Category Archives: Pop Culture

Keto keto keto keto keto …

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keto breakfast

So I’m resigned to the fact that I will never be able to take really pretty food pictures. But this is what a typical breakfast looks like–just pretend it is has starbursts and stuff.

No, I am not jumping on a fad.

I already jumped–a year ago!

And before I jumped, I already had a nice foundation in place: I’d been doing intermittent fasting for 3 or 4 years before that …

Okay. Being a writer, I could spin out 6000 words on this topic without drawing a breath, so I’ll try to keep it short.

Here’s what happened.

Back in the late 90s/early 2000s I used low carb to slim back down after having a baby. But I thought of it, back then, as a way to lose weight, not as a way to improve other health markers. So after a few months I went back to eating the way I had before.

“The way I’d been eating before” wasn’t the so-called SAD (Standard American Diet) diet fwiw. I haven’t eaten that way since high school. I got on a “whole foods” kick in my early 20s and have been refining it ever since. But it did include quite a few carbs: grains with every meal, desserts (organic ice cream, that sort of thing). Lots of fruit.

But four or five years ago something happened that raised a red flag for me.

It was a busy Saturday. I was out running errands. I hadn’t eaten in several hours–one of those days when eating takes a back seat to other priorities.

I stopped at a Starbucks and ordered a mocha coffee–i.e. sugar laden high carb treat.

And a couple hours later, I crashed. Shaky, nauseous, weak, light-headed–I felt horribly sick.

It wasn’t an unfamiliar feeling. I’d been a “grazer” for a long time, with good reason: I couldn’t go more than 3 or 4 hours without eating, or I’d start to feel those symptoms.

But the intensity of the experience shook me up.

I wasn’t obese. I was working out (weight training) twice a week. But I was carrying probably 10 or 15 extra pounds. That, combined with my sugar crash, was a wake-up call. If I was having this kind of a reaction to sugar now, what was I facing in 5 years, or 10, or 15? Were the extra pounds I had put on as I aged affecting me in ways that were slowly undermining my health? Was my diet really the best diet for me?

I’m a regular reader of the “primal living” health blog at Mark’s Daily Apple, so by then I’d come across a term Mark Sisson coined: “fat-burning beast.” The basic idea is one that keto fans will find familiar. You can train your body to burn fat for energy instead of glucose, and when you do, you break your dependency on carbs. You won’t experience sugar crashes any more. You won’t have to eat all the time any more.

This was before Keto diets were all the rage, but I knew that day that I needed to become a fat-burning beast.

I started intermittent fasting.

There are a lot of different ways to do intermittent fasting. The approach I picked was to fast for 24 hours, breakfast to breakfast, twice a week.

It was really hard at first. More than once I’d hit a wall about 2 in the after noon. My body temp would drop, my energy levels would plummet. I’d have to crawl into bed under the covers to warm up and sleep just to get through it. (Working from home helps!)

But after a few months, my body adapted and holy smokes, what a revelation.

I was no longer dependent on food!

Guys, you know I’m a golfer. I used to have to pack food with me when I golfed so that I could get through a 4-5 hour round without wanting to pass out. Now, all of a sudden, it didn’t matter. I could go out in the morning without eating breakfast and play a round without the slightest discomfort.

And needless to say, no more sugar crashes. And I lost a few pounds which felt good.

Then came the Keto thing. Sisson started blogging about it. He announced he had a book coming out.

I didn’t hesitate. I pre-ordered the book and as soon as it arrived started planning a 6-week Keto clean-out.

That was a year ago. This week, my sweetheart and I are doing the 6-week thing for the second time :)

To me, Keto delivers the same effects as fasting. Energy levels that are both high and steady; clear mind; body gets that lovely, compact feeling (versus the bloated feeling I get when I’ve been eating too many carbs).

