My new tooth

Tags

A new tooth, Crowns, Dental procedures, Dental visit

Yesterday I got a new tooth. That isn’t the latest in CRISPR technology of growing a new tooth, that will have to wait for a few more years, but a new crown. A couple of weeks ago I unexpectedly chipped the back off tooth # 22, as you can barely see in the beautiful selfie I made. Many people would have ignored the problem forever, but I called my dentist immediately, and she thought the tooth would have continued to degrade because there wasn’t anything holding it together but the front surface. It looks okay in the photo below but it’s all show and little substance. There was zero pain in the whole event because the nerve wasn’t exposed, and there was no pain in the procedure of grinding away some of the tooth to make a firm foundation for the replacement. As horrible as I look in the photo below it wasn’t particularly annoying except that I couldn’t talk in my usual articulate way.

This is how my dentist sees me … and you too.

The temporary tooth I have been smiling with all week looked fine, and none of my friends commented upon my invisible imperfection, but the new permanent tooth looks even better. It looks like it belongs in my face even more than the original which you can see above in its last minute of existence in that venue.

My dentist seems to think the fact that most of my teeth have their original roots living naturally is surprising for someone 82 years old, but I am saddened because of their less than perfect general condition. Back in the 1930s and 1940s when I was growing up in Spokane, Washington, there was a controversy about fluoride being put into the water. Many claimed it was a communist conspiracy, or a Nazi plot, to weaken America. Without any natural fluoride, teeth are not very resistant to decay, and Spokane water didn’t have any fluoride, and thus people like my father and mother had dentures from my first knowledge of such things. That’s just the way it was, so no one thought much about it.

It wasn’t until I was off to college, and on my own, that I started even thinking about taking care of my health and my teeth. I made a lot of money over the summer working in Antelope, Oregon, and after a couple of months into my first year of college I went to a dentist and had a lot of work done. My dentist at that time seemed to like me and tried to get me to become a dentist. He was so excited about this idea that he had me watching all the procedures being done to me in a mirror. I remember clearly the visits, my looking into my mouth, about like the picture above, but with this guy’s hands and instruments hacking and hewing away at “me”. At one particularly grueling event, where I overly identified with the carnage going on within “me”, I fainted. I later discovered this is a common event in medical school when prospective doctors start cutting on real people. But this wasn’t other people. This was “ME”.

I enjoyed my dental visit and as I was scheduled for an hour we talked about our personal adventures for fifty minutes.

Advertisements

An overview of diets with web links.

Tags

A diet that works, diet, Dieting, Links to the major diet plans., Love Your Life diet, My super easy diet works

 A long list of diets from Wikipedia. I also checked the possible 38 Popular Diets Ranked by Health.com experts and copied their list below. I made web links to all of the diets on their list and a few that they didn’t list. Debbie and I have created a slight variation on the intermittent diet where we did a very easy form of intermittent fasting and then once a month increased the challenge slightly. We have each lost about two pounds per month for ten months and are now within a few pounds of what I estimated to be our ideal BMI of 23.4 weight. For me, that was estimated to be 161.75 pounds. So what I am now aiming at is bouncing between 161 and 163 pounds. Two pounds seems to be about what the usual variation is when I weigh myself when I get up in the morning.

When we began this intermittent diet I was eating a serving of tilapia fish about once a week and taking salmon oil capsules. We have been moving slowly over to a vegan diet although I still eat Greek-style yogurt. One of the unexpected effects of our diet plan is that I am never hungry and am usually feeling just a bit full. I have been eating a lot of trail mix made with nuts and cranberries. The list below was created so it would be quicker and easier to compare what we are doing to what the rest of the dieting community is doing.

Best Diets Overall

1. DASH Diet
2. MIND Diet
2. TLC Diet (tie) Therapeutic Lifestyle Changes
4. Weight Watchers
4. Mayo Clinic
4. Fertility
4. Mediterranean (tie)
8. Volumetrics (tie)
8. Flexitarian
10. Jenny Craig
11. Biggest Loser
11. Ornish (tie)
13. Vegetarian
13. Traditional Asian (tie)
15. Slim Fast
15. SparkPeople
15. Anti-Inflammatory (tie)
18. HMR Health Management Resources
18. Flat Belly
18. Nutrisystem (tie)
21. Vegan
21. Engine 2
21. South Beach
21. Abs (tie) Abdominal exercise
25. Eco-Atkins
25. Zone
25. Glycemic-Index (tie)
28. Macrobiotic
28. Medifast (tie)
30. Supercharged Hormone
30. Acid Alkaline (tie)
32. Fast
32. Body Reset (tie)
34. Raw food
34. Atkins (tie)
36. Dukan
36. Paleo (tie)
38. Whole 30
Not listed but I checked them out
— Weight Management
— Dieting
— Intermittent fasting

The big problem with diets is the difficulty with sticking to them for the rest of your life and instead reverting to your previous lifestyle and level of weight.

