Paleolithic versus Neolithic

I’ve been thinking about the Paleo diet and how it makes a lot of sense. Hunter gatherers appear to have been a very healthy bunch of people. All that fresh meat and lots of exercise has got to be good for you. On the other side were the Neolithics building their little hamlets and farms, relying on staple products like grains for their main source of food. But their health deteriorated , their teeth fell out and their bones ached.

In the forest were the noble savages still living the same life they had for a million years. They were close to nature, part of nature, noble, glorious savages. They started with their primitive stone tools to be the dominant predator and a million years later they had progressed to slightly sharper stone tools. A million years and that was all they came up with! Yes, they were thick as two short planks.

Then emerged the neoliths, unhealthy maybe, a little crazy maybe, but smart, very smart. In a few thousand years they progressed from stone tools to nuclear power stations. They became the supreme predator. They transcended the animal condition. Is it possible that diet had something to do with it?

Studies have indicated that gluten may have a part to play in schizophrenia and bi-polar disorder. Great leaders and innovators have often been diagnosed with these conditions. Could this be a happy coincidence? Agriculture produced gluten which produced schizophrenia which produced innovation and development.

Awesome!

LOL

More on Alcohol Consumption

Some time ago I suggested that up to a half bottle of red wine a day was a safe dose of alcohol and would have a therapeutic effect. This is of course a maximum and I would suggest that you should avoid ever drinking more than half a bottle in any one day. Different people will have different bodies and so some may be able to drink more and some less. The other day I had two beers and then a half bottle of red. This was after a fairly long period of drinking red wine every day. I began to notice that I was pouring myself a glass earlier in the day and even hiding my glass if I heard my wife approaching the room. Clearly I don’t want to be someone who is seen to be drinking constantly. My face seems to be looking a little red too and I worry about the state of my liver. It is also quite expensive.

I haven’t had any alcohol now for six days as I write this and I am feeling very healthy although I know that this feeling will pass soon and the opposite will happen. If I don’t drink anything the night before I always never regret this fact which is something to think about however the key to health with alcohol is moderation not abstinence. A thing that concerns me and many studies support it and that is the longest living people tend to drink some alcohol so I wont give up altogether - that would be madness. So what to do? I’ve decided to restrict consumption to no more that a quarter of a bottle a day as a sort of medicinal dose and have days where nothing is imbibed at all.

I have also noticed that over the past six days my weight has dropped back to just over 70kg whereas it was edging up to close to 72kg. Maybe wine drinking is fattening after all. A half bottle everyday is around 400 calories which is a significant amount. Maybe at night while sleeping the body burns alcohol and stores fat. Alcohol needs to be burned off first so while the body is doing that it is doing nothing else.

You know the body soon bounces back to vibrant health if it is looked after. You notice this in animals that are brought to the shelter in a very poor state of health. After a few days of good food and tender loving care their coats return to being shiny and their energy returns. It is the same for humans – the body is all geared up to return to vibrant health almost at the moment you start looking after it. In some ways this is a bad thing as people tend to abuse their bodies knowing that it is very resilient – it is amazing what the human body can put up with. For instance it will take a prolonged period of alcohol abuse but after a while you will begin to notice it. As you age the bounce back will become less efficient and constant irritation of the body will eventually result in a fatal malady.

Controversial Discussions

Yesterday I was talking to a colleague about my lunch. I didn’t start the conversation, he did, as I looked to be eating a particularly healthy lunch and my dietary habits are often the subject of discussion. My lunch consisted of canned tuna, boiled sweet potato (kumara), butter and two boiled eggs. Now this is quite a lot for me but I am trying to overeat a little in an effort to build a bit more muscle mass. He started going on about how it is bad to mix certain types of foods like it is bad to mix protein and carbohydrate in the same meal as different enzymes are used to digest these things. It suddenly occurred to me how annoying it is to have someone lecture you on food choices, which incidentally, is something I do to other people all the time.

Time for a double take I think. Now diet is probably the most controversial subject known to man. If you can find an argument in support of something you can always find an argument against it. Most diets could be described as fads. Even Paleo, which you would think, is hard to bitterly criticize as it is only eating natural foods, has its opponents. Also what is good for one person may not be good for another. There is even a bit of a movement now for the “eat everything diet” which could actually work for some people. At another extreme I read about how humans, as they were largely scavengers exploiting the kills of large predators, ate mostly raw meat that was slightly off and that is what we should feast on now – rotten raw meat.

