Backing up on abortion

Although I am a fiscal conservative and a strong supporter of the Bill of Rights—including the Second Amendment—I am socially fairly liberal, or at least moderate.  I support gay marriage, for example.  I have also always been a supporter of a woman’s right to choose when it comes to abortion, and I still am, but under circumstances that are far more limited than current practice. 

I have never been that comfortable with abortion except in cases of rape or incest.  Women are not brainless toys, and the idea that a woman could be swept off her feet and completely lose her self-control has always been ridiculous to me.  No one is that stupid.  If you get pregnant, it’s because you chose to have unprotected sex.  You should live with the consequences.  And the fathers should have a say, even though the embryo is housed in the mother's body, although that "say" should include a very heavy dose of co-responsibility.  Having said that, very early term abortions have never really bothered me, even when they are, in essence, used for birth control.

When abortion was legalized, I either did not see or did not hear arguments for a slippery slope.  I don’t recall any such arguments, and I’m not sure there were any.  Everyone’s idea of an abortion was abortion in the aftermath of regret for giving oneself away too easily, and those regrets come fast, long before a fetus even becomes a fetus.  Embryos just aren’t viable.

But it turns out there was a slippery slope.  My support for abortion “rights”--which I’ve always regarded as a misnomer, since abortion is not equivalent to, for example, free speech—took a huge hit when I started learning that some states allowed late-term abortions and I learned about partial-birth abortions.  From the very first time I heard of this procedure, I thought it was barbaric and that it was women choosing to take the irresponsibility of an unwanted pregnancy to an extreme.  I pretty much closed my ears to it, but the case of the doctor in Philadelphia, who “aborted” viable babies then snipped their spines to kill them, has made it impossible for me to maintain my willful ignorance.

As barbaric and gruesome as those practices are, however, what really brought this to a head for me is the fact that the head of Planned Parenthood, a woman, when asked what should happen to a viable baby who, through a botching of partial-birth abortion, was fully birthed, would not categorically state that, of course, the baby should not be killed.  Instead, she said that what happened to the baby should be between the woman and her doctor.

No.  It shouldn't.  Killing that baby is murder, pure and simple.

And if killing that baby is murder, so is killing a same-age baby who doesn’t manage to pop all the way out of the womb before being killed.  The anti-abortionists are right.  We are killing babies.  Not embryos.  Not fetuses.  Babies.

At about the same time I confronted this issue, a friend of mine on Facebook, who is the most progressive liberal I know, posted an article expressing outrage at sex-selection abortions in China.  Yes, this is outrageous.  Not the sex-selection abortion—that’s bad enough.  What’s outrageous is her hypocrisy.  Apparently only American women have the right to choose abortion, not Chinese women.  Some Chinese women probably want those girl babies, and some of them are probably coerced into abortion by their families.  This is wrong.  But male babies are highly valued by both men and women in China for cultural reasons.  Why should a Chinese woman have to have a baby she doesn’t want?  If an embryo or fetus is a potential beautiful, smart woman in China and should therefore be protected, why aren’t all embryos and fetuses seen for their potential rather than as abortable masses of tissue?

I personally am not swayed by the potentiality argument. I’m not bothered by the abortion of embryos, at least not for reasons of imagining them to become people they may never become even if they are born.  

But once a fetus is viable, it’s a baby.  We have to draw the line somewhere, and so far as I know, murder is still unacceptable in society.  Once the fetus is viable, it’s murder.  Other than banning abortion entirely, there is no other line that can be drawn.

Below is my account of a life-changing experience I promised I would post about, which is that I went on the Atkins diet.  The account is written for other people who are on Atkins, and I refer often to the Atkins forum, which is a free online forum provided by the Atkins company in which people share experiences, support each other, answer questions, and share recipes.  But I hope it might help others as well (if anyone reads this blog, that is!).

My Atkins journey

I started on October 1, 2011, at 187 lbs, and reached my goal of 155 on August 2, 2012.  It took another few weeks to make sure I’d stabilized at that goal, and now that I have, I’m posting this.

