Category: Health

Yep, I don’t need food anymore. Just water, maple syrup, lemon juice and cayenne pepper.-Veep

Visited this Denny’s before the Russians built a Denny’s at the North Pole.

Historically, I had been able to bring down/control my weight by exercise alone.  In fact, at the age of 18, I was singly responsible for 80% of McDonalds® pre-tax profit.  A sample order:

• One Big Mac®
• Two Cheeseburgers
• One Large Fries
• Make that Two Large Fries
• Nine Pack of Chicken McNuggets© with Hot Mustard Sauce
• Make Sure You Put in THREE Sauce Packs
• A Cherry Pie
• No, Make that Two Cherry Pies
• Large Orange Drink.

I would then look at my date and ask if she wanted anything.  I did learn that high school girls like a healthy eater, or were perhaps amazed to see such a consumption event.

When I was between 15 and 19 I could eat like this each and every night, and not fluctuate too much during the school year, and I wasn’t fat, either.  Now the easiest part of almost any daily workout started with a quarter mile run.  During an average workout, I’d sweat out about a gallon of water.  That 7.48 pounds of water.  Or sixteen metric beers.  In reality, one of our coaches said that a day of our practice made boot camp in the 70’s look easy, so we were really working hard.

Fast forward to early dates with the Not Yet The Mrs.  We visited her hometown, and were walking down Main Street.  We took a left hand turn into a bakery and inhaled the smell of just baked sugar cookies on a spring day.  She smiled at the aroma as the memories came flooding in.

It is now that I have to come to a shameful admission:  The Mrs. has a drug problem.  If she doesn’t take a certain drug, she starts sweating, and if none is administered, eventually withdrawal symptoms will kill her.

I’m speaking of insulin.

At the tender age of eleven, The Certainly Not Yet The Mrs. was diagnosed with Type I diabetes.  Type I diabetes is not the “addicted to Twinkies® and chubby and insulin seems to not work anymore” but rather the “pancreas has left the building and no longer produces insulin type.”  She actually slugged me in the upper arm the first time I looked her in the eye and told she should deal with her addiction.

You see, insulin is absolutely required for your body to turn sugar into the gasoline that runs your cells.  If you don’t have enough insulin (or in the case of The Mrs. ANY insulin) your blood will turn to maple syrup, and you will become a zombie Canadian, and start to like hockey.  And eat brains.

No, I’m kidding.

Why I Owe The Canadians for The Mrs.

Without insulin you’ll die.  And that happened routinely before insulin was isolated in the early 1920’s.  By Canadians.

In October 1920, Canadian Frederick Banting concluded that . . . (it was Insulin). He jotted a note to himself: “Ligate pancreatic ducts of the dog. Keep dogs alive till acini degenerate leaving islets. Try to isolate internal secretion of these and relieve glycosurea.” – Via Wikipedia, kinda

No one knows what that means.

But Banting figured out how stop the hockey-loving zombies by illustriously isolating islet insulin in at totally tubular test tube.  And, thus 90 years later, allowing The Mrs. to not have maple syrup for blood.  Oh, and to live and stuff.  Even with the insulin, however, a Type I diabetic has to watch what and when they eat, so they don’t temporarily spike their blood sugar and turn zombie.

When The Mrs. was growing up, her parents sent her to “Diabetic Camp,” which is (by her description) a cross between hell and un-air conditioned hell where they have no candy.  Well, they have candy, but it’s made from coal-tar extract and pebbles instead of sugar.   They learned how to be diabetic.

Back to the Story

So, we made that left turn into the bakery in her home town, and bought a cookie.  As we walked out, she said, “My Mom figured out that I was buying cookies here during lunch when I was in Junior High after I became diabetic.  She said, ‘You’re digging your grave with your teeth, girl,’ and I always remembered that.”

Although The Mrs. has very good teeth, I could not imagine her getting to a standard six foot depth for a grave, even if she cheated a bit on standard width.

Then I realized it was a metaphor!

Fast forward to some other time in the future (in the last three years or so) when I heard my next metaphor.  The second in twenty years.

