So, my unexpected result this year.
I've been trying to lose weight for 15 years. 5'8" 205 lbs. I've tried dieting and always struggled, like most people, with that feeling of starvation and all the temptation that makes you fail.

In March I started walking at lunch 5 days a week and cut my calories down to about 1100 per day. At first I had no workout gear and after a mile and a quarter walk I was winded and sweating. Kept on going with the brisk walking and pushing myself harder and further. After a month and a half walking wasn't enough to wind me so I started alternating some jogging. Bought walking shoes and shorts/shirts to work out in. I kept pushing myself and counting my nutrition using a smart phone app so I wouldn't be deprived of vitamins and stuff on the lower calorie diet.

Surprisingly, no hunger. I started to find it hard to over eat because I wasn't hungry. I fealt nasty when I ate high calorie food. The app helped me make smart decisions when it mattered.
Over time I had to jog more and walk less to get a workout. After 4 months I was varying my workouts daily but averaging 4 miles per day during my lunch break. After 3 months I'd reached my goal of getting under 190. After 6 months I'd lost more than 30 pounds.

I have more stamina, look good, feel awesome and grew a beard for winter. ;-) Just had a physical and my cholesterol and blood pressure are perfect for the first time in 10 years. Every result on my physical was perfectly in range.

The only thing I did different from all my other attempts in 15 years was walk.

If you try to imagine walking/jogging 45-60 minutes a day, 5 days a week...you will fail before you start. Just go the first day and walk fast for as long as you can. Then make the decision to go the next day and push yourself again. Every day, decide to do it. Before you know it you'll be doing distances and times you never imagined and digging in the back of your closet for old clothes that fit.

Walking works.

>> ^snoozedoctor:

Sorry about your plight. Long term disability is a rare thing after recovery from influenza. You obviously ran into some bad luck and I hope that turns around for you. Actually, I don't think advocating personal responsibility is an interesting or unique position for a physician in the least. Promoting health and prevention of disease is part of our oath. With 1 out of 5 Americans still smoking and 1 out of 3 obese, we are clearly losing the battle. Sorry, but it's not my responsibility to hide the Twinkies, or the Camels and drag people to the gym. If citizens want better health outcomes from their health-care system, they should do their part. The quality of what comes out is only as good as what comes in.

>> ^kceaton1:
Yep I got hit with the same thing, the one-two punch. My side, it was sickness (swine flu, no joke), ending with long-term disability (plus surgery). That cost me my 40-50k job, but luckily I have parents that are helping me try to see through this. Otherwise, I would be a bankrupt statistic and most likely dead.
BTW, @snoozedoctor I understand your beef with "PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY FOR ONE'S OWN HEALTH", but that is a very interesting position to hold especially concerning what your oath has to say about that. I assume you're a professional in your field; perhaps you should take up that stance with doctors concerning those fields and see what you could flesh out other than: "throw'em under the bus".



Would you argue that regular check ups should be apart of your healthy life style? Perhaps a cholesterol check, yearly blood test for organ function and such?

My last blood work before insurance was over 300 dollars. Flu shot was 60 bucks at the doctor's office. Yes, people who don't insurance don't pay what they bill insurance at. Hell most of the time, the people providing these services don't know what they cost.

Now if a simple flu shot costs 60 bucks at the doctor's office, while Im there getting a check up no less. But costs 10 dollars at the drug store.......where's the disconnect?

As for exercising, Im frankly frightened that I might get hurt and it cost me more than a make in a year to get it fixed. Not to mention how long that recovery time would be and losing my job during that. At least doing stuff on the job and getting hurt means you have worker's compensation and you might be able to convince them to hold your job until you recover. But if you break your leg or pull loose a tendon while exercising you have only what you can afford to pay for. Which you don't know what it will cost until after they are done, insurance or not.

I suspect in other countries where healthcare is universal, people don't have to worry about this and they can push themselves a little. And it's in the countries best interest to make sure people exercise properly, stretch, don't over do it etc. So they probably take more care to make sure people are properly instructed on how to go about it and what they can do as they age to change up the routine and still get the needed results. You know, without having to be a professional athlete or hire a personal trainer. It's all too easy for family docs to recommend you to specialists for every last concern you have, plus they get a nice little referral kick back. It's a nice system the US has.......or not.


US workers work more hours than most countries, spend more time on the road commuting and generally have less time to live a health life as well. It's a useful thing to big businesses requiring those long hours that they provide your healthcare, because it'd be a shame if you lost your job due to not working the outrageous hours and lost that healthcare. If you untied health care from employment, people'd see how truly expensive it is and they'd be more inclined to have it reigned in and made universal. The premiums on health insurance alone would cover all of your general yearly checkups and tests and probably most of another person's for single people.

looks like these guys are starting a food pron station... "let's make food high in fat, cholesterol, and carlories, and then invite underage girls to eat it without utensils."

