Switch on the TV, open a magazine, buy a newspaper or surf the net and it won’t be any time at all until you come across an advertisement for some diet-related product. Be it an exercise-contraption, a formula drink or a low-calorie food range, the market cup runneth over with weapons we can use to fight the Global War on Flab.
As a veteran footsoldier in this campaign (my abdomen is more ‘lunch-pack’ than ‘six-pack’) I bear many scars of battle. But I long ago realised that I can never really win this war. Though I have succeeded, with grim determination and effort, to cast off the oppressive tyranny of blobdom, my liberation has only ever been temporary. Somehow, by various means, the forces of fattiness manage to regroup and come roaring back to overwhelm me again and take me prisoner.
Still, surrender is not an option and I am always on the lookout for new ideas that may, I pray, grant me permanent victory and eternal snake-hips. Somebody recently suggested that getting one of those Jane Fonda videos might help and, prickly with expectation, I went out and bought one. Another let-down, I’m afraid. I spent the whole of last weekend watching ‘On Golden Pond’ and I didn’t shed an ounce.
Now, fortunately, I have private health insurance which means that my midriff mission-creep has few practical consequences apart from a vampiresque aversion to full-length mirrors and the occasional ‘magic flying shirt-button’. The same cannot be said for many of my fellow citizens who find themselves at the less-than-tender mercy of the state healthcare system:
Patients could have to sign up to healthier lifestyles under new plans being considered by the Labour Party.
Written contracts would ensure a certain standard of treatment in return for people following doctors’ advice and attending appointments.
Or, ‘Ve haf vays of making you slim’. Okay, in some ways I am quite pleased that this is now out in the open because it has actually been bubbling away just below the radar for a good few years now, mostly as ominous mutterings from NHS doctors that they might refuse to treat patients who smoke (despite the fact that taxes paid by smokers prop up the NHS).
Yes, carry on I say. How about a ‘no dangerous sports’ contract? A ‘stress-free career’ contract? A ‘no casual sex’ contract? A ‘no riding motorbikes’ contract? Why not? Since the NHS is clearly destined to become a lifestyle-policemen they may as well go the whole hog. And I sincerely hope they do because then our dirty, little secret will be secret no longer. The dirty, little secret (that no-one ever mentions in polite company here) is that nationalised healthcare is not free healthcare, it is rationed healthcare and this is just the latest rationing scheme.
The unpalatable truth is that this is a cost-cutting measure. Not so much doctor’s advice but bureaucratic diktat. Despite the extra squintillions of pounds that have been poured into it by the current government, the NHS still cannot meet the market demand for healthcare and so increasingly ruthless ways to cut the waiting lists are having to be formulated.
I have no doubt whatsoever that proposers of the scheme will argue they are only finding ways to improve people’s health and forcing them to lose weight and give up smoking is therefore a truly kind act of a caring government. But that is not why they’re doing this. And, while no reasonable person would argue that losing weight and quitting the weed can by anything but beneficial to health, a threat to withdraw healthcare for those who fail is nothing but a squalid act of bullying.
But, this is time for satisfaction not outrage. The great fabian promise of free healthcare for all regardless of who they are or how much they earn is finally showing up for the lie it always was. Let it grow and deepen. Perhaps, when some poor sod has been turned away from a hospital because of his ‘irresponsible’ roller-skating hobby, the British public will finally realise what Ayn Rand realised a long time ago: that the difference between a welfare state and a totalitarian state is merely a matter of time.
Ha! I just commented on this, but it gets better! The collectivism folds in upon itself! There are some really weird people out there…ASH not wanting to encourage smokers to quit…class warfare…avoidance of individual health responsibility…it’s like an onion.
Well done, David. I’m sure the “no casual sex” contract would go down a treat.
I do despair. And Lord, do I loathe this government.
One little nit to pick: you say that: “And, while no reasonable person would argue that losing weight…can by anything but beneficial to health…” But actually, it’s widely accepted that it’s better to stay at a stable excess weight than to lose weight and regain it; yo-yo dieting is much more harmful to the human body. As someone who has suffered from various eating disorders since the age of 8, I (and my GP) can tell you that losing and regaining weight has messed up my metabolism good and proper, to the point where I will probably always be fat, even though I eat sensibly and exercise regularly (more so than most of my slimmer friends), and no matter what contracts the Labour government gets me to sign. If politicians knew the first thing about healthcare, they’d realise that.
