beforewisdom

Bill, why do you think that? My apologies for offering unsolicited advice but I think you will get better results from your health and fitness efforts if you ask yourself the following questions: - Who are the people giving me this advice? - What credentials do they have? - Are those credentials meaningful to the subject they are talking about? - Why are those credentials meaningful to that subject? - How do these people know what they claim to know? - Do other people agree with them? Why? Why Not? ( repeat these questions for those "other people" ) - Is it possible that who got good results got them for reasons other than what they think? Cheers

I don't think hiding an agenda works. People can tell when you are hiding an agenda and if think you are hiding something they tend to think there is something wrong with what you are hiding. I don't they hid their agenda in their book. The authors went vegan because they didn't like the cruelty involved with animal food production. They spell that cruelty out in their book. Nothing is hidden. I think what they did do different is that they didn't expect people to climb a mountain and cater their lives to hear their thoughts. They learned something about the group of people they wanted to persuade and talked to those people in terms of where they live, their concerns, etc. Most women want to be thin and don't want to starve.

That is one of those quotes you really like because you observed it yourself from your own life experiences before you heard of the quote. I have seen this quote for myself. It doesn't matter what kind of person you are dealing with, past a certain point. Even the best and worst of people on the spectrum will be malleable as to how you teach them to treat you based on how you behave around them.

I think the questions for the poll could have been improved. Radio buttons were used, but the choices were not mutually exclusive nor were the choices necessarily about the same issue. Having said that I think good teachers are very important. I think good teachers are not adequately rewarded and I think they are under- appreciated. I think that is part of our anti-intellectual culture. If you haven't rent a copy of the fun, but dark comedy "Idiocracy" ( from the producer of "Office Space" ). I've known a lot of teachers. They tend to be very civic minded, caring, intelligent and nice people. The experiences in their job are often thankless, even beyond the financial perspective. I also think their jobs must be frustrating because their opinions are often not heard nor valued as they should be. However, I do know that teaching does offer great intangible rewards when teachers are lucky enough to see the differences they make in people's lives when students work hard to work with them.

More fiber than a person can handle contributes to gas being generated. Eat less for a meal or two, you will not have an overload in your system at one point, the gas will clear out and you will get a break. Tofu doesn't have any fiber and the little that pasta has is easily digested.

Muscles are living flesh. They aren't supposed to be as hard as rock, or as hard when they are flexed.

On the other side of the world from you, I really am laughing out loud. Thank You. I had a rough day and needed that. There is a bright side to Roberts digestive tract troubles after all

No, they are processed forms of each. Normally I wouldn't encourage anyone to eat processed food, but they are much easier to digest and give you a break when you have been experiencing a lot of gas. Robert, there are a number of vegan RDs and MDs out there who can be communicated with online. If you experiments do not pan out, why not contact them to see if they can recommend a gastroentnologist (sp?) in your area who can handle hearing about your diet without automatically making it the culprit. Maybe what you are eating isn't the problem and you just have a medical issue to take care of.

Cook ( or cook more ) vegetables like cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, collar greens and mustard greens. Temporarily eat less fiber to give your system a break. For example eat tofu and pasta instead of legumes and grains.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/01/02/dining/02skin600.1.jpg http://tinyurl.com/24bzvy

Exactly all of my points. Robert and others have gotten similarly dragged down by the cribbing. It is all on the internet. It never amounts to tangible change for the animals in the real world. It is just aggravation that can easily made to dissappear from your life by choosing to read something else. If you don't see these disputes as doing anything valuable for you, all you need to do to get away from them is to choose to read something else. The aggravation instantly goes away.

