The Last Post

On March 1 an DRI found that I have a spotty liver. The only explanation is some form of cancer. Priorities change.

http://oathursdaynightgroup.blogspot.com/ 

and http://fredjustdoinglife.blogspot.com/ 
will continue for a bit.

I thank you all for your support.

As an atheist and a nihilist, this is the end. Any brutal egoistic Christians, hiding behind love concepts, that allow them to force their wrong beliefs on others, we already know what low lengths you will stoop to, so do not prove us right.

and again

The whole problem is psychological. We have to want to live the way that we must live to get clear of the problem.

http://www.weightymatters.ca/2019/01/first-mood-then-weight-bellletstalk.html

Crunch the Numbers

https://www.thelancet.com/commissions/EAT


Crunch the numbers and what do you get?

http://www.zoeharcombe.com/2019/01/the-eat-lancet-diet-is-nutritionally-deficient/ 

So who is the Lancet anyway?Who can we trust?

No Shit Sherlock

https://www.foodpolitics.com/2019/01/bad-news-on-world-hunger-and-obesity-they-are-getting-worse/

The amount of sugar we eat and the amount of vitamin D we absorb have no relationship.

I suffer from psoriasis, which heavy doses of vitamin D greatly reduces. Occasionally I stop taking the D for a while, until psoriasis breaks out again. Or is it really just misdiagnosed scurvy dermatitis?

When it clears up with just Vitamin D, what does that suggest?

Occasionally

http://www.memoirsofanaddictedbrain.com/connect/substance-not-just-substances-in-addiction/
Occasionally something comes along that has something add. Well maybe.

So the act of eating whets the desire. Well, well. We try it for whatever reason, and the idea get locked into our mind. The behavior becomes locked in, and we forget the reason we started in the first place, but we keep on the behavior. It becomes a problem, and we cannot stop, for the behavior has become natural, us. We are that behavior. We are now left to change ourselves.

That is what recovery is all about; changing our nature to something we were not. And that behavior is an exclusion of one of our normal behaviors. So we are left with what? Less than we were.

It is then not about not doing something, but rather doing something new. It is about developing a new desire to do something different, what ever that might be as a replacement for what we did before.

Advice, not Lecture

Occasionally we run across a post that has good advice. Here is one such post. http://dr.blair-west.com/relationship-therapy/whose-advice-do-you-take-whose-opinion-do-you-worry-about/

You had better know more than I if you are going to criticize, and understand what my issues are.

Knowing vs Doing

It is one thing to know what should be done, then there is the doing. We know that motivation lies in between. And overcoming obstacles, objections, changing habits.

Changing habits of any kind is process in it's self. Prochaska and Diclemente say there are six stages: precontempation, contemplation, preparation, action, maintenance, and termination. In permanent change, it is desirable to remain in the changed stage. 

There is yet another issue; change or suspension of a behavior. In the past there has been change, but that change has not been enough to completely remove the issue. I am still addicted to wheat, as the addiction never leaves. There are traces everywhere, and occasionally a deliberate cookie/butter tart/ fruit cake/ etc, which ought not be eaten but the will is weak and flesh is strong, pulling... So that is suspension of behavior, not actual change.

One meal a day, or skipping meals makes sense, from actual practice. I quickly become habituated, and the hunger is less then, but the hunger is always present. Having identified a wrong thought, or eidos, one that says I should eat when I am hungry, I can work on removing that thought, or replacing it with the behavior to only eat on schedule, but the schedule is also leaving me with a ongoing low hunger. One of the common causes of low hunger is a stress re-feed issue; stress causes adrenaline and cortisol release, which drives glucose release... and then is followed by hunger. I question the stress of life that I experienced daily growing up under that pair of control freaks. That is likely why I found QC environment to be so free of stress. It was not, but it was less than I grew up under. Oh well.

Knowing what to do is tough; there is so much miss information and wrong information; all with some logic and story. It is just choose one and go with it, or is there some try it and see how it goes method of choosing. It is all to difficult. The other way is to choose, not on what is right, but by what we can do. Base the plan on my previous and current doings, bad grammar and all. That brings doing, knowing, and planing closer together.  Oh well, it is only for a few years anyway at most and then I will be dead... Life is so impermanent. As are governments, thankfully.

So is it change or suspension of behavior that I seek; It seems to me that change should be easier in the doing and more or less permanent. In the past I know that I take on diets like a job, something to just be done. That is obviously, well maybe, just suspension of behavior. After it was over, the weight just came back, but slower... so there was some changes, longer term. Or was the doing just a habit that operated like an environmental control... no food, no eating. Is it the doing that establishes the habit, or is it the change in thinking, ideas, eidos, concepts, attitude, or knowledge that separates change from suspension of behaviors, and thus effects a change in the knowing/doing situation.

