Charlie Martin, who is making good progress on his goal toward healthier lifestyle, notes that the focus on weight is misguided:
In the first 13 weeks I lost two inches on my neck and two inches around my waist. In the following four weeks, I’ve lost another 3 inches (a total of FIVE inches) around my waist.
Obviously, I like the Army’s numbers better, so let’s use them — according to the Army, I’ve lost 5 percentage points of my body fat over the last four weeks, with my weight remaining stable. (Other methods give me somwhere around 29 percent, which is the most common value from the Withing body impedance too.) My weight is around 273, and 5 percent of 273 is 14 pounds close enough.
To have lost that much body fat, and still gained roughly 2 pounds over that four weeks means I’ve exchanged some amount of body fat for muscle, while also being around 32,000 kcals in arrears for that whole four weeks.
I’d remind Charlie that a lot of linebackers weigh more than him. I don’t think they’re necessarily fat.
Every time I read something like this, I wonder if I should start drinking it. As I’ve noted in the past, I don’t want to become one of those people who can’t function (or at least think they can’t) without it.
But he can’t, of course — it’s his political stock in trade.
[Update a few minutes later]
This seems related, somehow. Remember when Obama said that he wouldn’t add one dime to the deficit? Well, he was right — the GAO now says that ObamaCare will add sixty-two trillion of them.
“Our current system for assessing calories is surely wrong,” said evolutionary biologist Richard Wrangham of Harvard University, the co-organizer of the panel.
In a wide-ranging discussion of how food is digested in everything from humans to rats to pythons, the panel reviewed a new spate of studies showing that foods are processed differently as they move from our gullet to our guts and beyond. They agreed that net caloric counts for many foods are flawed because they don’t take into account the energy used to digest food; the bite that oral and gut bacteria take out of various foods; or the properties of different foods themselves that speed up or slow down their journey through the intestines, such as whether they are cooked or resistant to digestion.
Of course, in addition to that, the thermodynamic theory of nutrition doesn’t take into account how your metabolism responds to different kinds of calories. In a just world, much of the lipophobic nutrition industry would be sued into oblivion, or in prison, bearing responsibility for millions of premature deaths, and sufferers of ill health. Instead, they still seem to be in charge of the FDA.
[“Liberal”] Kapur’s argument amounts to the following: Democrats passed a law that had and still has insufficient public support (points 1 and 4), that cannot achieve its goals without unconstitutional means (point 2), that did not allocate the necessary resources to accomplish its objectives (point 3), and that lacks and still lacks even minimal support across the political aisle (all four points).
That sounds very much like the conservative critique of ObamaCare. At this point it’s fair to say that ObamaCare opponents have won the argument. Of course, since supporters won the political battle three years ago (and Obama won re-election), this monstrosity is now the law of the land, ensuring that both sides’ victories will have been Pyrrhic.
It has become very clear to everyone involved who is analytical and not ideological that the rational strategy, for both large and small firms, is to cease providing health care insurance to employees.
No company wants to admit that they are considering eliminating health insurance as an option, or be the first one to drop their health insurance plan, but once a competitor does so, the preference cascade will begin. The clear sentiment is “We will not be the first one to drop our health insurance plan, but we would be a close second.”
The coming preference cascade for employer group health plans is what the Democrats fear the most, because Obamacare was sold to the masses as “if you like your health insurance plan, you can keep it.”
Which was always a lie, of course.
I think the Democrats will be reaping a whirlwind in the next two election cycles.
It isn’t hard to see why nobody is clamoring to take a job that offers low pay and lots of regulations and will make everyone in the country hate you.
But it’s been clear from the beginning that this is the kind of thing you get with a massive, centralized health care “fix” like Obamacare: 15 unhappy people in a room making enormously important but impossible to predict decisions affecting a broad and diverse industry (not to mention the lives and health of millions). It’s hard to imagine a centralized approach getting all the nuances of health care right—and we certainly haven’t stumbled onto the miracle cure here.