Another fad diet, helmed by a guy selling pills on his website and claiming that he has discovered a secret path around the laws of thermodynamics. Yawn.
He pushes paleo but doesn't call it paleo. He says it isn't low-carb, but then forbids all food containing carbs. "You can eat as much as you want, so long as it's only the following foods!" and then the following foods are meat, fish, eggs, and vegetables.
Yeah. If you do that, you'll lose weight, unless you're pathological. You can eat pounds upon pounds of celery and cucumbers with a nice 20 oz steak and lose weight, because you only put down like 800 calories. And that's the dirty little secret of the SANE diet. He makes you promise not to count calories because they're fake and don't consider the all-important hormones, then advocates a diet that would result in a severe caloric deficit no matter how hard you try, unless you overindulge in nuts, oils, and cheese, all of which he explicitly warns to keep in moderation.
OK but why? If calories are fake and our body won't convert to fat if it comes from high-quality, nutritious food, why can't I drink heart-healthy coconut oil and slam a pound of cashews a day? They're high in fiber and protein, and you said fiber and protein are the only things that matter now that we've disproved Calorie Theory!
The SANE diet is a colossal appeal to emotion, attempting to absolve yo-yo dieters of their body shame by providing "the results of over 1200 studies" worth of flimsy, conditional science that says 'don't worry sweetie, it's not your fault.' It tells them counting calories would never have worked, and provides a long-term solution of "unclogging" hormones by eating a diet which tricks you into a caloric deficit by filling up on greens and low-starch vegetables. This is another one that claims fruit will make you fat because there's sugar in it.
Two stars for the studies that make up the supports for the strawman. If it were simple calories in/calories out, we would all be over 600 lbs due to the increase in caloric intake over the past thirty years. There are mitigating factors, and they are hormonal, metabolic, and likely microbiotic. Those things can be true without invalidating the obvious: Bailor's a huckster trying to move shady, proprietary supplements....more
The first half of the book was insightful and thought-provoking, spinning science until it fits cleanly into a sort of primitive, animist nature-worshThe first half of the book was insightful and thought-provoking, spinning science until it fits cleanly into a sort of primitive, animist nature-worship perspective, though more hobbyist than as a legitimate structure of belief. The next quarter talks about the importance of community and love, which I'm not here to knock. Then, the last quarter is a lecture about recycling and meatless Mondays.
I already recycle and I'm not going to do meatless Mondays.
Here are the quotes I marked: "At a certain point, self-organization or unexpected qualities emerge - a collection of molecules into a cell, a collection of sounds into speech, a collection of individual ants into a colony. In essence, an unexpected whole emerges from simple parts."
"The Nobel laureate Richard Feynman once observed that trying to understand nature through science is like trying to figure out the rules of chess as you watch a game being played -- but you can only see two squares at a time."
"So when a nail is driven by a hammer, the energy used to move the muscles of the body to deliver the blow comes from stores in the body, which in turn are recovered from food, which contains energy obtained from photons from the sun. When the nail is struck, energy is transferred to it and dissipated as heat - in the nail and in the wood and air surrounding it."
"Although well-fed and cared for physically, the monkeys exhibited abnormal behavior when they grew up, including a complete lack of interest in raising young. Thus, experiments with primates reveal both the powerful need for love - where the merest hint of a loving parent was chosen in preference to food - as well as the tragic, persistent consequences of deprivation."
Food part is good, exercise part is ridiculous. Piggyback isn't a lift. Still, good effort, good intent.Food part is good, exercise part is ridiculous. Piggyback isn't a lift. Still, good effort, good intent....more
Ken Berry was a fat doctor. He was telling everyone how to not be fat and they kept coming back fatter. Gradually, he realized that the things he was doing weren't working, and the things he was telling people to do also weren't working, so he went Paleo.
Thoroughly tedpilled, he lost weight and became healthy, and so did his patients. He still doesn't look particularly athletic, but he is trim, and states that he doesn't exercise so much as "play outside" so that tracks.
Ken Berry marshals his forces and writes an invective unga-bunga book lambasting the medical establishment in general and lazy doctors in particular. Berry is of the belief that being a doctor means you are always reading and learning, because science gets replaced every few years; the speed at which science becomes useless junk has increased exponentially in recent years, owing to COVID, the intercession of AI, and every media outlet baldfacedly lying for engagement. Most doctors do not read. Most doctors throw pills, as Dr. Mario taught us, or cut. If they are met with a problem that cannot be solved by pills or cutting, they will refer you to a specialist, who will also try to throw pills or cut. It's throwing pills and cutting all the way down.
