Calories Don't Count

Cells do not convert heat into mechanical energy. Skeletal muscle cells contract and release via a kind of electro-chemical process. I can't imagine how there would be a relationship between that and how much heat is released in a bomb calorimeter. Can you?

http://health.howstuffworks.com/muscle2.htm

H.I.T. Training Session 3: Sunday Update

Today was my third H.I.T. training session. Some notes:

• I am not pushing to failure enough. In Body By Science, the authors say that pushing to failure can be difficult because instinctively we don't want to do this so it can be hard to overcome and push through. I need to work on that.
• Halloween was the previous evening so I partied a little and stayed out late. While I didn't eat any candy that probably would have laid me out, I had 2 glasses of wine. I don't often drink, but drinking alcohol seems to have a bad effect on me, similar to sugar, the next day. I was a fatigued this session and struggled with it. My instincts were telling me just go home but I knew I'd feel better after a good hard workout and I kept reminding myself that it wouldn't take long.
• I did squats and leg press just to experiment and compare. The two exercises feel pretty different. The leg press is a little easier to do. I will switch to one or the other instead of doing both, eventually, but I haven't decided which, yet.

Body fat 28%

Workout:

H.I.T. Training: Sunday Morning Update

I am going to track my progress by body fat % according to my Tanita scale. Usually this scale is about 3% higher than the body fat doohikey they have at the gym so it might be a little high but it will be a good way to track changes even if the absolute value is off.

Note: I do the entire workout in Vibes. Squats and leg press are especially different this way. I highly recommended taking off your shoes to do leg exercises.

Sunday October 25th:

Body fat %: 29

Week 2 Workout (Sunday October 25th).

I'm kinda experimenting with different exercises just to feel them. I will eventually settle on a routine. I just got the Body by Science book and am almost done reading it. The information is very useful. So I will probably tweak these workouts somewhat in the coming weeks.

Squat (Lifefitness machine thingy): 80 lbs.

Shoulder Press: 10lbs.

Chest Press: 20lbs.

Assisted Pullup: 120lbs

Assisted Dip: 120lbs

Seated Row: 45lbs

Hip Abductor: 70lbs

Hip Adductor: 70 lbs

Warm-up: 5 minutes random running intervals (wearing Vibes). 12 min/mile slow and 10 min/mile fast. Yes I am a slow runner.

H.I.T: Once a Week Workout

I want to have more muscles and be stronger but I am lazy as all hell and hate going to the gym. I love to run around and play sport and hike but doing some kind of routine weight training thing gives me the blues. So I decided that a Mike Mentzer style training was the thing for me. So I came up with my own plan. Basically I will do a fully body weight lifting routine once a week. I will do one set of each exercise to failure and then move on the the next exercise with little to no rest. There is only a handful of exercises that I will do:

weighted squats

shoulder press

pull downs

pull ups

dips

bench press

rows

Notice there is no abs in this. I believe that the other exercises work the abs more than enough. It is low body fat % which gives the six pack.

I will also do a very short warm-up to get the central nervous system activated:

1-3 minutes very fast running

a few pushups

a few pullups

So starting next weekend, Oct. 24-25 I am going to document my progress with photos and a training log as a kind of experiment to see if this works.

Recently, I added two exercises that I forgot! Oops gotta do those dip and pullups. They are essential to upper body strength.

Satellite GPS and Atomic Clock Confirm Relatvity?

Do satellites really confirm Relativity? This "fact" is usually touted as the big thing that pretty much proves the gravity hypothesis of the universe. Not so fast. Here is a good analysis:

http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/ptti/1996/Vol%2028_16.pdf

GPS AND RELATIVITY: AN ENGINEERING OVERVIEW

Henry F. Fliegel and Raymond S. DiEsposti

GPS Joint Program Office

The Aerospace Corporation

El Segundo, California 09245, USA

Conclusion (from the paper):

Except for the leading [gamma] factor, it is the same as the formula derived in classical physics for the signal travel time from the GPS satellite to the ground station. As we have shown, introducing the [gamma] factor makes a change of only 2 or 3 millimeters to the classical result. In short, there are no "missing relativity terms." They cancel out.

