A Million Words

My main author website has been hacked and I'm trying to fix it and finding the phone support at my web hosting company has gone way, way downhill in the past couple of years. This morning's support person has a raspy, sleepy voice as if she was out all night and is trying to make up for her lost sleep by curling up under the desk. Anyway, I didn't keep up the blog posts and now it's the last day of November, so here comes the litany of excuses. I have much more to say but I'm still getting distracted by further research on the internet, and other things I might do with my life. I've also written a stack of articles for the local newspaper, which always seem to take up whole days of my writing life at a time. Meanwhile I had some kind of cold/bug that kept my brain running on a very low gear. When that let up I have been trying to get my feet back on the ground at aikido. I'm about two months back into it after over a decade mostly away, and I'm tryi

As with NaNoWriMo, my attempt at NaNoBloPoMo has been a bit uneven. I'm on day 11 and I think this is my 9th post. It's not that I don't have ideas, it's just that the day has been slipping away from me. I have all sorts of miscellaneous household stuff to do all the time, I have bits and pieces of paid work, and I like to keep up with the news, which is always incredibly distracting. Today I'm also achey and tired, probably fighting off the Thing That's Going Around. My son had it about a week ago, my nephew and niece have it, and my husband has also been feeling a bit under the weather. I'm not absolutely bedridden -- I did take the dog out for a walk, do laundry, and do grocery shopping -- but I spent a good part of the day lying around feeling like doing nothing at all. So it seems like a good day to talk about what to do when you're feeling like crap, because being on the road to better health doesn't mean you'll never get sick, especially

Demands of different lifestyles and adjustment stages . This morning I found myself thinking about the future of our species, and of life on earth. It followed from what I was writing about yesterday, the way we used to be just one species among many others and have expanded to conquer vast territories beyond our original ecological niche. We’ve made big, disastrous changes to the planet, and we might not survive that long, certainly not in our current numbers, with our current way of life. We’re at a transition between stages of our progress, and it’s a crisis that could prove catastrophic. I was thinking, too, about how some countries and communities are worried about declining birth rates. I don’t think it’s a problem, not in terms of species survival. If only a tiny percentage of us continue to reproduce, we will still go on. Homo sapiens were almost wiped out more than once in ancient pre-history ( https://io9.gizmodo.com/close-calls-three-times-when-th

There are a lot of differences between the life of a Paleolithic hunter-gatherer and the life of a modern, reasonably well-off human. We evolved and adapted in conditions that were simpler, rougher, and more physically demanding. Nowadays, we are more comfortable but that comfort has taken a toll in the form of chronic debilitating disease, which nobody wants. Looking back at our history – and especially our prehistory – can show how we’ve strayed from the way of life we were built for, but the past is a big place, people lived in many different natural environments, and we only have scattered clues about what actually went on.  Anatomically modern humans emerged around 200,000 to 300,000 years ago in Africa, and we stayed there for most of our prehistory. Around 40 - 60,000 years ago, we started using complex language and moving around over long distances, exploring new continents. Recorded history covers less than 10% of the time since the first homo sapiens migrated to Euro

For some things in life, the healthiest amount to ingest is zero. That covers tobacco cigarettes, most illegal or recently-illegal drugs (probably -- research on them is not good), alcohol (maybe), refined sugar (again, maybe), and various additives and preservatives in "food-like substances." That said, your body can handle a bit of toxicity now and again, so there's no need to avoid every little additive, just avoid the biggest killers, cigarettes and excessive alcohol. Here is the CDC's list of the top 12 causes of death in the United States, as of 2017: Heart disease: 647,457 Cancer: 599,108 Accidents (unintentional injuries): 169,936 Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 160,201 Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 146,383 Alzheimer’s disease: 121,404 Diabetes: 83,564 Influenza and pneumonia: 55,672 Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 50,633 Intentional self-harm (suicide): 47,173 Source:  Deaths: Leading Causes for 2017, table 1

