El Capitan On The Differences Between American and Italian Men

Captain Capitalism has a revelation:

What the ladies fail to see is that Fernando and Jon are the exact same guys, just an ocean apart. Oh sure Fernando has an accent, olive skin and speaks Italian, but they both "live life" (Jon plays video games, Fernando seduces naive female tourists), they both drink (Jon prefers Budweiser, Fernando red wine), they both live at home (though we interpret this as and applaud Fernando for "loving his mother"), and I guaran-freaking-tee you they BOTH play video games. Probably MW3 online, they're probably doing a co-op mission right now.

I don't quite fit in anywhere here, because I live alone, drink red wine, and don't play video games. I suspect it doesn't matter much, because the story is really about what the female imagines, rather than who the man is.

Helping People Lose Weight

I was thinking last night about doing some sort of health/weightloss gig. I could help people lose weight, but only if they actually listened to me. Most people appear to not listen unless they pay- of course, they may not listen even then, but at least I wouldn't be wasting my time. So, it seems to me it could be a fun thing if I could somehow charge less for the people who actually lose the weight and/or get healthier.
Tough to figure out. Charge a really high price and mark it down as they improve? Would I be able to get any clients at all with that model? If I could, they'd be highly motivated.
This is partly an economic insight, but economists are about the only people who'd actually make a bet in order to lose weight. Bet you'll lose the weight, and then you have a lot of incentive to lose it. Makes sense to an economist, but an average person is unlikely to make the bet because he didn't want that much pressure on him in the first place.

A person who contacts someone to help them lose weight, however, must be at least a little more motivated than the average person, but they need help getting used to and using non-mainstream ideas fast. A client who complies well and achieves his goals becomes the best sort of advertisement available, so one could regard the discount given as part of the advertising budget.

Perhaps it would function as pay X for month one, set goal. If you are 10% closer to goal by month's end, you get 10% off X. If you are 50% you get 50%. Now, excluding idiots who would starve themselves to avoid paying extra, it ought to work.

Well, Nikoley is still feeling happy with his experiment, and from a popularity perspective, he's getting the traffic. I feel the need to expand on the difference between the food reward perspective and what my experience with a technique based on a slightly different theory, the flavor/calorie association, led me to believe. Both theories a based on the same or similar bodies of research, from what I understand.

Flavor is a signal, both generally and with regard to specific foods. The presence of a lot of flavor, and perhaps varieties of flavor, indicates abundance. The body responds by encouraging more eating. What's going on here? Well, long ago this was part of a process kicked off in summer when food was abundant. Eat plenty and put on some fat; this was a good adaptation to what was coming next- winter.

Low or no flavor is a signal too. We don't get much flavor when fasting. Appetite gets down-regulated. Now the food-reward gurus keep saying carbohydrates don't matter, but I've noticed a serious difference in the ease of transition into a fasted state from a high-fat diet versus a high carb diet. The blood sugar roller-coaster ride makes the transition very harsh. With a high fat diet the blood sugar stays stable, and the transition into the fasted state is much easier.

The Shangri-La Diet is the introduction of calories with no flavor- often achieved with a nose-clip and calorie dense food, like oil.
Bland diets work to a limited extent, though it is not clear they are worth it for reasons I'll mention in a minute. Bland diets are based around foods with little flavor (low signal) and a range of calories.
Traditional, home-made fair tended to be variable in both flavor and calories over time. Things changed, ingredients were substituted, etc... In many cases, especially before the introduction of industrial oils and various refined foods, this variability was enough to keep the set point from going up very much.
Modern processed foods provide a strong signal for exactly the same calories every single time.
The solid, predictable nature of this signal leads us to crave more of the same food, but also, more food period. Of course, if a person is already eating one highly processed food, they will tend to find more of them and compound their error.
Finally, there are spices, herbs, fermented foods etc... This is a class of foods that have strong flavor, but very little calories. I believe the bland diet isn't a very good idea because these strong flavors signal nutritive and medicinal value. In modern times we see them as being used largely to make other foods more palatable and therefore problematic, but the benefits here suggest we should keep them. Use them in different ways perhaps, but use them.

This is basically what the research can legitimately support. It cannot support a food reward theory that ignores carbohydrates altogether. We can understand why, for instance a potato has a low response- the weak signal isn't as effective as a stronger one. But what does that mean over time? Are you going to eat all your potatos plain? If you have an issue with blood sugar and insulin, will it just magically disappear because the food-reward people want it to?
What's the time frame of your experiment? Will you get used to a low-signal/high reward food and slowly start gaining weight?

The best practice in the Paleo world is, in my opinion, Robb Wolf's unweighed, unmeasured Paleo. This is naturally somewhat low carbohydrate, and if someone is coming into this trying to lose weight, making sure it stays low carbohydrate is important. The Paleo diet also functions as an elimination diet; the safe starch & potato arguments just don't work for newcomers. These foods may be something people can add back in after they've healed up from the S.A.D., but I am seeing a debate where the very people who benefit from the original diet turn round and claim that one aspect of it isn't necessary. This debate will cripple newcomers- especially those who are metabolically deranged. Blood sugar is far more important than the debaters remember, both in regard to appetite and one's general sense of well being.

