Humans want more. All the time more. It’s our nature. In times long past, when your family/tribe killed a mammoth, you ate and ate for days until all the mammoth was gone and stored the excess energy as fat cos it would be another month before you saw anything more than nuts and berries again. Good strategy in a world of scarcity and uncertain supply. A strong theory for the epidemic of obesity and diabetes in modern society suggests that an environment of plentiful energy supply does not divert our instinct to overconsume and store energy, so we will eat beyond our needs. We love starch and sugar as cheap carbs that our ancestors would have quickly used running away from bears and tigers, but which we take more than we can actually use, failing to burn the kilojoules as we sit on our ever enlarging arses watching TV.
This instinct feeds the whole structure of commerce and capitalism. In the same way that we don’t need another 1000kj today but still eat an evening snack, we have a hunger for new things that is obscene. Many people will have retired a perfectly good iPhone 3 or 4 to get the iPhone 4S when it came out, which is a little faster, has better camera resolution (upgraded from more than you probably need for your limited photography skills, to even more than…) and umm yeah that’s about it. But it’s new and more. Walk past hard rubbish and you will virtually always see a CRT TV, which probably works, but isn’t flat panel HD so it’s no longer good enough for the kids’ bedrooms. The sooner we want more, the faster the economy grows, and becomes dangerously fat and diabetic.
It’s reasonable to say that in my lifetime I will not spend more than two million dollars, yet Alan Joyce of Qantas strike breaking fame earns 5 million EVERY YEAR. Perhaps his house is worth ten million dollars. He could still pay it off in two years. Where the hell is that money going? It’s probably just piling up in his in tray at home like all the stuff you and I never get around to dealing with. And he’s a low paid CEO. 5 mill a year is obscene, greedily taking far more than we could use, but not one of us would say no to it would we?
Which brings us to the internet and TV. There is far more information than you could possibly absorb in an entire lifetime. Wikipedia probably grows faster than you can read. There are docos, news and current affairs to fill numerous 24 hour TV stations. And certainly reading and learning are good and useful things. Just like you can’t get by without kilojoules and in a modern western world at least, gadgets, if you try to live without some reading and learning you will quickly become socially and functionally inept, not to mention turning into a redneck idiot. You need a certain amount of info to exist normally and healthily in society.
However there’s a point at which we are gluttonous with our information intake. Watching said news when you can’t vote, influence, change, learn from the things you see is just consuming info you don’t need. I find myself refreshing websites to see if there is new stuff, reloading feeds and checking Facebook one more time. When they run dry, I could write some lyrics/a song inspired by what I read; blog some thoughts about what I learned; find friends to chat with online about things I’ve discovered; go to bed… Instead, I’m thinking hmm, what can I search for that will provide another half hour or so of random reading. Or at work Ooh there’s five minutes while this job runs, I’ll just read some feeds. Or ahh it’s a bit late to play my guitar, I’ll just go and noodle on the internet for a bit…hey where did another evening go?? I consumed a whole bunch of data that may have been interesting or even significant, but I ate so much of it that my brain got diabetic and didn’t process it properly, and it was far more than I needed to get through my day and I probably didn’t grow or learn and I likely won’t even remember half of it. I should’ve eaten less and done more with it.
Tonight I obviously decided to create instead of consume – I took my recent experiences, a variety of things I had learned (consumed) before, processed them and compiled them into a new creation – this blog post. For a change I actually burned the mental energy from some things I had absorbed. This post is the product of that mental energy I had consumed. And now, assuming you got this far, you are the consumer of same. And that’s great, your brain has had some healthy nutrition. The question is…does it go into the pool of excess consumption and just make your head fat? Or will you take what you ate here and burn it – doing, or making, or helping, or growing, or being?
Warning to the faint of heart. There’s a couple of rude words near the bottom of this, but they are artistically justified I swear. Hehe, swear.
A few years ago a friend told me he was doing Febfast. Good idea I thought – most years I give up alcohol for Lent, which is a great Lenten observance – as well as the old fashioned ‘giving something up’, it’s a good head clearing exercise. Febfast has the advantage of being a lot shorter – for the secular giving up for a calendar month, you choose the shortest month. Another great idea! Also it is a fundraiser to support organisations that help young people with alcohol and other drug problems.
