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On 5/7/2019 at 9:29 AM, Joe > Average said:

 

After trying everything, I've decided not to limit myself to a label. Everyone has to customize to their own genetics. For me, most food combinations give me intolerable indigestion, so I do generally separate my food groups for different meals. I definitely have to eat fruit alone. Salmon roe, fish and cow brains  were the cure to my brain fog. Really organ meat is what took me to the next level in general. Grains don't agree with me either, but someone gave me some homemade sourdough bread that my body didn't mind.

 

 

Bread and circuses are enough for many. This is very interesting. 

That passage (From Tibetan book of living and dying) to me is most strongly a criticism on advertising and the endless creation of desire & how the capitalistic system is dependent on that.  Further, maybe a criticism of sexuality and the failure to recognize subconscious desires.  Buddhist  monks are some of the worst capitalists on the planet; they need only a roof over their heads, food, and water...

My diet/exercise routine has been successful except for the fact that the deficit isn't enough to make up for my cheat meals and cheat days, which happen every week!  IF I lived in a box I would be at 100% of my desired state and even shrinking but that isn't the case.  If I doubled my exercise I would be there but I am not that motivated to do that when I'm already spending 14 hours a week on it.  So currently I think I hover around 6- 8 pounds of fat to lose.  I even try to limit how much I eat when I'm out in restaurants and so forth but it's clearly not anywhere enough , lol.

Keto is pretty tough for most people.  The brain fog situation is pretty intolerable if one works indoors.  Outdoors they could get away with it.  It's like the brain sending signals that it's hungry for carbs only while the body is completely fine.

how many calories do you consume every day?

I have no idea on the calories. I know that when I was vegan, I was always hungry whereas now that I get all of my vitamins, minerals ect. from food, I stay satiated without grazing all day. I've come to hate the phrase "keto diet" as the amount of carbs in the standard American diet are hard to even find in nature and for most of human history. Grocery store fruit and grains are almost all genetically modified to have way more sugar than their ancestors. Grains made in the ancient way don't bother me at all whereas the commercial varieties all wreck havoc on my system. On the other hand, most people wouldn't be able to gorge on wild fruit because its not as sweet. Plus for most of human history, it wasn't available all year long anyway. Back to he idea of advertisement and desire thing, this ties somewhat back into that for me. After spending some time living on he land, eating wild game nose to tail, I started to rethink things that I thought I couldn't go without. My sweet tooth is nowhere near what it once was and I was a dozen donut killer. As to cheat days, I feel better just giving in if I have the urge though. It seems that planned cheat days increase the dopamine spike and crash on my end. Exercising (I do mostly HIIT) right after makes me feel better too.

I need to read that then. I believe that everyone should at least do a little digging to find the source of their desires. So many people have died taking selfies due to a desire for the affirmation of strangers. Even aside from losing one's life, the thrill of the moment is lost anyway. You don't remember looking in he Grand Canyon. You remember taking a picture. A doctor told me awhile ago that I was actually drinking too much water. I thought she must be off her rocker. Drinking water helped me to kick my soda addiction and "everyone knows" that you need to drink a lot of water. It turns out that the water recommendations are a product of soda companies trying to sell water.  It kindof makes sense as we survived for all these years without anyone telling us how much water to drink. Capitalism though...

"None of us is an offender, liar, betrayer, or monster. We are all fragile and flawed humans who may lie or steal or betray. We are fragile and flawed humans who commit offenses against others. When we do these things, we are not monsters; we are human beings who have become separated from our own goodness. We are not defined by what we have done. We have all been so conditioned to believe that we are held in high esteem because of the things we do, not because of who we are. In truth, our worth has nothing to do with performance, but this belief can make it very difficult to forgive ourselves when we do wrong. None of us is constantly our best self. None of us is perfect. Sometimes the failures for which we must forgive ourselves are not willful failures. We did the best we knew to do at the time"

