rkbabang

I agree completely. I usually recommend his shorter "Why We Get Fat" book to people though, because a 600 page densely written book with 150 pages of footnotes turns many people off. I'm a engineer, so I just took it all in and loved reading it. But it has been my experience, that such a tome is quite intimidating to a lot of folks. I recommended both books to a relative of mine. He read "Why We Get Fat" twice, but still hasn't been able to bring himself to start "Good Calories, Bad Calories" and it's been 6 months. Yet he's made the lifestyle changes anyway and is doing great. --Eric

Basically a low carb diet. 1) I try to eat 20grams of net carbs or fewer per day. (net carbs = total carbs - fiber), I go over sometimes, but not by much. 2) I try to keep my sugar consumption as close as humanly possible to 0g/day. I am very strict with sugar, I simply won't eat anything with added sugar. Any sugar I do consume is naturally occurring in the food itself (i.e. blueberries). 3) Any carbs I do eat come from vegetables and a small amount of berries. That's basically it. In practice in a typical day, my meals look like this: BREAKFAST: eggs and meat. Sometimes cheese. LUNCH: Salad (a lot of veggies) with some meat and/or a hard boiled egg. Topped with olive oil and a little vinegar. DINNER: I eat about half vegetables and half meat/fish/or eggs. Example chicken and broccoli, steak and green beans, etc. SNACKS: 0-1 per day, some examples are: nuts, or berries on whipped heavy cream, or cheese&pepperoni. DRINKS: I drink a lot of water (sometimes with a wedge of lemon or lime in it), I also drink 1-2 cups black coffee per day (hot or iced, no cream or sugar). Sometimes I'll drink unsweetened iced tea or hot tea. OILS: I cook with olive oil, lard, coconut oil, tallow, or grass fed butter. Which reminds me, I try to use as much grass fed beef and dairy as possible because they have a better omaga3/6 ratio. I use omaga3 eggs and take fish oil pills as well for that reason. I try to use non-processed foods when ever possible, I buy non-cured bacon with no added nitrates, for example. And I also take vitamin D3 pills because I work indoors. Good books to read: "Why We Get Fat: And What To Do About It", by Gary Taubes "The Paleo Solution: The Original Human Diet", by Robb Wolf My diet could be described as Paleo with a small amount of dairy added (Butter, cheese, heavy cream). Robb Wolf says "no dairy". --Eric

I'm still doing very well on the low carb diet. I was about 225lbs at the beginning of the year, ~190lbs after 3 months and 178lbs today (about 9 months on the diet). My bloodwork comes out better and better every time I get it done. I've had it done in December/2010, then April/2011, then again in July/2011. In July my triglycerides were down to 77 (from 140's in Dec). My HDL (Good cholesterol) was up to 65 (from 30's in Dec). My A1C improved well into the normal range from pre-diabetic range in Dec. Everything else was in normal range in Dec and stayed normal in April and July. I'm going to get more bloodwork done at the 1 year mark in December. I'm still having a lot of fun with the food I can eat and experimenting with new things. Last night I made pork-chops dipped in egg, "breaded" with coconut flour then deep-fried in lard. BTW: Here are the old threads on this topic: Do You Really Need This? 4 hour body --Eric

Sears still publishes a physical paper catalog? Seriously, I had no idea. I haven't seen one of those since I was a kid in the early to mid 80's probably. I was born in 1972 and wouldn't think to shop at Sears either online or off for anything. One exception is that my wife will go there to look at the Land's End clothes sometimes, but that is about it. I agree that it is a dying brand. To me Kenmore just means some other company's appliances re-badged to say Kenmore. Why not just buy the Whirlpool or whoever really makes it? --Eric

No problem. Glad to help. --Eric

Lib, do you know of any extensions that work with Outlook Express? i.e. I can click on something and it will prepare to email a link but opening outlook express instead of Gmail or Yahoo? I see the GMail ones but not one for OE. Thanks Try the extension called "email this page" It will add an email button to your tool bar and when you click it it will use your default email tool, which will be outlook express if that is what your default email tool in windows is. I just tried it and it starts a message in thunderbird which is my default email tool. --Eric

