oxygen is produced by plants from water.
The second step of photosynthesis is to use the ATP to produce glucose (sugar) from CO2. Technically, triose phosphates are produced, which the cell combines to construct glucose. Simple sugar is the main building block for plant structure (eg cellulose, etc).
That whole thing is called the Calvin Cycle and it is one fancy mini-machine.
However, for night functioning and for extra needs, plants can also burn sugar (that's called respiration) just as animal cells do. Mitochondria do that job. In the respiration of plants and animals, glucose is metabolized to CO2 and water to produce ATP - the energy for cell life and growth. Thus plants are CO2 emitters and oxygen emitters.
Animal life requires plants, but not vice versa. Only plants can produce glucose which is the building block for many things including carbs.
I will not get into the topic of how plants and animals construct proteins now. It is all a miracle.
Body type is relevant to health, exercise, and appearance. It's worth bearing in mind that few people are a pure type, and that, for example, endomorphs can be fat (often termed "skinny fat" - ie a belly on a slender frame) and ectomorphs are not necessarily fat.
The body types are genetic, products of inborn bone and muscle structure. In other words, the body frame.
Posture is complicated, because it involves habit, training, psychological attitude, and muscle strength. Further, good posture makes you more presentable and makes you look more confident even if you do not feel that way.
Medically, good posture helps prevent back problems.
Computer monitors, age, shame and shyness, muscle atrophy, and general slovenliness are the enemies of good posture: shoulders back, head up, no slouch, belly tucked in, etc. Look good, not proudful but self-respecting.
In the crematorium, will you sizzle nicely or will your corpse burn down the funeral home?
We recently posted about abdominal muscles and abdominal wall fat, but fat of course is widely-distributed on the body. It's not all subcutaneous. Much of the excess fat you have is intramuscular and most of it is stored amongst your guts in the large packets of soft lard which produce the belly.
The human body is a sponge for carbs. It is designed to be a prepper for the next famine. If you have ever assisted with surgery on a heavy person, those giant yellow blobs of adipose clinging to the organs and intestines mean trouble. They ooze a slippery oil that make it difficult to hold onto a tool and get in the way of everything you try to do. Disgusting. Surgeons hate working on heavy people because of that. It pisses them off but they deal with it. Risky, though.
But, with the first incision when the yellow subcutaneous globules billow up and flow out onto your skin, they will say things about you that you would not like to hear. It's one reason they knock you out first. Handling all of that goo in my youth helped motivate me to stay fit in middle age.
Around 15% body fat is considered good, athletic fitness for men, and about up around 19-23% for women. Women naturally carry somewhat more fat in their hips, butts, and boobs. Less than 19% in women is for under-30 year-olds, body-builders, the naturally-skinny, and if it gets too low, those with eating problems. No need for expensive tests to assess yourself. Just compare your image below the fold, from here.
No teacher is qualified to go rummaging into kids' unconsciousnesses, nor is it necessary, nor is it desirable. As a tomboy kid, I think this would have messed up my head. This is a political agenda driven by either ignorant or, more likely, deliberately-disruptive people.
Perhaps kids need safe spaces from psychological assaults by the education machine. This reminds me of the Death Education for kids that was a big deal ten years ago. The field trip highlight of that movement was to bring kids to mortuaries and see what was done to the corpses.
Is it cynical to wonder whether teaching arithmetic is just too difficult?
By New England puritanical standards it feels sinful or weak to be as attached to possessions as I am. So be it, because I never claimed to be sinless. I never claimed to be entirely free of superficiality either. Appearances have an effect on me and on everybody.
Artifacts from my life and from my family and my ancestors give me pleasure and comfort. Much of it probably has minimal monetary value (for example, you have to pay people to take away brown furniture today, even mahogany furniture, because nobody wants it) but it has meaning to me with memories attached.
I often mistype Marital as Martial. Freudian typos? It's an impossible job, but sometimes highly gratifying and always interesting. I enjoy doing it when I get a chance to. Generally speaking, as a therapist you fly by the seat of your pants but it's never dull. I have even done couples therapy with gay guys. Never a dull moment.
Where did that middle-class term "parenting" come from? And is gardening a useful metaphor for raising kids?
Our approach was to try to set good examples in every way we were able given our imperfections, to make parental praise rare and valuable and parental disapproval painful, to forbid TV with rare exceptions, to indulge their interests, to expose the kids to as many experiences and opportunities as we could and try to prevent them from being killed or maimed while allowing enough space for initiative, adventure, and failure. We had no better ideas than those.
As government and other medical bureaucracies impose themselves on medical practice, their temptations are to create "practice guidelines" for their practitioner subordinates.
I resist the underlying idea of one-size-fits-all, or even the idea of a tyranny of "best practices." Each patient is unique. Furthermore, most areas of medicine are in constant controversy and dispute, with new ideas always emerging. For one example, the nutritional bureaucracies are about 20 years behind the times.
I have seen plenty of people poorly-served because of fear of rules or of law suits.
Vit D is essential to health and to healthy growth, especially bone growth. Almost all of human Vit D is produced by skin in response to UV solar radiation. Animals with fur and feathers produce their own.
In its favor, it seems to help prevent some cancers and heart disease, so it is a good guy.