Then I heard of Dry July, and I thought yeah well, you have a good idea and someone else will hijack it, at least it rhymes that’s kind of neat. They support adults living with cancer, which is a useful thing – you can’t help but think most cancer related fundraising will result in patented medications and big profits for someone, so a charity that fundraises for hospitals providing day to day support isn’t too bad.
A local junior footy club did ‘Give it a Flick for Auskick’ which raised discussion about the appropriateness of alcohol related fundraising for junior sports. I can see both sides of that argument, can’t make a judgement there.
And then on Facebook the other day, someone mentioned Ocsober. And I thought, ‘great, another one.’ And then I thought, ‘hehe Ocsober, funny.’ And THEN, I thought, ‘no! Enough is enough!’ February, July ,October…that’s a quarter of the year already…it’s the thin end of the wedge I tell you. It will be all year before you know it. I’m starting to think it’s a conspiracy of the old fashioned Christian right, to slowly squeeze out of our society the last relief we have from the gaping hole left by all the colour they squeezed out of the rest of life. If the Puritans have their way, next will be ‘March’ on the Bottle-O, ‘May’ ye all be Temperate or worst of all, Nobeervember.
Luckily for you, dear readers, Neuromesh has your calendar covered. It’s time to strike a blow against those who would repress this wondrous molecule. Intoxication wants to be free! Sure we could aim against the incursions that have already been made on our God given tipple, and claim our rights in February, June and October, but I believe we should always get the first shout in be proactive, not just countering those months but claiming the whole year for freedom and inebriation. With this in mind, allow me to present to you….the Alcohalander!
Wineuary
Your liver is well conditioned by the Christmas festivities, so why not put all that work to good use! It’s important to make the most of the Australian summer, it’s hot and thirsty and you’ve had a good leadup from Christmas. But maybe you are a bit fat from all the Christmas beer, so get your friends to sponsor you for each bottle of wine you get through in January. Chardy, Cab Sav or Bubbly, every glass you have can help someone in need.
Fundraising for: families who spent too much on X-Boxes for their kids at Christmas and have an unmanageable credit card debt.
Febrewary
It’s home brew month. Reaching the end of Summer spending, with a big year still ahead of you, it’s an ideal time to stash away a few bucks by drinking on the cheap. Also the warm Australian weather makes for fast fermenting temperatures, so you should be able to get four ‘home projects’ completed in February. While you wait for your brew to settle, drink whatever you like.
Fundraising for: Community garden projects, especially if they grow hops and barley
March to the Pub
Occupy Wall Street, Occupy London, Occupy Melbourne…Occupy the local we say! Take your liver and your stomach out for a treat – get your friends, family and workmates to sponsor you for every Pot/Schooner + Chicken Parma meal you consume at the pub during March!
Fundraising for: Chicken Welfare
Graperil
Spent too much at the pub in March? Time to resort to Chateau Cardboard. The humble goony is the drink of fundraising choice for April. Strike back at your year ten English teacher and say No! Quantity is a great substitute for quality! Remember to tell your sponsors whether you will be drinking the two, four or the mighty five litre cask!
Fundraising For: Recycling awareness, but if you can’t find any sponsors, put your empty goony box in the recycling instead of throwing it in the garden of the local primary school, and we’ll call it even.
May Part-ayyy
What comes before Part B? Part Ayyyy!!! It’s the end of autumn and of sunshine. The sun is down earlier and the night is longer, and the longer the night, the longer the party. This month, your sponsors will be raising funds based on every nighttime hour you can spend drunk, so party for a cause!
Fundraising For: Insomnia research
Brewn
Chances are you completely forgot about the home brew you made in Febrewary, so it’s time to tidy up the garage and drink that. Of course, unless your friends drink as much as you they’ll probably remember that they already sponsored you for these home brewed charitable efforts, so it’s a good time to enlist some new sponsors for your community service work in Brewn. Plus you’ll have twice as many potential sponsors to hit up next month!
Fundraising for: Alzheimers research
Try July
It’s cold, it’s wet….stick to the warmth of your home and experiment. Try July is all about new things. Go to the grog shop and say “One of each thanks”, mix and match and see what works. You’ll be making money for charity each time you try a new cocktail, plus you can win prizes for the most suggestive new cocktail names! Imagine the fun when you offer your friends an ’Energetic Eel Enema’?
