Every parent that kids needs to learn to eat and drink from cups.
I also understood and enjoyed helping my oldest daughter learn to walk.
But for some reason it never occured to me that sleeping is something that many kids will need to learn.
The basic rules are simple.
Part 1: make sure the environment don't change while they are asleep
After a certain age:
- never let them fall asleep with a bottle
- or while you are singing or saying prayers
- or listening to music
- or watching tv
Do read stories, sing, play and try to make sure they are happy when they go to bed. Just make sure they are awake.
Basically they shouldn't fall asleep in a state they won't be in the next time they turn around furing sleep.
Kids after a certain age should fall asleep in their own bed and on their own.
Part 2:
Kids should not be afraid and cry themselves to sleep.
But if you just leave them alone in their bed they will.
Instead say some magic nice words that you decide, then walk out. Start a timer for one minute. Walk back in (even if the kid isn't crying) say the same words you said when you left. The rest of of the night until the kid fall asleep (i.e. not until the calm down) go back every 3rd minute, i.e. every 180 seconds, sharp. Use a timer. Say the same words.
The next day use 3 minutes first and 5 minutes the rest of the evening. Use a timer. Be consequent.
What you want to teach is you are going to be there for them either they cry or not.
Don't stop until after they are asleep. (I happily go back two times more and I don't care if it seems they are sleeping, if tjey open their eyes they'll close them just as fast, now convinced that you are still there.) If one stop going back when they calm down then they understand they'll have to cry to get attention.
Next day 5 and 7 minutes, then 7 and 9 etc. By now they are probably relaxing after a few minutes.
Except for my first who had already gotten a bad habit by the time I started teaching, the rest picked it up in 3 or 4 days. After that they'd enjoy going to bed.
Two more things;
- make sure somebody can hear them if they wake up in the night. Mostly because who wants their kid to be afraid, but a nive side effect is they learn that thet are not forgotten.
- do sleep training on good days (not when new teeths are arriving or while they have the cold)
> Kids should not be afraid and cry themselves to sleep.
> But if you just leave them alone in their bed they will.
Worked for us 3x. Did it soon after they no longer physically needed to eat in the night, which is a lot earlier than you'd think. Did it around 3 months IIRC. Two or three bad nights with each one (listening to the crying is no fun and I get why people cave) and pretty much smooth sailing from there on.
We did do some prep by deliberately delaying our responses to their crying, especially at night time, weeks earlier, and stretching out that delay as weeks went on, to break the "I cry, they show up seconds later, spazzing out and showering me with attention" expectation. We might have had to prep by pushing them to one nighttime feeding too, but they'd done that on their own by then anyway—then again, delaying responses helps with that since you're not rushing in there every time they whimper, so that may have been why that part happened "naturally".
Huh, I thought the person you're responding to explicitly advised the opposite? I.e. - don't cry it out?
We live in a flat with poor soundproofing and out of a desire not to make our neighbours miserable (especially the nurse who really needs a good night's sleep after a long shift..) we've tried to minimize night crying. She sleeps pretty well now.
We were fortunate enough to be in detached housing. If we'd still not been consistently getting full nights of sleep until almost a year after our first one was born (as in the post I initially responded to, I gather) we definitely wouldn't have had two more. Yikes. Our total months of disrupted sleep for all three combined isn't that long.
It should be noted that the author of the linked article is Gary Taubes, who is best known for Good Calories, Bad Calories, a book that seeks to turn the conventional wisdom of nutrition on its head.
I loved GCBC, but unfortunately Taubes goes a little bit too far near the end in condemning carbohydrates. It's really hard to recommend the book because of that overreaching.
A little too far is an understatement. I read GCBC when it came out and found its arguments compelling at the time. After learning more, I've reversed my opinion almost completely.
