Category Archives: science

I don’t live in Oslo

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I do live in Norway, though. Luckily there have been no terror attacks here on the south coast where I live, so the huge bomb blast in Oslo and the shooting episode are really not much “real” to me than it is to you.

The aftermath will probably be, though. Depending on who is found to be responsible, the political climate will change dramatically, I am sure. There is a strong undercurrent of resentment and scorn toward the Muslim immigrants in Norway. And rightly so, actually! What has happened is that Norway has taken in a large number of refugees from various Muslim countries, for the obvious reason that Muslim countries are among the few where killing people is still government business.

Now, the refugees are not necessarily political opponents, although that happens. They may often be common habitual criminals, which is enough to get you killed in those countries. So they are not criminals because they are Muslims. They are criminals from countries where being a criminal is highly unsafe, and we take them in because, well, we’ve signed various treaties to that effect.

As a result, “Muslims” – as in people form Muslim countries – are now a major part of the criminal underclass. They are responsible for the overwhelming majority of rapes, most robberies and all but a few murders.  (The exception being homegrown psychiatric patients with sufficiently serious mental afflictions, and a few jealous boyfriends.) Again, this has less to do with religion than absence of religions. That does not really help the public opinion though.

So today I put up a brand new smoke detector. I don’t really expect a Kristallnacht thing, or for that matter a preemptive strike by the foreigners, but I do share this house with a family that is not ethnic Norwegian. Since I have only newly arrived, I am not sure how many locals know that I am even living here yet – the upstairs family was alone in the house for some time, and people may still think they are. Just saying. A smoke detector may not be enough if push comes to shove, but it is generally a good idea to have anyway.

So yeah, the bombing could affect me  even that distance, in a subtle and indirect way. But hopefully not.

And hopefully we won’t take a nosedive into “homeland security” society, like a certain other nation that used to be admirable. But you never know. Humans are just barely rational even at the best of times.

On the bright side, if this turns out to actually be an Islamic terrorism, we might finally get a conservative government after the election. That would be a silver lining indeed, since conservatives here in Norway are rather different from the American version. The correct name for them is actually “Moderates”. This is the name of the corresponding Swedish party, “Moderaterna”. I was briefly a member of Moderat Ungdom (Moderate Youth) in high school. And no, it did not mean that I was only moderately young.  Now, however, that would be a more fitting description!

 

Reflections on quiet

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“The only person who truly knows your innermost thoughts is yourself.” And even that is a very optimistic view.

Back when I first started to experiment with the Holosync Solution, I briefly mentioned something important: If this could make people sit down and shut up for an hour each day, it would lead to rapid personal growth regardless of whether the brainwave entertainment actually worked.

This is not to say that I don’t believe the brainwave entrainment works. It probably does, at least part of it. And it probably does have health benefits beyond what you could get by just staring at the wall for an hour each day. But the fact remains that staring at the wall for an hour would indeed be an improvement for most people. Or at least half an hour, but if you really want far-reaching changes in your life, why not go the whole hog and just sit there for an hour.

This may seem like an absurd thing to do. And for all I know, it may be better to play Bach for an hour each day. I keep hearing good thing about Bach, although he is a mite too subtle and refined for a barbarian like me. ^_^ But the thing is, each of us has a profound need to sit down and shut up, if at all possible. And it is a need we usually repress at all costs until our health and even life itself is in danger.

There are different levels of quiet. What we today call meditation (and which the monks of old called contemplation) is a much deeper quiet than just sitting there and shutting up. There are also different levels of meditation. But we have to start somewhere, right? And the first thing we need to do is shut up.

Even if we shut our mouth, even if we go sit down in a room by ourselves and don’t turn on the TV, or the radio, or the stereo, or the computer… even if we just sit there and say nothing, that does not mean we really shut up. Our mouth shuts down, but the brain keeps making talk as if we were not alone.

Actually not all people have that particular brain that talks incessantly. Some think in images or even in music by default. But it is extremely common that our thoughts take the form of a flow of words.  This inner monologue (or in some cases dialogue or more!) tends to go on and on when we are alone.

