So you lost 30 pounds in 31 days on a 1000 Calorie diet. First of all, contratulations.
So let's start by assuming that you didn't gain or lose any significant muscle/bone/organ/other mass during this time. It's all fat. 30 pounds of body fat is about 108000 Calories. That means your energy balance was roughly -3600 Calories per day. You ate 1000 Calories, so you must've been burning 4600 Calories. That's significantly more than the average person burns (2000-3000 Calories). In practical terms, it works out to roughly "3 hours of strenuous exercise" more than the average person, every day. Perhaps your job is really more energy-demanding than you suspected.
In any case, if you're genuinely curious to gauge the effectiveness of different types of diets, you should try a similar experiement once you've reached equilibrium again. Find a low fat / high carb diet that also totals around 1000 Calories per day. Stick with it for a full month. See what the effects are. The laws of physics suggest that you'll experience the same weight loss, but the conjectures of biology suggest that you'll feel a lot more tired and hungry. You're also more likely to run into nutrient deficiencies (although not after such a short 30 days span).
My take on it: you lost a lot of weight because you were eating 1000 Calories per day while burning 4600. With a huge Calorie deficit like this, you're going to lose weight at a dramatic pace regardless of what kind of foods you're eating. Attributing this amazing success to the diet's "high fat / low carb" property makes about as much sense as attributing it to the fact that it all happened in January.
That's not true. This study did not control for number of calories eaten. Those of you holding up this study as some sort of proof that X calories from carbs will make you gain more weight than X calories from fat are flat out wrong. It says right in the fucking summary that this was "a test without calorie restrictions".
In case that's still too confusing to some people, let me translate: What happened is that people that ate a high carb / low fat diet ate more calories than people that ate a low carb / high fat diet. If they had been eating the same number of calories, they would have experienced the same weight gain/loss.
This study does show exactly what GP claimed: calorific value is what matters. It does not validate the ketogenic/Atkins diet in any meaningful sense. If anything, it's yet another argument against fad diets, instead showing once again that the human digestive system is not some mysterious sole exception to the law of conservation of energy.
Restricting calories leaves you hungry, which is utterly ruinous.
Citation needed. Hunger, while uncomfortable, does not violate the law of conservation of energy. You're talking about hunger and appetite as though they had anything to do with the fact that if you digest more calories than you expend, you lose weight. When you eat more calories due to hunger, the problem isn't that hunger is utterly ruinous, it's that you're eating more calories because you lack self-control.
its about about turning your body to "run hotter".
Metabolism is a primary factor in cellular aging. Increased metabolism may help fight obesity, but at the expense of life itself. Calorie restriction has been shown to increase lifespans much more than exercise ever could.
I realize that on Slashdot, where people tend to be highly math-oriented, it's a popular fallacy to believe that a calorie is a calorie is a calorie. However, studies like this one have been coming out for years now showing that that's simply not true.
You're misunderstanding our objection. A Calories is a Calorie. This study doesn't contest that claim.
Some kinds of energy are easier for our bodies to extract from food than others.
This is already accounted for in food labelling. The calories on the label all get metabolized, and the calories that don't get metabolized aren't listed on the label.
Some kinds of food make our bodies feel more full than others.
Sure, but that has nothing to do with the objection raised. Nobody's claiming that protein calories offer the same satiety as simple sugar calories. Satiety doesn't make you fat or skinny, though. Calories do. And a calorie is a calorie, whether it makes you feel full or not. If you eat 1000 calories in apples (~10 apples), you'll be a lot more full than if you eat 1000 calories in Bloomin' Onion (~0.5 Bloomin' Onions). However, whether you eat the 10 apples or half the Bloomin' Onion, you're still eating and metabolizing 1000 calories. The only difference is that after eating 10 apples, you're not going to then commence eating a huge steak, garlic butter mashed potatoes, and a slice of carrot cake. That has nothing to do with calories and everything to do with being a fatass.
