Hello Noemi, okay you cite this book 4HB and make reference to yogurt being good for weight loss and fruit better than veg. This seems to fly in the face of conventional wisdom. I do agree potatoes are fattening. Obesity is a big deal these days pardon the pun but seriously it is one of the key dangers facing society. I doubt the money spinning book 4HB has the real answer but I know Romanians have the answer to this problem check this link:
http://www.romania-insider.com/eu-obesity-report-slim-trim-romania%E2%80%A6-big-fat-britain/41647/#

So what is it about Romanian culture/diet/genetics or whatever else it might be that they buck the trend on a global epidemic? How can the obese world emulate Romanians success? Maybe there is some Romanian folkloric herbal potions good for weight loss? If you share your thoughts I’d be grateful.

Regards,

Sascha

Hi Sascha,

I’m not sure if you are Romanian or not. My experience with “traditional” Romanian weight-loss is quite simple: Family members throw random “remedies” at you along with loving insults which all have a similar theme: Eat less. Some of them are teas, generally because tea is almost zero calories and fills you up fast. I’ve heard yogurt can be good in the morning. I’ve heard “eat more meat” and “eat no meat”. Eat only grapefruit (sound familiar?) All the diets change depending on who is talking about it. Dieting is a kind of oral tradition for us, along with insulting another’s physique. I know it might sound like I’m criticizing Romanian culture, but I very much enjoy my culture, flaws and all.

As you can tell, I’ve heard many weightloss regimen ideas thrown at me by many-a Romanian Grandma, Aunt, Mother, Cousin .. etc.

There is no magic potions. Romanians living in Romania have access to high quality food from local farms. They also have limited access to fast food, and even getting to a fast food place usually requires quite a bit of walking. The Romanian diet is no healthier than other cultures, our staple foods corn and pork aren’t particularly healthy.

I don’t really believe our genes are better. Look at Romanians of the “Romanian Diaspora” that live in America – a large amount of them are overweight.

We also don’t eat as much. Plates in Romania are literally smaller, though we are getting more “Western” sized plates now with the big stores that are coming into almost every city.

Losing weight takes alot of hard work. There are no Romanian potions or teas that will make the process any less painful.

I do think the Four Hour Body book has some good guidelines. It is not all crackpot. Most of the book is really just: eat less and exercise. But he goes into how to exercise to get the most out of your time and what to eat to speed up the process (Similar to Atkins.) I personally lean towards flexible vegetarianism so I can’t really follow the 4HB diet.

In conclusion: Romanians are probably thinner because of higher food quality, & less convenient food options.

Good luck!

Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore–And then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over–like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

Photo from Bixby Park in Long Beach, California

Just as the four hour body explains, you don’t need to eat less, you just need to eat less of the wrong food. Eating less in general is too simplistic. But what about eating “good food”? What does that mean? Isn’t that just another simplistic statement? Unfortunately all the weight-loss companies, diet trends, bad science and false advertising makes it impossible to find out what specific foods actually do to our bodies. 4HB has it’s own list, but the New England Journal of Medicine has broken it down to 5 terrible foods for you and 5 good foods for you. Also included are behaviors that modified weight loss or gain.

This is how these numbers break down. The number in the parentheses indicates the weight gain or loss over the course of 4 years, for each serving of this food a day.

The Good

Vegetables (−0.22 lb)

Whole grains (−0.37 lb)

Fruits (−0.49 lb)

Nuts (−0.57 lb)

Yogurt (−0.82 lb)

Physical activity (−1.76 lb)

The Bad

Potato Chips (1.69 lbs)

Other Potatoes (1.26 lbs)

Sugar-sweetened beverages (1.00 lb)

Unprocessed meats (0.95 lb)

Processed meats (0.93 lb)

The Ugly

Other lifestyle factors were also independently associated with weight change.

Alcohol use (0.41 lb per drink per day)

Smoking (new quitters, 5.17 lb; former smokers, 0.14 lb)

Sleep (more weight gain with <6 or >8 hours of sleep)

Television watching (0.31 lb per hour per day)

I think the bad is all pretty well documented, but the good had some surprises. Fruits are more effective at weight loss than vegetables, apparently. This goes against the 4HB recommendations to avoid fruit because of the sugar in them. Of course, this is a correlation, so its important to examine all the effects of fruit, like curbing appetite and/or replacing high fructose corn syrup in one’s diet. Yogurt is kind of a random one to have almost 4 times the weight loss effect of vegetables, but since I am a yogurtofile, I love it. Now I have an excuse to eat it for breakfast lunch and dinner. The effect of potatoes is quite depressing. I wonder how potatoes stack up next to other carbs? Whole grains apparently help with weight loss, another point where the study differs from 4HB dogma.