What I like about my current diet plan is that it is so easy and it works.

Some problems with eating

Tags

diet, Diet list, Diets compared, Links to diets

Here in the United States, there is a growing problem of people gaining too much weight. This isn’t because we now have more food available. There hasn’t been a famine in this country during the lifetime of anyone living here. And yet, last night on the Public Broadcasting System’s (PBS) news were seen the victims of opioid addiction all of whom were morbidly obese. Part of the pain these legal opioid users mentioned was their poverty. For me there was an obvious omission because the subject of obesity didn’t arise in the conversations but it was profoundly apparent.

If these people are eating far more calories than their bodies need for maintenance there must be something these people and the TV interviewers are missing. Does their addiction to opioids interfere with their body’s ability to sense when to quit eating or are they simply eating the wrong foods? Is there some way that simple question could be answered? For example, if they happened to have an identical twin who wasn’t on opioids but who ate the same foods, was that twin obese? Or alternatively, would an identical twin who was on opioids but ate one of the popular diets have a normal BMI (Body Mass Index) below 25?

It would be difficult to find twins with one twin on opioids and the other not on opioids but on a specific one of those diets and impossible for all of the diets. However, it would be relatively easy to follow for a week a largish number of opioid users and observe what they actually ate. Even a questionnaire, which is not a very good way for getting accurate results, would probably be adequate for demonstrating that these opioid users were eating poor diets. Perhaps the best intervention for them wouldn’t be trying to wean them off of opioids but help them to eat appropriate amounts of better quality foods.

American’s big problem is putting too much of the wrong stuff into their bodies.

Alcohol and coronary heart disease

Tags

Alcohol, Cardiovascular disease, Coronary, Death

About 1996 I began a strange behavior. It was based on the idea that plaque in the arteries was in some kind of balance with the normal bodily processes. If there wasn’t some kind of natural method for clearing plaque off of the arteries then the build-up would be one way and quickly kill people. Instead, the process takes years and usually decades.

My idea was that if the plaque was in a librating state of balance with a slow buildup on the walls of the arteries then there must be some kind of dissolving function counterbalancing the accumulation processes. What could that be and is there a way that I could improve the cleaning of my arteries and remove the plaque?

Alcohol dissolves fats and therefore it might make more soluble the plaque buildup in my arteries. I had no idea if people who drank had less cardiovascular problems and it was obvious that those who did drink very much alcohol had a multitude of problems. Then I realized that the solubility of most things is temperature related and if the plaque was near a natural equilibrium state, it would probably be sensitive to alcohol plus heat. So, I began an experiment 21 years ago which continues to this day, and I have averaged about one hot bath a month with a shot of whiskey when my mouth temperature reaches 101°F. At age 82 my blood pressure is generally about 120/68, 55 bpm which is about right for a high school athlete in training. The old medical rule of thumb for the systolic was age plus 100 which means my blood pressure should be more like 182, not 120. Nowadays, the doctors are saying get it down to 120 any way possible and for them, that means using drugs.

I am quick to admit that a single person’s experience isn’t science but then I came across this study which is based on a cohort of 400,000 European adults followed for an average of 13 years. That’s science, and they came up with this chart.

Total hazard rate ratio of various diseases based on alcohol consumption

Image from Public Health Expert, University of Otago, New Zealand

The coronary heart disease curve shows the effect I have been suspecting for over twenty years even though it is unlikely that anyone was influencing that curve by following my hot-bath procedure. If they had been doing my procedure the death rate from coronary heart disease would drop even faster to near zero. Using my procedure of an occasional hot bath with a drink and one drink per day would probably put my overall consumption near the bottom of all the risk curves at 10-15 grams per day.

A wise man can learn more from a fool than a fool can from a wise man.

How to create meaningful spiritual experiences.