James Krieger's critique of the core chapter of GCBC is very worthwhile reading: http://weightology.net/?p=265. His blog also has other articles addressing the core Atkins-Taubes thesis of the link between insulin, carbs and obesity. Alan Aragon's Research Reviews had an Editor's Cut on Taubes, as well as pieces specifically on the role of insulin and carbs in obesity and weight gain, but unfortunately all that is subscriber-only. Lyle McDonald (who literally wrote the book on ketogenic diets) has also written a lot on that whole orbit of ideas--never an article against GCBC directly, though he has certainly expressed his negative opinion of it on many occasions.
However, I think most of the book is still worth reading, especially the history behind the demonitization of fat and the uselessness of "calories in, calories out." Taubes is at his best as a science historian and, obviously, not a scientist.
There's nothing useless about energy balance. It can be misinterpreted and misapplied, but Taubes throws the baby out with the bathwater and pretends it doesn't apply at all. For example, classical low-carber mythology is that on a low-carb diet you can eat virtually unlimited calories (as usually defined) and maintain weight, if perhaps not lose weight outright. As an example, there's an old post on Michael Eades's blog where he talks of a small woman allegedly eating 5000 calories and maintaining her weight. As explained in James Krieger's article, people's reports of their own calorie intake for studies have consistently been found to be way off the mark, to the point of being useless. When you actually measure what is being eaten under clinical conditions, the result is in line with the conventional theory of energy balance.
The main benefit of low-carb diets for weight loss is that they spontaneously reduce calorie intake by cutting out whole groups of foods (by looking at studies it's been shown that any diet that restricts food choices like this will tend to induce weight loss but is usually unsustainable), and especially lots of highly palatable foods (to use Guyenet's terminology). But most longer-term comparative studies of diets that look at the performance past the 12-month mark show that low-carb diets don't fare any better on average than other standard weight-loss diets. The one exception is a study the low-carbers like to hold up as a vindication of their views; Lyle McDonald addresses that one here: http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/research-review/comparison-....
>There's nothing useless about energy balance. It can be misinterpreted and misapplied, but Taubes throws the baby out with the bathwater and pretends it doesn't apply at all. For example, classical low-carber mythology is that on a low-carb diet you can eat virtually unlimited calories (as usually defined) and maintain weight, if perhaps not lose weight outright.
On the last point, of course it's wrong. I never saw Taubes deny CICO as being true. He repeatedly states that, while true, it isn't useful for answering _why_ people get fat.
It's as if I asked why some people are rich and others are poor. And you simply said that the poor people spent more money than they took in. It's true and yet utterly useless if you keep harping on that single point while ignoring inheritance, education, mental illness, drug abuse etc.
You've further convinced me not to recommend GCBC to anyone, since I keep realizing its possible for people to miss the central point of the book.
I'm totally in agreement on Guyenet's stuff, but he agrees with Taubes on CICO being not helpful:
>This is where I agree with Taubes-- 1) the key thing to understand is what is causing the energy imbalance, and 2) the idea that "eat less, move more" is a practical fat loss strategy does not necessarily follow from the first law of thermodynamics. Taking in less energy and expending more does cause fat loss, but the problem is that it's difficult to maintain-- the body opposes changes in its fat stores.
No. Low-carber thesis is that raising intake of fats suppresses appetite so you can eat what you like until you are full. The idea is carbs keep you hungry because of energy partiioning and so you over consume calories because you feel hungrier than you should. Taubes explains this very well in What Makes us Fat.
His main claim is that the energy balance problem is a consequence of getting fat, not the cause.
You don't mention insulin by name, but that's what underlies Taubes's thesis about the link being carbs and obesity. James Krieger dispels much of that argument here: http://weightology.net/weightologyweekly/?page_id=319
> Low-carber thesis is that raising intake of fats suppresses appetite so you can eat what you like until you are full.
Eating pounds of fruits and vegetables won't you make you full? Or rice and potatoes for that matter? Eating pounds of lean protein sources like tuna and chicken breast won't make you full?
> The idea is carbs keep you hungry because of energy partiioning and so you over consume calories because you feel hungrier than you should.
