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Our society does reward beauty on the outside over health on the inside. Women must not be blamed for choosing short-term beauty "fixes" that harm our long-term health, since our life spans are inverted under the beauty myth, and there is no great social or economic incentive for women to live a long time. A thin young woman with precancerous lungs [who smokes to stay thin] is more highly rewarded socially that a hearty old crone. Spokespeople sell women the Iron Maiden [an intrinsically unattainable standard of beauty used to punish women for their failure to achieve and conform to it]and name her "Health": if public discourse were really concerned with women's health, it would turn angrily upon this aspect of the beauty myth.
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Naomi Wolf (The Beauty Myth)
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at eleven years old the doctor weighed me & afterwards, my mother told me i was too fat & that i needed to go on a diet immediately. for an entire year, food barely passed through my lips. i did not even allow myself to take a sip of water because i wanted to be so thin that i could blow away with the slightest breeze— disappear. i dropped sixty pounds in a few short months & i had to wear long sleeves to cover up the “cat scratches.” - everybody told me how good i looked, though.
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Amanda Lovelace (The Princess Saves Herself in this One)
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It is not as if farming brought a great improvement in living standards either. A typical hunter-gatherer enjoyed a more varied diet and consumed more protein and calories than settled people, and took in five times as much viatmin C as the average person today.
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Bill Bryson (At Home: A Short History of Private Life)
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It’s never too late to start eating well. A good diet can reverse many of those conditions as well. In short: change the way you eat and you can transform your health for the better.
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T. Colin Campbell (Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition)
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Here are the two things I have come to believe about diets:
1. Almost any diet works in the short term.
2. Almost no diets work in the long term
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Tommy Tomlinson (The Elephant in the Room: One Fat Man's Quest to Get Smaller in a Growing America)
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So, what is my prescription for good health? In short, it is about the multiple health benefits of consuming plant-based foods, and the largely unappreciated health dangers of consuming animal-based foods, including all types of meat, dairy and eggs.
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T. Colin Campbell (The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss and Long-Term Health)
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Part of the reason people could eat so well was that many foods that we now think of as delicacies were plenteous then. Lobsters bred in such abundance around Britain's coastline that they were fed to prisoners and orphans or ground up for fertilizer.
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Bill Bryson (At Home: A Short History of Private Life)
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And I hope we can all agree that aiming for “perfect” is nothing short of bananapants.
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Kelsey Miller (Big Girl: How I Gave Up Dieting & Got a Life)
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If you avoid the killer diseases and keep the degenerative ones under control with sensible diet and exercise and whatever chemotherapy you need to stay in balance, you can live nearly forever.
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Wallace Stegner (New Short Novels 2)
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Some of my scientific friends and colleagues confess that they cannot for the life of them see why I don't abandon ship and join them. The short answer is that I have managed, by straddling the boundaries, to have the best of both worlds. By working with scientists I get a rich diet of fascinating and problematic facts to think about, but by staying a philosopher without a lab or a research grant, I get to think about all the theories and experiments and never have to do the dishes
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Daniel C. Dennett (Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking)
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It is found easier, by the short-sighted victims of disease, to palliate their torments by medicine, than to prevent them by regimen.
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Percy Bysshe Shelley (A vindication of natural diet: Being one in a series of notes to Queen Mab (a philosophical poem))
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Yesterday the paper had a "short" summary of the places where Jews are not allowed! I can better mention where they are still aloud: "in their houses and in the streets!" God, punish those who are persecuting the people you chose and to whom Jesus also belonged. -From the diary of Diet Eman
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Diet Eman (Things We Couldn't Say)
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A Donkey having heard some Grasshoppers chirping, was highly enchanted; and, desiring to possess the same charms of melody, demanded what sort of food they lived on to give them such beautiful voices. They replied, “The dew.” The Donkey resolved that he would live only upon dew, and in a short time died of hunger.
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Aesop
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Most Eugenists are Euphemists. I mean merely that short words startle them, while long words soothe them. And they are utterly incapable of translating the one into the other, however obviously they mean the same thing. Say to them "The persuasive and even coercive powers of the citizen should enable him to make sure that the burden of longevity in the previous generation does not become disproportionate and intolerable, especially to the females"; say this to them and they will sway slightly to and fro like babies sent to sleep in cradles. Say to them "Murder your mother," and they sit up quite suddenly. Yet the two sentences, in cold logic, are exactly the same. Say to them "It is not improbable that a period may arrive when the narrow if once useful distinction between the anthropoid homo and the other
animals, which has been modified on so many moral points, may be modified also even in regard to the important question of the extension of human diet"; say this to them, and beauty born of murmuring sound will pass into their face. But say to them, in a simple, manly, hearty way "Let's eat a man!" and their surprise is quite surprising. Yet the sentences say just the same thing.
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G.K. Chesterton (Eugenics and Other Evils : An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized State)
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There is no reason to be alarmed by benign, occasional, short-term hunger. Given base-level good health, you will not perish. You won’t collapse in a heap and need to be rescued by the cat. Your body is designed to go without food for longish periods, even if it has lost the skill through years of grazing, picking, and snacking. Research has found that modern humans tend to mistake a whole range of emotions for hunger.6 We eat when we’re bored, when we’re thirsty, when we’re around food (when aren’t we?), when we’re with company, or simply when the clock happens to tell us it’s time for food. Most of us eat, too, just because it feels good. This is known as hedonic hunger,
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Michael Mosley (The Fast Diet: The Simple Secret of Intermittent Fasting: Lose Weight, Stay Healthy, Live Longer)
“
It is not as if farming brought a great improvement in living standards either. A typical hunter-gatherer enjoyed a more varied diet and consumed more protein and calories than settled people, and took in five times as much vitamin C as the average person today. Even in the bitterest depths of the ice ages, we now know, nomadic people ate surprisingly well—and surprisingly healthily. Settled people, by contrast, became reliant on a much smaller range of foods, which all but ensured dietary insufficiencies.
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Bill Bryson (At Home: A Short History of Private Life)
“
The dark side of tracking a particular behavior is that we become driven by the number rather than the purpose behind it. If your success is measured by quarterly earnings, you will optimize sales, revenue, and accounting for quarterly earnings. If your success is measured by a lower number on the scale, you will optimize for a lower number on the scale, even if that means embracing crash diets, juice cleanses, and fat-loss pills. The human mind wants to “win” whatever game is being played. This pitfall is evident in many areas of life. We focus on working long hours instead of getting meaningful work done. We care more about getting ten thousand steps than we do about being healthy. We teach for standardized tests instead of emphasizing learning, curiosity, and critical thinking. In short, we optimize for what we measure. When we choose the wrong measurement, we get the wrong behavior. This is sometimes referred to as Goodhart’s Law. Named after the economist Charles Goodhart, the principle states, “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
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James Clear (Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones)
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Satisfying news hunger no longer involves a twice daily diet of a morning newspaper and evening TV news bulletin: news comes in snack-form
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Ian Hargreaves (Journalism: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
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If a metal or ion has a function in the body, it must be provided by the diet, since it is not possible to convert one chemical element into another.
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David Bender (Nutrition: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
“
A typical hunter-gatherer enjoyed a more varied diet and consumed more protein and calories than settled people, and took in five times as much vitamin C as the average person today.
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Bill Bryson (At Home: A Short History of Private Life)
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I don’t care if you eat worms and cardboard; if you eat 35% fewer calories, you will lose weight and your cholesterol levels will improve50 in the short run, but that is not to say that worms and cardboard form a healthy diet.
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T. Colin Campbell (The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss and Long-Term Health)
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First, when you try to restrict calories and exercise more, your body is hardwired to perceive a starvation situation. That makes you tired (so you move less and conserve energy) and hungry (so you eat more), and it slows down your metabolism (so you don’t die!). This “eat less, exercise more” formula is not too successful for most people. It can work for a short time, certainly, but less than 10 percent of people lose weight and keep it off for a year;4 you will almost always rebound and gain back the weight. Second, when you eat carbs and sugar, insulin spikes and your blood sugar drops. The insulin drives most of the available fuel in your bloodstream into fat cells, especially the fat cells around your middle, otherwise known as belly fat. So your body is starved of fuel, and this stimulates your brain5 to make you eat more.6 You could have a year’s worth of stored energy in your fat tissue and yet feel like you are starving. The only thing that can stop this vicious cycle is eating a lot of fat and cutting out the refined carbs and sugar. A high-fat, low-carb diet leads to a faster metabolism and sustained weight loss.
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Mark Hyman (Eat Fat Get Thin: Why the Fat We Eat Is the Key to Sustained Weight Loss and Vibrant Health)
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Cutting carbs, fats, or calories (dieting) is like trying to hold your breath. The longer you do it, the more your body resists it until you finally gasp for air – taking in more than ever to overcome the short-term deficit you induced.
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Matt Stone (Diet Recovery: Restoring Hormonal Health, Metabolism, Mood, and Your Relationship with Food (Diet Recovery #1))
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We just haven’t yet discovered the political will, economic might, and cultural flexibility to install and activate them, because doing so requires something a lot bigger, and more concrete, than imagination—it means nothing short of a complete overhaul of the world’s energy systems, transportation, infrastructure and industry and agriculture. Not to mention, say, our diets or our taste for Bitcoin. The cryptocurrency now produces as much CO2 each year as a million transatlantic flights.
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David Wallace-Wells (The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future)
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The three-fold increase in obesity in less that a quarter of a century cannot be the result of genetic change in the population. Rather, it is the result of increased availability and consumption of food, coupled with decreased physical activity.
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David Bender (Nutrition: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
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once believed that a published author must be an Olympian being—a wise or at least worldly philosopher-god who rises at noon, feeds his muse a diet of scotch/rocks, and debauches his soul into the keys of a rusty Underwood Noiseless while the rest of the world sleeps.
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Robert J. Sawyer (Space (Complete Short Fiction Book 2))
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People seem to be better able to deal with coming up short on positive goals than negative ones. So framing your subgoals as things you want to accomplish, rather than avoid, can help you escape the fatalistic, black-and-white thinking that can subvert your longer-term goals.
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Michael Greger (How Not to Diet)
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It was a world of fine shadings and the nicest proportions, where impulse seldom set a blundering foot, and the feast of reason was undisturbed by an intemperate flow of soul. To such a banquet his wife naturally remained uninvited. The diet would have disagreed with her, and she would probably have objected to the other guests.
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Edith Wharton (The Collected Short Stories of Edith Wharton)
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Writing short stories hasn’t gotten easier for me over the years; it’s gotten harder. The time to do them has shrunk, for one thing. They keep wanting to bloat, for another (I have a real problem with bloat—I write like fat ladies diet). And it seems harder to find the voice for these tales—all too often the I-Guy just floats away.