"Forgiving yourself is not a way to excuse what you have done or gloss over the harm you have caused others. It is not forgetting about your actions. In fact, it is an honest remembering of what you have done and how you have hurt others. Self-forgiveness is not a loophole to avoid admitting wrongs or making restitution. Self-forgiveness is true selfacceptance. What that means is that you come to accept yourself as a flawed human being"

"

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"McMurtry found himself transformed by the disappearance of desire: “From being a living person with a distinct personality I began to feel more or less like an outline of that person—and then even the outline began to fade, erased by what had happened inside. I felt as if I was vanishing—or more accurately, had vanished. . . . I became, to myself, more and more like a ghost, or a shadow. What I more and more felt, as the trauma deepened, was that while my body survived, the self that I had once been had lost its life.”19 He says he felt like an imposter, impersonating himself. Three years after the surgery, he slowly recovered his ability to desire, and with it, his old self."

"McMurtry’s crisis of desire raises a broader medical question. In a true crisis of desire, a person’s world is shattered. The personal transformation can be greater than in many other of life’s crises, as when a person is in a terrible accident or is sent away to prison. And yet, seen from outside, nothing happened to cause the transformation. "

"One is therefore tempted to chalk up McMurtry’s crisis of desire to mental depression. McMurtry, however, rejects the suggestion that his loss of interest in reading and writing was a symptom of depression"

"Sometimes a crisis of desire, rather than being taken by the world as a symptom of mental illness, is taken as a sign of enlightenment"

"Here is how one Buddhist scholar characterizes the process people undergo when they experience a crisis of desire: our suffering triggers “an inner realization, a perception which pierces through the facile complacency of our usual encounter with the world to glimpse the insecurity perpetually gaping underfoot. . . . When this insight dawns, even if only momentarily, it can precipitate a profound personal crisis. It overturns accustomed goals and values, mocks our routine preoccupations, leaves old enjoyments stubbornly unsatisfying.”23
It is instructive to contrast what Siddhartha experienced with what we today call midlife crises. People undergoing a typical midlife crisis aren’t disgusted by their current desires as Siddhartha was; to the contrary, they are disgusted by the meager extent to which their current desires are being satisfied."

"Parents, if they are good parents, typically supplant their own desires with those of their children. They get up in the morning and think not “What do I want?” but rather “What do my children need?” After doing this for two decades, their ability to selfishly desire atrophies. They are simply no good anymore at thinking about what they want, the rest of the world be damned. When their children finally leave the nest, though, this “external” source of desire dries up, and parents are faced with the task of relearning how to desire selfishly. This is the challenge that confronts empty-nesters—how to jump-start the engine of desire. "

Most people seek fame and fortune. If universal fame eludes them, they seek regional fame, local renown, popularity within their social circle, or distinction among their colleagues. Likewise, if they can’t amass a fortune in absolute terms, they seek relative affluence: they want to be materially better off than their co-workers, neighbors, relatives, and friends. At first glance, our desire for fame (more generally, for social status) and our desire for fortune (for material things) seem to be distinct: the former involves people, the latter does not. A bit of reflection reveals, though, that our social and material desires are very much connected: it is largely because we live among other people and want them to admire us that we want the material things we do"

" If we were indifferent to social status, it is unlikely that we would want the car, the jewelry, and the house that we find ourselves dreaming of. Indeed, if our neighbors ridiculed rather than admired the owners of SUVs, expensive wristwatches, and fifteen-thousand-square-foot
mansions, it is unlikely that we would put ourselves out trying to acquire these things. "

"

" Philosopher David Hume wrote of the“love of fame; which rules, with such uncontrolled authority, in all generous minds, and is often the grand object of all their designs and undertakings.”4 And novelist Anthony Trollope wrote that the desire for fame “is so human that the man who lacks it is either above or below humanity.”