We also found that the effects of a six-week Keto clean-out last–really for the whole rest of the year. I still fast from time to time but it’s more of a touch-point now. Being “keto-adapted,” I don’t ever need to eat (freedom!!!) Going 24 or even 48 hours without eating doesn’t faze me. I energizer bunny right through :)

It also kind of pulled our diet in a keto direction even though we didn’t bother staying in “strict keto” once the six weeks was up. If I was at a restaurant and they put out fresh Italian bread with olive oil, I’d eat a slice and enjoy it. OTOH if I was hungry for a burger I’d order it without a bun. I.e. I didn’t seek out carbs, but I didn’t shun them.

Keto is definitely a fad today, with all the hoopla you get with diet fads. People denouncing it as dangerous, blah blah blah. Or defining keto erroneously (“you eat pounds of meat every day! and no veggies!” yeah right…) and then clapping themselves on the back for knocking their straw man over.

Silly. Not even going to bother engaging on that stuff. Go read Sisson if you want thoughtful, in-depth, science-based considerations of dietary arguments.

What I also see a lot of is people who–let me put this nicely–need a bit of help understanding how to do it.

So at the risk of turning this post into an all-Sisson read: I really recommend Sisson’s book, The Keto Reset Diet: Reboot Your Metabolism in 21 Days and Burn Fat Forever (affiliate link).

Actually, let me amend that: if you are thinking about doing keto for the first time, just go buy the book.

Because it’s about preparing yourself for keto. And you owe it to yourself to build a foundation if you’re new to keto–and especially if you are like I was: the sort of person who needs to eat every couple of hours to keep your energy levels steady.

Going keto “cold turkey” can make you feel like crap. Just like I felt that day years ago when I sugar crashed from my mocha coffee.

But if you prepare your body, things will be easier. And if you have a framework–a little bit of the science–you’ll understand what you’re doing and how to do it right.

Plus the book has a bunch of recipes and we found most of them to be absolutely delicious. So there’s that, too–you can plan your menus without having to hunt for ideas.

Happy ketoing!

The Strong Female Character, con’t

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Fact of life: when women assert themselves in Real Life, we generally do *not* look like this.

Fact of life: with rare exceptions, when women assert themselves in Real Life, we don’t look *anything* like this.

Writing in The New Statesman, author Sophia McDougall makes some interesting observations about “The Strong Female Character:” that what passes for strength, on the movie screen at least, is often an act of unjustified (or barely justified) physical violence:

[T]here are characters who’ve clearly been written with SFC-compatibility in mind, who nevertheless come at least halfway to life.  Captain America’s Peggy Carter, along with Iron Man’s Pepper Potts, are much the best of the Marvel love interests. Peggy shoots Nazis. She never has to be rescued or protected by Captain America or anyone else. She has a decent amount of screentime. Her interesting status as a female British soldier in World War Two is not actually explored, but implies a compelling back story and an impressive depth of conviction and resilience, and her romance with Captain America is never allowed to undermine this. While her role is clearly ancillary to the male hero, it’s not so much so that she feels defined by his presence; it’s possible to imagine a film about her – a woman determined to overcome everything in her path to fight the evils of Nazism. Most importantly to the character’s success, she’s played by the superb Hayley Atwell.

She’s introduced briefing a number of potential recruits to the super soldier programme. This is the scene clearly written to establish Peggy’s SFC cred, and it unfolds like this: One of the recruits immediately starts mouthing off at her, first insulting her accent and then, when she calls him out of the line-up, making sexist, suggestive remarks.
She punches him to the ground.

McDougall also points out that male protagonists don’t have to be “strong.” (She offers Sherlock Holmes as an example: his “physical strength is often unreliable… His mental and emotional resources also fluctuate. An addict and a depressive, he claims even his crime-fighting is a form of self-medication. Viewed this way, his willingness to place himself in physical danger might not be “strength” at all – it might be another form of self-destructiveness.”)

