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Regard, Owner This Blog

Daftar Isi

Terima kasih atas Kunjungan anda yang berharga !

sometimes i get caught up in color....but these images look pretty perfect to me.  in fact, if those mercury glass pendants would appear in my hallway, i'd be one happy camper!!

Welcome to the Team Wales family!

With the Opening Ceremony now just days away, I wanted to take this opportunity to congratulate every single one of you; athletes, HQ and support staff, on your selection into the Team Wales family.

The Isle of Man is ready and raring to welcome us onto the island for the fourth Commonwealth Youth Games, and this year we’re proud to be taking a full team of athletes.

Everyone who has been selected to compete for, or represent Wales, has been chosen to do so not only because of your recent achievements but also because we believe that you can go on to emulate the success achieved by Team Wales at the Commonwealth Games in Delhi 2010.

Pune 2008 changed things for us; it was the first year that we used the Youth Games as a development tool, and we’d hope that come Glasgow 2014 or in 2018 the names on those Welsh shirts and the scoreboards will be yours.

Use the Isle of Man as a stepping stone; as an opportunity to get as much experience as you can. And above all enjoy it! The focus is very much on young people and the cultural day on the 12^th September is something not to be missed.

Don’t forget to keep checking Zeus for the latest Team Wales updates and information, and make sure you’re signed up to follow us on Twitter and Facebook. Throughout the Games we’ll be posting exclusive videos and interviews with athletes as well as some behind the scenes footage.

Thank you to all those supporters and friends who have consistently got behind Team Wales; we’ll be hoping to do you proud out there and look forward to seeing you all at our Welcome Home celebration.

On behalf of all of the Team Wales support team I wish you every success at the Commonwealth Youth Games.

Chris Jenkins

Chef de Mission

A Roadmap to Obesity

In this post, I'll explain my current understanding of the factors that promote obesity in humans.  

Heritability

To a large degree, obesity is a heritable condition.  Various studies indicate that roughly two-thirds of the differences in body fatness between individuals is explained by heredity*, although estimates vary greatly (1).  However, we also know that obesity is not genetically determined, because in the US, the obesity rate has more than doubled in the last 30 years, consistent with what has happened to many other cultures (2).  How do we reconcile these two facts?  By understanding that genetic variability determines the degree of susceptibility to obesity-promoting factors.  In other words, in a natural environment with a natural diet, nearly everyone would be relatively lean, but when obesity-promoting factors are introduced, genetic makeup determines how resistant each person will be to fat gain.  As with the diseases of civilization, obesity is caused by a mismatch between our genetic heritage and our current environment.  This idea received experimental support from an interesting recent study (3).

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i've got my eye on kelly green right now....i want to add it everywhere- plus i'm obsessed w/ grant's elle decor dining room...those chairs are killing me i want them so bad!

*images courtesy of note to self, fallon elizabeth, pink persimmon, grant gibson

Professor Doctor FCS, Ph.D.*

Yikes, I haven't posted here in ages. Nor have I read anyone else's blogs. (Sorry!)

I alluded to having news in previous blog entries, so here it is - I finished my PhD and landed an academic job. All of this was relatively drama-free, however it has made life incredibly busy**.

I have no idea how people pre-tenure manage to write blogs, read blogs, get grant $, teach, advise, and publish a metric ton of stuff. These days I'm barely able to manage dinner. Or a dentist. And I think my kid has forgotten my name.

But I'll give it a shot. I think we still have a long way to go into the academy where scientific women at the PhD level are not seen as strange and unusual specimens. I've already had a few female students make very positive comments to me about being a role model, and I get a kick out of helping people, so there it is.

So I'll keep this blog going a bit longer and see where it goes.

Thanks for reading, and more soon.

--------
(*) This is tongue-in-cheek. All newbies always have something to prove, and tack on the titles to the point of hilarity.

(**) Like really, really busy. You know how as a graduate student you're always thinking, "Why does my professor write such terse emails? Why do they take so long to respond? Do they hate my guts?" No. We don't hate your guts, we just have 400 emails just like yours.

i LOVE things that inspire...these necklaces totally make me want to design an entire house around them....such great colors!!!

*images courtesy of i dream of, nest egg, simply seleta/h&h, lonny

Role of psychology after a sports injury...

