Greta
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Posts posted by Greta
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I've had a rough couple of days with regard to exercise and movement. I have piriformis syndrome which flares up from time to time (been this way my entire adult life). Usually when it flares up, I'll just do the exercises my physical therapist gave me a dozen or so times over the course of a few hours, and it's all better. This time it didn't seem to be helping much, so I decided to try some piriformis stretches, and that made it profoundly worse. Went from painful to agonizing. I could hardly put any weight on my right leg, and I was shuffling around using these tiny three inch steps, with stiff knees and hips. It hit me last night that I was walking like C-3PO! :lol: But walking is all that I can do right now. Lifting weights is out of the question, and even using the AMT machine makes it worse. Walking does, slowly but surely, loosen it up. So I walked about 4 miles a day the last couple of days -- four very slow and difficult miles, but I did it! It seems a little better so far today, and I hope that trend continues.
If I would just do my physical therapy exercises every single day without fail, I could probably prevent most of these flare-ups. But when I get to feeling better, I tend to forget. :( So it's my own fault.
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Not envy - fairness. I don't envy people on gazillion pound salaries. I do think that it's unfair that I should be subsidising them.
THIS! Absolutely! These accusations of "sour grapes" and envy are grating. First of all, these conversations don't tend to go well if you assume the worst possible motives of the people on the other side. And secondly, it simply has nothing at all to with envy, it is about justice. I advocate a higher minimum wage, but I'm not personally going to benefit from it. I believe it is the right thing to do, that it would serve the greater good. It's not about me at all.
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Except the only power he has is to ask for a high wage. It doesn't occur in a vacuum. And people who do much less than the CEO of Wal-Mart do much less and get paid millions too. So, do we just confiscate everyone's wealth who earns a disproportionate (according to populist sentiment) wage? Kardashians, DiCaprios, sports stars, venture capitalists? If they don't work hard enough according to the Gretas of the world, their pay must be cut?
As an aside, I think it's a completely skewed view od humanity to say that salary determines how hard someone is working or what they are worth. Why enter that into the equation unless, again, we're talking about simple envy. If you're saying people should be paid based on how hard they work relative to everyone else, we are in trouble. That makes me shudder.
You asked what made one CEO salary moral and another immoral, and I gave you my opinion on the matter. You disagree with my opinion, and that's cool. But I was NOT nominating myself as the arbiter of who gets paid what, and I am NOT motivated by envy.
Oh please. These people aren't slaves. No one is forcing anyone to apply at wal-mart. There are people who don't need foodstamps, who need a part time job, who choose to apply, and it is a good stepping stone for them when they need experience or skills an nowhere else will hire them. Can we stop with the hyperbole?
The government is spending something on the order of $150 billion dollars per year to help the working poor meet their most basic needs. This situation is just a mess. And the mess isn't going to get cleaned up if we continue to believe that employers have a right to pay their workforce a pittance.
GDP and wages used to increase at roughly the same rate. That makes sense. Since 1980 they've been decoupled, and the GDP has continued to increase, while wages have stagnated. That makes no sense. So yeah, I stand by my statement that many corporations are getting uber rich on the backs of the workers who aren't receiving fair compensation.
But for the record, I never said they were slaves. I actually agree with the point that Ravin made on the first page of this thread: that sort of language isn't helpful to the conversation.
And, mathematically, let's say the Wal-Mart CEO gives up $24 million of his compensation. How much of a raise is each hourly worker going to get? (I'm genuinely curious).
I was unclear. I wasn't saying that capping CEO's salaries will solve the problem. I think excessive CEO salaries are just one symptom of a much larger problem.
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Why?
I'm not sure what standard would say that 400x's is immoral and 50x's or 100x's is moral? It seems arbitrary.
As far as drawing the line with an exact number, I honestly don't have an opinion on that. I'll have to leave that to people who are better educated on this issue than I am. I just know this. A CEO back in the 1950's made 40-ish times what the typical employee makes? Okay, sure, I can see that. He could have had 40 times the expertise of the average worker, and provided his company with 40 times the "value" of the average worker. That seems feasible. But the CEO of Walmart today makes one thousand times the typical Walmart employee. I know he doesn't work 1000 times harder. I know he isn't 1000 times more intelligent. I know he can't have 1000 times the expertise. Because all of that is simply impossible. So either he is being paid a disproportionately high wage or they are being paid a disproportionately low wage, and honestly it's both. That kind of pay scale is so out of proportion that, yes, it absolutely screams "immoral". It's an abuse of power. Anyone making 25 million dollars a year on the backs of employees who are having to depend on food stamps to survive? Yep, immoral for sure. So while I don't now exactly where this line should be drawn, I know we've gone far past it.
