Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Bugfixed, Attribution, Atkins
Go ahead and get this one out of the way. Seth Scali writes: "The decision last week that ruled the Greek ban on video games as unconstitutional has been overturned, and a new trial has been ordered. Story from TheRegister is here. Don't take your GBA on that trip to Athens just yet ..."
It takes a strong man. Reader edrock200 submitted the story about a TiVO mod which could expand system capacity to more than 1000 hours of recording. The story as shown says that 9thTee is the card's developer; edrock200 corrects this "'The QuadCard, like the AirNet and TurboNet adapters also sold through 9thTee, were developed by a TiVo user named Nick Kelsey (known as 'jafa' on the TiVo Community Forum.) 9thTee is the distributor - though I don't want to take anything away from them, they have been remarkably supportive of the TiVo community and they deserve kudos for taking the financial risks of selling these add-ons.'
'It is truly amazing what Nick has been able to do with his electronics expertise.'"
Thanks for the clarification!
The Lizard sleeps with one eye open. An anonymous reader writes "MozillaZine have updated their article on the recently reported minor security bug in Mozilla [Note Slashdot posting]with the news that a fix has been completed. The bug allowed the webmaster of a site to find out where a user went after their site. The fix means that there are again no known security bugs in Mozilla. Presumably, updates to Mozilla-based browsers (Netscape, Galeon, Chimera etc.) will follow."
What about the all-shrimp-and-chili-paste diet? Schlemphfer writes "A few months back, Slashdot featured a NY Times story that talked about the Atkins diet in glowing terms. This week, the Times has published a Jane Brody article raising serious questions about whether Atkins-style diets are dangerous and unsustainable. Brody is one of the most prominent and respected nutrition journalists, so it's worthwhile to read her take on the matter. Brody's article, which cites some important new research, may be an eye-opening read for Slashdot readers who took the plunge with Atkins back in July." (The NYT requires free registration.)
Suddenly everyone is in deadly earnest. Ian Cumming was one of several people to write with evidence of smileys predating the smileys unearthed by Mike Jones of Microsoft Research. He forwarded an informative message from Brian Dear of Birdrock Ventures, which reads in part:
"On the PLATO system, emoticons were much richer -- made using multiple characters displayed on top of each other. It was possible to type, say, a single character, then press SHIFT-space (which moved the cursor exactly one space backwards), then type another character. The second would display on top of the first. You could keep doing this for multiple characters and create many different faces, beer glasses, martini glasses, all kinds of things. And people peppered their emails and notesfile (PLATO's newsgroups) postings with them all the time."
And what is the PLATO system? The short version is this: PLATO was (is) an education-centered computer system developed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Luckily for you, Dear is writing a book about PLATO. His site is fascinating, and the book promises to be as well. Here is a page showing the richness of PLATO emoticons.
Reader Grant Barrett also writes: "The earliest (not first: you can never precisely say which was first) recorded smiley in print discovered so far was found by etymologist and word researcher Barry Popik who posted this message to the email list of the American Dialect Society. He discusses the yellow smiley face which everyone knows, but this particular smiley is the familiar punctuation-based emoticon. (On a side note, he has uncovered some evidence that Harvey Ball *did not* invent the familiar yellow-faced smiley.)"
That reference puts the typographic smiley all the way back to 1953, and as Barrett mentions, was in print rather than online. He also points out that "ESR's Jargon File cites a 'rival claim by Kevin McKenzie, who seems to have proposed the smiley on the MsgGroup mailing list, April 12 1979.'"
But there's only one groove per side ... To all those who thought that the optical-scanning method for playing vinyl was an elaborate joke, note that you can download the creator's code if you'd like. This is not the easy way to do things, but is one way.
I've been keeping track of my progress since July 13th on Atkins and as of today I am 41 pounds lighter. How about that? Nutritionalists be damned...
But I was a little happy when I heard about the Mozilla security bug. Not because I want to see anything bad happen to the lizard (after all I'm using it now), but because I knew it meant that soon Ximian would release a Mandrake 8.2 build of the most recent version taking care of a few of the other 1.0 bugs I wanted to see fixed. :)
---
Jedimom.com, picking out a thermos, for you.
StrategyTalk.com, PC Game Forums
The decision last week that ruled the Greek ban on video games as unconstitutional has been overturned
Wouldn't that be in violation of the EU Human Rights directive that came in force, or does a basic human rights charter not cover entertainment?
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
And closes with Brody saying she thought of it first.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Back in the 80s I was going to UofAlberta and I stumbled upon the plato system. I tired it out a few times and it seemed pretty neat. I remember wondering why I had not heard of it before.
One time I was doing some medical simulation. I remember that I had a patient and no matter what I did he didn't seem to be doing better. I recognized all the medical terms except one so I tried it. I selected Lumbar Puncture and man did his vitals ever drop fast! He was the only patient that died under my care. Actually the correct procedure was to immediately transfer him to a hospital at a major centre.
Just because there are no publicly known security bugs, that doesn't mean Mozilla is security bug free. There could still be some undiscovered or some that are still marked as eyes only. Look how quickly they fixed it once it was public. Look how long it took before they went public. But that won't stop me from using Mozilla.
I've lost fifteen pounds, and am still losing weight. I also have stopped having attacks of hypoglycemia, which used to happen almost every day.
The diet emphasizes low carbohydrate (max 30 grams a day - I can eat half an english muffin a day, and that's about it), and moderately high protein, but really emphasizes eating lots more vegetables.
They don't pretend that it's balanced nutrition, and explicitly say that one must take vitamin and mineral supplements, which I do.
Once I lose all the weight I want, I can increase the amount of carbo I eat, but I don't think I ever want to go back to the level of carbohydrate intake I used to have - a couple of cans of Coca Cola Classic a day along with a heaping plate of spaghetti.
I've tried low-fat diets before and never had any luck with them. Neither have I been able to lose weight purely from exercising since I've been in my 30's (worked in my early 20's though). But I feel better enough with the Protein Power diet that I have started bicycling again for the first time in several years (but I haven't bicycled so much that my weight loss can be attributed to exercise yet).
I weigh 235 pounds, down from 250. My aim is to weigh 180. I'm 5'11".
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
I like to call the Atkins diet the "make yourself sick diet" (someone elses quote, can't remember who - some registered dietitian) - If I remember correct, you survive off of ketones instead of glucose, which makes you somewhat ill and accordingly, you lose your appetite, eat less, and lose weight.
:)
The best diet is one that you can stick to. I have lost ten pounds over 8 weeks without ever feeling hungry or giving up junk food. I did it by following the food guide, walking/cycling, and lifting weights.
Keep in mind, this is a net of ten pounds lost - I have gained muscle mass.
To anyone that wishes to lose weight or just eat healthy, check out the book "The American Dietetic Association's Complete Food and Nutrition Guide" - it dispels a lot of common myths (ie/ you must increase protein consumption to build muscle but not carbohydrate consumption) and is very informative.
If you just want the basics, check out Food Guide Canada or The USDA Food Pyramid for more info.
There are alternatives to these as well. I don't have any links handy, but there are pyramids for a Meditaranian (sp?) and vegetarian diets as well. A lot of vegetarians are actually in terrible health because they don't eat enough protein or are missing vitamins - if you wish to give up animal products, do make sure you read up on a healthy vegetarian diet!
A really good website is also at Ask a Dietitian - lots of good questions answered there. (Check out the icon if you bookmark it - a little penguin
Lastly, if you are interested in weightlifting, do it right! Use an abbreviated routine (no more than three lifting days per week) and stay away from the muscle comics and expensive supplements. I personally will eat an energy bar if I'm on the go, but wasting money on Myoplex is pointless when a chicken sandwich will work just as well.
Check out the misc.fitness.weights faq or the iron page at stumptuous.com for some good tips.
Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
Title: "High-Fat Diet: Count Calories and Think Twice"
Count calories? Everyone realizes that if you eat more calories than you burn, you will gain weight. However, on an Atkins diets, one of the common effects is a loss of appetite, which results in fewer calories in. Ever eat a high fat meal and feel really full? Yup, that's the fat at work. Ever suck a whole bag of chips or a box of cookies down? That's those speedy carbs at work.
"But in a major report last week, the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies emphasized the importance of balance of nutrients, with carbohydrates -- starches and sugars -- making up 45 percent to and 65 percent of daily calories"
And this is different from the current party line how exactly? It's not. It's the same thing they've been preaching for 30 years as American obesity has gone through the roof.
One question I'd like to see answered is how long anyone can stay on such a scheme and what happens when you start adding back some of the wholesome foods limited or forbidden on this diet, like sweet corn, grapes, watermelons, potatoes, carrots, beets or oatmeal.
You don't go adding those things back. It's not just a "weight loss" diet, it's a "way of life" diet. It's like saying "How long until a vegetarian starts adding on the bacon, hot dogs, hamburgers", etc. When they do that, they're no longer in that group, and the benefits they see start dropping off.
Why hasn't the government tested it? One possible reason is that it is unlikely to be approved by any review committee, given what is known about the effects of animal fats and cholesterol on the risk of heart disease, strokes and some cancers, as well as accumulating evidence that diets rich in fruits and vegetables and moderate in protein and fat can prevent diseases like high blood pressure, prostate cancer, heart disease and diabetes.
Excuse me? It's think a chicken and egg problem? We can't test the effects of that because we think the effects are bad? If they won't test it, how do we really know what the affects are? The Atkins side says its the high carbs, not the fats, in the diet that are causing the health problems. The western diet has been shown to have a severe negative affect on many non-westerns. Look at Native Americans. Their rates of obesity, high blood pressure and diabetes are huge thanks to this "healthy" high-carb diet.
The Atkins diet is shy on several vital nutrients, including the B vitamins and vitamins A, C and D, antioxidants that slow the effects of aging, and calcium. And, a diet rich in animal protein can draw calcium from the bones, increasing the risk of osteoporosis and hip fractures.
Sigh. Atkins himself tells people to take multivitamins and calcium supplements. There are certain types of foods we simply don't eat often in modern society (organ meats anyone?) so that we miss out on some crucial vitamins.
