Drink less, exercise more – advice on pandemic living from an 18th-century poem
theconversation.com
theconversation.com
Every time I got annoyed with what I was coding I'd go over and do one pull up. Typing that made me realize I basically followed meme advice. But it works.
I've lost 22.5% of my bodyweight and reduced my waistline from 36 down to 32.
> A majority of adults (61%) reported experiencing undesired weight changes since the start of the pandemic, with more than 2 in 5 (42%) saying they gained more weight than they intended. Of this group, adults reported gaining an average of 29 pounds (with a typical gain of 15 pounds, which is the median).
Have had exactly the same experience: walked and cycled more (and progressively faster); eaten better home-cooked food (presumably adding less fat, salt and sugar than city-center lunch food); enjoyed the fresh air of open windows and a balcony instead of the stultifying atmosphere of an air-conditioned office; and generally rested, focused and felt better than ever.
Went back to the office last week buckling under the drive from senior colleagues to get back to “normal”. Now have a cold and a mild chest-infection.
That being said, a mild cold is nothing compared to the stress and pressure and exposure that everyone else lower on the totem pole has been subject to while supporting your comfortable WFH arrangement.
We're all in this together, right?
But yes, as someone who has been working remote even before the pandemic, I have had a similar experience. It's great being able to exercise between tasks, fast for most of the day, and overall have more control over my schedule. If I ever have to work in an office again, I know I will gain a minimum of 10 lbs. Group lunches, the desire of management to have you be there even if there's no meetings, no real ability to exercise during the day without being a weirdo, and commute time would take its toll. For me, that environment is evil.
I've certainly worked places where exercising at lunch would get you labelled as anti-social. Of course, this is the same place that would cause snickers and thought people were "weirdos" for being vegetarian or even ordering healthier options of food.
No.
EDIT: LOL, I submitted that before finishing my thought.
It's just been my experience that people frequently remark on differences in the workplace and I just get tired of frequently explaining my habits to never gain anything from it.
That combined with the uncertainty of even being near people outdoors for a few months killed the rhythm I had for mountain biking, hiking, and climbing. It took me about 9 months to adjust my food intake for this, and as a result I gained 15 pounds.
Luckily in the last three months I've gotten back on to a good active hobby schedule and adjusted my diet a bit and I'm just a few pounds above where I was!
Congrats on the weight loss!
If you stay in a calorie deficit and eat enough protein, you can lose fat and gain muscle at the same time which is nice :)
Cardio seems to be good for overall health so I do a bit of that too sometimes, but I don't think it's strictly needed for fat loss.
Some form of exercise and a sustainable diet is all that's needed really. If you do both of those things in any way, you'll be way healthier than the average person.
Come on people, get vaccinated and wear a damn mask! If we could do it, so can you!
We still have anti-mask groups demonstrating by the way. Though that mandate was lifted a few months back. Really interesting how Facebook has brought together the stupid people in their common cause… but maybe, just maybe there really is a problem with misinformation on the platform when the crazies are still forming up to protest something that isn’t there. :o
You do your part individually and that is the best you can do. All you are doing when you post something like this is causing a visceral reaction in the people that need to get vaccinated of "fuck you internet guy, I am not listening to you, I am not getting vaccinate!"
The people I know that are not vaccinated are this exactly. They are so pig headed that if you preach at them they will dig in their heals and do the opposite almost automatically. We need people to just shut up about this already and dial everything back so it is not some admission of defeat for pig headed people who haven't got the vaccine to actually do so.
Are you trying to change people’s mind or show that you are enlightened.
The preaching about damn masks does not change minds. That’s the point. Maybe a compassionate understanding of why people refuse is better. What’s that old saying “before they care you got to show that you care about them”
This IS about society. Only 60? 70% agree that masks / vaccines are imperative. This leaves a large minority that society needs to work with.
This is not an education problem. This is a hearts and minds problem and so to the original OP. Feel before you speak such things to make it counter productive to yours and dare I say society’s goals.
Or at least pay for your own covid test that clears you for a visit into society for 24 hours.
We can’t be burdened by the village idiot forever.
Stop comparing the two.