She concludes her piece by calling for

. . . a wealth of complex female protagonists who can be either strong or weak or both or neither, because they are more than strength or weakness. Badass gunslingers and martial artists sure, but also interesting women who are shy and quiet and do, sometimes, put up with others’ shit because in real life there’s often no practical alternative.

I suppose you know where I’m going next: right back to my experience with poor Libby: a woman who spends an entire novel putting up with others’ . . . stuff.

Here’s part of the comment I left on McDougall’s article:

I happen to think that putting a hapless character in a situation where he/she is overwhelmed by outside circumstances makes for humorous situations. A great example most of us can relate to is Hugh Grant’s character in Four Weddings & a Funeral. He was funny and loveable in his haplessness. He “got the girl” in the end only because his brother stood up for him.

But swap genders and make Grant a woman, and you’ll earn the Wrath of the Mob.

I know firsthand. I pubbed a novel with a woman who gets pushed around by family members and strangers.

I thought it was comic that she did things like sneak out of a window of her own house to avoid people who were camping on her yard.

My readers were not amused . . .

The fact is this: it’s complicated.

The Strong Female Character is something of a sacred figure. It may not be conscious, but writers use her because they know she is what readers/movie goers want and expect.

She’s also a SAFE figure.

Take that. And that.

Take that. And that.

It’s also likely that readers — and by this I mean female readers — want SFC because of their own ambiguity about strength and power.

In our personal lives, power is a double-edged sword. As a rather simplistic example: a woman who asserts herself can easily be perceived as unattractive. We’d like to think we can be powerful in the overt,  masculine sense and come across as sexy at the same time, but in reality, that’s not so easy to pull off.

In movies/novels, otoh, the SFC does pull it off. And guess what: readers want that.

One of Libby’s 1-star reviewers wrote:

[I]f I wanted real life, I wouldn’t be reading this book.

Exactly.

People read novels and go to movies to escape from “real life.”

They don’t want characters who mirror life’s uneasy ambiguities.

They don’t want books that are realistic about the trade-offs we all have to make between being loved and being powerful . . .

You never know what you’ll find in the attic

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October 1978 issue of Seventeen magazine with Brooke Shields on cover

For example, you might stumble across an October 1978 issue of Seventeen magazine with a 13-year old Brooke Shields on the cover . . .

I was thinking about selling it on ebay (along with the other issues in the stack) but you know, I might need to hang onto it a little while, first.

At least until I’ve read “Teen Pregnancy: Whose fault-boy or girl?”

Edgy teen  market journalism, 70s style — can’t resist!

And don’t forget the doggy bag

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Via one of Michael Blowhard’s always-worthwhile round-up posts, here’s a Christian Science Monitor piece that makes a point I’ve noticed myself: the cost of eating out is on par with, if not lower than, the cost of buying and preparing your own food.

This assumes you shop at the higher end of the supermarket food chain — and also assumes the time you spend preparing meals has a dollar value. If your definition of home cooking is to prise open a #10 can of franks-n-beans and dump some in a saucepan, the argument falls apart ;-)

Otherwise, as says one Mark Bergen, “pricing specialist,” Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota: “Simply put, restaurants are more efficient than you are.”

Some nice data about the resturant biz in the article too, though. Their profit margins are under 5 percent. And “most turn over more than their entire staff each year, a rate that has contributed to a decline in service over the past 10 years, experts say.” Yeah, that does explain a lot.

And of course, some requisite hand-wringing about portion size and how that’s making us fat. As if the doggy bag had never been invented. After golfing with my parents last weekend, we stopped at the Doug’s Fish Fry in Cortland. They were offering a fried oyster special. I ate half of mine and had the other half for lunch yesterday. Mmmmmm. (Heat them up under the broiler, a minute or so a side, just until the breading starts to sizzle, crisps them back up without overcooking the oyster.) (A trick I’ve perfected by reheating the ubuiquitous “chicken fingers” that my daughter often orders when we eat out.)

I’m not advocating a steady diet of deep-fried breaded whatever, of course, but in moderation? And they were oysters!