That isn't borne out by the evidence. The demonization of one macronutrient over another is baffling. If you subsist on calorically dense processed foods that are purposefully engineered to be high in palatability then you are more likely to overeat. Carbs aren't the problem. Neither is fat; dietary fat is very calorically dense, so it's easy to get lots of "hidden" calories from it, but that's the main downside from a weight loss perspective.
>Eating pounds of fruits and vegetables won't you make you full? Or rice and potatoes for that matter? Eating pounds of lean protein sources like tuna and chicken breast won't make you full? Of course it will.
I didn't claim otherwise
Fat accumulates due to an excess of calories. But this isn't the cause of us getting obese, it's a proximal cause, not the ultimate cause. What causes us to eat more calories than our bodies require?
> What causes us to eat more calories than our bodies require?
One big reason is eating foods that aren't filling relative to the energy and nutrients they provide. There's nothing unique about carbs in that regard. I can barely put away a 1000-calorie meal with an equal amount of calories from chicken breast and white rice (100+ grams of carbs just from the rice). Putting away the same amount of calories split between chicken breast and greens would be almost physically impossible--I ate a whole pound of grilled asparagus with my chicken breast on Sunday, and the asparagus barely amounted to 100 calories. But I can easily put away a 2000-calorie pepperoni pizza with extra cheese. If you think carbs are the calorically-dominant macronutrient in that pizza, think again. I'm not blaming the fat either. My point is that the issue goes much deeper than simple macronutrient composition.
Fats and proteins are more filling and satisfying per gram than carbs.
The pizza example you give is basically wrong. Carbs would be the largest source of calories. For example see http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/fast-foods-generic/9307/... which is for a 2500 calorie pepperoni pizza. Almost half the calories come from carbs.
> Fats and proteins are more filling and satisfying per gram than carbs.
Again, that statement makes no sense. You don't eat carbs, fats and proteins. You eat foods. Is 100 calories of olive oil as filling as 100 calories of asparagus (about a pound)? If that's too extreme, I'd still gladly put up your 100 calories of olive oil (a few spoonfuls) against my 100 calories of white rice (a small bowl) for satiety and fullness.
Different macronutrients stimulate hormones differently, so I'm not saying that macronutrient composition doesn't play a role in these matters, only that those effects are mostly irrelevant if you don't go overboard. For example, high GI and low GI foods have virtually identical glycemic loads when consumed alongside a lean protein like chicken breast (GI is measured by feeding food to a subject after a 12-hour fast), so even if you accept that insulin is the master regulator of fat storage (which is out of date nonsense that Taubes can't get out of his head), it still wouldn't matter appreciably so long as you eat your carbs alongside your fiber and protein.
> The pizza example you give is basically wrong.
I was going by the pizza recipe I usually make at home, which per slice has 200 calories from fat and 100 from carbs.
You seem to know what you're talking about. Is there a book, author, or website you'd recommend for getting a primer on nutrition? Many of my friends are doing paleo diets, juice diets, no-carb diets and all of them have pseudo scientific sounding explanations and bestselling books espousing them.
I don't personally need to lose any weight (in fact I could stand to gain a few) but I am still curious about how the food I eat is affecting my body. With everyone yelling different sets of "facts", it's hard to know where to even start.
Lyle McDonald is the best source out there. His website at http://bodyrecomposition.com has a near-endless wealth of articles. Alan Aragon's work (http://alanaragon.com/) is on a similar level, and in many ways he's a kinder, gentler version of Lyle. However, his best stuff is only available as part of his subscriber-only Alan Aragon's Research Review. James Krieger is another one whose website at http://weightology.net I already referenced elsewhere in this thread.