Last winter, I got a bad case of what was going around. It had me in bed for several days and hobbling along for a couple of weeks. This, despite being relatively healthy, or so I thought. But I was tired, I was still getting headaches, and I'd gained a couple of pounds. I quit alcohol and sugar for Lent, not as a particularly religious thing but because it's a good span of time -- long enough to make a change, short enough to see the end of it. My hope was to lose some weight, get more energy, and maybe, just maybe, cure my migraines. I also got a little bit competitive because my sister-in-law was doing a vegetarian version of the Whole 30 diet. So I checked out the library for some diet books, where I found two on eating for optimal brain health, Genius Foods and Brain Food . The first of these promotes a low-carb approach while the other touts the classic Mediterranean diet with a few modifications, but they agreed on many points. Reading those led me to looking into the

How did I arrive at this plan? Basically, a lot of tooling around the internet, reading some good books, and experimenting. As I begin to write more posts, I find that I'm looking at human evolution and history as a way to discover what works best for human beings, but it's not my only source and I think that modern science has a great deal to contribute. It's also the best place to go for figuring out why  things work the way they do. Understanding something about the mechanisms behind health makes me far more likely to follow the guidelines I set out for myself. When it comes to research, I have generally trusted the more mainstream medical research, research coming out of universities, and articles in medical journals. Government recommendations from countries with robust public health systems, like the UK and Canada, are also good, as is the World Health Organization. Their guidelines that will work well for most people, most of the time, but they lack granular

It's day 4 for November and my pledge to write a blog post every day is being put to the test -- it's been a rather hectic day and I had an article due which I just turned in at 5. So, I'm grabbing a couple of lists from my notes. I probably should have started with this, the plan I've been pretty much following for the past six months. Summary of the plan: Sleep plenty: 8 – 9 hours of nightly rest, in bed, in the dark, with no electronics (except maybe a Kindle that’s on airplane mode, and that only if you are having a really hard time getting back to sleep). S tay physically active throughout the day . If you wear a fitbit-type thing, your daily minimum should be 10,000 – 15,000 steps . If you don’t want to count steps , aim for about 3-4 miles of walking outside on top of your usual daily activities. G et outside every day, for at least an hour, except in extreme weather (more on this later). Over half of what you eat should be f

A brief discussion of weight. One thing that set me off on my current quest to understand health better was that I wanted to get back to my pre-pregnancy weight, even though my doctor thought that my weight was just fine. I don't consider myself to be particularly obsessed with weight, but I do think about it. Over the course of my lifetime, people have gotten fatter. Here's a chart (from  https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/health-statistics/overweight-obesity ) Interestingly, the percentage who are classed as overweight has stayed about the same (the so-called "overweight" bracket seems to be associated with similar health outcomes to the "Normal" bracket). The general increase comes from people who are in the part of the charts where weight seems to have a real negative impact on their health. Enter the diet industry. Thinking about weight loss is so easy; picking a number, setting a goal, the idea that you can fix all your prob

The u- or j-shaped curve is a feature of a lot of research studies on health-related topics. “Moderation in all things,” is as true now as it was when Hesiod and/or Aristotle doled out the advice thousands of years ago. It’s also a key to some of the trickiness of health advice – you can get too little or too much of a thing . People like to latch onto particular foods or behaviors as being healthy or unhealthy, but none of them exists in isolation. I mean, sure, kale is packed with all kinds of minerals, but if you only eat kale, the results aren’t going to be pretty. Here’s another maxim from the ancients: “The dose makes the poison,” attributed to Paracelus, a Swiss alchemist (b. 1494-ish, d. 1541). That can apply to everything from Tylenol to red wine, both of which will, in sufficient quantities, utterly destroy your liver, but which are pretty okay in small doses. Fish, likewise, is good for you (Omega 3 fatty acids are important), but because it also often contains som

Welcome to the next chapter of this blog! Apart from one lonely stub post in 2012, I haven't touched this blog in over 9 years. Back then, I was focused on all things domestic. In some ways I still am, but my focus has really been all over the place. I finished my fantasy series and a Regency romance. I still write miscellaneous articles for the local press. My two kids are now well into their school years, and doing fine. Our family was on a TV show a couple of years ago, which was interesting, and my husband now has a thriving Youtube career. As for me, I'm casually looking for a job, trying to get around to building a new chicken coop, playing guitar a little (this is new-ish), reading a lot, and continuing my usual hobby of immersing myself in one subject after another. This year, it's health -- a broad topic, but pretty important. At my age, and being as well-informed as I like to think I am, I should have figured out how to be healthy by now, right? But no. I do o