Tags

Becoming conscious of actions, Developing a mature personality., Developing human maturity, Evolution of personal behavior

The goal is to give you new and meaningful experiences so you may become a more fully developed human being. Each of these events will explore different approaches to what it means to be a complete human being. Everyone is capable of many things which they haven’t done yet, and each of these meetings will choose a theme and safely give opportunities to learn something that will make your life better. For example, instead of just saying good ideas and discussing them we will, in addition, practice the base actions a few times with the goal of creating a personal relationship with how to live with that idea and action.

Here is a generally accepted idea we can hear about, talk about and then physically practice a few times. “Show up, be open to a friendly greeting, pay attention to the situation, think about something relevant to say, do something appropriate, participate in a relevant way with the other person, let it go, give a polite thank you and depart.”

This is far too much to remember to do, so each of the actions would be prompted at a short interval, about ten seconds from one statement to the next. And then each person would move on to another person in counter-rotating inside-outside circles. After about five repetitions of this practice, change the roles of the two circles. This whole thing could be made more fun by having a different small object given to the inner circle for a discussion topic.

Several easy lessons could be learned by this simple routine. How to say hello in a friendly way to different people, how to observe something about the other person’s unusual situation, how to be polite in relating to some strange thing about the other person, how to relate to unexpected things in a flexible way, how to quickly let go of some interesting event and move on, how to politely say goodbye quickly.

That is an example of a kind of social dance, almost like a square dance where routine calls are made and actions are performed by the dancers, but these actions are about relating to personal behaviors.

This same general pattern could be followed of a lecture talking about something, followed by a short discussion of the ideas and then some form of physical practice of the idea. That physical practice takes an abstract idea and makes it into a behavior that is more useful to the development of the person.

We become able to do things by consciously doing them a few times.

Clockwork Purple – We have to juggle work…

Clockwork Purple Writers group, October 9, 2017
Miracles Happen by Brian L. Weiss, MD
Unseen choice page 87 by Aingeal, line 12 Charles – creates our unseen prompt …We have to juggle work, relationships, and interactions with other people at every moment. Alexa set the timer for 46 minutes … Starting now. That makes it 11:05 for the ending of my entry.

---

I am not a circus clown! And yet everywhere I encounter people’s expectations of me, demanding things of me that I am incapable of physically delivering or sometimes even responding to. Thus, I tend to slip away into various spins on reality that spring up spontaneously from … I don’t know where. I really don’t know where. Sometimes they are puns on the keyword in what my interlocutor just said, or any word that might generate a laugh, or failing a pun on a word or a laugh I will begin talking about the deeper meaning behind whatever the conversation might seem to be leading to. Sometimes I focus directly on what is being said and respond to that theme with precision, and sometimes just the opposite springs to the fore and I go blurry, foggy, atonal, or like a tail-wagging dog and just walk away. Perhaps everyone is like that and just hides it from everyone, including themselves.

I spent a lot of my early years living with my mother’s mother and to some extent, I am her seventh child; thus, when she came to her years of raising me, she was very experienced with kids. All seven of us kids grew up to be honest, reasonable, ordinary citizens playing our role in society as was expected of us. I was always an outlier in the family and I was accepted as being what I was. I wasn’t encouraged to be different, just to be who I was. We were all treated that way, and perhaps we all felt that way and that we were all just who we were. We all felt that we were guests in our family environment and were treated as guests. We treated each other as welcome guests, honored guests. I never thought of it that way at the time, but when I look back on my youth that description seems to fit the way it was. I can’t remember my mother ever criticizing anything I did, nor praising anything either.

We had a family tradition of showing 35-millimeter color slides on a projector at family gatherings, like Christmas. It was fun! We all laughed a lot at the funny pictures we had created and enjoyed each other’s company, but I don’t remember any criticism or praise either. We were just living, enjoying what we did and doing what we felt was right.

Being on a farm we all worked together a lot out in the fields or sometimes in the house. An example of that was one Christmas morning about 1965 when we were all squeezing into my grandparent’s house in Madras, Oregon. On Christmas morning when everyone was washed up and dressed, but before breakfast, my Grandma said, “Clean up time,” or something like that, and all her kids started doing house chores, and the grandkids, myself included, jumped right in and started cleaning up the house. Instantly, there were a dozen people running around, including the three-year-olds and the eighty-year-olds, cleaning up the house. It was great fun and with so many of us working we were done in a few minutes and sat down to breakfast.

