Michael569

Moderator
  • Content count

    5,950
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by Michael569

  1. You know I was thinking this too. Its like the whole keto movement has died out a bit? I don't know its because eventually they all burned out and got back to carbs and disappeared from social or they keep going but secretly lie about their diets because they have two much invested at this point. Even their arguments have always been completely non-creative and not even interesting. Some of the other fad groups at least make effort to sound convincing or lean onto some form of evidence, albeit poor and cherrypicked but with keto it was always like "You don't even believe that yourself mate" From all the fad diets, keto & raw vegan are probably at the bottom of the barrel. Well, keeping a few like Jenny Craig, Weight Watchers, South Beach & Atkins aside ofcourse but those have kinda run their course at this point
  2. Are you willing to start somewhere? Some jobs require no prior experience nor prior education. They might not be the highest grade jobs but they will give you a kickstart point. Go online and see what's available in your town by literally googling [name of your city] + jobs. Or translated into your language
  3. I think the question here isn't necessarily about money psychology but more about obtaining some money on regular basis. The easiest answer to question "How to earn money" is to get employed. Are you able to do that or do you have barriers that prevent you from securing a stable employment? If there are barriers, do you know what they are? Simply asked: What do you think prevents you from getting a job?
  4. "you must construct additional pylons No, srsly this was fucking depressing. Feeling sorry for this guy but I'm pretty sure this was a spot on description to millions of life of lonely men. Replace that skateboarding with gym sometimes but other than that...scary
  5. I like this post. Simplicity, practicality and down to earth. I don't know if you are a video game person; I've been on and off throughout my life. There is a game called Project Zomboid, which is a game where you are basically trying to stay alive and healthy while keeping your mental health in check, in a world dominated by walking corpses. The head stomping of zombies and all the crafting aside, the video game character has to train to stay healthy, stay strong, and maintain good stamina, keep his mental health in check, maintain energy levels, healthy digestion, healthy immunity, stick to a good sleep routine, and interact with his environment in a way that does not deplete him too much. I am saying this because I find the mechanics of that game perfectly match the theme of your question: How do I stay healthy and well in a world that seems overwhelming? But perhaps instead of zombies, you have been fighting with depression. Let's get started. I will deliberately keep this response vague enough not to get lost in rabbit holes but on point enough not to turn this into poetry. Same as the Zomboid game, there are a few things you need to keep your eyes on, if you want to be able to withstand the challenges of the world: Your diet - needs to give your body everything it needs. Without going into too much detail, you should know how much protein you need, eat sufficient amount of healthy carbohydrates, keep your eyes on daily fibre intake and eat some healthy fats to keep your immune and hormonal system happy. Do your best to minimise the amount of processed food and learn some practical ways to make cooking easy and economical for yourself such as batch cooking, shopping in bulk and learning up to 10 recipes you can rotate. Your fitness - According to the wider research, the main predictors of longer healthspan are your V02 Max (your peak stamina), and your strength (as measured by grip strength and lower body strength). These two factors you must maintain across your life at a reasonable level. They not only slow down ageing process but protect you from a variety of metabolic problems, keeping your immune system vital. On top of that, you should put a little bit of focus into your mobility, joint health and some explosiveness to protect your fast twitch muscle from atrophying as they are the first one to go in ageing people. You can google how to train all of this or just throw this whole comment into chat GPT. Your psychological well-being - this may mean different things to different people, but it is about being able to match the demands of your environment without being overwhelmed and without being locked in a sympathetic drive (fight or flight) all the time. Whatever the tool is, this needs to be managed carefully. Regular meditation habit helps a lot of people keep this in check. Sleep is also essential Mental occupation - this is a 4th factor that is important. There needs to be something in your life that gives you a sense of inner stability and a sense of purpose. Something that pulls you out from bed in the morning and that helps you fall asleep at night knowing your life is making the world a better place, at least for someone, or something (the planetary wellbeing, the animals, the climate, the education of the youth ...whatever it is) Social component - Project Zomboid does not have this and it is one of the reasons why managing the character's mental health gets progressively harder as the game goes on. If you spend most of your time alone in a "cave" your mental health will tank. Nobody is protected from this. So figuring out a way to invite people in life will go a longway. Anyways, this is for some basics. You could add more categories and go elbows deep in each of them but if you stay on top of these 5 you'll be doing better than 90% of the population; happiness-wise and health-wise.