“You can’t outrun your teeth.”  This pithy observation indicates that I can eat a metric ton more than I can work off on any given day, especially since I have a desk job calculating the approximate number of electrons in William Shatner on a daily basis.  Not a lot of time to get away from the desk, since I have to keep calculating how many electrons he gains when he drinks more coffee.

“You can’t outrun your teeth.” Well, of course I can’t, they’re busy digging my grave.

And that’s what Karl Denninger says.

Karl makes several points as he writes (quite passionately) about health and how it intersects with the economy.  As we look to the way our health care system is gradually melting like the Wicked Witch of the North East covered in picante sauce, Denninger notes that getting healthy is smart, and also it removes you from the nonsense related with health care nowadays.  And Penn Gillette showed that there is a direct correlation between weight and life expectancy.

Diet, especially as you get older, is key. Atkins and Paleo are (for me) two good choices.

J.P. Sears has a fun take on Paleo.  He’s a bit cynical, but I still like Paleo.  Enjoy!

So, Atkins® and Paleo (Mark writes about it at his blog, here’s a great recent post) are based around changing not only the total amount of calories that you consume, but the types of calories.

For example, drinking a gallon of gasoline would provide you about 31,000 calories.  So, if you just drank a tenth of a gallon of gasoline each day, you’d never have to eat anything (DON’T DO THIS AT HOME OR ANYWHERE!  IT WILL NOT BE GOOD FOR YOU! GASOLINE IS NOT FOOD!).

But just like Justin Bieber can’t process a thought, your body cannot process gasoline.  At all.  IT WILL KILL YOU.  But when someone says a calorie is a calorie, they have no idea what they are talking about.

Let me explain:

To determine the number of calories that food has in it, they dry it, burn it, and see how much heat it gives off.  When you think about it, you would see that firewood would be awesome to eat!  But it’s not.  It does, however, make awesome toothpicks.  All energy content isn’t the same – your body has to be able to convert it to use, and some things are converted to energy more easily than others.  I’ve read in the past that the order of preference is something like this:

1. Alcohol – because it’s what a body craves? Well, it gets used first.
2. Sugar – like, well, a sugar high. No one is surprised.
3. Other Carbohydrates – okay, you have to use enzymes and explosives to break the stuff up.
4. Protein/Fat – depends on several factors which one gets used. It’s like The Mrs.
5. Pebbles and Dryer Lint – mmm, mmm, good!

Paleo and Atkins remove part of number 1., most of number 2., and some of number 3.  That leaves your body (lots of times) burning at the number 4. level, which is where you want to be if you want to either lose weight or stay lean.

In my case, avoiding 2. and limiting 3. allow me to lose weight and also have a ton of other beneficial effects:

1. I lose weight. I know I already mentioned this, but it’s just awesome.
2. My mood is better. Nuclear war?    It’ll be fine.
3. I still have number 1. Yay wine!

Honestly, I could not physically eat the order I listed (and, I’m sure at some point that was a real order I actually ate) anymore.  But I have teenagers . . . .

I guess I’m back to supporting 80% of the pre-tax profits of Taco Bell®.

So, do you have a strategy or system to keep lean?  Does it involve Scotch?

Oh, final thought – I AM NOT A DOCTOR!  EVERYONE CHANT – YES, HIS ADVICE (except for not drinking gasoline) IS HORRIBLE.

He vants to drink your blaaad, but only if enriched with yummy vitamin C!

There was the time I almost killed myself through a simple experiment.

I had heard that having a high pH body (basic) was better than having a low pH body (acidic).  I decided to test this to see how it would work out.  Rather than do (as a normal person would) research, I decided to jump right in and purchased some antacid.

I took the antacid.

Going back to basic high school chemistry, what do you get when you mix an acid and a base?  Water and a salt.

I know that they say salt is fine for you.  It certainly is, when you haven’t just ingested something like three cups of it.  My body swelled up, and I’m fairly certain my blood pressure was sufficient to keep blood flowing from the tip of my toes to the top of my head if I were standing on a neutron star.