We've been wearing pants for several centuries now, this vaccine is new. The mRNA vaccines are not the same as past vaccines in either their immediate effect (I was zonked out for three days) or in their long-term effects (which, despite how safe they seem so far are simply not tested long term).
I say this as somebody who is fully vaccinated (Johnson & Johnson).
the vaccine technology is both new and old. most vaccines come with various levels of immediate side effects, and anecdotally, the COVID-19 ones seems to be at least as safe in this regard as any other vaccines that have been administered to hundreds of millions of people. It is true that the long term effects are unknown, and there could be some. However, most immunologists seem to be of the consensus that most after-effects from vaccines take place within a fairly narrow window, which we are now firmly out of for very large numbers of people. That doesn't rule out some hitherto unknown and unforeseen long side effect, but it does make it rather unlikely.
Consequently, taking the vaccine is reasonably considered "adult social behavior" at this point, and is therefore analogous to "wearing pants".
This hypothetical person was never going to get vaccinated anyway. The only way "preaching" would cause the outcome you describe would be if that adult had the maturity and oppositional defiance of a toddler.
From my circles, the vaccine/mask defiance is mostly about what is perceived (wrongly in my opinion, but still) as an overreach from the state, and as a risky bet that they might not want to take.
While I agree with you that this thinking is most probably coming from disinformation/propaganda, by countering it with condescension ('If we could do it, so can you!', 'brought together the stupid people') is the most definite way to have those people become defensive and stick to their opinion.
Maybe you don't care about changing people mind and just want to score internet points from people already convinced, but be aware that it is what you're doing.
And, while there are a lot of confounding factors, of course, there seem to be fewer people buying all the horse drugs in countries where the media was dismissive of them, vs in countries where parts of the media both-side-ed it.
This makes media handling of some of these claims in comparison to flat-earthers a bit more understandable, whether or not time eventually shows it to be justified or not.
Most if not all of what I have said to such people is often met with responses like "No", "fake news", "watch this video by Dr. So-and-so". Or them flat out talking down to me thinking I'm a dumb person on the fence about it when in reality I'm far from on the fence about it.
People on here laugh at those drinking bleach to "own the libs", oh those stupid conservatives. Have you ever considered how much you have to antagonize and anger people to push them to do this?!
This is not about the virus, as they say. This is not about the vaccine either. Many people across the world feel angry, ignored for years and powerless to change the status quo. They are miserable and see absolute contempt from the politicians. The same ones who now call for them to end the pandemic ASAP and go back to how things were before. The whole antivax fake news stuff taps directly into people's mistrust. When you live for years with the feeling "omg, these people are definitely lying to me", it takes just a few videos to confirm this: "oh yeah, they are _definitely_ lying to me and I am not alone to realize this". Go figure this out first.
If it is mistrust toward the state, how come it comes from the same groups that treat calls for police accountability as attack on police, support both military and police in pretty much any situation? That pushes for having cops as armed as possible? The same groups that right now managed to make abortion fully impossible in Texas? Whose primary approach to social issues is to make punishments higher?
If it is against corporations, why is it coming from the same party that is actively and systematically working to make corporations stronger?
> People on here laugh at those drinking bleach to "own the libs", oh those stupid conservatives. Have you ever considered how much you have to antagonize and anger people to push them to do this?!
Have you considered that the whole "own the libs" and "trigger the libs" is conscious attempt to make your opponents angry? And that those opponents do react to it too? That is the whole point, antagonize people you are owning or triggering.
And that is somehow fault of people who you go out of way to antagonize?
I got my 2 shots, I wear a mask when required. I don’t care even a tiny little bit what everyone else does. I can’t control them nor do I care to try.
This is not a recipe for solid public health policy. Maybe it's fine as an individual life choice, but COVID-19 is a public health condition, not a private one, and requires public health responses, not private ones.
It really drives me nuts when people take the attitude “I know what’s best for you, you’re too stupid to be able to make your own decisions. I’m really smart and I’ll decide for you.”
COVID-19 is a public health issue, not a personal health issue, and the required strategies for public health issues are not related to individual making the choice of "what's best for them."
Had COVID-19 been discussed and described correctly from the outset, this whole angle that "I know what's best for me" would have been appropriately cut off at the ankles before it even got started. Instead, we now face a situation where even the people who have been vaccinated likely did so thinking of it as a personal choice.