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Copperheads are so creepy. Once when I was a kid, my brothers and I were messing around at a creek on my grandparent's property. I was walking through some tallish grass, and my brother called out something to me, so I stopped to answer him. When I went to resume, I looked down, and there was a huge copperhead curled up in the grass just inches in front of me. If my brother hadn't caused me to pause, I would have stepped right on it. Miraculously enough, I didn't scream, or panic, or do anything crazy. I just backed away until I'd put a comfortable distance between us. When I told the grownups about it later, they insisted it was just a gartersnake and I only thought it was a copperhead because I was scared. I know the freakin difference between a gartersnake and a copperhead! I'd had a run-in with a coachwhip once too and I didn't insist it was a rattlesnake! :lol: But snakes do creep me out, and I generally try NOT to get close enough to tell what kind it is!
Anyway, I had a rest day. Not by choice, but by migraine mandate. I did go for a little walk this morning, and I'm about to go on another one with hubby. That will have to do.
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Except I don't think this new rule, or any rule, is going to take that handful of people down a notch. But I guess we can sure try.
People talk about McD's, but there's a reaon their food is so cheap. And to say they must employ people at a certain wage instead of using ipads...what are we, Luddites? The amount of magical thinking that says if we just demand businesses pay people more and everyone will be better off is astounding to me at times. Where do people think money comes from? If a McD's franchise has the kind of profit margin that everyone here is alluding to, that they can absorb a $6-7 raise for everyone on their payroll and still make enough to pay themselves for going to the trouble of managing a store, then, heck, I'm gonna open one!
Well the money is either going to have to come from the revenues of the business, or it's going to continue to come from the taxpayers. That's the reality we're dealing with. When companies don't pay their employees a livable wage, the taxpayers have to make up the difference in the form of public assistance programs such as food stamps, medicaid, subsidized housing, etc.
Personally, even though I'm an avid supporter of public assistance programs, I would rather see the businesses paying their workforce a livable wage. Because I tend toward the belief that any business model that depends on unfair compensation for its workforce, isn't really a business model that deserves to exist.
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I did 20 minutes of run/walk intervals.
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Went to my circuit training class today, and did 20 minutes of cardio afterward to make it a full hour.
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Also, this may not need to be said, but just in case... When I said we get healthier by eating a variety of real foods, and not by eliminating foods, that wasn't meant to apply to people who have food allergies, celiac disease, lactose intolerance, or any other issue that makes a certain food or food group problematic! Obviously anyone with those types of issues has got to do what they've got to do!
I just think that our culture in general (and *I* in particular!) has (have) gotten a little carried away with the notion that eliminating meat, or dairy, or gluten, or whatever happens to be today's "evil food" from your diet is going to be the miracle cure for everything that ails you and the fountain of youth. I've eliminated them all, and would have sworn at the time that it was wonderful. But it isn't wonderful for very long.
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Humans are omnivores. There are a lot of different diets that we do well on. As far as what is optimum, I think that varies from one person to another because we all have different genetics, and until the modern era of unprecedented availability of a variety of foods, our diets are one of the things that has had some impact on natural selection. Look at what your great-great grandparents ate. If it was all about the same, as long as you get as much exercise as they did, you're likely to be healthy eating what they ate. If your ancestry is such that some ancestors ate drastically different things than others, or the food culture has been in flux even longer--and this is probably true of most people today, at least in North America, Europe, and the English-speaking world in general--it's going to be a mixed bag so looking to what your ancestors ate won't necessarily help.
I would disagree with Tanaqui--because there is such a thing as sustainable animal husbandry. The system of growing grain and feeding it to animals not meant to eat it then eating them is not sustainable--but controlled grazing on land not suitable for agriculture can feed people we otherwise couldn't feed, because humans can't eat grass.
Agreed! With your entire post, but especially the part about sustainable animal husbandry.