And our bodies need more in terms of nutrition than just calories—so, contrary to one of your other posts, no, a 12 thousand calorie diet of pizza cannot be healthy, unless the toppings on that pizza are very carefully selected to provide the nutrients that our bodies actually need.
Sure, but that has nothing to do with the objection either. Nobody's claiming that a diet consisting of 12 thousand Calories of pizza will be nutritious. Nutrition doesn't make you fat or skinny, though. Calories do. And in the end, a calorie is a calorie. Whether you eat 12 thousand Calories in pizza or 12 thousand Calories in kale, the impact on your weight will be the same. Sure, 22.75 gallons of kale will be a lot more nutritious (and a lot harder to eat) than 5 pizzas, but they both turn into the same exact ~3.3 lbs of body fat if you don't burn the calories you consume.
You will be an unhealthy, lean couch potato. ... In short: exercise has structural effects which greatly enhance health.
Yes, and no. You're omitting the other side of the argument. Exercise stimulates increased metabolism; another name for metabolism is aging. Not in the wrinkled-and-frail sense, but in the death-is-genetically-eminent sense. Calorie restriction has been shown to increase lifespan (as well as markers generally associated with a high quality of life) quite a bit more effectively than exercise. Consequently, it isn't inaccurate to say that exercise kills (or hastens death, at the very least). Of course, since slashdot plays to an American audience, I'll grant that your claims are more relevant than mine; when people absolutely insist on eating 4000 Calories a day, it makes a lot more sense to talk about adding 3 hours of strenuous exercise daily than eliminating 4 out of 5 meals.
You must have a very, very small frame. I was extremely skinny at 5'10", 115lbs, and not a bit of muscle on me. I can't imagine being that weight at 6'2" and talking about having any muscle, even with vanishingly low amounts of body fat.
I recently vacationed in Japan. I would describe the cuisine, relative to American cuisine, as having generally lower levels of fats and higher levels of starches. Despite this, the only American-sized people I saw were sumo wrestlers. Can you explain why rates of obesity in Japan are dramatically lower than in the US?
Maybe, from a Newtonian point of view, it's a return to Renaissance times when people gained an understanding that a massive fast-moving object has the "right of way" in any interaction with a small slow-moving object. If legislation disagrees, well that's just tough - the case is appealed all the way up to the supreme court of physics where cyclists and pedestrians have a tough time arguing their case.
Complicating your characterization of the situation, in my eyes, is the fact that the coup you describe was really a popular coup. Perhaps not very popular in the east and south (where there is a large population of people who favor closer relations with Russia due to past Russian policy (compulsory settlement, Russification, land swaps, etc.), but popular with a majority of the population. Consequently, the way I see it, any foreign government invited to help is invited not by some usurper but by the majority of the Ukrainian people.
Of course, I agree that the ousting of Yanukovych by the Ukrainian parliament seems extralegal and at least in that sense illegitimate, but calling it a coup is a lot like calling George W Bush's 2000 victory a coup. Perhaps not totally in line with the law, but not exactly William III gunning for James II.
I had earlier cited my source ("The History of the English Paragraph" Edwin Herbert Lewis, University of Chicago Press, 1894), so you'll have to find a stronger retort to sway me.
In context (bazmail complaining about people over there in the US "still using Imperial measurements"), the difference (between the system of measures used by the US and the Imperial measurement system) is quantifiable and non-negligible. The difference between Kelvin and Celsius is less meaningful than the difference between US customary pints and Imperial pints; will you next be arguing that the difference between Kelvin and Celsius is meaningfuless?
I was an editing assistant for "The Encyclopedia of New Jersey" a little over a decade ago. Among other things, I wrote some Perl scripts to verify that each contributing author's name was always spelled correctly and associated with the correct subject matter. If I still had access to the full dataset and the scripts I wrote, it would be trivial for me to offer up such statistics (assuming that all the authors had unambiguously gender-specific names). However, since such access is not available to me, you'll have to settle for a mere anecdote.