But they don’t, and they haven’t, and we’re paying for their ineptitude every day.
Jackie D,
Point duly noted.
This reminds me of an incident a few years ago. I was keeping my self employed husband company on a Saturday in his home office as he engaged in his usual routine of working all the hours there are. I looked out of the window and below to the neighboring garden, where the elderly drunken bums (sorry, disadvantaged unfortunates) next door were lying around on sun loungers drinking beer and watching council workers industriously tidy their back garden for them.
“WTF?!”, I asked my husband. “How is it possible that you’re in here killing yourself for the honour of handing 40% of what you make to the government, which you can’t even claim any benefits from because you have committed the sin of being self employed, so that you can pay for those flipping bums to drink themselves to death while the council cleans up their mess?”
He shrugged his elaborate, defeated English shrug, the British equivalent of the New York “whadaya”, and resumed working.
He was (and is) overweight, so NHS care will be something else that is denied to him, (although he never uses it, anyway).
But what’s the betting that he will be allowed to continue merrily paying for the healthcare of the bums next door, and what’s the further betting that not one of them will ever be required to try to stop drinking before being offered medical care.
Greetings from the Wild West (Reno, Nevada, one state short of California):
I’ve yet to see a good analysis of the relative cost to society of early death from smoking, alcohol, drug addiction, obesity, or what have you, compared to the cost of keeping the very old alive year after miserable year.
We’re still some distance away from your NHS, no thanks to Hillary, but the trend is ominous.
My grandmother and her _younger_ sister both lived into their hundreds. After their meager estates were consumed, they spent quite a few years in a decent-enough nursing home at government expense, dreaming, as far as anyone could tell, of happier times. I can’t help thinking that they would have been better off, on the whole, if they’d paid a little less attention to their health and had a little (or a lot) more fun. It’s not for me to judge for them, of course, but I can judge for myself.
I know an 83 year old man, who is fortunate enough to have a doting daughter to look after him. I would not want to be him. I’m 56 now, and if I make 70, I’ll start to get nervous. I don’t want to see 80.
Well, anyway, not counting hypochondriacs, who is the real burden on the medical system, those who burn out young, or those who linger? (That’s a sincere question – I don’t know.)
Bill
I can’t tell where Mr. Hueter is coming from in his cited link. Yes, we should be responsible for our poor choices, which in the absence of socialized medicine would mean we should pay for our treatment or die. I have no problem with that. We cannot opt out of paying for socialized medicine, however. He seems to be saying that those who indulge in despised unhealthy habits (as opposed to approved ones, such as drinking) should both pay for the programs and be refused treatment.
Perhaps he is saying we should be rid of the socialized medicine–which I would agree with. But absent that, to refuse treatment while demanding payment is tyrannical.
As an alternative to giving Jane Fonda residuals, consider things like these:
http://www.bikinguk.net/web/
http://members.aol.com/hikenet/clubsintl.html
http://www.mileendwall.org.uk/home.htm
Brett, I was being flippant at times and might not have come across clearly. I apologize.
I understand you cannot opt out of NHS. Americans can’t opt out of Social Security, unless we wish to be branded criminals of various sorts, so I sympathize.
My point in my post was that while I certainly do think socialized healthcare is wrong and that it should be ended, from the viewpoint of a healthcare provider, it makes sense to ask your customers to take care of themselves.
I fully understand your comment about tyranny. The key here is “ask the customers.” After reading the two Guardian articles and the BBC report, I could not conclusively determine if this proposal would deny service to those who didn’t participate in the plan. Any help here would be appreciated and I would amend my blog comments as necessary. However, if the individual chooses to sign a health contract, that individual should fullfill his or her word.
David
You don’t go far enough.
No listening to loud music. No cooking meat. No driving like an eejit late at night when the roads are clear. No smoking (of course). No drinking to excess. No drugs. No wheat. No dairy products. No working to long hours. No watching TV. No reading. No pets. No holidays. No crossing the street. No getting out of bed in the morning.
They are all a risk.