With injuries hitting the Wales rugby camp, we tracked down Sport Wales’ Dr Joy Bringer to discover what role sports psychology can play in rehabilitation...

Joy is a Sport Psychologist, working full-time with elite athletes and coaches at Sport Wales in Cardiff. She is a Chartered Psychologist and is accredited to the High Performance Sport level with the British Association of Sport and Exercise Sciences.

In her role, she has travelled to the Athens and Beijing Paralympic Games supporting British athletes., and has been appointed as the Lead Sport Psychologist for ParalympicsGB for London2012. She has also been an integral member of Team Wales at the 2006 and 2010 Commonwealth Games.

How traumatic can it be to have an injury?

If the injury is career threatening, it can have a massive impact. Often you find athletes whose whole identity is sport. If that is suddenly taken away from them, it can be devastating.

That’s why we recommend a life balance in which studies, career or hobbies also play a part. So when things aren’t going so smoothly in sport, there are other things to focus on. And that’s true for anything – not just sport. If you’re 100% devoted to your job and you get made redundant, it’s understandably a huge blow. For those that have other interests, it is easier to adapt and move forward.

It all really depends on how serious an injury it is and the perception of the injury. If you have the confidence and belief that you will come back from the injury, it’s more likely that your recovery will be quicker. So confidence is vital!

What sort of issues crop up after suffering an injury?

·         The loss of confidence – questions pop up like, “am I going to get back to where I was before?”, “Are my competitors getting ahead of me?” “Will I be as good as I could have been?” “Am I going to recover in time?”

·         The fear of losing out on your dreams. If you’re moving towards the Olympics for example, there is the fear of not being selected and that may have been something you’ve been dreaming about and working towards since you were a child.

·         The fear of re-injury, especially in similar situations.

·         The feeling of isolation. Teams can be like a tight knit family. If you get injured and you’re not able to train or compete, you can be taken away from that and leave you feeling like you’re missing out.

·         Lack of motivation – if you’re constantly getting setbacks, and there may well be setbacks within the rehabilation programme, you can feel that you’re never going to make it happen and then you it’s easy to lose motivation and think “ why bother?”

How can psychologists play a part in overcoming these issues?

By working closely with the rest of the support team – coaches, physio, nutritionist, strength and conditioning coach, psychologists can help athlete set realistic and appropriate goals. If your focus is just on getting back to where you were pre-injury – that can be a too distant goal. It’s important to give yourself credit for little improvements you make every day.

We can also help an athlete stay in touch with the rest of the team so they don’t suffer from that feeling of isolation.

Psychologists can also help athletes believe in the rehab programme as well as the athlete’s ability to successfully complete it.

How do these issues impact on physical recovery?

We know that chronic stress can impact on physical recovery. Your body doesn’t heal as quickly. If you’re lacking motivation, that can then result in you not sticking to the rehab programme and you won’t see as much progress.

Stress can also result in emotional eating or maybe drinking which leads to weight gain and not eating the right things. So you’re not helping the body to heal itself.

If an athlete has a fear of re-injury, they may change their techniques to protect the injury. This may also result in tension around those muscles and can actually increase the risk of re-injury. But it does depend on the individual and the injury.

What happens psychologically if an athlete misses a major competition?

It really depends on what the competition means to the athlete and how the athlete interprets that. If they (and their support team) can keep it in perspective and believe that it’s not the end of the world – then it is not so devastating. It is a normal response to feel depressed, angry, frustrated, to consider retirement – or it can make an athlete more determined than ever!

How can you help an athlete focus on recovery and rehabilitation? What sort of things will you suggest and put in place?

We look at goal-setting that fits in with the rehab programme so we work closely with strength & conditioning, physio and so on.

We work on Emotional Coping and Problem Focused Coping– In terms of Emotional Coping, we  often deal in stress management, the responses to stress – helping an athlete to reevaluate the situation in a way that is going to help, not hinder them.

Relaxation strategies are also important –we can explore what helps them relax and encourage them to do what they enjoy – going to the cinema, listen to music etc – whatever it is that puts the athlete in a better mood.

Breathing techniques and progressive muscle relaxation are also useful techniques – we can help teach the body to notice the difference between tension and relaxation. This can help an athlete to actively relax.

We use a lot of imagery with the athletes – if they’re feeling stressed, they can imagine a relaxing, safe place. Imagery is also used to motivate – if you imagine yourself fully fit and back competing again, it can have incredible results.

