Lose weight: Rats do it, you can, too

In my travels on the Internet, I’ve discovered Seth Roberts, a professor in Animal Psychology (specializing in rats) at University of California Berkeley, who has spent 2 decades conducting self-experiments on two matters of concern to all of us: weight control and sleep quality.

He has reached some remarkable conclusions, here are just a few:

• Watching faces on television in the morning upon waking causes a sense of well-being the next day.
• Standing for 8 hours or more deepens sleep that night.
• Eating breakfast several hours after awakening, prevents early awakening syndrome.

Read the abstract of his experimentations here.

The most exciting is his discovery of a unique method for effortless weight loss. His conclusions are relatively simple:

By ingesting flavorless foods (such as oil or sugar water) the body is fooled into lowering its set point and appetite is suppressed. One naturally eats less.

After experimenting with various substances (water, sushi, thick pasta) for over a decade, Seth discovered sugar water and/or vegetable oil (extra lite olive, canola or walnut are best) worked best. He came upon the ideal flavorless foods comcept accidentally while visiting Paris in 2000:

“The food was excellent. I wanted to eat three meals per day but to my surprise and disappointment I had little appetite, even though I felt fine and was walking a lot. I realized that the new weight-control theory suggested an explanation: It had been hot and I had drunk two or three sucrose-sweetened soft drinks each day. All of them had been new to me because they were brands not available at home. The novelty meant that their flavors were not yet associated with calories and therefore would not have raised my set point. They had been sweet, of course, a familiar flavor that presumably was associated with calories. But maybe sweetness was effectively a weak flavor, I thought, and what I had observed was another instance, similar to sushi, of [a] bland food reducing the set point.”

Moreover, his theory explains the fattening of not just our population over the past few decades. He explains what “ditto foods” are:

“Ditto foods are foods that taste exactly the same each time. Soft drinks. Breakfast cereals. Your favorite salami. Anything out of a package. Frozen foods. Anything from a mix. Chain-restaurant food. I introduced the term because I believe that ditto foods caused the obesity epidemic. Americans eat far more ditto food now than 20 years ago. Microwave ovens and chain restaurants have a lot to do with this.

“Back in the 1950’s, people were not eating a low-fat diet. They were not eating low-carb (avoiding sugar and bread). They were not trying to eat small portions. (And they were not getting much exercise, either.) Yet they were much thinner than us. The reason is that they ate much less ditto food, including less junk food and fast food, than we do.”

This is a simple, effective way to lower your weight. I urge you to check it out. You can see a 9-minute video on the diet on my myspace site here and there are also many audio and video clips you can find by googling “Seth Roberts.”

Viva Las Vegas

This just in this week from The Daily Reckoning newsletter. It's anecdotal, but it's telling:

"But a housing market falls apart slowly. And according to our anecdotal evidence, it is still early...the winds are still getting stronger...and shifting direction.

"'I bought a house in Las Vegas more than a year ago,' an old friend reports. 'At that time, houses in the area were selling for $330,000 to $380,000 approximately...and there were a few for sale. Now, they're almost all for sale...I priced mine at $270,000. Still, no takers. I want to sell the house, of course, but there are some people who really need to sell. That's why I think this housing collapse is just beginning.'

"'I saw another statistic,' said another old friend. 'Half of all the houses for sale in America are empty. In other words, they were speculations. You know that many of those sellers must be very motivated.'

"Last night, back in Paris, we had dinner with a Canadian woman who sold her house in Bethesda, Maryland - a suburb of Washington, D.C. - a year ago:

"'My agent told me that I hit the very top of the market,' she said. 'I have friends who just put their house on the market this summer. They can't get anyone to look at it.'

"Prices have not collapsed. But bids are disappearing. Speculators are laying low. And genuine buyers are waiting...hoping to get a better price later.

"And here comes a bad report from an important housing barometer: housing starts have fallen to a six-year low. With too much inventory already, builders are cutting back as fast as they can.

"Maybe the storm will pass without major damage. But if we were you, dear reader, we'd get out of town."

New Orleans, The Crescent City

I didn't know this, but apparently New Orleans was founded on one of the greatest financial bubbles of all time. This comes intact from Addison Wiggin via the daily reckoning people:

“At the height of “the bubble,” just when the wheels started to come off, Mississippi John Law came up with a brilliant plan to save his company and the Banque Royale. The year was 1720. Paris, over the previous three years and by virtue of Law’s financial innovations, had become the largest and richest city in Europe.