Exercise too is constantly being criticized. Cardio is good then it is bad. Lifting weights is great then maybe not as you could go blind and so on. Exercise is useless for making you functionally stronger. Body builders are worse at doing everyday tasks and long distance runners damage their bodies.

So what to do? First off I think I will me much less vocal in my criticism of other people’s food choices. I am a student and not a teacher. I’m going to concentrate on what works for me and adapt my strategies accordingly. The focus has to be on healthy longevity and this blog is simply a log of my personal journey in pursuit of this goal.

Bruce Lee

Bruce Lee would at first glance appear to be an ideal candidate for the Early Celebrity Demise File except for the fact that he achieved immortality status as the world’s greatest martial arts master. Because of this I consider him to have been a Nietzschean superman .

While he died young and the cause of his death is still disputed and mythologized he is in my pantheon of total heroes. Bruce Lee is now an immortal which is the ultimate in active survival. The more mundane Active Survivalist probably shouldn’t follow Lee’s lifestyle to the letter however we can learn some things from his life and teaching.

Lee had an impressive body with almost zero body fat. He achieved this by eating a fairly standard diet that had a reasonable amount of carbohydrate and not large quantities of meat. “Lee believed in staying away from foods with empty caloric content and little nutritive value and found it especially helpful to avoid refined sugars, excessive fats, fried food and alcohol.” He considered the Western diet to have too much protein and too much fat. I think that drinking a little red wine would probably have done him some good though and maybe he would be alive today if he had done that. He was also known to eat egg shells which I would caution against – you could get the same benefit from eating canned fish with the bones. But to achieve a body like Lee’s you need:

"a lifetime of sacrifice, denial at the dinner table and tremendous dedication at the gym"

I’d say that Lee had phenomenal will power. Go here and here for some more reading.

Some Bruce Lee quotes gathered from GrumpyChimp:

"Knowing is not enough, we must apply. Willing is not enough, we must do."

"a man can be strong, but if he cannot use that strength quickly, he is not powerful".

"A goal is not always meant to be reached, it often serves simply as something to aim at."

"As you think, so shall you become."

"By adopting a certain physical posture, a resonant chord is struck in spirit."

"The less effort, the faster and more powerful you will be."

"Use only that which works, and take it from any place you find it."

"Using no way as way, having no limitation as limitation."

And my personal favourite in Lee’s own voice:

Body Under Construction

My three year project now has only nine months to go. Progress has been good but slower than I expected. I haven’t managed to put on as much muscle weight as I would have liked. My weight has remained remarkably stable at between 70 and 71kg during the time that I have been controlling what I eat and only drifted up from that on two occasions when I lapsed. Both lapses were easily corrected but I seem to be unable to get below the 70KG barrier - BMI 22.4.

In the last nine months I am going to concentrate on body building. I want to lose a bit more fat and build up a bit more muscle. Not that I have much fat to lose but it is a bit of a dream of mine to be able to see the veins on top of the abdominal muscles.

So in order to build muscle I am going to have to eat more food however in order to lose fat I am going to have to eat the right foods and be much more disciplined about it. This means avoiding breads and sugars and focusing on the Paleo foods but eating them in much larger quantities. I reckon that I should not let myself become hungry and if I do I should eat meat or starchy vegetables with butter.

Exercise, particularly the right type of exercise, is going to be all important. Massive cardio is going to be avoided unless it is in response to a bout of massive carbo eating. Upper body exercises are going to be the main focus with short and intense cardio exercises. It will be necessary to slowly increase the weights that I use and focus on and improve my technique to avoid injury at all cost. An increase in the tempo of exercise always results in some damage for me so I am going to have to proceed with great caution, always concentrating on good technique and never exercising in a rush or when I have some, more pressing need, to attend to. This last point is important as I find that if you attempt to do your routine at a time when you feel a little guilty about it the likelihood of injury is much greater. You will tend to rush it or just not be in the right frame of mind and body to do it well – better to not do it at all.

So, time to get constructing and achieve the project goal of a fitter, stronger, better looking body at 50 than I had at 25.