Eamon
Hi David,
Stephen Pollard has a great 4th of June piece on this too, with a particularly insightful question at the end about John Prescott! 🙂
Rgds,
A.N.Other-Fattie
Diabolical, grouping these two particular no-nos together, since they aren’t unrelated. It’s damned difficult to quit smoking. It’s damned difficult to lose weight. But trying to quit smoking and lose weight is more damned difficult than the sum of the two, since the one affects the other.
Why, all you tobacco-addicted fatties out there, it’s as though the government were setting you up to fail. You’d think they didn’t love you…
I was glad to hear the British Medical Association’s spokesman sounding less than thrilled by this chilling proposal.
Still, as Mr. Carr suggests, it at least rubber stamps the word ‘official’ on the patronising style of this nanny-state Labour party. There are signs that the public has finally started to wake up to this particularly odious characteristic of Blair and Co. so that will be yet another marble beneath his dancing feet, when election time comes around.
And a final thought. What if the doctor’s advice is just plain wrong? We have, in recent weeks, started to see some serious cracks appearing in the ‘Atkins is a dangerous crank’ facade erected by the HealthNazi uber-weasels – dieticians, the AMA, BMA et al. None the less, it seems likely (given how long it takes new research to penetrate through to the desk of the average jobbing GP) that you will still be being advised to ‘eat less fat and gobble those carbs’ for at least the next ten years.
There’s only one person I would trust less to offer dietary advice than my GP. And that’s a ‘dietician’. And NHS ones in particular.
A contract? That’ll be the usual governmental kind, in blood, signed at a crossroads, will it, doctor?
G Cooper writes:
“There’s only one person I would trust less to offer dietary advice than my GP. And that’s a ‘dietician’. And NHS ones in particular. ”
Hi G,
In a former life, I was a medical student for three years, at the Royal Hallamshire Hospital in Sheffield. Only going on personal experience, the whole point of Medical School is to beat out of you any form of independent thinking, to make you blindly follow “approved” facts, and to teach you how to suck up to authority; what a perfect model for the Socialist Utopia of the future! 🙂
(Before I carry on, the ostensible reason I chose to leave was because I failed a re-sit of a surgical exam, and was asked to retake the year. I declined this splendid offer of another year in hell – mainly in order to regain my sanity 🙂
In Great Britain, this rigidity of thinking in the medical profession may be due to its ossification since the late 1940s. But take it from me, going by the many narrow-minded dunderheads (and I include my old stupid self) whom I met as students, who are now presumably doling out what the drugs companies tell them to in GP surgeries all over the UK, I wouldn’t trust your average doctor further than I could urinate into a specimen bottle.
For example, I used to have mild asthma, but this got strangely worse after I’d been switched to a steroid, rather than relying on a bronchodilator. My doctor advised me to try an even stronger dosage of the inhaled steroid. Without revealing my surreptitious previous-life knowledge, I checked up on this, and found from What Doctors Don’t Tell You, that it could have been the steroids and the bronchodilators, which were making my condition worse!
I immediately stopped taking ANY medication (around five years ago, now), probably against medical advice though I didn’t ask, and have had no need for any such medication since; even the 78 steps of Lancaster Gate tube station, which I stagger manfully up every day, which once would have had me reaching for the inhaler, is nothing other than a daily mental Everest (Repeat after me: I will not take the lift, I will not take the lift, I will not take the lift 🙂
As for Atkins, the late and the great Dr Atkins is one cardiologist doctor whom I do trust. Like Mr Carr, I’ve tried High Fibre, low banana, and middling ice-cream; all to no effect. Less food, more exercise, and gym exercise bikes; none of it worked. But after four weeks, or so, of Dr Atkins’ fat-burner diet, I’m down to the last notch on my belt and I’m running out of trousers. I never feel hungry, I can swim 100 (very slow) lengths in Henley pool with only the boredom to contend with rather than energy exhaustion, and I will be raising a statue to the said doctor, as soon as funds allow (about 2041 going by what El Gordo is stealing from me, at the moment).