Steve Backley is a perfect example. Three months out before the 1996 Olympics, he’d been on crutches for six weeks. He used visualisation techniques. So he imagined himself throwing a javelin and throwing a personal best.

He won the silver medal and says: “It proved to me how powerful a tool the mind is and how the body just follows it. That's what I like about the championships, it's not only about the physical tests. There are 8, 10 guys, certainly in javelin, capable of throwing the distance necessary to win, but it's the one who handles the pressures of a major championship better than the others who will win.”

We talk to athletes at Sport Wales about those that have had successful comeback stories so they know that it is possible.

Imagery is also a good way to maintain technique. There was a famous study involving a group of rugby players and a group of ballerinas. When the rugby players watched the ballerinas on TV, there was no significant change in their brain activity. But when the rugby players watched a video of other elite rugby players, it activated the parts of the brain that scientist think are related to those same movements.

When an athlete gets injured, it is common to become overly worried about being in the same situation that they were in when they got injured. If an athlete can watch themselves successfully perform the movements in which they sustained the injury, this can also help lessen the fear of re-injury. Basically, it helps to remind the athlete that they have performed the movement many times without injury, and it increases the belief that they will be able to perform the movement again successfully, without injury.

What should family and close friends do? Do they play a part?

There are many, many research studies that show that family and friends are really important to making a successful comeback.  In psychology we call this social support.

It’s important to find out from the athlete how you can best support them. For one athlete, phoning them five times a day might be exactly what they need – for another, it might stress an athlete out.

And remember to support the athlete not just the week after injury – the support might be needed more than ever three months, six months or nine months later.

Seed Oils and Body Fatness-- A Problematic Revisit

Anthony Colpo recently posted a discussion of one of my older posts on seed oils and body fat gain (1), which reminded me that I need to revisit the idea.  As my knowledge of obesity and metabolism has expanded, I feel the evidence behind the hypothesis that seed oils (corn, soybean, etc.) promote obesity due to their linoleic acid (omega-6 fat) content has largely collapsed.

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i'm doing a little dance b/c it's friday...and b/c i made it an entire week keeping my house clean (that is a huge thing for me)!

*images courtesy of saras party perfect, ruthie gyll, pink persimmon

Food Palatability and Body Fatness: Clues from Alliesthesia

Part I: Is there a Ponderostat?

Some of the most important experiments for understanding the role of food palatability/reward in body fatness were performed by Dr. Michel Cabanac and collaborators in the 1970s (hat tip to Dr. Seth Roberts for the references).  In my recent food reward series (1), I referenced but did not discuss Dr. Cabanac's work because I felt it would have taken too long to describe.  However, I included two of his studies in my Ancestral Health Symposium talk, and I think they're worth discussing in more detail here.

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i have this feeling that plaid is back.....get ready :)

*images courtesy of erica in america, pink persimmon, green wellies

Chinese weightlifting team makes uplifting visit to North Wales

The Chinese Weightlifting Association brought their world beating weightlifting team – including three current Olympic champions – to Bangor for a pre Games training camp in preparation for the London 2012 Olympic Games from 4-10 August 2011. Arguably the world’s greatest weightlifting team, China won eight gold medals from 15 available at the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games and are hotly tipped to continue their dominance at London 2012.

Welsh Weightlifting Federation Head Coach, Ray Williams, worked closely with the Welsh Government to bring the Chinese to picturesque North Wales. He spoke to Sport Wales about what the visit means to the area and how he hopes to learn from the experience and use it to lift Welsh Weightlifting to even greater heights.

Ray Willimas, Welsh Weightlifting Coach

“It was a hugely exciting event for the country to have the best weightlifting team in the world based here in North Wales. Sport Wales have been terrific with their support to make this a reality. Bangor University have also been superb in every respect. They provided an executive chef and total autonomy of the gym. The Chinese delegation could not get a better package.

“It was a very timely visit now that we have the re-branded Holyhead and Anglesey Weightlifting and Fitness Centre. It’s an education for me and our other coaches to learn from the Chinese and I’m hoping to get some time in Beijing with them in return, which will be fantastic! Welsh weightlifting can only benefit.