Killer Tomatoes

My grandmother was 97 when she died and she died while sitting in a chair watching TV at her home. Earlier in the day she had gone for a helicopter ride. I don’t remember her ever spending a day in hospital except for giving birth to her ten children.

My colleague told me the other day that he once ate a feijoa and soon after fell to the ground, unconscious.

What is the relationship between these two stories?

We all used to dread a little bit going to my grandparents house as they would always try and feed us the most over-cooked foods and concocted meals from whatever was left over in the fridge and you never where sure how long it had been there. Yet they never seemed to get sick. Vegetables were always cooked thoroughly . It was a time when people were starting to eat everything raw or only lightly steamed even going so far as to eat raw mushrooms. Would my grandmother have lived longer if she ate more salads? I don’t think so.

All fruits and vegetables contain natural toxins and these toxins are mostly neutralized by cooking. The more cooking the better. Cooking also kills bugs and bacteria, the sort of thing likely to be found on mushrooms that grow in dark dirty places. People think they can wash vegetables and that this will be good enough but tests show even thorough washing is ineffective. Lettuce leaves simply cannot be washed to a point where they are safe to eat and this goes for all raw food especially mushrooms. As well as bugs there are also man made pesticides and herbicides to contend with. Yet long before man came along nature had already developed its own insecticides and even herbicides. It makes sense that the skins of fruit, leaves and bark have developed defences against predation. The main attackers are insects and fungus and because plants cannot physically fight back they have developed static defences by using toxins, hard shells and thorns to dissuade predation. Believe it or not it is mostly not in the best interests of a plant to be eaten and so evolution has provided ways to make it more difficult.

Some good has come of this and many of our medicines are derived from plant sources. This has been a happy coincidence, so often seen in evolution, where something has been developed for a specific purpose like poisoning or repelling insects and has later turned out to be a good drug for the treatment of human maladies. Yet while medicines are a good thing the healthy body shouldn’t take medicine if it doesn’t need to. Peeling, soaking, fermenting and cooking of vegetables has long been known to render it edible. Some things are downright poisonous if prepared in the wrong way and I contend that this is the case for most vegetable matter. Perhaps some things are ok, like nuts that defend themselves with hard outer shells or fruits that want their seeds to be dispersed by mammals. In general it is the skin of the fruit that is poisonous and this makes sense as this is the thing that was developed to protect the seeds and the food that surrounds the seeds.

So my colleague fell down after eating the feijoa because he ate the flesh close to he skin and he was particularly susceptible to the Methyl Benzoate that feijoa skin contains. My grandmother living almost a century was possibly partly due to thorough sterilizing and detoxifying of plant food – it certainly didn’t do any harm.

Active Dental Survival

I’ve been meaning to do a post about dental health for some time now. It’s a subject that had been weighing on my mind because I hadn’t had a check up in a few years and the other day a filling from a molar fell out along with a piece of tooth. I also noticed that I started to have dental dreams so my sub-conscious was worrying about it too. This is my usual, cowardly modus operandi – wait for a dental emergency and then drag myself to the dentist. This is not what I would call Dental Active Survival at all. The Active Survivalist should go to the dentist once a year for a check up and a professional clean. After all you’re going to need those teeth for the next hundred years or so.

Amazingly I managed to get the tooth fixed up without needing to get it crowned and the rest of my teeth were fine. The most worrying thing about my teeth was some side wear of the enamel caused by over-enthusiastic brushing. I must say modern dentistry is marvellous with highly effective and painless anaesthetics and super rapid drilling. There is no excuse not to go to the dentist regularly. (I always think like this after a successful foray to the dental centre)

I’ve always thought that the enamel on teeth, once gone, was gone forever. However this may not be true. Head over to Whole Health Source for a discussion on diet and reversing tooth decay. I highly recommennd Stephen's blog to anyone interested in diet. It appears that teeth can, to a certain extent, heal themselves and this healing can be greatly assisted by a good diet. The main culprit for tooth decay may not be refined sugars but the starches found in gooey breads and cakes. These tend to stick to your teeth and are perfect food for bacteria. Many people have found that once they started eating a Paleo type of diet their teeth required less brushing and plaque build up was minimal to non existent. I noticed that the sonic cleaning or whatever it is the Dentist just gave me was over and done with very quickly this time whereas last time it was quite painful and lengthy.