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Stephen King (Skeleton Crew)
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A host of other matters that affect the lives of many LGBTQ people—among them, health care, senior centers, immigration, poverty, homelessness, diet, and education—are currently given short shrift. Even those issues still being partially addressed, like hate crime legislation, are of uncertain relevance (and even potential harm) to much of the queer population.
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Martin Duberman (Has the Gay Movement Failed?)
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Not one of those big-city thirty-nine-year-olds who deal with their midlife crisis by buying ridiculously expensive cycling shorts and swimming caps because they have a black hole in their soul that devours Instagram pictures, more the sort of thirty-nine-year-old whose daily consumption of cheese and carbohydrates was more likely to be classified medically as a cry for help rather than a diet.
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Fredrik Backman (Anxious People)
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The upshot of all this work can be summarized as follows: short sleep (of the type that many adults in first-world countries commonly and routinely report) will increase hunger and appetite, compromise impulse control within the brain, increase food consumption (especially of high-calorie foods), decrease feelings of food satisfaction after eating, and prevent effective weight loss when dieting.
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Matthew Walker (Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams)
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The Mediterranean-DASH Intervention for Neurodegenerative Delay diet—or MIND diet, for short—was specially designed to improve brain health. Recent well-done studies have found that sticking to the MIND diet helps people avoid mental decline and remain cognitively healthy. One study even showed that people who stuck to the MIND diet cut their risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease in half. That’s extraordinary. And since no drug has yet been developed to prevent dementia, it’s your only move.
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Rahul Jandial (Life Lessons From A Brain Surgeon: Practical Strategies for Peak Health and Performance)
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went. On paper, the patients did fine. They lost weight and in many cases they even improved their health to the point of coming off some medications. They generally felt quite positive about the changes they were making in their lives. But they weren’t uniformly satisfied. Although they lost enough weight to improve their qualities of life, their behavior changes were often short-lived, and many regained their lost weight and reverted to their old lifestyles over the course of the next one to two years. Flash
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Yoni Freedhoff (The Diet Fix: Why Diets Fail and How to Make Yours Work)
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I decided early in graduate school that I needed to do something about my moods. It quickly came down to a choice between seeing a psychiatrist or buying a horse. Since almost everyone I knew was seeing a psychiatrist, and since I had an absolute belief that I should be able to handle my own problems, I naturally bought a horse. Not just any horse, but an unrelentingly stubborn and blindingly neurotic one, a sort of equine Woody Allen, but without the entertainment value. I had imagined, of course, a My Friend Flicka scenario: my horse would see me in the distance, wiggle his ears in eager anticipation, whinny with pleasure, canter up to my side, and nuzzle my breeches for sugar or carrots. What I got instead was a wildly anxious, frequently lame, and not terribly bright creature who was terrified of snakes, people, lizards, dogs, and other horses – in short, terrified of anything that he might reasonably be expected to encounter in life – thus causing him to rear up on his hind legs and bolt madly about in completely random directions. In the clouds-and-silver-linings department, however, whenever I rode him I was generally too terrified to be depressed, and when I was manic I had no judgment anyway, so maniacal riding was well suited to the mood.
Unfortunately, it was not only a crazy decision to buy a horse, it was also stupid. I may as well have saved myself the trouble of cashing my Public Health Service fellowship checks, and fed him checks directly: besides shoeing him and boarding him – with veterinary requirements that he supplement his regular diet with a kind of horsey granola that cost more than a good pear brandy – I also had to buy him special orthopedic shoes to correct, or occasionaly correct, his ongoing problems with lameness. These shoes left Guicci and Neiman-Marcus in the dust, and, after a painfully aquired but profound understanding of why people shoot horse traders, and horses, I had to acknowledge that I was a graduate student, not Dr. Dolittle; more to the point, I was neither a Mellon nor a Rockefeller. I sold my horse, as one passes along the queen of spades, and started showing up for my classes at UCLA.
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Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness)
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The week of slow is the running equivalent of a juice fast. Some people use short-term juice fasts to hit the reset button on their diet. The fast is not an end in itself. The goal is to make permanent changes to their diet, replacing bad habits with good ones. But instead of just making these changes from one day to the next, they first take a few days to break their attachments to the old habits by consuming nothing but healthy fruit and vegetable juices. Then, once they are no longer craving potato chips or whatever else, they return to a normal but improved diet.
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Matt Fitzgerald (80/20 Running: Run Stronger and Race Faster by Training Slower)
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Of all the minerals the most vital in dietary terms is sodium, which we mostly consume in the form of sodium chloride – table salt.* Here the problem is not that we are getting too little, but possibly way too much. We don’t need all that much – 200 milligrams a day, about what you would get with six or eight vigorous shakes of a salt cellar – but we take in about sixty times that amount on average. In a normal diet it is almost impossible not to because there is so much salt in the processed foods we eat with such ravenous devotion. Often it is heaped into foods that don’t seem salty at all – breakfast cereals, prepared soups and ice creams, for instance. Who would guess that an ounce of cornflakes contains more salt than an ounce of salted peanuts?
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Bill Bryson (At Home: A Short History of Private Life)
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Without the momentum of a stern discipline, motivation is mostly a momentary, flighty emotion. For it works best under the supervision of discipline, but can serve as not only an ally but also an enemy: because in anything that requires your self-discipline - whether going to church, going to classes, going to workouts, going through trainings, completing jobs, reading books, living well, eating healthily, studying, practicing something - the more times you skip, the more relaxed and motivated you'll become about skipping; and the next thing you know you've quit your fight altogether (or, put in short, the more you skip, the more you'll skip until you've quit). Maybe then you'll see that motivation bears its fruits when watered by discipline, but it spoils when not.
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Criss Jami
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However, the Bleeding Hearts were kind hearts; and when they saw the little fellow cheerily limping about with a good-humoured face, doing no harm, drawing no knives, committing no outrageous immoralities, living chiefly on farinaceous and milk diet, and playing with Mrs Plornish's children of an evening, they began to think that although he could never hope to be an Englishman, still it would be hard to visit that affliction on his head. They began to accommodate themselves to his level, calling him 'Mr Baptist,' but treating him like a baby, and laughing immoderately at his lively gestures and his childish English—more, because he didn't mind it, and laughed too. They spoke to him in very loud voices as if he were stone deaf. They constructed sentences, by way of teaching him the language in its purity, such as were addressed by the savages to Captain Cook, or by Friday to Robinson Crusoe. Mrs Plornish was particularly ingenious in this art; and attained so much celebrity for saying 'Me ope you leg well soon,' that it was considered in the Yard but a very short remove indeed from speaking Italian. Even Mrs Plornish herself began to think that she had a natural call towards that language. As he became more popular, household objects were brought into requisition for his instruction in a copious vocabulary; and whenever he appeared in the Yard ladies would fly out at their doors crying 'Mr Baptist—tea-pot!' 'Mr Baptist—dust-pan!' 'Mr Baptist—flour-dredger!' 'Mr Baptist—coffee-biggin!' At the same time exhibiting those articles, and penetrating him with a sense of the appalling difficulties of the Anglo-Saxon tongue.
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Charles Dickens (Little Dorrit)
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3. Learn the Will Skill. Many people believe that fitness and exercise are all about willpower—whether you have it or not. Will is important, but people forget that willpower is a skill with its own rules and tricks to practice. For example, recent research shows that if people can distract their attention for just a few minutes, they can suppress negative urges and make better decisions.8 Sharman W. used this idea to help her avoid cheating on her diet. She listed the ten reasons she wanted to lose weight and created the following rule: She could cheat on her diet, but only after reading her list and calling her sister. This extra step introduced a delay and brought in social support from her sister. Other strategies our Changers use include taking short walks, repeating poems they have memorized, and drinking a glass of water. The key is to be aware of the impulse and to focus on something different until the impulse goes away.
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Kerry Patterson (Change Anything: The New Science of Personal Success)
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It turns out that the eastern U.S. founder crops were four plants domesticated in the period 2500–1500 B.C., a full 6,000 years after wheat and barley domestication in the Fertile Crescent. A local species of squash provided small containers, as well as yielding edible seeds. The remaining three founders were grown solely for their edible seeds (sunflower, a daisy relative called sumpweed, and a distant relative of spinach called goosefoot). But four seed crops and a container fall far short of a complete food production package. For 2,000 years those founder crops served only as minor dietary supplements while eastern U.S. Native Americans continued to depend mainly on wild foods, especially wild mammals and waterbirds, fish, shellfish, and nuts. Farming did not supply a major part of their diet until the period 500–200 B.C., after three more seed crops (knotweed, maygrass, and little barley) had been brought into cultivation. A
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Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (20th Anniversary Edition))
“
Kelly and I had to take our turns to work the concessions stand at the games. We would always try to work our designated duties together. If you've ever assembled a hundred hot dogs after a game, you know things can get pretty hectic behind that concessions counter. Kelly and I would slap those orders together as fast as we could, but keep in mind this was not either of our fortes. Did the guy in the green jacket order a hot dog or a burger? Did that lady say "diet" or did I imagine it? We often held our breath when the person left, wondering if he would discover in short order that what he asked for was not at all what he received from the inept concession stand staff. Big crowds of of hungry basketball fans made us nervous, and Kelly and I often made a mess filling their orders. One time I got impatient with the ketchup bottle, as I kept banging on the bottom of it and nothing was coming out. All of the sudden, half the bottled spewed out in this huge blob, and I looked like a bloody accident victim the rest of the night!
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Lynne Spears (Through The Storm: A Real Story of Fame and Family in a Tabloid World)
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Vern did not trust humans was the long and short of it. Not a single one. He had known many in his life, even liked a few, but in the end they all sold him out to the angry mob. Which was why he holed up in Honey Island Swamp out of harm's way.
Vern liked the swamp okay. As much as he liked anything after all these years. Goddamn, so many years just stretching out behind him like bricks in that road old King Darius put down back in who gives a shit BC. Funny how things came back out of the blue. Like that ancient Persian road. He couldn't remember last week, and now he was flashing back a couple thousand years, give or take. Vern had baked half those bricks his own self, back when he still did a little blue-collar. Nearly wore out the internal combustion engine. Shed his skin two seasons early because of that bitch of a job. That and diet. No one had a clue about nutrition in those days. Vern was mostly ketogenic now, high fat, low carbs, apart from his beloved breakfast cereals. Keto made perfect sense for a dragon, especially with his core temperature. Unfortunately, it meant that beer had to go, but he got by on vodka. Absolut was his preferred brand. A little high on alcohol but easiest on the system.