Dueling faiths

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That would be science v. religion >:-)

Courtesy of Curtis Brainard and CJR Daily, we have this nice round-up of the media coverage of Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion [Update, link no longer good, sorry]:

[U]nfavorable reviews of The God Delusion have branded Dawkins’ promotion of science as “fundamentalist” and “evangelical.” It gave pause when proponents of intelligent design began to argue like scientists, and it is equally so when the opposite happens, and scientists begin to argue like preachers.

You don’t say!

lol

The need for mythic statements is satisfied when we frame a view of the world which adequately explains the meaning of human existence in the cosmos, a view which springs from our psychic wholeness, from the co-operation between the conscious and unconscious. Meaninglessness inhibits fullness of life and is therefore equivalent to illness. Meaning makes a great many things endurable — perhaps everything. No science will ever replace myth, and a myth cannot be made out of any science.

— C.J. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

What evangelical atheists fail to appreciate is that they, too, are in the thrall of myth. More Jung:

The real facts do not change, whatever names we give them. Only we ourselves are affected. If one were to conceive of “God” as “pure Nothingness,” that has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact of a superordinate principle. We are just as much possessed as before; the change of name has removed nothing at all from reality. At most we have taken a false attitude toward reality if the new name implies a denial.

;-)

Yodeling the Classics

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I heard a cut from this 1997 CD, featuring Mary Schneider, Australia’s Queen of Yodeling, on PBS the other morning and realized that my admittedly puny CD collection had a GAPING hole that had to be filled pronto.

I mean, yodeling the William Tell Overture? Rossini’s Large al factotum? The only question is why it took someone this long to figure out it HAD to be done.

Okay, sorry to have to break this to you

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But B-movie biology just doesn’t hold up to the physics.

The incredible shrinking man wouldn’t have had trouble wielding a needle to fight a spider. There’s no way Racquel could have manuevered her little ship in Fantastic Voyage. King Kong couldn’t have stood on his hind legs for long at all without exhausting himself. Mothra would be grounded on windy days. And on and on . . .

It’s extreme, all right

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Via Booksquare, Marc Porter Zasada has an article in the LA Times about “extreme copyright.”

In extreme copyright, you try to push the limits of what intellectual property can be owned and controlled — or you try to penalize those who seem to have pushed the envelope a little too far. For example, not long ago, the family of Martin Luther King Jr. took CBS to court when the network used a tape it had made of King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech in a documentary (the family prevailed). And a government-authorized publisher tried to copyright official court opinions by arguing that it had introduced “original pagination” to the otherwise completely public documents — which must be cited every day by judges and lawyers.

On the trademark side, people try to register phrases such as “fair and balanced” or protect a single word, such as “Spike.” Marvel and DC Comics may sue you if you misuse the word “superhero,” which they — yes — trademarked in 1979.

These days, if you’re a Hollywood filmmaker and you shoot a passionate love scene in an art gallery and pan past a sculptural assemblage of tuna cans, you’d better get the permission of the artist, and probably StarKist (sorry, make that StarKist®) as well. Big studios employ whole teams to make sure such accidents don’t happen.

Meanwhile, journalists hunger to find derived language in the work of budding novelists. Scandal websites expose lifted phrases in the work of journalists. Computers search pop music for recycled phrases. And people who write little-known books sue when their ideas enter the culture in more popular books.

There’s a backlash as well: anti-copyright activists who believe copyright “is being used less and less to encourage creative work and more and more as a means to discourage it.” [Emphasis Zasada’s.]

I dunno. I can’t see an artist thinking, “Let some movie studio do a pan shot of my art? No! That’s too creative. Gotta force them to do shoot something bland instead.”

I think it’s more personal. For an artist or writer, it often comes down to wringing those extra pennies out of your work — and whether the additional exposure you get from someone’s “excerpt” (I use that term loosely here) will generate more pennies than what you’d get if you charge for the excerpt.