“It’s the icing on the cake to have the greatest weightlifting country on earth visit our beautiful little country that’s produced so many great champions. A lot of hard work went into securing their visit but they applied to come to Holyhead (as well as Leeds Carnegie’s World class Lifting High Performance Centre). The good thing is that we got them here to this beautiful area and I have had the chance to take notes and dilute some of what they do and apply that to our training.

“They have 500 weightlifters in their national team. It’s professional amateurism to the extreme. We are doing our best to support our best athletes – and we’re not far off in some sports – but weightlifting has always been a performance rather than a participation sport, so our talent pool is much smaller. People confuse Olympic Weightlifting with Power Lifting but things like Cross Lifting are making the sport more accessible. It might take a few years to catch on but hopefully more and more people will be attracted to this brilliant sport.

“It’s my dream to one day provide a closed, total environment for lifters living in Holyhead and to be able to pay them. It’s the only way. Malaysian athletes go into residential training from the age of 12 – Gareth Evans (62kg Welsh weightlifter), on the other hand, is a painter and decorator. If we can offer total vocational training we’d be on a much more level playing field. The Pacific Rim countries and Canada all train in a total environment and the gulf is a million miles away with what we’re doing currently.

“It was a great coup to have the Chinese team here in Bangor. They could have gone to Leeds (where the GB Team train) but we’re rightly proud that they chose us instead. I think, without a doubt, that they’ll come back and base themselves here in the run up to London 2012. We can offer an environment for total concentration and immersion in what they do, without any distractions – which is what you need when you’re preparing for a major championship.”

The Chinese Olympic Weightlifting Team’s visit to North Wales was made possible thanks to the Welsh Government and Anglo-Chinese Sports and Culture Association (ACSCA) in partnership with Bangor University, Welsh Weightlifting Federation, Gwynedd Council and Sport Wales.

For all your sporting needs and interests visit us at www.sportwales.org.uk and follow us at www.facebook.com/sportwales and www.twitter.com/sport_wales.

I Got Boinged, and Other News

The reaction to my post "The Carbohydrate Hypothesis of Obesity: a Critical Examination" has been overwhelmingly positive, particularly among the scientists I've heard from. 

On Saturday, the inimitable maker and writer Mark Frauenfelder posted a link to my post on the variety blog BoingBoing.  BoingBoing has been on my sidebar for three years, and it's the place I go when I need a break.  It's a fun assortment of science, news, technology and entertainment.  BoingBoing was originally a zine started by Frauenfelder and his wife in 1988, and it has been on the web since 1995.  Today, it has multiple contributing authors and it draws several hundred thousand hits per day.  I'm thrilled that Frauenfelder posted my article there.  Apparently he likes my blog.  Thanks!

I added a new section (IIB) to my original post.  It discusses what human genetics can teach us about the mechanisms of common obesity.  It is consistent with the rest of the evidence suggesting that body fatness is primarily regulated by the brain, not by fat tissue, and that leptin signaling plays a dominant role in this process. 

All the summer schools

This summer I attended two conferences (3DIMPVT, EMMCVPR) and two summer schools. I know my latency is somewhat annoying, but it's better to review them now then never. :) This post is about the summer schools, and the following is going to be about the conferences.

PhD Summer School in Cambridge

Both schools were organized by Microsoft Research. The first one, PhD Summer School was in Cambridge, UK. The lectures covered some general issues for computer science PhD students (like using cloud computing for research and career perspectives) as well as some recent technical results by Microsoft Research. From the computer vision side, there were several talks:

• Antonio Criminisi described their InnerEye system for retrieval of similar body part scans, which is useful for diagnosis based on similar cases' medical history. He also featured the basics of Random Forests as an advertisement to his ICCV 2011 tutorial. The new thing was using peculiar weak classifiers (like 2nd order separation surfaces). Antonio argued they perform much better then trees in some cases.
• Andrew Fitzgibbon gave a brilliant lecture about pose estimation for Kinect (MSR Cambridge is really proud of that algorithm [Shotton, 2011], this is the topic for another post).
• Olga Barinova talked about the modern methods of image analysis and her work for the past 2 years (graphical models for non-maxima suppression for object detection and urban scene parsing).