If my memory isn't failing me, an overwhelming majority of the authors had male-sounding names.
Safe speech doesn't need protection. If your message is warm and fuzzy, nobody will seek to censor it. It's the uncomfortable, disgusting, and controversial speech that is the target of censorship. Only by pushing the envelope on that front that will we be able to preserve the free publication of all speech.
Sure, Brutsch could've been posting wholesome photos of his family's boardgame night. But that wouldn't really have accomplished the same purpose, would it?
Same EXACT crew who declared Iraqi WMD confirmed fact.
How many times will you be neo-conned, by the "bogey-man dictator" ploy?
I made a funny and linked to an obviously satirical blog post about a border that can "intentionally sneaked in behind" Russian troops. I felt that it was perfect for slashdot, as it fits nicely with the "In Soviet Russia" meme.
I'm flattered that a 3-digit UID would respond to my frosty piss, but... I don't get it. Why so serious, bro? Or was your post also meant to be ironic? (in which case, pre-emptive *whoosh*)
There is also 300 US active military "advisors" embedded with the Ukrainian military, helping with tactics, logistics and strategy. But I don't see you being upset over that.
To me, there seems to be quite a big difference between US military being present in Ukraine (at the request of Ukraine) and the Russian military being present in Ukraine (definitely not at the request of Ukraine). It's the difference between allied support and hostile invasion.
Star Control 2 was the best. I still remember waaay too many of the quasispace portal endpoint locations in hyperspace.
The FOSS remake (The Ur-Quan Masters) lacks one "feature" from the original Star Control 2 released by Accolade: in the original, it was possible to sell your last planet lander, and then to sell one more (?!), which would leave you with (practically) infinitely many more. This gives you limitless RU right from the start of the game (well, at least once you clear the moon, kill the Ilwrath scout, and gain full access to the human starbase), which makes it much easier to trigger the Yehat schizm in time to save the Pkunk.
For those that have never experienced this masterpiece, here's one of my favorite bits of dialogue. The protagonist asks the Zoq-Fot-Pik (an alien race, or really three alien races that originated on one common world) "what was your history like?"
Our past? Quite a broad topic for this short conversation
but we'll share a key piece of our history with you.
After we killed off the last Zebranky
we faced an interesting dilemma.
Should we proceed, and establish a culture
which would advance in art, technology and social sophistication?... ...Or should we just go back into the forest
and kick back and enjoy ourselves
knowing that a Zebranky wasn't gonna jump out of a bush and eat us!
Well, we DID go back into the forest.
We stayed there for about five thousand years and had a great time
Then, one stormy day, a Zoq, a Fot, and a Pik were walking up a steep path
looking for something good to eat, when a bolt of lightning struck nearby.
With a huge flash of light, the bolt of energy
carved a strangely-shaped chunk of granite out of a cliff.
It was a disk, with a hole in the middle!
As the rock began to roll down the hill, toward the three terrified beings
some dry grass got caught in its hole, and since the rock was still hot
the grass caught on fire.
When the rock finally got to the Zoq, the Fot, and the Pik
they simultaneously discovered the Wheel, Fire, and Religion
thus catapulting them on to the road of progress.
Which has led us to this day, Captain.
Oh! How did the flaming wheel give religion to our Culture, you ask?
I will explain.
You see, when it got to the threesome, the flaming wheel was going at a pretty good clip
and it ran smack into the Zoq, killing him.
The Fot and the Pik felt so bad
they really liked that Zoq!... ...that they decided the Zoq hadn't really died when the wheel flattened him
he had just gone to `a better place.'
Presumably one without lethal flaming wheels.
Slashdot Mirror
So you lost 30 pounds in 31 days on a 1000 Calorie diet. First of all, contratulations.