"And it isn’t just that we want to be famous; most of us imagine that we will be famous. Consider, for example, sociologists. Few would accuse them of being a fame-hungry group. Nevertheless, a survey of nearly two hundred sociologists found that about a hundred of them expected to become one of the ten leading sociologists of their time—obviously a mathematical impossibility. The survey also found that more than half of them hoped to achieve immortality via their sociological research: they thought their writings would still be read after they died.6 "

" Cicero’s observation that “those very philosophers even in the books which they write about despising glory, put their own names on the title-page. In the very act of recording their contempt for renown and notoriety, they desire to have their own names known and talked of.”7 A case can be made, then, that even those who openly scorn fame secretly crave it. In the words of Tacitus, “The lust of fame is the last that a wise man shakes off.”8 

If we gain fame, what then? We are likely to be miserable. The problem with fame is that it resides in other people’s heads, and as the nineteenth-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer observed, “other people’s heads are a wretched place to be the home of a man’s true happiness.”10 Because fame requires the cooperation of other people, it puts us at the mercy of those same people. In particular, when a person is inflated with fame, the rest of us have it in our power to deflate him, and perhaps plunge him into misery and anguish, with a few well-chosen words. This is not to say that it is impossible for a famous person to be happy, but when this happens, Schopenhauer suggested, it is usually because the activity that brought the person fame also brought him happiness—meaning that his fame and happiness are not directly connected and that he would remain happy if his fame were to diminish.11"

"It would be a mistake to think that the responses we seek in other people are invariably positive—that we seek only their love, admiration, or respect. To the contrary, a considerable portion of human behavior is motivated by a desire to generate negative feelings in others.  our goal might be not merely to win a trophy but to take delight in the physical and emotional suffering of our opponents. (In the words of novelist Gore Vidal, “It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.”

It is tempting to play down the existence of negative social desires and argue either that they are rare or that only unbalanced or mentally ill people experience them. If we accept this view, though, we will be unable to explain a considerable part of human behavior. In a perfect world, everyone would want to be loved, admired, and respected. In our world, lots of people have given up on being loved, admired, and respected but nevertheless want other people to acknowledge their existence: “If others won’t love me, then let them fear me. If others won’t respect me, then they will have to put up with my disgusting or belligerent behavior. I will not be ignored!” 

In a curious sense, then, in our own lives we behave like advertising executives: we carefully build a brand—the image we project to the world—and then work hard to maintain it."

"It is only a slight exaggeration to say we live for other people— that the bulk of our time, energy, and wealth is spent creating and maintaining a certain public image of ourselves. The best way to appreciate the truth of this claim is to consider how our behavior would change if other people vanished. "

"Our lost selves are the specific parts of ourselves that we have shut down or traded away, both as children and since becoming adults, in exchange for acceptance, love, power, money, and so on. They are the parts that we might have willingly cast off during the process of creating the socially modified self.

Again, in the interest of self-knowledge, it is worthwhile to take a look at what parts of yourself you might have given or traded away—and for what reasons. The most common scenario is trading our integrity or self-respect for money, power, status, or success; however, this can be applied to a whole host of things that you may have lost or traded away. "

"Our disowned selves are the parts of ourselves that we have rejected as unacceptable and have put completely out of sight and out of mind. We accomplish this through the mechanism of repression. That means that we have pushed them so deep down in the subconscious mind that we have absolutely no awareness of them whatsoever.

Repression is not the same as suppression. When we suppress parts of ourselves, we know they are still there. This would be true of our lost selves. We know those parts exist in us, but we intentionally keep them suppressed. Conversely, those parts of ourselves that we have disowned and repressed are out of our awareness altogether. Carl Jung referred to this repressed material as our shadow."

"we soon learned which of our attributes won us love and approval and which did not. Out of a sense of survival, we selected the most approved attributes to live from and quickly disowned the others. "

From the acceptable list, we created the socially modified self that we present to the world, and we dumped the rest into our shadow. It’s likely that we’ve added even more material to our shadow as we’ve developed, but most of our disowned selves were repressed early as a result of our being shamed over them. Having shifted all the unapproved attributes into our shadow and repressed them, we might think they are safely buried and inactive. They are not. Attached to every one of them is an energy, which is both active and reactive. Each attribute has the ability to rise up from the depths of our unconscious to be recognized and accepted.

For that reason, we remain ever fearful of our shadow, and we do everything we can to avoid coming to terms with it. The act of repressing it is an avoidance strategy.