The other great talks were about .NET Gadgeteer, the system for modelling and even deployment of electronic gadgets (yes, hardware!), and F#, Microsoft's alternative to Scala, the language that combines object-oriented paradigm with functional. Sir Tony Hoare also gave a lecture, so I had a chance to ask him how he ended up in Moscow State University in the 60s. It turns out he studied statistics, and Andrey Kolmogorov was one of the leaders of the field that time, so that internship was a great opportunity for him. He said he had liked the time in Moscow. :) There were also magnificent lectures by Simon Peyton-Jones about giving talks and writing papers. Those advices are the must for everyone who does research, you can find the slides here. Slides for some of the lectures are available from the school page.

The school talks did not take all the time. Every night was occupied by some social event (go-karting, punting etc.) as well as unofficial after-parties in Cambridge pubs. Definitely it is the most fun school/conference I've attended so far. Karting was especially great, with the quality track, pit-stops, stats and prizes, so special thanks to Microsoft for including it to the program!

Microsoft Computer Vision School in Moscow

This year, Microsoft Research summer school in Russia was devoted to computer vision and organized in cooperation with our lab. The school started before its official opening with a homework assignment we authored (I was one of four student volunteers). The task was to develop an image classification method capable to distinguish two indoor and two outdoor classes. The results were rated according to the performance on the hidden test set. Artem Konev won the challenge with 95.5% accuracy and was awarded a prize consisted of an xBox and Kinect. Two years ago we used those data for the projects on Introduction to Computer Vision course, where nobody reached even 90%. It reflects not just the lore of participants, but also the progress of computer vision: all the top methods used PHOW descriptors and linear SVM with approximate decomposed χ² kernel [Vedaldi and Zisserman, 2010], which were unavailable that time!

In fact, Andrew Zisserman was one of the speakers. Andrew is the most cited computer vision researcher and the only person whose Zisserman number is zero. :) His course was on Visual Search and Recognition, including instance-level and category-level recognition. The ideas that were relatively new:

• when computing visual words, sometimes it is fruitful to use soft assignments to clusters, or more advanced methods like Locality-constrained linear coding [Wang et al., 2010];
• for instance-level recognition it is possible to use query expansion to overcome occlusions [Chum et al., 2007]: the idea is to use the best matched images from the base as new queries;
• object detection is traditionally done with sliding window, the problems here are: various aspect ratio, partial occlusions, multiple responses and background clutter for substantially non-convex objects;
• for object detection use bootstrapped sequential classification: on the next stage take the false negative detections from the previous stage as negative examples and retrain the classifier;
• multiple kernel learning [Gehler and Nowozin, 2009] is a hot tool that is used to find the ideal linear combination of SVM kernels: combining different features is fruitful, but learning the combination is not much better than just averaging (Lampert: “Never use MKL without comparison to simple baselines!”);
• movies are common datasets, since there are a lot of repeated objects/people/environments, and the privacy issues are easy to overcome. The movies like Groundhog Day and Run Lola Run are especially good since they contain repeated episodes. You can try to find the clocks on Video Google Demo.

Zisserman talked about PASCAL challenge a lot. During a break he mentioned that he annotated some images himself since “it is fun”. One problem with the challenge is we don't know if the progress over years really reflects the increased quality of methods, or is just because of growth of the training set (though, it is easy to check).

Andrew Fitzgibbon gave two more great lectures, one about Kinect (with slightly different motivation than in Cambridge) and another about continuous optimization. He talked a lot about reconciling theory and practice:

• the life-cycle of a research project is: 1) chase the high-hanging fruit (theoretically-sound model), 2) try to make stuff really work, 3) look for the things that confuse/annoy you and fix them;
• for Kinect pose estimation, the good top-down method based on tracking did not work, so they ended up classifying body parts discriminatively, temporal smoothing is used on the late stage;
• “don't be obsessed with theoretical guarantees: they are either weak or trivial”;
• on the simplest optimization method: “How many people have invented [coordinate] alternation at some point of their life?”. Indeed, the method is guaranteed to converge, but the problems arise when the valleys are not axis-aligned;
• gradient descent is not a panacea: in some cases it does small steps too, conjugate gradient method is better (it uses 1st order derivatives only);
• when possible, use second derivatives to determine step size, but estimating them is hard in general;
• one almost never needs to take the matrix inverse; in MATLAB, to solve the system Hd = −g, use backslash: d = −H\g;
• the Friday evening method is to try MATLAB fminsearch (implementing the derivative-free Nelder-Mead method).

