I parked in the bank parking lot, as the city was still resurfacing our lot. As I rounded the corner to our building, I saw the very petite Asian woman who works for the accountants (she may be an accountant) coming down the sidewalk, about a block away.*
She's very nice. I don't know her other than to recognize her, but she's very friendly. She's usually very well-dressed.
She's also well-dressed in a way that you don't see much in the US much anymore, at least round here. She favors, for example, very high heels, which may in part be because she is very short. But she has a certain look.
A man was entering the building at the same time. He was clearly looking up the street. I came in the building just after him. She was too far away to hold the elevator, and I went ahead and go on.
Then came the comment.
This occurred long enough ago now, that I can't quite recall what he said.** But it was something in the nature of a wolf whistle in a sentence.
It took me off guard.
You don't hear stuff like this anymore. Men don't say stuff like "she sure fills out that dress nicely" or "look at the gams on that one" and the like anymore, and they really shouldn't. It was so out of context I think my reaction was something like "um. . . "
The reply from the elevator rider was "I'm married, but you have to look, am I right?"
Um. . . .
I don't know if you have to look, but commenting? It was like being transported back to the 1970s, and like most things from the 70s, not really in a good way.
Footnotes:
*When I say Asian, I mean it. She's from someplace in Asia and has a fairly thick accent. I don't know where she's from as I've never asked.
and think that a lot of them are basically bunkus.* And history has demonstrated that a lot of the current thought in any one era on diet in general is probably wrong.
Ice Cream cake, 1937. I frankly didn't know ice cream cakes existed in 1937, but they obviously did. Most Americans weren't overweight at this time, for reasons that will be noted below.
There's constantly some new diet fad going around as well as some new theory about what people should eat. Almost every study on diets demonstrates that people will lose weight on the at first and then regain it. Up until something I will link in below explored that, the latter was not obvious to me, but what seems to be fairly obvious is that most diet theories are pure bull.
And yet Americans are absolutely fascinated about diets. No matter where you live or work, you are going to hear constantly from people about some new diet they are on. Not only are they on it, but now it's popular to combine the diets with the latest pseudo-science about taking this and that, which sound more like solutions to difficult plumbing or automotive problems than they do to losing weight and eating healthy.
A lot of dieting advice and dietary advice is amazingly similar to the same sort of stuff that people used to spout about automobiles all the time. Car worn out and tired? No problem, just pour a quart of Amazing Berserkoil into your engine! It'll detoxify, clarify and contains essential oils that your car will love and admire!
I'm not a nutritionist and have no training in this area at all, but what has always seemed completely obvious to me is that dietary topics ought to be governed by evolutionary biology. I.e, you are evolved to eat in a certain way, and if you don't eat that way, you're going to have some negative consequence develop. You are also evolved to engage in certain activities, and if you do them and eat the way that you were evolved to, you'll probably be just fine, health wise, in so far as your health is governed by food intake, and quite a bit of it is.
But that doesn't fit the most recent buy this, eat that, craze.
So it'd be rare indeed for me to link in anything regarding diet. But having recently heard this, this makes scientific sense to me (which very few diets, including the currently popular "Keto" diet do):
Akin, who is known principally as a Catholic Apologist, but who also has a keen interest in a very large range of topics and a command of a blistering number of them, discusses diets and weight loss in general, but as this video makes plain, he's an advocate of what has come to be known as "Intermittent Fasting" and an opponent of processed foods. There's more to it than that, but that's basically what I want to point out by linking this in. To at least that extent (and I'd disagree with him on a few things mentioned in here), I think he's right.
The reason for this has to do with science.
Basically, it seems to me, you are most likely evolved to eat fairly lean meat and simple vegetables and grains because that's what your ancestors did for thousands upon thousands of years. Do that, and dietary wise, I suspect you'll be just fine.
Illustration of Lapps hunting from 1565, the same way they hunted in 565, and in 1565BC, and so on. Everyone, in one form or another, lived this way, and you are still supposed to.
