Me on a diet: the Psychology of the Sticky Pecan Roll

11 May 2009

During my various attempts to get in good shape over the years I've wasted my share of money on various diet & exercise books that try to tell you what exercise you should do, what muscles they benefit, what foods you should eat and why, and recipes that will make it more enjoyable. Big surprise, lack of willpower has tanked many of my efforts to stay on any kind of healthy eating program. But I really don't think that willpower is the whole story for me or other dieters. What about our ingrained habits of using food for reward, food to fix a poor mood, hedonistic eating, addiction to various kinds of foods (like my favorite, the Sticky Pecan Roll from Au Bon Pan)?

One diet approach that I thought took a step forward in talking about the psychology of diet was the Low-Carb diet (or "Atkins" in its most popular form). It talks about the role that carbs have in making us feel full, and thereby feel good. But I think you could do a lot better. I want to know the mechanics behind appetite, satisfaction and digestion: what actually occurs in the body to make you want to eat huge portions of your favorite foods, what happens as that urge becomes satisfied, and how you can use that knowledge to change your behavior.

I discovered the book You On a Diet while standing in line at a Jamba Juice one day. Using entertaining illustrations, it nails exactly what I was looking for. Some of the points in makes on the mechanics of body chemistry, food and appetite include:

• The lower gut contains 95% of the body's serotonin, which suggests that eating is self-medicating.
• Our caveman ancestors were more fit than us because the stresses of survival kept them lean. Stress, like fight-or-flight stress, means that Peptide NPY is inhibited and you don't feel like eating.
• When fat makes the liver work extra hard, it prevents glucose from getting to our cells, and produces hunger.
• Fiber is good for diet because it slows "the transit of food across the ileocecal valve, keeping your stomach fuller for longer." (p. 68)

The book identifies these foods that make you feel full, or suppresses appetite in some way:

• Nuts
• Cinnamon
• Whole Grains
• Fiber
• Red Peppers
• Smell of grapefruit (p. 88)
• Brightly-colored food
• Mint breath strips (p. 239)
  
• Fiber supplements (e.g. 1 tbsp Psyllium Husks with a glass of water)
  

Other eating strategies the book recommends revolve around easing the process of digestion. When the intestines are breaking down food, separating the good nutrients (to go into the bloodstream) from the bad nutrients (to be eliminated), a natural process of inflammation occurs. The intestines do their job well when that inflammation is kept to a healthy level. Bad foods increase the inflammation, and the separation of good vs. bad is impaired. Inflammation-fighting foods include:

• Lactobaccillus CG, a healthy bacteria found in yogurt
• Omega-3 fatty acids, such as Fish oil, walnuts
• Green tea
• Beer (hops)
• Tumeric
• Jojoba beans (available in supplements)
• Soybeans (isoflavins)
• Lignans, such as Flaxseed oil, rye bread
• Polyphenols, such as tea, coffee, fruit, vegetables
• Glucosinulates, such as broccoli, kale, cauliflower
• Carnosol, found in Rosemary
• Resveratrol, found in red grapes, juice and wine
• Dark Cacao
• Quercetin, as found in cabbage, spinich, garlic, capers, apples, tea, red onion, red grapes, citrus fruit, tomato, broccoli, leafy green vegetables, cherry, raspberry, and lingonberry
• Antioxidants, as in vegetables and fruits (especially bananas), Vitamin E, Vegetable oils, Tea, coffee, soy, fruit, olive oil, chocolate, cinnamon, oregano and red wine

The book covers some interesting facts on the mechanics of exercise and weight loss:

• Weight loss improves cholesterol by a factor of three. For example, a 7% weight loss leads to a 20% improvement in cholesterol levels. (p. 120)
• The beneficial effect of exercise in producing weight loss is greater than the detrimental effect of eating in producing weight gain. So even if you're getting in only a little exercise each day, the effect is significant. (pp. 141-142)
• Without exercise, we lose 5% of our muscle mass every 10 years after the age of 35. If you don't exercise (rebuild muscle) every 10 years, you need to eat 120-420 fewer calories a day to maintain your current weight. (p. 142)
• Focus on reducing the size of your belly, not weight loss. Exercise not only reduced fat but bulks up muscles, which can result in a net loss of zero.

