Health is Wealth: Prevention, Fitness and Strength

Today we start a multi-day series on improving health via prevention, fitness and strength.

Longtime readers know that I consider health (physical and mental) the key attribute of wealth and prosperity. Without health, then what good is your other "wealth"?

Readers also know that I consider "a healthy home-cooked meal a revolutionary act" because the Status Quo encourages chronic disease and ill-health. Why? 1) managing these conditions is immensely and enduringly profitable to the sickcare cartels and 2) weak, sickly, drugged-out citizens are easily manipulated politically and are too overwhelmed by their multiple chronic health issues to actively challenge the Status Quo.

I know that this sounds inflammatory to many of you, but for whatever reason oftwominds.com has attracted a very large readership of physicians, nurses and other caregivers, and the people who work in the trenches of the sickcare system are inevitably supportive of these "inflammatory" summations.

Sickcare is not sustainable financially, and so it will devolve and collapse, along with other unsustainable systems. I expect healthcare to slowly revert to cash-only if you want immediate care, with all other care becoming increasingly unavailable. Therefore prevention will be the key to well-being going forward, not hyper-expensive care that costs $100,000 for a few days of treatment.

In all my diverse reading about the science of human health, a few "obvious" things pop out.

1) Humans have a remarkable ability to prosper on a variety of real foods.
2) Processed foods are associated with "modern" diseases.
3) Chronic inactivity, stress and a diet of processed foods are associated with chronic inflammation.
4) Chronic inflammation is associated with a number of chronic diseases.
5) The only "miracle drug" is regular exercise combined with sleep, which is associated with exercise, good nutrition and stress reduction.
6) The mind and body are one. Mental health and physical health are related.

We cannot stave off all disease, of course, and many of us will need surgery or other major intervention regardless of our diet and fitness levels, but the point is that fitness and a common-sense diet of real, unprocessed foods make up about 2/3 of our "health metric" with genetics and the environment contributing perhaps a third.

The 80/20 rule may apply here (Pareto Distribution): achieving 20% of what's possible may reap 80% of the gain. For example, being able to jog 2 miles may reap 80% of the gain, while running 10 miles yields a diminishing health return and may even damage older runners.

This is of course inexact, but that's the rough proportions.

Increasing strength may provide an example of this: relatively infrequent short-duration intense exercise seems to increase strength and maintain it without daily workouts. In other words, it doesn't take much time to significantly improve one's strength.

Longtime correspondent Steve R. recently shared his own experiences with increasing muscular strength. Here is Steve's report:

Summary 

"Over about six weeks, I increased my overall muscular strength by 35%, by doing nothing more than a total of four 12-minute, very-intense workouts. 

Background
Over the past couple of years, I have been reading that much of the effort that most people put into exercise is wasted or even counter-productive, because they are missing the key ingredients of intensity and rest. The evidence coming into focus for me was that high intensity interval training (H.I.I.T.) was the quickest, most effective path toward cardiovascular fitness.
Long ago, I had learned that adequate rest is essential for weight training: i.e., never exercising any given muscle group more often than once per week. Recently, I ran across the book Body by Science: A Research Based Program to Get the Results You Want in 12 Minutes a Week (McGuff and Little), which presents a strong case for a 12-minute-only strength training workout, with about 7-10 days of rest between trips to the gym. I know it sounds crazy, but the authors back it up with their knowledge of physiology, their understanding of evolution, tons of studies, and their own clinical experiences (they are both trainers). The results I got are typical of their customers. 

The Workout
The workout consists of one 60-90-second set of each of five core exercises (leg press, underhand pulldown, overhead press, seated row, and chest press), moving from machine to machine as quickly as possible (no more than 30 seconds between machines). Each set is performed super-slow (6-10 seconds up; 6-10 seconds down) to prevent momentum cheating, and the weight should be chosen so that you "go to failure" (i.e., at the end of each set, you can't possibly do another rep). Doing the math shows that each set consists of about 5 reps. Only five sets of only five reps, for the entire workout, sounds easy, but trust me, the intensity near the end will kick your butt. 

Measuring My Results
I was careful to "compare apples to apples" when determining my gains. In other words, I didn't do fluff workouts early on in order to pad the results. The data show consistent 9% gains between successive 100%-effort workouts. I am very confident that the numbers are correct and that the gains are legitimate. 

