Tagged “health”

Coming back as someone different after a traumatic brain injury, and overcoming symptoms.

no projects, not side hustles, not reading to learn.
just sitting

does knowing the risk help, or cause added worry

Subjective well-being improves with car shedding, if it's not done for financial reasons.

huh, weird that I already had a tag for smoking

Importantly, it helped me overcome my fear that if I quit smoking, I wouldn’t be able to write anymore, since I’d always done the two activities together (today I tell writing students not to smoke at all, but if they must, not to smoke while writing, lest they prolong their addiction to protect their artistic production).

But what really helped me kick was Alan’s advice about motivations: “You’re 33 years old. You might smoke for 40 more years before you get sick. Not getting sick in forty years won’t be much of a motivation next week when you’re craving a cigarette. You need a motive for next week, not forty years from now.”

The next-week reason he came up with was "I spend two laptops per year on smokes". So he now buys a laptop each year.

Maybe this is what Flavortown is all about.

Why, I wondered, does flavor have such a hold over us? And why do so many scientists carry on as though nutrition starts from the neck down, that what truly matters in food is carbs, protein and fat, and flavor is just some meaningless and frivolous indulgence?

Our flavor sensing equipment—the nose and mouth—takes up more DNA than any other bodily system. Why is there so much DNA devoted to a sense we tend to think of as superfluous?

Known for his work in "in-flight surgery with a coat-hanger and silverware"

Related: VR Exercise Equivalent ratings. Apparently modded Audioshield is the highest intensity

Matrix of three factors for three stages (before, during, after). The word "host" made some of the explanations sound funny to me

Separate the agent from the host.
Provide protection for the host.

How do anti-inflammatories work? What do they actually do? Bodies are crazy

When I quit smoking 17 years ago, a wise doctor counselled me that if I was going to resist cravings, I needed a more immediate reason than "I won't get cancer in 40 years." My answer: "I spend two laptops per year on a product whose makers want to murder me and my friends."

The mysterious and meteoric rise in obesity since the late 70s. Part 2 includes a reference to The Australian Paradox

“True karate is about competing with yourself, not with other people,” agrees Da Luz of the Okinawa Karate Information Center. This also makes it a lifetime practice

Overview of a century of breakthroughs and other improvements to health and longevity. The many small changes that stack up to reduce mortality.

I love this for many reasons. Mostly for some people continuing with approaches that aren't just brute force deep neural nets. Goes into better detail than the original headline, which implied it could just automatically detect cancer cells (it was years of work going from pastry detector to other uses). Hard things are hard.

Excellent tips, and good pictures explaining what they mean (this is often overlooked in descriptions of actions). Sit forward, sit up. Leg angle closer to 120 that 90 is a good one

More negative knock-on effects from decades of demonizing fat

Also remember to take damn breaks