Coping: Red Dog’s Results and CRD’s

A fair question to ask, straight off the bat, is “Who’s the headless dude with the ball and shorts and has George lost his mind?”

That fellow happens to be a reader whose moniker is Red Dog and he sent in a marvelous discussion of how he’s been doing that one major Chemistry Experiment in life (changing our eating, and thus our appearance and fitness) and it’s a dandy first-hand report.  I removed his head because that would make him personally identifiable, and our massive legal department wouldn’t hear of it without a release and I didn’t think to do that Friday…such is life.

(As to the second part of the question – Has I lost my mind? – the answer should be self-evident.)

Here’s his report:

George you recently asked about thoughts on living locations and weight loss.  For weight loss I suggest you look at Tim Ferriss’s book, The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman Tim believes in PAGG (see chart below) eating beans for breakfast, and chilling your core body temp once a day.  I take cold showers in the summer.  Look at the pictures.  I went from 178 to 153.  

As to living location.  My requirements are I need a place for clean fresh flowing water, where it rains enough for growing veggies, inexpensive land for a runway, land to create a self sustainable life style.  I looked at a map of the US and created a triangle from:

Nashville TN, to Huntsville AL, to the Pickwith dam in SW TN.  I would buy 50 to 100 acres within that triangle.  

I also use Apple Cider based hot sauce on my beans in the morning.  

Policosanol	117	23 mg day.  Fat Loss & cholesterol lowering.
Alpha Lipoic Acid	117	Liver Disease.  Store Carbs in your muscles or Liver, Not Fat cells.
Green Tea	118	EGCG.  Epigallocatechin Gallate:  Inhibits storage of carbs as body fat.  Kills fat cells.  Suggest decaffeinated green tea extract pills.  Mega Green Tea Extract, decaffeinated, 725 mg.
Garlic	119	High doses of Allicin.  Inhibit Fat regain.  Allicin 6000 garlic
		www.fourHourBody.com
Beans	83	Epazote from Mexican groceries.  Lentils.  Soak beans overnight.
Whole Grains	91	Whole Grains or Oats, NO.
BreakFast	95	Eat within 30 minutes of getting up.
	105	Lime or Lemon Juice.  P
	106	Air squats before eating, After eating.
Fermented	111	Sauerkraut & Kimchee.
Cooling Body	129	Ice pack on back of neck in evenings.  Swim in cool water.
	144	Cinnamon good lowers glucose levels.  In coffee?
	146	Eat slower.  At least 30 minutes.
	164	Kettleball swing.
	167	Flying Dog & 2 legged glute.
	172	Kettleball swing from Home Depo.
	176	Back ball myotatic crunch

“Red Dog”t

Just have one more try — it’s dead easy to die,
It’s the keeping-on-living that’s hard.

I have to say, I am totally impressed.  The reader is not a young fellow (I forgot to ask his age, but I’m sure he’ll send that along) but his results lead to all kinds of interesting thoughts in the arena of life extension.

Policosanol was a new one on me, so you can Wiki it – though there is more on the Wikipedia site…

Policosanol^{[pronunciation?]} (or polycosanol) is the generic term for a natural mixture of long chain alcohols extracted from plant waxes. It is used as a nutritional supplement intended to lower LDL cholesterol (“bad” cholesterol) and increase HDL cholesterol (“good” or “healthy” cholesterol) and to help prevent atherosclerosis, though some studies have raised questions about the effectiveness of policosanol.

A second opinion from WedMD is here and when you’re researching, always be sure to check their side effects and cautions tab.  NOW Foods Policosanol 20mg Vcaps will run you about $16-bucks at Amazon.

What we’re really dealing with here are two issues:  One is the effect of weight on life extension while the other is the effect of weight on quality of life.

Looks to me like Red Dog is at about an ideal weight.  What’s more, he’s got the elements going here that will likely lead to an optimally long life.  Much thinner, though, and then the risks come back up.

A Wikipedia entry on the effect of being too lean from calorie restriction is worth some study:

Malnutrition may result in serious deleterious effects, as it has been shown in the Minnesota Starvation Experiment.^[8] This study was conducted during World War II on a group of lean men, who restricted their calorie intake by 45% for 6 months, and composed roughly 90% of their diet with carbohydrates.^[8] As expected, this malnutrition resulted in many positive metabolic adaptations (e.g. decreased body fat, blood pressure, improved lipid profile, low serum T3 concentration, and decreased resting heart rate and whole-body resting energy expenditure), but also caused a wide range of negative effects, such as anemia, lower extremity edema, muscle wasting, weakness, neurological deficits, dizziness, irritability, lethargy, and depression.^[8]

§Musculoskeletal losses[edit]

Short-term studies in humans report loss of muscle mass and strength and reduced bone mineral density.^[9]

The authors of a 2007 review of the CR literature warned that “[i]t is possible that even moderate calorie restriction may be harmful in specific patient populations, such as lean persons who have minimal amounts of body fat.”^[10]

