Pain, Pain, Go Away!

Pre-low-carb, a Sunday afternoon would have found me taking a four-hour nap. Since I no longer need them unless I'm sick, I've been working in the yard today. A couple of women came by while I was trimming the front yard. The hedge trimmer seemed to frighten them, but they stopped anyway and offered me some bread, which I told them I couldn't eat. One of them said quite a few people had told them that. The new portion of lawn I planted last year is still going, despite my lack of caring for it after I fractured my right arm in a bike wreck last year. The two roses I planted are sprouting leaves as well--they should look like this in a year or two: Salet, introduced in France, 1854. Photo from http://www.ces.ncsu.edu/depts/hort/consumer/factsheets/roses/salet.htm Mortgage Lifter tomatoes (an heirloom variety) are coming up in seed trays in the basement, and there's already volunteer lettuce growing out back, even though it snowed a few days ago. Yester

A potato is a lump of sugar. -Guest on Jimmy Moore's podcast Three years ago when I got into low carb diets and helping my mother control her diabetes, I gave myself a blood glucose test. Since I was wheat-free, I used a suggestion from the Blood Sugar 101 site : I ate a potato. That you can use a potato for a home glucose test should be the first clue that it isn't very good for you. Further clues take a little more digging (sorry). It's a given in camp paleo that grains and beans are Neolithic foods--foods that we weren't eating much of, if any, before we started farming. They're full of lectins and antinutrients. But so are some other agricultural products: potatoes have been cultivated for around 7,000 years in Peru,(1) and spread to the rest of the world only in the past 500 years.(2) Even if you're Irish, German or Russian, your ancestors haven't been eating potatoes for more than a few hundred years. Traditionally, potatoes went through a proces

Hurray! The construction work in my mouth is almost finished. It's been nine months since the bike accident that broke a tooth and knocked two others out of place. Next week, I get a crown and a new retainer, and my insurance is actually going to pay for a little bit of it. My orthodontist gave me a celebratory candied apple, which I gave to the receptionist where I work. In other news, I'm smarter than a Supreme Court Justice. Judge Stephen Breyer just fractured his shoulder in his third serious bike accident. I packed it in after my first serious accident. http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/supreme-court-justice-stephen-breyer-hurts-shoulder-in-biking-accident-in-dc/2013/04/27/f9fafde8-af6d-11e2-a986-eec837b1888b_story.html

I never gave much thought to food reward, but lunch today reminded me of it. I sat down to burger with bacon and salsa--the salsa's made from a 40-year-old secret family recipe, said the girl I bought it from, cole slaw, and sweet potato fries cooked in lard. Delicious! But I'm halfway through it and I can't eat another bite. I was really hungry, too. Looks like it's leftovers for dinner. Maybe tubers and cabbage aren't rewarding. But aren't bacon, lard and sweetener (in the dressing) supposed to be? Before low-carb, I could eat a bag of cookies at one go--and would most Saturdays (getting an early start on my free day). If someone in the office ordered pizza while we were working late, people knew they'd better not get between me and the pizza. I haven't kept up my plan for getting to bed early , but good news: without the flavored coffee (flavored with chemicals and with solvents), I'm feeling so much better that I've been doing fine st

In my last post, I gave some reasons why Coloradans have a low rate of obesity (assuming they really do, and I think that's true). Here's more evidence that we're less obese, but more importantly, that obesity and heart disease are associated with diabetes. (Everyone say it with me: association is not causation.) No, but looking at these maps makes you go "hmmm...is there a real connection there?" (Hint: type 2 diabetics tend to be overweight, and high blood sugars are hard on arteries and other tissues.) Source: PositivelyAware.com Source: Center for Disease Control Curious about high cholesterol by state? It doesn't look like the other maps, does it? No light, healthy stripe down the Rocky Mountains or ominous dark cloud from the Mississippi Delta up to Pennsylvania and down to Florida. For the first three maps, culture, race and poverty, and maybe even minerals in the soil look like they might be factors. But what do Hawaii, Alaska and

And more importantly, would moving to Colorado help you lose weight? A recent study suggested that some people in the northern US may be lying about having a svelte figure by fudging on their height and weight in phone surveys. The abstract of the study didn't mention the West, but all the obesity maps I've seen show Colorado as having the lowest rate of obesity in the US. I don't know whether that's accurate, but I think we're better than average. A few months ago, my employer held a firm-wide video conference where we could see members of all or most of the other offices. We have two offices in Colorado; the rest are in downtown areas of medium and large cities in the South and the Midwest. We all work in the same industry; the employees are mostly white, college educated professionals. As far as I know, the only big difference between all of us is our locations. I'm guessing there were a few hundred people in total on screen; we saw different offices at

I wish my neighbors' yard looked like this instead of the weed-choked dump they've let it turn into: Jennifer and Jason Helvenston, gardening scofflaws. Photo from the Institute of Justice. The city of Orlando, Florida ordered the Helvenstons to dig up their front yard and replace it with lawn or face a $500 per day fine. From the Institute for Justice (the same nonprofit organization that's defending blogger Steve Cooksey at diabetes-warrior.net ), Jennifer and Jason Helvenston of Orlando, Fla., take their role as responsible members of society very seriously, by choosing to commit their lives to sustainability: They built their home with naturally sourced materials, harvest eggs from their backyard chickens and grow vegetables in their front yard. Not only does their garden provide them with their own food, but it has become a community attraction where the couple teaches local youth about homegrown vegetables. The Helvenstons embody life, liberty and