It would make no sense, in this instance, for you to make a list of your disowned selves, since by definition they are unknown to you. Having been repressed, they live not in your conscious mind but in your subconscious mind, almost completely out of your awareness. Not to worry, though. There is a perfectly good and reliable way to discover them by doing a reverse projection exercise. The procedure is as follows.

Think of two people you dislike or disapprove of in many ways and make a list of the qualities they represent that you find most objectionable. They can be people you know personally or personalities you only see in the media. They may be dead or alive. The important thing is that you feel very judgmental and

critical of them for a number of reasons. Try to list about ten traits if you can. There’s no need to mention the actual name of either person."

THE SABOTEUR SELF

This is the self that is constantly checking your subconscious mind to make sure that whatever you are doing, thinking, or planning at the conscious level matches all the beliefs, ideas, attitudes, concepts, prejudices, and other content that exists at the subconscious level. If there is not a good match, this self will sabotage you in every way possible. It will sabotage your relationships, your finances, and every other area of your life if what you are doing, thinking, or planning is not in accordance with every belief that already exists in your subconscious.Once again, though, as with the disowned self, your beliefs, attitudes, and prejudices tend to be buried in the subconscious mind, and for the most part, operate automatically and out of your conscious awareness. Nevertheless, if you watch how your life is working and observe what is showing up on a consistent basis, you can tell when your saboteur is operating—trying to be right according to the thought patterns buried in your subconscious mind."

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"On their deathbed some people look back on their lives and are overwhelmed by a sense of failure. They have a closet full of regrets. They become disheartened when they reflect on how they have overlooked the preciousness of their relationships, forgotten the importance of finding their "true work," and delayed what some call"living my own life." Because they had left so many parts of their life for "later," they felt fragmented about unsatisfying work, unfinished business in relationships, and compromised lifestyles. But "later" came much sooner than they expected, and they found themselves burdened by unfulfilled dreams and a sense of incompleteness. Many people, although they have few other complaints, experience a certain remorse about having neglected spiritual growth, while even more express dismay that there has been so little authentic joy in their lives. All but those who have fully opened to life say that they would live differently if they had just one more year. "

" Many people speak of interests that had to be put aside because of family responsibilities, country, and social acceptability. Some, recognizing their desires, bought themselves the cello they had always wanted or the lathe, the canvas stretcher, or the new computer crammed with art programs. Many acknowledge a love of nature that they allowed to go dormant, and are drawn to long walks in the woods and sitting quietly by the sea. "

"Many seemed to concentrate on expanding their horizons 
so as to become yet more gracious in the eyes of someone they admired; for some that was a lover or mate, for others it was God. But all of those who seemed to make the best use of a terminal prognosis began to change their relationship to relationship itself. They had a going-out-of-unfinished-business sale. Many said they would have adopted a gentler pace of life, changed their surroundings, been less preoccupied with social and material ambitions. Some said they would have moved to the country, some to the city; some would have built new homes, others would have tom down old ones. But almost all said that they would have slowed down and stopped to smell, if not plant, the roses."

The question reminds us of how much we have forgotten. A part of us begins to panic at the thought that it hasn't had quite enough time to leave something valid behind. There have been so few moments when life was all it was cracked up to be. So much that might have been different had the heart not been obstructed by fear. As we begin to see where we have been absent from life, increasing possibilities audition for our approval. The heart suggests that we become more present, that we sharpen our focus. "

If we compare the lifestyle of the last person with our own, we will quickly recognize the impact the presence of other people has on our lives. We dress, choose a house, and buy a wristwatch with other people in mind. We spend a small fortune to project an image calculated to gain the admiration of these other people—or perhaps to make them envy us. We suppress ourselves and our desires in conformance with the
image we wish to project. And to finance our image-projection activities, we might spend our adult life working at a job we hate. Were we to find ourselves in the situation described in the last-person scenario, we would be freed from humanity, and as a result our material existence would be radically simplified. At the same time, we probably wouldn’t relish our newfound freedom. To the contrary, we would soon come to appreciate Seneca’s comment that “there is no enjoying the possession of anything valuable unless one has someone to share it with.”20