As a rule, the people whose work I lean on are those with both a deep knowledge of the underlying theory as well as clinical experience working with a range of athletes and non-athletes. Of course, you should never trust anyone unconditionally and always evaluate their reasoning on its own intrinsic merits. Someone like Charles Poliquin seemingly fits my description, but he makes most of his money from selling supplements and is always pushing his products--he recommends that you consume massive doses of his insanely overpriced fish oil, rub licorice cream on your abdomen for spot-reduction fat loss, etc--so everything he says must be taken with a truckload of salt.
People like Robb Wolf and Mathieu Lalonde from the paleo community also fit my desiderata. You can learn a lot from them, so long as you keep in mind that most of their clinical inferences are so far by necessity based mostly on anecdotal data rather than controlled studies. There are also some general issues to keep in mind with the ancestral dietary approach as generally preached and practiced. There's an underlying assumption that the ancestral diet was far more uniform across cultures than the evidence shows. They also tend to downplay the evidence that grain consumption has been around for much longer than 10,000 years, indeed closer to 100,000 years, giving plenty of time for many physiological adaptations to have taken place. Stuff like that. As with everyone with strong commitments to a specific point of view, their analysis is often subject to confirmation bias. A classic case would be Robb's analysis of the traditional Okinawan diet where he completely downplayed the very high levels of carbs consumption via rice by giving virtually all the credit for the health benefits to the fatty fish consumption.
His statement was on a per-gram basis, which seems pretty much obviously true (since it basically says that fat is more energy-dense than carbs).
Nonetheless, like jcheng I'm interested in what you've learned from your research. I've also been looking into low-carb/ketogenic diets, and a friend does intermittent fasting (IF), and there are a host of clashing opinions and studies of varying quality on everything. Taubes, Lustig, Aragorn...my conclusion is that we still know very little about the effects of diet composition.
I've switched mostly to sugar substitutes and reduced my carb intake because it seems like something most would agree upon. My IFing friend claims IF/caloric restriction is one of the few things actually shown to significantly prolong lifespans in animals. Do you have any knowledge of these things, or of better-done studies I should be reading? Thanks.
edit: I've just been reading Guyenet and what he says is quite interesting
> His statement was on a per-gram basis, which seems pretty much obviously true
Ah, I missed that. But that's not very a useful comparion. The useful thing to do is comparing calorically matched portions of fat-based and carb-based foods for satiety and fullness.
One problems with carbs though, particularly carbs that break down fast in the body (say, rice or honey) is that they do cause insulin spikes and blood sugar drops, which can often lead to additional consumption. Carbs are unique in this regard though to varying degrees: coconut sugar seems to have very little of this effect while rice is very bad. There's a reason why Chinese food is associated with folks being hungry an hour after eating.
However, I think the real harm comes from combining the carb boom-and-bust blood sugar cycle with high diets where it's easy to eat lots of calories, and when you add a sedentary life style by historical terms, it gets even worse.
A hundred and fifty years ago, the average Irish peasant would have eaten 12 pounds of potatoes every day. That's almost 5000 calories just from the potatoes (and now add a small amount of dairy, veggies, and eggs).
So it's not just one thing. It's the emphasis on carbs, the concentrated energy foods, and the fact that we drive in cars and dont walk that much and certainly don't try to grow our own food in marginal rocky soil.....
Edit: I always wondered why Javanese food is traditionally so sweet without a lot of people being obese. It turns out that the biggest sweatener used is coconut sugar, which has a glycemic index of something like 35. That's a bit higher than whole barley but quite a bit lower than wheat.....
What causes us to eat more calories than our bodies require?
Remember that your body doesn't care that you want to look good on the beach. It wants to load up when times are good, incase there is a famine around the corner. Piling on the pounds is a survival mechanism, people who tend towards fat are in fact highly tuned survival machines.
It's too soon to tell if this is still a useful mechanism. Mankind has only been "civilized" for a heartbeat in evolutionary time. Nevertheless, if you want to shed fat, the key is to convince your body that starvation is not around the corner.
Eating pounds of fruits and vegetables won't
you make you full?
