Exaggeration of the Negative

Lies, damned lies, and statistics paint over the truth until it is hidden from view. My goal here is not to invent anything new, but to peel away those layers of obscuring lies so that the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about diet and health is plainly visible in all its pristine simplicity. The movie pokes fun at callous doctors, smooth-talking fertility entrepreneurs, and earthy-crunchy birthing-class instructors. As the Virgina Slims cigarette ads used to say, you've come a long way baby. It wasn't long ago when pregnant Lucille Ball had to fight with CBS executives not only to keep her job but to include a childbirth episode. The word pregnant was censored, but they could write expectant into the script. And yet how far have we really come? We're laughing at ourselves--that may be a good thing. But if Baby Mama is any indication of our contemporary state of mind, then we still have not figured out how all this fertility stuff should be played out. The movie ends with both women getting pregnant with their own biological babies. There is no surrogacy after all. It all ends happily in an old-fashioned sort of way. Use the measure of your height in order to calculate your body mass index. And though some height loss is normal as we age, monitoring your height can also help alert you to the possibility of osteoporosis and compression fractures. Calculating your body mass index (BMI) is useful to estimate body fat and gauge the risks associated with it. Higher BMIs put you more at risk for heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and certain cancers. You can plug in your height and weight into an online calculator to measure your BMI. Cholesterol and fasting blood sugar information is important to know, as some of the most serious changes to your health first occur in these areas. This information should be available from your medical doctor, and is considered current if it's less than a year old. If any of these markers are abnormal, have them retested after you've been doing the HIIT exercises for a couple of months.

You'll probably be impressed with the results and more motivated to make exercise a lifelong commitment. Goal setting can take you a long way toward achieving your desired level of health and fitness. My intent here is to point out what is obvious at the level of sense, and then confirm it with science. The truth about food is on trial; I am its advocate. You be the judge. A consideration of its nature and current implications. There are lies, damned lies, and statistics . T here is always a debate in publishing, and in communication in general: do we more effectively reach people by accentuating thepositive, or the negative? I have wanted, for instance, in some of my prior articles, to explain all the reasons we seem, but are not really, so confused about the basic care and feeding of Homo sapiens (ie, ourselves). I have wanted to explain the obstacle course through which we need to navigate to get to the prize: a healthy, sustainable relationship with food in the service of pleasure, vitality, and longevity. But my editors and publishers have often pushed back: people want the good news! Apparently, Hollywood decided, and maybe rightly so, that audiences weren't ready for a surrogate ending. When the New York Times Magazine ran a cover story about surrogacy on November 30, 2008, many readers were enraged. In letters to the editor, they complained about the author, who wrote that she was practically euphoric as her surrogate got fatter and less mobile and she went white-water rafting and drank bourbons. The letter writers were also vexed by the cover photo of the fashionable and thin author next to her plain-Jane surrogate. Surrogacy is and probably always will be about rich women paying poor women for their wombs. Apparently, we do not want to read that story or see the images--unless, of course, it can be molded into something funny or with a more palatable ending. The way men and women decide to have babies and the way they talk about pregnancy has always revealed societal mores as much as it reflects the sophisticated (or not-so-sophisticated) science. Painkillers were developed years before society deemed the drugs okay for use during delivery.

Artificial insemination, too, was done years before it was public knowledge and a global enterprise. There will be lots more to come, many things beyond our imagination--or should we say, beyond anything we could ever conceive. There are a lot of different ways to set goals, but the two most important components are that your goals be written down, and that an action plan be incorporated. I recommend you buy yourself a notearticle and document your journey. Here are the key elements of goal setting. For example: Lose 10 pounds, shed my belly fat, drop cholesterol 20 points, reduce blood pressure 10 points, get off diabetes medication. Review your goals and plans weekly and determine if you met your goals or if they need to be adjusted. Habits take time to form; Buy those smaller pants, take a weekend trip, purchase a nice bottle of red wine. In addition, or at a minimum if you're not a goal-setting person, I recommend that you write down the top five reasons you're embarking on this fitness path and what it is that you hope to gain from your efforts. Make your answers meaningful rather than just a list of items. In other words, instead of writing to lose weight, write to feel proud of myself and good about how I feel; The problem with providing ONLY the good news - here's what's true, what you can use, what works - is that it leaves you scratching your head: if it's this simple, how did I get so confused in the first place? Providing the SOLUTION without explaining the PROBLEM seems to me much like that famous Chinese proverb about a hungry man: if you give that hungry man a fish, he will eat for a day; Information is the same. If you get an answer, you will know the answer now, but still be vulnerable to future manipulation, deception, diversion, and exploitation. But if you understand not just the truth, but how and why you get talked into ALTERNATIVES to the truth, you are protected permanently against both current and future falsehoods. When you are the person who knows the truth and its vulnerabilities, and only then, you are the person who has a fish and knows how to fish (as it were). That's my aim here: to give a fish, and teach fishing, too. I did some fishing as a kid with an uncle I loved very much, who was both a devout recreational fisherman and one of the kindest, best souls I've ever encountered.