Not Ken Berry, and not all of the other fringe iconoclast doctors he name-drops (looking at you DiNicolantonio). Medicine is a practice and practice makes perfect, and around 50% of your med school training is outdated and useless. Margarine gives you cancer. Cold doesn't give you colds. We don't do leechings anymore. To say nothing of the fact that, by Berry's own admission, his professional knowledge of nutrition is limited to "exactly one-half of a semester during med school."
Berry advocates for being a huge pain in the ass to your doctor all the time, like you would with anyone else you pay for their labor. He wants you to quiz your doctor. When they make a recommendation he wants you to say, "Source pls?" He wants you to print out your own research and hand it to your doctor, and if the doctor throws a tantrum, he wants you to go get another doctor.
And that's reasonable. You're trusting these self-important quacks with your life. If they won't stay current, what is your insurance buying them a yacht for?
The touchstone notes are the same as all my favorite caveman health books: Eat food, get some exercise, get some sun, drink water, manage your stress. Fat is good, sugar is the devil. Walk, talk, eat, and act like the Jack's Links guy and everything'll turn out just fine.
He sold me on the milk thing, too. I'm not going to stop eating cotty, gurt, or kefir but I'll tone down the rest of it because he's right about the animal kingdom's capacity for mimicry. If there were any nutritional advantage to milk for non-baby animals, we would know of animals who evolved specifically to con it out of other animals. We don't. Nature knows best.
However, it was not without its flaws. He was really pressing for processed meat to be good for you. It's not. We know it's not. I can't follow you there, Ken. Bologna isn't food. It's not pure evil, sure, but don't put it next to steak. It's not steak....more
The Nordic art of hiking without exerting yourself. It's also OK to exert yourself while hiking. You can roll around in the woods and base jump and fiThe Nordic art of hiking without exerting yourself. It's also OK to exert yourself while hiking. You can roll around in the woods and base jump and fistfight an ocelot if you want, but that's not friluftsliv. Friluftsliv is when you just kick it in the woods, wander around, look at some moss, maybe touch a mushroom. It's also when you camp on top of buildings. It's mostly just getting off your damn screens and going outside.
Love a book like this. It's an accessible, laymen's terms version of Spark by John Ratey. Here are the benefits of different kinds of exercise, and heLove a book like this. It's an accessible, laymen's terms version of Spark by John Ratey. Here are the benefits of different kinds of exercise, and here are how they routinely outperform medications. Take both. Double your pleasure. What's important is you get outside and get your ass around the block....more
Lanier is a techie experiencing a moment of Victor Frankenstein "My God What Have I Done" revelation at how he and his wretched ilk have built the titLanier is a techie experiencing a moment of Victor Frankenstein "My God What Have I Done" revelation at how he and his wretched ilk have built the titular Torture Sphere from the groundbreaking cautionary novel "Do Not Build the Torture Sphere". To his credit, he's more likable than Victor Frankenstein, but so are many types of cancer.
Though he never explicitly says the word "sheeple", he strongly and constantly implies it. The machines programmed by the despicable Cryptonomicon technocrats are now programming the normies and, at a slight delay, also the technocrats. It's like an ouroborous, but the snake somehow eats its own head.
The solution is basic and obvious. Quit it. Get off social media. It's poison, you're the product, it saps your motivation, it radicalizes you into something stupid and short-sighted against your will, it steals your creativity, it turns your attention into ad revenue and replaces it a la Indiana Jones with a big burlap sack full of mental illness.
Four stars because he's right. It's making us less human. It's behavior modification, it's a Skinner box that never gives you a reward and it's ruining your brain. One star off because he's cringe. Don't let that stop you from reading it, though. You've read and enjoyed a lot of books by authors who are cringe....more
I didn't know Carl had it in him. I liked the Cosmos series as much as the next pseudo-intellectual who wasted their teens and twenties red-eyed in a I didn't know Carl had it in him. I liked the Cosmos series as much as the next pseudo-intellectual who wasted their teens and twenties red-eyed in a cocoon of Zebra Cake wrappers, but I never really sat down and read one of his books. That's changing.
This was everything I liked about Species by Harari with everything cringe-inducing excised. Carl opens up with a brief history of the entire planet. His evocative descriptions of meteorites blasting the planet and glaciers falling from the sky set the scene for a sudden and unexplained 4 billion year jump to the life of Charles Darwin. From there, the narrative kind of weaves back and forth, eventually correcting its course to the dawn of man and our many similarities with animals.