Firefox 6.0 is available now. I just upgraded and I don't notice any difference in the user interface, but it does seem to be a bit faster rendering pages. --Eric

I've actually never used IE. I've used NCSA Mosaic, then I switched to Netscape Navigator until Netscape version 6, then to Mozilla, then finally to Firefox which I still use. I've experimented with Chrome a few times, but I always go back to Firefox. I'm using 5.0 right now. I just upgrade to the latest version whenever it is available. I've never liked Microsoft products and try to avoid them whenever I can. I've been running Linux at home for about 10 years now. And at work they give me two computers a Linux workstation and a Windows 7 laptop. I'd love to install Linux on the laptop, but I'm not supposed to, so I don't. I do have to admit Windows 7 isn't half bad though, it is the first Windows version that I actually don't mind using. I still have never tried any version of IE and don't plan on starting now. --Eric

I agree, only more so. I think you are off by many many orders of magnitude. --Eric

The Paleo Solution Podcast interview with Gary Taubes

The best way to look at home ownership is the same way you look at buying a car. It is a purchase of something you need to use on a daily basis(a place to live/a method of transportation), not as an investment. I rather own vs. rent simply because I don't want to have to ask permission to paint the walls, re-do the basement, put in a pool, etc... To me it is a quality of life decision, not a financial one. If I make any return > 0% at the end that is just gravy. If my return is 0% it is an excellent deal. If my return ends up negative, it was money well spent. Returns as high as 0% are very, very, very rare when it comes to automobiles or most other things we buy to use regularly. --Eric

It's a very real possibillity that this is total B.S. and he died in December of 2001 or some time after that. Throughout Bush's presidency I wondered if he was really dead and Bush just didn't want to lose his valuable bogyman. Like so many things, we may never know the truth. --Eric

I've been against these wars since 2001. I don't say anything different regardless of who is in the whitehouse. The left wants to tax, borrow, and spend us to death for social reasons, the right wants to do it for security reasons, and they both want to fight the insane drug war. When one side is in power they increase government in their favorite areas while doing nothing to reduce it in the other side's favorite areas, and vice versa when the other side is in power. Thus government increases regardless. And both sides are hypocrites to the extreme. Where have the anti-war left been since January 2009? Just like those on the right who only oppose spending and debt when a Democrat is in the Whitehouse, those on the left only oppose war and random murder of countless innocents when a Republican resides in the Whitehouse. It is lunacy. Quite true as far as it goes. Some people have it far, far, worse than we do. But just because the slaves on other plantations have much crueler masters than yours or mine, doesn't mean that we are free. Jefferson once said that it is government's tendency to grow and liberty to shrink. (I'm paraphrasing, I'm too lazy to look it up). Government is a cancer on society. It behaves the same in society as cancer does in the body, the end results are always the same, and it is just as necessary. --Eric

That is so true - but to be brutally honest, and I know alot of people are not going to like this but half the problem was how Bush and his administration handled the situation. When Bush left office they admitted they had no clue where Bin Laden was and his actions leading into the war on terror were rediculous and so costly in terms of lives not only $. Surprisingly Frank, (in Canada we have an election today y'know ;)) the CBC asked all Canadian Party Leaders what their biggest mistake has been since being leader of their party and our current PM - Harper, stated it was his declaration at the time that Canada should follow the US into Iraq. This was a surprisingly candid statement to make just days before his own election - I honestly didnt think he would own up to this at this point in the election. Absolutely. You won't get any argument from me here. I think Bush was more than half the problem, but Obama was the rest of the problem. When he won in 2008 I thought to myself "well he's a socialist, but at least he'll bring the troops home" LOL, was I naive. Mr. Peace-prize has done no such thing. Will he end these insane wars now? No, he won't. He's as much a part of the military industrial complex as Bush was. All B.S. campaign rhetoric aside, there isn't a dimes worth of difference between the two parties in the US when it comes to the military and expanding the empire. --Eric

I'm glad he's dead, he was a murderer and a terrorists, but it certainly isn't a clear victory for the USA. 10 years and trillions of dollars spent... not to mention all of the additional lives lost. Bin Laden's goal was to bankrupt the United States. One could make the argument that he won. --Eric