First, Americans are simply eating more -- an average of 400 calories a day more than they did decades ago.
And why is that? Could it be the fact that with less fat to make them feel full, and they eat more carbs, which leads to them eating even more carbs?
What it all comes down to is the fact we need to test these things rather than repeating the same thing for the past 30 years that IS NOT working. Yes, change hurts, but sometimes it is necessary.
o/~ Join us now and share the software
Make sure you drink a lot of water since your kidneys will need it. High protien diets eventually lead to kidney stone formation. Have you ever tried to pass a stone? Trust me, its not a walk in the park. As much as you are trying to lose weight based on the type of food you consume, you must also excercise. I run about 3 miles a day which takes me about 30 minutes to complete. I make sure that I eat whatever I want, but I am capping my calorie intake at 1500 cal/day. That 3 miles of running is about equal to 500 calories burned so in essence i take in only 1000 cal/day. Once I reach the desired weight, I can increase calorie consumption to 2000 cal/day and run every other day to maintain it. I weight 215 at the begining of July. I weight 184 as of this morning.
Whatever you do, just remember... high protien diet MUST MUST MUST be accompanied by lots of water and frequent trips to the bathroom! Good luck.
So instead of listening to science, you believe the marketing/"news" crap that's spouted from the "mainstream" media. Brilliant. I can't wait until all of the Atkins diet people start needing some new kidneys. They ain't gettin' mine.
You'd probably be far healthier just eating normally and getting some exercise. Fsck knows what's in those vitamin supplements...
Update now. 1.1 is is in unstable as of yesterday, although I don't know about the bugfix.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
I eat just as much on the atkins diet as I did before it, if not more. Now instead of consuming calories from carbohydrates, I get them from fat and protein. Fat is much denser in calories than carbohydrates are, unless you're talking about pure sugar.
And hey, what the hell does this paragraph say?
"...with carbohydrates -- starches and sugars -- making up 45 percent to and 65 percent of daily calories and fats, 20 percent to 35 percent." Nice ringrish there, sister. I've tried and tried to decipher what this is supposed to say. Does this mean that carbs make up 45 to 65 percent of your ideal diet, and fats should be 20 to 35 percent? Why the spurious "and"? For that matter, the first occurence of "percent" is unnecessary.
That's not an inaccuracy of fact, it's just an occurrect of stupidity.
The answer: Forever. Some people have been on this diet all their lives, healthily. It's used to control seizures. Do some research before you write an article for the New York Times.
Second, what makes you say those foods are so wholesome? Sweet corn is laden with sugar, hence the sweetness. Watermelons are little more than water and sugar. Potatoes are a ton of ready carbs, they're white starch; All of those carbs hit your bloodstream at the same time and get turned into glucose very rapidly.
What's surprising is that people in countries who ate this way in the first place didn't convince you. A dramatically better article (and not coincidentally one I agree with), What if it's all been a big fat lie? (Also in the NYT, free reg. req. etc) points out that people in Italy and the Carribean who ate a lot of starch (classically) tended towards obesity, and other people (who generally ate meat and veggies) did not. Seems simple to me. Being fat is unhealthy.
"high levels of saturated fats and cholesterol, long associated with heart disease risks."? Let's talk about how high levels of saturated fat and cholesterol became associated with heart disease risks. As per the NYT article I cite above, the last time the government spent our money studying fat, they spend several hundred million dollars trying to prove a link between fat/cholesterol intake and heart disease. They managed to prove only that treating cholesterol with drugs lowered the risk of heart failure. THAT'S IT. From that we got the food pyramid, which puts carbohydrates at the base. Eating tons of ready carbs means your insulin level spikes, and that's hard on the pancreas. And any time insulin levels are above a certain point, you store unused carbohydrates as FAT. You don't have to eat any fat whatsoever to get fat, which I think we all agree is unhealthy.
So in other words, the US government is the last group I'd trust to do a study like that. Last time they tried to prove a link between cholesterol and heart disease, they pushed a bunch of carbs on us and may very well be responsible for early onset diabetes and the american obesity epidemic.
Wow, it sure is a good thing that "they" invented vitamin supplements. Otherwise that might be a real problem, eh?
You know, that's what we were told to do. The government as much as told us that it was fat that made you fat, and we responded by eating carbs. Anything with "low fat" on it sold like, er, hotcakes. Which are made out of refined flour, which is the same as sugar once you have digested it.
This is horseshit too. While you are in ketosis, you do not store fat. When you have unburned fat, you remove it from your body by an ancient process known today (medically) as a bowel movement. You don't gain it as weight.
Hence the Atkins diet makes it completely unimportant to count your calories, except to make sure you have enough. As long as you don't eat carbs, your insulin level stays low, which means you don't leave the state of ketosis. Ketosis also has benefits to health, including slowing the rate of lean muscle loss. Furthermore, as I alluded to above, the reduced glucose levels inhibit stroke activity, and the reduced load on the pancreas dramatically reduces the risk of diabetes.
Mankind did not evolve to eat carbohydrates in any significant quantity. We grew up eating meat, vegetable-type plants which are not generally high in carbs (Except from fiber, which is indigestible), and limited quantities of carbohydrates.
I want to know which cracker and chip company commissioned this FUD.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I actually started on the Atkins diet as a result of that NYT article. I have been wondering how healthy this diet is long term so I turned to this article with interest. Unfortunately the writer apparently never bothered to actually find out the specifics of the Atkins diet.
Some misconceptions:
* Can't eat many vegetables such as carrots. Actually there are three different phases of the diet, and only on the first and shortest phase is this true.
* Lacking in vitamins. Again this is mainly true of the first phase and less so in the later phases. The Atkins book *strongly* emphasizes the need for taking a wide range of vitamins. Only someone who never read the book could not have noticed this -- vitamin taking is an integral part of the diet! And at any rate now that I am on the long term maintaining part of the diet, I doubt that I am lacking in vitamin intake now.
* The diet is boring and focused mainly on saturated fats meat (ie beef). Again, only someone who has not looked into this diet seriously could make such a claim. Ironically, as a result of this diet I have been eating much *more* vegetables than I would have otherwise. I've also been eating a wider range of foods.
But even more important than that is that she never directly comes to terms with the first articles main theses -- it is an outright scandal that the Atkins test has never been properly tested. Her response is just the sarcastic:
"Why hasn't the government tested it? One possible reason is that it is unlikely to be approved by any review committee, given what is known about the effects of animal fats and cholesterol on the risk of heart disease, strokes and some cancers, as well as accumulating evidence that diets rich in fruits and vegetables and moderate in protein and fat can prevent diseases like high blood pressure, prostate cancer, heart disease and diabetes."
In other words the first NYT article was right -- the establishment already knew what was the correct answer and weren't about to let an inconvenient thing like science get in the way! The problem this poses for me is that when I try to find truly, objective scientific points of view -- they are hard to find if they exist at all in the world of nutrition!
The current version of Mozilla in Unstable is 1.1-1. See the package page. It's been there for a week now.
/etc/apt/sources.list: ./
If you'd like the packages faster, to get the maintainer's "not quite ready to check into Unstable" mozilla packages (which are still quite stable, just haven't gone through as much testing), add the following line to your
deb http://pandora.debian.org/~kitame/mozilla/
1.1's been available from there for at least two weeks now.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
You mean like this one?
Well, that is not accurate. The decision of the court hasn't been overturned! The case will just move to the appeals court and we will see what happens there.
The only court in Greece which is allowed a final decision on a subject, which can't be overturned by someone else, is the supreme court. So, until the case comes to the supreme court, it isn't closed.
Good to know that the guy finally released the source code. It was depressing watching all the "elite" slashdotters on here blasting his idea away, debasing him with a bunch of random equations and "laws of physics". Now that it's open source, you can all move your feet to your mouth :)
Lordfly
hookers and grits.
Caloric restriction with optimal nutrition. Currently this is the only method shown to extend the maximum lifespan of a variety of mammals. While it still can't be verified to extend maximum lifespan of humans, the current ongoing primate studies have so far shown the same effects as in mice and other animals. Humans on it have also shown the same changes in their body function as the other primates. If ones needs to improve their eating habits, might as well gain as much additional benifit from it as possible.
Everything will be taken away from you.
What I'm wondering, is with the overwhelming number of posts saying, "I'm on the Atkins diet! I'm thin, trim, good-looking, and healthy!", is the Slashdot audience really such a fat, lazy, gullible, stupid bunch, or are there a lot of people who work for Atkins posting here? This is very, very wierd.
- http://metwww.epfl.ch/lecteur_disques/MainLectDis
c E.htm - http://www.elpj.com/frameset.html
Not cheap though. And unfortunately you can't skratch on these....I eat two bagels in the morning with cream cheese, work like a dog all day, then I eat whatever I can find sometime around 6 or 7. Then maybe once a month I eat like a fly (as in nothing but sugar for a day). Basically the same weight I was in high school, 175 or so.
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vitamin supplements?
Well, vitamins of course.
Why raise suspicions on that, when one trip to mcdonalds is what a person should really worry about.
Has anyone just asked Scott Fahlman if he remembers seeing it before his first use? It's not like he's hard to find or anything.
My problem with the Atkins diet is that people treat it as a diet. I've known many people to go on this diet and I think every one has put the weight back on. Why? They treat it as a diet. Yes, you lose weight but as soon as you go back to your old habits you'll get it right back. Those habits got you there in the first place. Three months of losing weight won't make you suddenly not gain weight when you go back to your old ways.
Good health and keeping weight off requires a lifestyle change. Don't overeat and eat the things your body needs. Get some good exercise and do it right.
Personally, I hit the gym almost every day. I enjoy it a lot. I also eat so much better than I did 5 years ago and I don't miss it one bit. It's not hard to eat healthy and you'll save money doing it instead of eating out all the time. Since 98% of Slashdot is men I recommend you check out Men's Health magazine. It has some very good info in it....
Here's a site about a guy's struggles to lose weight. It looks like it worked for him. He talks a bit about what he did.