Socrates or one of this elk said that man does not knowing do wrong, but some of us drop into an automatic mode when eating, where thinking is mostly bypassed. It is that mode that allows us to operate equipment efficiently, or for some to type fast... there is no thinking, just doing. That is the way I am when eating. Oh well, in the end we all just die anyway.

Fatal Attraction.

Not Yet Fatal Attraction... to food. It has not yet killed me, but it is making life miserable.So is the attraction to food something we can escape from?

Is free will, morality, and choice real or a illusion? Sam Harris thinks free will is not what we think it is. The Stoics realized that free will was not entirely free, it was only for the things up to us. So if food addiction is real, as it seems to be, how does one escape the grasp? Religion seems to have a partial answer, but religion is based on lies, so those who are susceptible to lies have an out. But what about those of us who reject religion, and try to rely on reality?

Some things are up to me and some are not. OK. But how does one resits the ongoing desire to eat in the presence of food? That is the reality.

Plato had his concept of knowledge. There is the object, our opinion of the object, and that is a low form of knowledge. There are concepts, eidos, that we learn about, that are eternal, unchanging, and real. There is also fiction, that masquerade as concepts; no these are concepts, just not real ones. Gods are just fiction concepts. It is part of thinking, all handling concepts, eidos, some of which are real and some which are not. Simple. It is all eidos or concepts. Oh well. Where does this leave us.

Free will and will power are just concepts, eidos. Each person has various amounts and that varies on the subject. Food, I have little free will to choose, for I was trained at an early age, second nature, epigenetic, what ever. Memory and understanding are two separate facilities, which are overrun by habit, also a separate facility. That is the problem, so what is the fix?

Dangerous Foods

From the view of a person trying to eat less, there are dangerous foods. These are foods that make us more hungry after we eat them than we were before. We should also include high calorie low nutrition foods as well.

Let me first say that this effect may not be universal, and it is not rational. But I can assure you that the effect is real for some of us. It has been suggested that it is an insulin generation issue, but for me this is also true of some fats, proteins, meats, and other assorted foods. Most foods as a mater of fact.

Food is intended to reduce hunger, or so reason suggests. So when it does not? 

Resolve Stress Eating

How does one resolve stress eating?  There is a variety of advice out there on the net. None of it worked well for me.

First I must say that the stress we feel is not about the situation but our thinking about the situation. Second that some things are up to us and some are not. This allows us to step back from the situation that is outside of us, and let the situation go. It is all in my mind.

When I was testing soil, self employed, I would take a cone penetrometer worth $13000, and shove it into the ground, sometimes 20 metres, then withdraw it to measure soil strength. That induced considerable stress in me, for if it was loss or damaged, it was at my expense. I have the same concern stress over many things. Oh well, it is what I think, how I value money, and equipment. It is not about the situation, but my thinking about the situation. I was not in control; I was at the mercy of fate, for the lack of a better word.  That feeling was the same over much less valuable situations as well.

So to deal with stress, we can remove ourselves from the situation, or change our thinking. The situations that we are ignorant of do not cause us stress, yet they go on.  Perhaps we just need to stop caring about the situation, or just realize that the situation has nothing to do with us... and everything to do with our, my thinking about the situation.

So I need to change my thinking.

Stress Hunger

A short choppy look in the rear view.

Stress creates hunger. When we are hungry, we tend to eat. Eating leads to obesity. Eating when stressed leads to obesity. Well for some. I was taught to eat when hungry, and stress, or my reaction to the situation was relieved by eating. Therefore I ate most of the time from age 6 to 18 when I left the home I grew up in, and that habit continued. I was raised to be farm labor. That was what I saw as my reason for existence, and that is what I was told. Not a nice outlook. My main objective was to come of age so that I could leave. I had no plan for the future beyond leaving. I knew what I did not want to do, but not what I wanted to do. Is there any doubt as to why I rate "family" so low in my priorities?

So I found a job, and another, and another, then I lit in one, where I liked the work, and became comfortable enough to realize I need education, and they helped me get started on my way. The selection was made on the basis of elimination and cost. Not on skill, desired, or interest, but on what was available. That was just before electronics, computers, and technology radically changed the world we live in.