Dr. Fitzgibbon asked the audience what the first rule of machine learning is. I hardly helped over replying “Never talk about machine learning”, but he expected the different answer: “Always try the nearest neighbour first!”

Christoph Lampert gave lectures on kernel methods, and structured learning, and kernel methods for structured learning. Some notes on the kernel methods talk:

• (obvious) don't rely on the error on a train set, and (less obvious) don't even report about it in your papers;
• for SVM kernels, in order to be legitimate, a kernel should be an inner product; it is often hard to prove it directly, but there are workarounds: a kernel can be drawn from a conditionally positive-definite matrix; sum, product and exponent of a kernel(s) is a kernel too etc. (thus, important for multiple-kernel learning, linear combination of kernels is a kernel);
• since training (and running) non-linear SVMs is computationally hard, explicit feature maps are popular now: try to decompose the kernel back to conventional dot product of modified features; typically the features should be transformed to infinite sums, so take first few terms [Vedaldi and Zisserman, 2010];
• if the kernel can be expressed as a sum over vector components (e.g. χ² kernel $\sum_d x_d x'_d / (x_d + x'_d)$), it is easy to decompose; radial basis function (RBF) kernel ($\exp (\|x-x'\|^2 / 2\sigma^2)$) is the exponent of a sum, so it is hardly decomposable (more strict conditions are in the paper);
• when using RBF kernel, you have another parameter σ to tune; the rule of thumb is to take σ² equal to the median distance between training vectors (thus, cross-validation becomes one-dimensional).

Christoph also told a motivating story why one should always use cross-validation (so just forget the previous point :). Sebastian Nowozin was working on his [ICCV 2007] paper on action classification. He used the method by Dollár et al. [2005] as a baseline. The paper reported 80.6% accuracy on the KTH dataset. He outperformed the method by a couple of per cents and then decided to reproduce Dollár's results. Imagine his wonder when simple cross-validation (with same features and kernels) yielded 85.2%! So, Sebastian had to improve his method to beat the baseline.

I feel I should stop writing about the talks now since the post grows enormously long. Another Lampert's lecture and Carsten Rother's course on CRFs were close to my topic, so they deserve separate posts (I already reviewed basics of structured learning and max-product optimization in this blog). Andreas Müller blogged about the recent Ivan Laptev's action recognition talk on CVML, which was pretty similar to ours. The slides are available for all MSCVS talks, and videos will be shared in September.

There were also several practical sessions, but I personally consider them not that useful, because one hardly ever can feel the essence of a method in 1.5 hours changing the code according to some verbose instruction. It is more of an art to design such tutorials, and no one can really master it. :) Even if the task is well-designed, one may not succeed performing it due to technical reasons: during Carsten Rother's tutorial, Tanya and me spent half an hour to spot the bug caused by confusing input and index variable names (MATLAB is still dynamically typed). Ondrej Chum once mentioned how his tutorial was doomed since half of the students did not know how to work with sparse matrices. So, practical sessions are hard.

There was also a poster session, but I cannot remember a lot of bright works, unfortunately. Nataliya Shapovalova who won the best poster award, presented quite interesting work on action recognition, which I liked as well (and it is not the last name bias! :) My congratulations to Natasha!

The planned social events were not so exhaustive as in Cambridge, but self-organization worked out. The most prominent example was our overnight walk around Moscow, in which a substantial part of school participants took part. It included catching last subway train, drinking whiskey and gin, a game of guessing hallucinating names of each other, and moving a car from the tram rail to let the tram go in the morning. :) I also met some of OpenCV developers from Nizhny Novgorod there.

MSCVS is a one-time event, unfortunately. There are at least three annual computer vision summer schools in Europe: ICVSS (the most mature one, I attended it last year), CVML (held in France by INRIA) and VSSS (includes sport sessions besides the lectures, held in Zürich). If you are a PhD student in vision (especially in the beginning of your program), it is worth attending one of them each year to keep up with current trends in the vision community, especially if you don't go to the major conferences. The sets of topics (and even speakers!) have usually large intersection, so pick one of them. ICVSS has arguably the most competitive participant selection, but the application deadline and acceptance notification are in March, so one can apply to the other schools if rejected.

i'm not going to lie....sometimes i cheat on y'all....when i should be blogging, i am actually pinning....it's rather addictive...i'm sure you will agree.  phew, i feel better now that i have gotten that off my chest.