Fundraising for: Diversity thing
Auguzzle
Crank it up, it’s all about the numbers in Auguzzle. It’s cold and dark, but hey have a few and a few more and you don’t mind. What’s the drunkest you’ve ever been mate, haha, you have 31 days to acheive it.
Fundraising for: I dunno, probably stomach ulcers or something.
Pisstember
Yeah what’s more Australian than gettin’ on the piss yeah? Get a few friends, and it’s your shout, and his shout and the other guys shout, as long as you don’t leave just when it’s your shout yeah!
Fundraising for: more beers!!!
Octoberfest
Maulticutural and stuff it;s German so its’qw good they invented beer right? Also, girls in them oktoberfest outfits and big beers and like lids on and that.
Fundraising for: scheiße hehe I swore in German
Noremember
I was gonna type something or…something, it was a, like, it was fu, it was fu…fuckin…hey, it’s been….mate…I love you mate, your fuckin….you know….
Fundraising for : Kebabs
Bleghcember
Yeah I used to, you know…and it’s fugn…I gotta….wait…be right back….
Fundraising for: Taxi fare
This is wonderful – a ‘film’ from when the first automated talking clock was installed in Australia in 1954, by the Post Office because Telecom didn’t even exist then. Prior to that, a human sat at the desk and literally read the time, over and over and over. And you think you hate your job. It goes for four minutes, well worth it to see the classic video, and also shows how the system was a literal clockwork mechanism that played off three discs.
I was inspired to look for this by wondering how the talking clock system managed daylight savings. Is there someone whose sole job is to manage the talking clock? What does s/he do, just come in twice a year to shift it back and forth at daylight savings?
The above system managed it because two systems were actually installed, one live and the second ran constantly as a hot spare. When it came to daylight savings, the secondary was manually advanced, and a technician would cut over to that at the crucial moment. The first machine would then be advanced and it would become the hot spare, and the process was reversed at the end of daylight savings. It was some quality engineering, designed to run constantly, which it did for 36 years.
The glass disc mechanical system with the BBC style Received Pronunciation accent was replaced in 1990 by a digital one recorded by Adelaide ABC broadcaster Richard Peach. He passed away in 2008 so possibly the talking clock should contain a warning to indigenous cultures that it contains the voice of someone who has died. This system probably just cuts over automatically. Whenever you replace something wonderfully clever with something merely computerised, a little bit of the magic goes out of the world. Telecom commemorated this fact by making a video twice as long and far less interesting.
Did you think I was dead? No I’ve just been busy playing my guitar. I have several songs on the boil at the moment, but this one is complete. It has random 5/4 timings and a four part guitar harmony bit. Also, it’s strong and grrr yeah! Listen to I Defy
Like another 70 million or so people, my personal details were probably compromised in the Great Playstation Hack of 2011. This has probably left me open to IDENTITY THEFT. ZOMG ZOMG call Today Tonight, blah blah whatever. So far the total cost to me has been: I got two free games and an animated dragon on my Playstation login screen. No wait that was the gain, the loss was umm…
Woot! Free Stuff!
Now this doesn’t exonerate Sony for failing to properly secure the credit card details I gave them. I dunno if these are even at risk, various articles say various things but ultimately credit card companies cover fraud pretty well and Mon keeps a good eye on finances so she’d notice if I bought a television in Bolivia or subscribed to LichtensteinGayPorn.com or whatever so I’m less worried about that than other people may be.
What do you think? Do we get Xbox or PS3?
The real danger is allegedly what they call identity theft. This is where you get hold of enough details about a person to start doing financial things in their name. I don’t even remember what I have told PSN about me. Probably name and address, email address, umm maybe my mother’s maiden name or something? That’s enough to start finding out lots about me I’m sure and maybe even to create debt in my name. This has happened to a close friend some years back, entirely unrelated to any known hack, so it’s possibly doable with reasonably public details and some social hacking skills.