But stress has been a constant, or my reaction to the changing situation, the desire to eat. It is just stress, but eating has always been the way that I dealt with that feeling. I have always felt pushed to do more, to learn more, to desire more. I grew up harnessing horse for light jobs, through the calculator time, computer, satellite phones, cell phones, to what we have today. The Fax has come and gone. Change and pressure to change has been considerable, and my reaction was to eat or want to eat in response to the changing situation, and I reluctantly went along, but my reaction remained. I never really saw the stress until I realized that many people just live their life without any desire to grow in productivity, or improvement, like I was trained to do, aka create a situation that demanded performance, and induce stress is myself.

And my reaction to any situation I find stressing is to eat or want to eat due to what I interpret as hunger. It was not until recently that I could see this clearly. So the real problem is my reaction to the situation, and my interpretation as hunger. Obesity is the end result. But we can cut the cycle at the situation stage, or at my reaction stage.   

One More Cause

There is something about beliefs that we grow up with, and never question, that drive us like nothing else. Most of us are liberal, somewhat. There is a issue with labels, for it is each issue that needs the label, not the entire person. Some of our concepts are liberal, once we move to a society, we as a species became liberal and progressive; we always were adaptive. Some of these liberal attitudes take us too far, then we need to cut off that concept, back up the damage, and revise.

One such concept that I gathered from others is that I should never be hungry. This is problematic for me because I seem to be hungry all the time. Buddha said that "life is suffering."  This can be translated as unsatisfactory, problematic, painful, discomfort, from physical and emotional pain, stress, chaos, life in general. Hunger is just one more of those things. Is it all about learning to live hungry? Here is the first noble truth.

Unsatisfied is our natural state. We are a liberal species. The discomfort I feel is a result of my thinking about the subject, not the situation or condition. The cause are my delusion about what life should be and my expectations of what life should be. It is my thinking that is the problem, something that I did not learn as small child. I was taught to develop expectations and now need to understand that what I was taught was just wrong. It is all about our individual thinking. Much of it is just wrong, and when I considered this, one line at a time, one concept at a time, it becomes clear: life is suffering caused by my thinking. It is not the situation, but my thinking about the situation. Here is the second noble truth.

There is a solution, and that is the third noble truth. I can develop a "grateful martyr" attitude, all the while knowing that it is just a thought defense. It is a struggle to go against society predominant idea or situation, even when it is wrong. Oh well, we live until we die, and are no more. Nothing lasts. Impermanence. Change. Birth - life - death cycle, and from the remains of our spices, the next may come... or not.

The solution is to follow a plan, and ignore the discomfort, because the discomfort is from my thinking about the problem, not the actual problem. There may also be some minor discomfort from the actual problem, but this is beyond my control... but could eat... and that is the other problem... so I must choose the lesser weevil... or for the grammar police evil. Essentially, this is the fourth noble step, but the plan is a specific part of the eight fold path. Here endith the lesson for today.

Exposure on/in blogging

Thanks Val, you got me thinking about exposure.

I am not thinking about some of the there possible meanings of exposure, as the Greeks and our Amerinatives did to the newborns, for a bit of time, if they survived, they tended to them, and only the tough survived... I am thinking of exposing ourselves to the net, but fully clothed, for all to take a run at our ideas.

First we need to have an idea, and to express the idea, and have a second real human read, understand, and acknowledge the idea as real, valuable and worth considering. If they agree, already, it is just a yha, ok. Nothing further. It is only when they oppose the idea strongly that there is any comment. Even then, with the opposed, so many times, it is just "idiot", as I do with the religious, flat earth, political, and contrarians. I could well imaging if one of those locked on for any reason, and I became a target. I might need to ignore the internet for a while. I feel sorry, no pissed off at those who do this, but also realize that I could, for a bit, but then the "why bother" would set in and I would be off to my next crusade.

The next thought about this is how much of the traffic is real humans and not bots of some type, either scanning for something or looking for a place to "lay eggs" or drop little virtues. There is no way to know. If we assume that all these peak from one source are bots, then I have few that are real people. Oh well, I write because it helps me, not others. It does not matter.

Sticking to a topic may also help. I think that I have offended people over the years by some of my statements, atheist, political, environments, a-religious, etc. Too bad, reality sucks. We all have our causes, and our own reality. I doubt that the Muslims are comfortable on my sites, for 'there is no god' has been stated more than once. I also am a nihilist...depending on the definition, well there is no purpose other to produce the next generation, and we do that too well now. There is no meaning... there never was... but we can paint on a purpose and we are off to the races... no meaning required. But I digress from my food/overeating issues, which few know anything about. And I have not found a solution that really works yet. I expect there is a multitude of causes... and different treatments work for different causes... yet there is one more, that I have not explored yet.  I know this because there is still a problem.