So why do I trust Dr Atkins? Because when I left medicine, I studied psychology, with a particular interest in the evolution of man. We’re basically the same creatures as the small Mitochondrial Eve group which left Africa about 100,000 years ago. And it was only 10,000 years ago (or so), that some of us invented the farming of grasses (wheat, rice, etc), and other carbohydrate-laden foods, such as maize and potatoes, plus the milking of other animals, and a move away from the much fatter human milk. (BTW, ask a anti-fattist Nazi why human milk is so full of fat if you want to see a collectivist mental program crash before your very eyes – does not compute, does not compute 🙂
So, getting back to some kind of topic, for 90,000 years we existed on meat, nuts, berries, fruit, vegetables, and eggs. Think about this – we were all on the full Atkins diet for most of our time on Earth! Even now, if you try to eat unprocessed and/or uncooked carbohydrate-laden crops, it’s almost impossible to digest them (try eating raw ears of wheat, off the stem).
What Dr Atkins did, very bravely, against the hysterical opposition of the internationalist medical profession, was to realise and then publicise that maybe as we’d spent most of our full human evolutionary history without the intake of large amounts of carbohydrate, perhaps we’d be better off now if we didn’t intake large amounts of carbohydrate. It’s a no-brainer really.
Add to this the small amounts I’d also learned about biochemistry, physiology, embryology, and pharmacology, in-between student demo agitation events at taxpayer expense, and it’s even more of a no-brainer. But go to your doctor, and mention that you’re doing Atkins, and their heads will blow off. But don’t worry. Most of ’em haven’t had an original thought in their heads since they were 18, and in 20 years time the next generation of idiot doctors will be ordered by the Euro-Czars to make you sign contracts to go on the Atkins diet! 🙂
I don’t think it is any surprise that, after education, jobs-protecting statists infest areas of life-and-death control such as the medical professions. And no surprise that Mr Blair’s government always seem so keen to expand the control they have over our lives, particularly in areas such as the mental health acts. It is the hospitals which will form the first outposts of a Euroland Gulag, just as they were the last outposts in the Soviet Gulag. (This may have already happened?)
I’m with Dr Atkins. Eat low carbs. I’m with Milton Friedman. Deregulate the medical profession. I’m with Ayn Rand. Abolish the NHS. We’ll all be the healthier, and the freer, for it. Right, gotta go and get my Leather Lane deep-fried pork chop! 😉
Rgds,
AndyD
(BTW, if there are any representatives of the Atkins Foundation reading this post, could they please regard it as a job application for the post of UK President for your organisation? 🙂
I think I understand, Charles; you were expressing schadenfreude at the free riders, no?
I can’t help you with regard to the NHS, as I”m American, too. I will note that in the days of yore, before lying about the effects of smoking came to be seen as a virtue, that insurance actuarials offered no reason to discriminate against people who smoke, and insurance rates did not do so. Such discrimination is routine now. The theory seems to be, if the claims aren’t true, they ought to be. The insurance companies, of course, are happy to take in more money and appear virtuous at the same time.
Baby boomers (apt name) are both bigoted and superstitious. This flies in the face of their self-evaluation as scientific and liberal, I know. The desire to treat other people like dirt has not been bred out of them, despite their high opinion of themselves. I know this destructive generation from the inside, being one of them. We should have been better to our fellow citizens; when we are old and weak, the impoverished subsequent generations are likely to take their just revenge.
Andy Duncan writes:
“…could they please regard it as a job application for the post of UK President for your organisation? :-)”
See? No sooner have we appointed Mr. Duncan our MP and he’s off looking for a part-time job to swell his coffers… Politicians – what are they like?
Your points about Atkins are well taken and he wasn’t by any means the first to advocate this sort of diet. I seem to recall there was a psychiatrist back in the 1960s by the name of… hmm… McKarness, perhaps, who believed he could cure many mental and other illnesses with what he called a ‘Stone Age Diet’. He put forward exactly the same evolutionary arguments as you’ve advanced and I still find them quite credible.
And deep-fried pork chops, eh? It’s enough to make a dietician cry.
I hope.
G Cooper writes:
“See? No sooner have we appointed Mr. Duncan our MP and he’s off looking for a part-time job to swell his coffers… Politicians – what are they like?”
Can’t do the politics thing, I’m afraid. I’m too easy to provoke, too thin-skinned, and keep losing my rag too easily. Besides, in which constituency would this fella get voted in:
Opinion on the NHS?: Abolish it.
Opinion on Guns?: Should be free with cornflakes.
Opinion on Tax?: Try to get it voluntary (eg: lotteries, legally binding contract taxes, etc.)