In meditation we make a distraction of sorts, by binding our mind to a mantra or some other symbol. This serves as an anchor for the mind, so that we can quickly jump back to that point of stillness when we realize we have been carried away on the stream of consciousness. It is like a teleport spell that takes you back to the anchor in a moment. No need to flail and get upset or disappointed or even surprised that an important person like me got carried away by random thoughts. Just jump back to the point of quiet and start again.

But – at least at the outset – the truth is that this inner silence is not really what we are aiming for. I mean, each of us is aiming for it consciously, I suppose. But not having it is an important lesson in itself. By seeking the stillness inside, we become aware of the mind-chatter, the inner talk show, the often inane babble that it all comes down to when there is nothing more to say and the mind just can’t shut up.

If you never sit down and try to shut down your thoughts, if you just distract yourself until you cannot stay awake any longer, you can delude yourself. You can think that you are this particular person, “I”, who has some clearly defined personality traits and is pretty much the same person at all times, and simply creates thoughts by the amazing power of your brain. You don’t need to wonder what to think, say or do: By virtue of simply being you, it all pops into your head when you need it.

Once you become quiet enough to listen to your own thoughts, you will realize that no, you are not that unified thing, like a pearl that is whole and looking the same from all angles. Rather, your mind is like a flock of sheep, or a kindergarten with overly excited children squabbling and laughing and crying and doing random things, talking incessantly and mostly about useless stuff. But you have to be still enough to observe yourself to find out these things.

Is that really useful to know? Yes, it really is. If you don’t know at least roughly what you are, you are deluding yourself. You will make a history, a narrative, that is actually, factually wrong. And you will be surprised over and over by things inside yourself:  Feelings, irrational impulses, sudden urges, subtle tendencies. Among all these, you are blown off course again and again and cannot understand why.

But even if not, you really need that quiet. For your body to relax, for your mind to defragment itself and settle down. For your thoughts to stop flapping their wings quite so vigorously. And to become able to fall asleep without chemicals and without being so exhausted that you cannot wake up in the morning without (more) chemicals.

So if you haven’t already, please take some time to sit down and just shut up for some minutes. Your future self will thank you.

Noisy brainwaves at night

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Ah, from now on there won’t be anything like this anymore. Or will there? While the picture has nothing to do with the topic at hand, I think it conveys a bit of the nostalgia of leaving a dreamy place and time. (The text is from the song S.S.S! (Sun Shiny Day), which is quite like that.)

One of the things I am likely to miss after moving to the apartment, is playing my stereo in the wee hours of the night. No, I am not rocking it out, quite the opposite: The sound is LifeFlow 2, a delta brainwave entrainment track. By passively listening to this, more and more of the brain is synchronized with waves of 2 Hz, which is close to the frequency of deep, dreamless sleep.

I don’t think such induced brainwaves are a complete replacement for sleep, but on the other hand this deep sleep is something we tend to get less and less of as we grow older. It seems to me, as purely subjective experience, that I am actually less tired at work when I have woken up 3-4 times in a night and turned on the delta track. This could be coincidence, of course. I won’t say it happens every single time.

But what happens almost every single time is that I fall asleep pretty quickly, since I don’t have to worry about whether I fall asleep or not. I’m good anyway, which is the ideal condition for falling asleep in the first place.

Obviously a stereo by the bed will be less popular if you share bedroom with someone. Well, unless they go to sleep at the same time, I guess, in which case it should be just as useful for each.

Earphones can also be used, but are kind of unwieldy, depending on your favorite sleeping position. Ear plugs are supposedly less effective, unless you can make sure they are inserted exactly to the same length in each ear. That won’t work for me, since my ears are quite different in construction. Standard ear plugs will fall off my left ear almost at once, but stick just fine in my right.

Supposedly the entrainment effect has very little to do with the volume, as long as it still reaches your subconscious, so I suppose I may try to keep playing, just more softly. Or perhaps by now I may be able to induce that frequency just by deciding to. I doubt that, though. It is one thing to do it with alpha waves and upper theta, but delta is not something you normally synchronize while awake.