VeganEssentials; I have issues with the way PETA does some things and I would never contribute money to them. That being said, like you, and many others I am tired of the anti_______ ( insert group of your choice ) rants. As I have told Rob, I have noticed that most of this sort of thing is on the internet. When you go out to volunteer to help animals or spread veganism you just will not encounter endless ranting ( maybe one comment or two ) or intra vegan bashing. The arm chair activists of the web boards who spend an hour a week volunteering and 6 trash talking other vegans on the web will never go away. If you swore off the internet today and came back 5 years from now you will find PETA bashing or similar threads on the vegan web boards. Probably the same people will be doing it and even making the same points. They will not change, neither will the big orgs. The thing to do, if it is feeling old, is to just stay away from the threads of web board vegans and focus on the people who turn out in the real world to help you get things done. The whiners just do not show up in real life to exchange their view. Getting away from threads on the internet or entire vegan internet forums will make the aggravation of these things instantly vanish.

The DVD set for the series comes with a documentary about the series where the producers were interviewed. I got the impression that race wasn't the only card on the table. Lee's high pitched annoying voice was a factor too. If Lee had gotten the role the action scenes would have been orders of magnitude better, but I think the series would have suffered. I just can't see Lee playing the humble Buddhist priest the way Karradine did. I found Karradine to suck in everything else he did and be totally unlike his character. Given that and the aforementioned documentary I think my suspicion is that his memorable character was the result of a lot of coaching from the producer who dreamed up the series.

Thanks! It is always cool to hear that somebody enjoyed their visit to my blog

I finished this book yesterday afternoon...the last book of 2007

Got to the gym 1st thing this morning and had the first workout of 2008 !!

I really like recipes with nutrition information and I really like recipes that use a minimum, if any, oil. That has it.

I just posted a book review of Dr. Barnard's book on diabetes. In that book he went out of his way to mention the health benefits of eating nuts and soy. However, he said he could not recommend using those foods to his new diabetic patients because his program for reversing diabetes hinges on reducing intracellular fat in addition to reducing body fat. He does that by getting dietary fat down to about 10% of a person's daily calories. In other words, those foods are not forbidden in his book, nor are they evil( he has praise for them), they are just not useful for his purposes. I've seen Dr. Esselstyn speak. He said he writes about treating very sick heart patients so his program has to be strict. He said it isn't meant for healthy people ( and he had no advice in that regard ). However, I ate with him several times and it looks like he follows his own plan. I would guestimate his age to be anywhere from the late 60s to early 70s. He is slim, trim, in great health and in good shape.

I won this book as part of a health package at a silent auction at a fund raising party for a local animal protection group. Dr. Neal Barnard's Program For Reversing Diabetes - The scientifically proven system for reversing diabetes without drugs by Dr. Neal Barnard M.D. ISBN-13 978-1-59486-528-2 http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51T%2BnjiUHhL._OU01_SS130_.jpg I don't have diabetes, but I found this book to be very interesting.. One current theory for the genesis of food allergies is that "leaky guts", porous intestines leak out proteins from our food before those proteins have been broken down into amino acids. These proteins then get out into the blood where the immune system is alerted to them, thus triggering an autoimmune response. Infants, whose digestive systems are not fully matured, are predisposed to having leaky intestines. They are vulnerable to developing food allergies if they are fed highly allergenic foods too early ( dairy products, soy, wheat, citrus, meat etc ). The proteins leak into their blood stream and their immune systems are inadvertently trained to see these proteins as hazards. Type 1 diabetes is believed to happen, in part, when the immune system mistakenly attacks and destroys the insulin producing cells of the pancreas ( pages 30 - 35 ). The book describes several studies of children predisposed to type 1 diabetes or children who were on their way to getting it. It turned out that these children's immune systems were "on alert" to attacking proteins found in bovine milk. It has been discovered that portions of those bovine milk proteins were nearly biochemically identical to the children's insulin producing cells. Wow. Dr. Barnard's dietary program for type 2 diabetes has been tested in several studies in partnership with the National Institute Of Health. In a nutshell, he prescribes eating low fat ( only 20% of calories from fat, preferably 10% ), high fiber, low glycemic index valued, and vegan foods. That is, each bit of food that a recovering diabetic eats has all of these qualities. The really interesting part is where the book explains why this works. Too much fat accumulating on the inside of cells causes the mitochondria in those cells to stop burning such fat, which leads to insulin resistance. Though a person's pancreas might be kicking out enough insulin, the insulin no longer has any effect on the cells. The cells will not absorb glucose from the blood stream leading to toxic levels of sugar in the blood. The diet described above has been proven to reduce the amount of fat within cells, restart the burning of this fat by the mitochonria, reverse insulin resistance, and lower blood sugar levels -- without drugs. Again, wow. Weight control is an important part of treating diabetes and this book has a lot of interesting facts about losing weight from the studies of Dr. Barbara Rolls who wrote the book "Volumetrics". Unlike the various quack popular diet book authors out there Dr. Rolls is a highly respected scientist who has been researching how to satisfy hunger with fewer calories. One thing she learned is that for each 14 gram increase of fiber in a diet ( via food, not supplements ) people will eat until they are full, but they will feel full on 200 fewer calories. 200 fewer calories per day is enough to lose 20 pounds over the course of a year. Her theory is that weight in the stomach triggers satiation. Interestingly, her studies found that not any weight will set this response off. Having study participants drink a particular weight of water did nothing for triggering early satiation. However taking in the same weight composed of water and food ( stew ) did. Dr. Rolls recommends eating foods that have natural "bulk" - a lot of water and a lot of fiber together naturally. To encourage weight loss she advises eating food that has the more weight per a particular amount of calories. A neat trick offered by the book is to focus on eating foods that have an equal number of calories as grams of weight...or less. Another simple weight loss trick offered by Dr. Barnard is to do a "quick fiber check" when your weight loss seems to be slowing down. He has a set value of points for servings of legumes, vegetables, fruit, and whole grains. You count the number of servings of each you have every day. If your points add up to less than 40 and you want more weight loss you eat more food from those groups of foods. The book also gave a very clear introduction to the disease of diabetes in accessible, but not dumbed down language that I found fascinating. I am really glad I won this book. I enjoyed reading it very much.