I am really struggling to figure out how you don’t think it’s a personal decision. Surely you don’t think people are anything but utterly selfish and self-centered.
I don’t think it was framed as a personal decision, I think it was an organic bubbling up of how people actually feel. If you’re suggesting we should be trying to manipulate how people feel, we’re on such different pages that this conversation will no longer be sustainable.
However, the risk to public health systems is immense. Too many people getting COVID-19 at the same time (let's remember that even with out Delta, it's remarkably contagious), and whatever fraction of them require hospitalization start jamming up the hospitals. Now, your regular everyday trauma, acute disease or sudden worsening of a chronic condition becomes a potentially fatal incident, because the hospitals can no longer treat you (at all, or even just effectively).
That is the actual risk of COVID-19 in terms of a nation-state, and what nation-state would say "oh, it's just a a personal decision whether or not you take steps to help avoid that scenario"? Rhetorical question, because we known precisely which ones have taken that approach, and what the results have been.
The issue is, it doesn’t matter. People don’t care. They think they’ll either not catch it, or not need to be hospitalized if they do. Or I suppose, they just don’t trust the contents of the shot. At this point I think it is impossible to get those people to change their minds for whatever reason they’ve latched on to.
The reality remains that any given individual's chance of becoming seriously ill, let alone dying, from COVID-19 is extremely small. The problem is not this risk, but instead the risk that large numbers of people will be sick enough to require health care, particularly hospitalization and even more particularly ICU facilities, all within a very short period of time, causing overload of health care systems and many more unnecessary deaths from things other than COVID-19 due to the impairment of the health care system.
But instead, huge chunks of the media/culture discuss COVID-19 in terms of personal risk. The personal responsibility that we have to each other in a pandemic like this is not a question of "I should do X because I might die of it", but rather "I should do X to reduce the risk that others will die of it and other illness".
And no, "your health is and always has been your best defense" is a ludicrous position. It's abundantly clear that none of our socially-understood markers for "good health" are guarantoors of "covid will not kill you".
Then why is it typically those same people that want to remove women's ability to have an abortion?
A couple of my group chats that are exclusively other black male expats, with origins ranging from Canada to the US to Kenya, are full of shared meme images and videos about the risks/dangers of COVID vaccination. Vehement opposition includes our one ER nurse-turned-millionaire-day-trader, and an aerospace engineer in the UK....We're definitely not a demographic screaming against abortion....hell, abortion saves a bunch of us from child support payments. (I'm only being slightly facetious).
Long story short, I would suggest broadening your information exposure if you think only "those people" are hesitant/opposed to rushed COVID-19 vaccines being rammed down our throats by the same governments who approved of prescription opioids and the Tuskegee Experiment.
[1]https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/issue-brief/latest-...
[2]https://www.politico.com/news/2021/06/07/vaccine-equity-blac...
It is incredibly condescending that these people think we can't differentiate between different usages of the word master.
I refuse to be a part of that.
I have yet to see it deployed toward those who try to emasculate guys who were masks, insist on framing choice to do as cowardly fear and so on. Btw, "nanny state" expression is exactly that. Or against those who exaggerate restrictions that exist in order to paint opposite side as super unreasonable. Sometimes in the future, if that applied to people who brag about triggering liberal snowflakes and such.
As of now, to the extend there are sides, the "be nice dont offend" expectation is put on exactly one side, usually in order to make them shut up.
>Personally I’ll stick with a firm insistence that Covid presents serious risks, vaccines are safe and effective, and the inability to comprehend a scientific paper
This comes across as based on the assumption that people are rational and, when presented with evidence, will weight that evidence accordingly. Unfortunately, that's just not how humans evolved to extrapolate about reality. Anyone who's ever debated online knows that simply presenting information isn't an effective way to persuade somebody. We're emotional creatures more than we are rational ones. There's lots of research on this (my favorite domain for this subject is behavioral econonmics) but a quick, interesting and related read that touches on this topic is Scott Adams' Win Bigly.
To the OP's point, speaking in condescending tone, regardless of the 'rightness' of your point, isn't likely to persuade someone because it will illicit an even stronger emotional resistance.
