Category: [Personal]

I am frankly a bit confused by this article hailing a doctor in the UK:

A red-brick surgery in the seaside resort of Southport in the north-west of England is on the frontline of one of the biggest questions facing the NHS: what’s the best fix for our growing obesity crisis?
Dr David Unwin thinks he has the answer. He has championed a low-carb lifestyle that not only helps patients lose weight but also, in more than half of his patients who were on the diet, has even managed to reverse type 2 diabetes, once thought to be an irreversible and progressive disease.
Such results appear remarkable and will be scrutinised by NHS officials now rolling out a national low-calorie diet programme to treat obesity and type 2 diabetes, which can lead to serious health complications and early death.
Unwin also appears to have identified what one expert calls the “magic ingredients” that motivate his patients to adhere to lifestyle changes for several years.

I mean, bravo for him if he has, but… I’ve always been under the impression ever since I was diagnosed with diabetes myself back in 2004 that diet was a big part of diabetic maintenance (certainly one of my first meetings with anyone at the Randwick hospital’s diabetes clinic was with their nutritionist, an off-putting man I didn’t like but that’s not really relevant), that the poorness of my diet was a substantial part of why mine was so out of control (and, frankly, why it’s still not as well controlled as it should be). And I have a very limited range of things I actually like (one of the things that makes me wonder if I have some flavour of autism, but let’s not go there now), and, frankly, an attempt at dietary change when I was diagnosed with diabetes just depressed me terribly and didn’t actually make much difference anyway, so back to the things I enjoy I went… sigh.

And, frankly again, most of what I do like is carbohydrate-y, so whatever’s in Dr Unwin’s diet sheet probably isn’t going to interest me that much. It is, incidentally, curious that the article says nothing about that:

Dr Simon Tobin, the senior partner at the Norwood Surgery in Southport, who is a keen runner and follows a low-carb lifestyle, said: “Many of our patients have been low carb for six, eight or 10 years, so it is completely sustainable. If you had a drug that did half of what we have done with the low-carb approach, it would be worth an absolute fortune. No one is shouting about it because it is not a drug that’s making a profit for a big pharmaceutical company.”

So if no one stands to make money, why doesn’t the article specify the “magic ingredients” beyond just the vague mention of them being “low-carb”? Give people some ideas for themselves, maybe even I might see something of interest… The article seems to be withholding a lot of information; if, as I said, dietary considerations have always been important in controlling diabetes, I’m left puzzled by the end as to quite why Unwin in particular is getting this sort of attention. Also:

Dr David Oliver and Dr Kim Andrews set up the Freshwell Low Carb Project at the Freshwell Health Centre, near Braintree in Essex, and have reported significant weight loss in patients.
An observational study published in October 2021 reported 774 patients were given dietary advice, out of whom 339 attended a review and had their weight measured. They lost a total of 1,103kg, with a median weight loss of 2.5kg.

That… doesn’t actually seem like much. If the 10-20kg losses Unwin’s patients reported are accurate, that’s significant. 2.5kg doesn’t strike me in anywhere near the same way. Plus those figures mean 435 patients, i.e. nearly a hundred more than those who did the review, didn’t do it. I’d be very curious as to how those people went and how that may or may not affect their results…

It’s the 17th of March, which means there’s going to be a lot of tedious people rediscovering their “Irish roots” as if wearing green and drinking Guinness makes you proper fucking Tuatha de Danaan or something. I’m precisely one-eighth Irish, and that probably still makes me more Irish than most of these pricks. Great-granda John Laughlin was a Belfast Catholic, by the way, born in 1883 just as it was about to become even worse than usual to be a Catholic in Belfast… don’t know when exactly but he found himself in Scotland by the early 1900s, where he had six kids, four of whom grew up Catholic and two of whom grew up Protestant, which is how I came to be nominally Protestant myself in spite of old Johnny boy, who I think had actually abandoned the family by that point, whereupon (according to a letter from him in 1951 my Gran kept and I now have somewhere) he had another family entirely in England. I feel sometimes like I was doomed to have turned out kind of complicated because of him…

John Coulthart recently marked the occasion of the 5000th post over on his blog, which is not at all bad for 17 years of effort on his part. I am obviously nowhere near that post count (not even quite up to 100 yet) and it may take me as long to get there depending on things like, you know, continuing enthusiasm, keeping up a good posting rate, not dying before I make it to that point, etc… but he offered this consideration that resonated with me:

Post no. 4000 (January 8, 2016) arrived almost a year after I’d stopped writing every day, and had consequently seen visits decline as a result. (You can’t really talk about “readership” here when most visits will be from people looking for pictures of some sort.) The WordPress stats show that visitor numbers had been falling even before I stopped the daily posting routine, no doubt as a result of the uptake in social media. What’s interesting about the present moment is that the visitor numbers have been rising again at a time when disenchantment with social media is growing. I don’t think these two things are connected—I’m bound to see more visitors if I’m writing more often, as I have been since mid-2020—but it’s a curious thing sticking with an endeavour like this while vast internet edifices rise and fall around you. Since stepping away from social media myself I value the autonomy of this place all the more.