Meditation in The Sims 3

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In the Sims 3, meditation requires visiting China and learning Martial Arts. In real life, you can easily learn it from the Internet (link with sound). On the other hand, the floating and trippy colors are subjective at best.

I guess there are not many people who meditate and play the Sims 3.  The two don’t quite exclude each other, but they largely appeal to different types of people. Meditation calms and quiets the mind, while computer games tend to excite.  (With the Sims 3, that depends a bit on your play style, I guess.) Games tend to be an escape from the real world, while meditation is a grounding in something even more real than the manifest world. So they are quite a bit apart. In light of that, I find it a bit amusing that meditation in this game has become quite a bit more realistic than before.

In the Sims 2, meditation was unlocked by the Logic skill (usually at level 4), and basically froze your sim’s motives – you did not get more hungry or tired etc, as if time had stopped for you. For your sim, I mean. After a long time spent in continuous meditation, you would start floating in the air and be able to teleport.  Not exactly a fast way to travel, since it took the day to get that far.

In the Sims 3 meditation is much more realistic, although there is still the floating and teleportation at the end, which is (in my experience at least) not realistic at all. (I hear some people feel like they are floating, but that is pretty much it.) For the rest, though, the skill has become more realistic. I am not sure tying it to the Martial Arts skill was a good idea, it could have been a separate skill. But I guess it beats logic as a starting point. Anyway, you now grow hungry and your bladder fills up etc much like you were just sitting there. The only thing that happens right from the start is that you start building up “meditative focus”.

This focus lasts for a while after you end your session, and improves the quality of your work and the speed of your learning. Fittingly, it evaporates if you use the “magical” ability to teleport.  Magic is not the best use of meditation, after all.

Once you have spent a long time in meditation – not hours, but a noticeable part of a normal lifespan – you become a master of meditation. I am not 100% sure this is a feature rather than a bug, but it seems the meditative focus now becomes permanent. It says 15 minutes left, but it has said so for half a generation now.

If that is intentional, it is actually a pretty good approximation of real life. If you do keep it up for many years, meditation will really change you and make you better able to live your life, learning things and doing things better.  Quite apart from any mysterious or seemingly magical experiences you may or may not encounter along the way.

“Austerity measures”

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My own austerity measures: The first sacks of things to throw away before moving to the smaller place. More sacks to follow.

I have written a few times about the near future, after peak oil and peak metal and so on. What I have sketched is not a disaster scenario. Disaster scenarios are good for selling books, and I agree that if we act like complete morons, we can make a disaster out of it. Then again we can make a disaster in paradise itself, as the Jewish creation mythos so beautifully explains. This tendency lies in us all and must be watched.

Seeing pictures of Greeks rioting in the streets not only brings home this human tendency to make a mess of things, but also an even more ingrained human tendency: To never give up something you already know from experience that you can live without. This is not a pure evil: It is kind of helpful for a marriage, for instance, that you won’t give up on your spouse at the first bump in the road, even if you survived for several years before even meeting them. But for the most part, it is people torturing themselves.

I am going through my own austerity measures these days. Getting less for the same money is the trend of the future, and I have started (somewhat unexpectedly, in my case) since I have to move from a house to half a house for the same rent. In the process, I am once again going through the things I’d like to bring along, and sorting out things that I won’t realistically have room for. The thing is, I started my adult life with much less than this. It took many years before I even had my first bookshelf. It is like my material riches have increased by 1000% and now I have to go back to 800%. Not really something to riot over, I think.

I can see how people who planned to retire at 50 will be upset that they can’t. The whole thing I am going through now is an exercise in how to (not) react when you find out that people break their promises if they have the power to do so. That is unfortunate, but when the promises were a bit too good to be true, when we were living our dream, simply going back to reality should not be the end of the world.

