Free The Animal

This is a clip from the Art De Vany Evolutionary Fitness seminar I attended last May in Las Vegas. This is from his 4-DVD set, seven hours of lecture. At $140 it’s a bargain compared to a flight to Vegas, two nights in the hotel, meals, and self-imposed bodily and financial abuse.

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Reader Adam, who described himself as “skinny fat,” and who began using some of my methods and those of other’s I’ve pointed to, has dropped from 215 to 201, a loss of 14 pounds that equates to a body fat reduction of about 6.5%. “Skinny fat” is the term used to refer to being skinny, yet fat, i.e., an excessive body fat percentage. Adam sends along a photo of a recent meal preparation consisting of real feed. Spinach salad: feta, sunflower seeds, dried cranberry, shrimp, avocado, olive oil & balsamic. And melon for dessert.

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The diet that really works Bryan Appleyard thinks he has found a diet that really works: it took him three weeks to shed 14lb with healthy ease. But he had to go back 5,000 years to discover the science behind it This isn’t just background, it is essential to an understanding of Arthur’s approach to diet and fitness. It is very rigorous and thoughtful – which is why Nassim’s [Nicholas Taleb] advocacy got me on the diet. The first point is that economics happens inside the body as well as outside. His work is all about the dynamics of complex, adaptive systems; he calls himself a complexity scientist. Central to this is the overthrow of old statistical models. Basically, we have all been taught that events – human wealth, earthquakes, blockbuster movies – cluster round an average forming a graph in the shape of a bell curve. This is an illusion and the concept of the average leads to fatal errors. In reality, almost all events of significance follow what are known as “power laws”. This means, to simplify, that what are thought of as rare events are, in fact, more important than any average. We think of bank crises,…

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I’m heading in a different direction with this blog. Over the last year, you may have noticed that it’s less and less about politics and its roots, and more and more about diet, fitness, and my own journey to improve myself in that regard. That includes a large dose of independent discovery, research, thinking, and experimentation. But just as there are lots of sites already that deal in politics in all its varieties, there’s plenty of sites — very good ones I often link to — that provide excellent information in the area of what I loosely refer to as “Evolutionary Fitness,” which really comes down to the dietary and health implications of evolutionary biology in the main. So what can I bring? Well, it’s funny, and you may not see this, but the reason EvFit appeals to me so is that it’s quite a lot like my political philosophy, i.e., individualism. But even more so, the reason I’m an individualist — aside from the fact that we are individuals and not a collective — is that I wish to live in accordance with the facts of reality and not the dictates of “authorities,” and that goes for “health authorities”…

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Sometime within the last month or so, I am suddenly getting the “wow, you’ve really lost weight!” accolades from virtually everyone I know, and even people I don’t actually know, but who’ve seen me around — like waitresses in restaurants I frequent. Everyone wants to know “the secret.” What’s the magic? Bea hates it when I get started, and has taken to warning people. And, I’m getting a bit tired of going over the whole story myself; because just like with politics, and the silly notion that humans ought to be free and not the living equivalent of Soylent Green, I know it’s going in one ear and out another. Maybe I ought to charge $49.95 for “the secret” and be done with it. It might actually be profitable, where people wouldn’t pay me a cent for my political views (lies, impossible promises and delusions are sweet, and always free). While I work out the business plan on that, I’m playing around with a 30-second elevator pitch. It might go something like this: Well. I was on this wonderfully healthily low-fat diet with plenty of vegetables, fruits and whole grains most of my life. As a kid, I developed an…

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