This is where the arguments about how many carbohydrates did ancient man eat just break down; we don't know, and we are dealing with modern day humans who've done whatever damage they've done with processed foods. Getting back to a healthy response to insulin should be at the top on the list of things to do, regardless of whether on not insulin is what originally caused the problem.

Diet & Narrative: Yet Another Story That Doesn't Work

Richard Nikoley is suggesting low carbohydrate diets work because it leads to lower calories and less palatable foods in the diet:

You're fat. You go low carb per se. You lose water weight because liver and muscle glycogen is being depleted. This is very motivational; or, rewarding, even "palatable." So you continue on. By virtue of blanket LC, you're excluding highly rewarding and palatable fast food, pizza, pasta, ice cream, sugar drinks, Hot Pockets, and all the other crap in favor of meat, veggies, nuts, cheese, and maybe some LC junk food if that's your thang. Yea, it's great to eat red meat again, and while some can pack away 16oz ribeye steaks one after the other, most can't. They're satisfied, and satisfied sooner, with less caloric intake, more often. It subtracts down. They lose weight. Was LC effective? Yes. Why? Food reward/palatability. And because calories count.

I don't think this is accurate because this is the way it went down for me:
Shangri-La Diet- The hyperpalatable contingent of the paleosphere recognize this as supportive of their theories, as Chris Kresser and Stephan Guyenet have discussed. Now, I quibble with this, because I think the flavor/calorie association actually makes more sense than the food reward theory. (One could actually make an argument for a less specific flavor/physiological reaction, but I'd seriously digress if I got into that.)
I can, however, go ahead and agree with their assertions and point out that if they are right and SLD is an example of how their theory works, I unwittingly controlled for it.
The effect of SLD is appetite suppression. It suddenly dawns on you, halfway through whatever it is you are eating, that you just don't want anymore. Shocking. Once I realized I could eat rather little, I shot for 1500 calories a day. Here is variable number two.
So I was consciously doing these things, but staying under 1500 was sometimes still a struggle.
Here is what I found:

I used to eat bananas everyday for potassium, but within an hour, I'd be really hungry. One day I brought brisket I cooked overnight and I didn't want to put it in the fridge, so I had it when I usually had my banana. I didn't think about food again until it was almost time to go home and I realized I hadn't eaten anything else!

If we assume that the word 'hyperpalatable' actually means something other than refined carbohydrate, and we assume it has more scientific credibility than the consensus on global warming, then carbohydrate restriction helps reduce appetite in conjunction with it!

I don't think we know and I follow Nassim Taleb's advice on scientific narratives. I am even a bit more cynical. The one bur in the side of the professionals for all these years has been the low carbohydrate clan. They could be right, they could be wrong, but I imagine they'd sure be annoying to academia. If you are young person coming up in the field, I doubt they'd care if you were paleo, or thought humans should subsist on algaes and yeast, just don't be one of those guys who keeps exposing that fact our studies don't mean a damn thing because our 'lo-carb' rat chow is 50% starch. Gary Taubes keeps saying, and it is still true- we need the studies before we simply dismiss insulin as a player.

Anyway, I continued on. I stopped eating grains, legumes or dairy (except for butter) and at the time it seemed to me to be the component Dr. Atkins hadn't known about. He did know some folks could eat more carbohydrates, while others needed to be more careful. I've spent the last two years or so weight stable (in a ten lb range) and I just eat real food. If I am hungry and bananas are the only thing around that fit the real food description, I eat them. Happens more often than not at work.

I have done a tuber experiment that may have been more drastic than what Nikoley is trying right now. I not only didn't want to eat; I didn't particularly want to live. While I can eat the occasional potato, too much starch on a consistent basis appears to lead to depression in me.

Yes, this is just my experience, but I don't think it fits well with the story, or the stories being told around the campfires in certain circles. I'll let Tyler Cowen give you the 411 on stories:

Will Catholics Learn From Libertarians?

In a move perfectly consistent with their moral code, libertarians are defending Catholic freedoms.
Meanwhile, the loudest, supposedly uber-Catholic candidate in the public eye is anti-libertarian.
This is not because there is anything inherently anti-Catholic in libertarianism. Rather, it is due to the fact that many Catholicism are far too Roman. The Republic was, after all, a pagan invention, ordained by gods to which we are not supposed to bow.

We have Democracy at the apex of our pantheon now, rather than Jupiter, but the American Republic displays yet more of the capriciousness so characteristic of the old gods. We are at the mercy of political law, and what was once declared moral, just, and good, is today declared evil and wrong. Saving, as an example, is considered good almost universally, in practically every moral system; yet, the government, pretending the laughable pretensions of Keynes is somehow valid, declares it evil. Every attempt is made to punish, destroy, inflate, tax, or otherwise remove whatever is valuable from the hands of those who saved it, to the priestly bureaucrats- whether they be technically private sector or no.