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
That's like 20 lbs a month. IANANutritionalist, but I hear that losing more than 10 lbs a month is too much of a shock to your system.
Think about it--you can just stop eating and lose 41 lbs in a couple weeks. It doesn't make it healthy. You should really see your doctor and make sure everything's going okay.
c-hack.com |
Atkins is okay as a diet, but a diet implies temporary. Low carb is a good way to lose weight at a reasonable speed (don't lose more than 8-10 pounds a month). High protein diets can eventually cause kidney stones. Drink lots of water, take vitamins, and eat as many veggies as the diet will allow, but it's also okay to take a break from it every once in a while.
I'm currently in a break from my low-carb, fairly high protein diet. I've lost about 15 pounds in my first 2 months. Most of my carbs came from salads, though. That's really the best way to do it, and you do need multi-vitamins on this diet.
I'm not an expert, and Jane Brody may know a lot, but for a long time, the mainstream doctors have been slamming Atkins and his diet, and a lot of them are starting to have second thoughts about that now.
What it comes down to is that doctors know a hell of a lot less than a lot of them think they do. I remember in the 70's hearing so much about how salt was so bad for you. A lot of people actually tried to cut all the salt out of their diet. What happened? They died of heart attacks caused by a salt deficiency.
Moderation, moderation, moderation (not the Slashdot kind). You can diet, but diet in moderation, and when you're off your diet, eat in moderation, and eat smart.
Canada Food Guide says eat whole grain foods more often
USDA Food Pyramid says eat more whole grains.
Seriously, where do these stories come from?
Low fat diets do not eliminate fats - it is recommended you that 30% of your calories come from fat by the USDA and Health Canada. They call it low fat because people usually eat >40% fat and that pushes our caloric intake too high.
Skinless chicken, baked potatoes with the skin still on, brown rice That's what both guides recommend - whole grains, lean meats - what's the problem?
Refined grains are mostly a problem because they are more calorically dense and lack vitamins, nutrients, and protein (I get 10-15% of my needed protein from whole grain bread).
Hell's bells man, you speak of conspiracy theories - what about the vegans that (often correctly) say we don't need milk or meat for protein - soy and peanuts would work just as well.
So who's really pulling the strings? The dairy and beef council or the cereal council?
Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
hmm... As any geek would know, this is only a "kilo-hour TiVo," not a "mega-hour TiVo" as the blurb states. For those who forgot thier prefixes, here is a short list of the powers-of-ten prefixes:
10^3 - kilo
10^6 - mega
10^9 - giga
10^12 - tera
10^15 - peta
10^18 - exa
10^21 - zetta
10^24 - yotta
learn 'em and use 'em properly.
--- At my sig, unleash hell.
Are you overweight, and lack the motivation to get some exercise? Have you tried all the other diets out there, and none of them seem to work? Do you get jealous when you see pictures of Ethiopians and Auschwitz prisoners? Do you think to yourself "if only I was oppressed, I could finally look like a supermodel, like I've always wanted?"
Well have I got the diet for you! It's called "The Gold Star Diet." Here's how it works: for just $2999.95/month, you get a personal trainer to follow you around all day, not allowing you to eat anything but stale bread crusts and moldy soup! He'll curse at you, strip you naked, shave your head, and call you by a number! Pretty soon, you'll lose all your self-respect! That is, if you're one of the few who starts out this diet with any. But that's not all! You also get 14 free mirrors to hang up around your house, so you'll never forget how imperfect you are!
Sickening.
c-hack.com |
Common Behavior
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Some people have terrible metabolism and require strict diets.
- Some people go to the gym and stick their thumb in their ass for an hour, don't even try to work out unless you plan on pushing yourself.
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Other people go to the gym, and then go home and eat a large pizza by themselves.
If if work out a a few times a week and don't eat a ridiculous amount of food, the weight will come off, but it doesn't happen overnight. Expect to see some results after four weeks, but don't expect the world. Good things take time, I managed to loose nearly 50 pounds in six months by just working out, five days a week.So who's really pulling the strings? The dairy and beef council or the cereal council?
The The Egg Council/Advisory Board of course!
Homer: So one of those Egg Council creeps got to you too, huh?
Lenny: Aw, you've got it all wrong, Homer. It's not like that.
[a man in an egg costume creeps, then runs, away]
Homer: You'd better run, egg!
Everything will be taken away from you.
To answer a couple of other points: the water loss only lasts as long as your glycogen -- less than 2 days. After that, you can lose muscle along with fat (though this is true of low-fat and low-calorie diets too, even more so), but most low-carb diets recommend exercise to prevent this. (Yes, I mentioned the `E' word, but it needn't be too frightening. I'm doing 15 minutes' worth a day at home, where no-one can see, and it's working for me. Based on the programme in The Hacker's Diet, but simplified and extended.)
And it's not just a standard low-calorie diet; for one thing, carbs give you an appetite. One of the characteristics of low-carb diets is that you don't feel as hungry.
I'm no endocrinologist. All I know is, it's working for me, and for everyone I know who's tried it.
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
Interesting STUFFe wycenter_timeline.html
From http://fitfat.ctvnews.com/interactive/timeline/ch
VERY INTERESTING:
1997 - The American magazine Psychology Today's body image survey finds that 15 per cent of women and 11 per cent of men in the U.S. said they'd be willing to give up at least five years of their life in exchange for the ability to reach their desired weight. That same year Redux or Fen-phen is taken off the market after studies link it to heart valve disease.
EARLIER HIGH-FAT LOW-CARBS DIETS:
1900 to 1920 - Although unconfirmed, there is reason to believe that TAPEWORM diet pills were marketed in the U.S. during the first two decades of the 20th century. Women allegedly swallowed "magic" diet pills that were actually TAPEWORMS in capsules. After they had shed enough pounds, women would take deworming pills to rid themselves of the parasite. (!!!)
1961 - Herman Taller's Calories Don't Count, which recommends a diet high in fat and low in carbohydrates is a best seller in the U.S.
1967 - Physician Irwin Stillman publishes The Doctor's Quick Weight Loss Diet. He advocates a high-protein, low-carb diet, but includes a recommendation to drink 10 eight ounce glasses of water per day to combat "water loss." Twenty million people try it.
1972 - Michael Jacobson of the Center for Science in the Public Interest coins the terms "junk food" and "empty calories" in reference to candy, snacks and soda.
Snapple introduces a new bottled fruit drink that is marketed as an healthier alternative to soft drinks.
And Robert Atkins publishes Diet Revolution which advocates eating all the fat you want as part of a high protein, low-carb diet. It quickly becomes a bestseller. (In 1992, he re-issues pretty much the same exact book.)
1982- Jane Fonda's Workout video is credited with creating the phenomenon of exercise videos. After selling millions of copies the tape was discontinued by the manufacturer after many of Jane's moves were found to be unsafe (!!!!)
1995 - North America sees a resurgence of low-carb, high-protein diets. (Back to this again!)
Also interesting : Bulemia first discussed in 1926, Anorexia brought to light in 1983 when a celebrities dies on stage; in 1929, Candy TV Ads say "candy is good for you."
Cover your eyes and click this link!
I have always thought it very odd that some people have to make an effort to drink more water.
I don't know why, but I have been thirsty all my life. Even since I was a small child. I constantly crave water. So I drink it, gallons per day. That's where the Coca Cola I mentioned above comes in. I also pee with great frequency.
It happens that one of the warning signs of diabetes is uncontrollable thirst. I've been tested a number of times for diabetes and have been found to be normal.
The last time I had my blood sugar checked I brought up my hypoglycemia with the nurse who tested me, and she said to eat a good lunch and have a couple snacks in the afternoon, which helps when I remember it but never made the problem go away. The only thing that did help was to increase the amount of protein in my diet and (ironically) reducing the carbohydrates.
I am never without a beverage at hand. Unfortunately, this is often coffee which I know is bad for me, especially in the quantity I drink it (2 or 3 pots a day). But I drink lots of pure water too. (Note that I was drinking just as much coffee before I started losing weight - I weighed 250 for about seven years.)
Many people on diets drink artificially sweetened sodas, but I find artificial sweeteners to taste foul. Nowadays when I'm out driving or something and stop into a convenience store for something to drink, I buy a mineral water.
I recently discovered some flavored but completely unsweetened carbonated waters from Poland Springs. They are flavored with the essential oils of various fruits and berries, like mandarin orange and raspberry.
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
cuz I post links to insightful articles that are completely on-topic. Sorry, I guess I should stick to flaming and offtopic rants.
:) Every other diet I tried left me tired, weak, and/or nauseous.
Anyhow...
Here is another link to an article critical of the Atkins diet. Nobody denies it works but it is essentially supported by anecdotal evidence - my man Randi taught me better than that!
As far as I am concerned, we are losing sight of the basic truths of nutrition... quit looking for a quick fix and be sceptical of everything.
I not only researched various diets - I also talked to people that had lost a lot of weight and kept it off for years.
Here is what I ended up doing (I won't call it a diet - it's the way I live now):
I went to Ask a Dietitian and used the healthy body calculator to calculate my caloric needs. I was very careful not to overestimate my daily activities. I arrived at a recommended daily caloric intake.
I referenced that against the Canadian food guide to find out approximately how much I should eat each day from each category. For me, it was 6 ounces of lean meat, 2 servings of dairy, 6-8 servings of grains, and 5 servings of fruits and vegetables. This is what I eat six days per week. If I ate this seven days per week, I would lose 2 pounds per week.
On one day per week, I pretty much eat what I want without gorging. The first few weeks I gorged until I was sick - now I'm not so bad. This really helps me stick to eating healthy because I know that for the rest of my life, I can occasionally eat snacks and not feel guilty!
Based on this, I should lose no more than 2 pounds per week - however, thanks to exercise, I have lost a bit more - 10 pounds net. Based on my bodyfat changes, I have actually gained a little bit of muscle, so I have actually lost more than 10 pounds fat, but I'm too lazy to do the math.