I'll credit that in some instances this is a bit altered beyond the very simple (but perhaps hard to apply) extent that it may seem when putting it forth in that fashion. Evolution does occur, and there are people who are very, very long associated with agriculture. . . although not to the extent you may think and indeed all people are more associated with agriculture than some believe. People were making bread out of simple grains before they cultivated wheat, it turns out, for example. And Mediterranean people who cultivated wheat very early on also were big on fish hunting (or, yes fishing). Pastoral people who took up raising livestock continued hunting and even in Palestine during Christ's time it's known that the Jewish people and their neighbors not only raised livestock, they hunted and fish hunted (yep, fishing).
Now, what additionally also seems to me to be pretty self-evident is that it's usually been the case that the "three squares a day" combined with sitting on your butt all day is not the historic norm. Nor is "processed food" at all. You aren't actually evolved to eat a lot of processed food and three big meals a day. Nor are you evolved to even eat two big meals a day.
Take all of this into account, diet wise, and you are likely good to go, diet wise.
Now, depending upon your individual metabolism you may be able to get away with it, even if you have a sedentary job. But most people won't be. And perhaps that's where I depart from Akin. Akin's commentary in the video states that exercise doesn't matter much in terms of weight loss or gain (he doesn't say that exercise isn't otherwise important), but I frankly very much disagree. Indeed, I think the lack of exercise that modern American life entails, combined with the advance of processed food, and combined with the constant presence of food, and further combined with the giant proportions that served food now features, combines to make people rather large. I.e., lack of exercise is an element of that, but a pretty important one.
Indeed, I come by all of these opinions not only because I tend to look at a lot of such things through an evolutionary biology lens, but because I also have some personal experience with all of this, making me a bit of a control set. So I'm pretty convinced as to all of this.
I've never been obese, but when I was a kid and an early teen I was on the chubby end of things. I was always pretty active, but I also lived in an environment in which there were three meals a day (as a kid should get) and deserts and soda were also pretty much always available. My mother never drank soda, but she did drink a lot of sweet tea. She was an awful cook, but both of my parents liked ice cream quite a bit so we always had ice cream on hand. My mother had a nearly hyperactive constitution but my father was inclined to carry a slight bit of extra weight as here both of his parents, and myself by extension and genetic inheritance.
One summer when I was 16/17 years old, however, I obtained a job in which I drove for a city garage chasing parts every day. This was in the pre air-conditioned era, and what that meant was that I reported to work really early and worked a full day. As a result, I wasn't eating much before I left the door and by and large I simply quit eating at noon. I was Intermittent Fasting before it had a name and without any particular intent. I was also pretty active in this role as a parts chaser.
By the end of the summer I'd lost a lot of weight. Indeed, going into the summer I was at or near my current weight, which is 165 lbs more or less (I slide up and down a bit). By modern standards that puts me right at the upper level of an "ideal weight" for my height or slightly overweight. As I've explored before, by the standards of a century ago, that's overweight. At any rate, however, going into that summer the extra pounds I was carrying included some flab, which isn't good. By the end of the summer, however, I'd lost ten to fifteen pounds through no effort of my own. By that time, as I'd lost the desire to eat lunch anymore, I kept loosing until I was around 140 lbs, maybe (probably) less. When I went into basic training the next year, I likely reported around 135lbs.
In basic training I gained weight up until I came down with pneumonia, at which time I really lost weight as I couldn't eat but was still active. When I came home from Ft. Sill I weighed 123 lbs, which is really light. Having said that, photographs of me early in basic training suggest I was getting pretty light at first anyhow. But, that 123 lbs actually reflected a late Advanced Training weight gain after I got out of the hospital.
Significantly, however, after that first summer the weight I put on or retained was muscle and not fat. In college, I came up to 145 lbs, the weight I was at when I got married, but again I was really active and my gain in that time came on in muscle. Since then, through having a sedentary job and what not, I've gained the extra fifteen pounds, or perhaps less on a day-to-day basis, but I'm much more heavily muscled than I was when I was 16.
Now, from time to time for one reason or another, I've gotten to where I'll skip breakfast or lunch, or both. Doing this on odd occasion is pretty routine for me, but I'll sometimes do it for days in a row. I just don't always feel like eating breakfast for no particular reason, and I've never regained the desire to eat much lunch. After I left for college I lost my taste for sweets and I never buy candy for the house, although my wife is the opposite, and she does. When I left college, I also quit buying soda.