"Living without people can be devastating, but living with them is no picnic either. Schopenhauer complains that society “compels us, for the sake of harmony, to shrivel up, or even alter our shape altogether.” Society “demands an act of severe selfdenial; we have to forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to become like other people.”21 He adds that “there is nothing to be got from [people’s] society which can compensate either for its boredom, annoyance and disagreeableness, or for the self-denial which it renders necessary.”22 According to Schopenhauer, “almost all our sufferings spring from having to do with other people.” He adds that “the Cynics renounced all private property in order to attain the bliss of having nothing to trouble them; and to renounce society with the same object is the wisest thing a man can do.”23 Yet it is generally difficult for people—even great thinkers such as Schopenhauer—to live without others. We poor humans are therefore on the horns of a dilemma: we find it hard to live with other people, and we find it even harder to live without them. Envy is one of the things that makes living with other people so difficult. The envy we feel toward others is like a corrosive
liquid, eating away at our happiness and destroying our tranquility: according to the Cynic philosopher Antisthenes, “as iron is eaten away by rust, so . . . the envious are consumed by their own passion.”24 And when others feel envy toward us, it can likewise poison our lives. British philosopher and economist John Stuart Mill calls envy “that most anti-social and odious of all passions.”25 According to Buddha, it is “the deadliest poison.”26"

"Envy involves an element of admiration: if I am envious of someone’s house, it follows that I admire it. (Philosopher Søren Kierkegaard characterizes envy as failed admiration.)28 In cases of envy, though, these feelings of admiration are mixed with a sense of injustice. If I envy someone’s house, I will feel, deep down, that it is unfair that he owns such a house but I do not. I can justify this feeling in many ways. I might think that I work harder, am a better person, have a purer heart, have had a harder
life, or have greater needs than he. If the world were fair, I would live in such a house."

 In most cases in which we begrudge others what they have, though, the argument from unfairness, if we examine it carefully, is without merit. Our complaints about unfairness are really nothing more than a cover for our feelings of envy, although we may not realize as much."

"Our biggest rivals in the competition for status tend to be those who are closest to us, either in geographical terms or in terms of status. In other words, familiarity breeds envy. A person is more likely to feel envious of his co-workers, neighbors, or relatives than of a multibillionaire he has never met. "

When a man envies, say, someone for his car, it does not necessarily follow that he wants to do this other person harm. He could be perfectly happy to let the other person keep his car; his complaint is that if the world were fair, he would have a car like that, too. And if a man, in his envy, does wish to harm the owner of the car, he can accomplish this goal in two ways. He might steal the other person’s car and make it his own, or he might destroy the other person’s car and thereby remove the source of his envy. In either of these cases, he will have com
mitted a crime of envy, which crimes form an interesting subset of crimes of passion. "

"Suppose, for example, a relative envies us because of the car we own, and suppose we try to placate this relative by giving him the car he so admires. Will our kindness win him over? Probably not. If anything, it will make matters worse. The envier will interpret our kindness as condescension, and if he envied us for being wealthy enough to own this car, he will likely envy us even more now: the fact that we can afford to give him the car demonstrates that we are even wealthier than he thought. Chances are that the only thing that will end the envier’s envy is our own ruination, at which time he will switch from envying us to pitying us or even despising us. "

"German sociologist Helmut Schoeck did an exhaustive study of envy. He found that “envy is much more universal than has
so far been admitted or even realized,”33 but although envy is ubiquitous, it is largely invisible. Indeed, it is perhaps the best disguised of all human emotions. According to La Rochefoucauld, “we often pride ourselves on even the most criminal passions, but envy is a timid and shamefaced passion we never dare acknowledge.”34 Or, in the words of Herman Melville, “Though many an arraigned mortal has in hopes of mitigated penalty pleaded guilty to horrible actions, did ever anybody seriously confess to envy? Something there is in it universally felt to be more shameful than even felonious crime.”35 Thus, someone whose envy drives him to commit murder is subsequently more likely to confess to the murder than to the envy that triggered it. "