Simplified Theory
The body adapts to an increased demand put upon it so that it can better meet that demand in the future. The idea is to give it a strong stimulus, followed by plenty of time to let it recover back to baseline, plus a small amount of growth. Experiments show that it takes 7-10 days for optimal growth to occur, much like the time the body needs to heal a cut. Resting less than 7 days thwarts the body's efforts to repair itself, like ripping a scab off before the cut is fully healed, leading to poor results, more injuries, and perhaps chronic stress. My average rest was 11 days."

This was very interesting to me on a number of fronts, and I replied thusly:

"Thank you for sharing your experience--it confirms my own intuitive sense of what works, as I tend to do pushups and sit-ups several times a week with biking and running interspersed throughout the week. I keep track and was surprised that a week between pushups did not really degrade the number I can do in one set (36).In terms of natural selection, this also makes sense. Hunters would more than likely only need bursts of strength or speed occasionally, and the body would thus maximize to occasional strength-building, as expending calories daily just to maintain muscle mass would be very ‘costly’ in evolutionary terms—why burn valuable calories unless there was a big yield?"

Steve added these comments on the natural-selection context:

"I think you're dead-on with your thoughts on natural selection. That seems to be the consensus among the top exercise people I listen to. Our ancestors probably didn't look like body builders, because like you said, excess muscle is too costly in terms of precious calories. This also dovetails with the emerging theory that traditional "cardio", especially too much, may actually be harmful. There are lots of people on the Amazon review/comment section for Body By Science that say something like, "Aerobics ruined my knees" or similar. It seems that short bursts of high-intensity exercise are the most effective. And I think for most people, distance running is very harmful - especially marathoners."

Thank you, Steve for sharing your experiences. I agree with Steve about "overdoing it." In typical American fashion (or is it human nature as well?), some people get obsessed with diet, fitness, etc. and go to extraordinary lengths, many of which end up being harmful simply because they are excessive.

The "middle path" may be the way to go in terms of fitness and prevention.

To give you a taste of what is possible in fitness as we age, here is a video clip of an 86-year woman performing a parallel-bars routine.

This entry was drawn from Musings Report #16. Subscribers and contributors of $50 or more receive the Musings Report each weekend. Subscription links can be found below.

Entries and email may be sporadic this week due to other commitments. 

Resistance, Revolution, Liberation: A Model for Positive Change (print $25)
(Kindle eBook $9.95)

Read the Introduction (2,600 words) and Chapter One (7,600 words) for free.

We are like passengers on the Titanic ten minutes after its fatal encounter with the iceberg: though our financial system seems unsinkable, its reliance on debt and financialization has already doomed it.We cannot know when the Central State and financial system will destabilize, we only know they will destabilize. We cannot know which of the State’s fast-rising debts and obligations will be renounced; we only know they will be renounced in one fashion or another.
The process of the unsustainable collapsing and a new, more sustainable model emerging is called revolution.Rather than being powerless, we hold the fundamental building blocks of power. We need neither permission nor political change to liberate ourselves. A powerless individual becomes powerful when he renounces the lies and complicity that enable the doomed Status Quo’s dominance.

Thank you, Vladimir T. ($25), for your much-appreciated generous contribution to this site-- I am greatly honored by your support and readership.

Read more...

The Central Banking Theater of the Absurd

The astounding hubris of central bankers is comical, but the consequences of their actions are playing out as needless tragedy.

Central bankers present themselves as Masters of the Universe. They are, but only in their own little Theater of the Absurd. In the real world, they are as clueless as any other mortals about the unintended consequences of their actions and the speed with which the corrupted, unsustainable financial Status Quo will decay and die.

The only attribute they possess in abundance is hubris. Their claims to godhood are comical when viewed in their little Theater of the Absurd, but they become tragic when the consequences of their actions play out in the real world.

Their job, such as it is, is to deflate a tottering system based on phantom assets slowly enough that it doesn't implode. Stripped of mumbo-jumbo, their strategy to accomplish this is to inflate other phantom assets to replace the phantom assets that are falling to zero.