I suppose it was my grandmother who instilled that work/play behavior into all her kids and they into their kids too. That we have to juggle work, relationships, and interactions with other people at every moment was never explicitly said to anyone of us. But all of those things were done with a feeling of joy. It wasn’t an obligation to do things, it was a joy. That way of living was created by my grandmother in her kids and working was as easy as laughing.

Thank you. Thank you, Bertha Aspinall Eidemiller! Thank you. Thank you for creating such a wonderful family.

There are many opportunities for kindness.

Tags

Cultivating the habit of kindness, How to be kind to yourself., I seek to help a fly., Learning to be kind to yourself., Opportunities for kindness.

Wherever there is a living thing there is an opportunity for kindness. That is an important idea for you to consider implementing because the more opportunities you have for being kind the more stable will become your habit for seeing where a kindness might be done and doing it. Why would you want to use your personal energy to be kind to others when it would seem to be more beneficial to yourself to be kind to yourself? I discussed this a couple of posts ago in Old age isn’t for sissies, or is it? The key to living a long, healthy, happy and productive life is a good relationship with one’s self and that is generated by habits that create those end results.

“Those people who are in the habit of being kind to other people are cultivating the habits of being kind to themselves at the same time.” If you have an abundance of kind actions that you have cultivated for treating other people, animals, insects, plants and even non-living things, then you have also created the habit of doing those same kinds of actions for yourself. The non-living things are included because if you cultivate the habit of treating non-living things well by helping them to perform the functions they were designed to perform, then you generate in yourself those same habits. When you are taking care of your physical things—your car, or house, or shoes—you are not only helping them perform their function better, you are generating the habits necessary for taking care of your physical self better.

When you help any living thing to get through its life better, you simultaneously help develop that habit for taking better care of your own needs in that realm of behavior. Catching a fly in your house and putting it outside helps you to be more aware of your own needs for being in the environment where you can thrive. Here’s a video to illustrate that point. To catch a fly. Save his life and yours too.

In some ways helping the fly through a door is better than helping a human being through a door. The reason is that the fly doesn’t have an economic transaction with you, and your actions are totally altruistic toward him and are satisfying your own human needs for generating habits of being kind to yourself. When you open a door for a human being they will usually thank you for that kind action, which is fine and expected, but their thank you is a form of economic transaction, and that makes your action into a completed action of making human society a little more comfortable for everyone. That is great, but a greater practice for your development of treating yourself kindly is to do that deed in such a way that there is no thank you solicited or expected. You open the door for the other person in such a way that they don’t owe you anything. It takes a little effort at learning but you can get the swing of it such that you benefit the other and cultivate the habit of kindness simultaneously.

Wherever there is a living thing there is an opportunity for kindness.

Monotheism, Queen Tiye, Zoroaster, Freud, The 7 Sages of Greece

Tags

Evolution of ideas, Freud, Monotheism, Queen Tiye, The 147 suggestions, The 7 Sages of Greece, Zoroaster

Eight years ago I blogged a post, Queen Tiye, Monotheism, Moses and the Hebrews. It began, “Sigmund Freud wrote Moses and Monotheism which was not published until after his death in 1939. Apparently, he didn’t want the trouble of defending his unusual theory on the early history of the Jews from attacks.” Because the book I am currently writing, presently titled Love Your Life, has a section dedicated to the Seven Sages of Greece, it was necessary to check for the sources of their 147 suggestions for leading a good life. Those suggestions appear to have been assembled about 570 BC and published on stone tablets at the site of the Delphi oracle, “an important oracle in the pre-classical Greek world (as early as 1400 BC).” Those ideas were popular, and copies were sent throughout the Greek-speaking world. That brought me to Zoroaster, who lived sometime between 1,500 and 1,000 BC and founded a widespread religion before the Pre-Socratic period, which began in the sixth century BC. He lived a thousand or more years before Jesus and a minimum of five hundred years before the Old Testament which was mostly written after that date and which was based on a protean verbal tradition.

The point is that the 147 suggestions of the Seven Sages were based on much earlier thinking, and those ideas were probably derivative of or at least influenced by Zoroaster of Iran via his religion now known as Zoroastrianism. That ancient religion stresses worldly wisdom and that is what the 147 ideas of the Seven Sages of Greece exemplified. His dates are speculative but they either overlap with Queen Tiye of Egypt or follow hers a little, but both of these influential people were creators of a Monotheistic tradition whose primary symbol is the Sun and both of whom predated the Classic Greeks by centuries. I suspect that Queen Tiye was a key to the creation of the short-lived Amarna monotheistic religion and not her husband or son because she was known to be brilliant and fierce and her king husband appears to have been a hereditary placeholder. Her father Yuya was thought to come from Mitanni culture which is within the Zoroastrian influence and near where Zoroaster was teaching.