"For this reason, Wenzel et al. (2012) argued that  self- forgiveness is best understood as the process by which we sever the negative link between taking responsibility and positive self-regard, which is a process that Holmgren (1998) referred to as genuine self-forgiveness. "

"In contrast to guilt, shame has long been viewed as a more aversive state of self- criticism that is less constructive than guilt (for reviews, see Gilbert & Andrews, 1998; Tangney & Fischer, 1995; Tracy et al., 2007). As shame is said to be a profound self-criticism of the global self, it is thought to be a devastating blow to self- worth that hamstrings people leaving them barely strong enough to crawl away and hide from their fundamental inadequacy (see Lewis, 1971; Tangney & Dearing, 2002). The only other escape from shame is thought to be an “externalization” of the felt inadequacy in the form of angry hostility toward those aware of one’s failure or otherwise vulnerable to one’s wrath (for discussions, see Gausel & Leach, 2011; Tangney & Dearing, 2002). This so-called humiliated fury, or shame-rage spiral, is an emotion-specific form of Freud’s notion of displacement and is quite similar to the classic explanation of violence dubbed the frustration-aggression hypothesis. "

"

Given the prevailing view of shame, it is not surprising that researchers of self- forgiveness generally expect shame to lead to less self-forgiveness and therefore to lead to less constructive responses to failure, moral or otherwise (see Fisher & Exline, 2010; Hall & Fincham, 2008). "

"In sum, guilt is widely considered a constructive dysphoria about failure whereas shame is considered a dysfunctional and potentially disordered dysphoria (for a review, see Gausel & Leach, 2011). As such, guilt is thought to lead to self- forgiveness, self-improvement, and making amends, whereas shame is thought to lead to debilitating self-castigation, avoidance of failure and its consequences, and sometimes also the hostile externalization of felt inadequacy. "

"

 In a good deal of clinical psychology research, shame is linked with both the “internalized” problems of depression, anxiety, and low self-worth and the “externalized” problems of hostility, aggression, and anti-sociality (for reviews, see Gilbert & Andrews, 1998; Tangney & Dearing, 2002). "

" And, clinically relevant shame is said to emerge from many, equally horrific, bases—body shame, trauma shame, parental shaming, punitive shaming, the shame of humiliation, or the experience of stigma, all of which can lead to shame and its internalized and externalized problems. Whatever its basis, shame is typically thought to be a debilitating dysphoria that manifests itself across people’s cognitive, affective, and behavioral systems. Shame is seen in negative thinking, pessimism, and cognitive distortion; in the negative affect of internalized states of fear, sadness, and hopelessness; in externalized states of anger and hostility; and in passive, avoidant, withdrawn distancing from the self and from others (see Ferguson, 2005). "

"Although there is a long-standing assumption that shame and guilt are highly distinct emotions that represent opposite ways of experiencing failure, there is in fact little theoretical or empirical reason to assume this. Shame and guilt are more alike than different; the small differences between them are a matter of degree. "

To summarize, our desires fall into two categories: instrumental desires that we desire for the sake of something else, and terminal desires that we desire for their own sake. Our terminal desires can in turn be divided into two subcategories: hedonic terminal desires, which we desire because we want to feel good or avoid feeling bad, and nonhedonic terminal desires. Our hedonic terminal desires are motivated by our feelings; our nonhedonic terminal desires, on the other hand, are motivated by our willpower.
"

If we take a census of our desires, we will find that the vast majority of the desires we form are instrumental. Most of the time, we are working toward some goal, and for this reason we form desires, the fulfillment of which will enable us to reach that goal."

"Because hedonic terminal desires are highly motivated, they typically give rise to far more instrumental desires than nonhedonic terminal desires do. For this reason, when we examine the desires we form in the course of a day, we find that they tend to be links on chains of desire that terminate in hedonic desires."