If teeth can heal themselves, and it makes sense that they do, it would be very worthwhile to adopt a diet that assists this. Especially if it results in a leaner, healthier body as well. I’m going to make more bone broths and am even more determined now to cut bread out of my diet completely. Let’s see if I can heal up that wear on the side of my teeth. I'll keep you posted.

Starving Fat People

My sister once claimed that she still put on weight even if she ate only 300 calories a day. On the face of it this claims seems absurd as a body generally needs around 80 calories an hour just for base metabolism burn.

However lately I have been thinking about this and pondering if inside every obese person is a skinny person. You would think that with a high energy input and constant weight lifting exercise achieved by just standing up and walking around that a fat person stripped of their fat would be a fine example of a fit person. Yet this is generally not the case. It might be with a young person but most obese people huff and wheeze when doing any physical activity and they look to be in poor health with poor skin etc.

Maybe an obese person is in some way damaged. Instead of food entering their system to be used for energy it is instead stored as fat leaving the body deprived of energy and consequently weak and feeble. Something has happened to the mechanism that controls weight. Perhaps the onslaught of a massive ingestion of sugars over years has broken the metabolism. What is known as metabolic syndrome.

For a fit and healthy person it should be extremely hard to gain weight. I think such a person who regularly over-eats meat, vegetables, root starches and occasional fruit will never become obese. The body has its own mechanisms for governing weight and when fed a diet of natural food the appetite will be suppressed at the right time, metabolism will increase or energy will simply be expelled. That’s with a healthy functioning metabolism. You will notice that animals in their natural habitat respond to a surplus of food not by becoming obese but by increasing in numbers. You never see obese wild animals.

So fat people could indeed be starving. Years of feeding themselves energy rich yet nutrient poor food has over loaded their systems to such an extent that even if they eat healthy food only they may still find it difficult to lose weight. Food is not metabolised correctly and the energy is stored as fat and the system responds by increasing appetite even if they over eat. The starving person inside all that blubber really does need more food because it is being diverted to the fat cells and not being released when needed. Maybe it has never had any practise at being released because the body has experienced an energy surplus for every day of its life. Dieting could possibly exacerbate the situation by putting an already damaged body into starvation mode and so holding onto even more energy and lowering metabolism. There is some sense to having one day a week where you consciously over eat although preferably healthy food – maybe heaps of starchy vegetables with butter.

The breakdown of the metabolism may also be a consequence of aging. Most people seem to gain weight as they age even if they appear to eat less than they did when they were younger. I noticed in myself that I only started to gain weight rapidly when I reached 40. Before that I could munch on chocolate, bread and cake and stay stable but now my weight shoots up as soon as I fall off the wagon.

So spare a thought for the sad plight of the starving fat person.

Attack on Three Fronts

I have devised the perfect weight loss and fitness plan. After two years of study and experimentation I am now pretty certain that this approach will work well for anyone.

For success an unrelenting and uncompromising commitment to the program will need to be undertaken. The plan incorporates three distinct methods into a coordinated approach and takes head on the battle to build a lean and strong body.

The three disciplines are:

HIIT – High Intensity Interval Training
IF - Intermittent Fasting
Paleo – Eat only natural unprocessed foods that stone age man had access to.

Do all three at once and you will have amazing results. Simple eh?

The Ideal Active Survivalist Restaurant

Most restaurants care little about the calorie count and nutritional content of the meals that they serve up to customers. Salt and sugar is used excessively to enhance taste and many ingredients are sourced from the cheapest providers and are of unknown quality. Who knows what items have expired and how much of the meal accidently dropped on the floor before it arrived at your table? Or what state of health is the chef in and what hygiene care is taken out back in the kitchen? Who knows? We all know that some real horror stories could be told.

There is one restaurant that is better in this regard than all the rest and that is Chinese Hot Pot or what is sometimes referred to as Steam Boat. At these restaurants you are presented with a selection of fresh vegetables and meats and other dainties that you can take back to your table and cook in boiling water. You can eat your fill of meat, seafood and vegetables and know that it has been cooked well and that the ingredients are of good quality. You can inspect the raw meat and the vegetables for freshness and quality. There is no hidden sugar and salt. To make it a lot more appetizing the boiling water is spiced up and there are delicious sesame sauces that could have hidden horrors but overall I think this is a perfect restaurant choice for the Active Survivalist.

