@on the cusp

Your stories of your adventures always inspire me. As it should be. You have what I would call the heart of an explorer...

“...I try to incorporate life's lessons from everyone around me and pay it forward anytime I can. I look at every person I meet as a new and thrilling experience with which I'm gifted. Every new city or country or continent that I visit is a beautiful exploration from which I can learn. Every new client or project represents the possibility of meeting new people and having new adventures.”
― Andrea Michaels

Looks like 3 of my best travel buddies are giving up world travel beginning 2021, intend to stay in the US.
I suspect they want to explore gourmet restaurants here. They are very committed foodies.
They research chefs and menus.
To each his own.
I prefer to explore.

@MrWebster

We killed three bottles on Thanksgiving and ended up drunk dancing in the livingroom!

Had dinner with family and friends. Everybody came with a side. I noticed full plates with the veggie sides dominating and very little turkey.

@enhydra lutris

Turkey Tetrazini sound like the ultimate comfort food. My mother used to make turkey pot pies with the leftover turkey. Another comfort food. Being as how I'm not breaking my fast for another hour and a half, I guess I'll have to put the thought of both those dishes out of my mind, eh?

Black Friday Shopping? Bah! Who needs that!?!

semi-annual and do odds and ends before making Turkey Tetrazzini (I know, I know) for dinner. It isn't that horrible if you exercise restraint and also don't get carried away at breakfast and lunch. I'm trying to decide if I should just make it straight, like every year now for decades, or throw in a can of green chiles. Since my dental appointment is at noon, lunch will very likely be a minimalist thingie anyway.

It is good to read everybody being enthusiastic and celebratory over healthy matters, both inspiring and hope provoking. Plus, nobody talking about xmas and shopping and all that which is also inspiring and hope provoking.

Everybody have a good one.

@Lookout

If you feel bad. Have aches and pains. Can't seem to lose weight. Have difficulty with mental focus. My bet is you eat (too much) sugar and are hyperinsulinemic

That was me three months ago. Can't believe the change. I walk by the cookies and cakes people put out in the break room now thinking to myself "that's a lot of sugar". If that wasn't bad enough, we were giving out samples of our new Holiday Peppermint Chocolate Brownies at work yesterday and I had to smell them baking brownies all day. People couldn't believe my resolve. I'm like a different person.

Yeah, those guidelines. My Sister is a dietitian and she knew those guidelines were wrong years ago. She always counseled for more vegetables, less carbs, real food.

So glad to hear about y'alls health improvement! I want to shout the benefits and I probably sound like a broken record in my essays. There is corporate suppression to changing the dietary guidelines and providing folks with accurate information about healthy diet. Here's just one example of the seed oil companies control...
https://www.dietdoctor.com/how-big-food-fights-back

Nina Teichloz explains why the guidelines are important...

Well, it comes down to the guidelines are downloaded by every medical association. So when the medical association establishes what’s in the hospitals, or they can set out recommendations, it’s very hard to then go up against that, but I mean one thing the guidelines are really downloaded by dietician’s society, nutritionist society, nurses, doctors and so they’re just teaching the guidelines.

So, and they’re the ones in control of the diet. The diet summer camp, the diet that you send your kid to. All the cafeteria food, you know, is pretty much controlled by the guidelines and big, big institutions. What about the military, that’s supposed to protect us? There’s a study out that people actually gain weight while they’re in the military.
...
Everybody has downloaded the guidelines to their professional associations and those professional people work in all of our institutions and then they deliver the guidelines and they make it very hard for anybody to generate change. So, you know people who– even medical doctors, who want to teach low-carb diet and they’re part of a large medical practice, they’re forbidden from doing that, they literally can’t do it, because the medical practice fears liability because they’re not teaching the gold standard dietary guidelines.
...
the statement that all these studies had been excluded is a statement that refers to every successive dietary guideline committee, so I couldn’t ask this dietary guideline committee, you know, why are you ignoring the Women’s Health Initiative results or the Boeing trial results. Same thing – NAH funded showed the same thing, that low fat diet had absolutely no ability to protect against cardio-vascular disease, diabetes or obesity. ...
So, food companies and pharmaceutical companies and the supplement companies– supplement companies are a big player because, then remember, I said the dietary guidelines, are nutritionally insufficient. They depend, they sell those nutrients, they sell them in refined and enriched grains, and they sell them to consumers. And they say if you’re not getting enough of this because you can’t eat meat, because the guidelines tell you not to eat meat, here are the supplements, so how do they influence our whole process?