*win

No, I agree with quantum. What better way to take a stand against the liberal enemy within than to eat lots and lots of hamburgers, steaks, ribs and chicken fried steak?! No, really, this would be a great protest. Tea Parties are for pussies. Have a Meat Party.

Here's how you do it:

Eat really fatty, cholesterol laden dishes 6 or 7 times a day. About one meal every 2-3 hours. But, you don't want to get fat and out of shape, because when the revolution comes, you are going to need to be lean and mean. Get a gym membership to counteract all those calories, and be vigilant about working out. Don't even waste a second. Eat a triple western bacon cheeseburger and curly fries and then immediately do some strenuous cardio. With all the extra workout time, you won't have as much time to sleep, which means you are going to have to get some cocaine. LOTS and LOTS of cocaine. So, to recap, take lots of cocaine, eat copious amounts of high calorie, high fat, low fiber foods, and then engage in extremely strenuous activities sporadically throughout the day. I think that would be the best way for people of your political stripe to make this world a better place.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'chtv, KFC, Double Down, salt, cholesterol, not a sandwich' to 'chtv, KFC, Double Down, salt, cholesterol, not a sandwich, theres no bread' - edited by calvados

>> ^westy:

lol this was so cheesy


Complete with a high-five!

Man... all that cheese... my cholesterol is through the roof!

>> ^Simple_Man:

I can't say for certain, but I'm think this video will change my life. I've been trying to lose weight for ages, not drinking any coke, doing exercise etc., but I've never realized the prevalence of high fructose corn syrup in all foods. I wrote down those 4 tips that he suggested to losing weight, and I'll repeat them here for those who missed it. I'll certainly stick to it and see if it works.
1. Get rid of all sugared liquids: only water and milk. Fruits are fine, because it contains all the fibers.
2. Eat carbs with fiber, because fibers are awesome. Fibers: Lowers total and LDL cholesterol, reduces risk of heart disease
regulates blood sugar, and speeds the passage of foods through the digestive system
3. Wait 20 mins for second portions, so your satiety response can kick in.
4. Buy your screen time minute-for-minute with physical activity.
Some other points:
-a calorie is not a calorie: you don't do exercise to burn calories, but to increase metabolism
-fructose IS NOT glucose. A large amount of glucose is used by the rest of the body, meaning it burns much quicker. Fructose can only be metabolized in the liver, and it's a volume issue. It means a lot gets turned into fat, and in that process, blocks receptors to generate certain chemicals which tell your body to stop eating, causing a vicious cycle.
-be a fattie or fart a lot (from the fiber). Make your choice.


So, it's been a couple of months. I'm wondering how the changes went?

Simple carbs are bad for you. Everyone knows this? None of the "omg carbs KILL BABIES" people or studies seem to contrast simple carbs vs. complex carbs. Are they stuffing them full of white bread? White rice? There was a study recently that showed just having *some* brown rice with your white rice measurably reduced the risk of diabetes, but I didn't see any of the He-Man Caveman Diet people mention that.

Some studies (though not all, admittedly--there are conflicting reports) indicate that sugars that are unbalanced in favor of more fructose (HFCS) cause problems that eating table sugar doesn't.

For the fatty meats, you also have to be careful about what exactly they're eating. Hamburger is the refined flour of the red meat world and steak is the 100% whole wheat bread. There's a difference in how they're digested, and there's a difference on their effects on the body. I'm too lazy to go find the reference, but there was a study comparing eating small amounts of hamburger vs. steak every day for some period of time, and the hamburger group had higher cholesterol and blood pressure and whatnot (could be misremembering the exact problems).

And for this study, the only thing that's moderately surprising is that the heavy drinkers are healthier than the non-drinkers. But it it utterly unsurprising that the moderate drinkers are healthier than both; this has been common knowledge for a while. Well, I am kinda surprised that 3 drinks a day is moderate drinking. That's a lot more than I drink. I wonder how the data would skew if they broke it down to 1 every few days, 1 every day, 2 every day, 3 every day, etc.

I'd put $5 on the some-complex-carb--eating, some-steak-eating, vegetable-eating, sugar/simple-carb--reducing, HFCS-avoiding, moderately-drinking person being healthier than any of the other permutations. Moderation isn't as sexy as being able to get all religious about being anti/pro-meat or anti/pro-carb or anti/pro-booze, though, I suppose!

I can't say for certain, but I'm think this video will change my life. I've been trying to lose weight for ages, not drinking any coke, doing exercise etc., but I've never realized the prevalence of high fructose corn syrup in all foods. I wrote down those 4 tips that he suggested to losing weight, and I'll repeat them here for those who missed it. I'll certainly stick to it and see if it works.