Yep. I've done more radical forms of low carb (at this point I'm lower carb, but by no means extreme). I've talked to a lot of low carb people. Those who seem to have the best results are those who eat real foods. Because with most of these extreme diets there is a market for weird products. Fake mashed potatoes, low carb cookies, etc. etc. So some people would mostly eat the prepackaged frankenfoods probably because they didn't want to take the time or couldn't take the time to prepare foods that fit into the diet. It's flat out a lot more work.
If you recall there was a time where the low carb diets caught the attention of the main stream. Restaurants started offering low carb stuff. There were low carb Oreo cookies. At that point I had been a low carber for awhile (and didn't have access to all those magical low carb convenience items). I thought...this stinks because people will buy these things and eat at these restaurants and probably assume low carb is BS and won't work. I don't think it's the low carb per se. It's those stupid fake foods.
Yeah, I started low-carb right before that big national low-carb craze hit, and there were few or no available low-carb junk foods at that time. So that's how I learned to eat low-carb. Also, at least in the small town in Oklahoma where I lived as a teen, there were no vegetarian frankenfoods like soy burgers back when I became a vegetarian either. But there's no shortage of junk foods which just happen to be vegetarian (potato chips and nutter butters are vegetarian! :lol: ) so I can't claim I was always a healthy vegetarian dieter. I did better sometimes than others.
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Oh, man, I have tried every healthy diet you can imagine: vegetarian, vegan, macrobiotic, blood type, paleo, ketogenic, probably others that I'm forgetting. I've done it all. Eventually, I had health problems with all of them. (Except Paleo - I didn't have any problems from it, but I didn't stay on it that long, because I didn't feel any benefits from it either.) Ketogenic lasted the longest at 12 years before I had any trouble. Blood Type Diet was the worst, causing me severe hormonal disruption after only six to eight weeks.
Now all of these diets are radically different, but they also all have two things in common. The reason they work, even if only temporarily, is that they all emphasize REAL FOOD over processed junk, and compared to the standard American diet, that's a huge improvement. The reason they all eventually fail is that they eliminate or severely restrict some category of real food. It finally dawned on me that since humans are omnivores, we are not going to get healthier by eliminating real foods from our diet, we're going to get healthier by eating a bigger variety.
So now, no food that is "brought to you by mother nature" is off limits for me. I try to eat a big variety of fruits and vegetables, whole grains, eggs, legumes, fish, poultry, even red meat and dairy, etc. I try to buy from sources that are organic, humanely raised, sustainably produced, etc. because I believe that not only improves the quality of the food, it's better for the future of our planet.
What I do try to avoid is white sugar, white flours, industrial oils (hydrogenated oils and oils that are extracted using weird modern methods like solvent extraction, etc.), MSG and other flavor "enhancers", and preservatives. All of that stuff has been so recently added to the human diet that we just don't know yet what the full implications of eating it really are, but so far it doesn't look too promising if you ask me.
This has been a very recent revelation and change for me. I only gave up my ketogenic diet of 12 years at the end of January of this year. What's interesting to me is not only did it improve the physical problem I was having, but it has also really changed my relationship with food. I became a vegetarian when I was in my teens, and that started me down an emotionally unhealthy path of thinking of some foods as good and others as evil, of thinking that I have to be restricting my food in some way, be on some sort of "diet" in order to be validated, like I'm a lazy, immoral, gluttonous person if I'm not severely restricting in some way. I most certainly am not saying that other people who restrict their diets have those problems. I have no idea. I just know that I did, and that I thought that way for more than 20 years!!! It is so liberating to be able to eat from mother nature's bounty without guilt! I'm an omnivore, and I don't have to apologize for it anymore! :D
Oh, and even though I do try to avoid processed foods, on special occasions I will indulge and I will do it guilt free, because I am really trying to avoid the all-or-nothing, dieting, "some foods are EVIL" mindset that has plagued me for basically my whole adult life. I just want to keep those foods as special occasion foods, not everyday foods.
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I hope someone will be able to give you better insights than I can, but I have reactive hypoglycemia myself, and I know how not fun it is. It's possible that her blood sugar spiked high and then dropped again within an hour, but that is pretty fast. The general definition of reactive hypoglycemia, I believe, is that you become hypoglycemic "within four hours" after a meal. For me, it generally occurs between two and three hours, but maybe for her it is different. I don't know, and it probably would be helpful to talk to her doctor about that.
