Resistance

By Richard Nikoley | April 30, 2008 |

I got an email about resistance training, yesterday. My response was to say that I pretty much just go with my trainer. I also provided links to Art De Vany’s workout and his essay on EvFit (PDF). Upon further consideration, I came to a realization. I read lots and lots of stuff about different ways one can go about doing their training. Lots of ’em, I’d like to try. But right now, my goal is singular and focussed, which is to get somewhat ripped at <10% BF, and to do that I've got at least 20 more pounds of fat to shed. OK. So what of the workouts? Here's what I realized, and it's kind of remarkable. When I began, last May, I was at 230 pounds. In the first couple of weeks of workouts, I went up to 236 or so, perfectly normal. Since then, I've shed weight down to around 206 or so. So, about 25 net pounds. Cool. Then, I realized the big important thing. I have pretty much doubled my strength during the year. Where I could barely get in 10x3 bench presses at 90 pounds, I can now easily do 10x4 at 165. In other...

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America: Love It or Leave It

By Richard Nikoley | April 30, 2008 |

SWAT raids of poker games. My heart swells with pride. In the last couple of months, police have broken up games in Charleston, South Carolina (netting a poker playing cop and prosecutor in the process) and, no surprise here, in Dallas and Houston. In the Houston case, prosecutors planned to file felony organized crime charges against the operators of a $300 buy-in tournament. In the Charleston case, investigators went back more than a year to find names of players who may not have been playing on the night of the raid. They then went out and arrested them, too. They were eventually charged with misdemeanors. Here’s a first-hand account of similar Charleston raid from a couple of years ago: At the game in 2006, Chimento said there was a knock on the door and then “…all of a sudden it was like a commandos SWAT team raiding a bunch of crack dealers. It’s was like the SWAT team that you see on TV, busting into your home, guns drawn, ski masks on, full protective gear, and demanding we put out hands on top of our heads,” Chimento said. “At first we thought we were getting robbed, then we realized they…

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To Fly

By Richard Nikoley | April 29, 2008 |

One of the things that’s been on my mind lately is getting back into hang-gliding in earnest. For the last few years it’s basically been a single outing during our annual family camping trip to Hat Creek Rim. That’s real easy flying, compared with the highly physical activity. It was getting increasingly difficult to do and enjoy, but I have twice the strength now. Here’s a few items that serve to wet the appetite. One guy with one Indy film under his belt is trying to do a full length film. The in-air footage is fantastic. Here’s the direct link to watch in Quicktime. He’s looking for help in promoting, so if you like it, he’d like a comment on the YouTube version which is a bit longer with less than stellar actors and dialog. Here’s a real artsy short someone put together. Nice. Speaking of Hat Creek, here’s how it looks basically from our view. Notice how low the sun is in the sky. We typicaly launch after 6:30 p.m., when the air is glass and going up everywhere. Second thing: notice on the landing, the severe wind gradient from about 25 ft to ground effect. Nasty. It’s almost…

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Good Calories, Bad Calories

By Richard Nikoley | April 28, 2008 |

After a period of reading another couple of books, I have just picked back up on Gary Taubes’ Good Calories, Bad Calories once again over the last couple of days. You know what? This is an amazing work on general grounds. Taubes is a consummate and meticulous advocate of the scientific method; i.e., you first form a hypothesis and then do your honest, dead level best to refute it. To the extent you fail time after time, the hypothesis gets stronger and stronger because you are systematically eliminating everything that can be speculated to count against it. It’s the only valid way to do science. You can’t “confirm” a hypothesis in the sense of coming up with conditions under which it holds, for no matter if it holds under a million such conditions, you need but one to obliterate it. The depth and research into this book is amazing. No wonder it took five years to write. In a nutshell, you have the Ancel Keyes fat-cholesterol-heart hypothesis that just won’t die, which is itself based upon his flawed Seven Countries Study. From the Wikipedia article: These studies found strong associations between the CVD rate of a population and average serum…

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A Motivation I Haven’t Written About

By Richard Nikoley | April 28, 2008 |

There’s a motivation underlying my food & fitness obsession I’ve not written about. My mom, aged 67, is a Type 2 diabetic. I intend for her to be around for a good long while, and so far as I have witnessed, the “help” she was getting from the medical establishment — whom she paid to treat her — is beyond malpractice; but I’ll refrain from telling you what I really think. There’s lots of anecdotes I could tell; like how I sent her to my personal trainer to do resistance training, and then how just two weeks ago I showed up at her house for the 66th birthday party to see her backyard sporting about 25 new large plants of various things for the spring. Each one had come in a 5-gallon pot, for which she had dug all the holes herself. Said she wasn’t even sore afterwards. She was diagnosed some years ago, was put on oral medication, given diet recommendations, regular checkups and so on. But there was considerable confusion about what she ought to eat. And I don’t think she was ever admonished to increase her lean muscle mass. She was aware of the low-carb advice, but…

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Refined Carbs Cause Alzheimer’s Too?