So let's start by assuming that you didn't gain or lose any significant muscle/bone/organ/other mass during this time. It's all fat. 30 pounds of body fat is about 108000 Calories. That means your energy balance was roughly -3600 Calories per day. You ate 1000 Calories, so you must've been burning 4600 Calories. That's significantly more than the average person burns (2000-3000 Calories). In practical terms, it works out to roughly "3 hours of strenuous exercise" more than the average person, every day. Perhaps your job is really more energy-demanding than you suspected.
In any case, if you're genuinely curious to gauge the effectiveness of different types of diets, you should try a similar experiement once you've reached equilibrium again. Find a low fat / high carb diet that also totals around 1000 Calories per day. Stick with it for a full month. See what the effects are. The laws of physics suggest that you'll experience the same weight loss, but the conjectures of biology suggest that you'll feel a lot more tired and hungry. You're also more likely to run into nutrient deficiencies (although not after such a short 30 days span).
My take on it: you lost a lot of weight because you were eating 1000 Calories per day while burning 4600. With a huge Calorie deficit like this, you're going to lose weight at a dramatic pace regardless of what kind of foods you're eating. Attributing this amazing success to the diet's "high fat / low carb" property makes about as much sense as attributing it to the fact that it all happened in January.
That's not true. This study did not control for number of calories eaten. Those of you holding up this study as some sort of proof that X calories from carbs will make you gain more weight than X calories from fat are flat out wrong. It says right in the fucking summary that this was "a test without calorie restrictions".
In case that's still too confusing to some people, let me translate: What happened is that people that ate a high carb / low fat diet ate more calories than people that ate a low carb / high fat diet. If they had been eating the same number of calories, they would have experienced the same weight gain/loss.
This study does show exactly what GP claimed: calorific value is what matters. It does not validate the ketogenic/Atkins diet in any meaningful sense. If anything, it's yet another argument against fad diets, instead showing once again that the human digestive system is not some mysterious sole exception to the law of conservation of energy.
Restricting calories leaves you hungry, which is utterly ruinous.
Citation needed. Hunger, while uncomfortable, does not violate the law of conservation of energy. You're talking about hunger and appetite as though they had anything to do with the fact that if you digest more calories than you expend, you lose weight. When you eat more calories due to hunger, the problem isn't that hunger is utterly ruinous, it's that you're eating more calories because you lack self-control.
its about about turning your body to "run hotter".
Metabolism is a primary factor in cellular aging. Increased metabolism may help fight obesity, but at the expense of life itself. Calorie restriction has been shown to increase lifespans much more than exercise ever could.
I realize that on Slashdot, where people tend to be highly math-oriented, it's a popular fallacy to believe that a calorie is a calorie is a calorie. However, studies like this one have been coming out for years now showing that that's simply not true.
You're misunderstanding our objection. A Calories is a Calorie. This study doesn't contest that claim.
Some kinds of energy are easier for our bodies to extract from food than others.
This is already accounted for in food labelling. The calories on the label all get metabolized, and the calories that don't get metabolized aren't listed on the label.
Some kinds of food make our bodies feel more full than others.
Sure, but that has nothing to do with the objection raised. Nobody's claiming that protein calories offer the same satiety as simple sugar calories. Satiety doesn't make you fat or skinny, though. Calories do. And a calorie is a calorie, whether it makes you feel full or not. If you eat 1000 calories in apples (~10 apples), you'll be a lot more full than if you eat 1000 calories in Bloomin' Onion (~0.5 Bloomin' Onions). However, whether you eat the 10 apples or half the Bloomin' Onion, you're still eating and metabolizing 1000 calories. The only difference is that after eating 10 apples, you're not going to then commence eating a huge steak, garlic butter mashed potatoes, and a slice of carrot cake. That has nothing to do with calories and everything to do with being a fatass.
And our bodies need more in terms of nutrition than just calories—so, contrary to one of your other posts, no, a 12 thousand calorie diet of pizza cannot be healthy, unless the toppings on that pizza are very carefully selected to provide the nutrients that our bodies actually need.