I recommend breaking an intermittent fast with a visit to one of these restaurants as you arrive with a good appetite and it is pretty cheap too at less than twenty bucks a person.

Longevity and the Cruelty of Nature

Methuselah
(Della Francesca ca. 1550)



In a post below I mention that Nature can be cruel although describing Nature in this way is an anthropomorphism. Of course Nature like God isn’t a sentient being so ascribing such qualities to it is more poetic than actual. What is more correct is to say that Nature appears to be cruel. One of these cruel things is the way the body just seems to give up and start falling to bits as the years pass by until we are left with a barely functioning, spotty, wrinkled old sack of bones in place of the magnificent creature we once were.

The truth is Nature just doesn’t really care about you once you could theoretically be a great grand parent which is around 45 to 50. Once this age is reached the downward spiral to decay and destruction appears to be swift. A man in his forties is still in his prime and possibly into his fifties but once the sixties are reached he could be justifiably referred to as an old man. Yet ‘not caring’ is quite different to deliberate cruelty. If Nature doesn’t care if you live or die then you might as well live – makes no difference to nature. We are not deliberately programmed to die in the way that we are programmed to reproduce. We have been selected to reproduce but we are not necessarily selected to age and die, it just happens because we are neglected, not cared about.

This means that Nature doesn’t care if we fiddle with things and drink from the fountain of youth. Humans can change things, make things better for themselves. We have the potential to live far longer than we do.

Seven Minutes a Week!

Seven minutes a week of intense exercise is all you need apparently to maintain a healthy body. This makes a lot of sense to me. When man became an agricultural animal his decline in health probably came about in part due to an increase in aerobic activity. Tilling the ground, bending over all day pulling weeds and threshing of grains was akin to endless jogging and the result was often worn out bodies before their time.

Now a new study has revealed:

Scientists at Heriot-Watt University have found that short, intensive periods of exercise – involving as little as seven minutes per week – can significantly reduce the chances of contracting diabetes.

What our study shows is that by doing the right type of training, intensive for very short periods, it is plausible for young, and most probably middle aged, adults to reduce their future risk for developing diabetes without spending 5-6 hours each week involved in exercise programs.

This is the sort of exercise that hunter gatherers over hundreds of thousands of years had. Long periods of stalking with the occasional, yet fairly regular, burst of intense exercise from either chasing game down or fleeing an enraged cave bear.

This seven minutes of exercise needs to be intense. The sort of exercise that leaves your heart pounding, your lungs gasping for breath and that unpleasant feeling of queasiness while you get your breath back.

I’ve changed my exercise program to this sort of approach. Now you can’t really do this sort of exercise without a little lead up and a little light exercise between the 30 second bursts of intense activity so total exercise time is still far more than seven minutes per week yet the actual total duration of intense exercise is probably around this mark . What I am doing is 25 press ups, 75 Ab King Pro, 25 press ups, 30 second sprint up a hill, walk for 2 minutes, jog for three minutes, sprint for 30 seconds up a hill and then repeat it all and finally finish with 25 press ups, 75 Ab King Pro and another 25 press ups. Takes about twenty to thirty minutes and has about 2 minutes of really intense exercise. I’ll try and do this at least every second day.

Nietzsche Quote for Today

"He who considers more deeply knows that, whatever his acts and judgments may be, he is always wrong."

Human All Too Human - Nietzsche

Just to temper my previous ramblings.

The Truth

I was brought up as a Christadelphian which is an obscure protestant Christian cult. For the most part they are decent folk with ideas that aren’t too whacky – they don’t believe in actual demons or hell for instance. These words are more labels for concepts that are anti the good. They do believe in God and heaven which is interesting as it appears that they are half way there. Satan has become a term for all that is evil, what could be described as our worst aspirations so why can’t God be a term for our highest aspirations? God exists as a concept. The Christadelphians always referred to their beliefs as “the Truth” as if by saying this it made it so. People were either “in the truth” or they were not. To be “in the truth” you needed to be a baptized member of the cult. Once you were baptized there was no turning back and the consequence of denying “the Truth” were dire indeed. I never got baptized so I get a certain respect as a militant atheist who is quite cold to “the Truth” in contrast to those namby-pamby agnostics.

So what is the Truth? - as Pontius Pilate once said.