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Eoin Colfer (Highfire)
“
Yet the homogeneity of contemporary humanity is most apparent when it comes to our view of the natural world and of the human body. If you fell sick a thousand years ago, it mattered a great deal where you lived. In Europe, the resident priest would probably tell you that you had made God angry and that in order to regain your health you should donate something to the church, make a pilgrimage to a sacred site, and pray fervently for God’s forgiveness. Alternatively, the village witch might explain that a demon had possessed you and that she could cast it out using song, dance, and the blood of a black cockerel. In the Middle East, doctors brought up on classical traditions might explain that your four bodily humors were out of balance and that you should harmonize them with a proper diet and foul-smelling potions. In India, Ayurvedic experts would offer their own theories concerning the balance between the three bodily elements known as doshas and recommend a treatment of herbs, massages, and yoga postures. Chinese physicians, Siberian shamans, African witch doctors, Amerindian medicine men—every empire, kingdom, and tribe had its own traditions and experts, each espousing different views about the human body and the nature of sickness, and each offering their own cornucopia of rituals, concoctions, and cures. Some of them worked surprisingly well, whereas others were little short of a death sentence. The only thing that united European, Chinese, African, and American medical practices was that everywhere at least a third of all children died before reaching adulthood, and average life expectancy was far below fifty.14 Today, if you happen to be sick, it makes much less difference where you live. In Toronto, Tokyo, Tehran, or Tel Aviv, you will be taken to similar-looking hospitals, where you will meet doctors in white coats who learned the same scientific theories in the same medical colleges. They will follow identical protocols and use identical tests to reach very similar diagnoses. They will then dispense the same medicines produced by the same international drug companies. There are still some minor cultural differences, but Canadian, Japanese, Iranian, and Israeli physicians hold much the same views about the human body and human diseases. After the Islamic State captured Raqqa and Mosul, it did not tear down the local hospitals. Rather, it launched an appeal to Muslim doctors and nurses throughout the world to volunteer their services there.15 Presumably even Islamist doctors and nurses believe that the body is made of cells, that diseases are caused by pathogens, and that antibiotics kill bacteria.
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Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
“
Have you ever been swept away by a toxic lover who sucked you dry? I have. Bad men used to light me up like a Christmas tree. If I had a choice between the rebel without a cause and a nice guy in a sweater and outdoorsy shoes, you can imagine who got my phone number. Rebels and rogues are smooth (and somewhat untamed); they know the headwaiters at the best steak houses, ride fast European motorcycles, and start bar fights in your honor. In short, the rebel makes you feel really alive! It’s all fun and games until he screws your best friend or embezzles your life’s savings. You may be asking yourself how my pathetic dating track record relates to your diet. Simple. The acid—alkaline balance, which relates to the chemistry of your body’s fluids and tissues as measured by pH. The rebel/rogue = acid. The nice solid guy = alkaline. The solid guy gives you energy; he’s reliable and trustworthy. The solid guy calls you back when he says he will. He helps you clean your garage and does yoga with you. He’s even polite to your family no matter how whacked they are, and has the sexual stamina to rock your world. While the rebel can help you let your hair down, too much rebel will sap your energy. In time, a steady rebellious diet burns you out. But when we’re addicted to bad boys (junk food, fat, sugar, and booze), nice men (veggies and whole grains) seem boring. Give them a chance!
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Kris Carr (Crazy Sexy Diet: Eat Your Veggies, Ignite Your Spark, And Live Like You Mean It!)
“
The Transition to Fewer Animal Products Many people claim to need animal products to feel good and perform well. In my experience, this assertion generally comes from individuals who felt worse during the first couple of weeks after a change to a lower-animal-source diet. Instead of being patient, they simply returned to their old way of eating—genuinely feeling better for it—and now insist that they need meat to thrive. A diet heavily burdened with animal products places a huge stress on the detoxification systems of the body. As with stopping caffeine and cigarettes, many people observe withdrawal symptoms for a short period, usually including fatigue, weakness, headaches, or loose stools. In 95 percent of such cases, these symptoms resolve within two weeks. It is more common that the temporary adjustment period, during which you might feel mild symptoms as your body withdraws from your prior toxic habits, lasts less than a week. Unfortunately, many people mistakenly assume these symptoms to be due to some lack in the new diet and go back to eating a poor diet again. Sometimes they have been convinced that they feel bad because they aren’t eating enough protein, especially since when they return to their old diet they feel better again. People often confuse feeling well with getting well, not realizing that sometimes you have to temporarily feel a little worse to really get well.
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Joel Fuhrman (Super Immunity: A Comprehensive Nutritional Guide for a Healthier Life, Featuring a Two-Week Meal Plan, 85 Immunity-Boosting Recipes, and the Latest in ... and Nutritional Research (Eat for Life))
“
Even though deaths were lower among the rich who lived more spaciously and moved residence more easily, the plague reduced their control, creating a shortage of manpower that raised the status of ordinary people. The wool-processing workshops of Italy and Flanders, England and France were short of workers. The rise in wages and the fall in inequality led to higher spending power which doubled per capita investment, leading in turn to higher production in textiles and other consumer goods. Fewer mouths to feed meant better diets. Female wages – once half those of men – were now the same. Workers formed guilds. The new confidence felt by ordinary people empowered them to launch a spate of peasant revolts. The shortage of labour necessitated new sources of power – hydraulics were harnessed to drive watermills and smelting furnaces – and new unpaid workers were obtained from a new source altogether: African slavery. Demand for silk, sugar, spices and slaves inspired European men, bound by a new esprit de corps, to voyage abroad, to destroy their rivals, in the east and in Europe itself, so that they could supply these appetites. The competition intensified improvements in firearms, cannon, gunpowder and galleons. The paradox of the Great Mortality was not only that it elevated the respect for humanity, it also degraded it; it not only decimated Europe, it became a factor in Europe’s rise.
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Simon Sebag Montefiore (The World: A Family History of Humanity)
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In Tokyo, ramen is a playground for the culinary imagination. As long as the dish contains thin wheat noodles, it's ramen. In fact, there's a literal ramen playground called Tokyo Ramen Street in the basement of Tokyo Station, with eight top-rated ramen shops sharing one corridor. We stopped by one evening after a day of riding around on the Shinkansen. After drooling over the photos at establishments such as Junk Garage, which serves oily, brothless noodles hidden under a towering slag heap of toppings, we settled on Ramen Honda based on its short line and the fact that its ramen seemed to be topped with a massive pile of scallions. However, anything in Tokyo that appears to be topped with scallions is actually topped with something much better. You'll meet this delectable dopplegänger soon, and in mass quantities.
The Internet is littered with dozens if not hundreds of exclamation point-bedecked ramen blogs (Rameniac, GO RAMEN!, Ramen Adventures, Ramenate!) in English, Japanese, and probably Serbian, Hindi, and Xhosa. In Tokyo, you'll find hot and cold ramen; Thai green curry ramen; diet ramen and ramen with pork broth so thick you could sculpt with it; Italian-inspired tomato ramen; and Hokkaido-style miso ramen. You'll find ramen chains and fiercely individual holes-in-the-wall. Right now, somewhere in the world, someone is having a meet-cute with her first bowl of ramen. As she fills up on pork and noodles and seaweed and bamboo shoots, she thinks, we were meant to be together, and she is embarrassed at her atavistic reaction to a simple bowl of soup.
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Matthew Amster-Burton (Pretty Good Number One: An American Family Eats Tokyo)
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For things to change, somebody somewhere has to start acting
differently. Maybe it’s you, maybe it’s your team.
Picture that person (or people). Each has an emotional Elephant side and a rational Rider side.
You’ve got to reach both. And you’ve also got to clear the way
for them to succeed. In short, you must do three things: → DIRECT the Rider FOLLOW THE BRIGHT SPOTS. Investigate what’s working and clone it. [Jerry Sternin in Vietnam, solutions-focused therapy] SCRIPT THE CRITICAL MOVES. Don’t think big picture, think in terms of specific behaviors. [1% milk, four rules at the Brazilian railroad] POINT TO THE DESTINATION. Change is easier when you know where you’re going and why it’s worth it. [“You’ll be third graders soon,” “No dry holes” at BP] → MOTIVATE the Elephant FIND THE FEELING. Knowing something isn’t enough to cause change. Make people feel something. [Piling gloves on the table, the chemotherapy video game, Robyn Waters’s demos at Target] SHRINK THE CHANGE. Break down the change until it no longer spooks the Elephant. [The 5-Minute Room Rescue, procurement reform] GROW YOUR PEOPLE. Cultivate a sense of identity and instill the growth mindset. [Brasilata’s “inventors,” junior-high math kids’ turnaround] → SHAPE the Path TWEAK THE ENVIRONMENT. When the situation changes, the behavior changes. So change the situation. [Throwing out the phone system at Rackspace, 1-Click ordering, simplifying the online time sheet] BUILD HABITS. When behavior is habitual, it’s “free”—it doesn’t tax the Rider. Look for ways to encourage habits. [Setting “action triggers,” eating two bowls of soup while dieting, using checklists] RALLY THE HERD.
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Chip Heath (Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard)
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Back in bed I listen to every sound. The plastic tarp over the table on the balcony crunching in the cold wind. the two short clicks in the walls before the heat comes on with a low whoosh. I hear a constant base hum all around, the nervous system of the building, carrying electricity and gas and phone conversations to all our respective little boxes. I listen to it all, the constant, the rhythmic, and the random. It's hard to measure the night by sound, but it can be done. I know that when the traffic noise is quietest, it's about 4:30 in the morning. I know that when the 'Times' hits the door, it's around 5. Now the clock says it's morning, 5:45, but the November sky still says midnight. I hear the elevator ding twenty yards down the hall outside our door. Seven seconds later, I hear his keys in our lock, then his heavy backpack hitting the floor. I hear the refrigerator door open, the unsealing vacuum wheezing as the cold inside air meets the dry heat in the apartment. The cupboard door. A glass. The crescendoing fizz of a new two-liter Diet Coke bottle opening. It's a one-sided conversation with no one actually talking. I lie in the dark, close my eyes, and try not to listen to his movements around apartment. these are the sounds of our life together before it got so messy. I want to say something back. Anything, anything that sounds like things sounded last summer. Even just to myself. Just something out loud.
The inside of my eyelids turn pink. My door has been opened and the light from the hallway shines through them. I won't open them. There is no noise.
