Month: November 2008

The combination of ‘online’ and ‘misrepresentation’ hasn’t reached standard household, or geek-hold, term status. But it might soon. Real soon.

I’m fascinated by the outcome of a court trial in which a MO woman was convicted of ‘accessing computers without authorization’. She had assumed a false identity online to cyberbully a younger teenager and that teenager went on to commit suicide. For her criminal conviction she faces the maximum penalty of 3 years in jail and a $300K fine.

Going deeper into the story, what you find out is that this MO woman created a fictitious identity on MySpace and used that faux persona to berate some girl who had previously wronged the MO woman’s daughter. Once that girl took her own life it appears some CA prosecutors got on board to find some available legal channel by which to allege a crime. MySpace is headquartered in CA. I’m sure the reason this case even reached a judicial decision, resulting in conviction, was because of the heinous outcome and the media attraction. That and the fact that the CA courts are pretty friendly terrain.

Now, what I believe this means for the greater public is a potential enormous shift in online mores. This kind of thing has resulted in death. How soon until ‘accessing computers without authorization’ gives ways to a more relevant term used in this case – ‘online misrepresentation’. Everything that falls under tort, contracts and criminal code is in play. How soon until people pretending to be other people online, resulting in harm, becomes regularly qualified as criminal?

Online providers are typically immune from this kind of liability because of everything in their ULAs. My belief is that these providers will do everything they can to continue staying outside of liability by releasing details of their users who are involved in criminal activity. Much like copyright infringement. They will just get out of the way and turn detail over. So, thinking about screwing someone over on eBay? Going incognito on Facebook?

Better think twice.

One of the really annoying things that happens is the constant revival of ‘My Pictures’. This thing will not die. No matter how many times I manually delete this folder continues to return. Help on putting this thing in the grave once and for all?

Happy Thanksgiving from me to you! I know it’s been a bit quiet around here lately. I have a whole boatload of blog ideas that I plan to unleash this coming Monday. Think of this as the calm before the storm…

We all know THOSE kind of Christians. Yeah. This lady lets us know in no uncertain terms that she’s not one of THOSE kinds of Chrisians.

A well-known side-effect of a low-carbohydrate way of eating is the production of “ketone bodies” by the liver as a by-product of metabolizing fat to fuel the process of converting proteins into glucose to provide the body’s daily carbohydrate needs. Muscles, organs, and the brain all lap up the ketones as an energy source, and even function more efficiently on ketones than glucose. In fact, the human heart functions much more efficiently on ketones than on glucose, and this increase in efficiency is part of the reason a low-carbohydrate diet can be successfully used to treat those with heart problems.

But in the last few years, the easy availability of breath-analysis equipment both installed in vehicles and for police at roadside stops has brought with it a new danger for those living a low-carbohydrate lifestyle. The breathalyzer cannot distinguish between isopropanol as a by-product of ketone metabolism, and ethanol which is usually found in alcoholic drinks.

Analysis here: http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/uncategorized/low-carbers-beware-the-breathalyzer/

Teetotaling pilot cleared of drunk flying charges following low-carb defense.

On the plus side, for those of us who like to imbibe from time to time, alcohol almost stops ketosis/lipolysis cold, resulting in a 73% reduction in fat metabolism for hours to days after drinking. So there’s little risk of isopropanol stacking with ethanol in your breath at that roadside stop.

I guess the message might be don’t low-carb and drive. Or if you do low-carb and drive, insist on a blood test rather than a breath test, since a blood test will tell the truth and not be fooled by isopropanol.

And no, this doesn’t mean you can carry around a carton of Slim-Fast or an Atkins Advantage shake with you all the time and get out of a DUI. A blood test will determine the truth quickly.

Here it is.. “I like this ship! Exciting!!”

CLICK HERE FOR A REAL PEEK INTO THE FINAL FRONTIER

As I’ve blogged about quite a bit recently, I’m in the process of losing a substantial amount of weight. The day I measured myself at 251 pounds on the big shipping scale at work was the day I decided to do what I knew I could to bring the weight down.

But I’m slowly realizing that the plan one embraces to change one’s weight really does need to keep changing as the weight comes off.

I often hear about the “low-fat” versus “low-carb” “diet wars” on the various podcasts and health shows I listen to and read. The low-carbers make me laugh with accusations that “low-fatties” just don’t get it. The low-fatters make me laugh with accusations that Robert Atkins was morbidly obese at the time of his death (false).

The more I read and learn about nutrition, however you do it, seems to be that as far as macro-nutrients go, as long as you have sufficient protein in your diet, losing weight for the obese or overweight seems to always improve their health. For the sake of argument, I’ll assume the U.S. Department of Agriculture new-style food guide pyramid (with colored columns, rather than stacks of food with grains at the bottom) recommendation of at least 30-40 grams of protein per day for a person on a 2,000 calorie per day eating plan is sufficient.