Well, I have some answers. I have identified three fundamental truths. If you embrace these three fundamental truths you can’t go too far wrong:

1. God is the label we give to our highest aspirations.
2. The Moment Recurs Eternally
3. The Creator is Mindless

So, I have explained number one above. God only makes sense when you think of him in this way. This is why he never directly answers your prayers or saves people. How can a concept save anyone directly? A concept cannot literally reach out of the sky and pluck someone off a sinking ship for instance. A concept can inspire someone or give them hope but it can never be a sentient being.

I have discussed number two of course and consider this to be my core belief. We are always in the moment yet the moment passes quickly to stay forever unchanged and unchangeable, locked in time and space. Consider carefully what you do for it cannot be undone.

Number three I haven’t touched on yet I clearly remember the day when it struck me like a bright flash of light. It always seemed vaguely absurd that God would be the great architect and builder of the Universe. As if he had a big office where he drew up designs and then made things. Those first ideas must have been the hardest, how do you create a Universe out of nothing? How do you get that first idea? And then why do things follow the same patterns? If you can create anything then why aren’t life-forms more weird and wonderful? Why is there always an easily discernable heritage in all things living? The truth is that to be truly creative and original it is essential to have no mind. Without a mind you have no preconceptions and no inhibitions. Mindlessness is unthinking. This is why nature can be so cruel because mindlessness has no conscience and no remorse. Human intelligence merely observes the world and copies it, sometimes in the imagination and sometimes for real. Nature does this too. Constantly copying, mutating and selecting. Mutation is the true creator but it is a very inefficient one making thousands of bad things before it gets it right. And what is right now may not be right for tomorrow. Selection mechanisms work with replication and mutation to create – there can be no other way but the mindless and accidental way.

I am a Lab Rat III

OK so I went and did it, I took the nicotine dose. I was spending the morning doing some physical computer installation work and thought now would be a good time to do the experiment. I had eaten nothing that day and worked out in the early morning.

The gum tastes quite spicy, quite pleasant. The nicotine didn’t take too long to have an effect. I tried not to chew it too quickly, keeping it lodged in my teeth for as long as possible as I worked. Nicotine is definitely quite a powerful drug. The effect was like smoking five camels one after the other and inhaling the smoke deep into your lungs. I recall now that I was never a deep inhaler of cigarette smoke yet with the gum you cannot really control the effect except by reducing the amount you chew. I did buy the extra strength ones which was probably a mistake and the next time I try it I might just have a third of a piece.

Interestingly my tongue, throat and lungs felt as if I did actually smoke the cigarettes. I soon started to feel that I had taken in too much and I think I spat the gum out even before I had received the full dose. I started to feel a little nauseous – it really does suppress appetite it would appear. I think I became a little hyper-active although only an independent observer could really say. I’d have to say I felt pretty cheerful, not anxious or depressed. I think my problem solving skills would have improved – it would be really interesting to take the nicotine while doing a computer test. The effect seemed to last quite a while and appetite was suppressed for the whole day. I did eat a small can of sardines for lunch but mainly just for the protein and fish oil.

My dose was far too much as I had to spit it out when I felt too affected by the drug. Later on in the day I had a very mild headache and my tongue was very dry which was unusual for me. Nicotine is certainly a powerful neurological drug and the effect can be readily experienced. It probably doesn’t lose its effectiveness with use like caffeine tends to. When I smoked I could always get a nicotine hit by breathing in more deeply. I’d say the experiment was a success although I was doing physical work rather than mental work. I am impressed that you can purchase something like this off the shelf at the supermarket.

Hey what about taking caffeine and nicotine together? Hmmmm...

Nicotine

I was quite impressed by Barak Obama’s level of fitness yet surprised that he continued to smoke. Smoking seems so wrong for someone who wants to stay in shape as inhaling anything that’s not clean air into your lungs cannot possibly be conducive to health. Well, I suppose it could be but my understanding of the workings of the lungs is that they are very sensitive and smokers only survive for as long as they do because the human body is amazingly resilient and you actually have to work quite hard to damage it so badly that it won’t bounce back. This is why you can probably smoke up until the age of thirty-five without causing irreversible damage to your body.

I used to smoke moderately, probably an average of two or three cigarettes a day. I stopped in order to reduce my insurance premiums. There did seem to be some benefits to smoking and the main one was that when I was working on a stressful problem I would go and have a smoke and very often the answer would come to me. Did this happen because I took some time out from my problem or was it something in the cigarette that helped my thinking?