Is 59 a "bad" low? That's a good question. For me, it feels absolutely awful, but people seem to tolerate it to varying degrees. I don't believe she's in any danger at that level, but if she dropped into the 40's that could be bad (confusion, disorientation, possibly even fainting), and below that it gets super dangerous. At 59, I think most people would still be able to function, but would feel weak, shaky, sweaty. At least, that's the way it affects me. Drinking some orange juice is a pretty quick way to bring it back up to normal range. But I feel wiped out for the rest of the day when it happens, even after my BG is stabilized again.
Do you have a home blood glucose monitor? If she doesn't mind the finger prick too badly, it is an excellent way to get a clearer picture of what's going on. They're pretty affordable, and some medical insurance plans will provide them, though I have no idea if that's true for the military.
Low-carb dieting controlled my reactive hypoglycemia *extremely* well for a number of years. But eventually it caused me some (unrelated) problems, and I had to go back to eating carbs. What I'm doing now is:
1. Protein (and a little healthy fat) with EVERY meal and snack. No exceptions. NEVER eat carbs alone.
2. NEVER skip meals, and have a snack if it's going to be more than four hours or so until the next meal.
3. No white flours or refined sugars.
And that seems to be working beautifully. It's a lot less restrictive than low carb, but sadly, it does still mean no cookies, cake, or brownies. :) But I can eat all the fruit and whole grains that I want, and as long as I do it within those parameters, it doesn't hurt me.
I hope you find the answers that you're looking for. I'm really curious how she felt when that reading was taken.
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I had a good workout today. The first time I did squats with the 45-pound bar, I got so sore it was hard to walk for days. So I stayed at that weight for awhile, because I wanted to make sure my body had adjusted. So today was the first time that I tried more weight. It wasn't much more, but it was enough to feel a sense of progress and accomplishment! Also, because of my trapezius pain, I had not been able to do deadlifts lately. But thanks to Laurie teaching me how to put my shoulders in my back pocket, I was able to do them today with slightly lighter weight, and no pain! Thank you Laurie! I also did overhead press for shoulders, curls for biceps, and kickbacks for triceps. And walked two miles with my dogs.
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57 minutes of glutes today. Yikes.
Wow, I've never done a whole hour of glutes before! It sounds . . . ouch. :lol: But I feel like I do more quad stuff than hams/glutes stuff, so I should take a lesson from you.
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Glad that you did what it felt like you needed. And 40 min of cardio is just fine especially with tomorrow as a heavy lifting day.
For me, if I do not plan, I do not have nearly the "hit" rate as when I do plan. At least if I've planned 3 days of strength training, for instance, I will nearly always get in 2 days. If I have not really planned, it could be 1 day.
I think I need to find the right balance of planning and flexibility! You're right, planning is good because I think I accomplish more when I do it. But also, life happens, and in my life a lot of migraines happen. So I have to be able to go with the flow to a certain extent too.
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40 minutes of moderate cardio today. It wasn't what I planned, but I felt like it was what I needed. Maybe I need to do less planning, and more moving. :)
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You might find that Classical Stretch is a good fit for you. If you go to the website, there is even one specifically geared to posture.
And that stretch that I linked for the trapezius is a functional stretch. I don't use my hand, just let gravity pull on my head which gently stretches the trap.
Thanks, Laurie! You know, I think someone had recommended Classical Stretch for me before, and I don't remember now why I never followed through on trying it out. But I'm going to do that. That posture video looks great, so I bet the others are too.
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Moveskill
Move Smart
Acrolibrary
Katie Bowman
Thank you! I downloaded an episode of each to check them out.
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Could anyone recommend a good fitness podcast? I'd like something interesting and motivational to listen to while I walk or do cardio. I tried the Jillian Michaels podcast, but it seems to mostly be chit-chat with friends, and not actual fitness information. Any better suggestions?
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Technically of course Max Shank is showing mobility work not stretching. ;)
Mobility work - that's a nice phrase! Yes, I was trying to contrast it with stretching, but I seem to be having trouble using my words today. :lol: I look forward to checking out more of his videos. Very cool stuff.
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Greta, sounds like you would be a fan of
or any number of people doing similar kind of work.
Wow, very interesting! And even what he calls "beginner" movements look very challenging! Thanks for posting this. :)
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To my mind, if you don't have full range of motion of every joint, you need to be stretching.
