real world math problem

After a 2-week plateau, Jimmy is again losing weight. 204.5 this morning.

Christopher is losing, too, and is, according to the CDC, officially "not overweight." (Which, translated, means he's at the 94th percentile for his age. The CDC defines anything from the 85th to the 95th percentiles as "at risk for becoming overweight." This is all pretty silly, seeing as how Christopher's height is at the 90th percentile for his age, but still. Having the CDC officially define him as "not overweight" is good for his motivation. I went through all the various websites and figures the other day, and decided that my goal weight for Christopher is 120. He's got 10 lbs to go.)

UPDATE 10-6-2006 10 pounds may sound like a lot for a child, and of course it is, but visually he's good now. He's "tipped" back across the line that separates "fat" or "chubby" to "normal." So that's good. If he didn't lose any more weight at all, but simply maintained this weight and continued to grow, that would be fine. Also, be sure to read the Comments!

Ed told Christopher his job this weekend is to figure out which one of them has lost more as a percentage of his total body weight to start.

UPDATE 10-8-2006 Jimmy is down to 204 this morning. (5'10" or 5'11")

UPDATE 10-16-2006: Jimmy down to 201; Christopher down to 129.5. I haven't been telling Christopher's weight - just the weight loss - because I didn't want him to be embarrassed in case any of his friends happened to come across the blooki. But now that he's into the 120s, I think it's OK. He is at 90th percentile height and roughly 92-93th percentile weight. None of the kids call him "fat" anymore, which in terms of the social issue of being overweight in middle school tells you all you need to know.

I've lost 5 lbs, but there's no way to "disaggregate" the causes, what with our mad-bad doctor-originated cancer scare over the past few weeks and all. (Haven't posted about it; it's happily resolved; mention it only to say that I can't reach conclusions about Shangri-La based on my own quite dramatic - for me - weight loss.)

I found Jimmy's weight loss chart from the last time I managed to put him on & keep him on a diet back in 2003.

July 25, 2003: 205 lbs
November 15, 2003: 198.5 lbs.
6.5 lbs in 16 weeks. Compared to 15 lbs in 11 weeks this go-round.

By March of '04 he was up to 208.5.

At some point in there (I think it was in '04) we were able to persuade our pediatrician to put him on glucophage, which stabilized the weight gain. He didn't lose, but he stopped gaining.

Then his liver enzymes (iirc) got screwy and that was the end of the glucophage. By this summer he was up to 222.

Taking Risperdal, he's been gaining weight every year, year in, year out, without growing taller. (Eric Hollander managed to get him off the Risperdal, but his new med, Depakote, which he must take for seizures, also produces weight gain.)

When I say he's been gaining every year, I'm talking about a young, strong male, much bigger than I am, who is ravenously hungry, screaming for food, and biting himself until he draws blood.

The diet we managed to do 3 years ago had to be constantly monitored and thought-through; we had to do everything in our power to feed him foods that would take the edge off his unceasing hunger so we could withhold food when his nighttime binge hour arrived and he started screaming and biting himself.

A nightmare.

The nightmare wasn't just that he was screaming, bingeing, and biting himself.

The nightmare was that Ed and I were chained to the refrigerator. To this day we have locks on every cabinet and a bike lock on the fridge. We can only buy side-by-side refrigerators, because those are the only ones you can use a bike cable on.

It would be 10 at night, or 11; we'd be dog-tired; and Jimmy would need to consume a thousand calories of parent-prepared food before the screaming stopped. This after an entire day of manning the kitchen because he was hungry all day long, too.

Dog-tired is wrong.

Bone-tired.

The Shangri-La diet has made all of that go away. All of it. There is no nighttime binge. There's not much daytime noshing, either. We have meals.

We got a little sloppy the last two weeks, and weren't always giving Jimmy his oil. Because you have to give the oil one hour after eating and one hour before eating, you can easily end up without that two-hour window of time, especially when a child has school or weekend programs during the day.

The nighttime binges came back.

I'm a believer.

Meanwhile Ed, who spends a lot of time pooh-poohing whatever my latest idea for self-and-other improvement happens to be, is a huge believer.

He's practically a Shangri-La acolyte.



I weighed myself this morning.

I gained a pound.

I don't think it's a real pound.

Since July I seem to have lost 2 stable, definitely-gone pounds on Shangri-La.

BMI 21.5.

I want a BMI of 20.5.

At most.



another olive oil diet

I went to see Erika yesterday.

We met Erika here in Irvington a couple of weeks after we moved in. She had been the on-call physician for the schools, and had a practice in a little house on Main Street in downtown Irvington.

