When you’re getting bad answers in life, maybe ask better questions. video here: https://www.instagram.com/p/BsS32U_liMG/
I’m absolutely fascinated by brain chemistry and how non-logical/non-conscious stress response drives the vast majority of human behavior and belief. We like to think we’ve rationalized our way to every position, politic, worldview, and lifestyle; but functional MRI keeps showing us they even the most genius-level people on earth are acting and thinking first and foremost from an emotive place of amygdala triggers and associations, oftentimes wrong and only occasional right. If I remember correctly, my dad actually got three or four in a row here, as well as a decent break. We were cranking Neil Diamond and I think he’d had a smidge of scotch. A few weeks prior he’d had a bout of pneumonia, a stoke and/or fall. Challenges only grow to impossibilities if you let them. And it’s easy to let them when you ask the wrong questions.
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There are Nobel prizes for discoveries about vitamin C (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Szent-Gy%C3%B6rgyi). There are tons of published findings on the efficacy of this compound. There are double-blind placebo-controlled peer-reviewed proofs of how it works, that it works, why it works. It's established Chemistry fact. Yet, I've encountered allegedly-educated people who contend that vitamin C (along with all supplements) is snake oil. I once chatted with a fairly prestigious surgeon who said to me, "you know, NO supplement has EVER had ANY published findings showing it works." "Really?" I said, with a mouth-agape tone, feigning amazement at his effort to appear well-read on the absolute totality of all human research. Then I followed up, "so you stopped reading even your own journals when you graduated from med school thirty-five years ago?" To be fair, he maybe continued reading JAMA, The British Medical Journal, The Cardiologist, Cell, Nature, etc., up until the 90s. However, if you've had any interest in learning since, oh, say, 1999, you would know that your own organization changed its official stance on even multivitamin recommendations (i.e. - in favor), let alone all supplements for all time. Spoiler: science continued after the 1980s. Heck, in just the past five years there have been complete paradigm shifts in human health and the related sciences.
Vitamin C, or ascorbic acid, was actually very well understood a long time ago (about a hundred years). Its benefit to humans and a lot of creatures in the animal kingdom is evident. Though it is true that there are a couple of extremely disingenuous studies which were contrived specifically to debunk vitamin C (they purposely used a wholly insufficient and futile dosage of vitamin C versus the placebo group) while deliberately infecting humans with colds and flus, the other several thousand efforts by real scientists and researchers has indicated benefit for humans all the way up to 8,000-12,000 milligrams: www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/9/4/339. It appears that a lot of intellectually lazy people aren't actually thinking skeptically. They just jumped on the "skeptical" bandwagon as a badge of sophistication so that they could stop reading and thinking. Dosages and saturation rates make the difference between benefit, innocuous, and deadly. It's so unbelievably simpleminded and parochial to say "doesn't work" about not just a compound we understand but ALL compounds which one terms "supplement." It's a completely throwaway sentiment with zero value. Sadly, there are a lot of studies which were conducted with the same type of dishonest parameters (laughably low dosages) for omega 3s, minerals, phytonutrients, you name it. Go ahead. Get on google. You can find a headline for anything. Guess what: alcohol and cocaine are ineffective chemicals. And you could prove that in a completely legitimate placebo-control-group study by down-dosing enough. For those "freethinkers" in your nearby work cubicles, they're likely to scoff at this research showing benefit as well, insisting on the simpleton approach of just dismissing everything they don't already believe. But, for those of you who continue to learn, this is even more research which explores the mechanism of human health benefit from vitamin C, not just the statistical outcomes (which also happen to make a solid case for adding vitamin C supplementation): https://today.oregonstate.edu/news/metabolic-syndrome-patients-need-more-vitamin-c-break-cycle-antioxidant-depletion It's a compass. Every time I deviate from perfect North, there is exquisite pain.
Consequently, I've found two dangers: comfort and avoidance. In comfort, there is the tolerance of pain which comes with time. It obfuscates the path. When we were young and touched a hot stove, it's clearcut: don't. With age, the edges of the same subject both yield pain (e.g. - too much work AND too little). The familiar pain befriends us. We don't pull our hand away for fear of straining our shoulder. We cuddle up to bad habits despite continuous pain. In avoidance, we become stale, sidestepping pain altogether, only to find we no longer learn and grow. That itself is painful. We traded the acute for the subtle. Balance, therefore, is a wide path. Explore it. And on either side there will be pain. And that's ok. Sharp pain is better than stealthy pain. I can step back from sharpness. I may never even know to step back from stealthiness. I’ve made the mistake from time to time wherein I’m thinking about the day as some force of nature that I have to “face” or “seize.” But the day is just time. Time is just a space I’ll fill up with whatever I want. “Today” is a label we’ve placed on a period which we will end up using however we desire. “Today” is potential. It isn’t happening to me any more than the cubic footage of a room I occupy. It isn’t happening to me more than the volume of a bucket. All of these are just measures; none have volition, purpose, or intent. They are tools.
They serve us. People talk about a bad week, a bad year, how rough 2018 was, or how hopeful for 2019 they are. All of it is blank canvas. Now paint. "Get Fit in One Fifth of The Time" - peer-reviewed science
"Sweat for Hours" - layperson anecdote; bros; inexperienced trainers There are defined mechanisms in physiology and exercise science which don't rely on endlessly adding time; AND they do a better job at improving cardiac output, excess post-workout oxygen consumption, leanness and overall fitness metrics. http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article… |
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