“Law’s “innovation” was paper money. Apart from a several-hundred-year stretch in China ending in 910, the world had never seen or used paper money. At the outset of The Mississippi Scheme, Law had demanded, on the pain of death, that his banker’s not print more money than could be redeemed in gold from their own reserves. The strict backing of the currency - what was essentially the world’s first gold standard - gave investors of the day such confidence that the currency actually traded at a premium.

“But there was a problem. Law’s bank existed by virtue of a deal with the Regent of France, the Duc d’Orleans. The finances of the government in France following the reign of Louis XIV, his wars and the building of Versaille, were a mess. Seeing how much value was being placed in the new bank notes of the Banque Royale, the Regent set another precedent modern readers will recognize: he decided to print his way out of debt. He suggested Law issue currency up to 80 times what the bank held in redeemable gold reserves. Law, being rather preoccupied with the power and prestige the scheme had bestowed on him, ignored his previous warnings, and let the printing begin.

“The new notes flooded into the market and for a while held the value they had gained with solid gold backing. So many people got rich, the Aristocracy of the time coined a new term to describe them: “millionaires.” Stories of commoners making so much money fired the imaginations of thousands and thousands more investors and the frenzy got out of hand.

“New Orleans, the site of this week’s investment conference, was founded at that time, named after the Regent, and meant to become the Paris of the New World - the jumping off point for those who would mine all the gold and silver soon to be discovered in Mississippi (sic).

“When people started getting wind of the fact that there was nothing backing Law’s currency but rumors of future profits to be reaped in the New World, they started losing confidence in the new currency. Law, trying to keep up appearances just a little longer, rounded up all the beggars, bums and thieves in Paris, furnished them with picks and shovels, and marched them through Paris ostensibly on their way to New Orleans...and the mines of Mississippi. The quiet hiss of air leaking out of the bubble accelerated into a screeching “whoosh!” when the same old dirty faces began appearing in the same old dirty doorways and alleys."

New Orleans didn't become the Paris of the New World and it didn't remain in French hands that much longer (1803) as France fell on harder times. To remember that things are so transitory (paper money, the rise of empires) even when they last for generations, is a good thing in these "interesting" times.

I've Only Just Begun

It's been 4 years since I left this bucolic street in San Francisco and came East across our great country. 14 months after 9/11 and I was on my way to New York.

So many changes since then: in me and in the country and with friends and family. Now, I'm a regular writer on my friend Porter's blog (goofyblog), but I feel the need to break out with my own as well.

Liberty Hill is the neighborhood in San Francisco just east of the Mission, just west of the Castro, just down the hill from Noe Valley and just south of Dolores Park. It's a little-known set of blocks in one of the finest sections of the City. I lived there for almost 7 years into the first part of the 21st century.

After spending my whole life in California, I needed to venture out and try things elsewhere. Change is the only constant in life and that's been true for me in spades. Strangely enough, I had 3 friends on that block who all left within 12 months of my departure. Johnny went to India to live permanently. He died there a year later of pancreatic cancer. Ken moved to South Bend for a job after his fur business closed in the City. I visited him once going east, then later coming back from the east. He moved to Connecticut a few years ago, but not before staying in Chicago, Alaska and Yonkers. Jeff moved to Thailand to be with his 28-year old girlfriend in Chaing Mai. I guess he's doing fine. He loved Southeast Asia and at the end there, hated San Francisco.

He thought he was too old for the City and he was probably right. The neighborhood we lived in was full of the wealthy. Tracy Chapman lived across the street until she, too, moved on in Summer of 2002. I like her music and whenever I hear it I think of Liberty Street and of San Francisco. Once I heard her song, Heaven's Here On Earth, in a bar in Virginia City, Nevada, and got instantly homesick.

The other day I heard some of her tunes playing somewhere here in NYC. Her stuff is so simple, so elegant. Her mansion was on the market for 2 months at a $2 million asking. We took a looksee while it was being shown and discovered that she had made the top floor into 2 apartments, though you had to descend the staircase and use her front door. That finally explained the older white guy we used to see coming down the outside stairs.

Tracy was really economizing!

My intention with this blog is to expand the postings I've been putting on goofyblog and to post material that might geared to the goofyblog audience. I'll still post there. But I'll put more of my own imprint on the postings here.

And off we go. . .