And by listing negative effects, you can also make bad things sound bad.
Lots of people kill themselves with marathons. Maybe there's a right way to do it, but obviously it's easy to do it the wrong way. Which makes marathons dangerous until someone figures out your right way.
"if running a marathon is bad, then surely running half a marathon is still not good, right?"
No. Does not follow. As you say, there are probably distances where the good far outweighs the bad. 26 miles is not that distance.
No, "lots of people" don't kill themselves with marathons. A few people who try to go from couch potato to marathon in 12 weeks or who chug ridiculous amounts of water over the course of a 5-hour walk-jog kill themselves with marathons. (It's possible to drink to the point of excessive dilution of the sodium in your bloodstream, which can kill you just like dehydration can, but this is basically impossible to induce below an Ironman triathlon distance if you're reasonable about water intake.) That's not "lots."
Distance running is what humans evolved to do, according to a good deal of evidence. Admittedly, running on asphalt and concrete with awful form created by a lifetime walking and running in awkwardly built shoes and sitting in chairs all day is not what humans evolved to do.
f) Amazon believes the consumer will eventually force the prices down and this was their method of bringing public attention to the issue. Thus every author posting on their blog today ultimately helps Amazon.
First, I find it very hard to believe that they wouldn't have seen that coming when they first yanked Macmillan's books.
Second, even if they did realize that they were going to lose and decided to back down, I find it hard to believe that the best messaging channel is a Kindle forum, and that the best language to use makes you sound like a tiny retailer with no power who has to "capitulate".
It's not just the forefoot striking (also, Vibram != barefoot, call them minimal, if anything). When you run barefoot, you don't do anything stupid with your feet, like subjecting them to lots of impact, because it hurts!
The Vibram KSO doesn't do a good job of keeping your feet warm in the cold and wet. I mostly run barefoot on dirt trails, but pull the KSO's out of my pocket when I hit really bad terrain. Cold is the one thing that stops me.
I'm moving to the Bay Area myself in a couple of weeks, and was kind of hoping that that was the solution to the cold weather problem. I am a little worried about finding good quality dirt trails.
From the Engadget leaked photos, it looks like it has both cellular connectivity and a front video camera. Video calling, here we come.
Still, the more I find out about the device, the less interested I am. It looks like it's just going to be a huge iPhone. Fun, but not useful. And while I miss almost nothing about my previous smartphones before the iPhone, I do miss the ability to be able to install whatever I wanted. Locked devices foster an entirely different application ecosystem -- one that's not super useful for programmers, I find.
I'm with you. Although I feel sure (tr: believe without specific evidence) that this will be a well-made device and cause even more people to throw money in Apple's direction, and I like tablets a lot, I'd prefer something built around a more open platform. I can live without the cellular connectivity.
Obviously Windows and Linux desktop metaphors are inappropriate for a device of this size (the main reason they haven't taken off in this space previously), but to my mind the front end is only a shell anyway, no?
This isn't meant to rain on Apple's parade, though. Rather, kudos to them for pushing into new territory and bringing the future that extra step closer.
I don't see how it's anything other than a net positive, you gain in security and ease of use for consumers.
If you're more hacker minded like this audience is, it's extremely trivial to jailbreak - the distinction being that it is totally independent and not sanctioned by Apple whatsoever. This is an important point.
After working in user support I can totally empathise with Apple's decision to keep the platform closed via the App Store. A large majority of the people buying these phones (ie, normal users - not geeks) are the ones who voluntarily install spyware on their PC's, click yes to every dialog box they see and execute random email attachments without thinking twice. The iPhone by far has the biggest mindshare, and a very hefty market share of any mobile communications device yet, and probably one skewed toward people with a large disposable income. It's constantly connected to the internet, has a connection to the phone network with an unlimited tab conveniently linked to your credit card, knows where you are and even in which direction you're facing. It knows who you talk to, who your contacts are...etc. I could go on. The point is this device and it's associated popularity is a fucking goldmine for the sort of people who write malware.
The App Store and it's uncompromising restriction is the final solution to keeping this cesspool of a software "ecosystem" off the platform.
