Happy Boxing Day, everyone!

Had a lovely time with Joe’s parents last night. Ended up eating some dark chocolate covered macadamia nuts, which didn’t sound very tasty, but surprise! They were.

Dinner was divine. Turkey, mashed potatoes, and truly excellent roasted veggies. I had a full plate, and then, showing restraint that surprised even me, had a second plate that was just meat and veggies.

Take that, carbs!

Speaking of which, Joe’s mother Pauline told us some pretty amazing stuff about the Atkins diet and how Doc Atkins (may he rest in peace) was a pretty smart dude. There’s a fellow who sort of took up the cause after Atkins, and his name escapes me, but according to this dude, vegetable oil is the devil.

Remember how we were told to avoid saturated fats and only eat the unsaturated ones? Turns out that was exactly wrong. They thought that, because they found lots of saturated fats in the bloodstream of people with heart disease, it must be the saturated fats that were the problem.

But apparently, a fat being saturated means that all its electrons are in use and there’s none left over for it to combine with anything. So it stays fluid in your bloodstream, and can’t react with anything to create problems.

Unsaturated fats, on the other hand, have electrons left over for reactions, and therefore can react with things. And one of its favorite things to react with is gluten, and together they form this glutinous substance that your body finds rather had to keep moving, to put it mildly.

So that’s what clogs your arteries. That’s what turns into arterial plaque. That’s what kills people.

This blows my mind because, like most of us, I believed the whole “saturated fats are bad” thing. It made sense at the time, although I am started to wonder if that was just because “saturated fats” is a phrase that sounds obese. Margarine for me, please… I don’t want to end up saturated by fatness! Look at all those fat people. They sure look saturated to me!

Now Joe and I are considering switched from Becel margarine to good old butter. Not entirely, because Julian is a vegan with a milk allergy and so he will still need margarine.

But for Joe and me, maybe it really is better with butter. It will take some getting used to, because I have been eating margarine for like decades and real butter tastes insanely rich to me now.

But my baking would taste better with butter. So there’s that. It’s what most recipes call for.

Carbs, however, are still evil. Pauline told us about this study they did with obese children with Type II diabetes where they put the kids on a strict zero carb diet for two weeks. This was to get the kids’ metabolism out of this mode where your insulin turns carbs into fat incredibly fast, meaning that your body doesn’t even get to use all of them.

I think of this as your body being in “feast mode”. it assumes that because you are eating a lot, this must be a feast time where you are storing fat for the winter and ergo the smart thing is to not just store as much fat as possible, but to stay hungry so as not to interfere with the process.

And as long as you keep eating lots of carbs, the mode stays in this mode, building up an enormous fat reserve that it will never use. After all, it’s saving it for a winter that never comes.

And how does your body know winter comes? When you stop eating all those carbs!

But the study did not end there. After that, they introduced carbs back into the kids’ diets, all the while closely monitoring how their blood reacted.

Monitoring what is actually happening to people… amazing. That’s practically science!

And they found that everyone had a different setting when it came to how many carbs it took to trigger feast mode. So not only did the kids lose both their fat and their diabetes over the year-long study, they came away from it all with a carb count they can use to stay that way.

I would love to go through this process myself. Lose my obesity and my diabetes? I’m SO there. And doing it via science that actually makes sense and monitors things closely using real, actual science, and not just some untested jagoff theory based on some doctor’s guess or other forms of nutritional folklore.

I imagine it’s very expensive, though, so I doubt the province would pony up for that any time soon. Not unless they develop the forethought required to see that if someone can cure my obesity, it will save them beaucoup de bux further down the line.

And I doubt that Christie Clark has the forethought to order pizza.

You would think that the fact that they keep electing people who turn out to be really, really stupid would give conservatives pause for thought, at least out of embarrassment. It can’t be fun to keep getting razzed by us liberals about the clearly literally stupid people they elect.

But they have been victims of stupidism for at least twenty years now. Once you stop believing a leader has to be smart and start voting for idiots no smarter than yourselves, you are down the booby hatch and there’s no going back.

Once the lemming horde is big enough, it just goes faster and faster towards the cliff and the lemmings no longer have any choice in the matter. If they slow down, they will get trampled without mercy. The only way to stay alive is to keep up with the herd, even if you are sure the herd is heading for disaster.

And yes, I know lemmings are not actually suicidal. Neither are conservatives. They are victims of a group dynamic, not a group urge for self-annihilation.

All we can do is try to rescue the ones near the outside edges, and hope they don’t take us with them.

On that happy note, have a great Boxing Day folks.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow!