Manufacturing is a bit different especially unskilled. Workers can simply shift to other professions if demand for US talent slows. Our general economic strategy as a nation is to shift those less skilled jobs out and replace them with higher level and more skilled positions.
Tech is the fastest growing and one of the highest paid job sectors and requires substantial investment in terms of time and education on the part of the workers. These are the jobs those losing jobs in manufacturing are supposed to be able to learn skills for and take on as a career. There is nowhere to go from here.
In the company I'm working for now I'm considered to be at the highest rank an engineer can obtain. This is a massive telecom/service provider/cloud company who will not be named. Every tier below has either been moved offshore or replaced by H1-B workers. With regard to my peers all full time US hiring is frozen and contracts are filled with a preference for H1-B's only resorting to US talent when no H1-B is available (this is the opposite of how it's supposed to work). In tech your salaries generally don't go up so upward mobility comes from shifting positions. Someone who stays in positions for a year or two is equivalent to 20 year+ in positions in the financial industry. When anyone shifts out they are replaced with an H1-B if at all possible regardless of why they left. In the last 1.5yrs my team went from being entirely US staff (mostly full time but a few contractors who were routinely converted once they'd proven themselves) to 50% H1-B Contractors.
We are talking about thousands of jobs. But hey, on the up side the difficulties with accent are disappearing because client organizations are filling with the same H1-B workers and they all have the same accent.
As long as it's possible for anyone to get pricing data more quickly than others those people will be able to fleece those others. The simple concept of faster interconnection to the market and after hours trading is openly sanctioned criminal insider trading on every stock.
The problem with the stock market is that the gains are funded from the losses of other market investors. The gains and/or losses should come from the gains and/or losses of the business you've invested in as they do with bonds.
"Insider trading is an integral part of the stock market."
Of course that is what HFT is all about. But even before that faster and better links to the market data including after hours trading were available. If knowing and having the ability to trade based on pricing information everyone else doesn't have isn't insider trading nothing is. It's the ultimate insider trading, I don't need to know anything about your company. I just know the price went down so I fill the now too high buy order of someone who doesn't have the data yet thereby STEALING their money.
"In all but the first case, the price of the stock in an efficient market must go up."
The problem is the efficient market part. If a stock is popular it's likely already valued beyond what the company could ever earn in a hundred years. The only relation between what a company is doing from a business perspective and the stock price is the number of positive news blurbs that can be issued to pump the stock (and be immediately forgotten by pretty much everyone who bought and/or sold the stock). The CEO giving an interview and spinning a strategy as the next big thing or spinning some marginal improvement in a lab of theoretical manufacturing in a positive way works just as well as earnings. Hell, they are better because in a couple months you can reuse the same material and nobody will notice.
Few people keep stocks for any duration and mostly stocks are kept only as long as the upward price trend continues so people can try to trade them around at the highest price. Nobody is really intending to invest in a company they are trying to gamble on price fluctuations and beat the other traders. Even the executives don't care about the company itself, all they care about it pumping the stock price. A publicly traded chair manufacturer only cares about making chairs to the degree they can spin a development as stock pump news and nobody cares about anything that won't accomplish that within a couple years and few care beyond the current quarter.
They are intentionally miscalculated... by high frequency traders who see updates and respond to them causing your buy order to be at a higher price or your sell to be at a lower one with them outright stealing a piece in the middle just like this insider ring was doing.
That's you and not representative of most investors. I also highly doubt Amazon is actually worth more than it was valued at when you bought it. Stock valuations are often 20-200 fold any reasonable market valuation. Amazon will likely never be worth (as an actual business, based only on profits) what it is currently valued at.
People trading on the market who are actually looking at real economic indicators are rare. It's supply and demand so the game is all about pumping to create demand and emotion based trading. Every couple weeks a drug company has cured cancer or so they'll spin it. Every couple weeks Samsung, Intel, IBM, etc are making massive breakthroughs in computing (that never seem to reach the shelves of course).
And high frequency traders plug in so they get the updates faster than you and I and straight up steal our money. It's the same game these hackers played but somehow legal.
Putting a 30 day delay on all publicly traded stock purchases and a minimum holding period of 6 months and reverting everything back to paper with verifiable hashes should do the trick. It won't fix everything but it would fix a lot of it.
In fairness you are one person who claims to have test themself, not a statistically significant sample, and the fact that you have your own glucometer suggests you have a condition which involves abnormal insulin regulation.
True enough. In place of artificial sweetener I should have said sugar alternative. I've grown stevia in my garden as well.
I don't really make a distinction between artificial and natural sweeteners. A random fluke of evolution vs development in a lab does not make a molecule any more or less benign. By the time they are done processing sugar cane in to table sugar I'm not really sure it still qualifies as a "natural' sweetener either. Table sugar as such does not exist in nature. Then again, neither do stevia extracts (or any extracts) or blends like Truvia.
Extraction is a lab process. Just because it is often common and easily performed in a kitchen doesn't make coffee, tea, and stevia extracts natural. You certainly won't find them in nature.
"Definitely something to think about as I start to increase my dietary intake a bit... I will need to keep my exercise high to make sure my body doesn't decide to store all those new calories as fat."
Yup. Since you aren't necessarily looking to build tons of muscle per say from what you'd said before. I'd focus on generating muscle fatigue the easiest way possible. You just need to find something that fatigues a good portion of your muscle mass very quickly and easily. Try chin-ups, pull-ups, and push ups. Find what you can do less than 20 of. When you can do 10 move to something you can't do 10 of and change them up a bit by 20 you definitely should change. Combine that with a wall squat to failure. Try to add a few seconds to the wall squat at regular intervals. Whatever you can keep up with. A wall squat will fatigue your lower body pretty quickly and efficiently. If it ever gets too easy raise a leg and switch out which leg it is. The same, while working with an exercise try to increase the reps and/or difficulty and slow things down to make it harder.
The point is not to be impressive or compete with anyone. It isn't even really about getting stronger (although you will build strength). You are targeting one thing and one thing only here. You are failing at a feat of strength in a large number of major muscle groups thereby triggering a flood of muscle growth hormone signaling in your body because it thinks it needs more muscle.
By keeping it to 2 exercises (wall squats and whatever back/shoulder/arm exercise) you'll likely clock in at 2-5min total time. You can actually count this on walk time if you want. It doesn't burn more calories than a walk. You probably won't sweat or even be out of breath this way. It's low impact so no sore joints. Stay hydrated (monitor via urine tint) and you won't have lactic acid build up to make you sore either.
There will be a slight increase in metabolic burn for up to 72hrs afterward. You can safely do this every day, 3 x a week, or just once a week to maintain. Just think of it as two processes, the burn of lean mass which occurs all the time, and the signal to grow lean mass which you can control via this method like taking a pill that lasts up to 72hrs. The later either offsets or outpaces the former. How frequently you take another "pill" is up to you.
Sure. You are right, artificial sweeteners impacting blood sugar is easily tested which is why it is a well known and established phenomenon.
"The effect of artificial sweetener on insulin secretion. 1. The effect of acesulfame K on insulin secretion in the rat (studies in vivo)." http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2887500
"Artificial sweeteners affect metabolism and insulin levels" http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/261179.php
"The effect of artificial sweetener on insulin secretion. II. Stimulation of insulin release from isolated rat islets by Acesulfame K (in vitro experiments)." http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2887503
In the interest of disclosure. There are "rebuttal" studies funded by well known soft drink manufacturers which rather than using hard science and performing measurements within the body follow the subjective survey of test and control groups method.
I'll stick with objective findings from unbiased sources.
"But a lot of the "dogma" out there says you need to "target" fat with specific exercises or you won't be able to get rid of it."
From my understanding this is completely bunk in terms of targeting fat. You can body shape through increasing the size of an underlying muscle though. For instance, if you cut body fat, and then have a flat butt you can increase the size of your gluts to be little more balanced there. Or if you are a woman concerned with the classic drooping breasts you can work your chest and back muscles and then those muscles will be more capable of holding things up.
If anything spot targeting an area is going to make it larger short term because the muscle under the fat will be larger.
"As a scientist myself I just decided to go with conservation of energy. If you eat less calories than you burn (and you do it consistently, every day)... you MUST lose weight... and that seems to be holding true for me"
I do agree. But I've known enough people who defied this to believe we are definitely getting something wrong on making these sort of energy calculations. Even with what we do know, simple conversation of energy is oversimplifying the problem.
Lean mass requires your body to expend calories to maintain it. Cells are dying and being cannibalized all over the body all the time (or shrinking and growing). Hormonal signals if present cause the body to replace (or grow) them which expends calories. If you simply cut calorie intake below calories spent in the most expedient way possible (diet+cardio) then you are signaling your body that you are starving. The hormones generated will signal storing energy in the most expedient form as well as the easiest form for it to use if needed (body fat). So your fat will get priority replenishment while being consumed at equal pace with lean mass (like that skin, or muscle). In the end you'll lose fat no matter what due to conservation of energy, the question is how much lean mass will you have left when you get there. The body will burn energy trying to maintain lean mass. The more you have, the more you can eat and therefore the more sustainable weight loss will be.
In the end the best strategy for sustained body fat loss isn't weight loss at all, if you maintain your current diet and instead focus on mass building strength exercise you'll trade fat for muscle. You'll get smaller because fat is less dense than muscle. And at some point you'll add enough lean mass to reach equilibrium with regard to energy intake vs expenditure. Conservation of energy.
Part of this problem is equating losing weight with losing fat. If you just cut calories a third of the lost weight will be fat. If you take a dieretic you'll lose a bunch of weight in the form of water really quickly but not be notably more lean.
Ideally, you actually want to be gaining weight not losing it. If you aren't putting on new lean mass your resting calorie burn is never going to mesh with the amount of food you like to eat. A calorie deficit via diet and cardio requires active effort every hour of every day in perpetuity to maintain it. Putting on lean mass requires intense active effort for 30-45 minutes about 3 times a week and then the same and then reducing that effort to once every 1-2 weeks to maintain it but that lean mass burns calories 24x7 265 1/3 even while sleeping and if the lean mass is muscle mass it burns an even greater extra amount of energy when active.
No, a man doesn't have to be a bodybuilder to not have to actually count calories or fret over fried vs baked chicken and a woman isn't going to get bulky strength training without taking hormone boosting supplements.
Taste and variety are good areas in which to improve. I can switch to water for up to a month before I need to drink something else to stay sane. It's nice to have at least half a dozen various flavors of water to cycle through.
They don't really need sugar and caffeine in them though and certainly not insulin spiking artificial sweeteners.
You'll find cranky programmers experiencing severe mood swings due to blood sugar fluctuation they likely attribute to stress drinking 6-7 diet cokes a day.
For most people artificial sweeteners including aspartame fool the body into thinking you've ingested sugar and responding in kind. In particular spiking insulin levels. This causes the body to reserve body fat, store any sugar in the blood as tissue (mostly fat), and experience low blood sugar levels and therefore mood swings. It also can cause headaches for the same reasons.
Many of these sweeteners also disrupt beneficial digestive bacteria. So no, artificial sweeteners aren't really harmless for most people. They are just even more harmful for a small minority.
It's worth mentioning, there are actually a few artificial sweeteners that don't trigger an insulin reaction such as Stevia and not to astroturf on Coca-Cola's behalf but I will credit them being responsible for forcing the FDA to acknowledge stevia as being safe for human consumption. Before they pushed this issue it was considered safe to eat as a supplement yet somehow not safe to use as a food additive... a strange determination that smells of uncontested U.S. sugar industry lobbying efforts.
"The more calories you consume, the more "full" you feel"
Calories don't trigger a full sensation. Food volume in your stomach triggers a hormonal reaction which makes you feel full. There is a correlation in that a higher volume of food often has more calories but it isn't causal. You can get full on distilled and deionized water.
The more quickly you can digest food the shorter the duration of feeling full as well. Protein makes you feel full longest, followed by fats, then complex carbohydrates, and simple carbohydrates.
When most people are talking about losing weight they are talking about losing body fat (which has almost no relation to dietary fat). A calorie deficit will cause your body to have to burn tissue for energy but which tissue it burns is about what it can spare and what you have eaten. Artificial sweeteners cause insulin to spike in the bloodstream which in turn causes your body to reserve body fat stores, burning lean protein instead. This also results in mood and hunger swings causing you to eat more. Many artificial sweeteners also disrupt normal digestion by interfering with intestinal bacteria.
Your best path to losing body fat isn't losing weight or a calorie deficit. Your best path to SUSTAINED fat loss is actually to increase the lean mass in your body via medium repetition heavy strength training combined with a lean protein heavy diet (either low cholesterol or even high cholesterol with appropriate HDL/LDL balanced ratios). Heavy lifting doesn't burn more calories than most other activities but it triggers a metabolic increase that lasts 72hrs. More importantly it increases lean mass which causes your body to burn more calories even while resting. Eventually the amount of food which is comfortable to eat will be the appropriate calorie level and you will just need to maintain lean mass with one lift session a week no more than 30mins. This is almost impossible to do by starting with a calorie deficit. You also should eat small meals 5 times a day, drink several large glasses of water a day, and eat a piece of fruit each morning to replenish sugars for proper mental health (there is a small reserve in the body that is mostly used during sleep) but no more.
The alternative is to focus on calorie deficit, which means low energy levels, feeling like you are starving, and enduring grueling sessions of cardiovascular exercise. This creates your deficit, you lose weight but 30-40% of it is lean muscle mass. This makes your calorie target keep dropping so you have to cut further from what already felt like starving. Eventually you can and will fail at this, either because you can't keep suffering forever (most people) or because your aging metabolism will make it impossible.
So yes, calorie deficit does equal weight loss. But if the weight you want to lose is fat, you need to go about obtaining a calorie deficit via weight gain. Eat small amounts of the food which is most calorie dense and takes the longest to digest (protein).
Diet drinks DON'T help people lose weight especially not good weight. That has been debunked long ago, Anything that tastes sweet causes insulin spikes which in turn cause your body to preserve fat stores.
Have you ever heard an actual fitness expert recommend drinking diet drinks?
There is very much a blame the victim attitude with regard to obesity and fitness.
Honestly the most common factor regarding diet is slowing metabolisms as we age it seems like the same pattern for most (white males, but the same pattern can be adjusted a little and suddenly fit AA Males and with different adjustments females). Suddenly the exact same diet and activity level we've had our whole life results in getting fat. Mid 20's you stop eating entire chocolate cakes and scarfing entire pizzas every day teenage boy style and start paying more attention to your diet. Then mid 30's that stops being enough and suddenly have to intentionally focus on calories all the time and go out of your way to exercise. Then you have to make a choice, in your late 30's to early 40's you can either go full on fitness nut or deal with a few extra pounds being part of life. From what I've seen those who are able to keep up that level of effort for the rest of their life are statistical noise and most crash by 50-55. Then in your late 60's some sort of wasting syndrome sets in and you magically stop eating much and your body melts off weight by 70 almost nobody is fat anymore.
But there are exceptions, they run in to the same problems but have bigger issues early on. I knew someone in high school who participated in and excelled in three sports, was constantly on a calorie restriction diet, and had a higher body fat percentage than average. While the average person of the same age does none of those things and eats literally anything they want and almost all of it garbage.
I know another female in her 30's who lifts heavy 3x a week, in addition to a 2-3hrs of cardio and plyometrics 3x a week. She eats less than 100 calories over what is calculated for her height/weight at a normal activity level and dramatically less than at highly active level but her BF never drops outside a fairly consistent yo-yo swing. You could say that with her high activity level she is cutting too much and the high calorie deficit despite all that metabolism boosting activity her body is cutting its burn rate (while still successfully allowing lift gains and progressing sports performance) but at some point physics has to kick in, she is expending more than she is taking in according to science. When is that? Because it certainly seems to be measured in multiples of years...
At some point, someone does need to throw out the pile of garbage that is our understanding of food, energy, and exercise and start from scratch. There is obviously some historical bad science at the core of our understanding that is used in calorie measurement or burn, etc that is used as a fundamental constant in taking measurements or calibrating equipment or the like in the modern age. That or we are missing some huge factor.
We need a different benchmark. Observe teenage males without altering their diets, choose the one with the highest combined matrix of high calorie intake and strength which does not correlate to intentional fitness or activity level (without any intentional alteration of conditions). Assume that's how everyone should function and can function and if they aren't find out what is broken that is causing them to need fewer calories and/or more exercise and fix that. Do the same for females. Only when that baseline is achieved do we recommend altering diet/exercise.
How is there a social stigma that applies to riding the bus alone where there are dozens of witnesses to your behavior that wouldn't apply to riding alone in a strangers car?
Give everyone in the office a vote every 30 minutes. The unused votes accumulate up to a months worth. The election determines if and how the temperature changes during that period. Add a time window during which there aren't normally workers in the office and set a baseline temp based on energy conservation, if there are any votes during that period the baseline is overruled and reverts to the last temp of "in office" hours for maybe 4 periods to be extended with any additional periods with votes.
The theromostat automatically drifts to the most stable temperature range everyone is good with and both accounts for empty offices and people working late. This minimizes people with big thermal swings causing big swings in office temp so there is no need for dummy thermostats.
Hardly, unless you are wearing a suit or a sweater 68F is cold. That's a good temp to be able to snuggle with your partner under a comforter with nobody getting sweaty as long as you don't mind the freeze should anyone open the blanket layer.
It's a nice comfortable temperature for the house in summer. As for winter, wear a coat during the trips to and from the car and wear summer like clothes underneath. Drop the requirements for formal wear from the office dress code altogether. In most cases, drop the requirement to go to the office altogether.
Slashdot Mirror
Manufacturing is a bit different especially unskilled. Workers can simply shift to other professions if demand for US talent slows. Our general economic strategy as a nation is to shift those less skilled jobs out and replace them with higher level and more skilled positions.
Tech is the fastest growing and one of the highest paid job sectors and requires substantial investment in terms of time and education on the part of the workers. These are the jobs those losing jobs in manufacturing are supposed to be able to learn skills for and take on as a career. There is nowhere to go from here.
In the company I'm working for now I'm considered to be at the highest rank an engineer can obtain. This is a massive telecom/service provider/cloud company who will not be named. Every tier below has either been moved offshore or replaced by H1-B workers. With regard to my peers all full time US hiring is frozen and contracts are filled with a preference for H1-B's only resorting to US talent when no H1-B is available (this is the opposite of how it's supposed to work). In tech your salaries generally don't go up so upward mobility comes from shifting positions. Someone who stays in positions for a year or two is equivalent to 20 year+ in positions in the financial industry. When anyone shifts out they are replaced with an H1-B if at all possible regardless of why they left. In the last 1.5yrs my team went from being entirely US staff (mostly full time but a few contractors who were routinely converted once they'd proven themselves) to 50% H1-B Contractors.
We are talking about thousands of jobs. But hey, on the up side the difficulties with accent are disappearing because client organizations are filling with the same H1-B workers and they all have the same accent.
As long as it's possible for anyone to get pricing data more quickly than others those people will be able to fleece those others. The simple concept of faster interconnection to the market and after hours trading is openly sanctioned criminal insider trading on every stock.
The problem with the stock market is that the gains are funded from the losses of other market investors. The gains and/or losses should come from the gains and/or losses of the business you've invested in as they do with bonds.
"Insider trading is an integral part of the stock market."
Of course that is what HFT is all about. But even before that faster and better links to the market data including after hours trading were available. If knowing and having the ability to trade based on pricing information everyone else doesn't have isn't insider trading nothing is. It's the ultimate insider trading, I don't need to know anything about your company. I just know the price went down so I fill the now too high buy order of someone who doesn't have the data yet thereby STEALING their money.
"In all but the first case, the price of the stock in an efficient market must go up."
The problem is the efficient market part. If a stock is popular it's likely already valued beyond what the company could ever earn in a hundred years. The only relation between what a company is doing from a business perspective and the stock price is the number of positive news blurbs that can be issued to pump the stock (and be immediately forgotten by pretty much everyone who bought and/or sold the stock). The CEO giving an interview and spinning a strategy as the next big thing or spinning some marginal improvement in a lab of theoretical manufacturing in a positive way works just as well as earnings. Hell, they are better because in a couple months you can reuse the same material and nobody will notice.
Few people keep stocks for any duration and mostly stocks are kept only as long as the upward price trend continues so people can try to trade them around at the highest price. Nobody is really intending to invest in a company they are trying to gamble on price fluctuations and beat the other traders. Even the executives don't care about the company itself, all they care about it pumping the stock price. A publicly traded chair manufacturer only cares about making chairs to the degree they can spin a development as stock pump news and nobody cares about anything that won't accomplish that within a couple years and few care beyond the current quarter.
They are intentionally miscalculated... by high frequency traders who see updates and respond to them causing your buy order to be at a higher price or your sell to be at a lower one with them outright stealing a piece in the middle just like this insider ring was doing.
That's you and not representative of most investors. I also highly doubt Amazon is actually worth more than it was valued at when you bought it. Stock valuations are often 20-200 fold any reasonable market valuation. Amazon will likely never be worth (as an actual business, based only on profits) what it is currently valued at.
People trading on the market who are actually looking at real economic indicators are rare. It's supply and demand so the game is all about pumping to create demand and emotion based trading. Every couple weeks a drug company has cured cancer or so they'll spin it. Every couple weeks Samsung, Intel, IBM, etc are making massive breakthroughs in computing (that never seem to reach the shelves of course).
And high frequency traders plug in so they get the updates faster than you and I and straight up steal our money. It's the same game these hackers played but somehow legal.
Putting a 30 day delay on all publicly traded stock purchases and a minimum holding period of 6 months and reverting everything back to paper with verifiable hashes should do the trick. It won't fix everything but it would fix a lot of it.
In fairness you are one person who claims to have test themself, not a statistically significant sample, and the fact that you have your own glucometer suggests you have a condition which involves abnormal insulin regulation.
Contrary to your data point are these studies...
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=7822217&cid=50293019
True enough. In place of artificial sweetener I should have said sugar alternative. I've grown stevia in my garden as well.