My point was mainly about the self-congratulatory tone of the message above, whose main effect is to :
- create tension with people that disagree
- gain approval from people that already agree
And in the end make the subject more tense than it has to be. No one bats an eye for other mandatory vaccine, this one creates tension because of propaganda campaigns and some valid concerns (like mrna vaccine being pretty new), but the answer to those tensions is not exacerbating an "us vs them" mentality
I keep hearing people suggest that we can’t be condescending because we shouldn’t offend anyone or make anybody feel bad and I am not seeing it do much good. Shame is a powerful social mechanism and I don’t see why we shouldn’t use it. What are you actually proposing? A clear statement of facts is a good start, but what do you recommend after that?
I’m not American, I don’t share your sentiments about letting people be people. A society is you and me and everyone else in it, working together. If you chose to work against the wider us for no good reason, then you’re no longer part of our society. Being anti-science is not a good enough reason for anyone to defend you around here.
Working together implies listening to the other side, even if you disagree and in the end choose to ignore it.
And being reluctant to the vaccine is not "anti-science" : it is after all a relatively new technology (mRNA vaccines have been experimented for more or less 10 years), that is being made widely mandatory, and it would not be the first time a new medicine is discovered to have fatal side effects after some time (the Mediator case comes to mind : https://www.france24.com/en/france/20210329-mediator-trial-f...).
To me, the cost-benefit analysis makes me overwhelmingly pro-vaccine, and I've debated as such multiple time, but what mainly disturbs me is that I find a lot of people from my side debating with ad-hominems (you're anti-science, stupid people, you're with us or against us, etc...) instead of trying to debate actual points and fears.
There are people debating in bad faith on the other side as well, that's for sure, but to me the best is not to engage them at all, and most of all not to debate in bad faith yourself either, as it is not a much better place to be a parrot of government propaganda than it is to be a parrot of conspirationist propaganda.
Not parent, but the thing that made me think you were from the USA was this line:
> From my circles, the vaccine/mask defiance is mostly about what is perceived (wrongly in my opinion, but still) as an overreach from the state, and as a risky bet that they might not want to take.
... and the rest of your post declined / forgot to mention where you were, or what kind of circles you were in.
Typically that's a trait of people that live in the USA.
> And being reluctant to the vaccine is not "anti-science" :
It really is.
Unless you're claiming statistics (epidemiology) is not a valid branch of science, in which case, okay, you really are more likely to die / suffer massive long term health nastiness from COVID19 than from any of the vaccines.
You refer to 'sides' being a bad way to describe things, but seem to rely heavily on the us / them dichotomy to try to make your points.
If a serious enough pandemic arises, you won't have to change minds. Real fear of the pandemic will be enough.
I don't know anybody, who knows anybody who died or was even hospitalized due to covid. All the fear and alarm has to be manufactured.
If the virus mutated to be like the Spanish flu antivaxxers would be singing a different tune. But nothing as bad happened.
And these panicky people saying "we're in the middle of a pandemic" are funny, like they haven't been outside for years - go out, the majority, vaccinated or not, doesn't give a fuck about Covid anymore.
Lives are pretty much back to normal, minus international travel and half-arsed safety in stores.
You seem to be extrapolating an n=1 scenario to the population as a whole ("I" --> "All"). Are you then implying anyone who does know somebody sick or hospitalized has warranted fear?
I'm not talking about whether it is warranted or not, but if you know somebody sick or hospitalized, the fear you experience from that is likely to be very impactful, and you will be more inclined to get a vaccine based on that.
While I think your idea of a nudge may work, it may not be feasible in the U.S.
I also think its premature to think Denmark is out of the woods, considering that covid is following seasonal patterns and high vaccination rates don't seem to be avoid high infection rates. I hope you are right, but I am skeptical. There is a strong possibility you will return to these restrictions by the end of the year when the winter starts. We will see.
It’s not thinking. This was our intentional strategy, and we were only capable of opening society and removing restrictions because we followed the plans.
We are now gearing up to start round 3 of the vaccinations.
How you can even debate the effectiveness of these vaccines is beyond me. It’s anti-science for no good reason. The vaccines work, every country that used them is getting to a place where the hospitals aren’t bogged down with dying people.