Retiring at 50 or even 55 is certainly dreamlike, at least if you have a job you hate. But the best response to that is to either get a job you like, or like the job you have. Almost all jobs consists of helping other people (because that is the only thing people are likely to pay for, if they have a choice). So by rising your love to a very high degree, you can usually find satisfaction in any work that is not contrary to law or decency.

I have every intention of working till 75 if my health holds up. That is not a certain thing, of course. But as far as I see it, retirement is not natural. It should not really exist. Rather, people may get disability pensions when they are no longer able to work, whether it happens at 20 or 90. If you want, you can of course quit your job at any time, but I don’t see why one should be rewarded for that. The way Europe at least has organized this, people have paid for other people’s retirement for decades, so it stands to reason that they want to get their money’s worth. But that money is not saved anywhere. It is already spent, on other people’s retirement. So it is not like you can give them back the cash. Given that we all face a period of austerity, I think it is more important to support those who are actually ill, over those who are actually lazy.

When the money is gone, it is gone. The tooth fairy won’t bring it back even if you break somebody’s teeth. It is like that with all things. The only certain thing about anything on earth is that it will end. As the Buddha said: “All things that have form are subject to decay.” I hear even the protons will decay some hundred billion years from now. We should salvage the happiness we can find during our journey through time, collect the good memories and learn from the unpleasant. For each of us there will come a time when we won’t get any more memories from Earth. There is more joy to be had from austerity than from rage. Believe me, I have tried both.

The VAT is coming! Buy books!

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My self-sim still read paper books, but then again he does not have to physically move every object he owns from house to house every couple years.

Starting July 1st, the ever helpful Norwegian government will start collecting 25% VAT (a form of sales tax) on electronic services from abroad, such as subscriptions to online games. And, notably, e-books.

This is contrasted with one of the rare holes in the Norwegian VAT, for paper books. For some reason the same does not apply to e-books. The most likely reason is that the government does not want to appear anti-cultural by suddenly taxing books, but e-books were so rare when they were first classified as services rather than books, only a few of us bothered, and nobody important to the public. To extend this to e-books from Amazon is just a matter of harmonizing with EU rules, the European Union has already for some time tried to collect tax from America.

It is not a big deal really, those who think this tax is unfair can simply steal every fifth e-book. Buying them is after all a matter of conscience in the first place, since the Pirate Bay has (as I already mentioned) e-books I could not  buy from Amazon, Barnes&Noble or Google Books.  At least when it comes to the kind of books pirates like to read. Probably not so great a selection of the type of books on my Amazon recommendation list: Aristotle for Everybody by Mortimer Adler, On Grace and Free Will by St Augustine, Holiness is Always in Season by Pope Benedict XVI, and a few more of similar beach lecture level.

Now, buying that kind of books seems extremely dignified for someone such as I. These past 12 years have not exactly been an unbroken triumph march of dignity, piety and deep thought, do you think? Still, the books should be within my reach to enjoy, though it may take its sweet time. In fact, that is somewhat the point: The books I buy before the end of June should ideally tide me through until the US$ has devalued by another 25%, which will likely take several months, if not the whole year.  It may go faster if Congress and the White House cannot agree on the debt ceiling and the government stops paying its bills in September. I certainly don’t think it beyond them.

Since some of these books are likely to be a bit above my pray grade, they may require two or more readings, which should also help make them last. Most likely they are also slow going. But again, that is not necessarily a bad thing. It is not like he who dies with the most books wins. Probably not.

Food and money

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No, generally speaking people in the third world are not starving because you eat too much. It is not like there is a fixed quantity of food in the world. It may have some small effect, but more on you than on them, I would say.

In most of Europe and North America, there is little connection between income and diet. People with more money to spare may eat out more at restaurants, but they generally don’t eat more and they generally don’t eat more meat than people with lower income in the same countries.

In the so-called “Third World”, on the other hand, food is a large part of living expenses. If there’s not enough money, there is not enough food. (This is a bit different for those who grow their own food, but if the crops fail, they generally don’t have much cash to tide them through until the next season.) Those who are a little better off can afford as much staple food as they want (such as rice or maize) but may only eat fruit and some vegetables when they are in season, and meat and fish only on special occasions.