  6. Hey, thanks for sharing this. Loss of energy and fatigue can be caused by lots of different things and radical change of your diet might not always be the most viable solution, although sometimes it does help. Mood & focus deterioration are both closely tied to your energy levels. I have seen this over and over in guys I worked with. You fix one, the other follows pretty much instantly. What was your past diet like? Mark Sisson does bring forward lots of interesting ideas and I agree with some of his propositions around the negative effects of processed food and high-flour ingredients like processed carbs. But I don't think he fully appreciates the nuances between different types of carbohydrates. He sort of throws out the baby with the bathwater when recommending keto. Lot of his beliefs about carbohydrates and saturated fat are incredibly naive and show a complete ignorance of wider nutritional evidence. The difficulty with gain of muscle might be linked to low energy & mood and might be linked to diet missing certain components - enough calories, protein, carbohydrates etc. I am deliberately being vague because I don't want to break my ethics and give you generic advice based on little information but at the same time I am almost certain that keto is not the answer. A form of moderate carb, lower fat, moderate protein would probably be the way to go. However without more specifics I can't tell you where to begin.
  7. hey, Can I ask what led you to keto? Is there a desirable outcome you're following? Weigh loss or something of that sort? I have heard this theory before on low carb forums but it not the full story. If your muscle glucose was permanently depleted, say on low carb diet, you would end up paralysed due to complete ATP depletion. Your heart, being a cardiac muscle, would probably stop as well so your body would not want to do that. It is like wanting to deplete your lungs of oxygen. Your muscles will source glucose through gluconeogenesis via other pathways even if you deprive yourself of carbohydrates, in that case it will be sourced from fat or amino acids. it will then be deposited into muscles during sleep and during periods of rest. You can't reverse this. Its basically evolution of species. Humans move by using the leverage between muscle and a bone, all of that being orchestrated through the electrical impulses of your nervous system. For muscles to work, they need glucose derived from food or stored glycogen. Your body will always replenish intramuscular glycogen no matter how deprived (unless extremely starved) even if it has to break down your muscle mass to use amino acids. The failure to supply muscles with glucose would probably be the last thing before heart failure Keto can definitely be done but it needs to be approached carefully with a lot of planning otherwise the most common reason for people to quit is exreme fatigue to the point of depression. Seen it with a few of my past clients. You could start by tracking your caloric intake a see if you're getting everything you need. Gradually, if you do it well and your body can adapt effectively you will start slipping in an out of ketosis. How efefctively that happens is also derived from your genetics but also how long you have been doing this. Some people like to use blood ketone meters or urine ketone strips that you pee on - these can be fairly reliable to tell you how effectively your body is using ketones to meet metabolic demands. There are also breath tests but those can be a bit costly. But again before all of this, please be clear on the "why" before fully embarking on keto. Not everything shared in keto communities is alligned with the principles of human biology and a lot of it is a bit dangerous. A balanced diet with moderate carb intake is an option as well while you transition
  8. I want to explore this theory a bit because to me this is where the rubber meets the road. I like your reasoning and I think we can take the nerdy theory one step further What you are describing is indeed pathophysiology of atherosclerosis which I am no expert in but from literature on CVD I have read, this is roughly how it works. Given that, here is the next question: The penetration of ApoB containing particles (namely - LDL, VDLD , LP(a)) through tunica intima is, to my understanding, partially unavoidable as it is one of the imperfections of the human body.It is not the penetration itself that is the problem (they can escape back in the flow and this happens all the time same way electrolyte particles penetrate between extra and intracellular space inside the axon of the nerve cells) but it is their irreversible binding to the proreglycan structures, (these proteins hanging around between tunica intima & tunica media) that cause those particles to stay there. Once they are locked, they are fucked. So then Is it that ApoB particles (LDL, VLDL, Lp(a) ) get oxidised before they enter the subendothelial space? Or is it that they get oxidised after they get in there through their immobility? - I dont' understan the mechanism tho Is there something that makes oxidative particle more prone to entering the subentothelial space? This is what I am not clear about, maybe you have some insights to share. Are we 100% sure that oxidation does not happen inside subentothelial space rather than inside the circulation? Purely because those particles, after attaching to proteoglycans trigger immune response - macrophages enter the subendothelial space, trigger chemotaxic response, more immune cells are called on for, and all of that and they trigger inflammation. Inflammation is prooxidative - oxidation creates fallout and increases the odds of ApoB particle oxidation (those that are locked to proteoglycans because they can't escape). Macrophages gobble up the dead oxLDLs, they grow, turn in foam cells, get too "fat" and get stuck in the subendothelial space, they die & accumulate like a puss but in this case the puss can't get out - plaque starts building up - typical atherosclerosis right? Its kinda like a cyst but it builds in a space where it obstructs blood flow and can kill a person. Maybe this is the greatest imperfection of the human body and the reason most of us die as a result of heart disease? Because it is not 100% avoidable? So what if, the oxidative ApoB particles are actually the ones that are already locked in to proteoglycan structures? Are we really looking at the right space when we are testing patients for oxidated LDL through standard blood test Shouldn't we instead be looking at oxLDL content inside the subendothelial space? - where you would be more likely to see oxidated particles? (for obvious reasons that would be extremely hard to test without arterial biopsy which would be difficult, dangerous, unethical and expensive as heck). But isn't that what we see from tissues of post-mortem studies? Docked in oxidised ApoB particles inside subendotheliual space? @undeather might know more about this form his clinical practice & research Given that maybe the total LDL count that common tests are looking at is indeed the correct way to study this? Plus you want to know how many VLDLs and LP(a) you have so testing for ApoB and for LP(a) is a good idea for those who want to go deeper Interestingly this connects us to Pomegranate juice. To my knowledge, there are not very successful medication that can dislocate ApoB particles from proteoglycans but I think Punicalagins in PJ actually can. I have been toying around with idea of starting that consumption as well so I absolutely agree with you that there is somethign going on there which helps offset this damage. Maybe PJ is part of the answer. I don't think it can reverse plaque but maybe there is a timespan, say 72 hours (made that up) before those locked particles can still be dislocated before they trigger an army of macrophages? But what if that's not the right perspective to look at it? What if looking at it through the lenses of oxidative theory is again looking at consequence and not the cause? Maybe we need to be looking at , what increases the risk of ApoB particles (LDL, APoB, Lp(a) penetration into subendothelial space in the first place? Since it is not 100% avoidable, how can we minimise it? I would say, it starts with reducing the volume of ApoB particles in blood. There are 3 of them: LDL, VLDL & LP(a). Lp(a) is mainly driven by genetics to my knowledge so that one is hard to control without medication & strict lifestyle management (weight control etc.) I am not sure to what degree LP(a) is derived form diet. Maybe you know? LDL & VLDL are more likely to be impacted by diet and genetics for peope with familila hypercholesterolaemia. So then the ways to control isn't just to focus on antioxidant status but to focus on the penetration factor (as quirky as that sounds Blood pressure is an obvious one - control for blood pressure and you reduce the force driving the APoB particles through the arterial walls into subendothelium. Exercise, stay lean, don't smoke. Helps protect the arterial walls from stiffening, that's good and that's important. Reduce the total ApoB in diet mainly by reducing highest sources of APoB containing lipoproteins - animal foods with highest saturated fat content. (might be more complicated) control for total bodyweight, waist circumference and common antropomethric factors associated with hypertension take medication if diagnosed with FH I appreciate that this theory has holes but it makes sense to me that this is they key trigger and this is where it starts. Oxidation should be minimised through diet and I think we should actively be researching substances that help dislocate APoB particles from proteoglycans (such as pomegranate juice), I think PCSK-9 Inhibitors can do that too (and frankly I think this is where the future of cardiovascular medicine lies). Statins are helpful fro people who are unable to take control or who have genetic disorder - they prolong life but they do cause other issues, I'm with you on that and don't love them. I don't yet know where seed oils come into the mix. I also agree with you that human outcome data based mainly on prospective observation isn't perect but I'd say given the complexity, is the best we have. Maybe seed oils cna be treated as doubkle edged sword? They are more likely to oxidise but because they displace saturated fats (people more likely to eat more PUFA will usually eat less SFA) they decrease the probability of excessive LDL migration into subendothelium? Just a speculation. Honest answer here is I don't know and I haven't yet come to final consensus on seed oils. I'm interested to keep this debate going, this is a topic close to my heart as I, same as you, have seen people close to me, succumb to it. I think you make a lot of good and interesting points. Agree with some, disagree with some but overall I love this discussion.