Meanwhile the “akzhually” anti-science people in America are still dying in droves…
> Covid-19 death rates 10 times higher in countries where most adults are overweight
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/03/04/health/obesity-covid-deat...
It’s fairly easy to explain why we have 600-800 a day even though it’s not “record outbreaks”.
Part of it is the 72% and who the 20% something that can still get vaccinated are (children), part of it is delta being capable of infecting vaccinated people as well as people who have already had covid, but the biggest reason is that we’ve opened society again with no restrictions.
We are capable of doing this because of the 72%, because even though we have 600-800 new cases a day, which while it’s not record numbers is still significantly higher than what we had when we first locked down, almost nobody ends up with severe cases. Which means our hospitals are empty by comparison to the first lockdown.
You can argue about the morality of opening society with just 72% instead of waiting until we’re near 90% but that’s a different discussion.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/30/israel-doubles-down-on-covid...
The virus is going to be around forever. There's no need for restrictions, we just need to accept the risk and move on.
For example here in Iceland (84% >12yo are fully vaccinated) we've increased restrictions but not nearly as much as we did for prior outbreaks and have substantially more tourists coming through the country. But at the same times as we've had many more infections we've had considerably fewer hospitalisations. Right now we're having kids go back to school and that's causing a spike in unvaccinated infections.
The problem with looking just at headline numbers is you miss all the context.
It's important to note that while outbreaks are definitely happening, hospitalisations and deaths are way down compared to previous waves.
In a highly vaccinated population going forward, the number of cases is utterly irrelevant. The only thing that actually matter is the number of hospitalizations and deaths.
Remember - long term, literally everyone is going to get covid. That is the only possible future. The goal is hopefully to have everyone double vaccinated before they catch it so their symptoms are mild when they do.
Should we stop bullying others to get vaccinated then?
Instead of a simple comparison to hand washing, you're saying people should "look at the odds" and somehow make a judgement call. Well, that's a much different request, and is open to a lot of variation, uncertainty, personal bias, etc. It really isn't as simple as "it's just like washing your hands".
The uncertainty and personal bias is what you're trying to inject into a very clear cut decision when you conflate the extremely rare possible side-effects from vaccination with the far more common effects of contracting COVID. If you look at a large population, yes, there are a few people who will have a significant negative reaction to a vaccine but for each of them there are many thousands of people who will have worse outcomes from the actual disease.
Similarly, people who are vaccinated are far, far less likely to require medical care. That reduces the load on the medical system — think about all of the complications we're seeing now because people with non-COVID problems are unable to get attention promptly — and a significant percentage of the money for treating more serious COVID cases will be paid by people other than the patients through some combination of taxes, insurance, and overhead costs (e.g. American ERs aren't allowed to refuse care since Reagan socialized them which means those expenses are added to everyone else's bill).
https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-immu...
Vaccinated people who get infected are probably contagious for a shorter period. However that only marginally reduces the risk of contagion for any individual interaction. Over an extended period of time everyone will be exposed.
Think of it like a soccer goalie defending against an endless series of penalty kicks. He might block the first few but eventually a ball will get through.
That's fine and understandable, but it suggests different communication. If the problem is resource management / availability then instead of talking about how many people per capita are infected and rates of infection, talk about the resource usage, and rate of availability. I think I did see one interview with a hospital manager nearly in tears about potentially having to make lethal resource based decisions, but it's far from a daily talking point like the simple case rate is.
I'm not going to. I'll stick with natural immunity, thanks.
Natural immunity acquired by recovering from an infection provides more effective protection than vaccination.
https://www.science.org/content/article/having-sars-cov-2-on...
For patients who were previously infected, vaccination cuts the risk of reinfection in half. However it's unclear how long that additional protection lasts.
Very much not true.
Literally many people will die if they get COVID (f.e. the extremely young, or the many people that are immuno-compromised) so there's lots of other people that are keen to get populations as widely vaccinated as possible, to reduce the effective R0 as much as possible, to make sure they don't die.
https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-immu...
Fortunately the extremely young are at very low risk of death.
https://www.who.int/news/item/16-03-2021-new-research-highli...
A year ago we didn't have a vaccine, and now more than half the population of most western nations are vaccinated. The idea that we have no alternative but to 'surrender to delta' because it's inevitable that 'literally everyone will get it' is depressingly pessimistic.