As more and more people have made the move from abject poverty to lower middle class in countries such as China and India, the demand for meat especially has increased. This has put some pressure on the prices for staple foods also:  Pigs eat much the same food as poor people, and cattle need at the very least grazing land that might have been used for growing food for humans. Where cattle ranchers can afford it, they also tend to feed their cattle some grains and vegetables for faster growth.

My point here is that there is not a fixed amount of each kind of food that you just parcel out among the world’s population. Increasing food production is pretty simple, and we do it all the time. We could easily feed 10 billion people on this planet, but it would be expensive if they were all eating meat virtually every day, as is common in America and parts of Europe.

That is not to say that we could not do it even then. The problem is not that food is too expensive: It is not expensive compared to most things. The problem is that some people are too poor.

This problem can not be turned into “some people are too rich”. There is again not a fixed amount of wealth that we can distribute. Rather, wealth is continually generated by human work and thought. The world today holds many times as much wealth as when my grandfather grew up. Not only are there several times as many people, but the average earthling is far more wealthy. This does not happen because a planet has a fixed trajectory of increasing wealth that we can simply distribute: It happens because people have had the freedom to generate wealth and the incentives to do so, the main of these incentives being “not being robbed and killed if richer than others”.

I am not opposed to rich people sharing their wealth with the poor. Far from it! That is a commendable thing to do. But even more commendable, for those who can, is to invest their wealth in such a way that it creates opportunities for the poor to use their own talents to generate even more wealth, for themselves and others. If we were to simply give all the wealth of the rich to the poor to use for food, this would like eating the seeds. Any sane farmer knows that you don’t eat the seed grain unless you are going to die anyway. We should have the same level-headed attitude to all forms of wealth.

There are some who are happy to contribute to emergency food aid to the starving poor, when drought or flooding or volcanoes have destroyed their livelihood. That is nice. But if we were more eager to contribute to schools, libraries and vaccines, there would be fewer people who were on the verge of starvation anyway. Even if there is drought in California one year, you don’t see a million Californians sitting on the ground covered in flies with a beggar bowl in their hand.  Are Californians created in God’s image and the people in certain other places are not?  No, but some people have currently more resources than others.

But the one most important foundation for any progress is PEACE. There is no point in building schools when they are bombed the next day, just as there is no point in planting crops that will be raided in the harvest. Once peace is broken, it is hard to put back together. I think we should all consider this. Even in the rich world, war is possible if we too readily believe in flattery at the cost of others. Before our culture wars reach the point where people start arming themselves “just in case”, we should consider that the end of this path is certainly poverty, starvation and pointless death. But if we live to be of help to others, everybody wins, including (and especially) ourselves.

Oops – sleeping may be it

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The human body is full of mysteries. Especially down there. But today was a slightly different form of pleasant surprise from what the picture might imply to the younger reader.

So on Thursday I had my blood drawn to test for the proteins that signal a probable prostate cancer. The reason was the sudden onset of one particular symptom of enlarged prostate.

For unrelated reasons, I went to bed at 2AM and slept til 9:30 AM today. The thing is, I did not have to get up to urinate, and when I finally got up, there was almost no liquid. That’s when I realized: This is when I used to sleep for the last 15+ years!

Well, perhaps not exactly, but around 2 to 9. When I lived closer to the city, I could do this and still squeeze in a 90% job before the 5PM bus home. Or very nearly so. When I moved further away, the next bus in to the city would not be get me to the office until nearly 11, so I would have to get up early and take the previous bus now and then.  Three such “long” (8 hours) days over the course of two weeks would be enough.  (Norwegians are very productive – we work short hours and have long vacations and still get everything done. ^_^)

The thing is, I did not actually work 8 hour days as often as that, with the predictable result that I slowly built up a large mound of “time debt”, “undertime” or whatever you will call it. Sometime this winter I started paying it down.