§Low BMI, high mortality[edit]

CR diets typically lead to reduced body weight, yet reduced weight can come from other causes and is not in itself necessarily healthy. In some studies, low body weight has been associated with increased mortality, particularly in late middle-aged or elderly subjects. Low body weight in the elderly can be caused by pathological conditions associated with aging and predisposing to higher mortality (such as cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder, or depression) or of the cachexia (wasting syndrome) and sarcopenia (loss of muscle mass, structure, and function).^[11] One of the more famous of such studies linked a body mass index (BMI) lower than 18 in women with increased mortality from noncancer, non?cardiovascular disease causes.^[12] The authors attempted to adjust for confounding factors (cigarette smoking, failure to exclude pre-existing disease); others argued that the adjustments were inadequate.^[13]

“epidemiologists from the ACS (American Cancer Society), American Heart Association, Harvard School of Public Health, and other organizations raised specific methodologic questions about the recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) study and presented analyses of other data sets. The main concern … is that it did not adequately account for weight loss from serious illnesses such as cancer and heart disease … [and] failed to account adequately for the effect of smoking on weight … As a result, the Flegal study underestimated the risks from obesity and overestimated the risks of leanness.”^[14]

Such epidemiological studies of body weight are not about CR as used in anti-aging studies; they are not about caloric intake to begin with, as body weight is influenced by many factors other than energy intake. Moreover, “the quality of the diets consumed by the low-BMI individuals are difficult to assess, and may lack nutrients important to longevity.”^[3] Typical low-calorie diets rarely provide the high nutrient intakes that are a necessary feature of an anti-aging calorie restriction diet.^[15][16][17] As well, “The lower-weight individuals in the studies are not CR because their caloric intake reflects their individual ad libitum set-points, and not a reduction from that set-point.”

Seems to me Red Dog has it just right: From the actuarial tables, one can quickly figure out the ideal weight.  And while it’s true that weight loss from malnutrition may be ad dangerous – even more so – than “normal weight” the logic is that if one has lean BMI, then many organs will be doing a lot less work (such as the heart), especially when combined with the other recommendations in Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman.

Some of the keys to life extension seem to be really getting optimal nutrition, as opposed to fat. 

Toward that end, the medical community periodically attacks the vitamin and supplement industry.  The reason is obvious:  Healthy people don’t consume as much medical care.

And while some big names have been attached to such studies, I’d point you to the Life Extension Foundation’s excellent article on how the “attack the vitamins” game is played, citing flawed research and grievous errors. 

In a world becoming ever-more chaotic, I sometimes think the planet would be better off in many regards, dropping such causes as registering handguns and hugging trees.

Instead if would make more sense, at least to Ures truly, to register statisticians.

—

Encouraged by Red’s results, my quest for lost poundage continues:  Down 12-pounds now since our cruising vacation, mainly from exercise, elimination of wheat, addition to the apple cider vinegar pills, and general carb reduction.  In their place has been multiple heads of cabbage which – once you get used to it – ain’t so bad.

Sunday afternoon,, Elaine and I did “Dueling Meatloafs.”  At 121 pounds, she can eat just about anything so she doesn’t feel bad about using bread crumbs.

At some multiple of that,  and with a flight physical on the horizon, my meatloaf was made the old-school Danish way – with oatmeal instead.  Last time at the doc’s office for a blood draw they were talking about drilling rights, so LDL/HDLs have become somewhat more important to me.

Hopefully, the (insane but don’t get-me-started-on-it) change to Daylight time will have Elaine sleeping in a bit this morning.  There wasn’t much leftovers of mine…but hers looks pretty good and maybe before she gets up, a little of hers will “evaporate.”

Funny how our fridge works, sometimes.

My son’s “Rough Landing”

George  II took the weekend (and a couple of vacation days) off to continue his quest to skydiving every designated jump zone in America.  I think he figures that once he does this (and has his GoPro rolling, he’ll be able to become the Warren Miller of skydiving.

Miller, if the coffee hasn’t kicked in, is the dude who directed all those impossibly cool videos of people skiing down impossibly steep mountains among amazingly cool jumps, moguls, and avalanches.

So I get a note (via FB) from GU (the Deuce) and he says “Had a Bit of a Rough Landing Saturday but at 110% OK.”

WTF?

I have no concept of what a “rough landing” is in skydiving, except that as a concerned parent you just know how your mind leaps to conclusions.

The explanation (so far)?

“To a skydiver, no explanation is necessary.  To a non-skydiving, no explanation is possible.”

Yeah?  Well:  George call your father to discuss.  Statistically, gravity gets us all in the end, so why push it past an occasional Lazy 8?

