Making up facts to convince others that you are right

You are in love with the person you are going to marry. The physical attraction is intense, of course. But what's extraordinary, almost magical, is the way it feels to talk. Time feels dense, expansive, precious. You are effortlessly curious and endlessly intrigued. You want to go deeper, to know and to understand the person you now love. When you talk, it's about so much more than conveying information. There's cadence, rhythm, intensity, silence. The micronutrients include all of the vitamins and minerals. There are many, many micronutrients and it is not necessary for us to discuss all of them here�plus, you�d be really bored if I did. Instead, I�ll just give you an overview of the vitamins and minerals and why they are specifically relevant to our Ketogenic Mediterranean Diet. Vitamins are divided into two categories based on what they will dissolve in. Water-soluble vitamins can be dissolved in water, while fat-soluble vitamins require some fatty acids to be absorbed. There are no specific vitamin requirements for an individual in ketosis compared to someone eating a carbohydrate-heavy diet. Further, a person following a well-planned ketogenic diet will not be lacking any vitamins in sufficient quantities. In fact, the Ketogenic Mediterranean Diet is so vitamin-rich that by adopting that lifestyle, you will likely be getting a more complete mix of vitamins and minerals than you were before. WATER-SOLUBLE VITAMINS. Water-soluble vitamins play many important roles in the body, specifically when it comes to the transfer and production of energy. While there was probably a counseling service one could seek out, I don�t recall anyone telling us about it. At the medical school where Simon taught for over 30 years, he maintained an open door policy�literally�in order to give students a place to confide their struggles.

Over the years he heard countless stories about child abuse, spousal abuse, substance abuse, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and other sources of suffering among a group of young people who looked on the surface like they had won life�s lottery. Simon quoted Thoreau�s dictum that the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. He once commented that while he thought it was hyperbole the first time he heard it, he didn�t think so anymore. Like their patients, many young physicians know despair. But the conventions of medical training do not facilitate coming to terms with emotions. Rather, trainees bottle up feelings and focus on projecting assuredness as they move from task to task and patient to patient. Emotionally stunted, they are inaccessible to their patients, as they are inaccessible to themselves. I�m not implying that self-knowledge is a necessary prerequisite for a contented life or to be good at a job. Bursts of laughter, expectant pauses, the enthused tumbling of words. It's a delicious, delightful whole-body experience. Now here you are, ten or fifteen or twenty years later. Family life is full of demands. Children, along with their pleasures, limit your time to talk to each other, while adding to the topics to be discussed. Logistics crowd out emotions; bad habits carve conversational ruts. Your tender inner voice that whispers, Turn toward him, or I need her, is drowned out by the din of frustration or the tasks of the to-do list. It feels almost foolish to continue hoping that conversation might lead to sharing and meaningful connection. You find yourself searching for a story to make sense of what you've lost. Thiamin, riboflavin, niacin, pantothenic acid, and biotin in particular help with the breakdown of nutrients and their conversion to usable energy. Vitamins C, B6, and B12 all help build structures.

While these vitamins are not incorporated into the cells they help build, they are necessary for their construction. Some of the major functions of the fat-soluble vitamins include keeping your tissues in good repair, protecting your vision, acting as antioxidants, and building bones. Vitamins D and E are also thought to play some role in mood regulation, and vitamin K is a major player in blood clotting. It is important to note that all of the vitamins are almost certainly involved in many more processes than we currently understand. Because they are able to build up over time, it is possible for vitamins A, E, and K to cause damage if they are chronically overconsumed. So far, there have not been any negative consequences associated with large amounts of vitamin D consumption. This is likely because vitamin D is not actually a vitamin; rather, it is hormone that we just call a vitamin. It�s just that it is if you are a physician. Surely, many who are not inclined toward self-examination are good neighbors, hard workers, and trustworthy to their family and friends alike. My dentist described his dad, an immigrant from Greece, that way, saying, He was still parking cars at Wrigley Field for Cubs games when he was 85 years old, and sharp as a tack. He never reflected much about himself, as far as I could see, but we always knew we could count on him. Simon observed that, in this respect, Socrates was wrong when he famously said, The unexamined life is not worth living. But the adage does apply to physicians, who must examine themselves and the lives they live because of the work they do and the socialization pressures of medical training. Otherwise they will adopt disengaged behaviors and rigid ways of thinking. After mastering article learning and multiple-choice test taking, they enter the clinical years of their training applying the same skills of compulsively completing assigned tasks. They mimic what they observe. Hence, if their professors talk down to them, they adopt similar ways of relating to more junior trainees and to patients. You look back wistfully on the blissful days of early love, and wonder if you're just too different. Time wears on, you feel it passing.