I don't really make a distinction between artificial and natural sweeteners. A random fluke of evolution vs development in a lab does not make a molecule any more or less benign. By the time they are done processing sugar cane in to table sugar I'm not really sure it still qualifies as a "natural' sweetener either. Table sugar as such does not exist in nature. Then again, neither do stevia extracts (or any extracts) or blends like Truvia.
Extraction is a lab process. Just because it is often common and easily performed in a kitchen doesn't make coffee, tea, and stevia extracts natural. You certainly won't find them in nature.
"Definitely something to think about as I start to increase my dietary intake a bit... I will need to keep my exercise high to make sure my body doesn't decide to store all those new calories as fat."
Yup. Since you aren't necessarily looking to build tons of muscle per say from what you'd said before. I'd focus on generating muscle fatigue the easiest way possible. You just need to find something that fatigues a good portion of your muscle mass very quickly and easily. Try chin-ups, pull-ups, and push ups. Find what you can do less than 20 of. When you can do 10 move to something you can't do 10 of and change them up a bit by 20 you definitely should change. Combine that with a wall squat to failure. Try to add a few seconds to the wall squat at regular intervals. Whatever you can keep up with. A wall squat will fatigue your lower body pretty quickly and efficiently. If it ever gets too easy raise a leg and switch out which leg it is. The same, while working with an exercise try to increase the reps and/or difficulty and slow things down to make it harder.
The point is not to be impressive or compete with anyone. It isn't even really about getting stronger (although you will build strength). You are targeting one thing and one thing only here. You are failing at a feat of strength in a large number of major muscle groups thereby triggering a flood of muscle growth hormone signaling in your body because it thinks it needs more muscle.
By keeping it to 2 exercises (wall squats and whatever back/shoulder/arm exercise) you'll likely clock in at 2-5min total time. You can actually count this on walk time if you want. It doesn't burn more calories than a walk. You probably won't sweat or even be out of breath this way. It's low impact so no sore joints. Stay hydrated (monitor via urine tint) and you won't have lactic acid build up to make you sore either.
There will be a slight increase in metabolic burn for up to 72hrs afterward. You can safely do this every day, 3 x a week, or just once a week to maintain. Just think of it as two processes, the burn of lean mass which occurs all the time, and the signal to grow lean mass which you can control via this method like taking a pill that lasts up to 72hrs. The later either offsets or outpaces the former. How frequently you take another "pill" is up to you.
Sure. You are right, artificial sweeteners impacting blood sugar is easily tested which is why it is a well known and established phenomenon.
"The effect of artificial sweetener on insulin secretion. 1. The effect of acesulfame K on insulin secretion in the rat (studies in vivo)." http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2887500
"Artificial sweeteners affect metabolism and insulin levels" http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/261179.php
"The effect of artificial sweetener on insulin secretion. II. Stimulation of insulin release from isolated rat islets by Acesulfame K (in vitro experiments)." http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2887503
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v514/n7521/full/nature13793.html
http://www.webmd.com/diet/20140917/artificial-sweeteners-blood-sugar?page=1
In the interest of disclosure. There are "rebuttal" studies funded by well known soft drink manufacturers which rather than using hard science and performing measurements within the body follow the subjective survey of test and control groups method.
I'll stick with objective findings from unbiased sources.
That's what I did in my early 30's as well.
"But a lot of the "dogma" out there says you need to "target" fat with specific exercises or you won't be able to get rid of it."
From my understanding this is completely bunk in terms of targeting fat. You can body shape through increasing the size of an underlying muscle though. For instance, if you cut body fat, and then have a flat butt you can increase the size of your gluts to be little more balanced there. Or if you are a woman concerned with the classic drooping breasts you can work your chest and back muscles and then those muscles will be more capable of holding things up.
If anything spot targeting an area is going to make it larger short term because the muscle under the fat will be larger.
"As a scientist myself I just decided to go with conservation of energy. If you eat less calories than you burn (and you do it consistently, every day)... you MUST lose weight... and that seems to be holding true for me"
I do agree. But I've known enough people who defied this to believe we are definitely getting something wrong on making these sort of energy calculations. Even with what we do know, simple conversation of energy is oversimplifying the problem.
Lean mass requires your body to expend calories to maintain it. Cells are dying and being cannibalized all over the body all the time (or shrinking and growing). Hormonal signals if present cause the body to replace (or grow) them which expends calories. If you simply cut calorie intake below calories spent in the most expedient way possible (diet+cardio) then you are signaling your body that you are starving. The hormones generated will signal storing energy in the most expedient form as well as the easiest form for it to use if needed (body fat). So your fat will get priority replenishment while being consumed at equal pace with lean mass (like that skin, or muscle). In the end you'll lose fat no matter what due to conservation of energy, the question is how much lean mass will you have left when you get there. The body will burn energy trying to maintain lean mass. The more you have, the more you can eat and therefore the more sustainable weight loss will be.