Even if Apple provided an "Advanced" setting which gains you root access on your device the malware writers would simply instruct the clueless user to enable it, and I KNOW that 99.9% of people would do it without hesitation, for the promise of nothing more than a cheap thrill. It's based on the same psychology as that study where an alarming majority of people would tell you their password for a chocolate bar.
Oooh, kittens!!! cue screaming and convenient lawsuits targeting high-profile Apple when their phone bill arrives with a $50,000 total
I don't think there was ever a reasonable chance of anything else. I mean, if you're Apple, why do anything else? For the most part consumers clearly love to use the App Store. It has serious review process and barrier to entry issues, but those can be fixed over time (hopefully) and as long as there is an active audience, vendors will continue to come.
Well, it's the problem for maybe 1% of developers (to pull a "sufficiently tiny to make my point, but still made up" number out of thin air). There is still plenty of money to be made that doesn't conflict with the default functionality of the iPhone.
Don't get me wrong, I'd rather there was no filtering at all and there was instead a sort of "paid apps have the option of getting Apple Certification and being listed at the top of all lists" option instead, but I don't think the App Store problems outweigh the benefits for users.
As the adage goes, "The plural of anecdote is not data."
Neither you nor your parent have any statistical basis for your estimates. As of early this month [1], there are over 100,000 applications in the app store. If 1% were rejected, that means that 1,010 apps were rejected. Your two apps could easily fall into that category.
Basically, all we can know is that many apps get accepted, but not all of them do. Any more clarity than that requires Apple's intervention (which I don't expect to see any time soon).
It may not be when you consider the large number of low-quality but harmless games and distractions out there. It's when you try to do something interesting - to push what the device can do that you run a high risk of not being approved.
The problem is that there is a hell of a lot of general purpose software out there already that's never going to be worth the effort to port to a single device.
The iPhone has some nice apps, but runs nothing important to me in my professional life. And if the new tablet isn't going to be a useful work tool, why would I want it?
I honestly don't see the value proposition either. Oh wait. That's because Steve hasn't taken the stage yet to show us that Apple has created something of value that we didn't know we wanted until we were shown. Some call this fanboyism. It's really just creativity at its best. Creating new things to make life better. That's what apple does, and they are handsomely rewarded for it.
Well, a gene can spread in a small group through drift (even if detrimental). If it allows that group to out-compete the next tribe over, it will spread farther.
Of course, no one has ever seen this in action, so it's pretty unlikely that group selection is very important in evolutionary history.
You will lose weight on calorie restriction as long as you go low enough. Though I've been fat my entire life, after college, I was 150 pounds overweight. I lost the extra weight by eating 900 calories a day for a year and a half or so.
At my normal healthy weight, I was starving. And weak as a kitten. I took up running, and stopped watching my diet. I literally could not keep up the willpower necessary to continue a 3000 calorie diet, even though 900 had been doable for so long. Despite running for an hour a day, I immediately started gaining 10-15 pounds a month.
So I was convinced that it was all about calories. I was fat because I ate too much. Why my body was so hellbent on eating 4000-5000 calories a day, I didn't know. I seemed to have a lot more willpower than anyone else I knew. It was sort of confusing. Then about a year ago, I read Taubes' book.
What if the human body is actually sort of complicated? What if hormonal regulation controls fat? What if the "trash bin" theory of body fat is actually a humongous oversimplification or just wrong? What if, after getting to a "healthy" weight by starving fat, muscle, and vital tissue, I wasn't healthy at all? What if it had also made me malnourished (hence the amazing hunger at my "healthy" weight)?
Anyway, I cut the carbohydrates out of my diet last December. I made zero effort at calorie restriction. In fact, I ate a lot. I made very little effort to exercise more. After a year of this, I'm almost 100 pounds under my max weight. I recently started running again, for fun, not weight loss, and am up to 2-3 miles a day.
And I am stronger than I've ever been in my life. Eating steak every day is probably more expensive than building the same muscle mass with steroids, but I'm pretty happy. I wasn't expecting it. It's good being a carnivore.
What little I've read on obesity research seems to require that both excess sugar and fat are consumed to overcome homeostasis.
Sugars can ignore homeostatic regulation for hedonistic reasons and fats don't have the same day to day correction that carbohydrates do.
