The Starch Solution

A friend has been on a diet for 30 days. She has lost 30 pounds. She's feeling much better and her caloric intake is 500 calories/day. Her diet is called the HCG Diet.

I don't mean to give her bad news, and I didn't. I keep my mouth shut in these matters. But she will gain all her weight back shortly after the diet is over. And here's the reason why:

The food we eat in America is making us fatter. It's a fact. It takes no doctor or registered dietitian to tell us that. Plain ol' common sense tells us, eating the food we eat is going to make us fat. So when she goes off her diet, and eats the way she ate before, she will end up looking like she did before.

If diets are meant to lose weight, going off the diet is meant to put all the weight back on. I don't think that is difficult to understand.

Now if she were to choose foods that were healthy and continually eat those foods, she would lose weight and she would never have to worry about gaining the weight back.

But unfortunately, in America, we don't know what healthy food is. Carbohydrates are considered bad, not healthy foods. So my friend is eating 50% of her calories in meat, which is composed of protein and fat, no carbohydrates. So not only is she eating a low calorie diet, her body is in ketosis.

I will not mention to her that she should eat carbohydrates. Even though indigenous peoples around the world prosper on a high carbohydrate diet, and have throughout history, we've been sold a bill of goods that is incorrect. We believe we need the calcium from drinking the milk of another species. That meat alone will supply us the necessary protein. We never think where does the cow get the calcium from. Where do the animals get their protein?

So, we'll be like the little hamsters, spinning around on our wheels, getting nowhere. Eventually getting fatter and sicker as time goes by.

But if you want to try to pry yourself away from your current beliefs and at least give it a chance that carbohydrates might be the answer to great health, Dr McDougall has just written a great book called "The Starch Solution".

BTW, my friend might want to take a look at this.

No More Harvard Debt

This guy has a blog detailing how he paid off all his college debt within a year.

 It's very inspirational and educational. In fact, in one of his posts he talks about another of one of my favorite personal finance blogs, Mr Money Mustache.

While we're on the subject, let me throw out another of my favorite blogs, Early Retirement Extreme, (though the writer of the blog has pretty much quit writing any more posts)

Mayor Marion Barry

I love Marion Barry. Nothing would be more fun than doing a line of coke in some crack house with da mayor.

 If you've been following the story, Mr Barry said something to the effect that there's too many asians in Washington and that they stink. Now Mr Barry had a blood clot and it was the Filipino nurses that saved his life. He went on Twitter and said how sorry he was for his previous comments.

 Now I don't mean to be prejudiced but I'll take a wild guess and say da Mayor belives Zimmerman killed Trevon Martin in cold blood. When the facts come out, will he have the courage then to speak up? Knowing da mayor, I certainly hope so.

Olive Garden Salad

I went to the Olive Garden tonight for dinner. It may sound boring but I wanted to write a post about their salad.

 I ordered their salad with no dressing. According to this website the salad is 120 calories. On the Olive Garden menu, if I remember right, it says 130 calories. But how can a dry salad with no dressing, mostly consisting of lettuce, which according to this website only contains 8 calories? I'll tell you how. They add croutons. Now you ask, why would they want to make something and try and make it higher in calories? And I say the reason is this, though of course I may be wrong, because their salad with dressing is 350 calories. And if it really is 350 calories, and let's say (being generous) the salad started with 50 calories, minus the croutons.

 So the salad increases 7 fold in calories with just the dressing. And what does the wonderful salad sounding name "Italian Dressing" actually contain? Almost total fat containing saturated fat that is responsible for causing heart disease and diabetes. Eating the regular salad at the Olive Garden is not by any means a healthy choice. And I'm not even counting the other calories that are added when cheese is added. What, perhaps 500 calories? So something that started at 50 calories is now over 500 calories.

 So this is what it gets to. Eating a salad by itself would contain no more than 50-100 calories per pound (CPP). Adding salad dressing is 4000 CPP. Yet oil is considered heart healthy and carbohydrates are considered a bad food in today's dieting America. And Americans are getting fatter and sicker, and we wonder why.

What It Means To Be Green

What It Means To Be Green

Change--And Some Hope VDH

The great Victor Davis Hanson

Walmart and Solicitors

I loathe going in and out of Walmart. Pretty much it's getting to be just about any store I go to. The person outside wanting donations is always there to welcome you, not asking for anything.

 But it's all dishonest and bullshit. In the book, "Influence, The Psychology of Persuasion", the author gives several examples of persuasion. One of those is giving someone something. When someone initiates a smile, or a greeting, that is giving something. Our society is built upon these unspoken rules that if we are given something, it's natural to give something back.