Indeed, in my college years, as I already noted, I lived on a very primitive diet. All wild game and mostly vegetables, for much of the year, that had come from my parents garden. On that diet, you won't put on weight. And as noted after I married beef came back into our diet (which I do like), but some desserts, which I very rarely bought or made for myself when single (cherry and apple pies, from our own cherries and apples excepted, and when in season), reappeared. So its no wonder that I added fifteen pounds, and within a few years. But I'll drop down to 155 fairly readily when I don't eat lunch for days in a row.
All of which gets to this point.
This time of year is a dietary nightmare. It's a nightmare in part because the people who are the Keto Schmeato All Bean Burrito Diet are going to be bothering you about that, or whatever the latest dietary fad is, and it's a nightmare as there's a constant flood of food that you don't need to eat going by you constantly.
Indeed, this thread was started some time ago, and I'm just finishing it off now because of this. I'm hearing about the diets. And this will mean, in part, I'll hear about people who claim to be "fasting" but still eat enough at noon to put me out for the rest of the day, but it's also the case that in my office its freakishly the case that seemingly 3/4s of the office has late in the year birthdays. That means that in November and December there's enough cake going through the office to feed all of Europe for a year, at least calorie wise.
And to add to that, people just start bringing in food at random. Indeed, there's one person who seemingly does this constantly from their home, and it's all sugary food. This is surplus from that person's own larders which means that the same is buying, but not eating, lots of cake, candy and the like. All of which makes it pretty hard to resist, as it's simply there.
And then for some reason cake like cookies, from a newer cookie company, are showing up in the house here. We're tiny people, and we can't really eat cookies the size of large pizzas, and particularly not sugary ones. My wife and my daughter love these cookies, but my daughter is so active that she'll burn through the calories no matter what. Like most modern Americans, however, my job principally entails, active lifestyle wise, sitting on my butt.
Of course, some would say "go to the gym", but I hate that sort of public display. And frankly, I don't have the time or don't imagine that I do. And that's the sort of urban Cow's Revenge activity that I really don't like.
All of which caused me, when I got on the scale last night, to be shocked that I've ballooned up to 170 lbs.
Well, it's not like I don't know what to do. And it doesn't involve Keto or the Orange Blossom Special Cleanse or something like that.
But it would be a lot easier on a "natural diet", but which I mean one that I shot, caught and grew myself.
I'm amazed by how many young women smoke, and comparatively how few men do. This is very much the reverse of the way things were when I was young. I.e., a lot of men smoked, but comparatively fewer women did.
Which isn't to say that women didn't smoke.
Historically, women smoking was frowned upon. It didn't really get rolling until the teens. Prior to that, it was not only looked down upon, but suggestive in a variety of ways, none of which were really good to have suggested about you.
Following World War One, however, it rapidly expanded. Cigarettes alone got a big boost by the Great War, taking over from cigars as the favored nicotine delivery method, and the Roaring Twenties brought in flapperism and all that entailed, including suggestive clothing, illegal booze, and of course smoking cigarettes. Flapperism went away but the illegal booze and smoking didin't, something that kept on keeping on during the Great Depression. Drinking became legal again and smoking became nearly universal.
Women had their own brand of cigarettes during the Feminist revolution of the 1970s, Virginia Slims, a name that not only referred to the cigarettes themselves but what smoking can do, at first, to a person's figure.
Ultimately it'll ruin that figure, of course. And for women it not only increases the risk of lung cancer, but breast cancer. We know this for sure, and nobody really denies that.
Given that, smoking really declined following the 70s. Even by the late 1970s, when I was in high school, girls smoking did so to suggest they were "bad" girls, although most weren't really bad. Rather, they were like Jessica Rabbit, just drawn that way, and in their case, attempting to draw themselves that way. Rebels without a clue, so to speak.
In college I can't recall very many women smoking. I can recall some university men smoking, but by and large it had really fallen out of favor. And when I was first practicing law, it was really on the outs. A smoking woman could be guaranteed to be at least middle aged and therefore, not young.
