Coping: In Praise of Vinegar

This is rather amazing. – to the point that I figure I should share it with you:  I am now a pound lighter than I was when Elaine and I took off on our cruise 13-days ago.

The numbers?  I put on 7-pounds during the cruise.  No, I wasn’t particularly proud of it, but lately I have been eating on a regular diet of two meals a day, within 8-hours of each other because of a lot of research I’ve been reading on apple cider vinegar.

One upshot of the reading was to find out that modern dietary ideas – like multiple meals per day – are not really how humans grew up in the wild.  Instead, people apparently used to walk around, looking for food, hunting and foraging, until they found something.

Then they ate to their hearts content….and moved on,

There’s a rhythm, apparently, to how this works.

When ancient ancestors had a meal, it often raised the blood sugar.  The blood sugar converted to fat, the fat was stored.  No mysteries to that.

But according to the data I’ve been reading (before going on the cruise), when the body is not given additional food (remember the wandering off part?) the first calories consumed were the easy-to-get-to sugars. 

Once those were gobbled up, the stored fats were eaten next by the cells.  And, at the tail end of that, the next to go were the heaviest of the fats – the kind that tend to accumulate around the belly in old men like you-know-who.

The idea comes into focus that eating kicks off this sequence of blood sugars increasing, fat storage, sugar burning, and finally fat burning.   Which is why people have different “breath” throughout the day.  Good breath mostly after eating but once the body moves into hard fat conversion, there’s likely some ketosis.

The part of ketosis that matters, when comes to eating habits, is this bit on the mechanics of ketosis from Wikipedia:

“During the usual overnight fast the body’s metabolism naturally switches into ketosis, and will switch back to glycolysis after a carbohydrate-rich meal. Longer-term ketosis may result from fasting or staying on a low-carbohydrate diet, and deliberately induced ketosis serves as a medical intervention for intractable epilepsy.[6] In glycolysis higher levels of insulin promote storage of body fat and block release of fat from adipose tissues, while in ketosis fat reserves are readily released and consumed.[5][7] For this reason ketosis is sometimes referred to as the body’s “fat burning” mode”

What I’ve gotten back into is waiting until Elaine gets up and cooks breakfast, instead of cooking my own.

Her schedule, and mine are offset a good bit:  I’m up at 4 AM writing.  She rolls out sometime between 7 AM and 8 AM…and gets hungry around 8:30 so that’s when food appears.

What this means is that instead of “breaking the fast” of overnight – which is where the word breakfast comes from – I’m adding about 4 1/2 hours to my fat burning time daily by eating when she gets up.

Then, I eat my second meal of the day by 4 PM, which means being up and about 3-4 hours after eating, which helps resolve lots of old-people problems like acid reflux.

But none of this should lose 9-pounds in less than a week. 

What Else was Going On?

Therein lies the tale…

For some reason, part of my “home chemistry experiments with my body” had not yet gotten to the bottle of apple cider vinegar pills that were coming up on my personal testing.  Now I’m into it.

Long-term readers will recall the idea here:  Make up a notebook for yourself and then systematically go through what works well for you as you test every vitamin and supplement you can get your hands on.  There is quite often something in the way of a supplement (or mineral) that when taken will change how you feel.

For example, when I want to learn at an accelerated rate, I will take Source Naturals Huperzine A, 200mcg, 120 Tablets.  The effect of taking one of these bad boys is that within an hour, there’s a marked improvement in mental acuity. 

Taken with a baby aspirin and a small something to eat, it is my “before flying” routine.  Since flying an airplane is a somewhat complex task where you need to have all your faculties, I figure anything that can bump up short-term IQ a bit is worth doing.  So a half cup of coffee, food with lots of protein, and a Huperzine A – plus a baby aspirin – I’m good to fly.

By the way, the baby aspirin is not to keep away pain or prevent heart attack.  Although, sure, it may do these things.  The real reason to take the aspirin is that it increases the body’s uptake of oxygen. 

I can actually tell the difference on the treat mill, too, as well as mental acuity on long flights where we’re up at 7,500 feet, or higher.  (We have oxygen, too, but don’t always carry it unless flight at 9,500 and higher is planned.  Requirements roll in (going from poor memory, 12,500 feet) for supplemental oxygen, but another long discussion…not this morning.)