As I mentioned, exercise is important. I exercise 20 to 60 minutes, three times per week in addition to walking for 30 minutes (to and from the train to work) each day. I also weight train three times per week. On my eat-what-i-want day, I sit on my ass and play video games.
I keep a food and exercise journal to help me keep track of what I eat. And if I slip, I don't freak out or give up - I move on.
Here is the main thing I learned - there is no "one size fits all diet" - you have to do some research and decide what will work for you while filtering out the crap (fat blocker pills, ab rollers, etc). Talk to a registered dietitian (beware of nutritionists though) if you need help. If you are obese, talk to a Bariatric physician. Set small, realistic goals - don't say "I'm gonna lose 20 pounds in 4 weeks" - say "I'm gonna lose 5 pounds in 4 weeks".
I now have lots of energy, feel great, look good, and my girlfriend says I don't look so pasty anymore and I'm more of a sexual Tyranosaurus now
Once I have lowered my bodyfat, I intend to increase my caloric input again and continue to weight train to build more lean tissue and increase my basal metabolic rate.
Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
while the report actually says
The report goes on to develop minimum carbohydrate reccomendations explicitly based on the need to avoid ketosis. Now, that may well be a worthwhile goal, and there are clearly some problems associated with ketosis (such as kidney stones), but one can hardly use that report as another, independent reason for rejecting high-fat, low-carbohydrate diets.
You! Yeah, you! That was irony, fuckwit. You know who you are.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
Vilhjalmar Stefanson (Can't find any links!) wrote at least one book about his travels in the Alaskan and Canadian arctic. He mentioned several times that the Eskimos ate an all-meat, no-carbohydrate diet, with a very high fat content. He claimed that they maintained wonderful health on this diet, and attempted to prove it to doubters on his midwestern campus (he was an anthropology graduate student) by living on such a diet through a hot summer there while he finished his dissertation. He believed that the high-fat part was essential.
See what I've been reading.
But the artificially produced vitamin C is subtly different, and, in fact has measurable oxidizing and mutagenic effects (sorry, it's PDF. There are also newer and better studies if you search hard enough).
Similar results have been noted with artificial beta-carotene. The manufacturers are modifying the supplements now, but it gives an idea of how little we understand the nutrition processes.
Incidentally, artificial vitamin C first came under scrutiny in the mid-80's, when it was discovered that it did not prevent scurvy, but fruit-derived vitamin C did.
Lastly, it's pretty well known now that, while vitamins and minerals are very important, there are a lot of phytochemicals in the plant-based foods that are extremely important to health, and we only know what a fraction of them are. They can only load the supplements with what we already know about.
A witty saying is worth nothing - Voltaire
I must have debates on this diet at least 3 times a week and most people that I have these debates with don't really know anything about it (hmmmm...sounds kinda like /.) The high protien, low carb part of this diet is really only for the first couple of weeks. The purpose of this 'induction' period is to train your body to start burning fat instead of carbs - like it's supposed to. After your body has relearned what to process for energy, you are supposed to gradually add carbs back into your diet.
My wife has been heavier set most of her life and has worked VERY hard (LARGE amounts of excercise and watching everything she eats) to try and control this as long as I have known her - mostly to know avail (anybody that didn't know her would never believe she's a fitness nut). She also had reservations about this diet (for many of the same reasons stated in the above article), even after a good friend of ours started showing excellent results after being on it for a couple months (we're still wondering who stole the other half of that fat man =). Her first attempt was too try and integrate some of the ideas into her current diet but she saw no results and kinda gave up on it. After some persistance from our friend, and after I did a bunch of research on the net, we finally got her to just try it fully. Within three weeks she was definitely seeing results and not all of it was weight loss. She also has (had) problems with Rosacia (adult acne) but she hasn't had a flare-up since being on the diet. She has also had irregular periods almost all her adult life but since starting the diet she's been on time - to the day! Her energy level is also completely different. She has always been a high energy person but it was like a fake energy (just do something to be doing something), now she's has the same type of energy but she can actually focus it now - she also actually seems to make more intelligent decisions and doesn't fly off the handle over stupid things as much either (because she thinks about it first).
My opinion is that this diet, like any diet, may not work for everybody but for some people it's exactly what they need. If you are overweight you're already unhealthy anyways so I don't think trying this diet for a few weeks is going to be any more unhealthy for you than lugging around all that extra weight.
LRJ
That's why you drink 8 glasses of water a day, to piss them out. At the Kidney center, they have to hook people to a machine once a day to 'piss' them..
Needless to say, if you could only take a leak once a day, you're going to have lots of nasty stuff in your system all day. And probably not gonna drink your 8 glasses of water a day either, so you concentrate all the wastes in your system.
Starman97@Gmail.com (bring it on spammers)
If nothing else, Atkins himself turns me off to anything he puts forth. It may be the product of years of frustration, but he comes across as being anti-scientific. He has closely honed his 'used car salesman' pitch. What I've heard him say, and the way that he propogandistically avoids commenting on real scientific research leads me to not find him trustworth, and by extension I don't find his 'product' trustworthy.
Eat your broccolli and go for a brisk walk.
The original article on the Atkins diet from the times makes some very valid points, however I think it misleads the reader in one respect: by showing evidence that the low-fat high-carb food pyramid is flawed and then concluding that the logical alternative is to eat a high-fat low-carb diet, a la Dr. Atkins.
In reality, studies have shown that both high-carb and high-fat diets can lead to health problems.
Keep in mind, the original food pyramid myth was promoted because of discoveries during the Vietnam war that American 18 year olds had tons of plaque built up on their arteries and 18 year-old Vietnamese did not. The conclusion that was drawn was that the American high-fat diet was the cluprit. Hence, the food pyramid as we know it.
However, if you think about what the research has actually shown, the ideal diet is as follows:
Lots of vegetables, some high-fiber grains, and a small amount of meat, preferably fatty fish.
Now think for a moment about the nutritional conditions that existed during the majority of human evolution. We were engineered by evolution to consume a diet very much like the ideal diet described above. Of course, exercise is critical to health as well, and our ancestors got plenty of that in the course of their daily lives.
Amazing magic tricks
How can you write an article arguing against use of the Atkins diet and miss the obvious and deadly mental health problem it presents?
You can't drink beer for two weeks!!!
I'd rather be a fatass than sober...
I cut waaaay back on the refined sugar, as in no more sugary soft drinks, candy, cakes, and all that, and dropped 1-2 pounds/week for several weeks, wound up stabilizing about 20 pounds lighter, about where I ought to be. And I stopped getting sick stomach, which used to be a big problem. Mix sugar with yeast (fresh bread, pizza crust, etc) and Bad Things happen. (My homepage is waaay out of date and somewhat inaccurate in case anyone bothers reading it.)
:-).
Other than cutting out the refined sugar I didn't do a whole lot. I still go through most of a bad of Doritos or Sun Chips a week (not quite as fattening as potato chips but far from health food), I still eat pizza... turned out to be pretty easy to stick to. I should excercise just to build muscle mass and feel better, 10 minute brisk walks around the neighborhood help noticibly but I skip them way too much... anyhow, Refined Sugar Is Bad.
A few rounds of UT:2003 do wonders in terms of waking me up too. Heh. Too bad games are banned at work
I'm not going to rehash all of the information he gives, except to say that this diet has worked wonders for me, allowing me to reach goals of weight loss without sacrificing strength.
To rebut the article. Ketones have never made be 'nauseus'. Instead, I find that when ketogenic dieting my hunger is blunted, not removed. The swings that sugar and insulin cause in my body go away. That alone is worth the effort.
Since so many people seem to be missing (or willfully ignoring) the point:
1. Obesity is bad. Everyone agrees on this.
2. Reducing the number of calories you eat or increasing the number of calories you burn is the only way to lose weight, short of liposuction. Everyone agrees on this.
3. High protein/fat foods have a higher satiety value, and eating a diet consisting largely of them is an effective way of reducing caloric intake for many people. This is the point of the Atkins diet, and even it's critics agree that it works in this fashion.
OK, here's where things start to differ.
1. There are numerous studies showing that a high fat diet is bad for you. Here's the part most people are skipping over: THIS IS NOT RELATED TO OBESITY. Fat has negative effects on other parts of your body than your waistline. So you can be skinny on Atkins, but that doesn't mean you will be healthy in the long term. Studies on the effect of eating a diet high in animal protein and fat are well-established.
2. The "obesity epidemic" in America does not automatically mean that there is some basic flaw in the science behind the diet that has been promoted in the past 30 years. What it points out is that the food pyramid and other education techniques in use have not been effective in helping people eat healthy, balanced diets. While yes, it's good to reduce fats, fat has been demonized to the point that people think avoiding fat is all they have to do. BZZZZT. Yes, carbohydrates should be the basis of a healthy, balanced diet, but that doesn't mean you can eat them with abandon.
So not only have we been harmed by too-simple explanations of how to eat a healthy diet, the food industry has actively exploited this to sell us lots of very profitable food that has the patina of health ("Now with less fat!") but is in fact still junk food that will make you fat if you eat too much of it.
This is all about psychology, marketing, and capitalism. It's not about biology. It's very likely that it's harder to limit calories under a high-carb diet. But that doesn't change the fact that it's better for you- remember, being skinny isn't the only goal.
We need to chuck the food pyramid and teach people the difference between simple and complex carbohydrates, and get a more balanced message out there about fats. The health education community should be taken to task for promoting such a simpleminded, extreme approach to diet. Brody won't make that leap because she's one of the architects of that message. The key is to throw away the bad message, not the science.
Most of the things we take for granted now, like email, chat rooms, and MMORPGs, we were doing back in the mid-70s.
Enjoy!
Is this thing on? Hello?
One interesting thing to note about dietary issues in general is the evolution of man vs. the evolution of our diet.
For a moment, toss out everything any diet "expert" has ever told you. Toss out the USDA's damn pyramid. Look at biology. Add up these few, relatively simple facts.
Step in the WayBack Machine(tm) and look at much more simple times. The human body and its metabolism is geared towards periods of relative "feast" and "famine." Seeing as the primary use for fats is fatty acid precursors, the sources of energy are protein and carbohydrates. Carbs are really effecient foods, but are usually scavenged. (fruits, berries, tubers, etc.) Sources of protein are usually hunted.
