robertreich:

With the hostage crisis behind him, the President is now ready to talk about the nation’s real problem.

Nine paragraphs into his remarks today announcing the nation has paid most of the ransom the radical right demanded as a condition for maintaining the full faith and credit of the United States…

“Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.”

Deciding to balance the budget by cutting spending immediately after demanding a tax cut for the rich is like asking your Fortune 500 boss for a salary cut, then explaining to the family how you can no longer afford to send the children to college, your wife has to stop buying that expensive “healthy food” and your mother has to find another place to live because you can’t afford to support her anymore.

robertreich:

Republicans offered Democrats two more weeks before the doomsday shut-down. Democrats countered with four. Republicans held their ground. Democrats agreed to two.

This is what passes for compromise in our nation’s capital.

Democrats have become irrelevant. If they want to be relevant again they…

New Spice

This is no way to make a rational decision about food.  Yeah, I do it all the time, but it’s stupid.  You’ve gotta have a plan.  Write it down. Buy it.  It eat.  No more ” I don’t know what I want” whining.  Buy good food, not crap, and you won’t eat crap. Good food is stuff that nobody has messed with — nothing taken out  — nothing put in.  You like apples? Eat an apple. You like nuts?  eat nuts.   Don’t mess it up with sugar and salt and other crap.  So you want to eat healthy?  Go get you some whole food and just eat it. And by the way.  Don’t get the stuff covered in toxic sludge.  You can’t wash that stuff off. Go to a farmer’s market and ask them — did you put any toxic crap on these vegetables? If they did, tell them to forget it.  You don’t want their toxic vegetables.

Food Horror

firemachine:

This is me battling an astronaut as a kid.   Sucka got served.

Mamaday:

That’s my boy.

I’ve been trying to eat low fat my whole life.  That’s what they told us to do to lose weight and have a healthy heart.  Fat was BAD.  But it seems, THEY have changed their mind. Let me explain what THEY say now. Now there are GOOD fats.  THEY started realizing this when they noticed that people who lived in the countries around the Mediterranean Sea had less heart disease than us Western types, and they ate a @#% load of olive oil (I can’t say that; I’m a professional).  Well now THEY know.  Olive oil has a lot of monounsaturated fat, more specifically monounsaturated fatty acids.  Fatty acids; What a disgusting phrase.  Fatty (what you used to call the shy, hungry kid next door- yeah you did- don’t deny it) acids (stuff that could dissolve your face if you got into a strong one).  They are the stuff that packs on the baggage.  But they are not all bad.

First let me explain that there are different kinds of fatty acids.  The afore mentioned monounsaturated acids are good.  They help lower bad cholesterol  (LDL) levels without lowering the good (HDL).  Olives, avocado and canola oil have a lot.  Eat them, but don’t eat too much or you’ll end up like the kid next door, because they have more than twice the calories per gram than carbs or proteins.  A little is good because it helps slow the digestion of everything you eat with it.  And that’s good because you won’t get hungry again so fast and pig out on chips and candy bars about 4pm. There’s another “good” one (in quotes because everything is relative).  That is, omega-3  fatty acids.  It has something to do with where the double bonds are— you wouldn’t understand, so forget it. They help lower triglyceride levels and combat inflammation among other things.   Fatty fish have a lot, but you’ve got to watch out for those that are contaminated with mercury and other bad stuff. I don’t have time to talk about that now, so educate yourself.  There are some omega-3’s in some plant foods, especially flax seed and walnuts, but they contain a precursor to the active form, which isn’t converted to the active form very efficiently.  The reason I referred to relativity is, you need a higher proportion of omega-3s to omega-6s than you are probably getting. Omega-6 fatty acids are also polyunsaturated fatty acids, which used to be GOOD. They are in vegetable oils such as soybean oil and safflower oil.  You still need them. Linoleic acid, an omega-6 fat, is an essential fatty acid.  You need it to live.  You just shouldn’t get too much relative to omega-3’s.  Are you thoroughly confused?  I rest my case.

Love ya,

Mamaday

OK, I’m going to tell you how to be healthy, but I’m going to do it in small bits of information so that your one-track minds can keep up. Let’s start with what it really takes to build muscle, since that’s all you really care about at this point.

Let’s start with carbs (carbohydrates for those of you who think carbs is a real word). You need them to build muscle. They are the fuel that lets you move. The terms energy metabolism and glucose metabolism are used interchangeably (too big a word for you?). The thing they are providing to your body gets down to glucose. You can get them as simple sugars (sweets- a girlie word) or complex carbohydrates (starches- no not what they put in shirts) or even some amino acids (protein- but, as I mentioned before, if you were keeping up, you get ammonia too if you eat too much). Unless you are working out like a mother, you want to get “energy”, i.e. glucose, from complex carbohydrates.

To illustrated this concept for your simple minds, imagine a chain. Guys like chains, right? Glucose is like the links of the chain. If chains were edible, it would be easy to eat one after the other. But if they are linked together and you had to remove each one before you could eat it, it would take a while to eat. Complex carbs are like that. They are long chains of glucose, which takes a while for your body to digest and absorb. So, they keep you going longer.

So, forget those sweet, sugary, syrupy, drinks you live on. They tell you they’ll give you energy. Energy is one of those things- you’ve gotta use it or lose it. Get your carbs from whole grains, yams, potatoes, brown rice, whole grain pasta.

You need the “whole” foods because processed foods are stripped of all the good stuff. You need the fiber in whole food to slow the absorption of the glucose from starch (and other stuff- for a later date) and you need the nutrients they strip out of processed foods to make sure the whole process of energy metabolism has everything it needs to work right. We’ll talk more about nutrients late. Small bits at a time.

Love ya,

Mamaday