In Romania, in the countryside, potatoes are traditionally grown to fatten pigs. We do have some potato dishes, but eating them all the time is viewed as a poor man’s thing. Because you really have to be starving and poor to need a pure carb like that. I find it interesting that slighting older cultures than mine value good food.  That being said, people that do hard physical labor in the countryside do eat a polenta-style dish called mamaliga with sour cream and Romanian cheese. This stuff fills you up instantly. But it fits the culture – if you worked hard physical labor all day, having 1 or 2 of your meals just be corn wouldn’t fatten you, it would actually make your body more efficient. Although, in cases like this where there is alot of physical activity, meat is actually the ideal meal, it is just not viable in a countryside village setting to eat meat every day. You’d run out of animals.

Math Time!

If this was your meal plan for almost every day for 4 years, you’d lose 6.8 lbs. every 4 years.

Breakfast: Yogurt (2 servings) and Fruits (1)

Lunch: Whole grains(1) and Vegetables(2)

Snack: Fruit (1) and Nuts (1)

Dinner: Vegetables (1) and Whole Grain (1), Fruit Desert(1)

15-30 minutes (let’s say the 4HB routine) : Physical activity (−1.76 lb)

* Also including all the random stuff they didn’t mention in the study like dairy. *

Does that seem paltry? Well, read the next section.

What I don’t like about this study

1. They should’ve studied body fat %, not weight. Weight is really misleading! It’s different for men and women, people with muscle and people without, and in certain cases, gives you bad information or at the very least mixed signals. I do believe this study has validity, I just wish I could have a more accurate representation of what these foods actually do to your body fat.

2. More foods need to be included so one can properly create a meal plan from this study. I’d like to know the effect of eggs, milk, certain types of vegetables, diet soda, cheeses, types of meat, butter, etc. I know they are trying to use this study to explain that higher quality food is better and there is a theme of unprocessed food winning over processed food (sugar soda, refined grains, etc). But I want more facts! Science is about specificity. It is not a novel, it does not need an overarching theme. Now get to it, scientists!

xoxo

Noemi

PS, while I traveled, yogurt was my go-to meal. It just makes sense!

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One afternoon, Nasruddin and his friend were sitting in a cafe, drinking tea and talking about life and love. His friend asked: ‘How come you never married?’
‘Well,’ said Nasruddin, ‘to tell you the truth, I spend my youth looking for the perfect woman. In Cairo I met a beautiful and intelligent woman, but she was unkind. Then in Baghdad, I met a woman who was a wonderful and generous soul, but we had no common interests. One woman after another would seem just right, but there would always be something missing. Then one day, I met her; beautiful, intelligent, generous and kind. We had very much in common. In fact, she was perfect!’
‘So, what happened?’ asked Nasruddin’s friend, ‘Why didn’t you marry her?’
Nasruddin sipped his tea reflectively. ‘Well,’ he replied, ‘it’s really the sad story of my life…. It seemed that she was looking for the perfect man.’

For one, from a philosophical standpoint, I think life is a human construct and the difference between “natural” processes and human ones is trivial .. and that’s because almost every natural process can fit into the definition of life. For example, stars:

Stars regulate with cycles, like the solar flare cycle, as well as the epic collapsing-at-the-same-time-as-exploding-from-nuclear-fission that makes stars appear constant. Stars have structure, but this might be my weakest point since stars aren’t made of cells. They do have a very defined structure and layers that support the processes I stated above. Stars create a crap-ton of energy, and catabolise (if I may) all elements except for hydrogen. Stars grow and develop over time, they accumulate matter and change their structure accordingly. Stars react to internal and external factors. They shift their luminosity because of factors like eclipsing binaries, as well as rotating stars that produce extreme starspots.

A notable example of an eclipsing binary is Algol, which regularly varies in magnitude from 2.3 to 3.5 over a period of 2.87 days because of Beta Persei 3.