Sure, but that has nothing to do with the objection either. Nobody's claiming that a diet consisting of 12 thousand Calories of pizza will be nutritious. Nutrition doesn't make you fat or skinny, though. Calories do. And in the end, a calorie is a calorie. Whether you eat 12 thousand Calories in pizza or 12 thousand Calories in kale, the impact on your weight will be the same. Sure, 22.75 gallons of kale will be a lot more nutritious (and a lot harder to eat) than 5 pizzas, but they both turn into the same exact ~3.3 lbs of body fat if you don't burn the calories you consume.
You will be an unhealthy, lean couch potato.
...
In short: exercise has structural effects which greatly enhance health.
Yes, and no. You're omitting the other side of the argument. Exercise stimulates increased metabolism; another name for metabolism is aging. Not in the wrinkled-and-frail sense, but in the death-is-genetically-eminent sense. Calorie restriction has been shown to increase lifespan (as well as markers generally associated with a high quality of life) quite a bit more effectively than exercise. Consequently, it isn't inaccurate to say that exercise kills (or hastens death, at the very least). Of course, since slashdot plays to an American audience, I'll grant that your claims are more relevant than mine; when people absolutely insist on eating 4000 Calories a day, it makes a lot more sense to talk about adding 3 hours of strenuous exercise daily than eliminating 4 out of 5 meals.
You must have a very, very small frame. I was extremely skinny at 5'10", 115lbs, and not a bit of muscle on me. I can't imagine being that weight at 6'2" and talking about having any muscle, even with vanishingly low amounts of body fat.
I recently vacationed in Japan. I would describe the cuisine, relative to American cuisine, as having generally lower levels of fats and higher levels of starches. Despite this, the only American-sized people I saw were sumo wrestlers. Can you explain why rates of obesity in Japan are dramatically lower than in the US?
Bruce Dickinson hates you.
Maybe, from a Newtonian point of view, it's a return to Renaissance times when people gained an understanding that a massive fast-moving object has the "right of way" in any interaction with a small slow-moving object. If legislation disagrees, well that's just tough - the case is appealed all the way up to the supreme court of physics where cyclists and pedestrians have a tough time arguing their case.
I guess I see what you're getting at. Mostly.
Complicating your characterization of the situation, in my eyes, is the fact that the coup you describe was really a popular coup. Perhaps not very popular in the east and south (where there is a large population of people who favor closer relations with Russia due to past Russian policy (compulsory settlement, Russification, land swaps, etc.), but popular with a majority of the population. Consequently, the way I see it, any foreign government invited to help is invited not by some usurper but by the majority of the Ukrainian people.
Of course, I agree that the ousting of Yanukovych by the Ukrainian parliament seems extralegal and at least in that sense illegitimate, but calling it a coup is a lot like calling George W Bush's 2000 victory a coup. Perhaps not totally in line with the law, but not exactly William III gunning for James II.
I had earlier cited my source ("The History of the English Paragraph" Edwin Herbert Lewis, University of Chicago Press, 1894), so you'll have to find a stronger retort to sway me.
In context (bazmail complaining about people over there in the US "still using Imperial measurements"), the difference (between the system of measures used by the US and the Imperial measurement system) is quantifiable and non-negligible. The difference between Kelvin and Celsius is less meaningful than the difference between US customary pints and Imperial pints; will you next be arguing that the difference between Kelvin and Celsius is meaningfuless?
Apparently, you're no engineer.
I was an editing assistant for "The Encyclopedia of New Jersey" a little over a decade ago. Among other things, I wrote some Perl scripts to verify that each contributing author's name was always spelled correctly and associated with the correct subject matter. If I still had access to the full dataset and the scripts I wrote, it would be trivial for me to offer up such statistics (assuming that all the authors had unambiguously gender-specific names). However, since such access is not available to me, you'll have to settle for a mere anecdote.
If my memory isn't failing me, an overwhelming majority of the authors had male-sounding names.
For the safety of the country there are certain things that need to remain secret.
So as Americans, we're all relying on what amounts to security through obscurity? That's reassuring...