So, I wonder if any Catholics looking at this situation see the point. I often hear a condemnation of individualism in response to libertarianism, but it must be noted they have real principles that would protect a Christian's right to live, associate, and contract to do what we believe is right. The average American Catholic's orientation to government would seem to get us in trouble- once in a while it protects us, then one day it turns on us, and it always compromises us.

Debt and Money are two different things

Much hay seems to be made by people saying debt came first, and then money came later, therefore we can have some sort of debt/money, or that it can be equivalent.
Debt is essentially a contract.
Money is an asset.
Modern money is fiat money. The monies that were once backed by gold are now backed by nothing except the edict of the nations that put the money out there. This will fail, and the debt structure that has been built up on this falsehood isn't going to help. Debt as money would blow up in our faces even faster, because it would be less real than our current insanity. What we need more than ever is the ability to verify assets exist before we engage in a transaction- this is achievable when your money is an asset (gold in a warehouse, for instance). It is not achievable under the current regime, largely because they want to keep pretending the debt currently on the books (like mortgage-backed assets) are worth something more than they likely are. Debt as money would lead us further down the path of instability.

Political Constructions of Self

Recently on PaleoHacks, someone asked the question:

If not birth control pills, then what?

I replied:

Well, the 'paleo' solution is to get pregnant when you are fertile.

Our society is so completely artificial. If earlier generations of females had spent their 20s doing everything but having children, the species would no longer exist.

Which someone responded to by saying:

I'm not here to produce babies any more than you are, August. "No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother." Margaret Higgins Sanger

Now, after noting the extremely weird teleological construction of her sentence, I thought about it for a while. Normally we see teleological constructions in religion. One expects the Creator to have made us for something, and while being fruitful and multiplying may not be the end all and be all of His plans, it rates high enough to be recorded as the first command.
No, this is a teleological construct of a different kind and I suspect it exists in her statement because she was fed a construction of self by a propagandist, likely disguised as a teacher.

Notice I didn't mention religion in my answer at all. Rather, I just wrote what makes evolutionary sense. Now, if a young lady spent any decent time thinking about the sort of person she should get married to (which also makes sense from an evolutionary perspective) she could quite reasonable expect to maximize her health and well-being over her lifetime. PaleoHacks is all about applying evolutionary theory to lifestyle in order to maximize health and well-being. The basics are don't eat any grains, legumes, or dairy- but from there there are all sorts of things to do. Sleep, proper levels of sun exposure, coming up with strategies for dealing with blue light at night. If you get wealthy enough, stop working in a cubicle and do most of your work while meandering around the city, to mimic the daily movement of hunter-gatherers. Some of these ideas are wacky, and may not even accurately recreate the environment of our ancestors. Also, we want the benefits of that environment minus the starvation, child-mortality, infections, brutality, and death. But I digress.

My suggestion isn't just based on evolutionary theory- we've got plenty of medical research backing this one up. This is healthier than any other option, and yet, someone appears to believe her very self under attack. She then follows up with a quote about choice, which makes no real sense because obviously a young lady should choose quite carefully about these things; I was not suggesting she just get pregnant by accident, nor do I think hunter-gatherers went around getting pregnant by accident.

I believe this is a defense of a false construct of self. This false construct says if pregnancy and children occur, the self will be diminished. I'm not here to produce babies doesn't make sense if the I is a human woman, the here is the earth, and babies happen to be a part of life here on earth. I'm not here to produce babies does make sense if the I is a political identity, here is whatever territory within which the struggle is taking place, and babies are those pesky things that take resources away from the political parasites.

I also ran across it at DarwinCatholic. Of course in addition to this construction, you've got to wade through the modern American Catholic's terrifying desire to be, well, reasonable.
Hopefully, as the current political furor over mandated contraception unfolds, it may begin to dawn on the bishops that their embrace of virtù interferes with virtue, but it will take a long while yet for the whole Church. Anyway, my willingness to remind the fairer sex that God may actually prefer children to the education/career track (a track might I add that has been very disappointing to me and to many) I get this:

This nonsense about a women's duty to maximize her years of fertility as if she were baby vending machine is exactly why many women my age have such a claustrophobic attitude towards the great goods marriage and family life.

My mention of fertility was this:

There are only so many years of fertility that a woman has, and it seems the secularists have won a great victory with this education/career nonsense encouraging an awful lot of women to waste that time in dubious endeavors.

Mentioning fertility is not the same as writing a lot of nonsense about maximizing years of fertility. It is the image of the 'baby vending machine', though that truly reveals this false construction of self again. Could a baby vending machine be a life affirming thing? Of course not. Indeed, how does affirming a part of her humanity, her biology result in her thinking about machines? It is modern life that has reduced us. Paperwork vending machines. The old political identity is there insistent that a lifestyle very likely to harm a woman is the one that makes her her.

Both should know better, and if I should hazard a guess, the paleohacks commenter will reach the right conclusion faster because she's learned via diet the lies we've been told. The Catholic is sadly, still too soft, and likely to wax enthusiastic about abstractions. The false construction of self finds that to be the sort of ground into which it can put deep roots, as I know only too well myself.