Wilder Fact:  Neutron Stars are very, very dense.  Not stupid dense as in “she’s so dense,” but heavy-dense.  A neutron star has a density of 7×10¹⁴ g/cm³.  Water has a density of 1 g/cm³, which shows you just how stupid the metric system is, since all I know is only that a neutron star is really, really heavy.  If I stood on one, I would be a tiny, thin, puddle of Wilder.  But if I took enough antacid, I could keep my blood flowing!

The Mrs. shook her head.  Life with me is like that, one large experiment.  She notes, correctly, that the difference between science and messing around is writing stuff down.  What do you think I’m doing now?  Yes, I’m writing it down.  Hence, science!

Anyway, I resolved to do many fewer potentially stroke-causing experiments with my life.

One thing that has recently caught my attention is vitamin C.  Vitamin C is, of course, the reason that the British are called Limeys.  The British Navy, enduring long sea voyages, would come down with scurvy based upon their diets consisting solely of rats and rum (I may be making some of this up).  Scurvy is not fun.  Gums bleed.  People die.  In fact, over 300,000 sailors (I am not making that up) died of scurvy in the 1700s.  1,500 sailros died in combat.  Maybe that’s why they drank the rum?

Some enterprising Scottish British Navy Surgeon decided that the cure would be switching from rum to Scotch.  He was fired, but James Lind, another (and real this time) Scottish British Navy Surgeon got 12 men to come down with scurvy on purpose, and gave two of them citrus fruits.  They got better, and also proved that the British diet will kill you more often than a Frenchman will.

After this, the British Navy supplied its sailors with citrus fruit (seeing as this was a much better alternative to them being all dead), and therefore kept their navy at float for years at a time, and allowed Admiral Nelson (more posts on him in the future) to keep the French navy in port.  So, yes, science works.

But Lind was dead for decades before they put his cure into motion.

What’s the deal with vitamin C?

Every animal produces it, except for gorillas, fruit bats, guinea pigs, and . . . (drumroll) humans.  And most animals make more vitamin C per pound than the recommended daily allowance, by far.

Linus Pauling, somewhere around winning his second unshared Nobel Prize©, came to the conclusion that vitamin C was the solution to most of our health problems.  Whereas the FDA thinks you need a tiny wisp of vitamin C, Linus felt that you could treat vitamin C like a sorority girl treats Diet Coke©.  Eat it all the time.  Inject it in your nose.  Have a bath in it.  Put it in your gas tank.  Wait . . . DON’T put it in your gas tank.  Think of the fuel injectors, man!

But, in Pauling’s thought, we people certainly weren’t getting enough.

Pauling’s first thesis is that vitamin C is used in the creation of the stuff that keeps your blood vessels together – collagen.  He thought that cholesterol deposits were the body’s way of putting duct tape on the inside of you so you didn’t bleed internally.  A better solution would be to make the stuff that actually fixes your circulatory system available to actually fix it.

It also appears that you can take a truly amazing amount of vitamin C and not die.

“The mechanism of death from such doses (1.2% of body weight, or 0.84 kg for a 70 kg human) is unknown, but may be more mechanical than chemical.”  – Wikipedia

Another way to think of that would be to have Wile E. Coyote drop an anvil made of vitamin C on the Roadrunner.  But, in this case, it’s radioactive vitamin C, so the Roadrunner turns into SpiderHulkRoadrunner.  Big, and green, and all spider-like, it’s probably more dangerous than a 300 mile tall Bill Gates!

Okay, that’s probably not true, I’m still more afraid of the giant Bill Gates.  But it does show that it takes eating nearly two pounds of vitamin C at a single sitting to kill you.  But no one knows why, but they think it might occur based on damage done to you while forcing it down your throat.  Strangely, sometimes science begins to look like a Quentin Tarantino picture.

The Mrs. and I came to our current experiments with vitamin C through different channels.  She was listening to quacks on the radio, I was listening to quacks on the Internet (specifically a trial that show that vitamin C in conjunction with chemotherapy was very effective against cancer).

Her radio quacks said to take one gram for every 25 pounds of body weight.  My Internet quacks said take vitamin C somewhere between 6 grams a day and 18 grams a day.  18 grams a day is a LOT of vitamin C, but, unless someone is tamping it down my throat with a broom handle, Science says it probably won’t hurt me.