I'm on a dissociated diet and I can offer some anecdotal insight here.
In some days I eat meat and diary. In other days I eat fruits and vegetables only. I also have days where I allow myself to eat whole-grain bread or pasta. The only days in which I don't feel hunger are the days when I eat meat. If I eat for instance pasta, or potatoes, or rice, in 2 hours tops I get hungry again. Of course, if I eat beans or spinach ... these vegetables keep me full longer than rice, but I still get hungry.
So the issue here is that meat and diary get digested slower. Beans and spinach also get digested slower than bread or pasta or refined carbohydrates, while having better nutritional value (because of the extra fiber).
It's really not about the quantity.
Btw, I also eat high-fat pork meat as I really enjoy it. I have no problems with cholesterol or other issues. I think the secret to a healthy life is having a diverse diet + abstaining from preprocessed crap.
The main benefit of low-carb diets for weight loss is that they spontaneously reduce calorie intake by cutting out whole groups of foods (by looking at studies it's been shown that any diet that restricts food choices like this will tend to induce weight loss but is usually unsustainable)
Another benefit is that the low-carb diets provide better satiety. In studies, if people were advised to eat ad libitum, those who had to choose from low-carb foods eventually consumed less calories than those, who could choose from "regular" food.
Yeah calories matter but processed foods seem to be the real culprit. They make it easy to eat too much and get addicted to the fat salt sugar combo that leads to problems.
I hate how grains make me feel so I am not going back. Losing weight is a side effect of having more energy via cutting out food that was toxic for me to be eating. This isn't religion but just empirical testing on my part. If it didn't work I wouldn't do it.
I follow Taubes, Sissons and Robb Wolf approach (paleo in general) because it just works for me and I love the food. I am thinner, stronger and with much better health eating tasty food and doing minimal exercise. I think Guyenet's approach may work too (maybe there is not only one right answer) but I think low-carb is easier to me and I dont see a reason to change it. My life is much better after limiting (almost banning) grains and refined sugar.
I just wish we could see more directly a sense of how little we know about good nutrition.
My favorite example is Vitamin B12, mostly because I learned the story when I reduced my meat consumption to about once a month. So there's this family of massive molecules containing the metal cobalt which we can't make on our own because we're not adapted to eat cobalt, and they're all called "Vitamin B12". It helps in the last step of making the protein building-block called methionine; if you get malnourished in this way your body just basically fills up with "almost finished" methionine which is useless and might even be poisonous. There can also be a slight risk of nerve damage although as I understand it we don't actually understand why the hell that would be.
The biggest cause of malnutrition in this sense is simply being old -- you can't absorb Vitamin B12 so well in the first place because it is huge and weird, and old people have even more trouble either because their gut is slowly dying or because they're infected with H. pylori, which is a safe bacteria more than 80% of the time and might even be important for a well-functioning stomach, but might sometimes cause a chronic tummy-bug.
Okay, so that's the problem, but what do we know about how much of the B12s we need and get? We know very little. The US Recommended Daily Allowance of B12s is 2.4 μg, but the US Daily Value for B12 is 6.0 μg. How much do you get in your food? You get almost none from vegetables, and vegans are basically all ipso facto suffering from B12 deficiency unless they take supplements or eat enriched cereal -- but most of them are quite healthy and see no problems from it. As for vegetarians like (almost-) me, the exact range for milk and eggs to get to this limit is imprecise because the limit itself varies by a factor of 3, so you might need to eat three eggs per day or else ten; so you might need to drink two cups of milk per day or else five, to live up to those numbers. So in theory there are lots of vegetarians also who come in at half or one-third their daily requirement, and never notice anything. Meanwhile there are people over 60 who eat plenty of meat but are starting to feel the effects anyway.