Roads?: Tolls, everywhere. Privatize them, if you can.
Government Duties?: Army, Police, courts, prisons, legislature, then perhaps either system of health and education vouchers, or guaranteed minimum income via negative income taxes, to be spent by individuals as they like, transitionally until extended family systems of support rebuilt.
Everything else: Nothing. Let people just get on with it.
Anyway, I need the work. IT contract market is dead (thanks Gordon), and IT training market is nearly dead. It seems my old window-cleaning job beckons once more.
Available for all other reasonable offers, from July 1st! 😉
“And deep-fried pork chops, eh? It’s enough to make a dietician cry. ”
Just one deep-fried pork chop. Though I did have two fried eggs! 🙂
Just one deep-fried pork chop. Though I did have two fried eggs! 🙂
Is there more to this diet than eating fried sausage and egg? If not why are the Scots on average such an unhealthy lot?
There’s a lot more to it, Mark. You have to totally cut out bread, potatoes, rice, pasta and other high glycemic index carbs — oh, and alcohol. The latter is the reason why I couldn’t stick to Atkins for more than a few months, even though it did produce fantastic results. Three months of Atkins, including 30 minutes of cardiovascular exercise and 30 minutes of resistance work every day, and weight fell off me quite easily. Doing the same exercise with the diet recommended by the BMA is pretty useless. (BTW, fried sausage and egg are allowed, but if you have a mental block to regular consumption of such things, as I do, they’re not a part of Atkins. I mostly ate tuna, salmon, avocado, olives, almonds, chicken, other fish, turkey and cottage cheese.)
As soon as I saw the words, in relation to Blair: “yet another marble beneath his dancing feet, when election time comes round” I knew we were in for some pithy comments signed by G Cooper. Also the point about Mr Duncan, our designated MP, already seeking to swell his coffers … well, at least we’d have a slim MP.
Jackie D – Don’t frighten me like that! You absolutely do not have to cut out alcohol on Dr Atkins! – only wimpy drinks like wine and fruit punches. Anything with sugar in it = no. Whisky is fine. Best of my recollection, you can’t have beer either. So on really hot days, you have to add lots of ice to your whisky and soda.
Bundaberg Rum, Coffee and cigarettes have made me the fine specimen of a man that I am today.
“nationalised healthcare is not free healthcare, it is rationed healthcare and this is just the latest rationing scheme.”
No kidding? Are you telling me the NHS is new to you? (Sorry, not so keen on British history the last 100 years). Here (Sweden), it’s reversed – nationalized healthcare was moving out and privatized healthcare has created a bulg in the huge and fat frontline. However, I’m just waiting for it to be crushed – as anything else that goes against a socialist government.
LB — I only drink beer and the other prohibited alcohol, so for me it was no alcohol at all. (I tried to get by on vodka and gin, but couldn’t hack it. Couldn’t do whisky, either.) Also, I only drink to get pissed, so the quantities I’d be drinking in wouldn’t be allowed.
mark holland writes:
“Is there more to this diet than eating fried sausage and egg? If not why are the Scots on average such an unhealthy lot?”
As Jackie D says, there’s much more to it. The Scots are so unhealthy because of the pie crusts, chips, battered mars bars, pizzas, fried bread, beans, toast, and all the other carbohydrate they wrap around their fried food, plus they probably smoke more than average, which really complicates things like atheroma – and believe me, I’ve assisted in aterial operations where we’ve literally scraped this stuff out like porridge, from the aortas of fat heavy smokers.
When given a high carb and high fat diet, the body (via pancreatic insulin and glycolysis) uses the carb to drive its energy requirements, and lays the fat down as blood vessel atheroma (causing strokes and myocardial infarctions), and fat inside the fat cells. The last thing the body ever wants to lose is its fat, as it’s saving it for famine, something all stone age people, and most modern people, go through at least once a year.
What Atkins does is remove the carb element, especially that of modern farmed foods, and push the body into the famine mode of lipolysis, ie. fat burning. Unfortunately the body does require blood glucose, for the highly active brain, and this is unavailable from lipolysis, so in normal famine circumstances, the body starts eating up its own muscle protein tissue to provide this glucose, and to keep the other essential protein-based metabolisms turning over. But Atkins overcomes this by pouring in loads of extra protein, to stop this happening, while at the same time kicking in lipolysis.
