Fat Loss

A bit of history to start.

False information from the USA.

The corn growers in the USA got their Government to lie about the factors causing the weight crisis and blaming it on fat instead of sugar, which was the actual culprit.

I have old files on my computer and this shows I was believing the false information.

WW

A BMI over 30 puts you in the "Obese" category. 

In 1998 I had a BMI of 29.9 and the thought of joining The Obese made me get busy about doing something about my weight. I started by reading the book "The Fat Loss Handbook". I also bought a Calorie and Fat counter book relevant to Perth, where I was at the time. 

As the Handbook tells you, fat is the big problem, or the problem which makes you big. 

At the time I was over 93kg. Within a few months a regimen of Watching fat intake and Walking had brought it down to the high eighties. 

The Buddhist monks have two meals a day, and for nearly a year that is basically what I have been doing in Thailand, with food that is tasty but high in cereals and vegetables. The scales at the beginning of June, 2000, have indicated just over eighty kilogrammes. Ideal weight for me is 78kg. 

So if you are thick, then WW; Watch the type of fat and Walk.

Now that was history with false information from the USA.

And now for my current information.

You need to keep your weight under control.

There is no quick fix for fat. A few days at a Health Resort will lose weight in your pocket but no where else.

The maximum you can lose each week, safely, is two kilogrammes. More than this and it is all water, which you will drink again, or you had better see a doctor, as you are sick.

We can get you started on the regimen required to take off those extra kilogrammes and get you on the path to less weight. You could lose 8 kilogrammes in the month. You probably won't.

The body tends to maintain the status quo. It tends to keep your body weight at what it currently is. As we all know it does a better job in stopping us from losing weight than it does in stopping us from gaining weight.

This is because losing weight indicates to the body that you are under stress. There is a lack of food. Otherwise you would eat enough to keep your weight the same. It tries to help you by bringing into play mechanisms that try to keep your body weight the same.

An increase in weight signals to the body that times are good. There is lots of food. You can store it up for the bad times, which have always existed in prehistory. It is advantageous to store it up. You don't want to keep your body weight the same if there is an opportunity to gain an extra 10 kilogrammes of fat to help survive the lean times which have always been ahead. So you can gain weight. That is good. But you can't lose weight. That is bad. If you are a caveman anyway.

The solution is to experience feelings of hunger regularly. A lion sitting under a tree does not have the ability to trot off to the corner shop for a regular helping of deer. He frequently feels hungry. If you feel hungry you are going to get the energy you need from your reserves of fat. When you do eat keep off sugar. Just no sugar. After a while you will get used to your coffee tasting sugar free. Sugar is unnecessary energy which is just going to be stored as fat. You need to eliminate it from your diet.

An increase in your weight shows that your energy intake is greater than your energy use.

It follows that as well as keeping your energy intake low you can increase your energy use by doing suitable exercise.

For a person very overweight this means that running is out as your joints will not like it. Best is to swim.

A cheaper option to weigh less is to

Feel hungry!

It ensures that you are not taking in more energy. And if you are too fat you need to have a net energy deficiency each day.

You also need to increase your metabolic rate so your body needs more energy than you are supplying. Obviously you can walk, and walk, and walk. The work done walking is when you lift your body with each step. Consequently if you climb a set of stairs or a hill you are doing as much work as walking a longer distance.

I had the experience several years ago of painting an apartment in Bangkok and needing to climb the stepladder and then get down. Initially I found three laps wore me out because I was definitely unfit. The need to paint all the room meant having to continue so my number of ups and downs got better. My appetite also got less. Consequently my weight got less.

Determined to keep it down I ate only when my hunger got to be too much. The result was pleasing with my belt being on the second of the two extra notches that the Findig shop worker put in the belt I had bought from them earlier.

The trouble is I am now back in Australia where there are so many items to tempt the palate. Just look at the rows of unnecessary energy items in a Coles store. A couple of Mars bars for after dinner, or chocolate eclairs, or vanilla slices or ………..

Remember to reduce weight the energy out must exceed energy in.

ENERGY OUT INCREASE and ENERGY IN DECREASE

No more Big Macs, super-size meals, chocolates, ………

Also remember that if your weight makes walking a problem there are swimming pools just waiting for your body. Presumably you know that GT is warm in winter.

So now some data from 2023.

A year of no chocolate or icecream or any other sweets and I fit into the jeans I bought in 2008 which I had not managed for years.

So do not put chocolate or icecream in your trolley.

Checkout-checkers.

Subscribe to the Checkout-checkers at www.checkout-checkers.org.