We actually don't even know how well you absorb it. A USDA researcher named Lindsay Allen did a 2011 study where she marked Vitamin B12 in eggs so that she could detect it, and then fed those eggs to 10 people. She found that the body absorbed 50% of a 1.5 μg dosage but only 20% of a 2.6 μg dosage. Let me repeat that. She found that, in absolute value terms, eating more B12 led to less of it being absorbed, 0.75 μg versus 0.5 μg. It's probably not statistically significant with 10 people, but still. We don't even know that eating more leads to you absorbing more of it. (I also wonder whether RDAs are "amount absorbed" while DVs are "amount eaten", as this is pretty much never reported, but I will assume that they aren't crazy and that it's always "amount eaten.")
I wouldn't use the scare-quotes around "science" when talking about nutrition science, as I think there is potential for real research here and I think people do indeed do it -- but it's a lot of work before we have a firm understanding, and most of that work hasn't been done yet, and yet you hear these confident conclusions. I would just like to hear people publish standards in the form, "you might need this much, or that much, we don't really know."
The engineer in me craves error bars. Where are the error bars?
I think that when it comes to diet, you should follow your instinct on how much to consume and listen to your body, while also doing blood analyzes from time to time.
I know such precedent exists in cases like this where you are to sign a non-negotiable contract. This is why most EULA's are largely worthless especially when it comes to standard retail software.
Well said, in that light you could even view the content providers as altruistic by relying on those with the money to pay higher prices while those without resort to piracy and get it for free.
The real reason anyone pirates is because they can get away with it. I'm sure if there was a digital way to steal a bottle of grey goose from a liquor store a lot more people would pirate grey goose and start making claims that the price is too high and it's too hard to get.
If you would go to jail for downloading Herbie Fully Loaded off of the pirate bay (just as surely as you would if you robbed a liquor store and then composed a blog post on "Why I rob liquor stores.") Piracy would be a moot point and would be confined to the fringes of society that are willing to commit theft.
In conclusion this is like saying it would be faster and easier to roofie a girl at a bar to get laid than it would be to take the time and money to buy her a drink and talk to her.
No, no, no, no, no, no. First off, your analogy should be "if there was a digital way to replicate a bottle of grey goose without doing anything to the bottle at the liquor store", but that notwithstanding:
The things that "content creators" make are things from my culture. They are things taken out of society and ideas that everyone contributes to. (e.g. Disney exploiting the public domain, sampling, etc.)
The fact that "content creators" think they can have a monopoly on pieces of culture (effectively) forever is what's wrong, not these ludicrous analogies to stealing physical things.
Copyright was intended to promote the progress of science and useful arts. Making it impossible to remix, adapt, and contribute to the shared culture by locking everything up in infinitely-long copyright periods is doing the exact opposite of what was intended.
So, are you saying that content creators should not be able to sell their content at all?
I would appreciate further explanation on the fact content creators whether it be a movie studio or a software developer are simply taking "your culture" and as such you should be able to reclaim it at no cost?
I do agree with your sentiment that IP law is inherently stifling and increasing futile, i.e. Apple v Android.
However, I fail to see the difference between someone who produces an item for sale in the form of something that can be captured in bits of data vs a more tangible object. Aren't both parties entitled to the ability to monetize(if they so desire) on the time and effort put into creation of their final product?
Copyright is generally interpreted that you can only copyright the part of a work that is original. So if you are granted a copyright for a work that includes unoriginal materials (which is virtually all works) you don't get a copyright on those parts of the work. For example if you write a song that uses familiar public domain motifs, you can get a copyright if you combine them or add to them in novel ways. You don't get a copyright on the pre-existing works.
Brandon, I completely agree. Though as someone who dabbles in mobile development on the side I am encouraged by recent trends. As developers become less willing to give away high quality apps for free or ruin the experience with advertisements, I think we will see a trend where more apps will be pay only and users will be forced to acclimate themselves to paying for apps in order to use the latest and greatest technology. I especially think the gaming side of mobile will help to drive away this resistance to premium. As hardware specs increase and the quality of games converges with those on PC and console platforms, I think the price will do the same. It will take time.