Like an eclipse, the world behind my closed eyes goes dark again. For just one second, before I feel a kiss on my right eye. I keep them closed. A kiss on the left one. I open them. Jack looks down at me and closes his eyes. He leans forward and puts his forehead on my chest and goes limp.
''Blues Clues' is on,' he says softly into my tee shirt. His muffled voice vibrating only a half inch away from my heart.
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Josh Kilmer-Purcell (I Am Not Myself These Days)
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The foragers’ secret of success, which protected them from starvation and malnutrition, was their varied diet. Farmers tend to eat a very limited and unbalanced diet. Especially in premodern times, most of the calories feeding an agricultural population came from a single crop – such as wheat, potatoes or rice – that lacks some of the vitamins, minerals and other nutritional materials humans need. The typical peasant in traditional China ate rice for breakfast, rice for lunch and rice for dinner. If she was lucky, she could expect to eat the same on the following day. By contrast, ancient foragers regularly ate dozens of different foodstuffs. The peasant’s ancient ancestor, the forager, may have eaten berries and mushrooms for breakfast; fruits, snails and turtle for lunch; and rabbit steak with wild onions for dinner. Tomorrow’s menu might have been completely different. This variety ensured that the ancient foragers received all the necessary nutrients. Furthermore, by not being dependent on any single kind of food, they were less liable to suffer when one particular food source failed. Agricultural societies are ravaged by famine when drought, fire or earthquake devastates the annual rice or potato crop. Forager societies were hardly immune to natural disasters, and suffered from periods of want and hunger, but they were usually able to deal with such calamities more easily. If they lost some of their staple foodstuffs, they could gather or hunt other species, or move to a less affected area. Ancient foragers also suffered less from infectious diseases. Most of the infectious diseases that have plagued agricultural and industrial societies (such as smallpox, measles and tuberculosis) originated in domesticated animals and were transferred to humans only after the Agricultural Revolution. Ancient foragers, who had domesticated only dogs, were free of these scourges. Moreover, most people in agricultural and industrial societies lived in dense, unhygienic permanent settlements – ideal hotbeds for disease. Foragers roamed the land in small bands that could not sustain epidemics. The wholesome and varied diet, the relatively short working week, and the rarity of infectious diseases have led many experts to define pre-agricultural forager societies as ‘the original affluent societies’.
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Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
“
However we decide to apportion the credit for our improved life spans, the bottom line is that nearly all of us are better able today to resist the contagions and afflictions that commonly sickened our great-grandparents, while having massively better medical care to call on when we need it. In short, we have never had it so good. Or at least we have never had it so good if we are reasonably well-off. If there is one thing that should alarm and concern us today, it is how unequally the benefits of the last century have been shared. British life expectancies might have soared overall, but as John Lanchester noted in an essay in the London Review of Books in 2017, males in the East End of Glasgow today have a life expectancy of just fifty-four years—nine years less than a man in India. In exactly the same way, a thirty-year-old black male in Harlem, New York, is at much greater risk of dying than a thirty-year-old male Bangladeshi from stroke, heart disease, cancer, or diabetes. Climb aboard a bus or subway train in almost any large city in the Western world and you can experience similar vast disparities with a short journey. In Paris, travel five stops on the Metro’s B line from Port-Royal to La Plaine—Stade de France and you will find yourself among people who have an 82 percent greater chance of dying in a given year than those just down the line. In London, life expectancy drops reliably by one year for every two stops traveled eastward from Westminster on the District Line of the Underground. In St. Louis, Missouri, make a twenty-minute drive from prosperous Clayton to the inner-city Jeff-Vander-Lou neighborhood and life expectancy drops by one year for every minute of the journey, a little over two years for every mile. Two things can be said with confidence about life expectancy in the world today. One is that it is really helpful to be rich. If you are middle-aged, exceptionally well-off, and from almost any high-income nation, the chances are excellent that you will live into your late eighties. Someone who is otherwise identical to you but poor—exercises as devotedly, sleeps as many hours, eats a similarly healthy diet, but just has less money in the bank—can expect to die between ten and fifteen years sooner. That’s a lot of difference for an equivalent lifestyle, and no one is sure how to account for it.
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Bill Bryson (The Body: A Guide for Occupants)
“
...the centrality of competitiveness as the key to growth is a recurrent EU motif. Two decades of EC directives on increasing competition in every area, from telecommunications to power generation to collateralizing wholesale funding markets for banks, all bear the same ordoliberal imprint. Similarly, the consistent focus on the periphery states’ loss of competitiveness and the need for deep wage and cost reductions therein, while the role of surplus countries in generating the crisis is utterly ignored, speaks to a deeply ordoliberal understanding of economic management. Savers, after all, cannot be sinners. Similarly, the most recent German innovation of a constitutional debt brake (Schuldenbremse) for all EU countries regardless of their business cycles or structural positions, coupled with a new rules-based fiscal treaty as the solution to the crisis, is simply an ever-tighter ordo by another name.
If states have broken the rules, the only possible policy is a diet of strict austerity to bring them back into conformity with the rules, plus automatic sanctions for those who cannot stay within the rules. There are no fallacies of composition, only good and bad policies. And since states, from an ordoliberal viewpoint, cannot be relied upon to provide the necessary austerity because they are prone to capture, we must have rules and an independent monetary authority to ensure that states conform to the ordo imperative; hence, the ECB. Then, and only then, will growth return. In the case of Greece and Italy in 2011, if that meant deposing a few democratically elected governments, then so be it.
The most remarkable thing about this ordoliberalization of Europe is how it replicates the same error often attributed to the Anglo-American economies: the insistence that all developing states follow their liberal instruction sheets to get rich, the so-called Washington Consensus approach to development that we shall discuss shortly. The basic objection made by late-developing states, such as the countries of East Asia, to the Washington Consensus/Anglo-American idea “liberalize and then growth follows” was twofold. First, this understanding mistakes the outcomes of growth, stable public finances, low inflation, cost competitiveness, and so on, for the causes of growth. Second, the liberal path to growth only makes sense if you are an early developer, since you have no competitors—pace the United Kingdom in the eighteenth century and the United States in the nineteenth century. Yet in the contemporary world, development is almost always state led.
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Mark Blyth (Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea)
“
In short, it was entirely natural that the newts stopped being a sensation, even though there were now as many as a hundred million of them; the public interest they had excited had been the interest of a novelty. They still appeared now and then in films (Sally and Andy, the Two Good Salamanders) and on the cabaret stage where singers endowed with an especially bad voice came on in the role of newts with rasping voices and atrocious grammar, but as soon as the newts had become a familiar and large-scale phenomenon the problems they presented, so to speak, were of a different character. (13) Although the great newt sensation quickly evaporated it was replaced with something that was somewhat more solid - the Newt Question. Not for the first time in the history of mankind, the most vigorous activist in the Newt Question was of course a woman. This was Mme. Louise Zimmermann, the manager of a guest house for girls in Lausanne, who, with exceptional and boundless energy, propagated this noble maxim around the world: Give the newts a proper education! She would tirelessly draw attention both to the newts' natural abilities and to the danger that might arise for human civilisation if the salamanders weren't carefully taught to reason and to understand morals, but it was long before she met with anything but incomprehension from the public. (14) "Just as the Roman culture disappeared under the onslaught of the barbarians our own educated civilisation will disappear if it is allowed to become no more than an island in a sea of beings that are spiritually enslaved, our noble ideals cannot be allowed to become dependent on them," she prophesied at six thousand three hundred and fifty seven lectures that she delivered at women's institutes all over Europe, America, Japan, China, Turkey and elsewhere. "If our culture is to survive there must be education for all. We cannot have any peace to enjoy the gifts of our civilisation nor the fruits of our culture while all around us there are millions and millions of wretched and inferior beings artificially held down in the state of animals. Just as the slogan of the nineteenth century was 'Freedom for Women', so the slogan of our own age must be 'GIVE THE NEWTS A PROPER EDUCATION!'" And on she went. Thanks to her eloquence and her incredible persistence, Mme. Louise Zimmermann mobilised women all round the world and gathered sufficient funds to enable her to found the First Newt Lyceum at Beaulieu (near Nice), where the tadpoles of salamanders working in Marseilles and Toulon were instructed in French language and literature, rhetoric, public behaviour, mathematics and cultural history. (15) The Girls' School for Newts in Menton was slightly less successful, as the staple courses in music, diet and cookery and fine handwork (which Mme. Zimmermann insisted on for primarily pedagogical reasons) met with a remarkable lack of enthusiasm, if not with a stubborn hostility among its young students. In contrast with this, though, the first public examinations for young newts was such an instant and startling success that they were quickly followed by the establishment of the Marine Polytechnic for Newts at Cannes and the Newts' University at Marseilles with the support of the society for the care and protection of animals; it was at this university that the first newt was awarded a doctorate of law.
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Karel Čapek (War with the Newts)
“
In the early 1680s, at just about the time that Edmond Halley and his friends Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke were settling down in a London coffee house and embarking on the casual wager that would result eventually in Isaac Newton’s Principia, Hemy Cavendish’s weighing of the Earth, and many of the other inspired and commendable undertakings that
have occupied us for much of the past four hundred pages, a rather less desirable milestone was being passed on the island of Mauritius, far out in the Indian Ocean some eight hundred miles off the east coast of Madagascar.
There, some forgotten sailor or sailor’s pet was harrying to death the last of the dodos, the famously flightless bird whose dim but trusting nature and lack of leggy zip made it a rather irresistible target for bored young tars on shore leave. Millions of years of peaceful isolation had not prepared it for the erratic and deeply unnerving behavior of human beings.
We don’t know precisely the circumstances, or even year, attending the last moments of the last dodo, so we don’t know which arrived first a
world that contained a Principia or one that had no dodos, but we do know that they happened at more or less the same time. You would be
hard pressed, I would submit to find a better pairing of occurrences to illustrate the divine and felonious nature of the human being-a species of organism that is capable of unpicking the deepest secrets of the heavens while at the same time pounding into extinction, for no purpose at all, a creature that never did us any harm and wasn’t even remotely capable of
understanding what we were doing to it as we did it. Indeed, dodos were so spectacularly short on insight it is reported, that if you wished to find
all the dodos in a vicinity you had only to catch one and set it to squawking, and all the others would waddle along to see what was up.
The indignities to the poor dodo didn’t end quite there. In 1755, some seventy years after the last dodo’s death, the director of the Ashmolean
Museum in Oxford decided that the institution’s stuffed dodo was becoming unpleasantly musty and ordered it tossed on a bonfire. This was a surprising decision as it was by this time the only dodo in existence, stuffed or otherwise. A passing employee, aghast tried to rescue the bird but could save only its head and part of one limb.