In the end the best strategy for sustained body fat loss isn't weight loss at all, if you maintain your current diet and instead focus on mass building strength exercise you'll trade fat for muscle. You'll get smaller because fat is less dense than muscle. And at some point you'll add enough lean mass to reach equilibrium with regard to energy intake vs expenditure. Conservation of energy.
Part of this problem is equating losing weight with losing fat. If you just cut calories a third of the lost weight will be fat. If you take a dieretic you'll lose a bunch of weight in the form of water really quickly but not be notably more lean.
Ideally, you actually want to be gaining weight not losing it. If you aren't putting on new lean mass your resting calorie burn is never going to mesh with the amount of food you like to eat. A calorie deficit via diet and cardio requires active effort every hour of every day in perpetuity to maintain it. Putting on lean mass requires intense active effort for 30-45 minutes about 3 times a week and then the same and then reducing that effort to once every 1-2 weeks to maintain it but that lean mass burns calories 24x7 265 1/3 even while sleeping and if the lean mass is muscle mass it burns an even greater extra amount of energy when active.
No, a man doesn't have to be a bodybuilder to not have to actually count calories or fret over fried vs baked chicken and a woman isn't going to get bulky strength training without taking hormone boosting supplements.
Or a pleasant one when your gf decides to check it.
Taste and variety are good areas in which to improve. I can switch to water for up to a month before I need to drink something else to stay sane. It's nice to have at least half a dozen various flavors of water to cycle through.
They don't really need sugar and caffeine in them though and certainly not insulin spiking artificial sweeteners.
You'll find cranky programmers experiencing severe mood swings due to blood sugar fluctuation they likely attribute to stress drinking 6-7 diet cokes a day.
For most people artificial sweeteners including aspartame fool the body into thinking you've ingested sugar and responding in kind. In particular spiking insulin levels. This causes the body to reserve body fat, store any sugar in the blood as tissue (mostly fat), and experience low blood sugar levels and therefore mood swings. It also can cause headaches for the same reasons.
Many of these sweeteners also disrupt beneficial digestive bacteria. So no, artificial sweeteners aren't really harmless for most people. They are just even more harmful for a small minority.
It's worth mentioning, there are actually a few artificial sweeteners that don't trigger an insulin reaction such as Stevia and not to astroturf on Coca-Cola's behalf but I will credit them being responsible for forcing the FDA to acknowledge stevia as being safe for human consumption. Before they pushed this issue it was considered safe to eat as a supplement yet somehow not safe to use as a food additive... a strange determination that smells of uncontested U.S. sugar industry lobbying efforts.
"The more calories you consume, the more "full" you feel"
Calories don't trigger a full sensation. Food volume in your stomach triggers a hormonal reaction which makes you feel full. There is a correlation in that a higher volume of food often has more calories but it isn't causal. You can get full on distilled and deionized water.
The more quickly you can digest food the shorter the duration of feeling full as well. Protein makes you feel full longest, followed by fats, then complex carbohydrates, and simple carbohydrates.
When most people are talking about losing weight they are talking about losing body fat (which has almost no relation to dietary fat). A calorie deficit will cause your body to have to burn tissue for energy but which tissue it burns is about what it can spare and what you have eaten. Artificial sweeteners cause insulin to spike in the bloodstream which in turn causes your body to reserve body fat stores, burning lean protein instead. This also results in mood and hunger swings causing you to eat more. Many artificial sweeteners also disrupt normal digestion by interfering with intestinal bacteria.
Your best path to losing body fat isn't losing weight or a calorie deficit. Your best path to SUSTAINED fat loss is actually to increase the lean mass in your body via medium repetition heavy strength training combined with a lean protein heavy diet (either low cholesterol or even high cholesterol with appropriate HDL/LDL balanced ratios). Heavy lifting doesn't burn more calories than most other activities but it triggers a metabolic increase that lasts 72hrs. More importantly it increases lean mass which causes your body to burn more calories even while resting. Eventually the amount of food which is comfortable to eat will be the appropriate calorie level and you will just need to maintain lean mass with one lift session a week no more than 30mins. This is almost impossible to do by starting with a calorie deficit. You also should eat small meals 5 times a day, drink several large glasses of water a day, and eat a piece of fruit each morning to replenish sugars for proper mental health (there is a small reserve in the body that is mostly used during sleep) but no more.