Of course, micro-nutrients matter, too. That’s why sites like fitday.com and dailyplate.com are awesome resources for tracking nutrition. They will easily calculate for you where you are as far as overall nutrition, making planning easy. Just track everything that goes into your mouth for a couple of weeks, and the deficiencies are easy to spot.

As my weight continues to safely reduce at the rate of around 2 pounds per week, I’m realizing that there are adjustments I’ll need to make. When I started my eating plan, I could pretty much eat all the fat and protein I wanted, and still continue to lose weight as long as I kept my carbohydrates quite low.

I found, however, that there were some deficiencies in eating this way. Notably, fiber, potassium, Vitamin D, and calcium all suffer on all but the most rigidly-structured very-low-carbohydrate diet. The best sources of potassium in the human diet also tend to be sources with a great deal of carbohydrate, too. Given that the FDA does not allow any pill-form supplement to contain more than 99mg of potassium, you really have to find whole-food resources to meet this need over the long-term. Many beans, poultry, some meats, spinach, and some other sources contain a good deal of potassium.

Leg cramps were cramping my style in my high-intensity interval training. I started eating more potassium-rich foods, and the cramps went away. I see a correlation, at least.

But as I approach my weight goal, I’m realizing that in addition to keeping my carbohydrates at a reasonably low level (around 50-60g per day right now), I’ll have to start cutting fats a bit, too. In the interest of building more lean muscle, I can’t cut protein, and even for a guy my size, a 3200+ calorie-per-day diet won’t reduce much!

As I sat down to look at food choices to reduce fat grams to keep my weight loss running, I realized something important.

They’re right.

The low-fat people.

And the low-carb people.

A low-fat or low-carb diet will take me where I want to go, at least initially. But as I transition into a normal life at my new weight, I have to take into account my entire nutritional picture. If I want to reach the recommended fiber level at which I’m at the lowest risk for colon cancer, I will need to introduce more whole-grains, which are virtually absent from my diet except for generous amounts of flax meal at this point. If I want to keep my fats down to a point at which I don’t gain weight while eating more carbohydrates, I have to eat more fish, poultry, and lean cuts of meat to avoid the higher fat grams. If I want to reach good potassium levels, some few starchy vegetables are required to meet my body’s 4000+mg per day requirement.

For those of us fighting overweight, in fact, all diets start to look at lot the same once you close in on a low body fat percentage. No refined carbohydrates, no sugary sodas, no junk food. Plenty of vegetables, a variety of fruits, and whole grains in moderation. About the only difference seems to be the position on meats, fish, and poultry, with the serious body-building crowd embracing ample portions of all, and the cardio crowd encouraging more carbohydrates to support that lifestyle.

If you’re obese or morbidly obese, insulin-resistant, or a Type 2 diabetic, it seems pretty clear low-carb is a safe way to lose weight, transitioning into higher-carb (but still low compared to the US DOA carb guidelines) living as you approach your goal weight.

If you’re not obese, but are overweight and have a number of pounds to lose, you are spoiled for choice in the diet arena. Do you want to low-carb? Go for it. Want to reduce fat? Have a good time. Want to simply reduce calorie to meet your target? Just keep your proteins and essential fats up while you’re reducing, and remember to keep overall calorie consumption at maintenance level without it creeping back up to overweight-level over time.

If you’re already at a healthy body weight, but want to cut enough to show those abs? Figure out a fitness plan with your trainer that will get rid of the few percent body fat to get into the under-fat you for the next show or day at the beach.

There’s always a transition into healthy body weight that ends up in very much the same place across all diet plans. In the long term, the winner is me. And you.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/europe/11/14/second.life.divorce/index.html?eref=rss_topstories

I believe Ben once wrote a song called ‘Computer Love’.

People are stupid.

Last night, I got into a discussion regarding the President-Elect Obama with my father-in-law. He mentioned that some elementary-school children in his home town made local news by chanting “Assassinate Obama” on the bus. I wanted to read more about the history of assassination in the USA, and it turns out there’s a lengthy page on Wikipedia detailing all the known assassination attempts on US Presidents. I can’t help but wonder: why does killing the President have such a long and varied tradition in the United States? Or is this normal everywhere else, too?

In real life, I have trouble ranting at people to their faces. I’m no Dr. Cox, able to recite a rant off the top of my head. So I’m going to rant here at the bazillion people who simply have no clue what they’re talking about when it comes to the Atkins eating plan, which I’m doing again after four years off.