Each chapter was fantastic, though some felt like they were just kind of slapped in there. The whole chimpanzee gang-war narrative, which I originally thought was an excerpt from the Outsiders until we got to all the fuck-words and placatory penis-stroking, came entirely out of left field and really would have benefited from a single italicized sentence of explanation.
Eventually the Geiger counter tottering resolved into a lancelike thrust into the idea that we're no different from animals, and baby, let me tell you something: I love when a book resolves into the idea that we're no different from animals. We're not! Morris calls us the naked ape but we're not even all the way hairless! We eat fruit and throw missiles and form strategic alliances for political self-advancement and have suspiciously large polygynous genitalia (some of us more than others). Elephants worship the moon, monkeys with walnut-sized brains have distinct calls to differentiate between types of predator and the response that the entire colony will then take. Very few animals engage in bloodshed when a harmless dominance display will do, especially as brain size and complexity increases. Even crows use tools.
There's nothing to distinguish us. We can placatorily penis-stroke all the we want about the accomplishments of civilization, but the animals have language, religion, tools, fundamental morality, foreplanning, higher reasoning, and, according to how it shows up in the brain scanners and hormone tests, love. We're not special. We just have a head start.
Ain't NOTHIN', fellas. We're meat from the ground. The good news is, we're not alone. SETI can pack it up, we don't need to find intelligent life, we need to admit we're not that much more intelligent than the animals we share space with. Especially given our insistence on ruining that space for everybody. At least you can train a dog not to shit on the carpet.
The first half of the book is great. Talks about animals and their emotions. Mostly anecdotal accounts of animals exhibiting behavior that's undeniablThe first half of the book is great. Talks about animals and their emotions. Mostly anecdotal accounts of animals exhibiting behavior that's undeniably emotion as a means of illustrating man's role as an animal and the fact that our emotions developed from the same common emotional pool as those experienced by animals.
The third quarter of the book is about how mad Bekoff is that his colleagues won't call these behaviors emotions, and how steamed he gets that they accuse him of anthropomorphising.
The final quarter of the book is him tootin on about how he's an ethical vegetarian and animals are mistreated in labs and factory farms. He says he apologizes to the animals in person because he thinks that makes a difference, even if the scientists go back to electrocuting the monkey's prostate right after. The book's raison d'être is him attempting to assuage his own guilt about the kittens he had to kill in cold blood back when he did animal research and ate meat.
Five stars for the first half of the book, 1.5 for the second half. Let's split the difference....more
I love books like this. Fat is good, sugar is evil, very clear in its delineation. Teicholz talks about that son of a bitch Ancel Keys and how he doomI love books like this. Fat is good, sugar is evil, very clear in its delineation. Teicholz talks about that son of a bitch Ancel Keys and how he doomed us all despite the fact he ate steak all the time. She also talks about the industries and lobbyists that stand to benefit from us eating cattle feed, in great detail. Most of the book is just poking holes in shoddy nutrition studies that have been taken as gospel, debunking the assumption that saturated fat is the boogeyman and that "whole grains" are going to do anything for our health except inflame the pancreas.
Now, it's true that for weight loss, so long as calories are held constant, it doesn't matter if you go low carb or low fat. However, if you choose low fat, you're going to wind up with a ton of deficient micronutrients because there are very few carb sources that contain nutrition of any kind. ...more
Great book. A little crunchy granola, even for an ape like me, but it's full of sound advice on moving around weird and how it helps your bones, mood,Great book. A little crunchy granola, even for an ape like me, but it's full of sound advice on moving around weird and how it helps your bones, mood, and children.
At the end of the audiobook, she left in her little bloopers from recording it in her closet, and the ADHD was immediately visible. And we're not just talking like, implied. It was a clarion. Trumpeting like fanfare. I was going to give it four stars but the esteemed load scientist Katy Bowman babbling, free associating, and narrowly reining in the suicide jokes really clinched the last one for me.
In retrospect, given that she's an outspoken champion of the Movement movement and coiner of the term "foot coffins", it follows that she would likewise be afflicted with the Can't Sit Still or Stop Freestyle Scatting disease.
Love this book, and all books like it. I recognized every name-drop Williams did. Every work cited in the text, I had already read, which is probably Love this book, and all books like it. I recognized every name-drop Williams did. Every work cited in the text, I had already read, which is probably why Goodreads kicked me toward this one next.