With the help of LifeFlow delta brainwave entrainment, I can go to sleep three hours earlier than before, get up early  and still not be particularly sleepy during the day. In fact, if I wake up a couple times in the night, this makes me LESS sleepy in the morning, because even a minute awake is enough to start delta “music” again.  (I don’t keep it playing all night so as to not mess with the brain’s natural 90-minute sleep cycle too much, and to not develop immunity. A couple times a night seems fine though.)

Now the whole 90% job grew out of the fact that I have Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome, a minority condition where the body’s clock is nor reset by external stimuli in the normal way. There are divergent opinions on whether it can be cured, or even whether it should be cured. Arguably it needs to be cured to approximately the same degree that black skin needs to be cured: The only serious problems from this inheritable condition are those imposed by society.

In fact, if the minority with DSPS were allowed to live the way they were created, we would have less problems with rush hours and billions of dollars would not be lost to people sitting in cars and raging when they could have been at work.  But let us just let that slide for now. Humans are stupid, as we all know from direct observation of those around us. Especially in traffic, I suppose.

Anyway, my brain is happy with brainwave entrainment. But evidently my kidneys have no respect for it. They probably continue to work hard for the first three hours of the night, every night. (And then more slowly in the morning, as before.) Which means that the sudden onset of the nightly bathroom run did probably not come from any changes down there, but from the changes in my bedtime when I first started to try to work in my undertime, and later switched to working full time.

This, dear reader, is why I almost never go to the doctor. Because when I do, the local clinic usually concludes that I am healthier than those who work there, and the only things I achieve is to  a) embarrass myself, and b) add to my hypochondria score card.  There have only been a couple times in my adult life that a doctor visit has actually helped in any way. OK, perhaps four times.

Oh well. I understand in America, the land of extreme health expenses, it is customary for the better off to take these blood tests even if they have no symptoms.  (And even if the sum of the biopsies and the treatments are approximately as lethal as the cancer, statistically speaking.)

Now, the big question is whether the kidneys will eventually decide to join the sleep rhythm of the brain, or whether I shall have this divergence for the rest of my working life. I have a feeling that if I live to my planned retirement at 75, I won’t have any long nights of continuous sleep even after that. But who knows.

***

Well, I suppose I no longer need to eat tomato and take long walks. Well, unless I want to decrease my “overall mortality” – the risk of dying from any random reason – by 40% by investing half an hour a day. As far as risk management goes, that seems a pretty good investment to me. On the other hand we could be fatalists and say that the day when you are fated to die, you die. That is certainly true. But that day seems to come a lot earlier for most fat and flabby people, in our part of the world at least.  (It’s a bit different in hunger-stricken areas, of course.  May you and I never need to save up fat for times like that.)

Besides, I have started to kind of like both the spaghetti sauce and the long walks. I walked for an hour today again, in rain that was so light it was almost fog. Then went home and ate pasta with tomato sauce. I rather enjoyed them both, truth to tell. Although my “things to write” memory runs full before even half an hour of walking…

Now to decide whether to call off that doctor appointment. I presumably won’t benefit from it in any way; but on the other hand, if I cancel it, the doctor will never know if he later runs into a case like this again.

Not losing weight here!

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“I’ll definitely work out for what I ate later…” This may not be quite as easy as one would believe, even if you really do work out. I speak from experience here.

Today I will write a small article about health and physiology. After all, I assume my reader to have a body and be keenly aware of it. Even though our lives in the body are rather short, we try to make it last a little longer and serve us a little better.

And there’s the small point that for each day you live, life expectancy rises by approximately 5 hours. (That’s in the first world, obviously things are improving faster in the third world.) So, death is approaching, but not by 24 hours a day. The longer you live, the longer your life expectancy. Nifty, huh?

Now, second only to smoking, fat is one of those things people know is Bad For You. There has been so much writing and broadcasting about this, there is hardly anyone in the English-speaking world who does not have a wary eye on their weight, or the weight of others. While some feel it is more important to enjoy life, most people have at least some interest in the issue. So here we go!