1. Get rid of all sugared liquids: only water and milk. Fruits are fine, because it contains all the fibers.

2. Eat carbs with fiber, because fibers are awesome. Fibers: Lowers total and LDL cholesterol, reduces risk of heart disease
regulates blood sugar, and speeds the passage of foods through the digestive system

3. Wait 20 mins for second portions, so your satiety response can kick in.

4. Buy your screen time minute-for-minute with physical activity.

Some other points:

-a calorie is not a calorie: you don't do exercise to burn calories, but to increase metabolism

-fructose IS NOT glucose. A large amount of glucose is used by the rest of the body, meaning it burns much quicker. Fructose can only be metabolized in the liver, and it's a volume issue. It means a lot gets turned into fat, and in that process, blocks receptors to generate certain chemicals which tell your body to stop eating, causing a vicious cycle.

-be a fattie or fart a lot (from the fiber). Make your choice.

"This is not rocket science."

No, rocket science has a basis in reality.

RANT:

Jacobson's arguments were simply ridiculous; the stand out being his lead-in time coal-burning CO2 adding to nuclear's output for every plant. No stupid, you build the next generation of nuclear plants before the last one expires. You don't let all your nuclear plants die, then wait twenty years burning fossil fuels before any more go up. This is a cost the world only has to pay ONCE, ever, and it would already be behind us if the fucking hippies weren't holding up construction of desperately needed new plants with their faux-environmentalist rhetoric. And how long does he imagine it would take to convert the world to alternative energy? Better add all the CO2 generated in that time to the alternative sources as well, wow, solar power's really bad for the environment. Disingenuous much?

Then there's the paranoid babble about nuclear power plants enabling nuclear weapon production. Yeah, like science and roads. He actually stands up in front of an audience of live people and adds NUCLEAR WAR to air pollution statistics. Tosser.

Electricity is the lifeblood of our civilisation, for fuck's sake, this man is cholesterol.

Okay..since my sarcasm didn't quite drive the point home, I'll explain why this is a misguided idea:

Tanning Salons
-Vitamin D is synthesized in the body after exposure to sunlight. Anyone living far enough from the equator is bound to be deficient in Vitamin D. In fact, go ahead and plot cancer incidence by latitude and you'll see what I mean. Vitamin D prevents cancer and heart disease.

Beef
- Read about Vilhjalmur_Stefansson. In the early 1900s he underwent a scientific study where he ate nothing but meat for a year...and came out healthier than when he went in. Also read about all-meat diets and ketosis. Prolonged ketosis is a cure for diabetes, heart disease and cancer - not to mention periodontal disease. In scientific studies, terminally ill patients who were so far gone they were beyond "medical science" had their tumors go into remission and even clear up completely on a ketosis diet. Cancer cells have a lot of insulin receptors - they respond to glucose, take away the glucose and the cancer starves. Read about it.

Pork
- Same as beef.

Alcohol
- In many countries, 1 in 3 people have some form of mental illness sometime in their lives. Alcohol helps a lot of people cope with society. How the hell do you think I cope with all the (50% of the population) sub-100 IQ zombies walking around?

Oil used for deep-frying
- Fat is not unhealthy. Cholesterol does not cause heart disease, nor is it a good predictor of those who will get heart disease. Only ~3% of arterial plague is cholesterol by composition - the vast majority is calcium. Vitamin D helps regulate calcium...this goes back to the tanning salons.

Gasoline -- especially because it gives people an incentive to WALK when they're going less than 2 miles to a store, instead of driving.
- I don't think the cost of gasoline has ever factored into a lazy persons decision of whether to walk. The burning of fossil fuels and the creation of air pollution is a national health hazard (akin to me walking up and dumping toxic waste on you) and so YES this should be taxed because pollution is a hidden cost of industry; but the funds shouldn't go to Medicare they should go to giant air-scrubbers which help de-pollute the air.

Coal
- Same as gas

Natural Gas
- Same as coal.

Sugar and High Fructose Corn Syrup, Junk Food in general, & Cigarettes
- Okay, maybe you have some kind of argument here because these are legitimately detrimental to your health, but only used in excess. So unless you find a way to tax "excess" or define "excess" I can't see an argument for taxing the stray cigarette or potatoe chip.