The way the body's metabolism flips between a glucose-centric pathway to a ketone-centric pathway makes perfect sense. In times of feast (abundant carbohydrates), use the carbs, storing everything away that is in excess. In times of famine, catabolize the fats into their building blocks and get energy from them (while looking for more berries.)
Homo sapiens and its relatives have existed for thousands of years on this metabolic model. Evolution would have it that it is the most successful model for the given environment. Things stay pretty matched while things follow the format of:
Humans hunt the tiger.
Humans catch the tiger.
Tiger eats a human.
Humans go look for smaller tigers and potatoes.
(ie. food chain struggle, varied diet)
Fast forward to today: Humans hunt McDonalds. A Big Mac gives little struggle (unless you try to fit the entire thing in your mouth at once).
Our food has evolved into a carbohydrate-rich diet because that's what the USDA said was good for us. On that note, carbohydrates are also the cheapest form of food, so when the Gub'ment is handing out subsidized food to everyone (public schools, hospitals, army bases, FBI cafeterias, etc), it would make sense to hand out carbohydrates. Abundant, cheap, energy-rich? C'mon. It makes perfect economic sense. But it doesn't follow nature. Nature would have us eat fewer carbohydrates and more protein, like our ancestors did.
The Atkins diet is simply putting things back into a biological perspective. Most criticisims of the diet focus too much on the induction part of it. Getting the person with a fistfull of twinkies back on the proper metabolic path is an awesome feat of biochemistry and cell biology, but it happens when you go low/no carbs. No one, including Dr. Atkins, says that the induction part of the diet is The Proper Diet.
One need only look at the effect of morbid obesity on life span to say that any negative effects of the induction phase of the diet are minute in comparison to the effects of hauling an extra 100 lbs of fat. Perspective is needed. It's like worrying about whether your 8-character root password has suffecient random characters in it, when you're running the La735t 57@ck 0v3rflo\/\/ on your apache server.
Finally, why rely on other people to digest all of this information (even me) and put their own (perhaps political) spin on it?
For those who wish to delve into the more archane, I suggest you go to NCBI and do some literature searches on the ketogenic diet. You'll see that there are some positive neurobiological and hormonal impacts that it has.
National Center for Biotechnology Information (Medline)
Search for some of these keywords (each line together):
ketosis ketogenic
ketosis epilepsy
ketosis protein sparing
TiFox
-- I'd say your post was about 3 monkeys, 18 minutes.
Dynamic Fidgeting(TM)!
"It's what made a Man out of Mack!" (anyone else remember that one?)
I fidget constantly, in every possible way, and I find it an
excellent way to exercise whilst one is stuck performing boring tasks.
I'm always amazed at how much stronger I seem to be than my peers who actually exercise normally.
Maybe it's genetics, but this body performs brilliantly given its' 48 yr
history, and all the abuse that I've heaped upon it.
Brak: What's THAT?
Thundercleese: A light switch.. of TOTAL DEVASTATION!
Stupid Geeks are trying to overthrow the system.
/. are ways to become more accepted. Some are black and white, some, some, some.
They've lost every battle. Slim is nice, fat is bad.
Guess what, Geek?
Fat is a way of life. Not dark neither light, the system in first place, isn't right.
Laid on
Where's my candy?
Nowhere to be seen. I eat because I like. I lie not because I eat, but because I inhale other's people opinions.
I would rather die creep then die healthy. At least I would taste life.
Buy a Nintendo DS Lite
I'm another person who moved towards a low-carb way of eating in July, in part because of the NYT article (and a number of friends who had suggested trying it). So far I've lost somewhere between 25-35 lbs; I don't know the exact amount because I didn't have an accurate scale for the first month. I do know that I lost about 15 lbs within the first 2 weeks -- the often reported water weight -- and I've lost between 1-2lbs a week since then.
/. camp. You know, that may work for them, but it's not going to work for me, or for people like me. Not everyone on the planet is physically able to exercise in traditional ways. I'd like to see low carb eating taken seriously as *one* strategy available to people who want to lose weight or reduce their dependence on high-glycemic index foods. It doesn't have to be THE way -- but it is A way.
I'm eating in the same pattern as I did before I started -- two meals a day plus a couple of snacks. Around noonish, I have brunch: usually an omelet with lean meat and cheese in it, but sometimes a couple of turkey dogs with cheese (no bun), and some low-gycemic index fruit. For dinner, I have a meat-centric meal: things like steak, tandoori chicken, rotisserie chicken or In & Out burger done protein style -- often with green salad. For snacks I have string cheese, almonds, macadamias, or small amounts of peanut butter. I have no idea how many calories I'm eating, and I don't plan on keeping track.
I'm less concerned about some of supposedly scary side effects, because most of them I already *have*. I've had chronic gall bladder issues for five years now -- but it seems to have improved since I started eating low carb. I think part of this is what most often triggered my attacks was a higher-fat meal after weeks of low-fat eating. Now that my gallbladder gets 'flushed' more regularly, I haven't had any problems at all.
The bottom line for me is that I'm losing weight in a way that *I* feel comfortable doing. I have never been interested in "dieting", and I don't think of this as dieting. I have friends who do things differently, and that works for them. But for me, eating low carb is working. In some ways, losing weight is just a side effect; what I'm most impressed with is how much better I feel these days, how much my mood has stabilized, and how much *healthier* I feel.
I will probably stay very low carb (fewer than 20 grams of carbs a day) for at least six months, with occasional breaks for higher carb stuff. I sometimes get the feeling that people aren't happy with low carbers because we don't seem to be *suffering* enough. I mean, I've got a friend who treats all food as "fuel" at this point and measures out weights and calorie counts to take a regular intervals. When he's not eating his 6 oz of lean ham or his 8 oz of apple, he's exercising his ass off. It looks boring. It looks tedious. It's netting him almost exactly the same loss rate as I have -- a little less, but about the same. What does he have that I don't? Well, injuries from a fall he sustained when a car cut him off while he was rollerblading. A complete inability to eat out -- he won't eat anything that hasn't been weighed and measured exactly.
I'm sure we're going to see more posts from the "eat less and take up running!"
I am a fan of low-carb diets because I personally know they work. I don't care what the "long term effects" of low-carbing are, the long-term effects of being 100 lbs overweight are far worse.
Anyway, Im 6'2" and after highschool years ago somehow found myself at almost 280 lbs. I read about Atkins, bought the book, did the diet. A few months later I was all the way down to 193. That's a LOT of weight. And it worked very well. Weight was practically a pound a day many days. Nothing is more motivating than seeing ACTUAL weight loss on an almost daily basis.
But, near the last portion of my Atkins weight loss I suddenly had a kidney stone. WOW do they seriously suck. I was wary of them anyway, so I drank plenty, and almost exclusively water. But I got one, and let me tell you, to this day I can still remember the pain.
I was at my goal weight, so I drifted on and off the diet for a year or so. Within that year (maybe 6 months later), I got another kidney stone. That one sucked too.
I drifted completely off the diet, but have ever since just been more careful about what I eat. Within a year I was at 215, but that's where I've stayed almost to the pound for 4-5 years now. It's not ultra heatlhy, but its no 280. I also haven't had a kidney stone since.
So, could it have been coincedence? Maybe. Probably not. If you hardcore low-carb, drink 10 gallons of water a day, that's all I can say. I'd still trade the pain of a kidney stone for the practically instant drop of almost 100 lbs, its worth it. But just be prepared.
I'm Rick James with mod points biatch!
I'm a card-carrying geek from way back but I will admit, here in front of Dog and everybody online that I have never been even slightly geek-like in one critical sense. :)
To wit, I have always been in fantastic shape.
I ski, hike, dance and practice various forms of martial arts and I watch what I eat - voila' - physical perfection!
But a couple of years ago I gained a couple extra pounds over the holiday season and couldn't lose it!!
I mean yeah, I'm a little older now but wtf? I wasn't eating any different that I could see, exercised the same etc.
Now don't get me wrong, ten pounds is no big deal. I'd laugh my ass off if somebody were obsessing over that, but after all these years of martial arts and dance I can feel a difference as little as 5 pounds and damn it, I wanted it gone!
So I ate less and worked out harder.
To no avail.
To tell you the truth it's been driving me nuts until I happened to talk to my mother and the conversation turned to my grandmother who was diagnosed w/diabetes awhile back.
Her doctor put her on an "experimental diet" and she lost about 30# and all indicators of diabetes disappeared!! She's been on it for a couple of years now and is in great shape. I should tell you my grandmother has been fat since she was a teen and has never lost more than about 15 pounds and it's always come back as soon as she blinked. So her losing 30 and keeping it off is a minor miracle!
Turns out that diet was Atkins (and yes, you do eat carbs, read the damn book!).
So I laughed and figured what the heck, I'd try it. I've only been on it for about 3 weeks so far but I've lost 5 of the pounds that wouldn't go away and I have an energy level I haven't had for years (like, um, since not too long before I gained those 10 pounds, actually).
So don't knock it 'till you try it!
Fat boy...
I personally think we'd be better off trying the Drop Dead Diet .. same results as Atkins, only a lot quicker.
Finding God in a Dog
I noticed then that he had a real hard time with it, and used lots of salt substitues and so on, but never seemed satisfied by them. I had the idea that I would do a lot better if I cut out salt when I was young rather than waiting to get old and already having high blood pressure.
For a long time food seemed tasteless to me but now my taste is much more sensitive. My wife likes lots of salt and the food she cooks often seems excessively salty to me. On the otherhand she complains that I don't put any salt in the food I cook!
I don't make much of a conscious effort to avoid salt, for example I still like pickles and eat a lot of canned tomato products, which have a lot of salt. I just don't ever salt my food.
I will try as you suggest and see how it works.
As for getting my kidneys tested, I plan to get a full physical sometime soon, my wife has been urging me to do so as I haven't had a physical in almost ten years.
