I nearly bust a gut laughing watching this! I have this feeder … fortunately, I do not have this cat ;).
Archive for September, 2013
Friday cat blogging
Posted in Friday cat blogging on September 27, 2013 | Leave a Comment »
Happiness, gratitude, and connection
Posted in Ancestral health, Connection, Psychology on September 26, 2013 | Leave a Comment »
Have you seen this video — The Science of Happiness - An Experiment in Gratitude — from the creative agency Soul Pancake? If not, take a look:
The “science” behind the video is from positive psychology research (full text) done by Martin Seligman. Seligman et al gave participants “one week to write and then deliver a letter of gratitude in person to someone who had been especially kind to them but had never been properly thanked” and found that this exercise “caused large positive changes for one month.” The Soul Pancake folks one-upped this by doing a similar exercise all at the same time and taping it for all to see.
Gratitude? Or connection?
I’m posting this because I think the Soul Pancake folks are missing out on the real story here. They noted themselves that the people who were unable to share their gratitude (e.g., those who chose someone who was deceased) did not see a big increase in happiness. They also noted that the people who were the least happy to begin with saw the greatest increase when they shared their gratitude.
In other words, it seems clear (to me anyways) that it wasn’t the gratitude: it was the connection.
To be fair, this wasn’t just any connection. The people weren’t sharing how their favorite sports team had done or what the weather was like. No, this was a really intimate, meaningful connection. The kind of connection that, for most of us, is fairly infrequent given the various competitors for our time and energy … not to mention how hard it is for us to to be intimate, period.
Anyways, an interesting video. And it looks like you can get an increase in happiness by occasionally doing a gratitude journal. But I think that Soul Pancake missed the key takeaway and that Daniel Gilbert (see last week) has it right re social relationships: “nature’s designed us to experience happiness when we’re connected to others.”
Even when that connection is forced upon us as part of a video shoot!
Quote of the day
Posted in Ancestral health, QOTD on September 26, 2013 | 3 Comments »
Food writer Jason Kessler has a funny take on why, after trying it for 40 days, eating Paleo-TM wasn’t for him:
The Paleo Diet attempts to get you to eat how cavemen ate. Although it’s pretty much COMPLETELY IMPOSSIBLE TO KNOW how cavemen ate, the diet asks you to cut out dairy. And flour. And sugar. And beans. And pretty much anything that wasn’t around for Paleolithic man. …
In our modern society, there’s no need to eat this way. We’ve evolved. We developed new ways to eat because we got smarter. Sure, we got too smart for our own good and figured out how to hack our way to dopamine central with foods scientifically engineered to hit that sweet spot in the sugar, salt and fat departments, but that’s no reason to throw all of culinary evolution out the window. …
I don’t know about you, but I don’t necessarily trust a diet – or a way of life – that tells you to go ahead and eat four pounds of turkey if you want to, but step away from the quinoa.
Quote of the day
Posted in Food industry, QOTD, Real food on September 25, 2013 | Leave a Comment »
Mother Jones talks about food quality, fast food, and those Chipotle ads, concluding that Chipotle’s ads paint a rosier picture than reality suggests. MJ’s suggestion:
So if you’re headed off to lunch after reading this article, and you want to eat organic, avoid GMOs, and get food that’s locally sourced—your best best is to go to a grocery store, read the labels very carefully, and make a sandwich. But if that’s not an option, you’re far better off going to Chipotle than McDonald’s, where if you order a burger—literally just a bun, meat, and Big Mac sauce—you’re eating more than 60 ingredients. Good luck, America.
Guest post: Food addiction and abstinence
Posted in Food addiction, Guest posts on September 24, 2013 | 5 Comments »
[I am happy to present my second guest post on Weight Maven. Michael is a blogger and the author of Fat Boy Thin Man, which I’ve read and recommend. In this post, Michael shares his perspective on the usefulness of abstinence in managing food addiction. — Beth]
By Michael Prager
When I saw Beth had welcomed a guest blogger a while back, I put up my hand and shouted, “me too, me too!” ‘cause I admire both her and her audience — smart, engaged, opinionated. I’m happy when I can live up to those traits myself.
She made a few suggestions on what I might discuss, and, natch, any of them would have worked, but I decided to talk about addiction and the notion of abstinence when it is applied to problem eaters who are also food addicts.
For drug addicts and alcoholics, the notion of abstinence is considered wholly different because everyone has to eat, right? But I don’t think the gap is as wide as most do. Do drug addicts ever take pharmaceuticals, ever? Most do, even if it’s only aspirin. So the question isn’t “drugs,” it’s “which drugs.”
The gap is even less pronounced regarding alcoholics, IMHO. Just as everyone has to eat, everyone has to drink. Alcoholics don’t swear off drinking, they swear off alcohol. If you think that’s just semantics, then you are in the majority of folks and don’t understand the term.
Quote of the day
Posted in Ancestral health, Obesity, QOTD on September 24, 2013 | Leave a Comment »
Looks like Daniel Lieberman, professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard, has a new book coming out next week: The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease.
As part of the pre-release publicity, he did an interview with The Guardian on why, given an evolutionary perspective, “diet and exercise really do matter.” Re obesity and the mismatch between how our bodies adapted to evolutionary pressures versus our modern environment:
We evolved to put on fat wherever necessary, and that was a good thing in human history. Most people until recently had to work hard and they lived just at the margin of energy balance, and a little bit more energy stored in fat meant that you could have more babies, and your babies were more likely to survive. That was pretty powerful stuff, right? Now we’re in this bizarre situation that for the first time in billions of years of evolution we have an organism that is not energy limited any more.
Why dieting “is a disaster” for us:
it takes superhuman effort to lose weight, it can be done but it isn’t easy. And that’s because we’re evolved not only to gain weight but to hold onto it. So if that overweight person starts dieting that’s just as hard as if an underweight person starts dieting, you go into a negative energy balance and all kinds of mechanisms kick in that cause us to become less active, to reshuffle energy around our bodies to defeat that effort to lose weight.
While he wrote the book to point out the problems, he’s not particularly optimistic:
The current gaze into the crystal ball doesn’t fill me with optimism. … So for example the US rates of childhood obesity have levelled off, so everyone’s patting themselves on the back. In actual fact they’ve levelled off to unacceptable rates and most of those kids who are overweight or obese have a much higher possibility of suffering a wide range of diseases. China has had a tenfold increase in type two diabetes. India’s a time-bomb of diabetes and obesity. The list goes on - Mexico is more obese than America. So I think the future of our planet is a lot more overweight people with a lot of very costly chronic diseases that will never be easily treated. So unless we really grapple with helping people change their diets and get them to be fit, these problems will continue to mount and cause economic woe and increased suffering.
I’m not sure that Lieberman’s book is going to be enough to stop the train wreck (I too am worried things are going to get far worse before they get better). In particular, I’m not on board 100% with what he’s described in the past as “socially acceptable coercion” as the public health strategy he recommends.
But I do think that understanding the problem is a pretty good first step. And his contribution is a big one over the traditional “eat less, move more” personal responsibility viewpoint.
Made me laugh
Posted in Made me laugh on September 23, 2013 | Leave a Comment »
How not to do a treadmill desk!
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Weight Maven is written by Beth Mazur. Beth believes that obesity is more symptom than cause and that the real problem is our modern culture -- especially diet. Beth writes about ancestral health, health policy, & mindfulness. And cats! More »
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