I was reading that Obama’s clear thinking during the campaign, while aided by many things such as relative youth, exercise and innate intelligence, could have been enhanced by the use of nicotine in various forms. He is trying to give up smoking and was using nicotine gum. Now it seems that nicotine itself is not particularly harmful. It is one of those natural chemicals found in plants that were probably synthesised as a response to insect predation – nicotine kills insects apparently. Some studies have indicated that nicotine might ward off Parkinson’s disease and other neurological maladies. OK you might start to get the feeling that I’m starting to go somewhere with this…..

Yes, it’s time for; I am a Lab Rat Three. I have purchased some nicotine gum, extra strength. Nicotine is supposed to be more addictive than heroin so this could be dangerous folks although I do feel confident that I can kick it as giving up smoking I found to be quite easy.

In my next post…the results.

Morality for Physicians.

— The sick man is a parasite of society. In a certain state it is indecent to live longer. To go on vegetating in cowardly dependence on physicians and machinations, after the meaning of life, the right to life, has been lost, that ought to prompt a profound contempt in society. The physicians, in turn, would have to be the mediators of this contempt — not prescriptions, but every day a new dose of nausea with their patients. To create a new responsibility, that of the physician, for all cases in which the highest interest of life, of ascending life, demands the most inconsiderate pushing down and aside of degenerating life — for example, for the right of procreation, for the right to be born, for the right to live.
To die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly. Death freely chosen, death at the right time, brightly and cheerfully accomplished amid children and witnesses: then a real farewell is still possible, as the one who is taking leave is still there; also a real estimate of what one has achieved and what one has wished, drawing the sum of one's life — all in opposition to the wretched and revolting comedy that Christianity has made of the hour of death. One should never forget that Christianity has exploited the weakness of the dying for a rape of the conscience; and the manner of death itself, for value judgments about man and the past.
Here it is important to defy all the cowardices of prejudice and to establish, above all, the real, that is, the physiological, appreciation of so-called natural death — which is in the end also "unnatural," a kind of suicide. One never perishes through anybody but oneself. But usually it is death under the most contemptible conditions, an unfree death, death not at the right time, a coward's death. From love of life, one should desire a different death: free, conscious, without accident, without ambush.

From: Twighlight of the Idols
By: FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Translated by Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale

Something to think about.... exit strategies, or is that reboot strategies?

Ouboros

It’s been a while since I wrote about Eternal Recurrence yet I think about it daily. Although every now and again I imagine death and non-existence and a cold chill runs down my back the thought of the Eternal Recurrence returns me to the reality of existence. Being dead will be no worse than being asleep. It will actually be much better, in fact it wont even be an experience so those anticipating a nice long rest will be disappointed although nine months of being in the womb again will be something to look forward to. For at the very instant that you pass away almost endless eons will come to pass and voila you will come into existence again as the Universe completes its full cycle. Instead of imagining the endless days of being dead imagine the glorious cycles of exploding galaxies and extinguishing suns all taking place during the blink of an eye, indeed considerably less time than that. In death there is no sense of the passing of time. Then you are in the womb again – this is our heaven and our reward. Death doesn’t bring coldness, instead it brings warmth and safety.

How can this be? some may ask. How can this not be? I retort. There is no starting or ending and eternity cannot be linear. Behold the great serpent circle of time.

Told You So Didn't I?

Sometimes I think this blog is just an unrestrained attack on fat people and that I probably should get back to writing about the longevity project. But I'm trying to help fat people, really. It's absolutely essential to approach old age with the lightest, strongest body you can and it will get harder and harder to achieve this as the years pass by.

I often have arguments with people about the benefits of exercise in relation to weight control. Too many people think that exercise is an effective strategy for weight loss and it's not and a new study out confirms this:

"Evidence is beginning to accumulate that dietary intake may be more important than energy expenditure level," Luke said. "Weight loss is not likely to happen without dietary restraint."

"Decreased physical activity may not be the primary driver of the obesity epidemic," said Loyola nutritionist Amy Luke, a member of the study team.

Exercise is not even a good strategy for weight maintenance for the middle aged and above person. Dietary restriction is absolutely essential to maintain a low weight and optimum health when the body is aging and slowing down.