I would imagine if you made cars illegal, car related deaths would go down. That isn't the point though. You would be punishing people that haven't done something on the off chance that they might. It is even worse than the whole pre-crime stuff of Minority Report, it is punishing people of no crime. Might it be more safe to ban weapons completely, perhaps, but at a great cost of liberty... and like someone (O wait me!) mentioned before, there is no logical ending point to keeping you safe. Like the great movie, "Thank You for Smoking", jested at; should we outlaw New England Cheddar because of people dying from high cholesterol? While this seems ridiculous, it isn't a stretch of the imagination, and moreover, there is no logical distinction between the two. What you have is a system that is made up of preventative safety measures based on arbitrary personal values, a realm that both Ben Francklin and Plato/Socrates warned against. The tyranny of the majority masked in the public good (in this case, safety). The battle cry of the "majority good" flies in face of the ideas the social contract and civil liberties (classical liberalism).

To rephrase what someone said before, there is no perfect system. Horrible things are going to happen. The real question is in what manor will this happen. Will we be free to make our own mistakes and suffer the consequences of poor judgment and/or bad luck. Or will we subject ourselves to tyrannical (in the sense of a moral majority overruling a minority, even if that minority is 48% of people) safety control ebbing away at our every freedom. More over, things could (as they did in Greece) switch from legal and noble to illegal and punishable by death very swiftly. This was in the ancient world, just imagine what shifts in life could be made via modern communications?!

I do truly fear centralized power of any kind; be it government or commercial. My fears are realized all to often in the long history of the human race. Domination and might makes right all to often are the prevailing models of society, I see moving away from the social contract and to a system of moral governance as a return to what is basically a theocracy of dogooders trying to get their moral agendas on top of the "new laws here" list.

>> ^rasch187
I would like to see some objective sources for your claims, imstellar.


How much are you paying me for the pleasure of being your personal research assistant?

If you are honestly interested in the validity of any of the claims I made, I'm sure you'll be able to pick out a few terms from what I presented and turn them into a couple Google searches.

Heres a start:

"THE METABOLISM OF TUMORS IN THE BODY. Otto Warbug. Kaiser Wilhelm Institut fur Biologic, 1926"

"On respiratory impairment in cancer cells."

"The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1931"

"My life with the Eskimo: Vilhjalmur Stefansson"

"Oncogenes in Tumor Metabolism, Tumorigenesis, and Apoptosis"

"Saccharine Disease"

"Good Calories Bad Calories"

"Elevated Insulin-like Growth Factor I Receptor Autophosphorylation and Kinase Activity in Human Breast Cancer"

"Potential role of sugar (fructose) in the epidemic of hypertension, obesity and the metabolic syndrome, diabetes, kidney disease, and cardiovascular disease1"

"Increased consumption of refined carbohydrates and the epidemic of type 2 diabetes in the United States: an ecologic assessment"

"Dietary glycemic index, glycemic load, and the risk of breast cancer in an Italian prospective cohort study1"

"A HISTORY OF SUGAR MF.RKETING THROUGH 1974, U. S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE ECONOMICS. STATISTICS, AND COOPERATIVES SERVICE
AGRICULTURAL ECONOMIC REPORT NO. 382"

"Glycemic Index and Serum High-Density Lipoprotein
Cholesterol Concentration Among US Adults"

"Relation between a diet with a high glycemic load and plasma concentrations of high-sensitivity C-reactive protein in middle-aged women1"

"Studies on the Metabolism of Eskimos - Journal of Biological Chemistry"

"Dietary protein intake and renal function"

"Advanced glycation end products and the absence of premature
atherosclerosis in glycogen storage disease Ia"

"Chemical Calorimetry. XLV. Prolonged Meat Diets with a study of Kidney function and Ketosis"

"Diabetes Mellitus - Japan 1950-2004"

"Diabetic Mortality rate and the amount of sugar consumed per capital in England and Wales"

"Pounds per sugar per head per year from 1800 to 1960"

"Fasting insulin and incident dementia in an elderly population of Japanese-American men"

"Diabetes mellitus and the risk of dementia "

"Prevalence of the Metabolic Syndrome Among US Adults"

"Cardiovascular Morbidity and Mortality Associated With the Metabolic Syndrome"

"C-Reactive Protein, the Metabolic Syndrome, and Risk of Incident Cardiovascular Events "

"Obesity and the Metabolic Syndrome in Children and Adolescents"

"NCEP-defined metabolic syndrome, diabetes, and prevalence of coronary heart disease"

"Coronary-heart-disease risk and impaired glucose tolerance. The Whitehall study."

Those eggs look dangerously undercooked.

Eggs have a very high protein:fat ratio, but too much cholesterol.

I saw a show on Discovery or something where they used this tech to insert stints into arteries. They'd normally be coil tubes, but they'd freeze them and bend them straight, then insert them through a tiny slit in the wall of the artery, and when the blood hit them and they'd warm up, and become a small coil again, opening up the artery clogged by cholesterol.

They also showed the opposite tech, where it has a shape when it's cold, but when you heat it, it forgets.

This was ages ago. Maybe more than ten years.