Or it may be wanting the pride of public attribution. I know that’s true of me, and my blog posts. I’d be most vexed if someone lifted my posts and reprinted them without attributing their authorship to me. (I also love to give attribution to others — I see the blogosphere as a self-organizing collection of information where attribution is key, like a hypertexted Wiki entry — you have to be able to trace the pieces back to their origin or you erode the integrity of the entire collection.)

Or it comes down to whether you believe people are trying to cheat you, and if so do you want to crusade against it.

For people who want to out plagiarists, it’s also personal: it’s the rush of proving moral superiority by exposing a scoundrel.

But here’s the thing. Our traditional notions of copyright are derived from our notions of ownership of physical property. We’re in the process, now, of figuring out whether we can apply guidelines based on the ownership of physical objects to stuff that isn’t physical at all, like someone’s name.

Digital technology serves to up the tension because digitized stuff shares more attributes with ideas, and fewer with physical property.

And of course the more a created work drifts toward the realm of ideas, the less plausible the notion of copyright. So just because you have an idea for a movie about a pirate ship — even if you’ve documented that idea — doesn’t mean you’ve been ripped off my Disney. OTOH, if a paragraph has been published in a printed book for all to see & touch, it’s obviously someone’s property . . .

Oh, well. Somewhere in this mess there’s a line that, once articulated, would put everyone at ease. But as long as there are lawyers willing to scuff the line away and ask for a new one, we’ll be wasting more time & energy on copyright battles . . .

The decline of the imperative

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Writing in Slate, Ben Yagoda muses on the displacement of the imperative by the construction “need to.” It’s become increasing rare to tell or be told, directly, to do something. Instead, we tell people they “need to” do this or that, or we’re told something “needs to be done.”

The ascendance of need to dovetails perfectly with the long and sad decline of the traditional imperative mood. Sad, because it’s a great mood. Without it, the Ten Commandments would be the Ten Suggestions. In our society, where giving offense is always feared, the imperative is rarely heard. So, instead of the pleasingly direct “No Smoking,” we have the presumptuous “Thank You for Not Smoking” or the loopily existential “There Is No Smoking.” The last remaining preserves of the imperative are the military, traffic signs (“Stop” has an estimable eloquence), innocuous adieus like, “Have a good one,” “Take care now,” and “You be good,” and, intriguingly, the titles of works of art. The biggest trove is pop songs, from “Come On Do the Jerk” through “Love the One You’re With,” all the way up to “Say My Name.” Command titles form a large subcategory of Beatles songs, including “Come Together,” “Don’t Let Me Down,” “Get Back,” “Help,” “Let It Be,” “Love Me Do,” “Please Please Me,” and “Think for Yourself.”

Yagoda traces this to the Abraham Maslow paper “Hierarchy of Human Needs,” and from there to “a Maslow epigone named Thomas Gordon, founder of “P.E.T.” (Parent Effectiveness Training)” — the fellow who told us that rather than order people around, we should express our needs using “I” constructions:

His copyrighted “Credo for My Relationship With Others” includes the classic sentence: “At those times when your behavior interferes with what I must do to get my own needs met, I will tell you openly and honestly how your behavior affects me, trusting that you respect my needs and feelings enough to try to change the behavior that is unacceptable to me.”

But here’s my question. If your spouse, for instance, says to you, “I feel neglected when you go out with your friends, and now that you know, I trust you’ll stay home every night,” does that really make the exchange more tolerable than, “please don’t spend so much time with your friends”?

Either way, the emotional subtext is loaded; either way, both the neglected and the neglectee are bound to feel uncomfortable, hurt, undervalued, alternately controlled and controlling.

All we’ve done is to render our language more baroque and less direct; we’re imposing an elaborate code of manners that while fascinating is, ultimately, only so much clutter.

What do you think? Is our language becoming more baroque?

Related: A speechwriter notes that our spoken language is also becoming increasingly vague.