It's another one of those sitting is killing you books, great for confirming pre-established biases but with the caveat of taking it a few steps further. I've been recommending martial arts to my trauma patients for years. It might seem like common sense, but I was following a hunch, between the success of somatics in trauma treatment and the benefits you see in ADHD kids who buckle down into a well-structured martial arts program, both as an outlet for their excess energy and as a means of familiarizing themselves with consistency. Williams finally matched me with the studies and theorists that agree, kickboxing is the next best thing for a recovering PTSD patient, right after dancing.
Dancing is the best thing you can do for your mental health. There's probably some deep evolutionary or Jungian reason for that, but it doesn't matter. What matters is if you have PTSD, it's time to go to Zumba. Full stop. You're not gonna beat dancing in terms of empirically demonstrable positive mental (and, to a lesser extent, physical) health outcomes and you have to stop trying. But martial arts is a close second, and provides the benefit of empowerment in situations of conflict that you just don't get from dancing. Unless it's capoeira.
This strikes me as intuitive, because in most cases, what makes trauma so traumatic is the powerlessness you feel. If you know that you're capable of putting a potential assailant in a rear naked choke and killing them, it doesn't matter if you never have to prove that in real life. The carry-over into self-confidence and autonomy is going to be sufficient to drive your overall traumatic resiliency up a few notches.
The downside to this spectacular book, the New Testament addendum to Katy Bowman's initial gospel? Now I am moving at all times, and in stupid ways. Like an octopus rocked off stimulants. I'm bouncing off the walls. The wife says, "Can you stop shadowboxing everywhere in the house? It's making me nervous." Ableism, and flagrant. She maintains my spazzing out disease has gotten "much, much worse" since I stopped drinking coffee, and Caroline Williams has given me carte blanche to cartwheel around the yard right in front of God and Everybody.
Frig off dude. I'm moving my DNA.
As punchy a note as that would've been to end on, I've got to talk about the stretching. It turns out, stretching as hard as you can is NOT the best way to do it. You're supposed to half-ass the stretching, make it "gentle". That leads to greater relaxation and faster improvements in flexibility. Sort of like how you're not supposed to max out every time you lift, or you won't get stronger. Sort of like how zone 2 cardio is better for weight loss, recovery, energy recruitment, fat burning, and mitochondrial function than tempo runs or HIIT! Turns out, throwing 110% energy into everything you do DOESN'T help and in fact makes things worse.
Absolutely livid with this development, but it's nice to be informed....more
Fake food is addictive. A whole collection of studies that demonstrates eating processed food, sugar, or artificial sweeteners causes you to eat way mFake food is addictive. A whole collection of studies that demonstrates eating processed food, sugar, or artificial sweeteners causes you to eat way more food than you would otherwise and usually more than you're aware of. ...more
A good, quick read. Got through it in one day. If you're a practiced Luddite, you're familiar with the idea, but the delivery is more scientifically rA good, quick read. Got through it in one day. If you're a practiced Luddite, you're familiar with the idea, but the delivery is more scientifically reinforced than usual. I also liked how he didn't bother divvying up all the different flavors of addiction, and put drugs right alongside things like video games, slot machines, porn, and the many hours we delete from our finite mortality staring at Grief Rectangle. Dopamine is dopamine and that's as far as the brain is concerned.
Good book if you acknowledge the inalienable truth that the industrial revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for etc....more
It's not a self-help book. It's a memoir about how she likes to spend time in the woods. She writes beautifully, exactly two notches too good for it tIt's not a self-help book. It's a memoir about how she likes to spend time in the woods. She writes beautifully, exactly two notches too good for it to come off as the K-hole gibbering of the morning transcendental yoga event at a local music festival. Still, you can recognize its phylogeny.
Not much science, mostly nature sprinkled with spirit. No worse for that. It's a good book if you're into Japanese nature haiku, but Westernized, prose, and for hundreds of pages. Good thing I am....more
Lukas reached out to me with a free digital copy of the book and I banged through it in about three hours. It's an easy read, smoothly written, intuitLukas reached out to me with a free digital copy of the book and I banged through it in about three hours. It's an easy read, smoothly written, intuitive enough. Their voices are very different. Lowell is technical, like he's giving a report, whereas Lukas is more emotionally expressive.