As a result of this and other departures from common sense, we are not now entirely sure what a living dodo was like. We possess much less information than most people suppose-a handful of crude descriptions by "unscientific voyagers, three or four oil paintings, and a few scattered osseous fragments," in the somewhat aggrieved words of the nineteenth century naturalist H. E. Strickland. As Strickland wistfully observed, we have more physical evidence of some ancient sea monsters and lumbering
saurapods than we do of a bird that lived into modern times and required nothing of us to survive except our absence.
So what is known of the dodo is this: it lived on Mauritius, was plump but not tasty, and was the biggest-ever member of the pigeon family,
though by quite what margin is unknown as its weight was never accurately recorded. Extrapolations from Strickland’s "osseous fragments" and the Ashmolean’s modest remains show that it was a little over two and a
half feet tall and about the same distance from beak tip to backside. Being flightless, it nested on the ground, leaving its eggs and chicks tragically easy prey for pigs, dogs, and monkeys brought to the island by outsiders. It was probably extinct by 1683 and was most certainly gone by 1693. Beyond that we know almost nothing except of course that we will not see its like again. We know nothing of its reproductive habits and diet, where it ranged, what sounds it made in tranquility or alarm. We don’t possess a single dodo egg.
From beginning to end our acquaintance with animate dodos lasted just seventy years.
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Bill Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything)
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SUCCESSFUL MUSCLE BUILDING: 7 TIPS FOR MORE MUSCLE MASS
How does successful muscle building work? Today I have 7 tips for more muscle mass for you. In addition to the training itself, there are many other factors that determine success in building muscle. The more of the following points you take into account, the faster and more successfully you will be able to build muscle.
THE RIGHT TRAINING PLAN
No training plan is suitable for everyone. Find or create a training plan that matches your level and goals. For beginners, I recommend a full-body plan . The whole body is trained every time in 2-3 units per week. If you have been training longer and have some experience, I would recommend a 2 or 3 split. Every muscle group can be trained up to 2 times a week. I would fundamentally advise against a 4 or 5 split, but of course, there are also professionals for whom such a plan can make sense.
CONTINUALLY GROW STRONGER
The increase in strength is a very good indicator of successful muscle building. Try to train so that you slowly but surely get stronger. That doesn't mean that you have to move heavy weights every time you exercise. You can also improve your technique or do one more repetition here and there. It is only important that you make progress.
PROPER NUTRITION
You could easily write your own contribution to the muscle building diet. The most important thing is that you consume enough calories. Your body needs a slight excess of calories, i.e. more calories than it consumes. This is the only way you can gain weight and therefore also muscle mass.
It is also important that you consume enough protein: approx. 2g protein per kilo of body weight. For example, if you weigh 80 KG, you should eat around 160g of protein a day. The remaining calories can then be consumed divided into fats and carbohydrates. The higher the quality of the food, the more strength you will have in training.
ADEQUATE SLEEP FOR REGENERATION
Your muscles grow in the resting phases and not during training. It is all the more important for the body that it receives sufficient regeneration and sleep.
JUST FOCUS ON YOURSELF
Everyone does it every now and then and compares himself with the other members in the gym. Especially when it comes to strength and muscle mass, it quickly becomes a competition who is stronger or wider.
However, this way of thinking is dangerous because it leads you to overexert yourself. In these situations in particular, high spirits or even a little inattentiveness can quickly lead to an injury. Apart from injuries, you are not doing yourself a favor, because everyone is different and has different requirements. Do not try to compare yourself with other members, but concentrate on yourself and try to become better than before.
DRINK ENOUGH
Your body needs enough fluid and, above all, water to function properly. It is best to drink 1 liter per 20kg bodyweight . So if you weigh 80kg, you should drink about 4 liters a day. In addition to water, you can always drink unsweetened tea. This has a pleasant taste and you can drink it both warm and cold. Thus, your body is ideally supplied with liquid, which supports many important processes in your body.
TAKE THE CREATINE SUPPLEMENT
Creatine (or creatine written) can give you additional strength and volume in your muscles. Many studies have proven the effective effects of creatine. When you take creatine, the cellular energy level of your muscles improves, which increases your short-term performance, so you can train harder, increase your maximum strength and reduce cell damage during long endurance sessions. I recommend taking 5g a day. Either in a shake before or after training or immediately after getting up with a large glass of water.
If you take these tips to heart, successful muscle building is almost guaranteed
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Kate
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A carefully planned sensory diet, the optimum sensorimotor activities you need to feel alert and in effortless control and to perform at your peak can provide an electrochemical fix that offers short-term and long-term relief.1
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Sharon Heller (Too Loud, Too Bright, Too Fast, Too Tight: What to Do If You Are Sensory Defensive in an Overstimulating World)
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Here are the two things I have come to believe about diets: 1. Almost any diet works in the short term. 2. Almost no diets work in the long term.
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Tommy Tomlinson (The Elephant in the Room: One Fat Man's Quest to Get Smaller in a Growing America)
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In short, caffeine is most problematic after 9 AM. Those who are stressed can do better by limiting their cof-
fee consumption to early in the day.
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Alan Christianson (The Adrenal Reset Diet: Strategically Cycle Carbs and Proteins to Lose Weight, Balance Hormones, and Move from Stressed to Thriving)
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The wholesome and varied diet, the relatively short working week, and the rarity of infectious diseases have led many experts to define pre-agricultural forager societies as ‘the original affluent societies’. It would be a mistake, however, to idealise the lives of these ancients.
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Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
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The wholesome and varied diet, the relatively short working week, and the rarity of infectious diseases have led many experts to define pre-agricultural forager societies as ‘the original affluent societies’. It would
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Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
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A word of warning: The absolute worst thing you can do is ask yourself, What products are super popular right now? For example, I can’t tell you how many people I know chased fidget spinners or tried to sell diet supplements. Both trends exploded brightly, and, sure, some people made some money—but they couldn’t build a business, because fidget spinners are a one-off product that don’t serve a direct person, and diet fads change every year. Those people thought they had a business, but what they actually had was a short-term cash flow machine, and most of those sellers are out of business now that their flash-in-the-pan fad has fizzled out.
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Ryan Daniel Moran (12 Months to $1 Million: How to Pick a Winning Product, Build a Real Business, and Become a Seven-Figure Entrepreneur)
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Protein offers both short-term and
long-term satiety.
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Ted Naiman (The PE Diet)
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Learn Chinese in 5 Minutes
1) That’s not right = Sum Ting Wong
2) Are you harbouring a fugitive = Hu Yu Hai Ding
3) See me ASAP = Kum Hia
4) Stupid Man = Dum Fuk
5) Small Horse = Tai Ni Po Ni
6) Did you go to the beach = Wai Yu So Tan
7) I bumped the coffee table = Ai Bang Mai Fa Kin Ni
8) I think you need a face lift = Chin Tu Fat
9) It’s Very dark in here = Wai So Dim
10) I Thought you were on a diet = Wai Yu Mun Ching
11) This is a tow away zone = No Pah King
12) Our meeting is scheduled for next week = Wai Yu Kum Nao
13) Staying out of sight = Lei Ying Lo
14) He’s cleaning his automobile = Wa Shing Ka
15) Your body odor is offensive = Yu Stin Ki Pu
16) Great = Fa Kin Su Pah
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Adam Smith (Funny Jokes: 300+ Jokes & Riddles, Anecdotes and Short Funny stories (Comedy Central))
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…interoceptive confusion and body image distortions are forms of impaired embodied mentalizing and expressions of pre-mentalistic thinking. For example, psychic equivalence demonstrates how patients’ painful self and affect states are expressed though extreme body hatred and the mistaken belief that being “skinny” will bring them self-acceptance, "confidence," and agency. The teleological stance explains the obsessive drive for thinness as a method to obtain self-acceptance and the approval of others. In short, subjugation of the body is a confused attempt to gain mastery and control over feelings of ineffectiveness and lack of self-worth.
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Tom Wooldridge (Psychoanalytic Treatment of Eating Disorders (Relational Perspectives Book Series))
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Shortly after Hein came to live with us, I discovered that he was actually a pretty nice young man.
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Diet Eman (Things We Couldn't Say)
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The man he had spoken to in that little cafe was Gestapo; the real contact had been arrested shortly before, and the Germans had learned the password sentences, probably by torturing him.
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Diet Eman (Things We Couldn't Say)
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Once You’re in Keto, How Can You Keep It Going Without Fasting? The short answer is: Eat a boatload of fat (~1.5 to 2.5 g per kilogram of body weight), next-to-no carbs, and moderate protein (1 to 1.5 g per kilogram of body weight) each day. We’ll look at Dom’s typical meals and day in a minute, but a few critical notes first: High protein and low fat doesn’t work. Your liver will convert excess amino acids into glucose and shut down ketogenesis. Fat as 70 to 85% of calories is required. This doesn’t mean you always have to eat rib eye steaks. A chicken breast by itself will kick you out of ketosis, but a chicken breast cut up into a green leafy salad with a lot of olive oil, feta cheese, and some Bulletproof Coffee (for example) can keep you in ketosis. One of the challenges of keto is the amount of fat one needs to consume to maintain it. Roughly 70 to 80% of your total calories need to come from fat. Rather than trying to incorporate fat bombs into all meals (one does get tired of fatty steak, eggs, and cheese over and over again), Dom will both drink fat between meals (e.g., coconut milk—not water—in coffee) and add in supplemental “ice cream,” detailed on page 29. Dom noticed that dairy can cause lipid profile issues (e.g., can spike LDL) and has started to minimize things like cream and cheese. I experienced the same. It’s easy to eat a disgusting amount of cheese to stay in keto. Consider coconut milk (Aroy-D Pure Coconut Milk) instead. Dom doesn’t worry about elevated LDL as long as other blood markers aren’t out of whack (high CRP, low HDL, etc.). From Dom: “The thing that I focus on most is triglycerides. If your triglycerides are elevated, that means your body is just not adapting to the ketogenic diet. Some people’s triglycerides are elevated even when their calories are restricted. That’s a sign that the ketogenic diet is not for you. . . . It’s not a one-size-fits-all diet.