Getting on Atkins has been life-changing for me.  Below are some experiences I’ve had and lessons I’ve learned in adopting this way of life.  It is long, so if you don’t want to read the whole thing, at least skip to #13. 

#1:  I started with Gary Taubes’ Why We Are Fat and Good Calories, Bad Calories, and moved on to New Atkins for a New You (aka NANY).  I was excited about the possibilities because these book are full of the science of obesity and diabetes and I was convinced that Atkins was not just another “fad” diet.  I subsequently found that I should NOT, under any circumstances, have believed that the fat will “just melt off”.  This was NOT true, and based on what I read in the Atkins forums, is especially not true for middle-aged or older women (I’ll be 62 this month).  I also realized, rather belatedly, given that I’ve dieted dozens of times, that all diets start off fantastically for most people (I lost a lot right at first) and that one should never listen to or be impressed by claims of losing a large amount of weight in a short period of time (including the claim on the front page of the Atkins website—marketing strikes again).  These are best-case scenarios and don’t apply to most of us.  This does not mean, however, that Atkins should be avoided.  It is a very healthy and sustainable diet.

#2:  A couple of times I’ve read comments from people who said they were losing slowly, only 2 lbs/week.  Get a life!  That’s fast!  For me, getting the weight off was very, very slow, slower than Weight Watchers or the severely calorie-restricted diets I’ve undertaken.  Moreover, I had to do calorie restriction as the diet progressed, even though you’re not “supposed” to have to on Atkins.  I did fine averaging about 1900 calories/day until just before I hit the midpoint on a 32-lb (total) loss.  Then I had to reduce my calories about 200-300 cal/day to get the rest of the weight off.  Note that is still within the 1500-1800 recommended for women by Atkins and WAY higher than Weight Watchers (~1200 cal/day) or the 1000 calorie/day diets I used to torture myself with.  My average weekly weight loss was 0.72 lb, not the 1-2 lbs (or more) promised by the book.  Yeah, 0.72 is “almost” 1, but when the scale doesn’t move for a week or a month or more, it doesn’t seem like it, and the average is skewed by the big loss at the beginning, which is mostly water.  Having said that, there are people on the Atkins forum who’ve lost weight even slower than I did.  I’m sure some of the reason it was slow is my age.  It was worth the wait.

#3:  Everyone is different, so my lesson #2 does not apply to everyone or maybe even not most people.  The rest of my lessons also do not apply to everyone, either, except maybe #4.

#4: Every emotion you’ve felt, I’ve felt, and probably most of the people on the Atkins forum have felt.  Whatever problem, whatever frustration I had, a dozen or more other people have had the same problem or worse, so despite the slow loss, I learned to suck it up and not get side-tracked.  The Atkins forum saved me from myself when I was ready to give up.

#5:  Because I had to reduce my calories, I occasionally experienced hunger. But when I experienced hunger, it wasn’t anything like the gnawing hunger I experienced on low-fat, low-cal, high-carb diets (e.g., Weight Watchers).  I have never had that gnawing hunger since starting Atkins.  I reduced my calories mostly by just eating less, but still kept my fat at around 60-70% of total calories, and the hunger was bearable.  Not being starving-hungry all the time has been fabulous.

#6:  On occasion, I found myself craving more food at night.  I found the best way to deal with that was to binge (if I was going to binge) on fat.  In my experience, I ate a lot fewer calories and didn’t gain weight if I binged on fat, as opposed to eating more of just about anything else.  Sometimes, if I had those cravings, it was because I hadn’t gotten enough protein during the day.  I did find myself falling behind on protein sometimes and learned to watch that more closely.