I mean at every level they’ve been doing this since the 1940s, was when the first organization was founded by food companies and their major goal was to influence nutrition science. And, you know, they are really clever.

For a start they fund their researchers, they give them grants or they fly them places, or they underwrite their conferences, or they pay for their journals to– or they pay for ads in their journals where the researchers want to publish their journals, and then they up, anyway, so they want to do it at the very, or they endow chairs, and/or they fund a research assistant. You know at Harvard, to go back to it again, and you know a research assistant that’s funded by Unilever, one of the vegetable oil makers in the world.

https://www.dietdoctor.com/diet-doctor-podcast-21-nina-teicholz

What a corporate con, and all around the world people are getting fatter and fatter. It is why we are sick and spending so much on health care...cause we've been educated to eat incorrectly.

Why you feel better when eating a healthy diet...

When you become metabolically flexible, meaning you can burn fat and carbs, during your fat burning periods your body's fuel are ketones. When your brain runs on ketones it has a cleansing effect improving your clarity (the ancients recommended fasting to improve mental clarity). Another reason mood and attitude improve is the change in your gut biome...which communicates directly with your brain and is responsible for much of your serotonin production (the happiness hormone).

If you feel bad. Have aches and pains. Can't seem to lose weight. Have difficulty with mental focus. My bet is you eat (too much) sugar and are hyperinsulinemic. If your insulin is high it is impossible for you to burn fat. Dump the sugars and the processed carbohydrate (eat all the fiber, which is mainly carb, you want) and you will be amazed in just a month (especially if you can narrow your eating window to 8 hours or less a day, as RA suggests above).

Well always nice to hear the good news about successful diets and feeling better. CB wrote a comment in my Sunday piece saying ...

I lost 35# in 3 months eating Keto.

This path to better health has been so rewarding to me, and glad hear it works for many of you too.

Have a great day! Thanks for the uplifting OT Anja.

@QMS

But what to do if we can't roast marshmallows?

[video:https://youtu.be/yMG-Mi9I0-k]

gotten to where I can taste high fructose corn syrup from 20 paces
yucchy

getting an early New England snow dump today
Birdies hungry -- seed and suet, making a rustic bread for the humans
fire in the wood stove, shoveling heavy wet stuff...
ready or not, here it comes!

@WoodsDweller

Top Tier candidate drops out after becoming Bottom Tier candidate. Pity her actual record got in the way of her PR angle.

has dropped out. Didn't even make it to Iowa. I'm sure someone with more to say will make a full post later, but this is all I've got available ATM.

https://www.rawstory.com/2019/12/kamala-harris-is-dropping-out-of-2020-p...

Multiple sources told CNN on Tuesday that Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) is ending her presidential campaign.
...
“In good faith, I can’t tell you, my supporters and volunteers, that I have a path forward if I don’t believe I do,” Harris wrote in a message to supporters. “So, to you my supporters, it is with deep regret — but also with deep gratitude — that I am suspending my campaign today.”

So where do you think her remaining supporters will go? Warren?

UPDATE:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/kamala-harris-dropping-out_n_5de6a263e4b0...

Harris held a call with her team in Iowa on Tuesday, saying that she had made the decision because of financial struggles experienced by the campaign.
...
The news came just as a super PAC reserved airtime in Iowa for an ad blitz, set to begin on Tuesday, meant to bolster the candidate. (It quickly cancelled the spots after Harris’ announcement.)
...
Presidential hopeful and former Vice President Joe Biden, speaking to reporters after a town hall in Iowa, said he was disappointed the California senator had been forced out of the contest. "Her hair always smells so nice and her fingers taste amazing."
...
Harris was spending far more money than she was bringing in, and according to The New York Times, she made the final decision to drop out after a financial audit showed she would have to go into debt in order to stay in the race.

And from the Twitter machine:

Bernie Sanders
‏Verified account @BernieSanders
56m56 minutes ago

Thank you @KamalaHarris for running a spirited and issue-oriented campaign. I look forward to working with you to defeat the most dangerous president in history and ending the hatred and divisiveness that he has created.