May You Be Forever Young

The mental stuff is crucial to longevity. We are dominated by our thoughts. What you hold in your mind - illness, wellness, thinness, fatness, decay, repair - affects how you feel and how you act.

I’m a big fan of The Secret and Bob Proctor. I think they both have a lot to offer.

If you are into this part of being young forever - the mind part - then you might like to check out Bob Proctor’s new program. Best of all, you can try it for free.

I had an aikido instructor who used to always say to us, “Feed your mind.” That’s what this is all about.

Check it out.

As one who is dubious about governments’ ability to deliver useful outcomes, it was interesting to read Jake Halpern’s Slate article Should the government pay you to lose weight?. A somewhat portly mayor in the Italian Alps decided to pay constituents to loose weight and keep it off:

Buonanno made an official proclamation in which he promised to pay his fellow townspeople cash to slim down. Townsmen would receive 50 euros (about $74) if they lost 9 pounds in a month; townswomen would get that same amount for shedding 7 pounds. What’s more, if participants managed to keep the weight off for five solid months, they each stood to gain an additional 200 euros ($295).

Apparently what looks like a stunt may actually work:

Could the answer to this problem really be paying people to eat less and exercise more? According to Dr. Eric Finkelstein, author of the forthcoming book The Fattening of America, the answer is most definitely yes. This fall, Finkelstein published a study involving 207 overweight or obese people who wanted to lose weight. They were randomly broken into three groups. One group was offered $14 for every 1 percent reduction in body weight over the course of three months; another group was offered just $7; and a control group nothing at all.

On average, members of the $14 group lost 5 pounds, members of the $7 group lost 3 pounds, and members of the control group lost just 2. Finkelstein says that the most persuasive data concerned the participants who shed 5 percent of their body weight, which is generally considered to be the threshold for real health benefits. The members of the $14 group were four times more likely to hit this marker than the control group. The beauty of this, insists Finkelstein, is that it is so cost-effective for insurers or employers. “If people aren’t losing weight and hitting their targets, then you’re not paying,” he says. “You are only paying for success.”

Apparently money talks to the stomach as well.

An article in the Sydney Morning Herald, Fat end the wedge between classes, talks about how diet is one of the ways that class can be demarcated. Said differently, the more you earn the more you can spend on your healthy lifestyle.

A survey released in Britain yesterday found the fatter you were, the less you earned, with lower-paid clerical workers nine times more likely to be overweight (75 per cent) than those at upper-management level (8 per cent).

Lack of money can lead to poor diet since the fat underclass work night shift, or double shifts in low-wage jobs, or they don’t work at all. They buy frozen or takeaway food, they do not know how to cook and their children are fussy eaters. They line up under the fluorescent lights of McDonald’s unable to resist the offer of an upsize. They buy the wrong cuts of meat in the supermarket and they load trolleys with processed food such as chips and frozen pizzas that not only contain an environmentally unsound surplus of packaging, but enough additives to give their children attention deficit disorder.

The middle classes, meanwhile, have developed an almost religious fervour around exercise and nutrition, none of which comes cheap. Look in their shopping trolley: artisan bread ($10) that weighs a tonne, soups in cartons from chilled shelves instead of in tins on shelves, anything labelled “organic” or “free range”, freshly squeezed juices and anything marketed as fresh, from pasta to seafood to sauces. It costs a lot to follow this lifestyle.

I’m not sure I like the tone of the writing, but I agree there’s something there. Part of it is education, and part of it is the economic power to make certain choices, something I often think about when I’m buying organic veggies and suffer sticker shock.

The Myth of Health Insurance is an interesting look at why health insurance is different from any other kind.

What we call “health insurance” has little to do with health and nothing to do with insurance. We do not face a “health insurance crisis.” We face the consequences of a set of economic and social problems rooted in a futile effort to make the distribution of health care—unlike the distribution of virtually every other good and service in our society—egalitarian.

And:

The sole rational purpose of true insurance is to protect the insured from an unanticipated economic loss so large as to jeopardize his economic well-being. No one sells or buys insurance to cover the cost of maintaining his property. Home insurance does not pay for plumbing repairs; automobile insurance does not pay for replacing worn-out windshield wipers. Yet people demand precisely this kind of reimbursement from so-called health insurance.

And especially:

In fact, Americans now view their health insurance as an open-ended entitlement for reimbursement for virtually any expense that may be categorized as “health care,” such as the cost of birth-control pills or Viagra. The cost of these services is covered on the same basis as the cost of medical catastrophes, such as treatment for the consequences of a brain tumor. Such distorted incentives produce the perverted outcomes with which we are all too familiar.

This has consequences for life extension. What will insurance companies pay for? As treatments become more advanced, people will certainly begin demanding them. The costs of the treatments are certainly going to be an issue, especially before economies of scale kick in. And not everyone is going to be able to afford them, which is going to make people look toward their insurance providers.

Via Digg.