The stimuli stars react to is magnetism, gravity, and extreme temperatures/energy. Stars are also asexual organisms. Our sun was born out of a previous star. Our Sun is the 2nd or 3rd star in this area, which is pretty cosmically young in my opinion. (Not really related to the topic at hand, but interesting nonetheless)

Yeah, I’m supposed to be studying for a geology midterm. Oops.

is not the answer? Is getting more things done in less time going to make a difference — or will it just increase the pace at which I react to the people and circumstances that seem to control my life?

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I got a message through the contact form on my site from amishera on why I mention that I like to eat olives. The truth is, there’s no special reason why I mention it, other than the fact that I really like eating olives. They are one of my favorite foods. (Sometimes I say “fruits” to throw people off. Olives are the fruit of the olive tree.)

Fun story: One time my parents found a specialty store that sold hundreds of different types of olives somewhere in northern or central California. They brought back a bunch of bottles including almond-stuffed olives, spiced olives, smoked olives, and other stuff. They were all amazing.

I’d rather get olives than chocolates. True story!
I hope I find olive-flavored ice cream one day. MMMM.

This is a short post and by no means does it encompass all my thoughts on the subject.

I’ve been reading parts of Being and Time by Martin Heidegger and as I was visualizing (in a way) Da-sein, I realized that I already have a very good concept of da-sein, it’s called Fiinţă. I understand now how Martin didn’t want it translated to “Being” because it’s misleading because of the common use of the word being like “She was being annoying” as opposed to “a being” even though, It’s not really A being, its more like, Fiinţă, which, I can’t explain or translate, but I’m sure Martin Heidegger eventually finds a way to explain it. “‘Being’ is not something like a being.” Being, Heidegger claims, is “what determines beings as beings, that in terms of which beings are already understood.”

Anyway, I realized that maybe the fact that I sort of understand Fiinţă and Da-sein I have always looked at my identity differently. I wonder if there is anything concrete that could be drawn from understanding this concept from a young age (age of language acquisition) as well as the obvious differences already known of how language creates identity. It’s obviously not the phonetics that create the identity, but the symbolic interpretation of the world through language that affects your development.

On top of that, according to Psycholinguistics, the fact that I speak two languages fluently and interchange and mix them at will creates actually a third grammar (and language) which expands the symbolic concepts you are aware of to a larger range. On TOP of that, my SLA was actually a natural acquisition NOT a conscious one so that adds more questions to the pile as well. God, I would love to study this. I am convinced it has a huge effect on personality. Consider the huge amount of people who are growing up bilingually (English and Spanish) and how unprecedented this amount is, and how little research is done about the subject. These are called “Coordinate Bilinguals”, or bilinguals who learn two languages naturally (finish learning the second language before age 6 or around there, there’s no age set in stone).

For coordinate bilinguals, words and phrases in the speaker’s mind are all related to their own unique concepts. Thus a bilingual speaker of this type has different associations for ‘chien’ and for ‘dog’. In these individuals, one language, usually the first language, is more dominant than the other, and the first language may be used to think through the second language. These speakers are known to use very different intonation and pronunciation features, and sometimes to assert the feeling of having different personalities attached to each of their languages.

Since I mentioned language mixing earlier, and how it’s considered to be a third grammar and a third language by some psycholinguists, I thought I’d show part of a powerpoint on Code Mixing and Code Switching

There is an exception to the last model, for example, adding endings or beginnings to a word to transform it into a verb. (when it is a noun in origin.)

The Sociopsychological Functions are also talked about in this slide which I find interesting and sort of hilarious at the same time. Language mixing is used to give Authority, Anger, Seriousness, Pain to discussion, and to express these things you usually use your mother tongue or “older” language.

Language Acquisition Device theories are hard to test because of lack of children without language, and producing such children would be considered abuse, although it’s been tried a couple times, with results always being inconclusive, since nobody (hired nurses, doctors, nannys) could keep their mouth shut around the children, and they always pick up whatever they can get. Cases of “wild children” are getting rarer and rarer and even when they existed they didn’t seem to prove much except that there is a time period where language acquisition is not as easy. (still doesn’t prove the “Critical period”) but even that doesn’t need to be proven to make the distinction between naturally learned languages and conscious learning.

Doamne, trebuie să mă culc.