So there was this bottle of apple cider vinegar pills (similar to High Potency Apple Cider Vinegar 625 mg 180 Caps by Swanson Ultra) in my test queue and I began the four week trial period on those.

WOW!

I was shocked.  9-pounds gone!  I doubt the rate of weight loss will continue as high, but to even lose 3-pounds a week would be phenomenal.  Hell, a pound a week would be fine.

There were a number of dietary changes between the cruise ship weight and this morning’s.

On the cruise ship we ate three squares a day.  Breakfast, lunch, and fabulous (bringing tears to your eyes and triglycerides or your cardiologist’s) dinners.

Restaurant food is generally much higher in sodium (salt), than we’re used to eating around here.  We are using ,Morton – Lite Salt Mixture that contains half the sodium of regular salt, with the balance of saltiness coming from potassium chloride…and since potassium is good for body chemistry….

Shipboard we had alcohol before and with din-din.  A cocktail (or two) and wine (or sake) with meals.

And I ate breakfasts.

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Prepper Notes: Grab & Go Bags and Chips

We wrote a definitive article on grab and go bags for subscribers back in 2008.  Yet as times change, our outlook has changed as well.

This morning’s we’ll explore how our grab-and-go plans have evolved and discuss how to do a “grab-and-go chip” in style and what to have on it.

Along the way, we’ll talk about your personal grimoire (magician’s spell book) updated to include digital recovery content should you ever need it.

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The Market’s Upward Bias

Slap the 55-day timer again.  New highs yesterday (again) and our Trading Model over on the Peoplenomics side of the house is proving far smarter than the guy who designed it.

Makes the earliest likely crash window open April 26th which gets to the “sell in May and go away” window.  Which is slightly less pessimistic than my “when in port, be short” adage from years back…

Baltic Dry Index is back to 553 this morning, right around 2009 lows.

Bibi’s Guns

The talk of the town this morning is what Benjamin Netanyahu will say.  If anything is going to move the markets, since not much else is going on in the US financial scene until jobs data later in the week, this may move markets.

Our military affairs contributor, warhammer, looks at things this way:

George, 

Tuesday, March 3rd 2015, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin ‘Bibi’ Netanyahu, will deliver a speech to the U.S. Congress in direct and blatant opposition to the U.S. President, Barack Hussein Obama.

If reports are to be believed, Netanyahu’s oratory will be a seminal event.  Miriam-Webster defines ‘seminal’ as follows:  “having a strong influence on ideas, works, events, etc., that come later : very important and influential”

See:  http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/seminal

Netanyahu becomes the first foreign leader since British Prime Minister Winston Churchill to address Congress for the 3rd time.  By all measures, this speech is trending as historic.  Not only U.S. President Obama’s Middle Eastern Foreign Policy legacy be at stake, but so too will be Netanyahu’s, not to mention the future of Iranian/U.S. Relations and perhaps peace in the Middle East.

Israel, the only true democracy in the Middle East, is facing the reality of an authoritarian, theocratic nation vowing the annihilation of the democratic Jewish state.  Iran is reportedly only one to two months away from producing enough fissionable weapons grade Plutonium to produce a nuclear warhead and wipe Jerusalem off the map.

Throughout history, Jews endured crushing defeats by Persia, Babylon and Rome, the two millennia long diaspora, the Roman Catholic directed Inquisition and the unfathomable, horrific Nazi led holocaust.   Netanyahu has stated time and again that the direct and public threats made against Israel by recent Iranian religious and political  leaders highlights precisely why they cannot produce nuclear weapons.  Iran has not hidden its intent to destroy Israel.  Why make the job that much easier and allow them to retain the technology necessary to produce a nuke?

Tangentially, if Shiite Iran somehow gains nukes, Sunni Saudis will surely not stand idly by.  They will either build or, more likely, buy their own nukes in order to strategically deter Iran.  The entire Middle East would eventually be at risk of slipping into a 21st Century Cold War, a war powered by religious and racial animosity.

Netanyahu is making his plea to Americans – ‘stand with us in an unbreakable alliance, or we will act alone as we must to guarantee the safety and solidarity of a free Israel.’  Israelis’ will be watching from their homes.  Netanyahu may not openly, overtly threaten military interdiction against Iran’s nuke program in front of Congress, but he will most certainly leave little doubt that, if pressed into a strategic corner that would undermine Israeli national security, Israel will do what she must to neutralize any and all perceived threats.