Your repetitive, fruitless spousal exchanges start to feel like a drain on the life energy you have left. If this is what talking is going to be, you'd rather garden, or cook a good meal, or watch some football. Do you still even truly desire to talk? Did you both let that desire die? Perhaps. But if you're honest, you don't think so. Deep down, you still yearn to find your way back to the nourishing, beautiful conversation you once shared. All my talk of self-realization and conversational skill is in the service of helping you attain that goal. Unlike vitamins, minerals are incorporated into the body�s structures. Most of the bone matrix is made up of the minerals calcium and phosphorus. Minerals also perform a huge variety of other functions in the body. Basically, if you can think of something that your body does, you need at least one mineral to make it happen. Dietary minerals can be divided into two categories, major and trace, based upon the amount of the mineral found in the body. Also unlike with vitamins, there are additional mineral requirements for those eating a ketogenic diet. Ketosis stimulates the kidney to shed sodium at a faster rate. Sodium levels in the body drive potassium levels, because the body is constantly trying to keep levels of sodium and potassium at a certain ratio. Because sodium is not found in high concentrations naturally, you will likely need to consciously increase your sodium intake on the Ketogenic Mediterranean Diet. We�ll discuss ways to do that in later articles. Because they expect perfection of themselves, they avoid delving too deeply into the struggles their patients are facing for fear they won�t know what to do with what they hear. When their patients are unappreciative or even oppositional, they take it personally, lacking the boundary clarity to recognize this isn�t about them.

Unprepared, developmentally, for the doctor-patient relationship in its real life complexity, they retreat. In place of a fulfilling career with meaningful relationships with patients is a job like any other job, with paperwork, procedures, and a way of relating that has been described as emotional labor. Emotional labor is a term used in the service industry when, for instance, flight attendants must mask emotions they feel and portray emotions they don�t feel. It�s fake relating to meet the expectations of the customer and employer. Not everyone enters medicine looking for fulfillment through healing relationships with patients. Some are attracted to the high earning potential, the status, or simply job security. But even among the materially minded, many desire to have a positive impact. I remember that my classmates who sought careers in surgery said that for them, the reward would be going in there and fixing the problem. Throughout these articles, I've encouraged us to look within, particularly when things feel urgent, or difficult, or dead. At such moments, if we can allow our defenses to soften, we can find a golden-ring awareness. We each bravely offer our feelings into the shared space of the relationship, and we think together about what's before us. In this space, we take our emotions more seriously, not less. We don't try to grow out of, or get past, or get over our feelings; we try to increase our skill at expressing them. I've discussed the extraordinary power of self-awareness (I see what I am doing) and self-responsibility (I'm trying to change it) to shift almost any marital interaction from a standoff to a collaboration. When we cultivate our capacities for compassion, curiosity, and self-control, we can speak, and listen, in a richer and livelier way. In a good relationship, the early bliss lives on as a wonderful memory and inspirational resource and returns from time to time, unbidden, surprising you with its potency. But what matters most is what's possible on the other side of love's first blush: conversations that are rewarding, intimate, and real. Compared to the vitamins and trace minerals, we have quite a lot of the major minerals in our bodies. Most of them are involved in some way with fluid balance or structure stabilization.