Yes. I haven’t really stepped away from social media as such, I’m still on it each day, but my posting to do it has become noticeably limited in recent times. Ironically, perhaps, it was actually someone on Mastodon who kind of inspired this thing here, cos on Mastodon you get a lot of talk about decentralisation (I know I talk about “Mastodon” like it’s a monolith but it is really a mass of individual communities on who the hell knows how many different servers) in opposition to the massive concentration of everyone on the Internet where venturing beyond the walls of Facebook or Twitter is scary. As I remember someone saying, Facebook is the Internet for a lot of people, a truly terrifying thought.

I no longer remember who said it nor exactly what they said, but it was something about how decentralisation Mastodon-style might bring about the revival of old-style blogging, and I just thought… hmm, maybe I should try that again. Back to 2002 when I first tried my hand at that, perhaps… so here we are now. (Parenthetically, I also found this post by Jeet Heer also pondering the revival of blogging on platforms like Substack, which Coulthart also mentions in his post. Although Heer has since been hired by The Nation and ended his own Substack thing…)

What Coulthart says about the “autonomy” of his blog is what struck me the most, cos that’s what I’m finding about mine too… thus far I haven’t exactly promoted it so I have no idea if anyone other than me is reading, but that’s fine. I suppose I can write longer form stuff there (I don’t know if they have a maximum word count or what it is if they do), but I feel like I’d need to explain myself there in a way I don’t have to here (“why is JG crapping on about 3D films like this? Richard who?”). And archiving on FB is shit; if I wanted to find something I wrote just a month ago it’d take me ages to find it again. This is a lot more convenient way of doing things. So I think I’m pretty happy myself with where I’m at; at least I hope I am given how much money I’m putting into the plan I’m on…

Just saw this headline for a story on the Atlantic website:

I’m not a subscriber so can’t read the full article, but I can tell you that subheading if nothing else is a load of shit. I don’t think I’ve ever felt myself being any younger than I am and I certainly don’t now. If anything I find myself feeling maybe 20% older than I actually am, which is currently 48 so I feel like I’m much nearer 60 if not even more than most people my age probably do. Having a stroke at 34 will give you that sort of perspective on yourself, I suppose.

But even in my early 30s before The Incident, I was aware of myself being in my early 30s much as I am now painfully aware (and it frequently is literally painful) of being in my late 40s and on the downhill slide into the next decade. I was something of a late bloomer as a social individual (not having money to go places and do things didn’t help); when I latched onto the Sydney goth scene (thanks aus.culture.gothic) in 2001, I was already 27, and finally doing things most people would’ve already been doing for 5-10 years by that age. But even so, I wasn’t deluding myself that I was 5-10 years younger than I actually was, I knew I was 30-something and quite comfortable with that.

Though once you have an illness in your mid-30s that most people (including me before it happened) generally associate with the rather more elderly, your perception of your own age kind of alters, or at least mine did. But I appear to have always projected myself as being older than my actual age, at least online; back around 2001 or so I was a member of a now long-gone forum, and I remember one thread where we were talking about our ages, and quite a few people were stunned to find I was only in my mid-20s rather than my mid-30s (at least one of the other board members was amazed to find he was older than me). I seemed to come across like that. Perhaps I still do.

But who knows, maybe my own perception of these things is just screwy. I see some people on Youtube (D’Angelo Wallace being one) who I get the impression of being maybe in their early 30s and I’m kind of shocked to find they’re a decade or so younger than I thought. (And I feel faintly appalled that they’re so many years younger than me and so much smarter at the same time. Bastards.) And there’s one particular person on Mastodon whose posts I often see when I go through the local feed who I would’ve placed as being in his 20s. He’s thirteen. He’s barely started high school, never mind university where I thought he might be. That’s the sort of thing that makes me feel even older than I already do…

A wet time in the old town last night; according to WeatherZone, Sydney got hit by some 22,162 lightning strikes on Tuesday. Yikes. Got the above photo from the Guardian website cos I thought it was quite impressive. I’ve had no issues with lightning, unfortunately the rain has been another matter… as I discovered last night there’s a couple of holes somewhere in my bedroom through which the rain was coming in. Yikes again. Hoping the weather holds off for a while, cos I can’t get someone to come out here until next week to see where the problem is and what to do to fix it… ugh.