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Coping: A Story and Backgrounder on CompSec

CompSec is computer security.  And we’ll get there, but first we need to go back to Monday’s column to pick up the scent…

Our discussion of the local gas company bill reported out of Australia received a numbers of fine comments from folks on the discussion side of UrbanSurvival, including an historical perspective from a reader Down Under that was most excellent:

Being an Aussie in Qld AUS I couldn’t help read your funny anecdote about the guy from Mudgee and the local gas company.
True or not it is believable as anybody in this country or yours would know. Great indicator of how as Voltaire put it “common sense is by no means common” .
Seems the western world especially left wing politics in your country and mine ergo Democrats and our Labor Party this lack of practical approaches to real world issues is rife.
In Aus like yours we have a general shift of wealth from the big middle class here to the genuine wealthy where they aren’t encumbered by heavy debt.
The big transnational corporations in both our countries hide their profits via “transfer pricing” in our case and no doubt ring around the rosey accounting in yours. Isn’t the Balance Sheet and P & L the devices that are the blind hiding the truth?
Off topic I know but I wished to vent.
I have always admired the USA and it’s wonderful citizens. I was in middle / primary school here when your country inspired me with your Apollo and 69 landings just because you felt like it. Now nearly 50 yrs still NO other country can do it. You’re all amazing.
Now it seems many voters there have lost their faith in the USA and what it represents both historically and in the future. Professional advocates, nefarious pressure groups (on a way bigger scale than here in Aus) are polluting your nations system and are beginning to have a big impact here too.
Many here in Aus are conscious of 1942 Coral Sea efforts of the US and the subsequent placing of US troops here, The blood and treasure that was lost by you is noted by many but like all history time dims memory and importance. Your citizens like ours only think in sound bites and believe the propaganda that’s why sites like yours are important to get folks to think outside the square. To question the conventional wisdom and spin. The truth is way weird and scary.

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Slap the 55-Day Timer?

OK, now China has gone and done it…lowering interest rates this weekend.

That means all the things we have been warning you (about additional deflation) is likely coming along and with it, this morning the major exchanges in Europe have edged back from recent highs.

Does this mean it’s time to slap the 55-day timer, since major collapses (and big corrections) don’t usually get organized until well after a major peak?  Put another way, airplanes don’t crash in the sky…the crash hitting the ground.  Same thing is true for stock markets.  They can’t crash from here, but give them some time to work down to the bottom of trend lines and the 50 and 200 day moving averages…then we’ll have something to talk about.

The week ahead will have some really useful data, if you can stick around till Friday.  That’s when the federal unemployment report will be out, along with the Federal Reserve’s misnomered Consumer Credit report (it’s all about debt, credit only if you’re a bankster).

For this morning, we get to watch a bunch of incredibly boring bond and bill settlements and eye (with understandable suspicion) the assertions in the Personal Income and Expense report.  Grab your crack pipe and read along…

Personal income increased $50.8 billion, or 0.3 percent, and disposable personal income (DPI) increased $52.6 billion, or 0.4 percent, in January, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Personal consumption expenditures (PCE) decreased $18.9 billion, or 0.2 percent. In December, personal income increased $45.3 billion, or 0.3 percent, DPI increased $37.3 billion, or 0.3 percent, and PCE decreased $35.7 billion, or 0.3 percent, based on revised estimates. Real DPI increased 0.9 percent in January, compared with an increase of 0.5 percent in December. Real PCE increased 0.3 percent, in contrast to a decrease of 0.1 percent. The price index for PCE decreased 0.5 percent, compared with a decrease of 0.2 percent.

Even funnier is this part:

Wages and salaries increased $42.4 billion in January, compared with an increase of $8.6 billion in December. Private wages and salaries increased $39.7 billion, compared with an increase of $7.2 billion. Government wages and salaries increased $2.5 billion, compared with an increase of $1.5 billion.

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Coping: There’s Big–And There’s Houston

Coming back to the ranch Saturday morning, where the noisiest thing heard all weekend was the air conditioning coming on, is a huge difference from Houston.

I’m not sure what to call the experience of driving back from the cruise ship terminal.  May be the best word for it is “combat driving shock.”