She was wild. She was the original n-of-1 self-experimenter, and was then writing her book on energy and the mitochondria. She took one look at Ed & packed him off to an acupuncturist to treat his back.

The acupuncture didn't work, but everything else she said made sense and I've been seeing her ever since.

Now I have to trek into Manhattan to get to her office, but it's worth it.

Erika is a female Arnold Schwarzenegger.

I'm not sure how she'd feel about that, but if I had to bet I'd say she'd like it.

She's Austrian, and has the "Arnold" accent, but what's Schwarzeneggerian about her is the inexhaustible energy, the optimism, and the utter indifference to the received views of her betters. A massively publicized NIH study proving once and for all the mortal danger of hormone replacement therapy has no more dampening effect on Erika than a spring drizzle has on a Labrador retriever. She simply goes bounding along evangelizing her precious "bioidenticals."

When I say "bounding along," what I mean is that at the precise moment the NIH death-by-estrogen study hit the papers, Erika decided to stop being an internist and start being a full-time hormone replacement specialist. The mere fact that the entire US media universe is seething with stories of middle-aged women dying of breast cancer because they took estrogen is simply not a factor in Erika's decision-making calculus because, obviously, the study is bunk.

That's Erika.

The other Schwarzeneggerian thing about Erika is that she makes this kind of thing work.

Erika can decide that the NIH and the New York Times are wrong, and she can base a major business decision on the fact that the NIH and the New York Times are wrong, and, for Erika, this turns out to be a good call.

I lost track of Erika for a couple of years when her practice in Hawthorne disappeared. She had by then moved from Irvington to a suite of offices in the Dobbs Ferry Hospital, and then from Dobbs to another suite of offices over in Tarrytown, and after that she set up shop in a huge suite of rooms up in Hawthorne.

But suddenly I couldn't get them on the telephone. The number had been disconnected and nobody had notifed me about a new number some place else.

I felt bad about that. The practice must have failed I figured.

It didn't fail. She'd had some kind of falling out with the folks she was partnered with so she stopped practicing in Hawthorne and started practicing full-time out of the Manhattan office she'd had all along, unbeknownst to me. She is mobbed by patients.

Yesterday I told her the Wall Street Journal had just run an article ($) on a new study showing that hormone replacement therapy is good for the brain (big surprise there) and Erika said, "In 5 years no one will talk about that NIH study any more. Everything will be bioidenticals."

That's Erika.

In 5 years all the bad, wrong ideology will be gone!

Because that's the natural fate of bad, wrong ideology!

I just wish I could train Erika's attention on Lucy Calkins.

Then again, Lucy Calkins is tougher than the NIH.

Or the New York Times.



wasn't I talking about olive oil?

Yes.

I was.

So I sat down on Erika's sofa and said, "I've found a diet that works."

"Tell me."

"It's called the Shangri-La diet."

She started laughing. "You're my funniest patient," she said.

I'm sure that's true.

Then again, Erika is my funniest doctor.

I started filling her in on Shangri-La, but she interrupted me.

She'd never heard of Seth Roberts, but for awhile now she's had 10 patients on an olive oil diet of her own devising and they've all lost lots of weight.

That's 10 out of 10.

Ten out of 10 patients using Erika's made-up olive oil diet have lost weight. She reports this like it's nothing.

Her regimen is to have them take 1 Tbsp of olive oil 3x a day, midway between meals.

She takes at least a Tbsp of olive oil a day herself, I believe, and has been doing so for years.

Erika doesn't have a Unifying Theory of hunger and anti-hunger on the Serengetti plains. She just figures a Tbsp of olive oil 3x a day keeps people full.

I said, "How'd you come up with that?"

Erika shrugged and said, "It's obvious."

more on mitochondria:
Bruce Ames in Discovery
Bruce Ames in REASON
Bruce Ames at fumento.com

The Shangri-La Diet at Amazon
Seth Roberts website

Shangri La diet in freakonomics
Shangri La diet part 2
early adopter
diet, evolution of the brain, & McDonalds
Marginal Revolution on Shangri La
your own lying eyes
progress report 7-23-06
Jimmy 7-24-06
mind hacks & Shangri-La 7-26-06
7-29-06 update
my life and welcome to it - 8-6-06 - success
compare and contrast photo op 8-12-06
9-12-06 update
9-17-06 Jimmy is melting
10-4-2006 Dr. Erika's olive oil diet works, too

shangrila

-- CatherineJohnson - 04 Oct 2006

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