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
Unless you have some sort of cron-job auto-running apt-get update for you periodically, apt won't automatically update its list of packages until you tell it to.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The sequence is quite obvious and not at all a conspiracy theory.
The government comes out with this guideline on it's own based on shoddy science. It was a knee-jerk reaction. Fat causes heart problems therefore we have to replace it with something, and carbs seemed the most innocuous. Look at the bulk of the chart, the bottom, the part you're supposed to take in the most of; bread, cerial, rice and pasta. Processed bread, cerial, rice and pasta is terrible for you, nevermind Atkins. Not a peep about "high-fiber" in there at all.
The industry sees this and, naturally, says, "HOLY SHIT! THIS IS GREAT! It costs nothing to make a cookie, we slap 'low fat' on it and it'll sell for 40x what it costs to produce!!" You cannot do that with beef. It just won't sell. I don't care how much you spin it, nobody is going to pay $30/lb for beef. THEN, the low-fat myth is then advertized out the pooper. Pardon the double entendre. =) The consumer public sees Jack and Crap about 'high fiber' because it costs more. Why the hell would you push something that costs more to make and sells for less? Sure, it exists now, but as a niche item. Go to your nearest local highschool supermarket teller and ask how many loaves of Sunbeam she sells vs. Colon Blow Loaf.
So now the food industry has an extremely lucrative thing going on. You think that they forgot about their lobbyists??
No, no conspiracy theories. Just good business, really.
I'm not saying that Atkins is necessarily the alpha and the omega of dietary solutions, but I am suggesting that the low-fat high-carb diet was foisted upon us due to an unfortunate meeting of four events; unprecedented American "concern" with health (early 80's, think "thigh warmers" and Olivia Newton John (or maybe you'd rather not)), a knee-jerk Congress, bad science and good old-fashioned capitalism.
I'm a biiiiiiig believer in always following the money trail. And in this case, cash didn't sing, it fscking yodeled.
Mmmm. Yodels. =)
My
Limekiller
Why hasn't the gov tested the atkins diet? Doh.
Well correct me if I'm wrong but it seems the US gov didn't properly test the high carbo diet (aka food pyramid) in clinical trials before launching the test on the US public.
The results of the high carbo diet test on the US public is now coming in, and this recent NYT writer is just in denial.
Sure they've been eating more, that's probably partially coz of the high carbo diets causing fluctuating blood sugar levels - spike crash spike crash.
That said, eating TONS on an Atkins or similar diet is still going to be bad, so no more US sized servings (you guys really eat a lot y'know). But maybe most people won't feel the urge to eat tons once on those diets.
And the right thing to do to fight it is to eat more protein, not eat more carbs.
I found this explanation in the book "Fit or Fat" a few years ago, which emphasizes weight loss through aerobic exercises. It works well, if one is disciplined enough. I just was never able to be disciplined enough.
One of the reasons I took up the Protein Power diet is that a friend of my wife's was advised be her physician to keep beef jerky on hand to quell her hypoglycemia.
If one is going to eat carbs to quell hypoglycemia, it is best to consume complex carbohydrates. I found that if I ate a big plate of pasta in the mid-afternoon I did OK - but if I forgot, I would have an attack. And it's really devastating, I got worse than a smack junkie who's missed his fix until I can have some fruit juice.
The advantage to me of the low-carb, high protein diet is that I just don't have to remember much of anything. I don't really feel that I am dieting, I really feel that I have permanently changed my eating habits. The hypoglycemia just don't happen.
I think I was well on my way to insulin resistance, mainly as a result of being so overweight.
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
Here's a snippet from something unrelated which describes a little of the forces behind what we think we need to eat.
... [T]he Basic Four was constructed considering U.S. food supplies."(12)
(Please note that they only go back to 1800's - as opposed to cave-man days when we ate a VERY different diet - and that the average Joe worked a heck of a lot harder back in "the good old days".)
On another tack, as we examine diets from different times, remember that on evolutionary terms changes only take place if something is sufficiently detrimental to affect the reproductive cycle. I.e. we could make our diets so horribly bad that we all died by the age of 40, but s'long as we kept having the same number of kids first nothing would change.
This lack of insight colors many "studies" of historical diets and health issues.
But I digress:
"...The diet of the average American has changed substantially in the last hundred years. In the 1800s, the average American ate in a similar fashion to many people in less developed countries today. The historic American diet consisted primarily of grain-based starches. Meat, dairy products, fruits, and vegetables were consumed in lesser quantities than they are today. As the economy grew, wealth increased, and transportation improved, Americans in the early part of this century began to consume more meat and dairy products, as well as more fruits and vegetables.(3)
American food habits are intimately linked with the productivity of our agricultural system. Like so many aspects of industrial society, matching production with consumption has been a chronic historic problem. Beginning immediately after the Civil War, farmers began to increase production faster than the market for food products was growing. Agricultural production grew as a result of land expansion, improved transportation, and the Homestead Act that pushed farmers westward onto new land. Consumption grew with population, but not nearly as fast as farm productivity. This circumstance put farmers of the period into dire economic straights.(4) These problems were exacerbated by the economic policies of the 1800s. Prevailing powers enforced "tight money" policies -- limiting the money supply in order to limit inflation. The wealthier classes favored tight money policies, but these policies served to limit income and consumption for the population at large.
The agricultural depression of the late 1800s continued for decades as farmers rose in protest movements including the Grange, the Farmers Alliance, Greenbackers, and Populists. These movements sought more expansionistic economic policies that would benefit farmers. Toward the close of the 1800s, farmers were at various times allied with workers' movements. Although they never succeeded in creating a viable third party, many of the reforms that these movements sought were enacted within a few years of the issues being raised. Such reforms included the regulation of railroads, popular election of U.S. senators, the graduated income tax, and rural free mail.(5)
There was to be no direct relief for farmers though. The philosophy, law, and scale of government in the 1800s was less interventionist than it is today. This is true of many aspects of social welfare and public policy. As applied to farm policy, the government let the farmers fend for themselves.
After the turn of the century, the economy grew more quickly. Combined with immigration, this caused consumption of agricultural products to grow more rapidly. Farmers experienced a period of prosperity that lasted from the turn of the century until the 1920s. There was little change in public policy toward agriculture and food in this period.
Beginning in 1920, farm prices started falling as the U.S. ended its involvement in World War I relief efforts. Prices and farm income did not recover until World War II. For the farmer, the Great Depression began early.(6) With farmers left out of the national prosperity of the 1920s, there was again pressure for government intervention. As a result, support for cooperatives was increased and farm credit was extended. By 1933, the government started offering direct price supports by purchasing agricultural surpluses. These surpluses were dispersed through school lunch and food stamp programs. By the late 1930s, policies were put into place that attempted to limit the amount of land planted, thereby limiting production.(7)
In the progressive period in the early twentieth century, government started to become more active in many social spheres. An optimism prevailed that problems could and should be solved by public intervention. In this climate, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) began giving nutritional advice. Their first food chart was published in 1917 and consisted of five food groups that were thought to provide essential nutrients. Scientists were discovering the role of vitamins and other nutrients. By 1933, concern that everyone should receive an adequate supply of nutrients led the USDA to expand their food chart to twelve food groups. By World War II, they had paired it down to the "Basic Seven."(8)
From the beginning, the USDA's role was primarily to help farmers. Giving nutritional advice was secondary. Given the prevalence of diseases resulting from nutritional deficiencies in that time period, ranging from scurvy to rickets, it was in everyone's interest for the public to consume a better diet. Farmers helped fund nutritional research because, as scientists discovered the nutritional value of the food they were producing, such research proved a valuable marketing tool.(9) Thus, it seemed that everyone's interest was served by nutritional advice and research. The public could learn how to avoid diseases of malnutrition, and farmers received government support for marketing their products.
World War II solved the problem of agricultural overproduction by creating a huge need for exports. Agricultural production soared during the war.(10) Food was rationed domestically and farmers were given financial and technical support by the government to increase production. Farmers were again prosperous.
By the 1950s, the "green revolution" was in full swing. After the war, farmers had sufficient money to invest in mechanization as never before. Improved seeds, fertilizers and other modern technologies were causing production to grow rapidly. Thus began a long, uninterrupted period of overproduction in American agriculture. The collective effect of rising production was falling prices. The more the individual farmers produced, the more they could sell. But the more they collectively produced, the more they overloaded the market.(11)
From its inception, the USDA and other organizations involved with nutritional research and education were inextricably intertwined with agricultural interests. In 1958, a funny thing happened. (Remember 1952-1958 was a conservative period under Eisenhower.) In the midst of a sustained crisis of agricultural overproduction, the USDA altered the "Basic Seven" food groups to the "Basic Four" food group chart that was to last for decades. Half of that chart was made up of animal-based foods. The timing is unmistakable. Even mainstream historians cannot help but notice that "[the] relationship between food guides and their assumptions and the food supply is particularly interesting
Why was the Basic Four so important to farmers? Half of the Basic Four food groups are animal-based foods: meat/eggs and dairy. Animal foods effectively concentrate agricultural overproduction. It takes a lot of grain to make a hamburger or a bowl of ice cream.(13) If American farmers tried to dispose of their surplus production by convincing people to eat more pancakes and corn muffins, they would not get too far. But condense that grain by feeding it to a cow, and it becomes meat and ice cream. Then people will consume, and pay for, a lot more grain. Some people who have studied the history of nutritional education are more blunt about the connection between agricultural over-productivity and dietary advice. According to some, the lobby made up of "meat, dairy, and egg industries and their academic and political allies [has] not only influenced our nation's food and nutrition policies, it has determined those policies" (emphasis in original).(14)
What about the health effects of a diet that is centered on animal foods? Over-nutrition, rather than malnutrition, has become the devil of American health. We know now that the elevated fat intake of the American diet is directly linked to the two leading causes of death in the U.S., heart disease and cancer.(15) Nothing in America kills more people than fat. Were the people who promulgated the Basic Four aware of the negative health effects of a high-fat diet?