• “Well, I know SoandSo who went on Atkins and died three months later of a massive heart attack.” Look, lady, your friend was morbidly obese, had been all his life, had advanced Type II diabetes, and was doing Atkins in a last-ditch effort to try to save his life. It didn’t work; those are the breaks. The damage was done back when he was surgically attached to his couch downing an entire box of Little Debbies snack cakes in his graying underwear. If he’d decided in his twenties or thirties to reduce either his carbohydrates or his fats and start exercising regularly, he might be alive today.
• “All the steak and bacon you can eat can’t possibly be healthy for you.” Yeah, lady, it would be terribly boring; although it might be “allowed” by my eating plan, I’d shoot myself after three weeks just to get the flavor of bacon out of my mouth. No, wait, I’d shoot YOU and then go wash my mouth out just for you suggesting it. Sure, I tend to have bacon and eggs for breakfast, but I bet you a nickel that I get more fiber, non-starchy vegetables, and nutrient-dense food in a day than you do in any two days.
• “I tried Atkins and was just so tired all the time.” Seriously, did you give it at least two weeks and monitor every single thing that went into your mouth? No sugar alcohols, no sugars, no flour, no wheat, just healthy whole foods? Yeah, you probably were on it a couple of days, or else you spent the first two weeks inhaling so much low-carb junk food that you had explosive diarrhea from the sugar alcohols. Try it again, lady. Read “Dr. Atkins New Diet Revolution” cover-to-cover. Don’t re-read just the Induction chapter and think you can wing it from there! Read the whole thing, then come back and plan your meals for a couple of weeks to match the initial (temporary) 20g carb per day limit. Unless you have extreme metabolic resistance or medications that affect your body’s ability to absorb ketones in lieu of glucose, you’ll get past the tired phase within a few days, and at most a week.
• “I’ve seen patient after patient in a hospital claim to be on the Atkins diet, and they’re horribly unhealthy.” Dude, what do you see in a hospital? You see sick people all day. The morbidly obese ones see Atkins as an easy way out of the problems they got themselves into over the course of decades through a high-fat, high-carbohydrate “diet”. High fat and high carb combined with a sedentary lifestyle is a recipe for the emergency room and premature death. Reduce fat, or carbs, or both. But either way, get off your ass and into the gym. I guarantee you those dying fat people, by and large, didn’t land in the ICU because of life-long adherence to a low-carbohydrate eating plan, working out at least three days a week, and attention to getting full nutrition from their foods or supplementation.
• “Atkins is a no-carb plan.” I was eating 90-110g of carbohydrates per day once I was in the maintenance phase and had lost all the weight I wanted to lose. Admittedly, that’s still 1/3 of the US RDA for carbs, and you have to start paying a bit more attention to the amount of fat in your diet at that level of carbohydrate… but that is in the book. You can’t live on really fatty stuff forever, just on induction and ongoing weight loss. Once you’re in pre-maintenance or maintenance, you ramp up the carbs to a level that your body can tolerate without gaining weight again. For some, that level is lower than others.
• “Low-carb only works because you’re eating less calories than most low-fat diets.” No $*!#, Sherlock. There’s a metabolic advantage to getting your calories from fat and protein, but according to the studies I’ve read it’s only a 10%-35% advantage. So for the typical 2,000 calorie per day diet, maybe you can eat an extra 200 calories on a low-carb plan. But, at least for me and thousands of other people, the satiety levels of a low-carb eating plan are the recipe to eat fewer calories without hunger or discomfort. If you’ve reached a stall in your weight loss, or you begin to feel tired, in fact the problem may be that you’re eating too little. The Atkins eating plan encourages you to eat as much as you need to feel satisfied at all times. If you’re hungry regularly, you aren’t eating right.
• “All-you-can-eat fat is going to kill you.” Yeah, you didn’t read the book, either. The farther along in your weight loss you get, the less fat you can eat and still maintain your Critical Carbohydrate Level for Maintenance.
• “Fat makes you fat.” No, glucose makes you fat. Humans can’t metabolize dietary fat directly to body fat. Go read “Good Calories, Bad Calories” for an understanding of the real metabolic process by which fat is stored or liberated by your body.
• “You can’t go without carbs too long. Your body needs carbs to survive.” Gee, Dr. Fatty, did you think that one up yourself? Go read up on Gluconeogenesis and get back to me. Done? Good. Your body will create all the glucose it needs if you have sufficient protein intake. Every healthy diet you see will include plenty of protein (except for those people in acute renal failure). Your brain usually requires 100-120g of glucose per day to survive. Once you’re in ketosis, it’s one of the last organs to be willing to use ketones (the sugar form of body or dietary fat) to power itself, and after a few days it will be willing to use 50-70g per day of its dietary requirement in the form of ketones. The rest need to be glucose, and your liver provides plenty of glucose synthesized from proteins for hte purpose.
