wshaffer

Life has been good lately, though not the sort of life that makes for good LJ entries. Unless y'all really want to hear about how I scrubbed the shower yesterday. No?

Some of the more notable things I have been doing today:

• Continuing to laugh my head off at this LJ entry: Pleasure Town is Invite Only!. mistful describes her first encounter with romance novels as a precocious nine year old. It is hilarious.


• Listening to the first episode of Paul Magrs's "Never the Bride" over on BBC7. A rather delightful tale of a landlady of a B&B in Whitby who is more than she seems. (Fans of Magrs's Doctor Who work will be thinking, "She's a Time Lord!" I'm sure she's not, or not precisely anyway.) For the next week, you can hear the first episode via the BBC's "Listen Again" service. (Requires RealPlayer).


• Cooking eggplant! With great success! After many unsatisfactory attempts to cook eggplant, I think I may finally be getting the hang of it. I posted the recipe for "Eggplant with Peppers and Yogurt" over at Spaceling Cafe.

This keeps popping up 'round my flist, and I couldn't resist. I'm kind of surprised by how many of these I have read. Here's the drill:

These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users (as of today). As usual, bold what you have read, italicize those you started but couldn't finish, and strike through what you couldn't stand. Add an asterisk to those you've read more than once. Underline those on your to-read list.

( My liberal arts education. Let me show you it. )

Many of these books are ones I have vague intentions of reading someday. For simplicity's sake, I've only marked a book as being on my "to-read" list if my intentions have actually gotten to the stage of purchasing a copy.

Edited because I bolloxed up the bold tags - I haven't read quite as many as it initially seemed.

Perhaps the one and only advantage to being too sick to do much of anything all weekend is that I got a lot of time to catch up on my reading and DVD/television watching. Some highlights:
( What I Read )
( What I Watched )

And I think that's the lot.

I've just started listening to the audiobook of Rethinking Thin by Gina Kolata. It looks at the science (or lack thereof) behind various diets, and why it is so hard for so many people to lose weight. I think later in the book it also tackles the question of whether so many people should be trying so hard to lose weight. (A very complicated question. Personally, I've lost quite a bit of weight over the last couple of years, and I think it's made a measurable difference to my health. However, it really looks to me like the healthier habits of diet and exercise that I adopted in order to achieve the weight loss made an even bigger difference than the weight loss per se.)

The early parts of the book really provide some historical perspective on our diet-obsessed culture. I thought that the tabloid fascination with celebrities' weight fluctuations was a modern phenomenon, but according to Kolata, Lord Byron's battle with the bulge got plenty of attention in the popular press. Byron apparently even helped to popularize one of the first fad diets: losing weight by drinking vinegar. I was also rather astonished to learn that the first popularizer of the low-carbohydrate diet was the French gastronome and food writer, Brillat-Savarin.

I've long thought that one of the reasons why standard diet advice fails for so many people (besides the simple fact that changing any habit is hard) is that it doesn't take into account that people's metabolisms differ. I came across a study today that actually manages to correlate success or failure on a particular diet regimen with a measurable metabolic trait. Basically, the researchers were comparing a typical low-fat diet with a low-glycemic-index diet. They found that there was a group of dieters with a distinct metabolic trait - fast insulin response after meals - who lost significantly more weight on the low-glycemic-index diet than on the low fat diet. Pretty interesting stuff. The low-glycemic-index diet is a close approximation to the way I eat most of the time these days, and I've certainly found it more sustainable than trying to adhere to an ultra low-fat diet.