The above links are weak and their exact dates speculative, but within a hundred years, and their philosophies not identical but they do form a reasonable sequence from which the ideas of the Classic Greeks also sprang. The PIE culture (Proto Indo-European) seems to have had a common core of seeking a reality based on natural forces like Earth and Sun. What a surprise came out of that for me!

Those 147 precepts in Love Your Life appear to have an ancestry going back to Zoroaster.

My new idea yesterday is as ancient as Zoroaster

Tags

Delphi, New ideas are sometimes old, Old age is for sissies, Old ideas are sometimes new, Socrates, Zoroaster

Yesterday’s post named “Old age isn’t for sissies, or is it?” concluded with “Old age is for sissies, sweet happy old sissies.” The route to that idea was that a person who treated others well developed the habit of treating themselves well and thus their old age was healthy and happy because they were living with a kind person and that person was themselves. People who are nasty usually die off before they reach old age, but before they go they complain about how unpleasant it is to be alive. The so-called sissies usually say they are happy and often say they are happier than they have ever been.

Today I was planning to write about goodness itself and quickly came across a quotation by Zoroaster a pre-Pre-Socratic philosopher from Iran. “Doing good to others is not a duty. It is a joy, for it increases your own health and happiness….” – Zoroaster. That quote is found on page 200 of Treasury of Spiritual Wisdom by Andy Zubko. That is essentially the subtitle of my current attempt to write another book – Love Your Life – A Way to Approach Health and Happiness. The man Zoroaster may have predated Socrates by a thousand years.

The problem with ancient Zoroaster is that all of his original works have been lost, and only derivative and probably only pseudo works attributed to him survive. Thus what we are left with is Zoroastrianism, with the emphasis on the “ism” part of that word. But that is like approaching what Jesus said by listening to a modern sermon. The contact with the source is very tangential and more a grasping at an authority for unsubstantiatable assertions.

My current feeling is that the past is gone and therefore it is no longer good or bad; only how it is influencing us at the present is good or bad. We must work with what is, the past is fixed and gone, and we must also work in the present with the inevitable things that are certain to come in the future. That relationship with the future is what is at the core of wisdom, and the more accurately an individual’s wisdom reflects physical, social and personal realities, the healthier and happier the person will become.

Love Your Life suggestion # 140 – Work with what is and what will be.

 

Old age isn’t for sissies, or is it?

Tags

ACE (Adverse Childhood Experience) die young, Old age is for sissies - sweet old sissies., Old age isn't for sissies

Someone in my Tuesday group actually said their mother told them in all seriousness the famous quote, “Old age isn’t for sissies.” This alerted me to the prompt in my Monday morning writing group, “Being loving to others and most definitely to yourself,” which led to a disquisition by me on old age. The gist of that literary exercise was that people who were unkind to other people when they were younger adults cultivated unkind behavioral habits that reflected back upon themselves. When they grew older those habits were so ingrained in their behavior that their emotional relationship with themselves was nasty. Thus they were living most of their conscious time with a nasty person who treated them badly, and therefore they were miserable.

Those nasty people would certainly be feeling a lot of emotional pain and because of their uncaring attitude probably were in the habit of not taking very good care of their bodies either and therefore after years of neglect would be feeling physical pain too. The opposite has got to be true also. Those people who are in the habit of being kind to other people are cultivating the habit of being kind to themselves at the same time. It is inevitable that over a long lifetime those other people we know as friends will turn over, old friends will move on and new ones will come along. But we are always the person who is here and thus we are the primary recipient of our kind and unkind actions.

It is the sweet kind old people who are considered to be the sissies in common observation and the nasty old ones who are thought to be the toughies. It is the toughs who are seen facing old age with grit and grimace and the sweet ones who are all smiles and cookies. But who is it that has cardiovascular problems and cancer, the diseases that between them kill over half of Americans? It’s the high ACE (Adverse Childhood Experience) people who grow up nasty, and live nasty, brutish and short lives. They, on average, don’t get to become old and those who do don’t enjoy old age. My conclusion:

Old age is for sissies, sweet happy old sissies.