We can apply the above remedies, while developing and distributing booster shots that cover delta.
Similar applies to various other VOI/VOC's on (or not yet on) the radar.
I did not watch the video on which it's based, of course, as time is finite.
GP (and to an extent, Prof Pollard) are asserting these things based on a number of assumptions -- pessimism (perhaps justified) about the callous thoughtlessness of many ersatz citizens, the current set of vaccines are all we shall have available into the future, delivery mechanisms will continue to require injections (slow, difficult, discourages some non-trivial subset of the population), and will continue to not be available to younger children.
If all those were true, then perhaps.
Happily, not all those are true.
Anyway, I was railing against the claim that 'literally everyone is going to get COVID' as an unavoidable future. I shall continue to rail.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/10/delta-variant-...
How on earth can we get out of lockdowns and get back to living our lives, unless we fully expect everyone to catch covid?
We've already proven time and time and time again you can't eradicate it with lockdowns (see Australia & NZ right now), so it will always be around. And we know vaccinated people can still pass it on to others.... so eventually everyone is going to have to have it if they want to interact with others.
I genuinely don't understand how life can go on any other way
You're painting two extremes and asserting one's not possible, and thereby concluding the other is ineluctable.
We've proven we can eliminate it (witness NZ and large parts of Australia), and assuming a policy of full vaccination and arrival / subsequent swab tests for visitors, it's quite feasible that once we've got most people in Australia vaccinated, propagation pathways can be well tracked, and propagation rates can be kept very low.
NZ too are in the middle of another outbreak and using severe lockdowns isn't making it go away.
And even still, if Australia somehow did manage to keep a lid on it - anyone that wants to leave the country is surely going to go to a place that has much higher rates, and they'll likely get it. Then they want to come back into Australia - will there be the mandatory 2 week quarantine forever? (I paid $3k a few months ago).
It's simply not a viable long term future.
Take your pick from vanilla incompetence, hubris, insouciance, or any of the various commercial or political intrigues to explain this torpid initial response that has brought us to where we are.
> NZ too are in the middle of another outbreak and using severe lockdowns isn't making it go away.
I see they've had 25 new cases today. Is this 'out of control'? It feels a long way from 'everyone is going to have to get COVID, there's no other way'.
As to your last question, yes, it's quite palatable for me that anyone who leaves the country and returns would submit to a test on arrival, quarantine at home for 2 weeks with subsequent tests at 7 and 14d.
What happens in 6, 12, 24 and 48 months?
How do you Keep covid out, forever?
Also, what about the other 99.9% of the world's population - surely they're all going to get covid sooner or later.
Hopefully the vast majority are double vaccinated before they get it, but like getting a common cold, it's essentially inevitable if we want to go back to mass sporting events, bars and clubs, mass public transport, planes, etc. etc.
The approach I described (home quarantine & testing regime for people arriving from overseas) is tenable and not too controversial - certainly much more palatable, and probably more effective, than the current (enforced hotel quarantine). Would need to be combined with proper deterrents for idiots wilfully subverting that process (we have been objectively atrocious at implementing or enforcing legal deterrents for anti-social behaviour on the COVID front).
Over the 24-48 month period you're demanding an answer for - my naive expectation is twofold. Many populations will have delta sweep through well within that period, resulting in large demographics of delta-immune people. (Note - this doesn't mean I want to live in such a place, just that it will happen.)
Second, we'll have booster & variant-specific vaccinations developed within that time, possibly with nasal delivery - meaning very fast, less contentious (higher uptake), and probably cheap.
Maybe condescending to people will work this time.
I'm not sure if the sarcasm is just flying over my head, but the reason why the rest of the world is in lockdown is because we are discovering that even with 100% vaccination rates health systems can collapse and death rates can still be in the ballpark of 5 per million per day.
The US governments have decided that those are acceptable losses and there is nothing to be done about them.
https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/coronavirus-denmark-removes-...
The vaccination or natural immunity, whilst not sterilising, has been proven incredibly effective.
Mask wearing on the other hand is a toxic pseudoscience infiltrated by political sectarianism in the US in particular.
