This just screamed out old New York to me. #NYC #Vintage (at Port Authority Bus Terminal)
This is probably the strangest thing I’ve seen in a long time. Sick people getting infusions of a healthy person’s poo to help them overcome bacterial infections in their gut. It’s apparently way more effective than antibiotics. Ok, science, you win again…
Ever ran a race and felt like it should have gone better? I think every runner has. Well with this new site, you can find out how you did in Paul Ryan time. I’m less than 30 minutes away from a world record in the men’s Marathon. This is definitely the feel good site of the day.
Egads! The bottom line is that exercise is not going to lead to the quick weight loss that we all hope it will. Diet looks to be much more important.
I was starting to hear stuff about this earlier in the year. This is slightly disappointing, but it falls in line with what I’ve been learning and experiencing through clients. I’d be interested to see how these results play into high intensity exercise.
So I guess the bottom line is that exercise will help keep you feeling younger and healthier, but it won’t necessarily lead to weight loss on it’s own.
This is a pretty well thought out piece on why there’s never going to be an end to the battle to repeal the health care law. A couple of social scientists, Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber, defined it in a class of problems they call “Wicked Problems.”
Solutions to wicked problems, by contrast, are only better or worse. Trade-offs are unavoidable. Unanticipated complications and benefits are both common. And opportunities to learn by trial and error are limited. You can’t try a new highway over here and over there; you put it where you put it. But new issues will arise. Adjustments will be required. No solution to a wicked problem is ever permanent or wholly satisfying, which leaves every solution open to easy polemical attack.
Anyway, he brings up some interesting points, and, I’m a huge fan of his writing so I had to recommend it.
This is a pretty cool look at the difference between lifelong activity and sitting on your butt as far as your muscles are concerned.
This is a somewhat dispiriting article in the NY Times Magazine about how hard it is to take off weight gain once it has been put on. Apparently the body wants to keep the extra weight on even though it’s bad for you. Your body actually works more efficiently during exercise so that you don’t burn as many calories. How cruel is that?
I do wonder how doing some more high intensity exercise at least once a week will help these results since nothing seems to mention that.
I do like the conclusion to this article though:
So where does that leave a person who wants to lose a sizable amount of weight? Weight-loss scientists say they believe that once more people understand the genetic and biological challenges of keeping weight off, doctors and patients will approach weight loss more realistically and more compassionately. At the very least, the science may compel people who are already overweight to work harder to make sure they don’t put on additional pounds. Some people, upon learning how hard permanent weight loss can be, may give up entirely and return to overeating. Others may decide to accept themselves at their current weight and try to boost their fitness and overall health rather than changing the number on the scale.
For me, understanding the science of weight loss has helped make sense of my own struggles to lose weight, as well as my mother’s endless cycle of dieting, weight gain and despair. I wish she were still here so I could persuade her to finally forgive herself for her dieting failures. While I do, ultimately, blame myself for allowing my weight to get out of control, it has been somewhat liberating to learn that there are factors other than my character at work when it comes to gaining and losing weight. And even though all the evidence suggests that it’s going to be very, very difficult for me to reduce my weight permanently, I’m surprisingly optimistic. I may not be ready to fight this battle this month or even this year. But at least I know what I’m up against.
In then end the idea that knowledge of how hard it is to keep weight off is at least a good way to keep yourself from getting frustrated with the realities of weight loss. Hopefully, it will allow some obese people to focus more on maintaining physical fitness rather than on weight loss.
I actually thought there were some interesting ideas in this editorial. I think the most astute one is :
Gandhi would underscore that social transformation requires significant responsibility on the part of each of us. The world is not a static system or an unalterable one. Society exists in a certain way when we enter it, but it is our actions or our inaction that maintain the status quo, make things worse, or transform them for the better. Gandhi explained this most pointedly when he declared that the British Empire existed because Indians had let it exist. He would say the same thing about the drastic income inequality in America today: it is here because Americans collectively allow it to be here.
I think there is something to this. We have a system here in the US that we have all bought into to one extent or another and until a majority of people decided to take action, it will not change.