It was discovered in 1908 -- more than eight decades ago -- that high fat intake induces arteriosclerosis. The "discovery" has been made repeatedly over the decades since that time. But these discoveries "went virtually unnoticed by nutritionists" for decades.(16) As we discussed in the section on technological change, demand drives change much more than invention. As the steam engine was invented over and over again before it was used, so the knowledge concerning the health effects of a high-fat diet were suppressed because of the economic desirability of disposing of American agricultural overproduction.
Could it be that people are simply naturally drawn to high-fat diets if such food is available? To some extent, it is probably true that human beings have a biological predisposition to eat sweet and fatty foods. This would have a clear evolutionary advantage. Gatherers who have been studied tend to be healthy, but there is not a lot of rich food in their environment. By seeking out rich food, they could maximize their chances of survival. They ran little risk of arteriosclerosis; there was simply not that much fat available. It may be true that, given our predisposition to like rich food, the average person would tend to overeat when provided with an abundant supply of ice cream and other such things. But what has happened in Western culture is something quite different. Rich foods, which are almost exclusively animal-based, are idealized in American culture to a great extent. Protein in particular is believed to be needed in large quantities for good health. High protein diets are thought to be healthy, important for bodybuilding and general well-being. This idealizing of protein is a cultural practice, not a biological reality. The favored foods among gathering cultures are meat and honey. Likewise, we Americans consume sugar readily because we like the taste. But we have not idealized sugar as we have protein. Why? Because protein, traditionally at least, comes from animals. Animal-based foods concentrate agricultural overproduction, thus feeding the inferno effect in our industrial economy. Sugar has no such economic impact.
The meat and dairy industries lobbied successfully for the four food groups chart and dietary education that emphasized the importance of consumingrich animal foods. But to say that the meat and dairy industry simply asserted their own vested interest is to miss a deeper truth about culture. Cultural selection is powerfully influenced by employment, by how different social changes affect the level of employment. The Basic Four served to dispose of agricultural overproduction, thus alleviating a serious economic problem. Vested interests had their way, but only because they had economy on their side, and some degree of biology. It is difficult to say exactly how information travels throughout a large culture, but there is no doubting that the economic effects of the Basic Four were pivotal in causing Americans to believe that they needed large amounts of animal protein to stay healthy. Cultural selection was thus pivotal in creating the protein myth as well as causing the suppression of information concerning the health effects of high-fat diets.
The creation of the protein myth occurred in a period in American history when there were a lot more farmers. Recently, the Basic Four has been replaced by a pyramid that emphasizes grains and de-emphasizes rich, animal-based foods. The Food Pyramid was stalled by protests from the meat and dairy industries, but finally its proponents prevailed.(17) Why did the Food Pyramid have to wait so long? Just as tobacco regulation and a fuller recognition of the health effects of cigarettes had to wait until the middle class stopped smoking, the pyramid had to wait until the number of farmers in this country had decreased to below 3 percent of the population.(18) Corporate agriculture is still a powerful force, but not nearly as powerful as was the agricultural lobby when farmers were much more numerous.
As a result of American accelerated consumption of agricultural products, the U.S. consumes seven times as much grain per-capita as some poorer countries...."
yeah because they were too busy gambling over street fighter 2. just you wait, those days are headed for a comeback my friend.
There are several points in Brody's article that reflect her unfamiliarity with the Atkins diet, and recent research, making me wonder why? I am sure she can read as well as I:
- Complete dismissal/inability to cover the role of insulin in fat storage
- "How much of a limited category of foods can you eat before you find yourself eating less and less?" I'd say quite a lot.. my typical lunch (yes, I do Atkins) consists of about 300 grams of fatty meat cooked in butter and cream, along with tasty VEGETABLES (yes, imagine!). I am definitely not eating less, gram-per-gram, but more, calorie-wise, and still losing. And feeling good for 8 weeks now, too.
- Why does she ask, what happens if someone doing the diet adds the forbidden items back? That's the same as going off the diet, and why would anyone do that? Wholesome foods = corn, potatoes, oatmeal? How did we ever reach civilization? Humans have lived for millions of years without agriculture, without the mandatory eat grain-and-sugars-or-your-brains-die food. We should all be dead millions of years ago already, if carbohydrate foods were necessary in any way.
- About kidney stones: They take a LONG time to form. How did they measure the diet's effect on kidney stones in just 6 weeks?
- She does mention that the diet did improve serum lipid values, decreasing LDL cholesterol and triglycerides. What she left out was that the diet does it MUCH better than the usually-recommended low-fat diet. It's DIFFICULT to lower cholesterol levels on a low-fat diet, which is why we have a multibiollion medical industry making cholesterol lowering drugs. Why use (questionable and expensive) drugs when you can use a diet?
- "Why hasn't the government tested it? One possible reason is that it is unlikely to be approved by any review committee, given what is known about the effects of animal fats and cholesterol on the risk of heart disease"... Oh no, this is the unscientific "we know it's bad for cholesterol so we won't even test to see if it's bad for cholesterol" way of thinking, totall ridiculous. About diabetes, there is strong evidence it is caused by too much insulin, which is caused by eating too many carbohydrates. She should at least account for the research that says so, instead of just claiming this and that.
- "The Atkins diet is shy on several vital nutrients, including the B vitamins and vitamins A, C and D"... and I thought meat and fish were a good source of the B vitamins and vitamins A and D, the fat-soluble vitamins. In fact, vegetarians often have deficiencies in the B vitamins if they do not eat supplements...
- She's probably partially right about the increased food portions. Which is exactly why people should eat foods that actually make one satiated, so there will be no need to eat huge portions that will nevertheless make you screaming hungry in 2-3 hours.
- She is right about the bad effects of refined sugars and white flour. Of course, this is also what Atkins forbids you to eat, ever.
- "The swing back to Atkins is a response to the fact that a low-fat diet hasn't worked for a lot of people because they stuff in carbohydrates." And why do people stuff in the carbohydrates? Carbohydrates make you HUNGRY because of quickly rising and falling blood sugar levels, that's why. It's not because people on a larger scale are bad people who get into trouble because they're sinful, it's physiological.
- "Eat more calories than you expend and you'll gain weight." of course that's right, but most people have a way too narrow understanding of the statement. I eat way more calories than recommended for a adult male of my size and age, and still lose weight. The excess is not STORED in my system, it is dumped out in my urine, out of my breath, in my sweat... so I am EXPENDING more than I eat, which is much easier to do on a low-carb diet than a low-fat one.
Totally, complete FUD. FUD, FUD, FUD.
s is.html and http://www.indstate.edu/thcme/mwking/fatty-acid-ox idation.html)
I lost 40 pounds through moderate diet and excercise, and kept it off for 4 years on a 90% vegetarian diet with plenty of carbs. I only gained it back when I started working insane ours and had to cut exercise. Even at 250 pounds now (and losing again, thanks to exercise), my heart rate is low, my cholesterol is below 160, and by blood pressure has never tested over 130/80 (typically lower)
Frankly, I don't see how the 'industry' has any more to gain that Dr Atkins does through the reverse position. I'm not doubting the validity of his 'diet', which involved STRUCTURED, REGULAR MEALS AND EXCERCISE.... He could have you eating buttered white bread 3 times a day at regular intervals with exercise, and you would lose weight. The only thing that will help you in the long run is a commitment to living healthfully.
As for your comments:
FACT: The foods that you are often encouraged to eat the most of, are the foods that are the easiest and the cheepest to produce. They are also the ones that MAXIMIZE profit for that industry.
What is your point?? That companies encourage you to eat their highest profit products is obvious.
Are you saying the food industry is suppressing Atkins because he is threatening there highest profit lines of business? That is baloney.
FACT: Fat in your diet, or [sic]protien does not put fat on your body - carbohydrates do. Period. End of discussion.
http://www.indstate.edu/thcme/mwking/ (in particular: http://www.indstate.edu/thcme/mwking/lipid-synthe
Read these links. You can eat whatever you want as long as you keep your blood sugar down (ie, eating nothing but fat is completely equal to exercise+low cal diet as both will keep insulin levels down, but only one accelerates your metabolism and excercises your heart and lungs...)
FACT: Anyone who says otherwise has either bought the industry hype, or has outright been bought by them.
Right.... remember to put on your tin foil hat. Again, if you can't support your argument, attack your adversaries...
FACT: Benign dietary ketosis (NOT the same thing as ketoacidosis) is the ONLY WAY your body removes fat stores.
COMPLETELY FALSE AND RIDICULOUS. Ketogenesis only occurs when acetyl-CoA levels exceeds the capabilites of the TCA (Krebs Citric Acid) cycle to utilize it. Granted, it is a SYMPTOM of high levels of fatty acids in the blood (rapid release of fatty acids from adipose (fat) cells), but it is certainly not the only method. Your body can easily remove fat stores through the following process: Low levels of glucose in the blood stimulate the release of glucagon, glucagon causes a reactions in adipose cells which activates hormone sensitive lipase, triggering a reaction converting the triacylglycerols stored in the adipose cells to fatty acids and glycerol which diffuse into the blood, and all cells are totally capable of passively absorbing fatty acids from the blood and converting them to acetyl-CoA in the cytoplasm via Fatty acid + ATP + CoA -------> Acyl-CoA + PPi + AMP.
A: None. The Universe spins the bulb, and the Zen master merely stays out of the way.
I don't know where you'd get citations. But I have noticed, fairly consistently, that babies fed soy-based formula are much more likely to develop plant/pollen allergies. Remember, until the child is about a year old, its immune system is vulnerable to overstimulation by foreign proteins -- that's why there are big red warning posters in our local child care clinics, warning parents not to feed honey to babies. (Honey contains all sorts of proteins that adversely affect an immature immune system.)
:)
I've also known a few adults who experienced this (in one case, after a spasm of too many soy nuts, the person became allergic to a wide range of plant-origin foods, and had particular problems if she accidentally ingested more soy).