The material on "good fats" vs. "bad fats" is helpful:

• Bad Fats are the ones that stay solid at room temperature: animal fat, butter, stick margarine & lard. Food manufacturers push these because they have a long shelf life.
• Good Fats are the ones that are liquid at room temperature are the good, omega-3 and -6 fats: olive, vegetable, sesame & canola oil, fish oil, flaxseed, avocados, nuts (especially walnuts). Nutrients that fight bad fats are: niacin and vitamin B5

Everyone know that whole grains are good for you, although we use the term so frequently it's helpful to review what this actually means. In a whole grain, "the grain still has all three of its original elements: the outer shell or gran, which contains fiber and B vitamins; the germ, which contains phytochemicals and B vitamins; and the endosperm which contains carbohydrates and protein." (p. 256) "'Refined' grains means only endosperm is enclosed." (p. 257)
Here's a fun subject the book covers: what gives you gas? It's important because it's a byproduct of the way you eat and what you are forcing digestion to do for you:

• Gas is a normal result of the intestinal inflammation during digestion, as good nutrients go to the bloodstream and bad nutrients to to the lower intestines (and produce gas). So bad gas can be attributed to too much bad foods in your diet. Also, when inflammation is too high, some bad nutrients get into the bloodstream, leading to cholesterol.
• Sulfur-rich foods such as eggs, meat, beer, beans and cauliflower make gas smell worse
• Drinking cola means swallowing more air, which means more gas

Other interesting things I found in the book:

• No evidence yet shows that artificial sweeteners are unhealthy (p. 97)
• It's the fat around our waist that gets us into trouble. Fat in other parts of your body cause relatively little harm to your health or eating chemistry. (p. 102)
• Alcholic drinks fight bad fats (p. 123)
• The liver is the heaviest organ in the body (p. 77)
• Your deoderant can make you gain weight, if it contains aluminum or polychlorobiphenols (p. 92)
• The more brightly colored the food, the better it is for you (p. 95)

So I can give a strong recommendation for You On a Diet if want to learn alot about the mechanics behind appetite, satisfaction and digestion.

George Soros' book The Crash of 2008

19 Apr 2009

I'm reading George Soros' 'The Crash of 2008 and What it Means; the New Financial Paradigm' . George Soros is the 29th richest person in the world, and a champion of progressive causes.

The thesis of this book isn't easy to quickly summarize, but it's a really good one. He says there are two ways of interacting with the financial world, as an observer or as a participant. The observational role entails looking at phenomena, and drawing rational conclusions. The participatory role involves manipulating the system and acting in your own self-interest. Now you would think that that the two states of interaction could be operate completely independently, so (for example) a stock trader would read the news, draw rational conclusions that would inform their trading activities. But the reality, according to Soros, is that human participants can't decouple the two. If you participate, your ability to be a detached observer is affected by what you experience firsthand. You come to believe that the rules that work for you are better universal rules than anything a detached observer would come up with. Maybe that works fine as long as you keep getting richer. But what if you and all the other participants screw up the whole market, and you've got a George Bush style administration that still thinks that these bozos are the 'experts' on the economy? The way out of the mess is to restore a balance with rational observation, and clear the air of old beliefs.

That's about as few lines as I could express it in!!

Soros includes some autobiography over the course of the book. He studied philosophy a lot when he was younger, especially Karl Popper, and he claims to not be a philosopher, but the book comes off as philosophy...actually quite good philosophy. I think Soros' way of viewing financial interaction as a kind of "bi-camerel mind" is pretty original stuff.

Sinatra's Orchestras

6 Apr 2009

I've been listening to music outside my usual comfort zones to see if there's anything I missed. For example, I never paid the slightest notice to the group Queen, but am listening to all their classics and finding there some good stuff in there. I'm also going through Sinatra.

I've always associated Sinatra with more affluent school friends' Dads who had paneled, shuttered studies, wore golf sportswear (which was pretty atrocious in the time period I'm thinking of) on the weekends and showed you their smug liking of Sinatra in their leather chair with a glass of scotch. Now that I'm actually listening, I see what about Sinatra imparted a feeling of "this music makes me feel upper class" to these guys. The orchestral introductions, for the ballads at least, have really brilliant and orchestration are often reminicient of late 19th/early 20th century Strauss, Mahler and Debussy. Because they're so immaculately performed and recorded, and more closely mic'd than classical recordings, they're pretty interesting to listen to. Then Sinatra comes in, and he might as well be singing "Hey buddy, remember the Music Appreciation classes we had to take in college, and how all the classy broads were suckers for that longhair stuff? Now you and me, buddy, we got class too." Now if you liked Sinatra's song as well...which still doesn't do much for me...you'd be in heaven.

There's usually a middle section with more of the orchestral material, and a few bars at the end. It would be interesting to splice the orchestral parts of all the songs together just to appreciate the fine orchestral writing.

More ways to lose Twitter followers

13 Mar 2009

I read an article today called How to lose Twitter followers in 10 steps. I've probably read about 20 such Twitter Ettiquette articles, and most are pretty good. They don't even all say the same things, which means there are many, many ways to be an obnoxious Twit. Twitterer. Ahem.