***

In official statistics, is is assumed that a grown man will burn about 2400 calories a day, a woman about 2000. The reason why we men burn more calories is that we are larger and have more muscles. The few remaining people who have hard physical work are not counted in these statistics, I believe, and neither are professional athletes. These are people who lie outside the normal range.  There is of course some individual variation.

Now that I walk an hour after work,  I burn 500 calories extra each day (my pulse watch shows 600, but that includes the basic 100 calories I would burn in an hour just by being myself). The smart reader would assume that these calories would be taken from my fat reserves, such as they are. I am not quite overweight, but my normal weight is right on the upper border of the recommended range.  (“Normal” weight in the literature, not that it is normal to be normal these days, it is normal to be moderately overweight.)

I went on the bathroom scales again. There is no sign of losing any weight after over two weeks of this.

Now, two weeks is not a lot. One pound of fat is approximately 3500 calories, which is roughly what I burn extra in a week. Diets or other techniques for rapid weight loss don’t actually reduce your fat very fast, but instead cause you to lose water, which can be lost and gained much faster. Some foods bind more water in the body than others, so it is possible to “lose weight fast” that way. Sweating a lot without drinking more can also cause you to “lose weight”, but is not good for your health at all!

Even if I burn 500 extra calories a day, I won’t lose weight if I eat 500 more calories too. That could easily happen: A large box of yogurt (half a liter is a common size here) contains about that many calories. So it could easily happen if I am just a little more hungry than usual. With light exercise this is very common, unless you also go on a diet and count calories.

Then there is the small detail that “weight” is not the same as “fat”. If I use my muscles more than usual, they may become larger – this happens especially easily to us men – and muscle mass is actually heavier than fat. So a man who is not overweight could easily gain weight by exercising! Obviously this requires that one eats that much protein, which muscles are made from. But there is plenty of protein in the western diet, both from plants and animals.

In my case, there is yet another reason why I might not lose weight: I may be actually burning 3000 calories a day already. This is not so relevant for most of my readers, who get a fairly large percentage of their calories from fat. I did too, until I got a chronic illness that strikes if I eat more than a few grams of fat in each meal. So I cannot eat typical fatty foods like cakes, cookies, sauces, chocolate, butter, margarine, mayonnaise and similar bread spreads, or most meat dinners.

In the first months after I dropped eating fatty foods, I lost weight, and quite a bit of it.  Some of it never came back. But gradually my digestion adjusted so I could eat larger portions of starch and sugary foods, and digest them efficiently. It is entirely possible that I eat 3000 calories a day, I have not sat down and counted them.

You would think that if I actually ate 3000 calories a day, I would have gained weight steadily over the last years.  But it is not that simple. When you eat both fat and carbs, the body will prefer to burn the carbs (it is faster and easier) but store the fat.  If you eat very little fat, the body will not be able to store much.  Carbs cannot be converted to fat easily. It is possible, but unlike some animals, humans really suck at converting sugar to fat. Only a small portion makes it over, almost all of it is lost along the way, and simply becomes waste heat.

(Fructose, which is a common sweetener in the USA, is more readily converted to fat. If I lived in America, I would probably be fatter. But I live in Norway, where fructose is rare. It is mostly found in honey, and I don’t eat much of that.)

So you can see, there are numerous reasons why I may not lose weight even though I burn 500 calories extra on fast walking each day. That is not a tragedy for me, since I am not dangerously fat. And in any case, there are health benefits to being active beyond losing weight. In fact, it is uncertain whether overweight is dangerous at all. Obesity probably is, but moderate overweight may be more a symptom of inactivity rather than a danger in itself.  Danish statistics show that overweight people who bike regularly (a common combination in Denmark, thanks to the flat terrain and delicious pastries) don’t suffer the metabolic syndrome that plagues overweight car drivers.