So the part that might be working in your diet might be the no-sugar part of no-carb.
Overall it's quite amazing that many people can consume something like a million calories per a year and end up within 0.5kg (3500 calories) of their starting point.
I'm about halfway through Taubes' book (Good Calories, Bad Calories), and I also recommend it. So far, he has made a very strong case, and the theory that he supports seems to have better predictive power than the mainstream theory.
Going from 4K-5K calories per day to 900 is an extreme swing. These type of diets are shown not to work. There is also some evidence they convince your body it is living in feast/famine time which triggers a fat accumulation response. I do not believe that it is healthy to remove carbohydrates from your body. The body is a complex machine indeed, but we have a pretty good understanding of how it works regarding nutrition. Most structures run on glucose, muscles are made of protein, fiber helps digestion and micronutrients are used all over the place. The bottom line is that fat is used for storing extra glucose. The function of protein in nutrition is very interesting. If you don't get enough, then your body will cannibalize muscles to get it. Proteins can be broken down to provide glucose, but it's inefficient and generates toxins. Carbohydrates break down to glucose much better. I would suggest you try a conventional approach : Checkout nutritiondata.com or one of the numerous calculators and for your weight and height calculate your daily needs. Pay particular attention to the grams of fiber needed and setup a plan that leads to 1-2lbs of fat loss per week - a deficit of only 500-1000 calories per day. Changing habits faster than that is generally not practical, it certainly never was for me. Make sure you are getting enough protein without overwhelming calories, supplementing with a protein shake if necessary. Try that out for half a year or a year with daily measurements and diet recalculation every 10 lbs lost. Never, ever deviate from the selected diet (you accomplish this by leaving wiggle room in your estimates), weigh yourself daily and keep careful records. I really don't think carb free living is either sustainable or healthy.
They do work. Thras looks like he was on a form of Protein Sparing Modified Fast. They work really well. I've done the same thing. The tough part about these diets is transitioning out of the diet, but if you follow the "maintenance" modes that most of these diets advocate, you'll be absolutely fine. The promoters of these diets do not advocate these as long term solutions. For people that are > 30% body fat, the longest recommended time to stay on this diet is about 12 weeks before moving to maintenance. For someone whose body fat percentage is less than 30 but greater than 20, the longest recommended time to stay on the diet is 2 to 6 weeks before, again, moving to maintenance. After two weeks on maintenance but not yet reaching the target weight, the person may choose to proceed with the diet or opt for a more moderate one.
Checkout http://bodyrecomposition.com which promotes a form of Protein Sparing Modified Fast that the author has dubbed "Rapid Fat Loss". He is not an advocate of protein shakes on this diet but rather obtaining macronutrients from actual food, because protein shakes are metabolized so quickly that the body feels hungry soon afterward.
No no. I just eat a lot of meat, eggs, and cheese. I average 2-3 pounds of rib-eye per day, 6-9 eggs, and 3-6 ounces of cheese.
Googling for calorie information...good god, that's 2900-4500 calories a day. And I'm only 5'10". No modified fast for me. Lost 65 pounds in the last year. Not an amazing result. On the other hand, an amazing result -- on a 3000-4000 calorie diet.
Ahh I misread your first post. So you went on a 900 calorie diet that wasn't necessarily a protein modified sparing fast. Now, at a macronutrient level you just eat higher protein and fat whilst avoiding carbs.
Are you certain that you didn't have pre-diabetes or some form of insulin resistance before starting your diet? It might be the reason why you feel like crap when having carbs. At a healthy weight, reasonable levels of carbs shouldn't cause you to feel like crap unless you have some underlying condition that's affected by them.
UPDATE:
Another thing that can be going on here is that when you lose weight, you don't necessarily get a reduction in fat cells. Normally, fat cells contain 90% triglycerides. When you lose weight, some fat cells release their triglycerides. But they can fill up with water instead (e.g., perhaps the body's adaptation to famine conditions... where there's no food there's likely no water). Your carb intake may have simply been causing you to bloat with water, and some of your fat cells may have been storing this water too. How long did this 10-20 lbs weight gain last? It's not abnormal to gain 10-20 lbs after losing such a substantial amount of weight because some of that weight lost will have been water-weight.
