For some reason I was reading or listening to something that said that; "We [humans] need to stop driving extinction." For some reason that hit me as the stupidest thing I've heard in ages, and I've heard it before. My new saying is when I hear something stupid it makes my head explode.
Do these idiots that say things like this realize that mammals wouldn't exist if a bunch of birds or lizards (or whatever the scientists thinks the dinosaurs are now) and become extinct?
Wait this is what made my head explode. The thing that made my head explode was the thought that all cultures should be treated equally!? Really? Let's say that there was this small indigenous tribe in Eastern Europe with a long history of being on the land and a unique culture, and suddenly the Huns came and over ran that tribe over and wiped them out. Did the world lose anything? Ok maybe it did. But come on if a culture has something to offer it will be offered despite the best efforts to wipe it out.
Lets see was the Greek culture wiped out when the Romans took over their country? No they had a lot to offer. Was the Jewish culture wiped out when the Romans took them over, or Christianity? I'm not saying that all cultures are bad but that if a culture has something to add then let it be added, but a culture shouldn't be propped up just because it exists.
I don't know why I wanted to say this but I think it needs to be said.
Thursday, February 2, 2012
Thoughts on Health
I've been doing some reconsideration on how I should go about trying to stay healthy. The driving force behind everything I do more or less is diabetes and diabetes has led me to low carb eating but I've had some different ideas lately.
I read a web site by Dr. Mercola who is an alternative medicine website. He has some guest authors or experts that come on his site. One of the writers that I noticed was Ori Hofmekler and I really liked what he said about insulin. I read a couple of books by him and he had some great information. Basically he believes that we have to eat like out ancestors which he believes walked around all day gathering and hunting and then at night would eat it all at once, so his idea is to not to eat during the day and to eat everything you want at night, or 20 hours of fasting and 4 hours of eating. I liked some of the things that he said but I just couldn't bring myself to say that I'm following the "Warrior Diet" that's just too stupid sounding. He also talks about a training regimen called "Anti Fatigue Training" that didn't sound like much fun.
After that I found a site called "Mark's Daily Apple" which talks about "Primal Living" with a "Primal Diet." This is site is by a guy called Mark Sisson who used to be a marathoner and then got injured around the time that triathlons started getting popular and he started competing in those and took 3rd in the Iron Man in Hawaii. Mark says that we over train and that was a problem that he had when he was an endurance athlete. He says that our ancestors would generally walk around all day lots of movement but only occasional bursts of activity or trying to lift something heavy like the animal you just killed. But basically we didn't try running around every day day in and day out. However, he really likes the barefoot movement. I started doing what Mark said when I was able to start exercising after my hernia surgery. I'd do the turbulence training and then on the off days I'd exercise pretty easy, then on Saturday I'd ride the exercise cycle at a fast, for me, cadence of 80 bpm. The first time I tried it I was able to do the ride, and I was able to do it. That surprised me because I've been able to do it before but only a few times. Anyway it seemed to be working. Then I got sick and stopped exercising, then my BG got high and I started exercising again, but only lightly like Mark says and my BG fell. Pretty amazing.
Mark Sisson likes going barefoot and so I started looking into that. I'd actually heard that going barefoot was a good thing because it helped you to keep from getting things like plantar fasciitis and I've been exercising barefoot since then. So I start looking into it and the things that I find are fascinating. Turns out that around the same time that we started being told to stop eating fat we were also told to start aerobic exercising. That started a craze for running as an aerobic exercise. Shoe companies started producing running shoes that padded the heel so people started running slow with heel strikes. I've felt the shoes that feel like your feet are in pillows. They feel great, but the people that talk about barefoot running say these shoes keep our feet encased like a cast and are feet are not allowed to move the way they're designed to. And they say that heel striking cause more stress on the knees and what not. That got me a little excited because of me having the knee problem when I run. The thinking is that when you run barefoot you will run with a ball of the foot strike that reduces the stress on your knees. Here's the interesting thing that the barefoot running people say, that the human body is designed to do endurance running. I've heard this before as well, humans can't outrun hardly any animals but they can outlast almost all of them. For example we can breathe through our nose, which horses can't do, and we sweat so we can expel heat. So these barefoot running people think that our ancestors actually developed language through the need to coordinate long range hunting expiditions where humans would run down the animals they hunted.
That's so funny how people think our ancestors did different things. Some think humans walked around slowly all day and only sprinted to run away from animals. Others think that humans ran down the animals until they become so exhausted we just walk up to them and stab them with a stick. I'm pretty sure that another web writer that I read got it right when he said he's not sure what our ancestors ate or did, but he's pretty sure they didn't sit on their butts and watch TV and the only exercise that they got is getting up and walking to the refrigerator.
After all this reading and stuff I went back to my roots and read some of Drs Eades site (they wrote protein power which is one of the books that I read when I first started the diabetes diet) and from that site I learned that Gary Taubes had written a new book. From reading on the Eades site I learned something very interesting. When Dr. Eades puts someone on a low carb routine he treats them like they are going to have withdrawals from carbs. He says that people that try the low carb route that say that they try it and they felt terrible and so they need carbs is like someone that tries to quit cigarettes and says that they felt crappy and that they're bodies need cigarettes is the same thing. Another thing is that people who do low carb are still caught up in the low fat mind set and don't eat enough fat. Fat is what gives you the full sensation.
