Elm Ave Park and Ride

Shit people say to you when you loose weight 🍏

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The other day I was commiserating with another guy at work who has also lost quite a bit of weight in recent years. The thing is people have such negative stereotypes about people who choose healthier lifestyles, though they usually say it in the most backhanded ways.

  • Oh, I see you have lost a lot of weight. Are you sick, dying of cancer, etc.
  • People always comment about weight loss but never weight gain. In a lot of people’s minds, it’s just mean to tell somebody that they’ve gotten fat but loosing weight is a compliment in the sense have you ducking lost your mind.
  • People, especially obese people are constantly sharing recipes and cooking techniques usually involving frying or including a few vegetables in lard, cheese or sugar. As apparently you just need a few good calorie dense recipes to cure your weight loss.
  • People this idea that healthy food must taste disgusting and should be eaten in moderation. Sprinkle some kale on a plate next to a big greasy steak and top your mega sized ice cream with a cherry and you’ll have a healthy meal when the opposite is true. The steak is fine but two thirds of your plate should be greens. Ice cream should be about the blueberries or fruit up top, the actual portion of the ice cream small.
  • Weight loss is all about moderation and portion control. Actually if you have to control portions of what you are eating it probably is not healthy food to start out with and shouldn’t be eating it or very little of it. But in general, the focus should be on nutritious and diverse vitamin and fiber rich food that fills you up quickly and doesn’t leave much room for junk food. It’s hard to over indulge in junk if you have a full stomach.
  • It must be you are doing a lot of exercise. The thing is it’s so easy today to get cheap calories, fats and sugars that one can easily eat 1,500 calories in a meal which works out to be like 3 ½ hours worth of walking to burn off or 1½ hours of intensive cardiovascular exercise like weight lifting or running to burn off. It’s much easier to skip calories, it is really hard to burn them off with exercise.
  • You’ve become a very picky eater, one who only eats nasty raw food that tastes like cardboard. Actually many raw or minimally cooked foods have a lot of naturally flavor and don’t require a ton of salt, fat and sugar to taste good. After a short while of eating healthy, diverse foods, you get to where you prefer it over the salt, sugar and fat encrusted foods that cover up the rich natural tastes.
  • People are very worried about you needing new clothes when you loose weight. The thing is over time clothes wear out and the thing is if clothes are a bit loose fitting for a while it’s not the end of the world. Moreover it can be hard to keep weight off so rushing to buy smaller clothes is foolish. That said the baggy look, trying to hide the loose waistline and my much oversized boxers and undershirts do get me thinking about replacing them.

The Superforecasters

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Web player: https://podcastaddict.com/choiceology-with-katy-milkman/episode/1587428
Episode: https://chtbl.com/track/224G4/https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/cdn.simplecast.com/audio/46d9ff78-39b5-4502-a5e9-0df217e1b3a7/episodes/1977547c-2cd4-4ad2-ac0c-def32704e478/audio/3684c6ab-0229-43c3-9c38-14995005c7ea/default_tc.mp3?aid=rss_feed&feed=66QlUXEg

There are moments in life where it seems as though everything is riding on one important decision. If only we had a crystal ball to see the future, we could make those decisions with greater confidence. Fortune-telling aside, there are actually methods to improve our predictions—and our decisions. In this episode of Choiceology with Katy Milkman, we look at what makes some people “superforecasters.” In 2010, the United States government had been looking for Al Qaeda leader and perpetrator of the 9/11 attacks, Osama bin Laden, for nearly a decade. Years of intelligence gathering all over the world had come up short. It seemed every new tip was a dead end. But one small group of CIA analysts uncovered a tantalizing clue that led them to a compound in Pakistan. Soon, the president of the United States would be faced with a difficult choice: to approve the top-secret mission or not.

We will hear this story from two perspectives. Peter Bergen is a national security commentator and author of the book The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden. He interviewed Osama bin Laden in 1997. Former CIA director Leon Panetta led the United States government’s hunt for bin Laden and describes the night his mission came to a dramatic conclusion.

Next, Katy speaks with Barbara Mellers about research that shows how so-called superforecasters make more accurate predictions despite facing uncertainty and conflicting information. You can read more in the paper titled “Identifying and Cultivating Superforecasters as a Method of Improving Probabilistic Predictions.” Barabara Mellers is the I. George Heyman University Professor of both marketing at the Wharton School and of psychology at the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania.

Shots – Health News : NPR

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4 tips to outsmart dopamine if your kid is hooked on screens or sweets : Shots – Health News : NPR

Turns out, smartphones and sugary foods do have something in common with drugs: They trigger surges of a neurotransmitter deep inside your brain called dopamine. Although drugs cause much bigger spikes of dopamine than, say, social media or an ice cream cone, these smaller spikes still influence our behavior, especially in the long run. They shape our habits, our diets, our mental health and how we spend our free time. They can also cause much conflict between parents and children.

I’m hoping this is not a trend 🌫️

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While it’s probably a short term meteorological phenomena with the blocking low off the Maine coast funneling all the Canadian wildfire smoke, it’s probably no coincidence that we are getting dumped on with a ton of wildfire pollution the year of Canada’s worse wildfires.

We used to think of wildfires and smoke they produce as mostly a western problem. It sucks to be them, we told ourselves. We all enjoy watching a freak show until it hits us personally. The truth is that is mostly a short term nuisance for most of us, except for those who have cardiac arrest and are hauled off in the meat wagon to never return.

The real question is this a one on phenomena that occurs every few decades like last happened locally in 2002, though this event probably was more serious with many air pollution meters pegged at their maximum setting, in what is being called the worse Canadian wildfire season ever. But humans have short term memory, and reporting and sensing of pollution has never been better.

It’s hard to dispute climate change is making wildfires more common, and that’s not just an activist talking point. Last summer and the year before we seemingly had a record number of gray summer days from high in the atmosphere wildfire smoke – and some brilliant sunsets to boot. But maybe because we are noticing it more from increased reporting in the press.