*update- i think my user name is sdarbydesign (don't judge me for not knowing)...and if you go to my boards- yes, i am totally unorganized....i think i have interior design pics under "books i like to read" but if you read this blog, you know i'm not the most organized of the bunch!!

*images courtesy of frolic, darling dexter, style on display, pink persimmon, robert abbey

The Carbohydrate Hypothesis of Obesity: a Critical Examination

Introduction

I'd like to begin by emphasizing that carbohydrate restriction has helped many people lose body fat and improve their metabolic health.  Although it doesn't work for everyone, there is no doubt that carbohydrate restriction causes fat loss in many, perhaps even most obese people.  For a subset of people, the results can be very impressive.  I consider that to be a fact at this point, but that's not what I'll be discussing here. 

What I want to discuss is a hypothesis.  It's the idea, championed by Gary Taubes, that carbohydrate (particularly refined carbohydrate) is the primary cause of common obesity due to its ability to elevate insulin, thereby causing increased fat storage in fat cells.  To demonstrate that I'm representing this hypothesis accurately, here is a quote from his book Good Calories, Bad Calories:

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i'm officially on vacation.....i'll see y'all next week :) xo!!

Ancestral Health Symposium

Last weekend I attended the Ancestral Health Symposium at the University of California, Los Angeles, organized by Aaron Blaisdell, Brent Pottenger and Seth Roberts with help from many others.  It was a really great experience and I'm grateful to have been invited.  I was finally able to meet many of the people who I respect and admire, but knew only through the internet.  I'm not going to make a list because it would be too long, but if you take a look at the symposium schedule, I think you'll understand where I'm coming from.  I was also able to connect with a number of Whole Health Source readers, which was great.  I recognized some of them from the comments section.  Now I know it wasn't just my mom with 57 Google accounts.

The symposium was the first of its kind, and represented many facets of the ancestral health community, including "Paleolithic" diet and exercise patterns, low-carbohydrate diets, Weston Price-style diets, traditional health-nutrition researchers as well as other camps.  For the most part they coexisted peacefully and perhaps even learned a thing or two from one another. 

I was very impressed by the appearance of the attendees.  Young men and women were fit with glowing skin, and older attendees were energetic and aging gracefully.  It would be hard to come up with a better advertisement for ancestrally-oriented diets and lifestyles.  I saw a lot of people taking the stairs rather than the elevator.  I like to say I'll take the elevator/escalator when I'm dead.  I think integrating exercise into everyday life is healthy and efficient.  Escalators and elevators of course make sense for people with physical disabilities or heavy suitcases.

The first talk was by Dr. Boyd Eaton, considered by many to be the grandfather of the paleolithic diet concept.  I was very impressed by his composure, humility and compassionate attitude.  Half his talk was dedicated to environmental and social problems.  Dr. Staffan Lindeberg gave a talk titled "Food and Western Disease", which covered his paleolithic diet clinical trials as well as other evidence supporting ancestral diets.  I like Dr. Lindeberg's humble and skeptical style of reasoning.  I had the great pleasure of having dinner with Dr. Lindeberg and his wife, Dr. Eaton, Pedro Bastos, Dr. Lynda Frassetto, Dr. Guy-Andre Pelouze and his son Alexandre.  Pedro gave a very nice talk on the complexities of traditional and modern dairy.  The following night, I was able to connect with other writers I enjoy, including Chris Masterjohn, Melissa McEwen, John Durant, and Denise Minger. 

Dr. Pelouze is a french cardiovascular surgeon who strongly supports the food reward/palatability concept of obesity.  We had a conversation the evening before the conference, during which he basically made the same points I was going to make in my talk.  He is particularly familiar with the research of Dr. Michel Cabanac, who is central to the food reward idea.  He eats an interesting diet: mostly raw, omnivorous, and extremely simple.  If I understood correctly, he mostly eats raw meat, fish, fruit and vegetables with little or no preparation.  He sometimes cooks food if he wants to, but most of it is raw.  He believes simple, raw food allows the body's satiety systems to work more effectively.  He has been eating this way for more than twenty years, and his son was raised this way and is now about my age (if I recall correctly, Alexandre has a masters and is studying for an MD, and ultimately wants to become an MD/PhD).  Both of them look very good, are full of energy and have a remarkably positive mental state.  Alexandre told me that he never felt deprived growing up around other children who ate pastries, candy et cetera.  They woke up early and ran six miles before the conference began at 8 am. 