ReiningIn HOA’s

A note making the rounds in ham radio circles is worth passing on…

IMMEDIATE ACTION NECESSARY!!!
The Texas Business & Industry Committee will meet Tuesday, March 10,
2015, at  2:00 PM, in Room E2.016 to consider the ARRL sponsored House
Bill HB 939.
HB 939 requires that HOAs/Homeowner Associations permit Hams & other
Texans to install standby electric generators. This bill is important
as it is the third in a series of four bills which, we hope, will end
with amateur radio operators obtaining permission to install antennas
at their residences in Home Owners Associations (HOA’s).
HB 939 was a bill drafted by and introduced by the ARRL West Gulf
Division — David Woolweaver K5RAV, Director and John Robert Stratton
N5AUS, Vice Director.
HB 939 is sponsored — at the request of the ARRL West Gulf Division
— by Rep. Rene Oliviera (Harlingen), Rep. Tony Dale (Cedar Park) and
Rep. Matt Schaefer (Tyler).
We need you to FAX or CALL — if you can’t fax — each of the
Committee members listed before Tuesday, March 10, 2015 at 2:00 pm. Do
not email – we have learned that due to the volume of emails
received, Legislators do not timely read emails.
The ONLY effective contact methods are either faxes or telephone
calls.

So, if you’re a ham, live in Texas, and would like to help keep amateur radio accessible to people who live in HOA’s, please contact your legislative representatives on this one. 

Monday Morning Mental Exercise

OK, What could Matryoshka Dolls, those nested things off to the right, have to do with mental exercise?  A second cup consideration…

I happened to catch the historical article on a Civil War-era oval frame mill up in Massachusetts in the latest Woodworker’s Journal (produced by Rockler Press, which I assume operates the definitive crack-house for us woodworking tool sluts over at www.rockler.com).

The mill is unique in that it has specialized for over 150-years in the making of elliptical turnings, such as elliptical picture frames, that the article notes hang all over the world.

And that put me in the mood to  begin thinking about how to conjure up an elliptical-faceplate lathe.

No, I don’t have any particular use for such a masterpiece of vibration and design, but by the description, the mechanism is probably using a back-and-forth device (such as is used in the metal shaper, if you happened to build the late  ToolGod David Gingery’s home-built shaping machine).

That back-and-forth platform would then run a standard lathe faceplate (cut into an ellipse, of course) that would present an even work surface traveling an elliptical path.

But here’s the really fun part:  How long would it take you to come up with a graceful way to make an elliptical lathe?

There’s a book that can help with this kind of problem.  And, if you’re planning to “recover” the world (less traffic jams) in a post-apocalyptic world, you’ll need it, so add to your ultimate Prepper library the 507 Mechanical Movements: Mechanisms and Devices (Dover Science Books).

Besides giving you some keen insights into how balance wheels and other mechanical speed regulators work (like those iron-ball rotating whizzies on steam engines), this book does something else that’s really cool:  It helps you evolve your ability to visualize. Mind of a clockmaker.

This is all somehow related to what we began with this morning:  Aging and how to fight it.

A friend of mine from eons back had a sign on her wall that read: “We’re always the same age on the inside.”

Sounds great, doesn’t it?  But it’s not true, of course.

People do slow down as they age and there’s probably a couple of reasons for it; one benign, the other less so.

The benign reason is that our “wet computer” upstairs is not indexed as gracefully as an SQL database.  Our indexing systems are extremely complex because that’s what makes us intelligent.

In SQL, you might index only a couple of classes (say date and city) when looking something up.

Real intelligence is a much more complicated look-up task.  We not only look up the hard dates and cities, but we add fuzziness to the edges (like might be a city, but could be smaller, like a town) and we can fuzz a data-range search by adding fuzzy recall/hunching as to another class (or index) such as time of day.

That’s the challenge of artificial intelligence, right there in a nutshell: our own unique way of fuzzing our indices to vaguely include other search parameters (parms for short) and associated weightings of results for best fit. 

I assume you have gotten deeply enough into A.I. (*artificial intelligence) to understand it’s more than neural networks…it’s fuzzing of multiple indices, right?  And how you recognize something I refer to as adjacency issues.

The simple bottom line (from the ramble) is that in order to keep brain functioning at peak, not only do you have to resolve indexing strategies for recall (while keeping adjacency functioning) while continuing to optimize most used information.

The not-so benign aspect of aging is oxidation, lack of use, and effects of drugs, nutrition, genetics and GMOs  via such channels as amyloidal plaques (*such as Alzheimer’s).

So the best way to keep the personal processor at peak performance is to  use it, feed it carefully, and one of the best ways to do that (IMHO) is to take an article like the working Civil War-era mill and ask “How’d they build an elliptical lathe back then?”

On the AI front:  A striking comparison to God, who supposedly “created Man in His Own image” so, too, we seem to be creating A.I. in Our Own image.

Thus, the Matryoshka Doll of it all, is both intriguing and revealing.

Peoplenomics this week uses this as a kind of starting point, but moves into much deeper waters with “Top 40:  The Basis of Learned-Algorithmic Social Control?”

Write when you break-even…

George   george@ure.net