And I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have gotten Covid if I wore the mask (yeah, I half-arsed that and got infected talking to an obviously feverish person with the mask on my chin lol).
I'm afraid I have a different psychology and physiology to you. A lot of people unfortunately think their experience dictates that their opinions should extend to how I breathe thus it manifests as policy. Not even to further discuss the real psychology of why they support such policies.
Get vaccinated, lower the weight and wear a mask is the real message. Unfortunately just like anti vaxxers obesity is something to be praise now and even "healthy".
Every stats in those countries now celebrating is worse than it was early sept 2020. Deaths, hospitalizations, ICU….all worse. It’s not just cases.
Respiratory viruses get worse in winter. The hope is this one won’t, or that herd immunity is finally reached, despite a higher case load than last year.
Well, no, we have 70-85 percent fully vaccinated population in Europe, and a lot of the remaining 25 percent most likely has antibodies. This isn't the same as last year.
Experts here in Belgium argue that we should be lifting restrictions ASAP so that the infections are flattened out and don't all happen during winter.
Cases: 5x
Deaths: 2x
Hospitalizations: 2.5x
ICU: 2.5x
Tiny compared to winter? Yes. But this is a seasonal respiratory virus and this season is worse than last year same time.
Now, the theory is you can go back to normal, massively increase viral doses in the air, and not see a rise through winter. Because of immunity. But, breakthroughs seem to happen more easily at high viral doses.
The other thing is, antibodies wane. Israel had to do boosters, they found greater susceptibility the further people got from their vax date. Boosters have reversed severe disease trends for now, and is optimistic. But they also have restrictions.
I don’t know which way the future goes. My point is just that it is terribly premature to declare victory over a respiratory virus in summer. Europe made exactly the same mistake last year. You won’t know till winter.
The other thing people forget is that efficacy is a relative measure, but hospitalizations are absolute. Ok, so, 95% efficacy in reducing hospitalizations compared to unvaccinated. Great! I got the vaccines myself, but that is a great result.
So, on absolute terms, you have 20x less risk of hospitalization from the wild type variant at case levels at a given point.
But….Delta is associated with a 2x increase in hosp risk compared to wild type. Oops ok so we have only a 10x absolute reduction in hospitalization risk.
And cases are 5x higher than this time last year. Oops, ok, compared to sept 2nd 2020 a vaccinated Belgian has only a 2x absolute reduced risk of hospitalization compared to same time last year. (An unvaccinated Belgian with no prior infection has a 10x higher risk, efficacy vs severe disease still 95%)
If cases go high enough you still see severe disease, even with vaccines. Maybe impossible for cases to hit 100,000 a day in Belgium, 5x winter peak. But Israel already 60% higher than winter peak, in summer, with boosters, and restrictions. So what happens without restrictions, in winter? (I’m assuming Belgium will get boosters)
The herd immunity threshold is said to be at 90% of all people, including children.
Still though, I disagree that "all stats are worse than last year". Hospitalizations are near exclusively among the unvaccinated. If we didn't have a vaccine, our hospital system would have collapsed, whereas right now we have little to no restrictions, just masks in public transit and shopping centers.
https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-immu...
1. Pick a country in Europe you think is doing well
2. Check the stats for sept 3 2021 and sept 3 2020. The hospitalization, ICU and death stats. For death use the 7 day average
Guarantee the stats are worse. Also any normal respiratory virus gets worse when some ends.
Maybe it will work out well. But Europe had the same hubris last summer.
Also, I am sure Marcus Aurelius said something about lifestyles about 1,5k years before this poem. And 1k years before Aurelius surely the Greek philosophers criticized unhealthy lifestyles too. Maybe it is just human common sense. I don't know.
Some things bear translating into modern language.
It requires strict adherence like anything else. It's often not enjoyable.
But if you follow it, you will lose weight. And "zero calorie" alcohol isn't really zero calorie, obviously.
This isn't about metabolic rate or anything else. I had my thyroid gland completely removed 30 years ago and have been dependent on levothyroxine ever since. I could theoretically "cheat" by artificially increasing my metabolism (take more levo, like some bodybuilders do), but I didn't. I just cut calories.