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Timothy Ferriss (Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers)
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The following are all foods you should feel welcome to eat freely (unless, of course, you know they bother your stomach): Alliums (Onions, Leeks, Garlic, Scallions): This category of foods, in particular, is an excellent source of prebiotics and can be extremely nourishing to our bugs. If you thought certain foods were lacking in flavor, try sautéing what you think of as that “boring” vegetable or tofu with any member of this family and witness the makeover. Good-quality olive oil, sesame oil, or coconut oil can all help with the transformation of taste. *Beans, Legumes, and Pulses: This family of foods is one of the easiest ways to get a high amount of fiber in a small amount of food. You know how beans make some folks a little gassy? That’s a by-product of our bacterial buddies chowing down on that chili you just consumed for dinner. Don’t get stuck in a bean rut. Seek out your bean aisle or peruse the bulk bin at your local grocery store and see if you can try for three different types of beans each week. Great northern, anyone? Brightly Colored Fruits and Vegetables: Not only do these gems provide fiber, but they are also filled with polyphenols that increase diversity in the gut and offer anti-inflammatory compounds that are essential for disease prevention and healing. Please note that white and brown are colors in this category—hello, cauliflower, daikon radish, and mushrooms! Good fungi are particularly anti-inflammatory, rich in beta-glucans, and a good source of the immune-supportive vitamin D. Remember that variety is key here. Just because broccoli gets a special place in the world of superfoods doesn’t mean that you should eat only broccoli. Branch out: How about trying bok choy, napa cabbage, or an orange pepper? Include a spectrum of color on your plate and make sure that some of these vegetables are periodically eaten raw or lightly steamed, which may have greater benefits to your microbiome. Herbs and Spices: Not only incredibly rich in those anti-inflammatory polyphenols, this category of foods also has natural digestive-aid properties that can help improve the digestibility of certain foods like beans. They can also stimulate the production of bile, an essential part of our body’s mode of breaking down fat. Plus, they add pizzazz to any meal. Nuts, Seeds, and Their Respective Butters: This family of foods provides fiber, and it is also a good source of healthy and anti-inflammatory fats that help keep the digestive tract balanced and nourished. It’s time to step out of that almond rut and seek out new nutty experiences. Walnuts have been shown to confer excellent benefits on the microbiome because of their high omega-3 and polyphenol content. And if you haven’t tasted a buttery hemp seed, also rich in omega-3s and fantastic atop oatmeal, here’s your opportunity. Starchy Vegetables: These hearty vegetables are a great source of fiber and beneficial plant chemicals. When slightly cooled, they are also a source of something called resistant starch, which feeds the bacteria and enables them to create those fantabulous short-chain fatty acids. These include foods like potatoes, winter squash, and root vegetables like parsnips, beets, and rutabaga. When was the last time you munched on rutabaga? This might be your chance! Teas: This can be green, white, or black tea, all of which contain healthy anti-inflammatory compounds that are beneficial for our microbes and overall gut health. It can also be herbal tea, which is an easy way to add overall health-supportive nutrients to our diet without a lot of additional burden on our digestive system. Unprocessed Whole Grains: These are wonderful complex carbohydrates (meaning fiber-filled), which both nourish those gut bugs and have numerous vitamins and minerals that support our health. Branch out and try some new ones like millet, buckwheat, and amaranth. FOODS TO EAT IN MODERATION
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Mary Purdy (The Microbiome Diet Reset: A Practical Guide to Restore and Protect a Healthy Microbiome)
“
Despite constant insistence that we lose weight for our health and track the simple arithmetic of calories in, calories out, there is no data illustrating that dieting achieves long-term weight loss. To the contrary, constant dieting may make weight loss more difficult, as our metabolisms fight back, searching for the stasis of a familiar, fatter body.57 A major study following contestants from the television show The Biggest Loser showed that despite their dramatic weight loss on camera, most contestants were unable to maintain their smaller size, despite hours of working out each day. The study’s results were staggering: after their extreme televised dieting, every contestant’s body burned fewer calories at rest than it did at the beginning of the competition—and one contestant was shown to burn eight hundred fewer calories each day than expected for a peer of the same gender and size.58 Those results aren’t limited to reality TV contestants. As one Slate writer put it, addressing dieters, “You’ll likely lose weight in the short term, but your chances of keeping it off for five years or more is about the same as your chance of surviving metastatic lung cancer: 5 percent. And when you do gain back the weight, everyone will blame you. Including you.
”
”
Aubrey Gordon (What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat)
“
at eleven years old
the doctor weighed me
& afterward,
my mother told me
i was too fat
& that i needed to
go on a diet
immediately.
for an entire. year,
food barely passed
through my lips.
i did not even allow myself
to take a sip of water
because i wanted to be
so thin that i
could blow away
with the slightest breeze-
d i s a p p e a r .
i dropped sixty pounds
in a few short months
& i had to wear long sleeves
to cover up my
only catharsis.
- everybody told me how good i looked, though
”
”
Amanda Lovelace (The Princess Saves Herself in This One (Women Are Some Kind of Magic, #1))
“
at eleven years old
the doctor weighed me
& afterward,
my mother told me
i was too fat
& that i needed to
go on a diet
immediately.
for an entire year,
food barely passed
through my lips.
i did not even allow myself
to take a sip of water
because i wanted to be
so thin that i
could blow away
with the slightest breeze-
d i s a p p e a r .
i dropped sixty pounds
in a few short months
& i had to wear long sleeves
to cover up my
only catharsis.
- everybody told me how good i looked, though
”
”
Amanda Lovelace (The Princess Saves Herself in This One (Women Are Some Kind of Magic, #1))
“
Naturally, immunity is a natural physician that fends off all invading bacteria and viruses, whereas food becomes its medicine or trouble since that appears to increase or decrease your immune system; thus, choose the right and healthy food, and adopt this proverb: Eat to be alive, not live to eat.
Experienced and qualified doctors understand the side effects of medicines before the prescription. Indeed, the majority of doctors hold a professional degree and certificate, whereas virtually none of them has the latest and accurate knowledge; as a result, it executes no difference between such doctors and a robot.
When naturopathy experts and spiritual figures predict with significant certainty that you have no cancer or whatever other sickness, it confuses, surprises, and creates suspicious feelings in your mind, whereas doctors have diagnosed metastatic cancer.
What should one believe and what not? However, one’s enemies are still awaiting its death. One breathes, expecting and waiting for the miracle of God; it will soon happen if one believes.
You neither feel trust in your family doctor and specialists nor feel satisfaction with their treatment. You always realize that they do not tell the truth about how risky your disease is, and they never discuss it.
If doctors fail to meet your sufferings of mucus, shortness of breath, and swallowing difficulties because of medication’s side effects, they will indeed put you on medical victimization, ignoring the better quality of life that the medical system promises.
Most doctors work for the insurance companies instead of caring for patients. It is factually a medical crime that doctors, hospitals, or insurance providers put patients at high risk.
Many doctors do not respect patients’ requests to fulfill it because patients want treatment according to international medical guidelines. Such refusal results in the spreading of their suffering. It saddens patients that the doctors only think about the insurance provider and not the patient.
Indeed, such a situation can put one on the track in a dilemma. However, one’s experience and others may prove that none of the medicines give patients a good quality of life, whether homeopathy, allopathy, naturopathy, or even a spiritual one.
If your fate stands as a barrier in front of you, no one sees or realizes what you have faced and is still facing worries about your health.
Factually, robot doctors cannot provide significant information that may help to ease patients’ suffering; there is only one way to change lifestyle and stay strict on diet; it will have a better result than medicine, which is full of toxins that damage patients’ health instead of curing it.
One can think or predict that the medical world has become a medical trade in which one cannot exclude the medical mafia. Is it a valid context that requires an authentic answer?
”
”
Ehsan Sehgal
“
Well, good riddance. Life is too short for diets. I won't hear another word of it.
”
”
H. T. Boyd
“
Let us examine first the psychological and legal position of the criminal. We see that in spite of the difficulty of finding other food, the accused, or, as we may say, my client, has often during his peculiar life exhibited signs of repentance, and of wishing to give up this clerical diet. Incontrovertible facts prove this assertion. He has eaten five or six children, a relatively insignificant number, no doubt, but remarkable enough from another point of view. It is manifest that, pricked by remorse—for my client is religious, in his way, and has a conscience, as I shall prove later—and desiring to extenuate his sin as far as possible, he has tried six times at least to substitute lay nourishment for clerical. That this was merely an experiment we can hardly doubt: for if it had been only a question of gastronomic variety, six would have been too few; why only six? Why not thirty? But if we regard it as an experiment, inspired by the fear of committing new sacrilege, then this number six becomes intelligible. Six attempts to calm his remorse, and the pricking of his conscience, would amply suffice, for these attempts could scarcely have been happy ones. In my humble opinion, a child is too small; I should say, not sufficient; which would result in four or five times more lay children than monks being required in a given time. The sin, lessened on the one hand, would therefore be increased on the other, in quantity, not in quality. Please understand, gentlemen, that in reasoning thus, I am taking the point of view which might have been taken by a criminal of the middle ages. As for myself, a man of the late nineteenth century, I, of course, should reason differently; I say so plainly, and therefore you need not jeer at me nor mock me, gentlemen. As for you, general, it is still more unbecoming on your part. In the second place, and giving my own personal opinion, a child’s flesh is not a satisfying diet; it is too insipid, too sweet; and the criminal, in making these experiments, could have satisfied neither his conscience nor his appetite. I am about to conclude, gentlemen; and my conclusion contains a reply to one of the most important questions of that day and of our own! This criminal ended at last by denouncing himself to the clergy, and giving himself up to justice. We cannot but ask, remembering the penal system of that day, and the tortures that awaited him—the wheel, the stake, the fire!—we cannot but ask, I repeat, what induced him to accuse himself of this crime? Why did he not simply stop short at the number sixty, and keep his secret until his last breath? Why could he not simply leave the monks alone, and go into the desert to repent? Or why not become a monk himself? That is where the puzzle comes in! There must have been something stronger than the stake or the fire, or even than the habits of twenty years! There must have been an idea more powerful than all the calamities and sorrows of this world, famine or torture, leprosy or plague—an idea which entered into the heart, directed and enlarged the springs of life, and made even that hell supportable to humanity! Show me a force, a power like that, in this our century of vices and railways!
”
”
Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Idiot)
“
In the long run—and often in the short-run—your willpower will never beat your environment. —JAMES CLEAR, AUTHOR OF ATOMIC HABITS Let’s say you decide to remove refined sugar from your diet. There’s overwhelming evidence that it’s not good for your health, and you’re convinced your quality of life would improve if you can kick the habit. There’s just one problem: sugar tastes good, and you experience cravings that are difficult to resist. How can you make it easier to change your eating habits? One of the most effective strategies is simple: don’t purchase products with refined sugar at the grocery store, get rid of any food with added sugar in your house, and purchase a few healthy snacks that meet your new criteria. If sugar isn’t available when and where you experience hunger, and if there are easy alternatives to your typical choices, there’s no need to resist temptation: the structure of your immediate Environment makes your new behavior automatic. A few minutes of willpower applied to altering the world around you can make it much easier to act in the ways you’ve decided to act.