It probably wouldn't be hard to remove the check for selling planet landers...
// if(landers > 0)
But I had the original game on floppies. Didn't know Accolade released a later version with bugfixes.
If only Star Control 3 hadn't been such a totally epic letdown...
:'(
Mod parent up. Exceptionally informative.
It is unfortunate that our "free" society tends to operate this way. Voltaire is rolling in his grave.
Safe speech doesn't need protection. If your message is warm and fuzzy, nobody will seek to censor it. It's the uncomfortable, disgusting, and controversial speech that is the target of censorship. Only by pushing the envelope on that front that will we be able to preserve the free publication of all speech.
Sure, Brutsch could've been posting wholesome photos of his family's boardgame night. But that wouldn't really have accomplished the same purpose, would it?
Same EXACT crew who declared Iraqi WMD confirmed fact.
How many times will you be neo-conned, by the "bogey-man dictator" ploy?
I made a funny and linked to an obviously satirical blog post about a border that can "intentionally sneaked in behind" Russian troops. I felt that it was perfect for slashdot, as it fits nicely with the "In Soviet Russia" meme.
I'm flattered that a 3-digit UID would respond to my frosty piss, but... I don't get it. Why so serious, bro? Or was your post also meant to be ironic? (in which case, pre-emptive *whoosh*)
There is also 300 US active military "advisors" embedded with the Ukrainian military, helping with tactics, logistics and strategy. But I don't see you being upset over that.
To me, there seems to be quite a big difference between US military being present in Ukraine (at the request of Ukraine) and the Russian military being present in Ukraine (definitely not at the request of Ukraine). It's the difference between allied support and hostile invasion.
Truly a sad story. Michael Brutsch was a champion of freedom of communication.
It seems that "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" is a rarely expressed sentiment these days.
<3 LSL!
The FOSS remake (The Ur-Quan Masters) lacks one "feature" from the original Star Control 2 released by Accolade: in the original, it was possible to sell your last planet lander, and then to sell one more (?!), which would leave you with (practically) infinitely many more. This gives you limitless RU right from the start of the game (well, at least once you clear the moon, kill the Ilwrath scout, and gain full access to the human starbase), which makes it much easier to trigger the Yehat schizm in time to save the Pkunk.
For those that have never experienced this masterpiece, here's one of my favorite bits of dialogue. The protagonist asks the Zoq-Fot-Pik (an alien race, or really three alien races that originated on one common world) "what was your history like?"
Our past? Quite a broad topic for this short conversation
...Or should we just go back into the forest
...that they decided the Zoq hadn't really died when the wheel flattened him
but we'll share a key piece of our history with you.
After we killed off the last Zebranky
we faced an interesting dilemma.
Should we proceed, and establish a culture
which would advance in art, technology and social sophistication?...
and kick back and enjoy ourselves
knowing that a Zebranky wasn't gonna jump out of a bush and eat us!
Well, we DID go back into the forest.
We stayed there for about five thousand years and had a great time
Then, one stormy day, a Zoq, a Fot, and a Pik were walking up a steep path
looking for something good to eat, when a bolt of lightning struck nearby.
With a huge flash of light, the bolt of energy
carved a strangely-shaped chunk of granite out of a cliff.
It was a disk, with a hole in the middle!
As the rock began to roll down the hill, toward the three terrified beings
some dry grass got caught in its hole, and since the rock was still hot
the grass caught on fire.
When the rock finally got to the Zoq, the Fot, and the Pik
they simultaneously discovered the Wheel, Fire, and Religion
thus catapulting them on to the road of progress.
Which has led us to this day, Captain.
Oh! How did the flaming wheel give religion to our Culture, you ask?
I will explain.
You see, when it got to the threesome, the flaming wheel was going at a pretty good clip
and it ran smack into the Zoq, killing him.
The Fot and the Pik felt so bad
they really liked that Zoq!...
he had just gone to `a better place.'
Presumably one without lethal flaming wheels.