This is obviously not how your body digests food and disregards completely the macro structure of what you're taking in. Take pasta and rice for example, both have around the same calorific value however, the carbon chains in rice are much longer than those in pasta. The implication of which is that it will take your body more time and energy to digest rice than pasta meaning that the energy release to your body will be quite different. Looking just at calorific value though, one would erroneously conclude that these two foods are more or less identical.
It doesn't matter. This is over-analyzing the simple fact that reducing intake results in weight loss.
Like I said, this is an unpopular opinion due to the difficulty people have in losing weight.
But I did it and I have the facts to back it up. And I managed to get over my body's natural fight against it by simply continuing to intake less calories.
If my body doesn't continue to get a constant influx of energy, it stores less as fat reserves. It's all proven by raw results.
The truth is you can lose weight on a diet of Cheetos, pasta and soda. It's not healthy, and you may die sooner than you planned, but you will lose weight, as long as the intake is less than the expenditure.
If you burn more calories than you eat you’ll loose weight. Doesn’t matter what those calories are.
As you say if you choose to eat low nutrient food below your required daily intake you may loose weight but wouldn’t recommend it for a healthy diet. Choosing better calories may help loose weight quicker as overall health improves but the fundamentals are the same, you are consuming less than your body requires.
Some people may be surprised that if they eat better the volume of food they eat increases but total calories decrease. It’s surprising how calorie dense junk food is which leaves you hungry as low volume so you eat more to feel full.
Like when I weighed 235 (which is high for my 5 foot 2 inch frame) I had breakfast, lunch and I could, literally, eat two burgers and some fries and a soda for dinner and still lose weight cause I ate no snacks in between but after I got down to 200 lbs CICO had little bearing on anything I did.
Now I really had to watch the quality of the food I ate in addition to the amount of calories. (i.e. simply eating less wasn't good enough).
Also, it bears mentioning that alcohol was not a thing for me. I barely drink (i.e I have like the equivalent of a beer for every 2 months). So it wasn't an option to give it up because it really wasn't a part of my diet anyways.
But it's not hard to see why those who give alcohol up have a positive response.
After I start hiking for 4 hours a day I’m losing weight even on 2300 kcal.
So it seems my programmer lifestyle is messing me up.
Have you had a resting metabolic rate test? They can tell how many calories you burn based on exhaled gases. I weigh about the same as you and burn about 1700 kcal/day just sitting on the couch.
I'm also a software engineer and I too sit for absurdly long periods of time.
Your body will use the minimum necessary. If you sit for a long time, most of that energy will be directed towards your brain.
At the end of the day, you simply have to reduce energy intake below baseline requirements. Then you will lose weight.
Note this is an absurdly unhealthy way to lose weight, as you will be neglecting cardiovascular health, muscle mass, bone strength, etc. In my experience, this can lead to "brain fog" and other issues programmers don't want, so that also has to be carefully balanced.
But you will lose weight, if that is the goal.
If you are sitting still at your desk all day, not moving a muscle, your brain has a large energy requirement.
So your muscles will waste, your bones will likely become brittle, but the energy coming in will go where it needs to.
Look for studies around Binge Eating Disorders, Withdrawal from substance abuse.
Good studies available in lab rat settings.
Unfortunately mostly small human studies (Especially about Baclofen). But I gave it a shot.
It's the only thing that explains how it helps me a lot with depression and anxiety, I get none of the negative effects and have very few withdrawal effects.
But I haven't noticed much of an effect on eating tbh.
Did help me drink much less alcohol though. I'm likely drinking because alcohol indirectly affects GABA receptors.
pregablin made me stupid. literally interfered with my cognition
It can also be used in "burst mode" (great for a create or a work session) either by taking 1200mg+ at once or best 300mg every 20min, eat something after 900mg, never exceed 1.2-1.8g.
It can be recreational as it often (but not always) has the good effects of alcohol (and a similar hangover).
But it takes ~2hrs to feel the effects and it lasts 2-3hrs. If you try to take more you get nasty effects like nausea, tiredness, stupidity and sleepiness.
Some people report these effects in general even after a small dosage, so it looks like not everyone reacts well to it.
Haven't tried pregabalin, wish I could.
Afik GABA system is something you really shouldn't mess with?
I thought you'd suggest some novel substance to upregulate GABA without tollerance.