When you go shopping at the supermarket you will engage the checkout-checker.

Because you are a fatty wanting help the Checkout-checker will remove the chocolate, icecream, Coke(except Diet), and other no nos from your trolley after you have paid for it all and transfer the items to a local family in need.

So you help yourself while helping others in need. In their case of food.

Humans and the environment

We are too many and we are destroying the planet. Prepare to be upset at seeing what we are doing to our home.

Humans are different to other life forms in that others are born, live, then die without usually having left any evidence of their existence. Some leave a skeleton which becomes a fossil or are petrified but most merely fertilize the environment on their departure.

Now humans are the reverse.

Evidence of their time on Earth is becoming increasingly obvious.

Since the Industrial Revolution a couple of hundred years ago there have been relics that will be here forever or a little bit shorter if we are lucky.

The current fervour over the worldwide pollution caused by the increasing plastic waste needs to promote the most obvious way to reduce it.

There is a human plague. Have less little humans. Save the planet and all other life by reducing human numbers by having less babies.

All humans, immaterial of what they ingest, are part of the human plague and hence endangering all life on the planet.

The lifestyle of the humans on this island was that of hunter gatherer before 1788 when the British colonised it. Consequently they left little evidence that they had been here for sixty thousand years. Their lifestyle was not much different to that of the kangaroos that had been here for twenty million years.

Both did the born, live, then die saga without having left much evidence of their existence. A few fossils and in the case of the Aborigines a few stone tools.

Since then with increasing scientific discovery humans have made their presence hugely more evident. The oil that took hundreds of millions of years to form in the Earth’s crust has been burnt with abandon or transformed into other substances useful to humans. Both uses have impacted the Earth with the richer nations populations having a much greater effect than the people in the poorer nations.

The poor aspire to the life style of the rich.

The expectation is obviously that while the effect on the Earth is currently bad just from the richer nations then should all nations achieve the same high standard of living the Earth is doomed.

A shopper in Australia enters the supermarket and exits with a trolley containing a large number of products encased in plastic. This plastic is not biodegradable. When it is placed in the garbage for collection and sent to landfill it is there forever. Some is reused but generally most is in landfill.

When I was a kid such plastics did not exist. In less than my lifetime these plastics have become a worldwide problem.

The biggest problem is that we are here for billions of years. Billions.

For society to not have drastically altered the products it uses to stop their effect on the environment bodes poorly for the future of the environment.

In the case of plastics biodegradable ones can be made from hemp and other crops. These eventually degenerate and no longer pollute the water and earth.

The other consideration with materials that are around forever is to recycle them.

This has to be completely effective because humans are going to be on the Earth for many more years and resources cannot be buried after they have been used once because over millions of years those resources will run out. It also means the reuse has to be complete because there is a finite quantity of any resource available.

An example is the materials used in batteries. The current idea of using them for storing electricity for human domestic or industrial use will be largely redundant when nuclear power is the prime producer prior to nuclear fusion being harnessed.

However with robots taking over more and more of the jobs previously done by humans and as transport batteries will be more and more in demand. Eventually all work will be done by robots and the recycling of all the battery components will have to be in place.

This means mining on the Moon, Mars or the asteroids will eventually supply some of the resource but presumably at great expense with some not being available.

This brings us to the number of humans using the resources. Some studies have said two billion is an appropriate number of humans on the planet. This is with them all having a lifestyle like that of the wealthy countries at present.

That is the resources angle of human numbers. The other aspect is the effect of the number of humans on the other life on Earth.

Other life on Earth

If humans succeed in all having an opulent lifestyle the demand for resources to support it will be such that there is nothing left to support other life if human numbers are not reduced.

It has to be a crime to not allow elephants to roam Africa, or koalas and kangaroos to wander around Australia, or whales to swim around the ocean, or forests to fill the land. If humans require too much of the planet’s resources there will be none left for other life.

It should be obvious that there are many people who do not have the standard of living of the average Australian but would naturally like to. From the news seen on TV many people around the world are in the same boat. They are woefully poor. Any Australian complaining that the conditions they live in are similar to that of a third world individual is just plain ignorant.

Hence the problem from the planet’s point of view is that all humans want to attain a standard of living similar to Australia. The effect on the planet if they all manage to do so will be a disaster for all the lions, tigers, elephants, koalas, forests, grasslands, salmon, etc. The list goes on for pages because all life will be affected.

These people should be able to attain such a standard of living.

The solution is for all humans on Earth to number two billion.