Uh, yeah. That's somewhat obvious. How else would I have gained the weight? Magic?
Now comes the million dollar question: Why was I so hungry that I ate 470,000 extra calories? Could carbohydrate driving insulin driving fat explain it?
Homeostasis in the human body doesn't just fail without a reason.
I was stating the conclusion of the theorem I read you as criticizing. If you set a diet plan at say 3000-3300 calories per day, you can just choose not to deviate from it? There's all manner of things I would like to do that I just choose not to do. You just set out that amount of food, say to yourself OK this has all the nutrients I need and no matter how hungry I get, it's not going to kill me... and then you just don't deviate. The real question is why did you feel your hunger was so severe you could not suppress it? How about a lifetime of bad habits caused a psychological reversion to previous bad habits and it was nothing but eating hundreds of calories extra per day? It is possible that for some people, some kind of a strange mechanism is at work, but occam's razor tells me that it is more likely just a series of small bad choices and that the standard model for human nutrition applies. I don't know you, maybe you are the corner case where the model breaks down because hunger signals are amped up or something? In my experiences of my own life, negative results are much more likely to be a result of a series of my small bad choices than on account of me being a corner case. I just have studied human nutrition, I believe the macronutrient model (fiber+protein+carbs) + micronutrient model works and that proteins and fats are both broken down to glucose at particular rates, with particular byproducts. I believe carbs breakdown to glucose "better" than protein or fats with less side effects due to the structure of the molecules (particularly noting the ammonia [I think it is] byproduct of chemical reactions breaking down protein into glucose. I think fat is just about having excess glucose in the blood and carbs just offer efficient means of getting sugar. Look, I completely believe the average diet is hugely overcarbed - once I started watching nutrition most of my intake is veg.
Pay attention to fiber? The research in support of that suggestion is execrable (pun intended).
I did try the 500-1000 calorie deficit for a number of months. My weight loss was on the order of 5-10 pounds, and I was hungry the entire time. And then I gained the weight back and more when I wasn't able to carry through. People simply do not lose large amounts of weight on small deficits. It's bizarre. According to the trash bin theory of body fat it should work. It doesn't. Almost like the trash bin theory is wrong...
The carb free living is sustainable and healthy. If you aren't going to read Taubes, then at least read Victor Steffansson. He's a bit more fun.
the point of paying attention to fiber is that if you get your daily needs in fiber, you'll have eaten so many vegetables that your tastes regarding carbs will change. Your belly will also be full, which cuts down on the feeling of hunger.
People do lose large amounts of weight on small deficits, get serious!! It just takes a while. I personally dropped nearly 40 lbs this way and large people can also certainly do this - go ask a nutritionist. Of course you were hungry all the time, your body was down regulating. You are sitting here attacking a theory immediately after admitting that you could not maintain the 500-1000 calorie deficit? That has nothing to do with the theory! You chose to eat more, you gained weight again - if you had maintained your discipline, you would not have gained the weight back.
I've researched the carb-free diet in detail and my conclusion is carbohydrates play an important role in human nutrition and it is very unwise to cut them out. We evolved to run off a particular type of fuel, continue with this diet for a couple more years and then consequences will become apparent. There is a wide variety of material from credible mainstream nutrition researchers on this. The healthy thing to do is to make sure your nutrients are handled in a balanced way and then slowly burn off fat and actually maintain discipline for years. This book has a lot of good info : http://www.amazon.com/Eating-Well-Optimum-Health-Essential/d...
Slow and steady works. Rapid and fast works also. Different tactics are needed for the different strategies. Your hunch that carbohydrates are important is indeed correct. The protein sparing modified fast that I was on, as outlined over at http://bodyrecomposition.com suggests strategic re-feeds incorporating starchy carbs once you get do more reasonable body fat percentages (e.g., under 30% for males). Lyle McDonald, the author of the site, is one of my favourite experts in physiology because he takes a hacker-like approach by researching studies, skeptically reviewing them, and then testing strategies that he thinks will work. If you peruse his forums you'll find all sorts of people, from athletes and bodybuilders to morbidly obese who have successfully adopted strategies that he has advocated (not necessarily devised).