Then I bought and read Gary Taubes new book "Why We Get Fat and What to Do About It." Gary Taubes is the guy that wrote "Good Calories Bad Calories" which was a great book, but it was pretty hard to read and it had a lot of good information. The new Taubes books was good, but the main thing that I got out of it, was that you need to be very strict on the carbs. It doesn't matter if you've got only a few to many carbs that's to many and you've got to cut them out. Also, it's hard to lose the last few pounds.
So with all this reading and stuff I've got a new plan.
1) Watch the calories closer.
2) Don't exercise so hard.
3) Don't worry about the fat so much any more.
So far I'm staying around the weight that I was at at the end of the HGC diet so it seems to be somewhat working in that I'm not gaining a lot of weight, but I need to be a little better if I want to get down to the weight that I'd like to.
I read a web site by Dr. Mercola who is an alternative medicine website. He has some guest authors or experts that come on his site. One of the writers that I noticed was Ori Hofmekler and I really liked what he said about insulin. I read a couple of books by him and he had some great information. Basically he believes that we have to eat like out ancestors which he believes walked around all day gathering and hunting and then at night would eat it all at once, so his idea is to not to eat during the day and to eat everything you want at night, or 20 hours of fasting and 4 hours of eating. I liked some of the things that he said but I just couldn't bring myself to say that I'm following the "Warrior Diet" that's just too stupid sounding. He also talks about a training regimen called "Anti Fatigue Training" that didn't sound like much fun.
After that I found a site called "Mark's Daily Apple" which talks about "Primal Living" with a "Primal Diet." This is site is by a guy called Mark Sisson who used to be a marathoner and then got injured around the time that triathlons started getting popular and he started competing in those and took 3rd in the Iron Man in Hawaii. Mark says that we over train and that was a problem that he had when he was an endurance athlete. He says that our ancestors would generally walk around all day lots of movement but only occasional bursts of activity or trying to lift something heavy like the animal you just killed. But basically we didn't try running around every day day in and day out. However, he really likes the barefoot movement. I started doing what Mark said when I was able to start exercising after my hernia surgery. I'd do the turbulence training and then on the off days I'd exercise pretty easy, then on Saturday I'd ride the exercise cycle at a fast, for me, cadence of 80 bpm. The first time I tried it I was able to do the ride, and I was able to do it. That surprised me because I've been able to do it before but only a few times. Anyway it seemed to be working. Then I got sick and stopped exercising, then my BG got high and I started exercising again, but only lightly like Mark says and my BG fell. Pretty amazing.
Mark Sisson likes going barefoot and so I started looking into that. I'd actually heard that going barefoot was a good thing because it helped you to keep from getting things like plantar fasciitis and I've been exercising barefoot since then. So I start looking into it and the things that I find are fascinating. Turns out that around the same time that we started being told to stop eating fat we were also told to start aerobic exercising. That started a craze for running as an aerobic exercise. Shoe companies started producing running shoes that padded the heel so people started running slow with heel strikes. I've felt the shoes that feel like your feet are in pillows. They feel great, but the people that talk about barefoot running say these shoes keep our feet encased like a cast and are feet are not allowed to move the way they're designed to. And they say that heel striking cause more stress on the knees and what not. That got me a little excited because of me having the knee problem when I run. The thinking is that when you run barefoot you will run with a ball of the foot strike that reduces the stress on your knees. Here's the interesting thing that the barefoot running people say, that the human body is designed to do endurance running. I've heard this before as well, humans can't outrun hardly any animals but they can outlast almost all of them. For example we can breathe through our nose, which horses can't do, and we sweat so we can expel heat. So these barefoot running people think that our ancestors actually developed language through the need to coordinate long range hunting expiditions where humans would run down the animals they hunted.
That's so funny how people think our ancestors did different things. Some think humans walked around slowly all day and only sprinted to run away from animals. Others think that humans ran down the animals until they become so exhausted we just walk up to them and stab them with a stick. I'm pretty sure that another web writer that I read got it right when he said he's not sure what our ancestors ate or did, but he's pretty sure they didn't sit on their butts and watch TV and the only exercise that they got is getting up and walking to the refrigerator.
After all this reading and stuff I went back to my roots and read some of Drs Eades site (they wrote protein power which is one of the books that I read when I first started the diabetes diet) and from that site I learned that Gary Taubes had written a new book. From reading on the Eades site I learned something very interesting. When Dr. Eades puts someone on a low carb routine he treats them like they are going to have withdrawals from carbs. He says that people that try the low carb route that say that they try it and they felt terrible and so they need carbs is like someone that tries to quit cigarettes and says that they felt crappy and that they're bodies need cigarettes is the same thing. Another thing is that people who do low carb are still caught up in the low fat mind set and don't eat enough fat. Fat is what gives you the full sensation.
Then I bought and read Gary Taubes new book "Why We Get Fat and What to Do About It." Gary Taubes is the guy that wrote "Good Calories Bad Calories" which was a great book, but it was pretty hard to read and it had a lot of good information. The new Taubes books was good, but the main thing that I got out of it, was that you need to be very strict on the carbs. It doesn't matter if you've got only a few to many carbs that's to many and you've got to cut them out. Also, it's hard to lose the last few pounds.
So with all this reading and stuff I've got a new plan.
1) Watch the calories closer.
2) Don't exercise so hard.
3) Don't worry about the fat so much any more.
So far I'm staying around the weight that I was at at the end of the HGC diet so it seems to be somewhat working in that I'm not gaining a lot of weight, but I need to be a little better if I want to get down to the weight that I'd like to.
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