BTW, because of all the extra protein being processed, more urea is produced (which results from the amino acid end chain metabolism), which needs more flushing out with extra water consumption.
Back to lipolysis. It’s a kinda magic really. The first whammy effect, is that because your body is in famine mode, it suppresses your appetite. So you don’t want to eat much, and you don’t get all those rebound insulin effects, as when you eat rich chinese carb-laden food. And the other double-whammy effect, is that normal people need to exercise for at least 20 minutes, to get lipolysis going, and it is only after 60 minutes that the ordinary carb stores get fully depleted, leading to full lipolysis. But we Atkins faddists are on 100% lipolysis every minute of the day. So you have to get all hot and sweaty, and go jogging for a full hour, to get to the fat-burning state I am in first thing in the morning the moment I get out of bed and shout out, at the top of my lungs, “James Naughtie, you’re an idiot!”
Even just walking down the stairs I’m burning off more fat than a marathon runner after 55 minutes of running. And that’s kinda cool! 🙂
So, that medical education wasn’t wasted after all. Thanks Mr taxpayer 😉
And if the Atkins Foundation don’t send me a large cheque for that puffery above, then I withdraw my magnaminous offer to become their UK President! $-)
PS> Sausages are a no-no, BTW, unless they haven’t been packed out with carb-laden sawdusty stuff. Beer is also right out, as I’ve found to my cost. Just sipping five pints of lager, puts you back about a week on the plan.
I don’t know if this topic is dead yet, but the Sun reports that lots of money is being wasted on bureaucrats in the NHS. Say it ain’t so…
I have no medical training and I don’t read diet books. However, I’d be surprised if someone on the Atkins diet moving from a full stop burns more calories than a marathoner after 55 minutes. I’d imagine that since marathoners have so low body fat, all of their muscles would be burning fat most of the time, and it wouldn’t take them that long to get into a fat-burning mode.
In any case, here’s what seems to work for me: cutting back on the calories, and increasing the exercise. Note the disclaimers: it’s specific to me, and it seems to work. Other things might work much better, and it might not work for you.
If I were just starting out to lose weight, I’d find a local hill that took me 1/2 hour to hike up. I’d go up the hill three times a week at a comfortable pace. If I was huffing and puffing too much, I’d either slow down, or find a less steep hill.
Then, I’d increase the amount week after week, being careful not to increase the hours too suddenly. Maybe I’d work up to doing something like two two-hour hikes and one four to eight or more hour hike per week. I’d be very careful to take lots of water, and I’d eat a small amount of something like raisins, peanuts, sugar candy, etc. every 30-60 minutes. I wouldn’t start with the snacks until after having done the exercise for 45 minutes or so. As before, I’d do it at a comfortable pace, so that I could carry on a conversation more or less and that I didn’t feel a burn throughout the hike. If I cut back on the calories or even kept them the same while gaining 3000′-6000′ per week, I’m sure I’d lose weight. Note that that refers to the elevation gain, not distance.
Then, supplement it with more anaerobic things like rock scrambling or climbing, sprinting, etc., and include things for balance like walking on pipes, boulder hopping, etc. Maybe do exercises like lunges, pull-ups, push-ups, etc. If you’re going to be climbing, exercise your forearms and shoulders. And, add some bike riding in there to work other muscles, etc. And, I could combine these things. For instance, in Griffith Park in L.A. (home of the Observatory from Rebel Without A Cause), I’ll occasionally ride up a moderately steep paved street, lock the bike at a trailhead, hike up, do a little bit of balancey things on the rocks there, hike back, and then cruise on the bike back down. The book “Conditioning for Outdoor Fitness” from The Mountaineers in Seattle WA has much more information.
Once again, the preceding is me-specific. YMMV.
An important addendum: I have some outdoors training vis-a-vis surviving, evaluating risks, etc., and I also carry appropriate equipment. When I’m just going for a short hike in Griffith Park for instance, I don’t take much. But, if I’m going to a more remote area I’ll take the 10 essentials, rain gear, a space blanket, etc. If I didn’t have training, I’d join a local group.