• “Your body can’t build muscle on a low-carb diet.” Well, I’m living proof that the human body can put on muscle while on a low-carb diet. I’ve added quite a few pounds of lean body mass while losing weight on an exclusively low-carb eating plan. That said, however, for building muscle mass quickly, a cyclical ketogenic diet such as Mark McManus’ “MANS Diet” will allow you to build impressive amounts of muscle while on a diet that, five days out of seven, is a very low-carb diet.
• “The Atkins diet is so limiting.” For the first two weeks, sure. Try life after the first two weeks, gradually transitioning foods into your diet. White bread, pasta, rice, sugary foods, and corn are basically out of the picture, true. But whole grains and a huge variety of whole foods are available to me, and I never feel deprived.
• “You don’t see really skinny people on the Atkins diet.” By and large, I think you’re right on this one. Eating a high-fat, low-carb, moderate-protein diet alone won’t get one into six-pack abs and ripped, muscular physique. Of course, you need to lift weights to get there. Eventually, you have to drop the fats substantially, and maybe even watch some calories if you want to sport a six-pack at the beach. But if you’re substantially overweight, Atkins gets you close enough to six-pack Nirvana to see the shore. Put in the extra work, monitor your diet more closely, and keep reducing fat while keeping protein intake up to slim a muscular physique down to “Damn I look good with my shirt off” levels.
• “Atkins weight loss isn’t real weight loss. It’s mostly water weight.” Oh, this old song keeps coming up. Can you really tell me that the huge gut that I’ve lost and the newly-defined legs and pecs are all water weight? Sorry, you can lose quite a bit of “water weight” in the first few days of Atkins — 3 to 7 pounds, typically somewhere close to 5 pounds — but after that, it’s fat, baby. And if you aren’t exercising enough, maybe muscle, too, like with any diet.
• If you aren’t eating lots of non-starchy vegetables, you aren’t on Atkins. If you aren’t exercising daily, with intense workouts for at least 30 minutes three times a week, you aren’t on Atkins. If you aren’t counting every carb that goes into your mouth, you aren’t on Atkins. If you aren’t staying hydrated with at least 8 glasses of water per day, you aren’t on Atkins. If you aren’t monitoring your micro-nutrients to ensure you’re getting sufficient US RDA of all essential nutrients via your food choices (or optional supplementation), you aren’t on Atkins. If you haven’t read the book cover-to-cover, you aren’t on Atkins. If you are truly hungry for any length of time, you’re not doing Atkins. If you aren’t getting adequate rest, you’re not doing Atkins. If you limit yourself to 20 carbs per day until you reach your weight-loss goal, you aren’t on Atkins. His plan works, if you bother to follow it. Dr. Atkins was most concerned with heart health, and this is one of the heart-healthiest diets on the planet, particularly for those who have had difficulty maintaining a healthy weight using other methods. Follow it correctly, and you’ll reap the benefits. Follow it poorly, and you’re gonna kill yourself slowly and be like the millions of lemmings who claimed to be “On Atkins” without having anything beyond the faintest clue what they were doing.
• “You’re going to destroy your kidneys.” A low-carbohydrate, moderate-protein diet is not a danger to anybody who is not in acute renal failure. In fact, a great deal of anecdotes from those in moderate renal failure indicate that eliminating sugars from the diet is more effective in reducing further kidney damage than the low-protein diet recommended by some diets. If your kidneys are already in trouble, follow your doctor’s recommendations. If your kidneys are fine, you’re putting them far more at risk with the popular high-fat, high-carb diet of most Americans than with a healthy low-carb lifestyle.
• “Ketosis is a dangerous body state associated with chronic starvation.” No research has shown it to be dangerous in conjunction with a low-carbohydrate diet. Your body has a great deal of difficulty ridding itself of any body fat in the presence of insulin associated with a high-carb diet. To lose any fat at all, your body has to begin lipolysis; ketosis for low-carbers is simply lipolysis (and digestion of dietary fat) carried to the point where the liver gets involved to convert the extra fat into body-usable ketones; those that stick around in the bloodstream too long are unstable, and eventually convert to acetone which gets filtered out by the kidneys and put into the bladder. If you’re a Type 1 diabetic, starving, or extremely ill, a positive ketosis result can be worrying. If you’re healthy, a Type II diabetic, and consuming enough nutrients without vomiting them back up, ketosis can be a perfectly normal way to show that you’re metabolizing dietary and body fat in preference to carbohydrates.

In my humble opinion, the Diet Wars aren’t low-carb versus low-fat. We’ve arrived at a great deal of consensus as to what’s unhealthy: sugar, refined carbohydrates, and a sedentary lifestyle are universal ills. The war is health and nutrition vs. ignorance and apathy. If we’re on our feet, moving, and aware of and working toward a better diet, that’s 90% of the battle right there.

Now go do something useful. Me, I’m hitting the gym.