In fact, Lyle starts off his book on Rapid Fat Loss (his PSMF) by specifically stating that if you can go the slow and steady route, then do so. It's certainly healthier and carries fewer risks. But some people can't or won't, for whatever reason, go slow and steady at losing weight. For them, it's much better to have lost the weight rapidly than carry it around having never lost it. For people like this, he suggests his form of PSMF.
I'm not necessarily against doing it quickly, but I see that as orthogonal to the protein/carbohydrate mix in the diet. As I see it, Person A currently has an average calorie intake of C, burns C' calories a day and requires P grams of protein and F grams of fiber. I would contend that it if you construct a diet plan with D<C' calories, then you will receive more favorable results with a proper diet that covers protein and intakes proper amounts of fiber and carbs and micronutrients. For me, this is a very vegetable heavy diet with daily protein supplements (I prefer brown rice protein + orange juice, to which you may add active culture yogurt)
You should be very careful on carb restriction. It can cause acid levels to build up in your blood which can be exceedingly dangerous. One side effect: the acids can crystalize in your bloodstream and collect at your joints. In short, you get gout/pseudogout/other gout-like conditions (depending on the exact composition of the crystals).
I know someone who did this; she was bedridden for a month and couldn't turn her head for 2 months.
There is a very important book you should read called _Life Without Bread_. It was that book that showed how excessive carbohydrates causes gout, and how that led my husband (who has gout at 30 b.c. of an immuneoresponsive issue) to cure his gout with low-carbohydrate diet.
Now -- anybody who does "no carb" is making a big mistake. Vegetables, and legumes, etc., are a very critical part of the diet. They provide so much more than carbohydrates, such as fiber and necessary acids.
And sometimes shit just freaks out. Like me, I have "steroid psychosis" type responses to very low levels of non-oral steroids. Sometimes you just have to accept that you're a freaky outlier. Plural of anecodate is not data, sadly, either way.
I've actually never heard of hyperuricemia being caused by carbohydrate restriction. Nobody seems to list it in the standard "drink your Coke, low-carb kills" list of warnings, either.
Just out of interest, have you had any tiredness from cutting carbs from your diet? Many people on who restrict carbs, such as on the Atkins diet, experience this from what I've read.
There's a tiredness and "brain fade" associated with these sort of diets. I'm not so sure it's the carb cutting so much as it is the extreme calorie restriction. I used a protein sparing modified fast (which Atkins is a form of) that advocated supplementing sodium and potassium along with essential fatty acids using fish oil (it was a low fat and low carb diet). I've tried Atkins before and experienced the tiredness/brain fade. The PSMF I was on though caused me none of these symptoms. In fact, I felt precisely the opposite. During the diet, I experienced a form of mild euphoria.
No tiredness for me. There's the "induction flu" that people on Atkins get, and I felt that for the first few weeks. Apparently it's caused by sodium depletion (carbohydrates cause you to retain a lot of water/salt). Drinking non-sodium-reduced beef broth every day for that month will cure you. Wish I had known. I just toughed it out.
As far as my energy levels nowadays...pretty much boundless. I'm ravenously hungry when I don't eat. But I'm told that's how it's supposed to work. When I was fat, I was hungry around the clock, even after eating.
Can you recommend any sources for more details about this 'beef broth' fix for induction discomfort? (Would other sodium replenishment options be just as good?)
Last time I lost significant (for me) weight (220 down to 180) I did it by cutting carbs. I did not eat only meat, but I did cut out all bread, other starchy food, sweet fruits, and sugars. So I ate meat, eggs, cheese, nuts, and green vegetables like broccoli, spinach, and legumes. I missed bread, because I love good home-baked bread, but you can have enough variety with other foods to keep a low-carb diet from getting boring. Atkins says to cut coffee and diet soda but I didn't do that. I did not exercise beyond normal daily activities.
Lots of people kill themselves with marathons. Maybe there's a right way to do it, but obviously it's easy to do it the wrong way. Which makes marathons dangerous until someone figures out your right way.
"if running a marathon is bad, then surely running half a marathon is still not good, right?"
No. Does not follow. As you say, there are probably distances where the good far outweighs the bad. 26 miles is not that distance.