Month: June 2011

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts4 Comments

Thanks to Dave Lull and Alex Chernavsky.

Questions About One-Legged Standing and Sleep

Seth Roberts5 Comments

Rajiv Mehta asked some questions about using one-legged standing to improve sleep. I do three sets of two (left leg, right leg) each day.

Q. How do you spread out your three sets (have you found some minimum time between sets, say 3 hours)?

A. I make sure there’s at least 4 hours between sets. The effect was weaker with only 2 hours between sets. The time of day doesn’t matter but for convenience I usually do one set in the morning, another set in the afternoon, and a third set in the evening.

Q. They say exercise before bed is not a good idea. Do you make sure your last set is at least X hours before bed?

A. No. If anything this particular exercise will make you more sleepy, not less.

Using the Tonic app for this.

 


Andrew Solomon on Right to Death

Seth Roberts6 Comments

From The New Yorker website:

My brother and I had by then been authorized by Willie’s next of kin to make his medical decisions. When we asked to discontinue life support, the hospital began putting up barriers; they did all they could to prevent our doing what Trish, my brother, my father, I, and everyone else who knew and cared about Willie agreed he’d have wanted. . . . . Hospital officials repeatedly accused me of murdering him, and wildly misrepresented New York State law relevant to his case. We had, with his biological family, the legal right to decide on his behalf, and having to duke it out with these doctors exacted a great cost we should not have had to pay.

Ugh. I am sorry Andrew did not name the hospital.

Christine Peterson’s Zeo Research

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Christine Peterson’s poster of her Zeo research was one of the highlights of the QS conference for me, as I said. Here’s why.

The correlation between Sleep Stealer score and time awake. When her Sleep Stealer score was 5 or less, she was awake about an hour during the night. When her score was more than 5, she was awake about two hours — a big difference. There should be a big difference, but you could fail to see it for a thousand reasons. The large difference is a validation of the whole thing — above all, an indication that her Zeo is working correctly.

Even when her Sleep Stealer score is low, she is awake a long time. This means there are major determinants of sleep depth not captured by the Sleep Stealer score. With the right Sleep Stealer score — assuming the correlation reflects cause and effect — she can improve from two hours to one hour (one hour difference) but that leaves one hour. This implies that the determinants of time awake not in the Sleep Stealer score are just as important as those that it contains.

Even when she is at the best level of important factors, she is awake a long time. When she had no drinks, she was awake 56 minutes/night. When other people didn’t disrupt her sleep at all, she was awake 54 minutes/night.

The average wake time for women 50-59 is half an hour. That’s a lot of lost time, day after day, night after night. Note however that the data is from Zeo users, who may have worse sleep than average.

It only took three months to collect the data. This isn’t on the poster. Yet this is a solid contribution, in the sense that I learned from it. With perhaps nine months of data and better data analysis, it might be publishable. The main point such a paper would presumably make is that even when you do everything right (Sleep Stealer score = 0) you’re still awake a lot. This point is nowhere in the sleep literature.

Christine, if you would like to sleep better I suggest:

  1. Don’t eat breakfast until at least three hours after you wake up.
  2. Get at least one hour of sunlight early in the morning — e.g., 6 to 7 am. You can do this by working outside. (I work outside several hours every morning.)
  3. Stand on one leg to exhaustion four or more times per day. (I do it six times/day.) You can do this while reading — it should not reduce your free time.

 

 

 

Flavor-Calorie Learning: Root Beer Floats

Seth Roberts10 Comments

After having guests over for dinner, my friend Carl Willat realized he had the ingredients for a root-beer float: Haagen-Daz vanilla ice cream and A&W root beer. He hadn’t thought about root beer floats in years. He made one. The next day he made another one. He ran out of root beer, bought some more. The day after that, another one. They seemed to taste better and better each day. He ran out of ice cream, bought some more. The next day, another root-beer float. The next day, another one. Toward the end of the week, he found himself thinking: When am I going to have one tomorrow? He had to force himself to stop buying ice cream and root beer, and after a while he didn’t think about them anymore.

At the heart of the theory behind the Shangri-La Diet is the idea that we learn to associate flavors (more precisely, smells) with calories. Here is a vivid example.

I’ve noticed this learning with liquor. A few months ago I bought my first bottle of rum — to flavor yogurt. Sometimes I drank the rum without yogurt, and it tasted better and better.

Weak Iced Tea and the Shangri-La Diet

Seth Roberts29 Comments

Pat McGee of Grand Prairie, Texas, learned about the Shangri-La Diet last week and realized the theory behind it explained something strange that had happened to him:

A couple of years ago I unpacked my scale and was astonished to see that I had lost 25 lbs sometime in the couple of years before that. [He went from 165-170 pounds to 140-146 pounds. He is 5 feet 8 inches tall.] I was mystified as to why, as I could point to no changes in anything I thought might be relevant in my life.

Last week, I found out about the SLD and read the first few chapters of the book. I realized that about three years ago, I had switched from sodas [with sugar, such as Coke and Pepsi] to weak iced tea. I did this mostly because I was feeling cheap and didn’t feel like paying for bottled sodas any more. I use 5 small teabags and a cup of sugar per gallon, steeped for about 6 minutes with a little lemon juice. Basically I want something that’s got just enough flavor that it’s not plain water.

When you are 5’8″ and 170 pounds, losing 25 pounds without trying (from BMI 26 to 22) is astonishing. Not only that, he has kept it off. His story is a little different than mine because I didn’t stop drinking anything — certainly nothing as fattening as Coke or Pepsi.

Here is a new use of the ideas behind the Shangri-La Diet — namely, identifying what caused massive accidental weight loss. Obviously others can use his discovery. From a theoretical point of view, he replaced strongly-flavored drinks with a weakly-flavored one. According to conventional ideas about weight control, this should have no effect.

It is also an interesting example of behavioral engineering because he switched from standard soft drinks (such as Pepsi) to his concoction without difficulty. His drink was pleasant enough. It derived pleasure from flavor (tea), sweetness (sugar), and sourness (lemon juice). A little salt would have allowed him to reduce the flavor even more.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts1 Comment

Thanks to Michael Bowerman.