Griffith Park! Oh yeah! I was just going to mention that myself! Good example! Yeah. I have all this training regarding evaluating risks in Griffith Park and I would definitely carry appropriate equipment if I knew where the hell it is. Could you narrow it down for us? Would it be too cruel to ask what continent?
Lonewacko, I’m assuming something also you- specific – the lack of children. How else do you get that amount of free time?
Uh, a small point about Atkins – after an initial period to get you into lipolysis (and ketosis – NOT ketinosis, as critics claim), you are encouraged to tailor it. If you like bread, start adding a slice or breadstick or whatever – keep adding back stuff you like, little by little, until you start to gain weight, then go back one step.
Big point about Atkins: for people like me, it is sustainable for life. It is not just a diet.
And yes, diet or not, baance your caloric intake against whatever exercise you do. Alas, this is not what the current medico-nutritionist establishment is willing to look at: when a study showed that teenagers who were in schools with physical-exercise programs or who otherwise exercised were not as fat as couch-potato types (like me) despite eating the same types and amounts of food, the response from those who want to outlaw McDonald’s and soft drinks was “No matter what the data show, we think they are eating too much.”
*‘No Matter What the Data Say’*
Griffith Park is in Los Angeles, California, USA. It’s one of the largest urban parks in the U.S. Many TV shows and movies include scenes shot there. For instance, I shot some pics of Kiefer Sutherland shooting the TV series 24 a few months ago, and they were shooting a stunt for the TV show “Fear Factor” just yesterday. The world-famous Hollywood Sign is just outside its boundaries, although if you try to hike to it they send helicopters after you. As for the free time, other then occasionally dumpster diving for PET bottles and aluminum cans to pay my Internet bills, I’m a bum.
Andy Duncan and others: Re Atkins, can you explain the French paradox? They eat a baguette at breakfast, a baguette at lunch and a baguette at dinner. Admittedly, most of them don’t use butter on it, although some do. But that is a lot of carbs right there. They also eat lots of potatoes and the scoff down sugar and thick cream-laden pastries. They also cover their food in rich sauces. And they drink wine. And the women are THIN! You very rarely see a woman of under 50/55 with an extra ounce on her. How do you explain this?
Liberty Belle writes:
“Andy Duncan and others: Re Atkins, can you explain the French paradox…”
The only three I can think of are:
What about Gerard Depardieu though? Is he the exception who proves the rule, or is all that Los Angeles living taking its western toll?
That’s as good as my explanation can get, I’m afraid. It’s 14 years since I last wielded a scalpel, in anger, and it’s hard remembering all that mind-numbing stuff if you don’t use it. The most fascinating part was neuro-anatomy, though, and I do remember most of that. Did you know for instance, that inside the head of John “Two Fingers” Prescott, there is actually a brain! It’s not a big one, as these things go, but the pre-frontal motor cortex is particularly adept with the control of fists, fingers, and the steering controls of fine Jaguar motor cars! 😉
Andy, many thanks for all that. It makes absolute sense that the human race’s digestive system wouldn’t have gone from hunter-gatherer omnivor to cud chewer in a blink of an evolutionary eye.
I don’t think I’m quite ready for Dr Atkins just yet. Even though the other day I nudged through the 11st line when when I’m super fit I’m about 10 and when I’m not so I ought to be about 10-4. Less food and more cycling (like the old days) ought to do the trick.
How funny that this thread has turned into a session of Overeaters Anonymous. The confessions, the despair, the fellowship, the helpful tips …
Andy Duncan, the only thing I admire the French for is their dogged determination to carry on smoking in the face of all the evidence. It takes a steely strength of will to smoke 40 Gitanes a day every day of your life from age 12, despite hectoring from the government. But though all the ladies under 50 or so are slim, their faces look like a road map of Connecticut. I do get a kick out of their political incorrectness, though. Despite signs on the doors of shops selling food forbidding animals, I have seen dogs being wheeled around majestically in trolleys, their owners leaning over the frozen food with a cigarette dangling from their lips. Other people think it’s OK to ignore the signs if they pick the dog up and carry it in. I also like the fact that they park under signs that say, in effect, “If you park here, you will be shot.”
Lonewacko, anyone who spends eight to twelve hours a week hiking is not a bum. You may be driven in directions that don’t result in much remuneration, but you are light years away from being a bum.