An alternative hypothesis to why atomic clock rates change and additional analysis of relativity and GPS:

http://www.ldolphin.org/vanFlandern/

Rethinking Relativity

Tom Blethel

What's the Beef?

One of my favorite low carb blogs is PaleoNu. It's basically the perfect approach to diet. Go check it out. The problem I have is the strange attitude the author has toward zero carb. He complains that zero carbers are too dogmatic in their beliefs that "carbs are bad"; that a toleration to plant matter means it's ok to eat it but he also points out that there is no reason to eat it. Basically, zero carbers are considered too dogmatic because we see no value in eating plants even though by his own admission there is no value in eating plants, except, presumably, that he likes them? WTF?

All dietary source carbs do have negative side effects in the body -- from the glucose and fructose to the fiber. These are unavoidable. One can tolerate a little poison but that doesn't mean he should eat it, even if it is really tasty. It is perfectly reasonable therefore to shun plant matter on principle, saying that is it bad; it is in fact bad. This is hardly dogma but objectivity.

Just wanted to get that off my chest.

On Zero Carb and Infectious Disease

I essentially follow a zero carb diet. This means that I only eat meat and fat or at least the vast majority of the time. Where I completely believe that this way of eating is superior and leads to optimal health in general, I do not believe that it is a magical cure-all for all disease, especially infectious disease. Recently, at the Zeroing in on Health forum (I had been a member since inception), vaccinations were being discussed. Several people, including the founder of the site, Charles Washington, chimed in that they basically didn't believe in inoculation and that being zero carb would prevent them from contracting infectious diseases. WTF?

In Cancer, Disease and Civilization, Arctic explorer Vilahjmur Stefansson reported that although the Inuit were of great health they did demonstrate a tragic susceptibility to European infectious disease. Charles Washington tried to argue that this was because they had carbs introduced to their diets at that time and so that made them susceptible. Well I have no way of knowing if Stefansson observed infectious disease in carb eating and purely carnivorous Inuit or not but it is known that the rate of tuberculosis, for example, among the Saskatchewan natives dropped dramatically 40 years after they were first exposed to the disease. At this point the Inuit would have been eating a great deal of Western carby foods.

While the Inuit were dying of small pox and other viral diseases, measures to stop the spread of small pox were underway in Europe and the U.S. Keep in mind that at this same time, consumption of carbs and sugar in the U.S. was increasing on average. The small pox vaccination was invented in 1796 and by 1897, after wide spread vaccination programs had begun, the disease was almost non-existent in the U.S. Whether or not this was due to the vaccination programs doesn't matter here so much as the plain fact that while the Inuit populations were experiencing high rates of small pox their carb-eating counterparts to the south were experiencing reduced rates of small pox. Today, of course, small pox has been eradicated.

So in other words: There appears to be no correlation between diet and rates of infectious disease.

A Universal Question

Let's say you live on a small island with a few dozen other people. There is a doctor on this island. One day you find you need medical treatment but you cannot immediately afford his fees. You can afford to pay the local thug who is known to be more than happy to coerce people into doing his bidding. So you:

A: Dictatorship: Hire the thug to coerce the doctor into treating you and/or hire the thug to coerce other islanders into giving you money so that you can afford the treatment.
B: Capitalism: Get together voluntarily with other islanders to create a fund to help each other out in the event that someone can't pay the doctor's fees.
C: Democracy: Get a majority of the islanders to vote to hire the thug to coerce everyone into paying the thug to coerce everyone into paying into a fund to pay the doctor's fees.

Does Democracy legitimize coercion? Leftists and Rightists alike say yes. Good luck with the enslavement. Y'all have been doing really well so far.

Which one of these best matches how Universal Healthcare Blah Blah Fishcakes would be funded?