You do not need to run around bumping the six billion surplus off, just have less kids and accomplish the reduction after some years.

Humans have to have less little humans. They need to save all other life by reducing human numbers by having less babies.

Two billion humans is enough.

Do not look at today's tomorrow but in a thousand, million or billion years. We are a plague. Think.

FROM POPULATION CONNECTION

Eight reasons to be concerned about our population reaching 8 billion

Quality of Life

Years ago I had a milkround and supplied milk to several hundred customers and the older customers were frequently drinking skim milk. They were obviously trying to make up for a lifetime of enjoying what they ate and drank and were now sticking to what was regarded as healthy consumption.

Have you tried skim milk?

In my opinion it tastes awful.

And the worst part of it was that my doctor was suggesting I should now drink it. The idea was that not drinking normal milk will prolong my life.

I stuck to normal milk and am pleased research now justifies that decision.

This article shows Australians are changing back to full cream milk as research shows it does not harm your health.

Skim’s not in: Australians switch back to full-fat milk

As nutritional understanding evolves, Australians are ditching low-fat dairy products and returning to full cream, Dairy Australia sales data shows.

Read the article here.

https://www.theguardian.com/food/2023/mar/08/skims-not-in-australians-switch-back-to-full-fat-milk

The trouble with the idea of prolonging your life is it means you will be getting older and less capable, and if you are less fortunate having your brain go to mush.

The former problems have already surfaced with a problem foot as a result of nerves being mucked up with by the bones in my back and a shoulder that has muscle problems because of the radiotherapy in my cancer treatment; now it has spasms of pain on occasion during the day and a tendency to become painful when I lie down to sleep which is not a good time for it to happen.

What about the mush potential? Well I would say that is on the cards as although I have now exceeded my mother’s time on Earth by a few years an episode during her final year reminds me that dementia may be an unpleasant option for the future. What happened was my first family was driving up north of Perth as I was collecting minerals for Geology teaching. Cue was somewhere up the road but as we were towing a twenty foot caravan I was not concerned about where we would spend the night. The better half was having a fit about not knowing. Consequently tension in the car was high. It was latish in the afternoon and all of a sudden mum is wanting to get out of the car. She has to go and help milk the cows. They had a dairy when she was a kid. This was a sort of hair raising experience – literally. It was also an indication to me that she might be getting dementia. She had heart problems and died later that year so we never found out if she did.

Years ago a report from doctors said that a beer a day ripped the bad cholesterol out of your blood vessels and hence was good for you. Ideas on alcohol I am assuming to be responsible for that idea not being valid any more but I have been drinking a stubby a day, preferably Boags, for many years now and it is an enjoyable interlude which I do not intend stopping. I am told that alcohol in any quantity is bad for my body. The trouble is that there is a vast difference between researching the effects of alcohol and assuming that imbibing ten stubbies a day has the same effect on the body as one a day. When I first started teaching I set up a biology experiment on trace elements. It was a country school and hence the students included many potential farmers. My spoonful of chemical in a beaker of water they pointed out was not going to be a trace. It was going to kill the recipient plant. It is the same with my beer. One a day might, as the doctors said years ago, be beneficial for my health. Either way it is going to be continued to be enjoyed as it contributes to my quality of life being maximised.

Online Learning

Keep dementia at bay; learn something.

There are many, many free courses available on the internet for you to do from the comfort of your own home.

Why you should learn something.
Help your brain avoid dementia by giving it some exercise by learning something new. There are many, many courses available on the internet that you can take; some have a fee for you to do them but there are many that are FREE.
Studies have shown that learning something new slows the progress of dementia in those of you who have begun to show the symptoms of this scourge of the elderly; and sometimes the not so old.
You can do this study from the comfort of your own home as long as you have a suitable computer and internet connection.
Assistance in the form of a class or volunteer to help you get set up might be available, depending on your location. If you are miles from anywhere you will no doubt have to get it all organised online.
Some of the classes have group discussions for interaction with the other students and forums where you can pose the questions you have and the answer may be forthcoming from someone who knows.
The courses may include students from all around the world. The advantage of the internet is that you can converse with class members from several countries simultaneously.

Volunteer to Talk

Another aspect to talking to people in other countries is to assist them to improve their ability to speak and listen to English. While you can volunteer to travel to Thailand and assist a teacher there with their English Language class by providing the students with a person who can speak with them in English you can connect with them on the internet and use the Maxwell Empire Scripted Books 1 to 4 where you each have a copy of the books and take a role each. Most of the chapters are with just two characters.