The alternative is to focus on calorie deficit, which means low energy levels, feeling like you are starving, and enduring grueling sessions of cardiovascular exercise. This creates your deficit, you lose weight but 30-40% of it is lean muscle mass. This makes your calorie target keep dropping so you have to cut further from what already felt like starving. Eventually you can and will fail at this, either because you can't keep suffering forever (most people) or because your aging metabolism will make it impossible.
So yes, calorie deficit does equal weight loss. But if the weight you want to lose is fat, you need to go about obtaining a calorie deficit via weight gain. Eat small amounts of the food which is most calorie dense and takes the longest to digest (protein).
Diet drinks DON'T help people lose weight especially not good weight. That has been debunked long ago, Anything that tastes sweet causes insulin spikes which in turn cause your body to preserve fat stores.
Have you ever heard an actual fitness expert recommend drinking diet drinks?
There is very much a blame the victim attitude with regard to obesity and fitness.
Honestly the most common factor regarding diet is slowing metabolisms as we age it seems like the same pattern for most (white males, but the same pattern can be adjusted a little and suddenly fit AA Males and with different adjustments females). Suddenly the exact same diet and activity level we've had our whole life results in getting fat. Mid 20's you stop eating entire chocolate cakes and scarfing entire pizzas every day teenage boy style and start paying more attention to your diet. Then mid 30's that stops being enough and suddenly have to intentionally focus on calories all the time and go out of your way to exercise. Then you have to make a choice, in your late 30's to early 40's you can either go full on fitness nut or deal with a few extra pounds being part of life. From what I've seen those who are able to keep up that level of effort for the rest of their life are statistical noise and most crash by 50-55. Then in your late 60's some sort of wasting syndrome sets in and you magically stop eating much and your body melts off weight by 70 almost nobody is fat anymore.
But there are exceptions, they run in to the same problems but have bigger issues early on. I knew someone in high school who participated in and excelled in three sports, was constantly on a calorie restriction diet, and had a higher body fat percentage than average. While the average person of the same age does none of those things and eats literally anything they want and almost all of it garbage.
I know another female in her 30's who lifts heavy 3x a week, in addition to a 2-3hrs of cardio and plyometrics 3x a week. She eats less than 100 calories over what is calculated for her height/weight at a normal activity level and dramatically less than at highly active level but her BF never drops outside a fairly consistent yo-yo swing. You could say that with her high activity level she is cutting too much and the high calorie deficit despite all that metabolism boosting activity her body is cutting its burn rate (while still successfully allowing lift gains and progressing sports performance) but at some point physics has to kick in, she is expending more than she is taking in according to science. When is that? Because it certainly seems to be measured in multiples of years...
At some point, someone does need to throw out the pile of garbage that is our understanding of food, energy, and exercise and start from scratch. There is obviously some historical bad science at the core of our understanding that is used in calorie measurement or burn, etc that is used as a fundamental constant in taking measurements or calibrating equipment or the like in the modern age. That or we are missing some huge factor.
We need a different benchmark. Observe teenage males without altering their diets, choose the one with the highest combined matrix of high calorie intake and strength which does not correlate to intentional fitness or activity level (without any intentional alteration of conditions). Assume that's how everyone should function and can function and if they aren't find out what is broken that is causing them to need fewer calories and/or more exercise and fix that. Do the same for females. Only when that baseline is achieved do we recommend altering diet/exercise.
How is there a social stigma that applies to riding the bus alone where there are dozens of witnesses to your behavior that wouldn't apply to riding alone in a strangers car?
Give everyone in the office a vote every 30 minutes. The unused votes accumulate up to a months worth. The election determines if and how the temperature changes during that period. Add a time window during which there aren't normally workers in the office and set a baseline temp based on energy conservation, if there are any votes during that period the baseline is overruled and reverts to the last temp of "in office" hours for maybe 4 periods to be extended with any additional periods with votes.
The theromostat automatically drifts to the most stable temperature range everyone is good with and both accounts for empty offices and people working late. This minimizes people with big thermal swings causing big swings in office temp so there is no need for dummy thermostats.
That's why office thermostats are pretty much universally dummies. They don't actually change the temperature.
Hardly, unless you are wearing a suit or a sweater 68F is cold. That's a good temp to be able to snuggle with your partner under a comforter with nobody getting sweaty as long as you don't mind the freeze should anyone open the blanket layer.
It's a nice comfortable temperature for the house in summer. As for winter, wear a coat during the trips to and from the car and wear summer like clothes underneath. Drop the requirements for formal wear from the office dress code altogether. In most cases, drop the requirement to go to the office altogether.