 By the solicitor welcoming you on the way in to the store, he is giving you something without asking anything in return. But wait. Does he want something in return? Of course he does--your money. And by him welcoming you, a contract is implied between you and him. You get all the time to think about it while in the store, and you can bet when you walk out he'll be asking for a donation.

 Not to give it goes against the social contract. But in today's society, we must look at the rules of the contracts and see how they are used to manipulate us. It's perfectly fine to not give, in fact I would bet most of the money, if not all, is for the solicitor and him only.

 That's why I like Trader Joe's policy: No Solilciting.

 I know when at Trader Joe's I won't be given a phony "Good morning" and other bullshit by these unwelcoming fucks. Oh yeah, at Walmart, just try to go through the other door--they got your ass surrounded. That's why I duck out the plastic door they use to bring in the carts. I have nothing but contempt for those fuckers and if we didn't give, they'd leave.

Don't Donate.

BHO and OBL--Lawyer Up

BHO lawyers up in case of failed attempt on OBL

Global Warming--The Last Days

Is the Pope Catholic? What would people say if he were to come out and admit he might be wrong about the divinity of Christ? That is essentially what has occurred in the Church of the Green Goddess; James Lovelock, father of the Gaia hypothesis, Defender of the Environmentalist Faith, most radical of Global Warming alarmists, has recanted! The rest of the story at American Thinker

Pay Go

Dan Snow: I hate to say this, but apps do beat books. Upon reading the article, you realize exactly what he's talking about. It's incredible how in one medium, one can combine interviews, film clips, dictionary, maps, all in one place. What a wonderful learning experience! And as regards my Kindle. The little bit of interactivity I experience makes things a whole lot easier. If I read a word and I want a definition, I just touch the word and up comes a dictionary that explains the word. If I want to highlight, or make notes, it's done. Also, if I'm reading the book on 2 or more devices, the device I'm now using will sync to the last past of the last device I used.

Too Much Copyright--Reason TV

Earth Day--Paul Ehrlich was WRONG

April 22 [1995] marks the 25th anniversary of Earth Day. Now as then its message is spiritually uplifting. But all reasonable persons who look at the statistical evidence now available must agree that Earth Day’s scientific premises are entirely wrong. During the first great Earth Week in 1970 there was panic. The public’s outlook for the planet was unrelievedly gloomy. The doomsaying environmentalists–of whom the dominant figure was Paul Ehrlich–raised the alarm: The oceans and the Great Lakes were dying; impending great famines would be seen on television starting in 1975; the death rate would quickly increase due to pollution; and rising prices of increasingly-scarce raw materials would lead to a reversal in the past centuries’ progress in the standard of living. For the whole article

Sebastian Thrun-New Education Model

Sebastian Thrun was a tenured professor at Stanford, who gave it up to pursue this. In his talk, he mentions the idea of the lecture being the means to teach is a model began over a 1000 years ago. The internet is shredding that model, just as the printing press was the tool that upended the way we learn. Mr Thrun gives props to Salman Khan who is the founder of Khan Academa. Here's a link to another online university. These are amazing times. Information can get into anyone's hands around the world. Today I was at the gym thinking, "My life's a bit different than man 100 years ago". I drive a scooter that gets 86mpg to the gym. While on the treadmill, I'm watching a "Live" car chase in Dallas, at the same time reading my iPad learning about the history of atomic theory.

Fatland

If you opened up this post, the title doesn't explain itself. Please read and be surprised. What's even more interesting, is that if you watch the video, I talked about this man only a week ago.

Richard Fernandez--PJ Media

It’s a definite. Fat is the new thin. Remember when you parents told you to finish the food on your plate because of all the starving people in China? Times have changed. One sign of its extent is the new World Health Organization warning of a new scourge stalking the world — the scourge of obesity. “Once considered a problem only in high income countries, overweight and obesity are now dramatically on the rise in low- and middle-income countries, particularly in urban settings.”

Once the narrative consisted of blaming Americans for gorging themselves on the world’s resources. Unfortunately, as the New York Times sources are forced to admit, the fattest people on the North American continent are now the Mexicans. This posed serious problems for the writer, who gamely tries to emphasize the exceptionalism of American greed by casting it as the sinister number two. “As you can see, in rates of overweight and obese residents, the United States is second to only one industrialized country: Mexico.”

But fats are facts. Pancho Villa has now become Paunchy Villa. There’s been an outbreak of rising standards of living the world over. Even the WHO’s poster boys have changed. It now tells the heartbreaking story of childhood obesity in Africa. So it’s eat your argula kids, just remember the fat children in Africa.

None of this is to say that the world’s problems have ended. But it does make undeniable the fact that the character of the world’s problems have changed. Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker tries to explain another puzzling aspect of the last 70 years: the Long Peace.

For the rest of the article