But is this my identity? Obviously it’s a serious issue on an economic level, but if it happened it wouldn’t mean the theft of my identity. Like if you steal my laptop, now I don’t have a laptop and that is pretty annoying, and it will cost me to replace it. But if you steal my identity, what have you taken from me? I’m still me. Would I insult my friends, alienate my workplace, annoy my wife even more than usual, pawn my guitars or parent my children differently? Would I, after the loss of my identity, wake up one morning and barrack for Collingwood, or vote for the CDP? Could anyone, with any of the details on the internet, even what I have posted on this blog, take away the essence of what makes me me?
Maybe...
I guess it depends on how you define your identity. With these details, you could steal my money. You could potentially wreck my career. For many, I guess that is what they define themselves by, so maybe you could actually take away some part of their identity. But me? You could take those things without removing anything that is essentially Jase.
Between the heavy metal concept album and the high addiction gaming reference, nerd factor is pretty high here :)
Click it for big view
Now the information you’ve all been waiting for, how to lose weight and stick to your diet. Lets just pause for this weeks weigh-in. 80kg. I have lost 10kg in four weeks, with this amazing diet secret. Here it is:
Harden up princess!
Seriously though, I realise most people find eating less quite difficult. Part of why it wasn’t so hard for me – near autistic perfectionism! Tell me what the structure is, and my instinct is to follow it. If these are the rules of the diet, that’s exactly what I’ll eat. After two weeks I had lost five kg. Also, I was sleeping like ten hours, waking up exhausted and starving, and wandering around much of the day alternating between hypoglycaemic rage and starved confusion. Possibly the recommended diet I was given was written with the assumption that people would cheat and sneak extra food and larger portions. Healthy weight loss is about 1kg/week so this was a little too fast. So I decided I could have a full bowl of cereal for breakfast, and more chips/potatoes/rice/pasta to fill me up at dinner time. Next two weeks, five kilos again although I’m a bit nicer this week, so maybe part of the agro was straight out sugar withdrawal.
This is me the first week
Here’s the other bit of the trick: I learned to like being hungry! After a couple of weeks, I started to feel kind of grrr, a bit harder and hungrier and edgier. Some of the suburban ennui that weighs us down slipped away, and I no longer want to gorge myself till I’m fat and lazy on the couch. Eating has shifted from being a leisure activity to being fuel for the body. This is not to say that I don’t enjoy eating. Quite the opposite. Because I don’t have an excess of food, I eat slower, and in doing so take more time to savour flavours and textures.
Art of Manliness has a great post on the benefits of delayed gratification. One of the points is that self denial helps you to feel and experience things more deeply -
Heaven is on the other side of that feeling you get when you’re sitting on the couch and you get up and make a triple-decker sandwich. It’s on the other side of that, when you don’t make the sandwich. It’s about sacrifice…. It’s about giving up the things that basically keep you from feeling. That’s what I believe, anyway. I’m always asking, “What am I going to give up next?” Because I want to feel. -Jim Carrey
When we get the slightest urge, we can fill it, and consequently we lose some of the tension that is supposed to make life interesting. Think of it like in Elmo Saves Christmas – Elmo loves Christmas so much, his wish is for Christmas every day. When his wish is granted, Christmas becomes mundane and meaningless, and he learns that Christmas is special precisely because of the anticipation and gruelling suspense of having to wait so long. So now instead of shoving unappreciated carbs down my gob at the first sign of an empty tummy, by the time I eat I’m really ready to eat. And when I do eat, I’m learning to take the time to savour it, partly because there’s not so much of it – I no longer eat like I have to beat Mike to the last taco, but simply eat ‘enough’, so I don’t get that slow fat feeling afterwards.
The trick is actually going to be working out how much of what to eat so I don’t waste away completely. Seriously, I really am losing weight too fast, and starting to drop muscle as well as fat. Don’t forget that the original point of all this was to avoid cholesterol medication, so loading back up the meat tray isn’t the solution. And I honestly do feel great being hungry! So the plan now is to get a bit more protein and exercise, and to try and convert the rest of the fat back to muscle.
This is the end of this series, but I’ll let you know how it’s going in a month or so when I go and get my cholesterol checked!