"Imagine a person incapable of feeling good or bad. This person would never form hedonic terminal desires. To the contrary, the only desires he would be capable of forming would be nonhedonic desires, such as a desire to click his tongue. This person, it should be clear, would be quite unmotivated. He would not feel compelled to eat, to care for himself, or to seek
companionship, fame, or fortune. He would resemble a deeply depressed individual. Unless others looked after him, he would soon perish. "

Man often thinks he is in control when he is being controlled, and while his mind is striving in one direction his heart is imperceptibly drawing him in another. —La Rochefoucauld
 

Chains of desire, then, are formed cooperatively by the emotions and the intellect. They divide the labor of desire formation, with the emotions specializing in the formation of terminal desires and the intellect specializing in the formation of instrumental desires; and in forming terminal desires, the emotions are concerned with feeling good and avoiding feeling bad. In other cases, the emotions form a terminal desire at the prompting of the intellect. "

"The cooperation between the emotions and the intellect, although considerable, is not perfect: as we have seen, they sometimes disagree about the desirability of things. The relationship between the intellect and the emotions can best be viewed as an uneasy alliance. To better understand this relationship, it is useful to think about how laws are made in a bicameral legislature. Legislation that originates in one chamber might or might not subsequently be approved by the other. Similarly, the emotions might approve or reject desires formed by the intellect, and conversely. "

" But unless our emotions cooperate, unless they commit to the goals our intellect sets, it is unlikely that we will accomplish these goals: our heart won’t be in it, and a mind operating without the support of a heart is singularly impotent. And notice that
the intellect cannot command the emotions to commit. Emotional commitment has a life of its own: it either happens or it doesn’t."

"The emotions, then, can effectively veto desires formed by the intellect. Does the intellect likewise have veto power over desires formed by the emotions? Often it doesn’t"

terrific talk:

On 5/9/2019 at 9:39 AM, Joe > Average said:

I have no idea on the calories. I know that when I was vegan, I was always hungry whereas now that I get all of my vitamins, minerals ect. from food, I stay satiated without grazing all day. I've come to hate the phrase "keto diet" as the amount of carbs in the standard American diet are hard to even find in nature and for most of human history. Grocery store fruit and grains are almost all genetically modified to have way more sugar than their ancestors. Grains made in the ancient way don't bother me at all whereas the commercial varieties all wreck havoc on my system. On the other hand, most people wouldn't be able to gorge on wild fruit because its not as sweet. Plus for most of human history, it wasn't available all year long anyway. Back to he idea of advertisement and desire thing, this ties somewhat back into that for me. After spending some time living on he land, eating wild game nose to tail, I started to rethink things that I thought I couldn't go without. My sweet tooth is nowhere near what it once was and I was a dozen donut killer. As to cheat days, I feel better just giving in if I have the urge though. It seems that planned cheat days increase the dopamine spike and crash on my end. Exercising (I do mostly HIIT) right after makes me feel better too.

I've noticed that carbs (especially sugars) in general have some sort of addictive quality.  Have a cupcake in the morning and you crave it for the rest of the day.  Pretty much if I have carbs I need to chose a lower GI carb to lower that and limit the consumption to 200-300 calories.  I have also noticed that if you mix carbs with fats or fiber they absorb a lot slower than if you toss them in on an empty stomach.  I also believe that carbs (particularly significant quantities of sugars) cause inflammatory-related acne with me.  I remove entirely or push down the inflammation by taking 1.8 grams of Fish oil (EPA + DPA) and 1-2 grams of good tumeric pills.  Cutting down the carbs and taking supplements made me 99% clear.

It's interesting that some health experts are advocating intermittent fasting these days as a way to dramatically lower the use of the pancreas (insulin spikes etc) to lower body fat accumulation and prevent diabetes.  This is easier said than done I've afraid!  

The SAD is overall quite bad for the body.  For me it seems like the minimum amount of carbs I need to function in an active day is about 400-500 calories worth.  My current mistakes however, is balancing carbs with fats.  Quite often on diet days I go over the amount by overconsuming one or the other.   I weigh 155 lb now with about 8 pounds of body fat to lose.