#7:  Perfection is the enemy of good.  Perhaps I didn’t lose weight very fast because I didn’t follow the program strictly the whole time.  I have a lot of self-discipline—I wouldn’t have had as successful career as I’ve had if I didn’t—but on personal stuff, I just can’t spend that much mental energy.  Although I was very good at keeping records and keeping the net carbs down (averaging about 35/day), I did partake of alcohol on occasion, even though I knew it could reverse my weight loss sometimes, and sometimes I overdid it on the nuts and overall calories, even after I lowered the calorie goal.  Toward the end, I even ate ice cream a couple of times (small amounts—all I wanted).  I also didn’t pay much attention to the limit on artificial sweeteners, but since I lost my sweet tooth (see below), I doubt I averaged more than 3-5 servings/day.  Although I tracked everything, I often did not pay much attention to where I was going for the day, so sometimes I overdid it on the carbs (though only a handful of times in the 10+ months since I started did I exceed 50 net carbs in a day) and calories.  But just keeping track made a big difference, even if I slipped sometimes.  All this may have slowed me down…or it may not have.  I don’t know, but I do know that I lost weight and was a lot happier than I would have been had I watched myself like a hawk every freakin’ minute.  I also did not obsess over minor differences in carb contents of different versions of the same foods, so some days I may have eaten more carbs than I counted, but I figured that was evened out by the days I ate less than I counted.  One of the reasons I was so hopeful setting out on this diet was that I was very tired of being obsessed with food, which includes being obsessed with not eating.  When I found I still had to count stuff, I was quite annoyed, but the online resources made that a lot less painful.  I determined not to agonize over everything, in which I was mostly successful, particularly after Collette helped me get past a plateau.

#8:  I don't bonk any more.  I used to have serious bonks on long runs (before my knees packed it in) and long bicycle rides (>35 miles).  I haven’t bonked once since going on Atkins.  In fact, when I finally got around to doing a 50-mile ride this summer, I felt great at the end except for my muscles being sore, which is understandable.  But I wasn’t slogging out the last 10 miles as I have before.  Another way of putting it:  I don’t need carbs to exercise hard.  It was a revelation to learn that my professional mountain-biking nephew eats the Paleo diet (similar to Atkins). 

#9:  I have mild hypertension and the Atkins diet didn’t make a difference.  As I already suspected, my hypertension is idiopathic, in other words, unexplained and unrelated to any of the usual causes.  My mom has the same thing.  Sometimes you really can’t buck genetics.
 

#10:  I don’t get cold any more.  I used to get cold pretty easily.  I still don’t stay warm as well as my husband does (especially when I’m sleeping), but I’m a lot better than I used to be, and skiing is no longer an exercise in ignoring how cold I am.

#11:  I had certain, er, digestive issues (gaseous emissions) almost constantly before I got on Atkins.  In fact, so persistent was this that when I started to get serious with my now-husband, I warned him about it because it was, er, uncontrollable.  Once I was on Atkins, this cleared up almost entirely.  In fact, I really didn't experience any problems at all until I had been at my maintenance weight for several weeks.  One day, I ate a whole pear (very high net carbs).  I had problems for 1.5 days.

#12:  One of the Atkins mantras is to check your measurements and you will see that you are losing inches if not weight.  This didn’t work for me.  I didn’t measure myself often, but so far as I can tell, the measurements and my weight changed at different rates and times, and, if anything, the inches lagged the weight loss rather than leading it.  In fact, when I would lose a lot, I would measure myself, and sometimes the measurements showed no change—the opposite of what “should” happen.

#13, and the most important of all:  I became a different person (you might have seen my post “Who am I?”).  My relationship to food changed completely.  It is hard to overemphasize the radical nature of these changes for me.  There were times when I almost felt—in the best possible way—that an alien had taken over my body and brain, although from Taubes’ books, I understand that, in fact, my “normal” self was the carbohydrates taking over my body and brain.  Importantly, the changes were completely unconscious.  I’ve changed my behavior—temporarily—on other diets, but the underlying behaviors were still there, just suppressed by force of willpower.  These new behaviors on Atkins arose spontaneously—no willpower involved:

a.       I lost my sweet tooth.  I didn’t think anything could cause me to lose my sweet tooth.  I used to crave sugar and chocolate like you wouldn’t believe—it was almost a physical attraction, as if I were a piece of iron and the sugar was a strong magnet.  For that reasons, I hated having sweets around the house, but my late husband and my current husband both kept candy and cookies around, so it was hard.  I love the Atkins-friendly desserts, and fortunately, I already loved really, really dark chocolate (>85% cacao), which is amazingly Atkins-friendly.  I do miss ice cream, but don’t crave it as I used to.  I don’t crave any sweets.  Miraculous.