All their promises, preening and posturing boil down to patting their breast pocketand speaking vaguely about a "secret plan" to end the crisis without bringing down the system that spawned the crisis as a consequence of its very nature.

There is no secret plan, of course, and no secret financial weapons; all they really have is artifice and the hubris to present artifice as reality.

To admit the usustainable is not sustainable would bring the entire rotten edifice crashing down, so the central bankers invite us into their little Theater of the Absurd and evince a phantom confidence in their phantom solutions that depend on phantom assets.

A swollen cloud of doom hangs over the central banker's little Theater of the Absurd; all their chest-pounding hubris and empty confidence is artifice, as phantom as the assets they claim will replace the phantom assets that have been destroyed by exposure to reality.

On their absurd little stage, they claim the Emperor's robes are thick and fine; and we laugh, bitterly, for these threadbare lies are all they have to "save" a parasitic, predatory, anti-democratic financial Status Quo.

Entries and email may be sporadic this week.

---

Resistance, Revolution, Liberation: A Model for Positive Change (print $25)
(Kindle eBook $9.95)

Read the Introduction (2,600 words) and Chapter One (7,600 words) for free.

We are like passengers on the Titanic ten minutes after its fatal encounter with the iceberg: though our financial system seems unsinkable, its reliance on debt and financialization has already doomed it.We cannot know when the Central State and financial system will destabilize, we only know they will destabilize. We cannot know which of the State’s fast-rising debts and obligations will be renounced; we only know they will be renounced in one fashion or another.
The process of the unsustainable collapsing and a new, more sustainable model emerging is called revolution.Rather than being powerless, we hold the fundamental building blocks of power. We need neither permission nor political change to liberate ourselves. A powerless individual becomes powerful when he renounces the lies and complicity that enable the doomed Status Quo’s dominance.

Thank you, Frederik A. ($50), for your splendidly generous contribution to this site-- I am greatly honored by your support and readership.

Read more...

The Grand Cycle Top in Everything

We are on the downslope side of the Grand Cycle Top in Everything.

Our Chartist Friend From Pittsburgh has assembled an epic collection of 31 charts illustrating what I call the Grand Cycle Top in Everything: Destruction Of The Dome.

The collection demonstrates his charting system, Curvilinear Wave Analysis: A Charting Method For The 21st Century.

Here are two examples:

I highly recommend viewing all 31 charts, as they provide a context for what lies ahead in the economy and the stock market.

Entries and email may be sporadic this week due to other commitments.

---

Resistance, Revolution, Liberation: A Model for Positive Change (print $25)
(Kindle eBook $9.95)

Read the Introduction (2,600 words) and Chapter One (7,600 words) for free.

We are like passengers on the Titanic ten minutes after its fatal encounter with the iceberg: though our financial system seems unsinkable, its reliance on debt and financialization has already doomed it.We cannot know when the Central State and financial system will destabilize, we only know they will destabilize. We cannot know which of the State’s fast-rising debts and obligations will be renounced; we only know they will be renounced in one fashion or another.
The process of the unsustainable collapsing and a new, more sustainable model emerging is called revolution.Rather than being powerless, we hold the fundamental building blocks of power. We need neither permission nor political change to liberate ourselves. A powerless individual becomes powerful when he renounces the lies and complicity that enable the doomed Status Quo’s dominance.

Thank you, Gerald O. ($10/month), for your exceedingly generous subscription to this site-- I am greatly honored by your support and readership.

Read more...

Bernanke and Draghi Are Dangerous

What is being sacrificed to maintain the euro and the E.U./U.S. banking cartel? Everything of value: liberty, democracy and sovereignty.

Today we present the culmination of the previous entries ( Global Crisis: the Convergence of Marx, Orwell and Kafka and Are You Loving Your Servitude Yet?): A brief commentary by longtime correspondent Harun I. on Mario Draghi's market-moving statement: “Within our mandate, the ECB is ready to do whatever it takes to preserve the euro. And believe me, it will be enough.”

Nice, Mr. Draghi, but at what cost? And who will ultimately bear this cost? It is already far beyond the measure of mere money; democracy, truth and sovereignty have all been destroyed to prop up the central bankers' Status Quo. We can presume Mr. Bernanke and the Federal Reserve are in on the propaganda campaign, and so we need to examine the words and promises of these two central bankers, as well as what they have not said.