  9. what I noticed is that there is a tendency among women (but also men) on the internet to almost try to create self-suffering where there isn't one. It is almost as if the demand for suffering has far outweighted the supply of it in western societies where the basic anxieties of survival are fully covered. Hence all the gender wars, Gaza discussions, constant cries about inquality, intolerance, opression of masculine patriarchy. Its like we have run out of problems and we are trying very hard to create them so that we have something to bicker about?
  10. it would make sense that it happens the same way the oxidised particles do? Sheer randomness and through the pressure of the pumping. Maybe the progression is identical to the way oxLDL gets there and what happens after is exactly the same - monocyte adhesion, inflammation, foam cell accumulation etc etc. In that case the main determining factor would be, how many particles per ml of blood do you have and what are the odds of them ending up in subendothelial space. Do we know anything about the size and the ease of luminal penetration? That would be an interesting factor to study.
  11. Thank you for sharing! First time I heard about microplastics connected to anything other than endocrinology. I wasn't able to find the full paper but curious is there is a chance of correlative factor? What did they control for? For example we could proabbly make the assumption that folks with worse lifestyles overall will be more "full of" microplastics due to buying a lot of takeaway drinks, heating up plastic containers, not filtering their water, eating from takeaway containers , eating more processed food etc etc. Curious if that was looked at? Either way, this is scary! Dod they explain the suspected pathophysiology?
  12. To anyone who has taken the time to understand the nuances of nutrition, statements like these are just laughable because it shows your own ignorance. I don't mean that in any negative way but you just haven't explored enough. You got complacent too early. Trust me I have been there when I discovered Robert More and then Veganism, suddenly everything made sense and I though I had answers to everything. I was buying herbal tinctures, doing enemas and convincing myself that iam detoxing my parasites and viruses and what have you. Then I realised all these extreme diets are mostly bs stemming from experiences of a few people who have been very sick and have found some help and then decided that they would be a wise commercial opportunity or that everyone should follow it. But guess what, life isn't that black and white. Things aren't just bad or good just because a guy on the internet says so. You don't need to eat raw diet to be healthy and to stay healthy. AV had a myeloma and a few other major health problems, maybe he had to....maybe. I don't know. But most people certainly don't have to eat raw meat. In fact it would be highly detrimental to the society if that turned out to be the case. You can be perfectly happy on a balanced diet and your life does not need to slide into this monotonous misery where you will just disagree with everyone and this new thing becomes an obsession that completely clouds your judgement so that you end up trying to convince the internet that it is wrong. We had AV topics here many times and we had many carnivores and vegans and raw meat eaters. We had people drinking piss around here. We had folks gazing at sun at the midday. We had insaney crazy vegans, rude and ruthless carnivores. The forum has seen it all. This is nothing new, these topics are argued all over the internet. But for heaven's sake don't be so lazy with your health and keep digging and keep researching, you will be surprised that the further you go, the simpler the answers become and you get to a stage where you realise what you have been told by others isn't mostly all bad. Wishing you well man, don't settle so easily. You only have one health, don't wreck it needlesly
  13. It's all good man, it takes a lot of willpower, education and support to get oneself off that stuff. A lot of people are vulnerable and easily exploited not just by unhealthy food manufacturers but also charlatans on the internet. As a fellow health therapist, it is one of the things that fuels my desire to do better. All the best to you and your practice
  14. Adjusted HR 5.04 Low vs Elite V02 Max fuuuuuuck !! . That is absolutely insane, I've not seen this stat before. What constitutes low and what constitutes elite? Also what constitutes High & Average in this chart. is this for ACM?
  15. Ofcourse. Diet is a paramount component of a healthy body. That is debatable. For example being skiny with a low BMI does protect you more from things like cancer and heart disease (to some extend) but makes you more prone to osteoporosis. After the age of 65, about 20-25% of people who fall and break a loading hip or a loading bone die in the hospital. Of those who make it out of hospital (often resulting in major loss of muscle mass and further loss of bone mass) about third die within 12 months as a consequence of prolonged immobiity, infection or heart problems. Of all those who make it past year 1, almost 100% will suffer chronic consequences such as limping, pain and higher risk of infection, falling and another fracture. Falling and breaking a hip is one of the most common ways to die after 65. And the main risk factor for osteoporosis besides being female, old or postmenopausal is low body weight.
