Seth’s blog

… continues:

The only person I’ve told about SLD is my wife, and she specifically told me not to tell her family about SLD.

Thanks to Honest Medicine, I found some interesting videos about the ketogenic diet. The first two are from Dateline NBC: Part 1 and Part 2. In Part 1, Dr. Donald Shields, head of pediatric neurology at the UCLA Medical Center, says, in answer to a question about why he didn’t recommend the ketogenic diet to the Abramsons, who discovered it for themselves:

Because I don’t think we had exhausted all the medical approaches [to treating their son’s epilepsy] yet. There were actually still other medications that we hadn’t tried yet.

The last is a great talk (9 minutes) by Dr. Deborah Snyder. “To say the ketogenic diet has touched my heart would be a great understatement,” said Dr. Snyder.

More videos from The Charlie Foundation. The Ketogenic Diet and Evidence Snobs.

I have never read a better description of the difference between being fat and not fat:

I had a gastric bypass and ate 750-1000 calories of liquid meal replacement a day.  I had complications and couldn’t swallow food.  I lost over a hundred pounds.  I regained it over a number of years.  Once I lost weight and was normal–my life did change for the better.  It’s the only reason I had my child.  For the first and only time in my life it was easy to have people in my life.  People wanted to be around me.  I had boyfriends who treated me well for the first and only time in my life.  I got married.  All this happened very quickly and easily with no effort on my part.  Being fat is completely different.  I think the way people treat a fat person is similar to being disfigured or in a wheelchair with your legs cut off .  In many instances it is better to be dead than to be this fat.

From an anonymous blogger who weighs about 280 pounds. She isn’t trying to sell anything, make a journalistic or academic point, appear to be this or that. The post goes on:

My daughter had a fat friend over for a sleep over the other day.  It’s the second fat friend she’s ever had over.  The difference between these girls and the thinner girls is striking.  The fat girls are obsessed with food.  They are more driven to eat, more interested in food, more hungry than the thinner girls.  The thin girls are interested in food far less.  It’s not that they are better than the fat girls, they are simply less hungry.  My daughter first fat friend got up all through the night to raid our refrigerator.  This child acted as if she were starving.  She ate until she was literally ill and threw up on the sleeping bags.  Then later she peed on my daughter.  My daughter is fastidious and she was completely revolted.   That was the end of the friendship.

I came across this because she is trying the Shangri-La Diet.

Sure, we can learn about human nature by looking at art. I’ve done that. What’s less obvious, at least to me, is how much  can be learned about human nature by observing art students. I got a glimpse of this from talking to a student at California College of the Arts. Three things I learned:

1. Every department looks down on every other department. Or, at least, there is a vast amount of “looking down on”. One example is that students in the illustration department look down on students in the fashion department. This is puzzling because the two subjects are unrelated (unlike, say, graphic design and illustration, which are closely related). Why does it happen? My informant thought it was because so many people looked down on illustrators that they were desperate to find a group they themselves could look down on; they chose fashion even though it made no sense.

2. Students in each major have distinct personalities. Photography majors tend to be self-centered and outspoken. In class, they talk more than they need to. Illustration majors are relatively childlike; they are wacky and playful and fun and less serious. In the illustration department, unlike other departments, critiques are always sugar-coated: “This is great, what a nice job you did, you might think about …” Graphic design majors are “urban” — more sophisticated, more interested in being cutting edge, more concerned about the job market. Fashion majors tend to be flighty.

3. Almost all students at CCA enter with their major already decided. They are intensely focused on their subject — think about it all the time. They have little interest in what can be learned from other disciplines. Somehow focus seems to get in the way of curiosity. You might think that art is about being creative and creativity is helped by curiosity. Somehow this doesn’t occur to them and isn’t taught.

Shown the above, my informant, wanting to give a more complete picture, added:

I also think that a lot of those students who help to create these perceptions are probably also the ones that feel the need to be labeled. The photography students who create the image of self-assuredness, the ones who talk about themselves and their work all the time, probably feel they need to do it because it’s the image of themselves and of photographers that they need to create. Same goes for fashion and illustration and all others. There are probably other students who feel the way that I do and just choose not to get into it and would rather leave those “personas” for someone else to convey.

I think it’s specific to art students, and [part of a] desire to be seen as artistic, since most artists i know outside of school don’t seem to perpetuate this. i don’t want to make it seem as if art students are superficial and uninspired. i’ve met my share of really great people.

More. Russ Roberts, interviewing Diane Coyle: “The culture among the graduate students [in economics at the University of Chicago in the late 1970s], and probably among the faculty, was to really look down on the other social sciences and to see them as a total waste of time.”

There’s a new diet called something like Fat Loss For Idiots or The Idiot-Proof Diet in which you lose weight by constantly changing what you eat. Here’s how the creators put it:

To lose weight your diet menu needs to be SHIFTED every few days –and this is something you’ve never tried before, and that’s why you’ve never been able to change your body when dieting.

Never tried before? When I go to a foreign country that’s close to what happens. And I do lose weight. According to the theory behind the Shangri-La Diet, this should work — because you are constantly eating flavors you haven’t yet associated with calories. Thanks to Tim Lundeen.