Why don't you look at Max Shank's 5 minute flow youtubes as a great way to work those joints.
Thank you, Snickerdoodle, that was very interesting! This video illustrates something that I think is really important, but I'm not sure I have the right words to express it. What he does in that video is functional movements which, like you said, move his joints through a full range of motion. But they do so NATURALLY, through the power of the muscles in those joints. He is not using any forces external to the joint to move the joint.
I'm not sure that makes sense, so let me give a specific example. Near the beginning of the routine, he is standing up, and he does some trunk twists. He uses ONLY the muscles of his trunk in order to twist his trunk. That's awesome. But that's not what happens in every single yoga or stretching class that I've ever been to. What happens in those classes is that you use the power of your arms to grab a hold of something (such as your hips) and PULL your trunk deeper into the twist than where your trunk can go naturally. That is decidedly NOT awesome. (IMO)
I think it is potentially dangerous to use an "outside" force to move a joint further than it can move through the power of it's own "internal" forces. And yet that's standard operating procedure in every single yoga and stretching class I have ever been to, 100% of them, zero exceptions. I'm going to watch more of his videos, and see if I can put together a . . . what should we call it? A "functional movements" routine? I'd be all about that. I would LOVE a class like that. I would attend often. But "stretching", in my experience, isn't about functional movements at all, it's about forcing joints past the point of functionality, and I question the wisdom of that.
(Edited to correct an errant comma.)
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I think that my last post sounded grumpier and more contrarian than I realized. :blushing: I apologize. I appreciate the advice, and I do want to be given a push if there's something I need to do but am not doing. I also just want to think through and weigh whether or not it's worth it for me. I just have to do some more research and decide if stretching is the right thing to try. In the meantime, I'll make better use of my foam roller.
Yesterday's workout was pretty low-key: just half an hour on the AMT machine at a very modest pace (plus my daily walk).
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Slache, that's incredibly generous of you to offer to send me your DVD's! But I don't want to take your DVD's from you. Maybe you could point me to a few titles (especially the foam roller one!) and I could purchase them. You're so sweet! :wub:
I know the science is clear that stretching before working out will at best do nothing good for you, and at worst increase your chances of injury. So, that's just not happening. But it leaves the question: is there any benefit to stretching after a workout or apart from a workout? From what I've read, the current scientific consensus seems to be that it is the people who are the least flexible and the people who are the most flexible who are at the highest risk of injury, and those who are average in flexibility are the most protected from injury. I'm average overall, with a few muscles and joints being MORE flexible than average, and one problem area that is tight. So I see no reason to want to increase my flexibility, with the possible exception of that one problem area. I'm not convinced that stretching already-flexible areas is going to help me, and my experience tells me that it's going to hurt me. If you know of compelling evidence to the contrary, though, I really, truly would like to know it. I'm all ears! I've just never read anything that convinced me that there's real benefit to it.
Plyos - I was indeed thinking of starting small! Just things like jumping jacks, jumping rope, a few squat jumps, that sort of thing. I know there's great potential for injury there for someone who is not athletic (that would be me), but I understand there is also tremendous potential benefits in terms of building strong bones.
Edited due to autocorrect being unhelpful as usual.
New salary overtime regulations
in The Chat Board
Posted
I said that I don't think we should compare this to slavery, so I feel like I should explain. I do strongly agree with your overall point, I just don't think it compares to the deplorable, nightmarish conditions under which slaves lived. I've personally thought of it more like serfdom. It seems to me like we're on a track back towards a 13th century type arrangement where a very few have abundance, and many who work for them have next-to-nothing. What made America great in the mid 20th century was a strong middle class. There were a lot of factors that led to that, like strong unions, higher (when adjusted for inflation) minimum wage, lots of manufacturing jobs that didn't require years of overpriced schooling but paid a livable wage, and probably many other factors that I'm not even aware of. But those things have been and are being slowly dismantled and eroded. The middle class is shrinking and if the trend continues, I fear we're going to be left with this huge divide between a few wealthy elite who own almost everything, and a large pool of cheap labor that will have no choice but to work for them for peanuts, just to scrape by on a subsistence-level existence. It's like Feudalism version 2.0
I'm sure that many would say that I'm exaggerating and being ridiculous, and honestly, I hope they're right! I would dearly love to be wrong about this. But I have to call it like I see it, and that's the trend I see.