In 2006 the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM.org) launched a free, noncommerical web site, NutritionMD.org, to provide nutrition information for doctors and patients as well as guidance on how to begin low fat vegan diets. It provides hundreds of recipes, shopping lists, and other user friendly information. http://www.nutritionmd.org/recipes/all.html

I know a lot of vegans who sink significant amounts of their spare time into helping animals, but who have left groups and organizations because of other vegans getting in their face. Existing vegans, whether or not someone else things they are vegan enough, have the same feelings as "the general public". If someone steps over the line often enough, they will walk. People are more powerful when they work together. I also believe that if you really are about something worthy, people will see it, and move towards it under their own power without having to present it to them in an "in your face" way.

Every bit counts. Almost all of the electricity in the United States is generated by older coal fired power plants that are exempt from the law requiring scrubbers on their smoke stacks. These older power plants are the dominant cause of acid rain. Years ago researchers at Cornell figured out that if modern appliances were made to truly turn off instead of sleep ( TVs that respond to a remote control, computers that stay in a sleep mode etc ) the power savings across the country would be enough to shut down 11 power plants. FWIW, anyone interested doesn't have to wait for appliances to get better. They can plug their appliances into power strips and turn the power strips off when they are not using those appliances. Over the course of a year they will save a noticeable amount of money too.

I just in one of Dr. Neal Barnard's PCRM books last night that many people have a problem with cruciferous vegetables ( broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, kale, mustard greens, collard greens etc ) which are easily fixed by properly cooking them.

Read the link to my blog earlier in this thread, it may help. The biggest culprits for gas are legumes and cruciferous vegetables, as they have some tough sugars that don't digest very well. They end up fermenting, being eaten by bacteria which gives off the gas. Aside from the things mentioned in my blog entry this can be helped by properly cooking these foods. Gas can also be caused by eating too much & eating too fast. It can also be caused by eating too close to bed time( the stuff just doesn't get processed ) Good luck

I read an article a few months back about an engineer and a gym that experimented with turning the cardio equipment into electricity generators. They got an impressive amount of power, for free. At the very least cardio equipment should be made to power itself. I just don't get why these things have to draw electricity for the displays.