b.      I have a lot more energy.  I think I have more energy overall, but I definitely have more constant energy during the day.  My whole life, I used to “crash” at around 11 a.m. and big time about 2:30-3 pm, no matter what or how much I ate.  Now my energy level is constant through the day.  Like losing my sweet tooth, this is an amazing and life-changing development.  I can exercise whenever I want and do high-concentration work whenever I want, without having to plan around the crashes.

c.       I’m no longer a food zombie.  This one is kind of hard to explain.  My entire adult life, when I was home, I would be constantly in and out of the kitchen looking for something to graze on.  Most of the time, I would be doing something else (reading, working on the computer, beading, watching TV, whatever) and would have no intent to go to the kitchen and wouldn’t even know how I got there.  If I was dieting (low-fat, low-cal, high-carb), I would then regain consciousness and leave without eating anything, only to end up back there again a few minutes later.  If I wasn’t dieting, I would eat something (guess how all those pounds kept coming back on?).  You might wonder how I could go back and forth like that and not even know it, but I guess 99% of my brain was still involved in whatever activity I was involved in, and the other 1%--the part I now know was driven by all the negative biochemical consequences of eating too much carbohydrate--was moving me unconsciously to the kitchen.  I hated working at home for this reason, even though working at home on occasion was an option in my career.  About three weeks after starting Atkins, I was home just hanging around for a few days after a very stressful business trip and down with some minor ailment.  This sort of situation would have had me in the kitchen grazing constantly.  I had been sitting around like this for 3.5 days when I suddenly realized that I had not once gone to the kitchen to graze.  This was a radical behavior change and it was completely unconscious!!!!  To me, it still seems miraculous. 

Another food-zombie behavior that went away was my obsession with particular foods.  By that I mean, if I thought of something I liked to eat, I couldn’t stop thinking about it until I had it—usually to excess.  Of course, the things I tended to crave were high-carb things.  Now, sometimes I think about these foods, but then make myself stop thinking about them.  The amazing thing is that I can stop thinking about them.  Somewhere on this journey, I read the phrase “intrusive thoughts of food”.  That was me when I would think about certain foods.  I couldn’t stop thinking about them.  Now I can.

d.       A pound up?  No problem!  About 5 months into this way of life, I realized I was no longer obsessed with my weight.  How did I know that?  Even though I’d still be weighing myself every day and writing it down, I didn’t even realize I was on a plateau until after it became an “official” Atkins plateau (no loss of inches or pounds for 4 weeks).  The first plateau was a stretch of 6 weeks, during which every day of no loss (or worse, gain, even though my rational mind knew it was just water-weight fluctuations) was an agonizing exercise in doubt and self-recrimination for imagined failures, etc.  You know the drill.  The next time, though, I didn’t even notice the plateau.  Again, a completely unconscious and completely radical change in my behavior and attitude.

e.       I can leave yummy food on my plate.  About 6 months into this way of life, I was at a luncheon at a conference, and the meal included potatoes and chocolate cake.  I didn’t touch the potatoes (this wasn’t hard).  I had two small bites of the cake and left the rest alone.  OK, I’ve done that before, so no big deal, although it was easier to stop eating the cake than it had been before.  But later that week I found myself at a formal dinner, and for the first time since going on Atkins, gave myself permission to not worry so much about the carbs because the dinner was late and light and I knew it was likely to be carb-heavy.  The carb-heavy choices were a dinner roll, crabcake (made with potato), and a chocolate truffle cake.  I had a couple of bites of the dinner roll because the salad was really small.  But that’s all I wanted, even though I was hungry.  I had a couple of bites of the crabcake.  It was very good, but the beef short rib that came with it had pretty much satisfied my hunger so I stopped there, too.  But I was by no means full, and so I pretty much gave myself permission to eat the chocolate truffle cake because I LOVE chocolate truffle cake and the piece wasn’t very big.  I ate two small bites……and that was it.  It was delicious, but that was all I wanted.  I even tentatively tried to eat more by taking a small bite while the speeches were going on, and I just flat did not want more.  My husband was eyeing me suspiciously, thinking, “Who are you and what have you done with my wife?”  Before Atkins, I would have devoured the whole thing in about 2 bites, even if I was dieting.  I would have found some excuse to eat it.  I still love chocolate, the cake was delicious, I even TRIED to make myself eat it….but that was all I wanted.  Very, very, very strange—and wonderful.