Is talking about printing money as good as actually printing money? It would seem so. Is promising to "do whatever it takes" as good as actually doing whatever it takes? Once again, it seems so; global markets leaped at the "news" that the financial Status Quo was going to be "saved" yet again.

What if it is beyond saving?

What if the cost in treasure, blood, liberty, sovereignty and truth is not worth the 'saving" of a broken, unsustainable, corrupted, parasitic, predatory system? Do we get to choose, or are we just passengers on the train as the central bankers accelerate toward the chasm ahead?

Here is Harun's commentary:

Words have meaning and people should choose them carefully. Nigel Farage commented that what he saw in the faces of EU officials was "madness". We should not underestimate his assessment. 

At some point these individuals have to be viewed as dangerous. If we peer beyond terms such as QE, printing money out of thin air, stimulate, etc, and understand their effect, they begin to appear not so benign.
What if central bank officials came out and said, "We are going to raise your taxes", or "we are going to reduce your purchasing power", or, down to its essential point, "we are going to take money out of your pocket"? We know that there would be an uproar.
So, what did Draghi just say? He said he is willing to destroy the purchasing power of the Euro in order to save it. But let's go deeper than that. These people are willing to see countries rip themselves apart, property destroyed, and most importantly, people dying, to preserve some frivolous ideology called the Euro. If on the other hand this is about maintaining the power of the elite, it is much worse, because if this were the case then we are seeing an attempt at totalitarian rule by what you call the "stateless state".
But of course, the markets cheered. At least that is how it is interpreted. I interpret it as people reacting to prevent the confiscation of their purchasing power by someone they cannot un-elect.
Who elected Draghi and endowed him the authority to tell Europeans that they will suffer and die before the Euro? How much violence is ready to be endured and how many lives is the EU body willing to sacrifice upon the alter of the Euro or any monetary system? 

Not one official has declared that they will "do whatever needed" to preserve liberty, democracy and sovereignty. Does this imply the Euro has a higher priority? Does the end of the Euro or the present monetary system mean the sun will stop spinning and all of its planets will be sent hurtling through the cosmos? 

The callousness and detachment from reality in an effort to save a nonessential thing makes them dangerous. The more desperate they become the more dangerous they become.
If just one of them would publicly muse aloud that perhaps a mistake has been made, and perhaps a rethink of the structure of the EU is appropriate, I would feel better. But they are willing to confiscate your labor through monetary chicanery, deny liberty, destroy democracy, ignore sovereignty, and even witness violence and death, not just in Europe but in the US as well, to maintain a system that is horribly and irrevocably broken.
Lastly, much is being made over whether the German Constitutional Court will ratify the ESM. The German High Court is wasting its time or willfully participating in a charade. A fund that will be used to bailout the very people who must provide funds to the fund is as ridiculous as this sentence sounds. Mind you that the countries that are suppose to provide funding to the ESM must borrow to do so and then must turn around and borrow from the ESM, effectively borrowing the same non-money twice -- at interest.
(If the money is "borrowed" from the ECB, which has no "money" and then "borrowed" from the ESM, the ESM will not owe a debt to the ECB. Therefore, the sovereign will owe a debt to the ESM and the ECB.)
All that has really been accomplished over the past hundred years is the establishment of elaborate transfer mechanisms, each destroying wealth one order of a magnitude faster than the previous.
I never thought I would witness such collective madness. But the worst part is that it is anything but benign, and, it is only just beginning.

Thank you, Harun. Let's enjoy the central-bank inspired market rally while it lasts. It comes at an unbearable cost that will have to be paid some day, and perhaps not as far in the future as the worshippers of the Federal Reserve believe.

---

Resistance, Revolution, Liberation: A Model for Positive Change (print $25)
(Kindle eBook $9.95)

Read the Introduction (2,600 words) and Chapter One (7,600 words) for free.

We are like passengers on the Titanic ten minutes after its fatal encounter with the iceberg: though our financial system seems unsinkable, its reliance on debt and financialization has already doomed it.We cannot know when the Central State and financial system will destabilize, we only know they will destabilize. We cannot know which of the State’s fast-rising debts and obligations will be renounced; we only know they will be renounced in one fashion or another.
The process of the unsustainable collapsing and a new, more sustainable model emerging is called revolution.Rather than being powerless, we hold the fundamental building blocks of power. We need neither permission nor political change to liberate ourselves. A powerless individual becomes powerful when he renounces the lies and complicity that enable the doomed Status Quo’s dominance.

