The Winner: My Adrenals!

While much of the country is probably suffering through too much cortisol, I think I am finally making enough. I quit taking it a few days ago when my face started getting puffy, I gained a couple of pounds that wouldn't budge, and I noticed my heart beating a few times: those are clear signs of overdoing hydrocortisone. I'm feeling back to normal now and my face doesn't look like the Pillsbury dough boy.

What finally brought this about? It could be that about a month ago, I really started cleaning up my diet. I haven't been perfect, but I stopped going out for lunch at work and getting anything from the deli except meat, cheese and roast chickens. I stopped buying chocolate chips under the pretense of making low-carb cookies. I also bumped up my kelp tablets to four per day and added L. casei shirota bacteria to my yogurt. After some five years, when I went through an incredible amount of stress with parents, relatives who were worse than useless in helping with their care, moving across the country, working at five jobs in one year, and being nuked with antibiotics, I am close to regaining the health I had before all that.

I even feel like working out. A few weeks ago, I started training a couple of days a week. I do some intense 15-minute strength workouts from Youtube. I'd like to have less pain from standing for long periods (I spent a few hours canning salsa over the weekend and stood out in the cold for almost an hour this morning to vote). But there's a lot less snap, crackle and pop in my back now.

The mental clarity is continuing--I finished an online course on Athens and Sparta, scoring 95% on the final. It was a pleasant surprise to find Victor Davis Hanson giving some of the lectures. My current course is on the Federalist Papers. Studying these subjects helps the Electoral College make sense--direct democracies didn't go so well (ask Socrates) and concentrations of power led to tyranny.

I'm very happy that people have had the freedom of speech to criticize government dietary advice, and that the big tech powers that be had no interest in silencing us. Much respect to the people who made greater sacrifices than standing in the cold to secure those rights.

Comments

What $115 Buys--Junk Food vs. Real Food

A lady recently went off about how little food $115 buys, complaining that the pile of (mostly) junk food she bought wouldn't make a week's worth of lunches and snacks for her children. Sad to say, but this looks like what I see in a lot of grocery carts. Fat pic.twitter.com/qbM23ydaOq — shellshock (@shellshockkk) March 7, 2025 Coincidentally, I paid almost exactly the same amount today on groceries that would make lots of healthy lunches. It's filling food that won't leave you hungry every few hours for snacks. If we want to make America healthy again, this is the way.

Celebrities Shilling for Big Soda

There's a push in Washington and ten states to ban soda (and other junk food) from SNAP, a program for low-income people to buy groceries. This seems like a no-brainer: the N in SNAP stands for nutrition, and soda doesn't have nutrients. It's liquid sugar, the last thing we need in a country full of diabetics. People can drink water for virtually nothing and save their SNAP money for actual food. Yet a number of posts from otherwise sensible accounts have opposed this. Reporter Nick Sorter says that a company called Influenceable has been paying influencers to post these opinions. (Click on the link for the full thread.) 🚨🧵 EXPOSED: “INFLUENCEABLE” — The company cutting Big Checks to “influencers” on behalf of Big Soda Over the past 48 hours, several large supposedly MAGA-aligned “influencers” posted almost identical talking points fed to them, convincing you MAHA was out of line for not… pic.twitter.com/PpPwH9lHGe — Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) March 22, 2025 Sorter adds...

$17/pound chips! Real food is cheaper

My latest video on YouTube: Real food is generally cheaper than junk food--the pictures prove it. I took these at Kroger and from their website in March 2025. Prices are either straight from the tags or calculated based on product weight. Music: On We Go (ClipChamp) First photo by AS Photography: https://www.pexels.com/photo/vegetables-stall-868110/

Not Only Cheaper, But Easier

A while back, I wrote about saving money on break time coffee and snacks. I haven't done very well putting it into practice. But a post by James Clear today got me thinking about it again: Warren Buffett uses a two-list system to prioritize things. Check it out --and follow the instructions. Using Buffett's two-list system, two of the goals I ended up with were taking care of myself and saving $400 more per month than I already am. As I said, I've been wanting to save money, and the system made me really focus on this. I came up with 11 money-saving ideas, six of which had to do with food. Buying hamburger in bulk. Ranch Foods Direct sells one-pound packages of 80% lean pastured ground beef in bundles of 20 for a lot less than Whole Foods. Sprouts only carries super-lean beef that's grass-fed, and it's more expensive, too. Not driving to Whole Foods. Whole Foods is out of my way, and saving a weekly trip saves gas. Coffee at home, tea at work. Tea is fr...

1972: Carole King, MAS*H and...Food for 2014?

I feel well enough to try Atkins induction again. The palpitations are gone, even without taking potassium. My energy level is back to normal--no more trucking on the treadmill early in the morning to burn off nervous energy or emergency meat, cheese and mineral water stops after yoga. It's back to lounging around to Chopin and Debussy in the morning and stopping at the wine bar for pleasure. I'm using the original Atkins book: Dr. Atkins' Diet Revolution from 1972. While looking in the book for a way to make gelatin (which is allowed on induction, but Jello(TM) and products like it have questionable ingredients), I felt the earth move under my feet : those recipes from 42 years ago look delicious and they're mostly real food. It makes sense, though: the cooks who wrote the recipes probably didn't have had a palette used to low-fat food full of added sugar or a bag of tricks to make low-fat food edible. Anyone who writes a recipe called "Cottage Cheese and...

Pain, Pain, Go Away!

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