Letter Never Sent

This article on weight and exercise in New York Magazine presents the argument that conventional science has it wrong on diet and exercise. How many models do we have for how things work that are just plain false?

To be sure, this is the same logic that leads to other unconventional ideas. As it turns out, it’s carbohydrates—particularly easily digestible carbohydrates and sugars—that primarily stimulate insulin secretion. “Carbohydrates is driving insulin is driving fat,” as George Cahill Jr., a retired Harvard professor of medicine and expert on insulin, recently phrased it for me. So maybe if we eat fewer carbohydrates—in particular the easily digestible simple carbohydrates and sugars—we might lose considerable fat or at least not gain any more, whether we exercise or not. This would explain the slew of recent clinical trials demonstrating that dieters who restrict carbohydrates but not calories invariably lose more weight than dieters who restrict calories but not necessarily carbohydrates. Put simply, it’s quite possible that the foods—potatoes, pasta, rice, bread, pastries, sweets, soda, and beer—that our parents always thought were fattening (back when the medical specialists treating obesity believed that exercise made us hungry) really are fattening. And so if we avoid these foods specifically, we may find our weights more in line with our desires.

The prescription seems to be: dump the sugar and junk carbs. Eat high quality, less processed food.

I am convinced that our obesity problems are caused primarily by one aspect of the typical American lifestyle: the widespread use of prepared meals (fast food, dining out, frozen dinners, sodas, and snacks) for daily eating. While we may be less active than in generations past, the real difference is that Americans rely more on prepared food for the bulk of their diet than ever before in the past. The lower the income, the lower the quality of the food, the greater the degree of obesity. As food preparation has been outsourced effectively to industry, consumers have compelling alternatives to the time-consuming work of cooking and cleaning. Naturally, they take the path of least resistance on a day to day basis. Over time this results in extra calories being stored as fat, which never get used simply because we keep eating the same calorie-rich foods in larger amounts.

With that in mind, over the next few weeks I will experiment with a couple ideas:

1. No sugar, soda, dairy. Beverages will be confined to black coffee, water, and maybe the occasional beer. Juices and sodas either have too much sugar or carcinogenic chemicals.
2. More cooking at home. Although, it is surprisingly difficult to prepare meals without dairy or tons of easily digestible carbohydrates.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

The nomad life is appealing. Living in a city for a brief time, then picking up and moving again whenever the fancy strikes. Having someone to cook and clean up while you focus on the other things you enjoy.

There was a news item recently about a couple who lived for 22 years in a TravelLodge. While I would prefer to move around more than that, it shows that hotel living is a sound concept. In fact, a few generations back, when home ownership was more rare than it is now, it was common for people to live in a boarding house or hotel for extended periods of time. Now in our connected age of affordable travel and communications technology, the main obstacle is a feeling of rootlessness. But I don’t think this has to be a real barrier. It is at least possible to make an anonymous space feel like home.

I see people camping out in public places all the time: from comfy library chairs and study rooms, to Starbucks, and chain bookstores. Grab your gear and your headphones and you can pop into your personal bubble whenever you like. Watch your video, listen to your audio, read and rove where you will. In Japan, the government is concerned about people who live a transient lifestyle, but who may not be classically homeless. The concern seems to be that many people sleep, eat, and bathe in Internet cafes while living without a proper residence. Are they worried about this as a negative indicator of the economy or are they concerned about an increasing number of people who prefer to live between places?

The nomad lifestyle is made possible by technology and trends in business to provide more service. Just as it has become commonplace to eat food in a restaurant rather than at home, there are opportunities in providing facilities for sleeping and bathing outside the hotel setting. Many 24 hour businesses like gyms, truck stops and Japanese Internet cafes already provide facilities for their customers to shower and look to their personal hygiene. It would not be surprising to see new businesses popping up to provide the barest essentials of shelter and personal hygiene in a very low cost package. There may be many creative solutions to the problems of life that do not require owning a house or maintaining a permanent address.

I read a good entry over at Signal V. Noise about how to go paperless by using an expensive duplex scanner from Fujitsu. While I still think this is a great way to do it, and I may even buy one of those scanners, a while back I came up with an easier and far cheaper way to scan my mail and documents into a digital form and have been using it for a while.

Most offices, like mine, have fax machines or fax copiers. I also have a fax to email service through my toll-free provider, Ring Central, where your fax documents are scanned and emailed to you as PDF attachments. If I ever want to archive a paper document into a digital form, I just fax it to myself and save the PDF to my computer. I also leave a copy in my gmail account where I can access the file from anywhere.

The only downside I have discovered is that the faxed PDF is not transformed into indexable text via OCR (optical character recognition) during the scanning process. I compensate for this shortcoming by giving each document a readily comprehensible file name. If you fax each document at a high enough resolution you may be able to perform OCR on the output, however the descriptive file naming used in conjunction with Google Desktop Search has worked well for me.