Thank you, Gregory J. ($100), for your outrageously generous contribution to this site--I am greatly honored by your support and readership.

Read more...

Are You Loving Your Servitude Yet?

Aldous Huxley imagined a world in which the Status Quo satisfies its lust for power by "suggesting people into loving their servitude."

Yesterday I discussed the Convergence of Marx, Orwell and Kafka as a means of understanding the global crisis. It's not just financial fraud on a vast scale, or debt or leverage or derivatives or a hundred other arcane mechanisms of parasitic predation; it's the partnership of a mindlessly expansive Central State with Monopoly Capital and the media machine that serves them.

I considered including Aldous Huxley in the convergence, as he too anticipated the essential nature of modern life. But perhaps his insights are more complementary than convergent, for he understood the media and State's capacity to not only present a deranged and destructive Status Quo as "normal" but to persuade the serfs to embrace it.

Aldous Huxley foresaw a Central State that persuaded its people to “love their servitude” via propaganda, drugs, entertainment and information-overload. In his view, the energy required to force compliance exceeded the "cost" of persuasion, and thus the Powers That Be would opt for the power of suggestion.

He outlined this in a letter to George Orwell:

"My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World. Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience."

As prescient as he was, Huxley could not have foreseen the power of electronic media hypnosis/addiction as a conditioning mechanism for passivity and self-absorption. We are only beginning to understand the immense addictive/conditioning powers of 24/7 social and "news" media. What would we say about a drug that caused people to forego sex to check their Facebook page? What would we say about a drug that caused young men to stay glued to a computer for 40+ hours straight, an obsession so acute that some actually die? We would declare that drug to be far too powerful and dangerous to be widely available, yet the Web is now ubiquitous.

Servitude comes in many gradations and forms. Relying on the Federal Reserve to constantly prop up our pension and mutual funds lest reality cause them to collapse is a form of servitude; we end up worshipping the Fed's every word and act as mendicants worship their financial saviors.

That the Fed is unelected and impervious to democracy or the will of the people is forgotten; all that matters is that we love our servitude to it.

I have discussed the atomizing nature of social media and the way it conditions self-absorption in 800 Million Channels of Me (February 21, 2011), and the way that the consumerist ethos generates insecurity, alienation and social defeat. The only "cure" for social defeat is to love the servitude of consumption, convenience and the resulting debt-serfdom: The Last Refuge of Wall Street: Marketing To Increasingly Insolvent Consumers(December 12, 2011). I have covered these topics in depth in my books Resistance, Revolution, Liberation: A Model for Positive Change and Survival+: Structuring Prosperity for Yourself and the Nation.

The Central State has the power via welfare (individual and corporate) and bailouts to buy complicity. Since the human mind rebels against hypocrisy and insincerity--we can all spot a phony--we subconsciously persuade ourselves of the rightness and inevitability of servitude and self-absorption.

And that is how we come to love our servitude; we persuade ourselves to believe it's acceptable and normal rather than deranged and destructive.

---

Resistance, Revolution, Liberation: A Model for Positive Change (print $25)
(Kindle eBook $9.95)

Read the Introduction (2,600 words) and Chapter One (7,600 words) for free.

We are like passengers on the Titanic ten minutes after its fatal encounter with the iceberg: though our financial system seems unsinkable, its reliance on debt and financialization has already doomed it.We cannot know when the Central State and financial system will destabilize, we only know they will destabilize. We cannot know which of the State’s fast-rising debts and obligations will be renounced; we only know they will be renounced in one fashion or another.
The process of the unsustainable collapsing and a new, more sustainable model emerging is called revolution.Rather than being powerless, we hold the fundamental building blocks of power. We need neither permission nor political change to liberate ourselves. A powerless individual becomes powerful when he renounces the lies and complicity that enable the doomed Status Quo’s dominance.

Thank you, Joe G. ($5/month), for your extremely generous subscription to this site--I am greatly honored by your support and readership.

Read more...