And here's something to think about:
Nursing bitches require a LOT of protein to produce the milk to support a litter. Take any two lactating bitches. Feed one a meat-based diet. Feed the other an identical diet *except* that the major protein source is soy. Let both eat as much as they want. The bitch fed the meat-based diet will roughly double her food intake, and when the pups are weaned ca. 7 weeks, she will look great. The bitch fed the soy-based diet will eat 4 to 5 times as much as usual, and will look like death warmed over by the time the pups are 4 weeks old.
Goes to show the relative *quality* of soy protein -- tho you don't really see this until the organism is stressed.
(Note: I've raised 11 generations and 160 litters, and my original field was biochemistry. I think by now I know what I'm talking about.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Sureley food combining has been pointed out to him. Can anyone recall his comments?
Full plate and packing steel! -Minsc
Come back and give us a report in two years time... ;-)
Identical twins are also likely to have had extremely similar upbringings, and therefore are likely to have similar attitudes towards food and come from the same socioeconomic background. I'm sure that your weight is affected by your genes, but to pretend that that's all there is too it is fooling yourself. Yes, your genes will have an impact on your weight, but so will the food you eat and the excercise you take - otherwise it wouldn't be possible to change your weight by changing your lifestyle.
But then, I finally got the time to get out there. Enjoying the woods as I always did. Just seize every opportunity. Also, I spent the summer climbing to about 20000 feet.
I enjoy training a lot, so the first thing I did when I finished was to start training again. At that time, I weighed ~85 kg. It was 7 months ago. Now I'm 71 kgs, which I'm pretty comfortable with.
In the meantime I was eating a lot. You've got to do that when your burning as much as I do.
My advice is rather than diets (OK, stay away from things that are obviously bad), go out training. Burn it. But it means that you have to be dedicated, and that you seize the opportunity to go out when you've got it.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
Dr. Atkins does not describe his diet as a high fat diet. He perhaps misleads a little in the book, perhaps to sell his product a little better, but, at a few points, he makes very clear that Atkins is not a high fat diet. However, this is a common misconception among Atkins detractors.
In his book, Dr. Atkins recommends low fat sources of protein, i.e., skinless chicken, although he occasionally mentions eggs, bacon, etc.
I was on a low-carb diet for about a year. Not Atkins, but Neander-thin. Basic premise - mankind has only recently started eating cultivated foods, and these "alien proteins" are what make us fat.
Practical upshot? If you could eat it, naked in the savanna with a stick, you can eat it. Basically, eat like Neanderthals eat. So Corn? Out. Beef? In. Peanuts? Out. (they're actually beans). Almonds? In. Cauliflower? In. Carrots? In. Rice? Out. (has to be processed)
So, given that, I did eat vegetables. Quite a bit, actually, more so than I used to. Could cook them in butter, actually, but it had to be real butter.
Overall, being very strict on it, I lost 30 pounds in the first month. Not a typo. I actually ate fairly healthily. Decent amount of veggies, took vitamins, and kept the weight off for over a year,
and lost an additional 30 pounds over the next several months. I didn't lose more since I wasn't as strict as I was the first month - while there was a lot of food I could eat, even more so than on normal diets, it's just NICE to be able to tuck into some bread, or pasta, etc occasionally. There is an entire subculture devoted to the low carb diet, though. You can get bake mix, cookies, chocolate bars, etc online, and they taste good.
Why'd I get off? Combo of things. I didn't have the cooking skills to go after some of the foods, and so the variety wasn't enough. My breakfast used to be a 1/3rd pound of bacon in the morning, and while it tastes great for the first 6 months, you can get sick of it. Also, since you're eating more meat, bills go up. Not to mention eating out! But, overall, it worked fantastically, and I don't regret it.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
This is a revolution:
/. all day. Go outside or something. See my sig for details.
Get away from the Tivo.
Put down your GBA.
Stop trying to listen to vinyl with your scanner.
Heck, just stop reading
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
I believe this would be the first recorded smilely. Here is a portion of the article.
"The first was a ':P' and was found at the end of 'I) THOU SHALT HAVE NO OTHER GOD'S BEFORE ME.' We moved down the list and found 'VII) THOU SHALT NOT COMMIT ADULTERY. ;) ' Amazed at this point, we pressed on to find 'IX) THOU SHALT NOT BEAR FALSE WITNESS AGAINST THEY NEIGHBOUR. :( '"
"We at the Institute will not put words in God's mouth, per say, however it seems that these 'emoticons' give us added insight into what God was feeling at the time the Ten Commandments were written. We believe there may be more, though further study is nessasary. Our next project will ..." (Continued on next page)
Reprinted from the Charleston Daily Star and Report with permission. All rights reserved.
That too, but remember there are pollen fragments in honey as well.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
I was amused to read the article only to discover that many of the "healthy" points she was making were similar to those in Atkin's book.
I also find it terribly amusing that all of the nutritionists that criticize the diet appear to have never read the book, or if they have it always appears that they rather specifically ignore parts of it so they can criticize it.
Atkins is not a no carb diet. It is a controlled carb diet.
It also has phases, only the first one is extremely low carb... afterwards you work up to a level where you maintain a steady weight.
I too have lost weight with Atkins. I've lost 25 pounds over a couple months. It has also helped me to have stable energy levels, as opposed to the post lunch blackouts after eating meals with a lot of carbs. I also quit drinking soda, and dropped caffeine altogether. All of these factors are making me healthier then I was before.
All I can say to the skeptics is read the book and read medical studies. Then make your own informed choice.
Her doctor put her on an "experimental diet" and she lost about 30# and all indicators of diabetes disappeared!!
You have raised an important point:
See your Doctor BEFORE you start on Atkins or any diet
I was on Atkins for over a year and dropped 75 pounds. The first 30 came off pretty fast and the rest more slowly. But I also ran into other problems and my initial bloodwork showed that is wasn't directly related to the diet. The only problem I had with the diet was kidney stones so make sure you drink enough water.
I can feel a difference as little as 5 pounds and damn it, I wanted it gone!
I hate skinny people. If I need to lose 5 pounds quick, I'll take a dump.
Viv
Gmail invites for ip
Yes, ALL baby formulas are inferior to mother's milk -- but some are more inferior than others. The same holds true of replacement milk for other animals. (I've also noticed a higher incidence of colic and similar problems in human infants fed soy formulas, which comes as no surprise considering that soy is known to cause the gut to produce a lot of slime -- mucous tissue's way of trying to protect itself from an irritant.)
Dogs aren't pure carnivores either -- they're more of a carnivorous omnivore. Most will willingly eat just about anything. But what I was referring to are nutritional requirements. Dogs, pigs, and humans are all fairly similar in general requirements, differing mainly in how much they need in terms of calories and some vitamins, and that dogs don't handle fibre as well (even so, the average commerical dog food has more fibre than the typical human diet!) Check the charts in Feedstuffs (the feed industry's main print rag).
I don't know about fish, but corn is routinely used to finish beef cattle for prime beef, and I've never heard of any problems from that (even growing up in beef ranching country). And corn is not an allergin to otherwise-normal animals (ie. not suffering from autoimmune disease, which is an inherited problem). I suppose you could get bloat if you were to switch 'em overnight from grass to corn, but that's more likely if they get into fresh alfalfa.
BTW the widespread notion that some dogs are "allergic" to corn is totally bogus -- the symptoms (itching etc.) are due to nutritional *deficiencies* (or imbalances, which biochemically act on the system the same as deficiencies), usually of certain fats or vitamins. You can easily demonstrate this by merely switching the affected dog to a diet with the exact same ingredients, but in different proportions, and the symptoms will go away!!
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
I had a similar problem a couple years ago. I had switched from a vegetarian diet to a vegan diet, and the loss of the fats from cheese meant that I dropped ten pounds without even noticing. At 6'7", 175 pounds is scrawny. I wanted to bulk up to about 195, and I didn't want it to be gut.
I worked weights three times a week, and did cardio on the off days. If I was awake, then I was either working out or chewing. I ate oat cakes and smoothies in the morning, and grazed all afternoon. It took me a few months, but eventually I did make it up to my goal. Maintaining the weight is a lot easier than gaining it, since my appetite has adjusted.
It mostly just required a lifestyle change: I had to plan on eating, so I became more organized about shopping and cooking. Once I had adjusted my daily routine, though, it was well-integrated into my life and I found it easy to keep with my program. I could be at work, at my desk, coding furiously and simultaneously eating the food I'd packed.
Oh, go on, check out my job.
I need to use my computer. It's an addiction. I'll only start running on a treadmill if I can get a hand-mounted keyboard.
What's this Submit thingy do?
It would be ironic, wouldn't it, if it turned out that rapidly dividing cancer cells simply have a higher need for certain nutrients, and grow even more successfully when encouraged with more effective natural vitamins supplements including trace phytochemicals?
Your last paragraph, btw, applies to the natural as well as synthetic pills sold in stores... and in relevance to the topic at hand, to attempts to use beta carotene to replace natural sources of Vitamin A - eggs, butter and other dairy products in proportion to milkfat, liver, shellfish, cod liver oil. The liver inefficiently uses up 5 units of it to make one unit of Vitamin A (retinol). Which, presumably, when found in those natural sources, would include other vital carnichemicals not found in plant-derived replacements.
On the gripping hand, when I stopped feeding soy-based dog food to my personal domesticated wolves, I watched their chronic skin allergies disappear like magic. Even the flea reactions. Clearly there is something about this stuff that afflicts dogs, but overall your "vulnerable to severe antigens" theory seems frankly bass-ackwards. You don't help your case by inventing a reason honey is forbidden for infants to replace the real one, the danger of botulism caused by bacteria growing from spores that may be in the honey.
I think the book could be condensed to about 30 pages. And 28 of those pages would be recipes... :) :)
I had problems with constipation as well but a few prunes cleared that right up. (Damn, I thought I'd last a few more decades before I had to start eating prunes!
Speaking of problems, a friend of mine had kidney stones off and on for years and was given a folklore remedy of an apple a day along with a teaspoon of olive oil.
He got sick of apples and olive oil pretty quickly but it's been a few years since he's had one. He's taken to having an apple-laden fruit salad once a week and making salad dressing with the olive oil (different salads I hope!).
Could just be coincidence or wierd body-chemistry too...