And yet there are still more ways to lose followers, because they have yet to cover MY list. Here are things you can do to get me to stop following you:

1. Tweet long sentences over multiple tweets. Listen, it's a 140-character medium okay? Don't try to bypass it with a continuation.
2. Be a celebrity-turned-Twitterholic. Hey I love your movies, and hearing about your glorious life was fun for a while, but now you twitter every tiny thought and movement you make as if I have nothing else to do but follow your 140-character fanzine.
   
3. Tweet a link without information. People do this...a naked link, its identity obscured by a tinyurl, and you think we worship you so much to follow you into a blind alley.
4. Tweet linkless information that needs a link. The other day someone announced a really cool sounding conference but gave no link.
5. Make your followers listen to your side of the one-on-one conversation you're having with a friend. Hey get a room. A chat room. This is Twitter.
6. Twitter using a context that only a tiny number of your followers know about. Recently I stopped following a colleague who kept tweeting things like "is excited about the new website" and "posted my first article to the new site. Can't wait for the reactions." What website would that be?
7. Tweet with the same hyped-up, caffeine fueled excitement and optimism day after day. You got tickets to SXSW, FTW! You ate at a new five star on Randolph, FTW! You got tickets to Coldplay, FTW! Okay, okay I give up, I hate myself and I want to be you!
8. DM everyone on your list with generic messages. People tend to have their twitter set up to get emails when they are DM'd. How out of it can you be about Twitter that you immediately turn it into a vehicle for spam?
   

Read on Twitter today from someone at SXSW: "Everyone starts out on the internet as a douchebag. Then you do something to move above or below that line."

Urban Sketching - Misc

14 Dec 2008

Here are a few sketches from a few years back.

This is of Chicago guitarist Eric Lugosch whom I sketched while he was playing at a restaurant in Lincoln Square maybe around 2003. That's his signature on the picture. While the detail in the hands is obviously a mess, I was pleased with the simple accuracy of his face and posture. His signature and his hair was done with a fading brown felt pen that didn't scan very well, so I enhanced these details a bit digitally.

This is a self-portrait sketched in pastels on paper at an open house at the Hyde Park Art Center in Winter '07. It was done in a room themed as Andy Warhol style portraits; hung on the wall were various classic Warhol portraits (Marilyn Monroe, Jackie Kennedy, etc.) and we were encouraged to use bold, non-representational color to evoke the mood of the subject. At the time I was feeling kind of burnt-out about work, so I took the instructions pretty literally, as you can see.

Mastercard Commercial I'd Like to See

19 Nov 2008

Karl Rove and former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales found to be involved in a cover up of the U.S. attorney firings by the Senate Judiciary Committee?

Nice.




Valerie Plame to take CIA leak lawsuit to Supreme Court?
Sweet.




A democratic-controlled White House, Senate and Congress?

Priceless.

Claudia the Photographer

19 Nov 2008

I'm pleased to announce my 4-year-old daughter Claudia's first photo gallery!

We let her run around the kitchen with the digital camera, and she took these shots. Keep in mind that she composed each shot by looking at it on the digital display before snapping it. (Except for the self-portrait, of course.)

As you can see, she likes closeups. Now is that just a kid being silly, or does it somehow reflect a child's view of her world?

'Rachel Getting Married' perfect...not in a good way

10 Nov 2008

What Babbette's Feast did for dinner parties, Rachel Getting Married now does for music at weddings.

'Rachel Getting Married' depicts a wedding that raises the bar on having music at your wedding that is played by friends, where you have an endless number of music-playing friends, who play in an endless number of styles, except for any style one might consider classical or non-rootsy.

My friend Andrew, who earns part of his living playing classical string music for weddings, will now be getting all sorts of odd requests he won't be able to meet.

"We'd like a quartet consisting of lute, guitar, ethnic percussion and violin. They will play at each of our meals, the rehearsal dinner, the wedding and the wedding banquet. We want them there the entire weekend, from the first morning as the overnight guests trickle in, to the morning after the wedding while they are leaving. They should be sitting around everywhere, noodling around, tuning up, improvising, and never taking a break unless told to shut up. At the wedding banquet they have to morph into a backup band for an annoying folk-roots singer.

We also want a 'White Stripes' style guitar-and-drums duo that will play really loud, but far away across the lawn, so they don't hurt our ears. They need to be content with not playing any actual rock music, but standards such as the Wedding March in Hendrix-playing-the-National-Anthem-at-Woodstock style.