I expect that there is some physical cause, and the only solution is not eating and learning to live hungry while surrounded with food. Such is life.

To Blog or Not TO Blog

The blog-a-sphere is shrinking. I have been blogging irregularly now for eight years and sporadically since 2006 spring, but the service provider I first used is gone, along with the first four years of posts. It does not matter. I blog primarily as a outlet, I often do not know the answer until I express it, and my memory is getting so bad; rereading a post is an new experience. Somebody said something like every author remembers ever word they have written. I do not. 

Many of the old bloggers die off, or just suddenly stop. There last post is just there last post. We have no further information. I assume they died off or similar event, and did not just stop blogging. It does not matter.... we all die off in the end.

I miss the comments though, and the though provoking statement, some of which we know are wrong... but which concept is wrong, and which are the same effect, just expressed in such different terms that it is not recognizable as being the same. Religions are likely the first coping systems, but nobody calls them that. They are group delusions, well yes, with many fanciful concepts, but in reality, they are all just coping systems... oh well, in the end we all just die anyway.

The traffic has diminished to the point that I can say anything without drawing fire, yet, as blogging is also a coping method, it does not matter. I get an audience, perhaps it is only bot clicks, but it does not matter. I have been able to express what I need to say to my imaginary friend that read this blog. It does not matter, it is just a coping mechanism, like religion. And after, I feel better, or not, it does not matter.

Sometimes I read something that I take for information, if it fits with what I already believe, or I let it go as fiction. Some will be held in abeyance until I forget it, it does not matter.  

Life is Suffering

Buddha said it. Life is suffering. Perhaps a bit of overstatement, but for sure life contains suffering. It is a bitch to be on a diet, hungry and all around us is food, good food. So perhaps it is not overstatement but reality; life is suffering.

All religions are coping mechanism, something to do and think to avoid thinking about the more unpleasant reality of now. Overpopulation. Pollution of our atmosphere, our waste exhaled carbon dioxide, and the waste of ever oxidation process that we depend on, and the earth scrubs the atmosphere, but has not been able to keep up since 1960 or about then. Oh well. in the end we all die. Death. Other unpleasantness. Overstatement can be a form of negative visualization, or we can use positive visualization rather than reality. Both are, well, self deception.

Buddha said the cause was delusion, aversions, expectations, and the like. The Stoics said some things are up to us and some are not, and provided a list of things that are up to us, our opinions, our beliefs, our thoughts, our motivations. It is those vary things when wrong that cause us suffering... more or less. Buddha gave us a prescriptive method of getting on with life, while the stoics provided an objective coarse out of the dilemmas. Both work, just do it verse build a plan and then do it. Both allow time to pass, the situation can change or not, and in the end we just die anyway. Depressing or freeing, I will chose freeing, for it is all about living until we die. Nothing more. Pass on information to the next generation, create the next generation. There will be a sixth extinctions. Will humans survive?

Yes, our beliefs are up to us. We have the power of assent too or rejection of any proposition. It all can be reduced to a series of propositions to assent too or reject. The problem arises when we are young and assent too something that is wrong, often religion, because we are told to, not because it is right. We base everything after that on what we believe, and is pushed onto us in our youth. We, as adults, need to clean our beliefs of all wrong concepts. That is the responsibility of becoming adult and taking responsibility for our selves. The computers do not make that easy to do; the generations growing up with computers and too much information will have the big problems. Oh well.

The only thing that can "save the human race", long term, is population control; a world wide one child policy. The population will age and die off, but the young will be enough to keep things going, more or less, and know that one child policy is required to maintain earth, until the Co2 level returns to below 300 ppm. But it does not matter, the earth will survive after man is gone... be it super-humans, germs, or nothings... or the next random survivors of sixth extinction. It does not mater, I will not be here. And if I cannot stop eating, it will not be long.

Inandof Itself

Aristotle suggest that diet (things) must be enjoyed for there own sake, not for what they might bring. He termed this "in and of" itself. Inandof itself becomes a term that is the first derivative of change, while weight change is the integration over time. It is the diet that we must come to like, not the effect if we are to be successful over time. And yet my body screams for sugar, and proteins.   

Which causes which?

https://paleodiabetic.com/2018/09/04/tighter-blood-pressure-control-may-reduce-age-related-memory-loss-how-low/

Are they more active with less memory loss, and that reduces the low blood pressure, or are the more active because they feel better with low blood pressure, and feel better, and that reduces the memory loss?

This may all be concurrent issues like metabolic syndrome.