âMaps, my dear, are the undergarments of a country! Â They give shape…to continents.â â The Englishmen Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain
I call this the Cruel Map.
Excellence requires consistency. Consistency does not imply excellence â a visit to any McDonalds® will prove that. But consistency is required for excellence.
And excellence is required for health.
The human body is an incredibly complex device, even when you ignore the brain like most television executives involved in programming selection do. The human body is robust. The only way that humanity can create something as wondrous as a human is to make a baby, which is generally pretty fun to attempt, even if you donât succeed. About as close as we have gotten to a really complex machine that approaches human complexity is the toaster. Bread in â toast out. Works every time, but I still canât figure out where the bread went. Maybe the bread powers the toaster?
Humanityâs most complicated machines canât even come close to the versatility that is a human: if your car were able to fuel itself like a person, youâd be able to feed it gasoline or junk mail or plastic bags and it would turn that into a trip to Cleveland leaving only carbon dioxide and water vapor exhaust gas, and some form of car-poop that you presumably would compost so you could grow more car food. Oh, and the car would self-repair for decades â your tires would grow back in the middle of the night. Unfortunately your car would try to pick up on other cars, and might identify as a truck, but thatâs a longer story.
The human body is excellently designed, and very, very consistent in its response to inputs. But the ownerâs manual sucks, and many times we donât operate it properly or fuel it very well. Case in point â achieving excellent health requires measurement. Of what? Unless youâre an adolescent reading this, youâre not getting taller. What parameter might be changing that you could measure, say, every day? Besides armpit hair length. Thatâs too obvious, and everyone does that, anyway. Think harder.
Oh, yes! Weight!
There is a discipline in measuring, especially when you ate a cake and donât want to see what the scale says that those extra calories did to your weight. This is no small problem â 74% of Americans were overweight in 2007, and there has been plenty of time since then for more Nachos Bellgrande®, Cheeze Whiz® and Twinkies⢠since then while watching videos from Blockbuster®. I was reading an article about it a few months back, and one doctor noted that a âbigâ patient used to be ~220 pounds early in his career, but now they have to buy equipment that can handle people exceeding 400 pounds in weight.
Fun Fact: The number of Blockbuster® video stores in the Roman Empire (117A.D.) is off by one when compared to the number of Blockbuster⢠video stores in the United States today.
Unexpectedly (at least I wasnât expecting it), heart disease has gone down as weight has gone up (Smoking, Orphans, and the French) but a whole host of other medical problems seem to plague our newly-larger Americans. I wonât go into the details, youâre aware and youâve read âem all.
But excellence in health is tied (at some level) to excellence in measurement. Thankfully, thereâs a $20 item that can provide excellent measurement: a scale. Oh, sure, counting calories might be your default position, but that simply wonât work. To gain a pound a month, you have to eat an excess 3600 calories during that month. How much extra, on a daily basis, is that? 2.7 Oreo® cookies. Each day. Itâs 9.6 ounces of Coke® (a can is 12 ounces, or 4,530 liters in communist units). On the average American diet of 3,600 calories per day, itâs less than 3% of you your total daily calories.
Okay, maybe the metric system has one use. One.
No one measures calories in that closely, at least not for long. So, a pound. Thatâs not so bad.
No, I said a pound a month.
If you went to college and graduated in four years, that would be 48 pounds. All from less than 10 ounces of Coke⢠a day. Measuring the input is futile unless you live in a bubble and measure everything you eat, all day. Thatâs why everyone is fat â the wonderful machine we own is adapted to live in a world where food is alternately scarce and plentiful â a world without refrigerators. A world where Sonic® bacon cheeseburgers are available until 11pm (Midnight on Friday and Saturday!) and an extra 74 ounces of Sprite® are available for only $0.25 wasnât really planned for when your pancreas was designed. If the pancreas had a staff, they would be very, very tired from all of the soda.
âOh, hell. More soda coming in. Insulin production to maximum. Again. And someone call storage and tell âem weâve got to get fat production moving. Itâs overtime tonight for sure, boys. And someone call the liver and wake it up. He may be hungover still, but itâs time to get to work. This fat wonât make itself.â
I drink about a soda a year, so thatâs not a problem my pancreas has. The Boy, who is 18, burns approximately 100,000 calories per day between sports and whatever it is he does in the basement that makes him all sweaty, and he drinks soda by the liter. A liter is a Canadian gallon, I believe, but it is less expensive in the 2-liter bottle because things that are measured in metric are just not as good so you canât charge as much as a non-metric premium product which would be sold in pints or quarts or ounces. I think Coke⢠is actually made by Pakistani slave children who are forced to milk genetically engineered badgers for the Coke© syrup. Or at least thatâs what I read on Wikipedia®, or maybe on Huffington Post© or CNNâ¢. So itâs certain that itâs true.
But while The Boy can consume endless calories, I canât even think about having a Chick-Fil-A⢠sandwich without buying larger pants and immediately expanding to the size of the British Empire in 1910.
Does this Empire make my butt look big? Â
Okay, if measuring the inputs doesnât work, how do you manage to eat and manage to be smaller than the USSR? You have to measure the output. Ruthlessly. And donât gain that first pound. If you do? Get rid of it. That day. Or that week. But donât wait. And you canât lose more than one pound at a time. And you know how to lose a pound. It may not be easy. It may not be quick. But you know how to do this.
This map shows the USSR and communist bloc countries at their greatest extent. Also pictured: all of the happy Soviet citizens.