In other good news, weight loss from exercise is far more likely if you are already unnaturally fat. Obese people will generally not feel hungrier after moderate exercise than without; in fact, most of them will feel less hungry after light or moderate exercise like walking, biking or swimming. This is because this level of activity stimulates the brain centers that regulate the appetite. Moving about is the normal behavior in humans “in the wild”, so the body works best when we do this, including the brain.  So if you fall in that category, you should definitely start walking or something like that, but very moderately at first. Don’t suddenly start running without consulting your doctor!

I, however, may have to start running if I want to lose weight. Or I could eat less, I suppose. I have not really decided whether I should do that, though. I just want to maintain the body so I don’t lose it from sheer negligence.

 

Personal health reform

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You also need to exercise to balance your eating. (And your nation’s budget.)

In America in particular, there is a bitter debate about how to finance the ever growing expenses of the country’s health care. The same problem faces most developed countries, although the debate is generally more civil in those I know. Still, there is much handwringing and various not-so-great ideas.

In the middle of this is the small voice of reason, belonging to Dr Dean Ornish: How about people stop eating fast food and starts walking at least a couple hours a week, meditating from time to time and be nice to their family? That way we would have much less illness to contend with in the first place.

Dr Ornish and his colleagues have proved, and in the sense of hard science, peer reviewed large-scale clinical tests, that radical lifestyle change can actually reverse coronary plaque, diabetes, and some cancers. A less radical change can prevent them in most cases, and even when not, improve your chance of survival and your quality of life.

The approach is fairly low-tech:  Cut down on fat, to no more than 10% of your calories. Avoid white sugar and corn syrup like the plague. Eat your veggies. Exercise at moderate intensity. Meditate. Stick with your loved ones. The  more of these things you do, the less likely you are to contract the illnesses that make up 75% of the country’s health care budget.

If we don’t do it for the sake of the country, at least it makes sense to do it because being terminally ill sucks.  You are going to die sooner or later, of course, but later usually seems like the best alternative – after all, that is why people will pay an arm and a leg for expensive new cancer drugs, although they were not willing to move an arm and a leg back when they could have prevented the whole horror.

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Now, I am fully aware that it is not easy. You come home from work, your head is already tired, and perhaps your feet too. You want nothing more than sit down in a good chair.  And as if it was not bad enough, you have to drive your kids (if you have kids, and most people do sooner or later) to some far-off destination.  When you’re back, it is already late and the weather is not good for walking, running, biking or whatever. There may be criminal elements out there too. No, it is best to stay inside and eat snacks in front of the TV, just like every other day.

I totally understand. After all, I keep a bottle of cola in the house at all times, if possible, and another at work. True, I mix the cola with water before drinking it, but I am sure it is still an unspeakable sin in the eyes of every nutritionist worth his diploma.  Sugar = poison, after all. But it all boils down to this: We have to do something, we have to start somewhere, we have to make a sacrifice for the sake of our own future and those we love, and those we don’t particularly hate. Someone has to go the extra mile. Or, failing that, eat their veggies.

You know quite well that you would do it if your life was at stake, and it is. The thing is to do it BEFORE the doctor tells you that you have X months left to live. I am sure that is very motivating, but by then we’ll probably feel even much less energetic than today. By then we may pray to God, but today God is praying to us, so to speak, imploring us to not be idiots and waste the body we’ve been given.  It is not by accident that the world’s religious traditions put emphasis on various exercises in self-control. Holding back our impulses was never easy, not 2500 years ago and not today. But it is a good idea, not just for ourselves, but for others as well.

It is true that for the time being, at least, most people will probably still continue to eat their fast food and veg out in front of the tube. So that if you eat your greens and work out, you’ll be paying for their bypass and they won’t be paying for yours. Sure it is unfair. But we should love our neighbor, right? It is more blessed to give than to receive. No, seriously, it is; I have tried. But even apart from that, it is more blessed to go the second mile than to receive diabetes, constipation, knee pain and heart infarct. For the love of ourselves and others, we have to make at least some effort, and encourage each other to do what we can.

And of course, if you happen to live in America, there is the small matter of your country not defaulting on its debt and sliding rapidly to banana republic status. Or at least, when that happens anyway, to be able to say “It wasn’t my fault… this time.”