In the fullness of time, I have lost my uncle, and my taste for fishing, which I have come to like less as I have tried to view it from the perspective of the fish! As I write this, there is a history of alternatives to the truth about food. Scientists will provide the foundation for the future of baby making (as strange as it may be), but we as a society will erect the framework. And that structure will depend on our current notions of family, women, and sexuality. The laws will follow--there will always be regulations. The ethics will be hammered out--there are plenty of expert panels already. But all of these rules, whether mandated by the legal system or endorsed by a panel of experts, will be constantly reshaped as our society twists and turns through the fertility maze. Every generation, beginning with the first women who had to suffer Eve's consequences, felt a bit overwhelmed with the advice and the choices. But amid the ever-present confusion, four things are certain. The explosion of choices will make the job of parents-to-be increasingly challenging. Our children and their children and their children's children will have increasingly clear pictures of their growing baby from zygote to newborn. When all is said and done, no matter how much we fine-tune the process, we will still be trying to manage a situation that is not completely manageable. I also recommend you make a second list of the five most likely obstacles to your starting or sticking with an HIIT exercise program and, importantly, what emotional cost it will have if you allow those obstacles to stop you from acting. For me, an example of an obstacle would be finding the time and energy to exercise with two small children at home that I want to spend as much time with as possible. But the cost of not carving out a little time for HIIT (and, thankfully, it takes so little time) is not living as long or as healthily as I possibly could, and missing out on the joy of watching my daughters grow into adults. Use the power of your mind, and the motivating forces of pain and pleasure, to compel you into action. I guarantee it'll help you stay on track! Proper warming up and cooling down are essential to getting the most out of your HIIT exercise routines--improving power and performance, as well as preventing injury. A popular way to warm up is to do dynamic stretches, which you should perform 5 to 10 minutes before your HIIT exercise. The foam roller exercises starting on article 117 are a great way to cool down the body and eliminate or reduce post-exercise muscle soreness.

They can be done any time after, or between, workouts. Dynamic warm-ups fall somewhere between static stretches and range-of-motion exercises. There is the current crop of prominent distractions: lectins are dangerous; What I cannot know is what new varieties of vintage nonsense will bedevil your understanding when this article reaches you, or the week, month, year, or decade after that. But to do you the kind of good I am hoping for - to empower you to eat well and reap the rewards for yourself and those you love across the full expanse of lifetimes - I can't pass along truth you will be given new reason to doubt 20 minutes after you read it. I must pass along the means of filtering truth from lies, both known and as yet unknown. And, of course, it's one step subtler than that. The truth evolves, and the truth I can share now will be embellished and refined by the truths to come. You need to be able to recognize those, too, so that a foundation of understanding allows for future construction but not destruction. Beware the person who espouses a view that changes not at all over a span of years and decades; The truth, to qualify as such, must be reliable. What I am calling the truth in this article is what, and only what, is supported by vast and diverse sources of evidence, stable across time and place, and buoyed by global expert consensus. There will always be surprises, for better and for worse. Pregnancy and childbirth--however you get there--is one of the few adventures you will ever embark on that when you finally get to the finish line, you've only just begun. Acknowledgments I like to think of this article the way I think of reproductive technology--I needed a lot of experts--some for their medical know-how, some for their breadth of knowledge on the subject, some for their emotional support, and some for their technological prowess. I feel that this project was a group experience, but of course, I'm responsible solely for the final product and any inaccuracies. Thanks to all of the librarians who retrieved ancient manuscripts and boxes of scraparticles and e-mailed me articles. At the New York Academy of Medicine, Arlene Shaner was dedicated from the start, retrieving old articles for me and then, at the end of the project, photographing many of the images that appear in the early articles. King, also at the NYAM, tracked down articles about an obscure doctor, Arnold Berthold.