”
”
Josh Kaufman (The Personal MBA: A World-Class Business Education in a Single Volume)
“
The breakthrough strategy to achieve short- and long-term success is to make the body feel safe throughout the journey with refeeds, diet breaks, and reverse dieting. With these three tools, you can safely lose body fat permanently and avoid the yo-yo effect.
”
”
Matt Gallant (The Ultimate Nutrition Bible: Easily Create the Perfect Diet that Fits Your Lifestyle, Goals, and Genetics)
“
The short answer is that building muscle requires a lot of energy. Based on doing math ourselves and with clients, we estimate that synthesizing one pound of lean muscle burns around 5,000 calories. Yes, the energy cost of building a pound of lean tissue is that high. Next, muscle increases your BMR, which means you’re burning more calories while you watch Netflix. A pound of lean muscle burns on average three times more than a pound of fat. A pound of lean muscle burns around six calories a day, whereas a pound of fat burns around two. A metabolic study found that after nine months of resistance training, resting energy expenditure (REE) went up 5 percent. So, if you add 20 pounds of lean muscle, you’re going to burn an extra 120 to 130 calories a day. This adds up over time.
”
”
Matt Gallant (The Ultimate Nutrition Bible: Easily Create the Perfect Diet that Fits Your Lifestyle, Goals, and Genetics)
“
Elevated blood sugars populated David’s brain the same way they swamped his blood. His increased blood sugar correlated with increasing glucose within his brain. David’s mind became toxic from that increased amount of sugar sponged with water. Plumped up thinking cells were bogged down with too much glucose and the accompanying fluid. Swollen brain cells clouded David’s thinking, much like a concussion. He couldn’t focus as the electrical messages short-circuited in this swamp of sugar-water. His thoughts drifted away, and sometimes his speech slurred. If David recruited most of his brain cells into this toxicity, he would have slipped into a coma and died. It’s true!
”
”
Annette Bosworth (ketoCONTINUUM: Consistently Keto Diet For Life)
“
The concept of dieting often conjures images of excessive weight loss and restrictive meal plans that are quickly abandoned. However, in its truest sense, dieting is not about short-term weight-loss fads, but rather a commitment to a long-term, holistic approach to health.
”
”
Rida Berilgen (ONE QUARTER: Humans live on one-quarter of what they eat; on the other three-quarters lives their doctor)
“
Berry Good Smoothie When trying to eat healthy, smoothies are your best friend. They taste great, they are packed full of fruit, and they're healthy. I feel as though we often forget about smoothies in our day to day life. Take full advantage of using smoothies when trying to keep a well-balanced diet. They make great snacks in between meals, are refreshing, and can cure cravings when you're looking for something sweet. When it comes to smoothies there's some really cool creations you can make and you can decide what you like the best, but here’s three great short recipes to get you started. Ingredients– - 1 Banana - 1/2 cup of Strawberries - 1/3 cup of Blackberries - 1/2 cup of Blueberries - 1/2 cup of Greek or Regular Yogurt - 5-6 Ice Cubes - 1/4 cup of Orange Juice Directions– Blend all of that goodness together. If consistency is too thick, add a bit more of milk to fit liking. Adjust flavors to fit desired taste. Serve.
”
”
Blake "Miles" Roman (Healthy Cookbook: Delicious Recipes for a Life of Wellness)
“
The idea of cultivation and exercise, so dear to the saints of old, has now no place in our total religious picture. It is too slow, too common. We now demand glamour and fast flowing dramatic action. A generation of Christians reared among push buttons and automatic machines is impatient of slower and less direct methods of reaching their goals. We have been trying to apply machine-age methods to our relations with God. We read our chapter, have our short devotions and rush away, hoping to make up for our deep inward bankruptcy by attending another gospel meeting or listening to another thrilling story told by a religious adventurer lately returned from afar. The tragic results of this spirit are all about us. Shallow lives, hollow religious philosophies, the preponderance of the element of fun in gospel meetings, the glorification of men, trust in religious externalities, quasi-religious fellowships, salesmanship methods, the mistaking of dynamic personality for the power of the Spirit: these and such as these are the symptoms of an evil disease, a deep and serious malady of the soul. For this great sickness that is upon us no one person is responsible, and no Christian is wholly free from blame. We have all contributed, directly or indirectly, to this sad state of affairs. We have been too blind to see, or too timid to speak out, or too self-satisfied to desire anything better than the poor average diet with which others appear satisfied. To put it differently, we have accepted one another's notions, copied one another's lives and made one another's experiences the model for our own. And for a generation the trend has been downward. Now we have reached a low place of sand and burnt wire grass and, worst of all, we have made the Word of Truth conform to our experience and accepted this low plane as the very pasture of the blessed. It will require a determined heart and more than a little courage to wrench ourselves loose from the grip of our times and return to Biblical ways. But it can be done. Every now and then in the past Christians have had to do it. History has recorded several large-scale returns led by such men as St. Francis, Martin Luther and George Fox. Unfortunately there seems to be no Luther or Fox on the horizon at present. Whether or not another such return may be expected before the coming of Christ is a question upon which Christians are not fully agreed, but that is not of too great importance to us now. What God in His sovereignty may yet do on a world-scale I do not claim to know: but what He will do for the plain man or woman who seeks His face I believe I do know and can tell others. Let any man turn to God in earnest, let him begin to exercise himself unto godliness, let him seek to develop his powers of spiritual receptivity by trust and obedience and humility, and the results will exceed anything he may have hoped in his leaner and weaker days.
”
”
Anonymous
“
Therefore, the general consensus is that diets should provide about 55 per cent of energy from carbohydrates, 30 per cent from fat, and 15 per cent from protein.
”
”
David Bender (Nutrition: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
“
There are many facets to the decline in fairness and opportunity in American life. Perhaps the worst are the conditions now imposed upon young children born into the underclass and subjected to the recent evolution of the educational system. They are related, and they reinforce each other; their combined result is to condemn tens of millions of children, particularly those born into the new underclass, to a life of hardship and unfairness. For any young child whose parents don’t have money, or who is the child of a migrant agricultural worker and/or an illegal immigrant, prenatal care, nursery, day care, after school, school nutrition, and foster-care systems are nothing short of appalling. And then comes school itself. The “American dream”, stated simply, is that no matter how poor or humble your origins—even if you never knew your parents—you have a shot at a decent life. America’s promise is that anyone willing to work hard can do better over time, and have at least a reasonable life for themselves and their own children. You could expect to do better than your parents, and even be able to help them as they grew old. More than ever before, the key to such a dream is a good education. The rise of information technology, and the opening of Asian economies, means that only a small portion of America’s population can make a good living through unskilled or manual labour. But instead of elevating the educational system and the opportunities it should provide, American politicians, and those who follow their lead around the globe, have been going in exactly the wrong direction. As a result, we are developing not a new class system, but, without exaggeration, a new caste system—a society in which the circumstances of your birth determine your entire life. As a result, the dream of opportunity is dying. Increasingly, the most important determinant of a child’s life prospects—future income, wealth, educational level, even health and life expectancy—is totally arbitrary and unfair. It’s also very simple. A child’s future is increasingly determined by his or her parents’ wealth, not by his or her intelligence or energy. To be sure, there are a number of reasons for this. Income is correlated with many other things, and it’s therefore difficult to isolate the impact of individual factors. Children in poor households are more likely to grow up in single-parent versus two-parent households, exposed to drugs and alcohol, with one or both parents in prison, with their immigration status questionable, and more likely to have problems with diet and obesity. Culture and race play a role: Asian children have far higher school graduation rates, test scores, and grades than all other groups, including whites, in the US; Latinos, the lowest.
”
”
Charles H. Ferguson (Inside Job: The Rogues Who Pulled Off the Heist of the Century)
“
We asked 54 people, recruited from the Bulletproof Executive Facebook page, to conduct two batteries of cognitive function tests per day for 4 weeks while using different combinations of butter and coffee: Lab-tested Upgraded Coffee (black) Coffee made with beans from a local shop (black) Lab-tested Upgraded Coffee with butter Coffee made with beans from a local shop with butter We did not test MCTs, short-chain C8 MCTs, or coconut oil because the test was already too long and dropout (people not completing the test) was a problem. Nonetheless, the results were conclusive. With or without butter, the coffee from a local coffee shop produced statistically significant lower scores on tests of cognitive function compared to lab-tested Upgraded Coffee beans.
”
”
Dave Asprey (The Bulletproof Diet: Lose Up to a Pound a Day, Reclaim Energy and Focus, Upgrade Your Life)
“
Roughly half of all American Catholic teens now lose their Catholic identity before they turn thirty. The reasons are varied. Today’s mass media, both in entertainment and in news, offer a steady diet of congenial, practical atheism, highlighting religious hypocrisy and cultivating consumer appetite. As one study noted, many young adults assume that “science and logic are how we ‘really’ know things about our world, and religious faith either violates or falls short of the standards of scientific knowledge.”8 Others have been shaped by theories trickling down from universities through high schools into a vulgarized, “simple-minded ideology presupposing the cultural construction of everything” and fostering an uncritical moral relativism.9 But the example of parents remains a key factor—often the key factor—in shaping young adult beliefs. The family is the main transmitter of religious convictions. Disrupting the family disrupts an entire cultural ecology.