Houston, thanks to the boom in energy over the past few years, has ballooned up to more than 6-million people.  Departing from the docks area, we were still in the continuous band of development of Greater Houston an hour and a half later.  The spreading monster will consume Huntsville, TX shortly, I’m sure.

The city has the same overbuilt feeling to it that I first experienced driving through Los Angeles 40-some years ago.  Being from Seattle, and driving down I-5, L.A. was culture shock personified and there’s a kind threshold that takes place with a city as it passes through the 5-million mark, or so.

Not that lots of cities aren’t bigger…they are.  Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles all line up as bigger.  But something happens when a city gets to be the size of New York:  the population density is high enough that things like subways and trains coming in from the suburbs to an extreme island population core, actually makes sense.

The difference – if I can say this right – is that NYC has the feel of a well-raised loaf of bread.  High density, crusty in places, but damn entertaining.

Houston, on the other hand, while going up a bit in the central core area, is more like a pizza than a loaf…and the only other city I’ve been through in the past 10-years that has the same vibe is Sacramento.  Like Houston, it just seems to go on and on, forever.

According to this report, Chicago’s growth has been faltering – on the other of a quarter of a percent in a year in 2013.  Job creation in Chicago seems to have failed, as much as anything.  Houston by comparison claims job creation of 4.2% more jobs in the past year.

As you know, Elaine and I have been contemplating moving “out west” to get closer to our kids.  But driving through Houston at 8 AM on a Saturday has a totally Los Angeles vibe to it, complete with the grayest gray there is when the sun’s not out.

It’s a grim reminder that we “can’t go back” to the era of “right-sized cities.  The damn planet has gotten too big for that.

You’re welcome to play along as we keep tossing darts.  Eugene, Oregon is close to the kids, nice flying country yet lots to do, but without pizza-city vibe to it.  The Washington Coast towns (from Astoria, OR north are interesting, but run a bit too gray for our tastes.

Friends are having a house built in the hills north of Phoenix, but the closest airport is a 30-mile drive down the road to Deer Valley.  Plus, too close to the dissolving border for our comfort.  That ACLU 100-mile “Constitution Free Zone” is worrisome. 

You’re welcome to toss ideas in the hat.  As interesting as the Texas Outback is, being out west again has a certain calling to it.  So if you have ideas, please send ‘em along.

Drone Regulation

I keep forgetting to mention that the FAA is working toward regulation of those increasingly popular drones we’ve been reading so much about:

The FAA proposed a framework of regulations that would allow routine use of certain small unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) in today’s aviation system, while maintaining flexibility to accommodate future technological innovations. The FAA’s proposal offers safety rules for small UAS (under 55 pounds) conducting non-recreational operations. The rule would limit flights to daylight and visual-line-of-sight operations. It also addresses height restrictions, operator certification, optional use of a visual observer, aircraft registration and marking, and operational limits.
            The proposed rule also includes extensive discussion of the possibility of an additional, more flexible framework for “micro” UAS under 4.4 pounds. The public will have until April 24, 2015, to comment on the proposed regulation in the Federal Register, which can be found at http://www.regulations.gov/#!docketDetail;D=FAA-2015-0150. For more information and links on the proposed rule, see the FAA’s press release page at www.faa.gov/news/press_releases/.

As a pilot, I’m not very happy with the “micro UAS category, since even with a 1/4” thick windshield, I’m pretty sure 4.4 pounds hit at 80-miles an hour would go through it.

Not that I should worry:  The FAA hasn’t been able to go with a driver’s license in place of a third class medical – and that issue has been around for at least 10-years.  No reason they shouldn’t study this decision until it become irrelevant, as well.

Reminds me of the old saying “I’m from the government and I’m here to help…”

Speaking of Which (Lighter side of things)

Grady up at the www.nostracodeus.com project found this one circulating out on the web as an email headlines “Gas Bill”:

A man living in Kandos (near Mudgee in NSW Australia) received a bill for his as yet unused gas line stating that he owed $0.00.

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What Would You Do If You Won the Lottery?

Yes, I mean seriously. No, neither Elaine or I have ever won anything larger than $65 in the weekly lottery tickets we’ve bought over the years, but then again, lottery tickets are properly called “taxes on the poor” or “tax the statistically inclined.” Still, there are times… But the real reason to use “Winning the Lotto” as a financial thinking tool is that it forces you to look realistically at all the investment options out there. And that, I believe, is a very worthwhile thing to do at least once a month.