You can afford to compromise â outward, on those things that arenât intrinsic to you. But if you want to have excellence in anything, you can never compromise inward on the things that are important to you. You have to have a line.  And health should always be important to you, unless youâre Johnny Depp. If youâre Johnny Depp â you already know that death will be no obstacle to your lifestyle.
Health determines what the quality of your life is really like. And Iâve got some new goals.
The Boy will be out of the house in August, and off to the next stage of his adventure in life. But that leaves Pugsley as the only chick in the nest. Pugsley needs a sparring partner to practice with so he can defeat the hordes of Orcs⢠that will be unleashed when the monetary system is abducted by Sauron® and Frodo© is unable to stop inflation by throwing Ruth Bader Ginsborg into Mount Doom®. My goal? To be in sparring shape and size by August.
There is no shortcut. But I have a map.
Iâll let you know how it goes . . .
Soviet Map via:Â User:MaGioZal [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0), GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons
I absolutely LOVED your car analogy. I’m a lurker who found this site via Ms Hoyt about last December and now you’re a site on my daily checklist.
This has forced me to read one of your books, due to the quality of your writing here. TYVM. Please, keep on keepin’ on.
Oh, the parental gig NEVER ends. We always worry about our kids….
Thank you! I’m glad you enjoyed. I absolutely intend to keep typing. It’s the voices in my head . . . they won’t let me stop.
Our bodies are rather well designed. To last to about age 45. Right about the time you achieve wisdom, then your body starts going to crap. I don’t want to play golf in Florida or Arizona, so I don’t need to live to 95 or anything like that, just don’t give the human design manual TOO much credit. Loved the Roman map! You had me LOLing today.
Agreed. 45 is like peak performance. Yeah, it was kinda fun to put that one together – a lot of times the memes are the LAST thing I write, so they mate up with the text. The Roman one was earlier on, so I just crammed it in . . .
Repeated polling across Russia ( and across the former East Germany ) finds a very strong preference for the old soviet regime(s). Wonder why. There were no homeless. Everybody had a job, residence, easy access to free health care. Your kids could go to university for free. There was no street crime. There were no debt bubbles threatening. The elites were just party bosses with dachas, not billionaires lording over everyone. Nobody had to suffer Nancy Pelosi, CNN, Walmart. There was a presence of meaningful community. Stuff like that. Stuff you can’t get around here for love or money. If you’re so-called Ukrainian you can old dream of the security of Soviet life as opposed to being a US toadie.
As life spirals downwards note the Yellow Vests of France. No hope, no future for regular folks. You think the Soviet Union was a police state? Take a look around. We have met the enemy and he is us. Life has a way of paying you out.
You might want to check your sources. From Pew: “The highest rates of approval for the transition to capitalism are found in Eastern Germany, the Czech Republic and Poland, at 82 percent, 79 percent and 71 percent respectively.”
That’s a landslide. People do miss free stuff.
But where I live, nearly everyone has a job, a place to live, the local community college is cheap, street crime is nearly zero, and we don’t have party bosses or Nancy Pelosi. Health care is NOT free, but I can also write this blog without fear (currently) of exile or gulag, though The Mrs. thinks (and I agree) it has put me on “lists.”
I’ve written pretty extensively, though and do believe things will get pretty dicey, and publicly predicted a danger zone that starts around 2024 and keeps getting more likely until 2032. We will determine what the other side of that crisis looks like.
A calorie is not a calorie. Soda is poison.
If I might take your car analogy further, if someone gave up a brand new 911 Carrera GTS, would you put used motor oil into it? Would you ignore regular maintenance? Yeah sure, you can keep driving with recycled oil or just topping off your ATF but quicker sooner then later, you’ll see performance dropping.
You got close with your reference to insulin. There’s a lot more to losing weight then obsessing over a scale. Start with gut health, fermented foods are excellent(kombucha e.g.) Avoid processed foods. Period.
There’s a reason new borns have diabetes. When I grocery shop, I note what people are buying. 99% of it is garbage…packaged death. If you want to put a quarter million on that Carrera, 1 item foods are your Royal Purple.
Agreed – 100%!! Sugar is a VERY powerful molecule and drives a VERY strong response from the human system.
I just can’t post it all at once. What would I talk about next week?
Several years ago weighing in the upper 180s-low 190s, I just had had it maintaining that weight. BF was mid teens with slight ab definition. But that much weight just was a pain for me to keep up. 3,000+ calories a day, 200 grams of protein and huge BMs. Over the course of a couple years I slowly feathered down into the low 150s before settling in in the upper 150s. Yes my strength has gone down a bit as evidenced by my PRs in the gym but I’m 67 and I felt it was a needless strain carrying that weight.
My energy is still very high, I work easily 70+ hours/week in my studio, I enjoy vigorous physical activity almost daily and spend frequent…ahem, quiet time with my gal.
For me, dropping was easy, I just didn’t have an evening meal anymore, almost what is called intermittent fasting with me eating only a part of each day. My daily caloric intake is around 1200-1500 and I feel pretty good. Bet your last donut too that everyone of those calories is nutrient packed. Absolutely no crap(processed foods) On gym days I still make it a point to overload a bit on protein, both animal & plant, but other then that, eating so much less, for me, is appropriate.
Good luck.
It’s working really, really well. I’ll give an update, probably late next month. I’m very pleased with what I’ve seen so far . . . .