It reads like shadow work. Maybe a kind of grief journaling? Lukas is drawing a connection with his father, identifying with his father, explaining why the man did the things he did. The interpretations are almost divinations. He's worshipful of his father, and able to identify many things that Lowell himself likely couldn't, due to an emotional intelligence that seems natural, but honed by all the psychotherapy.
It's not really a mental health memoir, though. It's a biography, certainly. There are elements of mental health in it. Lukas' advice is solid, especially regarding the physical movement and connection with nature (which is what earned this placement on my sought-after unga bunga bullshit shelf, the highest Goodreads honor I can bestow). Lowell blows his life up a few times, but bounces back more or less unscathed, and that is attributed to bipolar, but we don't really get a look at the nuts and bolts of it. Lowell's own reluctance to use emotionally charged language keeps us too distant from what he's actually going through, and Lukas shows up after to fill in the blanks, but the blanks he's filling in are his own. He imagines he can relate to the experience, and he's got a good claim to it - nature and nurture put them in similar boats, psychologically speaking - but he relates to what he perceives as having happened, which still puts him several degrees separated from whatever Lowell was actually feeling.
Lowell paints a picture of a busy life, and he's self-effacing enough that it mostly doesn't come off as boasting or self-pity. It's a demonstration that the disorder doesn't have to run your life. He worked around it, and we see the ways he worked around it, in encyclopedic detail, but also with encyclopedic detachment. It's a bipolar memoir with the bipolar experience excised, despite Lukas' best efforts.
Thanks for the book and the opportunity to review it, Lukas. For real, I like what you've done with the place. The exercise, the journaling, the medication as applicable, and the prioritization of connecting with nature and service work, I firmly share in your belief that those are the keys to getting where you're trying to be....more
Do not take the "unga bunga bullshit" shelf out of context, that's the highest honor I can bestow.
Digital Discipline is exactly that, an easy-reading Do not take the "unga bunga bullshit" shelf out of context, that's the highest honor I can bestow.
Digital Discipline is exactly that, an easy-reading treatise on how to stop being chained to your phone all the dang time. Grandma was right. Go out and play.
Mela knocks together a coherent argument that overreliance on technology makes us twitchy and weird. He's right. That's not up for debate. The language is accessible without being overly preachy, though some turns of phrase will catch you off guard. Here's my favorite:
For example, when new, promising drugs come to the market, they tend to be portrayed as wonder drugs. What happens next is that people try this new drug rather carelessly. After a while, reports of people with terrible side effects come with certain treatments. Then, regulations are eventually made. Both meth and cocaine were legal for many years before being prohibited. Sigmund Freud and Pope Leo XIII, among others, used cocaine before it was outlawed. Lobotomy was used as a medical treatment in the 1940s and 1950s. It was viewed as a miracle cure, even though it soon became clear that it had terrible side effects.
An utterly unhinged paragraph. Siggy F and the coke pope and then describing the brain damage consequent of lobotomy as "side effects". I am being authentic when I say this was the paragraph that elevated this review from 4 to 5 stars.
And like, he's right! All of those things are accurate and that is a valid read on the situation. We don't know what these pills do, which is why everyone's all chock full of mesothelioma. We don't know what the long-term consequences of looking at a glowing rectangle 12 hours a day will be. We don't know what it's going to do to our caveman hardware to replace all our meaningful relationships with brief, misspelled text messages.
But you know what? Probably not gonna be great!
The book is anti-TV and anti-video game, but especially anti-porn. Ties in nicely with the information provided by Gary Wilson in Your Brain on Porn, and Mela explains some rudimentary neuroscience, especially as applies to superstimuli.
If you obsess over the digital detox thing, you'll see a lot of familiar faces in the citations. If you're new to this, Digital Discipline is a good place to start.
A quick, pleasant read that leaves you feeling more meditative. Do your breathwork, do yoga in the woods, learn how to build a fire, hang out with racA quick, pleasant read that leaves you feeling more meditative. Do your breathwork, do yoga in the woods, learn how to build a fire, hang out with raccoons. It's the intersection of Paleo lifestyle, new-age shamanism, and a scooch of pilates. Good book, sound advice.
Cannot believe he named his child Stryder. I don't care how much you like Tolkien, dude. That's for his whole life....more
The usual. Eat food, eat more fat, lift heavy weights, do a little cardio, meditate. Nothing wrong with the classics. Five stars because it made some The usual. Eat food, eat more fat, lift heavy weights, do a little cardio, meditate. Nothing wrong with the classics. Five stars because it made some supplement recommendations and then justified them....more
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