By Richard Nikoley | April 27, 2008 |

I’m typically very skeptical — really — of cure alls. Chiropractic is a good example. Now, about every couple of years I end up waking up having done some damn thing to my neck whilst sleeping, and I can barely move my head without sharp pain in my neck & shoulder. It can take a week or more to work back right, and it’s very painful every step of the way. Just trying to raise my head off the bed can be excruciating, and I end up having to roll out. In each case, I’ll go to a Chiropractor, he/she cradles my head and pops/cracks it to the left, then to the right, and it’s like 50% relief on the spot. The rest of the discomfort melts away over the next 24 hours. Fine. Cool. Love ’em. But then they always want to get kooky, suggesting x-rays, regular visits to keep my spine “aligned,” and its all justified under some silly notion that spine “mis-alignment” is the ultimate and fundamental source of all trouble. Nonsense. Quackery. On the other hand, the notion that refined carbohydrate over years and years lies beneath a lot of our modern diseases carries some weight…

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A Messsage of Freedom and Liberty

By Richard Nikoley | April 26, 2008 |

Wesley Snipes gets three years for “failing” to calculate what “The Land of the Free” demands of the time of his one and only life (money) and filing papers documenting it. It’s enough to get the “America: Love It or Leave It” crowds dancing in the streets. (link: Balko, who has a few other links to spectacles of American freedom and liberty)

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A Round of Applause

By Richard Nikoley | April 26, 2008 |

Art De Vany serves up the impressive 4-month fitness results of one of his readers. Part I Part II Any doubters left…that random, stochastic evolutionary fitness, i.e., pre-agricultural (Paleo) eating, brief, intense, fun and functional resistance training, and intermittent fasting is the path to longevity, fitness and health?

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Diets Don’t Work

By Richard Nikoley | April 24, 2008 |

Practitioners of the Evolutionary way know why. It takes a stochastic approach, i.e., Paleo eating, intermittent (brief, intense, preferably fun or at least functional) resistance training, and intermittent fasting (offset by intermittent overfeeding).

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How to Kill Your Chances of Being a Superstar

By Richard Nikoley | April 24, 2008 |

You sing Jesus Christ Superstar as an American Idol contestant. The Broadway show and subsequent productions were condemned by some religious groups. Tim Rice was quoted as saying “The idea of the whole opera is to have Christ seen through the eyes of Judas, and Christ as a man, not as a God.” Some Christians considered this, as well as the omission of the resurrection, to be sacrilegious. They also found the character of Judas too sympathetic and some of his criticisms of Jesus offensive. When they said Carly Smithson was going to do that song during the Andrew Lloyd Webber show this week, I immediately asked myself what in the hell she was thinking, and could possibly nobody alert her to the fact that a very large part of the country will never vote for her if she sings that? See, I very keenly remember the apocalyptic, sings-of-the-end-times outrage at the time the album, opera, and film were released in the early 70s, and my family wasn’t even yet part of the Christian fundamentalist movement, but simply evangelical — i.e., fundamentalism lite. When the vote was revealed last night I wasn’t the least bit surprised, even though she is…

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Breakfast, Breakfast and Longevity Notes

By Richard Nikoley | April 23, 2008 |

Here was the literal break-fast last night, after a very nearly 36 hours fast. Very simple, and no, it’s not lettuce that’s gone brown; it’s balsamic. Pretty much, the only salad dressing I do now is home made with quality cold pressed extra-virgin olive oil. This one is simply olive oil and balsamic. Another one I do is a French vinaigrette that’s a bit more complex. I’ll have to remember to provide the recipe next time. You’ll love. Yep, those are potatoes — fingerling — initially sautéed just a minute or two on the stove in butter, garlic, and lots of paprika. Then, onto a cookie sheet at 350 for 20. Then 3-5 under the broiler. While I eat almost no grain, grain product, rice, pasta, legumes…I do take in some potato, usually a couple of times per week. Oh, almost forgot: 16 oz ribeye, grilled at five-hunerd. This morning: The omelet begins with a good sized pat of butter on medium, then several slices of yellow onion sliced very thin, like a 16th. Onion in the butter until brown and carmelized. In the meantime, beat the two eggs; and I took one of the three strips of bacon and…

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“…what’s wrong with Earth Day?”

By Richard Nikoley | April 23, 2008 |

That was a question posed to me about my own essentials-only Earth Day post. I think my answer in comments requires it’s own entry. “…what’s wrong with Earth Day?” Here’s a couple of people who took the time to spell it out. Greg Swann Warren Meyer I encourage you to read and understand both. It’s only the tip of the iceberg. In terms of fundamentals, what’s wrong with it is: collectivism. Both posts are must-reads, and take particular note of Don Boudreaux’s post that Greg links to.

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And I’ll Keep Saying It

By Richard Nikoley | April 22, 2008 |

Fuck Obama. And his pretentious, stupid bitch. Caroline Glick has her number. Speaking in February of the man she knows better than anyone else does, Michelle Obama said that her husband, Illinois Senator and candidate for the Democratic Presidential nomination Barack Obama, is the only candidate for president who understands that before America can solve its problems, Americans have to fix their “broken souls.” She also said that her husband’s unique understanding of the state of souls of the American people makes him uniquely qualified to be President. Obama can do what his opponent in the Democratic race Senator Hillary Clinton, and Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, cannot do. He can heal his countrymen’s broken souls. He will redeem them. But then, saving souls is hard work, and Mrs. Obama won’t place the whole burden on her husband. He’ll make the Americans work for him. As she put it, “Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zone. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you…

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A Little Hasty?

By Richard Nikoley | April 22, 2008 |

In the interest of keeping my own self accountable and honest, I was compelled to revisit the Texas Polygamy case and my quick-draw post on the matter prior to taking in anything but the initial report. Billy points to three posts by Wendy McElroy here, here, and here. It’s the latter of those three he’s referencing. I think she’s dead on about the women from the perspective of 3rd party intervention. There’s no plausible way they couldn’t leave or explicitly call for help if they wanted. Having read over what I posted, I still think my general point is valid, which is that rational men, unbound by “The People” fallacy, might have taken care of that mess long ago. Of course, they would have been totally accountable for whatever actions they took, and had they found it necessary to dispatch the rapists and those giving aid and comfort to the rapists (the adult wives), then they would have also been responsible for the well being of all the children as far into the future as it takes. Not saying that’s what should have happened at all; just what if. Ghastly? Perhaps, but the prospect strikes me as less arbitrary and…

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