In the US, Vit D is added to commercial milk to make sure kids get some. About 15-20 minutes/day of unprotected sun seems enough to raise Vit D levels but few people get that daily. Sunbathing nude, of course, makes it quicker. Some of it is stored in fat cells for a while, until it gets used up.
A "healthy diet" above and beyond the basics cannot be defined and never will be defined because adequate nourishment can be obtained in so many ways. Much of the science of nutrition is dubious and, anyway, nobody reading this website is in any danger of being malnourished. Overnourished, more likely. Americans probably pee out more vitamins and minerals in a week than malnourished African kids get in a year.
In other words, Americans are the last people in the world who ought to fetishize the idea of "healthy" food. That is probably why we are the only people who do.
The nutritional science which has the most value involves diseases of malnutrition, which are absent in the Western world. The knowledge that has general applicability concerns the roles of protein, carbs, and fats in the diet, perhaps the role of vitamins, and the new information about how people become fat.
Furthermore, some foods are disparaged as unhealthy for no reason. Consider steak and burgers, ice cream, and so forth. People say "Eat fruits, greens, and vegetables." Why? They are just sometimes-tasty fillers with minimal nutrients but which can be fun to eat if done right. Is orange juice "healthy"? Depends what you mean. It's flavored sugar water and some people prefer it to plain water. Is chocolate "bad for you"? Of course not. It is wonderful food.
People talk about what foods are "nutritious." In the Western world, that is an absurd notion. Lots of guys in the NBA were raised on Frosted Flakes, Doritos, hot dogs, Coke, MacDonalds, and school lunch slops. Highly nutritious. The only people who should eat brown rice and whole wheat bread are people who prefer the flavor. The only people who should pay any attention to nutrition are parents of growing kids, people who are overweight, and athletes and others with heavy physical work.
In the prosperous Western world, you are not what you eat - so people ought to eat what they like and what they can afford and ignore the health marketing hype and ignore the health superstitions. I can tell you why our family meals consist of what they do: Tradition, preferences, and nothing more.
Modern investigators find it hard to accept the fact that groups exhibiting superb physical development and perfect health ate liberally of the very dietary component that modern nutritionists have demonized: Saturated animal fat.
These are quite closely-related experiences, aren't they? I think in terms of lions.
Watching a lion chase a gazelle is exciting. Being chased by a lion is fear. Having a similar feeling with no lion is anxiety. Something like that. The point is that context matters quite a bit in how we label these things.
Another point is how the term "anxiety" is often applied to normal variations in people to medicalize something. Example: "I am afraid to meet and mingle with people" vs. "I have social anxiety." Same thing, sounds different.
This is all terribly oversimplified. And so is this cute presentation below, but it makes some good points.
In Western civilization, self-exposure is often a daunting process. I mean physical as well as psychological exposure. Self-exposure requires courage and trust, but fortunately it is rarely called-for.
In public, we cover ourselves up literally and metaphorically. We put our best foot forward, if sober. The only real exception is at the beach where everybody wears highly-exposing underwear and our flaws are out there for all the world to see.
My topic is shame, whether about our physical or our psychological beings. Most of the time, shame is not neurotic but a healthy human response to exposure of our flaws, imperfections, and general instinct for privacy. We all have all sorts of dirty laundry. We are all on some spectrum between shame-paralyzed and shameless. The extremes are problems.
What sorts of things are often on many peoples' shame/privacy lists?
Physical self must be exposed sometimes: physical exams, weight, strength, physique, dentist(!), beach, sexual encounters, excretory fuinctions
Psychological exposure: Our private thoughts, fears, fantasies, mental flaws and weaknesses. Sometimes we will cautiously expose these to close friends or to shrinks.
Other personal attributes: Money, personal habits and home, rotten behavior, political views, failures, public performances, job status, childrens' difficulties, etc.
Intimacy means showing aspects of our unadorned selves to somebody else. It is not something to be done lightly because our private selves are not necessarily appealing to others (note the expression "TMI").We know that better than anybody, hence shame.
Caveat: Sociopaths are quite good at faux intimacy for purposes of ingratiation and manipulation.
Mitochondria are complex little buggers which live in our cells almost like little bacteria. They are the cell's, and thus the body's, power source (they burn sugar and only sugar but, only if necessary, the body will convert body fat or body protein into sugar for them to burn). They have their own DNA which is separate from your personal DNA.
"mtDNA" is only inherited from the mother, which is why we know that all living humans are descendants of one woman, Mitochondrial Eve. That is quite remarkable.
In recent years, the identification and understanding of Mitochondrial Diseases has been progressing. Most of these diseases are disabling or fatal: What is Mitochondrial Disease?
A young friend recently asked, while on a lovely July walk, how plants got the energy to grow. It is high school bio, but I forgot some of it. I recalled the rough outlines of the Calvin Cycle, then began wondering whether plants had mitochondria because they use solar energy. Well, plant cells are eukaryotes just as are animals, so of course they have mitochondria. 
In 20 years, we have had two significant water pipe leaks and at least one mess from very heavy rains.
Vit D is essential to health and to healthy growth, especially bone growth. Almost all of human Vit D is produced by skin in response to UV solar radiation. Animals with fur and feathers produce their own.
Mitochondria are complex little buggers which live in our cells almost like little bacteria. They are the cell's, and thus the body's, power source (they burn sugar and only sugar but, only if necessary, the body will convert body fat or body protein into sugar for them to burn). They have their own DNA which is separate from your personal DNA.