That’s it for now.  In a year I’m hoping to add #14:  “This works for the long term.  For the first time in my life, I haven’t started gaining weight after losing.  Before, I’ve regained all the weight, and sometimes more, in 2 years or less.”  Because of all these experiences, and the radical, unconscious behavioral changes, I have more confidence than I have ever had before that the last diet before Atkins will be my last failed diet.

I’ll let you know.

Whoa!  Talk about being gone for awhile!

I've decided to reactivate this blog.  Reading through my previous posts, there's nothing I disagree with.  At this point, I'll make only one observation:  Obamacare is turning out even worse than I feared.  Every doctor I've talked to is extremely concerned.  Even the liberals among them think it will be a disaster.  A couple are going to retire.  They feel the government is more and more intruding between themselves and their patients.  And, of course, it's turning out that it will be WAY more expensive and cover WAY fewer people than promised.

At some point in the not-too-distant future, I'm going to be posting about a life-changing experience I've had recently.

Two other life-changing experiences since I last posted:  I got married and retired.  As you might have heard, being retired does not mean you have lots more time!

on being away

I haven't been on for awhile. It has to do with finding love and being busy with my job--thank God I've got a job! Life is good in every respect except for the unease I've been feeling about Obamacare. This "pass something--anything--mentality" is scaring the living daylights out of me. This is no way to run a country. The arrogance is breathtaking. Obama actually mused to Katie Couric about how nice it would have been to just put something academically approved in place without having to negotiate with all these people. The horror! Imagine that--having to negotiate stuff!!! How primitive!

The whole attitude makes me sick. As far as "academically approved" is concerned....well, I'M an academic. I know just how idiotic academics can be. We may be smart, we may have great ideals that get people thinking, but as for applying them....well, we'd all be Communists now if that had been possible. Thank goodness it isn't. That a sitting president would wistfully wish for such a thing is extremely scary. Yes, the health care system could use some reform, but what is proposed is not only unworkable, it will bankrupt the country....if stimulus I, II, and III ("jobs bill"--give me a break!) don't do it.

But fortunately I'm sane, still.....just....for having found love. I can hardly believe it. From widowhood to engagement in a few short months. I am indeed blessed.

So to all you 50+ widows out there, don't give up and don't lower your standards. We may outnumber men, and maybe most of the good ones are taken, but the "taken" ones might be widowers some day, and they'll still be good.

climategate

Here's a letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal. Too long, which is why it wasn't published, but at least I can put it here:

One of your letter writers asks “where’s the outrage?” in the scientific community about climategate, and Daniel Henninger wonders--to briefly paraphrase--surely there are those scientists who worried about the credibility of science as the rhetoric leading to this scandal accelerated. There are plenty of us who have worried about this, in my case starting two decades ago when the pathologies that led to climategate began to emerge. On the issue of climate change, the convergence of large sums of public (free!) money, egos, complex science, and politics led inevitably to where we are today. Some of us who saw it coming but did not speak out as vigorously or publicly as we could have are now thrashing ourselves for having naively thought that, somehow, it could never get as bad as we feared.

Now, of course, the rhetoric has become so heated that many are either afraid to speak out or exhausted by the thought of being shouted down after even the mildest dissent. I have been appalled at the reactions of colleagues whom I otherwise respect when I voice my doubts about one or another point of the science. There is a reason why, with the exception of some courageous scientists like Richard Lindzen, many of the most vocal critics of the AGW hypothesis are retired. They are not in their dotage and out of touch; it’s that they have nothing to lose. Those of us who are still practicing our science are reluctant to become the whipping boys of the rabid AGW-hypothesis believers (I use “believers” deliberately), if for no other reason than responding takes so much time away from our research, teaching, and students. For younger scientists, the consequence are even direr—they may not ever get grants, papers published, or promotion.