I have seen, again and again, the scientific establishment change cues and opinions on fundamental ideas in my lifetime.  Carbs?  Great!  Carbs?  Tool of Satan.  Carbs?  Great!  Carbs?  Probably not good for you.

John Belushi knew.  Cigarettes and Carbs in the year 2132 will be all the rage.

And it continues.  Eggs?  Great!  Eggs?  YOU WILL DIE IF YOU LOOK AT THEM.  Eggs?  Have a dozen.

It’s enough to make you crazy.

And that’s why I began to focus on vitamin C.  At least from everything I’ve read, it can’t hurt you.  And it might help you.  After dealing with a doctor, Pauling added lysine to his recommendations.  Oh, and the doctor was dying.  Here’s a link that discusses it.  Blah blah blah heart, blah blah blah not dying.

But Pauling died of cancer.  So doesn’t that make him a stupid poopy-head with two Nobel™ prizes?  (And he nearly beat Watson and Crick to the double helix shape of DNA, which would have bagged him a third.)

Pauling died of prostate cancer, which, statistically, every man who lives past 70 will get.  And he was in his 90’s.  He’s smarter than me with my single Nobel© prize for blogging.   What can listening to him hurt?

So, now, I’m taking vitamin C.  In much more than the recommended daily alliance.  And, since The Mrs. isn’t tamping it down my throat with a broom handle, it probably won’t kill me.

And, vitamin C is cheap.  And I’m cheap, so that works.

I’ll let you know how it works out after I get my next Nobel® prize.  In the mean time?  I’m avoiding antacid.

As can be shown in the story above, I am a horrible choice to emulate for health advice.  Talk to a real doctor.   

Recently, I’ve had some pretty good success with losing weight.  Sadly it has involved amputation.

Just kidding.  I’ve been losing weight due to what I eat.  Or, more accurately, what I don’t eat.

I’ll start my (average) weekly diet that I’ve been following for a while with my favorite day:

Friday

Friday Breakfast Menu:  All the coffee I want! (no cream, no sugar)

Friday Brunch Menu:  More coffee!  (no cream, no sugar)

Friday After Lunch Workout Meal:  Coffee. (no cream, no sugar . . . seeing a pattern here?)

Friday Late Tea:  Coffee.  (again)

Friday Dinner:  Friday night we normally go out.  That’s when the fun begins.  Habitually, I make the glamorous switch to iced tea (unsweetened).  While this may sound daring, it’s nowhere near as daring as . . . the appetizers.  Generally we have something fairly low carb, like calamari.  Mmmmm.  I’ll have a salad, a low carb vegetable like broccoli, and then a huge ribeye.  The Mrs. and I will share some wine with dinner, and generally a little more when we get home.

Saturday

Saturday Breakfast:  Mmmm, coffee!  But this time fresh ground good stuff.

Saturday Lunch:  Varies from nothing (50% of the time) to a low carb whatever.

Saturday Dinner:  This varies as well.

We have what is known as Gourmet Night.

The Mrs. and I were fans of the television series Hannibal.  For those of you unfamiliar with the show (which is most of you since ABC summarily cancelled their best show ever), it follows the career of Hannibal Lecter, a serial killer and cannibal.  It’s a great family show.

The show is particularly good at showing Dr. Lecter making dinner.  And in the scenes in the show where he’s in the kitchen with the food processor and a cut of meat, well, it is a show about cannibals.  You can’t help but wonder exactly what (or who) Dr. Lecter is having for dinner.

The scenes on the show, however, are shot in such a vivid, crisp and cinematic way and the food looks so wonderful on screen that it inspired The Mrs.

Since we have been having Gourmet Night, she’s made intricate dishes like Beef Wellington, Beef Bourguignon, and, last Saturday, it was ribeye covered in a cream mushroom sauce.  Oh, and a nice Chianti and some fava beans.

The Mrs. isn’t alone in her culinary inspiration from that show:  Hannibal inspired a cookbook.

I must state that no neighbors have been harmed in the making of any dish at Wilder Gourmet Night.

If Friends and Hannibal had an ugly baby, it would look like this.

Sunday

Breakfast: Coffee.

Lunch: Coffee.  Sometimes eggs and a breakfast meat, like smoked alpaca.