  16. @Yousif Don't forget that the rest of your body suffers wear & tear as much as your muskuloskeletal system does. Let's take an example of a person who does not exercise and they end up with hypertension (high blood pressure). Because their heart has to work harder all the time, there is more sheer pressure on the lining of their arteries and this is causing progressive damage which leads to inflammation and a deposition of a plaque (complex topic simplified). On the other hand, you have a very active individual with normal blood pressure in whom this is not happening but yes, his joints are under more wear & tear and he might need surgery in his 50s or 60s for knee or pelvic joint. Maybe the argument should be - which poison are you going to choose? Would you rather that your heart and vascular system works extra hard or that your mobility aparatus does. Which one is easier to reverse and repair? Which one will kill you faster? What @undeather is saying is that exercise won't necessarily make you live longer (it might) but it slows down the first onset of health problems and helps you age better without less pain and less disease
  17. That's true, overweight & obese people tend to eat a lot of processed food which is heavily based on processed wheat flour, sugar and fat. Granted, no argument at all there. But as a therapist & a professional you need to be precise and accurate when demonising major food groups for your clients otheriwise it makes you seem like an amateur. That's all I'm saying. The answers are probably deeply rooted in people's environment, habit, psyche and upbringing rather than sugar addiction which is more like a consequence of somethign else. Anyway, I'll let this go, thanks for the response.
  18. ^ nice comment
  19. @Yousif why not put it to the test. Stop all forms of exercise,and see how you feel 3 months from now
  20. It seems like you have already decided that you would not accept counterarguments. Was this post supposed to be more like a journal entry? We have a Journalling section for that. You could further distil your arguments if you want the forum to comment. Start with why you believe wheat is unhealthy. You seem to hint back to wheat repeatedly, which makes me assume that there is something in wheat that, if removed from processed food, would render the processed food....healthy? Less unhealthy? So the question is, Why is wheat bad? What is the evidence? What is the argument? Otherwise, the tone & the overarching theme of this post seem rather childish. "I am angry at the world because the world does not bend to my will; I blame evil corporations, greed and sugar."
  21. Thank you for raising this post 🙏❤️
  22. It is but you need to calibrate it precisely by filling in the customizable section in your profile (not sure if this is a feature of 3.5 too) otherwise it remains fairly basic. GPT4 can do really in depth analysis with whatever variables you give him even for thinks where it has to imagine hypothetical concepts, time & space orientation or where your descriptions remain fairly vague, I found it is extremely intuitive even if given brief promt only. It also works well with photos, printscreens, drawing, videos and giving it simplistic instructions and combine them with hypothetical and vague instructions. For example I use it to help me practice copywrighting for very theorectical scenarios giving it tons of random variables and asking it to critically assess not just things like grammar but style of voice, tone of voice,syntax, word repetition, consistency wth certain branding guidelines that I gave him previously like tense, wording, language, the way I write things compared to the way I used to etc. I find it can detect extremely subtle things and feed those back to me. I even tell him what to focus on during feedback and it still does that very well. Given enough instructions, you can learn it to talk certain way, respond certain way, perceive situations through the lenses of your instructions but again that depends on what you do with it. it still has a tendency to use a lot of sales & cheesy language so that needs to be paid attention to. The limit is is a downside but it is like 50 messages in 3 hours, I've never come even close to that. I also like Dall-E and it is fun to play around with but not something I use for professional use as the results still look too AI-ish compared to Midjourney for example. Overall it is worth the price and you can unsub anytime. Again, depends on what it does for you. Don't upgrade if you are using it to answer basic questions only if you want to do a lot of speculative workor type of work that require subtlety and precision.
  23. Sounds like you are trying to justify avoiding the gap you need to bridge through significant amount of personal development to be where they are. Very few, that's true. Until that oxy is out of your system. And what happens if you ever get into a situation where you have nothing outside of yourself to depend on anymore? I am not bashing on anyone, the response was an attempt to add subtle humour into what I thought was an unreasonable way to approach something as simple as going out,. But you do you, don't let me or anyone else tell you what to do. Every being has a unique way of how they are approaching their life. Maybe for some, this is indeed a must, maybe I'm just too old to understand it
  24. You know back in the days when I was a teenager (I'm 33 now), I'd just hit the gym and get a massive pump, smash an extra-chicken kebab, and that kinda spiked my confidence and mood sounds like you're trying to medicate a major social anxiety there. Treat the root cause and you'll be good when meeting women without needing to rely on brain-chemistry altering stuff