207 karma · joined December 17, 2018
No, the unpleasant part of being diabetic is having to live every second of your life as an act of weighing how what you're currently doing is going to affect your blood sugar levels an hour for now:
- Have I been sitting in this chair too long? - Have I not been sitting down enough this morning? - Have I been drinking enough water? - Did I just drink too much water? - I haven't been to the bathroom in two hours; does this mean I'm screwed? - If I eat a piece of toast after dinner, will I be able to have sex with my wife without going hypoglycemic? - I'd like to go hiking, but it's hot outside and my insulin might spoil, so maybe I'll walk around the block instead. - I just plan on going to the grocery store for 20 minutes; do I need to bring insulin in case there's a traffic jam on the way home?
Etc., etc. Pharmaceutical companies can't solve the real lifestyle problems associated with diabetes short of inventing an actual cure.
2) Private enterprise is a different concept from privatization.
3) I don't believe it's mere coincidence that everything the author likes about US infrastructure is privately supplied, while everything he suggests is "humiliating" is publicly funded -- do you?
All we need to do is look at who the best distance runners in the world are: Kenyans, Ethiopians, Moroccans -- these are not people with above-average annual incomes or large net worth. By deliberately excluding the entire continent of Africa from the scope of analysis, the author talks himself into a baseless and silly theory.
Endurance sports have always been sports of the people. Buy a pair of shoes or swimming trunks, a cheap Walmart bicycle and join us.
It's a shame the bracelet was so poorly designed. The thing was damn near perfect.
Supposing that every person today who applies for a job today with the TSA knows about the body scanners and the pat-downs and the unexplained detentions, to what extent are new job applicants morally blameworthy for applying for a job that they already know involves all of these things?
At best, your argument covers people who applied for jobs with the TSA before anyone knew what the TSA was going to be doing at airports, and who have over the course of 18 years been unable to find work elsewhere. What share of TSA employees do you suppose that is? What's your guess?
Completely disagree with this. The best available evidence suggests that it is visceral fat, not insulin itself, that causes insulin resistance. There is an underlying autoimmune malfunction at the heart of it. But because people with diabetes often crave sugar (because their bodies fail to absorb it), people have conflated cause and effect.
And, as I noted above, the people who talk to me don't generally discuss a lack of willpower. They discuss their willingness to eat things they know are bad and their unwillingness to be active. It's possible that this is all part of the hocus-pocus of cognitive science and that they're merely verbalizing a chemical predisposition, but I'm not quite so cynical about human consciousness to believe that.
I don't have misplaced angst against managers or salespeople, and I respect people who are good at those things. I simply wanted to call attention to other kinds of success.
In a normal person with a functional pancreas, no amount of sugar or high-glycemic foods will cause hunger. It's just not possible. This is because the body naturally releases insulin and the hunger goes away (so does the blood sugar).
The reason people become insulin-resistant is because they eat too much, and put on weight. High-glycemic-index foods are implicated in weight gain because they are high-calorie foods. The added insulin means that the body is also absorbing them more readily. Insulin causes people to gain weight; in fact, one of the side-effects of insulin injections for diabetics is... weight gain! That's because insulin's sole purpose in the body is to make it absorb calories and deliver it to cells.
All that is to say that you're conflating effect for cause. Weight gain causes diabetes, which causes sugar cravings. Sugar doesn't cause diabetes, and it only causes weight gain if you eat too much of it. There are whole societies on earth that eat almost nothing but high glycemic index foods: the rice farmers of Bangladesh; the mango farmers of Central America; the rural people of Morocco who mostly eat dates; and so on.
Sugar doesn't cause diabetes or weight gain. Weight gain causes diabetes, which in turn causes sugar cravings.
I have been physically fit my whole life. The comments people make to me in casual conversation might raise your eyebrows. They don't say, "I wish I weren't overweight, and I feel powerless to do anything about my problem." Instead, they say things like, "HAW HAW HAW I don't run unless chased HAW HAW HAW!" They say, "I hate vegetables, I can't stand them. How can you eat steamed brussels sprouts? How do you go without sweets?"
They can't figure me out. They just don't understand how it's possible to work out twice a day, take two 15-minute walks, and restrict my daily calories to 2000. They can't figure out why I don't eat bacon all the time, like they do. They can't figure out why I don't eat patty melts and biscuits-and-gravy.
These folks are not fat for medical reasons.
It's no surprise that people who put on 100+ pounds of extra weight once would tend to put on 100+ pounds of extra weight a second time. But it's silly to claim that there is an underlying medical reason it's happening.
The body gets used to whatever conditions you face. Human beings have thrived in the Arctic Circle, the North African deserts, and everywhere in between. Obese people have accustomed themselves to an obese lifestyle. If they can make a permanent break and embrace the lifestyle of a person with normal weight then they can stay skinny forever. In the end, most people just don't want to exercise 2+ times per day and limit their portion sizes. So they don't.