OK so part two of reducing Jase. First, lets see what lifestyle expert Dr Rudi has to say about weight loss:
Thanks Dr Rudi. What it really boils down to is to burn more energy than you consume, by eating less and/or exercising more. And acknowledge that your body is going to hate you for that. According to Cracked, where I get all my science from :
Due to the cruel laws of physics, losing weight requires two things:
1. Pain
2. HungerThis is due to a few fairly simple facts about your body. Your body wants to store fat, because through most of human history, food was scarce and in times of plenty it wants to store up for when supplies are short.
This is a process your body invented to keep you alive, over centuries of living in a world that did not have fast food or Hostess snack cakes. Any time you try to stop or undo that process, your body will send unpleasant sensations to your brain, because it thinks you’re setting yourself up to starve to death.
Any diet or product that claims to make weight loss effortless is an excellent product, if your goal is selling books and exciting but useless products to lazy people.
AS SEEN ON TV!
Maybe that’s a little harsh. It’s our habit in modern Western culture to expect things to be easy and fun. We live in a society where everything is effortless, we turn our unprecedented wealth into anything we need – we can buy leisure by paying for lawn mowing, gardening, cleaning. We buy our way out of responsibility to others by giving money to charities or at church instead. We buy off responsibility for family by paying for dog walking, child care and better school, sports and activities for our kids etc. We can buy (short term) self esteem and happiness with products that we identify with or which make us feel important or clever.
Every other problem we can fix by throwing money and expending minimal effort, why shouldn’t we be able to lose weight that way?
This is one place our modern wealth isn’t going to rescue us. You’re gonna be hungry. The suggestions from the dietician amounted to 6170kj (1470cal) per day. At my estimation, this is possibly as little as half what I was eating before that. What? Half? Things like, for brekkie instead of four pieces of toast lavished with peanut butter, two pieces with vegemite. Instead of morning tea being a muesli bar, an apple and a banana, it’s just one piece of fruit. Lunch – instead of a Chinese takeaway container chock full of meat and potato rich dinner leftovers, just a salad sandwich or ryvitas or something. Afternoon tea – big container of trail mix becomes small container of trail mix. Or a piece of fruit. If you steer clear of too much bread and fats, you can juggle what your food is, so a muesli bar one day, a banana the next, small serve of fruit sorbet for dessert instead of an orange, and so on. Dinner – assume about half of what I would have eaten, and mostly veg and salad. No more big roast…
I'm drooling on my keyboard
Obviously this works for weight loss. But yep – I was hungry. Sooooo hungry. So how did I keep that up? Stay tuned for the next update :)
Who’d have thought the world could ever have too much of me? Well, turns out according to a BMI chart,there is about 20kg too much Jase in the world. Now like an IQ test or being elected in a democracy, there are doubts about how meaningful an indicator BMI actually is, but let’s roll back for a moment.
An obese man, according to the BMI chart - 6’5″, 275 lbs, BMI 33
My Dad and brother both have been diagnosed with familial hypercholesterolemia, so when my cholesterol showed a little high at a workplace health screening, my doctor ordered proper tests. This came out with a total of 5.2, where the Australian recommendation is below 5, and a bad ratio of LDL to HDL, or triglyceride count, or something, but combined with family history he’s like, ‘Here’s Liptitor, enjoy the rest of your life on that and have regular liver function tests.’ Wait, what? Liver function? If I’m that close to healthy, I have other things I’d rather ruin my liver with.
Pictured - other things
I spoke to my family history who said their cholesterol was a lot worse when they went on meds for it, so I went to a dietician who said that the greater concern was the extra weight. Reducing my weight should apparently bring the cholesterol down to below five, and some other dietary choices could improve it further. So as of two weeks ago, I’m on a diet for weight loss and cholesterol reduction. Weight at the dietician’s, 91kg. Ideal weight according to BMI, around 70kg, which I haven’t weighed since I was a scrawny 16 year old. Actual target based on the fact that I have the shoulders of a second row but the height of a ball boy, 82kg, by the end of April.
Coming up next, how much I’m eating, how I feel and is it working?
Painted on the floor of the train station were the words ‘please validate’, an existential challenge to those who would access Platform 1. I spent ten minutes standing at the station desperately trying to justify my need to travel, while the commuters behind me became increasingly agitated.
Finally another would-be passenger explained that it was referring to the ticket machine. In a kindly tone, I assured the machine it was doing a good and important job, and proceeded to the platform.