This could backfire. With voice only or real-time text only, you just have to sound (or type) professional. Most people imagine they are talking or text-chatting with someone who looks like this: They might not enjoy the experience as much if the reality is more: http://www.geekologie.com/2011/03/24/ps3-headset.jpg or http://blog.hpsgroup.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/ugly-woman-moustache-pictures.jpg

Purposely misspelling words? I'm sorry, this baffles me. I like the concept of not spending a lot on an expensive editor or on an expensive website designer, but I'm more impressed with someone who creates a nice product on the cheap rather than someone who purposefully degrades the product for the appearance alone. This is expending extra effort to make the product worse. Of corse, maybe im rong and mispeling is more bettr, and using screen real estate inefficient- ly is better too. But I don't think so. You don't need to spend any more time nor money to make something easier to read and run a spell check before you print. Saving time and/or money I get, but I don't get inefficiency for inefficiency's sake. --Eric

I'll stick up for cwericb. I don't think a website has to be complicated and expensive to use screen real estate efficiently. Take a look at the attachment of my browser window viewing the site. A lot of wasted space. Why not expand the info to fill the window? I'd prefer a simple HTML site like berkshirehathaway.com for ease of reading than what they have. I'm not too worried about the web site though. It serves its purpose. But as cwericb said, It could be better. --Eric

Don't forget all the diesel burned on the farm and in transporting the corn. As well as the energy burned in the distilling process. I've read that the carbon footprint is greater than that of gasoline. And we know the cost is greater. So we are spending more to increase our carbon footprint. And don't forget 10% ethanol at the gas pumps is mandated by law in most (all?) of the U.S. --Eric

No problem. I've typed many a thing in haste on-line that I regretted afterward. We all do it. The tone of my initial post was somewhat inflammatory now, that I go back and read it, as well, for which I apologize.

Excellent article thanks. Gonzalo has a more realistic assessment of what the government is actually going to do...exactly what it has been doing. It will burn that candle until the wax is gone then try to deny that the candle no longer exists when it's gone. I just can't imagine them doing what needs to be done. Not this year, or next, or ever. The tone of my first post may have been a little harsh, but to state that the US dollar will (not "should", but "will") be made redeemable by gold is quite a wishful statement. I just don't see that happening.

Wow. 1) Thou shall not criticize anything anyone says unless you have read what he has said over a period of years. I'll try to remember that. I guess I should go back and read years worth of your writings before criticizing this statement of yours, but since I disagree with it I won't. 2) I agree with almost everything he said I just made 2 small criticisms. One, that you can't put a number to "trust". And two, that regardless of what should happen I don't think the US will go back to the gold standard. 3) It is much easier to launch an ad hominem attack than to criticize the content of someone's comments. Which says a lot about yourself. --Eric

Based solely on usernames I've seen here I know there are at least some here who would be interested in this. The Atlas Shrugged Part I movie comes out tomorrow in 300 theaters nationwide (US) I'm not sure about Canada. I haven't been this excited about a movie in a long time. I'm hopeful that it will be as good as the looks. Here's a good review from someone who saw a screening. I can't wait to see it. --Eric

Reminds me of the economic theories that have equations including things like "utility". How on earth does one quantify "trust", "utility", or anything else which is not only different from person to person, but in each and every individual can change from moment to moment? And even in one individual at one moment there are no units so no way to quantify it and assign it a specific numerical value. Sure you can say the price of gold in any fiat monetary unit tends to be inversely proportional to the trust in that fiat money, but using a mathematical formula is inappropriate in this case. Also this guy is dreaming if he thinks the U.S. dollar will ever again be redeemable for gold. The political class never gives up power willingly or peacefully. I can't imagine this happening, even though it should.

The Fruit link is an excellent summary. Thanks. The other thing to remember is that for those of us that have metabolic syndrome and/or diabetes we have messed up our metabolism over a number of years (or decades) so it isn't going to go back to normal over night. For example, as I mentioned in my last post, one half of one banana was enough to spike my fasting blood sugar the next morning. Which shows that I am still highly insulin resistant. I would expect this to improve as time goes on. In a year or two I hope I can eat a banana on occasion without the negative consequences. Someone who's genes or metabolism are different from mine may be able to eat more fruit than I am right away. It is all about learning what works for you. --Eric