Dinner:  Something from the grill – steaks, burgers, brats, chicken, ribs, brisket.  The big Atkins cheat of the week is generally here – grilling and BBQ go with ice cold beer.  Hey, I don’t make the rules.  Mojo does:

Monday

You know the drill before dinner.  Coffee.

Dinner:  Either leftover BBQ meat, or, more generally, a salad.  Like a lettuce salad.  Some ranch or, more recently, lots of hot sauce and a little ranch.  Perhaps some torn up sandwich sliced chicken.  All the carbonated water I can drink.

During the weeknights there isn’t any alcohol.  As Mark Twain said,

Willpower lasts about two weeks, and is soluble in alcohol.

But he didn’t live to be even 150 years old, so what does he know?

Tuesday

Coffee.  Again.  I bathe in it.  I put it in my armpits for deodorant.  I rub it in my hair for conditioning.  I place it on my face for moisturizer.  I use coffee grounds to brush my teeth.

Dinner:  Salad (as above) and/or an Oscar Mayer® Portable Protein Pack.  I know, I know, they are horribly expensive for the amount of calories you get in the Portable Protein Pack – but part of what I’m paying for is willpower.  I had one.  I can say “Stop” that’s enough.

Sure, I could make my own, dice some ham and cheese, but the pre-packaging is just enough to say, “You’re done here, John Wilder.”

Am I hungry, especially during the week?  Sure.  But I’m surprised sometimes at just how full the two ounces (that’s sixty-five kilograms) of the Portable Protein Pack will fill you up.

Also, all the carbonated water that I want.

Wednesday

See Tuesday.

Thursday

See Wednesday.

You might think that on a diet like this, I’d be hungry occasionally.  No, not at all.

I’m hungry ALL THE TIME.

Okay, that’s an exaggeration.  I’m rarely hungry after a nice ribeye.  And coffee is much more filling than you might expect and also has the good side effect of doubling as my personality.  Also, your stomach shrinks, and it takes much less food to satiate (JohnWilder® Certified ACT Word) your hunger with a smaller stomach.

As far as skipping meals?

Starting in sixth grade, when they stopped making me eat lunch at school, I stopped eating it.  Breakfast is the most important meal of the day?  Never been all that interested in eating breakfast on a regular basis.

And, when I do eat breakfast or lunch, I don’t get less hungry during the course of the day, I get even more hungry and my hunger at dinner is even larger.  And, when I’ve had to work long (12-14 hour days) for a long duration (weeks), and they bring in lunch every day?  I’ve eaten lunch for the energy burst.  And, also the pants waist size increase, because who doesn’t want to gain weight.  I mean, they make bigger pants, right?

My mathematical formula relating lunch to weight loss looks like this:

• Lunch once a week?  I can lose weight.
• Lunch twice a week?  I can maintain weight.
• Lunch three or more times a week?  I can expand like the Russian Empire.  I start covering my French Freedom Fries with mayonnaise and capitulate to the forces of metabolism and gravity.

When I’m working human length hours at work, however, I’ve learned that hunger actually isn’t strong enough (in the small amounts of it that I feel) to drive me to cheat on my diet.  That’s what wine is for.

“One piece of pizza surely won’t hurt,” says the wine.

Every person (by now, at my age) knows someone, or more likely multiple people, who have had gastric bypass surgery.  I’m not going into detail on the surgery, but after reading up on it, all I can say is I’d prefer the diet that I’m listing up above.  The people who I know who’ve had surgery have said nothing but good things about it, and I’ve seen a man lose so much weight so fast he looked like a candle on the black dash of a 1998 Toyota Corolla® in the Sun.  Literally, a candle melting inside the corona of our Sun, or so Jim Morrison told me.

But surgery sounds like much more work, pain, and much more cost than simply eating a lot less.

Besides, who needs surgery when I have all the coffee I can drink?

Before you go and jump into even considering this, GO SEE A DOCTOR!  I’m just telling you what’s worked for me and my results.  If you think this is good advice, write down JOHN WILDER KNOWS NOTHING 453 times in cursive.  Please, take responsibility for your own decisions, heaven knows someone has to.