The level of the discussion in the emails downloaded from CRU (many of which I have read myself) is not business-as-usual, as some apologists for climategate have tried to imply. At best, the language is supremely arrogant in its callous disrespect for the science and its other practitioners. At worst, it is everything the talk show hosts claim—outright scientific fraud. The answer is perhaps somewhere in between, but anything less than transparency and honesty is unacceptable. We scientists must hold ourselves to a higher standard, the more so if our science has a direct impact on society. We must not just tolerate criticism, but embrace it. This is all beside the fact that the participants knew full well that their emails were subject to Freedom of Information requests yet still used such intemperate language. That some of the emails “don’t read well” is an appallingly weak excuse from such intelligent people and only serves to highlight their arrogance.

In the science of complex systems—and few physical processes are more complex than climate--there will always be data that do not fit the favored hypothesis. We are obligated to honestly present all the data and, if we exclude some from our analyses or alter some, we must nevertheless still present the raw data and be forthright about our reasons for omitting or altering it. Why? One reason, of course, is that it is the honest thing to do. But more importantly, those data are critical for other scientists who might want to replicate our results, replicability being the hallmark of good science. And those data may be the very data that prove critical to a new understanding as the science advances. If one works on complex systems, one will inevitably and eventually be wrong. That is nothing to fear because if we are proved wrong, it means the science has advanced; we were right at one time in the context of what was known, but as more is known, we often must revise our conclusions. No scientist has suffered from this process.

But enter politics, and all that changes. The scientists of complex systems must speak in probabilities. Policymakers don’t want to hear “probable”, they want to hear “certain”. Scientists, being good citizens, try to comply, but if the issue becomes important enough, an amplification takes over, with the policymakers pushing for ever-more certainty and the scientists trying ever harder to comply because their research funding comes to depend on it. If the scientists then taste political power, they believe their own certainty and become entrenched in their hypotheses. It is this entrenchment—whatever drives it—that gets scientists into trouble. This has happened over and over in the history of science. What is remarkable about climategate is the scale and the potential consequences. I hope Daniel Henninger is wrong that this could harm all of science; I fear that he might not be.

Cash for Clunkers

The "Cash for Clunkers" program has been termed a huge success by the mainstream media. $1 billion dollars spent in a week when it was supposed to last until November 1st. What this has succeeded in doing is to provide a means to unload some excess inventory from the dealers lots they have been having trouble selling. This will not increase production of automobiles, or steel to make automobiles, or plastics to make automobiles, or tires to put on automobiles or seats, or floormats, or anything else that goes into making automobiles. It' s just a blip in sales and now it's over.
What is needed to restart this economy is something that will be long termed and sustained. Something like letting people keep their own money and letting them spend their own money instead of pouring it down the rat hole that Washington has become. In addition, get the federal government out of many things that is none of their business, such as education and get serious about reducing the size of government.
Thanks

LIving a full life

Thanks to the Wall Street Journal,  I just found Greg Mankiw's blog.  Mankiw is an economics professor at Harvard.  In addition to discussions of economics, he has a list of links to topics such as "Advice for Junior Faculty".  Mankiw has a sense of humor!  Most refreshing in a professor.  His advice is excellent:  live to do research and publish papers.  Have no friends or family unless they will publish with you.  Above all, avoid having children!  He then goes on to indicate what might happen at the Pearly Gates.  Priceless.

My fellow faculty members ask how I can possibly have taken the time to learn to fly.  As doing so has had, if anything, a salient effect on my career, the question leaves me non-plussed.  The only possible answer is, "I made the time."  That is the key to being successful and still living one's dreams, or having a family, or whatever else you need to do to become a whole person and not just a brain.  

Of course, if your ambitions are to be the acknowledged very best at what you do, to be on the Time 100-people-to-watch list, to be a "widely cited expert", or whatever you consider to be the pinnacle of success, by all means go for it.  But then again, you might not make it, and then where will you be?  Do well, work hard, and have fun, and you never know where you'll end up.  You might be surprised.