”
”
Charles J. Chaput (Strangers in a Strange Land: Living the Catholic Faith in a Post-Christian World)
“
Accountability With Friends In many areas of life there's a battle between doing the thing that will work very effectively to solve a specific problem in the short term versus doing that which will take longer to become effective but will solve many problems in the long term. For example, building up willpower is extremely slow, but once you have a high capacity for it, you can do a lot of difficult things outside your routine. If you have low or normal willpower, you will rely exclusively on habits to get a lot done. Similarly, it's a good practice to build up the ability to be accountable entirely to yourself, but if you're unable to do that, or for habits that are very long term or very difficult, you can ask a friend to help you be accountable. A good friend of mine, Leo Babauta, who is a master of habits and is excellent at being accountable to himself, asked me to help him stay accountable for his diet because he was trying to eat a perfect diet for a full six months. That's a very difficult challenge, but having someone to stay accountable to makes it slightly easier. Earlier this year I wanted to completely eliminate all non-work web browsing for three months, so I asked a friend to hold me accountable. It worked, and I'm not sure I would have been able to do it without him. When asking a friend to hold you accountable, make it concrete and easy for him. It must be concrete, because you don't want to impose on him to constantly evaluate your progress. Either Leo ate sugar or he didn't. Either I visited a web site or I didn't. You must also report your progress at regular intervals. Leo created a shared spreadsheet where I could see whether he ate properly each day. Last, there must be consequences for failure. The primary purpose of having consequences is that they make the agreement official and definite. People remember bets, but forget offhand claims. My friend bet me $50 I couldn't stay off the web sites for three months. Without the bet, I doubt he would have kept track of it if he had just said, “I don't think you can do it”. Since your friend is doing you a favor, be willing to make a one-sided bet where he has no downside. Reserve accountability for only the most difficult and important of your habits. It increases compliance, but at the cost of coordinating (albeit minimally) with someone else. It's also a missed opportunity to build the habit of self-reliance, so use it only when there's serious concern that you may not stick with the habit without it. Habitualizing
”
”
Tynan (Superhuman by Habit: A Guide to Becoming the Best Possible Version of Yourself, One Tiny Habit at a Time)
“
For the vast majority of our time on earth, our species did not buy its food or its clothing or its shelter or its education or its medical healing. We chased down our food, skinned rabbits and deer and buffalo for clothing, found caves and built shelters of buffalo hides attached to tree trunks, and carved limbs and even buffalo bones, and sought out plants that heal. Our elders told the important stories around camp-fires, healers studied plants for their powers and chanted to the heavens for theirs. In short, for 98 percent of our existence as hunter-gatherers, we did not consume. We created. Ten thousand years ago, in a creative discovery that has proven to be a mixed blessing indeed, we started to plant things. We no longer imitated the prairie in the way it seeded itself patiently each year: We hurried the process along and chose to do our own planting. We called this “agriculture.” Agriculture was not a moment of “pure progress” for humankind. It looked like a good deal—we could choose our diets no matter what the game were doing in our neighborhoods; we could stay home more and wander less; we could even have some people do the seeding and growing while others gathered in villages and then cities and were fed by the growers. But we paid a great price for this. Wes
”
”
Matthew Fox (Creativity)
“
It also makes us question the admonitions that carbohydrate restriction cannot “generally be used safely,” as Theodore Van Itallie wrote in 1979, because it has “potential side effects,” including “weakness, apathy, fatigue, nausea, vomiting, dehydration, postural hypotension, and occasional exacerbation of preexisting gout.” The important clinical question is whether these are short-term effects of carbohydrate withdrawal, or chronic effects that might offset the benefits of weight loss. The same is true for the occasional elevation of cholesterol that will occur with fat loss—a condition known as transient hypercholesterolemia—and that is a consequence of the fact that we store cholesterol along with fat in our fat cells. When fatty acids are mobilized, the cholesterol is released as well, and thus serum levels of cholesterol can spike. The existing evidence suggests that this effect will vanish with successful weight loss, regardless of the saturated-fat content of the diet. Nonetheless, it’s often cited as another reason to avoid carbohydrate-restricted diets and to withdraw a patient immediately from the diet should such a thing be observed, under the mistaken impression that this is a chronic effect of a relatively fat-rich diet. In
”
”
Gary Taubes (Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease)
“
given sufficient time, high-fructose diets can induce high insulin levels, high blood sugar, and insulin resistance, even though in the short term fructose has little effect on either blood sugar or insulin and so a very low glycemic index. It has also been known since the 1960s that fructose elevates blood pressure more than an equivalent amount of glucose does, a phenomenon called fructose-induced hypertension. Because
”
”
Gary Taubes (Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease)
“
Goal setting works best when you have long-term goals and short-term goals in different areas of your life. Of course, you’re not going to have goals in every area, but you want to choose enough different ones to sustain your interest. Some examples of goal areas are Family relationships and your home; Humanist, volunteer, philanthropy, ethical; Social, cultural, travel, entertainment; Finances, career, education; Physical, diet, exercise; and Fun.
”
”
Susan J. Elliott (Getting Past Your Breakup: How to Turn a Devastating Loss into the Best Thing That Ever Happened to You)
“
...Falon sucked hard on her straw and swallowed. “You haven’t mentioned a girlfriend or a wife.” “That’s because I don’t have one.” Haley touched the tip of her nose with her finger. “Whew, I’m feeling good. I should drink more often. My ex left me a year ago for someone else,” she admitted and giggled. “I’ve been surviving on a steady diet of hate and loathing.” Falon raised her cup. “Whatever works, right?” “Yeah, I guess,” Haley agreed with a shrug and a grin. “She always complained that I wouldn’t allow myself to be exciting. Look at me now, though, I’m stranded in another country with no money or passport, wearing shorts with sea turtles on them with no underwear. I’m drunk with someone I don’t know who could very well kill me in my sleep.” The empty cup dropped from her hand onto the floor as her head lolled back against the chair. “I’m fucking exciting now.
”
”
Robin Alexander (Fearless)
“
I read about it in Buck Up, Suck Up . . . and Come Back When You Foul Up: 12 Winning Secrets from the War Room, written by James Carville and Paul Begala, the political strategists behind Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign “war room.” Here’s the excerpt that stuck with me: Newt Gingrich is one of the most successful political leaders of our time. Yes, we disagreed with virtually everything he did, but this is a book about strategy, not ideology. And we’ve got to give Newt his due. His strategic ability—his relentless focus on capturing the House of Representatives for the Republicans—led to one of the biggest political landslides in American history. Now that he’s in the private sector, Newt uses a brilliant illustration to explain the need to focus on the big things and let the little stuff slide: the analogy of the field mice and the antelope. A lion is fully capable of capturing, killing, and eating a field mouse. But it turns out that the energy required to do so exceeds the caloric content of the mouse itself. So a lion that spent its day hunting and eating field mice would slowly starve to death. A lion can’t live on field mice. A lion needs antelope. Antelope are big animals. They take more speed and strength to capture and kill, and once killed, they provide a feast for the lion and her pride. A lion can live a long and happy life on a diet of antelope. The distinction is important. Are you spending all your time and exhausting all your energy catching field mice? In the short term it might give you a nice, rewarding feeling. But in the long run you’re going to die. So ask yourself at the end of the day, “Did I spend today chasing mice or hunting antelope?” Another way I often approach this is to look at my to-do list and ask: “Which one of these, if done, would render all the rest either easier or completely irrelevant?
”
”
Timothy Ferriss (Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers)
“
Of those that appeared to play obvious roles in heart disease, three in particular stood out even in the early 1950s. Two of these are familiar today: the low-density lipoproteins, known as LDL, the bad cholesterol, and the high-density variety, known as HDL, the good cholesterol. (This is an oversimplification, as I will explain shortly.) The third class is known as VLDL, which stands for “very low-density lipoproteins,” and these play a critical role in heart disease. Most of the triglycerides in the blood are carried in VLDL; much of the cholesterol is found in LDL. That LDL and HDL are the two species of lipoproteins that physicians now measure when we get a checkup is a result of the oversimplification of the science, not the physiological importance of the particles themselves. In
”
”
Gary Taubes (Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease)
“
Will I go into starvation mode? The short answer is an emphatic “no.” This is one of the great dieting myths—the fear that if you cut your calories for even a day, then your metabolic rate will slow right down as your body tries to conserve its fat stores. This starvation mode myth seems to be based on the Minnesota starvation experiment, a study carried out during World War II. In this experiment, young volunteers lived on extremely low calorie diets for up to six months.
”
”
Michael Mosley (The Fast Diet: The Simple Secret of Intermittent Fasting: Lose Weight, Stay Healthy, Live Longer)
“
The OMAD Diet is not a temporary weight-loss method or fad diet. It’s a lifestyle plan that works for the long-term. This scientifically-based, comprehensive lifestyle plan works simply because, unlike short-term weight-loss diets, an easy-to-follow, lifelong weight-management lifestyle will help you lose weight and keep it off permanently.
”
”
Diana Polska (One Meal a Day Diet: Intermittent Fasting and High Intensity Interval Training For Weight Loss)
“
Do: Mentally prepare yourself Controlling diabetes is more like a marathon than a sprint. You can go as hard as you can for a short period, but then it all stops. Prepare yourself mentally that the changes you are making are for life! If you're not ready, any changes you make are not going to be sustainable.
”
”
Jyothi Shenoy (Diabetes Diet)
“
Newt Gingrich is one of the most successful political leaders of our time. Yes, we disagreed with virtually everything he did, but this is a book about strategy, not ideology. And we’ve got to give Newt his due. His strategic ability—his relentless focus on capturing the House of Representatives for the Republicans—led to one of the biggest political landslides in American history. Now that he’s in the private sector, Newt uses a brilliant illustration to explain the need to focus on the big things and let the little stuff slide: the analogy of the field mice and the antelope. A lion is fully capable of capturing, killing, and eating a field mouse. But it turns out that the energy required to do so exceeds the caloric content of the mouse itself. So a lion that spent its day hunting and eating field mice would slowly starve to death. A lion can’t live on field mice. A lion needs antelope. Antelope are big animals. They take more speed and strength to capture and kill, and once killed, they provide a feast for the lion and her pride. A lion can live a long and happy life on a diet of antelope. The distinction is important. Are you spending all your time and exhausting all your energy catching field mice? In the short term it might give you a nice, rewarding feeling. But in the long run you’re going to die. So ask yourself at the end of the day, “Did I spend today chasing mice or hunting antelope?” Another way I often approach this is to look at my to-do list and ask: “Which one of these, if done, would render all the rest either easier or completely irrelevant?
”
”
Timothy Ferriss (Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers)
“
we have shown in experimental animals that cancer growth can be turned on and off by nutrition, despite very strong genetic predisposition. We have studied these effects in great detail and have published our findings in the very best scientific journals. As you will see later, these findings are nothing short of spectacular, and the same effects have been indicated over and over again in humans.
”
”
T. Colin Campbell (The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss, and Long-Term Health)
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The type of wheat that we currently consume is called dwarf wheat, named for its short stature relative to other varietals of wheat. Despite its diminutive size, dwarf wheat is highly prolific and produces a lot more grains per acre, which is an outstanding trait for productivity and profitability. 28 However, its nutritional content has declined over the years—ancient grains such as einkorn wheat are 200 to 400 percent higher in vitamin A, vitamin E, and the antioxidant lutein as well as certain minerals when compared to modern wheat. 29 Dwarf wheat is also significantly higher in starch content, especially in a type of starch called amylopectin A that contributes to a higher glycemic index for wheat and has been associated with insulin resistance. 30
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Akil Palanisamy (The Paleovedic Diet: A Complete Program to Burn Fat, Increase Energy, and Reverse Disease)