All the other musicians, however, will be playing in extremely cramped spaces like tiny dining rooms and small tents. But don't worry, this will not be your ordinary gig. Everyone is really going to have a good time. All at the same time, all the time. They will all sway together and sing. Nobody, not even the groom's family and guests who haven't met anyone before, will be withdrawing into a contemplative mood, or feel shy or disconnected to the group mood. Well, there might be one person in whom we'll concentrate all the types of dissatisfaction that someone at a wedding might experience. Because that would make a good story.

By the wedding banquet, it should seem to our guests like we've already reached our peak, but wait until the wild nighttime bachannale we'll have in a very cramped tent, with a soul band with five brass players and hot Brazilian dancers direct from Carnival de Rio. Can you supply that? By the way, the wedding is in Connecticut.

Bear in mind that our wedding party is extremely multi-cultural. The band should match this demographic, or if you can't do that, achieve it with outlandish costumes.

We're really looking forward to this!"

Grant Park Rally Report

5 Nov 2008

It wasn't like a celebration after a Bulls victory or a Pistons victory in Detroit.

It wasn't like a Taste of Chicago or a Blues Fest.

It didn't lure hooligans or Obama-haters looking for trouble. They weren't in the neighborhoods either.

It wasn't a "complete mess" or any of the things some people said it would be. It was a gathering whose core was made of people deeply involved in the outcome of the election.

What it was, was an evening of watching CNN on a Jumbotron and then hearing McCain's concession and Obama's victory speech. And then it was time to go home. The Chicago Tribune has a time lapse photography video of the entire event in 3 minutes.

There were two high points for me. First, when at 10pm CDT, CNN announced a projected Obama win from Virginia, immediately followed by their projection of Obama winning the Presidency. The jubilation of that moment is something I will never forget. Next, and this is a funny one, was seeing Biden come out with that smile and his sky-blue tie. I like that guy.

The Chicago Tribune caught a pic of me in the crowd at one of the moments of jubilation. (It's pic #56 of this slideshow.)

The appearance of Obama himself was a bit anti-climactic. His energy level was not like the best we've seen from him, and his speech was more humility than jubilation. I was prepared for this by watching one of his campaign speeches earlier that day on the internet, where it seemed that fatigue from the final push was starting to get to him. Also, I already sensed a Barack Obama changed by his new responsibility. He knows his words aren't just for the purpose of bathing supporters and Democratic faithful in a warm glow. He's now on a higher plane, talking to all of America, the Congress and Senate, the World.

The majority demographic there seemed to be post-college people in mid to late 20's. One reporter described them as "poly-sci nerds." Plenty of people in their 30's, 40's and 50's too though.

There were a few negatives. The Chicago Tribune advised us to bring stuff to eat, but both our water and snacks were confiscated at one of the checkpoints. What's up, Tribune? The second is the standing and the waiting, which comes with the territory of course, but always requires some endurance. The third was the lack of cellphone signal (which everyone warned would be the case) so I couldn't do the Twittering I was hoping to do.

As previously announced, there was no live music (save for a solo singing of the National Anthem), but the choice of recorded music was very nice. Good mix of rock, blues, soul, funk and country, quality songs, but with none of the pieces being tired, worn-out overexposed classics. The African-American artist who sang the National Anthem sang in "the key of soul," but it wasn't one of those over-the-top, love-to-hear-my-voice Whitney-Houston kinds of renditions. The music that followed the Obama speech was of the same cinematic-sounding orchestral variety that was played after Obama's acceptance speech in Denver: a bit manipulative, yes, but not nearly as clicheic as actual movie music and not transparently patriotic sounding. I have good feelings about the music that will be associated with this Presidency.

For the walk back to our train, we were corralled by the police to go west on Jackson (although I needed to go north on Wabash). There the crowd really let some energy loose, whooping and hollering, where the echo from the canyon of skyscrapers was deafening.

Today, I can't find a copy of the Chicago Tribune or the New York Times...they were all bought up before 9am!

Congratulations to President-elect Obama and all his supporters!

Obama Election Night Rally in Chicago

3 Nov 2008

For my friends outside of Chicago, you may or may not know that Barack Obama's campaign has organized an Election Night rally on the lakefront in Chicago. If Barack wins, this may be the most televised event of the evening, and the likely location of his acceptance speech.

If you're watching TV that night scan the crowd for me, since as you can see, I was able to get a ticket! (Sorry, I've blurred the bar code, so you can't make a counterfit.) There was a less than 24-hour window before they all got snapped up, but all you had to do was fill out a form on a website. To get a feel for how hot an item this ticket is, see these Craig's List ads, and these items on eBay.

If you use Twitter, follow 'gregsandell' and I will try to make updates throughout the evening. I think you can also read my Twitters from my facebook page.