I gave my talk on Friday.  Giving a talk is not like writing a blog post-- it has to be much more cohesive and visually compelling.  I put a lot of work into it and it went really well.  Besides the heat I got from from Gary Taubes in the question and answer session, the response was very positive.  The talk, including the questions, will be freely available on the internet soon, as well as other talks from the symposium.  Some of it will be familiar to people who have read my body fat setpoint and food reward series, but it's a concise summary of the ideas and parts of it are new, so it will definitely be worthwhile to watch it.  

We have entered a new era of media communication.  Every time someone sneezed, it was live tweeted.  There are some good aspects to it-- it democratizes information by making it more accessible.  On the other hand, it's sometimes low quality information that contains inaccurate accounts and quotes that are subsequently recirculated. 

It was a great conference and I hope it was the first of many.

for my mom's 60th b'day (which we have been celebrating for over a week), the real surprise was for my family to meet in TN and go the world's longest yard sale.  my parents and brother have been going for years but i have never made the trek...well, this year i made sure i could go and see what it was all about (it's a massive yard sale that goes from GA to Maine).  now warren was invited but he opted to stay at home and babysit the kiddos b/c he does not do yard sales!  my fam on the other hand, TOTALLY does yard sales.  the whole weekend was a blast!  my bother and i drove to TN to surprise my mom on friday....we got there early and checked into our cabin. we decided to kill time by going on a hike. eventful, would be one way to describe the experience...we ended up going a lot further then we thought-  hoping my parents would pick us up on the way into the park...well, they got lost and we were stranded in the dark for about 2 hrs.  we made the best of it w/ this iphone app called songified (might be the funniest thing ever...try it).  my parents finally arrived and the celebrating began! saturday started early w/ going to nonstop yard sales...i have never seen anything like it.  parts of it are amazing and others are like the worst yard sale you have ever been too.  but you just never know what you might find.  everyones purchases were very different: my brother has an antique booth and he has a corky/ hipster style so it was really funny to see him buy.  did you know that member's only jackets go for $50?!!  my brother did, so he was super excited to get one for $1...along w/ a locker, some blue blockers, vintage phones, tons of old t-shirts (basically everything you see in the car was my brother's).  my mom and i have a similar style- we love jadeite and old signs....she scored several plates and an adorable fresh egg sign.  i got two signs for walker's room.  my favorite purchases were a vintage crewel, framed fabric and this adorable platypus planter made from an old turquoise propane tank. my dad tends to get a lot of tools and books but on the last day, he spotted this fabulous hippo cookie jar that he got to put taylor's cookies in (soo cute)!  so that was my adventurous weekend...warren likes to call my family hoarders...we like to think of it as a hunt b/c you never know what you might find!

on another note, taylor started 4 yr old school today!  i miss her already but i hope she is having a blast!

Kit Heath Captured Competition

Kit Heath are excited to launch the Captured Competition! 

Enter the Kit Heath Captured Competition for a chance to get your hands on on of our popular Beachcomber bracelets!

To enter the competition upload your favorite holiday picture on to our Facebook page and tell us about it!
We’ll pick out favorites and then you can get to choose the winners!
The 3 most inspiring photos and memories will win a Beachcomber bracelet full of beads that match their memory!
For an idea of what we are looking for please have a look at our latest news letter:

The competition is open to all as long as they are not employed by or are family of a member of staff of Kit Heath.
This competition is not open to stockists of Kit Heath. The competition closes on 31st August, we will then post our favourites in an album for the public to choose, this will be posted up on 1st September and voting will close on 5th , prizes are as follows – The prizes are from the Beachcomber Collection

1st prize bracelet and 6 beads
2nd prize bracelet and 3 beads
3rd prize bracelet and 1 bead

(All beads will be chosen by the winners)

Entries will be short listed and displayed on our Facebook page to be judges by our Facebook users, the most popular and the image with the most “likes” will win the competition.
The winners entries will be displayed online and in our newsletter, only the winners first name will be displayed.

What a really fun way to get to know our lovely fans! 

For full information, terms and conditions please visit our website.